2/7 chapters done. Revision is flying along. All reports indicate that it really improves the story, although further cutting will be necessary in a third draft. But that's for the future!
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Tobias was beginning to hate the smell of dirt.
He was pressed into the ground, spear in his right hand, waiting, waiting, waiting. Every time they heard anything remotely like a deer a call went out, he would drop his supplies and throw himself on his belly behind the closest tree. Then began the game of ambush and hope. Some days, there was nothing at all – only the sound of stones slipping in the distance, water winding through a creek bed. Other times, there were two or even three of the deer loping through the trees, drinking at the streams, or stopping to sniff curiously at an abandoned carrysack. They didn’t seem aggressive, but Tobias couldn’t help but stare at the tall antlers that the males carried, bleached bone sharp as needles. He imagined how it would feel to be charged and this time stand his ground, to dodge out of the way at the last moment with air under his feet and then bear the creature to the ground with his spear buried in its neck.
He dreamed of that sometimes. They were like dreams of being in the movies. In those visions he was always taller and wrapped in muscle, and Rei was b his side. He always awoke hungry.
But there was always more than one, and the time when they would find a deer alone drove him to sharpen his spear every night. “I'd kill for a steak. Just one steak,” Tobias said once, as they all crouched low around a fire.
“Which of us would you kill?” Foster asked, joking.
Tobias shrugged. "Whoever has the most meat on them, I guess." Nobody laughed.
And now, on his belly in the mud, pins and needles attacking his legs from all directions, he could only hear one set of hoof beats. His heart was beating so loud he was sure the deer would hear, and the dream of meat was back on his tongue. The trees ahead clumped to form a natural path, with Pal hiding on one side and him on the other. Foster was down the path somewhere, keeping watch, ready to shout out if the deer was alone, and all three girls had scattered away into the trees to cut the animal off if needed. It had to work.
The noises were closer now, very close, but he couldn’t see anything past the bush. The hoof-falls slowed.
There was a high-pitched whistle.
He tried to move, but his arms had frozen.
Dimly, he heard Pal shout. He raised his head and saw the boy leap out, but when he tried to follow everything shook and blurred. His spear was too heavy to lift.
The noises were too close. It was right there.
It burst past the trees. No antlers, no fury; it was a female. But it was still huge, as tall as his shoulder, and it was running fast and scared.
Pal stepped out into the does path and threw. His aim was sloppy; the spear only grazed and skipped off. Too short to fly well, not sharp enough to stick. Pal cursed and stepped back out of the way.
It was almost passing him.
Something in his body tensed and suddenly Tobias was on his feet. He pivoted out from behind the bush with his spear in his right hand, winding back, preparing to throw.
I’m too late, he realized. He could see every detail of the doe as it ran, muscles flinching and bulging under soft skin. Her eyes were deep and dark, and he knew then that she was judging him.
He threw anyway.
The spear never left his hand. The doe caught him under the chin with her shoulder and stars burst behind his eyelids as he flew back, arms flailing but catching only air, and he saw the sky. The same beautiful shade as Rei’s eyes.
He landed on his back, his breath punched out, throat crushed and constricted. He clawed at the dirt, trying to lever himself up, gasping and choking. His strength failed and his head came down, leaving him looking upwards at the clouds.
The hoofbeats faded away.
This might be dying, he thought. It’s not all that bad. Hurts a bit.
Then he thought, do I get to see my mother again? That would be nice.
And finally, as he heard his companion’s shouts and their anxious faces began to appear in a halo above, he thought it’s okay. She wouldn’t have wanted you anyway, skinny little cyclops.
He blacked out.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Saturday, January 5, 2008
New Year, the Toilet Maze, and onwards with Weathermen
Well, 2008 came pretty fast. I've got two months now before uni begins again to edit the HELL out of Weathermen and get it into a 2nd draft stage; some folk have read through the draft manuscript and enjoyed it, but there's a long way to go before the whole thing hangs together as a novel (as opposed to a set of connected scenes linked by flat characters).
In the meantime I've been busting out short stories, one of which I've sent off to Voiceworks magazine in the hope losing my publishing virginity. Here's another I've been working on: this is only the first half of the first draft, but if you like it give me a yell and I'll mail the rest for some hard critique.
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Working title - Toilet Maze?
