Out In The Cold: Chapter Three

In the morning the wind had eased.  The television spoke of fallen trees and floodings; Connor filled the sink to as far as the overflow hole and snapped the tap back, watching the water sloop up and down as if the tiny peaks were looking for an escape.  He filled the sink with tubes and bottles and gradually the water slipped up to the overflow, gurgling away into the hidden abyss behind the walls.  Leaving things this way, he moved off to his room and planted his shoes on his feet before joining his mother in the car.  They pulled out and left the house behind.  It was their annual trip to his grandmother's house.

At the train station people moved at infuriatingly slow paces, filling up spaces that others dodged around in sweeping panic of hurry and semi-madness.  His mother had put a full day's worth of coins into the machine and left the car parked ready for the dash back to the sanctuary of home later that evening.  It would be dark and cold, Connor thought, when they got back home and he had turned off the heating as he left.  He couldn't just leave without some sort of blemish to cherish, but now he regretted it and he could see it would only be colder tonight, with the sky so clear overhead.  He wanted to dash away, disappear between the tubs waddling back and forth, in and out, but it was too late: their train was here.

Miranda found good seats, window seats, hurriedly discarded their bags in the overhead tray and directed Connor to sit.  He did so.  Though he dutifully obeyed, she shivered with terror: at any moment he might spring up and scratch, snarl and bite at a passer-by like some deranged animal.  She didn't imagine it, she remembered it.  His fifth birthday, at a Brighton café, he had done just that.  It had filled her with bitter tears that she fought back in order to dish out the several apologies, each one a tearing agony of embarrassment.

Connor picked at the fabric of his seat, looking for loose threads or tears he could worry at, or use to hide stones, rubbish or a dirty tissue in.  The window held his reflection and he watched his face bob and sway against a moving flurry of green fields and occasional embracing woods.  The journey to his grandmothers's was a yearly ritual that was pointless to consider escaping.  If he didn't come his grandmother would only come to them and she would surely stay the night.  He didn't like the way she looked at him, through him.  It made him cold.  Made him look away from her.  He felt like some animal made lame by her stare; acid, it burnt him, and under it he felt like the cold ash forgotten at the edges of her fireplace.

Miranda's book was held loosely between her fingers, the words wandered up to her, called up to the uninterested stare and lodged themselves briefly at her doorstep before the page fled from her.  The book was a prop while she worried over Connor, kept watch on those around them, checked his glances and where they took him.  Prayed he didn't need the toilet, doubting he would want to wander away from the tiny hole he was working into the fabric of his seat, but worrying in any case.

*

Christmas came and went without incident; the trip to Miranda's mother's had been smooth.  She had left in something of a state of shock, feeling that there must be something around the corner, something ready to step out of the darkness.  But it didn't.  Even Chirstmas day had been free from event, Connor had opened presents, disappeared to his room and spent most of it out of sight while she was left to watch television, or read in the box seat.  Her only source of disappointment had been the return to the house after the visit to her mother's: the heating was off and a tap was dutifully filling a sink to the overspill.  That was it though.  At other times, windows had been broken, bed sheets thrown into the garden; on longer periods away she had twice returned with Connor to find the freezer off, a foul and fetid stench filling the house.

Now New Year's Eve hung over her and the clock ticked along.  The rain fell outside, it fell as dutifully as her tap had run, filling up the sink.

Although his mother sat downstairs in her precious box seat, Connor had decided to retreat into his hole.  He rarely came in when she was still in the house, but she felt he was safe tonight.  He could hear the spit and thunder of fireworks even from his hole, his mother, he was sure, watched in gasping amazement at the window.  There was nothing better to do than carve his name into different joists and push back the felt insulation further and further, widening and lengthening his hidden recess.  He felt a master here; here he could feel free.  He played with the lights too; he sat in the brightness holding the bulbs up against his eye then killing the power to his 9 volt.  Lights flashed dully against the darkness.  Orange glows and blue rings snapped in and out of focus, his own firework display to accompany the whizz and crack of those outside and, in the darkness, he held his breath.

