Everything that's in my head

Chapter One

As Adam reached the deep end, he turned and sucked in as much air as he could into his lungs. Doing one more length of crawl was out of the question so he decided on a more sedate breast stroke and spluttered his way back on the final length.
Back in the changing room he towelled himself dry, got dressed and finally replaced the watch Dougal had given him on his wrist. Feeling weary but virtuous he made his way out of the large, deserted municipal swimming pool and into the large Victorian park it nestled in. There was no one around as Adam had instructed Dougal that he didn’t want anyone ‘messing with his head’ and that he preferred solitude to being in crowds.
He had also asked for it to be permanent winter. Quite why, Dougal could only guess at: it had caused a lot of heated debate between them but Adam had been insistent and would brook no argument. So Dougal gave him a land dusted with a light snow and beset with a freezing, cutting wind that cut through the thickest of Adam’s overcoats. Adam was entirely happy with this arrangement as it gave him a sense of home and anyway being cosy was something he felt he liked more than anything else right now.

He had asked Dougal earlier on that year, if he could live in a huge medieval castle, with battlements and a portcullis. Adam had by now, become so adjusted to getting what he saw in his mind's eye, he just needed to squeeze his eyes shut once for the impossible to happen. Dougal was happy to give it the go ahead and threw in a few stables and various outhouses. He staffed it with an army of servants and a host of cooks and administrators. It had a thousand dark panelled rooms and the only light came from a million candles that burned day and night. On some days, Adam took to wearing a large bear skin over his shoulders and would wander around the battlements sporting a beard and wearing his hair down to his shoulders.

There he would sit among the gargoyles and ruminate over the past, the present and an uncertain future.

Dougal was due for dinner that evening so after his afternoon dip, instead of going straight home past the silent railway station, he would need to make a slight detour as he would have to go via a Sainsbury’s that had been near him when he was alive. He thought the whole thing through and just closed his eyes when he wanted to be back in the place that he knew from all those years ago. Being there gave him a sense of home and he liked handling money and generally being in 2008, the year coincidently, he died. So with his bearskin slung over one shoulder, he crept along the deserted aisles until his trolley was full and made his way to the check out.

A year had passed since his resurrection and he had made startling progress.


Over the ensuing months, there had been a gradual role reversal between Dougal and Adam. As Dougal pressed his protégé on matters Adam’s time the more the answers become complex and so it was Dougal’s turn to be the pupil. Bit by bit Adam’s explanations turned into presentations and finally morphed into lectures, some lasting for hours as he explained, persuaded, cajoled, humoured, Dougal into understanding the culture, history, art and science of his time.

Golf was one the things that Adam found the most difficult to get across. He soon tired of Dougal’s pinched look of incomprehension and had ended up shouting that ‘he hadn’t practised the sport and what difference did it make anyway!’, which made the good professor up stumps and flounce out of the room. Today was the day that they would make up only if Dougal promised faithfully not to mention the dreaded ‘G’ word ever again.

He arrived that night, just as a snowstorm began to bite in earnest and wasn’t in the best of moods. Adam met him at the drawbridge with a flaming torch and a small retinue of pages and footmen.
To show his displeasure, Dougal arrived as his true self, contrary to the protocol of their relationship. As he clambered out of the carriage, he cursed the cold, the gloom and the fact they could both be in the tropics somewhere, sitting in wicker chairs sipping Margaritas.

As his six feet hit the snow, Dougal shot out an antenna and said theatrically,
‘I come in peace’, which Adam thought hilarious. He went to hug him but couldn’t decide which bit of Dougal to hug. Despite the awkwardness of Dougal’s true self both were content to beam at each other in delight at a friendship regained.
‘No problem Doog, come in’, said Adam finally, held one of Dougal’s antenna in both hands and led him warmly into the courtyard.

Over a fish supper, six months previously, having had a little too much Muscadet, Dougal had let slip that he was fact half insect or to be more precise, beetle. Adam had taken the news philosophically; after what he had been through; nothing really amazed him any more and he treated it the same way as if Dougal had been homosexual, Dougal could, whenever the fancy took him, change from human to bug with little in the way of effort, which was disconcerting at the time but something Adam had got used to.

He instructed staff to expect an important guest and that they would eat in the 'Great Room.'

A hot bath was run and certain senior members of staff i.e. the cook, the Sergeant of Arms, and the chaplain were tasked with attending the great man.

Once bathed and pampered, Dougal appeared in the Great Hall, dressed in a navy blue lounge suit, suede loafers and smelt of talc. He was served a dry sherry and stood by a roaring log fire.

