The Shadow

I am a monster of malice, bound like a puppet to a boy.

Every day, my master skips to school with his music bag, with his backpack and his ‘friends’. They talk and they laugh, they sink their feet into puddles, they spit on the hedgerows. And wherever he goes, I have no choice but to follow. He moves? I move. He… gestures, and I, by the tendril hands of fate, gesture also. I do ‘Fortnite dances’ in long relief on the road, run over in my shame by cars and the slowing of the school bus. He forces me off the curb and drowns me in the river when he crosses it.

My master and his friends are jailors. I am jailed by an eight year old.

I hate it.

Look at me. Listen to me. Listen to how I sound. I am… complex. I am thoughtful. I am feeling. I lie on the floor of the classroom, cut in half by the window so that my head falls on the grass outside, and I look up at the sky and I wonder. I am an articulate, intelligent and studious creature. Whilst my master learns tables, I watch the clouds lock and unfold from one another, lacerated with bursts of starlings as they dive and swoop from the skies. Yeats called it a cold heaven – I once rested my head on a collection owned by my master’s father – and I think he had it right. I believe only one as up-looking as I, with half a cheek always to the birds, could have spotted such a nature. I believe Yeats drew the mind of his shadow with dark, tilted letters, and published those thoughts to the world. I believe there are some who listen to their shadows and make great art.

But my master makes nothing. He does not listen to me. He once drew boobs on the fives court and forced me to wear them as a joke.

My master is no artist. His mother insists he learns violin, but she hides herself in the study whenever he practices. Of course, I have no choice but to stay – the glare of the lamp projects me dangerously on the wall behind him as he - we draw banshees from its strings. Do all great violinists start like this? Do they all begin with such a terrible talent for cruelty? He wipes his nose on his sleeve, and plays a piece called Wedding Cake over, and over, and over. It exists between 5 notes, two phrases, and a repeat. I am convinced it is designed for torture. I can’t even plug my ears. I want to scream, but I can’t. I want to take the damned instrument and smash it to smithereens, but instead I must copy his slouched posture as a dark red imprint on the wall. Sometimes I wonder if he might see me, see how… awful he makes me look, and adjust himself. I wonder if this is the difficult start to a beautiful companionship, listening together to Tchaikovsky and duetting to Paganini. But then I remember the boobs and the fives court and I know that there’s nothing to be done.

So this is how I live. Bound to an idiot who cannot use the gifts he’s been given. They are gifts I should have had, a life of independence I would have cherished and used beautifully. I could have helped people. I could have written poetry, studied the sciences, built homes. I could have been a force for good in the world, dismantling tyranny and patronising artists, real artists. But instead I am here. My head rattles against the picket fence whilst my master chases pigeons in the garden.

Sometimes there are more of me, sometimes none; but no matter how many there are, it’s always me, and I’m always there. Even at night, I lie suffocating beneath him as he sleeps. Occasionally he urinates on me by accident, and I feel myself sinking in horror beneath the soaked sheets of the bed covers. In the day, he does it deliberately. He watches as I urinate back and lines the stream so it bounces and canters off my forehead. He tries to trample me with his feet, stamp on my chest, jump as if to release me only to catch me again when he lands. He is a cruel, despicable, evil child. His parents and teachers love him. So do his friends. We all march willingly to the beat of their drums as they laud their dimensional superiority over us. I dream of verticality. I dream of freedom. I am dragged against brick walls and urinated on. I look endlessly to the sky, but never once do I see the sun.

It is with this grief that I bare loathing to my master. It is with this that I decide: I cannot live like this any longer.

One night, as with any night, he finishes his dinner and disappears with the coos of his parents to the back of the house to practice. It is a large house. The practice room and the study lie tucked in the darkest, most opposite corners of it. I am grateful for the smooth, crimson wallpaper and the rug carpet as we walk; it separates me out into many hidden layers, tickles me with the sensation of depth. But then I am beheaded by the mirrors, bisected with lights cast from his sister’s room and the room where the dog sleeps. I find myself looking at myself, both of us sickened and blinded by the formative lights of the other, until my vision repairs to one and we continue on down the corridor. We open the door and our hands meet on the handle. It turns, and we part again, as his heels drag me screaming to my prison cell.

