Here's the thing, this story
this anecdote stuck
If you ask me when exactly, why I
couldn't say
all I recall is that it happened on a
train with a bloke I got pissed with
while on a long journey
but it stuck sunk into me like it was
mine
In the way that a dream does or a moment
in a movie
When I was a kid I saw this film called
the Nun's Story
and in it Audrey Hepburn's lured into
this nutter's cell by a woman who believes
she's the archangel Gabriel and beats
herself with whips
and for the next year I couldn't sleep.
Every night the curtain billowed and in
crept a bleeding angel come to tear me
to bits
I was 10 at the time an artless little
bugger
but the image of a mad shrew
self-harming through some religious
delusion
freaked the fuck out of me
I've lost the thread here
this story if i tell it
you may end up like the 10 year old me
can you handle that?
sometime in the mid 90s I was traveling
back from Dundee after a lecture
things were happening in the world and i
was hungry for a view
in Rwanda people were massacring each
other
but in South Africa the white government
was abdicating power
that was something to celebrate. My Dad
drummed into me from an early age
there's a time to talk
and there's a time to reach for the
baseball bat
it seemed the blend of both had some
effect on apartheid
over the years, I uh, I had a tendency to
opt for the non-dialogue approach when
confronted with a racist
it often landed me in trouble
the train pulled out of Dundee I settled
down
opposite me was a man rough looking in
his forties with skin that had seen too
much sun
and these very pale eyes like in those
spaghetti westerns of the sixties
an hour into the journey a fly
demented by captivity began to swirl
around my head
finally it landed in front of me on the
carriage table
I raised my paper to end the episode but
my wrist
was gripped by a giant hand owned by the
man opposite
who said simply it's just a tiny soul
trying to find a path to god
my instinct was a offence but the look in
his eye was
childlike pleading
we began to talk in the way that you do
on a train when you're bored but there's
a
smidge of something compelling about the
person opposite
he had an accent I couldn't work it out
at first but
clocked that he was a big man when he
stood up to go off the toilet for a
piss
big in the way that they make them in
countries where they eat a lot of meat
so he sat back down and I said, I think I
know where you're from
he looked shifty it was the day that his
country had become a democracy
and soon all of these thick necked sadists
would be crying crocodile tears
in front of forgiving clergymen and
bleeding heart liberals
and getting off Scott free
I guessed he was a Boer
six hours and twenty pints later we
connected in a way that you can on a
journey like that
when you tell perfect strangers things
you wouldn't tell your oldest friend
while
dying in a ditch
and he told me this story
he had been part of the South african
Special Forces in the Angolan war
a conscript an 18 year old farm boy
whose first taste of footwear was army
boots
six months into his service he'd seen a
lot of death
he said towards the end he was bushfucked
in lay terms
suffering war trauma while in action on
a recce
his unit caught what they called a gook
a black terrorist trying to
infiltrate his country this gook
had a wound so deep you could see
the bones of his neck
I remember the Boer's voice the words he
used
the detachment with which he told the
story
he was fatally wounded he begged me to
kill him
hour after hour his retching and
writhing were driving me insane
I didn't know how to help him or if I'd
be court martialed if I did
help him end it that is
Seven hours passed by, his cries were
like the whimpering of a dying
fox. Finally
I slid my knife into the wound to sever
his spine
It seemed the quickest solution
I had to saw the thing it took me
five minutes
when his head came off there was this
hissing sound like his soul was leaving
his body
I thought i saw something fly into the
night sky
it seemed like a kind of a moth
I'll never know what it was but since
that day
I wake every night to the sound of tiny
wings above my head
I don't know why he told me the whole
thing
and over the years I've tried to
understand he must have carried that
with him for a long time
and never told a soul till that day on
the train
20 years later in another country
to a stranger to me
to a man who in every other circumstance
would have reached for that baseball bat
and smashed him to bits
Then I saw the fly on the carriage table
I'm not a religious man
but it hadn't moved through our entire
conversation
was it about forgiveness you ask? No
too simple too easy
if he had wanted to unburden himself he
could have found a priest
because the way he told that story was
matter of fact
like we were watching a vivisection
like it was something tattooed in his
mind's eye he knew was never going away
his cross I like to think the whole
thing was
simpler this massive inward looking
traumatised man
who happened to be on a train at the
same time as this young Brit he took a
liking to
then told a story he had never been able
to tell
as he stood up to go, I said
your country was the most
institutionally vicious on earth since
the Nazis
with racism enshrined in his
constitution and you fought for it's fucking
army
he nodded that great head
I don't know why but I asked what he did
for a living
he said he never worked a day in his
life wound up on some beach in the Sinai
desert
six months after his military service
not knowing how he got there
then spent the next 25 years in therapy
paid for by his granny
his eyes fell on the name badge in my
suit
I'd forgotten to take it off after the
lecture
he murmured john gabriel
as if trying to brand it into his memory
at that moment dead on cue
the fly burst back into life
we watched it was off
and then he left
he must have tracked me down because a
year later
I got a letter
after we met something happened
although I spent two decades talking to
psychologists
I can't find the language to describe it
all I can say is
the fluttering of wings stopped that day
I now work for an
international organisation helping
soldiers with
PTSD most of our works in Africa
yours sincerely Marius
what do I take from this i thought about
it
never told anyone until today just you
and all I can say is
two people met on a train had a chat
and something came of it what that was
I still have no idea but it happened
like now now you know
[Music]