Rain on Film

It starts in the thunderstorm, just before dawn; a dulcet choir of raindrops at the window. It begins casually beneath dark, swelling rainclouds with the image of a Calligraphy pen scratching blue ink onto a sheet of paper. My eyes are tightly shut, blacking out the friction, but I see words being carved out, words that will eventually tell a tale of sadness, loss and possession in a fictional town somewhere in Middle America. For a few moments the strength of recollection forces me to believe I have woken up in the past; forces me to believe that I am sixteen years old again and being dragged out of slumber by the unwelcome knocking of a cold, winter morning.

I open my eyes and the memory dies. Everything stays dark. All I know is that it is here and it is now: I am 27 years old, hurtling toward 30 at the speed of an express train, and it is raining heavily. This will not be a morning spent walking to school, an afternoon waiting to return home, an evening spent listening to music, watching TV shows and (God, do you remember how you’d always be - ) writing stories.

I lie still for a moment waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, and realise I am shivering. It is cold - the kind of December weather one would be accustomed to if one were in Britain – but not cold enough to make the body tremble and shudder, especially when said body remains hidden away beneath the duvet. No, it is not the cold that is doing this, but the memory; the vivid memory of a boy who loved language and found comfort in the page.

I suddenly feel the weight of that old Calligraphy pen between my fingers, and it brings back teenage days of scribbling words (often ones learnt from whichever book I happened to be reading that week) onto A4 sheets of paper, folded across the middle to create make-shift paperbacks.

The pen drops and I am alone again. I look at the clock to find it is nearly five-fifteen am. I summon strength and, despite the cold, find it is remarkably easy to get out of bed.

By the time I step out into the rain, Calligraphy pens and self-published novels couldn’t be further from my thoughts. Crossing the street I am once again spellbound by the realisation that I live in Los Angeles now. It’s been nearly three years since I moved here but waking up in California has a knack of making it seem like you’ve just arrived. I light a Marlboro under the umbrella and head down the street to where the car is parked.

The sky appears a little lighter when I arrive at the magazine offices. I meet a young blonde girl, maybe twenty years old, at the door. I take very little notice as I pass her but step full-on into the trail of her perfume. It strikes a match in the memory box and I find myself in Love again, lying across from (shh, now, don’t say her name) a girl with dark hair and thin red streaks, in an old single bed. Fireworks hang like constellations outside the window and the smell of gunpowder is thick, but the November breeze is too good to expel.
Let’s do this forever, she says, and the boy in bed beside her (that boy seems like a stranger even to me these days), the shirtless boy with long hair and butterflies in his belly, pulls her closer, as if the scented evening air might take her from him. Her eyes are big in the darkness, and the sweet smell of perfume is on the surface of her skin.
Aren’t you cold? He asks.
Actually… no. And she laughs, drawing closer into his arms.

I remember this – all of this – in the time it takes to step out of the rain and into the reception area. The flame goes out (as if it were the weather keeping it alive) and I realise I am standing, umbrella still raised above my head, in front of two puzzled reception workers.
“Don’t worry about me, I’m from the past,” I half-joke. They continue to look utterly befuddled and so I start toward the lift, colour rising rapidly in my cheeks.

I’m still thinking about Anna (ah, now you’ve gone and made it real) and the magical Bonfire Night of 2001 when I sit down at my desk. A couple of lines from Tom Waits’ Martha jump out from behind the curtain.
Those were days of roses,
Poetry and Prose,
And, Martha, all I had was you and all you had was me…

By noon I have edited an article about Auschwitz down to 2,000 words. It is the sixth – and final – part of a series dealing with the Second World War. I wonder whether there are two more terrifying words in the English language than Concentration Camp.

I buy coffee and a sandwich for lunch, and run into a drunk on the way out of the diner. He tries me for money but I respectfully deny him. He slurs a few mostly incoherent words, spluttered out in sickly-sweet alcoholic breath. I imagine him, like so many others, lying lifeless in a coffin, his face contorted and still. It is an image that has haunted me since my father died and it always disturbs me. At his funeral, an overcast day in the autumn of 2002, he went to the ground as drunk as he had once walked upon it. It was raining that day too, and I remember looking down at the grave for hours, as though I were a missing member from the album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I shake myself out of reverie and wonder what is wrong with me today.

