amphibi.us

I worked after school at my father’s bakery. I swept the floors, wrapped the food, I took out the rubbish at the end of each day. I walked down the back of the shop, pushed down hard on the back door. I walked out into the alleyway and dropped the black bins by the bricks. That was when I found Candy Bone, lying on the floor, his nose broken, his knuckles skinned. I crouched down to help him, called out ‘mister’; even though I would find out he was only a year older than me. But it’s hard to tell how old someone is when they’re face is hidden under a dozen scars and cuts.

He looked over, coming round, and pulled himself to his feet, using the brick wall as a crutch. He ignored all my questions as if I wasn’t even there, eventually pulling his jacket collar up high to cover his cheeks, his mouth. Then he simply hobbled away without a word, leaving me still holding the trash bags. I looked down and all there was left of him was a puddle of blood on the floor and in the centre of it, a small, jagged tooth.

I didn’t tell my pa what I saw that day but I came to find out about Candy over the next few weeks as school started up. I had my friends and we kept our part of the ground, walked in tight neat groups. My friend Jules had been told about the fight at lunch and by dusk we all headed down the alley at the far end of the road, by my fathers shop. And there he was, the boy I’d found, his scars just healing, his fingers taped, up against three boys, all older. It wasn’t a fight, it was a massacre. So uneven the fuel of seeing punches and butts fell away almost immediately, until Jules and my other friend Frank actually started catcalling and whistling for it to end. The boys actually looked relieved to stop, embarrassed almost. The crowd broke and I went with my friends to the park, looking back just once, quickly, to find the boy left on his own, lying almost exactly in a mirror image of what went before amongst the dirt and the filth.

We sat in the park, drinking beer. Jules explained the boy was called Candy Bone by the first boy that beat him, a psycho who had been pulled out of school after he knifed a teacher. Said it was the easiest fight he ever had. Ever since Candy had gone out of his way to start something with anyone. Always down the same alley, always the same result. Jules figured I’d probably dumped the trash on his head probably three, four times that year if I hadn’t looked where I’d pitched the bags. I hadn’t. We laughed about it, glad there was someone below us, such a complete loser, to be beneath even our contempt. It made us feel safe and more importantly, not as weak. We broke away that night all of us calling out the name in sissy voices, flinching and doubling over in the shadows as we pitched empty cans at each others feet.

After that night I kept an eye out for him whenever I took out the trash. I didn’t see him but I took to walking the alleyways, looking for evidence of him, which I usually found. A blood patch, a scrap of torn clothing. Bloodied penny coins I knew they slipped between their fingers before they threw their first punch. Then one day I found a small thing, rumpled against the rotted vegetable palate of the grocers next door; a small notepad, curled and water-stained but still useable. I crouched down, scooped it into my pocket as my father called out for me. I went inside, the pad damp against my ribs, the copper spine prodding against my shirt and into my skin.

I looked through it that night as I lay in bed. It was scuffed and a lot of the ink had run like the women who rushed into the bakers from the rain, whose mascara had begun to slip. But even so I could make out sketches, tight sentences in the corners of some of the pages. The sketches were of some far off places I didn’t recognise that were exotic and beautiful. The words were extravagant and drawn out into long rambling sentences that I could never imagine hearing anyone around here speaking. I stuffed the pad under my pillow and went to sleep and in the night I dreamt of some of the things I’d seen in the notebook, sometimes interrupted by a spurt of blood or the sound of a knuckle popping against something soft.

A few days later I found him in the alleyway. Except this time he wasn’t bleeding or battered, but on his haunches looking between all the bags, the rubbish. I dropped the bags and stood in the doorway until he finally acknowledged me.

“I’m looking for something. Notepad. Think I might have dropped it.” His voice was quiet but quite light. Finally he looked up to me.

“I’ve got it.” I pulled it out of the pouch of my apron, held it up. Immediately his eyes went from dully looking to me to lighting up with the notepad.

“How’d you come up with all the sentences? The sketches? It’s like a comic book or something.” I half smiled. It was true. Since I’d looked at it, I’d compared it to other comics, newspaper dailies and it was better than anything in any one of them.

“Dunno.” Was all he said as he raised up, stuffing one hand in his pocket and reaching for it with the other.

“I’d like you to tell me. Or I could keep it.” I drew it back, out of his hand. I don’t know why I did that. I wasn’t meaning to be cruel; I genuinely wanted to know his secret. But as soon as he brushed, I felt pissed, superior, remembering what my friends had told me about him getting whipped over and over. Me; who’d never even thrown a punch.

“You wanna give that back or we can go in the alley right now.” He said, mechanical and low, having said it so many times. It wasn’t even a threat it sounded so tired, more of an excuse to just not have to talk anymore.

