Happy New Year

Ten...

The world started to move too fast. I could feel my heart beating through my eardrums as it shook my entire being into a state of awareness. I caught sight of you, but you were gone before it really registered.

Nine...

Someone shuffled behind me, knocking me forward and, like a wave, music and heat flooded over me. I heard a mumbled apology from behind me that brushed past my shoulder with its speaker, but it didn’t really matter. I was now lost and confused.

Eight...

As I tip-toed my way above the crowds, all I could see was an ocean of heads and hairstyles, none of which I recognised, just like no one recognises the drops in the ocean even as they splash over your face. I landed back on my heels defeated.

Seven...

I twisted my shoulder towards the bar, opening my body up to a crashing, charging fool who stumbled straight into me and sent me tumbling to the floor.

Six...

The fall took exactly a second. The countdown told me that, and in that time, I saw a room of faces dance like a spinning top in front of my eyes as the lights behind them stretched into towers.

Five...

I hit the floor harder than I expected. My back bounced upwards, and for a flash, I thought I was floating, until it landed again and the pain rushed around me. Even through the relentless thud of the music, I could hear the laughter. You always can. Someone laughs at you and a missile launch couldn’t block out the sound.

Four...

There’s an arm wrapped around mine now, and I was lifted upwards. My heart revved inside my chest, making the tips of my fingers tingle. I was up now. Every hair on my arm seemed alive, touching the world and feeding back to me.

Three...

My friend stood right in front of me, mouthing something and looking slightly concerned, but I looked right past him. She’s right there. My heart chimed like a clock.

Two...

I paused. Everything seems perfect. I’m there. She’s there. That’s what New Years Eve is about. That moment that burns itself into your memory like a brand on your life. I pushed past my friend, stretched out my arm as far as my fingers would reach, and just brushed the side of her arm. She turned slightly.

One...

Now she’s right in front of me. I could almost see my reflection in her eyes, or maybe it’s my soul. God know I’d been lost in those eyes often enough. Like sunrise, a smile broke onto her face, and all the nerves popped inside me, dissipating away. Without knowing, I could feel my hand again the soft white of her face as I ran it slowly upwards, stroking through her blusher with my fingertips. I leant my head in. She did the same. I felt the gentle caress of her top lip against my bottom lip.

Happy New Year.

The Parade: Part One

Benjamin Black was bundled out of his sleep one cold and frosty February morning by a noise that sounded, at least to his freshly awoken ears, like a parade of partying elephants beneath him. All he could hear was a mismatched collaboration of noises, sounded, songs and dins that were forcefully squeezed into the same airspace, creating a sound somewhat akin to that of a marching band during an earthquake. The floorboards under his bed trembled, vibrating the water in the glass he’d laid down next to his bed before falling asleep the previous night. Even forcing his pillows to become emergency earmuffs didn’t seem to make the slightest difference. The tune being sounded out below was still so clear that, if the mood took him, he could have tapped his foot along to the beat and maybe even sung a harmony or two to himself.

This isn’t right, he thought to himself, it’s... oh God! It’s half six in the morning. What’s going on? He wrapped his blanket around his shoulders like the bun of a hot dog, and tiptoed out of his room to investigate.

It wasn’t unusual for his family to wake Ben up. In fact, the more he thought about it, it would be unusual for them to not to. No matter how many times he asked, shouted, moaned, complained, or groaned, they never seemed to get the message. The message being: STOP WAKING ME UP!

Sarah. It would be Sarah, he was sure of it. She was the one, the ‘teenager’, with her friends that pretended to smoke weed and steal drinks from the local off-licence. She was the one who’d flutter her eyelashes at boys, and colour her face in to try and make herself look pretty. If anyone was stupid enough to be making this kind of noise, even in this family, it would be her.

Or perhaps it was Tina, Ben’s mum. She had a reputation – one she vigorously denied both having and deserving – as an odd-ball, or, as one of the neighbours put it, ‘a goose one gullet short of a gander’. Some of her friends, back from when she was younger and had a life, loved to party well into the early morning. Maybe they just got carried away? It had happened before. Twice.

There was something different about it this time, though, something a finger just couldn’t be put on. They banged with extra thwack and crashed with added wallop, like playing the drums with sledgehammers.

There was no need for Ben to be quiet as he made his way downstairs. He could barely hear the patter of his feet on the carpet over the raucous rumpus, there was no doubt in his mind that he was silent to his cacophonous subjects. He stood poised in front of the living room door, shadowed by the light that stole out through the grooves.

Whoosh! He threw the door open.

