Pale Roses

Two little brothers out playing found the body. Despite numerous warnings to stay away from the old factory and the railway line, they squeezed through the bent wrought-iron railings, and followed the embankment down to the railway line. The two boys intended on making a secret hideout with tarpaulin and bits of timber. All sorts of industrial rubbish and debris had been left behind. Housing developers bought the land months ago, yet it remained inactive. Every once in a while a train would hurtle past.

The boy hung from the branch of a tree by a red plastic cord. The eyes bulged, and black tongue protruded. They thought it a mannequin at first. Running back to their home, barely stopping for breath, word soon spread and the street swarmed with police cars and an ambulance. Soon the residents of the street gathered by the railings leading down to the railway track.

Most kids knew it as a dangerous place to adventure and play: the shorted route being across the train tracks. The parents warned their children to stay way. After all, many potential dangers lay waiting: rusted copper wire, barrels of oil, canisters of industrial strength paint, asbestos, decayed floors and exposed electric sub stations.

Most nights the police chased teenagers off the land before the housing developers hired a security guard and a Doberman to do the chasing. Teenagers would climb over the high concrete fence and shout obscenities at the guard and his dog. Sometimes, the slow ones were caught and scared off: threatened with police action or prosecution.

They thought it a wonderful place in which to make a clubhouse or make rope swings from off the beams in the warehouse, or just explore. A good majority of the adults in the surrounding streets had once worked in the factories and warehouses that now stood gaunt and rusted. Now it was their children's playground.

Not long after the discovery, the identity of the suicide became known: Gareth Evans. The neighbourhood mourned one of their own. Everybody knew him. And they all knew he had been subjected to bullying at school. Parents and teachers were consulted and developing a plan of action. Too late. Gareth’s parents, inconsolable at the loss of their boy, felt let down by the school authorities.

Gareth gave them goodbye kiss. No note or explanation. He informed them only that he would be going to a friend’s house and stay over for the night. Neither protested. The lack of ceremony belied the profound occasion. The final departing. The mother and father argued furiously the evening their son left. Things had not been good for a while. Both tormented themselves as having contributed to their son’s decision to end his short-lived life.

At the scene, of death, police officers found an empty two litre bottle of cider, popular with adolescents due to its strong effects and cheap price, on the ground by the foot of the tree. The red cord used had been taken from his mother’s washing line in the back garden. Nobody noticed it missing. Nobody noticed Gareth climbing over the fence and walking down the embankment. In his trouser pockets, red rose leaves were found stuffed and scrunched up. Taken from his father’s rose bushes. He hadn’t noticed the naked stems, rather prominent, once pointed out.

Weeks later, the father sat in his son’s room at a desk. Sometimes he would take clothes from out of the wardrobe and place them over his face. As a train passed along the track, the perfumed scent of roses filled the room. The father closed his eyes and believed some supernatural event to be occurring. He pictured his son smiling and waving to him. He called out to his wife to join him in the room.

Another time, underneath the bed, he had found an exercise book with etchings and coloured drawings. All of them roses. Exquisite. The detail and artistry revealed a talent neither of them appreciated.

The mother refused to alter her son’s room. It soon became a chapel. A way of recalling his presence, his memory; a sanctuary in which to grieve. One day the father discovered a shoebox in a far corner under the bed: more exercise books filled with drawings of flowers and rose leaves: wilted and pale.

The father recalled the moment of Gareth’s birth: the blood-covered baby shrieking; the dizzying blur of electric strip lights; the sweat-drenched face of the mother crying with love and exhaustion; the sense of newborn hope and holding the future. He had failed his son. The person he swore to protect. He wished to reach his son. To re-start it all. The mother felt this great desire too. One morning, they lay down on the train tracks and held each other, weeping.