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Monthly Archives: August 2016

SAIL – Ropes, beaches & butterfly catchers

27 Saturday Aug 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Chapter 3.

Tom likes walking along the beach. He also likes walking to the beach. He likes the smell of the earth in the woods that you have to walk through to get to it.

Tom has been going to the beach regularly now for almost a year. Well, 7 months. And a week. 
The main entrance to the wood that leads to the beach is just at the end of The Avenue – a road full of big houses that back on to the Golf Club.

His dad goes to the Golf Club – but only if someone invites him. Tom doesn’t go through the main entrance to the wood though. Tom cuts across the main road and in through a gap at the roadside.

The wood is big; the tree canopy high and the air is cool; and there is a big crater-like bit in the middle of it that with a bit of work could be something amazing – like a moon station or A Knight’s Lair.

There is an old camp made out of branches and bits of scrap stuck together into a dusty criss-cross thing full of shadows – but he doesn’t know who built it: it has been there forever.

There are tall peeling white trees growing up the sides of the dip. The trees have grown over in an arch, tunnelling the light down to a small bright torch-like circle of light at the end.

Tom likes the idea that there is a magic land where dragons might live or some such thing through the arch and into the circle: but not really.

At the other side of the wood, furthest from the golf course, there is a break in the bank and the barbed wire. Once through the gap, the earth gets sandier and the thicker trees transform to pine ones, their needles like a spongy mattress on the ground where the earth turns to sand.

Tom likes the way the smell of the air changes on a windy day as the sea breeze blows through into the woods.
 Salty pine.

Tom likes Pine trees. The other word they use for them – con-if-er-ous – Tom has to break down into pieces and say slowly, otherwise he tends to rush it and say carnivorous, which is silly as the trees are hardly going to eat a hamburger or sausages or something. But then again there are carnivorous plants that eat flies.

The air in the woods gets this weird rubbery whiff every now and then – which really throws him. This is a recent thing though – last week a boy at school showed him a condom: took it out of the pack and blew it up like a balloon. Tom tried to do the same but he suddenly felt a bit funny putting his mouth over the bit where you’re apparently meant to put your willy in. Then his lips and fingers got in a muddle and the ribbed tube of puffed air fired off around the playground, frootling and parping as it went.
 The wood sometimes smells like condoms.

The beach is the best place, ever. It is long and curves around a bit of land that sticks out into the sea: a promontory as the local national Trust map describes it.

The bit of land used to have a big house on the end of it but it’s been pulled down now with only bits of old rubble left.
Tom knows because he climbed up there once.

Apparently, in the Second World War, a spy lived there and used to send messages to German U Boats with a torch or something. He was ugly and had a strange wart on his nose that people couldn’t help but look at apparently – but he was caught and put in jail or shot – or so the old man with the Labrador that Tom sometimes meets on the beach says anyway.

They talked a bit once. Tom hadn’t meant to. It was just that Ceasar and the man’s Labrador started doing the sniffing thing to each other and Tom and the man ended up standing by them as they sniffed. Then Caesar decided to jump on the man’s dog: which had all got a bit embarrassing. So they chatted to cover their embarrassment: well Tom’s at least.

Some days (increasingly), the beach looks like someone’s kicked their shopping down it .
 Once it looked like someone had actually kicked Tom’s mum’s shopping down the beach because, on closer inspection, the various wrappers, tins, packets, empty drink bottles, and the fish finger and cereal boxes,  were exactly the same as the stuff Tom’s mum buys – exactly the same – except for the rotting dead seagull; and the half a flip flop, the discarded bike tyre: and a pair of broken funny glasses with the big nose moustache and eyebrows: but exactly the same otherwise.

Tom doesn’t only walk on the beach with Caesar. There is a bit of the beach furthest away that he goes to on his own. It is a funny bit of beach. All flat and quiet. He never sees anyone there. Which is fine. He gets to think about stuff: like Kathy, and the stealing problem; Nigel’s mother; and other stuff: like his bike being un-cool.

Today, Tom is thinking about Mrs. Goodrich, ready salted crisps and the school caretaker sorting that thing out with those boys who’d been pushing him around. Oh, and he’s picturing himself kissing Kathy but with the body of Daredevil. And perhaps with his blindness as well. That would make all of his senses super sensory. So the kiss would be to the power of like 100.

He kicks the shell in front of him. Tom likes the way shells leave soft shapes in the sand that just melt away; that disappear as if by magic.

He is on the special part of the beach today. The sea is very quiet and flat.
 He walks a few yards and comes up to the Tie. The Tie is his name for a great piece of heavy rope that comes up the beach out of the sea and ends in a huge knot tied to a huge wizened old peg in the ground.

It seems like a million years old, gnarled and polished. The knobs on it look a bit like Nigel’s stones.

The Tie is a kind of distance marker for Tom’s mood. If he’s slightly ticked off he might walk as far as it but no further. If he’s in a massive funk he usually walks straight past the Tie, for a little way at least, until he gets bored and turns back.

Today is no different. But Tom is feeling a little strange today.

He doesn’t like the way everything about his life seems so… so flat today. Not that he doesn’t feel that way most days but today he cant’s seem to fly away from his own head.
His daydreams normally do the job. A small dream of pop stardom, Minecraft fame or maybe being really cool and Nigel’s mum thinking he was cool perhaps; 
Or just being on a flying dragon for a bit of a laugh, though of course they didn’t exist: not in East Anglia anyway; something like that usually sorted things. Just not today.

Sometimes he day-dreamed that he could make time stop so that he could go and kiss anyone he wanted too. But he used to get lonely very quickly in that dream; and anyway, everyone’s eyes reminded him of his dad’s eyes so he didn’t stay in that dream very long. He only really began the dream to be able to kiss Kathy without her pushing him away. It just went wrong and got a bit lonely when he could kiss everyone. He liked the idea of kissing Kathy. And the girl in the sweet shop perhaps.

While Tom is thinking of kissing, something happens that really surprises him.

As he walks back past the Tie he stops.

He looks at its gnarled knobs and the huge rope. As he does so a big fat fist of an idea, like Sandman’s huge sandy hand in Spidey 2, seems to punch him in the head. BOOM.

He will undo The Tie. Yeah. Why not.

He studies the huge flaxen rope for a bit. He wonders whether he can undo it. Tom is a little shocked by this sudden need to untie the Tie but he isn’t quite sure why. He leans down and touches the rope. He likes the way it feels under his fingers. The rope is very thick and frayed but it’s really soft to the touch. The underside is all slick with green slimy stuff and hangy-down green bits.

Tom flicks through the reference book in his head: algae. Or Zombie slime.
 He sees that some water and some grains of sand have clung to his sleeve where he’s reached around and under the rope. He pulls the sleeve up and tries to dust them off. The grains stick to his fingers, so he stops. They remind him of breadcrumbs.

He takes the end of the rope and pushes and pulls it a little: the knot is very loose. It slips through easily. He pulls the rope through, unwinds the last hitch and looks at the rope now undone laying across his left arm and into his right hand. The rope is really thick: as thick as his leg. But it is surprisingly light. He tosses it up in the air and it seems to almost float back down. He puts the rope on the floor, laying it alongside the Tie.

