A Mysterious Cloud Of Suspicion

Ever since I can remember my father was something of a mysterious man. My mother regaled me many a time about how at times my father would just disappear. He would simply put on his jacket and vanish into thin air. Nobody knew where he went or what he got up to. Then suddenly out of the blue, he would re-appear as if nothing had happened. He would take off his jacket and hang it in the wardrobe before popping back downstairs for a cup of Earl Grey tea. He never spoke about where he had been nor who he had been with. My mother knew better than to ask him questions. She was just happy to see him safely return, none the worse for his disappearance.

I sat on the edge of my mother and father's bed looking into the old oak wardrobe that had once seen much better days. It had been over a week since we celebrated my mother's funeral. It was quite a modest affair with very few attendees. This was mostly due to my mother living to a grand old age. Most of those whom she knew throughout her life had long since gone before her. There was virtually nobody left. My mother used to say how the worst part of getting old was the feeling of being invisible. Nobody saw her, nobody asked her opinion about anything. It was as if she simply didn't count, she didn't exist.

An old war jacket of my father's caught my eye as it hung limply from the steel bar inside the wardrobe. It was an old leather flying jacket that was faded and cracked for the want of a little beeswax. There weren't any badges to indicate my father's war service except for one intriguing roundel with what looked like a flash of lightning or electricity from the bottom left of the circle to the top right, up into the sky. I often wondered what it was supposed to symbolize. Perhaps it was the power of god reaching down from the heavens to create mortal man here on Earth. However, I suppose it means whatever you want it to mean, meaning is in the mind of the beholder of the thought.

I stood up and for some inexplicable reason, I reached into the wardrobe and took the jacket off its hanger and put it on. I turned to the left through ninety degrees to see myself in the almost full-length mirror on the inside surface of the wardrobe door. I looked like a younger version of my father, except I was quite a bit taller than my father. My height was all in my spindly legs. From the waist up my father and I were the same build and dimensions. We also shared the same facial looks with a small cleft in our chins. We could have easily been taken for identical twins had we lived at the same time.

I was gently rubbing the well-worn collar which I slowly pulled around my neck, when suddenly I heard footsteps coming upstairs. At the same time, I heard the light patter of rain and an air-raid siren go off somewhere in the distance. I also heard the fast footfall of people in the street, as if they were running to take cover somewhere before the bombs rained down on them. Then I heard my mother's all too familiar voice call out as she came upstairs.

"Is that you Jack? Are you back again? I didn't hear you come in darling?"

Not wishing to offend my mother, I quickly took the jacket off and put it back on its hanger in the wardrobe. The bedroom door flew open and I was shocked to see my mother, not as the old woman I had last spoken to shortly before she passed away two weeks before, but as a very beautiful younger version of herself. My mother stood in the doorway and looked straight through me as if I didn't exist.

"Oh, you've gone again. What am I going to do about all this coming and going, Jack? It's a sign of the times I suppose, I'll just have to get used to it I guess."

And with that, my mother turned and left the room closing the door behind her. I stood totally perplexed by what had happened. Suddenly I realized that the pitter-patter of rain had stopped and when I went to the bedroom window it was only to see the usual passers-by going about their usual business.

I went to the landing at the top of the stairs and stopped. After a few seconds, I called out.

"Mother? Is that you? Are you there?" There was no reply.

I tentatively went downstairs fully expecting to see my mother at the kitchen sink washing some pots and pans. There was nobody there. I sat down at the old Formica-top table to wonder about what had happened. Was it my imagination? Wishful thinking perhaps? Or could it be.....I began to think about the unthinkable.

I went back upstairs and looked a little fearfully at the leather jacket inside the wardrobe, exactly as I had left it. I slowly moved towards the wardrobe and began to finger the soft leather of the jacket. It felt good to the touch and I felt that somehow it allowed me to connect with my father. I braced myself for what I was about to do, expecting almost anything to happen.

I slipped the jacket off its hanger once more and again put it on. I waited a few moments half expecting to hear my mother's footsteps on the stairs. There was nothing of the sort. This time I decided to go back downstairs wearing the jacket to see if anything transpired.

I sat at the kitchen table staring off into space thinking that what had happened when I first tried on the jacket had after all been the result of a grieving, over-longing imagination. Suddenly that all changed.

My mother came downstairs and this time seemed to see me as clear as daylight. However, my mother seemed to be under the impression that I was my father.

"Oh Jack, you were here all along. I thought it was you. I went upstairs to look for you, but you'd simply vanished into thin air. I don't know how on earth you got past me on the stairs. I must have had my mind on this awful war."

My mother gave me a kiss on the cheek and said "Let me make you a cup of your favourite tea Jack. I know how much you love your Earl Grey, no milk or sugar. I'll put the pot on now. Then if you want we can go back upstairs and have some horizontal fun, as you like to call it."

