The Day Tripper

by James Goodhand

The hit of booze loosens my bones; I’m inching toward being myself.

Very bad sign - I already don't like these people.

“Right.” “The world is as wide as the chances that come our way. Take an opportunity, and it leads to more opportunity,

If the indexing system for your experiences went awry...” “Things would seem to occur in the wrong order.” “Ends before beginnings.” Dr. Defrates grins. “Imagine that!” “Effects before causes?” “Yes!”

You take away countries, and imaginary friends in the sky and whatever, but people’ll still fight. They’ll find something, like where people are putting their genitals behind closed doors, or football, or over where you can park your car.”

“None of us can change the world to suit us. We can only change ourselves.”

We are indeed haunted by our past and future. We are wont to repeat our own habits, our worst mistakes.” “But are we destined to repeat them?” “Aha! That’s the question! No, I don’t believe we are.” “Go on.” “Change will require a conscious effort. You’ll be pushing against the weight of your own history.” “What does that mean?” “Like walking against the wind. When you begin to do something different, there is a resistance. It is easier to walk on a path already there than it is to cut a new one.” “Right.” “Unless you fight, you’ll be following the exact route already laid out.”

“Get back the life that should be mine?” Defrates looks me full in the face. There’s a flash of something in his expression: Is it annoyance? Or pity, perhaps? “You can but try,” he eventually says, in the tone an adult uses to tell a kid they can be anything they want to be.

You reap what you sow

“I don’t know what I did to make the change.” “Does it matter?” Defrates asks. “I want to understand. I need to.” “Up! Up! Up!” he shouts at a heap of kids, before a bundling has the chance to catch on. “I imagine,” he says, attention back with me, “you will have assumed a different attitude to something or other. Taken a new approach.” “So what of that day when my mum visited me in prison? It’s supposed to happen in a few days’ time. But I’m not there. I lived that day.” “It has—to use your term—updated.” “So it’s gone? And what about those days when I woke up in that horrible bedsit? Are they gone too?” “Nothing’s gone. Modified, perhaps. Adjusted to allow for changes you’ve made. Introduce a cause...” I nod. “Get an effect.”

Desperate to be in control. Was it that sort of attitude that landed me a long jail sentence? Can a change in perspective have such profound effects? “There’s something you need to understand,” he says. “You’re asking me what it is that you’ve done to make this change. What were you expecting the answer to be, I wonder? That you’d done something minutely different? Walked a different way, crossed someone’s path, triggered a change in time’s trajectory from an inconsequential act?” “Maybe. I don’t know.” “You’ve seen too many movies, young man.” Trademark patronizing grin. “Time doesn’t hinge on the small details. Change is not effected by a misplaced foot here, a flap of a bird’s wing there.” “I guess.” “You’re heard of the butterfly effect?”

“Good decisions lead to good decisions, just as bad decisions beget more bad decisions. Worth bearing in mind.”

“Look, I totally appreciate your help,” I say, in sight of the gates now. “But I want my life back.” “This is your life, Alex,” he replies. “You know what I mean.” He sways his head side to side, like it’s me who doesn’t understand. “I want to go back. To before all this...shit started.” “You show me any man, Alex, and I’ll show you someone who wants to go back to when they were twenty and falling in love.”

A realization strikes me: that the worst our enemies can do is turn us into them. That, surely, is the greatest victory they can ever score.

Jazz smiles. “Sorry. I’m keeping you out of the pub, aren’t I?” It’s fast getting dark. I’m still a mile from home. I no longer have an evening to kill. “You really are.”

The picture chosen for the front is all wrong. It’s Mum with Dad, taken back when Ross and I were young. She is, already, fading. They should’ve used that photo from the mantelpiece at home: black-and-white, late teens, Karen Carpenter hair, everything still an option; when you’ve made no choices, none of them have had the chance to be wrong. She sparkles with life in that picture. When my time’s up, I’ll be wanting a picture of that afternoon on the Thames in ’95 to be remembered by. Before the lengthy business of dying began. When I was all cause, no effect.

There follows a eulogy that only Dad could have provided. Her life, it appears, began only when she met him. Her defining moments being the things she liked to bake, her enjoyment of fish and chips in Wetherspoons, the hotel in Tenerife she always insisted they return to, the pride she took in her home. No mention of that young woman photographed on the mantelpiece. The person who left school at fifteen and worked two jobs till she’d saved enough to be free; who flew to Spain and worked bars and sang with a band; the girl who then spent three years on cruise ships, chambermaiding till she worked her way into the cabaret; who returned home and put herself through college. Who then met my father—an event which trumped all that had come before. Still, she was a Good Woman. On that, all agree.

I can see it now. Every time I’ve let this man make me angry; every time I’ve boiled with fury for hours and days after his attacks; every time I punched myself in the head till I was bleeding and seeing double; or worse, the times when nothing could stop the tears coming, hating myself with a white-hot fury for my weakness—when I was only letting him win. The worst our enemies can ever do is to turn us into them. His anger isn’t producing anger in another. He doesn’t know what to do.

If only I’d known it years ago: that the only way to deal with a control freak is to remove yourself from their control.

“Real change is possible, Alex.” His eyes burn into me. “Take the initiative,” he says firmly. “Whilst you know change is possible.” “You think the opportunity passes?” “Rot sets in,” he says. “You live a life you’re not happy with for long enough, and it’s possible to forget that things could be different.”

tomorrow the comfort of routine will be gone; might ambition fill the void?

“Have you ever heard anything so tragic, though? Alex Dean—so keen to fit in he’ll destroy his own life to do it.”

“I’ve been helping you, since then?” I ask. “What, like often?” He looks at me uncertainly but then shakes it away, familiar enough with my funny moments. “Two nights a week, wasn’t it. Sometimes three.” “Fuck.” It’s like an explosion in my guts. It is, I suppose, pride. For this guy, and for myself too. Totally alien feeling. Booze wouldn’t come close. Not even cocaine. “Thank you for letting me help you, man.”

life doesn’t hinge on the details? How change is born of committing to living differently? And yet, with such a small shift in behavior, a tragedy has become—what—a blemish? On an otherwise joyous night?

Was it such a small change? I wonder, barely half my mind on the question, as I hammer out the song. Would a small change take so much effort?

“Don’t confuse the size of the grief with the magnitude of the loss. One life—all of this. There are greater tragedies every day, Alex.”

Changes have to be made whilst I still know that change is possible. This is a rare opportunity: the gift of a day early in my life, before the rot.

A brown cat of quite magical wiriness—named Oberon, I have discovered—weaves purringly about me before settling on the hearth so close she’ll surely go up any second. I attempt to glide her away and she looks up at me with gemstone eyes, expression that says she knows how to take care of herself, thanks all the same.

What of the lonely busker’s life, the body wrecked by booze, the shithole digs, homelessness? These things that once came after this date are surely banished.

"surely" someone is taking things for granted

Buzzing with gratitude for the web of causes, stretching down the years, that has brought about this effect.