The mathematician and the actor.

I passed another one this evening. You will have seen them, the roadside shrines - dead flowers, small wooden crosses, toys, rain-soaked photographs taped into polythene bags carefully placed on the grass verge, or pavement, or pinned to a lamppost or the trunk of a tree. Often they’re on a bend, sometimes at the bottom of a steep hill. They make me feel sad and depress me. They make me think and remember.

Look hard and you’ll find me in this picture and unfortunately, if you knew who to look for, two brothers who died before they were old enough to vote, pictured here for probably the last time. I knew them well and they were Fine; the capital is intentional, I liked them.

They lived two houses away from the girl who broke my heart. It was nothing to do with them, it wasn’t their fault, they were too close for comfort but not at all involved. If they had been, who knows, it may have changed their ending.

Martin and Stephen. The mathematician and the actor.

Their dad was a weather man, not the telly type, the meteorological office type, a bit posh, and a whole lot posher than me. Stephen and I though, same rugby team, me the loose head, he the wing three-quarters. Between us we’d put down so many tries, enough to get us both onto the county side for South Oxon. There was no problem with the trials, we flew through.

The Six Bells, Friday night, me and the girl (Titania) having a drink, under-age of course. Well it was then, not now, life less watched, much easier to ‘get away’ with.

‘Night Martin, night Steve’.

Out into the dark and along the road. On another night we might have given them a lift; but tonight Titania was staying at mine.

‘Night Toby, night Kate’.

A kiss on the cheek from Kate, the gypsy girl, so full of everything that I (nor Titania) was not, and Toby a volcano waiting to erupt.

‘Night Kate’.

Then home.

The news spread fast. Both dead, knocked down, a hit and run, on Chinnor road, thumbing the lift that I so many times had thumbed.

Both dead. Stephen and Martin, the actor and the mathematician, dead and dead and dead, killed on the road, and rumour had it that one of their heads was sheared clean off and thrown into a field, eyes still bright with reflected headlights.

Teenage nonsense of course.

The other found in a ditch bloody and broken and not quite dead until the lifting up and into the ambulance.

Teenage truth of course.

News travels fast, bad news fastest. Toby and Kate, Titania and I, so many others, dressed in feathers and jeans and hats and robes and stars, but mainly sorrow, on hearing stood slack in the road and wailed.

The mathematician and the actor - it could not be.

But it was.
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Another friend had been driving the car, the car that hit them on that dark road, over the limit and going too fast, that friend just old enough to have passed his test.

No friend now. Suddenly how we hated him – Kate and Toby, Titania and me, and all the others in their feathers and rags, hats and robes, hearts and tears smeared on their sleeves.

The mathematician and the actor - it could not be.

But it was.

They buried them both. It rained on the day, cold, and wet, and grey. We weren’t invited, family only, we went to the Bells instead, dressed in black; black feathers, black rags, black hats, black robes, with hearts and tears smeared on black sleeves, and afterwards left flowers at their last breath.

And not thirty-four years in total between them.

We are all there in the picture, at least the boys - the actor, the mathematician, Toby, the rags and hats, and feathers and robes, Oberon, the killer behind the wheel - each frozen in a flash - the rugby playing boys of Lord William’s School, every man all, until the last.

It was soon after that the drift began. Slow-moving at first, but gathering quiet speed; first the feathers and rags, then the hats and robes, Toby and Kate, Titania, Bells, team, game… and finally me.

And that was the last time we were ALL in the picture. I gave up playing Rugby, the driver was locked away, some moved on, and those two – well those two, the mathematician and the actor, became a memory; the end of one thing, the start of something less. I guess we all started over, one way or another.

I hate those roadside shrines – there seem to be so many of them.