Waiting for someone to sing with.

There was a bench resting amidst concrete paths and grey grass. It was fashioned from wood and was gleaming nearly white in the sun. A boy and girl sat here, with the wood lying hard and uncomfortable under them. Colourless flowers bloomed all around while the sun cast shadows of stem and leaf below. Between them lay a foot of distance. They hadn’t spoken for sometime but it had not yet grown awkward. The boy shuffled to his right closer to the girl until his leg brushed up against hers with a faint rub of denim on denim. He looked at her. Her face stared back at him but her face was only half there, it was somehow misted through the clear air. The curls of hair fell all around her shoulders and down to a glimpse of cleavage above a patterned top.  Her eyes were old and deep set, her nose small and slight perched atop pursed lips and a rounded chin. The rest of her face could have been anyone’s but he was unnerved. He leaned in, his lips took hers as they kissed and a bitter taste filled his mouth like lemon juice. The citric acid swirled to the back of his mouth and he swallowed before pulling away slowly. Was it then that her head came to rest on his hard bony shoulder padded only by her curling locks of hair? The boy tried to remember where he had been and what he had done before coming to sit here in this courtyard but it was impossible to recount. He felt as if he knew all that had come before this, like it was story he had told before. He gave up, and let his head fall back as he closed his eyes. Now there was nothing, just a white glare from the sunlight that pored through his thin closed eyelids.

“I wish it could stay like this forever” he heard himself say, but there was no response from the girl. He opened his eyes but the white canvass remained there until a dark black speck broke it. The dot grew closer and closer still until it turned into a bird. It flew back and forth over and over again; it flew past a hundred times all at once before resting on the grass where it prodded at the turf. A tune began to echo in his ear as the girl hummed and the bird suddenly turned to stare at him, motionless. It opened its mouth and began to sing but this was no bird song, it sang in a human voice and he listened closely, was it telling him something? He struggled to make out the words and the harder he tried the quieter the birds song became, until it shouted at him.

“You’ve gotta make your own kind of music.” The bird called.

Then his eyes opened and he shuddered. He was looking at green flimsy walls that rose to a point above him, they fluttered in the wind. For the first time in his life he felt lost. The song the bird had sang continued on his phone as his alarm sounded. He found the phone under his pillow and clumsily hit ‘snooze’ with his thumb’s third attempt. The song stopped and silence fell upon him like a veil. He thought about the dream before it vanished and he remembered how the day had truly been. At the time he had never been happier but that day and that girl were now gone. The only time he ever came close to seeing her again and to feeling what he had felt were in the dreams he had at night and they never did it justice. Something was always slightly wrong and she never said the things she had said. In his dream she never told him that she wished it could stay like that forever too. She never kissed him the way she had and she never tasted sweet from the balm on her lips.

He sat back and thought.

Was it all just a promise that I had wanted? Was it only ever some hopes and desires we shared? Was it special?

There was a truth deep down that he always wanted to hide from. He interrupted himself when he was on the brink of it, just so he could never fully accept it. But this morning while he stared up at the green he let his guard down and the truths flowed over him in a flood. He had been too lonely and had tried to create this thing out of nothing but dust. He stopped being himself. Surely that isn’t how it should be. That had been two years ago, before he had asked her to come with him. He rose from his makeshift bed, climbed into a pair of tattered jeans and slipped the phone into his pocket. As he pulled open the door of the tent a shaft of light pierced his eyes like a church spire. When his eyes adjusted the lake stood before him, vast and calm, glittering in the morning light. The last traces of the night’s fog settled around the base of the island in the centre with the ruins of the building rising above into the blue.

Then, in his pocket, the alarm sounded again.

“You’ve gotta make your own kind of music.” A voice told him.

