Everything that's in my head

Chapter 2

They adjourned to the billiard room and Dougal lit a cigar.
They played with brisk efficiency, each moving uncommanded by the other, around the baize, fishing out balls from pockets and replacing them on their correct spot with each saying 'shot' once in a while,
Adam took a 3-0 lead in no time and Dougal complained he was still ‘too full of dinner’ and that it affected his concentration.

Adam breezed around the table like a panther, potting balls with an annoying aplomb and all the while winking at Dougal and leering.
At 5-2, Dougal wanted a sit down and they collapsed in the drawing room on sofas as large as a family saloon car.

‘We found him outside, wandering alone. After all that time mooching about, he didn’t look so great, in fact he looked bloody awful.’
Dougal took off his spectacles and slowly cleaned them with the handkerchief he always kept in his left trouser pocket.

‘No disrespect to the old man, far from it, he taught us a great deal’
In our investigations spanning many millennia, we had never come across anything with such wrath.
He must have looked into every rock pool on every shore of every beach on this empty Earth and seen only himself glaring back, teeth barred, ready to tear to shreds the image that tormented him.

Dougal lifted a buttock and stuffed the handkerchief back into its home.
‘We rescued him and he us’ he quoted, piously from some oblique religious text.
‘He had your form: legs, arms, shoulders, it was all there, like you, but up here’. Dougal tapped the side of his head, ‘he was completely different’.

By now, Adam was decidedly woozy after the meal and the numbing effect of the brandy and was quite content for Dougal to prattle on about Earnest, a man that would be god, at least for Dougal anyway.

Later, in the small hours Adam cried foul and pleaded for Dougal to stop. He had been talking, nay babbling, for some two hours about the mysteries of Earnest, and Adam fancied a walk along the battlements to clear his head before turning in and calling it a night.
He was just standing up stretching, when Dougal suggested they do something different.

‘Why don’t we go outside?’, he said quite matter-of-factly.

‘Outside, outside?’ queried Adam.

‘Outside’, confirmed Dougal and went to get his boat cloak.

Outside was a place Dougal only mentioned in passing, now and again, and never expanded on it let alone suggesting going there. Outside meant a place that was real, not made up from either Dougal’s imagination or Adam’s but the actual surface of the Earth.

Dougal returned wearing a fur hat, thick mittens and had his cloak tucked firmly under his chin.

‘I take it it’s cold’ Adam said sarcastically and Dougal laughed heartily.

‘Minus thirty’, he said and walked towards a spiral staircase that lay in the corner of the room.

They ascended the stairs with Adam mumbling that minus thirty was in fact very cold indeed and both could die the moment they opened the hatch.

‘This is only to get us to the lift’ said Dougal pointing to his attire,. And by the time they got to a damp, featureless room with dark brass portholes and a depressing neon strip, Adam could see what Dougal meant.

Immediately they entered, their breath turned to crystals that fell to the floor with a faint tinkle and Adam began to shiver uncontrollably.

‘Christ’, was all he could manage through clenched teeth.

‘Put this on’, said Dougal and handed Adam a thin plastic suit of some kind.
By the time Adam had squeezed into it, (an awkward moment, as it meant taking off his bear skin and exposing himself, albeit temporarily, to the intense cold. Dougal had to hold the trousers open while Adam climbed in to them by which stage he was almost hysterical.) Once on and zipped up, the cold magically disappeared and he began to admire himself in the reflection of a porthole. The whole ensemble was quite ‘Glam Rock’, which he found hard to explain to Dougal.
They travelled in a lift for a self-conscious 4 minutes with Adam singing 'Do You Want to be My Gang',until Dougal blurted out matter- of-factly, that he wouldn’t be going with him.

‘What do you mean? Not coming with me!!’, asked Adam incredulously.

‘I can’t’, replied Dougal, shrugging his shoulders, ‘it’s a…you know’, and made a gesture as it to point to his true identity.

‘Oh’, said Adam forlornly and before he had time to make a case, the lift door opened and Dougal thrust him out with a firm shove in the back.

When Adam opened his eyes after some ten minutes, he found himself on a flat plain of tarmac that stretched to the horizon and beyond.
In the distance he saw what he thought looked like a meter of some description and after ten minutes walking towards the familiar machine, found it was indeed a Pay and Display machine in full working order. Adam reached into his pocket and found some loose change and bought an hour’s worth of parking. He took great joy in hearing the machine buzz and whir, printing out its ticket which had no use.

