Al Collage

 

Every morning Al drove his car into the same car park and exchanged weather related banter with the attendant. Today the sky was grey and heavy and the attendant was nowhere to be seen. Al couldn’t shake a feeling of loneliness that weighed upon him. He imagined the Brighton conjoined twins, trapped above the Queen’s Arms public house in 1911, had felt just as lost.

As he walked towards the entrance of the hospital, he remembered the year he was born: the year of the hijacker; the year of the first Earth Day; the year the King visited Nixon in the White House. Then he remembered 2008, a portentous year, when he had been part of a band that performed in the aftermath of a devastating tsunami that struck Japan. As the world’s financial order crumbled, he and his bandmates stayed on the stage playing uplifting notes to a shell-shocked crowd.

Al went to visit his first patient of the day. The hospital was marketed as resembling a 5-star hotel but Al saw behind the façade. What he was dealing with, in reality, was more akin to a rundown 3-star. The patient, Mr B, was recovering well and had downloaded the lottery app onto his phone and was playing with it when Al walked into the room. For some odd reason memories of his mother’s holidays in the 1950s to Red Island holiday camp flooded Al’s mind, especially the story she’d so often told of a man called Eddie, who suffered from his nerves, but still travelled from Mullingar to Skerries every day, on the dangerous meandering road, to work as a waiter. Sometimes, it’s the small victories that matter most.

“How are you today, Mr B?” Al asked

“Much better, doctor, thanks. Whatever you did is working a treat. I’ve even won a small holiday on this lottery app. Things are really starting to look up.”

“Oh, that’s great. Where to?”

“The Western Isles.”

Many of Al’s casual acquaintances never realized how empathetic a doctor he was, but he didn’t need to brag. In the evenings he found solace watching videos of a down-at-heel clown ploughing his lonely comedic furrow.

On this particular morning, the 7^th of May, his feeling of loneliness would not go away. On top of it, he was starting to feel intimations of another pandemic.

He had taken to writing a rock opera at breakneck speed; had even recorded some of it in the car on the way in. He had named it Tommy Times Ten, and was determined to finish it.

The thought struck him: he had remained on the same dream trail for 3000 years, drying the ink out, but all one could do was keep going if it felt like the right thing to do.

That evening the car park the attendant was back in his hut.

“There’s rain coming,” Al said. “The roads will be dangerous”

“A rain of terror,” the attendant cackled.

As he drove for home, Al imagined the world ending with an hysterical dispatcher on a phone line patching a call through to a wrong number.

© Brian Ahern 2023