John found the message wedged behind the toilet cistern in the last cubicle of the Civic Road Public WC, Gentlemen/Disabled. It was written on a long piece of cheap loo paper folded over five times, the script tiny block letters as if the author had been trying to copy the font on the hand driers. It read: “England again! I’m getting to like the word ‘lav’. I hear it a lot, it always reminds me of pubs. Please write back. Hide this in a different ‘lav’ somewhere. Maybe I’ll find it. Cheers!”
He considered tucking it back, but then decided that it would be rude not to reply, especially since it had said please. What would his mother say if he didn’t write back to a letter he got in the post? Probably belt him. So he folded it twice and stuffed it in his school blazer.
His Dad was waiting outside the Gents, chewing on a cigarette with his tweed jacket buttoned tight. He had a ginger moustache, and his carroty hair was cropped down close to the skull, exactly the same as John’s. “What took you?” he asked.
“Reading a letter.”
“Don’t go reading anything in toilets, son. It’s all grown up stuff. Written by crazies and students. You know what I’ve told you about students. One of them gets close to you, you know what to do. Polish your shoes when you get home.”
That night, John polished his shoes until they shone. He hung his blazer on a wooden coathanger, because good clothes deserved good hangers. He then took the letter from his blazer pocket and set it down beside his homework, and composed his reply in snatches between sums. When he finished he checked it over for spelling, then signed at the bottom and folded it twice. Then, after making sure the hallway was empty, he snuck down to the bathroom.
The toilet had come loose from the wall, and both the letter and his reply slipped into place behind without a hitch. Then he went back to his bedroom as quietly as he could, crossed out a day on his calendar that read 1988, Year of the Dragon! Be Passionate in Life! and tucked himself into bed. He slept tight until morning.
When John woke he found a man in the bathroom.
He opened the door to brush his teeth and saw him rummaging through the medicine cabinet. John shrieked and slammed the door shut, skittering back into the hall with his hands over his mouth. His father shouted from downstairs, “Watch it, you’ll shake the house down!” He barely heard, his heart beating like a motorbike engine, waiting for the doorknob to twist and the man to stalk out. Maybe he was a robber. Or, God forbid, a student.
From inside the bathroom he heard the clinking of bottles full of pills and the creaking of drawers as the man explored. Finally there was an excited squeal and the sound of paper rustling before the man found the letter behind the toilet.
“Ah!” John heard him say. “So it’s England again!” He crept up to the door and pressed his ear against the wood. “Ahem,” the man coughed. “I shall begin. Hello. I found your letter. Only old people call it lav. Why do you hide your letters in toilets? I am eight years old. Who do you think will win the football? Signed, John.” The man coughed. His voice trembled, as if he was terribly tired. “God, football. Sorry John, don’t follow it. Not many telly’s in bathrooms these days. It’s dangerous having one near the tub. You going to come in?”
John didn’t move, feeling the door slick against his palms with sweat. There was silence from inside the bathroom for a few moments, and then the man spoke again. “Guess not, eh?” He sounded unsurprised. “Well, I’ll just write my little answer here…” There was a scratching through the door of pen on paper. “And I’ll tuck it in here, and that’s that. Maybe next time!”
There were three footsteps and John jumped back, and the door swung open, and John thought he would scream. The man was stooped over, his arms swinging low, so skinny they seemed like bones wrapped in skin. He had little tufts of brown hair sprouting from all over his chin, like he didn’t know how to shave. His eyes were dark and sunken. He wore a workman’s boot on one foot and a sandal on the other, and his clothes were patchy and torn. At first it seemed like he was wearing a shirt of many colours, but John realised he was wearing many shirts, one over the other, all with holes so large he could see the layers beneath.
He looked terribly sad.
Then the man stepped through the doorway and John fell back against the banister, and he nearly screamed again then because the man had vanished.
He looked around, puffing and panting, and stood up slowly. Downstairs his father was clinking a spoon against his teacup, which meant John had to get down to breakfast quick-smart. “Just a minute!” he called out, and peeked inside the bathroom. It was empty. He checked behind the door, and in the shower, and even made sure the man wasn’t laying down in the tub. He was about to give up when he saw the note hidden underneath the soap. It was the reply he had written, folded twice. The first letter was gone.
“Get down here!” his father bellowed, and he knew he would be getting all red in the face, so he stuffed the note inside his pocket and skipped down the stairs.
By lunchtime that day he had forgotten the man entirely.
At home that night he remembered the letter when he was folding his school pants. It was crumpled and dirty, but he unfolded it carefully and laid it on his desk. Then he jumped back, expecting it to burst into flames, or for the sad man to climb out of the page and tramp around his room, peering into all his drawers. But nothing happened.