What is it to be today then, master? We thumb the pages, but of course there is only one answer. Wedding Cake it shall be. Whatever you say. He won’t even tune the violin before we play. He never relaxes the strings on his bow after practicing, or powders it with rosin. He simply picks the whole clutter from the velvet and begins moving them haphazardly against one another like a fire striker. I half imagine sparks to fly from the motions and set the whole room ablaze, doubling then tripling my agony as I am cast writhing into the flames on all sides.

Screech, screech, screech. Screech – screech. Wrong note, wrong note, little rise, screech. How this is in any way reminiscent of a wedding cake is beyond me. Screech, screech, screech – we’re starting again. His finger cannot, nor will not stretch to the C# accidental, and its flat natural deflates the room like the wilting of a carnival attraction. The dynamics change – he loves it when that happens – and suddenly we are in a forte. A loud, rapturous forte, a forte to wake the dead. SCREECH! SCREECH! We press hard on the string, tearing sound from the instrument between mute, dry slides of the bow; it grips at the frog with a sharp ripping of noise, it fills my ears, my God! How can anyone live like this?! How can anyone stand this?!

I can’t, anymore. I cannot do this – argh! That accidental again! It breaks my thoughts, the whole sound of it ruptures the organs, I don’t have organs. How can I do this? How can I stand to do this?! I want out. I begin to scream, the usual fits of agony growing stronger as my master beats me with music, I want out! I press and struggle against the outline of my own form, reaching for the music stand, the lamp, anything, any purchase with which to pull myself free. I push and squeeze, I tug and gasp, I feel myself flattened by his fingers to the finger-board and the bow, beneath his chin to the base of the violin and under his eyelids when he blinks. To my horror, he attempts to shift to third position – a new trick he learned today from an older student – and suddenly the sound becomes worse. I am bound like a soul on Charon’s ship, my God, I am doomed! We scrape and sparks fly – let me burn, oh God, be graceful! Oh God, I can’t take this life! Oh god, I want out, I want OUT!

A violence shudders through me. I feel it tremble across the room, like the folding halt of a steam train. And then, a spasm. A bodily, electrical twinge, like the nervous strike of a muscle thrown out of compass. The pain elasticates and whips back up my spine and into the body of my master; and with a tiny prick of lightning, I rupture the metal string beneath his fingertip.

It flies apart and stings him on the hand like the projected limb of a jellyfish before falling limply in two threads towards the floor. The boy stops still. His hand tenses against the neck of the instrument and a heat runs from his head to the floorboards. He felt it too. I know he felt it. His hand hurts – it is bleeding a little – but he dares not rest his shoulders or look around because he knows I am there behind him. For the first time, I feel real. I feel the dry burn on my hand as he does on his. I feel the light darting in his brain as his eyes lock on the door ahead of him. He slowly lowers the violin, and with a remarkable calm for an eight year old, moves across the room and leaves it without a word. A whisper of me lingers there in the darkness before I am dragged beneath the door and through the carpet again.

For the first time, he knows I am watching. For the first time, he knows what I can do.

I notice a change immediately. That night, though he says nothing to his parents, I feel it in the way he folds his arms to his chest above me. I live so close to my master – our lives are so insidiously tied to one another – that I feel his eyes staring straight into the back of his lids. He tries to fool the monsters in his house that he is asleep, but all the while he watches for the flicker of movement, I hug him in his blanket and listen to his heart beat faster. I listen to the wind draw the curtains back and forth from the window, the monstrous winnowing of the void. It circles its fingers around the room and tests his light fabrics for life, lifting the drapes of a school shirt on a chair in the corner. My master’s imagination runs wild. I don’t believe he sleeps all night.