He looked around and seeing nothing more than an enormous car park walked back to the lift door and pressed the down button. The door opened after a while and Dougal was there, cloak wrapped over his eyes, looking very shifty.
‘It’s nothing but a car park’ said Adam, not a little disappointed and gave the ticket to Dougal by way of proof.

‘Earnest had a car at one stage’, said Dougal apologetically and as he pushed the button to close the lift, he tossed Adam a set of keys.
‘We thought having somewhere to park it would please him’.
The lift and its chipped green door vanished and in the space where it had been stood a battered grey, Citroen Diane; luckily for Adam, he had driven one in his youth.

He started the engine, which roared into life on the first turn of the key and Adam felt a surge of euphoria. He let the engine idle for a while, mulling over the possibilities of where he could go. The car park stretched as far as the eye could see, and he wasn’t confident that it led anywhere in particular. But all the same, he pulled the long gear stick towards him into first and released the clutch.

Not being entirely confident about his new freedom, Adam was content to drive around in circles and straight lines, changing gear and generally getting used to the whole idea of having a car at his disposal. Quite soon the novelty wore off and soon he was climbing through the gears heading in no particular direction.

The car was not designed for speed and had no aerodynamic features to speak of, only a 650cc engine, which was perfect around French lanes but was slow and ponderous on the flat. Not that this bothered Adam. He was in heaven. He drove with one arm out the window and only a finger on the steering wheel.

Eventually, he came to a crossroads and instinctively stopped out of habit. The engine idled for some time while Adam thought about the possibilities. He then realised that with no other cars anywhere to be found and not knowing where anything was, direction was meaningless. So he turned East and headed towards the horizon.
Despite the freezing temperatures, Adam was not cold. The suit kept him just right; so it was crisp, fresh and altogether pleasant.

As he drove, two things played on his mind, the possibility of getting lost and running out of petrol. But as the road went by these worries left him, no doubt Dougal had thought of everything and he was, after all, too precious to lose.

The view was very much like that he had had from Dougal’s supped up car; endless tundra, rocky outcrops and gentle sloping hills. It was empty and silent which suited Adam. Having not spoken to a single human being for some considerable time he was not sure what he would say anyway.

Eventually, after two or three hours he pulled over for a well-earned rest. He changed down and pulled the car over to the side of the road and came to a gravely halt.

He got out of the front seat and opened the back door. He had hardly got himself comfortable when he was asleep. How long he slept he didn’t know but it must have been a while as the weak sun had dipped behind the horizon when he awoke, stiff and miserable.

The darkness was all consuming, it was as if a black cloak had been laid over the windows and it was a struggle for Adam to reach the driving seat and turn the engine on. By the light of the headlights he could see around the musty interior and could properly wake up. He sat there for a while, listless and on the horns of a dilemma. Should he continue on, certain in the knowledge that nothing of any note lay over the horizon or should he return to the car park and back to the comfort of Dougal? He could do with a large sandwich and a glass of beer after all, not forgetting a long hot soak and his soft bed. Anxious as to what to do, he suddenly noticed something up ahead. At first he thought it was a lonely star that had lost its bearings and fallen to Earth. But as he squinted, he knew instinctively what it was. It was the light of a single 60 watt bulb, bravely illuminating the darkness and like Canute, losing the battle against the tide of night.
Immediately, he turned the ignition and the engine leapt in to life, as if conscious of the urgency. To say he raced towards the pathetic ray of light would be an exaggeration: motor bikes had bigger engines but with his foot flat to the floor, he managed fifty miles an hour and with ten knuckles shining white on the steering wheel, he squeezed another 5 miles an hour from the straining engine.

The light steadily grew brighter and with the passing of half an hour Adam slammed the breaks on and came to a skidding halt.

Breathless, he clambered out and stood in awe of the thing that presented itself in silent majesty.

It wasn’t so much a house, more a house that had once been but by the symmetry of its lines had obviously been constructed by human hand.
There was even an upstairs window of sorts. It was square and had been put there for a purpose, which made it uniquely human. The bulb that had lured him like a moth, hung from a dirty plastic cable suspended in a crude kind of porch. There was no door, so Adam breezed inside through a portal of weathered stone and into the interior.
He could make out a breakfast room with a simple table and chair in the middle. He came across a set of stone stairs towards the rear and slowly and silently he felt his way up, one step at a time, into an ever increasing darkness.