He sat down at his desk and read the letter slowly. He recognised the first half, having written it the night before, but the man had added a little bit at the end. The letters were very small like before, but very messy, the type his teacher would call chicken-scratches. His own writing was much neater, which made him proud. This is what the letter said:
“Hello John. I’m sorry I had to run, I didn’t mean to scare you. If you want to meet again, just write me a little reply and leave it in a different bathroom. Is it true that only old people say lav nowadays? It would be nice if you brought snacks. Cheers! Sincerely, Charlie.”
He read the letter three times, and thought for a very long time about whether he should write back. He was sure now that his mother would not like him replying to this particular letter. She would probably tear it into little pieces and then tell his father, and then he would yell and turn bright red.
But the letter was very polite, and his teachers said that good people were polite. And after all, the man had not been mean. Just messy.
So he wrote his reply on the back of the same sheet, so neat that it would make his teachers clap, and he folded it three times and hid it in his blazer. Then he kicked off his socks and went to bed, and dreamed of very strange things that he couldn’t remember in the morning.
He rushed into the toilets at school first thing the next day and hid the letter behind a pipe, too low down for anyone to notice. Then he jittered all the way through mathematics class, so excited and scared he couldn’t see the numbers on the board. At recess he ran again to the toilet block so that he was the first there.
But when he nipped inside he saw that one of the cubicles was already shut and the little OCCUPIED knob showing, which he thought wasn’t fair at all, because he had run so fast. Then he heard a voice, and he recognised it as the sad man, and it was coming from the cubicle.
“That you, John?” the man was saying, and John’s throat went dry. He tried to say yes, but it only came out as a squeak. “Okay,” said the man. “I’m coming out. Don’t be scared.”
First there was a little click as the lock turned, and then the door opened with a long squeak. Then the man walked out. He looked just like he had in John’s bathroom, all raggedy and tired. He smiled a little smile. “So, here I am,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.” And he held out his hand for John to shake.
John walked up, still cautious, and shook the man’s hand. The man had to bend down low for him to reach. His skin was cold and wet. “Are you a student?” he asked.
“No,” said the man.
“Is your name Charlie?”
“Yes,” said Charlie. “That’s me.”
“I brought sandwiches,” said John. And Charlie smiled a great big smile.
At home John kept a diary. He wrote in it that night, keeping his handwriting neat and precise. Dear diary, he began. Today I met the man from the bathroom. His name is Charlie and he is very nice. He sucked on the end of his pencil, knowing that if his mother caught him she would smack the back of his hand, because pencils were for writing, not eating. He did it anyway. We ate sandwiches together. He had a funny accent. It took him a while to write accent, having to consult the dictionary his father had given him the previous Christmas. We talked about school. I told him about football.
There were clicking noises outside as his mother turned off the lights one by one. “Bedtime, sweet,” she said through the door, and then moved away. He waited until her footsteps had faded to nothing before writing further. Charlie is writing letters to me like penpals. But we play it like a game, so we have to hide the letters. I have to find a different hiding place every time. All his space for that day was used up, so he turned the page and continued into the weekend. I will write him another letter soon. He is my friend. He told me sums were boring, which I think is right.
That was enough, he decided, and hid his diary away behind some books. Then he curled up in bed with his socks on, feeling very naughty. But as naughty as it was, it was very hard to keep his eyes open, and he fell asleep before he knew it was happening.
There was one thing he didn’t write about in the diary, but he dreamed about it that night. How he and Charlie had talked for almost a long time, a very long time, and they had ended up eating all the sandwiches he had brought for recess and lunch, and Charlie had even shown him how to make a paper airplane from squares of toilet tissue. But nobody else had walked into the toilets the entire time they were there, which was very strange. Stranger still was that when it came time for John to go, he had shaken Charlies hand and walked back out into the light, and the noise of ball games and skip-rope and kids squalling over skinned knees had washed over him like a cold shower, like he had stepped out from under the eaves and into a thunderstorm that drenched him to the bone.
When he looked at his watch, no time had passed at all.
Charlie had scribbled a short note in what little space was left on the sheet; it wasn’t the length of the message, he explained, but how you meant it. John tried leaving his reply in the school toilet block a second time, but when he returned at recess Charlie wasn’t there. He sulked for the rest of the day, until he remembered the second note: leave it in a different bathroom. So he hid it away until the weekend, when his mother took him with her to get the groceries.