Lion Man

I woke up at around 10am on Saturday morning. My eyes cracked open and fuzzily glared through the crack in the curtains. I could see the blue sky and that the morning was cool and clear. I was immediately furious at myself for sleeping in. I had hoped to get up early enough to catch the sunrise after a drive over to Nendrum Monastic Site, its only about 5 miles from house. As I lay there I thought that the light scattering of low clouds would have looked beautiful two hours ago, glowing golden and pink, from the huge red ball emerging over the horizon. I’m just too lazy you see. Anyway you’d I think I would have been used to sleeping in, it happens just about everyday. I got up and walked down the corridor outside my room, feeling the cold wooden floor slightly sticking to my bare feet as I sleepily wandered to the kitchen. As always first things first, greater societies wake up call – coffee. The kettle hissed its shrill and angry shriek, and I couldn’t help but notice that it sounded angry with me too. A minute later and the whole room was infused with the warm rich scent. Even the smell of it was perking me up; it reminded me of something I read about 17 century smelling salts, which were used to wake up patients who had fainted. 

I had nothing to do that morning so I sat about and listened to music while reading ‘To A God Unknown’ by Steinbeck. When I got bored of that I looked outside at the group of Goldfinches, backlit by the low morning sun, who were getting a free meal in our garden, a birdfeeders charity, and when I got bored of that I headed back to my dim and cluttered bedroom. I have a pretty bad attention span at the moment, I can’t quite explain why. In my room I started to look through boxes of old stuff that I kept over the years. Some of the things had been acquired quite recently, like my camera shaped cufflinks I wore to my formal about 3 years ago. Other things were very old and yet at the same not that old to me, like a coin I bought from an antiques shop nearly 5 years ago. It’s a big round coin that’s over 120 years old that fascinated me. I think I paid 50 pence for a 1 penny coin, which I can’t even use anymore, what a bargain.. Other items included an old Nokia phone which proudly boasted a 1.3 megapixel camera, an old birds foot brooch with a green metal 3 leaf clover on it and a pen knife which I forced my parents to buy me when I was around 10, I remember I cut my thumb every time I tried to open it. None of this really meant anything to me, obviously the penknife had a practical use and the coin was quite interesting, but these things weren’t actually special to me. However there was one thing that was important. I found it right at the bottom under a little blue wooden airplane and next to a Barry’s token that you could use to go on rides. It was a small figure just under an inch tall of a lion standing up right with two large black fists. He seemed to have some form of silver armour on his torso, into which his mane flowed. I hadn’t seen it in many years and so I sat holding the firm plastic figure between my thumb and forefinger.  The lion’s legs and arms shining brown and ridged here and there, his face angry and snarling in a roar. I remembered what I used to call him, he was called Lion Man.

The strange thing about Lion Man is that I couldn’t remember where I bought him, nor any particular time or place where I had him with me and yet he reminded me of so much. He was a symbol of white lines, for hopping and games, sketched throughout hard concrete playgrounds, of scratched knees and the exchanging of Pokémon cards, of chasing friends in the rain across muddy grass and stained clothes. He represented uniform classrooms and short-gelled hair, football games, the PlayStation 1 and excitement over Christmas’ and Santa Clause. He was a symbol of youth. Overwhelmed by the memories that seemed to radiate out of this tiny toy, I slipped him in my pocket, and went back to my daily routine of social media, new music and TV. I sat stationary while the sharp afternoon light streamed through narrow slits in the blinds, like water from a faucet, and cast harsh lines on our cream sofa.

Later that day my dad arrived home and asked me if I wanted to go with him to visit my grandfather. My grandpa was 93 and recently had to go live in an elderly care home. I hadn’t seen him in over 4 months. On the way to the home, which was in Holywood, about a 20-minute drive away, my dad told me that grandpa was living in the EMI unit, which stands for Elderly Mentally Infirm. My dad told me this to warn me about what I should expect from my visit. I was a little apprehensive about going to see grandpa; if I’m honest I was worried about what I would say and about what I would see. I understood that a lot could change in 4 months when you’re his age. On the way there it started to rain when we were going over the hills. With green and bare wintery fields on either side, lacking their usual springtime livestock, I listened to the beating of raindrops on the windscreen. I swear the weather seemed to worsen the closer we got to the home. Talk about pathetic fallacy. We pulled up in the car park and I was a bit surprised by how few cars there were. When we got inside dad took me through to where grandpa was eating his dinner, lightly golden toast, sausage and eggs. We pulled up two chairs and dad commenced to help him eat, he carefully compiled small mounds of food on a spoon and fed it to him as a parent would feed a 1 year old. It is what it is.

