THE INSIDE OF THE BOTTLE-OPENER
“Too many openers spoil the bottle,” claimed Charles.
Mag laughed, even though she really failed to understand the joke or the reference. Its beauty was that she didn’t need to understand because Charles was funny whatever he said. His face lent meaning or humour with every glance. The trouble was he said very little.
“Still waters run deep,” thought Mag.
Marley was staring through the kitchen window from outside. He was stood there after sweating in the sun – digging the potato patch or moving things about to clear the path for visitors.
“Hi, Marley,” said Mag. “How’s the water butt today? Mended?”
“Ok, I think,” said Marley, as ever speaking to Mag by looking straight at Charles, as if Charles were some sort of pivot that implied confidence. Charles knew, for example, that Marley had once been inside. Doing time. On His Majesty’s pleasure. As they say.
Charles had naturally never told Mag about the conversation he and Marley had once held in the early days, at that distant point of memory when Charles was willing actually to hold a conversation.
“You know how things are,” Marley had said. A strange way to start an old conversation. Years ago Charles knew exactly what he meant. What mattered it if a gardener – factotum, odd-job man – had been a resident of the ‘Bottle Opener’? The most notorious establishment of its kind, where inmates regularly populated the roofs – as if randomly demonstrating how free they really were. Shouting at visitors as their negotiated the obstacle course of shrubs and sheds that represented the Bottle Opener’s immediate grounds.
The sun was really working its heart out that day – glancing off Marley’s face and dancing not only with the fairies that many believed populated the air but also among the speech bubbles of conversation. Memories certainly gave a strange slant to the present, as well as changing themselves (the memories) in the process. But Charles could not recall whether he had that thought then or now. Days got mixed up as life itself seemed to lose its meaning with age.
Charles did remember Marley telling him that the Bottle Opener was called that because … well, that was a long drawn-out explanation. There had been a legendary inmate called Rudge (once merely a visitor from outside) and Rudge’s term indeed overlapped with that of Marley at the very beginning, but most inmates had only heard talk of Rudge rather than met him. On the outside, Rudge had been a wide-ranging tippler and womaniser, as sharp as a tinopener, too – but, whilst inside, apparently, he was Alcoholics Anonymous through and though – and as celibate as the bars ground into the lower and upper concrete of his cell window (as Rudge himself put it). But that was afterwards. Inside, he was bluntly a man of few words. According to Marley. And Charles reported it all differently somehow when talking to Mag about what Marley had said about Rudge to Charles.
Bottles were smuggled through the bars by befrienders who visited the establishment for forgiveness but Rudge had refused any share in such bottles. But bars sure continued to represent a word that conjured up a whole world for Rudge – when, on the outside, there was never an opening time or a closing time but simply a snake of time sucking grog through its own tail like a straw. Marley shrugged. His own words crudely misrepresented his own time at the Bottle Opener – and Rudge’s poetic turn of phrase when reporting it after his stint of service at His Majesty’s Pleasure were far beyond Marley’s range of thought. So Charles and Mag remained quite oblivious of the ‘snake of time’ phrase. Perhaps it had never been used by even Rudge himself. Only doing time would tell.
Marley eventually told Charles that Rudge had befriended him when they shared a cell together – during the conversation that they held through the night when they had also christened the place the Bottle Opener. Now it seemed the place had always been called the Bottle Opener. Strange ways, strange times.
Each period of time held different conversations and overlapping events … and back, today, Mag and Charles seeing Marley through the kitchen window would become just one more undependable future memory for someone among them to toy with or merely fetch from the past and interpret or misinterpret accordingly. Usually the latter.
The sun always seemed to shine, from inside the Bottle-Opener. And, today, the sun was shining in the kitchen garden. The path was freshly weeded. The water butt fixed so that any leaks were yesterday’s leaks. The shed had been moved on its moveable plinth towards a part of the garden to give shade for anyone wanting to use the deck-chair. Marley shuffled his feet expecting a cup of tea to be passed through the window.
Mag, much later, that same day, or another day, stood by the kitchen window, alone, watching birds swooping in to feed off the pellets of food she’d left for them on various devices of bird-table or bird-house or bird-cage – except the bird-cage itself was where they nibbled at the food from outside, the food being inside the cylindrical hanging cage as a container. She almost wept as she remembered that climate changes were afoot and probably had been since Victorian times if anyone had the nous to recognise this fact. Human beings were at risk as well as birds. She had a dream last night when she watched three men digging the garden, back-breaking stuff – three of them, three blokes, three geezers, rough diamonds, rogues, wasters, rather tongue-tied individuals who helped round the grounds of the house, just for a few scraps of food she could spare and the bottles of drink she had stockpiled for just these occasions. Bottles were better than money, in these circumstances. The food was relatively unimportant and they laboured in the hot sun purely for what the bottles contained, indeed raising their respective thirsts so as to enjoy the drink that much better. The dream was not a dream at all but it didn’t matter. It <I>seemed</I> like a dream, that was what was imporatant – like most of Mag’s life had seemed like a dream, since her husband had gone way. Charles, Marley and Rudge saluted as the sun reached such a certain pitch that they needed to shade their eyes when they looked towards the kitchen window. They couldn’t see Mag because of the reflections.
Rudge looked through the bars of his cage. He had dreamed of Mag dreaming of him, although he didn’t know her name was Mag nor that the other two men he worked with in the garden were known to each other, let alone to her … or to him. Tears came to his eyes. He was so far down the pecking-order of self-knowledge, he wondered if he existed at all. Rudge rather envied Marley his strange ways and means of getting in and out of the cage as if it were a puzzle people had for Christmas, squeezing a shape through impossible gaps. He envied Charles even more than he did Marley. Charles had only tried to get <I>into</I> the cage from outside but had failed; failure and success having grey overlapping areas as most things did. But Charles always gave confidence that he was there, that he knew what he was doing: telling the truth.
Marley had a dream, too. He was in the shed surrounded by unopened bottles and he man-handled a hammer as if this were the only method to tackle their opening. But shards of glass would be one mixer too far, he assumed. The shed seemed to be moving under him – like a sedan chair – or like a feat of imagination that was beyond even the dream’s capacity to manage – and it soon ground to a halt. Once Mag had visited him here in the shed. Until the dream itself dissipated.
The final dream was Charles. Not a dream of Charles, not a dream by Charles. The dream was Charles. A dream that was a person, not a person dreaming a dream. A dream that masqueraded as a real person with a real name carrying a body round with it as if it was his. Like a vehicle or lift or big wheel. Charles suddenly recalled those ships in a bottle: scrimshaw vessels that were too big for the bottle that they seemed to be voyaging within. Sailors used to make them for their favourite nephews. Prison-ships. Charles used to live near the Essex marshes. He once knew Magwitch, before he was famous.