The local supermarket had a little public loo out the back, and as soon as they stepped from the car he dashed away, rolling the letter up tight and slipping it inside a lavatory roll. Then he returned and helped his mother collect the beans, the spaghetti, the potatoes and a long string of sausages.
When she was at the checkout he made his excuses; “What, again?” she replied, but he was already out the door and off to the lavatories. He checked that there was nobody about before he ducked inside, holding his breath, his breakfast doing a little dance inside his stomach.
And there he was.
“Hello,” said Charlie. “It’s nice to see you again.”
John pointed to the letter Charlie was holding, all crumpled up in his hands. “I asked you a question in there.”
“So you did.” He squinted at the page. “In reply, no, I can’t do magic.”
“So how do you do it?”
Charlie sat down on the floor, picking at the hole in his pants. “I don’t do anything,” he said. “The letter takes me around.”
“So it’s a magic letter?”
“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “I don’t know much. But I do know I’m hungry.”
So John pulled out the sticky sweets he sneaked from the kitchen cupboard and they ate together in the supermarket toilets, and when they were done John tidied up by stuffing all the sweet wrappers in the garbage bin. “Very nice,” said Charlie, and settled back with his hands on his belly. “That was great.”
John smiled, very pleased with himself. “I wish I could bring you home for tea. But Mother would go berk.”
Charlie smiled his sad smile. “That’s okay. I don’t think I’d fit in. I wouldn’t be dressed for it, anyway.”
They sat in silence for a while. Then John asked “Are you my friend?”
Charlie rested his head in his hands for a while, and finally a silly grin broke out over his face. “Yes,” he said, and for the first time his eyes twinkled in the darkness. “I am.”
“That’s good,” said John. “That’s nice.” He doodled little circles on the tiles with his index finger. “I have a football game tomorrow.”
“Mm.” Charlie stretched, and fumbled about for his pen. “Gonna score a goal?”
“Maybe.”
“Score one for me, eh?” The pen had rolled away under the urinals. He washed it off in the basin before spreading the letter on the floor and writing on the back in very small letters with his biro. “You should get going. I don’t know if it’s okay for you to stay here too long. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, and handed it over.
“Maybe at Church?”
“Maybe.” Charlie grinned. “Now, go.”
He opened the lavatory door and looked out. The sun was low and bright; it was still morning. In the distance, a lady pushing a shopping-trolley was frozen in mid-stride. A young man walking his dog was standing perfectly still, the spotted pup caught in the air, leaping after new smells. The leash was strained tight around the pup’s neck. They looked like the waxworks in Madame Tussauds.
He hesitated at the door. “Are they okay?”
Charlie rested a hand on his shoulder and sighed. “They’re fine. Step out and see.”
“Will you come?”
“No,” he said, and gave John a push out the door. “I’ll be just fine.” John had just enough time to wave goodbye before the door swung closed, and then the air rushed around him and the sounds of the birds and the spotted pup appeared from nowhere, like someone turning on a television.
He folded up the letter and put it in his pocket. Then he thought for a moment, and turned back to the toilet block, and opened up the door very slowly, peering inside.
It was dark and empty. “Hello?” he asked, and his own voice echoed back. He waited for Charlie to reply, but there was nobody there.
When his mother asked him why he was crying, he couldn’t explain.
He wrote his reply that night, and signed it “John (your friend).” Then he folded it into quarters, smoothing the paper as best he could by squeezing it between textbooks. His mother ushered him into bed and turned off the lights, and he tucked his head beneath the cover to keep out any phantoms. He woke that way, smothering in the darkness, and went to church with a headache.
Only when they stepped from the car and he saw the needle-spire of the chapel did he remember the letter, still flattened between history texts. “We need to go home!” he said, and his father cuffed him about the head and dragged him through the doors with tears in his eyes.
The sermon was long and boring, and seemed to go for many hours. By the end he was terribly hungry, so hungry that his stomach was gnawing and growling so that all the ladies in the pews could hear. His father smacked him again on the way out. “What were you thinking, making noises like that?” John just apologised and kept his head down. When they got home he checked that the letter was still in place, and spent the rest of the day in a sulk.
Monday morning came and John walked through the school gates with his bag hanging heavy. He had already used the boys toilets, he figured, but the girls toilets would be okay if he could sneak inside. Thinking about it caused his heart to stammer and made it hard to breathe. Maybe I could just toss it through the window, he thought, and then decided that it wouldn’t count as being really hidden.
