Five Minutes
"Do you have five minutes?"
"No. Not really. What do you want?"
These were unspoken thoughts. People need time and attention but there is a limited amount of time, so you have to be judicious.
I wondered why this stranger was accosting me. He looked a bit like Harry Death, a momentary peripheral figure from my childhood, red-bearded and garbed in black clothes from another era. Rumours swirled about Harry. He slept in a coffin surrounded by skulls and candles with dripping wax. The man at the centre of all this was an enigma, neither confirming nor denying, never speaking. Here they differed because this man before me wanted to talk.
"Do you have five minutes?"
The best thing was not to answer.
"Why?"
"If you give me five minutes, I'll tell you my life."
There was a lot that could be done with time. It could be spent as a currency. It could be presented as a gift, or wasted as a valuable commodity. It could swirl down the drain like water, owned by everyone and by no one. But the idea of a life recounted in five minutes was interesting. This was the kind of memoir that appealed to me.
"Okay then. Tell me."
He did not start talking right away. A hint of doubt crossed his face as if he was surprised that I had agreed to listen, or whether he would be able to deliver on his offer. He cleared his throat and rapidly began to speak in bursts of clipped sentences.
"Born into the post-war. Ration books just gone, meagre fare, gaps in the buildings, hand-me-down clothes. I'm wearing the plastic helmet which I've cut into the shape of a German one. I'm holding my Sten gun which must serve as a Schmeiser. I've got my sister and her friend up against the wall outside the house and I demand that they show me their papers. They are older and humour me. At night the lamppost on the corner bathes the ground in amber light. It is very quiet. Up at the end of the street is the alley where someone was killed once and thrown over a wall.
My best friend lives halfway up the road. In the summer we get to each other's houses by climbing along the walls in people's back gardens. No one seems to mind. Sometimes we creep up behind the milk float and try to steal bottles of milk. The milkman always sees us in the mirror and slams on the brakes. We get bruised shins and no milk.
My father opens his white shirt and manages to clear almost everything from the table into it. Maybe he's had too much to drink but his appreciation of the absurd, so often buried in remote parts of his character has stayed with me forever. Who is this man? He brings me postcards of Magritte paintings when he comes home from work. I am the youngest.
I have been sent to my room because I hit my brother. Now I can come out, except I won't. I've managed to lock the door. All manner of pleading and bribery won't move me. If I open the door I can go and change the gears on the Land Rover which belongs to someone who is visiting. I will not. There is a ladder. They are coming up over the roof.
All kinds of interesting things can be found in the cupboard under the stairs which smells of floor polish. There are things from the war, ominous and pristine.
Then it's off to school one day. Dropped off on the gravel driveway of an old manor house with leaded windows. I've got a uniform with my name sewn into it and a box my father made with my number on it—sixty-four. There's some sniffling and home-sickness among the seven year-olds. We have toughening up practice every morning in the dormitory when we wake up. An older boy lines us new boys up. He walks down the line, randomly hitting people in the face. You must not cry.
Mrs. Gibbs teaches the young boys math. She invites us into her garden full of lovely flowers with chickens wandering around and peacocks. She gives us tea and scones. She shows us the wild pond teeming with insect life. She reads us stories. Mr. Gibbs doesn't seem to exist.
But when we get a little older they take Mrs. Gibbs away from us. Now it is to be boxing, Latin and football. No more women. The only woman we'll have dealings with now, is the matron, and only when we are ill or injured.
It’s a pleasure to come down with something contagious and be confined to the sick-room. We don't have to do any lessons, just lie in bed and read all day. The matron brings food and she is nice to us. The windows of the sickroom open over the place where the teachers and headmaster park their cars. At night we stand on the sill and piss out of the window. The sound of our urine hitting the metal roofs of the cars below fills us with laughter.
Until we are eleven we wear shorts. We get chapped skin and chilblains in the winter from walking through the snow. Our thighs get red and sore and hurt a lot under hot water. In the summer we swim naked. When we climb out of the pool we run around whipping each other with our towels, the smell of cut grass is in the air. We like to throw marbles into this grass. They damage the mowers which manicure the cricket pitch. There is always an enquiry to find the culprit. If no one owns up there will be group punishment. Even the innocent will suffer. It makes me think of the Germans. But no one confesses and no one snitches.
