Chapter 11.

Wednesday. Brilliant.

Tom loves Wednesdays. Well, one particular Wednesday in every month. It’s the day he gets to hang out with his Auntie Bea. Mad Bea. She’s great. She is everything that Tom’s thinks his life isn’t: happy, interested, excited, funny.

Tom feels bad for his mum for a moment. It passes, along with the thought. Easy for Bea to be those things perhaps. She doesn’t have Tom’s dad for a husband and Tom and Jaqui for children.

Mad Bea is noisily unmarried and smokes fags. She can also eat every golden-wrapped toffee in a Quality Street tin without anyone noticing.

She lives alone in a village five miles out of town. Tom loves it there. It is close enough to the sea to go and hang out and make sand angels, walk about, be weird, whatever, and the village itself is cool.

No-one knows Tom there. Well, not in a way that he’d notice. The village is picture-postcardly small, and the people quiet. They don’t really talk to Tom – but not in a bad way, really.

The cottage that Bea lives in is a ‘big wood timbers on the inside, thatched roof on the outside’ kind of house.

(Tom’s father’s words echo in the back of his mind. “For the last time…It’s a bloody cottage!”)

Her house is just off the end of the Church Lane. It has a pub at one end of the road – The Cheapesake Arms – and the East-gate to the churchyard at the other.

The Cheapesake has an odd collection of Sailors’ pottery mugs on one wall and a quirky room upstairs where they have old toilets as chairs and a front door for a table.

Bea loves a drink ‘on the Cheap’ (one of her favourite jokes to self) and Tom has been in there with her on many occasions.

The owner is mad. When people order a bar snack he shouts “Bridge to Engine-room”
down a tube topped with a brass mouthpiece before delivering the order.

The pub smells like Ceasar but Tom is not quite sure as to whether this is due to the Landlord’s permanently damp retriever permanently slumped across the front door step of the pub or the steam coming off the heavy tweed coat of the old man who sits at the far end of the bar.

Bea lets Tom eat pork scratchings and have sips of shandy. She is the youngest person in there by a mile and everyone fancies her.

Inside Bea’s cottage everything is low, and cosy. Tom thinks its a bit Bilbo Baggins, just without the big round burrow door. In the kitchen is an Aga cooking range set into the long wall on the left, tucked under a low beam peppered with cheap looking postcards from around the world. Any light enters the room gingerly through the low leaded windows at the far end of the room. The Aga is always warm and Tom loves to just prop his bottom against and listen to the radio.

Radio plays a big role in Bea’s life. One radio programme in particular more than any other sits at the centre of her whole world. The Shipping Forecast.

At first Tom wasn’t quite sure how it worked: did it forecast what ships there were, where they would be and where they were going? Like a weather forecast tells you what weather, where it is and where it’s going?

Bea had put him straight, eventually, after some quite complicated explanations that he didn’t really understand.
 Auntie Bea understands stuff. Big stuff. Tom thinks that’s why she’ll understand, more than anyone, the extraordinary thing that he thinks he’s done.

Bea gets the Sea. When he tells her about making sand angels and leathery water, she gets it. When he tells her about the sun burning discs on the inside of your eyelids, she gets it. When he tells her that he wants to be a stuntman because they look so cool when they fall off high buildings, she gets it. When he says that he finds it hard to talk to Kathy because she likes the company of boys who know stuff that he doesn’t, she gets it.

Auntie Bea is connected.
The Shipping News is Bea’s obsession, her highpoint of the day or night to be more specific. At first, Tom thought she was just plain nuts as he sat there, hot drink in hand; in the dark.

She was a youngish woman (not a whiff over 30) living in an inlander’s cottage; no boat name, no ship decoration – and oar in the garden or piece of prow or ships timber built into it walls.

Come to think of it, it was kind of weird that, for an old cottage within a hop skip and jump of the sea that there was no association with boats or the sea; at all. Tom wondered whether the cottage had over the years been drawn from its inland home by the pull of the sea.

Anyway. Bea. No sea shoes, no favourite sea film, or song, or shanty; who liked the Shipping Forecast. Nuts.

As far as Tom knows Bea didn’t know anyone who owned a boat, worked on a boat, likes boats, built boats or otherwise. There is no family link to the area the shipping forecast covered. No relation to the North Sea, The islands or Nordic people. Bea had never been on a ship holiday and there wasn’t a North Sea Fish cookbook in the house.
Bea was not a member of Save The Whale, Save The Herring, Save The Cod or Save The Fisherman.
But she loved the Shipping Forecast.

Tom likes the way the Shipping Forecast sounds. He did so right from the beginning. The way the voice speaks as the Forecast rolls on. He would sit there with his head bowed and a cup of tea steaming in his hands.

At first he never looked at Bea. It almost seemed a bit rude; like when he walked into the bathroom without knocking to find Bea in the bath ( no flannel he noted).

Bea seemed to float about on the voice. It was as if she was a little boat trapped on the high ground until the roll of the forecast released her on to the ocean’s back as the wash of the shipping words rose up around her.

Tom used to think that the way she turned the lights off and listened in the pitch black was a bit weird. He felt silly sitting there in the dark.

After a while Tom plucked up the courage to ask her why.
 Bea said that she liked to ‘see’ the places. Tom was puzzled.

“I can’t see them you see. With the lights on. But with my eyes shut: when it’s all dark. Suddenly the pictures, the images just flicker up in my head. It’s like the words. Like I get swept out into the ocean. I feel like I’m flying really, really low across the tops
 of the swells and they’re solid beneath me and dark but I can see. I can see the white tips, the horses spraying across me”.

Tom was starting to get that slightly tight-chested thing that happened when Bea went on one of her flights of fancy: feeling a bit anxious.

“When I used to listen, I always wondered what those yawning stretches of grey black sea were doing as the words poured out into the kitchen, All those words flooding the floor.”

“Have you ever been there?” asked Tom.

“Where? Out there? Middle Dogger in a storm? Crashing the waves in Cromarty crags? Oh no, but up here.”

Bea slapped the side of her head, abruptly and theatrically, which she did a lot and it never ceased to shock Tom.

“…and in here…”

Bea also had the discomforting habit of grabbing her whole chest in a surge-like motion when she said ‘in here’.

“that’s where I’ve been!”

Tom likes her way of speaking when she gets excited. She becomes all lyrical. Or ‘a bit Welsh’ as his dad likes to say. (Tom doesn’t think his dad’s being kind when he says it.)

“So I turn the lights off …and I can see them…big muscular swells rolling in the dark like a giant hand flexing and squeezing”.

Tom looked at her in silence when she said that. But. He wasn’t lost in thought, struck dumb by the power of her description. He wasn’t wrestling a particularly tricky conundrum either. That was the problem. It was the absence not the presence of some chaotic complicated set of thoughts rushing around his head that struck him dumb – not a thought in his head at all. This made him feel quite useless. Something should happen in your head when someone tells you stuff like that Tom thought.

“ Dogger. Forties. Cromarty, Forth, Tyne Dogger South – They’re extraordinary, magical…just, I don’t know, romantic, I suppose, like fire!”

The fire reference threw Tom a bit. But it didn’t fool him. There was that word again. What was it with his Mum and his Aunt and ‘Romantic’?

Tom couldn’t quite see anything extraordinary in these names. He couldn’t see the earthshaking romance in these names. They just made him feel lonely.

“Don’t you…” 
He pauses: but not for effect.

“Don’t you…feel lonely though, when you listen?”

“Lonely? No, no why lonely?”

Her voice goes all round and soft.

“Well, it’s kind of all about flat bits of sea miles away and in the middle of the North Sea, and people drown there, on their own, and we always listen in the dark and… I suppose it makes me feel…lonely”.

Blimey.
Tom realizes that Bea’s eyes do this weird green around the blue floaty thing.
He lets out a small breath and feels better. To mark the moment, his foot, previously happily perched on the edge of the chair, pushing his knee up to his nose, suddenly does a jelly thing and falls off the side. Tom’s body folds over like a squeezed tea bag.

 

Chapter 12.

Bea looked quizzically at the young boy in front of her.

Tom was sitting fidgeting on the chair, pushed up close to the bottle-blue Aga at the far side of the kitchen.
 His awkward half-boy, half-teenage self suddenly seemed to her to have been folded badly and hung on the chair to dry, one leg crossed under the other, one elbow crooked into his lap; and the other resting on the Aga with the steaming tea at the end of it.

The special boy who calls the flat, grey swell of morning a ‘leathery sea’ still had a small way to go before he really ‘got it’ Bea had thought to herself; but he was close; maybe already there; she knew it would be soon.

Bea recognized the quite extraordinary thing lurking in Tom’s ordinarily ordinary self: she had seen it from a very young age.

It would, she knew, eventually drive a wedge between Tom and his mother, (she had never managed to remove the wedge in her heart that appeared there two weeks after Tom shone his little light into the world from the rolling sea of the womb).

These days Tom’s mother was so busy trying to keep Arthur (Tom’s dad) happy that she seemed to have lost her ‘sight’ in these things: the ability to recognize when something is special or different: or even when it isn’t but by framing it in your mind’s eye in such a way you make it just a little magical.

The magic dust had been blown out of her sister’s eyes a long time ago: blown out by Arthur’s grinding everyday-ness and his emotional absences Bea wouldn’t wonder.

That was alright. The world and, more importantly Tom, would one day know exactly what a truly amazing woman her sister was, and what sacrifices she made every day for those she loved.

Viv was special in a way that some people could barely imagine.

Special was a family word in the growing up years of Viv and Bea.
They had been taught to see themselves as special from a very young age: to see themselves as different.

She loved the majesty and the magic of that as a little girl. Their father would read them delicious stories and tell them tales of fine young men and women pure of heart.

The girls used to love to go with their father to the meetings at the country fairs and church halls. She knew that her father was special; different. The way people were around him. The way her dear Bear, ( ‘big paws’, a soft face and lonely eyes), looked up to her father; the way Bear hung on his every word. Bear did everything for him. She loved her father doubly so because what Bear loved she loved also: and he loved her father: for a while at least until the Great Divide

It was only when Bea grew to fully understand what her father really meant by being special; being different: what that meant to him and his cabal of fine upstanding men – and ultimately what that meant for anyone who didn’t fit into that picture – it was only then that the magic gave way to something else: a mute loathing: creeping at first, but one that grew with every twist of his mind and every rule he tried to inflict on her.

Bea was what was called ‘spirited’ and ‘difficult’. Certainly no man from her father’s perfect little England was interested in a girl like Bea – far to independent; far too opinionated; far too…difficult.

Bea wasn’t interested in just being a conservatory to some English man’s semi-detached castle. She had doors and windows and a fine roof of her own. They were open and glass and they let the sun in.

When she was twelve, Bear had told her that she was made for better things. Before the Great Divide, Bear had told her that she was the special one. It was just that her father couldn’t see it. That was while Bear still spoke gently and kindly of her father: an excuse for his every doing never far from Bear’s big bear-like lips.

Bea’s mind tracks back, hand over hand, along the strings and strands of memory to the present.

The special boy.
 No, when Tom, at only eleven and a half years old, had mooted his big theory: that the problem with grown-ups was that they grew up and away from the ground, she knew. Tom really was special. Tom was different. In a way that people like her father would never understand.

