And Now for Something Completely Different

I'm off on holidays today until next Saturday -- hopefully with no internet access as I could use, but will not willingly take, a break.

Since my last post, of course, the world lost the greatly talented and profoundly disturbed Michael Jackson. While his death - after years of drug addiction and mental illness - may not have been a tragedy, his fifty-year-long life certainly was. His abuse as a child himself can not and does not excuse his involvement with children as an adult (to whatever extent that involvement occurred), but it does go some way to explaining his shockingly evident self-hatred. The plastic surgeries, the eating disorders and the medical dependence seem more and more like desperate attempts to alter and ultimately eradicate himself. Like in that spooky, kooky "Thriller" video from long before I was born, the monster was inside him after all.

And meanwhile, innocent women and men are shot dead on the streets of Iran. Nothing is ever very simple for very long.

The following poem, however, is about as simple as they come. Enjoy, and take care.

*

We are leaving for a little while;

there is time for this, even

time for leaving and returning now.

We will wander like tourists

along the Left Bank and eat ice-cream

outside Notre Dam. I do not fear

this leaving, because I will take

you with me. I will keep you

like a secret in my mouth.

The Nameless (Part Two)

Summer has finally arrived. It may be raining, it may be cold, there may be no ice-cream vans in sight, but my exams are finished and I finally get to indulge all those hobbies that seemed so interesting when I was trying to study (this week: teaching myself bass guitar!). For now, here's the next bit of this story. Enjoy.

*

They spent the rest of the day in their yard playing obscure card games, yelling at each other and letting stray cats eat scraps on the porch. Ethan especially liked the strays. I watched him watching them and when no one was there he’d reach out and pat them hard between the ears, even if they didn’t like it. Sometimes the boys fought out there too. It was Cameron who mainly ended up fighting; he was real thin, all delicate and narrow, with dark hair and a pretty kind of face. The other boys bullied him when they got bored of playing cards. If he got really beat up and his nose was bleeding, Ethan would tell them to stop. Sometimes he even bought Cameron sweet things in town, ice-cream or nectarines. One night I saw them lying out on the porch and Ethan was petting him like a stray, smoothing tangles through his hair.

They knew all the girls’ names, and whenever they walked down the street they’d say hey, how are you, and sometimes curl a strand of hair around their fingers. Everybody loved them, even the serious girls who didn’t usually have boyfriends. I saw Caroline Dalton in the pick-up truck with Matthew one night, and they had the radio on and she was laughing and laughing, with this little cardigan buttoned up around her throat, and everyone knew she wanted to be a doctor and she never ever went out with boys.

As it happened, the week I first met them was also the week carnival came into town. I watched the Big Dipper being put up from my bedroom window, a couple of blocks away from Three Roses, in the car lot behind the bowling alley. The Dipper was the scary ride that I guess everyone was excited about, but I liked the dumb kids’ stuff more: the Funhouse and the Bumper Cars and the games where you got to win toys. Usually I’d go to the carnival with my parents, but I was too old that year. I just sat inside my room watching the Big Dipper go around and around and sometimes hearing faint screams.

On Wednesday afternoon I lay out in the garden reading the encyclopedia. It was almost too hot to read, and I had to keep rearranging the book on my stomach because it was so heavy. Sometime around two o’clock, Ethan came outside and lay on his porch steps with sunglasses on. I looked up and he was looking over at me. I went back reading for a while, but whenever I looked up, he looked back at me. I started feeling the strangest sensation, as if I was a kid and I could tell that something was going to happen, or was already happening, and no one would believe me. After a while he took his sunglasses off and laughed.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“You been to the carnival already?”

“No.”

“Oh, really?”

I was going to tell him I had no one to go with and then suddenly I didn’t want to. “No.”

“We’re gonna go tonight, I think.” He stared into the sky. “You wanna come with?”

“Um – well – are you – would you mind?”

“I’m asking.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

He shrugged and put his sunglasses back on. “We’re leaving at eight.”

I put the book under my arm awkwardly and went inside. My mother was sitting right at the kitchen table, reading out of a recipe book. I crossed my feet and then uncrossed them and then did a little cough.

“You okay, sweetie?”

“Um, I’m going to the carnival with the boys across the street tonight.”

She looked up over her glasses. “Oh?”

“Well, yeah. See, they invited me and I thought it would be rude to say no.”

“Do you want to go?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Okay.” She looked back down at her book. “Well, if you want to go and they asked you, there’s no problem. Is Ethan going to drive you?”

It felt inexplicably strange to hear my mother saying “Ethan” very casually like that. It was like listening to her explain about where babies come from. I wondered for a second had she ever looked at Ethan and thought he was extremely good looking like all the other girls did.

“I don’t know,” I said. I waited for a second and then ran upstairs and into my room.

The Nameless

After a prolonged absence from the world of blogging, interspersed with a few lonely little poems, I am delighted to be back (despite one final exam looming on the Wednesday morning horizon). This is the first part of a completed short story that I'm planning to post in sections, but God knows how many times I've said that and not done it, so let's see how it goes.

Enjoy, and happy summer.

---

I watched them: the scavengers, the nameless boys. They arrived in Three Roses one day in June, hanging out the back of their mother’s pick-up truck. No father around. They were all bare arms and dirty faces, dragging suitcases into the clapboard house right across the street that we thought was going to be bulldozed, kicking beer bottles away from the door. Their mother stood on the porch gently crunching the glass with her shoes, as if she was curious about what glass was made of. Then she cried. My mother stood at the kitchen sink, hands beaded with glistening suds, and, watching, mopped her brow with the dry part of her arm and said, “you be nice to those kids, now,” because we were a liberal neighbourhood.

There were four of them: the oldest, Jacob, was nineteen; the youngest, Cameron, just five years younger than him. Matthew and Ethan were sixteen and seventeen respectively. We found out from one of my father’s friends that their mother’s last name was Miller. For the first week they lived there, I never spoke to them, but one night at home I heard them shouting, rattling doors and crashing dishes and calling: Ma! Ma, come on! My father shook his head sympathetically and I held my fists in my lap until the noise stopped. I wondered if someone would come out of the house, but nobody did. When I went to bed, I pretended to be one of them. I laid in the dark stroking my arms and imagining them bare and sticky with sweat.

I was fourteen that summer – notionally the same age as Cameron – but I was an only child, used to those deserted months when I never saw any of my friends. I stayed inside a lot reading books of the encyclopedia, because I wanted to be a scientist. I was also intensely private from my parents, and would become hysterical if anyone touched the door handle while I was in the bathroom. Sometimes at night I locked my bedroom door and closed my curtains and examined myself in the mirror like a tumour. Once I even made a list, in order or preference, of all the different cosmetic procedures I would have when I was older, starting with the removal of this scar I had down the inside of my left leg from a time I fell off a bike when I was nine, and ending with my teeth, which were crooked.

On Sunday, the boys came to church in ironed shirts. Afterwards, when I was done talking to some of the girls from school about where the boys came from and how come they were here, my father gave me money to get myself some soda. I saw them in the car lot, sitting in the dust. I called over hello, partly because my mother told me to be nice, and partly because I was pretty confident around boys, since all my cousins were boys and I was the oldest. They squinted back at me from between cars.

“Where you going?”

“Get soda,” I said.

“You mind if we come with?”

“No.”

They got up slowly and came over, all skinny with their sleeves rolled up. I watched them and pretended not to watch them and felt the sun throbbing hot on my scalp. They were as different as new candles or strips of coloured ribbon: shiny and smelling of soap, like something I had loved and then forgotten.

“So, you live right across from us, huh?”

I told them yes.

I would have told them anything.