A Wild Keys Chase – Tim Warren
May 6th, 2009 | Published in Volume VI: Desperately Seeking, Volume VIII: Lost and Found
I have lost my car keys. Ethel, however, contends that I am car-less and wonders what the worry is. I tell her that she is wrong. She says, ‘Yes, but not about that.’ Alas, I can’t argue. But if I had my car keys, then I’d show her.
~
Ethel is looking at me doubtfully now. So again I try to explain. ‘What else can we do, though?’ I say. ‘Unless we go right back to the beginning we don’t have a hope. I mean, do you remember where I had them last? I don’t.’
Ethel sighs. As ever, she does it with great eloquence. ‘You’re so good at that,’ I tell her.
‘A sigh is just breathing out,’ she says, ‘breathing out with honesty.’
‘Ah,’ I say, ‘sorrow on the out-breath, horror on the in? Such is life.’
Ethel nods. She is very agreeable like that. And very cheerful. It’s one of the things that first attracted me. That and something about her ears. When I spoke they seemed to hear something worth saying – I’ve still yet to encounter that affliction in anyone else.
Today, though, I think she thinks we’re wasting our time, or at the very least that we’re wasting hers. But already we’ve reached a reception desk; a Ward Sister is beginning to speak; it’s too late now.
‘Welcome to St Winifred’s Maternity Hospital,’ she says. ‘How can I help?’
‘Well,’ I say, ‘this was where I was born,’ and I begin to explain my dilemma. Ethel sighs, and tries not to think about MRSA.
~
I am the Ward Sister. You should try it. Seriously. Spend as long as I do around as many babies as I do, and I guarantee you’ll feel the same: it’s the most effective form of contraception known to man.
I wish it weren’t…
‘Oh. A maternity ward,’ they say. ‘Uh-huh.’ And when we part they promise to call – the polite ones. But I don’t need to tell you what happens next, do I?
Maybe if I changed my line of work? It’s not as if the average maternity ward’s brimming over with eligible men…
~
Regrettably, it has become clear that I must re-evaluate our strategy. With two of us on the case, as well as by missing out the nights – after all I was merely asleep at those times – I had assumed that a complete retracing of my life would not be impracticable – or at the very least half as impracticable. Alas, this has not proved to be: our need to sleep each night, Ethel and myself, will more than cancel out the time-saving effects of skipping the nights of my past. Indeed, had I not been so lucky as to be born at midday we would have struggled yesterday even to retrace day one.
Also, Ethel lost a contact lens, which slowed us down a little.
Had she not been born at St Winifred’s too, goodness knows how complicated things could have got…
~
I am Ethel. People have said that there are such things as soulmates – my husband among them. I’m not so sure. I think it’s more a case of finding a man with unusually compatible flaws and hoping for the best. Or at least that was how my mother explained it; she was a very practical woman, my mother. But even she couldn’t explain why love always seems to lead to this, to the eternal question, ‘Have you seen my car keys?’ – but it just does, doesn’t it? Slowly, imperceptibly, inexorably, it just does.
Even dating only non-drivers failed to short circuit the process. I just sigh and get on with it. That’s what my mother would have done. It’s what she did do. That and put a handy little dish by the front door.
~
I am Ethel’s soulmate. She’s wrong about the key thing. I wish I could tell her that, I wish I could prove it to her, I wish I could grow old with her, our love growing with every passing day, good bad or indifferent. And our children too – good, bad or indifferent (or whatever we might choose to call them). More than anything, though, I just wish I could meet her.
~
‘Now, about those car keys,’ I say to Ethel today.
‘Oh yes,’ she says, brightly, ‘the non-existent ones for the non-existent car that you have never had?’
‘Yes, of course!’ I say. ‘The car! I’d almost forgotten that that was missing too. And all the more reason to find the car keys, then,’ I tell her, ‘or I’ll never be sure it’s mine.’
I can tell from her sigh that she agrees. And then I tell her my new plan. I tell Ethel about the division of labour, and Ethel tells me that I have misunderstood the concept slightly, but to never mind, I haven’t done an Economics degree like her, although really that’s taught at GCSE level and it’s probably not taught all that well nowadays and besides, never mind because it’s all on Wikipedia, but she can see what I mean, so please go on – can I remember where I was? After standing in silence for a few minutes we sit down – ignorance isn’t always comfortable.
Then I remember my point: ‘We shall hire people to do the retracing, I tell her – lots and lots of people! That solves everything!’
Then we sit in silence.
‘I’m late for work,’ she says, strokes my hair tenderly, and goes to find her coat.
‘I wish I could drive you,’ I say, as she kisses me goodbye.
~
I am the car for which this man searches; had he had a car I would have been it. I am an old Yugo, one of those ugly old cars from Eastern Europe – Eastern Bloc blockiness lumped onto wheels – now rusting beneath the sea off Beachy Head.