Now would be a good time to tell you a bit about my grandpa. With shame I admit that I don’t know enough about him. He married my grandmother in his late 20s and together they had 3 children, my granny is still going strong at the age of 93 too. Ever since he was young he collected minerals and continued to do so throughout his life. As a result he had quite a sizable collection, of which his assortment of Irish zeolites was particularly renowned within the mineral community. He was funny man although he never laughed, but even in his later years was quick and witty. While I sat beside him I remembered that, despite the assemblage of dropped food that had accumulated on his lap and the floor around him, he was still that man. It’s an important point to keep in mind. It’s all too easy to focus on the change I had seen in him, but everyone is forever changing, even everyday, and this is just one more phase for him. 

I looked around the dining room at the other members of the home. I remember now the old, withered and wrinkly woman, characterized by her purple beret, with a whole host of sandwiches in front of her, demanding “more bread” from apparently no one. I can see the other elderly woman with her face expressing constant dismay. Her memories and reasoning declining, only those things thoroughly ingrained in her brain remained as she recited some prayer from her past, over and over like a broken record. The old man across from me, apparently named Michael, (I over heard some nurses attempting to gain his attention) who glanced around with a sad glint of confusion in his eyes, as he incessantly wiped the already clean table with an old napkin. I can remember these things, all the while a “Home Sweet Home” sign hung ironically on the wall over erroneous books with no purpose.

I paint a depressing picture. It was upsetting to see so many people at this stage of life, dependent and declining in their mental health. The time for my father and I to leave came, and when I stood up I felt something move in my pocket. I delved in and felt that solid figure lying still. I knew instantly what it was and was overcome by an odd sense of guilt. While I looked across the room at the elderly, I ran my fingers over the little plastic shape, recognizing all of its crinkles, bumps and the linear creases of its mane. The most upsetting thing was that I still had something that those people didn’t.

I had my Lion Man in my pocket.

Chapter 1 – A Silver Spoon

My story starts nearly twenty-two years ago when I was born. Everyone’s story starts at birth. The great game of chance in life is what family you will be born into. Before one is even alive, the direction in which life will take you is already decided, as if by God or mere chance. Some may argue that being born into wealth is the luckiest thing that can happen to a person, some think the opposite, that this silver spoon in your mouth can never be removed. They talk like it’s inevitable that you’ll choke on it sooner or later. Then there’s me, and I don’t know what I think anymore. Iv been confused by all the events that have taken place in my life. The things that happened are so extraordinary that it seems ridiculous not to tell them.

My father was a wealthy businessman, just like his father before him. Indeed, the family business has been going for 90 years. Centered on investments, the business had money in coal and steel, which had proved very successful through the times of the great wars. After that it was clothing factories, before they moved to Asia for cheaper production, and then it was technology, which would go on to boom in years to pass. The business was always based in New York, where my father was born. Although he was born there he wasn’t the typical New Yorker you might meet on the street in East Harlem back then, even now in 1991 it would be unlikely. He was the kind of man that you wouldn’t see on the subway, certainly not back then, and if you did see him, then several hours later you’d be sure you dreamt it. He just wouldn’t fit in. His rose red cheeks and rather fresh face would bob carelessly above his clean suit in a grubby subway train. A handkerchief resting pointlessly in his jacket pocket, potentially its only real purpose would be to wipe the dust and dirt off the inside of the window beside him. However that would, in his mind, bring down his overall appearance. You see he had spent almost all of his childhood outside of Manhattan, in the wealthy suburbs surrounded by people just like him. My mother hadn’t come from such a well-off family. She was born and raised in Chicago before leaving her parents and the Windy City to come to New York. She was working as a secretary here in a law firm. In this environment surrounded by wealthy people she managed to learn how to act posh. She clothed herself in the façade of wealth. One day my father had accompanied his father to the office, where mother worked, to discuss some dull legal matter with the lawyers. It was here that my parents met. Now it seems so fitting that they would meet here and their love would spark in a place filled with suits, pretentiousness and ignorance. Mother would quit her job once they married and she lived with him in a new apartment, over on West 24^th Street, which they rented together. She worked for the family business in a rather limited role until she became pregnant. She later gave birth to a healthy baby boy, Michael, my elder brother. All this happened before I even existed but I can tell of it from the stories they told me. They told me the story of how they met but dressed it in romanticism for in actual fact it wasn’t very romantic.

