Scorched Earth

SCORCHED

EARTH

Glenn Haybittle

Published by Cheyne Walk 2020

Copyright © Glenn Haybittle 2020

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All right reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retreival system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of the book.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Published by Cheyne Walk

www.cheynewalk.co

ISBN- 978-1-9999682-7-4

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

― Maya Angelou

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.

― Black Elk

Contents

Sam

1

2

3

4

5

Nick

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Katie

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Nick and Katie

1

Sam

2

Acknowledgements

Sam

1

He stares at himself in the mirror and says his name aloud. Sam Pearson. He feels his face and the contents of his mind don’t quite relate to each other, as if each speaks a language unknown to the other. Sometimes he thinks there is nothing more guaranteed to alienate you from yourself than pronouncing your name aloud while looking at your face in a mirror. It can be like summoning forth the full frightening magnitude of the unsolvable strangeness of life.

Sam Pearson, he says to the glass. Now his voice, like his face, seems to belong to a stranger. A blank-faced perplexed stranger awaiting the next moment of his life, doubtful it will ever arrive. He can pull up no defining radiance of personality onto his features, into his voice. How far down into himself does he have to go before he understands who he is? He makes some grotesque faces. His face in the glass, he realises, is leading him now. He feels like his face is following the cues of his reflection, mimicking its prompts. The thought begins to frighten him. As if madness is at hand, never very far from the surface.

To inhabit his body and face with more surety he thinks of things he knows about himself. His favourite food: crisps and chips. His favourite TV show: Star Trek. His favourite occupation: playing his bass guitar. But soon he finds himself thinking about things he doesn’t like about himself. The constant sensation he has in public that everyone is looking critically at him which makes him as self-consciously awkward as a novice on skis. He doesn’t like that. And he doesn’t like how much thought he can’t help giving to potential mishaps whenever he is tasked with performing an errand. He pictures calamities and his imagination brings them to the brink of fruition. He doesn’t like how, whenever a teacher singles him out in class, his blood catches fire and he has to dig his nails into his palms to stay in his body, to stop the alarming sensation of floating up towards the ceiling like a fugitive hot air balloon. He often sits with both his legs and feet crossed, his arms folded, making of his body a roughshod double spiral. It’s a way of making himself feel more compact, like a parcel ready for mailing. Because he doesn’t feel compact at all. He feels all his component parts haven’t been competently welded together. As if any jolt in the road will loosen all the hinges and joints. As if any jolt in the road will unravel him.

Sam is thirteen. His mother named him after a film star, but she is now at a loss to remember who that film star might be. No one at school calls him Sam. At school he is often known as Straws because of his thin legs and arms. Jones, Dixon and Warlow call him Samantha. Because they think he’s more like a girl than a boy. Or else they call him Muppet. And now Jones, very pleased with himself, has started calling him Aids. Sam had to google Aids because he didn’t understand the hidden code of the insult Jones was directing at him. Even after googling it he can’t say he understands what Jones means. Not that it matters what words Jones uses to insult him. The expression on his face is eloquent of his opinion of Sam. It’s one of the few moments in his life when Jones achieves eloquence. He is good at contempt. Much better than he is at English, History or Science. And Dixon and Warlow imitate everything Jones does. Often they try to outdo him, as if Jones is a sexy girl they are showing off for. Recently their persecution of him has precipitated because Sam made overtures to befriend Jamal, the very shy Syrian refugee boy who has joined their class. Manifestations of vulnerability, loneliness, always summon in Sam a protective instinct. Jamal’s loneliness was so apparent he felt compelled to reach out and offer some kindness. Jones, Dixon and Warlow call Jamil the terrorist. But they don’t physically hurt Jamil. Instead they have begun physically hurting Sam. They are testing how far they can go, what degree of violence they can get away with. Every day it gets a little worse. Even when Sam is not at school they are like three sleek shadowed sharks circling in the waters of his mind. Sometimes he fantasises that he is granted super powers. Then he vanquishes all three of them in a dazzling feat of ingenuity in the school playground and everyone stares at him with startled admiration.

