The Boy Who Could Keep a Swan in His Head

by John Hunt

  Phen trained his glasses still further left. The green door of the tool shed came into focus. “We haven’t looked there.” Pal was losing interest; they’d have to move soon. The thatch hut, Phen knew, was home to lawnmowers, gardening tools and compost bags. “Stay low. Move slowly.” He took the leash off the collar and gently broke through the Brunfelsia bush. You had to admire an opponent so devious and cunning. Phen held a stick he’d found like a machine gun. “Spread out.” Pal over-obeyed and ran to a bunch of children with ice creams. With two yards to go, Phen shoulder-charged the wooden door.

  It swung open violently, smacking a terracotta pot and dislodging a rake that fell sideways, blocking his entrance. A startled cockroach left via the back window. Phen wasn’t sure what to do next. He peered into the dark room and kept his stick in the ready position against his shoulder. There was a gas burner, pot, mug and some Boxer pipe tobacco. He decided to duck under the rake and investigate further. He found a footprint in the spilled fertiliser; even in the half-light, though, he could see it was from a workman’s boot. The only other item of interest was a brown tortoiseshell comb. It leaned against the wall, delicately balancing upside down on the metal handle of a shovel.

  “Too late.” Sergeant Dawson lowered his gun dejectedly.

  “Not necessarily,” came a voice from the sunlight.

  Phen was still trapped inside by the rake. He squinted directly into the sun.

  “I’m glad you didn’t touch any of the park attendant’s things. He’s a very strict and ordered man. Especially when it comes to his old copies of Scope magazine, which you didn’t find because they’re wedged behind the chicken wire in the ceiling. He’s told me many times that this is his office and he doesn’t like trespassers.”

  Phen slipped under the rake and closed the door behind him. Pal returned with flakes of ice-cream cone around his mouth. Now that Phen had found the man he was looking for, he had no idea what to say to him. The three of them walked, for no reason, to the bench next to the kiddies’ pool. Phen rather exaggeratedly turned his machine gun into a walking stick. He’d seen how old people strolled. He sauntered to the bench, giving each step a poke in the ground and a twirl of his wrist. They sat down with a large space between them confirming they were essentially strangers. Phen resisted the temptation to start talking immediately. He waited for what he thought was a mature, grown-up length of time before opening his mouth.

  “I go back to school tomorrow.”

  “I know. All the dustbins are full of empty school-shoe boxes.”

  “How’re your laces?”

  “Fine.”

  They looked down at each other’s shoes.

  “I didn’t get a new pair this term.”

  “Me neither.”

  “New shirt, though. Very stripy.”

  “Yes. The label says ‘Perma-Prest shaped for the fashion crowd’. I found it flapping like a flag on a car aerial. Last night’s wind must have dislodged it from some washing line … Are you looking forward to school?”

  “I have to audition. For the s-s-school play.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “It’s tomorrow. First day back.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You’ll be fine.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do you know you won’t be?”

  “Last time all I had to say was ‘S-s-stand and deliver!’ I was a s-s-sentry. I took s-so long, the king and his cavalry just rode over me and into the castle.”

  “That was then, this is now.”

  “S-so?”

  “So last time we were here the pool was empty and now it’s full.”

  “So?”

  “Things change.”

  Phen looked at the man looking at him. His fedora was at an angle, his left eyebrow raised as if that was the cause of the tipped hat. Who was this man? He’d taken the cup-shaped cap off an acorn and stuck it in the middle of his placemat. It looked as if the square of hair under his chin was held in place by it. A bolt perfectly placed in the centre.

  “One ruined hanky doesn’t mean a life of misery. The woman you helped might be wiser and stronger now. You might have done your bit to prepare her for an even better life. One bad term of stand and deliver doesn’t mean the next will be the same.”

  Phen felt slightly annoyed. He didn’t like the way the man turned to face him, twirled his thumbs and waited for a reply. His walking stick became a rifle again. He shot an Alsatian and the hysterical dachshund barking at it. He then took aim at the mother in the kaftan who was now smacking the swing for hitting her screaming child on the head. Sergeant Dawson had found his man, yet clearly he wasn’t like those Jerry prisoners who always refused to talk.

