Sleepwalking

Perhaps the start of something much bigger. Again. The latest in a line of opening narratives, as I try to find a firm footing on the cliff shale of creativity. Blah, blah, blah

 

The sun pierced through everything making it all yellow, and their eyes squinted though their backs were to the heat as they peered like snakes and slithered through the grass towards some great unknown next exhilaration just outside the span of present consciousness. There were six of them, a crew of belligerent soldier kids on a reconnaissance mission, minding each other’s back, flanking the fantasy, buttressing each other’s hearts against expectation, the tickle of grass like green flames licking at their faces and necks as they rifled beneath a mist of flies and squashed other grub life into the turf, scratching along on their elbows and bellies. Twelve lungs, expanding and contracting, suffused with the olfaction of sun-seared brushwood, hearts going at it, strumming the earth; tremors that reached the conifers that swung gently in the distance and overhead, and found their way back to the soldiers, nipping at their ankles, moving them along.

 

They were spread crawling across the embankment above it all, not so much racing as keeping pace, and there was no one else in view because all life existed beneath this high jinks summer time junket in the wilderness of youth’s best dream on the hills, looking as if from the mountains of the world upon the houses which lay like plastic play things of the mind from the acme embankment above the viaduct where the canal streamed silently behind them like a silver road beneath the sabre rays that guided the escapade.

 

They were children of 12 and were sprawled commando style moving forwards along the bank, rat-like in their rummaging postures, holding their rifles in search of some vague enemy, invisible but known to be thereabouts. A crack team on the trail, some of them were dressed in the appropriate fatigues of war. Others were clothed in simple jeans and t-shirt, proud of their grass-smudged forearms and cobwebbed hair. Wearing the abrasions of the day, battle scars, some were laced with bites and nettle stings they fought to ignore and make haste upon their destination of plunder and melee.

 

They were moving in a stealthy line, crisscrossing and whispering in the yellowing grass, unafraid of the stuff of war. If anything, they were excited by the prospect. Their adrenals stayed alert, minds focussed in the camaraderie of phantasmagoria.

 

Avarice to adolescence on their lips, sweet, the slick taste of maturity in the rawness of the jungle; they wrestled themselves undaunted into it, shed skins. Each craved the wide-stance warmongering of their nearest antecedents and grew into that muscled beast, as the last embers of childhood flickered in the forest of youth.

 

A crew of six guerrillas, four boys, two girls, heavily tooled, toting air guns, pellet pistols, crossbows, hatchets, hunting knifes, drinks’ bottles, a stash of comestibles. They waded through the swale single file to the heads and buttocks of their nearest front commando. Those behind the girls, who were ripening, played reverie upon the swinging hips with fierce hormones, ploughing the bank with their spirits tumescent against the fallow. And the girls, likewise, stole their eyes, ruddy-cheeked and nascent breasts heaving, from the lithe musculature of their male comrades.

 

It was a canal bank over a main road. To the left spanning off into the distance behind an increasing density of trees were houses on a cul-de-sac where other younger children could be heard playing but not seen, obscured by the houses which sat curving away into a circle at the bottom of the cul-de-sac at the base of a steep bank which was buttressed by the wall that formed the roadside which ran beneath the viaduct where the cars, which to the small army of youths looked tiny and further away than they were, sped their myriad colours, their sounds muffled disproportionate to their near distance, and of another world outside the swashbucklers’ adventure.

 

The children crawled silently amongst the dirty organic smell of nature, then erected into a freshened air to make way down the steep bank on the other side of the road, following their alpha chief into the woodland, speaking commentary to one another in muffled voices, their faces daubed with mud and ruddy with aggression. The sun was off their necks now, and in the twittering quiet of the forestland they felt the bristling nerves of impending action, and tensed up in the shade.

 

It was dense woodland, dry on the ground. Days of heat had brought the foot of the dingle to a crisp. Their shoes crunched as they passed through, eyes darting upon the din of their numbers’ soles while they flattened against trees, and then hunkered down on the move into the mission. Trees murmured above, the scattering of small beasts in the blackness under the foliage made piquant the valour of their intrepid quest. With their fluttering hearts and minds coruscating with expectation they settled to a private absorption in the glory of the wild.

 

Soon they came to rest. The sun’s glisten passed through the trees and lit up the tired faces while they stood exhilarated around a tree stump drinking thirstily. There was a brief period of group badinage before they spread out in the dreamland of their own space.

 

Ken Codswidth, or Kenny, called the respite and found his own space there on the stump. The first to flounder, breathless, sweat all over his face, he laboured his buttocks down, wobbled, chortled and spat. The others wandered from him.

