The Riotous Fields

Somewhere in the Dreaming is a place where riots happen. Usually it is a field. But sometimes it is a run down council estate or disused factory site. Dream of the Endless is standing there, watching from a distance as the latest riot takes place. He is dressed from head to foot in white with a large, green emerald hanging from a silver chain around his neck. Even his hair is white. His eyes are like two black holes with distant stars glowing in each of them. You feel as if they could bore a hole into your very soul, to your innermost being. You realise they could, and you are left feeling uncomfortable with this thought. A small leather pouch hangs down from his belt. It is made from the finest white suede, and you realise that this pouch contains sand. Not any ordinary sand, mind you, but the stuff that dreams are made of. You turn your attentions from this ghostly figure to the events that are being portrayed before your eyes, even though you feel as if your attentions in this part of the Dreaming are not entirely welcome. Never-the-less you are transfixed to the scenes being acted out upon the Riotous Fields, and you watch. This is what happens:

An old Ford Transit van pulls up in front of some garages. It is one of those older models that has the snub-nosed front, and it has been resprayed in matt purple. Three men in their mid-twenties are inside, talking. He who was once known as Morpheus listens in on the conversation.

"You know Billy, the simple one?" begins the man in the drivers' seat.
The one in the middle says "Yeah, I know him. What about it?"
"He is a right cry-baby, you know. I bet you that we can make him cry real good," he replies.
"And how are you gonna do that?" asks the man who is sat by the passenger door.
"It's easy," the first man says, "We just paint something rude on the garage wall about his mother, an' he's bound to start bawling."
"I like the idea," says the man in the middle.
"So do I," says the man by the passenger door.
"It's decided, then. We paint something on the garages and watch to see what happens," the driver says.

So the three men get out of the van and starts spraying all over the garage wall with yellow spray cans. They write things like 'Simple Billy's mother does head for a tenner,' or 'Simple Billy's mother is a slapper.' Then they lock up the van and walk up to the front door of their shared house. They sit in the front room lounge with cans of beer, and they have a wonderful view from their vantage point above the garages. Dream of the Endless just sits on the top of the garages and waits for the fun to begin. No one sees him sitting there, but this fact is hardly surprising.

Simple Billy is the kind of kid who never even sat his Eleven-Plus, let alone left school with any GCSE's. He works in a factory as the machine minders' dog's body. He hasn't become a machine minder himself, as he does not show the mechanical aptitude necessary to run a machine line, but he is big and strong, and has his uses to all the machine minders upon the factory floor. He changes the machine heads each time a new line is called, and changes them back again, ready for the next shift. He doesn't get bored with his work, as he doesn't seem to have the intelligence to get bored with such things. And he still lives with his mum, even though he is now twenty-four years of age.

His father left when he was five, and no one ever bothered to explain to him that it wasn't his fault. He grew up believing that if only he was good enough, his father would have stayed around. But his father ran off with another woman, and his mother stopped walking into doors.

He was starved of oxygen during birth. He didn't suffer extreme brain damage because of it, but it was enough to make sure that he was never the brightest card in the pack. At school the other kids called him names like 'spastic' and 'dumb fuck', and he learned that it was to his advantage to bunk school from a very early age. Hence his lack of the most basic of GCSE's. All the girls ignored him, other than to snigger behind his back. The teachers barely paid him any mind either.

The other boys used to do things to him, just to amuse themselves and to pass the day. They'd hide his school bag in the girl's toilets, knowing full well that he would not dare go in there. He'd often go running to the dinner ladies who were on duty in the playground during lunch, and they'd send one of the girls into the toilets to retrieve it for him. As for the girls, they were far worse. Every time he walked pass them they'd snicker, and he could never get the joke. So from the age of eleven he bunked school, and from sixteen he worked at the local factory.