“Yeah, Candy Bone’s gonna kick my ass? I don’t think so.” And it was then I noticed it; saying his nickname made him flinch worse than the time I’d seen him sprawled in the gutter, when I saw the three boys tear him to pieces. It was the shame of it that made him ache right there in front of me in the rain.

“Look…I don’t want to fight you. Hell I don’t even know you, man. I just wanna figure out how you drew all these cool things, came up with all those neat words…I don’t know, so maybe  I could try it out sometime, buy myself a sketchbook, or something.” It was true; I liked English best in classes, all the crazy tales, twice as good when the smart girls read them out loud in the class. Even the way the words laid themselves out on the page, ready to be taken in and devoured or something. My dad started calling my name out. I started to shake the pad impatiently, just out of his reach.

“Okay. Meet me in the tyre yard on Saturday at noon.” He said, flexing his hands until I tossed him the pad. He turned and walked away. I knew I should have held onto it, that he could have double crossed me, but he sounded so desperate, so honest, I knew he wasn’t going to back down. I turned and called back to my pa and made my way inside as the rain broke.

I met him on the dot of twelve. It was sunny and I sat on a pile of three tyres that felt like they were almost melting in the heat below my legs. I’d made excuses to back out of seeing my friends, reversed it to my pa. He walked up, still with the same scuffed jacket on, still with both hands in his pockets. He didn’t raise his head when I called out, didn’t acknowledge my wave, neither. He pulled up, and leant against another pile of tyres, like he wasn’t used to sitting unless he got knocked down.

“You wanna know about the book? Okay I’ll tell ya; but you can’t tell no-one else after okay?” His voice was hurried like he’d thought it through.

“Who I’m going to tell? Who’d want to listen?” I shrugged. I realised then he didn’t have anybody; wasn’t used to kidding around, batting insults the way grown ups talked about the weather. I held my hands out, palms up and decided to just him go with it. He pulled out the book, rolled back the cover. It was flat now, like he must have used weights to smooth out the water crinkles.

“I take the mail.” He said quietly. He looked up from the paper, looked me straight in the eye. His nose was swollen on the bridge, broken. I looked down to his fingers and saw they weren’t that bad, the scabs healing. Like he’d taken a beating and hadn’t fought back.

“I…intercept it. That’s a good way of saying stealing, my ma used to say.” He smiled briefly, his lips parting, then closing quickly.

“The postman’s walk up to the gate and I head straight for it too. Say it’s my house; make a joke about not waking the baby sister or setting off the dog. You say dog to a postie and they’ll throw the mail to you. Make jokes about it; show you the scars on their shins, like they’d been attacked by a shark or something.” He stopped briefly, pulled out a carton of cigarettes. Not cigarettes, rolled joints. He shook one out, pulled it from the package with his mouth; I could tell he’d practised in front of a mirror a thousand times. He lit it, offered me one. I took it, never having smoked before; tried it once at the park, coughed before I’d inhaled.

“I take the post. I don’t bother with the bills, or the adverts, just the handwritten letters. I run them open; steam them if a can…and I read them. After I do, I take them all back, wait until dark, early morning and slip them back through the right slots. Always a day later, so it’s no big deal.”

“So you copy the lines out of the letters.” I drew on the cigarette, felt the smoke rise through me.

“And draw what I read on the sketches. It’s no big gift.” He blew a stream of smoke through his nose, looking like he was deciding something. Then he walked over, taking the pad in both hands, letting the fag hang in the corner of his mouth.

“See, here; a man whose a travelling salesman writing to his wife. He went to Bermuda on a tin can plane that he thought was gonna crash.” He pulled the cigarette from his mouth, used it as a rod to point out the details, so it made the smoke from the engine come alive, though he didn’t realise it. I half laughed and he jolted back, coiled. I shook my head and explained myself and he looked at me for a long moment.

“You enjoying that cigarette, huh?” Was all he said and went on.

I don’t know how long we sat there for but I remember each page he showed me; there were helicopters, farms, dragons, a page of flags from every country in Europe, a picture of a sweetheart and her faraway soldier man. Each of them was detailed and broad, simple and defined. The more high we got, the more his voice seemed to slink inside the sketches, like they were part of them. After a while I pointed things out I saw. He listened, sometimes laughing, sometimes shaking his head and explaining how that couldn’t be true. By the time we reached the end of the book, the sun was in full tilt and we had lit another joint, a third. We sat below the tyres in the dirt, so it gave us some shade and let us rest our backs.

“So I’ll bite, man. Why the hell you get into all those fights? You’re smart; you sketch the hell off of everyone else in school? Why do it?” I was smiling as I asked him, feeling the hit of the smoke, the low warm energy of the sun. I looked over, expecting him to feel the same. But in an instant he had returned to himself; shrouded, hunched, back in the shadows. I raised my hands to cool it, but he was already locked.

