Tiger’s Tooth

A fictional short story based on some true events set in Northern England

Elsie from number 8 had been the one to find him, after the fall.

Nosey old cow.

At the foot of the stairs he’d been, a milky heap of awkward limbs, and a half done crossword.

“Normally, I can see your horse racing flickering through your curtains of a Saturday afternoon….. and I said to Geoff, that’s not like Jim….cause it’s not, is it?”

She’d continued

“So I just went over - me being……concerned, and there you were on the floor, Jim, spark out…..didn’t half give me a fright!”

Part of Jim Brierley was grateful the mithering old busybody had saved his life, the other, wished she’d not bothered.

Why?

Because he’d instinctively known what lay ahead.

At 81, falling was considered an event not to be glossed over. As he’d lay grimacing in pain that Saturday four months ago, his shins the shades of a moulding jam sandwich, he’d tightened his lids, praying the next thing he’d set eyes on would be his late wife Jean, luminous in the beauty of her youth, beckoning him into a tunnel of light, his angel.

Instead, he’d opened them to see that bloody battle axe from across the road.

Say ‘road’, a cul de sac is what it really was.  A grim, Manchester mutation of Ramsay Street where everyone knew everyone else’s business.

There’d been a token stay in hospital, followed by an unwelcome invasion of neighbours feeding like locusts on every small detail of his drama.  Checking up on him; door knocks, phone calls, putting his wheelie bin out. And how Jim hated it all. More than that, he hated himself, despised the useless lump his once strong, agile body had become.

Whatever he said to protest the unwanted interference, was met with the same reply;

“We’re worried about you, could be worse next time, you know. You were so lucky Elsie found you...”

Jim had never been one for fuss. When Jean had been alive, that had been different. She’d been his wife and concern had been born of genuine love. Not like these days, everyone wanting to wear their goodwill like a shiny badge.

As he’d feared and anticipated, the next phase of the campaign began.

“You’d do better in a home you know. Always someone there. There are some nice ones now…..”

There was no way he’d wanted to go into one of those places. He read the papers, watched ‘Panorama’. You went in and you never came out.

But over the period of just a few weeks, they’d succeeded in grinding him down. By the time the woman from social services had arrived to tell him he ‘posed a risk’, he’d all but given up.

And here he now was. Sentenced to end his days in ‘Poppy Meadows’ - a worthless beast put out to pasture.

The name of the place evoked scarlet flowers swaying in butterfly filled fields edged with brambles.

The reality, was rather different. Yes, the external situation was pleasant enough - it overlooked a tidy patch of grass that backed on to the river and the place the local kids used to call ‘Tiger’s Tooth’, but inside had no redeeming features.

First thing you noticed was the smell. A pungent stew of sweaty cardigans, boiled white cabbage and piss. The kind of honey coloured piss that had to be worked at - cultivated by means of constant exposure to tropical temperature and minimal fluid intake.

He’d only been there a couple of months but already, Jim loathed the place. The routines, the bland food, the ridiculous, pedantic rules.

The day room resembled a prim doll’s house - high back chairs draped with sepia lace so the tops didn’t become stained by the constant rub of greasy head. The residents lounged as shrivelled geckos, eyes glazed, moving only to relieve themselves of phlegm, attempt to use the bathroom or take a tablet.

Jim had tried to make conversation with them, he really had - they were his new house mates after all - but most would drift in and out of a state of presence, rendering any sustained or meaningful dialogue nigh impossible.

Frustrated by his repeated, futile attempts at connection, Jim decided there was only one thing for it. He would have to join his fellow residents in their collective resignation.

And once he surrendered to his unfortunate predicament, Jim Brierley felt himself liberated on the inside. He began to journey somewhere he hadn’t visited in a long, long time. His past.

With ample time to do nothing else except think, one by one his earliest memories began to emerge. Out from the crevices of his mind they swam towards his consciousness like familiar fish. It felt comforting to greet them again. They came as birthdays and Christmases. Satsumas in stockings, brass bedsteads and beautiful May Queens. They came as pale blue eggs in a muddied bird’s nest, pink flurries of cherry blossom, the smell of simmering plum jam. These memories cajoled Jim from his own wintering, colourful and nimble in their occupation of him. As he danced with these recollections, it dawned upon him, his fellow residents were doing exactly as he was. They too, were rock pooling their past, reclaiming the treasures of their childhoods and youth.

