Acid Bubbles Read online

  All this fake machismo made me feel more nervous than I’d ever been in my life. Going sober to a party with a sure thing was daunting. The first move tonight would be to down a few pints in the pub before we ventured off on the road to our manhood. My stomach was very nervous and I dry retched my way down the stairs.

  Running the gauntlet of the family dinner table was always a torture when the aunties were over from the old cottage. In the old days the cottage was the main farmhouse, but now occupied rent-free by my opinionated scrounging aunties, both closet Nazis. The old cottage was over a rise out of sight from the farmhouse, so if you were lucky you didn’t have to see the old girls. Sadly it was too close, and they would invite themselves over for a free dinner on a regular basis, a far too regular basis.

  The modern kitchen was dominated by an old Victorian farmhouse table. Around this expanse of wood were gathered the oddest assortment of mismatched chairs. Each of the chairs had arrived as if by magic and reflected the personality of its occupant. Where they came from nobody seemed to know, but these chairs will always be etched in my memory. Most had been standing mismatched around the table all my life. I can never remember a tablecloth and always the oddest place settings scattered around, never anything formal. I was the last in the house to join the happy throng. Being the youngest wasn’t good news, I’d be easy prey for my auntie’s attentions.

  The aunties, Beatrice and Violet, took over all conversations, and were dominating and more solidly Victorian than the table. Both war widows with sad and different stories, they shared a common hatred of everything German. Nazi Germany had taken their beloved Sidney and Joe away from them. They had a mint imperial smelling bitterness, unbroken after more than two decades alone.

  My aunties formed an evil alliance as bad as any evil axis. These old ladies were my fascists. Anything, and I mean anything, I could do was never good enough. I was the big disappointment because I wasn’t going into the family business. It was the livestock that I hated so much, finding the hideous-smelling crowded pens uninteresting. It was always bitterly cold at 5am no matter what time of the year. This wasn’t the life for me. I was going to be a dentist or at worst a dental technician with a clean laboratory, more money and fewer hours. Best of all, no mountains of shit, I loathed animal waste, steaming piles of shit. You could keep farming!

  “These modern girls showing their bottoms and fat legs get no respect from men!” Beattie boomed, showing the open page of a magazine to make her point to anybody who was interested. The picture featured a smart girl wearing a dress two inches above her knee, all very disturbing I didn’t think.

  “I think I would have worn a dress like that if I’d been eighteen now. I wish Jane would dress a little bit more feminine,” Violet said, looking across in the direction of Beattie, her thin high vinegar voice cutting through the air. Beattie couldn’t have heard above the sound of the pressure cooker, though the suggestion that somebody should wear such a disgusting item would have shocked her older sister.

  “You only say that because you’ve got good legs. Big legs like mine aren’t suited to that style. I was very lucky when I was eighteen, meeting Sidney,” Beattie boomed. She had very good hearing when she decided to use it. When my mother asked for help her deafness was almost profound. She without any conscience expounded values she always failed miserably to demonstrate.

  “We all covered up when I was eighteen,” Violet said, “but if I were eighteen now I’d show my knickers.”

  “I didn’t know you had such a wild side, Violet,” Jane said in surprise.

  “I haven’t got a wild side, I’m jealous of you young girls. And you, young lady, don’t make the best of yourself with all that leather,” Violet responded.

  “Looks like a boy, a ruffian, a ne’er-do-well!” Beattie boomed. My sister looked back uninterested and uncaring.

  The evil axis legs debate had now finished. It was time to attack fresh prey, namely me!

  “My God, what the hell is that smell?” Beattie said. She watched me with gimlet eyes whilst building her next bout of criticism. I always promised myself one day I would get revenge. Was my day ever going to come?

  “Yes, what is that smell? It’s really sickly like vanilla and chocolate but worse,” Violet added.

  “Look at your hair, it’s just too long. You look more like a girl than a boy. Those shoes, they’re higher than good girls wore in my day. Bad girls wore shoes like that,” Beattie boomed at me.

