Weightless v2

The lack of a body bothered me at first. I’d get upset about my weightlessness. Like all bouts of depression, it passed. Stuck in a cell, I started to recognise that it was dumb of me to miss my teeth, hair and eyes, to cry for my skin, arms and legs.

To reminisce about the good old times. Harking on about the joy of a fresh bruise or the fruity fragrance of a fingertip stuck into a sweaty arsehole.

It’s the body that caused misery. It’s why the Guards entertained themselves beating us black and blue. Letting us rot in a cell like a loaf left to go stale and mouldy in a bread bin. It’s why people worried about their appearance, the size of their noses, tits, clits, cocks, bellies, the shape of their lips, forehead, cankles, how tall or short they are and last, but by no means least, there’s weight. All the fat fuckers of the world, the eaters of hot tasty pies, gorging themselves silly until they’re so bloated and ballooned that they look as if they should be in cartoons and comics, or the skinny girls, starving themselves to death. It was always the girls who starved themselves at school, never the boys. And then there’s the internal bodily malfunctions, the headaches and bellyaches and earaches, the ulcers and tumours and diabetes, which brings me on nicely to the heart – nothing hurts quite so much as the heart. It was like carting round an aching moon.

Gravity was overrated. They can’t imprison what can’t be found. It’s better to be out of sight and out of mind. There was no ‘I’ in John Murdoch. He was a 16-year-old phantom. Melting away into the ether, slipping out of the barred window like steam and floating gently upwards, gazing at the prison.

The Governor, Mr Coleman, stood in the yard, shouting at me to come back down to earth, to regain bodily form, and serve my time. The Guard handed a horn speaker to Mr Coleman and he told it to me straight, bawling orders. “Murdoch, I know you’re up there somewhere. I want you to get down here this second. You think you’re free, but you’re not. I’ve seen your sort over the years, from broken homes, dripping with bad attitude, no work ethic, and a history of violence. You’re addicted to trouble. Get back down and do your time. Take your medicine. Mark my words, listen to me or you’ll regret it.”

My old man appeared in the yard. Dressed in baggy supermarket jeans and his dark blue donkey jacket with patches, the collars flicked up. The Governor passed him the horn speaker. “Son, this is your dad. Don’t listen to this pompous git. He doesn’t know what he’s on about. Get away and escape if you can. Go for it.”

In the distance, I saw a cluster of dark dots heading towards me. Starlings weaving through the sky like a black cape. The Governor tried to snatch the horn speaker back. Dad stepped sideways and then the Guard whacked him on the back of the legs with a baton. A scuffle broke out as dad tried to put up a fight. He was never much of a fighter. I watched them tussling on the floor of the yard. The boys in their cells were yelling and shouting for me to fly off and spirit myself away into another dimension. I wondered how Mr Coleman and the Guards had convinced dad to come and visit. Whenever I had tried to call him, he either didn’t answer or – the one time I got through – he hung up.

The Governor yanked the horn speaker from dad’s grip. “Get back down here,” he shouted, scanning for any sign of me, squinting his black insect eyes as drops of rain started to fall.

I was going to migrate South for the winter. Flying with the starlings. They swept through the invisible me, flapping their wings in unison. I wanted to leave behind the Murdoch that Mr Coleman was barking orders to from ground level. I wished I could wave farewell to the hurt I had caused. The Judge had said that my sentence was a reflection of the savage nature of my attack on an innocent man. I may have shown promise at school – one teacher in particular, Ms Henderson, explained that I was intelligent and could do well with the right support – but the seriousness of the assault could and would not be ignored. The man that Murdoch had launched himself on had suffered grievous bodily harm and might easily have died from multiple injuries. It was peculiar that Murdoch had used his phone to call for an ambulance after mercilessly beating the man unconscious. The Judge said the call demonstrated both compassion and the confusion of a dangerous mind. After considering the evidence, the Judge said that he believed Murdoch was in control of his actions and therefore should serve his sentence in a Young Offender’s Institute.

Murdoch stared at his shoes as the Judge talked. He wasn’t allowed to wear his Nikes in court.

Gravity was everywhere.

“Come down,” the Governor hollered.

“Give me a hot pie and I’ll think about it.”

He couldn’t hear me. No one could.

My dad pushed off the Guard. “Go with the starlings,” he yelled. 

That was dad all over. Misreading the situation. He was decent enough, but completely useless. The starlings had flown off without me. They wanted nought to do with me. I didn’t know how to dance like them. Couldn’t mimic their fly moves. Couldn’t mur’murate to save my life. 

Besides, invisibility has its advantages.

Out here, I’m camouflaged by the air itself.

Not vanishing as such, as I was never there to begin with.