Sometimes searching is not worth the effort: the skeleton that sits behind my wheel knew that all too well – before he was a skeleton. Or perhaps it is: search or don’t search, either way you become a skeleton. So why hurry?
Fill your life with seeking, I say. Fill it with anything, just fill it – fill it, before it all turns to rust. Rust and bone… Rust and bone and seaweed…
Or perhaps I’m being overly specific?
~
I am the missing keys. It’s dark down here. Why didn’t the State, in its wisdom, think to put the ignition near a window? WHY!
I thought I saw a fish once…
Oh God, it’s dark down here. Dark and lonely… So dark and bony…
~
I am the writer. I am interjecting to be postmodern. Except, is it really all that postmodern, if Laurence Sterne was doing it all those years ago?
No.
Then on with the story.
~
Outsourcing is a marvellous thing. A miracle of the modern age.
Ethel, though, says it’s cluttering up the place, she could hardly get in the door this evening for car key retrieval agents. Worse: her entire day has been impeded.
‘They’re everywhere, all over the town, all over everywhere you’ve ever been,’ she says, elbowing her way to the coat rack. ‘I couldn’t even get served in our favourite café at lunchtime. And now this! How many have you hired? I don’t want to criticise, but I think you may have gone overboard.’
Of course! She is right. I call over the head retrieval agent and demand a frogman. Having been in no real danger I had quite forgotten the boating incident, but no detail escapes my Ethel. Ethel’s memory constantly astounds me. And that’s where they shall be found too, I shouldn’t wonder, right at the bottom of the lake, where no light and no memory but her own could ever have penetrated, none but that of my dear sweet Ethel. She shall be my saviour. She is my saviour! All shall be well, thanks to her. Thanks to Ethel. The keys shall be mine again.
And then…
And then it is merely a case of finding the car.
~
I am the frogman. I have seen things that should never be seen – beneath the water; beneath the waves. Corpses; corpses and body parts: bloated, shrivelled, peeling – props from a film of a drowning, or so I tell myself. But what scares me most, what turns my stomach, is the loneliness. There was no-one to save them, these people, these body parts beneath the waves. No-one to save them from another; no-one to save them from themselves.
I don’t want to be lonely.
Not like that.
I don’t ever want to be lonely like that…
~
I am the frogman’s air tank. I keep him company. I try to keep him alive. But I don’t know to whom he turns on land – on land, when he is just a man. When he has seen what he has seen.
~
‘Ethel,’ I say, ‘you understand, don’t you? Ethel?’
But Ethel is asleep.
Looking lost and a little sleepy, a retrieval agent steps out of the wardrobe, another disengages himself blearily from beneath the bed, and a last pokes his head from beneath the quilt, his beard tickling my feet – murmuring a sleepy apology, he alights and follows the others quietly out of the door. Apparently, I have woken them.
‘No wonder I couldn’t sleep, ‘I mutter, and turn over. I turn over to better look at Ethel sleeping. To better hold her – she no longer smells of feet.
Ethel sighs. Even in her sleep, she knows the right thing to say.
~
I am the quilt. But I shall keep my silence. That’s what we quilts do, we keep quiet, we comfort. Just imagine if we didn’t. No, blame the pillows – those glorified cushions, with their incessant talk and chatter – it’s them that keep you awake, night after night after night after wretched thought-wrecked night. They whisper worries in your ears, the pillows. But already I’ve said too much.
~
It’s the morning, the frogman is here. He has found nothing, he says, at least nothing he wants to tell me about. And yet he looks like he wants to talk.’ Why don’t you sit down,’ I say, ‘have some breakfast with us? Take the load off?’ ‘No, no,’ he says, ‘I couldn’t. I really couldn’t, but thank you.’ As I thank him, Ethel gets up too.
‘I’m not a princess,’ she says, placing a gentle kiss on his cheek, ‘but I guess it can’t hurt.’
‘No, I guess not,’ he smiles, ‘and maybe you just made my day.’ Ethel smiles too.
He’s wrong, as it turns out, but only by a second or two. As he leaves, one of the other retrieval agents falls into step: ‘I wonder, maybe we could talk,’ we hear her say. She says it with the kind of gentle concern that only Ethel has ever directed towards me. It is good to have an Ethel in your life.
‘I have gone overboard, haven’t I,’ I say to Ethel, omitting the question mark. ‘I have.’
‘Yes,’ she says.
~
Hi. It’s Ethel again. I might not believe in soulmates, but don’t get me wrong, I do believe in him, I do believe in love – no, really I do.
Oh, I admit, some kind of disarray of the senses does seem much the more likely – and compromised neurology’s not off the hook yet either – but what can you do?
