Tomorrow's Ghosts Read Online Free
Author: Charles Christian
is Saint John of the
Book of Revelations
.”
“What was the official explanation?”
“The wreckage definitely belonged to a yacht, a yacht called
The Four Apostles
that was registered on the Greek island of Patmos. It had been in British waters throughout the summer, taking part in various races and regattas around the coast. Its crew were last seen drinking in the yacht club at Lowestoft. They were discussing sailing the boat down to the marina at Ramsgate, where they were due to meet up again with her owner, who had been away on business. There was one crew member among them who spoke mainly Greek or, more to the point, very little English and who fitted our shipwrecked mariner’s description. But that’s as far as it went.
“The guy I found on the shore that evening had no identification papers nor any memory of either who he was or where he’d come from. He was the sole survivor. No other bodies were ever found. Unhelpfully, there were no records of anyone fitting his description being reported missing in Greece. In the absence of anything better to call him, somebody in one of the seamen’s missions where he was staying put the name John Patmos on his paperwork. And it stuck.
“The next thing I heard, he was learning English and living in a beach house. Actually that description is a little over-generous. It’s more of a wooden hut on a run-down caravan park near Pakefield just south of Lowestoft.” I pause. “But then came the fateful day he saw his first Punch and Judy show.”
“What!” exclaims Ursula.
“You heard me right, Punch and bloody Judy! What happened is he saw his first ever Punch and Judy show about eight years ago, on the pleasure beach at Great Yarmouth. It was one of your interfering do-gooder predecessors who decided it might be nice to introduce this poor shipwrecked foreigner to a little bit of traditional English popular culture. Ice cream, fish and chips, candy-floss and a puppet of a little man in a red coat who beats his wife and baby to death before being attacked by clowns, ghosts, a hangman, the Devil and a crocodile. The experience blew John’s mind, which had quite clearly been in tatters since the day he was first washed ashore, if not before. It clearly struck an unfortunate chord in his psyche that set off all his worst apocalyptic fantasies.”
“Such as?” asks Ursula.
“Such as? Well, why don’t we go ask him ourselves.”
3. Punch and Brandy
Forty minutes later we pull into the caravan park near Pakefield in Ursula’s Beetle.
“I see what you mean about beach house being a generous description,” says Ursula, as we park outside John’s black tar-clad hut.
“This is nothing,” I reply, “just wait until you see inside.”
She flashes me a worried look. Justified as it happens, as the interior of the building is painted throughout in narrow, red-and-white vertical stripes, echoing the candy-stripe canvas exterior of a Punch and Judy booth. I hear Ursula take a sharp intake of breath for surrounding us, everywhere we turn (and I do mean everywhere) on table tops, propped up on book shelves or else huddled together for support on chairs, are a legion of Punch and Judy show puppets, their staring, painted eyes seemingly following us around the room.
John greets me as if I’m one of his oldest friends and, I must confess, over the years we have met from time-to-time to share a bottle of
Metaxa
7-Star
Greek brandy and drink it late into the night discussing everything and nothing. He chastely greets Ursula as ‘Little Sister,’ his Greek Orthodox upbringing unable to conceive of women having any role to play within the church except as nuns.
I fear John’s fascination with Punch and Judy has slipped over the boundary between healthy interest to unhealthy obsession as there are many more puppets here since the last time I visited. Old ones, dating back to the late nineteenth century, so badly battered hardly any of their original paint remains,
Book of Revelations
.”
“What was the official explanation?”
“The wreckage definitely belonged to a yacht, a yacht called
The Four Apostles
that was registered on the Greek island of Patmos. It had been in British waters throughout the summer, taking part in various races and regattas around the coast. Its crew were last seen drinking in the yacht club at Lowestoft. They were discussing sailing the boat down to the marina at Ramsgate, where they were due to meet up again with her owner, who had been away on business. There was one crew member among them who spoke mainly Greek or, more to the point, very little English and who fitted our shipwrecked mariner’s description. But that’s as far as it went.
“The guy I found on the shore that evening had no identification papers nor any memory of either who he was or where he’d come from. He was the sole survivor. No other bodies were ever found. Unhelpfully, there were no records of anyone fitting his description being reported missing in Greece. In the absence of anything better to call him, somebody in one of the seamen’s missions where he was staying put the name John Patmos on his paperwork. And it stuck.
“The next thing I heard, he was learning English and living in a beach house. Actually that description is a little over-generous. It’s more of a wooden hut on a run-down caravan park near Pakefield just south of Lowestoft.” I pause. “But then came the fateful day he saw his first Punch and Judy show.”
“What!” exclaims Ursula.
“You heard me right, Punch and bloody Judy! What happened is he saw his first ever Punch and Judy show about eight years ago, on the pleasure beach at Great Yarmouth. It was one of your interfering do-gooder predecessors who decided it might be nice to introduce this poor shipwrecked foreigner to a little bit of traditional English popular culture. Ice cream, fish and chips, candy-floss and a puppet of a little man in a red coat who beats his wife and baby to death before being attacked by clowns, ghosts, a hangman, the Devil and a crocodile. The experience blew John’s mind, which had quite clearly been in tatters since the day he was first washed ashore, if not before. It clearly struck an unfortunate chord in his psyche that set off all his worst apocalyptic fantasies.”
“Such as?” asks Ursula.
“Such as? Well, why don’t we go ask him ourselves.”
3. Punch and Brandy
Forty minutes later we pull into the caravan park near Pakefield in Ursula’s Beetle.
“I see what you mean about beach house being a generous description,” says Ursula, as we park outside John’s black tar-clad hut.
“This is nothing,” I reply, “just wait until you see inside.”
She flashes me a worried look. Justified as it happens, as the interior of the building is painted throughout in narrow, red-and-white vertical stripes, echoing the candy-stripe canvas exterior of a Punch and Judy booth. I hear Ursula take a sharp intake of breath for surrounding us, everywhere we turn (and I do mean everywhere) on table tops, propped up on book shelves or else huddled together for support on chairs, are a legion of Punch and Judy show puppets, their staring, painted eyes seemingly following us around the room.
John greets me as if I’m one of his oldest friends and, I must confess, over the years we have met from time-to-time to share a bottle of
Metaxa
7-Star
Greek brandy and drink it late into the night discussing everything and nothing. He chastely greets Ursula as ‘Little Sister,’ his Greek Orthodox upbringing unable to conceive of women having any role to play within the church except as nuns.
I fear John’s fascination with Punch and Judy has slipped over the boundary between healthy interest to unhealthy obsession as there are many more puppets here since the last time I visited. Old ones, dating back to the late nineteenth century, so badly battered hardly any of their original paint remains,
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