Published 'Strange Wonderland' 1997
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 forced it on him. Still, it was a nice day today, good to be outside under a clear blue sky – even if surrounded by insects.
“Idle White!” He had caught a single pugilist by the juicy earlobe.
“Yes, sir?” said a thin boy with thick grey trousers down to his mid-shinbone. The other scrap-merchant had scuttled off, but Major could guess who it had been. Then, Major’s ruminations were interrupted by the outlandish sound of a mechanical roaring from above. All the boys not implicated in the periphery of the fight’s repercussions had their faces parallel with the cloudless sky, volcano-cone noses poking 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. The most likely place was within the heady confines of the Boys’. Both Idle and his co-pugilist had 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 exposed in the open, with Major on the warpath. Thus, eventually, inside the dank, seeping darkness, Idle White felt his way tentatively to the nearest cubicle door and rattled the latch as he called: “Jules, Jules, are you in there?”
He could still hear the roaring noise, but now it was muffled, lugubrious with its relentless 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 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 his friend Jules wasn’t in the lavatory, where the heck was he? Idle White did not want to punch Jules again, one bout of fisticuffs was enough between friends, for a while anyway.
Idle White must have been thinking; time passed without touching the sides. Could Jules have been outside all the time, risking punishment from Major, maybe believing that he hadn’t been identified? Major did not really scare Idle White. Why then was Idle White skulking inside the Boys’? Surely not to avoid the likes of a mere teacher. He lifted himself from his haunches, rubbing at the damp patches on his trousers. There was silence outside. Unaccountably, he thought of the family back home. His real mother; she had 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-brother. Idle White; half himself.
The schoolyard was deserted. The whole sky was of metal grey. It was easy being a teacher when all the boys had disappeared. Major ambled towards the staff room, buttoning up his flies.
Boys will be boys. That's what Idle White's real mother would have said when he got up to mischief. His step-mother spanked him.
Idle White's friend Jules often doubled as an enemy, one of those boyhood companions remembered forever, though he may never be seen again after the age of seven. Most faces were non-stick, easily passing through the memory and out again. Jules was different. One of the games they used to play in the school playground was called 'Girls'. The adult Idle White couldn't recall much about it since the mental fusewire of the experience had blown ages ago. Idle White could see many faces from the corner of his eye, hustling in from all quarters of the playground, watching him and Jules at their games. He recognized none of their ill-defined features, nor could he pick out actual words from their hubbub.
One stark staring day the call of "Fight, Fight, Fight, Fight" bounced off the ancient school walls, like ghosts of a future football crowd (for in those far-off days, football fans did not chant yobbishly but waved scarves and twirled rattles). Idle White and Jules 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. They must have stared at each other's eyes for the good part of a dinner break; an irresistible force meeting an immovable object...
Time was frozen then. The future's grown-up version of Idle White would be able to jump back into that moment whenever he liked and he often did so when an adult existence wore him threadbare. He re-entered his own body as a snotty-nosed boy, easing into the comfortable clothing of the past. All was silent, desperately silent. The wire of memory was as taut as a piano's. Incredibly, Jules' two separate eyeballs were of different colours, one a glinting ruby, the other an emerald. Then Jules' head audibly shattered, scattering splinters of bony blood and curds of brain to every corner of the playground. Idle White had won, and the cheers erupted around him.
He would always see Jules' face staring back at him, a suspicion of growing sadness in Jules' eyes. Idle White recalled it clearly, had studied it in obsessive detail; that frozen unblinking moment of childhood. Boys will be boys and never will be men...
Idle White removed from his cluttered pocket what resembled a squat, round pillbox. He sat in the fork of a tree, looking down upon his home town, distantly laid out in the valley like the models on his bedroom carpet in one of those very houses below him. The town's tall factory chimney did not belch smoke on the Sabbath. He wondered why the Old Fathers had decided to build it at the centre of town, where the grids of terraced twouptwodowns were at their thickest. Perhaps to ease the journey for those who worked at the factory, which used to be 98.4% of the inhabitants. Now with unemployment spreading, in rich seams of cancer and coke, the working proportion slid down the temperature gauge of the soul towards a new ice age.
Idle White was old for his years; the kid philosopher of his times. He knew more about life than most, soaking in mental energy emanating from the town's pantile roofs, willing it not to wane. He saw himself as a deity. More so even than Major, the teacher, especially more than Major.
