"The blue one's getting closer! But wait is that a brown cone I see coming?" (www.nemonymous.com)

 

 

 

 

I. Unidentifying Flying Objects

Boys were insects. Or so it seemed to Major as he weaved his way among them to put a stop to a scrap between two of them at a thinly frequented part of the schoolyard. This was his fifth tour of playtime duty in a week and he wondered why teaching had to be his vocation: nobody had made him do it, in fact many of his college contemporaries had ribbed him and, if he’d been of a weaker mind, he would no doubt have ended up like his friends in stockbroker’s offices, earning money left right and centre. Still, it was a nice day today, good to be outside under a clear blue sky.

 

“White!” he shouted as he caught one of the culprits by the earlobe. He could not help think­ing that in the old days street urchins like these were actively encouraged in the arts of pugil­ism.

 

“Yes, sir?” said a thin boy with thick grey trousers down to his shinbones.

 

The other boy had scuttled off before he could be recognised, but Major had a suspi­cion…

 

His ruminations were interrupted by the outlandish sound of a mechanical roaring from above. All those boys not caught up in the peripheiy of the fight’s repercussions had their faces already level with the cloudless sky, volcano-cone noses pointing upwards.

 

Idle White took the opportunity to wriggle free from Major’s pincer fingers and legged it across the playground, seeking out the boy, who’d just been his companion in fisticuffs, within the heady confines of the Boys’. They’d both probably decided that it was in their inter­ests not to pay too much heed to the mysterious roaring from above: they could not afford to be left out in the open, with Major on the warpath. So, eventually, inside the dank, seeping dark­ness, Idle White felt his way to the nearest cubicle door and rattled the latch as he called:

“Treff, Treff, are you in there?”

 

He could still hear the noise, but now it was muffled, more lugubrious with its continuous under-rumbling.

 

There was no answer.

 

Idle White was nonplussed. The motions of his mind were far too slow to support finer feelings. Sometimes, he even wondered whether he was who he thought he was. His whole life had been playing arse-up to his father’s belt, dangling his baby sister above the water butt in the garden and drawing intricate grids across the pages of his schoolbooks rather than read them meaningless words.

 

If Treff was not there, where was he? He did not exactly want to hurt him again. One fight’s enough between friends ... for a while anyway. White must have been thinking hard for time passed without properly realizing it. Treff must have been outside all the time, risking punish­ment from Major, maybe believing that he had not been identified.

 

Major did not scare White. Why then this skulking inside the Boys’? Surely not to avoid the likes of a teacher. He lifted himself from his haunches, rubbing at the damp patches on his trousers. There was silence beyond the door.

 

Unaccountably, he thought of the family back home. His mother ... but she’d died years ago and he could not recall hide nor hair of her. His father, the despot who tried to keep the rest of them from existing. His sister. His half sister. His third brother. His second cousin. Idle White, himself. And…

 

The schoolyard was deserted.The whole sky was of metal grey. It was easy being a teacher when all the boys had gone. Major ambled towards the staff room, buttoning up his flies.

 

 

ii. Boys Will Be Boys

Boys will be boys. Or that’s what my mother used to say, when I’d got up to some mischief or other.

 

I had a particular friend. You know the sort, one you remember for the rest of your life, even though you never see him again from, say, the age of seven. Most faces are non-stick, easily passing through the memory ... and out again. But Jules was different.

 

One of the games we used to play in the school playground was called “Girls”. I can’t recall much about it now, since the mental fuse-wire of the experience blew some time ago.

 

It’s strange, I can still see faces out of the corner of the eye of my mind hustling in from all quarters of the playground, watching Jules and I at our games. I recognise none of their ill-defined features nor pick out actual words from their hubbub.

 

But, one stark staring day, the call of “Fight Fight Fight Fight” bounced off the ancient school walls like the ghost of a future football crowd (for in those far-off days, fans did not chant mindlessly but waved scarves and twirled rattles) ... and the memory is even clearer to me now than the present.

 

Jules and I were playing the “Eyeball” game, where opponents would crouch knee to knee, face peering intently into face: the first to blink would be the loser.

 

We must have stared at each other for the good part of dinner break. An irresistible force meeting an immovable object

 

Time was frozen then. I can jump back into that moment whenever I like and I sometimes do so when modern existence wears me thin. As I re-enter my own body as a boy, it’s like easing into the comfortable clothes of the past. All is silent. Desperately silent. The wire of memory as taut as a piano’s. Incredibly, his two separate eyeballs are of different colours, one glinting like a ruby, the other like an emerald. Then, Jules’ head audibly shatters, scattering splinters of bony blood and curds of brain to every corner of the playground.

 

I had won. And the cheers erupted round me.

 

I’ll ever see Jules’ face staring back at me, a suspicion of growing sadness in his eyes. I recall it clearly, for how I had studied it in obsessive detail for that frozen unblinking moment of childhood.

 

Boys will be boys and never will be men.

 

iii. Down From The Roots

The boy removed from his pocket what resembled a squat, round pillbox. He was sitting in the fork of a tree, looking down upon his hometown, distantly laid out in the valley like the models on the carpet of his bedroom in one of those very houses below him.