My mother was radiant in her casual clothes and well-home-coiffured hair. She never wore any makeup and had a lovely soft complexion. And she smelled of her favorite scent, 'Lilly of the Valley.'

Then the thought suddenly entered my head that what my mother was referring to when she said horizontal fun was in fact sex! My mother wanted to be intimate with my father and quite frankly the prospect of having sex with my own mother appalled me.

Within two minutes my mother placed a hot cup of Earl Grey tea and a small plate of digestive biscuits on the table. Then she turned away and said that she was going to go upstairs to make the bed. She gave me another kiss on the cheek and turned to go upstairs. As she rose up the stairs she called back to me."

"Don't you go disappearing on me again any time soon, Jack? We have a lot of catching up to do young man." And with that, she was gone.

I quickly stood up and tore off my father's old leather jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. With a bit of luck that would be an end to this incredibly strange experience. Thankfully my mother didn't reappear and I began to relax. Disaster averted. The bizarre idea that having sex with my mother might result in me making my own mother pregnant with me as her firstborn, of me being my own biological father, almost melted my brain. That was just too, too close a call and one I did well to bring to an end. I picked up the still-hot cup of Earl Grey and it tasted delicious. At least that much was real. As for the rest, who knew what that was all about?

Eventually, I got up and made my way upstairs with the leather jacket draped over my arm. As soon as I entered the bedroom I went straight to the wardrobe and hung the jacket in its usual place. Then once again I sat down on the edge of my parents' bed. Suddenly I came over all tired and kicked off my shoes and lay back on the bed. I must have dozed off an hour or so because through the window I could see the old clock tower was about to strike midday. When I was drinking that Earl Grey earlier I remember seeing the kitchen clock at ten thirty. I sat up and thought that perhaps it had all been a dream or a figment of my own imagination. Then I had an idea.

I got off the bed and sat once again facing the open wardrobe. What if...I thought.....What if I tried some other items of my father's old but well-preserved clothing? Would I experience a similar effect? There was only one way to find out.

I stood up and reached into the wardrobe and gently ran my hand across all of my father's hanging clothes. My hand stopped at an old pin-striped suit, lovingly preserved by my mother ever since my father had passed away some forty years earlier. It was a very nice suit.

Ever so respectfully I put the suit on not sure what, if anything, was going to happen. I soon found out. From downstairs, I could hear one or two familiar voices, old aunties and uncles. Then one voice, which I immediately recognized as being that of my father's elder brother, sang up the stairwell...

"Are you ready yet Jack? Margaret is already at the church waiting for you. They are driving around in circles until you arrive. She can't go in until you are there waiting for her. You can't keep a good woman waiting Jack. Come on man, let's go."

I suddenly realized that I had donned my father's wedding suit. The prospect of being dragged off to marry my own mother did not exactly fill me with glee. Hearing the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs I hurriedly took the suit back off before Uncle Tony could come crashing in to manhandle me to the local church. Just in the nick of time, I managed to divest myself of the suit.

Again I sat back on my parent's bed. My mind was now fully alive with all sorts of possibilities. Like what if I should happen to bump into my father himself? Having got past a quick double take, what would my father think of me? More to the point, what would he think of a stranger who looked like his identical twin wearing his clothes?

Eventually, I wondered if I could do something meaningful for my parents, something to ensure that they had a better life than they had had. My father was a gambling addict, always putting his spare cash on the next horse that for sure was going to make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. My father was always chasing the ace.

Somebody once told me that the reason my father was a gambler was because at one time in the past, he had had a bit of a winner. And that tap that he had opened had therefore shown the potential to give again, to give more, if only.....

What on earth could I do about this? What if I could try to find out when he had that initial winner and scupper the race? No, it was never going to work, my father would simply have another bet on another race anyway, just in case. There had to be something else I could do. Eventually, I formed a plan that just might work.

***

The plan was to see if I could somehow establish contact with my deceased father via the leather flying jacket. If it was possible for that jacket to exist in two places at one and the same time, the past and the present, just maybe I could communicate with him. I could try putting the jacket on and see if that would transport me into the past as it seemed to have done earlier, but quite frankly that scared the hell out of me. God only knows what it would do to my mother and father. To meet up with an as-yet unborn child of the future could very easily end in disaster. Instead, I decided to write a short letter to my father and put it in the inside pocket of the jacket in the hope that he would find it and respond. I took hold of an old faded Basildon Bond notebook and an old biro and set to.

Dear Jack Chandler

If and when you find this letter then please write at the bottom "Got It" and place it back inside the pocket where you found it. Thank you.

PS You can't trust a fart.

The last line was something my father often used to say and just maybe it would serve the purpose of pricking his interest.

