Ray and Rube and Me

We watched in awe, Rube and I, as our friend Ray walked stoically toward a dusky horizon along the road from Calais to Boulogne: his destination, ultimately, like our own, the city of Paris where we hoped to make our fortune as buskers. We were an odd trio to say the least.

I, a callow and often drunken youth of merely seventeen and several years younger than the other two had somehow – or through having booked the hovercraft tickets – been designated ‘team leader’. This did not bode well for our trip, though in such capacity I advised we split up the better to secure motor perambulation to the capital.

Ray, in his twenties and with six years army experience was the obvious choice to hitch on alone, and leave me to look after Rube who only six weeks before had been a resident of Goodmayes Mental Hospital as a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who’d taken somewhat of a funny turn.

Speaking of which, Rube’s mad parents – his mother Phyliss was more deserving of psychiatric attention than her only son ever was –and his father, Monty who pretended to be deaf to save his sanity had asked Ray and I to accompany them to Southend as a day out for Rube away from his institutional confinement. In the car on the way down Rube, gibbering and generally out of it on whatever psychotropics had been administered, would only be comforted by my singing his favourite Irish tunes (he was mad keen on Planxty and The Bothy Band). This though maddened Phyliss who started shrieking her disapproval, ironically like a banshee. Monty hummed to himself and eh? and what-ed his way out of confrontation. Ray sat beside me on the back seat chuckling as I belted out Spancil Hill and The Wild Rover.

By the time we reached Southend there were more people in that car in need of strong medication than just Rube.

And now we're in France and Rube is shaking and muttering and fidgeting and fretting. He’s like a wind-up toy with faulty wiring, gulping and sweating and spouting some insane mantra that could have sounded like ‘what the fuck am I doing here?’ but it was incoherent to all but himself.  We’d spent the night before attempting to sleep under the stars in the ruins of an old Calais Castle. By the end of this second evening, he’d be praying for such luxury.

The sky had been black as the Earl of Hell’s arse crevice but now the God’s had entered battle and the whole thing was lit up by lightning flashes and thunder roared like Zeus himself breaking rumbling wind. The rains suddenly poured, lashed, pounded and thudded from the ground. Rube and I had finally got a lift from a local social worker in one of those wee Citroen cars that look as if you build them from a kit. Rube wanted to beg him to add him to his case-load but couldn’t find the words. The only French he knew and kept repeating was voulez-vous manges mon pantalon? Which may not even have grammatically correct but seemed to make the driver laugh. He dropped us off at a camp-site somewhere outside Boulogne little knowing that we didn’t even possess even the most basic equipment like even a tent.

We were in the middle of a weather cataclysm with only sleeping bags for protection.

There was, though, a camp toilet.

I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to sleep on the floor of a campsite toilet but my advice would always be – don’t! Assuming you ever achieve slumber you will wake up soaked in urine and have the smell of human defecation in your nostrils for days. Folk will have kicked you whether by accident or design and will have sworn at you in a multitude of languages. I lay there all night slurping at my bottle of duty-free Johnnie Walker and singing Irish songs to Rube with the intention of cheering him up. It seemed to have the opposite effect.

We left this toilet hell at first light. The skies were clear and birds chirped in the trees. On reaching Paris we met Ray under the Eiffel Tower as arranged. He slumbered fitfully on a bench in the Parc du Champs de Mars, a man soaked and bedraggled after hitching 200 miles through the night in a violent storm. We hadn’t the heart to tell him we’d taken the train.