Tom looks at the Tie (though having untied it he wonders whether he now needs to change its name).

He finds himself hypnotized by it. The wood is veined and lined, like a long, wise face: a long ancient face in the sand. A tree face: like the long faces of the old trees in that film. He reaches out and runs his hand over its smooth surface. He rolls his hand into a soft fist, pushing it into and around the deep worn dent where the rope had been rubbing and pulling against it.

Tom finds himself wishing that he was a rope sometimes. Then he could just untie himself: well, the ‘himself’ that he doesn’t really like: the ‘himself’ that lives in that house with those parents and that sister: and that life. Tom will check his life to see if there’s any evidence of beautifully worn bits like on the Tie. Nope.

Being a rope doesn’t really fit into his secret set of super powers but that doesn’t matter as he is thinking of binning them anyway since he overheard Kathy calling John a baby for wanting to be like Iron Man.

He suddenly feels bored and hungry. Breadcrumbs. Fish Finger breadcrumbs. The rope: a long fishing line to great big fish fingers. Fish Fingers as big as ships. Fish & Ships.

With this expanding idea  in his head, Tom shuffles off down the beach.

His mind wanders. It wanders over to Nigel’s mum. It did that a lot at the moment. Mrs. Goodrich also pops up again. He is feeling that funny feeling. He thinks that it is the same feeling that makes his sister want to meet boys: dangerous boys that she knows their parents won’t like – boys who wear expensive trainers while living in very small houses with their mum.

He kicks the next shell that comes up in his path. It skittles across the sand until its edge catches end on, turning sharp left into the soap-suds sea.

Tom walks on.

Unseen, the rope far behind him laying across the beach stirs. A million quadrillion grains of sand dislodged by his untying, shoal around the hidden length of the rope snaking in through a slot in the rolling grey back of the sea to some dark deep place beyond.

The rope’s end moves, a few millimeters perhaps? towards the sea’s edge – or perhaps not even a millimeter – maybe. But none the less, move it does. Withdrawing.

 

 Odd Jobs

‘So unlike his Grandfather’ Michael had thought when he first made the connection between the boy and The Old Man.


At first Michael had thought the boy was just a born victim: one of those people that just seem to walk through life with a ‘kick me’ sign permanently attached to their back.


His hand traced across the bench surface to the edge of the paper towel where the spoon sat attentively, his distorted face caught momentarily in its shining upturned bowl.

Pursuit was something that Michael knew a lot about; the sound of it, the smell of it; the sheer lung bursting ‘mnng’ of it. Michael had often been the pursuer: and he was very good at it.

Eventually though he had become the pursued.


One day, with little warning, his conscience had turned on him, wild eyed and angry, dripping with such bitter vengeance that to spend even the smallest passage of time in the quiet black silence of his own company terrified him. Once started it had rarely let up; harrying him first through his sleeping and then through his waking hours.

It was only after many years of self-inflicted solace, willing himself to face the anger and shame naked, without distraction or excuse, that he had finally become able to spend much time alone and happily so.
 Michael had originally come here, to the school, to hide: his escape not from some act of criminality or legal wrongdoing – his country had demanded and he had obeyed – but from the product of his service. He had to untie the knots that his acts had sheeted through his heart and soul.

He had thought that the monotony of the school: the odd jobs: sweeping up the rubbish: fence painting amid the smell of the freshly petrol-cut playing field grass; dispensing acid blue tablet after tablet into each urinal every other day; wrestling the twin brush polisher and its acrid smear across empty parqued corridors; light bulb maintenance: quiet sanctuary found in desperately dull and repetitive acts.

Therein lay their beauty he had thought, their simple powerful attraction. Perhaps the monotony of these acts, the very act of becoming one of the invisible people undertaking the relentless and inane maintenance of things unseen; someone whose everyday was as far from his previous incarnation as one could of thought possible; that would save him. Save His Soul: S.O.S.

Blue Tablets. Urinals. That reminded him: there were some particularly nasty biro scratchings that he had to remove from a cubicle wall in the Girls’ Toilets. Girls were so different to boys in so many ways but both seemed to become one in their shared cruelty. Funny thing graffiti. Seemed a bit old fashioned now, hiding your own bitter insecurities by scratching some nasty words about someone else on a wall. These days Children teetering on the barbaric edge of puberty were far happier txting cruelty, circling a chat room or blocking and burning faceless avatars in digital hyper space. Old school graffiti seemed almost courageous in the face of the digital cowardice of the average teenage troll.

The graffiti referred to Kathy: the girl that the Davis boy hung around with. It would be removed before break-time, a small act of damage limitation. Kathy was worth protecting, if only for her rare taste in boys.

He had become so used to seeing the Davis boy alone. He was quite unusually taken aback the day he first saw them together. Michael thought that she would be quite overwhelming even to a young boy of exceptional maturity; and the Davis boy was about as far from that as you could get.

How the Davis boy interpreted her was beyond Michael; but so were many things.
 To Michael the girl seemed highly contradictory in her character: both tomboyish and yet at the same time very physically self-aware: feline almost.
 He also noted that though in some ways she struck him as street smart and worldly, in others she also seemed to be, consciously at least, devoid of any idea whatsoever as to why her chemicals and the boy’s might be wrestling so violently in the ever-decreasing space between them.

 

 Chapter 4.

Tom loves teatime. It’s a great time of day; though a little weird sometimes.

Tom walks into a kitchen that smells of fish fingers. He loves fish fingers.
He puts his earlier fish finger musings down to telepathy, one of the many superpowers that he hides from the world, along with his human form’s Silver-Surfer like ability to merge like molten shiny metal into the surface of the bath water and his ability to invisibly extend his stride to superhuman lengths, thus rendering him able to cover great stretches of ground while outwardly looking to anyone watching him as if moving at a normal human pace.

He has recently downgraded his cosmic ability to harness electric energy to sub super level 3.
 He had originally thought that his harnessing powers were far greater than could be explained by science. But, having taken Dr. Reed’s ‘empirical’ (February New Word No.17) approach to the science of super-humanity, a closer inspection of his socks revealed that they contained a far greater percentage of man-made fibre than his mum led him to believe. They were in fact supercharged conductors of electro energy all by themselves. His Intel Outside.

As if to prove the point, his socked foot scuffs the kitchen lino as his hand brushes against the oven door firing a static charge across his hair and teeth. There you go.

Fish Fingers.
The essential and only rule regarding Fish Fingers is that they are super-crunchy; sometimes potentially a little burnt on the outside (which requires grilling them for 4 minutes longer than it says on the packet).

The achieving of this super crunchiness inevitably leads to shrinkage of the actual finger of fish meat itself which in turn creates the much prized ‘gaps’ into which the condiment of choice can be applied.
When said piece of crunchy fish finger with shrunken fish stick gets swooshed around the plate on the end of a fork these ‘gaps’ collect the condiment of choice (ketchup in Tom’s case) surrounding the finger of fish inside.