“I told you about the book. That’s it.” He started to pull himself up off the floor, his hands returning to his pockets, jamming the pad down the front of his jeans. He marched away as I called after him. I tried to start running, but my legs gave way after a few steps. So instead I watched him disappear in the middle of all that heat, a black spot amongst the sun.

I never told anyone about that afternoon. I didn’t see him in school, I didn’t chance upon him in the alleyway. My friends found other things to trash talk about and Candy seemed to fade away; other fights were going on, girls were becoming centre stage. But I never forgot about him, the sketches. I walked the alley, looking for evidence, but there was no blood, no teeth, and no sketches. Just the trash rotting in the rain.

The radio announcer at school made us all gather in the hall. The headmaster shuffled on into centre stage and leaned into the microphone; it was set a little taller than him and one of the other teachers had to come over and re-adjust it for him, letting us laugh quietly in a low wave. He coughed to still us, which we did and he announced the death of the student, Paul McGillis. It said something that no-one even knew who he was until the photo was put up on the stand next to the head teacher. And even then most of us had to squint, imagine layers of cuts and bruises over the top of the black and white photo of the awkward boy unwilling to pose for the shot. Most of us saw him in red, after all. There was a silence, then a quiet muttering between us. There was to be a memorial and the councillor was to be made available. His photo was to be placed in a corner of the school in remembrance.

The memorial was poorly attended, the councillor returned to locking her door for the day at noon after a week. Inevitably someone defaced the picture, drawing in black eyes, cuts, bruises. There was the threat of expulsion but too many suspects. Finally someone scrawled ‘Candy-bone’ over the photo and it was retired with the talk of a memorial bench plaque which never materialised. Soon boys would brag how’d they beaten Candy, brought about his demise, been party to it, so soon there was a gang of twelve who called themselves the Part Piece Killers, though they all knew it was fake.

The killer was his father, a florist who lived a block from us. My pa knew the mother, had known the man was a bad seed all along. Turned out the fights he lost in the alley weren’t as bad as the beatings he took at home when he didn’t raise his hands. He was sent down for life and it was simply the mother now, waiting for the house to be sold, wearing black and scorned by the neighbours for her seeming inaction. One day my father prepared a tray of food for her, was readying to take it round to her. I offered to do it for him, explained I’d knew her boy, had talked to him. My pa looked at me and saw something in me that let me take on the responsibility. He didn’t say anything to me about how to act, just patted my arm and let me go.

I knocked on the door and explained myself when she finally opened the door. She almost flinched, like she was waiting for more accusations. I walked inside, laid the tray down on the table. She spoke of my pa, said what a good man he was. It was strange hearing him being described by someone outside of how I saw him, but I matched up what she said as pretty close. I listened and said what I thought I was supposed to say.

Then, without thinking, I mentioned the day at the tyre yard, the sketchbook. I don’t know why, or maybe I did; she disappeared for a moment, then reappeared clutching the notepad. She hadn’t understood it, so I sat next to her, explaining the sketches I didn’t say how he’d come across them, said it was imagination. By the end of the book she was crying and I felt tears in my eyes too until she wiped them out of my eyes. I wanted to do the same for her, but knew I couldn’t. It looked like the tears had settled in her, had worn a path that she’d grown sued to. I stood and patted her shoulder the same way my pa had done, thinking how good that had made me feel and hoped that a little would rub off on her.

A week later the pad came through the post to me. My pa handed it to me without any questions. It was the first piece of mail I ever got. I even saved the envelope for a long time after. I took it to my room, looked it back over again. I took to keeping the pad near me, in my jeans pushed down by the belt like he did.

The alley came to be called Candy Bone lane. It was the place you went to dump your girlfriend or spike up. There were very few fights there now, like that part was done, but it was just as evil and hated. The name even got sprayed on the walls. It stood there until my pa got bored of waiting for the authorities and the two of us wiped it off. It even hurt my pa’s business for a while, being that close to the alley, but not for long. Like everything else; people forgot or moved on to hate something else instead.

But I never forgot. Every chance I could, I’d scour the papers, the school newsletters, looking for competitions, ads. Every chance I got I carefully removed a page from the pad and submitted it to the addresses, signed it with my name. When they didn’t win they were placed. When the letters of recommendations and small cash prizes arrived addressed to me my pa didn’t have to ask because I told him the truth. When I saved enough I bought a sketch book and pencil and put them all in a ruck sack and set out on a Saturday.

On that Saturday I hiked up to the tyre yard, telling my friends one thing, my pa another. I stood in the sun and I sketched what I saw and other things that I remembered. When I was done I signed it with both our names, full names this time; his first, then mine. And when it was done I turned over the page and tried to ready myself for the next one.

© Chris Castle, 2010

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