Miranda's window held little between the purpled flashes and the blues that sparkled in the air above.  Her neighbours all year around tried to out do each other every year, and, each year, it provided Miranda with a new and better display than the previous year.  Outside the wind stirred, the fizz of falling lights was caught up for a moment longer before fading into the night.  The temperature outside had risen with the onset of the rain and the familiar frosts had fallen away from her window, away from the paving slabs; the white fingers that had pulled up toward her palms on the glass pane were gone.  The air was filled now with misty rain rather than left empty by Winter's touch.  There was a week left before Connor returned to school, when he realised this, when it felt real, like it was clawing at him, she knew the calm would break.

Connor felt safe enough in his space and slept, slept through the chime of twelve.  In his dreams he felt a touch on his hand, against his cheek, saw his mother's look of wonder but everything felt wrong to him, his skin was hot where she touched him, her wonder wasn't mirrored by him.  She wasn't his mother.

Out In The cold: Chapter Two

Connor lifted himself over his mother's back yard fence, landing lightly among broken garden tools and wood scraps.  The back light was on and it threw enough light across the lawn to see his way back.  He opened the French doors, helped himself to cake from the fridge and went to his room.  It was a mess.  The sight shook him each time he entered, but it was momentary and he adjusted; he had made it this way, this was how he liked it.

Moving to his cupboard, stepping over debris, unavoidably crunching some of it underfoot, he opened the door and stepped inside.  He hunkered down and wormed his way down into the mole hill of clothes, shoes, blankets until he disappeared into the mound.  Scratching at the floorboards below he found the one he had worked loose and pulled it clear, heaving himself in below the other boards, into the darkness.  Here he was free, safe from his mother's watch.  The boards opened into a dead space underneath the hallway and the stairs; he had room to move about freely and could fit at least another two people his size if he wanted, but he wouldn't, why would he.  He turned on his little light, powered by a lumpy 9v battery; the light's plastic casing was shattered long ago.  He had pulled out the metal parts fastening them back together and now a series of lights dripped out enough light for him to see the copper piping that ran overhead along the beams, the ruined webbing in the corners, his tools, the box of matches he had hidden.  Here he also had bedding and a pillow and it wasn't long before he decided to bed down in his hole.

Miranda left the school, her head held low, like so many times before.  The leather strap of her bag had given way to age and she fiddled with the fraying edge, sat in the car wondering why he caused her so much grief, so much trouble.  His teacher had told him to sit down, but instead he hung at the window, his hand against the pane, had slammed the window with the flat of his hand and, annoyed it hadn't given way, struck the nearest child.  She heard the story, so familiar, the words were like echoes skittering back across her mind to the last time and the time before that.  She simply nodded and apologised, finally abashed when the teacher finished on the part where Connor had lashed out at him too.

She drove to several playgrounds, the library, the supermarket; she walked along the canal and then up through the woods her breath momentarily clouding the way ahead before clearing above her slumped figure.  The police had checked all these places and would call the moment they heard something.  In her heart she wanted to disconnect the phone and disappear into the night's darkness.  She opened her coat, purged herself of the warm air trapped inside and welcomed the chilled touch of the black air, it was an embrace to the wishes and the prayers.

She sank to her knees and murmurred broken words between salty tears, each word drifting away into the darkness.

*

It was two days before Connor made himself known again, he knew it was the only way to gain enough sympathy from the school, from his mother and from the services that by now would be involved.  All those involved were well aware he could disappear, this wasn't the first time, but this was the longest time.  It hadn't become a media story, so certain was everyone that he would turn up.  Each day his mother disappeared to search for him he used the time to feed himself from the tins she wouldn't miss at the back of cupboards; showered and brushed his teeth, read his books and mooched about in the garden collecting good stones, stones he could throw long and hard, or picked at the garden waste and the tools there at the garden's end.  In the night he lay in his hole relishing the tears he heard his mother crying, he knew though that they weren't for him, not really.

Scores of adults and children at school wanted to know where he had been, but he wasn't about to give away the best thing about the house.  He could go there any time and he knew it.  As long as his disappearances were his secret, he could vanish whenever he had a mind to.

Christmas was gaining momentum.  Decorations were in the classroom as well as an advent calender. Only the children who had performed well that day were allowed to open the doors to chocolates or riddles hidden there by the teacher. He didn't care to participate.  Instead, when Chrissie had won for the third day in a row he sneaked in at break and hid drawing pins in the cloth of his teacher's chair, he tore at the edges of display boards and sketched obscenities on Chrissie's desk.