Bea was especially keen to see Tom this week. She watches the news. She had missed it at first, too stunned like everyone else at the inane enormity of what was happening. She listens to the radio. She listens to the Shipping Forecast, the reports coming in from the ships, like Sentinels now, in every corner of the earth’s waters, listening, watching and ready to sound their horns if they should witness another land mass inexplicably heading off into the sunset.

But, one by one, the layers and pieces slotted and overlapped and sat over each other. The cat’s cradle of events and feelings and memories pulled tight together, turning in on itself to reveal a new pattern: the rolling spume of TV news footage, and the confusions in the Shipping Forecast, the satellite pictures and the madness of people.

And the phone call from Tom.
 She senses something on the phone when he calls as usual, to say he was still coming, as usual, but also whether she had she noticed anything unusual, which was the most unusual thing he could say.

He was nervous. being extra-ordinary was enough to tighten the life out of anyone. Some never got used to it. Some just pretended they were ordinary.

How easy it must be: how inanely delightful to never once trip over an exception in oneself. How reassuring to know that here is absolutely nothing within or without you that will ever create even the slightest ripple in your little world, let alone a maelstrom of such crashing enormity that perhaps you might drown in the surge of it.

How deliciously…dull thought Bea.

 

Chapter 13.

The clock crosses and uncrosses its arms. The day drags on.
But that’s fine. Time was doing its ‘can’t be arsed to go too quickly’ thing but today it doesn’t bother Tom. Today Tom is very excited. He’s excited because today he gets to see Bea.

She knows stuff. Like the time he described his own first flight over the dark rolling water of the shipping forecast in the dark. Bea got it.

Tom can barely contain himself. Tom wonders about his stupid idea: about the Tie and the untying.

Bea is the only person he could ever tell but he is nervous of telling her. What if just this once she doesn’t get it.
 What if she looks at him as if he is some stupid boy?

A small sick feeling pops in his stomach like a balloon: a fear balloon has just gone off in his stomach. Tom is sidetracked momentarily by the thought of the stomach acid being the reason for the balloon bursting by eating through the rubber.

How will he explain; what should be his opening line?

“Bea, I have untied us”.

No. Too obvious

“Bea! We’re free”.

Too prison break.

“BEA!”

Yes that was it. Simple yet surprising. Calling Bea’s name out really loud – like a shout – in her face – yes, that is, well, simply the best way to announce to his Aunt a happening of such island-shifting, life-changing, scary–making magnitude as this.

Had he ever mentioned the Tie to her? Had he ever told her about it? He’d told her about the beach; especially the bit where no one else went.
 He’d told her about the way the sea there seemed to arrive at the beach’s edge in a leathery flick.
 He’d told her how the sky flashed to bright blue to white phosphorous fizz under his eyelids, so that the world became a big bright negative print of itself when he opened them. He had told her about the way the sun seemed to chase the shadows of the clouds around, surrounding them, closing in on them and making them shrink till the cloud’s shadow disappeared completely: and how at this point, having lost its shadow anchor, the cloud would just float off unfixed and free.

He’d mentioned all of them: but no, he’d never ever mentioned The Tie.

Tom sits staring out of the class window.

The desks around him stand empty and quiet. The class had emptied out five minutes ago. Tom hopes that no one notices that he does not peg it out of the door at the speed of light like the rest. 
There is method in his madness.
 He is merely avoiding the predators; by reducing the time between now and the next class he also reduces the opportunity for torment and torture time.

With a bit of luck the fact that most of the people in his class just think he is odd works wonders – for the most part, everyone couldn’t care less or just don’t notice: everyone except the Caretaker of course.

Tom had noticed that he always just happens to be walking past the window or through the gap in the hedge or by the garages or at the rear of the canteen or the far corner of the playground whenever the terror stalks Tom, his crusty muddy leg and his man-made fibre glow.

Speak of the devil.

The Caretaker looks in at Tom, which introduces Tom to the really conflicted pleasure of finding himself feeling both totally safe and totally spooked out at the same time.

The Caretaker. Always watching.
Tom wonders for a moment: where does he appear from – and where does he go, this funny man who hibernates in his workroom, his big hands straining teabags?

Tom had been in there once to get back one of his confiscated books.
 Tom clears his mind of most of the things rattling around in there, apart from the monumental shocker of having potentially untethered the island that he lives on – but the memory of that Kiss is still there. He can’t shake it. It won’t go. Might as well have a re-run then, thinks Tom.

 

Distant lands

Michael sipped his tea again.
 The silence through the school runways was to some extent rather perverse given what was occurring in their topsy turvy world.


That the pupils seemed quite indifferent to the fact that the country they lived ‘on’ was floating off into the sunset, literally as well as figuratively, Michael put down to bravado (the fixed geographic context of living ‘in’ a country having being replaced by the transient raft like quality of living ‘on’ one by the ‘expert’ on  News At Ten a week previously).

He certainly knew that the young girl that the Davies boy was keen on was not pleased.

He had overheard a slightly hysterical phone conversation between her and what he assumed to be her father while spearing and bagging the rainbow multitude of crisp packets, drinks cartons and cans from amongst the bushes on the school side of the wall by the front gate.


He also assumed that this was not the reaction that the Davis boy was hoping she would have.


His right hand released itself from the mug and drew up to his face, his large fingers, two still hot from the ceramic mug, traced across the lines in the corner of his eyes.

What was it they called them? Laughter lines. Michael could not remember doing that much laughing: not recently anyway.


He did though laugh out loud when the news first broke.

He wondered what The Old Man thought of this.
 He thought of him again when listening to Jeremy Paxman hold forth on the irony that ‘our being cast adrift’ should have such a powerful and opposite effect in regards to its action: drawing us together with such purpose; generating a heightened sense of shared identity, a sense of kinship and a sense of self amongst a group of people that had for the best part of 50 years been slowly drifting apart – until the day the island slipped its mooring.


Suddenly we felt more like The United State Of Englain – or Great Britland – or whichever dreadful derivative hybrid you chose from any given tabloid at any given time.

It did not seem to matter anymore what colour, creed, religion or persuasion you were. If you were ‘on’ this Island floating towards some random future along with everyone else, you were all indeed special.

 You were one of a kind. You were ‘in’, in an ‘on’ kind of way.


The Old Man’s grandson had with one clumsy slip of a knot done more to create a feeling of one-ness; a feeling of what it meant to be ‘Englainders’ (The Daily Telegraph,  June 26^th, Front Page, Col 3) between every man woman and child on the island than any of The Old Man’s cruel and divisive little speeches and pamphlets.

Michael allows another rich warm smile of a thought to wash into his head.

Wherever we end up – wherever we might eventually pitch our island anchor, we will be the immigres, the guests; the usurpers, the uninvited, stoutly defending our displaced minority culture and spirit in the face of a indigenous populous wondering who we thought we were and when we were going to leave.

One thing’s for certain – having almost completed the big left turn to head south, on the current trajectory the issue of under whose sovereign state the Falklands (Or Las Malvinas) eventually resided would soon become more than just notional and a matter of constitution.

How funny.

We may end up like some prison ship, thinks Michael, mauling its way through the surf, unwanted, destined to float on until the end of the world or some other cataclysm put us out of our misery.


Mind you, all those people who dreamed of seeing distant lands and traveling to the corners of the earth would be delighted. It might even put an end to low cost airlines! (Michael reserved an utterly random and abstracted loathing for low cost airlines.)

All those people who felt the need to speak loudly about their most recent ‘travels’ in bars and cafes and restaurants up and down the land – all those desperate little itineraries being recited out loud again and again to whomsoever might listen; every one of them screaming ‘please please find me interesting; please find me windswept and exotic; and please ignore the cringing insecure and desperately provincial person hiding inside me’ – perhaps we’d be blessed with their silence.

Now our Island was going places. 

No more ‘3 holidays a year’ hidden from our own conscience on six separate credit cards.  Just pop across to the closest land mass on one of the re-tasked Sealink Ferries


Life was one big cruise.

Michael looked at his watch again. The mote filled light in the centre of the room shifted.


11 minutes to go.

 

 

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.

 

 

Chapter 9.

The beach is empty, as usual. Tom walks across it in a swervy stumble, his feet changing direction quickly and often to avoid treading on stuff.

The beach is scattered with a lot of stuff – the odd shell, a broken flip flop, frays of seaweed, brightly coloured sweet wrappers (some from very weird and wonderful parts of the world) – but mainly, the beach is scattered with Tom’s thoughts.

Tom sometimes pretends that there are so many thoughts crashing around inside his head that some fall out of his ear. The swervy stuff is to avoid treading on them.

He scuffs his feet through the sand. One shoe digs deeper into the sand than the other and his leg comes to a dead stop, snapping into a funny shape.

Tom knows that at times like this he has two choices.

Option 1 – He falls over, which is nice and easy; not too cool but also not too complicated.

Or Option 2 – he stays precariously near the edge of falling over, locked in a strange position.

This second option also has two variations. In the first, he stays fixed like a statue but with one leg trembling a lot, possibly for hours, days, weeks; years.

This gives him loads of time to figure out how to explain to anyone who may be watching him how he got in that position in the first place. These people could at any point include beach walkers, friends, family, journalists, world news stations, Kofi Annan, the Dalai Lama; or Kathy.

In the second variation he stands on his trembling leg for a split second and then, genius of all genius, he just carries on walking – a miracle, like the ones in his RE book.

Option 1. He decides to fall over.

Lying on the sand near the sea, face down, and moving his limbs at various intervals is one of Tom’s favourite past-times. He likes the way he feels sandwiched between the earth’s molten lava middle, pushing upwards in search of volcano action, and the weight of the sky, and the various stratospheres, gravities, planets, and all of the milky ways, universes and the cosmos above it pressing him down towards the Earth’s crust. He is the filling in a Hubble meets M Theory sandwich.

The Cosmos. Tom had heard of a theory called Superstring Theory. Which sounded really cool. Having not the faintest idea what it was, he initially imagined it to be a cosmic version of cheese string. Genius.

He then wondered what it could be used for. He wondered what Cat’s Cradle would be like, if you played it with Superstring. Or used it to make one of those telephones from two cups or tin cans.

He rolls his head to the right and the white noise of the sea and earth turning closes down into a muffled buffeting rumble.

At times like this Tom feels that time stands still. Or lies still.

The salty air whips around his nose for a while and then enters it through his right nostril.

This is because his left nostril is mostly blocked by tens of thousands of particles of crushed rock, glass, coral, dinosaur skeleton, boat bits, rust, Nemo’s relatives, the shore lines of foreign countries, glaciers, fish bones, giant squid beaks, crustacea shells, missiles, plastic bags, submarines, pirate’s gold teeth, the Kraken, meteorites, asteroids, volcanic carbon deposits, Moby Dick, precious stones and bits of old car (or sand to you and I).

They have been wedged up there thanks to the downward motion of his Gulliver-like collapse meeting the upward motion of the Lilliputian beach.

The sun is warm on his back. He feels the last of the mud crust fall off his legs as he moves it. Freedom.

Tom turns over. Funny. The sky above him seems a bit confused, like it doesn’t know what it’s meant to be doing.

It’s blue; he’s sure of that. It’s the clouds that are the problem. Some of them are very high and stretched out; long, crispy and wispy. Cloud goujons. A couple of others are small and fat and bobble about a bit.