Breaking the Fish Finger into three pieces is recommended as breaking it in half just makes for a high level of disappointment after just two crunchy bites.

The crunchy, crumb-iness is a key part of the whole fish finger moment.

The combination of slightly spongy fish stick and over murdered breadcrumb case, when chewed into one-ness a few times makes for a really toasty mash. Top-banana-full-enjoyment is achieved by allowing your tongue to turn the mash around for a while to get the most of the burnt-crumb-ketch-oven-fish-tray-ketch-bread-board- ketch-crumb-fish-burnt-fish taste before swallowing. Nice.

Tom shuffles into the bench seat at the breakfast counter. He does not understand why they call it a counter because counters are what they have in shops; but his Dad says that it is the American style of living. His dad loves America. He watches all of the American forensic cop shows as well as a healthy assortment of ‘supernatural-sleuth-meets-child- prodigy-who-becomes-a-Medium’ shows.
 His mum calls it ‘getting his NETFIX’

His Dad sometimes imitates the voices of the tough cops when on the phone to his friends. But not only are most of the really, really tough CSI/Medium/Cop people on telly women: but also he isn’t actually very good at sounding like the men ones he can remember – which makes Tom feel embarrassed when his friends or Nigel’s mum come around to visit.

Nigel’s mum doesn’t say anything but his dad usually ends up sounding a bit like the bloke with the funny accent at the Post Office (who is always drunk; apparently).

His mother, still in her work uniform but now wearing slippers, moves about the kitchen. Tom drops his arms into his lap and then puts his face sideways on the counter top. It feels cool and nice against his cheek.

The smell of the Formica reminds him of the way his skin smelt when he had chickenpox; a sort of sweet funny smell; like John’s Nan’s talc. The reason he knows what John’s Nan’s talc smells like is because they spilt it all over the floor by accident while nosing around in her bathroom cabinet last year.
 He can see some tiny grains of sand on the formica surface. They must have come off his sleeve. He feels for the wet bit. It is dry now; almost. He blows towards the grains and watches as they tumble across the Formica surface.
His chest makes a funny wheezy noise at the end of the blow.
 Tom looks through his arms at the floor. He moves his head to one side as his mum’s feet scuff past. He hates her slippers.

Nigel’s mum wears shoes that are brown or black with pointy toes. Tom finds the way that she walks in them really nice. He thinks her ankles must be weak though because her legs seem to wobble every time she takes a step; which must be painful or uncomfortable. It also makes her bottom move from side to side a lot.

His mum’s ankles never wobble. Not because they’re all big. She doesn’t have ankles like the old ladies at the bus-stop, all puffy and wrapped up in a big bandage.
 Tom’s Mum is young really. She’s just got ‘not skinny’ ankles.

Wonder Woman has big shiny wristbands that deflect bullets and rockets. Nigel’s Mum has ankles.They are like the ones he sees on the women in the fashion magazines at the hairdresser where Tom’s mum goes to once a month.

The Vicar at the Christening they all had to go to recently – no Kathy and therefore rubbish – had said that there is a reason for everything in this earthly life.

So perhaps his Mum’s ‘not skinny’ ankles are a clue: to something.

Tom imagines that he has another mother, a real mother, who is an alien; and that she has left him with his Earthly Mum and Dad (agents of the Empire barely disguised as human) but only until she comes to claim him again on the death of his real father, the Grand Galactic Vizier, at which point Tom will take up his rightful place as heir, ascend to the throne and ultimately and majestically lead the Empire in a big Universal punch-up with some rather ugly aliens.

In this other world – a ghetto waste-scape that looks a little like an American version of Ipswich after a few bombs and the odd fire – everyone has Supercharged Subarus that convert into x wing fighters; which is quite useful.

This is all highly classified information of course.
 Tom remembers Kathy telling John that she thought that him wanting to be Iron Man or Captain America was childish so Tom tended to keep his intergalactic-ness to himself; mostly.
 His mum puts the fish fingers and peas in front of him. The fish finger joy backed up by a number of peas (straight from frozen) means Tom stays quite chirpy until the last pea explosion (you place the pea in the middle of your tongue and press the tongue upwards until the pea effectively pops with a little ping of pea-ness).
 Suddenly, Tom doesn’t want to be here. He wants to go to his bedroom.

At times like these, when his bubbly balloon suddenly pops and flops inside him, he notices that she watches him, his mum: looks at him in a strange almost otherworldly way.
 Not otherworldly as in the alien woman in Voyager episode last night. That would be weird. That woman was from the Phargel Constellation, had streaked blue hair, wears a short skirt and has an inappropriately tight top of strange scales that edge round her ribs and only half cover her ‘not small’ breasts. (Tom felt very grown up when he said or thought the word ‘breasts’.)

No; his mum just looked Otherworldly; like she was looking at him from the bottom of a bath full of water.

Tom could see her mouth making words to herself and pulling faces while she jabbed at the peas that had escaped into the sinkhole.

He recognised what she was doing because her face looked like his felt when he was having conversations with Kathy in his head – only realizing that his face was moving because people on the bus were staring at him.

The Lost Hours between a chirpy, fish finger scoop teatime and the nine o’clock news tended to pass unnoticed – hence their name. Tom spends them in random model making – a killer combination of coloured brick, old tat and mixed kit pieces – school-book leafing, cunning parallel universe Minecraft interjections (imagined) and daydreaming of course – nose pressed firmly to the varnish card cover of his science work book; though as the Lost Hours are by their very nature not recorded or measured you’d be hard put to piece together exactly what went on at any given time

The games console that he got last Christmas lies in a pasta pile of leads and controls to the right of his bedside cabinet. Being cheap, it broke within two days of him getting it so he just pretends that he is another ‘thumb crazy computer game kid wasting his life away, losing the power of both speech and physical movement in the process‘ as the newspaper his dad reads had it pegged.

The short walk upstairs is pretty uneventful though somewhere in his head he is vaguely aware that being 40 or so sock scuffs into the journey he shouldn’t touch anything metal. By the time he gets to the top of the stairs this brain wave has been over-ridden by the occupational hazard of his having to open his bedroom door to get in it.
 The massive static shock from the door handle makes him jump, as always.

Tom opens the door and looks at his room. The room doesn’t look like much. A box. It looks like a room someone has made up to pretend that a boy like Tom might live there but not really; which is true in a way.

All of his comics are tidied into a pile on the white and once flat packed desk that he had helped his dad put together. (Tom’s dad lost one of the plugs that held the side panel tight and Tom found it and his Dad squeezed his shoulder and he half put his arm around him until he stopped.)

The only computer in the house that is any cop is in his Dad’s office in the spare room. The computer in Tom’s room is really a glorified word processor from his Dad’s shop. It doesn’t have any graphics packages to speak of or anything like that and there are sooty edges around the input slots where it used to sit in his Dad’s stock room sucking up the dust from the furniture foam in the Returns room. (There was a lot of dust, as Bernie, his dad’s old and very wheezy, puffer-wielding warehouse man would tell you at the slightest opportunity.)