By afternoon registration Chrissie was nowhere to be seen and his handiwork had been cleaned away, but if you looked carefully you could still make out a faint etching in the table's laminate.  The teacher had seen the pins, but the frayed boards went unnoticed.  At the weekend he disappeared for several hours and waited outside Chrissie's house.  No one paid him any mind and when Chrissie left with her parents, Connor took a well fingered stone from his pocket and aimed it at a window, each and every crash that accompanied the successful targetting met with an uncontrollable sense of exultation that ran, rippling though his core.

On the walk home he saw his mother pass in the car, she slowed.  She couldn't pass him without picking him up, but he ran into the wood and disappeared from view.  At home he had made himself a sandwich, leaving the fridge door open.  His mother left the car keys at the counter and closed the door, she began, silently, to pick at the mess her son had left for her.  He wouldn't allow her the slightest peace.

In the evening Connor sat in the box window completing his homework: he wasn't stupid and it wasn't hard.  He let his book flap loose on his lap afterward, idly watching it slip slowly to the floor.  The wind outside thudded against the glass, as if shouldering the window in frustration.  The wind's direction was indiscrimate, the trees outside were battered from a west-sided barrage, then an east.  Connor's eyes rounded, his pupils growing black and large as he sucked in the energy on display, for him.

Out In The Cold: Chapter One

On cold frost bitten nights when the rain is whipped into a frenzied blur, unsure of where it came from or where it's going to, and all the time losing its original understanding of itself as rain, becoming frozen hail, newborn should race for cover.  These new spirits pupate in the skies above, they fly high above or crash into the gloomy darkness of the earth below.  On nights like these our first thoughts are battered and bruised, caught in a wild whirlwind high above creation; our thoughts become darkened by hardship and the cold sting of the night and sit forevermore, ghosting the edges of our minds.

In family photos our parents match up to us. They glisten with the pleasure given by comparisons made by casual observers.  But not all observers see the resemblence, not all onlookers understand the connection at all; not all parents are proud; and some parents wonder if their child is theirs at all, or some soul flung into the womb by the casual hand of the cold winter wind.  Parents who wonder at it read up on the soul and it's origins, some discover the belief that a child's soul would flee the world and return to heaven's crib if it was unhappy and infant mortality was satisfactorily explained this way with the reassurance that, eventually, the child would return when it was ready.  Here, in this world, far from those beliefs, our children accept the situation they find themselves in, or, don't know how to fly back to the one they left behind.

The cold winter wind's brush had reddened Miranda's cheeks, but she bustled on, oblivious to the cherry glow on her face.  Christmas was nigh, time was precious; the food was all in bar the fresh veg, but that would be picked up the day before, she liked her carrots to crunch and snap before reaching the roasting tray.  Her son idled in aisle five: the entertainment section.  She passed the top end of it and shot a look down the length and there he was picking through a score of plastic cases or rearranging stationery goods held in the same section.  At the counter she saw the video game, well beyond his age range, add itself to the moving belt; her son sauntered away to the magazines and she moved it aside out of the way, away from her shopping.

In the car, her son's face was a tumult of fury; rifling through the bags, as soon as they were under way, his addition was quickly found to be missing.  Miranda knew that until tomorrow afternoon, at the earliest, things would be unpleasant.  And indeed they were.  Already a ruin, his room was now no place to vent any frustration and so the bathroom was spoiled, tiles cracked, mirrors broken and the toilet left overflowing.  Only when he saw his mother on her knees cleaning the wreckage did his temper ease and abate.

Eleven years of this.  Eleven years of what seemed like solitary confinement with a 'deranged beast', as her mother had once said.  But he was hers, what else could she do but weather the constant battles, the movement from one school to another, from one care professional to the next.  Christmas was coming and that was all.

In the night, when peace did descend, she sat in the box window praying to the night, to the dark spaces in the woods outside, to the shadows that hid from the light.  Darkness brought her peace and so she wished on it, night after night.

*

Connor sat at the end of his bed; the sun was up and his mother's alarm had sounded from her room some time ago.  At the window, white climbing arms spread like fungus, glittering against the pane.  He moved to the glass and held his sweaty palm to the creeping face of cold, gradually it fell away under the transfer of heat and retreated.