But that didn’t matter, because when he took his books from his bag for the first class there was no letter sandwiched in between. Fear like ice ran down his spine, and he upended the bag over the floor, scattering pencils across the carpet. The other children were looking at him very strangely, but he didn’t care. The teacher was yelling from across the room. He didn’t hear. He tossed aside his books, riffed through the pages, shook his bag again. Then a shadow spread before him; the teacher, her eyes furious and a ruler raised high.
“Back in your seat!” she said, and slapped the ruler across his knuckles, and he spent the rest of the class fuming and trying not to cry.
His mother was in his room when he got home, dusting and rearranging the books on his shelf. “Honey,” she said, without looking around. “You sound all snivelly. Are you feeling sick?”
John sat down on his bed and pulled the blanket over his shoulders. “No. I lost something.”
“That’s a shame.” She straightened up the last things on his desk. “I did some cleaning. Try and keep your room tidier.”
He looked at her through red-rimmed eyes. “Did you see my letter?”
“I don’t think so.” She tugged the blanket back down. “I just made the bed, don’t mess it up.” Then his mother walked out the door and closed it behind her, and left him alone.
He cried for many hours.
The next morning John tried writing a new letter on a new sheet of paper. He folded it over and held it to his chest, and somehow it felt wrong, like a shirt that didn’t quite fit. At school he waited until the first bell rang, and then dashed into he girls toilets to hide the letter behind the hand-towel dispenser, his heart beating in his ears all the while. But as he worked his way through mathematics class, the whole idea began to seem very silly. Charlie had to be a very strange man, he thought, to be leaving his letters in toilets, which meant that he was even stranger for replying. Perhaps it was he that had lost the original sheet of paper, not his mother. Perhaps he should have never replied. It was probably all for the best. Father would have called Charlie “not all together,” most likely. Yes, it was for the best.
At recess he didn’t go anywhere near the toilet blocks.
By lunch he had decided that Charlie had been a fantasy. A dream that had escaped into his days, and nothing more. A game.
By the final bell, John had forgotten Charlie entirely.
In the meantime I've been busting out short stories, one of which I've sent off to Voiceworks magazine in the hope losing my publishing virginity. Here's another I've been working on: this is only the first half of the first draft, but if you like it give me a yell and I'll mail the rest for some hard critique.
--------------------------------
Working title - Toilet Maze?
John found the message wedged behind the toilet cistern in the last cubicle of the Civic Road Public WC, Gentlemen/Disabled. It was written on a long piece of cheap loo paper folded over five times, the script tiny block letters as if the author had been trying to copy the font on the hand driers. It read: “England again! I’m getting to like the word ‘lav’. I hear it a lot, it always reminds me of pubs. Please write back. Hide this in a different ‘lav’ somewhere. Maybe I’ll find it. Cheers!”
He considered tucking it back, but then decided that it would be rude not to reply, especially since it had said please. What would his mother say if he didn’t write back to a letter he got in the post? Probably belt him. So he folded it twice and stuffed it in his school blazer.
His Dad was waiting outside the Gents, chewing on a cigarette with his tweed jacket buttoned tight. He had a ginger moustache, and his carroty hair was cropped down close to the skull, exactly the same as John’s. “What took you?” he asked.
“Reading a letter.”
“Don’t go reading anything in toilets, son. It’s all grown up stuff. Written by crazies and students. You know what I’ve told you about students. One of them gets close to you, you know what to do. Polish your shoes when you get home.”
That night, John polished his shoes until they shone. He hung his blazer on a wooden coathanger, because good clothes deserved good hangers. He then took the letter from his blazer pocket and set it down beside his homework, and composed his reply in snatches between sums. When he finished he checked it over for spelling, then signed at the bottom and folded it twice. Then, after making sure the hallway was empty, he snuck down to the bathroom.
The toilet had come loose from the wall, and both the letter and his reply slipped into place behind without a hitch. Then he went back to his bedroom as quietly as he could, crossed out a day on his calendar that read 1988, Year of the Dragon! Be Passionate in Life! and tucked himself into bed. He slept tight until morning.
When John woke he found a man in the bathroom.
He opened the door to brush his teeth and saw him rummaging through the medicine cabinet. John shrieked and slammed the door shut, skittering back into the hall with his hands over his mouth. His father shouted from downstairs, “Watch it, you’ll shake the house down!” He barely heard, his heart beating like a motorbike engine, waiting for the doorknob to twist and the man to stalk out. Maybe he was a robber. Or, God forbid, a student.