I then neatly folded the letter and placed it inside the inside pocket of the jacket. Then I fell back down on the bed and rubbed my chin as I sat thinking about what I had embarked upon. The thought occurred that whichever way this went it was teetering on insanity. I asked myself more than once if I was losing my mind.

The thought entered my head that what had happened earlier was just some imaginative yearning, a mental or psychological quirk, some rogue neurotransmitter running amok in my mind. Then again, nothing ventured nothing gained. And with that self-justifying thought in mind, I lay back on the bed and fell fast asleep.

Some hours later, before the five o'clock sunrise, my eyes eased open, and due to the cloak of darkness that still shrouded the night, I came to in a gentle way.

Slowly I sat up on the bed, rubbed my eyes and lightly scratched my cheek.

I looked over to the still open wardrobe to see that nothing had changed except....the leather jacket was now facing the opposite direction, or was that too all in my mind? I gingerly made my way to the wardrobe and softly put my nervous fingers into the inside pocket to fish out the letter.

My hands were almost trembling as I held the Basildon Bond branded paper up to the soft moonlight that seeped through the old oak sash window. I breathed in deeply as I flipped the letter open to see written across the bottom...

"Got it. Now what?" Now what indeed, I thought to myself.

What's more, my father had chosen to date his response,' January 3rd,1950' as if it might somehow matter. As it turned out it mattered very much. 1950 was four years before my own birth, which made things a lot less complicated from more than one angle. There was no chance of me bumping into my younger self and since I hadn't yet been born then, nor had I therefore been named.

This was more than I had hoped for. I had fully expected to find the letter devoid of any message from my father and I was quite prepared to write the whole episode off as a touch of over tiredness and grief provoked madness. The response changed everything. This was for real. Neither I nor anybody else had moved around in that room during the night. I needed to mull this over and consolidate my plan, a plan I never thought would come to anything. Now I was faced with carrying out that plan, whether I liked it or not.

As I sat downstairs in the kitchen sipping a hot cup of Earl Grey tea I started to go over once again what I now intended to do. The whole intent of this adventure was to try to change my father's life-ruining addiction to horse gambling. By spending every last penny he ever had, we lived a life of penury. And now here I was about to try to eliminate that habit with one crazy roll of the dice.

I had already taken the trouble to find out via the internet what horses came in what position in 1950. I found one horse rather aptly called 'Old Leather Jacket' which easily won his last race on January, 4th, 1950. What was more, the horse won at good odds of twenty to one. With this, I could win over my father's confidence and hopefully execute my plan to perfection. I knew my father would not be able to resist what I had in mind to propose.

I took another piece of the Basildon Bond note paper and wrote......

"Aintree steeplechase, ten past ten in the morning, place ten pounds to win at 20 to 1. Message me back after you collect your winnings."

I knew that this seemed to be counter-productive to getting my father to quit blowing all of his money on betting on horses, but it was only the first part of the plan.

I once again placed the note inside the inside pocket, this time with an old ten-pound note to cover the bet, and crossed my fingers that my father would simply follow my instructions and not spend the money on a beer with the lads. As it was early January the fourth, I would know in a matter of a few hours, hopefully.

I went downstairs to breakfast and sat with a mouth full of hot buttered toast and a heart and soul full of hope. If I was lucky my father would place the bet and message me back after he had won. Then it would be time to implement the next part of the plan.

I looked across the kitchen to an old piece of furniture that was both a dresser and a radiogram. A neighbor had gifted it to my mother many years ago after her elderly mother had died. As we were more or less as poor as a church mouse my mother gladly accepted and it served us well as a constant source of information and entertainment with news and music.

On her off days my mother would sing along to something like Sammy Kaye and Don Cornell doing 'It isn't fair.' On her better days, my mother would dance around the house to Red Foley singing an upbeat 'Chattanoogie Shoeshine Boy.'

I got up and turned the old gramophone on to see if it still worked. It did, after a fashion. There was lots of white noise and you needed to be ever so delicate twisting the tuner to pick up whatever station you could. I could hear all the sounds of my day accompanied by a great deal of static crackling, it was almost unlistenable. I just wasn't in the mood to play with a recalcitrant tuner knob and turned the old radio set off. Suddenly I had an idea.

I ran upstairs and flung open the wardrobe doors. I didn't want to take my Dad's old leather jacket just yet as it had some higher purpose to serve. However, if I could try on Dad's old wedding suit again.........

I ran back downstairs and put just the pinstripe blazer part of the suit on. Then I turned on the radio gramophone again and began to search radio stations to see what came out. It was different than before that was for sure, it was all old fifties music interspersed with a Queen's English commentary. It sounded like it could be the BBC Light Programme. Suddenly, I heard a noise at the door. Somebody was putting a key into the old Yale lock!