He looks up at the sun. The cloud shaped shadows it throws on the beach scamper around him.

Tom likes the sun. It reminds him of foreign places and the bit in films where the sun makes a big flare across the television screen like a flame.
He likes the way that, when you close your eyes after looking at the sun, the shape stays printed on your eye-lids, like a smudgy, white circle, surrounded by lots of colours. He also likes the fact that if you wait a while the white circle turns into other colours; like purple and orange and blue and pink.

He likes the way that the sun makes walking from outside to inside feel like time or space travel – like he’s changing atmospheres or centuries.

Tom remembers that he is going to do something. What? Check the Tie? Re-tie the Tie? He’s not sure. He needs to see it.

He climbs up off the floor and dusts the sand from his clothes. The sand up his nose tickles as it falls out. Tom walks towards the place where the Tie is. At first he does not see it. A funny feeling immediately rises up in his chest. Now he does.

The large wizened peg is still in the ground where he left it. For some reason it looks a bit out of place all of a sudden.

The rope is nowhere to be seen.
 Tom looks out to sea. The sun is hopping across the waves now. It’s showing off: like the boys in the park. The little flashes and glints make it look like the sun is scattering bangers across the grey-green hills of the rolling sea.

Tom looks back at the Tie. Something’s different. Something’s changed. He’s just not sure what.

Tom squeezes his brain a bit. It is not just that the rope is off somewhere else doing something other than being tied to the Tie.

Nor is it the fact that unbeknown to Tom, the last sand granule falling out of Tom’s nose at that very moment will, in the not too distant future, undertake an extraordinary journey.

That one granule, breeze-blown across the beach to land on a piece of drift wood picked up by a dog who will deposit said chewed and slobber soaked piece of wood in the back of the family car where the grain of sand will fall off, only to be picked up again on an unknowing piece of luggage that will then get put on a plane with a load of other luggage, where it will then be flown to a peninsular on the south east coast of the United States of America, take a transfer coach journey and finally fall off the bag onto a sandal to be hopped, skipped and jumped to a nearby beach and settle not far from the very spot where 65 million years earlier (almost to the day) an Iguanodon, having totally ignored the portentious whooooompf noise that had echoed around the planet a week earlier and the rather ominous-looking dark, choking cloud gathering in the sky above it, promptly dropped dead on the spot, thereby starting its own journey from being a very large single piece of living, breathing dinosaur to becoming quadrillions of very small pieces of dinosaur; granules no less; one of which, with a wanderlust ucommon to the average particle, would travel far and wide until eventually landing on an East Anglian beach some 65 million years and 5000 miles later to get wedged up the nose of a rather extraordinary though largely unnoticed boy.

No: that’s not what’s different. Tom cannot put his finger on it. He turns and walks back the way he came, thinking of the character Sid from the movie Ice Age for some bizarre reason; and chocolate; but not necessarily in that order.

 

The Cupboard

The cupboard broods in the corner of the room. Michael turns on his heel and walks back across the room,  following exactly the same line along which he came, until he arrives back at the chair. He turns and lowers himself back into the seat, hovering for a second, slung in the holster of his leg muscles and ligaments, before he finally sits. Old habits and ritual tics.

The cupboard. 
Why this prison of childish souls should be in The Caretaker’s Office he had no idea.

All of those things – the colourful clutter of all of those individual moments of indifference, of dissent, of boredom – confiscated and crammed into, currently, six wheezing boxes bunched on shelves inside the cupboard’s matt grey shell.
 Dirty magazines were put straight into the incinerator. Knives or weapons of any sort were broken up or sent to the local police station. So what was left was the madness of pocket tattle that child after child used to amuse themselves through the monotony, the relentless drone of the curriculum played out through the lips of their teachers.


No wonder the cupboard seemed to suck the light out of the room. Michael draws the mug up to his lips.
He sips the tea. There were a few other things of course that could be keeping all of the light for themselves, one in particular, wedged tightly in the bottom of the cupboard wrapped in a damp sack-cloth bag.


Michael wonders what The Old Man is thinking about all of this.

His sacred little island locked in place for so long, floating off into the sunset: and from the look of the last report (and a deft arcing left turn just before Norway), a distinctly Caribbean sunset at that.

Michael smiles.
The Old Man would always use the ‘owned’ pronunciation of the word Caribbean: ‘ka- rib-ee-an’: the word’s colourful ‘ka-rib-yan’ butterfly wings clipped, its limbs hog-tied and its head bowed awaiting its next order.


The Old Man: funny. When Michael first met Peter Davis, The Old Man couldn’t have been more than forty; forty two at most. But he seemed so institutional to Michael, so enstated: his voice ground from the Rock of Ages and liberally greased with Jerusalem.

The role had been simple enough at first. Peter Davis required a driver as he intended to do a lot of traveling in the coming months – and he felt the need for a companion who could also ‘do’ for him.

Michael soon came to realise that the provocative nature of Peter Davis would require him to use some of that sterile, unfeeling brutality, nurtured and perfected through his tours of duty, and apply it pointedly against those that might ‘have a go’ at Peter Davis. Eventually he would be asked to apply it to those who had yet to even respond to Peter Davis. The ‘pre-emptive strike’ Peter called it.

“They may be doing nothing at the moment but mark my words they will, so we’re just, well, teaching them a lesson in advance, so to speak.”


Michael had been little bothered by the tasks at the beginning. Their dark dingy beerhall unpleasantness offset by the bright small joys of driving the girls around, taking them on trips, dropping them at school.

Over time, the girls became the only reason for him to stay. The bankrupt spirits of Peter Davis and his cabal of Little White Liars became wearing and twisted even to Michael’s troubled view of the world, the effervescence of his two daughters the only salve.


When he was within a few feet of the girls, especially B, the kaleidoscope of wonder that they emitted served only to pinpoint and amplify the smallness and ugliness of those men their father called ‘sound men and true.’

Watching the girls as they grew up and away from The Old man was one of the few pleasures Michael had towards the end.

He mourned the loss of their innocence but is some ways it freed them.

The girls were very special: and very different – but not in the Old Man’s twisted terms.


As they grew, so did B’s courage, with each new cause, each new revelation, each new hypocrisy of her father’s.


Viv’s reticence grew in spiraling counterpoint to B’s courage. Viv did not lack the courage of conviction. She just chose the path of least confrontation.

She also seemed better able to process and reconcile the truth of The Old Man’s beliefs. She believed they were not the first young people to be horrified by the startling ignorance of their parents’ prejudices. She just felt that she saw so many different kinds of ignorance, and that prejudice thrived in so many hearts, not just white ones, that it felt a little naïve just pillorying her father for his own version.

At first B challenged her father in small ways, teasing him. Not reacting immediately to the sound of his voice. Leaving things where she knew they would annoy him. Inappropriate language and phrases began to pepper her conversation. Willful and spirited they called it.

Then the small moments of anarchy became more layered and sublime.
 She began to wane in the subjects that her father loved and loved coaching her in.

B began to spend less and less time slumped in the cramped little corner of his library study with Viv, leafing through books and asking questions. B’s absences put hairline cracks in the ritual of their shared Saturdays. The death of their Saturday ritual, that of Peter, Viv and B orbiting quietly around each other in the library was a death from which Peter Davis would never recover.

Michael had watched this with a dispassionate eye to begin with. It was not his family and they were not his children. But he found himself beginning to quietly side with B in his mind. Perhaps he was jealous of her ability to hurt The Old Man so much with such a small gesture or act.

He was feeling more and more trapped in his relationship with the ostensibly warm Peter Davis.

 There was a sense of something about him that had begun to disturb Michael a little and that was saying something.

 

Chapter 10.

Tom sits in the lounge. He is feeling brave. Dinner is over. There are meat straggles stuck between his teeth. One strand in particular is dangling down on the edge of his tongue. His tongue plays with the strand. The effect of the tongue strand on his facial expressions makes Tom resemble a nutter.

He turns and looks at his deranged face reflected in the dark rectangle of the lounge windows. He thinks the effect of the trees moving behind the reflection of his meat-straggle demented face looks brilliant. He turns back to look to the end of the room.

Along the left hand wall runs a low, modular ‘Bilbao’ shelving system: currently on special offer at his father’s shop due to sharp descent in imterest. A complete set of the Encyclopediae Britannica run along its lowest shelf.

Tom realised a while ago that if he ever had any great secrets or things to hide: like a million pounds from a bank-robbery or a blood soaked murder weapon or the Dead Sea Scrolls, that’s where he’d hide them. There was little danger of ANYONE in his family opening one of them EVER.

Yes, Tom is feeling brave this evening.

The source of his bravery sit at right angles to him on the ‘three-person Milano Signature Style corner-module sofa system’, locked in the bright all powerful tracker beam of the telly.

The television lights up the space on the sofa between them (as if it needed highlighting). Tom sits at his usual 47 degree half twist.

His dad had wired the telly into the super hi-tech sound-cylinder, but badly, so, subsequently the sound comes out in some schizophrenic shamble, partially from one of the 4 built in speakers and partially from the Sound-cylinder (but only the middle-range)

If you weren’t used to it, it would probably make your brain explode like an alien mind bomb wave. Tom had eventually trained his ears and exact body bearing to adjust to the audio visual 4th dimension his dad had created.

The together part of sitting together was of course a bit of an optimistic description that Tom liked to use to describe the event of both his parents sitting on the same piece of furniture.

Even in these rare moments he’d noticed his dad was a master in the dark art of the invisible shield technique favoured by some of the characters in Tom’s comics – a super power that allows him to be both present yet a million light years away at once.

Tom would normally be upstairs by now, slung over his comics. (He had, on one occasion, fallen asleep face down on one of them. It took two days, three baths, heavy flannel action and soothing Savlon before for the inky figure of Daredevil left his cheek.)

But tonight he is down in the thick of it. The weird feeling that came over him while he was standing in front of the Tie is still there, inside – strange but quite nice in a way. There has been a funny feeling wandering around inside him doing strange things since he untied the Tie.

And it’s doing it again. This time the feeling felt like it had sort of turned around and changed colour but that didn’t make any sense at all.

Tom chews the inside of his cheek. He looks back to the television. The news is rather odd today.

Frankly, the world seemed to have gone stark raving mad.

The old bloke who’s been on quite a lot recently talking about ‘the issue of cultural integration’ in a place called Tower Hamlets had just been on again.

Tower Hamlets. Tom thinks the place sounds quite exciting and medieval, the kind of place where knights, pirates, wizards and monsters lived, all galloping around on heavily-armoured steeds with pounding hooves wielding shafts of light and steel.

Tom doesn’t know any ‘muslims’ and only one Ali but he runs the slightly rubbish video shop his dad goes to sometimes and he doesn’t think that it is that Ali they’re talking about.

He certainly didn’t know any black people, not directly anyway; Diara, the boy at school in his year was far too cool for Tom to know him or anything about him.

And as for the people from the Balkans and Romania that the old man goes on about, that would require Tom to know where or what the Balkans and Romania are and that was a google search away at the moment.

(The Globe that sat on the far shelf in Tom’s room was very, very cheap, and to be fair its spelling of country names was not to be trusted – nor their position for that matter.)