I spend the rest of the afternoon at work writing throwaway verses about my own life. I guess you can’t really call it autobiography unless you’ve achieved something worth reading about. Still, it is strangely fitting on a day so consumed with nostalgia for times that may as well never have existed. I write about Anna (the Good, the Bad and the Break-up), about University days spent in a smoky bedroom listening to Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald, naturally tripping on the beauty of the songs. I write about my flirtatious relationships with various careers, and about standing in nightclubs with no idea of how to engage with other human beings. I write about torrid, hurtful affairs with women I should never have been involved with. I write about them and experience the same happiness, the same regret and the same longing I experienced the first time around. Each word takes me back and back and back until I am living those days all over again. The memories flash like moving pictures falling out of a strobe light.

I quit writing around five o’ clock, delete every word, and leave. The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. Best to leave it where it is.

I stop in at a trendy local bar that boasts a good Billie Holiday collection on the jukebox, and start drinking. For a while I mull over various starting points for my next article (a piece about the nature of Genius, of which I know very little) and listen to Billie’s voice. When I hit Drink No. 3 I am full of wonder and already too shaky to drive. I decide to leave the car where it is for the night and order up another beer.
Lighting a cigarette brings Bukowski to the forefront of my thoughts. I consider the life he lived, the literature he left, and the undeniable power of the sentences he strung together. He could have, I figure, written the simplest of postcards and still made it infinitely readable. There was just something there. Something magical in the words he chose that went from the Soul of the writer right to the Heart of the reader.

Midnight descends like a laughing clown and I stumble into the street. I have not eaten. Walking seems like a struggle.

The street is dark, lit only by a single streetlamp. I stagger onward, wondering not for the first time why it is the Heart that is associated with love and not the Liver. The liver, after all, is the organ that has bore the damages of my own love life.

“Excuse me. Are you James Greene?” Someone asks behind me.
I turn, surprisingly quickly, in the direction of the voice.
“I am.”
“The James Greene that writes for Mercy! magazine?” The man is tall, bald, cleanly shaven.
“Unfortunately so.” My head swims with drunkenness.
“You wrote an article, a month ago, condemning Holocaust conspiracy theorists.”
I nod vacantly.
“I read that article,” the man says.
“Oh, and did you - ”
I feel a sudden hot explosion of pain in my chest long before I hear the gunshot. It is an excruciating, magnified sensation not dissimilar to when your head unexpectedly collides with something hard.

I fall backwards, vision blurring. I hit the deck hard, clutching at my lungs and clutching at straws. The man stands over me for less than a second before bolting in the opposite direction. A moment later there are voices all around me. Distressed, panicked voices.

My breath is shortening and I have just enough time to think He. Shot. Me. before the world turns from sickening grey to a comforting black. I drift – not in time, not in space – but back once more to the bedroom on Bonfire Night. The thick, musty aroma of gunpowder hangs in the air (this time from the barrel of the stranger’s gun, as opposed to fireworks long since burned out). Pain slips further and further away, and I am no longer watching my own life but living it all over again. I pull the girl close to me in the same way I did six years ago and hear her whisper those wonderful words one last time:

Let’s do this forever.

It is true what they say: when you die, your life flashes before your eyes. It plays out like a dream-play in your imagination, not in an instant – never in an instant – but from dawn until dusk. It wants you to know the joy and the pain, the bliss and the burden of your years. Some people believe you go one way or the other - up or down. All I know is that in the moment when the voices fade and the present recedes, there is no Great White Light leading to Paradise and no Ferryman waiting to take your soul across the river into Hell: there is only what is done. And what is done can never be undone.

Not even in Death.

Rain on Film appears in Aesthetica Magazine Issue 21 (Feb-Mar 2008). It is available to buy at WH Smiths, Borders, and various independent establishments (including the Cornerhouse, Oxford Road, Manchester).

You can also order it online at http://www.aestheticamagazine.com