Ben had been itching to tell somebody at school about what he’d seen earlier that morning, but he wasn’t bumping into the right people. He’d gotten there half an hour earlier than normal – normal being about half a minute before the bell rang and everyone was ushered inside – and had fully expected to see someone worthy of a good natter if he lurked around long enough.

He did not. The playground remained a ghost town, a bitter wind taking the place of the tumbleweed of the Wild West. Frozen puddles covered the ground, a patchwork ice rink surrounded by leafless trees, and the children stayed away like ostriches to the sky. After another two laps of the playground, (laps which reaped no rewards and in which he nearly slipped over four times, despite dragging his feet along the ground) Ben had had enough of waiting around. His fingers were turning blue and his breath was much too visible for his general liking. If he couldn’t find anyone worth talking to, he would wait, and bring them to him.

Inside was much warmer. The school caretaker – Barry? Harry? Larry! – sprinkled granules of salt along the corridor, soaking up the frost that had melted off coats and boots and was now forming splashes on the floor. The coat pegs were mostly empty. There was a pink raincoat four pegs down that belonged to one of the girls, Ben didn’t know exactly which, that gathered in a small group and giggled about boys at lunchtime, and there were a few pairs of Wellington boots lying at various angles on the floor. Other than that, the school might have seemed closed to the unobservant passer-by.

Ben took his seat in class – fifth row back, third from the left (which also happened to be third from the right) – and waited for a spillage of other children. And he waited. And he waited. Fifteen long minutes, until now he was no longer expecting other children but was also a tad quizzical about the whereabouts of his teacher, or, for that matter, that one teacher that always snuck into the classroom like a shy cat and told him when his actual teacher was ill or ill-disposed. Still, no one came.

And that’s when he heard it; the rumbling grumble of this morning had followed him to school and, apparently, stolen his teacher and his class-mates. It got louder and louder, and Ben could feel the desk in front of his tremble and began to feel his knees chatter as well. The door flew open.

‘You have got to come see this!’ At first, Ben couldn’t believe what was happening. Everything seems so implausible that even dreaming couldn’t explain things, but there, stood in the doorway like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, was Ben’s sister, Sarah.

‘Wha... t?’ Ben was confused. So many questions were bouncing around like power balls inside his head. What was his sister doing here? What was the noise? Where was everybody? Just, plain and simple, what?

‘C’mon.’

He jumped out of his chair, pushing his desk forward and sliding his chair back like a tiny explosion surrounded him, and was out of the door before he had time to really think about what he was doing.

At the end of the corridor, where normally there would be a set of double doors to let the children come and go and play, was an elephant, curled up asleep on the floor. It’s gigantic torso throbbed as it slowly breathed, in and out, and it’s ears softly flapped.

‘She’s tired,’ his sister said, placing a hand on her brother’s shoulder. ‘And so she should be, she’d had a long day, and she’s still got to make Dad’s tea tonight.’

‘What are you on about?’

‘Oh, yeah. Our Mum’s an elephant.’

Super Glue, Teddy Bears, and the Human Heart: Part One

‘And then she just stood there and laughed. Laughed at me. Then everyone else joined in. Johnny and Paul and Andy and Ben and Harry and Jamie and Ollie and everyone. They just stared laughing. I even laughed for a bit, even though everyone was laughing at me. Then she put her arms up in the air, like a big letter ‘Y’ or maybe like one of those sticks you use to find water, and she started cheering…’

‘Daniel,’ his mother said, debating the use of the dreaded middle name, ‘she did not start cheering.’

‘She did’ he retorted. ‘She did, and then everyone joined in, just like the laughing. I don’t really know why they were cheering. They hadn’t won anything, nothing like that.’

‘And how do you feel now?’ Her voice was softer now, cradling him with her syllables.

‘I don’t know. Mrs Johnson says that my heart is broken, but it doesn’t feel broken.’

‘It takes a lot to break a person’s heart, Daniel. They’re made to take knocks, like a door to your soul. Eventually it’ll open up, but only to the right person.’

‘The person that rings the doorbell?’

‘That’s right. I had lots of people knock on my door when I was younger.’ said his mother, smiling to herself. ‘Tall men, and short men. Men with big wallets, and men with big dreams. Men with moustaches that tickled, and men with skin so smooth than it felt like you were having a wash when they held your hand. Lots of men, all knock, knock, knocking on my door. And every time they’d knock, it would feel like my heart was breaking, but it never did. Not once, even though it felt like it. And then… then your Dad came along. He didn’t knock like all the other men. That’s when I knew he was special.’

It wasn’t until then that Daniel realised just how warm the room was. The ants in his pants were running around, searching for cool. He fidgeted like a boy whose backside was attempting to Tango.

