The Same Mistakes Make The Story

The man steps off the bus and kicks himself for missing his stop. For God’s sake, it’s only been ten years since he was last here. How much could have changed in a decade? He hitches the rucksack he carries on his back into a more comfortable position, takes a hold of his suitcase, figures out the quickest route to his destination, and then sets off walking towards the housing estate. He feels the damp seeping through the hole in the sole of one boot, and almost immediately trips over the untied lace of the other. He stops and tugs at the laces. Both ends snap in his hands, and by the time he’s finished retying, the loops in the bow are the size of a button on his grey overcoat. He sighs. He is long overdue new boots, but he has nowhere to live at the moment, plus no work on the horizon, a mere $174 in his pocket, and just short of that in a savings account. He’d opened the account for a rainy day but had been at the center of a monsoon for months. Dry feet were not a priority right now. This is not how he imagined marking his fortieth birthday.

The young boy got his chores out of the way first. There was nothing much to do, just make his bed, tidy his room, and put his dirty school uniform in the linen basket. He wouldn’t be needing the uniform again, but he knew it would be passed down to his younger brother. The young boy will have grown even more by the end of the Summer, when school restarted. He’d reached that halfway house between childhood and becoming an adult. His mum told his aunt he was needing a new wardrobe and shoes practically every other month. It wouldn’t be long before he was taller than her, she said. He couldn’t imagine being taller than his dad though, even if there was already ready very little difference in height between the three of them. It was only his brother who needed to catch up.

           The young boy’s plan was very simple and known only to him. Chores completed to his mum’s satisfaction, he packed himself a lunch and put it in his school bag; blackcurrant jelly sandwiches, a packet of cheese and onion chips, a chocolate wafer bar, and a small bottle of soda. He expected to be home by teatime. He then waved bye to his mum, promised to be good, and went out of the back garden gate and into the street. He bumped into his friend, Paul, at the same moment the man stepped off the bus less than ten minutes’ walk away.

The man pauses for a moment, to ease the ache in his neck. The rucksack contains notebooks mostly, with a pair of denim jeans and a couple of t-shirts tucked into any tight space they could find. His limited toiletries are shoved into the rucksack’s tiny side pockets. The suitcase is filled with yet more books; not notebooks this time, but novels, collections of short stories, essays, and letters, anthologies, dictionaries, reference books, and a pencil case. He’d wanted to keep the pencil case with his notebooks in the rucksack but decided it might be wiser to keep his deodorant, toothpaste, and toothbrush closer to hand, for politeness’s sake if for no other reason. He didn’t want to turn up at his brother’s house stinking like a hobo.

           He is about to turn right, head for his destination, but then goes left, and makes his way towards the outskirts of the estate instead, where the city ends and the countryside takes over. It was there, in that hinterland between the streets and the fields, where he’d often felt at home as a boy; sitting under a tree perhaps, building worlds out of clouds, imagining desert islands and distant planets populated by people who didn’t exist. He wants to sit under that tree one more time before returning to the bosom of his family.

           He knows that his family considers him to be something of a failure, that he is a victim of his own refusal to be a part of the real world, that he spends far too much time caught up in his fantasies.

“Hi, Simon, where are you going?” asked Paul. “Nowhere much” the young boy replied with a shrug of his shoulders. “Do you want to do something?”. The young boy thought about the question but couldn’t come up with an honest answer. “Maybe later” he said with a  smile. Paul smiled back. “Cool. See you later, maybe” he said and carried on with his life while the young boy walked away.

The man eventually finds the footpath he is looking for, still puzzled by the way the streets seem to have shifted, slipped and crossed paths until all that remains today is a maze of pavement and garden to struggle through.

           The path follows the stream, which in turn follows the estate from his old nursery to the High school he attended. He makes his way to a center point, where the one and only bridge along the steam takes you from building to field. There are many spots along the way where he would once have leaped from bank to bank, or swung across on a rope, but those days are long gone, and he didn’t have a suitcase in tow the last time he jumped here.

