I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now……
There had been an instant as he walked down the dusty road when George knew he was about to be shot. That someone had him in their sights and that this moment would be his last. After the long journey from Kuwait with his troops in the heat and the sweat down his cropped hair into his collar and the sand and the burning oil wells and the bodies of dead Iraqi soldiers most of them younger than his own troops.
What a place. What a waste.
The war was officially over. They were just tidying up. An early morning patrol. But some sniper, some Baathist fanatic who nobody had told the news, was going to kill him. After 30 years of slaving his guts out for what, a Major, after all that time just a bloody Major, from Korea via Malaya, Vietnam, Bosnia, Belfast, to die here in the sand and dirt outside the town of As Sulayab with the marshes and reeds of Southern Iraq stretching away on either side of the road
It was then. The sun in his eyes and the scent of the oleander bushes, just before the bullet smashed into his skull and scattered his brains, blood and fragments of bone across the face of Private Peter Robson of the Northumberland Fusiliers walking warily beside him, instead of darkness and extinction or whatever lies on the other side of the door marked ‘Death’, his consciousness and body were flooded with the memory of another sunlit moment.
On his back.
Light bouncing through the open window.
Head hanging over the bed, eyes half closed with an upside down view of the purple oleander flowers cascading over the stone balustrade visible through the tall windows with their shutters folded back opening onto the balcony.
Relaxed in the heat of a Maltese summer morning, with warm thoughts of Jackie and Cilla’s bodies in their swimsuits on Tigne beach. He could imagine Jackie’s nipples hard through the wet material and wondered what it would be like to kiss her and run his fingers through her hair and then touch her and……
I should get up and go down there and she’ll…. or maybe Cilla with her brown eyes, blonde hair and that smile of hers and he is yawning and stretching and…..
“OH MY GOD!!”
The words screamed at the ceiling as his body twists upright on the bed.
‘What am I doing here. In this body. Not my body, Not my body now. An earlier body. A teenage body.’
“FUCK !”
‘Where’s the road, the squaddies, the burnt out tanks and transport and the choking smoke from the…..’
A torrent of thoughts
“Shit. This can’t be real”.
‘But I’m here. In my bedroom. Mum and Dad’s house in Hughes Hallet Street. Ghost. I’m dead. I’m a ghost’.
But the body is real enough. He can feel the bed beneath his arse, his fingers through his long hair. Bare feet as they touch the floor.
He stands on the cool marble tiles and gazes round the room. A room he hasn’t seen for more than 30 years.
“ I must be dead. This is some sort of purgatory or hell or ……”
He knows it’s not. This is as solid as the road he had been walking down moments before. Every detail of the room. Every sensation in his body, from the saliva in his mouth to the nails digging into the palms of his clenched fists.
He is here. This is not a hallucination, some momentary pre-death effect. He is in his room in Vega, his parent’s house in Sliema. The Union Tennis club on the other side of the back wall of this bedroom. The sound of a car passing outside. The distant noises from the seafront. The incandescent morning heat of a Maltese summer’s day rising from the street below.
He is here and this is his body. The body of a teenage boy. He closes his eyes for a moment. He turns slowly to look at his reflection in the long mirror on the far wall.
Mid shot of full-length reflection of young man wearing only a faded and torn pair of blue jeans.
Good looking tanned face. Kind of skinny torso with long muscular arms from hours of swimming in the summer warm Mediterranean. Straight shoulder length bleached blonde hair untidy and salt streaked that his mother and father were constantly complaining about. “You’d just look so much better with a proper haircut Georgie….you’re such a handsome young man….why do you have to grow it that long?”
There is no doubt he is in…..no he is himself and he is 17 years old, at least that is the age his adult mind reckons he must be. Malta 1966. The Beatles have just released Revolver. Bob Dylan is God as far as I am concerned and I’m still madly in love with at least 3 of the girls I hang out with and…..
'What date is it exactly? Time of day? Where are mum and dad, Mary and Stevie? What the fuck should I do next?'
Questions like rifle shots through his brain and then….the enormity of what has happened hits him. So strong he almost passes out. He stumbles back and sits on the bed, his right hand moving into the pocket of his jeans and closing on a folded piece of paper.
He takes it out, unfolding it, un-crumpling it, smoothing it. He rolls over, lies on his belly and reads it as the shafts of brilliant morning sunshine pour in through the balcony window onto this message to him written in his own scrawling teenage hand in red crayon on both sides of the paper in front of him.
Hi Georgie
If you’re reading this, which I’m sure you probably will sooner or later, as I guess you still have my habit of putting your hands in your pockets when I cant think of anything else to do and anyway it makes me feel like Marlon Brando, then you must be here.
This is not an easy thing to understand but please try to surrender to it and don’t ask too many questions– for the moment at least. Just accept that it’s happened.
