Lost And Found

Lost and Found A short story by Mark Hale

Sometimes, your most memorable experiences occur when you get yourself lost. With that thought in mind, I left the hotel and got on the first tram that came along. The itinerary said that I was supposed to be with the other “Lucky competition winners”, on my way to visit one of Germany’s oldest breweries. This was one of the “Many varied cultural events” planned as part of my “Once-in-a-Lifetime” bike trip across Europe. As we had so far managed to visit the Crazy Horse erotic revue in Paris, the ganja cafes of Amsterdam and were scheduled for a night dredging the “1 Euro” lap dancing clubs of the ReeperBahn here in Hamburg, I was now convinced of the organiser’s sense of irony. The prize presentation at Spearmint Rhino should have been enough of a clue. I had been seduced by the lure of something for nothing and now I was paying for it, a lightweight drinker on a protracted pub crawl. I was beginning to feel like a lost soul on a package tour around the circles of Hell. My fellow travellers didn’t seem to be remotely worried about being on a twowheeled sleaze ride. To a man they were hosing the floor with testosterone from the moment they climbed into their brightly coloured leathers until the moment they fell into their beds. All that I had in common with these guys was that I rode a motorcycle. I didn’t fit into the trip’s collective “Bikes, Birds and Booze” stereotype and was feeling increasingly marginalised. I was the sole “traditional” black leather biker in a parade of multicoloured leather jester outfits. One of the clowns was in hospital and waiting to be shipped home already. When we left Amsterdam, some of the riders were sporting heroic beer-and-hash hangovers. Hamburg was 300 miles away and all the overgrown boy racers were determined to get to the restriction-free autobahns as fast as possible, and then go even faster. I’d already been dubbed Mister Sensible, the back marker on the BMW - now my habitual position among the rocket jockeys - so I was the one who got the verkehrspolizei lecture when I stopped at the accident scene. One of the group had stopped to spew up on the hard shoulder and forgotten that he wasn’t in Romford any

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more. He’d staggered left when he should have staggered right toward the Armco and had run slap-bang into the traffic. Fortunately, he’d bounced off the side of a van instead of going under its wheels, but the impact knocked him out and caused him to choke on his own vomit. That was the end of his trip. The ambulance crew had to revive him at the roadside. Later we found out that the hospital staff plugged him straight into a ventilator to keep him breathing because he was still so ‘relaxed’ from the night before. The ambulance was just leaving as I arrived, and the presiding German traffic cop explained what had happened to Wayne in perfect English. His use of English slang was pretty good too, when he told me exactly what he thought of foreign tourists who rode bikes on the autobahns when they weren’t fit to steer a supermarket trolley. At least the accident allowed me to get out of the next morning’s brewery trip. I made the excuse of fatigue and the trauma as early as possible after dinner. Telling everyone what had happened to Dwayne or Shane or whatever his name was had been fairly traumatic in itself. Some of my fellow bikers had thrown Nazi salutes and shouted “Sieg heil!” while I relayed the traffic cop’s message about respecting German traffic laws. Everyone else in the restaurant, including the staff, had stared at us in horror. Once again, I found myself wondering why I was still tagging along with this flying circus. I was glowing with embarrassment as I left the table, wishing that I’d had the guts to say something about the bigotry and narrow-mindedness of my fellow countrymen. The “Bitte Nicht Stören” sign remained on the door handle of my room as I passed through the lobby, politely refusing the offer of a map from the concierge as I left the hotel early the next morning. I was determined to lose myself in Hamburg. It was Sunday, and the tram cruised through deserted streets with me as its only passenger. As soon as someone else got on board, I got off at the next stop and waited for another. 3 trams later, I was yards away from the Elbe, its surface heaving like molten gold in the early morning sun. Apart from a few dozy-looking seagulls, I had the vista to myself. Joanne loved moments like this, the unique feeling of being the only person fully awake in a dozing city, and I thought about calling her until the time display on my mobile phone reminded me how early it still was. I must have caught one of the first trams to run.

