RuKsaK

It was one of the very few and shallow recurring dreams I used to have as a boy. My house would seem to have sprouted an additional staircase inside it – an inviting one, older looking than the real one, with a curve to it which spoke of adventure. It was never a challenge of nerves to go up it in the dream – the staircase showed it was friendly. At the top was a room of wondrous Victorian toys – the centrepiece being a languid, sun-basked rocking horse. That was the end of the dream every time and it was always a natural, child’s pleasure to get there. In woken life I often considered how much that room was real and how I might one day actually find it.
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Bernard’s hair was the first thing you noticed about him – a defiant blonde sticking from a stubborn head. He was our leader because of it. I’m not sure whether early years of teasing had put that hard face under the hair or the hair had done it by itself. All the same, you wouldn’t mess with Bernard. He had expressions which knew more than us, carried more confidence.
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We had a dayfull of summer muck rubbed into our faces, the smell of the sea and the kind of tired muscles you get when you’re a kid – happy ones. We had brown skin, but didn’t care about that. The summer was on us and we were bathing in the season, not its weather. That was when seconds and minutes were laughed at – our lives counted in months, if that.
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However, the end of each day’s sunlight brought a short stab of sadness with it – having to go home. For this reason we’d take it in turns to walk the other to his home.

My house, the one my parents still live in, sits on yet another quiet street of my town. Hedgerows seem to be everywhere in differing sizes and neatnesses. There’s a long one opposite my childhood home which runs for about a hundred metres and stands a couple in front of a warehouse wall. In our glum silence we heard the twittering of young birds from behind it.

Bernard looked at me with eyes that nudged and said follow. I did.

Through the hedge we found a perfectly crafted nest holding three wiggling, squeaking pieces of bone and skin. I’d never seen anything like it, but they were clearly birds, a day or two old. Their eyes were sealed over in a globule of ultra-pink skin and their heads were skulled balls, writhing on scrawny necks. I was repulsed, but before I knew it Bernard flipped the nest over and they all fell to the floor.

I was shocked, but something in me was more disgusted by seeing their entire shaking bodies, almost transparent, with little nuts for hearts and lungs swelling like they’d break the needle ribs around them. I felt something firm, incongruous placed into my hand. Bernard had found a brick and put it there.
‘Finish off the little bastards!’
‘What!’
‘Drop that brick on them – they are disgusting!’
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To this day I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know why, when their screeches became initially louder, more maniacal, beneath the brick that I stamped on it. I heard and felt their minuscule lives finish. I don’t know why I did it, but I know all the time that I did.
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I rushed home without saying goodbye to Bernard. My head was hot and I ran to my room to cool it on the unused radiator on the wall. I sat there, slumped, begging the cold, white-painted metal to take away the heat from my burning skin. It didn’t, but somewhere I lost a dream, a staircase and a peaceful wooden horse, which I’ve never seen since and never will – vanished in the years of that day.

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Charity - zero