Arthur Christmas

Well, that was subtle...

No sooner do I have one of my (increasingly rare, actually) atheistic rants, than the universe, with its typical perversity, sends Arthur crashing into my life.

Thanks for that, universe. Remind me to kick you in the crotch next time I see you...

Things were going well this morning - I popped to Argos when they opened at 8.30, to return some unopened archive boxes that we hadn't used in the move, then headed straight to the doctors. The doc who started me on this whole experiment by offering me elective bariatric surgery sorted me out with three whole months worth of Xenical, which should tide me over nicely till I get set up with a practice in Merthyr. I went and collected them from Linda, our friend at the pharmacist, (and of course, the other pharmacy-folk too). Had a bit of a chat there, and  then started to make my way home.

There was Christmas music seeping out of a shop doorway. "Mary's Boy Child," by Boney M.
"...And man will live forever more, because of Christmas Day," they sang, in optimistic defiance of biology.
That's when Arthur introduced himself.
He did it with a shout. A friendly shout, as these things go, but nevertheless, a shout. Normally of course, when strangers start shouting at you in the street, you quicken your pace and develop serenely selective deafness. But there was something about the interposition of the Christmas carol and Arthur's shouting that stopped me in my tracks. I turned round.

Fucking Boney M!

Arthur was drunk. Well, either Arthur was drunk, or the world was sailing on a very rough sea and the rest of us were just too wrapped up in ourselves to notice. He swayed and staggered madly, drunkenly, in imminent danger of crashing to the ground with every step, waving a can of Skol Super lager around as he came. (Translation for the Americans. British lager is just like beer, only vastly more potent than anything of which you can get tall, frosty skeins in the States. Ours is warmer, and frequently of more mysterious origin, and absolutely nowhere near as much fun to drink, but the key point is - stronger. Super lager is basically a ball pein hammer to the skull, with a couple of shots of heroin into the eyeballs as a chaser. Arthur was very, very drunk...).

Arthur crashed up and into me. He was tall, and dressed in a leather jacket and despair. His face was bristly but not unpleasant.
"I'm drunk now," he explained unnecessarily, "but I'm not gonna be drunk tomorrow. Is there somewhere that can help me with this?"
'This' wasn't the problem of sobriety. This was his teeth. Or rather, his non-teeth - he leered into my face and pulled his lips up and open, revealing that most of his upper front teeth were missing, the remainder were black, and he had one broken shard left of one of his very front teeth. I held my breath, trying to ignore the lager-and-god-knows-what-else stench till he put his teeth away again. He grabbed my hand earnestly with his spittle-covered fingers.
"Err...yes," I said. "There's a doctors just down that road there," I pointed. "They have a dentist, I think..."
"They say I don't live here," said Arthur, who spoke with an eastern European accent - Russian, I'd guess, given his sentence-constructions - "they'd tell me to fuck off..."
I thought he was probably right, but I was just keen to do my bit in this unlooked-for conversation, and get the fuck on with my day. Shit to do, Arthur buddy - I'm outta this town tomorrow...
Arthur, a little unexpectedly, began to cry.
"Christmas Eve!" he wailed. "24th December, last year!"
This was a bit cryptic for my tastes.
"Can I tell you what happened?!" he pleaded.
I thought about it - I had a guy coming to take back my cable box at 12, it was probably 10...something, and a seriously drunk eastern European guy was clasping desperately at my hand, asking to tell me his life story. I sighed.
"Sure," I agreed, which I think it's fairly obvious was code for "Whatever the fuck you need to do, dude, just don't kill me. I have one day left in this city, dammit..."

"Middle of night," he said, setting the scene. "We were in a squat. There is knock on door. I go to answer it. Man there....Bastard. He puts his foot like this-"

Arthur stamped heavily and sideways, showing the classic 'foot-in-the-door' technique.