All the food we are given must be eaten, down to the last morsel. It’s not important if we like it or not. This rule is enforced. Every boy has to do clean-up duty in the dining room after meals. That means we have to clean up the teachers' plates too. They eat with us but sit at a table on a dais at one end of the room. Their food is much better than ours, so one of the perks of clean-up duty is eating the scraps the masters have left on their plates. In the afternoons we get a slice of bread with yellow butter and a small bottle of milk. I think the government provides the milk.
Everyday in the morning we must take a shit. Afterwards we must put a tick in the box next to our names. Failure to do so will cause us to be publicly questioned and hauled off to the doctor.
Wednesday afternoons are free of compulsory sport and we can play in the woods with minimal supervision. A master is on patrol but this is our world and we know it much better than he does. We hide when he approaches. After he has passed us we can resume exploring and tree-climbing. We dam the stream, walking in it with Wellington boots. Sometimes it sloshes over the tops and makes for wet feet. We build secret defensive structures and form gangs, fighting over territory.
The woods are a long sliver of wilderness flanking the playing field. They are bordered on the other side by the stream. There are three distinct zones. At one end there is a huge and dense bamboo thicket, with thick stems towering up twenty feet. This is an area through which we make a labyrinth of tunnels. The other end is a pine forest, mysterious and brown, dead needles on the ground. A strangely still and silent place with an air of foreboding. The middle zone is lush with leaves. There is a fallen tree which rests in the fork of another. The climb is a little dangerous but is rewarded with a crow's nest of foliage which we augment with branches to make a perfect vantage point. This fallen tree is worth fighting for. Occasionally the younger boys are hunted and beaten with bamboos when caught.
Once every couple of months is the hair harvest. This is when the barber comes to visit. He sets himself up in the bathroom and no one escapes his chair. Short back and sides for all. We are frightened of the barber.
T'was snippig and the greasy clip
did hum and mumble for the tress.
All flimsy were the locks that nip
and barber cause the prey distress.
That's what Julian Roberts said about it.
On a limited number of Sundays we are allowed to be visited by our parents and taken out for the day. Sometimes my father comes, and sometimes my mother. Never together. My mother usually arrives late in her Lancia. I am waiting alone at the door as all the other boys have left. Eventually she arrives and we drive off somewhere. I'm sure my parents were wondering what they could do with their estranged son for six hours after the drive down from London. We might go for a walk, or visit an old site, the day culminating in a damp hotel dining room having a cream tea. When she drops me back at school I have to fight off the surge of rekindled sadness and resume my customary indifference to homesickness.
On other occasions I am invited to go out with a friend and his parents. We cram into their old Dormobile with the dogs, and drive off to the New Forest for a picnic. This forest is not new anymore. It was once—almost nine hundred years ago when William Rufus claimed it for his personal hunting ground, displacing any peasants who happened to be there. And it was there that his body was found after a so-called hunting accident and hauled out on a cart.
1066 to 1087, 1087 to 1100, 1100 to 1135, 1135 to 1154, 1154 to 1189, 1189 to 1199, 1199 to 1216. Get the dates and the monarchs wrong and Captain Hill, of the gamy leg, will slap your buttocks and let his hand rest there a while, as you stand next to him trying to amuse yourself and the class by pulling out the thin strands of his hair that are brushed across his almost bald pate. He chain smokes and throws the butts out of the upper window behind him without looking. We like to close that window and laugh as the cigarette ends fall harmlessly to the sill and he never seems to notice.
The New Forest is one of two magical forests that I know. The other is the Forest of Dean. I have wandered in both. But it is in The New Forest that I discover a predilection for deliberately getting lost and then finding my way back. Call it problem solving."
"Hold on."
"What?"
He looked at me quizzically as he came down from the detached intensity of his monologue.
"This is all very interesting but you've been talking for more than five minutes."
"I have? But I haven't finished yet. I don't want to leave you with the wrong impression."
"You said you could tell me your life in five minutes. That's what we agreed on."
"Don't you have a little more time?"
"No. I'm sorry but I have to go. Thanks for your story."
He looked worried.
"Listen. One minute. If I paid you six hundred pounds, would you kill me? You could make it look like an accident."
"No thanks. I can't help you there."
© Tom Newton 2019
This story is from the collection of short stories by Tom Newton—Seven Cries of Delight, Recital Publishing 2019
"Do you have five minutes?"
"No. Not really. What do you want?"
These were unspoken thoughts. People need time and attention but there is a limited amount of time, so you have to be judicious.
I wondered why this stranger was accosting me. He looked a bit like Harry Death, a momentary peripheral figure from my childhood, red-bearded and garbed in black clothes from another era. Rumours swirled about Harry. He slept in a coffin surrounded by skulls and candles with dripping wax. The man at the centre of all this was an enigma, neither confirming nor denying, never speaking. Here they differed because this man before me wanted to talk.