At breakfast he watched his mother move about the kitchen, wiping surfaces and clearing the dishes from the machine to the cupboards.  She moved with expert efficiency and only shot him the odd glance when she knew his head was bowed down to the wet cereal in front of him, even so he still saw her: nervous and fidgety.  She wouldn't give anything away, but he felt her inward sighs anyway.

He moved away from his bowl.  She lifted it revealing a milky ring on the wood below, cereal scattered in mashed piles by the spoon.

"I haven't finished."

She replaced the bowl after first cleaning the ring away, sucking it up into the sponge, the mashed cereal too.

He came back to his chair and finished the remnants; dropping the spoon with a ringing clatter into the bowl he looked at her eyes on him and moved away to his room.  She cleared the bowl sopping up the milky ring again and the loose particles of cereal mashed into the grain of the wood.

After he left, she watched him march to the road's end and on to the bus there.  He never made the five minute walk to the school.  Only once had she urged him to before she knew better, deciding to leave out the bus money beside his keys in silent capitulation.

Outside the clouds rolled across the sky with vacant intention, removing the light and casting silken shadows that sprung up from the ground, unwilling or uncertain of their place in the world.  Miranda let the phone click back into place, she would work from home today and finish putting the bathroom back in order.

By one o'clock both work for the day and the bathroom had come to a conclusion and so she locked the house and went out to the woods.

She found a frosted bench, sat, and wished in to the nothingness between the trees before letting her hope drop to the ground below.

At Miranda's feet the ice had cracked, sending splintered alarms to the edges of a frozen world.   Leaves, browned and blackened, sat half in, half out of the frozen cage.  Not even the light touch of the wind would pick at the exposed fringes.  She worked her heel at the looser escarpment of ice and freed the dead and lonely things there, bringing the souls of her shoes together like gloved hands she picked the leaves loose; some tore, others were pulled free and with an exultant rush, the wind foraged deep and low and scattered them up into the air, pulling Miranda's gaze back to the skies and the distant rolling shadows.

When she returned home a police car waited.

"He's run away.  Again.  Hit a teacher this time."

Disclaimer - What our children face; what they've always faced

What our children face; what they've always faced

A meaningful and hopeful future; a life of aspiration and promise; a land of plenty with rivers of honey.  Or, none of the above.

The world of the child is one that has been under attack from one generation to the next, but I think it is no more so than now that British children are under attack from a lack of hope and failure of future.

When I look around at the problems they face today, I see:
Broken homes
Unhappy parents
Missing mothers
Missing fathers
Adults who miss the point of childhood and innocence
Adult fashion on a five year old
An education built on sand with change after change sweeping away the footings
Children unafraid or unaware of the audience before them as they spout one expletive after another
A harassed sexual identity
A numbness to violence
Access to drugs
Invitation to alcohol

And all the time the erosion of their right to be a child and nothing other than this.

These stories are responses to my personal frustration with the world we find ourselves a part of today.  Each one is driven along by an interest in the classic motive of a fairy tale: to teach and to explore, or even to warn.

They are meant to be enjoyed, but I hope they provide some reflection and maybe even agreement.

Matthew Twelve: Chapter Seven

The light that pricked at Matthew's lids was a new light, almost scented; colours slipped up into his vision drawing his hands up to brush the sleep from the corner of his eyes. Rich, white nails brushed themselves along the skin of his cheeks and, surprising him with their alien touch.

The face that looked back from the mirror in his room was not his own, but he stood in front of the glass all the same. His hands were ever so slightly stretched, the skin taut, his nails white and new. He felt his jaw work tightly, free itself and click dryly as he worked it loose. Staring back at him was an adolescent version of his father's face, it made him cringe, stepping back, and as he did so, his lip raised, quivering with fear or anger, he wasn't quite sure. Colours stormed him again and the room swam with patterns, blemishes, stains. He turned to the window on the world outside.

The wild greens and clustered hills retreated from his gaze and the new scrutiny he regarded them with. The water was calm, slate blue, reflecting the empty openness of the sky above.