His mood had definitely improved since arriving and he had thankfully reverted back to the Dougal that Adam knew and loved, once he was settled, relaxed and warm.
Adam opened with, ‘there’s something I want’,anxious to ride the wave of bonhomie and sat himself down at the end of a very long oak table.
‘Something, I would like you to supply me with’.
Dougal nodded the nod that he knew something was coming he wouldn’t necessarily agree with and fixed Adam a stare, waiting to scowl.
‘Go on’, he said.
Adam reached into the deep pocket of his smoking jacket and retrieved a piece of crumpled paper. He cleared his throat and started to read from it.
‘As you know, I am alone in this world. I have been washed up on a foreign shore. I am like a newborn, a babe in arms with only a human/beetle for company’. Adam actually said the word stroke, when it separated the nouns, giving it, Adam felt; emphasis. ‘Despite our long and fruitful friendship, I feel the time has come when we turn our thoughts away from science and onto more sentimental topics’. Adam alighted on the word sentimental, making little rabbit's ears with his fingers above his head.
Adam sensing this attempt at visual parenthesis was distracting Dougal, hastily dropped his fingers and placed them on the table.
He stared intently at the notes in his hand as he spoke and read the words as if they weren’t his own.
‘As you know, I have been without human comfort for a while. The tender embrace of a real woman I have not felt for many a long year and it is now, now that I ask you as a friend and fellow human stroke thing, if you could do me an enormous favour?’ Adam felt this last bit didn’t scan as well as it might but it had been late when he wrote it and he was confident Dougal would notice the sudden shift in register.
Dougal looked very tense when Adam paused for breath and lent forward out of the high, winged back chair he was sitting in. He cast Adam a wary eye but said nothing, content to cock his head to one side and eye him up and down like an old hen.
Adam put his speech down in front of him and sat down with an exasperated sigh shouting at no none in particular,

‘I haven’t been laid in 1,000,000 years, God help me!’

Dougal was so shocked at this he changed back into his true self and then back to Dougal in an instant.
He shrank back behind the wings of his chair and said quietly,

‘I don’t do confrontation’.

‘Sorry’, said Adam, regaining his composure, ‘but it has been a very, very long time’.

Both looked at their respective fingernails not wanting to be the first to speak.
Finally, Dougal could bear it no longer and came up with:

‘We’re working on it’, and left it at that.

‘So there’s hope then?’, Adam asked presently.

Adam winced when he said this as he knew perfectly well that hope was one of the things that Dougal couldn’t get no matter how hard you explained it. Hope, suicide and golf were the big three that you couldn’t mention just as sex, politics and religion were in Adam’s time.
‘We have found a bone, no more than a fragment but what we have learnt from you has been very useful, only it might take a while’, says Dougal from behind the security of the wings of his chair.
‘A lady fragment?’ asked Adam, probing Dougal’s outer defences;
‘A fragment from a woman born in a slightly later era than your own’. It’s a slow process; you took the best part of a thousand years’.
‘How long for her then?’ asked Adam, not unnaturally.
Dougal thought for a bit and scratched his head. He was obviously doing some extraordinary calculation in his head and his eyes rolled back and forth, until after an awkward pause he said,
‘About 600 years’.
‘600 years!!! I can’t wait that long!’ Adam exploded.
‘Give or take a few months’.
‘But, I’ll be dead by then’
‘No you won’t’, Dougal said in a quiet voice.
‘I have given you the secret of eternal life’.
’ Oh, right’, said Adam brightly.
‘None of that dipping you in the river Styx either, just change a few enzymes here and there, and Bob’s your uncle’.
This killed the moment for Adam, as he felt that Dougal’s tone was a bit disrespectful, given the mysteries of life and death.
‘You don’t think I would work away like an ant for the past millennia only for you to get all, wizened and incapable?’.
Dougal changed tack swiftly to a course he felt more promising.

‘Which brings me to my next point.’ Dougal rose from his chair and idled over to the fire. He prodded it with a poker until sparks flew and a burning log snapped and crackled.
‘We would need your help at the final stages’ said Dougal presently, staring at the flames.
‘We would need you to cast your human eye over the subject’.
‘In what capacity?’, asked Adam, folding his arms.
‘Well, as a designer, as we don’t really know what constitutes a real woman as such. We had no idea that you were a man until we saw you doing that thing in the bath.’
Adam reddened but said nothing.
‘We would need you to draw up a list of specifications as to the partner you wouldn’t mind spending eternity with, paint a picture, so to speak.
‘I’ll see what I can do’, mumbled Adam,
‘We cannot see what beauty is. Anyway, I believe it is in the eye of the beholder, it would be a great help, would you mind terribly?’
Dougal drained his glass placed it on the mantel piece, clapped his hands together and said;
‘Let’s eat’.

They ate heartily, well into the night. The cooks served platefuls of venison and partridge, mutton and sucking pig washed down with flagons of rich claret. Course after steaming course, arrived with unerring regularity. They laughed, cried, sang and nearly danced if Adam had had his way.
As the huge grandfather clock struck twelve, both men sat back in their chairs and loosened their belts. The talk was of history and war, which Dougal was obviously very keen on and harboured some strangely radical views. He found the idea of the First World War faintly amusing as he found the atomic raids on Japan a very funny joke. But then Dougal wasn’t really from Adam’s time and therefore had no real cultural reference. He nodded and indulged Dougal’s giggles as he would a man who used the word ‘nigger’ but was too stupid to care.
‘Tell me’, ventured Adam when Dougal had composed himself,
‘Where is Earnest Serius?’
The laughter in Dougal’s throat died instantly, and he sat up not a grin or a smirk in sight.

‘East’, he said and reached for his brandy tumbler.