Tomorrow’s Words

Out of the blue, the boy appeared in front of me.

“I want to die!” he sobbed, rivulets of tears streaming down his chubby cheeks.

It’s not often that children step into the path of an oncoming bike, holding out the palm of their hand as a traffic warden would. Had he had run away from home after a hiding?

“I really want to die. It hurts. It hurts so much.” The words came out in gasps. This was not the time to offer platitudes. I got off my bike and hugged him, then rummaged in my backpack to get him a tissue. I also fished out a bottle of orange juice, which he gulped thirstily, licking his lips and then wiping them on the sleeve of his grubby shirt when he’d finished.

“Thank you,” he said, unfathomable pain in his eyes.

“Tell me about it?”

“Lean your bike against the wall, and let’s sit down on the kerb, and I’ll tell you!” he said, with a quiet authority that bewildered me. I put it down to what I had assumed to be a tough life – maybe he had younger siblings, and he was obliged to care for them, and so he had had to learn how to order people about.

“I almost died three times, you know…” he said, and I swivelled round to look at him. “Yes, I did, too. The first time, I fell out of my cot. The second time, I was run over by a car. The third time, the neighbours’ dogs mauled me so badly the parents are in two minds about whether or not to switch off the life-support system...”

I noticed his quaint use of the word “the” with ‘parents’, and his weird use of verb tenses – but I didn’t comment. This child would give Charles Dickens a run for his money any day, so precocious and eloquent was he. “So,” I said, half perturbed and half amused, “why is it you could to die a fourth time?”

“Third!” he exclaimed. “The logistics might not be that difficult for you to understand…” he said, his eyes delving deep into my soul. “As a writer, you must have heard of re-incarnation.” 

“What does this have to do with you, though?”

“I really don’t have time to explain.  I just know. This time, I am finding it extremely difficult to walk towards the Light” (the way he said it gave the word an upper case initial). “I cannot seem to find the right Path” (ditto). "I don't really know whether I want to, after all."

“So, what do you want from me?”

“Nothing, really. Nothing and everything. I want you to go to this address (and here he dug his tiny hand deep into the pocket of his jeans and drew out a crumpled sheet of paper, smoothing it on his thigh) and give this to the parents so they can share it with the neighbours. Only then will I be free. I cannot go there myself. Don’t ask questions. Please.”

I took the paper from his hand, and glanced up as a shadow fell upon me. “Exercise whacked you out then?” sniggered Rhona, who was always the poster girl for Fashion Plates.

“No, I was just talking to…” but when I looked to my left, the boy was nowhere to be seen.

“Ha! I saw your lips move, and I thought you were singing. Now you say you were talking to someone. Are you sure you weren’t having a daydream, or maybe you didn’t have your snack before biking, and now you have a hypo?” Rhona knows I have diabetes.

“I don’t actually remember how I got here, but then, whenever I’m on my bike, it’s like I’m on automatic pilot. But, I tell you, there was a boy sitting down next to me, right here. He was telling me something about dying and being born again… reincarnation…”

“Ah. I see. One of those religious nuts whose sole aim in life is converting others to their skewed beliefs.”

“It was not like that at all. He… he was telling me something about how he had nearly died three times, and…”

“But that’s what reincarnation is. You have to die, and your soul, or the equivalent, goes into another body - human or animal. Some weirdos even say it goes into an inanimate object.”

“Wait. Let me try and remember exactly what he said. I am sure he mentioned falling out of a cot… and… being run over by a car. The third instance had something to do with… dogs… yes. That’s it. He mentioned being mauled by the neighbours’ dogs so badly that, and these are his exact words, ‘the parents are in two minds about whether or not to switch off the life-support system’ and then he mentioned light, I am sure, but I forgot how he phrased it…”

All this time, without thinking, I was rolling up and unrolling the slip of paper the child had given me.

“What’s that, then?” My friend gestured toward the paper.

“What’s what? Oh. This! This is proof that I am not cuckoo, as you seem to be thinking. Here, look!” I told her what the child had said about the paper.

