Life Begins...

Retirement remained an abstract concept even as Bill reluctantly entered this phase of his life. Blinking in the stark light of a truth he would much rather deny. The joke he trotted out was to mispronounce retired. Retard? Not me! He found any number of ways to sidestep his existence. Struggled with the ways that he might now be retarded. Held back by his own entrenched ignorance.

Letting go of his previous existence was tough. What made it even tougher for Bill was that he’d not liked that phase of his life. He’d resented the choices he’d made and what that had made of him. Now though, he was staring at the prospect of being nothing. No use to anyone. Including himself.

The pressure to make further errant choices was too much. He’d made such a mess of previous decisions that he did not trust himself to get it right. Knew that he was certain to get it wrong based on his past performances.

Bill found himself sitting there and wondering what the point was, whilst he stared at four walls in need of a lick of paint. Never one for the frivolities of decorating, he’d continued to stare at those walls until each and every one of them had capitulated to the force of will he had retained despite his being spewed into a constricting compartment of life he had little time for.

Getting out of the house with no purpose in mind was a chore. He came to realise that he required a reason and so took to manufacturing them. Even then, the results were lacklustre. After a while he understood that he’d once carried an ongoing lack of purpose that was as much a part of him as the passive anger that he now expressed as humour but translated into grumpiness.

He was a sell-out. That was the conclusion that he came to. He’d sacrificed his dreams in the pursuit of drips and drabs of money. Willingly put himself in debt in order to chase the goal of paying the debt down. That had been his existence. And once he’d become debt free he’d lost all reason for being. Now he looked back upon that flimsy excuse of a life and despaired. All that time wasted. The energy of his youth absorbed into a discarded paper towel. And for what? A piece of paper that said he now owned a house. A contract with the devil that took the best part of his life and left him to lament his folly.

Bill would have gotten angry, if he had anywhere to point that anger other than himself.

Despite the gift of his newfound depression, Bill went about the rudimentary business of living his retirement. Some habits died hard as they took you to the grave. He chivvied along the wayward ones, the ones that wanted to fall at the roadside. They were, he knew, the thin end of the wedge. Leaving the dirty dishes in the sink may afford some respite that evening, but the very sight of them the following morning hit him hard. Too hard. His weakness shamed him and thankfully for Bill, the stirring of that shame also stirred his resolve. He wouldn’t go out like this. To atrophy and be forgotten by the world in pathetic increments was a joke he would not allow himself to be a punchline to.

His forays into town dialled into his depression. He’d heard of the death of the high street. Now he experienced it himself. Even the town folk seemed to be dead. Lurching and shambling around him like zombies from a forgotten B-movie. This wasn’t living, but Bill had yet to find an alternative.

There was a pub in town that opened in the morning. He couldn’t recall how he knew this nor how he’d come about the further intel that they served the cheapest breakfasts going. It was with some trepidation that he entered the formerly grand building. Further capitulation to a life less lived as he stepped inside a building that had once been a bank. Back when banks actually bothered about seeing the faces of their customers.

The bank’s loss was the pub’s gain. There was something about the place that Bill warmed to even as he sat at a free table and lifted the menu from its wooden cradle. His information had been correct. He wasn’t sure how they could turn a profit on the food. He’d struggle to buy the ingredients for this price, let alone cook them. He glanced cynically at the beer pumps advertising equally low prices and thought he had his answer. Then he took a surreptitious look at a neighbouring table upon which were the remnants of one of the meals on offer. The food wasn’t the best quality, but it wasn’t awful either.

Bill took the menu to the bar, making a note of the table number on his way. He felt a compulsion to buy a pint once he was at the bar. Ordering tea seemed alien somehow, but so too was a breakfast beer. He paid for the food and pot of tea and returned to his table and thus began a ritual that swiftly became a daily routine.

The allure of the pub not only dwelt in the economies of the food. There was a welcome rhythm here. Bill got out of the prison of his house and to an extent the restrictions of his mind, and the day became his own as a result of this pilgrimage. Best of all, he enjoyed watching the ebb and flow of the pub’s clientele. The colourful flotsam and jetsam of life.