Tom can’t quite make out why this old man is getting so upset about them.
 He had been on again, talking about ‘repatriation’ for coloured people, muslims, gypsies and ‘anyone else who doesn’t like it here’ which as far as Tom could work out meant sending them home even when they didn’t want to go

The place on the news, the ‘where they came from’ part of ‘send them back where they came from’ seemed sunny and tropical with lots of beaches but then again he thought perhaps that the nature and quality of the place was not the problem – that maybe the problem lay in the fact that someone was telling you that you’re not good enough to stay here.

Tom has noticed that every time this old man comes on (because boy had he been on a lot recently) his mother and father exchange funny looks and his mum ends up looking down at her hands a lot.

The old man seems familiar. He looks like he’s from the world that Tom’s granddad and grandma come from. In fact, he looks a lot like the old pictures of Tom’s granddad – but much older.

The screen flickers and a load of graphics whoosh around and now there is a man, a different man, with a map behind him. Whatever this is; it isn’t going to be the weather thinks Tom.

The man gestures to the UK generally, and then points to England and then to the vertical and horizontal lines that sit over it.

(‘Latitude’ and ‘Longitude’ says Tom to himself in his ‘bored in geography class’ voice.)

He thinks that the lines look like a big piece of string has been wound around the globe holding the world together.

Then it happens. As the man speaks and moves his arm the England and Scotland bit of the UK moves northwards. Not only that; as it does so it seems to leave Cornwall, Ireland, and all of the Scottish Isles in its wake (though strangely the Isle of Wight seems to be hanging in there somehow!)

The movement on the map is made double weird by the fact that it causes a massive single gasp from both his parents: the most they’ve done together in years.

The man is then replaced by real satellite pictures of the same thing happening.

The strange feeling inside Tom shifts again rolling around like hot lava in his stomach.

As they sit (along with a few million other people), their mouths slightly open, the front bit of their tongues becoming drier and drier, the man on the television smiles and then stops, realizing that this isn’t a weather report and this is not a smiling matter… …or is it?

Tom finds himself thinking about the Tie. It pops up in his head randomly.
The screen flashes and they are back to the newsreader. Who looks left and the screen flashes again.
There is another old man on the television now: he looks a little fierce. Not because he’s being fierce. He just has one of those faces. Itt is an outside broadcast: from Northern Ireland.

The man speaks so quickly that Tom has difficulty understanding him. The man is from somewhere called Coleraine.
Tom has always felt that everyone else has far nicer names for the places where they live.

Tom pushes his hands deeper into his pockets, sliding further into the sofa, his one and only slightly cool T Shirt (Slip Knot) riding up as his back scrapes down the coarse sofa fabric.
His right hand has found a small ball of fluff and some crumbs in the very corner of his pocket. He shifts uncomfortably as he watches the television.

His body crunches in the middle and slips left a bit. He lifts one cheek up off the sofa a little. A hot funnel of air creeps out of Tom’s bottom, an extra squeeze sending it rocket thruster like into the foam of the cushion.

Top chuff.

Tom thinks that chuff is a great word. To chuff and To be chuffed were twinned like towns in Tom’s mind. To Chuff: to break wind and To be Chuffed: It covered all the bases: taking pride; being pleased with something/oneself.

Genius. To be chuffed about a chuff was therefore pure genius. (He also liked the fact that there’s no French or German translation for it.)  Tom celebrated by knocking out another hot strangled parp of air into the foam.

The man on the television seems to be very upset about something.

Tom catches something about ‘her Majesty’ and ‘the Union’ but the rest disappears into the jumble of lips and teeth at the bottom of the man’s face.

Now the man with the map is back again. He points to the space between a place called Bangor and another place called Stranraer (there really are some silly names in the world thinks Tom).

The arrows running between the two do a squeezing together thing.

Well that’s just nuts. England or Gt. Britain, or whatever you want to call it, is a land mass that’s attached to tectonic plates that float on molten lava beds wrapped around an even more moltener centre. (Tom didn’t know exactly how you explained ‘more molten’ in a word.) It can’t just float off merrily without a by your leave?

Can It?

Tom watches the light from the television as it beams across his parents’ faces.

He imagines the words pouring out of the television like trails wiggling towards them.

Something in the strangeness, the sheer weirdness of what the man on the television is talking about seems to have stunned them.

Even weirder, they seem to have shrunk – their feet suddenly barely able to touch the ground; their clothes sitting on them now the way Jaqui’s used to when she’d been in her dressing up box.

The look on their faces reminds Tom of a time when they had come across a small blonde boy waiting on his own by the coin operated Postman Pat ride at the supermarket. He couldn’t have been more that five years old.

Worrying that the boy might be lost and upset, Tom’s mum and dad walked over and asked “Are you Ok?”.

The blonde boy had turned and looked at them for a few moments before shouting.
”Fuck off!” At which point he ran off towards a rather ‘big’ (Tom always tried to avoid using the word fat) family loading a small car with large bags of ‘summer barbecue’ foods and beer while screaming “STRANGER DANGER STRANGER DANGER”, leaving Tom’s mum and dad speechless, still leaning down towards the space where the child had been.

Yes. It was that look.
Tom thinks about his flannel in the bath and, for just a moment, a very, very silly idea crosses his mind.

All of these strange things going on: do they have something to do with The Tie? That, that would be NUTS.

The feeling inside him turns once more, getting bigger. The feeling seems to answer questions he’s asking himself.
Tom rolls forwards and up off the chair, and leaves his parents locked in the beam of the telly.

He’d swear that they were now closer than before. 
A damp bramble smell floats through the space by the door to the lounge.

Tom walks through into the hall to find Ceasar at the bottom of the stairs half sitting, half walking in circles.

Ceasar looks up at Tom. Tom runs his hand across the top of the dog’s head and under it as Ceasar lifts his head up to land his face squarely on the now upturned runway of Tom’s hand.

He feels across the silky flap of Ceasar’s ear to the pinked inside.
There seems to be something electric running along his arm into the dog’s head.

Tom wonders whether it is to do with the feelings he is having. As he moves his foot he realizes it isn’t; Tom is wearing a pair of striped socks that contain more man-made fibres in one toe than there are in the whole sofa.

The fur on Ceasar’s neck crackles as he draws his hand away.

Tom walks up the stairs towards the comics and the flapping fabric walls of his darkened room.

He stops. Come to think about it there was something odd about Ceasar though. No slobber. Ceasar’s mouth was as dry as a bone (which is quite an odd way of describing it when you are talking about a dog).

Tom walks into his room, his hand smarting from the shock off the handle.

BANG.

He reels and spins, the snub nose round from the spitting barrel above crunches into his shoulder. He collapses across the edge of his bed, half on and half off, in a wheezing right angle. His cheek drags across the sheets as the weight of his lower body drags his upper body back over the edge of the bed to the floor below. His cheek jars against the divan and finally he slumps heavily to the ground.

His arm is turned under him, one leg at a right angle, trainer half off and his face turned towards the dark space under his bed. The dark brown pelmet brushes against his cheek.

Bourne stares down at him from the metal walkway railing of the deserted quayside warehouse above, shakes his head, and walks away. Exotic music plays somewhere nearby. The thoughts in Tom’s mind get foggy as he lies there

Somewhere in another corner of Tom’s mind he realises that it is possible to smell distance.

He realizes that he can recognise tiny shifts in the depth and density of smell between those at the far, shadowy cool-wall side of the space under his bed and those floating around closest to his nose.

The collective smells of hot shoes, old die-cast metal figures, brightly coloured lego plastic, various kinds of dusts and ink stained comic pages wrap around his face like a big smelly tape measure.

Should really be just one big smell: an under-the-bed, stinky, petridish smell.

But Tom was realizing that what should and what would were very different entirely even though he wasn’t sure why: or what for that matter.

The Tie. Tom enjoys the fact that the Tie might be linked – he might be linked to these tectonic events – to all of these events: to the news.

Him.

A small corner of him tucked away in there somewhere is sure of it. Not certain. But sure. Like a Should to the Could.
But something bothers him. If his very, very silly flannel of an idea really was true then that was quite extraordinary, in the way the great wonders of the world are quite extraordinary because they are, well, extraordinary in a great big see them from space’ kind of way.

Tom felt a little bit sick all of a sudden and his head began to buzz, but not in a ‘big-fat-bumble-bee-on-a-sunny-day’ way.

Tom suddenly didn’t know whether he really did want to be extra ordinary.

What if something went wrong? What if England floated in the wrong direction? What if it crashed into something and everyone died?

What if they knew it was him? Or would anyone even believe it? Him?

Tom rolls onto his face. His nose presses into the carpet. He breathes in and immediately regrets it. An enormous pressure builds up behind his eyes. He sneezes.
Mmmnn.

If the ‘island- floating-away-like-my-flannel-even -though-it-would-be-against-all-the-laws-of- Physics’ thing is true it means something even bigger than it being extraordinary. It means that right here and now, he’s the only person in the whole world who knows why.

Mr. Brilliant-I’m-So-Clever on the News who seems to know everything doesn’t know it. Stephen Fry doesn’t know it. His head Mistress doesn’t know it. OK, Stephen Hawking may have figured out the science of it but even he didn’t know it.
Tom feels a bit dizzy.

Tom thought he was going to be sick.

To be the only person in the world who knows something; that was fine for people who think and do extraordinary things, like Einstein, Da Vinci, Eminem and David Blain.

To realize that you are the only person in the whole wide world, the universe even, with that thought, that knowledge in your head was fine if you were like them.

But Tom was crap at Maths: and he had mud under his school trousers: and had only sort of kissed Kathy: and he got slapped a lot.

Kapow! It got worse. Or just bigger. 
Perhaps he was also the first person in history to realise that he had realised that he was the first person in the history of the world to know something.

Tom’s head began to hurt. Good job he was lying on the floor.

He loved being on the floor. Any floor. He just likes being close to the ground. It helps him to think clearly. It makes him feel OK. Tom doesn’t feel lonely when he lies on the floor.

Tom thinks that maybe that’s why adults are so weird.

Tom thinks that maybe the problem with growing up is that you do exactly that: grow up and away from the ground. You got to look at the carpet really close up and put your ear on the ground and hear the sound of things that didn’t move or breathe inside the house – humming and booming and burring and rubbing and all the other weird noises you couldn’t quite put your finger on. You got to look at drops of water and bugs hanging on blades of grass and make grass look like it was fifty feet high because you can barely look over it, and the prickly bits would tickle your skin.

He pulls himself up into a squat, then stands up only to fall across his bed. The sheets are cool against his skin. He looks up into the corner of the room and its flappy shadows. It seems impossible: a piece of rope and piece of wood and England; and him.
Tom sees the face of Nigel’s mum. She smiles at him from out of the shadows. Tom is smiling now, so much so that he doesn’t notice his eyes slide shut.

An Active Imagination

Michael looks to the far side of the room again. His eyes track down the front of the brooding cupboard to a point just beneath it where the darkness wells. Michael looks into the rectangular void.


The faint trace of a frosted line under the cupboard’s base offers the only evidence of the salt pool’s recent existence.

The frosted trickle running down from a small opening in the pressed box steel of the door above it reveals from whence the water came. He had soaked the floor overnight and cleaned it with detergents in the morning till barely a trace was left.