So the computer in Tom’s room just sits there, not doing terribly much.
The desk was meant to be a way of helping him do more grown up stuff: a place to do his homework and ‘pursue interests’ he might be, well, interested in: like advanced model making, learning a new (Earthling) language. It should have also included Googling really difficult words or funny pictures – but that would require a computer that worked.)

Tom never really got further than reading his comics when he came to his room. He certainly didn’t do homework. He hasn’t told his Mum that he owes about 20 bits of it to Sausage Beard.

In the back of his mind somewhere, Tom reckons (though ‘hopes’ might be a better word) that something really monumental is going to happen – something that will make the world forget completely that he owes any homework.
Maybe the stalking alien pod robots will arrive in a big bang of huge explosions and cause so much chaos as they chase people around the planet that everyone will forget everything:

His Mum and Dad will forget that they don’t like each other.
 His Dad will forget to take them to a Harvester for his mum’s birthday and take them somewhere brilliant and different instead.

Kathy will forget that Tom tried to kiss her in the woods.

And Tom will forget that he thinks he is rubbish.

The second hand on his plastic non-digital clock ticks noisily. 
It starts to get dark, as it always does about now.
 In the book Tom is reading in English the writer said that ‘darkness fell’ which they all though was a bit random; like darkness was an old person or someone with too much shopping.
 Tom also thinks it’s a funny thing to say: but it makes sense in a way because it is like someone drops a big blanket over the world; a big blanket that falls in super slo-mo.

When he switches on his table lamp the walls do this weird thing – where they change from hard white plaster with posters and stuff stuck on them to molten lava or big dark blankets that seem to move a bit when you look at them out of the corner of your eye.
He picks up a comic.

He hears them downstairs now; his parents. They always try to keep their voices down but it never works. They always end up shouting in the end. Calling each other names.
 He knows when his Mum is upset because he can hear her slippers scuff, scuff, scuffing around from one side of the house to the other: she has a habit of walking from the lounge to the kitchen, turning around and walking back into the sitting room because she has remembered something else that she wanted to say to his Dad.

His Mum is scary when she gets mad. She uses words like some people use poison darts or ninja throwing stars. Maybe Tom’s mum is a ninja master of flying dagger words (Tom loves that film; sneakily watched it at Nigel’s house when his Mum was out).

When he told his Aunt Bea that when his parents argued his mum sounded like someone from one of those legal eagle or high court programmes on the telly, Bea had said that his Mum was naughty to do that.
 Bea didn’t know this but Tom overheard her having a go at his mum on the telephone telling her to ‘get over herself’ and to stop it – ‘you’re trying make him feel bad – like he’s stupid – and you know it. So stop it – its wrong’.

That seemed pretty fair to Tom – if she was picking on him because she knew he couldn’t keep up or match her, that was like bullying – like the bullies knowing that you can’t run fast – or pronounce a certain kind of word – or understand their riddles.
 His dad is a bit weird. But he is not stupid.

There was a time when Tom and Jaqui, his big sister, would still have bothered to sit downstairs during one of their parents’ fights, even though all of his Mum’s walking in and out of the room had never failed to make him feel a bit sick – like he was on a boat in a rough sea.

He puts the comic down on the desk after a few minutes: Creepy Tales. It is an American horror comic. It is brilliant: short stories of people who have boarded ghost trains and planes, fallen into the twilight zone, woken up with wings, played cards with the devil and some such.

Tom slump slides further into the chair at his desk. One finger reaches across the desk and catches the edge of the small plastic bag – drawing it back across the surface towards Tom’s face. The same finger rummages ina plastic fold and drags out a shining flat square from its interior.

He smells it first, the acrid plastic and ink: his new CD purchase. Genius. His previous weekend’s purchase.

Tom couldn’t resist taking it out of the bag, holding it up to his nose and thumbing the sleeve edge a lot on the bus home, the security sticker seal yet to be broken.
 He used to think that having a new CD was brilliant because it made him interesting. Until the rip download kids laughed at him. Ripping free music was all well and good but if you don’t have a proper computer and no smart phone, well, CDs it is!

He thought McFly rocked. He had planned the day perfectly. The purchase was made at approximately 11.15am on Saturday morning from the Resale/Second Hand music shop (the only half groovy place in his town, England, Earth and the Universe).

This allowed 15 minutes for the journey home and then a full one and a half hours of appreciation before lunch.
The final act – placing the CD in the player (an old one of his sister’s) – took place only once you had checked the disc for scratched messages from either the band or the record label and made sure there were absolutely no smudges, scratches or bits on it.

Tom’s dad had found him squinting at a CD sleeve and started banging on about the lost treasure and pleasure of the record sleeve – how you took home the sacred vinyl  – unwrapped it and tapped its heavily printed cardboard sleeve – how, you’d get into the real detail – the small print – of how all the credits in the sleeve note had to be read in full and memorized – The band members, the catchphrases and in- jokes, their instruments, track listings, track duration, guest musicians by track.
Then there was the producer, engineer, assistants, coffee maker, clothing designer credits, studio/s (usually including a re-mastering at somewhere windswept and international like Montreux or L.A) the record company, the distribution company, rights reserved, the ‘with thanks’ listings with funny bits, the names of the tour manager, roadies, lighting company, haulage and equipment shipping(live albums only): every last detail to be read hundreds of times; searching for a new piece of information to be shared, something in the background of a picture unnoticed, the labyrinth of hidden jokes to be discovered.

Information was power his father said.
 Tom didn’t have the heart to point out that that was what Google was for.

Nigel has an i-phone AND i-watch of course so all of this was lost on him. He just downloaded. And Tom was at least one working printer away from printing out the sleeve notes, even if he had wanted to.

Jaqui just listens to the music. She reckons reading writing on the packaging is for losers.

As Tom studies the small writing it collapses into a big squeeze of black scratchy lines and blurry pictures.

He raises his head from the desk.

Umpft umpft umpft baa da da umpft umpft umpft baa da da umpft umpft umpft worp worp worp wa wa wa wa umpft umpft umpft


The banging tune seeps through the plaster-board wall between his bedroom and Jaqui’s. He knows it’s plaster board with an echoey gap because he had once tried to screw a large volcano clay model of his attached to a bit of chip board to the wall with his dad’s hammer. The hole stayed a hole for about a month.

It’s D Wayne or R. Kayne, Kanye K, Canned Key Or Key West pumping out of Jaqui’s room: which is good.

Not because he really likes Who Wayne Whatever.
 He doesn’t really know anything about him apart from the picture on Jaqui’s wall.
 It’s good because the general noise helps to drown out the voices coming from downstairs.

He gets up and turns towards his bed. Tom makes his body go straight like he’s been hit by a small caliber, high velocity bullet from a gun. The Sniper’s Choice.
 He falls face down onto his bed pretending to fall from a really high building, like the fat guy with the beard in CSI the other night. His face presses into the cool pillow.

Maybe he should learn to be a stuntman; spend all of his time falling off really tall buildings, leaping bikes over canyons and living in America somewhere surrounded by comics and being able to buy Frothing Blood capsules any time he wants to. He lets his arms and legs go limp.