  “Nobody knows if things aren’t going to get worse tomorrow.”

  The man stopped twirling and prodded at the exploding hair behind his head. It could not be contained by his hat and sought freedom in every direction. From this tangled mess, he produced a tube of Life Savers. Phen declined his kind offer as the green sweet disappeared into the mouth opposite him.

  “And nobody knows if things aren’t going to get better.” He sucked loudly and put his tongue through the hole in the middle of the sweet.

  “My gran says it’s all fun and games until you lose an eye.”

  The man pushed his hat further back and decided to suntan. Phen studied the narrow, deep lines that erupted from the edges of his closed eyes. Blown sideways, they fanned out towards his ears, but never quite made it. And in those distant whorls, more tufts of hair grew wild and rampant.

  “And how many one-eyed people do you know?”

  “None. If you exclude pirates.”

  “Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow,” he said, apparently tired just at the thought of it. “Everybody worries about tomorrow.”

  “Shouldn’t we worry about the future?”

  The man sat upright again. He plucked the acorn cap from his chin, licked it and stuck it in the middle of his forehead. He stared at Phen through his new, middle eye.

  “Ooooommmmm,” he chanted three times. “Tomorrow is just today in one day’s time.”

  8

  Serendipitous

  /ser-en-dip’i-tes/ adjective

  Pal was delighted his master had decided not to go straight home after the park. Instead, although it was turning to dusk, they had veered right down O’Reilly Road and headed in the general direction of Yeoville. The further they moved away from Hillbrow, the more bunches of houses began to reappear. They huddled next to each other in a sincere attempt at respectability. Tiny mowed lawns reached freshly painted front gates, some left half-open in a cautious welcome. This was the road less travelled, full of new sights and smells. Pal was allowed to take the lead. His master seemed distracted as he let himself be pulled in any direction. Even the quick devouring of half a chicken-mayonnaise sandwich found in the gutter went unnoticed.

  By the time Phen reached Harrow Road his mind was no clearer. He decided to cross over and give it a few more blocks. He was feeling confused about Sergeant Dawson’s discovery. He wasn’t even sure why he’d gone looking for the man in the first place. He’d stalked and found his prey, yet somehow felt he was the one who’d been caught. The more they talked, the more he became entangled. Often he’d seemed to give the answer just before Phen would ask the question. But that answer just led him to thinking about another question. He had looked asleep half the time although his head would slowly turn half an inch left and right as if his fedora housed some secret radar.

  He’d said our job wasn’t to fight time, just to piggyback on it. He’d then done that hat-twirl thing and stated, with both eyes open for a change, that so many claimed they suffered from not-enoughness, when the real problem was too-muchness. Phen had tried to look intelligent because the man spoke as if he’d known this all along. Phen nodded perpetually, meanwhile his brain was tying itself in a bigger and bigger knot. It wasn’t helped by the irregular way the man spoke.

&nbs
p; Phen began to imagine him powered by the ancient circuit board behind the only metal door in Duchess Court. The stencilled DANGER sign and the broken lock beneath it offered the perfect ingredients for an enquiring mind. It was full of switches, exposed copper wire and spiders’ webs spun from one fading label to the other. S1 Ground Flr and S2 First Flr were beautifully written in dark-blue fountain-pen ink. An electrician full of serifs and exaggerated curls had, long ago, written a love letter to the current he was installing. Faded white rectangular pieces of paper lined up square and proud were neatly trapped on all four corners by triangular pouches. He’d seen these same pouches before in his parents’ photo album. As he shined a torch over the rubber insulators, silver lines of gossamer spun out, dressing everything in fine silk. More an alchemist’s concoction than hard science.

  That something so beautiful and untidy could power all of Duchess Court mesmerised Phen. When the lift stopped or the lights went out, he imagined a rain spider trying to tiptoe off a live wire. He saw the hairs on its legs go static and blue as the charge lit it up like a Christmas decoration. Phen felt that some similar magical, yet interrupted, source powered the man who enlightened and confused him at the same time. His silences seemed to surge suddenly into voice, only to return to silence again. Sleep, or half-sleep, descended at the same speed as it lifted. A tilt up or drop of the chin and the switch was flicked.

