by Peter Ackers
"...this race was for rats..."
I was not a physical baby, although I cried a lot. Mum said I didn’t really fiddle with things as babies do, didn’t do a lot of crawling or trying to eat things. Mine was a mental rather than an oral fixation. I would become fascinated by moving things and could sit for ages at a time, just staring. Although this sometimes scared mum and she’d have to come and make sure I wasn’t ill, she enjoyed the fact that this habit kept me safe. If she was in the kitchen making dinner, she didn’t have to worry that I was crawling towards the fire, or seeking to eat drawing pins. A glance behind her now and then would confirm that I was intently watching how she peeled potatoes. She developed a nervous twitch in her foot when sitting watching TV, and fully believed it was her brain’s subconscious way of providing a moving target for my eyes.
Dad used to try to teach me things, physical things. Not to overcome what they both probably thought was a mental problem, but simply because he subscribed to the old Chinese saying of Give me the boy and I will give you the man. He believed that the younger someone learned a skill or a talent, the better he or she would perform it as an adult. A football fan, he believed I could be a world-class player as long as I started kicking balls early enough. I got a football for every birthday and Christmas until the age of six. But I also got a chess set when I was four, and I could always beat my then 13-year-old brother.
I think the ages of 6-8 are when a child finally “sobers up”, shall we say? Sobers from the mix of emotions and other feelings that swirl the mind of a child into a maelstrom of desires and thoughts. It was at that age, surely a milestone in my life, that I calmed down mentally. This is when kids start to stop and think, to begin using the logic and reason skills that have spent years developing in the brain. They sit there idly, growing, resting, until the brain is ready to use them and they are booted up, like computer programs. I guess my dad thought he could paint on my blank brain and turn me into a star football player. But, like Tattoo-guy, I just wasn't built that way.
I began to see the school playground for what it really was, how the teachers saw it. School is not so much about learning as preparing - preparing for adult life. We are taught English and history and mathematics, but that’s just scenery; we learn our most important skills, the things that will really help us through life, in the playground. This is where chief-executive egos are formed, where social dexterity is forged and sexual politics discovered. In the playground and not the classrooms is it decided who will go on to the offices, the job centres, the hospital delivery rooms, the morgues.
At school I was an enigma to some people, strange to others, a freak to yet others. But to the teachers I was one of those kids the school industry calls “invisible pupils.” My report cards were littered with those old lines like “could do better” and “easily distracted”. Five years, five reports, eight teachers: forty times I learned that if I didn’t get distracted, I could do better. Invisible pupils are titled as such because they fade into the wallpaper. Teachers tend to notice and remember the academic achievements of those who toe the line and the disruptive behaviour of those who don’t give a fuck. It leaves no room for invisible pupils, the typical students, and when report time rolls around at the end of the year, the teachers find it hard to recall us, and thus hard to give an honest appraisal of. My only good review came from Mr. Gear, my Computer Studies teacher, but it wasn’t enough for Mum. Seeing how my brother had turned out, she took a brief but useless interest in my future when I left school, in the hope of achieving something good with at least half of her baby-output.
Mum’s dad had been a mechanic and because of this she’d gotten the idea that mechanics were solid, reliable people, that the job itself paid well and was mentally rewarding. She said something about a mechanic being someone who provides a conduit between people and life. I don’t remember if she explained that enigmatic law; I can only imagine she meant something convoluted: imagine that a mechanic fixes a car that drives someone to work, thus allowing that man to bake a loaf of bread, which fills the stomach of a doctor, who then has the energy to save lives - or some cheesy shit like that. So, she pressed onto me the idea of being a mechanic.
I always think of that day when school finally spits out the children it has spent years and years refining. Like cars exiting a factory ready for the showroom, an endless stream of facsimile young adults are churned out into the streets, thinking alike, acting alike, following the same principles, abiding the same laws. And like cars we are also machines, but machines that will go on to serve the country and each other, to process taxes and fill prisons and build office blocks and clean streets. Conformity and uniformity. The thought terrified me.
I remember the day we left school. I was the only one walking, and causing an obstacle to all the laughing and whooping kids who thought they’d just finished some kind of prison sentence, and I pitied them, for they did not know that their sentence was just beginning. We were being led out into the wide world, but that world was not going to be so kind to us now. Now we would have to follow all sorts of new laws, would be liable to paying bills. The government was now going to charge us a kind of toll, or rent, for existence in the country, for inclusion into society. Also known as Tax. Without that rent, or Tax, we would be punished; the prisons were full of such subversives, as were the cardboard cities. You pay tax if you work; you rot if you don’t work. Simple as. A portion of my life would have to be given up in order to live in this robot world where the line must be towed, and if I was true and loyal, then in fifty years’ time, when the government was sure I was too old to be a nuisance, I could “retire”. But the thought of that horrified me.
I heard plans voiced by joyful kids…
“I’m going to run my dad’s pub -”
“My mum’s away next week, so it’s party on -”
“My brother gets nearly fifty quid a week on the dole, and he says I should try it -”
“Fucking shoulda burned this place down last year -”
… and I wanted to laugh at them. They raced past me so full of ideas and dreams, and their eyes were blind. I saw girls with small feet so they could stand closer to the kitchen sink when washing the family’s dinner plates; I saw burly boys with brick-layer arms. I saw big bus-driver hands. Receptionist smiles. Here they were, ready and primed: the next generation of caretakers to this robot society. They had bolted out of the gates like greyhounds in a race, but this race was for rats, and they cheered despite the fact that this race was not yet run, and already stacked against them.
And I saw with some mental telescope way into the future, some ten, twenty years. I saw my wife, with her small feet. She was washing dishes, while in the living room I sat in my mechanic’s coveralls and played with the kids - one of each sex, in accordance with uniformity and conformity. The boy had a postman’s walk, the girl a waitress’s swagger. And I saw a dim, grey garage like some android Jeffrey Dahmer’s lair, with car parts in boxes and on shelves and scattered everywhere. I saw a prim woman wrinkling her nose as she waited for me to finish tinkering under the bonnet of her Mercedes. I saw her drop her credit card into my hand from a height so she didn’t get her own car's dirt and oil on her perfumed skin. And I realised I didn’t want to fix her car, and I didn’t care if she would use it to get to her office, where she might counsel some depressed teenager and save a life while costing Boots the sale of six packets of paracetamol. I was doing a job she was unwilling to do - if she didn’t research engines and try to fix the problem herself, she was unwilling in my book. Would you wipe a doctor’s arse so he could go into surgery and save someone’s sight? I didn’t want to fix her car, bake her food, install her washing machine or package her fucking tampons. I wanted to pay her wages. I wanted her to do for me all the jobs that I was unwilling to do!
All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind. Aristotle.
And it hit me just like that. I knew then, right there in the street amongst all those hyperactive kids planning for tonight’s
leaving party, that I didn’t want to work for someone else. I didn’t want conformity or uniformity. I wanted to walk above that level. I wanted - nay, deserved - to tread a higher path.