But as he basked in these long forgotten joys, Jim also dipped his curiosity into those places that felt darker and secret.  The hidden pools, which are usually the most interesting of all. Before he knew it, it was 1953 and he was 10 years old again, a boy in short trousers.

Little Jimmy Brierley lived in a real life Lowry.

Large cotton mills cast their shadows upon every canvas of red brick or grey cobble in their way. Lanky towers puffed out black plumes that mottled windows and mocked clean laundry hanging on the line.

There were war damaged churches with missing windows where wind howled in as restless banshees. Damp walls blistered their peeling paint advertisements as snake skin - Tea, Bovril and closed down local draperies. Drowned cat canals imposed their stagnant sour upon adjoining scrub land.

And amidst all this, a newly built council housing estate. It snaked like a dirty toothpaste squeeze along the main road to Manchester.

Each house had a short path and iron gate, whilst boxed hedges offered a scant privacy.

After the prefabs of the war years, these houses with capacious kitchens and a decent sized back garden, felt like a nod to the American dream to those who acquired them. Outside privies were still shared and it would be years before families stopped reusing the water in the tin bath, but this, was progress! Come weekend, the women would be out with their donkey stones, scrubbing the darkened doorsteps as though they feared the devil might get into the house if they didn’t.

Around every corner it seemed you’d hear the cyclical rhythm of rubber balls bouncing off brickwork as pairs of girls chanted “Queenie O Cocoa”.

Ah, ‘Queenie O Cocoa’!

How Jim remembered his sister singing it.

Jenny…..little Jenny…..

“Queenie O Cocoa, who’s got the ball, I haven’t got it, it isn’t in my pocket…..”

“What’s that, Jim?”

Jim came to from his impromptu doze to see Steph, one of the care home staff leaning over him and smiling.

“Oh……nothing. Must have been dreaming”

“And I thought you were one of the ones I got more sense out of!”

She said playfully.

Steph was his favourite. Even though he’d only known her a couple of months, she bent the rules a bit. She knew he missed ‘real food’ instead of the slop the home served. Steph smuggled in things he wasn’t supposed to have - eggs and soft cheese. Ever since all that nonsense with Edwina Currie all those years ago, people had gone barmy, hysterical about stuff.

Steph was old school, sensible, normal. Had that earthy sense of humour, she did. Jim could tell by some of the things she raised her eyebrows at. Twenty years ago, he’d have dared crack a risqué joke or two to a woman like Steph. Not these days though.

Now if he tried it, he’d no doubt be labelled a ‘dirty old man’, wouldn’t he? But innuendo didn’t cease being funny when you got old, did it? How could it be that one day, suddenly, it wasn’t? He hadn’t turned into a different person mentally just because he’d aged.

He looked down at his sagging body, taking himself in like a poor view from a crumbling pier. How it betrayed the man he still was on the inside.

“Bloody hell, Jim!”’

He said to himself. Maybe people didn’t laugh anymore because the punchline had shifted and he was now it!

His skin was reminiscent of those packs of pre-cooked chicken with a honey/barbecue glaze. Amber and puckered, so tender it almost fell off the bone - which was a bonus if you were eating chicken, not quite so much a plus when you were the chicken - and he, was most definitely the chicken....

His hands and face housed so many age spots he reminded himself of a strange beige and brown Dalmatian. Those ebony eyes the girls once swooned over, lodged as waxy discs in hooded folds of puffy skin.

Wiry white hair sprouted from his ears and nose faster than bamboo, as if to tease his gleaming bare scalp. His bulbous nose had more bumps than a strawberry and his chin and neck held a wobble a blancmange would’ve been proud of.

“Eee....yer ‘an ugly bugger now”

He told himself in disbelief.

When he’d first moved in, he’d shown Steph photos of himself in his youth.

“Look at me there, Blackpool 1963! The girls used to say I was like a dark Billy Fury”

He’d said proudly.

“Billy who?”

Replied Steph.

“A lot of em all had names like that then, Steph. Moods…….or sometimes descriptions of themselves - Little Richard, The Big Bopper, Adam Faith, Marty Wilde ………although actually …….that might’ve been his real name...….”

What would Steph know!  She was 58, so had grown up in a different era entirely. To her, Elvis probably meant Costello!

Still, she had a bit of patience for him, a bit of time - which was more than the others had. Some of these young ’uns just sat looking at their phones. He didn’t expect them to say much - it was just a job after all - but a bit of eye contact would have been nice. Jim missed the personal touch of the old days. The world was changing and not for the better, he noted.

