STALKER

Chapter 6 - 20th May, 2022 - Part 1 Before the Jump

If you can't imagine the dark form, the spectre, Grandfather I hope the clip helps.   Imagine a translucent human form containing smoke, occasionally that wispy smoke escapes and returns.  It is constantly moving and spiralling.

My only shift this week at the club was tonight, Wednesday. I hate working Wednesdays, it's Ladies' night but I can't afford to refuse the shifts I get. My girlfriend Sarah hates it even more than me. She is the possessive sort. I made the mistake of inviting her to drop in one Ladies' Night, thinking she'd find the male strippers a bit of a giggle. Nope, big mistake. All she did was glare at me because the customers got flirty and friendly as the evening wore on and I humoured them, after all, it is my job to be charming. They buy more drinks that way and the tips get bigger.

So I shouldn't have been surprised tonight when I arrived at her place to find her in a sour mood, prepped and ready for a fight. Unlike, my mother who puts down my being distracted and distant lately to depression, my girlfriend put 2 and 2 together and came up with...I must be cheating on her. After a barrage of questions from her and unsatisfactory answers from me, I was told we were finished and asked to leave. I honestly can't say I'm upset, just a little dazed, women can be a big bag of crazy but I will miss the sex. I'm as big a failure with relationships as I am at staying in school...poor mum will have a cow.  I'm sure she'll see this as another symptom of depression.  Still, for some reason I feel relieved, one less person I have to explain myself to and I seem to be doing that a lot at the moment.  

So here I sit, 3 am....my new journal sits on my lap, opened to a fresh page, ready for my latest entry, my last jump.  I didn't dare go back to my grandmother's house which pisses me off.  I was enjoying the freedom staying there gave me.  Instead, I had to creep into my house and was desperate not to wake Mum up.   

Back to the journal...I haven't gotten past staring blankly at the page, tossing up what the odds are that someone, at some point in the future, will read it. I'm feeling conflicted. If anyone read my previous entries they'd think I'm insane. At the very least, I overindulge my fantasy life and that doesn't bother me. However, this entry is different. I'm not only putting my secrets down on paper but the secret of another. A secret that they hid successfully all their life. Before the last cigarette finishes I light another while considering my options; write a lukewarm version, ambiguous enough to let people fill in the gaps in their own way; or lay down the facts as I see them. Another cigarette and another moral dilemma later I question whether I reveal the secret to this generation, to my father in particular. In the back of my mind, the answer to that one was a given...." letting sleeping dogs lie".

I need a cigarette.  Where to start?  

......

19th May - part 1 before the jump

The original plan was to repeat what I'd done on my first jump, which was to stay in the background and watch what happens. So my plan was simple. I was going to give myself 2 hours to get to the meeting spot, find a hiding place, and sit and wait. Even with the map I created with the bits and pieces of information I had, I pessimistically, anticipated difficulties. The main one was that on the 10th of October 1942 there was a new moon and I was going to have zero natural light to help get my barrings or spot any landmarks to get me from A to B. So as much as I didn't want to take a modern torch with me, necessity forced me to. The same goes for my mobile, which held photos of the old town. If it was a big fail and I got lost, I would come back and work on a plan B.

Well, that was what I was going to do until I had a closer look at the journals yesterday morning. One was from 1943 to 1948, mostly written in English, in what I assumed was my Grandfather's neat blockish handwriting. Surprisingly, there were sections written in another language that I eventually worked out was Dutch. I hadn't planned on fully translating those sections, but when I experimented with the first few lines with Google translator and inadvertently "opened a can of worms" my curiosity was piqued...I HAD TO KEEP GOING.

Have you ever eavesdropped on an embarrassing conversation; read someone else's private mail; secretly heard a confession..... and been caught.  The average person would feel embarrassed, guilty, even scared but that would be someone else and not me.   I've always been a bit of a nosy bastard, guilt and discretion aren't part of my personality.  

Not even the dark spectre with his churning black form couldn't deter me when I was in the middle of being obsessed about something...it took one look at him to know he was pissed.   He appeared in the doorway, looming there for a long time as I translated the handwritten entries. Then slowly started pacing around the room with his featureless face turned towards me.  He made the air in the room vibrate and wispy tendrils of smoke abruptly shot out from him and then slowly return, spiralling back within his form.  Grandfather was not pleased.

I ignored him as intimidating as he was.  There were four sections, a couple of paragraphs each. In the end, I translated every word turning the gibberish online translations into coherent English, that was a packet of cigarettes later.   The passages left me shaken and I could understand why the dark form was so restless, why he had come.  He stopped and stood beside me as I read the last few words, standing close enough that parts of his form reached out and clung to me.  I felt and absorbed his sadness.  It was a strange sensation, the brief touch made his sadness my own, intense and very personal.  In my 20 years, I'd never experienced such a strong emotion.  It was the first time I realised, although his shifting form was insubstantial, what he felt was not, he was suffering.

 After my initial surprise, I was intrigued and excited.    What I read changed my plans. Next stop 10th October 1942.  

......

20th May - still part 1

There's so much more I can say but I feel as if I'm betraying an unspoken pact between my grandfather and me.  At the same time, I'm thrilled by the experience.  I suspect he has lost trust in me as I have with him, after last night.  I don't want to think about that while I write this...I want this to be only details, facts and nothing else.  

As I wrote the entry I realised how different our worlds are.  How at almost the same age, we may as well have been decades apart in experience, common sense, and almost everything. I can see clearly the gap, the indefinable difference, between being a man and a boy.  My complaints are petty in comparison to what he had to contend with, and I'm not talking about surviving a war, I'm talking about surviving life.  The exchange of emotions I had with him gave me a tiny taste of what intense, enduring emotion is like...I have never felt anything close to that.  I have to laugh at myself, I thought I was so worldly but in reality, I'm only half-formed as a person.  I can't even muster a strong emotion at losing my lover of a year, while his longing is still as fresh and raw in the afterlife.  I'm torn between doing the decent thing and letting the past be; and watching, like a voyeur, someone else's life first hand.