She squinted at it. “Oh, my goodness. This address says Mellieħa. How on earth would a child without transport have ended up, here at Żurrieq, miles away?”

“Well, he did, somehow, and I spoke to him. And mark my words, even if it’s the last thing I do, I will go and speak to the parents.” Ooops. Without thinking, I said the parents, as he did, and not ‘his parents’.

“Look, my car is parked a couple of streets away; I was on my way to the sub-Post Office. Let’s ask the school janitor if he can keep the bike for you, and we’ll go to this address together. I’m curious, now, and I want to see how it will all end. I can get these circulars franked for posting, tomorrow. One day won’t make that much difference.”

Thomas was a friend of my father’s, so of course he let me put the bike in his room in the school yard. I told him that my friend and I had an important errand to run, and to save time we were going to use her car… which was the absolute truth.

We drove up to Mellieħa, and a passer-by gave us directions, since we weren’t familiar with the area.

The house was in one of those quaint areas in the old part of the seaside village, where time appears to be standing still, untouched by progress. The whoosh of the waves was the only thing to be heard, in the infinite silence.

I banged the old-fashioned dolphin-shaped knocker three times, setting off a cacophony of barks and howls from the house next door.

“Well, at least the dogs exist!”  Rhona, ever the cynic, commented.

The quick clack-clack of wooden Dr Scholl’s mules against the stone flagstones was followed by the squeaking of the door being opened.

“Yes?”

It was obvious by the look on the woman’s face that strangers, especially those raising a ruckus, were rather thin on the ground in those parts.

Rhona dug her elbow into my ribs.

“Excuse me…” I stammered, struck by the resemblance of the woman to the boy I had met earlier. “But…” Inspiration struck. “Do you recognise this handwriting?” I handed over the paper.

“Yes, it’s David’s. Is this some kind of joke?”

I gasped. This was not the attitude of a parent whose son was in the I.T.U. She sounded more like the mother of a Dennis the Menace being accosted by the victim of his latest prank.

“Well… it’s a long-ish story, and quite a surreal one.”

“How amiss of me not to invite you in! Do enter, please,” David’s mother moved aside for us, and then ushered us into the kitchen, which smelled of freshly-brewed coffee and the rabbit stew simmering on the stove.

“Coffee?” We nodded, blown away by this display of olde-worlde hospitality. “Milk? Cream? Sugar? Sweetener?”

We sat down and I was just beginning to relate my story when a boy ran into the kitchen, bouncing a ball.

“David! How many times have I told you not to do that?”

I blanched. Unless he was an identical twin, or a clone, that was the boy I had met in the morning. Rhona looked at me, and it was in that instant, as she told me later, that she believed me. I felt faint.

“Ma! At noon, when they come back from Valletta, I’m going to play with the doggies of Rupert, and I’ll have lunch there, he told me his mum said I could…”

I recovered just in time to scream “No!”

Mother and child looked at me much like the way Rhona had, when she found me sitting on the kerb. I took a deep, deep, breath and asked them to sit down and hear me out. David’s mother said “Well, you couldn’t be making this up if you tried – but he’s here, isn’t he?”

Hardly had I finished my story than all hell broke loose, next door - snarls, growls and bays… and muffled shouts for help. Knowing that there was no one at home, David’s mother called Emergency Services, and the rest, as they say, is history.

As it turned out, a burglar had shinnied over the boundary wall, hoping for a quick haul. He must have known that the family had several dogs, but obviously he never expected them to have the run of the house and the backyard. It was only by a fluke that they did not kill him; he rolled himself into the foetal position and remained thus, until the orderlies came.

David, now a grown man, married, and with a daughter named after me, says he owes me his life. We cannot understand how I came to be in possession of a note [“If my vitals don’t stabilise by Sunday, pull the plugs, please.”] in his handwriting, which he swears he never wrote. It’s now framed, and hangs in his office.

Let’s just say it’s one of those inexplicable things that exist in time-warps. Or a parallel universe.