  Although the sentences had been irregular and his startling blue eyes anything from tightly shut to wide in wonder, he had clearly said that good could be as unexpected as bad. That we should be careful not to play the victim in advance and by doing so attract the wrong luck. “Tonight,” he’d said, “could prove serendipitous.” Phen didn’t know what that meant and had waited for another clue. None had been forthcoming. He’d tried to sniff surreptitiously to see if he could catch a whiff of alcohol on the man’s breath and felt ashamed to come away with a strong smell of Pepsodent toothpaste mingled with the sweetness of apple-flavoured Life Saver.

  “You’ll wonder where the yellow went …” was all the man said, allowing Phen to finish the radio jingle in his head.

  He’d also told Phen to stop worrying about his role in the school play. By then, they had moved to the willow tree. They sat next to it and stared at the horizon for a long time. Instead of singing, this time he’d recited some poetry: “Oh Willow gray, I may not stay / Till Spring renew thy leaf; / But I will hide myself away, / And nurse a lonely grief.” Again Phen had looked at him waiting for an explanation and again none was forthcoming. Instead he had lowered himself slowly onto his back, as if testing the elasticity of his spine, and stared at the sky. Phen had waited a few moments and then done likewise.

  “You’ll be fine,” he’d said into the clouds. “Look at this tree. It grows up to grow down. No one understands gravity better.”

  You would’ve thought the snoring of the man next to him would ensure the exact opposite, yet Phen had also drifted off. By the time Pal woke him, the sun was much higher. The willow had created a triangle of shade that saved his face, but not his knees. Bony hills of angry red stared back at him. Miraculously, the man was still there, body straight, arms at his sides, sleeping at attention. His forest of chest hairs, some turned gold by the sun, rose and fell in deep and regular intervals. A scar the shape of a horseshoe U-turned just beneath his chin.

  “Bottle,” he’d said without opening his eyes or breaking his breathing.

  “Better go,” Phen had said, getting up and clipping Pal’s lead on.

  Initially the man had stayed horizontal and just nodded.

  “Do you have a name?” Phen had asked. “I gave you mine.”

  The question forced the man onto his elbow and then his feet. He patted himself down again. Dry grass shot off his pants and showered down on an unimpressed Pal. His master picked the dry flakes off his ears.

  “Hmmm. Do you think names are important?”

  “Well, everyone needs one.”

  “If I said I was Algernon or Ebenezer, would you look at me differently to a Peter or John?”

  Phen shrugged.

  “What about Xavier? I’ve always wanted to be a Xavier.”

  The man began to stretch in a number of positions as if preparing for a major sporting activity. He started by elongating various parts of his body in slow motion. He swivelled his neck while rotating his hips to the point of a pirouette. Then he raised both hands before bringing them down sideways and holding them parallel to the ground. He hung there for some time, suspended east to west, then sank down, folded his arms and, Cossack-like, tried to shoot each leg out alternately. He wasn’t very good. Twice he nearly toppled over as his knee joints battled to carry his weight. His body appeared to be hinged differently. If the exercise was designed to remind his frame how it was supposed to work, it wasn’t particularly successful. He became stuck on his haunches. Unable to move, he eventually toppled onto his back, lay there for a while and eventually stood up.

  “What if I said I was Lord Marmaduke the third? Heir to a massive fortune. Castles everywhere and my own private golf course?” His voice was believably posh as he gave a twitch of his superior nose. “Or Mad-eye Malone? Still on the run. Ha, ha, ha, haaa!” He laughed insanely. “Them coppers will never get me! They’ll never find the money!” He pointed to his squint eye while his other hand shot randomly through his forefinger. “What about, say, Thomas, loving husband and father of two? Family tragically killed in a car accident – and he’s never been the same since. I like Jack: simple, strong name. Ex-army, special forces. Seen a lot, maybe too much. In time, that has to affect you.”

  Phen held Pal close as he tried to construct one man from the many that stood in front of him.

  “So which one is it?”

  “Heb.”

  “Herb?”

