Island of Saints A Story of the One Principle That Frees the

Human Spirit

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are
products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are

not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales,

organisations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 Andrew Portsmouth

All rights reserved.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of
trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, shared or otherwise
circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form other than

which it is published and without a similar condition including this

condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

.
 Published by Andrew Portsmouth
First Edition, 2015; First Printing, 2015.
 ❊

I dragged open my eyes, the world at ninety degrees, the evidence of a big

night scratching at my mind. The sun squeezed between the blinds.

It was a Saturday afternoon.

I’d dreamt about the old days—dreamt about a girl I used to love—
but woke up sore and alone. I put on my glasses.
Often, on days like this, I’d wander in search of the murmur of

unknown people, a café—Canterbury was full of them. But I felt too weak
for the questions—‘milk or cream?’, ‘large or small?’, ‘cash or card?’.
Instead I made a cup of instant coffee with undissolved bits floating on top.

The phone was ringing. ‘Ollie Tonbridge,’ I croaked.

‘Hi, it’s Max. Feel like a run?’
Maximilian Nadherny-Borutin—an old school friend—was also

big on his diet and vitamins. I whined an excuse and returned the phone to

its cradle.
Max’s direct ancestors had been Czech counts and the owners of a

castle in Bohemia, and he’d never ceased regretting the realities of modern

life. He was simply above crawling in the dirt, although that’s exactly
where he was: Max was a dentist, a profession of which I was deeply
suspicious, what with people’s spit flying into your face every day. And,

whenever we spoke, I felt that he was trying to look at my teeth.

Max also piled into every pyramid scheme he stumbled upon in

search of the legend of easy money, with each failure serving only to

convince him more. So the promise of jogging not only guaranteed physical
discomfort, but also the opportunity to buy the best personal care products

in the world, or to make vast amounts of money like many other ‘very smart

people’.
I looked into the fridge and threw out a week-old carcass that was

once a chicken. A year earlier, a colleague had part of his stomach and

intestine removed after an encounter with a seemingly harmless old creature

like this; it almost killed him. Funny isn’t it, how with a little help from

nature, the exploited bounce back and bite us?

I stared into the mirror, distorting my features, then lurched for the

universal remote.

Hopping through the channels, I stared at the successful people—

successful because there they were there; there in the dream machine. I was

interrupted by a surging burning sensation in the pit of my stomach. Jerking

to my feet I ran to the toilet, heaving, then slumped onto the tiles. Wiping
my brow with a damp, shaking hand, I made my way back to the sofa,

recalling a dream I’d had about various famous people being my friends.
 I tried to remember the way I’d used to feel about myself. I’d catch
a glimmer of it, occasionally, in my signature or in the eyes of a girl I used

to know, but then it’d be gone. I checked the Internet. I kept track of my ex-

lovers—the mysterious and the typical, and for each my alcohol-fuelled

self-pity was now filled with sorrow, guilt and regret, in sequence.

I tucked a book under my arm and took myself for a walk. Turning

left out of the building onto the grimy back streets to avoid the superior
glances on the main road, I remembered the street party there on Thursday.

It had been Union Day, and the Flag of Europe hung in front of all the

apartment buildings, as required by law: the old men were showing kids

how to play games like rolling an old bicycle wheel along with a stick, or

throwing balls at stacks of tin cans. They were all having a great time

together, but strangely it had made me feel sick.

I made my way further, piss and shit and vomit strewn everywhere
like flowers in the countryside; a place where people assume the same

rights as the dogs and pigeons. The summer sun would elevate all of it to

the nostrils as a stifling, all-pervasive stench to force you into the road,

where I walked even now to assuage my terror that some lump might fall

from one of the decrepit buildings and pulp my head.

On I went past the disenfranchised who were lying in the

doorways; then the young men (how I hated them) standing and talking
across the pavement; three massage–hair–manicure–pedicure specialists,

one of which was for dogs; the bookshop frequented by nice girls in
glasses; a pharmacy window promising eternal youth and then the twenty-

four-hour solarium that doubled as a late-night knocking shop, where

student girls from the countryside turned blonde and orange to subsidised
their education; and then at the corner the Twinkle cake shop, a small

family bakery that I was, on better days, particularly fond of.

I stopped and gazed in at the colourful cakes and the bustle of the

tiny store. Inside I could see the daughter serving. She was charming and
insecure; a terrible scar somehow made her beauty greater, by revealing its

transience. I often thought, when buying cakes I didn’t want, how I might
tell her so, but I’d always felt an invisible distance between myself and
those serving me. Our relationship instead tip-toed from strudels of

propriety and gâteaux of tenderness, to hopeful cookies and lustful tarts, all
destined for my bin.