Most of the other boys spurned Idle White, they did not like how he looked at them; not unfriendly, but all-knowing, almost pitiful of what he saw in their eventual fate. Today, Idle White opened the pillbox and withdrew a roll of narrow paper tape bearing raised circular blemishes spaced equally along its length. He put it to his bubbling nostrils, the smell had an underlay of potential.
He was interrupted by a flash of sun on one of the tiny windows opening below. Someone had spotted him from down there, seeing Idle White as an insect in the only tree that had survived the recent wind storm. White's feathery tentacles were slipping on the frictionless summer sky, the trunk and knobbly jagged branches a skeleton of an alien space creature etched upon the hill ridge. Let them look. He could outlook them any day. He had nothing to hide.
Inserting the narrow roll of paper into his silver cap gun, he artfully wove the strip between the spindles, allowing just a short tab to protrude under the hammer. Satisfied with his accomplishment, he caressed the trigger with his index-finger, testing purchase upon it. Yet, for some unknown reason, he could not find impetus to yank it.
Many years later, Idle White is a dreaded grown-up himself. He yearns for one more snort of that redolence blossoming from a burst caphead. Recollections of times past unhindered by modernity might retrieve his lost youth. Through the open window an old Idle White looks and looks and looks, until he outlooks even his dreams. He sees the ancient tree still there, only budged to the side a few yards (or a few inches judged by his current perspective) in the intervening years. The ridge itself has been slightly weathered into different contours. Unbelievably, the insect is still there in the fork of its branches, waving its hair-trigger feelers. Then a flash, as if lightning has hit the tree, or even come from it. The old man flinches as he hears the tall factory chimney crashing to the ground nearby, another echo from times past. He dons his old Davy Crockett hat, and sleeps.
Idle White and Jules peered from each other's eyes and saw stars sparkling like scattered gems. It was as if a careless, or self-disgusted, thief had left them in his wake. The boys wondered if they were perhaps really looking down upon a town, where deepest night had failed to douse the glimmer from erstwhile neighbours' windows.
A short sharp dose of hindsight told them they were indeed inside a roaring, sometimes stuttering, star-hopper, built by ambitious inhabitants of a world similar to ours. They had the gumption to outdo their own abilities, unlike the grown-ups who squatted down below within earthbound skulls. Grown-ups sometimes dreaming that they might hatch into full-blooded butterflies; wings wide, and strong enough to reach the strange yet shimmeringly beautiful heartlands of the universe, but instead ever retreating into the petty incestuous reality that money and matter engendered.
The spaceship hovered for an eternity of misbegotten, misbegodden entropies. Its engines now humming semi-silently on underdrive, reluctant to leave the slight gravitational ghost of attraction from the planet below. Night had slipped around the corners of the world, sliding like obliquely opaque slime.
The town that had once been the stars to those on board crept with incipient insect life. These various self-contained beings down below, ones that called themselves grown-ups, wove intricately curved grid-patterns which were obvious to Jules and Idle White in the sky, but entirely unknown to those below who actually constituted them. The two boys pointed down to the schoolyard where they had once flicked cigarette cards. Other boys scattered across its concrete surface, whereon white lines had been painted as demarcations of various ball games, but the games that the boys played without the supervision of teachers seemed underpinned by nothing except illogic and disorder. Were these different boys than had played here only the day before? Were they ghosts of those who once played here, with whoops and unstructured chants? Only Major, the sole teacher on playtime duty, desperately tried to reimpose the patterns ...
It was now Jules' turn to nudge Idle White. There, down below, was a boy evidently playing truant, entangled in a tree at the rising edge of the town, a spider roosting in the web of its winter branches. Even at this range, they recognized Idle White, and they wept. Perhaps they were the ghosts, and the real Idle White and Jules were down below. Yes, ghosts, or at a push, angels.
The spaceship shuddered as an unseen pilot placed a huge humped version of a child' s gun-cap into the craft's triggerhold turret, which in turn swivel-aimed the barrel on its grinding plinth. The flash was blinding and the town's tall factory chimney crumbled to the ground. Nobody on board, however, noticed that in the school's playground a boy's jewel-eyed head had been hit too, by ricochet. The spaceship roared off, into those parts of the universe where there was no light to go faster than.