"...So door cannot be closing, yes?"
"Right," I agreed, nodding that I understood.
"He come in, call others, and they follow. They beat me up, man...." Again, he stamped, this time more graphically, acting out a thorough kicking.
"Then...last thing I know, he get a brick, and..." He mimed the overarm motion for me. The man had slammed him in the face with a brick.
"So-" And again he showed me his non-teeth.
"I am on floor, switched off," he said, using a phrase that worked. "This is nothing!" he roared suddenly at the world, daring it to do more to him, but his defiance lasted only a second. Arthur slid down onto the pavement, still clutching my hand. And the tears came harder.
"I am on the floor, switched off," he said again. "I can do nothing!"
The memory of impotence caused him pain, it was obvious.
"My girlfriend!" he explained.
"I can do nothing! My girlfriend, she's four months pregnant..." The tears became a wail, and I reached down to rub his back, like you would a kid with a scraped knee.
"They raped my girlfriend!!" he managed through tears and snot and slurring. "The baby...she lost the baby...and I can do nothing!"
I continued trying to do 'comforting contact' with this obviously deeply scarred man, but there's something about not believing in a higher power that leaves your range of responses to the world's atrocities somewhat limited...or maybe I'm just crap with people. It was territory we were about to come on to in a big way.
"I know there is a Jesus," said Arthur. "There is a Jesus, and these bastards, he will make them pay for this...forever...Jesus loves everybody, no matter what you've done, if you're a murderer or what. Jesus loves you..." He seemed a little confused between Jesus the Shepherd and Jesus the Terminator, but to be fair, he's not alone in that, and has more reason than most.
"Can I pray?" he asked. "It's really important to me," he affirmed. He still had my hand, so it wasn't like I could leave, and of course I'd never stop anyone doing something to make them feel better. So there we were, me standing, bending, him kneeling at my feet, kissing my hand, mumbling in probably-Russian and occasionally beating his breast, looking for all the world like a king blessing a medieval knight, or more appropriately, a Pop blessing a pilgrim.

Ohhhh crap, I thought to myself. This is becoming A Thing for the day...

When Arthur had finished praying, he asked me my name and I told him it was Tony.
"Artur," said Arthur, holding tightly to my hand. "You a good person, Tony..."
Yeah, right...I thought. It's weird, but because so many people think you can only be a moral person if you believe in a deity, there's an unspoken determination among atheists to out-moral them wherever possible. This wasn't exactly what I was thinking, but it did go through my head that if I just walked away now, I'd be pretty much letting the side down.
"Is there somewhere that can help me with this?" he asked, doing the leery teeth-showing thing again. We'd come round full circle.
"There is, yes," I said....and it was like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books from the eighties. Do you a) tell him again where to get help? b) take him to get help? c) Pull away, knowing he won't remember you ten minutes from now. I sighed.
"C'mon Arthur," I said, taking hold of his arm. "Let's see if we can get you some help..."

I knew of course, rationally, that he needed to dry out before anyone would be able to help him, and that even then, it would be at an Emergency Room where they'd be able to give him something to stabilise him. But I remembered, a couple of doctor's visits ago, an old lady had been brought in by someone who'd just encountered her on the streets, and they'd got her an ambulance to take her to hospital. So I walked Arthur back to my doctors. We had only gone a couple of hundred yards when he wailed.
"Can I tell you what happened?!"
"You've told me Arthur...but sure," I said, aware by now that it made no difference. His mind was tormenting him with the images of that Christmas Eve from Hell, round and round and round. He had to speak the words to relieve the pressure in his brain. Plus of course, Super lager=ball pein hammer - he had little in the way of short-term memory left, everything was focused on the long-term trauma.

Eventually, I got him into the surgery, and sat him down. I explained to the receptionist what the situation was, and she seemed keen to help me. She spoke to a doctor - not to my doctor, but to an officious little prick, frankly, who kept on about Arthur not being a patient of theirs, and needing an Emergency Room.
"I know that," I told him. "Can I get him a cab from here?" (I hadn't brought my phone out with me...I was only gonna be gone about half an hour...)
"Yes, you can do that," said the Prick-Doctor, "but really, we can't..."
"He's gone," said the Receptionist.
"What?" I said. "Who'd gone?"
"Oh god, he's wandering into traffic," she observed.
I looked round. Arthur had left the surgery and was indeed playing chicken with the traffic.
"Fuck," I said. It seemed to cover everything.
And again, the Choose Your Own Adventure options flashed up in my head. He'd left. He'd gone out of my life as suddenly as he'd come into it. That was an end to it...right?
"Fuck," I said again, for emphasis, and took off, running up the road to catch him. He'd just opened another can of super lager. This was not gonna be good.
"What's your name?" he asked again. I told him it was Tony.
"Tony Tony Tony," he said. "Always Tony." He sounded like he disapproved, but I wasn't having any of that.
"I've been with you for a little while now Arthur," I said. "Not changing my name for you or anyone."
He laughed, briefly.
"You wanna drink?" he asked.
"Nono, I'm fine," I said, taking his arm again. I was planning to lead him up to the main road, where we might spot a passing cab, the driver of which I'd have to speak to very nicely to get him to take us to the local hospital. Then I spotted a better bet. A local minicab office.
"C'mon Arthur," I said, beginning to get stuck in my own little conversational time-warp.
"Where we goin'?"
"Going to hospital, get you some help for those teeth, eh?"
"Nnno, I not goin' there," he declared. "'m'drunk..."
"Yes you are," I agreed.
"Can I tell you what happened?!" he wailed, and the cycle started again. This time when the events of last Christmas had run to their conclusion, he said he was going "up there" - gesturing to our local church. Seemed to make sense - he said they had bingo, and food and stuff. Forgive me, it's been a while and this is a major cosmopolitan city - I figured they could have! I also figured that, having picked a destination-point, Arthur at least knew roughly where he was.