From inside the bathroom he heard the clinking of bottles full of pills and the creaking of drawers as the man explored. Finally there was an excited squeal and the sound of paper rustling before the man found the letter behind the toilet.
“Ah!” John heard him say. “So it’s England again!” He crept up to the door and pressed his ear against the wood. “Ahem,” the man coughed. “I shall begin. Hello. I found your letter. Only old people call it lav. Why do you hide your letters in toilets? I am eight years old. Who do you think will win the football? Signed, John.” The man coughed. His voice trembled, as if he was terribly tired. “God, football. Sorry John, don’t follow it. Not many telly’s in bathrooms these days. It’s dangerous having one near the tub. You going to come in?”
John didn’t move, feeling the door slick against his palms with sweat. There was silence from inside the bathroom for a few moments, and then the man spoke again. “Guess not, eh?” He sounded unsurprised. “Well, I’ll just write my little answer here…” There was a scratching through the door of pen on paper. “And I’ll tuck it in here, and that’s that. Maybe next time!”
There were three footsteps and John jumped back, and the door swung open, and John thought he would scream. The man was stooped over, his arms swinging low, so skinny they seemed like bones wrapped in skin. He had little tufts of brown hair sprouting from all over his chin, like he didn’t know how to shave. His eyes were dark and sunken. He wore a workman’s boot on one foot and a sandal on the other, and his clothes were patchy and torn. At first it seemed like he was wearing a shirt of many colours, but John realised he was wearing many shirts, one over the other, all with holes so large he could see the layers beneath.
He looked terribly sad.
Then the man stepped through the doorway and John fell back against the banister, and he nearly screamed again then because the man had vanished.
He looked around, puffing and panting, and stood up slowly. Downstairs his father was clinking a spoon against his teacup, which meant John had to get down to breakfast quick-smart. “Just a minute!” he called out, and peeked inside the bathroom. It was empty. He checked behind the door, and in the shower, and even made sure the man wasn’t laying down in the tub. He was about to give up when he saw the note hidden underneath the soap. It was the reply he had written, folded twice. The first letter was gone.
“Get down here!” his father bellowed, and he knew he would be getting all red in the face, so he stuffed the note inside his pocket and skipped down the stairs.
By lunchtime that day he had forgotten the man entirely.
At home that night he remembered the letter when he was folding his school pants. It was crumpled and dirty, but he unfolded it carefully and laid it on his desk. Then he jumped back, expecting it to burst into flames, or for the sad man to climb out of the page and tramp around his room, peering into all his drawers. But nothing happened.
He sat down at his desk and read the letter slowly. He recognised the first half, having written it the night before, but the man had added a little bit at the end. The letters were very small like before, but very messy, the type his teacher would call chicken-scratches. His own writing was much neater, which made him proud. This is what the letter said:
“Hello John. I’m sorry I had to run, I didn’t mean to scare you. If you want to meet again, just write me a little reply and leave it in a different bathroom. Is it true that only old people say lav nowadays? It would be nice if you brought snacks. Cheers! Sincerely, Charlie.”
He read the letter three times, and thought for a very long time about whether he should write back. He was sure now that his mother would not like him replying to this particular letter. She would probably tear it into little pieces and then tell his father, and then he would yell and turn bright red.
But the letter was very polite, and his teachers said that good people were polite. And after all, the man had not been mean. Just messy.
So he wrote his reply on the back of the same sheet, so neat that it would make his teachers clap, and he folded it three times and hid it in his blazer. Then he kicked off his socks and went to bed, and dreamed of very strange things that he couldn’t remember in the morning.
He rushed into the toilets at school first thing the next day and hid the letter behind a pipe, too low down for anyone to notice. Then he jittered all the way through mathematics class, so excited and scared he couldn’t see the numbers on the board. At recess he ran again to the toilet block so that he was the first there.
But when he nipped inside he saw that one of the cubicles was already shut and the little OCCUPIED knob showing, which he thought wasn’t fair at all, because he had run so fast. Then he heard a voice, and he recognised it as the sad man, and it was coming from the cubicle.
“That you, John?” the man was saying, and John’s throat went dry. He tried to say yes, but it only came out as a squeak. “Okay,” said the man. “I’m coming out. Don’t be scared.”
First there was a little click as the lock turned, and then the door opened with a long squeak. Then the man walked out. He looked just like he had in John’s bathroom, all raggedy and tired. He smiled a little smile. “So, here I am,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.” And he held out his hand for John to shake.
