Stephen’s Dream

A short stuu=ory about the miseries of a teenage boy

It was dark where he was.

Stephen had expected it to be dark, but not quite as dark as this. When he tried to see his hand held before his eyes, he couldn’t, it was that dark.

What an ending to a rotten day!

It had started at breakfast that morning. He was only a couple of minutes late down the stairs even though he almost ran to the table, but dad was, of course, there first, and he was a stickler for punctuality.

Being fourteen Stephen was fond of his bed. For some reason the night’s sleep needed a few more minutes, and then he was on the verge of being late, and then he was actually late.

And dad hated sloppy inattention to punctuality and made his feelings quite clear by slapping him across the head hard enough for stars to appear, and growling about teenage boys and their filthy habits.

He didn’t have a filthy habit and didn’t know what one was. He kept himself clean. He even washed behind his ears, where nobody would notice if he hadn’t.

That had been a somewhat painful start to this particular day, and with those darned stars still in his field of vision it was no surprise that he didn’t see the small car when it tried to occupy the same bit of the road that he was aiming for when he crossed it. There was a screech of brakes and rubber on gravel and he escaped being killed or badly wounded by the skin of his teeth.

But Mr Horace who taught history at school had seen it and Mr Horace never needed much of an excuse to put himself in punishment mode. And boys being careless enough to nearly cause a major accident in which his own car may well have been involved certainly called for punishment.

In the past, when it had not only been allowed but encouraged, he would have tackled Stephen with a cane, but it was no longer permitted and he might have got the sack if he tried it on, so instead he resorted to sarcasm.

The class, twenty three of them because it was first lesson and the other seven hadn’t as yet put in an appearance, they obviously didn’t have the sort of father that Stephen had, knew that something was on the agenda when they saw Mr Horace’s eyes. They bulged slightly and had about them the eyes of a bullying buffoon, which I suppose he was. But those eyes were a give-away.

“Did you want to meet your maker, Podgy?” he asked.

Now Podgy wasn’t Stephen’s surname, which was Rodriguez, his family having Spanish ancestry way back before the second world war when the first to be British Rodriguez had made it to the sandy shores of what was ro become their home for untold future generations. But to Mr Horace the very name Rodriguez was pretentious and needed dragging down a notch or two, so he called Stephen Podgy, as if handing out nicknames was one of his educational duties.

“No, sir,” replied Stephen, and then the tirade began, all of it aimed at him and all of it subtly touched by references to the boy’s ancestry. Many a sentence was contrived to end in olé, such as did you fancy dancing the tango with that Range Rover, Podgy olé?

And the one thing he should never have said in reply had to do with pointing out that the car he had almost tangled with had been a Mini rather than the much more sophisticated Range Rover, so he did.

“It was a Mini, sir.”

Which provided Mrs Horace with the best reason he could think of to risk his gainful employment by slapping the teenager’s head sharply whist holding a copy of History for Geeks, his own personal attempt at producing what, to him, would be the perfect child’s introduction to his subject but which was still on A4 paper, in his own handwriting.

This gave the stars still present inside Stephen’s field of vision a fresh impetus, and they took control of him, blacking everything else out, the classroom, the nasty teacher, the sound of tittering from other boys and a couple of girls, and he slumped sideways on his desk without actually realising he was doing anything of the sort, and from thence he slipped like a lifeless dummy to the floor, out cold.

He wasn’t thus for long, merely a couple of minutes, but that was long enough for Mr Horace to feel that instead of holding the one and only copy of History for Geeks in his right hand he might be holding his own P45*.

He’d bordered on the edge of dismissal more than once and usually because he took the disciplinary side of his role in the classroom far too seriously, and this time he smelt the clammy air of the borough job centre with a nose that started to twitch.

“Did you see that, children?” he squeaked, though his voice had meant to be deep and resonant, “the insolent boy was knocked down by a car on his way to school and he’s got delayed concussion!”

One or two of the class had seen what had been no more than a noisy squeaking of brakes that had left Podgy (they thought of him as that too) unharmed, but being sensible, daren’t say anything, though one girl, whose father was a solicitor’s clerk and who therefore felt immune to anything Mr Horace could do to her, did mention that she’d seen the near accident. And she did use that term: near accident.

Mr Horace suggested she might like to write it all down just in case, though he didn’t say just in case of what, and he invited her to stay behind in his room with him on his own when the bell rang at the end of the day just to confirm things, though similarly he didn’t say what those things might be. But his reputation went before him, and she declined by saying,

“I’ll have to ask my dad first, sir,” and he replied,

“Better forget it, then, we can discuss the matter some other time,” and she smiling, repeated,

“I’ll have to ask my dad first, sir,”

And that was when Stephen recovered communication with the light of day and slowly crawled to his feet with just about everything around him looking as if it might have been created by Picasso.

Mr Horace, seeing that he’d probably been lucky and escaped with his job intact, chose to call him Stephen instead of Podgy and asked “are you all right, Stephen, after that funny turn?”

And he replied by staring blankly around him and saying nothing because the connection between brain and mouth was virtually non-existent, which Mr Horace took as dumb insolence but chose to ignore with a sneer before arranging History for Geeks neatly on his desk at the front of the class.

It took the greater part of the rest of the day for Stephen to begin to feel normal. In maths he struggled with the five times table, which he normally knew by heart, and couldn’t see why x should ever equal y+1. In Geography he shook his head in disbelief when the lady teacher mentioned the Virgin Isles and in PE he failed to climb a single rope.

The last lesson of the day was biology in which the existence of birds and bees became the basis of a lesson on human reproduction without the need to mention anything that might make the boys and maybe even the girls snigger.

But at the end of the lesson a question was posed.

“We’ve covered the how,” that was the birds and the bees bit, “but what about the experience of birth? What about the journey from darkness into light?”

And one girl, she with a father who was at the bottom end of a legal office, suggested, “sir, it must be scary…”

And the biology teacher agreed with her and said something that entered Stephen’s head with much more emphasis than was intended,

“If only we could remember…” he said.

And that rumbling voice posing the thought played around in Stephen’s brain, though, on the way home, he was careful to note where all the cars were so that he didn’t repeat the exercise of his morning walk to school.

Would he ever remember being born? That was what rumbled through his mind, that and, what had it been like?

And before he reached the front door he convinced himself that he could remember bits of being born, the darkness bits, the not able to see anything bits, the slithering bits. It was as if being born had been what had forged today.

And maybe he could, because that’s what sent him down to the cellar after tea and after his dad had gone for his daily exercise, walking to the pub and back.

The cellar, he mused, was dark. Dark enough for you not to be able to see your hand in front of your face, and that meant it was very dark.

And it was in that darkness that several recent shakings of his brain inside his skull sent ripples of insanity through his awareness and he decided, there and then, that he was actually being born and that he would henceforth live in an infinitely better place.

So he locked the cellar door, sat in the darkest corner where once piles of coal had been stored, and went to sleep.

He’s probably still asleep.

© Peter Rogerson 13.05.22

*P45: UK card indicating the need for employment.