Can anyone spot the flaw in this logic?

As we stagger-walked past the church, I was confused.
"Where we going, Arthur? Thought you wanted to go in here?"
"Nooo, wanna see my girlfriend," he explained. This gave us problems. I wasn't even sure, from his story, that the girlfriend was still alive!

"Do you believe in Jesus?" he asked suddenly, seeming suspicious of my sticking with him.
Oh crap! People who remember my conversation with the "you ain't from round here" guy in the States will recall that I never lie about this, no matter what the provocation. It's about as close to martyrdom as you can get being an atheist.
"No...not personally," I told him.
"Ohhh man, but there has  to be a Jesus!" he exclaimed. "Look what happened to me. I'm a good person, man. It makes no sense if there's no Jesus! Otherwise, you tell me why it happened?!"
I didn't want to hurt him by pointing out that it happened because some people are just evil fucks, and other people aren't. I'd never rob him of that belief.
"Wanna pray!" he declared again. But this time, he didn't drop to his need, just clasped my hand and swung his head in close to mine, dribbling a little beery saliva and rather more snot onto my shirt.
"Can't remember the words in English," he said, almost craftily. "My Heavenly Father..."
He waited, expecting me to finish it for him. I wouldn't have, even if I knew the prayer he particularly meant. I mean, the Lord's Prayer is "Our Father..." - but that only occurs to me now, writing it back.
"My Heavenly Father..." he prompted again. I shook my head.
"I don't know the words either, Arthur...C'mon, let's keep walking..."
"Oh man...you pray for me....Please..." He looked at me intensely. "Pray for me..." Then the fire went out in him, and he staggered forward again.
We ended up walking past my flat, with me increasingly desperately trying to flag down passing cabs. There was nothing up the way we were going that seemed to offer any hope of a refuge for Arthur.


When suddenly, refuge cycled up behind us. Two community support officers on frankly dorky -looking bikes cycled up to talk to us.
I told them about Arthur, as much as I knew. Asked them whether we could get him to hospital.
"Yeah," said one of them. "We will. You can leave him with us."
I didn't really want to. I wanted to be sure he got help.
"Go on sir," said the officer. "We'll look after him."

I told him these guys would make sure he got his teeth seen to - which, on reflection, was probably about as much of a lie as it would have been if I'd told him the Lord lived in my shoebox - and took my leave of Arthur. And oddly, I haven't felt able to mention him to anyone till I wrote him down.

I want to make it clear - I didn't tell you all this to make myself look big and Samaritan-like. Quite the reverse in fact. If anything, it was an object lesson in how not having recourse to an easy leveller of playing-fields makes you unable to answer questions like "why did this happen to me?" with any answer that brings comfort. Doesn't make you wrong, of course, just comfort-impoverished, which I'm not sure isn't actually worse than being wrong.

The reason I haven't mentioned him to anyone till now is rather more pat. He asked me to pray for him.

I can't do that, I don't have faith in anything that would receive those prayers and intercede for Arthur's shattered life and consciousness. What I have faith in is human beings. Of course, I'm not blind - human beings were responsible for the acts that brought this man to the point where he staggered into my life today. We have such phenomenal potential, just by being alive, to be the best of people, or the worst. If you can't pray to a god to bring someone peace, all you can do is share their story with other people, to show the consequences of actions, to show a warning of what we can be, and to make a plea for our positive potential. All I can do is pray to you guys. Spare Arthur, in his brain-sized cell in his private Hell, a thought this Christmas. I know we're all feeling the bitchslap of economic implosion, but if you can do something - any damn thing - to bring light into someone's life - do it. I'm gonna do something myself, though I have no idea what. Maybe the person I can help will  come staggering into my life just like Arthur did (I have no illusions I helped him at all). Or maybe I'll have to work a bit harder next time...