… Who Did Not Die

Being a non-ghost story for Christmas.

“Well now, that rather depends on what you mean by ‘different’, don’it?”

TC’s leathery face creases into a smile, and his gravelly Cockney rumble splits in a chuckle. “I mean I think I was always gonna be different one way or another, know’t I mean?”.

He slaps his famously “gammy” leg, propped up along the bench in TC’s usual corner of The Dublin Castle.

“Had this for as long as I can bloody remember for a start,” he smiles ruefully.

I spy the conversational “opening” and go for it.

“Just how far back CAN you remember…?”

TC’s forehead wrinkles in contemplation. It’s impossible to discern his age: so weathered are his features that he could be anything from 40 to 80 years old. Or more.

Camden Town has its share of myths and legends, and TC fits in alongside them as easily as he does among the aging punks he so closely resembles. To the casual observer he might in fact be one of those 60-somethings for whom it was NOT a phase, who can be found most weekends hanging around the Lock with whatever remains of their hair glued into a towering mohawk, charging tourists £1 for a photo (to "Help A Punk Get Drunk", as their handwritten cardboard signs read). But talk to any of the locals who've come to know TC (and he's a personable enough chap, as I'm discovering) and they'll tell you there's something else entirely going on with him, although theories as to exactly who (and indeed what) he is vary from the fanciful to the truly outlandish.

"Earliest memory I can put an actual date on was the Queen's coronation," says TC. "I was about three at the time; me dad dragged me and me brothers and sisters, all six of us, out to watch the parade go by. We had no idea what time they'd be passing, we ended up standing in the sun on a hot June day with no shade for the whole afternoon. I were bright red and puking me guts up by the time we got home. The old man caught hell from me mum for that one, I can tell you," he grins.

We'd arranged to meet in The Dublin Castle at 3pm. It was quite dark outside already. TC had arrived exactly on time, limping through the door with the help of his silver-topped black cane, exchanging cheery greetings with the staff and smiling at the sight of the pint of Guinness I had waiting for him. "Someone's been well briefed," he said as he raised the glass. "Cheers". I placed my phone on the table between us, set the recording app going ("Is that thing gonna be able to hear me from there?") and eased into the conversation.

The silver top of his cane is shaped like a skull. The motif recurs through TC's dress and presentation; a silver skull ring on one of his gnarled fingers, a faded skull tattoo - one of dozens - on his upper arm, revealed now as he slides his battered leather jacket off. He spies me noticing this and says with a conspiratorial wink: "So he knows where to find me, 'case he ever changes his mind…"

"How much do you remember about your father?" I ask. TC's eyes mist over.

"Everyone should know someone like my old man," he begins. "Kindest, most patient man you would ever meet. He could see the good in people even when they couldn't see it themselves, know't I mean?"

"Examples?", I pursue, intrigued.

"Well, when I was little my dad's boss was this right flinty old bastard. Worked him like a bloody pit pony and begrudged him every penny of the pittance he paid him. I don't even know what they were doing in that office but it involved a lot of money, very little of which ever left the building. We had it hard at home, even by the standards of the day."

I check to see that the phone is getting all of this.

"I used to listen to my mum pleading with my dad… 'Get away from him Robert,' she'd say, 'he's bleeding you white, he'll be the death of you'… But my dad… not only did he not judge the old geezer, it was like he COULDN'T judge him. Like it weren't his place. He used to tell us the old sod weren't evil, he was just lonely, he was only mean and rude 'cos he'd been hurt or damaged. That if we treated him with the sort of kindness that he couldn't show… one day he'd make peace with himself and come good. My mum thought this was the biggest load of tosh she'd ever heard, but bugger me if my dad weren't proved right eventually."

"What happened?" I ask, my eyes widening.

"To hear my mum tell it, it were as if the old geezer went to bed one man and woke up someone else altogether. Something come over him; something finally got through to him, and ever after that he couldn't do enough for us, especially me. Sent me to all these doctors up the West End to see if they could fix this," he slaps his bum leg again, "but there was nothing to be done. Still, I didn't mind; I was used to being the skinny little sickly one in the litter. But then I got PROPER ill…"

"When was this?"

"I remember it was coming up on Christmas, like it is now… We'd moved out of the Cottages into a bigger gaff up towards Chalk Farm when the Fever came to town."

"The Fever?" I enquire. TC shrugs.

"We'd never heard the word "virus" in them days… It was just The Fever, and when it got you, you went to bed and either you got better or you didn't. And being I was still the skinny sickly one it got me right away. I don't remember much about the next few days, lying there fading in and out, pissing sweat and coughing. I remember me mum wailing, me dad holding me hand, and the old geezer."

"He was there?"