For an hour he stood at the window as the colours swam across his vision, his sense of aspect and distance playing with his mind; like the foreign texture of new clothes, his senses battled with something that was familiar, but suddenly wasn't. He felt loose in his own skin, even though now it felt that more taut and stretched. The bones in his hands seemed more prominent under the skin, almost pointed or sharpened, even ridged.

It was his birthday. His thirteenth.

Opening the bedroom door, he quietly let himself out on to the landing and slunk along to his mother's room. The room was empty but for the bright light of the morning reaching in from the west. The skin on his arms dimpled and the hairs rose.

Using the edges of the stairs and avoiding the creaks at the centre of the boards, Matthew made his way downstairs. From the second step he could see that his father was still sleeping, the tumbler's contents adding to his stained trousers.

Stepping into the embrace of the morning air, the sharp sun warmed him. A long line lit out through the grass, which was bent at an obscure angle, leaving a sunken fold in the dewy blanket. He picked out its direction, caught the lasting smell of his mother's scent and trotted down towards the creek.

Under a line of trees, the light pierced the nimble wooden edges of limbs and shifting patterns formed, fell away, swimming together across the mossy earth.

When Matthew reached the verge above the beach, he halted and scanned the sand. Soft steps, pressed into the sand, drifted down to the water's lip. He stepped up to the first, before hearing the crash and heavy pad of his father's maddened dash towards him.

Retreating to the water, Matthew fell back, step by step until the water reached his haunches. His father stood at the bank staring past him, the frenzied fury frozen there; his breath sent out puffs of steam like little signals and Matthew followed his eyes.

The upturned body of his mother sat as still as a leaf, floating in the light, wanting ever so desperately to follow the absent tug of the tide. The woman lay there uselessly and Matthew regarded her now for what she was: weak, frail and dead.

*

The body of his mother drifted around him, the face upturned and the eyes open to the open sky, occasional splashes added fresh tears to the lifeless face.

Matthew's father sank against the bank, merging with the muddy verge, his eyes locked on his wife's body. In Matthew's eyes he saw the same woman who, for the past two years, had barely the energy, or will, to nod her head, wave goodbye or greet him at the door. The woman was as mobile now as she had been in the best portion of his memory and he stepped away from her, his bare feet raking up the mud from the creek's bed as he moved away from her and his father.

As he took purchase of the far bank his father stirred, shaking his head as it snapped and stretched into a foul an inhuman shape. The nose pushed out and fell in on itself becoming a sharp-pointed muzzle and the eyes clouded over, while his fingers seemed to break and stretch into wide-spaced things that could claw and slash.

Now on the bank, Matthew raced up into the far woods, hearing the splash and suck of his father in the water behind him, then the crash and crunch as he tumbled into the wood in pursuit. He heard his father's voice, foul in his head, it left a stink there, the stink of misery and grief, muddied and gravelled.

He was getting closer, but Matthew didn't slow, he had a new-found well of energy and he wasn't prepared to slow: not yet. The road was getting closer and if he could reach it he felt the creature wouldn't follow him beyond the wood. The first day he had seen the man came back to him, he recalled that weary desperation in his eye and the bus that drew up just in time. He remembered his dog and the man that stood over the limp remains.

The road was coming into sight, but his father's heavy crash was closer; Matthew cut up a bank tearing at the earth with his outstretched hands pulling himself on and away and on towards the road. He didn't stop to look, to think, to listen, but instead fairly flew across the cold tarmac and into a car's empty wake. Behind him the wet, angry eyes of his father lurched out of the shadows and he plunged into the road. The bus struck him at an oblique angle, the creature's body flying ragdoll-like into the air almost perpendicular to the ground that it was launched from. Wheels ground against the road, the smell of melting rubber filling the air, brakes screamed into the quiet and his father's bloody body fell to the roadside.

Matthew saw it all and it became a long-treasured memory.

He buried his mother's body beside the dog, he owed her that much, but he buried her deeply.

He began to respond, on her behalf, to the letters in the post; he carried on collecting the money from her bank account as he had before, making sure the money went out for gas and electric, water and council, just as he had before. He told the doctor there was no need of a follow up and commended the surgery on their support. He informed the school that Matthew's behaviour would be addressed. And he lived that way until it was no longer necessary; he was still quiet, reclusive, but his teachers had become accustomed to this and so life, quietly, carried on in his empty house.