He looked to the right of the cupboard. On the far bench, pushed to the back against the wall sits a pile of used newspapers. All are meticulously refolded, having been read from the beaming masthead to the final line with any particular articles of interest cut out with the orange handled kitchen scissors resting in the drawer beneath the scarred table- top. Michael had been amazed at the lack of hysteria over the last few weeks.

At first, the newspapers had adopted their usual hyperbolic sensationalism, pumping up the fear and anxiety with doom laden stories of Armageddon: the island crashing into Greenland, a new ice age: the coming of new diseases and of course the role of global warming in the separating of Britain from its waspish perch on its Teutonic tectonic plate. Carbon Monoxide and rogue ozone holes were to blame apparently.

According to the Sunday Mirror’s Environmental correspondent – a curious position Michael thought – the rays pouring through the holes in the ozone layers had altered the temperature of the Gulf Stream to such an extent that it’s waters had, over centuries (already the flaws in the argument were large enough to drive an island into), loosened the strata of rock that operated as some sort of glue to such a degree that the Island had eventually loosened and simply ‘come away’ from its shelf. 20 points for insanity.

Such active imaginations. A part of Gt. Britain has proven itself to be a loosening scab finally dry enough to shed the skin on which it grew. The man wasn’t fit to write a classified ad in the East Anglian Times let alone a two-page special report full of bollocks in a National newspaper

Michael takes a slow sip of his tea, feeling the temperature change as his lips touch the cool lip of the mug.
He luxuriates in the brackish taste, delivered by the flat blackness of the leaves powdering inside the bag’s ‘dynamic filtration systems’.

Michael lifts his left arm and brings the scratched face of the classic Longines watch to where he can read its dial in all its elegant circular charm.
The watch had been a gift from The Old Man while their relationship was still young and while he still valued the difference between Michael’s opinions and his own.

23 minutes until he ventures out again. This prospect does not fill Michael with the dread it once did.

 The invisible rope that ties him to the centre of this room plays out as far as he needs it to but never too far as to create any sense of panic in him.
The one thing that does fascinate him about the way in which ‘the Action’ as he calls it has affected people is not the sheer immensity of the anthropological melt down it had engendered in every person in every street in every town up and down the country.

No, the thing that had really floored him was the seemingly infinite ability of particular Television Production Companies to take the best and worst that the world and its shambling humanity could throw up and figure out how to confect them into another tawdry piece of Asylum-eye candy.

One particular production company had taken a previously very successful but waning programme format of theirs and upgraded it for the inhabitants of the new ‘raft-like’ reality.

A newspaper article featuring a behind-the-scenes perspective of the programme had been very detailed, marveling as much at the engineering and the human choreography as at the resulting emotional collapse and random sexual acts the programme generated.

Michael consumed the detail quietly and thoroughly, his finger tracing line after line, his facing hand holding his interest at any one time on one of the many explanatory diagrams and aerial maps facing the article.


From what he could surmise, the old format featured a ‘closed’ house filled with randomly but particularly chosen people: there but for the grace of their various emotional fractures, flaws, social tics and proudly worn proclivities. A sort of boarding house for people with emotional and sexual Tourettes.

These people were then given jobs and activities to do jointly and severally that would begin to stretch their hearts, their minds and hopefully it seemed their libidos to breaking point.

Throughout this journey into the bowels of the human psyche Michael also gathered that an external audience would vote on whom they liked and disliked and who would be ejected until there was one person standing – they may well have crashing psychosis, claustrophobia and a sexually transmitted disease by that point but yes, they were still standing.

But the genius was in the programme up-grade: and their sublime use of two particular factors hewn from the new floating dream of their Island reality.

The first factor was one of Disorientation – to make the ‘house’ mimic the new floating-away status of The Great British Island, they had placed the whole compound on a floating platform, which could be (in the tiniest of increments) re-orientated in such a way as to be wholly unnoticeable to the housemates: not consciously anyway – their north could become south and their east west, all without them having any idea of why or how – all taking place under their very feet through the effortless brilliance of superior track and bearing engineering.

 The organisers would hold parties or games that involved all housemates to enter into highly animated and very physical activity while the house was ‘shifted’ to its new axis.

The second factor was one of Identity – every housemate had been put forward by someone who knew of a startling and identity-altering truth that would or could be revealed at their most vulnerable point – the truth that you had been adopted for example, or that you were born with two sets of genitals. Something, anything that could pull the rug from under you.

The intention was that the house would be left in one position for just long enough for the primal sensors of the contestants brains to register those things that anchor us in our state of being: where the sun rose over the house, where the shadows fell at tea time, which way due north was, whose window the sun set through.

At that point, an event would be called and while it was in full swing the house would be shifted again.
This resulted in the contestants becoming more and more disorientated internally, the feeling becoming more and more intense with the passing of each couple of days. The greatest psychosis coming from them being uncertain as to why they had begun to feel anxious, disorientated and upset in the first place.

(The incremental cruelties unleashed by this shift in the axis of someone’s very being was quite remarkable to Michael. The engineering of distress, far outreached the clumsy objectives of water boarding and the cattle prod. Entertainment fueled by extraordinary technology truly was both the blight and the light of human existence.)

As the contestant’s behaviour became more erratic, hurtling towards their various tipping points, the Identity grenade would somehow be dropped into the room.

In once such instance, Mark’ With a C’ as he liked to call himself knew nothing of his Identity revelation before he entered the house.

He thought he was just your average mixed-race (3 to be precise: Ghanaian, Portugese and Swedish) gay guy with an I.Q. of 110, and the potential to be the next Damien Hirst, raised in a one parent family by his doting bi-sexual artistic mother after his father had died of an overdose in Afghanistan.

And so he entered his third week still thinking as much. Until on the Tuesday afternoon, 15 minutes after the end a synchronized blind-folded belching competition, he was called to ‘The Room’.

It was difficult to hear what was being said after a while. His screaming had become so intense and high pitched as to render the human ear incapable of hearing anything.

The ambulance eventually arrived and at the point where sedation had overcome him (dramatically of course) the waiting audience discovered the true horror of it all.


Mark with a C, of The Factory, Homerton, East London had in fact been born Derrick with a D in Strathpeffer, an elegant greystone Victorian Spa Town long fallen for grace in the Scottish Highlands.

He had been raised in a loving two-parent household, his mother, a district nurse and his father, the manager at a local engineering firm doting on his every wish until, at 17 years of age, gainfully employed and with a charming young girlfriend called Tina, Derrick with a D had banged his head on a step ladder and subsequently found himself 600 miles from his immediately forgotten home and in Hoxton Square with blunt trauma induced amnesia, dressed in a stolen exotic dancer’s outfit and a fifty pound note.

The story revealed that, living hand-to-mouth, he had become somewhat of a local celebrity. At some point in the following two years he endured a deep dive ’holistic hypnotic’ memory reclaiming session with the locally infamous Maroushka at the invitation of a local artistic benefactor. Through this process, the ‘truth’ of Mark with a C was uncovered.

Bang. Shock. Hysteria. Crash.

The news rocked the world – and unsurprisingly, one small house in Strathpeffer in particular and the gay community of Homerton in general.


Cue public Soul searching. Fracture. Repair.

Interviews with parents ensued, two slightly shell shocked people somewhat overwhelmed by it all, filmed outside their small, neat Greystone cottage.

Tina’s weeping entreat for the return of Derrick with a D was splattered across an inappropriate number of news channels and newspapers. From the look of the hundreds of photographs and interviews she choreographed, the shock of Derrick’s discovery had turned her once mousy hair quite blonde, and her teeth a gleaming Hollywood white.

Her assertion, though admirable, that she would take Derrick with a D back just as he was, even if that had to be as Mark with a C, flew somewhat in the face of the wishes of Mark with a C’s two partners.

Is Derrick with a D lost for ever? Should mark with C prevail. Or should Mark with a C return to the life he once had? 


Txt DERRICK on 8679 now. Or Txt MARC on 8468.

The day after whichever #REVELATION sewered out of the televisual pipe, Michael would find the papers filled with the minute detail of the previous night’s emotional melt down, embellished by the journalists ever outraged commentary, the confetti of advice and shared experience sent via texts and emails scattered across every page – and an interview with the most recent ‘victim’ of course.

Baseness was a repellant human trait that Michael could only marvel at. It demanded respect purely for the fact that its stamina and resilience far out stripped that off its polar cousin Civilization. The civility of any human being could be stripped away in very little time it seemed, to reveal a thick, gristled streak of almost impenetrable Baseness.

It seemed to Michael that however far you dug into the sewer of humanity, there was always another layer of Baseness beneath it, surpassing the last in both the weight of its vulgarity and the banality of its cruelty.

Michael had humanity pegged as a slightly worn grubby scratch card spinning through the cosmos. Cosmic Litter. And as with all scratch cards, when the shiny foiled surface was removed, the revelation beneath it was engineered to mostly disappoint.

It seemed to Michael that God (if, contrary to the protestations of Dawkins and Hawking, he, she or it really did exist) did indeed play dice with the universe.

 

 

Primarily because talking in such a way as to resemble a conversation requires more than one person (unless, like Tall Paul, a boy the year above Tom, you have a mental condition that enables you to have a number of conversations all at once all by yourself).

 

 

 

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.

Chapter 5.

Tom opens his eyes. Morning.

His room is warming up nicely, the sun fuzzing through the gauzy primrose yellow curtains.

He looks at the ceiling and his eyes follow a small crack in the plaster running in a squiggly line outwards from the plastic cornicing.

Cracks: the house was moving. Not a surprise really. Even the house wanted to go and live somewhere else.

Tom runs his tongue over his teeth; they feel weird.

He cups his hand, puts it over his mouth and breathes out. His breath is a bit smelly. Ok, more than a bit – it mings.

He slides one leg out from under his steaming bedcovers and dangles it in the cooler air. He moves his toes: they hurt but he’s not quite sure why.

He slides the other leg out and swings his body up and out of bed adopting a zombie like posture as he does.

He is a zombie. He is dead from the neck up at least. He’s a head zombie. A head zombie-mind-reader. A mind-reading-head-zombie-body-stealer.

He crosses his room to the ‘thresh-hold’ – and steps out onto the landing on his way to the bathroom. His feet scuff the carpet. They feel heavy. He can hear the clatter-ding-caw of breakfast stuff going on in the kitchen downstairs. And the muffled sound of his parents below speaking ‘at’ each other.

Some people think his parents are talking ‘to’ each other but Tom knows better because there is this thing they do – a ‘not listening’ thing – where they just talk over the beginning and ends of each other’s sentences, like Mr. Baker does when Tom starts wanging on because he’s taken so long to answer the question that he’s half forgotten what the question was.

Tom looks in the bathroom mirror. An average boy glances back at him..

He stops brushing his teeth. He looks at his hair in the mirror. It is really average brown-ish and cut in a weird shape around his head, like a space helmet but without the really cool bits.

His face sits in the middle of his head. He leans close in to the mirror. He tries to look at his face properly to see what he really looks like but his face gets in the way. He makes his eyes go in and out of focus a lot and waits a bit to see if his face changes at all.

He’s stayed up late one night and watched a Greatest Movie Moments programme that was packed full of film clips. A woman talked about great movie ‘silhouettes’ – like Indiana Jones with his hat and his whip. And the man from a film called the Exorcist, under a street light.

He tried a few of them out. Weird.

Sometimes he thinks that if he stares hard enough his face might warp into someone brilliant looking; but no. Nothing. Just average, dull, boring him.