Apart from talking to Steph, his only joy these days - as in a real thing he could physically see with his eyes, not confined to his mind - was to watch the garden birds and put a bit of food out for them. Even that had rules. You weren’t allowed to put peanuts out because of allergies and you could only put them in certain places so as not to attract rats.

Jesus! It couldn’t be right that the older you got, the more rules there were, could it?

He observed a robin watching jealously as the bigger birds gulped down the spills that fell like showers of hail from the feeder. How they bashed it piñata-like in their attempt to dominate and take as much as they possibly could. Meekly, the powerless robin could only look on as the magpies, crows and pigeons dined on the lion’s share.

He could relate to that robin, Jim could. Scratching around for the scraps left over as others tucked in.  He now understood the term ‘pecking order’. Still, over the course of a lifetime, everyone had their turn at being both magpie and robin, didn’t they?

But how many appreciated it at the time?

He wasn’t sure he had.....

Robins.

First time he’d seen one had been at Grandma’s house. Ah! The pretty stone farmhouse out in the Lancashire sticks……

The bus ride took about an hour. Both he and Jenny would race up the narrow stairs on the double decker as Mam paid. Straight to the top, praying no-one had bagged those sought after seats at the front. Those seats! If you managed to get one, how new and fascinating everything appeared! The wide window acted as cinema screen to showcase a newsreel of factories, vehicles and people. Oh, the things Jim would observe from up there that he never noticed whilst on the ground. The spires of churches, the symmetry of the neatly planted flower beds. How small adults became, their funny little gestures like opening brollies or adjusting caps reduced to a series of twitches. Like a centipede the people rolled along, one single moving lace on the boot of the city.

As they left the grime of urban sprawl, Jim noticed the scenery become greener. They passed parks with bandstands and Jim found himself peering into the cart of a rag and bone man. Then they passed a cemetery, Jim admired the large headstones that looked like angels, so much taller and grander than the rest!

“If I die, I want one like that!”

He told Jenny.

“Don’t be so morbid, Jim!”

Mam interjected as she sat beside them.

“Anyway, those kind aren’t for families like ours. They’re for them with a bob or two, those are….”

And then, as though to jolt him from the phantoms of his thoughts, a large branch had noisily raked the side of the window and they found they’d reached their destination.

Jim loved nature and the long walk up the lane. It was May and there were lacewings, red admiral butterflies and fat ladybirds so shiny, they could have been polished. Toads guarded ponds like stout soldiers in their khaki green, waiting for the sequin hum of dragonflies to clip the still of air.

He found himself whistling ‘All things bright and beautiful’. Whistling was a newly acquired skill and he was keen to sustain it. He liked that song when they sang it in assembly at school.  He imagined God as carpenter, tailor, sculptor, everything - picking out legs for beetles and buffing the shells of snails. Or was that Jesus? No……Jesus had been an actual carpenter, hadn’t he? Jim was certain Jesus didn’t design living things. Why had Jesus even needed a job if God were his dad?

So many questions he had!

If God had more power than Jesus and could do more things, why didn’t he ever visit Earth? Why didn’t he visit Manchester?

Oh he did, Mam said. You just couldn’t see him. God, watched you all the time.

It was a strange feeling he got when he considered that. Uneasy at the prospect, he turned his thoughts back to nature and what he might find when he reached his Grandma’s house. There was always something being born, springing to new life, one week piglets, next a foal……

How pleased he’d been when he’d walked into the kitchen to see Cleo the farm cat nursing half a dozen jet black kittens!

Kittens were the best of all, ’cept for puppies maybe.

Six squirming babies. How they competed for the milk of their mother. Clambering over each other, mewing and pressing their paws upon her weary teats.

“She’s a good mam”

Grandma said, her kind blue eyes smiling.

“Like yours!”

And then;

“Would you two like to hold one?”

Both children, he and Jenny had thought they might burst, such was their enthusiasm.

“Oh yes! Yes please!”

Carefully, a fluffy black bundle was placed into the impatient arms of Jimmy and his five year old sister. There they nestled, warm, fragile and utterly dependent.

Jim jerked up in his high back chair and opened his eyes with a start.

He knew only too well what came next and he had no desire to revisit it. What happened that day, and what had come to pass just a few months later. Sometimes the most horrible things happened straight after the loveliest, didn’t they?

