Suspect Recollections And The Great Toby

Some call it embellishment, I just call it filing in the gaps, as best I can — and if the facts don’t always stand up, sure what about it? A good story is a good story.

I’ve been talking about this kind of stuff recently with people of a similar vintage, younger even, how ropey our memories have become. Recent recollections as unreliable as hell, while old glories — and old traumas — seemingly live on in technicolor permanence. 

Maybe that’s why us older folk talk about the weather so much. Difference is everything, the nuance of our existence. Those of us living near the sea, we separate our days and even our seasons by degrees, as seas warm and winds fall. Typically, in these drawn out winters days and nights, we find hope in the favourable gradations of a fiery evening horizon, or portent in those spilt black ink clouds threatening to unload. But a bit of a stretch in the evenings, all the same? 

If we do have time to notice, there is the regular magic of hot breaths steaming under a blinding low January sun as we scrunch along that light glittering of retreating frost on the path. Or stopping, that time, to salute a plump Robin perched on an icy fence top. Could have been the same gallant little one who bobs around our back garden, taking what meagre fare he finds.

All observations are filed away for passing conversations or reports. Maybe keep the magic bits to ourselves, for ourselves?

I’ve been tripping along memory lane in recent blog pieces, jogged by the visit Anne and I made to my old friend Joel in south west France. I started off writing about that trip, but before I knew it, I was back in that old R16 in south Holland, motoring down that Route Nationale, direction Bordeaux, that long ago summer with a bunch of buddies. The wind in our hair-brained schemes as we laughed and we swigged and we bickered as the heroic Richie drove and drove, and drove. Miles and miles and miles of highways, villages and pitstops jump cut by memory now into a vivid collage of images and impressions and, I admit, suspect recollections.

And I am still revisiting old events and writing about characters I had not thought much about for years.

Yes, some of my most treasured memories are dubious: the sweet amber resin that appeared to have perfectly preserved them in the frame, is actually the fairy dust of redressed imagination.

I was really struck by this when I was talking recently over WhatsApp phone to my pal Ciarán, who still lives in Breda, and we were yapping about the old gang. The things I had forgotten, and the gaps Ciarán filled in — and I for him — as we chatted for at least an hour.

There is an upside to all this too, though. Anne and I have been rewatching The Sopranos after heck knows how many years, and the things, events and even characters we had forgotten — and it’s been brilliant! Isn’t it mad how the mental mind works — vitally important things forgotten and seemingly trivial incidents recalled?

Like, I remembered Big Pussy’s poignant demise, but Ralphie’s brutal exit, and the tragi-comic aftermath, I had largely forgotten. Anne too. 

But we had both remembered the episode where Tony Soprano torments the would-be hardass lawyer who wouldn’t give him back his deposit on the beachfront house he was about to buy, before the proverbial hit the fan with Carmela, and they separated that time. 

The speedboat just out from the jetty with the ginormous speakers blasting the not-so-wiseguy legal eagle with Dean Martin live at 2.30 in the morning. So live and loud you would swear you could hear the ice clinking in Dino’s glass. And the lawyer guy sitting there on his veranda, master-of-the-universe whiskey on the rocks, or whatever, in hand, saying nothing, just getting up, and following his distraught wife back inside, and closing the doors forlornly on the rumbling Dino outside.

A tricksy memory has also revealed to me that things I thought little of have stayed with me, while people or events I thought hugely significant did not … or maybe that’s just a defence!

What was it Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”.

I think this is what has hit me the most, in all this reminiscing and remembering … how certain people made me feel. And I have never forgotten them. The good ones — nay, the great ones, like Joel, Ciarán, and others. And the great ones that are still in my regular life, and how knowing them and how good — how alive —spending time with them makes me feel. 

And the not so great ones? To hell with them.

But, just as the leading players stand out, I am thinking also of those wonderful character actors that creep up on you in a movie, and you can’t get them out of your mind afterwards. The good guy might get the woman (or guy), but these minor players get your heart.

I’m thinking of Toby, one of my companions in that R16, and the ensuing summer, when I really got to know him. Now there’s a guy that captured my heart.

I hadn’t thought of Toby much these past years, but as I do now, it’s with affection, warmth, even love. 

Toby, for me, was the Thursday in every week … the worst of the week is over, and the best is yet to come.

He was the guy who strolled into the Ile Teit cafe pub in Breda, or accompanied you — again — to Madame Detree’s cute bar in Cadillac village, in southwest France, and out we would go on to the terrace with our big tankards of lager, and everything was all right as we sat back and shot the breeze and kept the beers and the banter flowing.

Toby was all about the second impression because the first one was so poor. A lanky dark, hairy looking dude, with staring Charles Manson-esque eyes, he made me uneasy that first time I encountered him, in the bar of course, until he smiled that toothy Toby smile, and spoke in that unmistakeable English west country drawl of his, ‘All right, mate?’. And you just knew he was a good ‘un.

A lanky assemblage of bones in an all-denim attire of shirt, jacket and frayed at the bottom jeans, his beard was so dark and dense, he could be clean-shaven (rarely!) and have a full beard nearly the next day, or damn near it.

Long and swarthy, with those slightly startled dark, dark brown eyes — iris and pupil were barely distinguishable, which contributed to the slightly crazed look that was his resting expression — his was a jet black bush of long, long hair, that a comb would never fully penetrate, and he wouldn’t be bothered with a hairbrush. 

Oh, but he was just the sweetest, sweetest guy, with that drawl, and his own patois, always a smile and an ‘all right, man!’

He straddled every camp in our little ex-pat Breda world. Got on with everybody, it seemed, because he judged nobody, and it really took a fair bit to piss him off, or disappoint him.

It’s the voice, above all, that I carry with me … he was actually quite shy and drank excessively, I reckon, to compensate … and his tone was just so calm, reassuring and friendly. He hated bad vibes or disagreement, and his solution, to just about everything, would be an invitation to get another beer in.

I was actually taken aback the first time I saw Toby clean-shaven. He really had the most regular features, a perfectly symmetrical face and the neatest dimpled chin. It was like Cinderella dressed for the ball. 

Many Saturday afternoons, during the football season, myself and himself would meet at Richie’s gaff in Breda, with a crate of Spar supermarket beer, and we’d listen to Sport on Two, on BBC Radio Two, all the football matches, and the iconic music and all.

I was only there really for the banter and the fun. I had fallen out with big time English football, having been in thrall to it as a teenager. 

I had been to London one summer while in college, and when the footie season came around, I went to a few matches. I was in Wembley, I saw Spurs, QPR, at home, and West Ham hosting Manchester City in the draughty galvanised tip that was Upton Park then. And the football was even worse. The kind if game where you’d be more engrossed by the pigeons cooing in the rafters above you.

Watching those games on Match Of The Day on the Saturday night, they appeared way better than the unedited 90 minutes I had endured. And that kind of disillusioned me, turned me off following English football for years, until the pitches and the football actually improved. So much so, I enjoy it hugely now, if not quite as enthralled by it as when I was that mesmerised teenager, devouring Shoot and Goal football mags, and catching what football I could get on the box.

But this was good craic now in faraway Breda, listening and slagging off Richie’s Leeds or Toby and his Coventry City, and their usual dice with relegation … even though my own Manchester United were hardly going well at the time.

And Toby, that night, outside Bar Detree, when he grabbed me by the shoulders, imploring me to go on up to Marine’s apartment in Cadillac, knowing how into her I was, but had not been able to let her know …

TO BE CONTINUED