I wandered on, down into Brussels Street, lined with its exorbitant
but empty boutiques—shielding the elite to the grime behind, peddling

handbags as expensive as they were ugly. I passed extravagant identical cars

and five-star hotels packed to the rafters with loneliness and frustration,
along pavements used by the rich to sup their coffee and by tramps as a

toilet. I passed, too, bewildered and ageing tourists.

 Others peering, leering from sightseeing buses. An old man and his

wife glided peacefully past in matching electric wheelchairs; then two

homeless people in a doorway—a man and a woman, filthy now and

sleeping, but with love etched on their faces. I saw, in some of the
anonymous faces that passed, my own sorrow—and all of a sudden a girl

who from the back looked exactly like a girl I’d once known, my heart leapt
and my legs scurried but as I drew close her face . . . a monster; a horror-
film special effect, the face of an impostor.

I had walked further than I’d thought. There was a rumble and I
was caught in a downpour, feet squelching, jeans sodden, I was unable to

stop—mesmerised by the smell of the tepid rain, the hypnotic lights

blurring then sharper, the rain hitting the ground. Then as soon as it had
started, the rain stopped. Numb, I wandered into Ring Café. Every one of

my friends hated that tired old café.

There were few tables inside as most had been moved outside, to

entice tourists. But those were now wet, and I hated to sit on the pavement
anyway. I found myself a place in the echoey emptiness with my back to the

wall. I straightened up. My bad posture had prompted my previous two

girlfriends, quite independently (as far as I am aware) to nickname me
‘Penguin’. Straightening, was a motion that many took as a cynical or

superior response to whatever they were saying at the time; they would take
subtle offence. Another habit of mine was sighing, the insides of which
were a mystery, although someone had once said it might mean I had a
heart problem. Sighing led people to think I was sad, usually resulting in

sympathetic interrogation. I had also become more and more allergic to

almost everything; my skin raging, itching and crumbling, eyes watering

and welling such that people thought I was seedy, my throat tightening.
A Viennese coffee sat before me; I hadn’t even noticed it arrive.
Pensively, I picked up the sugar packet, gave it a shake and tore it open,

emptying less than half its contents into the cup. I twisted the packet closed
and placed it neatly back on the saucer. Even in troubled times, I had to

consider my waistline.
The café had no cappuccino, only Viennese coffee—which I detest

—and Algerian coffee, piled up with artificial cream and a sickly syrup. I
seldom felt at ease in cafés at the best of times. It was something to do with
the way waiters would ignore me, busying themselves with fabricated tasks;

in their glance a mixture of pity and disgust.

‘It’s probably because I am alone,’ I sighed, as someone took the

empty chair opposite me, without asking.

The misery of these days was fed by the nights. I would bore and
drink and bore my unfortunate friends in kitsch little bars, with crazier and

crazier details: they did not understand, how could they? Their sympathy,
their relentless advice tempered with their self-satisfaction in their relative
success, as they smugly generalised my soul. I would smile and laugh, share
in their jokes, only to collapse an hour or two later into a speechless cave of

sorrow—old, crumpled, hunched, winded and unplugged, barely able to

move as though my ribs could collapse at any moment: a force I’d hardly

known I had, gone. After an illustrious career of breaking hearts, my last

girl had broken mine; chopped, diced, pummelled and stewed it. I was
haunted—night and day—by her parting words; by my failure to win her

trust and to overcome her fears; and by the thought of whom she might be

with now. I could forgive her, and even myself: I was lost in a forest of
forgiveness, but it was utterly impossible to forget.

I was—she had told me—always fiddling with her hand, touching

it, holding it, stroking it, squeezing it; rendering it all but unavailable to her

for normal tasks like opening doors, picking up her jacket or scratching her
nose: my actions of tenderness, she had explained, left her feeling as if

she’d had a limb lopped off. I stared at my hands.

After drinking my Viennese coffee and then the agonising

procedure of paying, I made my way toward the Underground. The light

was beginning to dim, objects were appearing to float and the poor—not

even the homeless—were raiding the litter bins. It would take a little longer
this way but I just couldn’t face the stifling trams packed with long-
suffering fare-dodgers, and besides, I was in no hurry. I made my way down

into the sweet, musty clouds of the tramp-filled tube station, warm and
homely and revolting, reminiscent of Grandpa’s jumper yet more pungent

or that up-close smell of pigeons only sweeter; it was the natural scent of

humans, or at least alcoholic ones, and of the languid whores who loitered
there all hours of the day. Then at last I was on the escalator, eyed by all the

people ascending as I travelled to the grimy platform below. I stood in the

crowd waiting for the train, as usual people walked through me: the weakest

link forever waltzing back and forth to let them pass.

