A Collaboration with Andrew Busby
“Piece o’ lucky ‘eather, sir?”
Reynolds was startled, but quickly and visibly relaxed as he discovered the source of the quiet voice. The young, tanned gypsy girl was cherubic, but looked like she’d missed more than a few meals.
“Sorry?” asked Reynolds.
“Lucky ‘eather, sir. Just a pound-a-piece.”
Reynolds shuffled his feet. “No, thank you,” he replied meekly, and continued to browse in the window of the sports shop. The young girl persisted:
“Aww, sir. It’ll bring ya luck. I promise.”
Reynolds sighed deeply through puffed cheeks. He didn’t need this. One look at her innocent emerald eyes tempered an imminent outburst, however. “Listen, love, I don’t want any. I don’t need any.” He regarded the wilting, purple blooms. “Er . . . I thought lucky heather was supposed to be white.”
The girl smiled. “’Tis true, sir, but this be lucky, too, sir. Specially grown in soil with magical properties.”
Reynolds returned a grin of his own. “Ahh! I see!” He also saw the obvious expectancy in the girl’s face, as though being turned away a hundred times a day was taking its toll on her pretty features. “Well, then, I’ll have to buy two off you, won’t I?”
Her face shone like the midday sun up above. “Oh thank you, sir, thank you very much.”
Reynolds proceeded to choose his flowers very carefully, and cooed over them when they were standing pathetically on his palm. He fished in his pocket, and placed a crisp fiver in the girl’s grubby hands.
“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t change this. I’m sorry.”
Reynolds smiled again. “Don’t worry about it. You keep it.”
A quick intake of breath from the girl. “Oh thank you! Thank you, sir, thank you!” she squealed gleefully.
“As long as you buy something to eat with it. Okay?”
“Oh yes, sir. I will, sir. Thank you.”
Reynolds watched the girl as she happily skipped away down the high street with not a care in the world. He shook his head and smiled. He’d just returned his attention to the expensive set of golf clubs in the window display when he heard the horrific, time-freezing commotion of a road accident – the screech of tyres, the dull thud of metal and the high-pitched smash of glass, the shriek and scream of what could only be a young child . . .
A young child?
But then a second scream. Then a third. Then more. Some grown-up, sprung from deep vocal roots. Others not. Some male, browner than nuts. Others not. A few quite untangled by age or gender. Others not.
But the first one remained a young child’s. That would never change.
Reynolds held each ear between his fists – held his nostrils between finger and thumb . . . the rest of his digits digging a lower zip . . .
He pulled his mind from its dive and planted his two feet squarely on the pavement outside the sports shop. He watched the tanned gypsy girl skipping back up the high street, this time with more cares in the world than any world could possibly hold.
“Whatever’s the matter?” asked Reynolds bewildered.
“I’m sorry, I can’t accept this for just lucky ‘eather, sir. Too much took the luck away.”
The girl held out the fiver like a flag. The unchanged fiver.
* * *
Many years ago, there lived a band of travellers who decided, after bunker-cutting in many diverse green and pleasant lands, to seek the valley between the flanks of purply-heathered hills that one of the travellers had dreamed about. But the travellers’ king planted his flag in the mulchy soil of a lower basin, where flies flocked above the rusty landscape like curds of premature darkness. The purple hills would have to wait. Settling, apparently, couldn’t.
The queen stood beside him and inscrutably decorated her face with the silt she’d just found beneath her feet. The princess, their small daughter, played a game of greens round the king’s flag. The other travellers cheered in strict unison, with the optimum of hope, each planting their own, if lesser, flags in the plots they meant to billet.
* * *
Reynolds absent-mindedly fished the fiver from her grubby hand. The tanned girl skipped off, apparently happy, but still leaving him with the heather.
He went to shout after her vanishing svelteness. He sensed an omen, if not a curse. The heather was whiter than his face. That said something. Reynolds said nothing. He was already late for the dinner-gong at the guest-house, even before he realised he was late.
Still troubled about the car crash that he’d heard further down the street, Reynolds ran to the street corner. The traffic continued to flow, the pedestrians continued to amble, the traffic lights continued their monotonous control. There was no trace of debris or commotion. There were neither ambulances, fire engines, police cars, blood, defiled corpses, nor tear-shocked witnesses.
Everything was normal and as it should have been.
