Chapter 1

            Most kids don’t like school, yet I can confidently say that a vast majority of us, as adults, got their best memories from this wonderful establishment that gave us so much joy and grief at the same time. If I had a choice, I would do it all over again; I would once more go through all the panicking caused by assessments and the fear to get caught for not having done my homework, the fear to be reported to and told off by my mother, the fear to get publicly humiliated by other kids, and so on and so on. Ah, what a golden age that was.

            Our primary school was at the edge of the neighbourhood, a block of buildings with three ten-storey towers in the middle. These towers could actually be seen from our school " well, they could be seen from much further than the school. My mother, my brother and I lived on the eighth floor of one of them. Had our flat been on the other side of the tower, had our mother not been working all day, surely she could have kept an eye on me during playtime, with a pair of binoculars of course; she’s no eagle, despite her saying ‘mums see everything’, ‘mums know everything’. Anyway, it’s not like monkey business was any of my specialities, at least not at the time. Sure I would misbehave from time to time, but I was still relatively quiet. All I can remember is buzzing random intercoms, chatting and laughing during lessons, and once, but this was even before primary school, I bit a little girl’s derriere. Now don’t judge me too hastily for the last one. I had simply found an ingenious way to have contact with a girl’s parts: I suggested we played the smurfs; she was a blue smurf and I was a black smurf, whose purpose is to convert the blue smurfs into black ones by biting their butt. I really thought she had understood everything the concept! I don’t even think I really bit it, at least not that hard; all I wanted was to get her derriere into my mouth. Sadly she cried and I got punished for that. But apart from that, I was quite an angel. My mother really didn’t need to keep an eye on me. I wonder if she would have tried spotting me from her window though. Be assured that at least one mother has. I would bet the little money I have on it.

            The proximity of the school was to everyone’s convenience, but that’s a given. It made it easier for the kids just as much as it did for the parents. I remember that the arrangement was my mother dropping me at the beginning of the school path as she went to the bus stop every morning, and my brother, who was six years and a half older than me, waiting for me the afternoon to take me home. As I became a bit older, for my last years at primary school, I was allowed to walk the whole four hundred yards alone, but I had to go home directly of course. I didn’t have to be jealous anymore of these other kids who had a key attached around their neck, as I had earned one myself. I guess it was so in order to give freedom to my brother rather than me. The poor boy had to go home directly after school even as a teenager just to take his little brother home. I’m trying not to be too harsh on our mother though. It is true that she was hyper protective, but the place where we lived wasn’t the nicest in the world.

            Coming back from school was now a great time. Not that I didn’t enjoy my brother’s company, who would often leave after dropping me in anyway, but I could hang out with my new mates. Yes, that’s right. My new mates. As I was getting more free time (it could easily take me up to an hour to walk these four hundred yards) I was, by the wonders of that same freedom, able to chat, after school, with my classmates, who became my friends and, because of this, also became the reason why I was now a bit disruptive in class. Talk more outside, talk more inside; Laugh more outside, laugh more inside. My extra-curricular activity, apart from judo and music, was now Bert and Albert. The three of us were some sort of gangster aspirers. We were the kind of average kids who wanted to live ‘Boyz n’ the Hood’, dreaming of becoming arms and drug dealers in order to earn respect. But we didn’t. Instead of that began the era of intercom buzzing, or intercom pianoting as we called it since we pressed all the buttons at once, hoping that people would mistake each other’s voice for the little brats who were responsible for this, and start insulting one another; there was the throwing stuff out of my eighth floor window, the telephone pranks, and I probably a few other things I forget.

            At school, and sometimes outside, we also enjoyed the company of Saïd, Paul and Jack, who became my new best mate during my time in secondary school, and with whom I would later form the new gang. It wasn’t easy for Jack to integrate at first because he was two years older than us, and when you’re still living your first decade, it is quite a gap. This must be the reason why I haven’t got much memory of him at that particular time, but I can still remember Paul, also older, and also sitting at the back, in year 6, coming to my and Bert’s table, at the front, and saying the following, but with a fart instead of the last word: ‘you son of a ***’. It happened so often that I think he did it every time he felt a gas leek on the way. Saïd I remember for the jokes, which were always about sex. One of them even involved a 12-year-old girl giving oral sex to her boyfriend. If we’re all honest with ourselves, we will admit that indeed this is the kind of stuff that we said and heard at that age. So we all know that our kids are less innocent that we’d like to admit.

           I also remember him bringing a few cigarettes he had stolen from his mum’s purse. Not everyone was up to it, but we smoked them in the toilets. The second or third time was noticed, so our teachers gave the whole school a warning, without ever knowing who it was. It might have been just the two of us now that I think about it, the others preferring to stick wet toilet tissue on the toilets ceiling. Still, the warning scared us off.

