Cricked Neck

This piece is related to Crap Education, it is about Micky as a less-than strong swimmer and how that led to me getting a cricked neck.
Micky came to Lowestoft, he brought with him his oldest two children, Rupert and Kelly. They came to visit me in my house in Pakefield.
Geoff was there. Geoff had been living there for some time, after I had suggested that he might begin a road to good fortune from my house in Pakefield, following his road to destitution from my flat in London.
On the first evening that Micky and the children were there I went to bed early; tomorrow was going to be another day. Geoff meanwhile had other ideas. Geoff is an insomniac and he foresaw a beautiful evening, listening to music, smoking and drinking with his old friend Micky, everything would be so cool, so beautiful.
Geoff put on his best orange Japanese kimono and wooden sandals on his feet, sandals that consisted of a flat plane to place your foot on, and two high wooden blocks between that and the floor. They were so beautiful, so comfortable, so spiritual! He had bought them in Japan.
On the CD player he put some weird Japanese whistling and creaking music, and then settled down for a night of it, so far as Geoff was concerned that would be a real night, finishing at dawn or not finishing at all.
Micky was worried. He had his children to take care of. But he felt it would sound too weak, too pathetic, to do what I had just done and say: I’m off to bed. He did not have my advantage – if that’s what it can be called – of spending some months sharing a dwelling with Geoff.
Micky stuck with it until about 3 a.m. and then could keep up his cool-guy pretence no longer. He went to bed. Geoff stayed drinking and playing Japanese wailing sounds too loud all night through. I periodically woke up and heard them.
The following day Micky was more tired than he would have liked. He took his children to the beach while I tidied the house.
Shortly after they had gone to the beach Micky rushed in to the house, in the lumbering sort of way he did, and said in an urgent tone, ‘You’re a strong swimmer, can you come down to the beach, the children are drifting out to sea in the rubber dinghy and I am not confident enough at to go out and rescue them.’
I jumped out of my trousers and put on some swimming shorts and sandals and a T-shirt so as not to get too cold in the sea while Micky explained, ‘I’ve asked some people on the beach to keep and eye while I fetch help and they’ve said they’ll raise the alarm if anything happens, I’m just not confident enough as a swimmer to go in and bring them back, I could end up in more trouble’.
We ran down to the beach. I waded into the water and swam out to the dinghy where the children were happily paddling about with a small oar each.
‘We’re all right, you don’t need to rescue us, you can swim back to the beach’, they insisted cheerily and breezily.
But they were not all right because had that cheap plastic dinghy deflated, they would have been way, way out of their depth in a cool grey swirling sea.
Swimming with my legs and pushing gently with the palms of my hands, I nudged the boat back to the shore.
As we got to within child-wading depth, a wave tumbled in and threw the boat and the children onto the shore in a bundle, to their shrieks of laughter. It turned me head over heels in the melee and I twisted my neck as my head hit the shingle, with what seemed to me like a wrenching sound.
The neck was going to be alright, it was just a bit noticeable whenever I moved too jerkily and I needed to hold it to one side for much of the time.
In the conservatory of the Jolly Sailors that evening the atmosphere was not relaxed, Micky was exhausted and kept apologising to me for the neck, which I assured him was nothing, Geoff had been drinking too much and was becoming angrily overbearing as he tended to after a few drinks, and I was trying to hold it all together with my head on one side.
‘You’re too stressed’, Geoff announced with a serious and staring look, ‘Too intense, you need to cool it more.’
‘Yeah, Geoff, too stressed, you’re right. Too bloody right!’

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