The Vale - Part 1 (d)

I lie in bed staring at the patterns on the ceiling, the trees twitching in the wind casting shadows of branches like veins inside a lung, pulsing with the thing which makes everything twitch on this planet. Lori is asleep, I can tell by her breathing. She sleeps in white cotton pyjamas and brushes her hair before getting into bed so that it trails across the sheet in silky threads.

I find myself thinking about Ian Rook. If only I could bring my whole self to work and kneecap him in the toilets. He has such a nasty frequency, hostile threatening energy. I can feel it as soon as he walks into the room. I must build a protective wall around myself and not let myself be penetrated by the forces of destruction carried around by these people. The ones without morals, who still play the game and win.

I’ve felt something like it before from a boy who used to live near me on the estate, Marcus Whale was his name. I’m not sure if he's still alive, I’d be surprised if he was but you never know. He had a sort of superpower so maybe he could never die. Ian Rook definitely doesn’t have a superpower and if he ever did have it has been dulled by years of running on the corporate playwheel.  

Marcus Whale was a far more interesting character, otherworldly, magic even. I remember the first time I encountered him. It was on a Wednesday evening and I was at Scouts. I was only in Scouts for a short time, maybe a year or so before it started to cramp, what I considered to be at the time, ‘my style’. 

I remember it had been a very hot day and the skipper said we should go to the sink in the kitchen of our little community hall to run our hands and wrists under the cold tap because this would cool down all the blood travelling in our veins. We took turns to do this and I recall how it worked very well, it was sound advice that I still use today. 

Afterwards, he said we should all have a drink of orange squash to take outside with us because we were going to be identifying insects in the grassy path next to the carpark. He asked me to fetch paper cups from a wall mounted cupboard and count out sixteen, one for each of us.

I opened the cupboard door and to my shock there was a boy all coiled up tightly inside like a snake. For a split second and with very bright eyes, he stared right through me, then he shot out and across the kitchen, surging forth like a mamba, he pushed the fire door open and was gone into the warm evening air. 

We all froze and looked at each other for a few seconds. ‘That’s Marcus Whale,’ said one of the other boys and the skipper told us in a patronising voice to just ignore it and carry on. I saw him regularly after that, around the estate, always by himself. He was a couple of years older than me, wiry, his eyes had hardened and were less full of wonder and he was always dressed in jeans and trainers. I don’t remember ever seeing him wearing a school uniform.

I built a sort of layer of fear around the name Marcus Whale so that each time I saw him, I experienced a shot of adrenaline, a tensing of muscles, a quickening of the heart. I wasn’t really sure whether it was purely because of this frequency he gave off or the shock of the encounter I had when he leapt out of the cupboard that day had somehow compounded my phobia. 

I had frequently observed other people being intimidated by him, showing it in every inch of their physical bodies, including men twice his size. I concluded that it was simply his superpower, the essence of Marcus Whale. That boy was simply wired up with a terror charge. You felt it as he walked past you in the street. It isn’t something which can be learned. Something in Marcus Whale’s upbringing, perhaps even before that, beginning with his conception, had instilled in him this force. And there was always a possibility you would bump into him, he was semi-feral and could appear anywhere on the estate, at any time of the day or night.

‘Stay right away from him,’ my dad would say with a sweeping movement of the hand, ‘right away Son’. I had every intention of doing so, the fear was that he might approach me, talk to me, ask me for change or a light. ‘And don’t talk to those boys who hang around in a great throng. They’re trouble, they’re like a swarm of jellyfish, not a brain cell between them and if you brush up against them, they’ll likely sting you for something. You mark my words.’

Those boys, they were my peers, how long could I avoid them for? They were the sons of my dad’s colleagues, men from the factory which employed many of the local people. When I joined secondary school, those boys became my classmates. Together they formed a single organism, a threat but they weren’t a gang. There were no real gangs back then, not of the sort which exist today. The thing was, without the throng of boys, there were few options for finding mates, except for oddballs and deeply religious kids with puritanical parents and some of them turned out to be more dangerous than Marcus Whale himself. 

My dad didn’t understand, he assumed there was a hardcore of normal kids on the estate who had good parents, innocent hobbies, drank shandy and agonised over asking girls to the cinema and that I could just hang out with them. I looked but I never found them.

Spending my spare time just lolling around in the confines of our flat wasn’t an option either. My mum was an emaciated presence who lived on cigarettes and jaffa cakes but she filled that space with smoke and a thick, desperate emotionless fog. She was never horrible to me but she was a drain, she dragged everyone down and sucked all the energy out of the room. As soon as I hit my teens I knew I needed to go down, down, down the hundreds of steps and out of the tower, onto terrafirma. 

There was something about the great expanse of flat land that made me want to run and run. To run off the edge and float away into outer space. The concept of earth as a spherical planet was a difficult thing to grasp for those of us who lived on the vale, there were no such things as curves, our world was flat as far as the eye and our imaginations could see. To escape we must go up, go fast and get high. 

I lie flat on the back, staring into the near darkness of our bedroom, visualising my demons all hanging down like bats from the ceiling. As long as they stay sleeping I’ll be okay but I need to drop now into the relief of sleep. I want to dream about joy riding, to be free from the dull confines of being a fully fledged grown-up without the wings. I use my imagination to conjure up the sounds of revving engines, the screech of tyres and the white noise of the world hurtling past at such speeds that nobody can touch me. I want to feel it again, the tingle of immortality. 

We didn’t die but nobody warned us that the cheap glory of those days would climb to a peak and then simply ebb away and die, fading forever into forgotten history. Everyone remembers differently and everyone’s memory is warped and swallowed by all the circumstances which follow. I sometimes wonder how the others remember and how everyone remembers the others.

Now all the best things have to be purchased with money and the only way back is through unconsciousness but those dreams cannot be summoned, indeed they are gifted to you, god knows from who but they come when you least expect.