Sticks and Stones

When he heard the chanting – wild and insistent in the street – Robert was twelve again.  “Fat boy, fat boy.  No more pies for you.  Fat boy, fat boy.  Eats enough for two.”  He’d had it for years as a kid and he couldn’t bear that Sam was having to go through the same thing.

Sam, on the other hand, seemed pretty impassive to it.  Every day he’d come in from school, stalked by the wobbling, adolescent voices, hang his blazer on the stair post and settle down in the dining room to his homework and then sketching.  Super heroes, monsters, anything.  Since Jane had left, Robert had made a point of trying to work his shifts so he could be home when Sam got in from school and usually he managed it.  Tea-times saw him grilling chicken or fish-fingers in the kitchen, watching Sam’s face through the glass door for any delayed reaction to the taunts.

Robert had broached the issue with Sam once and had gone as far as asking him if he wanted him to do something about it.  But Sam had shaken his head.  “Don’t worry about it, Dad”, he’d said.  “They’re just idiots and it’ll soon stop.”  Robert knew it wouldn’t though.  Sam was still too young, thank God, to have any real understanding of long term consequence.  Of the job he wouldn’t take because he thought he wasn’t good enough.  Of the girl he’d never ask out.  No understanding that he’d carry the fat, little kid he was now forever.  Always twelve, always fat.

God, but Robert loved him.  His serious, concentrating face when he drew his figures, the heavy teardrops he noticed once when the teasing had been particularly harsh.  Wiped away quickly when he saw Robert come into the room.  The way he made it so easy for him and Jane to share him.  Fair and loyal.  His half and half kid.

Robert wasn’t sure either that he wasn’t somehow tacitly complicit in the bullying of Sam.  “Have you thought any more about that footy training on Tuesdays?”  “What about basketball?”  “I reckon if you worked at it, rugby could really be your sport.”  Questions and assertions always met by Sam’s sweet smile before he retreated to the safety of his paper and pencil.

Robert remembered the exact point when things stepped up to another level.  He’d got Sam for the weekend and they’d caught the bus together into town.  Ostensibly to look in one of the games’ shops, but also to call in at the olde-worlde sweetshop just off the high street.  For Robert, old habits died hard. Sam’s phone had pinged, indicating a text – an unusual and for Robert, a welcome event.  Was his son finally getting a social life?  He’d ummed and aahed about him getting a phone at all when Sam had first started secondary school, but had decided the mile walk to and from school warranted it.  Now, there seemed another reason for the phone.

At almost the exact moment he felt the relief of normality, it was snatched away.  He saw Sam check his phone and then swipe away the image he’d opened, but not quick enough for his dad to miss the pig in a prison suit picture, with words in white capitals beneath it.  Fat bastard Sam.  Imprisoned by his belly.

He didn’t even know how to talk to Sam about what he’d seen.  It was so gross, so fucking sad.  His son a meme to laugh at.  To casually pass on to others.  They spent the evening at home, as usual.  Sam in an epic marathon of monster drawing.  Robert watching David Attenborough; incandescent inside.

By the time they’d gone to bed, Robert had settled on which of the boys would have sent the image.  A sharp-faced, rat boy called James.  They’d walked past him once near the school gates, James with his low-crotch trousers and steady gaze.  He’d smiled with cold teeth at Sam and Robert, the ‘V’ sign he made with his index and middle finger insolently rubbing up and down the side of his face.

By the next morning, any doubt Robert had disappeared with the night.  Dawn brought clarity and certainty.  He realised too he knew exactly where the little shit lived, as he’d bought Sam’s cot all those years ago second hand from James’ mum.  The cot had been James’ older brother’s and it struck Robert like it never had before that she must have bought a new one just for James.  Sam had had no such luxury. 

They’d even bumped into each other at a school welcome evening and reminisced about the time they’d met at her house to pass it over.  Robert shivered when he considered that maybe James knew about the second-hand cot.  That he’d always known.  Leaving Sam in the middle of his monsters, Robert decided he was going to their house.  After all, Robert had his own monsters.

James’ house was three streets away – a leafy road, populated with modern, well-kept houses.  He watched at the side of the drive by the wheelie-bins, waiting to see if anyone came in or out of the house.  He had no coherent plan, no real thoughts even.  More, just a compulsion to see the kid who’d sent his gentle son the monstrous image.  Robert felt the wrongness of him being there too, but more than that, he felt his tremendous love for Sam when he thought of the profile of his face concentrating on the shading of his pictures.  How grave he looked.  How young.

Over the next few weeks, Robert went to the house regularly.  Sometimes early in the morning, more often at dusk.  He learned James lived there with his mum and baby sister.  He saw no evidence of his older brother or a dad.  He saw how careful and tender James was with his sister when he strapped her in her buggy.  He saw how well he helped his mum with the shopping bags from the car.  One time, he’d washed the front windows of the house.  On a couple of occasions, he’d cleaned the car.  Everything about James made him sick.

Robert had begun to love the evening walk to watch James.  The early autumn, violet time when people don’t yet draw their curtains and blinds against the dark.  The spying into other people’s windows and the little snatches of their lives.  He wondered on more than one occasion whether other people were ever really as happy as these snatches suggested.

As the season went on and the evenings grew longer, Robert began to walk like a monster, ghoulish, tall and thin.  On one particularly windy night in November, the shroud of his grey overcoat almost conceals the petrol can he carries in one hand and the rags of material he carries in the other.  His mind is full of images of all the people he could have been.  Other versions of himself.  Solider versions without his gaps and voids.  He’s thinking too of what love will make you do.  Of his love for Sam, burning cold.

His love lights the rags as he stuffs them through the letterbox of James’ house.  He’s checked that only James is in and he pictures him making memes in the back room.  He knows this creation – this casual destruction of other lives - means something and nothing at all to James, and this makes Robert sad.

Robert knows too that James will get out of the house in time, or he won’t; and he’s ambivalent to this fact.  But as he walks back up the driveway, the monster falls apart.  Its shroud drops in tatters to its feet and its stature shrinks.  Robert, a small man in trackie bottoms and a hoody, walks back home to his son.

The monster’s eyes are left on the pavement, its arms in the road.  Twisted wood and burning coals.  Sticks and stones. 

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