 

Kenny was the outsider. He was new to the group. It was clear he was agitating the more robust buccaneers with his tiring insulation - rank impedimenta on this rare summer’s day. He was unfit for the mission, cumbersome, surplus baggage they needled on through complaint. But equally he was feared for his cruel wit, which could cut the blithe swagger of cooler troops to ribbons of humiliation with withering precision. This in mind, ever poised to preserve a reputation, they left him to contemplate his exhaustion alone.

 

Kenny was a nerd, a straight ‘A’ geek who shunned daylight, preferring virtual interface to the vulgarian outdoors. But mostly he didn’t like people, and made it known. He was a rare thing, funny but poor company, though later the girls would laugh. A chronic bariatric, he attacked people before they attacked him. It was a lesson hard taught, the damage done in the teaching, his acerbic character a badge of honour that rarely lost him pride, or won friends. They’d invited him along to teach him a lesson, more punishment than anything else. A natural cynic, Kenny knew it and was determined not to fall short. He’d take his breaks and any digs they levelled would bounce back twofold. Playing the long game this way, he’d break their wits before his legs gave way. Kenny had earned his esteem from the inside out; had wrought an iron core beneath the flesh cushions and was hard beating.

 

He let his body hang slack, regarding the roots’ plough through the ground. His head wallowed between his legs to the broken up soil. He sat a stout and sour hog of a boy. Then with alacrity impossible outside of a new dream was erected to full height, wafting flies irascibly from his cheeks while they continued to dart at his face, as if they had found a game upon his person.

 

One by one the players dropped to the dust. He made himself known.

 

“Whose Neanderthal wet dream of an idea was it to come out here?” A renewed Kenny piped.

“Mine, you fat f**k.”

“The lead Neanderthal, I should have known.”

“Do you good, moving your legs instead of your mouth for once. You’re always either eating or talking.” It was Ollie Samson, schoolyard alpha, frequent truant, lauded, emulated, yet to be surpassed. A year eight icon, already untouchable; had eyes that came at you; was still as a lizard. Broad, muscled, voice broken in an accelerated maturity, like his body had been running to some state safer. They called him ‘Whistler’. No one knew why. Likely he invented the moniker and it caught on, like everything he said or did caught on. He was that type. Whistler, who smoked a stem like it was a cigarette, and sometimes really did smoke.

“Why have you got a twig in your mouth?”

“You envious, Podge? Sure you’ll be eating soon enough.”

“That was cool about a hundred years ago, in America.”

“I know, that’s why I’m doing it. What’s your excuse for existing?”

“Hmm, food ... the odd wank ... taunting schoolyard egotists.”

“Listen, I’m easy, Podge. Whatever makes you hard. You catch your breath and we’ll move on.”

“Is there actually any point to this? What exactly are we looking for?”

“Can’t think why you’re here. I’m just out here for the buzz. Who knows maybe we’ll shoot some squirrels later, burn a barn down or something. Maybe I’ll get to rattle Madhabi’s a*s while you micro- dicks watch. Who the f**k knows?”

“Ha, you’re a virgin, just like the rest of us, Whistler.”

“Whatever you need to believe, fat kid.”

“If it’s all the same, keep it in your pants. We don’t want your c**k tarnishing the perfect vista, do we? Okay, let’s massacre some wildlife. Why the f**k not. That’s normal. ”

 

Whistler, who, aside from Kenny, and perhaps Sam, everyone looked towards. Whistler inhabited some black place at the back of his own mind, miles outside of the sunshine forest. He used the dingle as a psychological bunker, therapy against the bleak inner space. He was the boy who dissected dead mice and cats with infinite curiosity for inner workings; the one who sat contemplating it all; who couldn’t make sense of it until he stepped outside and breathed; who became secured with each fresh foot from base; least happy at home; less still in his own room, for he was one of those boys, who dared not sleep for wetting the bed. It had been two years since he’d slept properly, his eyes wide to the world. But this was all undercover. He was an image he’d built. Instead he sharpened knives. He dreamt with his feet on the ground. The fierce, the restive, the bitter, his cloak of cool keeping him warm from it all; the mind of blustering badlands he could hold distant when he was lost in the verdant enclave, hidden from it.

 

Mostly he came alone to this place. Here he found peace from the hovel in the boundless outdoor. Freedom from the helpless plight, the tedium of violence in the filial home, where his mother drank bottles empty that she lined up and smashed and cried into, pining the barbarous male who made her that way to return and give vent onto her to reveal them both again, make real the madness, bring her to life, within reach of death. He visited unpredictably, intermittently.