And now his eyeballs feel really achy at the back from him making his eyes do weird stuff.

His body isn’t much better. He lifts his arms up. He does Hulk power arm shapes. He lets them flop down again. He hunches himself over so his shoulders go all round and sloped.

He is skinny and he looks funny in his matching Y fronts and vest.

The bang on the door makes him jump.

It is his Dad. He is in a bad mood. Something about being late and ‘what do you do in there all day?’

Tom thinks that’s a bit unfair. Jaqui spends much more time in here than he does. He puts his toothbrush under the tap, rinses it and puts it back in the holder.  His Dad bangs again.

Tom’s dad is pretty much the same as all of the other dads in The Close: same looks, same clothes, same interests.  It’s like there is a secret dad shop somewhere in town where all the dads go to get kitted out.

Tom can’t understand why his dad wants to look like the rest of them given how rude he is about them. He mows the lawn, washes the car, stands by his fence nosing about other people’s visitors. Just like them.

Like all the other dads he seems to have a lot of passing conversations with Mirka, the Au Pair at Number 23 about nothing in particular: certainly from what Tom can make out anyway.

Mirka is a teenager from the Czech Republic and she says she is studying.

Tom made the mistake of saying Czechoslovakia once. He wouldn’t be doing that again.  He wasn’t sure whether the hot prickly feeling that had crept up his neck onto his face was because she shouted ‘stupid know nothing dumb ass’ really, really loudly and everyone heard or because he thinks she is very attractive.

Tom’s dad has a super power of sorts. He is the Invisible Man. They were at the pub once and his dad was trying to get served and even though he was right in the front of the queue almost every one else got served before him.

The barmaid girl whose eye his dad was trying to catch actually asked Tom what he wanted and he had to the do the nod and eyes thing in the direction of his dad.

His dad’s face had gone red. Though Tom wasn’t sure whether it was anger or embarrassment: hard to tell really. Sometimes Tom’s dad’s went red but then he would let out a huge fart and his face would go back to normal. This wasn’t one of those times

Tom’s dad is quality.

Tom overheard his dad and mum talking about a dinner party they had been to. He felt really bad after a while because he allowed himself finding it hard to imagine the other people at the dinner party finding his Dad really funny and interesting.

He couldn’t imagine anyone saying ‘That bloke is really interesting: funny, bright; yes, I really like him’ about his dad; which is a bit harsh as his dad must be a bit of a laugh to be invited in the first place.

Tom’s dad has two pairs of nice trousers and wears his leather coat with everything. He drives a silver French car and wears a fancy french after-shave on special occasions.  Whenever the commercial for it comes on the telly he strikes the pose of the male model and whispers the name.

He has slightly bow legs and pigeon toes but won’t admit to them claiming that he has “misshapen muscle mass due to playing football semi-professionally… which, by the way is one of the many reasons we don’t see your grandfather; ever, because I’m a football man and he’s a rugby union snob and anyway, let’s face it, he’s a twisted old…”  at which point Tom’s Mum would shoosh or nudge his dad into silence.

Tom had never really considered why he never sees his grandfather. He supposes he should do but what you don’t have you don’t miss perhaps.

Come to think of it none of his friends had their grandparents.

Well, Nigel did – a grandfather – his dad’s dad – but he was up in the North somewhere – pretty rich by all accounts – but since Nigel’s mum and dad had split up Nigel didn’t really see him.

Tom’s dad runs a small furnishings shop in the town specializing in ‘styles for modern living’ (as claimed in his small ad in the small ads bit of the local paper) – Tom thinks the stuff is OK but there’s a lot of corner units made out of something called plywood and, to be honest, he’d heard his Dad say that they would go up like November the 5^th if you dropped a fag on them.

Tom can sense his dad leaning into the bathroom door preparing to hammer even louder this time.

His mum shouts up at his dad to tell him not to shout at Tom.

Her voice sounds funny – it’s got a sort of ‘leave him alone’ and ‘don’t be mean’ tone This confuses Tom as she’s not really a softy like Nigel’s mother.

Tom thinks his mum looks a bit lost sometimes. Tom thinks lots of things about his mum: some of them are not very nice which then make him feel bad inside for thinking them.

He’s decided that she is a lovely person who just got sidetracked into being not very nice or a bit mean sometimes, like Doc Oc’s nanoparticle electro-molecular conflation experiment accidently going horribly wrong, turning a totally decent professor bloke into a marauding genocidal maniac.

Aunt Bea says Tom’s mum has got a lot on her plate. As far as Tom can see that’s half the problem. She doesn’t. She’s got too little as far as Tom can see. She always eats funny little portions and goes on strange diets that feature in her magazines and she just gets more tired and really grumpy

Tom’s mum works as a manager at a local supermarket. She likes her job. She has a couple of friends from work who pop round sometimes. One of them, Tina, sticks her chest out a lot and she wears a lot of makeup.

Tom’s dad calls her an ‘old tart’ under his breath when he thinks no-one’s listening– but the other one, Annie, seems alright.

Tom’s Mum likes to make the house just so: not that his dad ever notices.

She is not that old. Tom thinks that she is pretty; just not like in an actress kind of way. If you look at her closely there are millions (OK, maybe thousands: three thousand or something like that) of weeny blonde hairs covering her face which her powdery foundation sort of hovers on top of. Maybe it’s hovering for a reason.

Even from upstairs her can tell that she is not happy.

Tom’s mum has little explosions of loving Tom too much, and sometimes not much at all. Sometimes she seems disappointed in him: or she doesn’t like him; something anyway.

Tom’s dad doesn’t help. He seems to look straight through her with x ray vision. It’s as if he believes somehow that if he doesn’t focus on her for a bit and then does again she’ll have turned into someone else. His dad’s eyes are like those of an android programmed to kill without conscience.

The photo albums are full of photos of Tom’s parents having a laugh. There are a few with his Granddad and Grandma, not that he would he be allowed to call him Granddad if he ever did meet him – because “he would think it sounded common”.

Tom knows that something bad happened. If you’ve got a dad why wouldn’t you see him? And his mum and Aunt Bea seemed very close with each other. Why wouldn’t they be close with their dad?

Funnily enough they do look quite grand, his Granddad and Grandma. Tom wonders whether that’s where all those complicated words in his mum come from. They sound like they come from the world that Granddad looks like he comes from.

He looks a little bit like the Attenborough bloke that his dad always watches on the telly: but after a few too many family buckets of Ken’s Lucky Fried Chicken.

Maybe it’s a good job that they don’t see them and they never talk about them. Tom was told that the first time his Granddad held him Tom pooped his nappy with a massive farty bubbly noise and then vomited all over his Granddad’s trademark linen suit and expensive Italian hat.

The situation was made worse apparently by his Aunt Bea saying, “Sick, yes, but what insight, what a critic!”

His father is normally crying with laughter by the time he gets to this part of re-telling the story and Tom has never had the courage to ask him what’s so funny. Insight is a word he doesn’t really get. And why would a baby throwing up be critical?

Anyway.  He reckons it might be to do with his Granddad being a shit or something. That was what Aunt Bea had sort of half shouted in a bit of a shouty conversation with his mum on one of their curry nights in.

Tom is dressed now. He walks down the stairs, his hand sliding along the edge of the glossy-white banister.

He looks out of the window that looks out over the Close; at the houses that look just like Tom’s. Tom’s house is pretty average.

It is a sandy brick and white weatherboard ‘new build’ house on the edge of a market town by the sea.

His dad had told Tom that the town expanded in the late 1950s – that’s when their house was built. The only reason his dad had told him this is that Tom had seen a house off the high street with a small stone shield in its front brickwork with ‘built in 1815’ engraved into it. When Tom had asked his dad why their house didn’t have one of these his dad pointed out that writing 1968 on the front of the house wouldn’t be quite as cool.

Tom’s family went to visit a cousin once down in the West Country – somewhere near a place that sounded like a Cider drink – and their road looked exactly the same as his but just the other way around, sort of.

Tom thought that perhaps that made their house a bit like a McDonalds. You could go anywhere in England and find the same – same road, same house, same families. Just in a different place. Which was a shame because when they had driven down to Devon once for a summer holiday Tom realised that all the old houses and buildings looked slightly different from one place to the next. Maybe that’s why old people looked so confused. They come from a time when their houses and streets looked like theirs – not everyone else’s. Maybe they knew where they were once. And didn’t anymore.

For a while Tom thought that maybe all their houses looking the same makes England look a bit dull (apart from the nutter at the end of St Margaret’s Road who put paving slabs across the front wall of his house and some weird plastic bird in a small pond at the front being attacked by old toy wrestler and superhero figures and a Tamiya model of a WWII Tiger Tank).

But then on a school trip to look at European Cathedrals (weird idea really) they had driven through Belgium and all their houses were the same too – different to Tom’s, but the same as each other. So maybe everyone liked being the same.

Except Tom.

The upside was that Tom did quite like having to write out his address or say it out loud

Someone had obviously thought it would be good to reflect some local piece of history in the road names on the estate: in Tom’s case it’s a bit of Roman and Saxon thrown together – the excuse being that there were the remains of an old iron age hill fort and burial mound nearby.

So, at No. 23 Ethelburga Close, off the Boudicca Through Road (and just across from Legionnaires Drive) on the Wessex Estate, you’ll find Tom, his mum and dad, his sister Jaqui; and Ceasar.

Distinguishing house feature? A small tuft of Pampas Grass in one corner of the front Garden. The people who lived there before them had planted it and Tom’s dad couldn’t be bothered to dig it up, even though he hated it.

The Wessex Estate is sandwiched between the main road coming into town and Seaway along which you’ll find the rubbish football club and sports centre and the VW dealership full of shiny cars they can’t afford.

Everyone seems to admire them but Tom’s dad says VW a bit too smug for his liking and he seems to always hope some strange fate will befall them. Maybe he’s just jealous.

Between the Wood and The Golf Club is a track leading to the sea that smells of damp bark and burnt rubber.

Beyond that is a smart road called The Drive that snakes into the south side of town, with the Golf Course spreading either side of it. The Drive is full of very big houses where everyone looks like they have just been on holiday.

When you’re in the middle of the Wessex Estate you could be anywhere (or No Where thinks Tom).

Eventually you might realise that you’re near the sea because of the seagulls.

You can also tell because some houses have small covered boats in the drive or in their garages; and windbreaks and beach stuff in brightly-coloured plastic and stripy canvass. There is one house with a cool Volkswagen Van outside sprayed kind of bright orange and sea blue.

So; kind of could be anywhere seaside-ish but no great shakes.

Tom is frozen on the stairs eyeing the pampas tuft flopping in the wind. He hears the sound of distant pounding.

Jaqui rushes past Tom on her way up the stairs. The static from the man-made fibres in her crop-top and mad tights meets with the buzz of his just scuffed sock shuffle skin. The air fuses in a static lightning flash.

She punches his arm. The smell of brambles fills the air.

Tom’s sister, Jaqui, is pretty average as girls go. She is older than Tom. He wishes she wasn’t his sister.  He can’t understand why she doesn’t feel the same. How can she bear to be Tom’s sister. She hates Tom (or that’s what he’s decided). Her friends laugh at Tom and throw things at him. When Tom’s sister gets annoyed she hits him with her trainers or those mental cork wedges she loves, which he thinks is funny. This annoys her even more.