John walked up, still cautious, and shook the man’s hand. The man had to bend down low for him to reach. His skin was cold and wet. “Are you a student?” he asked.
“No,” said the man.
“Is your name Charlie?”
“Yes,” said Charlie. “That’s me.”
“I brought sandwiches,” said John. And Charlie smiled a great big smile.
At home John kept a diary. He wrote in it that night, keeping his handwriting neat and precise. Dear diary, he began. Today I met the man from the bathroom. His name is Charlie and he is very nice. He sucked on the end of his pencil, knowing that if his mother caught him she would smack the back of his hand, because pencils were for writing, not eating. He did it anyway. We ate sandwiches together. He had a funny accent. It took him a while to write accent, having to consult the dictionary his father had given him the previous Christmas. We talked about school. I told him about football.
There were clicking noises outside as his mother turned off the lights one by one. “Bedtime, sweet,” she said through the door, and then moved away. He waited until her footsteps had faded to nothing before writing further. Charlie is writing letters to me like penpals. But we play it like a game, so we have to hide the letters. I have to find a different hiding place every time. All his space for that day was used up, so he turned the page and continued into the weekend. I will write him another letter soon. He is my friend. He told me sums were boring, which I think is right.
That was enough, he decided, and hid his diary away behind some books. Then he curled up in bed with his socks on, feeling very naughty. But as naughty as it was, it was very hard to keep his eyes open, and he fell asleep before he knew it was happening.
There was one thing he didn’t write about in the diary, but he dreamed about it that night. How he and Charlie had talked for almost a long time, a very long time, and they had ended up eating all the sandwiches he had brought for recess and lunch, and Charlie had even shown him how to make a paper airplane from squares of toilet tissue. But nobody else had walked into the toilets the entire time they were there, which was very strange. Stranger still was that when it came time for John to go, he had shaken Charlies hand and walked back out into the light, and the noise of ball games and skip-rope and kids squalling over skinned knees had washed over him like a cold shower, like he had stepped out from under the eaves and into a thunderstorm that drenched him to the bone.
When he looked at his watch, no time had passed at all.
Charlie had scribbled a short note in what little space was left on the sheet; it wasn’t the length of the message, he explained, but how you meant it. John tried leaving his reply in the school toilet block a second time, but when he returned at recess Charlie wasn’t there. He sulked for the rest of the day, until he remembered the second note: leave it in a different bathroom. So he hid it away until the weekend, when his mother took him with her to get the groceries.
The local supermarket had a little public loo out the back, and as soon as they stepped from the car he dashed away, rolling the letter up tight and slipping it inside a lavatory roll. Then he returned and helped his mother collect the beans, the spaghetti, the potatoes and a long string of sausages.
When she was at the checkout he made his excuses; “What, again?” she replied, but he was already out the door and off to the lavatories. He checked that there was nobody about before he ducked inside, holding his breath, his breakfast doing a little dance inside his stomach.
And there he was.
“Hello,” said Charlie. “It’s nice to see you again.”
John pointed to the letter Charlie was holding, all crumpled up in his hands. “I asked you a question in there.”
“So you did.” He squinted at the page. “In reply, no, I can’t do magic.”
“So how do you do it?”
Charlie sat down on the floor, picking at the hole in his pants. “I don’t do anything,” he said. “The letter takes me around.”
“So it’s a magic letter?”
“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “I don’t know much. But I do know I’m hungry.”
So John pulled out the sticky sweets he sneaked from the kitchen cupboard and they ate together in the supermarket toilets, and when they were done John tidied up by stuffing all the sweet wrappers in the garbage bin. “Very nice,” said Charlie, and settled back with his hands on his belly. “That was great.”
John smiled, very pleased with himself. “I wish I could bring you home for tea. But Mother would go berk.”
Charlie smiled his sad smile. “That’s okay. I don’t think I’d fit in. I wouldn’t be dressed for it, anyway.”
They sat in silence for a while. Then John asked “Are you my friend?”
Charlie rested his head in his hands for a while, and finally a silly grin broke out over his face. “Yes,” he said, and for the first time his eyes twinkled in the darkness. “I am.”
“That’s good,” said John. “That’s nice.” He doodled little circles on the tiles with his index finger. “I have a football game tomorrow.”
“Mm.” Charlie stretched, and fumbled about for his pen. “Gonna score a goal?”
“Maybe.”