 

The tall factory chimneys did not belch smoke, for it was Sunday. He wondered why the Old Fathers had decided to build them right at the centre of the town, where the terraced grids were at their thickest. Perhaps, to ease the journey for those who worked there ... which used to be 98.6% of the inhabitants, but now with unemployment spreading like a cancer even through the most industrious streets, the proportion was sliding down the temperature gauge towards a new ice age.

 

The boy was old for his age. He was the kid philosopher of his times. He knew more about life than most ... he seemed to soak in the mental energy emanating from the town roofs, willing it not to wane. He saw himself as a deity. The other boys spurned him, because they did not like the way he looked at them. Not unfriendly, but all-knowing. Almost pitiful of what he saw in their eventual fate.

 

He opened the pillbox and took out a roll of narrow paper tape which seemed to have raised circular blemishes spaced equally along its length. He put it to his nose, but the smell was not significant ... though an underlay of its potential…

 

He was interrupted by a flash of sun on one of the windows below. Someone had evidently spotted him, examining his insect speck in the only tree that had survived the recent wind storm, its branch-holds slipping on the friction-less summer sky, standing like a skeleton of an alien monster upon the hill ridge.

 

Let them look. He could outlook them any day. He had nothing to hide.

 

Inserting the roll into his silver cap gun, he artfully wove the strip between the spindles, letting just a short tab protrude under the hammer. Satisfied with what he had accom­plished, he caressed the trigger with his index-finger, testing purchase upon it. But, for some reason, he could not yet find impetus to pull it.

 

Now, an old man, he yearned for one more sniff of that redolence blossoming from a burst caphead. That would retrieve his lost youth, recollections of times unhindered by modernity and of thoughts even too shameful to remem­ber. Through the open window, the old man looked and looked and looked ... he saw the old tree still there; it had only moved to the side a few yards in the intervening years; the ridge itself had only been slightly weathered into different contours.

 

The insect was incredibly still there in the fork of its branches, waving its hair-trigger feelers. The old man flinched as he heard the tall factory chimney crashing to the ground … another echo from a past age. He put on his old Davy Crockett hat, and slept.

 

iv. Movement’s End

Treff and Idle White peered from their eyes and saw stars sparkling like scattered jewels. It was as if a careless, or self-disgusted, thief had left them in his wake.

 

Then, the two boys wondered if they were not really looking down upon a town, where night had failed to dowse the lighted windows of their erstwhile neighbours. The actual words in their minds were nothing like those that were written, but words themselves often have mis-meaning to freight them, for the sense of the word is in the way it’s used or the way it’s not. If I said the boys were in a spaceship, the whole thrust of my story would misfire and stall.

 

But that’s where they were: a roaring, some­times stuttering, star-hopper, built by ambi­tious inhabitants of a world similar to ours, except they had the gumption to exceed their own abilities ... unlike the men and women we all know so well who squat within their own skulls, dreaming that they might hatch one day into full-blossomed butterflies with wings wide and strong enough to reach the strange, beauti­ful fulfilments at the shimmering heartlands of the universe, but ever retreating into the petty incestuous reality that money and earthbound love engenders.

 

The spaceship hovered seemingly for an eternity of misbegotten entropies, its engines now humming silently on underdrive, evident­ly reluctant to leave the slight ghost of an attrac­tion from the planet below. The night had by now slipped round the corners of the world, sliding like opaque slime. The town that had once been the stars to those on board was creep­ing with incipient insect life; the various self-contained beings wove intricately curved grids that were clear to the observers in the sky but entirely unknown to those who actually constituted them.

 

Idle White nudged Treff and pointed to the schoolyard where they had once flicked ciga­rette cards. Boys scattered across its concrete surface, whereon white lines had been painted to cater for the demarcations of various ball games, but those games that the boys played on their own seemed underpinned by nothing but bright illogic and fresh disorder. But these were different boys than had played here only the day before. Or they were ghosts of those who’d once played here. Only the sole teacher on play­time duty tried to reimpose the patterns

 

Treff’s turn to nudge Idle White: there was a boy evidently playing truant, crouching in a tree at the rising edge of the town, like a spider roosting in the web of its winter branches. Even at this range, they saw this was Idle White himself ... and they wept bitterly as they un­accountably realised that they were the ghosts, and the real boys were in the schoolyard.

 

The spaceship shuddered as the unseen pilot placed a huge humped cap into the triggerhold of its gun turret ... which in turn swivelled the barrel on its grinding plinth, targeted it upon the tiny skull of a boy haunched up in the schoolyard opposite his friend similarly con­torted ... and fired pointblank. The flash was blinding ... and a tall factory chimney in the industrial part of the town crumbled to the ground in apparent sympathy or symphony (or ricochet), thus concealing the abrupt sound of the spaceship’s roaring off into those parts of the universe where there was no light to go faster than…

 

Pity the words meant nothing.

 

Despite this, the butterfly followed on.

 

 

(published 'Back Brain Recluse' 1989)