Some were there for a liquid breakfast and Bill marvelled at their stamina. None of them were spring chickens. Perhaps younger than they looked, but old all the same. Many came for the food. There were those who sat in an oasis of their own company. Focused on the job in hand, which was to consume their breakfast and then be on their way. Others met with friends to share a meal and insipid conversation. Bill wondered how much of that chat was worthwhile. Thought it likely that mostly it was muzak in the stead of the relative peace and silence of the pub. An attempt to drown painful realities out with familiar noise.

The watchers were what drew Bill further in after a while of frequenting the pub. There were three of them and watching was their prime activity. The food on their plate was merely fuel. It went largely unnoticed as they undertook the business of assessing their surroundings. There was a keenness to them. Thy were birds of prey. He admired their energy. It spoke to him in a way nothing had for an age.

Then, one day, something more than their energy spoke to Bill.

“Mind if I join you at seventy three?”

Bill smiled at the reference to a table that had become his usual spot without him ever intending it to be so. He’d drifted into the quiet harmony of the place and found a peace of sorts.

He nodded at the seat her hand was resting upon. Noticed the black painted nails. A detail that added well to the whole. “Be my guest.”

She smiled before sitting, “I’d like that, thank you.”

Bill had not felt attraction in an age. There had been no real attraction for as long as he could remember, only a theoretical appreciation of beauty. A distance had presented itself to him and he’d barely acknowledged it as he was summarily removed from the world and made a spectator. In the presence of this woman he was enlivened. The mystery of it intrigued him. The mystery of her was a force he could not ignore.

He smiled as he thought about having skin in the game once again. This tenuous connection was more than he’d experienced in an age. It didn’t matter if it was a fleeting illusion. The reminder was enough. This was what it was to live and he found that he wanted more. A strange but compelling thought drifted before him then. That he’d come in search of this. Of life. For a reason to live. And here it was right before him. In a town pub that opened early for the lost and broken. Here was the place he had found belonging after too long in a desert of servitude and drudgery.

She seemed to sense his need for silence. A pause in which he could open the curtains and move the furniture around in this room in his mind. And she knew when he was done reorganising and preparing, “We’ve been watching you.”

He instinctively looked across at the other two watchers. They barely acknowledged him and this economy of motion made him grin. A secret had been imparted. The title of a story yet unwritten.

He returned his gaze to her. He’d barely dared to look upon her before now. This a place where to stare was an unwelcome intrusion. He felt her more than saw her. She was an envoy from a land where he had always belonged. A guide to how he should be. He knew this and thought perhaps he’d always known it. Her energy. He felt it enter him and yet he was lighter for the addition. The inexorable pull of it was all too welcome. And as she moved him something fell away. Dark shackles that had held him for too long in a prison of his own making. He thought himself bowed and broken, but now she brought him to his feet and bade him rejoin the fray. His time was not done. Not yet. Not by a long chalk.

Relaxing into the moment he found a strange form of peace, “so what now?” he asked her.

There was a pause in which he marvelled at how he had mastered the nervous energy that remained fizzing within him. An inner calm held its hand out and stilled the threatened storm of chaos. Somehow he knew how to be in this moment. And he wanted much more of this. Had wanted it all his life.

She stood and a smile played upon her lips, “you come with me.”

He joined her and as he left the pub he understood several things. As conspicuous as he felt leaving the busy boozer with this woman, no one looked. Few cared. He was nothing to them. Part of the furniture at best. Wallpaper to most. That the other two watchers were with them was a certainty he did not need to check upon. His life was changing. Had changed when he found this pub and a new routine in the stead of a life-long pattern that had failed to ever serve him well.

They walked out of the town. He was aloof from the insanity of this endeavour. A fatalism had befallen him. Better to go against the flow and explore what lay up stream than to continue to stagnate in a dark pool of a depression that grew denser with the pulse of each dying day.

The words of his mother arose within him and created a moment of hilarious insanity. She reminded him never to go off with strangers. This advice he had heeded for the best part of his life. Now he was being led astray. But he wanted this with every fibre of his being. He was comfortable in this discomfort of the unknown and the unknowable.

These people were family. He had known it from the very first time he’d sat in their company. A communion that need not be remarked. Their continuing silence was a comfort that thrilled him. An anticipation built within him. Foreplay that would not disappoint in its thrilling conclusion.

A dark voice of reason suggested that this was dire folly. That they were leading him to his death. So be it, he told that dissenting voice. And he meant it. Better to end at the hands of these people than never to attempt a start.

