The Passing of TIme itself - Part One

ONE

Many people, especially at a stage in their life where they are unable to do little else except talk to grandchildren about battles in love and war by the fireside; or lie in bed for most of the morning, while spending the endless summers sipping tea in the shaded areas of the garden, admiring the sun and the delights of nature in their obvious states of splendor, would like to say that they had spent their life well, enjoyed many romances and looked for adventure on the battlefield (and off it) and such other fantasies.

I cannot be said to be one of those fortunate people. I have loved one woman; I have sought the adventure that others crave, although I never really suited the 'nomadic' lifestyle. I wanted to spend my whole life with my darling wife at my side, but that wasn't to be. As things turn out, ideas never tend to plan out the way you want them to. Now then, where should I begin? I suppose the most logical of places would be at my birth, and me always being one to comply with the laws of logic and fact, that is where I shall begin.

I was born Andrew Pinteran on the twenty second of August, 1920 to a medium rich family in Yorkshire, England. However, due to the nature of my father's financial work, we had to move to London, 'The Big smoke' as they call it. I was merely a boy, not even close to being a man. 1935. Swinging London, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself there. The fifteen year old me wanted to escape, and London was where he found it. England, once the largest colony based empire the world had ever seen, was growing back to its height of greatness, and I was a part of it. The sights, smells and tastes of the city enthralled me, the cars going by at impossible speeds, enthusiastic drivers honking horns simply because they had the money to. My family never bought a car, as my father walked to work and my mother stayed at home with me.

But something was about to happen in my family. I didn't really understand what was happening at the time; but there was something big going to happen. I could tell. My father was more aggressive towards both my mother and me, and my mother had an addiction to morphine that she had got from nursing soldiers in the First World War. She never told me where she got it from, but my father knew. He had known all along. And so did the promiscuous doctor.

You see, humans are not all super, as it is, and the sad truth is that we lie, cheat and steal to get what we want. In my mother's case this was morphine. As it turns out, ever since the war she had been romantically involved with an army doctor, who came to be her lover for the entity of my life. My father knew of course, but didn't mind on account of his own numerous affairs with colleges, shop assistants and on one occasion, a waitress. His drinking continued to worsen, and he often beat my mother to the point of tears, and resulting in her often departure from his bed, only to return again from her lover to our home, apologizing, and my father, being the misogynist that he was, accepted her apology.

But it wasn't until 1936 when my family was torn apart for good. It was my discovery, although there can be no doubt that it affected my father much more than it did me. I walked in to the bathroom of our two bed roomed house in the suburbs to find my mother, lying face up on the floor. Her wrists were bleeding from the scores in her veins were, she had injected the morphine, and the bathwater was still on. As the water began to rise over her lifeless body, I noticed in her left hand, a half submerged rusty needle, still with some of the terrible liquid inside. She had overdosed.. We never knew if it was intentional, but the fact that she had run the water makes me think that it wasn't. I saw the water run over the floor boards, trickling through the gaps, melded with some of the blood from my mother's wrists. She had taken two doses; her in-coordination caused by the drug had made the second injection more perilous; she had missed the vein four times. This was where the blood was transfusing from, and this sight was far too much for a boy of any age to comprehend. I fainted then and there. My father came home from the pub later that evening. I was just about recovered. I had put the tap off, and never once during the operation did I cease to cry. The tears ran from my eyes, down my cheeks and onto the soaked floor, adding my pain to my mother's. Father was never the same after he saw her.

Drank harder, until he was paralytic. He would sit up all night crying, drinking, vomiting, and crying again. I saw little of him in his final months. He didn't go to work. I still enjoyed school. The laughter of normality bit at my body, but that was the way I like it; normal. Several months after my mother had passed away; I came home to find not the unconscious father lying in the sofa that I was used to, but a police detective sitting on my kitchen table. He had just finished a cigarette when he noticed my unsmiling face in the doorway. He was sitting awkwardly, and I knew that it was bad news from the way that he refused to look at me properly, which I remember thinking had been the height of rudeness.

"are you..." he looked at some papers that were scattered on the table, selected the right one then picked it up and read it before finishing- "Andrew Pinteran?" I nodded slowly, expecting the worse. He beckoned me into the kitchen, and I duly obliged.

"I think you should sit down". It had taken him an indecisive minute to say this. It would be torture getting the news from him. He slowly put his hand in his pocket, grabbed his cigarette box with a grubby hand and pulled one out, before spinning the rest down onto the table. "You don't mid do you?" he asked through his tobacco mouth, as he picked up his matches from the table. I knew that it was irrelevant what I said, as the outcome would be the same no matter what I said, so I agreed.

Without a word of a thank you, he sparked up the match, put it under the cigarette end for several seconds while it lit, and then shook the match out in the air and threw it into the nearby kitchen sink. I heard the incredibly faint sound of a sizzle as the embers were extinguished in the thin film of water coating the bottom of the polished steel basin. The detective removed the cigarette from his mouth after a long inhale and breathed out the smoke through his mouth an instant later. The stale smell of tobacco was replaced by fresh tobacco, and the warm scent wafted around my nose. The smoke climbed upwards, encircling itself, dancing effortlessly until it hit the roof, which still possessed the watermarks from my mother's last bath, which had by now turned a sickly black as the paint began to rot away in the mold as the water had seeped through the thin surface of the bathroom floor.

"I am afraid I have some bad news Andrew." He began. "By the way," remembering his formalities an instant after he should have done, "my name is Rutherington" detective Rutherington." He took another drag of the cigarette, closing his eyes, enjoying the feel of the smoke creeping down his throat. Years later, he would die from a long and painful battle with lung cancer, but right now he was here, talking to me, delivering the news that I had been expecting for a long time.

"I am afraid your father was found this morning. He had committed suicide, shooting himself through the head with his revolver. I am so sorry." He sounded anything but. Placing the cigarette between his lips again, he inhaled the silvery smoke through his mouth. Exhale.

I was actually ok with the whole orphan thing. After the detective had left, leaving the number of a local orphanage I was to go to, and the house was to be sold off, the contents put into a trust until I was eighteen. However, my life, and that of every living soul alive the next year, was going to be cut drastically in to pieces very shortly.