He did not find it funny the other day though because as he tipped out the backdoor into the garden with her in hot pursuit he tripped over the hose reel lying across the path.

He fell on the bit you wind the hose around and the tap went into his ribs. He thought he might throw up it hurt so much.

He laughed. Not because he was going to throw up but because in her rush to spam him across the forehead with a random trainer she tripped over Caesar’s water bowl and twisted her ankle.

She got really angry with him and his laughing didn’t help.

He said that she was just angry because she was probably going to meet Dangerous Boy and she wouldn’t be able to go to the wood and snog him if her ankle was twisted. He knew because he had seen her.

That didn’t go down well.

She only stopped hitting him on the head with her trainer because their dad had come out and pulled her off him. He thought she had over reacted a bit but thought better of saying anything else.

He knew why she was really upset. Her best friend Tina (who Jaqui quietly believed was much prettier than her) was seen with Dangerous Boy last week.  Jaqui was frightened that Tina was going to get off with him: he’d heard her say so when she was talking to Chivaughn, Chavayne of Chardonnay or whatever her name is.

Once Jaqui had been dispatched and things calmed down Tom noticed that his dad smelt of that after-shave from the blue bottle and he was wearing one of his new shirts – so he must have been on his way somewhere special.

As he walks away Tom sees two huge slobber marks across the back of his dad’s smart brown trousers. Nice.

Damp brambles.

The pounding of something heavy up the stairs follows the smell of brambles.

Ceasar gallops up the stairs after Jaqui. He passes Tom, another static flash and a huge swipe of slobber is left clinging to Tom’s school trouser leg. The slobber is undecided as to whether it should run down his leg as gravity dictates or follow the static upwards towards the light flash emanating from around Tom’ s head.

A damp woody, rotten smell fills the air.

Their dog, Caesar is pretty average apart from the fact that his name is the same as a Roman Emperor. He fits right in at Ethelburga Close opposite Legionnaire’s Drive.

There is nothing imperial about him. He is an average everyday mix of retriever and terrier. He smells of damp brambles and has bad breath.Caesar came and licked Tom’s face while he was watching the telly last Saturday and Tom had to wash his face with Dettol: twice.

Tom is frozen in static shock on the stairs. He sees his face reflected in the window glass. He looks like a nutter. His hair has breached the vice like grip of hair product, and is now sticking up proudly, ignited by static,  The awfulness of his life, which Tom is never slow to celebrate most of the time, is put to one side as the sheer genius of static electricity fills his head.

He imagines building up enough static to be able to stick balloons and small cuddly toys to himself and walking into his Physics class, introducing himself as the lesson for today at school: that would be genius funny.

Tom’s school is a comprehensive secondary school called St Michaels. It is built out of prefabricated steel and glass. It’s got different coloured plastic panels which are all a bit faded. The colours are all apparently called things like Mute Blue, Ethereal Yellow and Whist Green.

Tom found out the name of the colours from the caretaker once while waiting to go into see the Head Mistress. Tom thinks that the caretaker is strange. He watches Tom a lot. Sometimes it makes him feel really uncomfortable.

He might be a nutter John said.

What if he ended up like that child on the front page of his dad’s Sunday Paper that is otherwise full of pictures of half dressed women.

Tom, the obedient child, buried under the floor of the sports hall by the caretaker. John had got a little carried away to be fair. But the caretaker is kind to Tom so that’s fine.

When they started bullying Tom a lot, the caretaker seemed to always be just where Tom needed him; and he was brilliant at making the boys leave Tom alone without winding them up; which was more than he could say for Mr Poulter, the Art teacher who always managed to just make it worse.

The thought of school fills Tom with a big fat ‘so what’. He arrives at the bottom of the stairs and swings right.

The radio is on in the kitchen. Tom takes a bowl from the cupboard and the third box from the left in the line of cereals.

It is vitamin enriched which apparently gives you a happy heart. Tom thinks that maybe he should eat a box, call customer services, demand a psychological assessment and then threaten to sue them under the Trade Descriptions Act.

The smell of old cooked food wafts out at him as he takes the milk from the fridge. There is one really nasty smell in the middle of the overall waft. Tom can’t quite put his finger on it. Judging by the smell he reckoned that even if he were to put his finger on it he would probably require a paramedic.

He scans the fridge. It is most likely to be the cheese that his dad bought home the other evening.  It was drippy and yellowish. It smelled like a dead person – not that Tom had ever smelt one but he’d seen them on the telly and they look pretty smelly.

“A cheese with its own postcode” Tom had said.

He thought that was very funny. He had heard someone on the television say that about someone’s nose because it was so big. He thought it kind of worked for the cheese.

His dad said that his comment just showed what an ‘oik’ he was. A look passed between his mum and dad, which resulted in his dad going quiet; but not for long.

“This is a fine cheese” his dad said.

Tom assumed that it was like those posh cheeses in the ‘Finest’ section of the supermarket. Tom said that it was fine as long as it was nowhere near him; which he thought was equally funny.

Tom eventually spies it, lurking just behind the half empty soya milk (yeecchhh) double wrapped in cling-film, sweating. Tom closes the door leaving the cheese to sit unpleasantly in the dark emanating its cheese violence.

Tom imagines that somewhere in the labyrinth of one of the computer games that he doesn’t have there is a level which requires you to traverse a sea of this stinking cheese.

He sits down at the counter. He starts to shovel in the cereal. He can hear Jaqui stamping around upstairs. The plasterboard ceiling creaks and groans. She has lost her ballet shoes. Funny.

The kitchen radio drones on over the wet gravel crunch of Tom’s cereal eating.

There is a man on the news. He is from somewhere on the south coast – a ferry skipper. You can hear the whistling of the wind in the background as he speaks. He is all worked up about his ferry trip taking 10 minutes longer than usual and him being late and he’s never late and how something’s odd with his compass.

The Bermuda Triangle is mentioned a lot. Tom’s dad is not quite sure why the man is so upset. “10 minutes late? If the 7.37 to Liverpool Street was only 10 minutes late I’d eat my shoe”.

Speaking of which, Tom hears a massive thud upstairs. Jaqui has either fallen over the dog or one of her legs has dropped off. Tom hears the dog charging down the stairs.

He squeezes slightly further along the breakfast counter and puts his left arm lengthways, protectively along the side of his bowl in readiness.

There is a politician bloke on the news now. He is talking about the ‘special relationship’ between the British and Americans reaching right back to the war.

He talks about ‘slipping the yoke’ of Europe, which reminds Tom of some of the language that comes up in English Lit. All very Shakespearean.

Another politician, a lady this time, says that the relationship is not as good as we think and only the Americans really benefit from it. She says we should be ‘aligning ourselves more with the European Community’.

Tom makes a note in his head to look up ‘aligning’ to make sure that it means what he thinks it does because it sounds like ‘malign’ which he vaguely remembers is bad.

The woman blahs on about economic superpowers and import tax, isolationism and agricultural grants: and not getting closer to the Americans being a good thing.

Tom tries to gather in a rogue piece of cereal with his tongue from its current position,stuck to the outside of his lip like a crusty spot (not dissimilar to a thing Jaqui had on her lip for a week and about which she got all weird and went mental with with cover up and stuff.)

His tongue slips over the oaty circle which drops to the counter top in a small blob of milk.

Tom’s father would love the British to be closer to the Americans. He’s always going on about ‘dodgy foreigners, bloody French! And the Italians! All big pepper mill, alo beoootifool layydee and sparkly eyes on that holiday in Rimini”. Toms mum always gives a little smile when he brings this up.

Tom reckons his dad was angry because they couldn’t really afford the holiday so he felt better if he told himself that they were all dodgy and ripping him off.

And as for the Germans “Don’t start me on the Germans. Bloody EU. Bloody Edward bloody Heath” was what it all boiled down to with his Dad. Tom isn’t sure who Edward Heath is but he admires his ability to irritate his dad.

Tom becomes nervous. Tom thinks about the Tie a lot while listening to the radio and ambling around his cereal. Maybe he would go to the beach after school and see the Tie. Maybe he should re-tie the Tie.

He couldn’t really think of a good reason other than maybe he shouldn’t have untied it.

Ceasar’s smell precedes him like an Early Warning System. Tom feels the weight of Ceasar against his left thigh as a slurry of slobber trails along his left arm.

Tom sees Ceasar’s black nose sniffling across the top of his arm. He turns and places the bowl with the little cereal and milk left in it on the floor. Caesar wags his tail, licks his lips and farts.

Ceasar licks the bowl swishing it from side to side across the tiles and towards the other side of the kitchen with furry pink swipes of his tongue, clatter scrape clatter as it goes.

The DJ on the radio introduces a golden track from the archive.

‘Ohhhh, I am going to Barbados, Woooh, lovely country, Ohhh I’m going to Barbados, Woooh, by the sunny Caribbean seaaaaaaaa’

Tom is pleased that no-one can see him sitting, listening to Old Bloke Music

 

 

Cat’s Cradle

 Michael had ceased to be amazed by the cat’s cradle of life a long time ago: the way by all things are connected. How the fingers of one’s life continuously turn and twist, yet the string is the same string, never changing its length, thickness or design; continuous, steady, fixed.

 The padlock across the cupboard doors glints in front of him.

 The flat grey sheen of the cupboard’s sprayed steel surfaces seem to almost glow. His gaze shifts across the room to the table opposite.

 A bucket, a small plastic bottle of detergent, made misty by the chemical, and some wire wool sits beside a random tumbling stack of blue latrine hygiene tablets.

 Michael remembered the first time he came across words about the Davis boy scratched in the loo cubicle. The usual thing: questions of sexuality; acts privately undertaken.

 Michael wondered whether the boy’s grandfather had any idea that he was ‘that one’ in his class. The outsider; the loner.

 Not that his grandfather would or could be of any help: he had chosen the degree of his involvement (or the absence of it) a long time ago. Not that he would know what to do with him anyway.

 The minutiae by which young people navigated life; the small intuitions required to help them do it: these would be utterly alien to him. To the Old Man youth was ‘another country I’d heard of long ago’.

 He was only good for the puffed chests of little men. He was only good with grand gestures and flattery: cajoling thin-spirited people into turning his ugly little ideas into actions (Michael never could bring himself to use the word Ideal when it came to The Old Man). Bierkeller Cod oratory designed to turn a man against someone who couldn’t help but stand out to be seen; that’s what the Old Man was good for: very good at making other people the butt of everyone’s disappointments: especially his own.

 Michael reaches up and runs the coarse palm of his hand around his face: his calloused fingers bump across the lines and the rents of skin that gather below his cheek and under his jaw.

 Michael had, for a very short while, wondered whether he should contact the Old Man: to let him know. A word had not passed between them since the day he turned on his heel and walked away from the planning table at what was laughingly called their HQ; scattered with scraps of pamphlets, slogans and statistics: ‘massaged’ facts and figures on and about everyone seen as ‘not quite Right’.

 His hand traces up and around his eye, the hard skin of his finger-tips running over the crow’s feet, like tyres on a cattle grid.

 Michael has long since lost the habit of flannelling his open hand across his face and over his high forehead; the physical tick of the fractured and the damaged.