He reached the stop stair and felt his way into a room that had the window he had seen when he first arrived. He let out a loud 'hello?', to check if any one was there; after all this wasn't his house. By the lights of the car parked outside, he could see a bed against a far wall. It had a smooth, wooden headboard and a soft forgiving mattress.
Adam chuckled to himself.
‘Dougal, you little darling’, and collapsed on a mound of pillows, in fit of giggles.
He climbed under a warm, patchwork quilt and lay still, listening to the deafening silence out side.

In the morning, Adam decided on a lie in that lasted until a guilt ridden 11:30 am and it was not until 12:00 that he was truly up and ready for the day. He trotted down stairs to the breakfast room and now that day had come, he could see it for what it was: truly Spartan. The table and chair were the only furniture and on the far wall hung a corner cupboard,that hovered above a crude cooking stove. Dougal had thoughtfully left a note on the table that had a ‘Home Sweet Home’ card attached. It read:

‘Hope every thing is OK. Wishing you every happiness in your new home,
Dougal.
PS feel free to use the typewriter’.

His eyes roamed around the room for while They settled on the cupboard again, whereupon he sprang to his feet and with one stride yanked the little door open. What he saw pleased him greatly. Seven slices of thick bacon lay, luxuriously wrapped in grease proof paper Someone had scrawled the words ’Smoked’ on the side in blue biro and Adam felt the weight of it in his right hand. It felt comforting; heavy in its fleshiness.
At the back of the shelf hid a brightly coloured, rectangular packet with exotic writing on the side. Adam lifted it into the palm of his hand and examined it in detail. He did not understand the language but written among the fancy, foreign illustrated words was the word 'Tabac' that lifted Adam‘s spirits considerably. He opened one end and sucked in a rich brew of dark, aromatic tobacco that sent his senses swirling.
He reached father into the cupboard and produced a jar of coffee, a chipped metal coffee pot, a small bag of sugar, a loaf of fresh, fluffy white bread that was soft and tempting to the touch, a pound of butter, bright yellow and slightly salty, a heavy, metallic lighter and two packets of brightly coloured cigarette papers with a picture of a dancing girl shrouded in smoke on the thin cardboard lid. The commercial artist that had drawn it spared no detail as Adam noticed that her silken dress hugged her pert buttocks in a swirl of revealing sensuality and Adam felt a stirring in his loins, it had, after all, been a long time. He mumbled a quick, silent prayer in honour of Dougal and made for a tap that he had spotted protruding incongruously, from a wall by the door.

Next to the stove was a pile of kindling that leapt into life as a shower of sparks the moment Adam applied a flame from the lighter and soon the bacon was fizzing on the stove and the smell of freshly made coffee wafted around the room. Within no time and with Adam in rapture, breakfast was served; the first one he had prepared for himself for over a million years and it tasted wonderful. The grease ran in torrents through his fingers and he wiped them on his trouser legs that afforded the only cloth in the room.

He slurped the coffee, savouring every mouthful that was too hot to drink but Adam was oblivious to the pain and continued apace, blowing madly on the steaming brew.

The whole thing was eaten and drunk in a matter of minutes and Adam leant back in his chair. Giving his fingers a final wipe he reached for the cigarette papers and rolled himself a fat clumsy cigarette that once lit with a satisfying click of the metallic lighter, preceded to puff and billow smoke around the room like an autumn bonfire.

The tobacco had an after taste of vanilla and cherry, which Adam found greatly satisfying. As he took a long pull on his creation, he felt utterly replete, cheerful and content. He felt something beneath his feet and looked between his knees to find the typewriter Dougal had referred to in his note. It had the word TYPE WRITER written in bold white lettering across it. It lay on a pile of white paper as thick as a man’s arm.

Adam removed the outer casing and gingerly placed the machine onto the table. It was brand new and had a very light touch only emitting a slight click when the keys were depressed.
He took a sheet of paper and rolled it into place.
His fingers hovered above the multitude of letters that lay before him, finally typing.



The Book of Adam
And he sat back in his chair.