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While I was taking pictures of the river and the surprisingly photogenic seagulls, the sound of someone tuning an electric guitar drifted from a long redbrick building to my right. I’d heard about Sunday at the Altona Fischmarkt before, a morning of live music performances, street entertainment and stallholders who sold pretty much everything from bongs to bath-taps. It wasn’t exactly high culture, but it would tell me more about the real Germany than some alcoholic fairground ride. Many shoppers were already in the massive market hall as I walked in. The stalls stood in neatly arranged rows along most of the hall’s length. On a raised stage at the back a group of black-clad musicians were finishing their sound checks. Stilt walkers and jugglers mingled with the shoppers, music fans and tourists, adding to the festival atmosphere. Happy to have found something uniquely German, I lost myself in the crowd. “You’re a long way from Hastings.” To be addressed in English was surprising enough, but it took an effort to reply when I realised who had just spoken to me. He was a tall man, wearing dark jeans and a T-shirt that was once black, but had seen the inside of a tumble dryer a few times too often. Despite the summer’s warmth he wore a long black leather trench-coat over his basic ensemble. His hair was long, dark and oily and he hid his eyes behind a pair of black Ray-Ban Wayfarers. What finally gave his identity away was the straggly goatee beard and thin moustache that he’d obviously been trying to cultivate since we’d last met. Some men just don’t have sufficient facial hair coverage to grow a proper beard, but Gary Dawson was still trying. He looked at me, the corner of his mouth twitching as he wondered whether I was going to recognise him or not. Well, of course I did; he’d lost some weight and his dress sense had regressed by about twelve years, but it was definitely Gary. The problem was – what do you say to someone who fell off the face of the planet nine years ago? “Shit,” I gasped, eventually, “The Ghost of Hastings Past.” I put out my hand and Gary shook it firmly, then used it to pull me closer into a bear hug. He smelt of our shared past, of patchouli oil and far too many cigarettes. We separated and both managed to say “But what are you doing here?” at the same time.

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“Come on,” Gary said as he clapped me on the back and began to guide me through the crowd, “One of the bars should be open by now.” In spite of my avoidance of the brewery trip, it seemed that I was destined to get drunk today. At least it would be while I chatted with an old friend, I told myself. That would make the hangover worthwhile. Gary plonked a half litre glass of Budvar and a Jagermeister chaser on the table in front of me, the same combination on his side of the small table. The bar he’d taken me to was on the balcony level of the hall and we could look out over the market floor, but the rock concert was muted enough for us to speak normally. “You first,” Gary said, easing into his chair, pushing his Wayfarers up into his hair and lighting up a Gauloise. “Where do I start?” “What are you doing these days? Did you go to Poland?” That had been my plan when I was renting Gary’s spare room ten years ago. A chance meeting and a very brief relationship with a trainee lawyer from Katowice had convinced me that my destiny lay in Eastern Europe. “Yeah. It was a great experience. I taught English for a couple of months until the language school realised that my qualifications were fake.” “And the lawyer? Didn’t she live in one of the most polluted parts of Eastern Europe?” “Yeah, well, I didn’t get that far in the end. But there was a very nice teacher at the school in Gorzow Wielkopolska…” Gary gave out a smoky chuckle and took a swig of his beer before he spoke again. “You still despatching in London?” “No, I work in a bike shop now. I got sick of riding in the winter, a friend of a friend offered me a job, and…” “And the others?” The Others. Our friends from Hastings, our merry pirate crew of Goths, DJs, art students and wannabe rock stars. Yes, I could tell him about a few of them, the people who’d managed to stay in touch with me during my gypsy years. It was a strange thing to ask of me, as he’d never bothered to stay in contact with any of us. He never replied to letters or Christmas cards and I’d always got his answering machine whenever I called, until I gave up. After a few years, when I got Mark Hale “Lost and Found”

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my first PC I tried to find him on old friends’ contact websites. Unlike some of the people that I’d gone to primary school with and a couple of sad individuals from my Civil Service past, Gary had remained - wilfully, it seemed to me - lost. It was like he’d fallen off the face of the planet. When he moved away from Hastings, he seemed to have set himself the challenge of cutting his links with anything that reminded him of the place. It was as if he’d wanted to start again, completely from scratch. He’d done the same thing to me once I left Southampton too. Well, what could you expect from someone who’d been rejected as an army officer candidate because he was ‘Too ruthless’? Gary must have noticed a slight stiffness in my face, something that betrayed my negative thoughts. “Then again, people move on. I could walk past most of those guys and not recognise them now. People change, don’t they? You’ve changed. I can see that,” he told me. “Yeah, greyer, fatter, more serious…” “More confident, more content…” I had to agree with him. Life was good for me now. “Thanks to you, mate, thanks to you,” I told him. I meant it too. He got me away from my damp, depressing basement flat in Saint Leonards before something bad could have happened. I was unemployed, surrounded by bits of wrecked motorcycles and the jagged shards of my last doomed relationship. I had already cut the girl’s name into my arm when Gary came back from Southampton to visit his parents and we’d met in the street by chance. He’d looked me up and down and then insisted on me staying with him for a couple of weeks. He could see the state that I was in and his kindness gave me another form of release. The weeks became months and I didn’t exactly rebuild my life in Southampton, but it did make me realise that I’d been living on the edge of darkness in that dingy flat. Gary waggled his empty beer glass and raised an eyebrow. “So how about you get me another drink, and some breakfast to show your gratitude?” He tossed back the shot of Jagermeister as I stood to go to the bar. No point in trying to match Gary drink for drink, then. The barman spoke a little English and readily accepted my requests. More beer for my friend and food for both of us.