***

Seeing the silhouette of a male figure on the other side of the front door, a figure that I was all too familiar with, I quickly pulled off my father's old blazer, just in the nick of time.

The door swung open and right there before my very eyes was a younger version of my father than I remembered from my childhood. I stood stock still and looked right at him. He looked right through me as if I wasn't there. He pulled off his denim jacket and threw it over the back of a kitchen chair. Then he emptied the contents of his trouser pockets onto the Formica-topped table. Amongst a few coins was a slip of paper, I just had time to see that it had 'Denny Betting' printed in bright red at the top. Underneath the title, I could see scribbled in ink 'Ten pounds to win on Old Leather Jacket at 20 to 1.' It was enough for me to know that my father had done as I asked him to in my last letter to him. So far so good, all was going to plan. Then my father picked up the betting slip and went upstairs, apparently none the wiser about my presence.

It had become clear to me that I had to be actually wearing his jacket or blazer to be able to travel back in time. If either was draped over my arm there was no movement. I sat back down and tried to think this through.

Discarding the thoughts that it was all in my imagination or some sort of psychological delusion I was left with two possibilities. One, I was actually able to travel back to a time long since passed, or two, the past was still in play in some other parallel perfectly synchronized dimension.

I was also curious as to where my father's clothes acquired this magical power to transport me between the two time zones. What chemical qualities might the blazer and jacket possess to achieve all of this? The question I asked myself was, where did that power come from?

Then I remembered that during the war my father had served time as a sailor.

Was it possible he had had something to do with what was called the so-called Philadelphia Experiment whereby a warship had been tele-transported from one location to another in a military attempt to make it invisible? Could my father have been on board the ship in question, the USS Eldridge?

The story was that the experiment was based on Einsteinian theories about unifying electromagnetism with gravity. The Unified Field Theory was an attempt, they say, to make ships undetectable by the enemy. It all seemed a bit far-fetched and was never proven. It seemed like a bit of a long shot to me. My father would have had to have been on board the ship being used for the experiment, or to have had contact with an American sailor who had been on board, and acquired the leather flying jacket from that source.

The thought of the power of electromagnetic fields set me thinking about another possibility. My father was an electrician by trade and was once lucky to survive a substation explosion. The only injury he sustained was a hole in his hand which was grafted over. Also, outside of my parent's house was an electricity pylon, and these towers were well known for producing electromagnetic fields. Such fields were said to be responsible for the appearance of ghosts from another time. Again, this theory was unproven.

The only other possibility came from a story of my father's about something that had happened to his younger brother during a wartime sortie over the Bay of Biscay, north of Spain.

My mother once told me that my father had told her about how my Uncle, en route to England, had flown into some mysterious-looking cloud. My Uncle lost all control of his aircraft and all sense of orientation. Apparently, the time in the cloud lasted only two minutes, according to my Uncle's wristwatch. Yet when he exited the cloud, almost two hours had passed! The cloud was an acrid ochre, almost orange color and smelt of some sort of indescribable fragrance. This was all getting very confusing and getting me nowhere fast.

At last, I decided to concentrate on the matter at hand, my father's ruinous gambling addiction.

Trying to figure out the endless possibilities about where the power of my father's blazer and jacket got their power from had already taken up far too much of my time and thought processes. I looked at the kitchen clock to see that the race was already over. It was ten thirty in the morning. For sure my father was already on his way to collect his winnings. Indeed, as the local betting shop was but a few hundred yards away he may well have already been to collect his winnings.

I went upstairs to check the leather jacket on the off chance that my father had not only been to collect his win money but had also returned to put a message in the jacket's inside pocket telling me he had collected his winnings, exactly as I had asked him to do.

This time as I reached into the inside pocket I noticed something I hadn't seen before. There was a name tag just below the top line of the pocket. And even more surprising was that it was not my father's name on the tag. The name was that of my Uncle Robert, the pilot who had got lost in some cloud over the Bay of Biscay. That re-opened that line of inquiry in my mind. Then my fingertips touched upon the old Basildon Bond branded writing paper upon which my father and I had been exchanging messages through time.

I slowly opened the folded paper to see that yes indeed my father had been to collect his winnings and was now awaiting further instructions. This time my father was in for the surprise of his life. Because this time my plan was to see if he and I could meet up for a chat.

There was no time to waste on this next step. That money my father had won on Old Leather Jacket would be burning a hole in his pocket. I had to get to him before that happened otherwise all would be lost. This was no time to tarry. My mother and father's future well-being depended on what happened next. If all went well it would change their lives forever.

I quickly took the leather jacket and put it on. It seemed to change the whole atmosphere even inside the house. Suddenly, I heard footsteps coming up the stairs and my heart skipped a beat.