He wrote all afternoon. Stopping occasionally to roll himself a cigarette, and make coffee. Other times he would wander over to the back window and stare wistfully at the valley below. By the early evening he had completed four pages of a messy, manuscript with atrocious spelling and a clumsy, heavy style. Yet despite the poor quality of what he had written, he had made some progress and by the light of the setting sun, sat outside on the roof of the car and read it back to himself aloud, stopping occasionally to underline a particularly good bit or scratch out a piece that was crap. He crawled into bed when it was too dark to read and went straight to sleep, his mind empty and void of inspiration from the physical effort of concentrating for so long.

Next morning, he was up, bright and early and making coffee just before nine. He tore some bread from the loaf and made a doughy kind of toast by putting it on the stove and almost burning it. By half past he was tapping away feverishly: with the keys hurling themselves against the paper as fast as he could depress them.

On a lazy day two weeks later, in late afternoon, he began peering at the card on the cigarette papers and at the picture of the dancing woman who moved so sensuously among the ribbons of blue smoke. Such was its detail, that he could even make out the individual folds in her dress and the two delicate bridges of muscle that formed the nape of her neck. Her face was more in profile but her jaw line was strong and pronounced. Her arms were long and slender and one reached up like a minute hand while the other lay on the slight bump of her belly, He reached down towards his manhood and closed his eyes. He saw the silk dress fall to the floor and felt her hazel, sluttish eyes burn into the back of his brain.

Within a thrice, he was tugging furiously; snorting and arching his back; sometimes on his knees or standing proudly, legs apart like some latter day Colossus of Rhodes., his eyes screwed shut lest the image of him cavorting with the temptress should fade. As he approached orgasm, and still pulling violently, he wondered where he could deposit his issue. He decided on outside and charged headlong towards the open doorway only to be met by a beaming Dougal who jumped back letting out a yelp of surprise.
‘Oh God, sorry!’ was all Adam could manage and ran to his room his head bowed in shame.
Once he came down stairs an hour later, Dougal met him with a warm smile and a toothy grin.
‘Just popped in to say hi’, he said cheerfully, without hint of the previous incident.

‘Bought you some vitals’ ,he continued and with typical theatricality, made a sweeping gesture towards a box piled high with goodies. Adam leapt upon the box and pulled out items with gleeful abandon and placed them on the table.
‘There’s more in the car’ Dougal said presently, his voice almost drowned out by the cries of joy that came from a delighted Adam at every new find.
While Adam was arranging the treasure trove in orderly piles, Dougal sat himself down behind the desk and began to leaf through the piles of manuscript that lay scattered around..
‘May I keep this?’ He asked Adam, his eyes not leaving the page in front of him.
Adam looked up from a large bar of half eaten chocolate. He had a sticky, brown mess smeared around his mouth, which he wiped away with the back of his hand.
‘Help yourself, it’s all rubbish anyway’.
‘We shall see’ said Dougal rising to go. He folded the untidy sheaves of paper and tucked them into his inside pocket of his blazer.
‘Are you off?’ asked Adam, a little disappointed.
‘Have to go’. Dougal proffered his hand and left as quickly and as unexpectedly as he had come.
Adam stayed waiting at the door, waving until Dougal had disappeared out of sight and returned to his typewriter. It wasn’t long before he was fully absorbed again and Dougal was long forgotten.

And so it went on. Adam found a perfect walk to invigorate him in the mornings, which he embarked on after breakfast and sometimes before. It started at the end of the back ‘garden’ that really was a rocky, featureless piece of ground outside the back window and ended by way of a winding footpath to a dried up river valley that once had Noah like floods crashing through it but now was a silent bowl of frozen dust. This was as a pleasant spot to have his morning constitutional. He would squat in the morning silence over a pot hole that served perfectly for his purpose and gently massage his bowel while contemplating the next chapter and taking in the view. He could easily calculate how long he had lived at the house by counting the little mounds of earth left by him on previous days. One uneventful morning, he counted 115 different mounds and was shocked how time had flown.