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The conversation was limited while we ate hot platefuls of spicy sausage, sauerkraut and mashed potato. Gary didn’t so much eat as inhale his meal. “You looked like you were ready for that,” I mentioned, as his knife and fork rattled onto the empty plate in front of him. “All part of the lifestyle,” he replied, cryptically. Then he congratulated me. “What for?” I asked. “The wedding ring, you monkey spanker. How long?” “Oh, right. Two and a half years. We’re very happy.” “Glad it all worked out for you. You know, I often wondered what happened to you after you left Southampton. You were still in quite a state.” “Better than I would have been if I’d stayed in Hastings, mate. That town was dragging me down.” “Yeah, I’m glad that I left too.” We were silent for a while, as I worked up the courage to ask The Difficult Question. Why was he here? Ten years ago Gary was a rising star with an exemplary career in the Hampshire Constabulary and I was a struggling, near-suicidal actor in Hastings. What had happened since then? “So, uh, are you here on holiday?” I asked him. I could feel the sentence creaking as it hung in the air between us, so tangible that I wished I could snatch it and stuff it back in my mouth. Gary shot me a wide-eyed-can’t-believe-you-said-that look and then chuckled at the discomfort that I could feel freezing on my face. He lit another Gauloise from the butt of his last one while I tried to shake off my frightened rictus. Despite my embarrassment, a small voice in my head was asking when Mr “If you’re going to smoke that, take it into the garden” had become a Sixty-a-Day man. “No, I work here now, occasionally.” He mimed string plucking and I remembered the enormous bass amplifier on which I’d rested my hodgepodge of a hifi back in Southampton. Gary was one of the most talented musicians that I met during my wanabeerock-singer phase. We hung around the same cheap Hastings recording studio and the drug-addled hippy who ran it had suggested that we work together. Gary’s band was looking for a singer and I was looking for someone who would take my naïve attempts at song writing seriously, so we gave it a try.

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There were, of course, artistic differences and I took my fragile little ego elsewhere after a few months of being asked to sing covers. However, by that time Gary and I had bonded. He was the first real friend that I made in Hastings. He introduced me to the circle of clubbers, artists, petty drug dealers and weekend DJs that helped to make my life in that town more bearable. “So when did you move here?” “Well,” Gary drawled, “I started off back at the White Rose down in Munchen a couple of years ago, but all the old gang were long gone. I just sort of ended up here. I suppose that the wind must have pushed me this way” We both chuckled and then fell silent, both perhaps wondering what to say next. I remembered Gary’s tales of life at the White Rose. Aged 18 and fresh from the 6th Form, he joined a Goth band and toured across Europe before settling at the White Rose Club. At the time, the White Rose was Munchen’s premier Goth music venue and Gary had been part of the band-in-residence, providing the warm-up for international acts like The Mission, The Nephilim and Sisters of Mercy. Despite their darkling po-faced collective image, German Goths partied pretty intensely. Usually the fun only stopped when the Polizei arrived in riot gear and refused to join in the dancing. Gary arrived back in the UK 3 years later. Every item of clothing he possessed at that time was black. He came from a service family. His father was a retired Inspector from the Sussex force and he had a brother in the Firearms Unit at Gatwick. After his last Hastings band flew apart in a welter of arguments, driving bans and Northern Soul covers, he cut his hair, got a proper job labouring for his landlord and applied to join the army. After the “Too Ruthless” debacle he turned to the police. 5 years after facing off against the Munchen Uberfalkommando, he joined the ranks of the Hampshire Constabulary and passed out as a uniformed police officer. When he’d looked after me in Southampton, it seemed that life couldn’t have been much better for Gary Dawson. He lived in a beautiful cottage on the edge of the New Forest, was barely out of his probationary period and was already marked for promotion. He had the prettiest, brightest and most loving girlfriend that I have ever secretly lusted after and had surrounded himself with a circle of landlords, music promoters and assorted go-getters. Despite him pulling me out of despondent Hastings, I knew that I was never going to fit in with the sort of people he associated Mark Hale “Lost and Found”