By the time I was born my father’s parents had passed away and he had inherited yet more money. I was born in 1971 against a background of rising inflation caused by the war in Vietnam which would linger on for the next four years. I don’t remember the earliest times of my childhood but I can imagine that I was very content in a naïve sort of way. One of my first real memories I have of my father, that is to say not just a memory that I later formed for myself from a photograph, is the time him and I took a small rowing boat out onto the pond in central park. I remember the brown-varnished timber of the boat sitting effortlessly on the water. The pond glinted green from the algae under the autumn sun. My father’s hands gripping the oars and casting us to and fro over the water’s glistening surface. The outlines of the surrounding trees with their leaves coloured yellow, red, orange and every shade of green reflected in the pond. All the while the great pillars of concrete with their innumerable silvery windows towered over us, the sunlight had cast a yellow hue on every square inch it hit. I stared up in awe. Now, looking back, the beauty of this view contrasts remarkably with the words he said to me that day. At the time I didn’t realize how grotesque they were, I was only seven years old after all, but I see it now. He turned to me after allowing the boat to rest in the middle of the pond and said

“Son, how do you like all this?”

“I like it a lot, I like the view from down here” I told him with a smile.

“No, I mean how to do you like this life you have?” He demanded with a frown.

I didn’t say anything, for me it was the only life I knew. I hadn’t thought about whether I liked life at that point, for me life just was.

“Listen,” He said, “In life there are two kinds of people, there are winners and there are losers. Which is it you want to be Patrick?”

I paused and looked up at him with the innocent mind of son who is just trying in some way to make his father proud and said “A winner, father.”

He didn’t smile but a look of quiet satisfaction came across his face, as if his parenting role for the day had been successfully accomplished.

I feel a strange sense of guilt looking back at that day, that I ever spoke those words, but I was a child and I knew no better. My father had tried to draw me a succinct picture of the world. With a verbal pencil he sketched it as the great Colosseum. Where man was pitted against man and to succeed in life would be the death of your enemy. He saw life as one adversarial battle and he tried to instill in me this same morbid outlook.

Time

I left a dull lecture room remembering little of what was discussed. The most memorable thing I took from that room was the pretty blonde girl who sat opposite me. She stared uninterestedly into space for the maority of the time. It was a peaceful stare and it hypnotized me as she glanced lazily around the room.  The only other thing I remember was the large moth that had become trapped, it half beat and half fluttered against the window.

Leaving the building I walked past a small stream that had been dry and dead for most of the year. Now its bed was soothed by little torrent of water making its way down the course. I had never seen this channel full, the water never flowed violently and I wondered how it had ever managed to carve out this ditch amongst the stone and turf around it. It was so small and seemingly unimportant to have marked the landscape in any noticeable way but it had managed. Opposite, a great tree stood overlooking the stream. Its declining leaves dripping with cool water from the rain that had passed a few hours ago. Its bark was dark from the wet and softer now. I saw these two things sit before me. The tree that was once so small, a mere seed turned sapling and over the years it had grew formidable. The tenacious stream flowing down from olive green forest, it had spent centuries, proprietarily marking its territory in its channel. Behind all this was time. It was ceaseless. I imagined it as a great wheel turning through the cosmos, dominating everything in front of it. Its robust tires rolling over anything that got in its way. Yet here I was with my minute life lasting so short. It would be but a fraction of the great wheel’s turn. All my concerns seemed to fade as I realized my worries were wasted. I worried about my course and about jobs, I was unsure about where my life would take me and how I would survive. In that peaceful moment I found solace. I was able to disregard all this nonsense that had been bashing about my mind like that poor moth batting against the window in my lecture room. I thought a great deal about time as I walked to get my bus. Concluding that, all in all, I knew not much about time, I was too young still but that I would come to know time all too well.

