XANDER’S POT LEG

A teenage boy has an accident, which changes him for good.

Xander was a wild kid. At least, he had been before he hit his teens. It was unusual for such quietly unassuming parents as his were to produce such a difficult son, but it must happen sometimes.

He ran wild. He wasn’t that bothered whether he upset his mum or dad much, and if he did they rarely did a deal to correct him. They were quiet folk. Always had been, which is probably why they had met in the first place, and done the usual things like fallen in love and bred. Introverted, you might say, made for each other like some couples are.

Then Xander became thirteen, and broke his leg. It had been a silly thing to do, on the park and trying to leap from the roundabout when it was spinning faster than it was supposed to because he’d put all his strength into making it race. Then came the snapping sound from his leg as it twisted under him, against the base of the roundabout, and the sudden raging pain, and when he tried to walk he couldn’t.

And there was nobody else around. He couldn’t get onto his feet because the broken leg wouldn’t let him. There was bone sticking out of his skin, ugly and bloody and agonizing, for goodness’ sake. He was in one hell of a mess, and, of course, it started to rain. Not that it mattered much if he got wet.

“Well, what have you been up to?”

He heard the voice through his tears. It sounded nice enough, the sort of voice that might offer to help. But did he need it? After all, he was Xander the Great and never needed anyone. He could do anything by himself. He’d always believed that. Then he paused his raging thoughts.

He could think of absolutely nothing but the insane pain and his need to push that bone back into his leg so that he could get on his feet, or if not that, crawl away. But he couldn’t do it. He found himself crying, real tears rolling from eyes that were rarely moistened by anything as cissy as crying. He strained his neck and looked up to see who it was who had addressed him.

He hadn’t seen her before. Or had he? He didn’t really know who he’d seen before, but standing there, looking at him through what may have been sympathetic eyes was a woman with hair so long he’d love to feel it, run his fingers through it, smell it., but he couldn’t move. Not even for that hair.

“You need an ambulance,” she said when she noticed the extent of his in jury. “What on Earth were you doing to make that kind of mess to your leg? Just hang on a moment and I’ll ring for one.

He did and he didn’t want an ambulance, but it wasn’t wanting that won the day, but needing. The few minutes wait was a lifetime of unbelievable agony, but an ambulance did come and two paramedics carted him off on a stretcher after one of them made a sarcastic comment about boys having to play.

The one good thing to happen that day was the woman with the hair extracted his address from him so that she could go and inform his parents that their offensive son was on his way to hospital. She hadn’t known Xander very long, but she had worked out somehow that he could be offensive.

The thing is, from the moment she decided he wasn’t a very nice person he started to become one. Maybe the pain in his leg dictated that he was needing something stronger than himself. Or maybe there was something about her. Her hair, maybe?

His leg was so badly broken that he was kept in hospital over night after the surgeon did everything he had to do in order to repair the damage, though he did suggest that Xander might have a problem with a limp for the remainder of his days.

“The leg might end up a little bit shorter than it was,” he said, “but you’ll get by.”.

Xander smiled and said ”thank you.” It shocked him to be so polite when the leg still hurt like mad, but maybe he was beginning to get an understanding that there are consequences to things he interacted with in the world, like park roundabouts and good manners.

The day after his leg-breaking piece of stupidity he was sent home. The instructions to his parents were that he should rest that leg as much as possible. The surgeon went to great lengths to explain why the broken ends must be given a chance to mend without too much movement, and anyway the flesh wound would be tender for quite a while.

“I’m sorry, mum, dad,” he said when they got to their home, in a taxi as his parents had never owned a car of their own. They weren’t that sort.

“It’s not like you to apologise,” grunted his father, an elderly man who had never actually enjoyed life much and left it quite a long time before finding his wife in the world. From birth to the age of fifty-odd, which he now was, he had gone with the flow, never stepped out of synchronicity with what he had perceived to be his lot in life. Unlike his son, of course, who had been anything but synchromised.

“Well, I am sorry. All this trouble I’ve caused,” murmured Xander.

“You’re a sweet boy,” crooned his mother.

“I want to thank the woman who got the ambulance from the park,” he said, smiling at both of them, “she was so kind and I wasn’t as nice as I might have been. My leg hurt, you see.”

“That would be the lass who came and told me,” replied mother, “she was nice. Not everyone would have helped a ruffian like you even if he was bleeding all over the place.

“I’m sorry, mum…”

Two parents looked at each other in almost total confusion. This wasn’t the Xander they knew and had once loved and now merely accepted as their son who would go his own way in the world before long and leave them in blessed peace. Here he was being sorry for nothing!

“There’s no need to, son,” murmured his dad, “it’s you that are suffering the pain, not us.”

“I’m still sorry, though…”

And that was said without him knowing why he was sayng it.

The next day they had a visitor.

It was the woman who had phoned for an ambulance when he’d injured himself. At first he didn’t recognise her because she was very different in appearance from what she’d been.

Her long hair, the glorious masses that he’d even wanted to run his fingers through in a moment of agonised madness, were bound up and underneath the wimple of a young woman in a nun’s outfit. The other day she’d been dressed in a neat short cotton frock, though he’d barely noticed. Now her body was covered by a sombre black habit which reached below her shoes and started off at her neckline. It was only when she spoke that either he or his parents recognised her.

“I wanted to make sure you were all right,” she said.

“But you…” he floundered. He wanted to say she looked different. He wanted to point out that she hadn’t been a nun a couple of days ago. In pre-broken leg days he hated nuns because he supposed they represented a sickly sort of goodness. But she’d been ordinary back then. Young and alive. Active, with hair he’d really and honestly wanted to run his fingers through.

“I know I was in fancy dress when you hurt yourself,” she smiled. “I only wondered if I could sign your cast? You know, the plaster they’ve put on your leg?”

He hadn’t thought anyone would want to do a thing like sign the glaring white covering on his leg, but the idea appealed to him, though he couldn’t have said why.

“If you like,” he said.

“Then I will, she said, and smiled the sweetest smile he’d ever seen, not that, being a wretched tearaway, he’d seen many.

And with a felt tipped pen she took from a pocket somewhere in her dress she wrote HOLY CHILD in indelible capital letters.

Which worried his placid parents no end.

© Peter Rogerson 27.08.22

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