“You’ve gravy on your buttons, Bernard!”

He could hear Annie the shift supervisor saying patronisingly to a slight man in a camel coloured shirt.

In a year’s time, could he also need help with eating? Would mealtimes be reduced to dollops of mash and puddles of overcooked mince? Easy to swallow slop.

Mam had made bacon ribs, liver and onions, cow’s heel, pea soup, kidneys.....

It was as if you really took on board the sobering death of the animal in those days. Had to.

He’d inhale the stench in a confused state of competing desire and disgust as she salted and boiled the meat in the pot. Most of the time appetite had won out and he’d filled his belly with gratitude and relish. The bacon ribs he found particularly macabre. Literally chewing the pink flesh from the cage of bone, as he did so, considering the parallels with his own. But the truth of death was somehow made palatable by pretty crockery and a crust to mop up the saline. Sometimes he’d steer the meat and gristle into the comfort of a cloud dumpling as though reconciling heaven and hell.

But you couldn’t reconcile heaven with hell could you? Nor life with death. No matter how fiercely he’d ploughed the juices into the doughy mounds, screeching his fork as he did, one resisted the other. Dumplings were not the light ambrosia they promised, but choked his mouth with their cloying weight.

It was back with him, again, that day, that awful day.

The first dreadful day.

As he clicked back into the memory, he found it had fast forwarded a bit, as memories often do, the brain becoming its own wilful and subjective editor.

“I know this isn’t nice…..but it’s for the best.”

Grandma said, her flat Lancashire tones stinging like witch hazel on a fresh graze.

Her usually kind mouth had grown pinched and mean, her blue eyes icing over as her gaze hovered upon the writhing, crying kitten on the cold stone floor.

Then, without a flicker of emotion, she scooped it up like a piece of coal and tossed it without sentiment to the rasping orange tongue of the open fire.

Jenny instinctively turned away.

Cleo, the tiny mite’s mother looked on from the dusty sheepskin rug - her energies absorbed in nursing the others.

But he had seen.

Jim, just 10 years old at the time, had felt compelled to watch the last glimpses of the pitiful creature as it perished. Witness that final petrified expression.

Betrayal. Confusion. Horror.

The look that acknowledged nothing or no-one was coming to its rescue.

“It’s just the way of the country”

Mam said as they walked back to the bus stop that day. Such a clear, fine day. Seemed wrong for the sun to shine so brightly after what had just happened.

“She’s made us Elderflower cordial!”

She added cheerily.

But Jim couldn’t think about Elderflower cordial. All he could think about was what he’d seen.

“Look Jim…….It’d’ve ‘ad a far worse death rolling around in agony on that stone floor, unable to move. Would’ve been lame. Your grandma did it a favour. I know it doesn’t seem that way but trust me, it was for the best. Poor little fella’s out of his misery now……”

“It’s her fault!”

Jim suddenly snapped, pointing accusingly at his sister who was skipping on ahead, seemingly oblivious.

Angelic Jenny with her cloud of white blonde hair and red Wellington boots splashing in the puddles that dotted the golden crumble of a lane. Little Jenny, clutching the arm of her best doll, Bella. How soon that lovely kitten had been forgotten!

“She should never have dropped him. If Jenny hadn’t dropped him, it wouldn’t have happened!”

He cursed, his brown eyes narrowing, his freckled face crimson with incandescent rage. At that moment, he truly hated his sister. Little girls, stupid and clumsy. He bent down, picked up a pebble and hurled it at her.

It missed and landed by a patch of nettles.

Mam grabbed his hand instantly, smacked it with the flat of her palm before yanking up his dipping head by the back of his collar.

“Don’t let me ever see you do anything like that again, d’you hear me? She’s your sister and it’s your job to look after her. D’you hear?”

“Hello! Ground control to Major Jim! I said d’you hear me?”

Jim was back in the day room and Steph was shaking his pills like a baby’s rattle.

“Time for these, lovely.”

She said, taking out two of his heart tablets and popping them into his palm.

“Who’s Jenny, by the way?”

“Sorry….what?”

“Kept saying Jenny, you did. Just now. But that wasn’t your wife’s name was it?”

“Did I?”

“So, who’s Jenny then?”

“My little sister.”

As he said it, his eyes filled with tears.

The memories were flooding him like a monsoon and it became impossible to stop them.