I went home happier that day; I was content knowing that everything would work out fine in the end. It was just a matter of time.

They.

She

She wakes up in the morning, still tired, with bags under her eyes

And with the smell of cheap white wine on her breathe from the night before.

She smokes ten of her menthol cigarettes a day

She prefers how they taste

They’re slowly staining her teeth

And she’s still confused when she gets a cough

She doesn’t look like her mother

She doesn’t sound like her either

She doesn’t speak about her dad

And she doesn’t even speak to him

She was born to these now divorced people

It’s never been easy for her

A disabled brother, she’s always dealt with wheelchairs

It sits uneasy on her mind, who will care for him in the future?

Like a sentence placed upon her

She’s stressed most of the time

Always had a job, but never enjoyed one

She hurts, does she hurt herself?

And looking to men for safety

They’re morphine to her

But like morphine too much will kill her

And she’s dying.

She falls back into old habits

It’s the only way she knows

Back with an ex that she was never happy with

Their talk is boring, it’s stale.

But they don’t talk about it

It’s familiar so it ‘works’

Or am I just jealous

She walks life along this rubble path

Its tough and its bumpy

And its lines with fence

Electrified and barbed.

She has no choice and cant climb the barriers.

She knows a lot, think a lot too

She’s clever and she’s pretty

She covers any blemishes with make up

And covers any weaknesses with fronts, its fake.

Up until now she’s been trying

And I hope she keeps going

I was a temporary fix

But it wasn’t right, I know that.

So now I just pray that she wins this fight.

..

He

He would tell me about his childhood

And then he'd try and tell me about mine

But he could never understand

He grew up in a middle class world

You could tell from how he spoke

He was raised by loving parents

They were always there for him

It was calm and it was stable

He loved them, maybe he could have loved me

And never held grudges even when i wanted him to

He could never know what iv been through

I hope he forgives me.

He'd kiss me when I was sad

Just so it meant he did something

There wasn't much for him to say

And i didn't expect him to say much.

We both hated small talk so our conversations were short

He was short

With dark hair and dark eyes

And when it came to love he was dark too

Cynical and always somewhat removed

He liked being unhappy, he revelled in it

He'd rather watch films alone
And take tips from the actors on how to pretend

But i needed him in that place

It was a place where i was alone

And i needed company

And thats what he was.

His room was clean but bare

And his head was cluttered

He came across relaxed, laid back

Apparently he wouldn't stress, he'd say it was wasn't worth it
But i know he worried, it was etched on his skin.

We were wrong

He'd had heartbreaks of his own

But he never spoke about that

Nothing was said unless it needed to be

When he would drink i'd see the real him

And he drank too much

But at least i could see him then

Inside he was in turmoil

It was self consciousness

He would be eaten up by it

And so even when he would hide it

I could see him being consumed

He was living life in a suit of thorns

He had made it for himself

And so every movement was pain

And all my efforts were in vain

He'd complain about my smoking

And i'd complain about his complaining

He loved music and i loved his music

And he loved food and that helped me

I needed that help

But thats all it was, help

He doesn't know if i still need it

We never really connected and i could never make him laugh

He worried about the big things

But he did nothing about them

He thought the world was jigsaw puzzle

And he was convinced there was a piece missing

Thought it had been destroyed

So didn't even try looking

And i couldn't help him find it

In the end physical distance was placed between us

Like a meal placed on a table, ready to be finished
It acted as the nail in our coffin

We knew it was over

He needed someone else

And i hope he finds her

Because she's not me.