‘Are you tired?’ Daniel nodded his consent. His mother made to pick him up, but he shook his head, and instead rolled himself off the sofa and onto his feet, swaying like a flagpole in the breeze as he touched ground. When he got to the doorway he tentatively turned heel.

‘Mam?’ he whispered, like the word escaped from his mouth without permission. ‘Why did everyone laugh and cheer when I felt sad?’

His mother paused. She didn’t want to lie to her son, but he wasn’t ready for the world yet. He needed to be dipped in it, like marshmallows in chocolate.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, honestly, ‘I really don’t. Sometimes people do strange things when they don’t know what to do. I once knew a man who, when he found out his sister had died, fell asleep.’

With that, Daniel made his way upstairs, dragging himself up each step. Each was his own personal Everest, and he, without pickaxe, Sherpa, or thermals, scaled them with ever increasing momentum. At the summit, standing proud and sleepy, he planted his foot into the carpet and silently claimed this triumphant feat in the name of Rachael Madison from Miss Archer’s class, even though she didn’t love him and had laughed at him and had cheered when everyone else had laughed at him too.

When his head touched pillow, he faded away into the Land of Nod instantly, not even bothering to take off his pyjama top, as he often did in the warm, lingering summer. For the first time in his little life that he could remember, Daniel didn’t dream.

Daniel didn’t wake up until late the next day. The sunlight had crept up his blanket like high tide, warming the limbs that lay sprawled across the covers. The first thing he felt was the hairs on his arms, the scouting party for puberty, stand up to salute the Sun. The next thing he felt, which would not leave him for the rest of the day, was a careful and calm cracking of his heart.

The next few hours were spent trying to ignore this sensation. It felt as though he’d had his pocket money stopped for cleaning his room, as if his insides had cuddled a porcupine. Life so far had not prepared him for this, and as far as he could remember, he’d never had any lessons about it. Counting and sounds and weddings and Jesus and the Egyptians and rivers and heads, shoulders, knees and toes, but never breaking hearts. Breakfast didn’t help, neither did the bath he was forced to take, though he was wary not to roll around in the tub too much in case he made it worse.

By the time when his tummy had started rumbling but it was still too soon to ask for more food because he hadn’t eaten all of his dinner, Daniel had come up with a plan. Exercising the nonchalance of a cat, he spilled away from his home in front of the TV, past his mother and her kitchen table of gossip and cigarette smoke, up the stairs and into the most forbidden place to every little boy, his big sister’s bedroom.

It smelled like her hair, and it didn’t look like a bedroom. It looked like the Teddy Bear’s Christmas Party. Everywhere he looked, Daniel’s eyes were assaulted with cross-stiches and buttons and hazelnut faux fur, but beneath all of the stuffed toys, he could just make out the treasure trove that he was about to search. He knew two things about his sister; firstly, she smelled, and secondly, she loved to buy books. She bought books like she was hoping to find a boyfriend just waiting for her inside one. He could see books stacked neatly on shelves, topped off with dust like a cake would be topped with sprinkles, but none of those would be the book he was looking for. The book he was after was new. Faded blue cover beneath the plastic protector that came fitted with each and every book borrowed, begged, or stolen from the school library.

It wasn’t under her bed, and it wasn’t in any of the drawers of her dressing table, and it wasn’t in the wardrobe amongst the clothes, and it wasn’t on any of the bookshelves lining the walls, and it wasn’t anywhere to be seen on the floor, and it wasn’t in the pages of her diary, although Daniel checked carefully just in case, and it wasn’t in the secret locked box at the end of the bed that Daniel knew how to get into without the key. Just as he was about the leave, he noticed something. The dressing table, a relic from his Great Aunt’s house that was now covered in Christmas lights despite it being early September, was slightly lopsided. When he stood on the loose floorboard next it to, it titled like a ship’s deck on unsteady seas.

Immediately, he fell to his belly. He resembled a beached dolphin. Under the left leg, right at the back buried in the cobwebs that spring up like sycophants around a lottery winner, was the book. Faded blue cover. Plastic protecting sleeve. Without thinking, he dragged it out. The dresser rocked, the waters getting stormier. Above him, he could hear a rolling, and then felt the thump of a toppled mug against his leg.

Quickly and without care, he scampered back to his room and jumped onto his bed. He placed the book out in front of him, his buried treasure. The Human Body by Steel, Hays and McGeorge. With the tenderness of an enraged rhino, he flicked page after page away, until he stopped dead on a double page spread. The title read The Heart.

‘If my heart is breaking,’ he said to no one in particular, ‘then I’ll just have to build myself a new one.’