I don’t have time to explain why it’s happened to you or ‘where’ I am. Too complicated really. Don’t worry you haven’t somehow destroyed your teenage self, but neither am I lurking somewhere in your subconscious….well only as much as I have all your adult life.
I’m kind of somewhere else which might be a little hard for you to grasp but if things work out we may meet ….which will be even stranger.
Weird to be writing this to you and really knowing so little about you….me…us….who I’ve become all those years down the line.
Look I have to go soon Georgie, at least I guess you’re still called Georgie, I’ve always liked the name. Please trust that it will be OK and that there is a good reason for this happening to you….me.
Pieces of practical information you might need. It’s Thursday the 28th July 1966 and if you arrive pretty soon after I leave it’s around 10 o’clock in the morning. Mum & Dad are in Sicily till next week some time, Stevie’s god knows where but not in his room and Mary’s in Valletta with Janie (Janie’s so gorgeous, shame she’s Maysie’s best friend or I’d be after her. But I digress).
Once you’ve read this I suggest you get yourself together and go down to the beach. You remember the Swimming Club on Tigne Beach? I’m sure you do. They’ll all be there. Jackie, Donna, Cilla, Richard, Nick, Mike, Jo, Cherie, the whole bunch of them.
Talk to Nick. He knows what’s happening
Take care of the record collection and I wouldn’t tell anyone else about this. Stevie might understand but he can’t keep his mouth shut. Mum, Dad and Mary will just think that this time I’ve lost the plot completely.
Good luck
Love
Georgie (aged 17 !)
PS How the f____ did I end up joining the army?
PPS If you look on the balcony you’ll see a number of geranium plants growing in old tomato tins. Under the red geranium you’ll find a key. It opens the locked draw at the bottom of the wardrobe . The notebooks in there are my journal in the form of a biography kind of novel kind of thang written over the last year or so. Fell free to read them, they still need some work......
Don’t be surprised if things here are a little different to how you remember them, though of course some of it is pure fiction! It’s not your memory that’s at fault…..and right now I don’t really have the time to explain how things have worked out a little differently to how they ‘were’ but I’m sure you’ll cope .
PPPS If things get really tough then phone this number Senglea 459. Oh yeah and if you still do it there’s some really nice thai grass under the socks in the top drawer.
He smiles. It might come to that.
So he kept a journal or was writing a novel, not something he remembered doing but he would look into later. And what did his teenage self mean by ‘things here are a little different to how you remember them”? But time for that later, right now he needed to get out of the house. Take a walk down to the sea and try to understand, if that was even possible, what had happened to him.
He stands up. Folds the note carefully and puts it in his back pocket. Glances round the room at the chaos of books, clothes, album covers, ashtray, empty plates, glasses and cups strewn across the tiled floor. Posters of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Marlon Brando, Jean Paul Sartre, Che Guevera, Brigitte Bardot, Audrey Hepburn adorn the high whitewashed walls.
He slips on a red Tshirt from the pile of clothes. Grabs a towel and some dark blue swimming trunks from the top of the bed, a pair of black plastic sunglasses and a battered leather wallet from the pine dresser next to the wardrobe.
His military & public school training has kicked in. Whatever has happened to him, there is an urgency to find out and the note from himself is the impetus he needs. He is excited by the prospect of seeing his old friends again, not as he had sometimes imagined thirty years older but as they were back then. But it is no longer ‘back then’.
It is now.
He glances once more round the room. Picks up his front door key hanging against the frosted glass on the back of his bedroom door. He goes through the door and closes it behind him. He stands for a moment in the hall. The high whitewashed ceiling above him. His mother and father’s room to his right and along the landing his sister’s room. The corridor stretching around the corner to the small bedroom where his brother Stevie keeps the curtains drawn 24 hours a day.
The house is silent. There is nobody else at home.
He takes a deep breath. The stone staircase and banister rail in front of him curving down to the marble tiled lower hallway illuminated by the light from the huge high window into the backyard and garden.
“What’s waiting for me out there? I’d better take a look”.
Two at a time he runs down the stairs and into the hall. Past the kitchen, dining room and lounge. Opening the front door he is blinded for a moment by the intensity of the Maltese summer sun. He puts on the sunglasses, stuffs the wallet and key in his left hand jeans pocket. Then he is slamming the door behind him, turning to see the row of large high whitewashed limestone houses and the wide road stretching towards the glistening blue Mediterranean only a couple of hundred yard away. He starts to walk down the pavement towards the sea.
Cut to high long shot of street as George walks quickly towards the sea front.
Pan across to other side of street to reveal a man leaning against the wall smoking a cigarette. Dark hair. Tall and thin with a pencil moustache wearing a light suit, white shirt and thin red tie. He puts his cigarette out against wall.
Pull back to original long shot to reveal him following George down the street.
Fade to black.