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with in Southampton. Gary was in a gold chariot on the Appian Way while I still struggled with worn-out sandals on a rocky side path, barely managing to keep him in view. I had to focus on my path and get somewhere, just as he had on his. That had meant finding regular work and somewhere to live, neither of which I managed to do successfully in Southampton. All this trail of recollection did, however, was lead me back to THAT question. “Gary,” I half-muttered, “look mate, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to but why are you here?” “Well, you’ve worked out that I’m no longer in the employ of the Hampshire Constabulary then.” Gary was still smiling his easy, relaxed smile but his eyes were now glassy and fixed, staring at some point in the past where everything had gone wrong. He’d careered off the metalled surface and his chariot had sunk in some grim mire. I knew the look on his face, that car-crash stare. I’ve seen it enough times when I’m shaving in the morning. “You don’t have to tell me,” I said slowly, trying not to stammer, “But what happened?” “It was a good gig. Stolen Vehicle Squad, plainclothes, one step away from CID,” he sighed, “Dad was so proud. Dawn too. We’d just got engaged when…” He rolled his eyes theatrically and looked directly at me. “This is some role-reversal, isn’t it?” I nodded in agreement, feeling the scars on my arms itch. They still do that when I get anxious. “5 years ago, I’m helping this little scrote out of a stolen Jag that he’s just been trying to sell me when he whips out a Stanley knife and tries to carve me a new mouth.” Gary drew on his Gauloise until the glowing tip had almost reached the filter. He chuckled again, the smoke momentarily veiling his face. When it reappeared, his jaw was set and his mouth a thin, lipless line. “I would have got away with a disciplinary if I’d only dislocated his shoulder. That was a prior injury, you see. Too many crashes when he was just a little joyrider. He could pop it back into place if he leaned against a wall. No, what went against me was, well…” Gary grinned at this point, a charmless, feral baring of incisors. Mark Hale “Lost and Found”

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“…He wouldn’t let go of that knife, you see, until I broke his arm. Stupid little sod. He had a very clever lawyer, though. Got a shedload of compensation. Needless to say, I was only on a disciplinary until the court case. After it they dropped me like a hot rock. Dawn tried to stand by me, bless her. She moved in and took on all the bills while I tried to find a new job. Remember what I used to say?” “If you can’t get a real job, become a security guard.” “Exactly, but I couldn’t even manage that. Ended up bouncing and collecting glasses at a mate’s nightclub. As you can imagine, I wasn’t a great deal of fun to be around. She stuck it out for as long as she could, but eventually…” He didn’t have to say much more. The tremor in his voice told me how much everything that he’d lost had meant to him. “You remember Jim?” Gary asked, sitting up a little straighter as if he were making a physical effort to seem brighter. Yes, I remembered Jim. He was Gary’s best drinking buddy and a kind of alter-ego, a hulking Hastings Goth who’d enjoyed throwing flour over other Goths at gigs. He’d fallen in love with some New Age type and gone to live in Glastonbury. They called their baby boy Patchouli. Jim was a shop fitter by trade, when he could be bothered to work. “I got some work with him for a while, travelling around the country and tarting up shops. Pissed all the money up the wall, of course. Then I got my first year’s tax bill, so here I am.” He slouched down in his chair, finished his beer and then knocked back his chaser, as if to say Top That. I couldn’t. Of course I couldn’t. I wrote all of my address and contact details on the back of a beer mat and watched as Gary placed it in an inside pocket of his heavy overcoat. I told him to call me the next time he came back to the UK. I offered him our spare room as somewhere to stay, without thinking of consulting with Joanne first. He nodded and smiled his thanks, then stood to give me another hug before I left him. As I walked away I was already resigned to the thought that I’d never see Gary again. Once he helped me out of the desert in my soul but he had lost his own way since then. When you’re in a barren environment for a long time, a part of you comes to accept it as normal. The longer that you’re in that arid ocean, the more you Mark Hale “Lost and Found”

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welcome the simple challenge of survival there. Either you survive or you wander off and die in the dust storms. Once you’ve survived in the desert of your soul, it’s a difficult place to walk out of. You need a reason to leave and Gary seemed to be a long way from finding one. I walked out of the Altona and went back to the tram stop where I’d alighted earlier. This time I waited for a tram that would take me to the Stadtzentrum, in the hope that I’d find some sort of map and be able to plot a course back to my hotel. When I got there I was going to pack, load up the bike and go home to Joanne. I’d had enough of being lost. The End 3900 Words.

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