The Ted of Avontown By Georgia Boon

This story is inspired by ‘The Shoelace,’ by Charles Bukowski. Here’s an extract: 

a woman, a 

tire that’s flat, a 

disease, a 

desire: fears in front of you, 

fears that hold so still 

you can study them 

like pieces on a 

chessboard… 

it’s not the large things that 

send a man to the 

madhouse. death he’s ready for, or 

murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood… 

no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies 

that send a man to the 

madhouse… 

not the death of his love 

but a shoelace that snaps 

with no time left … 

* 

1

We knew two Teds when I was growing up. When I was four, my Dad put me in the car and said we were going to see Ted. Apparently I asked, in that awkwardly lyric phrasing we all use when we learn our first language, ‘The Ted of Avontown,’ or ‘The Ted of Stroud?’ The other Ted we knew lived in the charming Cotswold idyll. I will have hoped my father would say we were on our way to visit the Ted of Stroud because Stroud promised ice-cream parlours, poppling streams, a large glittering green fairy ring of hills and commons cresting its boundary; whereas Avontown was all stunted tower blocks, facades of hostile glass and, worst of all, home to The Ted of Avontown, as he would now be known forever more. 

The Ted of Avontown was tall and spindly, yet surprisingly cavernous, like a giant underground grotto that was reached through a tiny hole in a rock. When I picture him now, it’s always as we would first encounter him on any visit: walking towards us, holding something in his hands. Once it was three lemons that he wanted my father to inspect closely. He thought there was something strange about them. Another time it was a ram’s horn he had found inexplicably on the stump of a tree, and that he thought was beautiful; and another, a crow, which he wanted me to pet. 

Around the time I started secondary school, I askded my Dad, ‘Why do we visit the Ted of Avontown?’ This was at the age when a voice in our heads instructs us to question everything our parents do. 

‘You know, Georgie, the Ted is an old friend of mine.’ 

‘I think you visit him because you feel sorry for him.’ 

‘No, that’s not it, not at all,. If anything, I think the Ted of Avontown feels sorry for us.’ ‘Why can’t he come to our house?’ I asked this, even though I didn’t know how I would feel about cavernous Ted unravelling himself on our sofa. 

‘His driving licence expired,’ my Dad said. Then he smiled to himself. ‘A long time ago.’ 2

At fifteen, to secure the cloak of mystery around me, making me inscrutable and yet fascinating to everyone, including my Dad, I carefully avoided showing so much as a hint of curiosity about anything at all. I overslept one Ted-visiting morning, and climbed into the car, not having had time to clean my teeth or tie my laces. Even though my head had was reeling with questions about the Ted of Avontown, I kept my lips pressed shut and scraped around my tongue around my teeth, trying to dislodge the scurf. 

I wanted to ask my father why we only ever saw the Ted of Avontown outside; if the Ted of Avontown had a family? And if not now, had he ever? Why did the Ted of Avontown look so anguished whenever birds scattered upwards? And follow them for so long with his tear-filled eyes? And what was the meaning of the crumpled papers he would bundle into my father’s arms whenever we parted, with titles like The Termites of Maiwand, and Hugh Farringdon on the Chess Board and Beards in the Bayeux Tapestry? But I never asked, and I will never know. 

At that time, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would slow blink and flick my eyes upwards, as though they had just asked if I believed in Father Christmas. What I really wanted to be was a poet, but there was no way anyone would ever hear me say those words. Yet this was what the Ted of Avontown claimed to be, openly, brazenly I felt, especially considering he hadn’t published anything. He gave readings every Thursday night in the ruins of the old Abbey. In the summer, his words were drowned out by outdoor drinkers under fairy lights and polluting skies; in the winter, all the hollows of his face were illuminated by the eerie lighting that had been installed to pick out the edges of the brutalised chapel walls. 

3

That day, the one when I’d not had time to clean my teeth, The Ted was waiting for us outside as usual, hands cupped around God knows what (an acorn, a rat’s tooth, a tangle of sheep’s wool and barbed wire). I stumbled out of the car, my shoelaces whipping around my ankles like animatronic bindweed, lashing me into a clumsy stagger, before one of them snapped, releasing me to the tarmac, the pads of my hands taking on grit and leaving behind shreds of skin in exchange. 

I was surprised that my cheeks grew hot: I was blushing in front of the Ted of Avontown. Did poets stumble? Did they wear shoes with laces? Perhaps I had tripped myself into an embarrassment that would rule me out of bardic eligibility forever. Even though Ted was someone who only self-identified as a poet, in that moment, it seemed he held the keys to troubadourship. 

The Ted of Avontown stood, his hands still cupped, his protractor-sharp hips jutting out, and said, ‘Here, I think I’ve got a spare one of those.’ He drew a rodent-nibbled piece of string from his palm. I accepted it from him with a trembling hand. 

My Dad died before the Ted of Avontown. But the Ted of Stroud died before my Dad. That meant there was only one Ted at Dad’s funeral, and that was the Ted of Avontown. Apart from my son, of course: Ted, who was nine at the time. He was enchanted by the tall man who stood in the graveyard after the service, under the shaggiest yew. Young Ted pointed with a twirling finger at the Ted of Avontown, and asked me, ‘Who’s that, and what’s he holding?’ 

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