I’m told it was the Romans that invented Cupid – they invented a lot of things, the Romans. I don’t know why they couldn’t have given him glasses.
Or some clothes. No wonder his aim’s a bit off.
~
As Ethel returns from work, the final car key retrieval agent is leaving. Another is unaccounted for – still stuck in my teenage years, apparently – a common problem I’m told, especially amongst us men – but to all intents and purposes that is it now.
‘We’re done,’ I tell Ethel. ‘No more looking. I was wrong. I’ve come to my senses.’
‘Really?’ she says. ‘Is it all over? We can stop?’
‘Yes,’ I tell her, ‘I don’t know why I didn’t see it sooner. I was blinded somehow, but now I see it.’
‘That there were no car keys, no car, that you have never even driven in your life?’
‘No,’ I tell her. ‘That it is only when we stop searching that we shall find – I mean, it’s always in the last place you look, isn’t it? So stop looking.’
With a sigh Ethel slumps into a chair, head in her hands. She hasn’t even removed her coat; it must have been a hard day.
‘Would you like to talk about it,’ I say, ‘or shall I fetch the aspirin? Ethel? Are you okay, Ethel? Shall I fetch the aspirin?’
I fetch the aspirin.
And lest it all be ruined I try my hardest not to look for anything else on the way…
~
I am the missing car key retrieval agent. No-one said life would be like this. I didn’t go to uni to become a car key retrieval agent! I mean, God, what kind of stupid job is that? I wanted to be in publishing. I wanted to find great writers. I wanted job satisfaction, like my parents had. I wanted a home, like my parents. I wanted a partner, like…
Well, maybe that part didn’t go so well for them either, but that’s not the point. It still wasn’t meant to be like this.
My friends say I should try a call centre. ‘You’ll love it,’ they say, ‘India’s so amazing! We like totally found ourselves!’
Well, I say ‘friends’…
~
It’s me. I am the one who is searching. The one you’ve been following. And there is a point to it, I promise there is.
I know there is.
There has to be.
Or I’ve wasted all our time.
~
Tomorrow, he will find an old car in the drive, its keys in a little dish by the door. Then he will ask me, ‘Ethel, where’s my wallet? Have you seen it? Have you seen my wallet, Ethel? My licence seems to have gone missing, I’m sure that’s where I put it. Ethel?
‘Ethel?’
But I won’t have gone anywhere. I’ll still be here. Sighing.
I love him, you see.
He knows what my sighs mean, even when I don’t; what secret sorrows they express, what it is I have lost. He has an answer for each one. Oh, many of them wrong; many of them wrong, of course. But he tries. He tries, and he understands the important ones.
We are all missing something; each one of us; even more so when we think we have found it: the second we find something, we need something else to find. That’s just the way we are. It’s what drives us forward. Why do you think the rich are so unhappy, so unfulfilled? They have everything: everything but something to search for.
I don’t think I’ll ever have that problem.
~
Well, there it is! Amazing! It’s odd that the papers aren’t in my name… but, well, there it is. And there’s a little dish by the front door now; I don’t remember that. And I seem to have forgotten how to drive too…
Maybe I won’t renew my licence then, I’ll just get some refresher lessons, perhaps take the test again. It probably wouldn’t hurt. And it’ll be nice to have a new challenge.
That’s what Ethel says.
In fact, she seems really happy today. She even says she might learn to drive as well. Then we can go on road trips, she says, and she can share the driving. ‘That would be great,’ I tell her, ‘but I already know how to drive; for me it won’t be learning, I just need reminding.’ She smiles. I think she knows something I don’t, but that’s fine, that’s how it should be. If she knew only what I know, she wouldn’t be Ethel – and then where would we be?
~
I suppose you’ll have wondered, wondered if there’s a point to this? To life, I mean. To everything. I know you will have done – it’s what you people do; you seek me all the time; you never bloody stop. (Sorry, I should have introduced myself, it’s me. I am it. The point. And you’re exhausting me). But that’s fine, that’s what I’m here to do: to narrowly evade you all, as long as you live, or thereabouts. Because what then? What would you do if you actually found me? If you finally grasped exactly what it’s all about? Wouldn’t you be stopped in your tracks? In fact, isn’t that all that would be left to you – one long straight track, straight to the end? If you really knew.
And where’s the fun in that?
Well, I suppose it’s not too dissimilar to Scalextric…
But still, we all need a little mystery, right?
~
Oh, dear me! Goodness! Am I late? What must you have had to put up with, you poor things? I’m the ending, you see; I should have been along ages ago. But, well…
Actually, I won’t explain the lateness. We’ll just assume you’re the type that likes your endings tall dark and ambiguous, shall we? Or at the very least perhaps we can agree to ‘better late than never’?
No?
I thought as much. Didn’t wash with Salman Rushdie either, poor man. Shame about that business with the Ayatollah…