Sam lives in fear and dread of each new school day. He lies awake in bed at night willing the hours to pass more slowly. It frightens him sometimes to think about time and how we can never escape the tight clasp of its companionship. To give himself courage he watches YouTube videos of the 1980s band Orfée. He feels protected for as long as every song lasts. Both taken out of himself and taken more deeply into himself where fear can’t reach him. It’s the bass player Nick Swallow who reinforces his desire to go on living. Something about his appearance, the way he projects himself out into the world, thrills Sam. Nick Swallow provides him with a blueprint of how he might become more harmonised inside his body one day. Sam has been playing bass guitar for two years. His bass guitar is his best friend, his only friend. It feels like he is fulfilling a need of his nature when he is playing his guitar, as he imagines a bee must feel when settling itself between the yielding petals of a pollen-heavy flower. He is learning all of Nick Swallow’s bass lines, one by one. He has mastered all the bass lines on Fingerprints, Orfée’s first album. Nick Swallow’s technical ability improves impressively on the second album, Climbing Trees, and provides challenges which Sam relishes. But he can’t go on studying Nick Swallow videos all night. He knows you mustn’t wear out the things that bring you comfort. And then the shrivelling dread of spending another day at school returns. Sometimes he worries he might end up imitating his father. Once, when he was no longer able to hold back the tears in front of his mother, his stepfather stepped in and chided him. If you don’t man up you’ll end up like your father. His mother gave his stepfather a look of reproach. His father has been edited out of every narrative in the new family home. His stepfather broke a rule by mentioning him. His stepfather is an actor. Sam has seen the film in which his stepfather plays the hapless drunken victim of a werewolf. He only had one line. Sam felt a guilty rush of support for the werewolf when it eyed his stepfather and bared its sharp teeth. Now, his stepfather is very proud of his new acting role as a violent husband in a primetime soap opera. Sam always shuffles off to his bedroom when it’s on television. Jones, Dixon and Warlow deploy his stepfather and his bad acting as another taunt.

Sam’s real father jumped in front of a train when Sam was five. He has never been able to learn from his mother why he did this. He imagines his father must have been deeply unhappy. He fears he might have been weak. His father’s surname was Wyatt. Sometimes in the mirror he calls himself Sam Wyatt. Sometimes at night he thinks he detects the presence of the shadow of his father in his bedroom.

Sam made the mistake of telling a girl at school what happened to his father. Natasha, an overweight girl with mottled skin and crooked teeth. He didn’t believe she was capable of treachery because barely anyone ever speaks to her. A week later, Jones had the information. It’s now another of the taunts he directs at Sam. One time he and Warlow enacted the moment of his father’s death. Warlow jumped down from a desk, arms flailing, and Jones played the part of the train, thumping into Warlow and knocking him to the ground. There’s nothing more dangerous, more frightening and more likely to escalate into the spread of violence than cruelty. Sam knows this. Once cruelty is aroused in one person it begins to infect others. It’s why he values kindness above all other qualities. It’s why acts of kindness can bring him close to tears. Cruelty is the comprehensive absence of kindness. Cruelty is what he understands as the devil. And kindness is what he understands as God.

Recently Sam has discovered he has a second self. This second self is a shade wiser than Sam and sometimes answers his questions.

Do you think we ought to steal some money from mum’s purse?

Why not? How else are we going to feed the fox?

His second self though has no answer to Jones, Dixon and Warlow.

Sam has considered various options for evading school. He has imagined hiding out all day in the local cemetery. Or better still, spending all day with his grandmother who has dementia. His family say the person she once was has vanished. They are all unsettled that she no longer recognises them, as if their vanity is offended. It doesn’t bother Sam that she doesn’t know his name. He has trouble himself answering to his name. He goes to see her every day after school so that his grandfather can go out for a walk and do some shopping. He enjoys the atmosphere she creates around herself. He finds she allows him to be himself, without inhibitions. He feels a kind of solidarity with her. She too has been forced into exile from a truer life. Sometimes she turns away from him and begins to talk to someone only she can see. She talks to people no one else can see most of the day, every day. Just like he talks to Nick Swallow and his second self who no one else can see.

His grandmother was once a ballerina. Whenever he goes to see her the first thing he does is to fit one of the buds of his headphones into her ear and then perform some improvised madcap dance moves for her which she almost always copies. Music always lifts her spirits. She wears a wide smile when they dance together. Usually she copies all his movements, but now and again she performs a few movements he recognises as belonging to classical ballet, mostly gestures with her arms and hands. When she does this, she possesses more poise and grace than anyone he knows.

Sam has two ambitions. One is to learn to play the bass as well as Nick Swallow. The other is to do a project about his grandmother’s career as a ballerina.

2

Yeah, you should be loving someone. Oh, oh. Loving someone. Sam sings this at the top of his voice to his grandmother and points at her. It seems to please her. She is quick at taking pleasure in things. So he sings it again.

Over and over, says his grandmother. It’s become her mantra. She says over and over whenever her eyes lose the light that make them her eyes.

Who’s that? says Sam, pointing to a black and white photo, fingerprinted and curled and yellowed at the edges, of five young people locking arms on a railway station. He has foraged this and other old photographs from a cardboard box of memorabilia. It is packed with old photos, newspaper articles, programmes, train tickets, letters and even a pair of pink ballet shoes.

I don’t know. I lose sight of the lights.

