Reaching Tom

Touching Tom

by Mick Stringer

He sat where he always sat. On the bench at the corner of the green.
Tucked away between the rhododendron and the bright green shrub with
the unpronounceable name that smelt of cat pee.
He wore an old suit jacket - dark grey, striped - something that might
have clad a city banker before passing via Oxfam to the hostel. Utter
incongruity. Suit jacket, mud-streaked denims, and a pair of nearly new
trainers that glowed white, silver and luminous green. We called him
Old Tom. He was maybe a hundred years old. He stank of decay and
whisky.
"Morning, Tom." I tried to make my thin, boyish voice sound very
grown-up. Adults said 'Morning', kids said 'Hello' or 'All right' or
just nodded and grunted.
"Morning, Tom." I repeated, sitting down next to him and feeling the
hard planks - slightly damp - against my thighs and bottom.
He gave me a bleary stare.
"What's 'at?" he growled, looking and sounding like some worn-out old
animal - scabby, flea-bitten and wounded - cornered in the lair where
it has come to die. To steady himself, he put his hand down on the seat
between us, and there it was. The thing I had come to touch.

Like so many regrettable adventures, it had started with a silly round
of bragging.
"I dare pick up a slug," Askie had begun, and proved it, holding the
slithering brown jelly in the palm of his hand.
"That's nothing," snorted Smegger. "I put my hand in some cold sick,
behind the Three Horseshoes." He sniffed. "It was a bit of an accident,
though."
And so it had gone on, until I'd made my rash commitment. "I dare touch
anything you say."
"Well," said Askie. "Let's see."

Now here I was. Looking down at it. The great, pustulating lump on
Tom's hand. Smegger reckoned it was the plague. Askie, more poetically,
guessed it was a curse from the old witch in Wither's Cottage. Both
were gleefully sure that it would prove horribly contagious.
It was the size of an egg. Purply red against the wrinkled brown of his
skin. Crossed by thready veins, topped by small pimples, like
cold-sores, which looked as if they'd burst if stroked by so much as a
feather.
But I had to do it. I stretched out my finger and at the very point of
impact, froze.
We stared at each other. Now I'd done it. And I couldn't move a muscle.
I was cursed.
Then Tom smiled. A big smile, that transformed his face into that of a
benevolent grandfather watching a child open a present.
My paralysis slipped away and I moved my finger a few millimetres from
the lump. I was euphoric now. It seemed as if the space between our two
hands was charged with electricity. I had done it. I had touched Tom's
lump.
"I have to go now," I said.
He didn't seem to notice my going. Just sat there, nodding, the smile
still on his face. A few days later, the bench was empty. I never saw
him again.