           There’s an abandoned armchair hiding under the bridge when he eventually reaches it. The chair is soaked and coated with moss. He crosses the bridge and remembers to listen out for trolls asking questions, but all he hears is the squish of his own footsteps.

           Once over the bridge, he follows the path that leads him to the old quarry and the abandoned railway track. The quarry is now a lake, and the railway track has succumbed to the encroaching grab of grass.

The young boy skirted the nursery, avoiding a football match taking place in the street. He didn’t want to talk to his friends today. He had other things on his mind. He considers seeing how long it will take him to walk to his new school but decides to walk away from the estate altogether.

           His mum wasn’t keen on him leaving the safety of the streets. She knew about the men who loitered on the periphery there, had heard about the dirty needles and soiled lives hiding out in the hedgerows and bushes. He’d heard the same stories, but knew they were just that, tales to scare away the unwanted. Well, he wanted to be wanted.

           The traffic roar turned to murmuring engines, and the angry bark of a dog became a muffled growl as the young boy left the bridge, kicking a stone in front of him as he headed towards the quarry.

The man and the young boy meet where the railway embankment waits for them. It has been waiting years for this moment.

           “Hi” says the man.

           “Hi” says the young boy.

           “What do you have in your school bag?”.

           “Lunch”.

           “I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten all day. Not since this morning, anyway.

           “Do you want a sandwich?”

           “What’s in it?”

           “Blackcurrant jelly”.

           “My favorite”.

           The two of them slide down the embankment, the young boy helping the man with his suitcase. When they get to the bottom they sit and eat.

           “What’s in your suitcase?”

           “Books”.

           “Not clothes?”.

           The man shakes his head before tilting it back and shaking the last of the crisp crumbs out of the packet and into his mouth, while the boy bites the wafer biscuit in half, handing one piece to the man.

           “Nope, just books”.

           “Are your clothes in your rucksack?”.

           “Some, but mostly it’s notebooks in there”.

           “What do you put in the notebooks?”

           “My stories”.

           “I make up stories too”.

           “No kidding! Do you write them down?”.

           It is the young boy’s turn to shake his head.

           “No. I have to write stories in class, but these I just keep in my head”.

           “You should write them down, here”.

           The man opens his rucksack and rummages around in it. He takes out a notebook and checks inside. There is some scribbling on the first page, which he rips out and puts into the pocket of his overcoat. “Spoilers”, he winks, and hands the notebook to the young boy, who flicks through the empty pages. He thanks the man.

           “But you have to promise me you’ll write your stories in it” the man insists. The young boy crosses his heart and hopes to die.

           “I’ll dedicate the first one to you” he says, as the man stands up and starts to make his way along the invisible railway track.

           “Hey, mister! The estate’s that way” he shouts.

           “I know” the man yells back without turning to look.

           “Tell me your name then, so I can dedicate the story to you”.

           “My name’s Simon” the man replies as he walks out of the young boy’s life.

“That was “When Will I See You Again?” by The Three Degrees. I’m Stephen Gartside and you’re listening to ‘Words Aloud’ on Scargrove Community Radio, and with me in the studio today is author, Simon Peterson, here to talk to us about his debut novel, “Ch..Ch..Ch..Ch..Changes”, which is currently selling like hot cakes to wide critical acclaim. Simon, we talked earlier about your childhood, here in Scargrove, and you explained how the area seemed to sneak into your book without you even realizing it”.

           “That’s right, Stephen. It wasn’t until I was well into the first draft of the novel that I started to recognize these moments that I’d forgotten all about, memories I didn’t even know I had”.

           “Now, you didn’t start writing until you were well into your forties, and you’re now approaching sixty. I was wondering, what advice would you give to your younger self?”

I looked at the man interviewing me and smiled. “I think I’d probably tell him to make the same mistakes I did, but to make sure he wrote them down, for future reference”.