  “I’m not a bad girl, Auntie, I’m a boy,” I exclaimed.

  “You’re wearing high-heeled shoes and sailors’ trousers, flares I think you call them, and that hair. A common girl would dress like that for a night out with soldiers,” Beattie said, and then buried her head in the magazine. She’d had the last word.

  “This is 1971, the world has changed and I’m changing with it. This is new and wild,” I said. Beattie and Violet snorted with derision.

  “I think Peter looks nice. He’s only seventeen he’s allowed to make a few mistakes.” My mother, Iris, voiced this over the sound from the pressure cooker, the steam making her ghostlike in the room. A comment I couldn’t decide on. What was she saying?

  “Dinner is ready. All sit down and stop arguing,” My mother said. This carried weight, everyone was quiet. My mother’s words always held a quiet authority. She’d been snatched away from the middle classes. Her grandfather was a gentleman farmer, and my father, John, a hard-working farm boy who had first seen my mother at a country fair. I think my mother wanted to escape the constraints of the family home. My very grand grandmother always schemed for her to marry someone from the right circle. She fell in love with John and I never heard my parents argue. I cannot recall a single harsh word between them.

  Tough as my father was, my mother had quiet well-spoken strength. Through the haze of steam I could see her move towards a switch next to the door. It sounded bells in the farm buildings, and only at lambing time could we ignore the call for a family dinner around the large Victorian table. John my father and George my studious, quiet, twenty-three-year-old brother would be at the table within two minutes.

  My father said little after the hard labour of his fourteen-hour-day. George would hardly speak to me. He thought I was letting the family down by not helping with the farm. He’d studied hard at agricultural college, and was always talking about modern agricultural methods. One day he would be the boss, and it would be like working for Hitler, a dictator, a fascist.

  The chairs around that table were a mismatched broken bunch, and the people around that table were as strange and different as each chair they sat upon. The chairs were held by their usefulness around that table. What was holding us together, blood bonds?

  “Dad, will you run me into town later?” I asked, halfway through the pudding. There was a heavy atmosphere in the room that night as if a storm was building. I didn’t know at the time, but it was.

  My father removed a rag from a pocket in the overalls he always seemed to wear. He threw this soiled cloth at me and my clean clothes. The piece of material wasn’t dirty, but the force of my father’s action and his words shocked me.

  “I do fourteen hours, you do nothing! You can walk and wipe the muck from your own stupid shoes. Help me some time and I might help you!” my father said. There was finality in this statement that indicated I should remain quiet. I didn’t!

  “Dad…”

  “Shut up now or you won’t be going out!”

  This was the end of my last family meal around the big table. My mismatched chair was about to be used for firewood.

  My father and I were set on a hard path. Bitter arguments would fill the twisted future I would walk into tonight.

  Chapter 4 – A very short time before the now. One step beyond.

  Shortly after I was diagnosed with cancer something quite extraordinary happened, and it happened in the dark shadows of the night. It started as a nightmare. No ordinary nightmare, a special kind of nightmare. Dreams are dr
eams, everybody has them. Sometimes they are vivid, sometimes vague. I think everybody in the world, and I mean everybody, knows what dreams are.

  I thought I did until one night several months ago. This night was the first step on the road to revelation and discovery. In fact this very first strange step would lead me in the end to the truth, all the truths about my past. That first infant stumbling along this road wasn’t an easy lesson. It was a journey that gave me a wretched awakening in terror.