Reynolds felt a pang of inner panic; the first sign of insanity? How old did an old man have to be before senility gave him its wicked hallucinations?
He shrugged, bewildered, then took a reactive glance at his watch. Mrs Longstaff at the guest-house wouldn’t wait much longer for him to get there before she fed his steak-and-ale pie to the dog. With a final perturbed stare at the scene of the phantom accident, he walked slowly and absently to The Welcome Traveller. Even though his mind was still in a world he called his own, his stomach reminded him of his urgency. Yes, that’s what he needed: a hearty meal and a few gills of brandy. Accident? Nah! He’d probably imagined it.
With the briefest of smiles, he glanced at the inviting sign of the guest-house.
The smile was banished and an ever-so-slight twinge wriggled in his chest. Below the wording, the sign showed a picture of an old-fashioned, horse-drawn gypsy caravan in the midst of a white and purple meadow. Red and blue flags were dotted around, and right in the foreground, a young girl was holding a small bunch of purple flowers, and smiling.
* * *
Only after a few weeks but, of course, still many years ago, the band of travellers – who, strangely for gypsies, were led by a king and queen of real royal pedigree – had managed to erect make-shift bivouacs to protect them from the evil elements. With conscientious fervour, they spent much of their valuable time labouring to ensure everything was weather-proof. Sadly though, the floors ended up as porous as the roofs were watertight and they soon discovered that the mulchy damp rising from the ridiculously shallow foundations was far worse than any soaking drizzle that the wild winds could bring across the purply hills.
Yet they were happy. Who wouldn’t be? When the weather broke and they were able to go outside to play, they gambolled in the fitful sunshine and re-planted their flags in the renewed solidity of the steaming morass. They hit hardened balls of dung with what appeared to be weaponish things – with handles at the bottom – towards these flag-holes.
The princess had always wondered for what these contraptions were intended, kept as they were in the driest attics of the bivouacs. She somehow knew it was meant to be far too serious for a game. So she could not account, in her yet underdeveloped mind, for the laughter interspersed with jocular curses. The king and queen seemed to own more flag-holes than could possibly be counted by even those privy to the art of arithmetic. Watching her parents strut about issuing gawkish catcalls as they threaded the byways of these flags was not conducive to daughterly respect and she scooted off to the royal toilet, dug into the giving ground beneath the palace bivouac. She’d rather spend her time squatting there, than watch such fooling about by so-called grownups.
* * *
Reynolds, after a tepid stew served up in chipped crockery, managed to find his bed. There was much to put out of his mind and even more to hope he wouldn’t dream about, once asleep. He recalled looking into the window of the sports shop. Even if he didn’t realise it at the time, the interruption by the young heather seller prevented him from diving in and purchasing the expensive set of clubs he had been drooling over. Impulse buying (bordering on kleptomania) was an ill that had beset him for most of his life. That was why, perhaps, he had offered as much as five pounds for the lucky heather. It had been lucky even before he knew it was lucky. His thoughts became confused as he drifted off into the first dream of the night. He found himself squatting in a dank oubliette, rolling his own turds into balls. One by one. Testing each for its optimum rollability. His nostrils were plugged by older, crumblier and hence less noxious dung, the prevent the fresh sort he was rolling from perturbing his tender sense of smell.
Reynolds rolled in his bed as his mind continued to imagine rolling his own shit. His fitful sleep couldn’t halt the dreams, however, and he suddenly found himself in a purple valley.
Waifs of varying ages surrounded him near and far. Smiling and chuckling though they were, Reynolds sensed underlying emissions of sadness. One particular urchin, a young boy, stopped running and faced him. His eyes told a story of recognition.
“To sell the heather is to reclaim the land,” he whispered. “We do as we must, and as our forefathers have instructed.”
With that, the young lad blinked back into the surroundings and continued with his game.
Reynolds woke with a start, and with a sheen of sweat covering his torso.
“The land?” he uttered, into the darkness of the room.
He lay still for a while, spitfire thoughts bombarding his very being. Moments later, with visions of flags and shit and golf clubs and the young heather seller, he slumped into a deeper sleep, into which no unwelcome visitors could follow.
* * *
The next morning, Reynolds laboured downstairs into the dining room. The few other patrons of the guesthouse had apparently breakfasted earlier, and he sat in solitude at the table near the bay window. Within seconds, Mrs Longstaff made her appearance through the bouncing kitchen doors.