 

Whistler had been through it with her, rolled his first joint at nine, smoking them into the perpetuating brief tranquillity. Then the rest of it. He’d used the bottle too. His dad had taught him that one the year before. He was too young not to learn the hard way quick. Whistler, who got messed up trying to get deep away, then became precociously wise. Maybe nature had given him a way out. Sometimes the world comes to save you. You’ve got to seize it to your guts. He’d built dens in the ditch wilderness that no one would find. It was his place; some weird inheritance from a dead god. Perhaps Whistler was the youngest escapee of them all. Perhaps he was building a new house, world big. Perhaps not, though for the quieting moment he revelled outside of everything.

 

He brought with him the intruders this day. He carried friends to the hive, sharing the honey of his paradise. Just like Kenny and everyone else alone, Whistler wanted to belong to something, inside or outside of the struggle. Beneath it all was the very human that kept him best hidden.

 

Whistler found freedom in the wilds, self-knowledge in nature, strength leading the tribe there, taking them on. Whistler was growing above it now, into the hard-barked tree of man. The journey was more than begun; callous his grown fortitude against the sensitivity of boyhood. Having said too much, a young man for whom actions strode where the vacant stasis of words dare not, he quietened, turned his back and sucked coolly on his stem, knowing Kenny would follow once he heard his own inner voice and caught his breath.

 

Kenny lolloped about between the troops making quips and digs to their embittered chuckles. He was starting to enjoy it, carving out a niche in the group dynamic. It was different out there, not all bad. Something real and dangerous and long gone struck him. His heart went with it. His body was alive. It aggravated his asthma. Though he was starting to enjoy himself, rather than admit pleasure, he kept safe playing sardonic. It was a role he had perfected to rise above his obesity.

 

A lifelong asthmatic, he sucked on his inhaler and got high before eating a bag of sweets in two shovels, then made jokes. The sugar high and surplus air gave him a fresh mania that transcended his exhaustion. The new energy got the better of his spirits as he lumbered towards a nearby tree. Leaping for the bow, he reached, arms wide, belly hanging loose like a massive wattle beneath his ridden-up t-shirt, swung for not more than half a second, his dead weight overbearing the fortitude of the sapling, snapped the branch, and deported in a slow motion comedy onto the soil, which spat its shallow grave dust around his amorphous shuddering jelly, setting off another breathless attack.

 

Kenny had risen again in endless reform. He’d bitten dust many times on account to his indefatigable temerity, and so stood scrabbling, dizzied, shaking this smallest of humiliations with the collected earth, and after a few more puffs on his inhaler, again he went amongst them.

 

He was the joker, and the girls chortled while he held court on butterfly bushes, one of which grew wild and misshapen, much like Kenny, he improvised, brushing against the black knight’s spikes of fragrant flowers, irritating an establishment of bees into the air. Extemporising, Kenny theorised on the confused family of airborne creatures, bulbous and on the hunt, positing a delirious lust for their more comely butterfly friends. Of course, he was projecting his own plight. He identified the swarm as red-tailed bumble bees, comparing his own pressure-sore fundament with their ruddy derrieres. His skill for converting solitarily acquired esoterica to original witticisms was as delightful as the sun that lit up the overgrown woodland.

 

The girls moved, giggling together. The girls sucked juice and stood bawdily with one hand on their hips, learning the ways of display and provocation, looking over at Whistler who rested moodily against a tree. In his reverie, he ignored everything. They’d been studying films for manners of appeal, and looked to Sam, again in a failure to attract, who studied the ground, disinterested. The girls, Kyla and Madhabi, stood together, and looked at one another and they laughed. Shortly, they grew comfortable and made away from each other, and then returned.

 

After about ten minutes of loitering, Whistler shouted the group together. Each came quickly to his side, except for Kenny and Sam. Kenny, the mutinous, who through perversity as much as ill health, shuffled rebelliously. Sam moved slow and studied the ground before coming up alongside Whistler to front the infantry. Collecting up their varied accoutrements, they set back to the mission.

Reviews

[TL Boehm]

ah the curse of prose at the cafe. it never gets the attention it deserves. Why is that? Any way the stand out part in this for me was the dialogue. Sounds so much like the way teens malign each other. Well done. A solid start to something bigger if you so desire to expand it.

[quixotic_rose]

This reminds me of the story Lord of the Flies. don't know if you've ever read it or not, but that's the first thing that came to mind, It's a nice adventurous tale you've told me in this writing. good work