1. Colin Wharton RIP.

A QUESTION OF TIME, Part 1

Colin Wharton was thirteen and about to cross the busy main road because on the other side he could see Ian Ganderson, and Ian Ganderson was his very best friend. Or would have been if it hadn’t been for Eleanor Crinkworthy, who attended the girl’s school next door to the one he was obliged to suffer in. She was overtaking Ian in his affections on the inside because, well, she was forbidden. By Colin’s mother, because of her gender.

Both Ian and Eleanor were thirteen as well. Ian was the one who liked discussing important things like man in space and the possibility that aliens walked undetected amongst the human race, citing Mr Harris, the bullying history teacher who was obsessed by the miracle of royal houses as his evidence, and Eleanor was the one with the developing bosom, which gave her a very interesting shape, similar to that of his beloved mother. But Eleanor thought important theories like the existence of aliens to be beneath her, and conversation with her revolved around the importance of women in the universe.

At least they both had a sort of acknowledgement of the Universe in common. In a way he loved them both.

He waved at Ian and Ian waved back. After all, it was home time on Friday, and Friday being the very last day of this particular week the chances of the two boys having an esoteric debate before Monday next were remote indeed. They didn’t live close enough to each other for it to be likely.

Instead he would scribble a few notes on a sheet of paper, lying on his bed where he was offered merciful peace. Well, scribble wasn’t exactly the right word: he’d neatly and in tiny lettering note down his latest addendum to a dozen theories so that full discussion could take place at play time on Monday, and Ian would do the same, and the logic of it was usually one or two of their discrete ideas coincided like magic, which proved they must be right.

Across the road and talking earnestly to another pretty girl was Eleanor Crinkworthy. She did a lot of talking earnestly to a whole army of pretty girls, did the lovely Eleanor. I suppose it could be assumed that she was some sort of highly intellectual proto-feminist who was rapidly evolving a belief in the brilliant way females throughout history had dominated the males of just about every population by behaving in a subservient way. It was clever, and explained just about everything, including the annoying Colin Wharton’s obsession with the equally infuriating Ian Ganderson. For some reason she wasn’t quite sure if she rather liked Colin. Maybe he was the proof of all her best theories. Anyway, she saw him wave and waved back.

“Stupid boy,” grated the bullying Mr Harris as he drove his Ford Popular over a pot-hole. By the way, it was the year nineteen fifty six and Ford Popular motor cars were all the rage amongst the working classes who, if they could afford a car at all, found it was a Ford Popular.

“I’ll cane him on Monday,” decided Mr Harris to himself, irrationally blaming Colin Wharton for the existence of a pot-hole in the exact piece of road he had just jerked over. It was possibly a good thing that Colin wasn’t privy to that bullying teacher’s inner thought processes and insane decisions when it came to the wielding of his classroom weaponry. But then, not one of the boys was in any way sure what constituted a punishable offence and what didn’t. Some said it might have something to do with Mrs Harris’s menstrual cycle, and the probability was they had his that particular nail firmly on its head.

The Ford Popular having rattled past and slowly made its way out of sight round a significant blind bend, Colin decided to join his two best friends on the other side of the road. He was a lonely boy most of the time, largely friendless because his single mother imposed strict rules on the way he spent his life, rules largely based on her knowledge of the wiles of some of her gender, and she didn’t want Colin to put a girl in the family way, especially as the only likely female candidate on their street lived next door, and they were Catholics. She didn’t trust Catholics, especially when it came to personal protection should perfectly natural misbehaviour offer itself to her son.

In that, she was a realist. But it did mean that she kept a tight rein on what the boy could or couldn’t do, especially in the vicinity of girls. It was possibly a blessing that she had no knowledge of the existence of Eleanor Crinkworthy.

But back to Colin’s most vital moment in time.

He was on one side of the road and his two best friends were on the other. And, anyway, he’d have to cross over sooner or later in order to go the right way home, so sooner might as well be be now.

So Colin Wharton stepped into the road and got smashed to smithereens by a Mark One Land Rover. And by smithereens that’s exactly what he might have concluded, but his brain entered a dimension the existence of which he’d hypothesised about with Ian to the point that for the zillionth of a second at precisely the instant when a jagged fragment of his skull lacerated just about every little grey cell in his smashed cranium, it became real.

And by real I mean it was switched on. Like a light. Brightly.

But there could be no two ways about it. Otherwise Colin Wharton was dead.

That’s what the ambulance driver said when he scraped him off the road. It’s what the police constable on his bicycle concurred with as he adjusted his cycle clips.

And it’s what somehow the brilliantly hypothesised dimension rejoiced in knowing as it converted the least fragment of time into something that looked very much like a lifespan. And it didn’t seem to need a beating heart or a blood supply. All it needed was for Colin Wharton to be dead.

Oh, mercy me!

© Peter Rogerson 31.05.21

...