The train arrived.

I sat in a long line of strangers looking across the carriage at

another long line of strangers looking back, sharing our peculiarities for
each other’s amusement, to the whistling and rocking of the train. I usually

prefer to stand, to avoid the embarrassing situation of giving up my seat for

an old lady, but that day I felt too exhausted. One man had an unmarked
white box perched protectively on his lap and was looking very pleased

with it, and everyone desperately wanted to know what was inside:

sideways glances every few seconds; an old woman with a face to tell a

thousand stories about illness and strange neighbours; a teenager, bored; a

couple in their early fifties, he, moustached, frustrated by his own ageing

and disgusted by his wife’s, she, tired of his moods and arrogance, longing
to break free but with no place to go; then a man I instinctively hated,

dressed like me, hair like me, acetate glasses and stuffed up with

pensiveness, like me; and a pretty young girl who I suspected had noticed
me, in her peripheral vision.

Bustling with puberty and poverty, this carriage reminded me of

where I belonged. And what on earth could be in that box? A stop before

mine, I gave up my seat to an elderly lady.

As I left the metro I saw a young couple on a bench. Him nibbling

at her neck, her revelling in it. ‘They’ve got it, whatever it is—what I want,

they’ve got it!’ I thought. I was jubilant, then they noticed I was looking and
I shuffled along inconspicuously.

In fact, every day I would watch paradise walk straight past me—

my own love, perhaps—anywhere, anytime, yet each opportunity seemed to

pop up when I least expected it, when I was least ready, most helpless, and
in a flash it would be gone. I was dismayed by these missed opportunities.

The girl for me was out there, I knew it. Perhaps our paths had

crossed again and again but I’d always found some thought or call or noise
or mood to distract me, days weeks months busily passing when instead I

should have been talking to the one I wanted. I just had too much inertia to

jump on the wrong bus, to chase that fantasy, and I knew that any one of

those lost moments might just have saved me.

 Cautious and analytical, I simply didn’t know where to start. The

previous summer I had bought some plants, a gladioli and a few

chrysanthemums, with a view to progressing to a goldfish and then perhaps

a dog, then a family. But they had all died.

I found myself at my front door as another storm erupted, fumbling

for my keys, and in I went. I slumped on the sofa, immobile, the church

bells chiming their accusations, the light impossibly gloomy, the air

pressure tumbling as if it wasn’t day at all or rather one of those endless

days they have in Finland, the rain aimlessly drifting in slow motion,
horizontally even, everything stiflingly mouldy green or moody grey-blue

as if the red had failed or when light reflects from a poisoned puddle,

stagnant, toxic; all life made impossible in an apocalyptic sci-fi way.

I was still on the sofa the next morning when I awoke. It was

turning May. I always loved this kind of sun—bright but not hot—and I felt

the life oozing back into my bones, my skin responding, the blood shifting.

Canterbury could be fine at this time of year as the long winter finally
abated and the gloomy streets began to lighten. I headed out. The trees,

where there were any, were beginning to show buds of hope and in a few

short weeks the gloves and scarves and winter coats would be gleefully
stuffed away again in all those flats and houses, and the threat of flu would

be past.
 The streets were quiet but from time to time I would pass someone,

mostly better dressed—in their Sunday best, calm and collected with their

dogs or partners or both, or busy marching to some highly anticipated

meeting somewhere. There would be the odd tramp who would ask for
money and I would say no and continue on my way, twisting along to avoid

the other walkers or lampposts or rubbish bins or dog shit. People appeared

to walk at me, their faces to the ground their minds elsewhere; it was a
miracle we didn’t all collide. I was sure I was more evasive than most, but

still my shoulder would brush others’ and sharp-edged shopping bags would

bash against my legs to produce scowling looks from their flailing owners,

drawing on my vice of saying sorry when I shouldn’t.

I walked past the Central Café, its orange and brown striped

awning extended to shield the interior from the sun. Then I bought some

chocolate, a few mandarins, some milk, yoghurt, and headed home,

completing a small circle and entering my building via the underground car

park, as I sometimes would because I liked the smell.

Then, I cleaned the walkway outside my flat (although it was not

mandatory). Now, anyone who might take a look around inside would never
have believed that I would clean outside, but I did, and with increasing

frequency, because it gave me an extraordinary pleasure: the pleasure of

deliberately doing something purely by choice—something of no

consequence whatsoever.