He wonders if there is an exam in Stuntmanship. Or Stuntpersonship – Mrs. Field’s would never allow an exam for ‘anything-man-ship’ in her school.
He listens to the sound of his own breathing for a bit. It sounds funny, like the sea. He thinks about the Tie for a bit. Maybe he should go back tomorrow and tie the rope back on.

His mind wanders to Kathy.

He wants to think about her in that way that makes him feel nice: but he just thinks of how she flicked his ear really hard as he walked down the corridor to Double Maths and then ran off laughing when the shock made him turn right, crash, into a locker and cut his lip.

 

 Memories

Michael’s eyes pull focus, the bright wrap of air in front of him falling away into a featureless bleached blanket.


It’s nice here. In the white nothingness .
He waits for his mind to play out any distinct memories of his own beginnings with girls across the white screen in his head. Small wisps of things flitted in and out of the edge of his consciousness. Always so difficult to recall these things he thought.

Michael spent a lot of time butterfly chasing memories across his subconscious, net flailing this way and that. He would, though rarely, sweep one towards him, just for a moment, hold it up towards the light, breathless for just a moment, before it quickly and silently slips the net and is gone.

These rare moments came in all manner of formats: a smell, a song, a flash of fabric, a passing movement, hair raised skin, a texture, a play of light refracting.
 A few skittish recollections shuttered up inside his head: of clumsy fumbling; fibs and bravado; presents promised; the slipshod clumsiness of pretending to know how things worked.

None of them are tangible enough to grasp and feed into the process running in his head – so he backs out of the realm of the butterfly catcher, and the wrap of white nothing comes back into focus.
 Graffiti. Michael believes that you can discover a lot about someone who indulges in graffiti: the highly personal and cruel kind of graffiti at least.

He had little to comment on the graphic vagaries or tribal tags that were regularly spewed across the side of railway tracks, tube tunnels, and, curiously, the walls that ran behind Supermarket.


He had daubed the odd wall himself. His neck ran hot with shame at the memory of some of it. He had become quite adept at hanging cruel ridicule on a wall, for all to see.

Spiteful; mean; spiky words fashioned to cut down a person where they stood. Or simply words set to inflame the simple minds of those most useful to his bright, all-white cause – those quickest to anger and confrontation.

There was no artisan skill, no crafting of Michael’s art. He simply carried the urge to render petty hatreds on any vertical surface he could find with him, from school wall to garrison latrine to public podium.


(It did not matter where in the world he peddled his trade: every encounter with them – foreigners – seemed somehow to hone the ugly little crusts inside him, and the twisted anthropology of his own superiority.)

He had found it a very short and simple walk from a wall to a pamphlet and from the pamphlet to a website forum and from there to the hustings.

As time passed, all those things that sat strangely in Michael, had begun to draw together:

To say Michael had a fragile sense of self and a troubled soul was a remarkable understatement – and there were a few things vying for top spot in the Why stakes:

his deeply buried insecurity, teased nicely into shape by his beautiful, elegant yet feckless mother – a woman who slashed the spiritual and emotional cord between them at exactly the same moment as she dispensed with the physical one:

his Tom Brown schooldays concept of manliness pumped into him on the playing fields and prefect studies of his desperately provincial major-minor school

the small-minded provincial bigotries of his father, and the mediocrities that passed for Member’s at his father’s club; trading smug little sips of superiority across the lip of their gin glass:

the shocking banality of war and battle and the cruelties; the staggering abdication of humanity and conscience that glory and winning demands; and the faces that never leave you.

It was that young man, with all those things rattling around inside him that The Old Man had spied that day as he passed the town hall.

Michael, his straight military back racked high on his hips, the thirst of his recent tours of duty being quenched by a little bitter-soaked British summer evening.


The Old Man had walked up to Michael and handed him the Manifesto.

Michael remembered how he had immediately felt unnerved by The Old Man’s look: the man who would in no short time become his ‘boss’ and mentor: and he remembered how quickly he had set aside the small red light that flickered in the back of his mind in the fix of The Old Man’s green grey eyes.

Michael looks up and away from the memory, as if to control it; moving it back into a manageable form; back into its box.

He looks across the room towards the corner furthest from the door.

One erupting crack runs through the linoleum between him and the cupboard set in the far corner – tracing the ragged line of his gaze: its erupted edges revealing the equally erupted concrete beneath it; as if a rope running under the floor between him and the cupboard has been wrenched upwards to reveal a deeper truth.

 

 

JulianBorra©2016

AUTHOR’S NOTE: In the process of publishing this story to the blog I am altering the original text of the Kindle Version. The blog published version will be the most up to date edition.

SAIL – The End of the Beginning, CheeseBurgers & the Running Boy

19 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Screen Shot 2016-08-19 at 12.29.07.png

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

An un-ironed old man sits sipping cool lemonade, a thick-rimmed glass tumbler clutched tight to his advancing stomach.

His forehead, beaded and shadowed under the broad rim of his Borsalino hat, wrinkles intermittently, a rippling rumba to the words inside his head.

Tinny music from his ‘new wife’s’ old radio crackles the length of the garden, alarming two finches flitting amongst the branches.

The finches remind the old man of two bickering children he once knew: girlish voices at the edge of his memory echoing through the shadows of his beautiful and very English garden.

A Sandpiper percolates between the rhododendron bush and the large privet hedge edging the west side of the garden.

Its yellowish legs and white shock belly flash in the half-light as it engages in a near miss with a portly Collared Dove flying in the opposite direction at a dignified 40 degrees.

The sound of the sea reassures the old man, its salted rolls riding up against the sandy shoulders of his small stretch of quintessential East Anglian beach below, just beyond where the green lawn drops away from sight.

The vast stretch of water in front of him is deeper in its hue than he remembered, the cool grey-purple pitches of the North Sea now long gone, now replaced by the obsequious blue of the Mid North Atlantic.

Once there was a time when he could see clear across the water to the skies of Nordic myth: Asgard used to float somewhere above his not very wild blue yonder as the setting sun warmed his back.

Now the sun sets across the water in front of him – and a thin thread of land runs like a sore across his horizon and a scar on his future, a small grey speck at its middle.

Titusville: ridiculous name for a town. And only a few miles from the launching pad of ‘Man’s greatest journey’.

They thought going to the Moon was something. Lord knows what they were thinking about this. He certainly knows what he thinks. And as he thinks it, the very large and very American Collared Dove, currently sitting above him in his very British ash tree takes a shit on the shoulder of his unstructured linen travel jacket, as if to simultaneously both underline his thought and file an objection.

There was a time when, if there was one thing he knew, it was that the Britain he loved was ‘going to the dogs’. That seemed like such a distant certainty now.

He had taken to wearing the linen travel jacket everyday as a totem of their ‘journey’ to wherever in God’s name they were going.

He looks at the bird slop edging down his lapel.
 The old wives’ adage crosses his mind.

‘Good luck my arse?!’ he mutters as he dabs at the dropping with a well-worn silk hankie.

Good Luck? Not for him. Not bloody likely.

