Regulars

That afternoon at the Ruskin Park Cider Festival, three sips through my fifteenth glass, time had given up. It was a first for the history of everything. Up until then, time had always been moving, passing through space whilst space remained still.

However, in that moment, in the pub, at the top of Denmark Hill, on the edge of Ruskin Park, surrounded by drooling, blaring drinkers, time had rung its own bell, it had counted itself out. Time was crouched in the dirty Camberwell road in protest, refusing to stir, until myself and the remaining universe took on our fair share of the work.

Rather than moving forwards through apathetic space, time made it clear that it intended to catch its breath, it was the turn of space to move backwards through time whilst time stood still and wallowed in its immobility and thought about its life.

So myself, the cider drinkers and the rest of the universe discussed time’s declaration amongst ourselves, we shook our heads and rattled our glasses, we bickered and we mused and finally, emboldened by the cider and the quavering promise of an unexpected adventure, we obliged.

In its shallowest parts, moving through time felt like falling backwards through a spider web of loose cotton wool, its strands stretching and snapping and tickling us as we passed.

We were almost playful, each of us forgetting our anxieties for a little while, purring with delight whenever the warm, fleecy strands of time were thick enough to cradle us like a hammock, shrieking with laughter whenever they gave way unexpectedly beneath us.

In its deepest parts, moving through time felt like sneaking along the storm-cloud-black bed of a vast and roiling sea. We crept backwards in an eyes-closed, lips-tight, hand trembling parade, the universe creeping ahead like a frightened child backing out of a dark, unfamiliar room.

That is how we marched backwards, depths to shallows, shallows to depths, one leading to the other, sometimes suddenly, sometimes gradually, always at the same, drudging pace. Whenever I looked at the others I recognised in their faces the same look I had seen in the faces of commuters all across the world, a look of people who the perennial seeds of boredom have been planted, a look of those being gradually, ground down to nothing. We were working in toiling, unpaid employment, traipsing through time, on board an endless commute to nowhere.

Then, as though a comet had come smoking and splintering through the roof of the pub, a realisation struck us all at once. That it was under our control and no-one else’s how quickly we decided to pass through time, we could speed up and slow down as we pleased.

Stretch the instant of a dropped, glass shattering to a three hour, ponderous, disarming motion picture. Hasten the whole evening’s proceedings to two quick claps of our hands, wake up the following morning with a lurching hangover and a feeling as though we had fallen off of a hundred-storey building and survived.

We revelled in this beautiful, drunken, new found freedom. Even in the gloomy depths where panic thrummed and unseen hands stroked our faces as we passed, we skipped and played and bellowed with joy, chasing each other backwards through churning clouds of time that were as thick and as black as house fire smoke. The entire universe partaking in a backwards, cosmological game of tag.

At one point I peered up through time and saw what looked like the contrails of airplanes. They were sporadic at first and far away, but after a little while more and more appeared, closer and closer, looking like torpedoes streaking straight down through time. They were the old men regulars, so laden with tradition that they sunk swifter than flooded submarines.

I stood and watched them soaring past all around me, swarms and swarms and swarms of them, an old man meteor shower, each of them sitting still on their barstools and levering their tankards to their lips and plummeting out of sight, down towards the black, abyssal bedrock of time.