            That was in year 6, the happiest school year of my life. I was about to meet the person who made me, two years later, without even apparently knowing it, the most miserable boy, later to become the most miserable man on earth. My beautiful Alicia. I had met a pretty girl or two before, but none of them had ever given me a spiritual stroke at first sight like she did. None of them had ever stunted me at first glance. None of them had made my heart sing something like, although I probably didn’t know the song at the time, ‘Sweet Home Alabama’. And you can forget the feeling you get when you look Medusa in the eyes, because Alicia’s will reach much deeper into your soul. She’ll petrify you but will leave you alive to feel it. It was like her eyes were made by the most powerful entities of the cosmos, from the two most beautiful stones in the universe. They were like two supernovae filled with the purest colours, signalling the end of an era and announcing the beginning of a new one. Yes, at the age of ten, I was falling in love.

            I have to admit that I’d always been looking for a girlfriend, and I think I might know one of the main reasons. Near the end of nursery school, I saw, one day, in my classroom, a girl kissing the hand of a boy. I remember telling them that it was the boy who was supposed to kiss the girl’s hand, but they both told me where to go. They acted like they were a real couple. At that age, they were probably 5 or 6 years old, that was surprising. It got me thinking about my own love life. ‘Should I get one?’ Whether this was a good thing or not, this is when I started wondering if I should be involved in a relationship instead of just biting little girls’ derrieres. So I kept my eye open.

             There was Melody in year 2, a pretty brunette, with green eyes I think, who was sitting next to me in class. I had always fancied her, so one day I decided to slip an anonymous letter in her belongings, declaring my attraction to her. About one hour later she was telling me off (that was quick!!), saying that if I had anything to say to her, the decent thing to do was to tell her face to face. How did she know it was me?? Well, you see, the thing is that sitting next to me, she knew my handwriting very well, which wasn’t hard considering how particularly awful it was. I know, I wasn’t very bright at the time. Anyone would have thought of it but me.

            Despite it being my first rejection, I felt stupid more than I felt sad. I recovered pretty easily, if there was actually anything to recover from. She obviously wasn’t the one. The next year or so, she left our school, but it was ok because another pretty girl came along: Mandy. She was the same type, only taller and thinner. What I remember about her is that I wouldn’t talk much to her, apart from my flirty catchphrase ‘All right Mandy?’ every time I saw her in the neighbourhood. That would always make her smile, especially that time when I slipped over a banana skin the very next second. You can’t look at a girl and where you walk at the same time you know. Oh, there was also that time when, several years later, I saw her among the crowd that was watching Jack and me being rescued from the fire we accidentally set in Albert’s basement. Jack and I were black from head to toes that day, but I still felt the need to utter my flirty catchphrase to Mandy. She smiled, probably wondering what was going on in that head of mine.

            She was a very pretty girl, but I was never entirely determined about becoming an item with her, except once when we were in a public swimming pool, around the age of 14. I was telling her how beautiful she was and kissing her on the cheeks. I wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t been interrupted by another friend who was feeling left aside. All this to say how special Alicia was. Even if I had met other pretty girls before, Alicia would erase them from my conscience. She wasn’t just pretty you see; she was the most attractive of Mother Nature’s creatures. And if her eyes were so beautiful I felt it was because they reflected her beautiful, flawless, tender soul. Or maybe, as I like to think, it was because my attraction to her was reciprocated. I believe that the more you feel for someone, the more attractive they appear to you. Why else would she consider me as a boyfriend? The attraction between us, if it was indeed on both sides, even felt paranormal sometimes. I’ll tell you why later.

            It all started in year 6, as I have already told you, with Bert, who went to church class with her. One day, on my way back from school with him and Albert, he showed off about the fact that there was a very beautiful girl in church class with him. ‘She’s so beautiful’ he said ‘that you’d cry if you saw her’. He was so pompous about it that he asked us to come and wait for him so that we would see her. Naturally I couldn’t say no to such an invitation. So there we went.

            He left the classroom first in order to see our reaction. I wanted to see her so much that I was standing a couple of feet only away from the exit. Another step forward and I’d have been in the way of people coming out of the classroom. It seemed that I really wanted to see that beautiful girl, probably because I had heard so much about her. I didn’t even realise that my mates were two or three yards behind me. All I knew, asides from the fact that she was gorgeous, is that she was blond and had blue eyes. Well, typical, you’ll say, but I remember that I had a slight preference for brunettes at the time. A blonde came out, then another one, then another one. There was actually quite a few of them, like there was a stereotype or something, that blond girls are into religion. I wasn’t sure whether or not she was one of them, and if so, I couldn’t figure which one it was. I turned back to look at Bert in order to find out and with a nod of the head he directed my attention back towards the entrance of the building.