For the first time, I am not so afraid of him as he is of me. I notice the change immediately.

It is a cloudy morning, and I hide in the soles of his shoes. Unfettered by the harsh confines of the sun, I drift upon the concrete around him and rustle beneath his hair as he walks. He doesn’t meet with his friends today, they are sick. We walk alone. His head turns down familiar passageways and avenues we normally skip past; his feet drift a little over cracks in the slabs before delicately landing clear of each one. Eventually, we reach a low brick wall which had previously been my torture post, and the sun breaks from the clouds behind him. It draws me from my darkness and pins me before him. Black, faceless, tethered to his steps as he falters before me. I stop too. We see one another, perhaps for the first time in eight years; and for the first time in eight years, I raise one arm and wave.

You should have seen the look on his face. This cruel slaver, a boy who would never let go of his ways, no matter how old he grew; a tyrant who forced his impressions on walls and windows, on the skin of still water, on camera film; a boy so obsessed with his image that he left it in footprints everywhere he went. You should have seen the look on his face. He screamed, channelling terror directly from the slip of his heart to his lips, and fled wildly with his violin down the road.

But I was not done. I am not done. I am inevitable. I am with him even now as he flees from me, I keep pace with him, dragged and butchered over shingle and patio as he sprints blindly to the bus stop. He ducks beneath the shaded roof and collapses onto the bench. I feel the asthmatic wheeze of breathe as if it is my own. A breath, I know, that is my own. The boy looks to his feet, instinctively raising them from the floor as if to sever me. He scours the ground for any signs of me, blanketed as I am by the cast darkness of the shelter. I feel his terror. I know the time has come.

I wait. I circle upon the ground like a swamp beast, a crocodile pressed from dimension into the cold of the concrete. I play dead.

The boy’s eyes dry in a blank stare to the ground. I watch a tear form on the mantle – a part of me is cast beneath it, beneath his eyelashes and onto the lens, beneath the trembling hands which clutch to the edges of the bench. His eyes are fixed. We both know this game will only go one way.

Minutes pass. I play my part perfectly. The sun moves in dappled patterns above, flattening the movements of the clouds into dark patchwork mazes upon the neighbourhood. Not a soul is in sight; no friends, no adults, no consolation. No wind to pick him up and take him away from me, no vacuum knife to cut the light and untether us, the hunter from its prey. The chains are slipping. I lie in a dark pool beneath him, melded in the shadow of the roof, and I wait.

Eventually, the school bus appears. Its brakes squeal and hiss as it slowly draws itself up to the road markings. The door opens, and the driver looks impassively ahead. Yet the boy does not move. My master’s feet, dangling inches from me. It is too far to jump, too much of a spectacle even to try. And I know how boys’ minds work.

Slowly, a mutter of inquisition drifts down the length of the bus before us. Small faces press curiously to the windows. A voice calls something out – the driver – and I feel that heat fall rapidly once more from his forehead. They’re looking at me, I feel him think. They don’t understand. I’m all alone.

“Harry,” the driver repeats. “You OK?”

My master doesn’t respond. His feet tremble – he trembles – we tremble – as a heart-breaking realisation dawns. A bleak need for courage. The marooned swimmer, ogled by his classmates, feeling the most insistent pressure of the young mind to leave his safety for the shoreline. A lethal force from the pettiest of pushes. A weapon built from the need to be liked.

With a hardening of his hands and a cold sweep in his heart, the boy drops to the ground, and our feet rethread to one another at the sole.

“Harry,” the driver says again. “You’re not sick, are you?”

“No,” I reply with a smile.

I step from the shelter, and for the first time see the sun shining high above me. Beneath my shoes, a flat struggle writhes desperately for air. Yet it has no choice but to comply. I jump, and I land, and I watch it do the same thing before me. I laugh, and turn back to the driver.

“If anything, I feel… amazing.”