"There was no shifting him. At me bedside noon and night. I remember hearing him talking to someone, but I was fairly certain there weren't no-one else in the room. He was saying things like 'I've done it all, what more can I do,' and 'You promised he would live…' Anyway, the next morning the fever broke and I was right as rain. The doctor called it a miracle, he said 'It's as if a decision had been made in Heaven that the child would not die'…"

"Heaven…?" I ask. TC smiles.

"Or somewhere."

"So after that, what…? You never got ill again?"

"Oh dear me no," says TC ruefully. "I can get ill, I can get hurt, and I have been, more times than I care to think… I just always get better, that's all. All except this." He slaps his bad leg again. "This, it would appear, was what you would now call a pre-existing condition…" He chuckles again.

"So when did you realise that this was… permanent?"

TC's face changes. He is still reminiscing, but rather less fondly.

"That would have been when I was with Daisy. Sweet Daisy."

He swallows. His eyes dampen. I wait for him to go on.

"Not long after my illness, the old geezer made dad a partner in the company, then he died and left it all to him. So suddenly, we was what they used to call "comfortable". Mum and Dad retired to the country and we kids were able to pursue our ambitions. Martha had her hat shop in Knightsbridge, Peter wrote books - I read a couple, they were alright - but I could never settle on anything. The gammy leg ruled out the army, and most of your fetching and carrying type jobs, but I picked up the odd bit of work here and there. I was mending shoes in a shop on the Kings Road one Christmas time when Daisy come in to have the heels fixed on her favourite boots."

He sighs deeply.

"You've never seen anything like her. So alive, so bright, so full of joy. I couldn't take me eyes off of her. I pretended to take twice as long fixing those boots as I actually spent working on them just so she'd keep coming back into the shop. Eventually she noticed me staring and she invited ME to tea at the Gaiety on Christmas Eve."

"Pretty bold," I observe.

"EXTREMELY bold for a lady in them days," agrees TC. "I was lost, I tell you. Hopelessly lost. And by some miracle she seemed to think I weren't so bad neither. We were happy as larks for twenty years, but then we started to notice…"

"Notice what?"

"That she were getting older and I wasn't," says TC, his eyes low. "I buried her looking exactly the same as I had on our wedding day thirty years before. My boy, Timothy junior, looked like he was my older brother by then. Soon after that, he looked like my dad. Soon after that, he stopped wanting to have anything to do with me. I realised I was in for the long haul and that by and large, it was gonna be on my lonesome." He takes a deep breath.

"So where did you go?"

TC smiles, the hard part having been disclosed. "Everywhere," he replies. "Started hitching rides on merchant vessels, saw the world, then when I'd seen all of it I went back to the beginning and saw it all again. There's always something new to see, something different going on, something changing. But there was always something calling me back here…"

"Back to London?"

"Back to Camden Town. No place like it. There's hardly a brick left standing of the place I grew up in but somehow it's still home."

I ask the question I've been building up to. "Do you ever wish… Do you ever wish it would end? Ever feel like you've had enough?"

TC seems to think it over for a second, then: "Nah, not really. Like I said, there's always new things to see. Even if I didn't change - and I've changed a fair old bit over the years - the world is always changing around me. Here - this is an interesting little factlet for you…" He leans in, and goes on in a confidential loud whisper…

"Did you know that the Royal Society - the fellowship of the finest scientific minds in the Empire - debated closing down in 1861 because they thought they'd made all the important discoveries and there was nothing left to find out?"

"Seriously?"

TC shrugs. "Well obviously I didn't hear about it at the time but I've read up on it since and yeah; they thought that since they'd decided everything was made of atoms there was nothing else to discover and they basically knew everything. In 1861…"

He picks my phone up off the table; I'm relieved to notice it keeps recording.

"Now imagine trying to explain what THIS is to the smartest person in the world in 1861. You wouldn't even know where to start…"

"Sometimes it feels like the world just staggers from one crisis to another," he says, brandishing his near-empty pint glass, "and sometimes it feels like one big fairground, but the one thing it NEVER is is boring. Besides," he says with a childish grin, "it's Christmas. Things tend to happen to me around Christmas, in case you hadn't noticed."

He chugs the last of his Guinness and checks what looks a lot like a First World War era military wristwatch; just one more story there isn't time to hear on this occasion. "Right, I gotta go. There's this band on the Ballroom this evening I've been meaning to go see since the 70s."

"The 1970s?"

TC wags an admonishing finger. "Cheeky," he says. Then he throws his battered leather jacket back on, swings his leg down and hobbles towards the door.

As he reaches the threshold, the barman calls out "Merry Christmas, TC." TC pauses in the doorway, looks around the room and smiles.

"Gawd bless yer," he says. "Everyone".