Tommy, who would be dead 10 years later. His body found high up on a winter cliff-top path on the Jurassic Coast of Devon. With him went one of the few reliable witnesses to my own life up until that point in time and I am still learning how to tell the stories that he found so effortless and light with laughter to recant. My own stories were always getting lost in the telling, because I was lost myself. I have, thus far in life, luckily and by the skin of my teeth, avoided becoming the corpse in the forest found by hikers, but became instead that Missouri security guard that everyone thought was dead. There is no other void quite like being gone from the world but still walking around in it.
My friend, Tommy, looks out at a bleary eyed moon in a starless sky. His face hidden from the sting of rain and a bitter cold you can feel in your bones. And the sea is also out there, in the nothing, where everything else in the world is too, and there’s nothing to see out there of it tonight, but the grassy ledge on which he stands. A broken seagull’s egg at his feet like he hatched right there from it in the darkness that very night. And the wind is blowing in, out of the nothing, with nothing in its way from back where it began, back to the place where these things come into existence, out of the nothing.
Tommy leans into the wind and steadies himself, but he can feel its lift and his clothes flap frantically about him like beating wings. Until suddenly, he is awake. More awake than he has ever been in his life. Awake to that spectacular ever present roar of breaking waves on a beach of pebbles far below him, deep in the nothing and yet somehow all around him still. And with every wave that bows and breaks below the pebble's explode into raucous applause right back, for the turning of the tide, again and forever ‘till the end of time.
Tommy anti-depressed himself out of the following day with maximum milligrams and decided to stay there, just out of everybody’s reach. It took me three days to hitch-hike to his funeral in rural Wales and it felt like I walked the entire way. I slept in a barn and under a hedgerow next to a road before finally reaching my place of tears with his waiting family and many friends.
This is a story that both Tommy and I don’t know yet, standing in the kitchen of my ground floor flat in Weymouth, Dorset in 1991, doing hot knives for breakfast and in need of a root canal.
Photos, Salisbury, UK, 2016
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