 He has not lost his habit though of reading the lines, rolls and pocks in his face while he thinks, as if in the braille of them somewhere an answer to the questions stumbling around inside his head will be found.

 The men in that room: that funny little room packed with the purveyors, the guildsmen, of the Little White Lie: every motto another Little White brick with which they would rebuild their little England: their little island locked fiercely and immoveable in the top right hand corner of the right part of the world, just above Europe.

 For them being above Europe was always so much more than just geography.

 Their absolute belief in their superiority was faintly ridiculous, arch revivalists of some misty bygone age where all things good were good and whole and unsullied by others: outsiders.

 Michael picks up the kettle, the weight of its boiling cargo tipping it forwards in his hand. The tea bag is already in the mug, waiting, perfectly positioned at a right angle. The thick funnel of boiling water pours over it, drawing out the perfect pitch of colour and taste.  He uses the spoon to scoop and squeeze the sodden sack against the side of the mug before hoisting it out.  The spoon descends again to stir. Meticulous. Military precision always. Even in the making of a cup of tea: especially in the ritual of a cup of tea.

 The two girls had been with the Old Man outside the hall that summer evening. B was two years old at the time, wrapped tight in a light blanket over a baby dress of country cottage cottons. 

Viv was four, or five perhaps: he could never remember the exact difference in their ages. For all her floral swaddle, B was spirited and contrary even then, wriggling to break free of her ‘mother’s’ grip (the beautiful, eternally patient and ultimately screwed over Anne), her small pudgy arms flailing and grasping at invisible sparks of life. Viv just stood anchored to her father’s leg, taciturn and disappointed by everything even then.

The sound of more running feet tumbles through into Michael’s consciousness. Again, he turns his head slightly, as an animal might, reading the intention and objective of the pursuers and assessing the victim’s ability to spoil it.

The passing laughter that accompanies the running feet jangles and claps between the walls of his building and the one opposite. Michael turns back and continues with his tea ritual.

 When Michael first realized who the Davis boy was, he had promised himself that he would watch out for him: not for any particular reason and certainly not as any mark of respect for his previous employer: he would ‘just because’.

 (For years Michael had believed that the laws of fitting in; the codes of similarity, were the things to be protected and defended at all costs. Now, difference was all that mattered to Michael. B had been right all along. It had just taken him a while to realise.)

 As time passed, Michael grew accustomed to the boy, gradually allowing the recognition of his presence into the cloistered monotony of Michael’s routine. Over the recent months he had become quite attached to him and his characteristic quirks and geeks.

 It became patently clear that the boy was, in many respects quite odd: certainly to someone like Michael.

 Michael had been brought up to believe that all boys should be upstanding, blindly loyal to Queen and country; honourable; mischievous sometimes, certainly, but never showy: and certainly never extraordinary or different.

 The skin at the corner of Michael’s mouth gathers upwards in an unexpected smile; the tiniest movement; barely discernable but a smile it was. Those silly rules: Never stand out. Be a ‘man’. Don’t be too good with books.Ideals are dangerous: especially those of the more extreme political, religious or aesthetic kind (unless of course it is the unspoken and wholly understated one of a fine white Christian kind that Idyll and Empire are built upon).

 There had been little room in the little empire that was Michael’s schoolboy heart for quirks and oddities – boys who demonstrated them were usually ‘straightened’ through some form of attrition; emotional, physical or both.

 Some things never changed: the running feet animated proof that to be different, to be extraordinary, to be more than everyday was viewed with deep suspicion and, for the person being extraordinary, a wholly dangerous past-time.

 By some strange reverse Michael had begun to find himself viewing the boy’s quirks and oddities in a positive light: and as time passed they became more; greater; turning and morphing until they revealed themselves as ‘good things’ – quirly little beacons of redemption.

 In some twisted reverse of logic they brought to mind all of his brittle traits and rituals that B used to tease him about: the way he always wore the same shoes with the same suit or jacket on the same day: the way his hair was always combed to attention via a series of four identical sweeps of his comb choreographed with the same immaculate precision every time; his penchant for eating exactly the same pub lunch everyday – a sandwich of honey roasted ham on white bread, heavily buttered and smoothed with English mustard, two pickles, and a sliver of farmhouse Cheddar set to the side; the way his broad bear-like shoulders always rolled in a shrug executed with military precision – Bear – how he loved that she called him Bear.

 

Chapter 6.

The bubbled water laps up the sides of Tom’s thighs.

Tom likes to jump into the bath early before it has barely begun to fill up. He enjoys the feeling of the water level creeping up his body, slowly welling around his ankles and creeping up the outside of his thighs. It tickles and feels slightly odd in the fact that his skin below the water is warm while the skin above is chilly, prickled with goosebumps.

Tom imagines that he is a spy strapped into an icy flood chamber in the subterranean grotto, the laughter of his evil nemesis echoing around the chamber as the water creeps ever higher.

The school day was pretty ‘not’. Tom spent most of the day enjoying the farmy grass smell floating up from the playing fields into the open windows, closely followed by the sharp tang of the fumes from the two stroke engine of the clanking machine cutting it.

He jams his arms down along the outside of his thighs, wedging them against the milky avocado plastic of the bath. They could at least have changed the bathroom. Everyone on television keeps making jokes about avocado bathrooms.

As the bath fills up, Tom gets that weird sensation of having hotwater whooshing around his legs, while his back pushes against the cool plastic surface.

The faded yellow flannel floats over his hips, barely touching. It bobbles and ripples a bit but the tiniest contact with Tom’s Thing keeps it fixed in place. Immoveable.

This little island of floppy yellow cotton is quite important to Tom.

Tom does not cover his Thing with the flannel because he’s shy. It’s just that everyone in Tom’s house acts like he isn’t there. They just walk into the bathroom, do stuff: sometimes even talk to him.

But that’ll change Tom thinks. He’s not sure when but he has a vague feeling that it will: soon.

He thinks about the Tie. Doing so makes his stomach feel funny. His toes, the right ones in particular, are the keepers of the water level. They, wholly independent of whatever is going on inside his head, monitor the water and act as required, knowing just when to turn the water off to maintain the perfect depth to ensure the flannel stays put, hovering over his privacy.

Tom is still amazed that he untied the Tie. It’s been there forever. Maybe since the beginning of the century. Maybe longer.

And what’s at the other end of the rope? What does it do? Tom senses that it is something really important. He senses that it might have something to do with the really extraordinary thing that he is going to do one day.

Maybe it’s a clue. Maybe he has to look for other Tie clues. Maybe he will find a lost treasure. Maybe there’s a rock tied to the end of it that will give him brilliant superpowers.

To be honest his current slightly average superpowers are getting him down. Maybe he has said maybe in his head too many times now and the word sounds funny to Tom, like a made-up word that he hasn’t really heard before.

That happens to Tom a lot. If he stares at a silly everyday word long enough or says it enough times, it begins to sound like a made up word, or a foreign one. Shoe for instance.

He thinks about the Tie a lot: and his untying of it.

It is quite hard to concentrate on what he is thinking because his whole face is in pain

from pulling a Maori war face one hundred times in the mirror. He saw some Maoris doing them on the news his dad was watching last night.

The face pulling is called a Hakka and it involves pulling faces that mean that you are going to gut and chop into pieces anyone who crosses you. It was part of the Maori Welcoming Party for a visiting Royal, which Tom finds a little confusing. Gutting you seemed a rather unwelcoming promise.

Tom tries pulling another killer warrior face to see if doing one more cancels out the pain of the first one hundred. As he does so he wonders again what on earth the great big piece of rope could be attached to: a fish perhaps, like a big fishing line: for giants. Or maybe there’s a boat somewhere, out in the middle of the North Sea that had anchored itself in a Bermuda Triangle like zone, lost on the other side of the fourth dimension, the only evidence being this big anchor rope that just appeared out of nowhere. Which Tom had just slipped free.

But that was just silly.

The Tie itself was so old and wizened.

(Tom loved that word: wizened. It should have been onomatopoeic – another word, one of Tom’s showing off words, that he loved – once he knew what it meant. But, ‘wizened’ just looked like it sounded, and was a bit like ‘wizard’ which was the name for old blokes with long wrinkly faces, which was cool still. It just made it an adjective apparently.)

Perhaps its magical?  But Tom couldn’t figure out why; or how.

Tom sponges a trickle of bathwater into his mouth, swills it and fountains it in a big arc back towards his toes. It leaves a taste like the water in Aunt B’s kettle.

Tom’s sixth ‘toe’ sense has lost sight of the water level for a moment. As his toes crab up to turn the dimpled plastic tap left in three and one half turns something unusual happens.

The flannel ripples along one edge, and without much further ado, bobs a few millimetres to the right. Unlike before though, it continues to do so.

Toms feels the vague tickle of disengagement and then nothing.

The flannel seems to stall for the briefest moment, and then heads off towards his feet, rippling down its sides like the Manta Ray that he’d seen on one of his Dad’s fave Blue Planet programmes.

Tom watches it closely. He cannot get the Tie out of his mind. A very, very silly thought suddenly occurs to Tom as he watches the flannel bobble on un-attached.

No. That’s a ridiculous idea.

The flannel bobbles and sinks, a small wash-pool of water filling the dip at its centre, only for the centre to float up again, the whole thing turning slightly and then righting itself. It continues, still heading south towards his toes, which now sit one set hiding under the other, a little sheepish at their recent failure in the tap department.

Tom suddenly feels very, very chilly. He draws his knees up to his chin, the sponge clutched in his fists and held tight to his lips. He sucks the bathwater through the sponge, feeling the air travel through the porous bits as it does.

His mind wanders.

The chatter of the automatic weapon fire clattering across the tiles of the chamber startles him but he makes no sign of it.

Suddenly the large moustachioed henchman reaches into the freezing water, fixing his scarred, muscular fingers around the pale noble neck as he drags the young Bond out from the ice pool, gouts of water rolling off the struggling form.  The young Bond’s body collapses, folding over the sharp, brutal edges of the frozen ice pool.

They had tortured him for 48 hours. He had said nothing. His body glistened with a mixture of sweat, ice flakes, droplets of blood and victory. The light flares and fades. The young Bond’s eyes begin to close.

(After a rather protracted conversation with John about Bond Vs. Bourne, Tom had stuck with Bond, more out of loyalty to his father’s childlike love of From Russia With Love – especially the theme tune by some bloke called Matt Munro.)

Would Verushka find him in time, help him escape from the Evil Island and bathe his battered body lovingly and adoringly back to health in her exotic villa?

The massive hammer blows on the door rouse the young Bond. He reaches weakly for his coral pink towel with the small tear half way along it, the result of some previous over-vigorous back toweling.

Verushka would come soon he knew. He just had to be patient. (He’d considered changing the name as it sounded too much like Veruca but he couldn’t think of any others)

“Get a bloody move on. Your sister needs the loo.”

Funny. Verushka’s voice had taken on a manly angry tone not dissimilar to his father’s.

In the fading light, the last thing he sees is the foaming scurf from the flood chamber trickling down the muscular strands of his arm, twitching and pulsing.

He is floating now. The sky is the sea; the sea the sky. As his eyes mist over, the white out of death almost welcome, he sees the sandy yellow edges of the Evil Island floating into the distance.

Is he floating way from it? Or it from him.

Three explosions echo through his head.

“I said get a BLOODY MOVE ON!”

 

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.