"Do you have five minutes?"
The best thing was not to answer.
"Why?"
"If you give me five minutes, I'll tell you my life."
There was a lot that could be done with time. It could be spent as a currency. It could be presented as a gift, or wasted as a valuable commodity. It could swirl down the drain like water, owned by everyone and by no one. But the idea of a life recounted in five minutes was interesting. This was the kind of memoir that appealed to me.
"Okay then. Tell me."
He did not start talking right away. A hint of doubt crossed his face as if he was surprised that I had agreed to listen, or whether he would be able to deliver on his offer. He cleared his throat and rapidly began to speak in bursts of clipped sentences.
"Born into the post-war. Ration books just gone, meagre fare, gaps in the buildings, hand-me-down clothes. I'm wearing the plastic helmet which I've cut into the shape of a German one. I'm holding my Sten gun which must serve as a Schmeiser. I've got my sister and her friend up against the wall outside the house and I demand that they show me their papers. They are older and humour me. At night the lamppost on the corner bathes the ground in amber light. It is very quiet. Up at the end of the street is the alley where someone was killed once and thrown over a wall.
My best friend lives halfway up the road. In the summer we get to each other's houses by climbing along the walls in people's back gardens. No one seems to mind. Sometimes we creep up behind the milk float and try to steal bottles of milk. The milkman always sees us in the mirror and slams on the brakes. We get bruised shins and no milk.
My father opens his white shirt and manages to clear almost everything from the table into it. Maybe he's had too much to drink but his appreciation of the absurd, so often buried in remote parts of his character has stayed with me forever. Who is this man? He brings me postcards of Magritte paintings when he comes home from work. I am the youngest.
I have been sent to my room because I hit my brother. Now I can come out, except I won't. I've managed to lock the door. All manner of pleading and bribery won't move me. If I open the door I can go and change the gears on the Land Rover which belongs to someone who is visiting. I will not. There is a ladder. They are coming up over the roof.
All kinds of interesting things can be found in the cupboard under the stairs which smells of floor polish. There are things from the war, ominous and pristine.
Then it's off to school one day. Dropped off on the gravel driveway of an old manor house with leaded windows. I've got a uniform with my name sewn into it and a box my father made with my number on it—sixty-four. There's some sniffling and home-sickness among the seven year-olds. We have toughening up practice every morning in the dormitory when we wake up. An older boy lines us new boys up. He walks down the line, randomly hitting people in the face. You must not cry.
Mrs. Gibbs teaches the young boys math. She invites us into her garden full of lovely flowers with chickens wandering around and peacocks. She gives us tea and scones. She shows us the wild pond teeming with insect life. She reads us stories. Mr. Gibbs doesn't seem to exist.
But when we get a little older they take Mrs. Gibbs away from us. Now it is to be boxing, Latin and football. No more women. The only woman we'll have dealings with now, is the matron, and only when we are ill or injured.
It’s a pleasure to come down with something contagious and be confined to the sick-room. We don't have to do any lessons, just lie in bed and read all day. The matron brings food and she is nice to us. The windows of the sickroom open over the place where the teachers and headmaster park their cars. At night we stand on the sill and piss out of the window. The sound of our urine hitting the metal roofs of the cars below fills us with laughter.
Until we are eleven we wear shorts. We get chapped skin and chilblains in the winter from walking through the snow. Our thighs get red and sore and hurt a lot under hot water. In the summer we swim naked. When we climb out of the pool we run around whipping each other with our towels, the smell of cut grass is in the air. We like to throw marbles into this grass. They damage the mowers which manicure the cricket pitch. There is always an enquiry to find the culprit. If no one owns up there will be group punishment. Even the innocent will suffer. It makes me think of the Germans. But no one confesses and no one snitches.
All the food we are given must be eaten, down to the last morsel. It’s not important if we like it or not. This rule is enforced. Every boy has to do clean-up duty in the dining room after meals. That means we have to clean up the teachers' plates too. They eat with us but sit at a table on a dais at one end of the room. Their food is much better than ours, so one of the perks of clean-up duty is eating the scraps the masters have left on their plates. In the afternoons we get a slice of bread with yellow butter and a small bottle of milk. I think the government provides the milk.
Everyday in the morning we must take a shit. Afterwards we must put a tick in the box next to our names. Failure to do so will cause us to be publicly questioned and hauled off to the doctor.