“Score one for me, eh?” The pen had rolled away under the urinals. He washed it off in the basin before spreading the letter on the floor and writing on the back in very small letters with his biro. “You should get going. I don’t know if it’s okay for you to stay here too long. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, and handed it over.
“Maybe at Church?”
“Maybe.” Charlie grinned. “Now, go.”
He opened the lavatory door and looked out. The sun was low and bright; it was still morning. In the distance, a lady pushing a shopping-trolley was frozen in mid-stride. A young man walking his dog was standing perfectly still, the spotted pup caught in the air, leaping after new smells. The leash was strained tight around the pup’s neck. They looked like the waxworks in Madame Tussauds.
He hesitated at the door. “Are they okay?”
Charlie rested a hand on his shoulder and sighed. “They’re fine. Step out and see.”
“Will you come?”
“No,” he said, and gave John a push out the door. “I’ll be just fine.” John had just enough time to wave goodbye before the door swung closed, and then the air rushed around him and the sounds of the birds and the spotted pup appeared from nowhere, like someone turning on a television.
He folded up the letter and put it in his pocket. Then he thought for a moment, and turned back to the toilet block, and opened up the door very slowly, peering inside.
It was dark and empty. “Hello?” he asked, and his own voice echoed back. He waited for Charlie to reply, but there was nobody there.
When his mother asked him why he was crying, he couldn’t explain.
He wrote his reply that night, and signed it “John (your friend).” Then he folded it into quarters, smoothing the paper as best he could by squeezing it between textbooks. His mother ushered him into bed and turned off the lights, and he tucked his head beneath the cover to keep out any phantoms. He woke that way, smothering in the darkness, and went to church with a headache.
Only when they stepped from the car and he saw the needle-spire of the chapel did he remember the letter, still flattened between history texts. “We need to go home!” he said, and his father cuffed him about the head and dragged him through the doors with tears in his eyes.
The sermon was long and boring, and seemed to go for many hours. By the end he was terribly hungry, so hungry that his stomach was gnawing and growling so that all the ladies in the pews could hear. His father smacked him again on the way out. “What were you thinking, making noises like that?” John just apologised and kept his head down. When they got home he checked that the letter was still in place, and spent the rest of the day in a sulk.
Monday morning came and John walked through the school gates with his bag hanging heavy. He had already used the boys toilets, he figured, but the girls toilets would be okay if he could sneak inside. Thinking about it caused his heart to stammer and made it hard to breathe. Maybe I could just toss it through the window, he thought, and then decided that it wouldn’t count as being really hidden.
But that didn’t matter, because when he took his books from his bag for the first class there was no letter sandwiched in between. Fear like ice ran down his spine, and he upended the bag over the floor, scattering pencils across the carpet. The other children were looking at him very strangely, but he didn’t care. The teacher was yelling from across the room. He didn’t hear. He tossed aside his books, riffed through the pages, shook his bag again. Then a shadow spread before him; the teacher, her eyes furious and a ruler raised high.
“Back in your seat!” she said, and slapped the ruler across his knuckles, and he spent the rest of the class fuming and trying not to cry.
His mother was in his room when he got home, dusting and rearranging the books on his shelf. “Honey,” she said, without looking around. “You sound all snivelly. Are you feeling sick?”
John sat down on his bed and pulled the blanket over his shoulders. “No. I lost something.”
“That’s a shame.” She straightened up the last things on his desk. “I did some cleaning. Try and keep your room tidier.”
He looked at her through red-rimmed eyes. “Did you see my letter?”
“I don’t think so.” She tugged the blanket back down. “I just made the bed, don’t mess it up.” Then his mother walked out the door and closed it behind her, and left him alone.
He cried for many hours.
The next morning John tried writing a new letter on a new sheet of paper. He folded it over and held it to his chest, and somehow it felt wrong, like a shirt that didn’t quite fit. At school he waited until the first bell rang, and then dashed into he girls toilets to hide the letter behind the hand-towel dispenser, his heart beating in his ears all the while. But as he worked his way through mathematics class, the whole idea began to seem very silly. Charlie had to be a very strange man, he thought, to be leaving his letters in toilets, which meant that he was even stranger for replying. Perhaps it was he that had lost the original sheet of paper, not his mother. Perhaps he should have never replied. It was probably all for the best. Father would have called Charlie “not all together,” most likely. Yes, it was for the best.
At recess he didn’t go anywhere near the toilet blocks.
By lunch he had decided that Charlie had been a fantasy. A dream that had escaped into his days, and nothing more. A game.
By the final bell, John had forgotten Charlie entirely.
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