That’s you. When you were seventeen.

I don’t think so. She looks pained for a moment, as if someone is twisting her wrist.

You need to believe what I say to you. I don’t tell you lies. Well, sometimes I do. I told you yesterday that Leonardo da Vinci was flying over from Italy to have dinner with you. But that made you happy, didn’t it? You said what a nice man he sounded even if you didn’t know who he was. This photo was taken during the war. In 1940. You were part of a dance company and you’re about to go to Holland. Your mother had to chaperone you because you were so young. Your dad wouldn’t allow you to go but he was away in the RAF and your mum disobeyed his orders. And when you were in The Hague, Hitler attacked Holland. You stood on the roof of your hotel and watched German soldiers falling down from the sky. You had to escape Holland in a boat. And the queen was in another boat not far behind. Sam knows all this because his grandfather has told him. That was incredibly brave of you. Going through all that when you were so young. I wish I was that brave.

Have you seen my friend? She didn’t come yesterday, but I think she’s coming today. She always wears a silver dress. Sometimes she brings me flowers.

Do you mean her? he says, pointing to a girl in the photo.

His grandmother twists a silver ring with a green stone round and round her finger. It’s like she is trying to summon a magic power from it. Then she looks up and over at the window. Look at all the people in that tree. What are they doing?

They must be fairies. I think they’re waiting for you to dance. They’ve heard what a brilliant dancer you were.

There was a man in my room today with a twisted face and he kept hissing at me. I don’t want to see him again.

Oh him. I’ve sent him away. I packed him off in a taxi. I gave him a one-way ticket to Australia.

Did you really? Thank you. He was frightening me. I like it when people are kind. I like your face. You’ve got a kind face. I like people’s faces when you can see kindness in them. Some people’s faces have no kindness in them. I don’t like those kind of faces.

There are three boys in my class like that. They don’t know how to be kind. Or they think being kind is the same thing as being cissy. They make my life hell.

She is the only person he’s able to confide in. She, like he feels himself to be, is an outcast of society. With his mother he feels constrained to downplay all his troubles. Because she makes him feel she already has a weighty burden to carry.

Over and over and over. She spider-crawls both her hands over the table in a straight line and counts to ten until her arms are fully extended. Her expression at times resembles that of someone who has recently traipsed across a war-torn border on foot, but he is often conscious of how beautiful his grandmother’s hands are, how much vitality they still convey.

Look at this photo. That’s you with Margot Fontaine. Were you good friends?

Margot? Is Margot here?

Do you remember her?

He fancies he can almost see how slowly, how arduously her brain works.

Is my father still upstairs?

No, he left the world a long time ago.

They will be sorry they missed me. They don’t really understand what happened. I reached up as high as I could.

I know you did.

Is that what she said? I couldn’t understand her.

Let’s dance again.

She stares at him as if he is something just pulled out from a magician’s sleeve. The thought makes him feel guilty, but the madder his grandmother becomes the more he likes her. The more space she grants him to find and be himself. Of all his family she is the only one in whose achievements he takes pride. As if she might be a beacon for his own aspirations. Before she lost her marbles as his stepfather puts it, she was an admirable rather than a lovable woman. She stood aloof. Her diction was precise, her words eloquent, but she withheld feeling from everything she said and touched. His own mother always gives her a low rating as a mother. About two out of ten. There was barely a single maternal instinct to be found in her. She never allowed me to see the grain under the paint. I can’t remember her hugging me once in her entire life. To Sam, whose mother’s hugs always seem more duty-bound than heartfelt and make him squirm with discomfort, this doesn’t seem such a bad thing. And whatever his mother thinks, he knows his grandmother still wants love and feels love like anyone else.

Shall I read you tonight’s pudding menu? He picks up an electricity bill from the counter and performs his best impersonation of a diligent waiter. Okay, tonight you can have boiled and deep fried and marinated hippopotamus earlobes or else you can have chocolate pudding with custard.

She laughs. Chocolate pudding and custard, she says.

3

Confrontation number one: Fifty more yards until he reaches the school gates. He is dragging his feet. A knotted pain in the pit of his stomach. Blood throbbing in his wrists. The inside of his head like a Mediterranean hotel room –every noise too loud, every noise loaded with jarring echoes.

They seem to take form out of his fraught imagination. As if his fear has bodied them forth. Warlow with his spotty sepulchral face and darting snake eyes and scrawny overcharged body. Dixon with his grazed hands, his boxer shuffle and dismal smell of gravy. Jones with his comedian’s eyebrows, his cruel mouth and strutting imperious show of masculinity. It’s eloquent of how unhappy Sam is that they are the most pulse-quickening presences in his life. More so than Nick Swallow. More so than his grandmother. Warlow snatches his bag, rips