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.’

The Night Sky

Adelaide tore through the door, wrenching at the handle like the world was wrenching at her heart. She dived into the blanket and pillows, and immediately recoiled. They still smelled of him, of insolence and selfishness and of her love. Through the tears flooded the memories; scattered nostalgia of stolen kisses and interlocked fingers and stares, wholeheartedly naive stares into ocean eyes and endless pupils.

Downstairs she could hear the front door closed gently, and then the silence. The scream of uncertainty that comes after something like this echoed through the walls, permeating an air of tentative distance, a reluctant surrender to doubt. Like mice, the whispered their unimportant words in a world that was uncrushed. A world so far removed from when she was now.

“Adelaide...” came the muffled voice she’d been waiting for, hiding in the far corner of her room.

“Go away!” she screamed, slamming the pillow and playing it as a drum, a drum that had perhaps just called her fat or maybe have pinched her backside or might even have taken away her first love.

“Adelaide. I have something for you. Something... from him.”

She was up before the words had settled, darting cat-like across a floor lovingly littered with rainbow teddies. On top of the highest shelf, perched like a lighthouse, was a little UFO shaped box. She lifted it down gently. The top was curved, conical but flat, and stars were cut out of like the remnants of a pastry sheet. She lifted this lid up, hearing the old hinge creek in acknowledgement. Underneath, halfway through her plie, balanced a small plastic ballerina. She wore a distinguished blue dress, her head held high looking at where, just a few seconds ago, had been her night sky.

“Where is it?” Adelaide demanded of the figurine.

“Underneath. Locked.” Replied the ballerina.

“What?! Where’s the key?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say. He might have taken it with him, before he...”

“Don’t say it,” Adelaide cried, her eyes glistening with rage and pain.

“You’ll have to go to his house to get it. I can’t go for you.”

“I don’t want to go.”

And with that, Adelaide collapsed into her bed, a hurricane in need of her drizzle.

Custard

There are certain things that people universally remember. First kisses and last days at school and the first time you did something stupid just because the butterflies in your stomach told you to. And there are certain things that are equally as memorable, but are less universal. A unique imprint on the isolated history of a single life. For me, that was when I discovered that custard made me immortal.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. If we keep skipping our merry way down those particular cobbles then you’ll be lost in the Everglades, surrounded by alligators. Figuratively speaking, of course. Reading on will in no way cause an onslaught by alligators, crocodiles, snakes, or hillbillies with rapey intentions.

I was twelve when I first experienced death. Not my own, that came later. No, it was my Aunty Maureen, whose soul – bless it – must certainly smell of cats, that snuffed it. Naturally gifted with a tremendous immune system, she stepped out onto the road outside her house and met oncoming traffic face on. She put a huge dent in the Nissan Micra -2004, cherry red, actually quite nice – which hit her. She would have been happy about that. At the funeral, closed casket, my Dad stood up in front of all the grim faces dressed in uniform black and told them that she had been sad her whole life, and that maybe death was a release. I didn’t believe him. She’d always seemed happy to me, always smiling and laughing and swigging from that glass bottle of hers with the Russian writing on the label. I cried all day. Not because I missed her, because she smelled of cats and wee and it’s hard to miss anyone who hurts your nose, but because it made my Dad cry.

When we got home, he ripped off his tie as if it was a noose. The ceremony and pomp was left outside, along with all the brightness of the unencumbered world. My home was the last walk of a doomed man, and we were his heavy heart.

That night we had custard.

Four years later, I died for the first time. Since then it’s become a bit of a hobby, but back then, dying was scary. It was as alien to a sixteen year old as clear skin. I got shot, if you’re wondering. I still have the bullet somewhere, a little keepsake. It’s not every day you die for the first time. It hurt. A lot.

I woke up five hours later, in a puddle of my own blood, alone in a pitch-black warehouse somewhere to the south of town. I’d been driven there earlier on the promise of free sweets and maybe a bit of dope. To be fair to the man with the handlebar moustache and the calloused fingers, he did give me the sweets. There was a hole in my chest, bullet-sized obviously, that went right through, creating in me a human peephole. It took me over an hour to walk home, but it was warm out and I got myself a bit of a tan and I enjoyed seeing this one dot in my shadow as a walked.

I didn’t tell anyone what had happened. I didn’t really know what had happened. It’s the kind of thing that’s quite hard to believe, even if you experience it.

That night I had custard.

From that day on, I was fearless. I could survive anything, I assumed, and was willing to put my assumption to any potential test. In the three years that followed getting shot, I died another twenty six times. Four stabbings, nine car accidents, six shootings, one fall from an aeroplane, two suffocations, two bar fights gone nasty, one snake bite and one lets-play-chicken-with-that-rhino. I moved about a bit. If all these things had happened in the same small town I’d grown up, I would have been worshipped as a God. I changed my appearance a lot too. Miraculously, I managed to stay anonymous. And alive.

So that was my life. Die, then live, then repeat. It took all of those three years for the novelty to wear thin, and for me to get curious. I should stress now that I was always one of those kids that never concerned himself with the hows and whys of the world. Things happened, that was all I’d ever needed to know.

Then, one morning, I had custard.

Not just any custard, though, and not just cooked any old way. Ambrosia custard, Devon’s finest quality, microwaved for 3:41, then left to cool, then microwaved again for 0:11.It was the way my Dad had always made it for me, and it was the way I liked it.

As I spooned my yellow breakfast, a spoon devoid of cake because of my careless sweep, a spider webbed its way down from the ceiling. It hung there like the dazzling beauty from China’s finest troupe, perched and pausing for applause. I squashed it between my thumb and forefinger. Its fall reminded me of when I fell out of the aeroplane. That time, I’d landed in a lake. The spider landed in the custard.

My custard ruined by the flavouring of a dead arachnid, I picked up my bowl and just when I was about to place it down next to the sink to waited to be washed in a fortnights time, the spider crawled out. Now, I’d definitely killed it. I had spider blood on my hands and felt the crunch, but now it was walking. I killed it again, and placed in back in the custard. It crawled out again.

The next few weeks were littered with various animal deaths and bowls of custard and animal resurrections. I had found a cure for death. I’ll never forget that feeling, when I really knew that it was true. I felt like I’d just taken my first steps.

From there, the way I saw it, there was only one possible course of action: find interesting people to bring back to life…