  Let me explain. It was just an ordinary night and I was inside a jumble of mundane dreams. These dreams were ordinary from me, many to be forgotten even before waking. It was during one of these dreams in the depths of night that I first discovered the crack, a small fissure into a different reality. Dreams are dreams and will always remain so. This is what I thought. Until I put my hand on the door handle…

  After I’d walked through the door my whole perception of the real and the non-real changed forever. You see, I was in a passageway in a vague and very normal dreamlike state. When I grabbed a door handle at the end of this random corridor, it was cold to the touch, very cold. Straightaway something out of the ordinary was happening. The sensation of cold was like touching a shelf in an ice box. At first I thought I’d woken up and knocked over my glass of water. No, this was not the thing at all. The sensations were spreading and not only confined to my hand. My whole body was receiving new stimuli, a new world was opening. I could now feel it along my arm. More than that, I could perceive every hair on it, every sinew and every molecule making that part of my body, all with a stunning crystal clear intensity. It was with the joy of enlightenment more than fear of what lies ahead that I stepped up. After a moment’s hesitation I decided my next move. Yes, inside what I thought was a dream I calculated what I was about to do.

  I turned the door handle and I could feel the mechanism inside, not a simple sensation like when you’re awake, but every single piece of metal touching every other piece of metal. Parts ground in the opening action of the door. The door creaked open, and I could feel the dryness in the hinges as they needed oiling. The wind hit me, and to my surprise it was a cold, damp night. The corridor had been null, dreamlike. Now my whole body, every molecule, was awake. It was ten times more real than any real I’ve ever known. It was like plunging your face into a bowl of icy cold water, a sensation of being far more awake than ever in any normal existence. I’d walked or been propelled into a new dimension, a world somewhere else other than here.

  This was no nightmare, this was super reality. I wanted to discover more about this new found vital space. I stepped into the wet, dark cobbled street. It was lit by yellow, dull almost Victorian lighting. At first I thought it was a Victorian dream but no, there were modern signs, people in the strangest clothing, but not from any remembered past. A bone-chilling light drizzle was falling. I could smell everything that night, the rain, the dirt, food, even at a distance and the most disturbing part of all, the people. This is when a hint of agitation started to disturb me. It was the stench of the people. They smelt dangerous. I was overwhelmed by the smell of aggression. I had developed super senses and I was fascinated. At the same time somewhere in the back of what I assume was my own mind I was very frightened.

  Then it struck me. The revelation came to me like a thunderbolt, and I knew without doubt what this strange dimension was. This other reality was a manifestation of my battle with cancer, my fear of a lingering painful death. This was a cancer experience with groups of dark shadowy foe characters hanging round in doorways, under lights, smoking and mumbling. All these dangerous smelling characters represented tumours in near human form. All were malicious-looking, the type always to be cast as bad guys in the movies. The problem was tonight I was inside the movie and these bad guys were very real.

  I can only tell you this in hindsight because at the time things were very different for me. At that moment I could not tell if I was awake or not. It would be a complete lie to say I had any knowledge our universe existed. At that moment on that damp night I was alive. Dream did not exist, all my past was gone, and this was living reality in a cold damp street, with every sense in my body on fire. I could hear the locks turning behind me as if someone was forcing me into the alleyway. This made it impossible for any retreat back into soft option dreaming. By then it wasn’t important, I’d already forgotten its existence. I turned to face a danger behind me, face down whoever was closing the door. I was shocked to discover no one behind me, the only thing there a graffiti scrawled brick wall. I turned and looked around that dingy disturbing street, discovering only one escape route.

  The street was cobbled as if to take heavy traffic, but it didn’t seem to be a through road of any kind. It was accessed by one solitary alleyway, narrow and darkly shadowed, off to my left. I could see into this disturbing alleyway from where I was standing. It was dark and wet. In every corner its shadows pulsed with the movement of cockroaches and rats. Beyond I could see a brightly lit street. I ran!

  My running was a revelation. As I accelerated every tendon in my legs, every single muscle, and every fibre of my being worked in harmony. I could control my velocity, the drain on my energy, everything including a colossal top speed. Each footfall came with the knowledge of my toes contacting the ground. I could feel the type of stone the cobbles were made of. The sensation was one of slow motion though by now I must have been doing thirty miles an hour. I was faster than the fastest men in the world, and it seemed slow. Where could I push this to? The sticky, damp light rain started to sting my face such was the speed I was travelling. As my arms pumped I could feel the wind rushing between my fingertips. This was the most scintillating experience of velocity and power I think any living man has ever experienced. This was fabulous. I was escaping in epic style.