He knew though that something of worth lay ahead. They were guiding him to the treasure he had sought all his life. The jewel of his destiny shone in a cave awaiting his discovery.

She stopped at a lock-up and nodded to her companion. Bill expected simple key to lock. Instead a fob was raised and pressed, and the shutter door rolled up of its own accord. A simple trick that promised far more to come.

Lights glittered on as they stepped forth. Bill felt his heart drumming an excited beat in his chest. The palms of his hands were moist with an excitement he had not felt since his twenties. His twenties now a history lesson he had failed to learn from.

Another press of the fob and another shutter rolling away to reveal stairs that unravelled downwards to a space that Bill knew was the entrance to the secret that was to be revealed. The cave that held a treasure that was his and only his.

As he followed her down into the depths, he knew that something life changing awaited him at his journey’s conclusion. Again the dark voice that dwells in anguish and despair vomited unease upon him; this is where you die. This is where they have all died. Then it presented him with a sterile vision of bare white tiles and a metal bed with restrains and gutters for the blood and waste that would flow from him as he was butchered. Another victim made willing by his own limiting stupidity.

The unease of the vision only strengthened his resolve. There was a strange truth in it. He looked upon the woman leading him down the steps and he knew her to be dangerous. Her movements reminiscent of a stalking cat. A constant, coiled energy that would be released in a frenetic and frantic instant. She was a harbinger of change and he was excited to witness all the change she would bring to this world.

Her companions followed close behind. Their shadows emanating a sense of purpose that thrilled him. This was now shit or bust. Better to die at the gates of promised transformation than to hang back and fail to ever launch. He smiled inwardly and for the first time thought of himself as a pensioner whilst removing that label from who he was to be. Smiling at a lifetime in which he had failed ever to launch. A boat stranded on the dry and humourless land, staring out at the sea and fearing his very purpose.

Heart in mouth, he emerged into a room that would be his end or his salvation. Hunger for change that had awoken in him rumbled as strip lights flickered on and illuminated his destiny. There was no going back now. Hadn’t been from the moment she’d approached his table.

“Well, Seventy Three,” she said without turning to face him, “welcome home.”

Bill felt close to tears. Tears of joy that almost sent him into paroxysms of laughter as he envisioned being hoicked into the air by his ankles and slapped on his hairy butt. A cry to herald his birth escaped his lips. There was no restraint in this immediacy, only the delight of discovery and the wonder at a life beyond his imaginings.

“Just as long as you know that’s not my age,” he quipped. Astounding himself at the calm he presented with those words.

“And Twenty Three isn’t my IQ,” now she turned to smile at him. A smile filled with both charm and danger, “Forty Six. Heinz. Show Seventy Three around.”

Heinz, thought Bill, and in repeating that word he knew that this man was Fifty Seven. He shook his head and grinned as the two men stepped forth, unlocked cabinets and revealed the treasure Bill knew had lain ahead of him. Before him were instruments that would transform him in their repeated use.

“Superheroes,” Bill breathed the word into the room without attending to it.

Forty Six chuckled, “superannuation heroes, maybe!” the Aussie twang was unmistakeable.

Heinz shrugged and grinned sheepishly, his demeanour a world away from the watcher in the pub. Here he was the little schoolboy who’d been bullied at playtime. Small, but uncowed, “it’s a hobby.”

Bill loved him for that self-deprecation, “beats crochet,” he said.

The comment broke the ice with the two men before him. They both nodded and Forty Six winked at him, “you’ll do. You’ll do pretty well.”

Bill stepped forth and lifted a club from the first metal cabinet. Hefting it, he then threw it from hand to hand. This was a reacquaintance, he knew. The weight of the weapon held a familiarity to it and the years fell away as the connection sent a thrill of distant memory and welcome through him.

The overhead lights flickered and as they steadied themselves he felt bigger somehow. Stronger. A sense of everything falling away until there was only the clarity of the now. He nodded and turned to the only family that had ever mattered.

“What kept you?” asked Twenty Three.

Seventy Three grinned at her and his two brothers, “I overslept.”

Forty Six slapped his back, “better late than never, mate!”

Heinz smiled a warm smile that told Seventy Three that he’d missed him better than words ever could.

“It’s good to be home,” he said to the three people who had always been home for him. They hugged then. Seventy Three feeling their strength feeding his own. He would die for these three, and in that certainty he would live far more than most could ever dream of.