            It must have been five or ten seconds later that I saw her standing on the upper step. I had to look up to see her face, like an angel above me descending from heavens. It had to be her, otherwise Bert was an idiot; but on the other hand, I liked her so much that I hopelessly wished he’d been talking about somebody else. I was expecting someone very beautiful indeed, but I never expected lightning to strike me like it did, to open my eyes like a blind person miraculously healed from a curse that prevented them from beholding such pure beauty before; a lightning that burnt my retinas and reached through my heart on such short notice. No, I wasn’t prepared for this. I just stood there, looking her in the eyes for a fairly long time " only a couple of seconds but for this kind of situation I’d say that was rather long. I didn’t know what else to do.

            She wasn’t just beautiful, no. You know how very attractive people tend to be pretentious? Not her. She was actually quite the opposite, I could tell. No words or facts needed when you can read someone’s eyes like you read this story, and hers let me see her heart, pure and humble, sweet and tender, loving. First impressions often reveal parts of who we are, and I could find no fault in her. Her coming out of church school might have influenced that impression if Bert hadn’t been attending it as well, for he was no angel that boy. No, it played no part in it. I could have met her in my own neighbourhood and still feel exactly the same. Never in my life have I been so hypnotised by someone’s glance, which explains why to this day, twenty years later, I can still find myself in catharsis when my mind is exposed for too long to sweet memories of her.

            I’ll never forget the way she was looking at me. She didn’t even seem unpleased by my eccentric staring. It felt like there was actually a tiny possibility that the attraction was mutual. I don’t know exactly what she felt or thought, but it looked like there was something there.

            Worries came to me that I was going to fall in love with the same girl as my mate, whatever his feelings for her were. So first I had to make sure she really was the girl he’d been talking about. Sadly, yes. He had that big smirk on his face that could be translated as ‘I get to see her every week and you don’t’.

            Getting her out of my mind afterwards wasn’t easy, especially with Bert mentioning her every now and then, but since I didn’t know when I was going to see her again, I thought I should. I didn’t do a very good job though; I kept thinking about that moment when our glances met. I thought that I could have done better, like smile to her, but there were many reasons why I didn’t; one of them being that it might have been like giving Bert the finger. On the other hand, for someone who liked her, he didn’t show much sensitivity. He seemed rather arrogant if anything else, but I never judge anyone or any behaviour so quickly. He could have just been ashamed of showing his mates his sensitive side, if he had one. I wanted to leave him a bit of time to prove to me that he really cared for her. Besides, as I have already told you, there were other reasons: I was simply too intimidated by her.

            During the few months that followed this encounter Bert started acting like a jerk. Well, to be honest, he’d always been one, to some extent, but it was becoming irritating. One of the games we had when we were at mine was to look up the phone book for people with funny names and call them. Ok, I admit that I must have been irritating too to those people. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them subsequently unlisted their number. One day we warmed up pretty well at those phone pranks of ours, so much that after calling Mr Sirfcake Bert got the strange idea to dial Alicia’s number. I let him do it because he assured me this wouldn’t be a prank, that he was just gonna talk to her. Since I didn’t mind hearing her voice, I stopped objecting. She had indeed a slightly hoarse voice, feature which made it particularly charming. Someone else answered and Bert hung up. I don’t know why but it made him laugh. I, on the other hand, wasn’t very happy.

            ‘Don’t ever do that again, at least not from my phone’, I said.

            Yet some other days I sometimes noticed the idiot sneaking to the phone, or even already with the phone in his hands, at which point he would immediately hang up. I wonder how many times he managed to call her house, but I’m sure that he never did it from his own phone and that he wanted me to be blamed in case they had caller ID. Fortunately, caller ID wasn’t common at the time, nor were mobile phones for that matter. The probabilities for Alicia’s parents not to have it were well in my favour, so I figured that Bert was just an idiot with no brain, or else that he was desperate to cause problems between Alicia and me and couldn’t find anything more efficient.

            Yes, Bert was a real moron. Mind you when he swung over the guardrail of my eighth floor window I was just clever enough to do the same. You see, there was that special dynamic between both of us and Albert. Albert used to laugh seeing us monkeys contesting for the prize of the dumbest stupid idiot, but most of the time he was mature enough not to enter the competition. The ingenious ideas usually came out of Bert’s remarkable working factory of stupidities he had for a brain. You really should have met the boy, for he was something that would astonish most psychiatrists.

            He was short, but not much shorter than I was, weird dark hair, squareish glasses, and teeth almost as rubbish as the ones I have today. I think he had some kind of a Napoleon complex, which would explain why he needed to make everyone laugh. For him it was a laugh of respect, a way for us to acknowledge his importance as a human being. I should say it is a mark of respect for most boys of that age, but still, it was significantly more for him. I think he was actually deranged but I never could figure out why. If given the abilities, that boy could have become a good mobster, which I’m sure is what he wanted, but he wasn’t that gifted. For me, being funny was just a matter of looking interesting, being liked, but lacking originality, I would simply go along with Bert’s creativity and repeat it, sometimes with a slight difference " with my own pinch of salt.