“Good morning, Mr Reynolds,” she greeted jovially, “what’ll it be this morning?”
“Er . . . just tea and toast, thank you,” he replied, not having any appetite for an artery-thickening fry-up.
“Tea and toast it is, then,” Mrs Longstaff beamed.
Reynolds took an exaggerated glance around the dining room. “It’s quiet this morning.”
“Yes. Everyone else has eaten already.”
“I suppose your conversations must come in peaks and troughs,” Reynolds continued, enjoying the trivial banter, serving as it did as a temporary shelter from the constant raids of more ominous thoughts.
“Usually they do,” replied Mrs Longstaff, “though I had someone to keep me company earlier.”
“Oh? A visitor?” Reynolds inquired, only half-interested.
“Yes. A charming young thing, she was. Just turned up out of the blue and offered to help me in the kitchen . . .”
Petrified resignation began to build inside Reynolds like approaching thunder.
“ . . . gorgeous eyes and a face as pretty as a picture.”
“Wh-where did sh-she go?” Reynolds quivered.
“I don’t know. I gave her a bacon sandwich and she left. She did give me these, though.”
Reynolds blanched as the thunder broke within him. There, in the palm of Mrs Longstaff’s hand, where two, wilting, purple blooms.
“She said they’d bring me luck,” she added as explanation. “Mr Reynolds? Are you alright? You look strange . . .”
But Reynolds’ chair was already vacant.
* * *
A purist might argue that dreams are ring-fenced, nothing of them being able to seep into everyday reality. Yet when Reynolds had spent his ablutions, which were regularly post-breakfast, he had a strange yearning to inspect his doings, their shape, consistency and propensity towards spheres, but he flushed them away without actually succumbing to the temptation or, even, remembering he’d forgotten, in his haywiredness, to use any paper.
Shaking himself from any number of such brown studies, he recalled the words of Mrs Longstaff about the girl visitor – his abrupt reaction to speed in pursuit of the fetcher of purple blooms – the inevitable repercussions of being cut short instead – the mind’s meditation, while squatting, upon mysteries that were beyond anything to do with the cut and thrust or geographical contours, or any other factor having a bearing on his golf handicap – finally, the determination to return to the sports shop window to exorcise the ghosts that had since plagued him.
* * *
Camp was being struck. Even the mock marquee – the palace that not even dreams could credit – was being dismantled piecemeal and loaded on anachronistic lorries with EAGLE AND BIRDIE’S CIRCUS painted upon their strategic steaming hulls . . . wheels a-spinning in the slick slime of the terrain, as a number of dusky maidens frolicked naked in the soft business end of earth’s bottom field.
The erstwhile princess watched them scornfully. She vowed never to stoop that low even when she had grown fulsome body enough to bring it off. The king and queen were glanced slipping off-stage with not even a scowl left behind. They had several of the flagpoles under their arms, pilfered like giant pick-a-stix games. They knew how much money there was in course laying and they wanted to set up business elsewhere, hopefully on firmer ground. The princess sniffed, simultaneously sad at the end of her dreams (or the dreams she was in) and happy at the come-uppance of her tee-shot, as she watched the trajectory of her own soul as it curved through the upper air like a golden albatross.
* * *
Reynolds arrived breathless on the opposite side of the road from the sports window, intent on a bit of his own pilfering. He prided himself on being the most successful shoplifter in Christendom. Living out of his suitcase from downbeat digs to downbeat digs (Mrs Longstaff’s being an example of the better sort of bunker he’d bedded down in!), he was finding it increasingly difficult to make house-room for swag. Still, once he’d got the gold-headed clubs, he’d no longer have to need to play the gypsy. He’d settle down and play all the top-notch courses with the best of them.
As he stepped off the kerb, forgetting his Green Cross Code in the process, he was hit by a thought. The shop shot into the air. And then nothing.
* * *
Mrs Longstaff was not bemused by the non-return of her latest lodger. She chipped another tureen like gunslingers used to notch their barrels. She was the type of lady – salt of the earth as she was – who never thought of anything but the immediacy of soap or snooker or talk show or world-wide wrestling or, when in higher mood, the latest Open with all those nice young men striding over the heathery dunes in plus-fours. She gave no heed to the hinterland of her otherwise non-existent dreams. Except she did sometimes wonder why she found herself sobbing to herself on occasion, even though she never felt unhappy with the world.