The klaxon sounded for the change of shift, and Billy left the factory floor. He walked up the stairs towards the changing rooms, with his head hung low as he always did. He didn't do this because he was tall, as he wasn't so tall as to bang his head against things. He hung his head down low so he wouldn't attract attention to himself. Some of the other men from his floor were making use of the company showers, but he did not. He had this strange belief that other peoples' showers were never as clean as the one at his mother's. So he removed his overalls and changed into his usual clothes. His mother sewed name tags into all his clothes, in case he ever lost any of them. He wished that she wouldn't, because none of the other men on his section had names in their clothes. But he never had the courage to ask her to stop doing it.

He finished dressing himself and combed his hair in the usual left hand parting. He had his hair combed the same way by his mum since he was five, and he never thought about trying something different. It was the start of the weekend, and that meant church on Sunday, followed by the usual roast dinner. It could be the middle of summer for all his mother cared, but they still had roast beef with Yorkshire Pudding, or pork with apple sauce. For a treat at Easter and Pentecost they had lamb with mint sauce, or chicken. But no matter how hot or cold it was upon a Sunday, they always had a roast dinner. His mother believed in God like people believed in gravity. Just because you can't see it, it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. He had the same theology as his mother, but if you said that word to him, he wouldn't have a clue about what it meant. He finished combing his hair and walked out into the evening sun.

The factory was down the road from the garages. There were rows of council houses upon each side of the road, and apart from the odd bit of tasteless stone-cladding that was fashionable in the early Eighties, they were all exactly the same. Two up two down, with a small back yard. In the distance he could see Barry's van parked outside the garage that Barry hired from the council. It was upon it's last legs. Even Billy could tell you that, although he had no mechanical knowledge. It had been resprayed many times, and at the moment it was sporting a rather sickly shade of purple. Billy didn't like Barry and his mates. They used to pick on him whenever he attended school, and they still picked on him, even now.

As Billy got nearer to the garages, he could make out writing upon the garage wall in yellow paint. He couldn't read it yet because he was still too far away. Several kids were pointing at him, laughing. This wasn't that uncommon, as all the kids knew that he was simple. What was unusual was that they were also pointing at the writing upon the wall. His stomach knotted up in dread, expecting the worse.

When he got close enough to the garages he read the writing. "Simple Billy's mother gives head for a tenner," and "Simple Billy's mother is a slapper." Even though he was simple, he knew what head was, and he knew what a slapper did for a living. Without his mother's knowledge he often visited the prostitutes in Arthur Road. They had a soft spot for him, and charged him lower rates. The tarts with a heart they were when he was around. He in turn never hurt them like the other punters sometimes did, and he knew them all by name. If his mother ever found out, she'd drag him by the ear to the local Pentecostal Minister and make him kneel in repentance. So that was the one part of his life which was secret from his mother.

He frowned. Then he looked up to Barry's house. The three of them just stood there, pointing and laughing. He felt the rage building up inside of him, the rage he had struggled to keep in check for so many years. He picked up a stone and felt it's weight. Then he lobbed it squarely through Barry's front room window. It shattered into a thousand shards of glistening glass, and there was the satisfying crash that cheap class usually made. The three of them came running out towards him, and he found himself making fists with both hands. He caught Barry squarely upon the jaw with a left upper-cut. Barry was sent flying backwards onto the concrete and knocked himself out cold when his head connected with the driveway. The other two stood there stunned for a second. Then they began to lay into him.

The police were called, and a crowd had already gathered around the fighting. They had to push their way in through the throng of on-lookers. By the time they had reached the centre, there stood Billy, covered in blood. The other three were all on the floor, out for the count. The police just barged in there and arrested Billy for common assault and GBH without asking anyone what had happened. There were boos and jeers from the crowds, and the officers just carried on with what they were about, ignoring all protests from the watching crowds. They bundled him into a waiting police car and drove off towards the local nick. He was charged and put in the cells overnight until the Magistrate called for him to be brought forward in the morning. Dream of the Endless just blended in with the crowds, watching the proceedings intently. If you knew where to look, and if you looked carefully enough, you might just spot him. Then again, you might not.