He closed his eyes once more and was instantly ten years old again. But this time it was late summer.

“I don’t want to see you lot back til teatime.”

Mam had said that glorious August day.

“You’ll have a nice time in those woods today, little picnic…... Jenny’s insisting on bringing that bloody doll with her. I’ve told her though, that she has to carry it…..”

Pissed him off, it had. That he had to take his little sister with him. Still, Barry Brice had the twins Rose and Susan, and Fat Billy had his kid brother Peter. As long as the younger ones stayed out of their games and played together, it shouldn’t matter too much, plenty of space in the woods.

The woods backed on to the grounds of the monastery. Sometimes they’d balance along the walls where the pear trees were, filling their pockets with nature’s bounty and catching glimpses of a strange world of stern looking men on the other side.  Most of the time though, they’d play by the river, fishing with nets they’d fashioned from sticks and stolen nylons. They’d build dams and discuss jumping the legendary Tiger’s Tooth like the teenagers did.  It was a sheer drop where one piece of land ended and another began. Between the jaws of the ‘teeth’, a river, to the side, a fast flowing waterfall.

What a gang they made! Barry, the eldest, 12 with his T-shirt off and lobster skin, straw hat, fancying himself a North Manchester Huckleberry Finn, shorts brimming with catapults, pen knives and matches.

Fat Billy, same age as Jim, his sandy hair alive with lice, bursting from his too-tight trousers that stank of sour milk and stale tobacco.

(His mam was a wrong ‘un).

The twins in their matching frocks, tresses curled in the style of Shirley Temple.

Carrot-topped bug eyed Peter, clutching his toy car, and of course, Jenny. Sweet blue eyed, cherub, translucent skin and swishing pig tails. Jenny, with the gap in her teeth where she’d recently been caught by a tennis ball.  Fresh burgundy scabs perched proudly on her on chubby peach knees.

It had been a sweltering day. Barry had brought some tin can stilts looped with fraying grey string and they’d taken turns at pretending they were at the circus.

Then they’d looked for minnows without success but had the good fortune to find a frog which they’d popped in a jam jar they’d brought along. How enthralled they’d been to watch its clambering and observe its speckled skin close up, before Jenny had bounded over, knocked over the jar and the relieved little beggar had escaped.

Next the gang had built a den by tying branches together with Barry’s string. They’d eaten inside there. Beef dripping sandwiches, a rock bun each and all the pears they could manage.

At this point Jim’s memory became hazy.

“Does anyone want a sasparilla tablet?”

He could remember Fat Billy had asked, rustling a paper bag in his trouser pocket.

Then Barry had suddenly yelled;

“The girls……where are the girls?”

The next part happened so fast it was hard to make sense of it.

The unexpected smash of the pot doll against the rocks.

There she was, Jenny leaning over Tiger’s Tooth. Teetering on the edge.

“Bella!”

She’d yelled.  She wouldn’t try and rescue a doll, would she? Girls did silly things like that though, didn’t they?

And then, she fell. No scream, no cry. Maybe there had been a scream. Could it be the waterfall had masked the sound of a child, the same way the crackling fire had played its reliable percussion over the mews of that tiny cat just months earlier?

Maybe that was the purpose of the elements; of water, fire, air and earth. To disguise and tone down the harrowing screams of the world. To absorb, mute and temper. Without this masking and distraction, the suffering would surely be too much to bear for those who remained.

The hike back, was largely done in stony silence.

Fat Billy had nervously dared offer another saspirilla tablet, this time holding it up, a sticky jewel in his clammy pincer grip.

“Shut the fuck up!”

Barry had instructed.

Normally he’d never have said anything like that in front of the younger ones. But that afternoon, everyone was instantly older.

As Jim marched home, fighting back tears, he’d imagined her floating downstream like Moses on the Nile. Maybe she’d be found by older girls who’d coo and make a fuss, hold her up, alive, miracle. Dry the pink roses of her damp cheeks with their petticoats, lay her on the bank, squeezing each plump drop of water from her cotton wool hair.

No.

Miracles were just for Bible stories, weren’t they?

Back in the present, Steph clasped his trembling arm.

She’d seen him in the chair again, looking out towards the river. But not the way the others did. There was no peace in that water for him.

Out the words came, a push and pull of fits and starts. The way an engine cranks up, finding momentum before suddenly cutting out, losing it. She flinched with him as the memories twisted as lemons in the pit of his stomach before birthing as words, acid on his lips as he mouthed them.

