JJ stumps off down the road, wincing at the sunlight, which seems unfairly enthusiastic for this time of year then stops, visibly pulls herself together and settles into a smoother gait, more suitable for the distance she has to travel. She makes one stop - for water and chewing gum from the corner shop in the middle of the row - and swings away, absently dodging the other foot traffic. Her mind is clearly elsewhere. She crosses the road quickly at the corner, against the lights, and ducks almost immediately into an alleyway decorated with more thought-inspiring graffiti. She has no eye for it, but keeps moving.
We make jokes about me and my mental mapping skills, my insistence on walking the back paths through Cardiff, but there’s more than one reason why I like to do it. For a start, yes, it’s quicker (it feels quicker), but - more importantly for me today - the routes and landmarks are all tied into events and people and mood and who I was when I first walked down them; also significant events surrounding journeys through them.
Without making a conscious effort to, I wanted to map me, ground myself in the person I’ve been the last few years. This whole thing was upsetting on many levels but I think you’d either have to be someone like me or know me very well to know exactly why. It got me thinking about, well, about what the woman in grey had mentioned, almost in passing. I don’t often do that. Not nowadays.
In case you hadn’t picked this up, I remember everything. Everything. People really don’t get what that means, and first of all I didn’t talk about it, and then I thought I’d never shut up about it, but that passed and now it’s like - if it comes up, it comes up. Sometimes I lie. You’ve probably noticed. Linguistically, socially, it’s just easier to say: I don’t remember, rather than: I don’t want to talk about that right now.
So, anyway, I came out of the eidetic closet and now here I am - only not running around loudly any more, merely standing here, just outside the door, but I reached back inside it for this more sombre suit I’m now wearing.
I don’t half talk a load of shite at times, eh?
But anyway - to not know - that’s like having a hand chopped off. It’s a piece of me missing, after all.
There are certain advantages to being a temp. I remember one time, I had been working at this factory - doing typing-and-filing stuff for the HR manager, incidentally the most misanthropic bint it’s ever been my misfortune to have shared oxygen molecules with, but anyway, there was this bloke used to come in fairly regularly off the line - I think he must have been a team leader or quality or union guy or something, no-one ever explained... anyway, he had a finger missing, and no-one ever mentioned it. Not once. I’m serious. Ever. Now, I may have mentioned this before but I’m nosy. I mean terminally. And there’s something about knowing you’re only there for three more days unless Sandra never comes back off holiday, not that I’d’ve blamed her coz by god that woman, but anyway, yeah.
Turns out when he was a lad his dad was into model railways. No - bigger ones like kids can ride on; he and his mates would construct the trains, mostly from kits - engines, boilers, pistons... really the works, and lay out tracks and buy the coal and even make miniature shovels and of course they had a whistle. Turns out the whistle’s an exaptation - didja know that? Hence: “letting off steam.” Anyway. Gibbsie’s dad is reversing one time, along a quarter-mile stretch of track they’ve just put together, and he’s looking over his left shoulder. What he can’t see, but seven-year-old Gibbsie can, is the bolt that’d worked its way loose on the way up, and had fallen out, is sticking up from the track on the right-hand side and is probably going to disrail the rather delicate engine (he’d raised his hands to describe the length of the tiny engine-with-driver’s-seat).
Gibbsie loved his dad; doesn’t take a genius or a great imagination to see that or the be-jumpered men with beards running that little too slow to catch Gibbs Junior, dashing to stick his hand between the sleepers to prevent his dad a nasty tumble and the denting of his belovèd engine. Or the sounds of clack and crack and a whistling scream. Or the man, grey-faced with shock, running with his son in his arms in a blanket to his friend’s van.
What surprises too many people, I think, is that Gibbsie is an ardent model train hobbyist. Even has a stripy driver’s cap.
It took him a while to learn to do without his index finger but, as he said, it was a long time ago, and he has others.
Time ensured that the missing part of Gibbsie formed part of who he is. So, you know, it’s only a day or so, right? Out of my lifetime even until now not as much as even half a finger by percentages, eh?
Am I that much of a miser that I can’t bear to part with as much as a single coin of memory out of my vast treasure house?
All very well, I grumble to myself, but Gibbsie didn’t have random bits of his finger turning up again, did he? It’s like having nothing past the fist knuckle and then a fingernail, floating in space.
Metaphor is a crutch. Bah.