 

 

2 DAYS EARLIER

The salt water at the base of the sand bank pools in swirls of ribbed green grey, its job done.
 The tide, having yet again successfully deposited tons of deep-sea detritus along the East-Anglian coast line, is now withdrawing to its place further out to sea to contemplate its next tidal ‘dump’.

A passing silver and blue sweet wrapper plasters itself against an very old, very gnarled, very large wooden peg (more a mooring post if you will) set half way up the beach, whipped there by a snap of breeze.

A heavy wrist-thick flaxen rope runs up from the sea to spool around the wizened peg, shining green dreadlocks knitted into its length.

Two knots, like staring eyes in the long weather-worn face of the peg, look curiously over the top of sweet wrapper, as if reading it like a paper.

BraCao Ping screams the bright writing on the front of the wrapper. BraCao Ping: a testament to the fact that no one can make confectionary quite like an impoverished South American country can; especially one with tons and tons of gelatinous and potentially toxic animal by-product to play with.

The wrapper’s haphazard graphic flag of madness flutters against the peg.

A light grasp of Colonial Old Spanish and Barrio vernacular would tell you that BraCao Ping is a ‘rip ping of sweet hot thing for your mouth’.

‘A Unique Flavour & Texture’ the pack says.

BraCao Ping’s principal ingredient is synthesized in a laboratory to do a smart and passable impersonation of a citrus fruit (though which fruit no one was quite certain).

The wrapper grows restless. There’s a whole beach to play on. And the large peg suddenly seems a little…well, inert.

The cloud shadows roll across the beach, their sun-burned fringes flaring about them.
The wrapper sets off to follow them.

There was a time when the BraCao wrapper would have traveled almost six thousand miles to wash itself up on this beach – but not any more. Not even the half of it – or the half of the half of the half of it.

Funny old world really.

 

CHAPTER 1.

Cheeseburger. One of those words that starts to sound quite funny if you say it a lot.

Cheeseburger cheeseboorga chizzbirga chissbuwrga schisbuga, shisbugga, shisbugger. Bugger.

Tom likes cheeseburgers. He loves Nuggets. Loves Large Fries – especially the ones left right at the bottom of the cardboard sleeve because they are smaller and crispier and have more salt on them. The other good bit is that by the end of the box-bottom scrabble your fingers smell of friesnuggetfiletburgernoodlesbatterketchup – which means you can stick them under someone’s nose.

As Tom walks past the fast-food restaurant, he notices that the deep fat fry and plastic smell wafting across the pavement transforms itself to the sharp citrus medicinal shower product smell sliding out of the Chemist next door.
Weird.

His Dad takes him to the restaurant sometimes for a treat. It has bright red plastic seats and a fat old lady who sits at the serving counter looking utterly disappointed with life. The restaurant is called Ken’s Lucky Fried Chicken but written to look like KFC; which is a bit of a con.

And they don’t just do pretend Kentucky Fried Chicken. They do pretend burgers, nuggets, filets o fish and Chinese take away.

His dad says if Ceasar (their dog) ever goes missing he’ll know where to find him. Or order him. Tom walks on.

He kicks at an old Ready Salted Crisp Bag skipping along the pavement towards him. Its open end closes itself around the toe of his trainer. Tom tries to kick it off but it just rolls down further over his trainer. It now looks like his trainer has pulled a rather jaunty red hat on. He looks around. He doesn’t know anyone. Thankfully he is on his own.

Tom spends a lot of time alone funnily enough. He walks everywhere because his bike is always broken. (Not really; it just isn’t a very cool bike so he avoids riding it mostly). He walks up and down the high street quite often and likes to look in the shops. Sometimes he runs up and down the high street because the cool boys from school try and put him in the waste bin outside the Library.

Tom looks around him: his eyes flick from one side of the street to the other. The sound of the crisp bag rackling on the end of his foot keeps him alert. It reminds him that smart phones are the Great Satan: and that he doesn’t want to be on Youtube; again.

The boys and the waste bin thing is embarrassing: but not as embarrassing as when the girls from his school do it.
Which is why he spends a lot of time ‘not at the bus stop by the war memorial’ and ‘not outside the Sweet Shop’ where they tend to be.

Where Tom ’is’ is mostly defined by where he is not: in life anyway.

He likes to go to the beach near his house though. He goes there a lot. It is like a beach that he saw in an old film that his mum was watching one Saturday afternoon. His mum thinks beaches are ‘Romantic’. Tom was going to use the word romantic at school but he looked it up first, which was a good job; it turns out that it doesn’t mean what he thought it meant.

Romantic is a word Tom thinks but would never ever say: saying it would mean a ‘slapping’ from anyone close enough to deliver it: or Kathy holding him down and doing the ‘spit-dribble-on-to-your-face-almost-but-not-quite’ torture.

He likes the feeling of her sitting on him and he thinks she does too but then her face goes funny and she smacks his forehead as she climbs off him.

Tom likes Kathy. They kissed once – ish. She lives in a house just down the road.

He likes her a lot: fancies her maybe. She is nice looking in an eldest sister kind-of-way but not as in a weird fancy your own sister way but someone else’s sister.

Kathy makes him feel a bit weird in a nice way so, yup, definitely more than just a friend.

He does not have many other friends. John is alright in an OK way.
They like the same things, specifically doing nothing in particular.
John’s dad is very nice so they tend to talk about him most of the time. John seems to need to talk about his dad a lot (which is weird because, from what Tom can tell, his dad isn’t around that much so he can’t be that great). Tom does not like talking about anything much these days so it works out just fine. But John lives on the other side of the town and is only allowed to ride his bike over to see Tom once a week.

So he is a friend; just not a ‘see you tomorrow’, stones up at your window, back garden neighbour kind of friend.

There is also Nigel. Tom visits Nigel every now and then to keep his mum happy (Tom’s mum that is, though she says that it makes Nigel’s mum happy as well).

Nigel and his Mother live just two houses along. They used to live in a big house in the village near by.
Nigel likes to polish stones and has a stone polishing kit. Tom knows that Nigel is a bit soft. He has a soft face, and his hair is very shiny and thick. Tom imagines that’s what rich people’s hair is like. Nigel’s mum has thick shiny hair too. Maybe that is what the advert means when it says a ‘rich, lustrous sheen’: maybe it means that the shampoo gives you rich people hair.

Nigel goes to a private school up the road. Some of the boys from the town shove Nigel around a bit when he is at the sweetshop, stealing his money and giving him kicks.

Tom’s mum feels sorry for Nigel’s mother who seems to be in their kitchen a lot – and cry a lot. Tom thinks she looks like a sad angel; like she should be an actress or something.

She tends to smile at Tom while he eats his breakfast. She sometimes smiles in a scrunchy-eyed-squeezy-tear-down-the-face way which makes Tom feel a little odd.

Roger, the man who lives across the road from Tom’s house drives a Yellow and White sports car. It is really smart.

The man likes Nigel’s mum too. His wife doesn’t though.

Tom thinks this is a little unfair and he can’t see why she gets annoyed when her husband takes Nigel’s mother for a drive to ‘cheer her up’.

Roger thinks he is above everyone else on the estate: including his wife.

