WINSTON IN THE RAIN

A little look into a day in the life of a man who might have known better, but apparently didn't

It was raining. It had been all day. Steady, down-pouring, wetting, splashing, puddling. The wettest Wednesday for ages.

And Winston was out in it.

He’d been out in it for as long as it had been raining because that was his plan and he always followed his plans. If he didn’t he was afraid he might start losing his marbles. Might start going gradually feeble-minded.

He’d been afraid of that since he was old enough to know there was such a thing as dementia, and that had been a long time. His dad had disappeared into a cloud of forgetfulness and it had been horrible.

“Who are you?”

“Dad, it’s me. Winston.”

“I don’t know … who are you?”

“I’m your son!”

And so on. That’s how it had been and when his time was up dad hadn’t died too soon. A life ending is a sad, even a bad, thing unless the life has already fizzled out, bit by bit, dripping into a virtual drain in a dissolving mind and running away to nowhere.

He wasn’t going to have any of that, so he stuck to plans even though ignoring them might have been a better indication of his sanity.

And his big plan was to be out and about today. To walk the river bank from Swanspottle to Brumpton, a beautiful gash through the country, slow, lethargic, with old fellows angling with rods and nets and young tykes chasing and tumbling and being young tykes. It would take all day. Going there and back, to Brumpton where there were shops and back to Swanspottle where there weren’t any.

He was going to buy a dog collar. Not for a dog, but for a clergyman because next week or sometime soon he was off to a fancy dress party and when he wasn’t going as a woman he liked to go as a vicar. He liked the pomposity of it, the way he could get away with spite and insults because he was in a character that wasn’t actually him, though in his secret heart he knew it was.

When he went as a woman it was because deep down he knew he should have been born one. But he had tumbled from the womb with a man’s plumbing, and that had to be that. Winston had been a boy and then a man.

He trudged along the river bank not bothering to wonder whether he was being daft as mud splashed up his trouser legs and rivulets ran down his neck even though he was dressed to the nines with waterproof stuff.

“It’s a lovely day for walking,” he told himself, though he knew it wasn’t. He often tried to convince himself that black was white or two and two make five, and he rarely believed his fantasies with all of his heart, though sometimes he almost did.

He’d been born during the dark days of war when the country was at sixes and sevens trying to survive and he blamed that if he blamed anything. Dad had fought in it and somehow it had sapped the sense out of his head in later years as he aged. So two and two had to make anything but four and he had to work out a clever reason why. It was what made him mentally superior to those that couldn’t.

Now he was wet through and uncomfortable. Even his underclothes were wet. He could feel the cold of it scraping against his bottom from his jockey shorts where the coins in his back pocket pushed through, and it was horrible, and he was still short of Brumpton by several miles. And when he got there, what next? How would he get dry enough to walk home? And would he get his hands on a nice white plastic dog collar for the fancy dress? And if he did, would it get all spoiled and wet by the walk home? Might he catch the bus instead, might he try not to get much wetter?

And the heavens opened wider, just to confound him.

“You’re wet, mister,” squawked a boy from inside a green tent quite a few yards from where a man was fishing under a large golf umbrella.

Winston didn’t like boys. He hadn’t liked them even when he had been one himself, all those years ago. He had fought some of them, of course, because that’s what boys do, and he had blacked a fair few eyes and had his own discoloured in return. And for some reason he had never associated himself with them. They were boys, repulsive, bullying brutes who often smelt of wee especially after he’d punched them, and he was something else.

He was Winston.

“I know I am!” he growled irritably, itching to strike the dry tented boy. Itching to go up to that green tent and batter it down so that the wretched creature inside it would get to be as wet as him.

“Where you going?” asked the boy, grinning through the tent entrance.

“None of your business!” he growled back. “It’s none of your business so I’m not telling you.” Even to him it sounded petulant, but that didn’t matter. He’d be out of range of the pesky brat soon enough.

He stalked on.

“The bank’s collapsed down that way,” the boy told him, shouting because he was already almost out of earshot. “You’ll have to come back, and my dad’ll sort you out, being nasty to me,” added the boy. “My dad’s fishing,” he explained.

“Just you be quiet, lad,” came a muffled voice from under the golf umbrella. “The man doesn’t want to talk to you.”

Round the bend, and with the rain still siling down, he came on the collapsed river bank. The rain had probably loosened the mud and a higher than normal flow of river water had done the rest. The pathway was gone. Winston would have to go back, past the irritating child in his tent and the (to him) threatening man under his umbrella.

Yes, there was no way forwards.

Unless he jumped over the gap.

He’d been good at jumping when he’d been a lad. He’d had to be. Although he’d probably been the king bully at school himself, he’d needed to run and jump to get away from the hoards of lesser bullies that always seemed to want to rip his clothes off him and throw them onto bus shelters or into gated gardens.

He grinned for a moment because that’s what he had done. That had been his little speciality, ripping trousers off the others and lobbing them where they were virtually impossible to get at.

Splash!

Another bit of river bank fell idly and slowly into the stream of the river with an oozing splosh, and it left a gap that not even an Olympic athlete could have cleared.

But Winston had to try.

It made him even wetter. Suddenly he was in the river, and the river that had battered its own bank started sweeping him away. There was quite a current in that river.

By the time he had managed to pull himself back out and onto wet land he was frightened and angry and filled with hatred for anyone who was in any way drier than him.

He might have gone back to batter the boy in his tent, but he didn’t.

In a strange way the whole idea scared him, the boy had sounded ferocious and he had a dad nearby, and anyway he wanted that dog collar.

Sopping wet and squelching like a dying rat in a drainpipe he almost crawled into Brumpton.

It was Wednesday afternoon, early closing, and every single shop was shut.

But the buses were still running, which was how Winston managed to get home where he told his wife a grand story in which he was attacked by a small army of out-of-control boys who somehow forced him into the river, where he almost drowned.

“Bloody kids,” he growled.

© Peter Rogerson 03.09.16

Reviews

[SweetNutmeg]

Another happy one! I'll have to remember to not come here when I'm not feeling cheerful. Fortunately today I am feeling cheerful and enjoyed your story. Thank you for posting it for our amusement.

[Peter Rogerson]

My pleasure as ever, SweetNutmeg. I had to reread it because I'd forgotten all about it. Maybe I'm going gaga....