The book continued, chapter after chapter. On Sundays he took rest and bathed in the galvanised bath that Dougal had given him. The process took forever; filling the coffee pot to the brim with cold water, emptying it once it had boiled and repeating the process until he had two inches of warm water with which to soap himself. He rigged blankets from his bed in a kind of curtain around the bath suspended from hooks he had fashioned from empty tins of peaches and made a kind of labyrinth of interwoven cloth walls that opened onto his bath and the stove. With the steam from the boiling water and the heat from the rusty, iron plate, plus the three feet thick blanket wall, he was able to take off his suit and air his putty coloured body to the intense cold. He would stand shivering, for only seconds, enough time for him to apply the soap and to rinse it off, before he was back out and into his suit.
Once it was on, he could return and wash his hair in the soapy water before donning a towel shaped into a turban and dragging the bath outside to be tipped away. The whole venture took him two hours from start to finish but was worth it as he felt fresh, clean and ready to face the rest of the day. For it was on bath day that Adam made himself a packed lunch of bread and garlic sausage and went for very long walks. So long, he would come back in the late evening tired and aching, speechless with fatigue. The reason for these long treks was not only to take in the surrounding country side but also in the vain hope of finding something, anything, of interest and that was undeniably human. After all this planet was still his, as he was the only human alive and therefore, by default, its sole representative. It would be good to touch base with his fellow species. He needed something he could identify with no matter how banal, that could let his imagination loose and he could reminisce.
Over the course of a few months, he had collected a fossilised human hand shaped like a fist, which he found sticking out of a riverbank and which curiously still wore a wedding ring. He dug up the surrounding earth but found nothing; so only the fist was labelled and put away somewhere safe. He also found a set of porcelain dentures, yellowed but otherwise perfectly usable. A bent, empty can of Pepsi, three buttons, something he didn't recognise and must have come from a later time, a rusty fork, a coin and a piece of flat rock that Adam deduced had been part of a wall and had the words suck my scrawled on it. Adam was immensely proud of it and treated it as if it was the Missing Link itself. He gathered these artefacts and posted them around the breakfast room, which after a while, began to resemble a small town museum. Dougal, on his fortnightly visits, would pick them up with all the reverence they deserved and put them back delicately, saying nothing, but clucking from time to time at something that had obviously pricked his interest.

One particular Sunday, Adam had woken up 'feeling funny' but shook it off as being nothing of any importance and pushed it to the back of his mind only for it to bounce back with renewed vigour. He made his usual cup of coffee and noticed he felt nervous and jumpy. The problem being. Adam realised, there was absolutely nothing to feel 'nervous and jumpy' about. He made it out of the house and embarked on his usual walk with the all the energy of the panic stricken, hoping against hope that it wasn't what he thought it was. He knew the symptoms; he had been here before. If it was, what he thought it was, there was nothing to be done but sail straight into the storm.

Finally, having walked only a matter of miles, he climbed on top a rocky promontory and gave in to the blackness that pursued him. His eyes filled with tears that fell into the weathered valley below. He remained there, wretched and alone until nightfall, before managing to drag himself back to the house and his bed, not to stir for 3 days and 3 terrible nights.

He could not even manage to move an inch to the left or the right. He couldn't even roll a fag or put the kettle on the stove. Eating was out of the question, just the very thought of food made him retch. All he could do was lie there and take it. A black dog stared at him, across the room. Adam threw books at it but it didn't move.

By the end of the week Adam looked terrible. His eyes had sunk into his head and had black rings around them, as big as oysters, which made him look and feel like a drug addict. Once Dougal roared up for his weekly visit, it didn't take him long to decide to pack Adam in the back seat and cart him off to the castle where he could look after him properly.

He laid Adam on the grand four-poster bed and fussed at the window for a few minutes, muttering to himself, before finally leaving with a bow of the head and closing the large oak doors quietly behind him.

Adam slowly recovered.

3 weeks later he was able to walk around the battlements alone without Dougal hovering at his elbow. His appetite returned and within a month Dougal and he had re-started the History lessons, (more as a therapy than for learning.) He was able to dress, albeit in an extravagant, silk dressing gown, and answer Dougal's questions, patiently and calmly, without bursting into tears.

'I tell you Dougal, that's what’s its like', he said one afternoon, staring into nowhere.

Dougal was confused. Adam was obviously getting bored and it wouldn't be long before he would call an end to the meeting, feigning tiredness, and Dougal still wouldn't have got to the bottom of it.

He tried one more time.

'Is this what happened when you left your world and came to ours?'.

'It's all in the book' Adam said and went upstairs for a nap.