  Fabulous, that is, until I could smell danger bubbling up behind me. They were moving very fast, possessing similar powers to me and were charging after me like a herd of stampeding cattle. It wasn’t like one of those dreams where you can’t run any faster no matter how hard you try, it wasn’t like that at all. I was faster than the wind, moving well beyond the dreams of any Olympic athlete. No, the experience wasn’t dreamlike, it was super reality!

  I was going fast, very fast. In seconds I was through the dark infested alleyway, clear of all the dangers of the filth-smelling menace. I thought I was away and free, but things in this life weren’t simple. I was now moving at speeds impossible in a normal dimension. Grave danger could be heard running behind me moving with increased urgency. It seemed to push its odour of vile stench ahead of it, then I realised the murderous mob were all gaining on me. They had more experience in this world than I had!

  The brightness of the street had been an illusion made by looking through the dark infested tunnel of the alleyway. The lights themselves were large and high above the street, but they threw out a terrible sickly yellow light turning everything in that wide thoroughfare into a veiled malevolent threat. The whole street was thronged with dark people offering no safe haven. I was now surrounded by hundreds of cancerous figures all wanting to invade my body. I was in plain view for all to see, and the larger lights on that street made me no safer as they illuminated fresh meat for the mob. I was a magnet for their evil. I was the attraction they all wanted to devour!

  At this point I finally realised the predicament I was running into. Panic took over and I pushed my body even harder. The sensation of feeling everything could be described as slow motion, but I wasn’t running in slow motion as everything was happening in real time. I understood everything. I’d reached maximum velocity, and at that moment felt more alive than I’d ever done in all my life. This wasn’t a dreamlike state, this was living in a place I never been before. It was the most exhilarating thing I’d ever experienced, and I was alive for the first time. The big problem with this crystal bright total sensual experience was, it wasn’t going to last. It was life in the fast lane, the fast lane to a painful death as hunted prey.

 
Everybody I passed on this wide boulevard was dark wearing disgusting, shapeless, greasy clothes with expressions void of anything but maliciousness. Were my stalkers male or female? I could not tell, most seemed to be rat like in their movements and androgynous. They varied in size and colour, some quite tall and thin, others stocky with obvious latent power. The absolute impression this crowd of moving horror gave me was of a mudslide of evil dark flesh running, oozing along the alleyways and streets.

  It wasn’t the awfulness of their appearance that made them terrifying, it was their unwillingness to slow down, and their constant building stench as they closed in on me with every stride. The rain was now coming down hard beating at my face, and at forty miles an hour felt as if it was going to penetrate my eyes. This would have been a consideration under normal circumstances but I couldn’t slow down, not for one second. Where I was running to I hadn’t a clue, but I wasn’t going to slow.

  They were gaining on me stride by stride by stride. My lungs filling with the cold damp air were about to burst, this wet vapour of acrid water drowning me with each forced breath. I forced it out in a fine spray only for this to be followed a second later with the urge to feel that raw coldness fill my chest once again. I knew I could only keep this pace up for another few seconds, a handful of yards gained in front of the poisonous onslaught. The mob would never stop until its cancer consumed the cells of my body.

  If there was somewhere to run and hide, a safe haven in this sickly yellow city, I didn’t know where to look. Everything was new to me, all the sensations and all the horror. I was looking with the fever of a desperate man for a way out, a bright glass door, the golden door or a subway sign for Tranquil Place… None of this materialised. I found not a single friendly face, and with stinging eyes I looked for any possible escape. My eyes searched through the passengers travelling on the filthy blood-red convoys of double-decker buses, but I found no sanctuary. I couldn’t see anywhere to go, and everybody in that city knew why I was there. They all wanted a share of my cells.