Normally such crowds would have dispersed after the show was over, but instead of doing what crowds normally do, they walked as a man, woman, and child towards the local nick. Even the teenage kids who'd normally be giving Simple Billy a hard time knew that something wrong had happened to him, and they were amongst the crowds, which were lead by the tarts with hearts. They arrived at the nick at around half past six, and began chanting for Billy to be released.

The desk sergeant was a wise old copper who was a matter of three years from retirement. He was sitting in the cell with Simple Billy when the fuss started outside. His name was John, and he knew Billy's mother. When Billy was a kid he'd often take him home after he had found him upon his local beat, crying in a corner with his clothing torn and his face bruised. He'd take him home to his mother, and often tried to glean a statement from Billy. But Billy never said anything, even though John always knew who was responsible. It was always Barry and his mates. The three stooges.

Now Billy had been arrested for doing something which he should have done when he was ten, and he couldn't help but feel sorry for the lad. He was going to give a character statement to the Magistrate for him, so that he might make bail, even though this wouldn't bode well with his superiors. But what could they do to him, as he was retiring in three years? Keep him tied to his desk, keeping track of who was in the cells? He had been doing this for the past five years, so he couldn't give a shit what his superiors did to him.

The crowd had begun to grow restless. The officer who usually manned the front desk of an evening shift was standing outside, trying to keep things calm. He was making a lousy job of it. Someone threw a bottle, and then the shit hit the fan. He ran inside and called for the Riot Squad to be put on standby. A brick came crashing through the front door, and he corrected his instructions. The Riot Squad were called out. During this time, Dream of the Endless had moved from Billy's cell to the roof of the local nick. He nodded to himself in satisfaction, knowing that this dream riot would serve its purpose.

During the night of madness Barry's house was burned to the ground, along with his van. This put him out of business as the local painter and decorator for the council. Without his van and the tools of his trade which were kept in the van, he couldn't fulfil his contracts, so the work went to his rivals. Several other vehicles were also set alight, and the fire brigade could do nothing but watch as they burned themselves out. Several officers were injured from the Riot Squad, and the events of the night had hit the local papers the next morning. They told the whole story, including Billy's childhood Hell at the hands of the local gang of wide-boys, how he'd often be taken home crying by Good John, the once local bobby. They also gained details of the three injured men who were set upon by Billy, and told a story of years of bullying on their part.

Of course the riots burned themselves out by the next morning, and the Magistrate had a hard job of deciding what to do about Billy. He couldn't put him in remand, as this would cause further rioting. He couldn't even expect for any charges to stand up in court should it go to Crown. So he fined Billy one pound for each man he had assaulted, and set him free. He now had a criminal record, but none of the local employers could give a shit, and would have probably employed him should he ever need a new job. None of the kids called him names any more, and he began to grow in confidence.

He began courting a girl from the parish church, and married in the Autumn. He moved from his mother's house, and with the money that he had saved up over the years he brought one of the local council houses with a twenty per cent deposit and a ten year mortgage, and moved in with his new wife. Then he got himself promoted to machine minder, as his confidence brought out a hidden talent for anything mechanical. He still wasn't the brightest bulb in the pack, but he could tell you what was wrong with a machine just by looking at it, and could fix it faster and better than anybody else on the factory floor.

Dream of the Endless was satisfied with the dream he had just created. He knew that Billy would like it, but there was one more thing he had to do. He had to deal with Barry and his mates. So he sent the Corinthian, the worst of the nightmares that he had ever created. The vision of a man with teeth for eyes would haunt them until the day they died. And the message that the Corinthian brought with him would let them know how petty they were, and how little it meant in the greater scheme of things.

You fade into the background as the dream comes to a close. It was not often that Dream of the Endless allowed a mortal to see him at work, and you leave feeling privileged for the experience. But many things have changed since the days that he was known as Morpheus, and he often showed a more human side to himself. As for where fantasy ends and reality begins, you can never tell with dreams. Maybe Billy did marry that girl and get promoted. Maybe he also brought his own council house, although he probably had to work harder for it. But the riots were just a dream, and they served their purpose. Or were they...