Tom heard him calling her ‘silly cow’ once but not in public. It was only because their kitchen window opens on to a small alley that runs through to the parade of shops: and you can hear everything if the window is open.

Tom doesn’t like Roger.

Tom does like chocolate: but he likes stuff like the walnut whips his Mum gets at Marks’s the most – and biscuits, though they make him feel a little bit sick sometimes.

His Aunt Bea taught him to bite the top off a Walnut Whip and then lick out the centre which should be creamy but isn’t because the ones they’ve got have been in the cupboard for a while

Some of the chocolates at the Corner Shop are pretty duff.

Mr. Sharpa the shopkeeper probably buys old stuff so half his bars are usually a bit spongy and not good for ritual eating.

That’s why Tom feels OK about stealing stuff from his shop: because it is old (though he did take a whole new Box of Rolos once).

It’s ‘a cry for help’ apparently, his stealing; or so the lady that turned up at the school to talk to him said.

He’d been caught stealing again (big deal – it was only the third time) and the school had asked him to talk to her: Mrs. Goodrich.

She is about the same age as his Mum. But she is alright. She doesn’t look all worn out like his mum. She has shiny hair like the woman in the advert and Tom looks at her legs a lot.

Between not very nice Roger, Nigel’s shiny hair and crying mother and Mr. Sharpa’s duff chocolate, life can get into a little bit of a tangle as far as Tom is concerned.

But there’s always Kathy.
And Mrs. Goodrich’s legs.

 

2.

Tom loves going into Mr Sharpa’s shop.

He loves the way it smells.
If he shuts his eyes, the smell of all the different sweets make mad coloured patterns behind his eye lids: like looking through his kaleidoscope, though the newspapers that smell like the compost bin at the end of the garden ruin it a bit.

Having a frozen statue kaleidoscope eyelids moment just inside the doorway of the shop isn’t always the best idea.

The fat bloke who smells of tea bags and waits until everyone has left the shop before he buys his newspaper walked straight into Tom, knocking him out of the way.
Three times by last counting.

The fat bloke always seems ‘preoccupied’: the polite word Tom’s Aunt Bea uses for when you’re lost in your own little world daydreaming or something.

Tom doesn’t think Fat Bloke gets just how brilliant it is to have sweets that smell like kaleidoscopes.

The shelves with all the magazines on make Tom a little dizzy sometimes.

He found out from Dr. Benson – or Dr. B as his mum calls her – that this is possibly because the varnishes used on the magazines to make them shiny have quite a lot of chemicals in them.

Maybe that’s why the grumpy bloke who smells of tea bags bumps into him.

Maybe all the chemical smells from the magazines he takes off the top shelf have gone to his brain.

Funny place the top shelf.
 Very mysterious. Tom is not quite sure exactly what is so bad to be kept up there, but given what seems to be freely available for the dumb boys with smart phones at school to look at and snigger about the magazine stuff must be REALLY bad.

When Tom tries to look up at the magazines on the top shelf his neck ends up at a funny angle and his head feels really, really heavy for some reason, which makes his neck hurt and gives him a headache.

He doesn’t mention that to Dr. B though: just because.

He doesn’t go near the shops at the moment.
Not that he wouldn’t like to given half a chance and an armed guard.

He’d like to go to the shop a lot more often: Mr. Sharpa has a young girl working for him who is really pretty and Tom would like to talk to her. Well, more than just the universal ‘Just those…oh and these. Ta. Thanks’ vocabulary of your average confectionary transaction, which was all he’d managed so far.

Not that he knows when she’d find the time to talk to him. She is always on her mobile ‘you know like yeah like, you’re kidding, never, I would! – laugh laugh – you never? – cackle caw – tosser’.
She’s boom tasty.

He noticed the other day that she walks home along his road, so she must live nearby. He knows that her brother is called Vince and he works in the Greengrocer on the high street.

Tom is definitely interested in a ‘I know she’s not Kathy but…’ kind of way, though he’s not exactly sure what being interested actually entails.

So, it’s not because he doesn’t want to go to the shop. He does. And it is not because of the stealing.

It’s the hitting that’s the problem.

Shops that smell of Chocolate and funny smelling magazine varnish should have a health warning as far as Tom concerned; especially running up to Guy Fawkes’ Night.

It started when West goose-necked him after he didn’t hand over the contents of his pockets immediately.

West was after the usual of course: an expensive smart phone, until he copped a load of Tom’s ancient Nokia hand me down.

So after that he just moved onto pilfering any loose DS games, actual money (mental), cool pens, kit. Anything.

What West finally got out of Tom was £2.37 in assorted change, one Driller Killer badge with a broken pin stem (lifted off Jaqui’s last squeeze), a biro with Reed Employment written on the side, and an old chocolate coin from last Christmas.

Tom had found the shiny coin in the far corner behind his bed at the end of a ’machine-gunned spy falling from a helicopter down into the ice crevice with fading out scream to make it sound like he’d fallen a really long way’ moment.

Maybe that’s why West has decided that Tom was his new ‘bitch’. (Tom doesn’t get the use of the B word, given that West is most certainly white, never been to prison, isn’t in a proper like you see on the telly gang – and he doesn’t breed dogs.)

Being told by Miss Goodrich that ‘West is probably just a boy who obviously translates the inadequacy of his upbringing and his continuing battle with obesity into negative physical actions and demonstrations against weaker boys’ didn’t really help.

In Tom’s world, West is a fat bullying tosser. And Tom is his bitch. And that really wasn’t going well for him.

Things weren’t helped by the fact that Tom thought he was saying ‘batch’ at first. Afterwards Tom realized that West was actually saying Be-atch but how was he to know.

West got annoyed that Tom didn’t understand what he was saying at first, as if it made it less, nasty.

When the contents of Tom’s pockets finally lay scattered on the floor in front of West, Tom thought he might get laughed at for carrying around a Christmas Coin in the middle of June. But West was bored by then. And momentarily distracted. He’d spotted Nigel’s rich hair coming down the road. Nigel called to Tom but Tom just scooped up his debris and slunk off. No fear. Soz Nige.

Anyways, on most occasions West just hit Tom or nicked his sweets or most usually both.
And to be fair to West, he did have some creative flair. West liked to give his bullying a seasonal flavor.

In November the light violence was brilliantly illuminated by gunpowder.

A load of rockets had been nicked from Mr Sharpa’s shop in the week before Guy Fawkes Day.

The Whodunnit question was answered the next day by the screaming whizzwhistle of a rocket as it hurtled past the sweet shop door on its way towards Tom’s head, fired from inside a nearby hedge.

It wasn’t just Tom of course. West also fired them at passing cars: oh, and cats.

West used to live on the estate on the other side of the town before he moved two roads along from Tom.

Tom’s dad said the estate was full of unsavoury types – dodgy he called it. Full of trash.

The dodgy estate has two-story houses made of red brick with slate roofs and scruffy old curtains in the windows.

Some of them seemed quite happy to have their trash actually in their front gardens.

Some have put a drive in with ‘crazy’ paving. Tom doesn’t know what’s so crazy about it. Something about the place made Tom feel really depressed. Tom thought that was probably what made boys like West unhappy and made them hit him and take his sweets.