Wednesday afternoons are free of compulsory sport and we can play in the woods with minimal supervision. A master is on patrol but this is our world and we know it much better than he does. We hide when he approaches. After he has passed us we can resume exploring and tree-climbing. We dam the stream, walking in it with Wellington boots. Sometimes it sloshes over the tops and makes for wet feet. We build secret defensive structures and form gangs, fighting over territory.
The woods are a long sliver of wilderness flanking the playing field. They are bordered on the other side by the stream. There are three distinct zones. At one end there is a huge and dense bamboo thicket, with thick stems towering up twenty feet. This is an area through which we make a labyrinth of tunnels. The other end is a pine forest, mysterious and brown, dead needles on the ground. A strangely still and silent place with an air of foreboding. The middle zone is lush with leaves. There is a fallen tree which rests in the fork of another. The climb is a little dangerous but is rewarded with a crow's nest of foliage which we augment with branches to make a perfect vantage point. This fallen tree is worth fighting for. Occasionally the younger boys are hunted and beaten with bamboos when caught.
Once every couple of months is the hair harvest. This is when the barber comes to visit. He sets himself up in the bathroom and no one escapes his chair. Short back and sides for all. We are frightened of the barber.
T'was snippig and the greasy clip
did hum and mumble for the tress.
All flimsy were the locks that nip
and barber cause the prey distress.
That's what Julian Roberts said about it.
On a limited number of Sundays we are allowed to be visited by our parents and taken out for the day. Sometimes my father comes, and sometimes my mother. Never together. My mother usually arrives late in her Lancia. I am waiting alone at the door as all the other boys have left. Eventually she arrives and we drive off somewhere. I'm sure my parents were wondering what they could do with their estranged son for six hours after the drive down from London. We might go for a walk, or visit an old site, the day culminating in a damp hotel dining room having a cream tea. When she drops me back at school I have to fight off the surge of rekindled sadness and resume my customary indifference to homesickness.
On other occasions I am invited to go out with a friend and his parents. We cram into their old Dormobile with the dogs, and drive off to the New Forest for a picnic. This forest is not new anymore. It was once—almost nine hundred years ago when William Rufus claimed it for his personal hunting ground, displacing any peasants who happened to be there. And it was there that his body was found after a so-called hunting accident and hauled out on a cart.
1066 to 1087, 1087 to 1100, 1100 to 1135, 1135 to 1154, 1154 to 1189, 1189 to 1199, 1199 to 1216. Get the dates and the monarchs wrong and Captain Hill, of the gamy leg, will slap your buttocks and let his hand rest there a while, as you stand next to him trying to amuse yourself and the class by pulling out the thin strands of his hair that are brushed across his almost bald pate. He chain smokes and throws the butts out of the upper window behind him without looking. We like to close that window and laugh as the cigarette ends fall harmlessly to the sill and he never seems to notice.
The New Forest is one of two magical forests that I know. The other is the Forest of Dean. I have wandered in both. But it is in The New Forest that I discover a predilection for deliberately getting lost and then finding my way back. Call it problem solving."
"Hold on."
"What?"
He looked at me quizzically as he came down from the detached intensity of his monologue.
"This is all very interesting but you've been talking for more than five minutes."
"I have? But I haven't finished yet. I don't want to leave you with the wrong impression."
"You said you could tell me your life in five minutes. That's what we agreed on."
"Don't you have a little more time?"
"No. I'm sorry but I have to go. Thanks for your story."
He looked worried.
"Listen. One minute. If I paid you six hundred pounds, would you kill me? You could make it look like an accident."
"No thanks. I can't help you there."
© Tom Newton 2019
This story is from the collection of short stories by Tom Newton—Seven Cries of Delight, Recital Publishing 2019
Narrated by Tom Newton.
Narrated by Tom Newton.
POST RECITAL
TALK
BR: Tom, welcome to The Strange Recital!
TN: Thank you, but… I’m always here. I mean we do this together, right?
BR: Okay, but you’re still welcome. Let’s talk about this story, Five Minutes….. (pause)
TN: Okay… are you going to ask me a question?
BR: Oh, right. Well… first let me say that it’s included in your collection, Seven Cries of Delight, available from Recital Publishing. Er…five minutes, seven cries… what’s the message in these numbers? The ratio of 7 to 5 is 1.4. That’s not half of pi. And it’s not the golden ratio, which is 1.618. Now, the ratio of seven fifths to the golden ratio is 1.15 something, but that doesn’t seem to mean anything either…
TN: You’re wasting your time, I think. There’s no hidden meaning there.
