A. Kennedy - All the Rage

Head injury.

In what is still the boy’s favourite legend a man fell from a ladder and was given a head injury, and when he woke he could see to the future and find whatever anybody needed.

This made him famous.

He was called Peter.

Which is the boy’s name.

Head injury.

The man was Dutch — being from Holland means you’re Dutch.

Which is confusing.

Dutch sounds like Scotch, but Scotch is a drink and Scottish is a person, so the boy is not Scotch — the boy’s mother and father are quite sure about that. They are thoroughly Scottish in every way.

If he says he is Scotch he will be wrong.

If he laughs too out-loud he will be wrong.

If he spoons his soup towards himself he will be wrong.

It would be equally wrong for the boy to keep a hard want burning at his heart, a need to draw in calamity and knocks.

He does it anyway.

And now he has a head injury of his own. He holds it like a smile poured in under his hair.

The boy pictures his brain as newly alert and changed to a glistening mass, a larger cousin of the oyster his grandfather made him eat last summer — told him it was living, that it would forage and thrive beneath his skin and scour him out into a better health. He is sure the accident has roused his oyster-mind and that it is currently flexing, searching forward with an appetite he admires. He hopes it has decided to look for his future, to bring it back and show him the ways it could be.

The boy is not alarmed when some kind of effort, some kind of striving, presses his eyelids unstoppably shut and sets the night running and swinging and plunging him to sleep. He leaves himself and travels.

He remembers — dreams and remembers — the other time he saw his father cry. His daddy had been singing: head back and the words there, red and wet in the mouth and, at the end of them, a weeping.

The boy’s manhood and contentment, he feels, will be built in evenings when he is grown and sings, and there are men about him and hugs which cuff his skull and magnificent griefs, such marvellous injuries to shape him and let him rage. These will be hurts he can be proud of, historic and honourable.

Then he pictures his mother’s table, her dining-room table on which he must not ever lean his elbows during meals. It shines oddly, ripples and draws his attention to stand beside it and peer down. Laid out along the mahogany he sees his older body, naked and washed. The boy studies his wish to be solid, short-bearded, complete, and to have impressive arms with one tattoo — a little flag with writing underneath it, which he cannot read, but realises is important. His parts which are meant to be secret remain as he knows them — a little boy’s mickey, always — and then fade — goodbye mickey . Somehow, he spills away.

It seems a proper punishment that when his parts are gone they haunt him more than ever. They sting.

And the boy then sees himself opened like a book while hands dig out the truth of him, work wrist-deep, and find a rifle and a chanter, the shine of a plough, forgetfulness twice-distilled, broom flowers and roses, a lobster upended and balanced on its claws, a woman’s hair dragged from its scalp and thick as jute, a righteous and clever tawse, a burning rivet and a burning brand and a burning cross and a burning word, a collar the colour of blood, a whale bone carved with a ship and on the ship a man who travels, who will scour the world, burn it, bleed it, thieve it out and suffer as he steps, heavy and mad as horses, and held in his hand is a heart, a sleeping heart, a hunted heart, a slave heart, a heart like a hole through to nowhere that he lifts above his head.

He waves to the boy and the boy waves back.

This waving troubles the boy — it shivers him and makes him rock.

‘Hold still.’

He is seasick as he rises up into the ward, turns conscious, hears the tiny panting of the pressure cuff as it inflates. His arm is throbbing and troubles him.

‘I said hold still. You can do that, can’t you?’ The nurse, another nurse, whispering. ‘You’re a big boy. Can’t you do what you’re told?’

This will be a predictable element of his recovery. Every three hours, night and day, someone will come to measure the condition of his blood, put the chill of a thermometer under his tongue.

‘Don’t bite it.’

For the boy this will be wearying and unheroic.

Tomorrow afternoon his mother will arrive and sit next to his bed with a new copy of The Beano and The Dandy and, in a paper bag, the Oor Wullie annual he was not allowed for Christmas, because it is full of rough talk and ways in which nobody decent should behave. His father will not visit, but will sit in the parked car outside and listen to football reports on the radio — this will be because the smell of hospitals makes him sick. He will send his best. If he knew about the Oor Wullie annual then he would not.

The boy will take his comics and his mother’s kiss on his forehead and on the one of his cheeks that is nearest to her. He will think he doesn’t want to read, because he suspects reading might be difficult, but he won’t say that, for fear of being rude. He will not know what to do when he sees that she is very sad about him, and so he will pretend that his head hurts more than it does and she will nod a lot and put a bottle of Lucozade wrapped in crinkling yellow stuff on the bedside cabinet which is his while he is here and then she will stand up and he will suddenly regret that she is leaving.

Once he is alone he will still have the scent of her against his skin. And he will catch the only true hint he’ll ever get from his future — that there will be times when that exact perfume strikes him, makes him open like a book and ask to be hurt by strangers until he cannot think. This doesn’t unsettle him, is merely strange. He assumes it is the first of many insights and, sitting up in bed — little boy, little mickey — he is happy. The crack to his skull has left him brilliant with wishes, unsteadied by apparently too many opening paths towards glories. He has been thoroughly punished in advance and this means that his powers will be remarkable.

MARK HAD NEVER thought he’d consider throwing himself under a train. Turned out he was wrong.

Not for the first time.

Cheap shot, I realise, but I always do take the cheap shot. I wouldn’t really be me without it.

But I am me and I have been — with assistance — very badly wrong. Repeatedly.

At least the weather was okay. Hot, in fact: the light bleaching and withering down at everyone while they waited on a platform which wasn’t their platform at a station they shouldn’t have reached. This was not on the way to anywhere anybody had meant to be and apparently no services ever stopped here. It didn’t even seem to be a place for people, rather for goods, repairs in sidings, arcane mechanical processes. Mark could smell ageing oil and traces of coal dust. There was a sense beyond that of gap sites, bomb sites, failed reconstructions after the war.

The last world war, not the current succession of little wash-and-goes.

He found himself reminded of his childhood, the shoddy old home town and his lovingly rehearsed escapes therefrom.

And he had escaped, of course, quite quickly. Clever youngsters still could then and he was clever: full grant to go and play at studying in a mediocre, but blessedly far-removed university. He didn’t look back.

And as for going back, turning up again — nobody would have thanked me for trying that. Best to do all concerned the big, merciful favour and disappear.