He supposed that’s what the ‘physical actions’ were that Miss Goodrich had spoken about.

Tom has heard that West nicks mobiles off the older kids so, in one way, Tom is glad that he hasn’t got a smart one, but in another, he still feels a real loser when they all show each other stuff off the internet and instagram each other.

Tom knows the estate that West comes from because the bus to the open-air swimming pool goes through there.

Tom likes the swimming pool. He likes water. He likes to take a deep breath and make a star shape, and just sink to the bottom, the sound like a big wooly wet blanket around him, till his chest feels like its going to cave in and die.

21 Seconds is his best. But he thinks he might have forgotten to count 13, 16, and 17. He gets really dizzy so it is more like 18 seconds.

But the water isn’t as much fun as the sea. Tom loves the sea. He also likes the beach that the sea rolls up over.

  

Running.

Michael sits at a table beneath the window. He faces into the room’s interior, both feet planted squarely on the ground in front of him. His body tips slightly forward, the weight of it pitching down each leg, the pressure closing down the tiny space between the ball of each foot and the floor. He enjoys the feeling of connection.

A thin, flat light pours over his head, fixing it in a halo of bright, fragile air. The table at which he sits is set lengthways against the wall beneath the window, a chair placed at either end of it.


Michael sits at one end of the table, his back against the metal seam between the glass above and the steel panel below.

The table’s steel legs seem to hang beneath it, their patina of rust and chipping like long tassles to the floor.

(The whole school building is constructed out of concrete, steel panel walls sprayed pastel blue and green and windows set into peeling white steel frames – a mixture of clear and frosted wire security glass and toughened plastic panes slightly bowed by the sunlight of fifty some summers.)


The stiff, plaster-beige folds of Micheal’s work coat gather beneath his leaning frame. His left hand is set firmly on his knee: the other hangs, slung over the side of the cracked and chipped table-top.

Michael sits, a little lost in himself: as always.


The air hangs in a warm, hollow fold at the centre of the room.


The cooler stagnant smells of oil, electricians tape, stale tea, cooked meats, wood pitch and the inside of drawers hang like shadowed cloths around the room’s edges.

(The reek of the previous Caretaker’s cheap and profusely smoked cigarettes has finally lifted, though it has taken all of Michael’s six years here for it to do so; the pocked tar muddied ceiling tiles above him the only evidence now of the thick tobacco plumes that once stained the air.)

An inconsistent sun pours in through the frosted wired glass. It falls across the polished steel toe-caps of Michael’s work boots, creating two dark shadows which appear and disappear as the sun tides in and out.

He looks at the floor.

The cracked plastic flooring has begun to reveal the similarly cracked concrete beneath.

Michael is lost in thought until, quite suddenly, the present rushes into the room, with the escalating caw of the boiling kettle and the shrill whistle that always follows it.


Michael smoothes his hand across his mostly grey hair with its yellowing blonde temple streaks like sandstone welts through granite.

He shifts his weight forward and goes to stand. The tightly wound long muscle strands, unseen beneath the time-shined fabric of his work trousers, allow him to undertake this action with a lightness, pace and deftness that verges on the feline: an unusual physical characteristic to find in a fifty-something year old man. 

It is a physical characteristic in which Michael still takes enormous yet silent pride. His own memory might fail him every now and then but his highly trained muscle memory never did.

As he walks across the room towards the sink, where kettle and mug perch, he is suddenly struck by a feeling of ‘ inconsequence’ so powerful and yet so banal as to, for the merest fleeting second at least, give him little reason to even complete the next step.
 He stops.

The feeling passes, unlocking his legs in the process

 As he approaches the bench, something outside the room catches his attention.

The muffled sound of one pair of running feet swiftly followed by three or four more pairs in hot pursuit, spills in from the outside.


The sounds are accompanied by a frosted shape and then four more, rushing past on the other side of the glass behind him.


Though no external sign of interest in the outside events seems to invade the locked room of his routine, inside Michael every sense crackles and turns, unfurling their antennae to collect every miniscule scrap of information they can of the pursuit outside.

The sound of running decreases until the white hum of the ordinary returns.

The kettle coughs a couple of puffs of purposeful steam through the loose fitting lid and the cream and brown plastic switch pops ‘off’.


Michael absently flicks through the rolling file of young faces that he stores in his head, each carefully logged and categorised. There are many boys and girls that the first pair of running feet could belong to: many that spend the last ten minutes of every class hiding in the hollow bleak cavity of fear that bubbles up in their chest before break-time; a quietly worn fear that seizes them every time they come to having negotiate the space between one class and the next; every journey peppered with the potential for some kind of nightmare scenario: sometimes succeeding but mostly failing in getting past unscathed.

Michael looks at the wall, one hand on the kettle. Who’d be 12 years old – and weak.

Michael’s hands instinctively reach out to rest on the edge of the bench on which the kettle and mug sit.

He places his thickened palms face down on its cool surface
.

The chopped and sawn indentations of a thousand small cutting and shaping jobs had removed the bench’s perfectly tooled right-angled edges a long time ago.


The candy-striped scores, ruts and scours in its surface filled with decades of every colour and hue of paint, present a jolly depth and subtext to the surface’s dull brown flatness.

He enjoys the familiar feeling he gets from setting his hands upon the bench, the bristling of it across his neck punctuating his thoughts.


The first set of running feet had been quite particular – a little clodding: as if a pair of outsized shoes strung from jangling trousers were being repeatedly thrown to the floor.


The Davis boy.
 T. Davis. Yr. 7.

At this moment of informed recognition, if you knew Michael’s face really well –  if you could read the infinitesimal shifts his emotions rarely played up into his face, you would have seen a brief shift in Michael’s expression, an ill-defined echo of some deep-seated memory, a feeling, passing across his face.

Funny old world. Goes Around Comes Around.

 

JulianBorra©2016

AUTHOR’S NOTE: In the process of publishing this story to the blog I am altering the original text of the Kindle Version. The blog published version will be the most up to date edition.

23.06.2016

18 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Aspiration, BREXIT, Childhood, EU, Halcyon Days, Identity, Little England, Populism, provincialism, Roots, Sovreignty, UKRIP, United Kingdom, Xenophobia

Simon-English-Channel-12.jpg

Why dig up an 8-year-old, slightly clumsy, over-written story to publish in chapters on a blog?

Firstly because ‘SAIL’ (the writing of which I scratched over for 2 years) has a good heart and some redeeming tracts of writing in places (just).

But mostly because one very British day in June and the aftermath of it compels me to do so.

The nature of the story – that of a young boy who inadvertently unties England and in the process of doing so unites himself with his true beginnings – has an additional resonance given the spiritual and soon to be constitutional separation of our fair island from our Europeans cousins.

So that is what I shall do.

Starting tomorrow, I will upload two chapters of SAIL, on every successive Friday for 12 weeks.

I will put the Amazon Kindle Publishing link at the bottom of each published chapter if you feel the need to leap ahead; but after 24 short weeks you’ll have it for free.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sail-Julian-Borra-ebook/dp/B00B6E4AKK

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