BR: But I thought there was hidden meaning everywhere.
TN: Maybe there’s non-meaning everywhere. In fact, my view… (phone rings) Agh… phone. It always interrupts you. I mean why do people think you’ve got to answer right away? I mean we’re in the middle of something.
BR: I don’t know. I hate that.
TN: Think I should answer it?
BR: Ugh…
TN: Okay. I’ll answer it. Hello?
TN2: (on phone) Hey, who gave you permission to use my life story on your podcast?
TN: I beg your pardon. Five Minutes is my story.
TN2: You may be the guy narrating the story, but the story inside the story is mine.
BR: Wait a minute… this is the guy who wanted five minutes of your time?
TN: That’s impossible. I made the whole thing up.
TN2: No you didn’t. You stole my memories.
TN: But you told them to me!
BR: Which is it—you made it up or he told it to you?
TN2: I told you about my childhood and now you’re trying to make it all public. You’re trying to get rich at my expense.
TN: Get rich? Are you crazy? You’re lying right now, trying to claim my story as yours. It’s fiction!
TN2: It’s truth!
TN: Fiction!
TN2: Truth!
BR: Come on, come on, enough! This is going nowhere. It’s not a fruitful argument. Maybe we can come to some sort of agreement.
TN: First he’ll have to admit that he’s lying.
TN2: No way. I just want a share of the proceeds. Say 50 percent of the profits generated by book sales and podcasts.
TN: Profits? Hmm, well, 50 percent of profits may be acceptable.
BR: But wait…
TN2: Okay then, I’m glad we agree. ‘Bye now. (hangs up)
TN: Asshole... See, he can’t take anything because we don’t make profits. We just recoup costs, if that.
BR: But I’m still unclear about…
TN: He was just lying about the whole thing.
BR: Okay, good.
TN: I should have killed him when he asked me to.
BR: Tom, welcome to The Strange Recital!
TN: Thank you, but… I’m always here. I mean we do this together, right?
BR: Okay, but you’re still welcome. Let’s talk about this story, Five Minutes….. (pause)
TN: Okay… are you going to ask me a question?
BR: Oh, right. Well… first let me say that it’s included in your collection, Seven Cries of Delight, available from Recital Publishing. Er…five minutes, seven cries… what’s the message in these numbers? The ratio of 7 to 5 is 1.4. That’s not half of pi. And it’s not the golden ratio, which is 1.618. Now, the ratio of seven fifths to the golden ratio is 1.15 something, but that doesn’t seem to mean anything either…
TN: You’re wasting your time, I think. There’s no hidden meaning there.
BR: But I thought there was hidden meaning everywhere.
TN: Maybe there’s non-meaning everywhere. In fact, my view… (phone rings) Agh… phone. It always interrupts you. I mean why do people think you’ve got to answer right away? I mean we’re in the middle of something.
BR: I don’t know. I hate that.
TN: Think I should answer it?
BR: Ugh…
TN: Okay. I’ll answer it. Hello?
TN2: (on phone) Hey, who gave you permission to use my life story on your podcast?
TN: I beg your pardon. Five Minutes is my story.
TN2: You may be the guy narrating the story, but the story inside the story is mine.
BR: Wait a minute… this is the guy who wanted five minutes of your time?
TN: That’s impossible. I made the whole thing up.
TN2: No you didn’t. You stole my memories.
TN: But you told them to me!
BR: Which is it—you made it up or he told it to you?
TN2: I told you about my childhood and now you’re trying to make it all public. You’re trying to get rich at my expense.
TN: Get rich? Are you crazy? You’re lying right now, trying to claim my story as yours. It’s fiction!
TN2: It’s truth!
TN: Fiction!
TN2: Truth!
BR: Come on, come on, enough! This is going nowhere. It’s not a fruitful argument. Maybe we can come to some sort of agreement.
TN: First he’ll have to admit that he’s lying.
TN2: No way. I just want a share of the proceeds. Say 50 percent of the profits generated by book sales and podcasts.
TN: Profits? Hmm, well, 50 percent of profits may be acceptable.
BR: But wait…
TN2: Okay then, I’m glad we agree. ‘Bye now. (hangs up)
TN: Asshole... See, he can’t take anything because we don’t make profits. We just recoup costs, if that.
BR: But I’m still unclear about…
TN: He was just lying about the whole thing.
BR: Okay, good.
TN: I should have killed him when he asked me to.