“I’m sorry”

He said as he relayed the story.

“I think it’s just come back to me recently because of the fall I had…..y’know”

“It’s okay”

“Washed up eventually.”

Jim said.

“Her, I mean, me sister. Things always surface, don’t they?”

A dogwalker had found her. Days later, by the edge of the woods. A rusty old bicycle chain had been dangling from her ankle like a copper bracelet. Strange, the small details that stick in your mind. People threw all sorts into that river.  Could just have easily have been a piece of old rope or sacking. Perhaps it was because Jim had wanted a bike that he’d held on to that.

He’d wanted her to have an angel headstone. It must help get you to heaven, he’d guessed, having an angel above you.

But they weren’t for families like theirs. Mam had said that day on the bus, so Jim hadn’t bothered asking.

The rest of the evening at Poppy Meadows went by fairly pleasantly. It was a Sunday and they’d had a roast dinner. Roast beef and all the trimmings. Or their sanitised version of it, at least…..

He’d enjoyed that meal more than any he’d had since he’d arrived there. Each tiny morsel and movement pleasured him. His tongue meeting the spiking edges of the crisp potatoes, the resistance his remaining teeth gave as they wrestled with the small chunks of beef that livened, springy in his tired mouth.

He tasted that food as a condemned man devours a last supper, because with each bite and swallow, he grew more determined it would be just that.

Jim didn’t know how he’d managed to leave the building without alerting staff later that evening, only that he had. Maybe if that Annie hadn’t been so transfixed looking at pictures of nail art on her phone, she’d have seen his stooping figure shuffling down towards the river with a fading torch light.

Maybe if Geoff had been out walking his Labrador, he might have spotted his old neighbour. But it was a funny time of night and when there was no shiny badge of virtue to wear, no audience to impress, Jim found, as he’d always sensed, that no-one actually gave a damn.

It looked the same as he remembered it, Tiger’s Tooth.

A grassy bank on one side, a sulky, protruding lip of land on the other.  A gap between the two sides of about six feet.  He heard the smashing water before he saw it. Loud and gurgling. Shining his torch, Jim surveyed the moss covered stones that crocodiled their menacing bumps around the deep swirling currents.  Leaves and twigs spun into heaps whilst foam gathered as unsettling bubble bath in the filling tub.

Jim lowered himself to sit down upon the grassy bank. It was damp, and he noticed a couple of large rocks and chose instead to position himself upon one of those.

Softly, he sobbed in the moonlight as he pressed his quivering fingers upon the fabric of his cotton shirt, remembering the yellow sun dress his beloved sister had worn that fateful day.

70 years ago but still as vivid as ever.

“That bloody doll! You silly, silly girl!”

He said, talking to no-one and everyone.

“I wanted to go after you, I did….I really…..”

It was true, he had.

“No, it’s too dangerous. Yer mam can’t lose two kids”

Barry had said at the time, gripping his shoulders firmly, literally holding him back from jumping in.

There was no-one to hold him back now.

Courage was an odd thing, wasn’t it?

Which took the greater courage, the act of jumping to one’s certain death or clinging half heartedly to the last fibres of a threadbare life?

When you merely existed, as he now did, he had come to the conclusion it was the latter.

Jim Brierley had no desire to die propped up in a hospital bed, white leads and bleeps leashing him to a circuit of sterile, repetitive function.

He had no wish to die wedged in a high back chair, his nostrils assaulted by the punching odour of old. That grotesque film of rot he could smell on his clothes, taste in his mouth, even now in the cool night air.

He would jump not to die, but to live again, albeit briefly. For a few fleeting seconds, how he would live! He would feel a last rush of air on his torso, a torrent of water dewy on his thin lips. Oh! To fly like a bird, and splash like a salmon….

But things never go to plan do they?

And as it happened, when old Jim Brierley got up to stand, to hurl himself forcefully into the heart of the current, he found himself too weak to effect it. He stood there pathetically, his body a limp paper plane unable to propel itself.

And eventually, he slipped upon the algae. He rolled the opposite way of the water, cracked his head upon a rock and succumbed to the rather dull and unexceptional death of hypothermia.

“Silly old bugger, going out there that time of night….”

Geoff commented to Elsie a few days later.

“I know you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead but I never right cared for him.”

said Elsie.

“Still, the poor fella’s out of his misery now.”