  “No, Heb. If you want to call me something, let’s make it Heb.”

  “Okay.”

  “Heb Thirteen Two.”

  Heb Thirteen Two took his fedora off and cleaned the brim between his thumb and forefinger. He then replaced the hat on his vast expanse of hair with the firm clamp of a Lego piece finding its exact position.

  “You’ll work it out. You have a bright, dancing mind.”

  Heb Thirteen Two had cha-cha-cha-ed a few steps forwards, then had done a few backwards.

  “Gotta go.”

  The fedora had begun to rise and fall as he’d changed to the twist, his unlubricated hips corkscrewing painfully.

  By the time Phen reached home he’d travelled in a large square up Harrow, left into Abel, left into Quartz and back into O’Reilly Road. Aside from the owner of a pink-eyed pit bull on a studded lead, he’d spoken to no one. If he did have a dancing mind, it was now sitting on the pavement outside his flat, exhausted. The more he tried to clear his head, the more it blocked up. In the end he had let Pal zigzag him from one island of grass to the other. Even the rich smell of roasted coffee beans from the Gobble & Go hadn’t slowed him down. Normally he’d pause and allow the colossal triangles of chocolate cake to tempt him from the glass shelf that lined the window.

  Finally he forced himself to stand up and imitated Heb Thirteen Two with a few exercises of his own. As he turned, he saw a watchful Mrs Kaplan stick her arm out of her fifth-floor window and shoo him inside. Phen opened the door to number four as quietly as possible. Pal headed straight for his water bowl while Phen tried to slip unnoticed to his bedroom. Somewhere in the dog’s rush, he stood on a loose plank of parquet. It plinked as it leaped out and plonked as it returned.

  “A little late tonight, aren’t we?”

  Although Phen recognised the voice, he was confused by its location. The panels between the lounge and dining room had been drawn slightly, so he was forced to peer around the frosted glass. His father, sitting relaxed yet upright, with a London Illustrated News on his lap, gazed back at him. His hair was neatly combed, his face perfectly shaved and, most surprisingly, he was fully dressed. You could say he was almost ov
erdressed. The very slightly checked sports jacket and white shirt spoke of a sophisticated cocktail party. The grey slacks with the perfect crease were underpinned by a pair of stylish black brogues. They hadn’t been dusted; they’d been polished. The dotted design on the toecap circled itself twice before shooting up the side of the shoe. Phen had never seen his father shine from the feet up before.

  “We thought we’d all listen to the radio tonight. As a family,” his mother tried to explain. She spoke as if the lines had been rehearsed. “Family time,” she reiterated, as though hoping the label would stick.

  Phen was astonished. He’d been prepared for anything except an attempt at normality.

  “Fine.”

  He looked for the oxygen cylinder. It wasn’t behind the curtain or the last defiant leaf of what was their only indoor plant. His father inhaled and then exhaled in an exaggerated fashion to supply the answer. This was followed by a totally unnecessary thumbs up, until Phen realised it signified not just that he could breathe, but that he’d also been told to be on his best behaviour. He couldn’t remember the last time all three of them had been in the lounge together. Perhaps his last birthday? His father’s migraine had allowed for the singing of “Happy Birthday” but had stifled the three cheers that were meant to follow.

  “Why don’t you get a book and join us?” his mother continued. She was attempting to make it sound as if this happened every Sunday evening. “What with tomorrow being your first day back at school, I thought it might be nice to have a sort of family send-off?” As hard as she tried, his mother couldn’t help ending the sentence with a question.

  “I’ll just wash my hands first.”

  He wasn’t sure why he had to wash his hands, but the thought crossed his mind that in normal families this might be what sons did. He combed his hair too and tried to hide the dirt on his shirt by tucking it into his shorts. He was about to pick up a war comic. The cover showed an Australian with one side of his hat flipped up, defending himself against a banzai-crazed Japanese soldier. The soldier, much smaller than the Australian, was attacking him with a bayonet the length of a Samurai sword. The occasion, however, seemed to call for something less graphic. Instead, he traded it for C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle. It was a book he’d almost read a number of times. He found fantasy in novels unnecessary. Real life provided enough of it.