So for those of you who are interested, here's my short story, and a congratulations to the 21 entries who were published and everyone else in the competition who was brave enough to enter. Roll on next year…
If I Were a Blackbird
‘If I were a blackbird, I’d whistle and
sing.’
The song drowns
out my other thoughts, my granddad’s voice still fresh. I’d give all my pencils
and paints just to have him here. But I can’t, so I sing his songs to myself.
One of infinite fragments of Patrick Busby I wish I’d recorded on my phone,
just to listen to when I need him. A fourteen-year-old boy who still needs his
granddad, I bet I’m the only one.
‘Am I
weird-looking, Eve?’ I ask across the picnic blanket. ‘Be honest.’
Eve Quinn
stares back at me, a half chewed ball of melon puffing her cheek like a
hamster.
‘When you ask
questions like that, yeah,’ she states, taking a big swallow.
I begin to
reply but my head jerks to the side with a wet slap.
‘You get radio
on those things, Busby?’ The shout comes from across wet field by the pond that
divides the boy’s and girl’s schools. I came to St George’s to escape people
like this.
I wipe the side
of my face with the handkerchief Eve hands me, and catch her looking down at
her sandwich.
‘Ignore them,’ she
mumbles. She never acknowledges them,
but she doesn’t stand up for me either. I watch them move towards the woods at
the east end of the pond, laughing. I gaze over at the sunflower field in the
west: a yellow line in the distance tracing the outline of my favourite place
to draw.
‘I don’t know
why they ever thought a lake would stop boys and girls slipping through the
hedges to meet up,’ Eve says, changing the subject like always. ‘There’s all
sorts of ways across.’
I nod, taking
another sandwich.
‘I mean there’s
the boats?’
I imagine I’m a
pirate, sailing away. I know they’re meant for rowing practice, and I’d never
voice my fantasies to anyone, not Eve, definitely not Dad. Mum had listened,
before she died too.
‘Why don’t you tell someone?’ Eve’s looking at
me and I can tell I’ve been staring into nothing. ‘And stop that!’ she snaps,
batting my hand from the eyebrow where I’ve begun to pluck the brown hairs from
the end. I’ve tried everything; plastering my fingers, wearing gloves, but
still I pull.
Her
blue-streaked, black hair stands up at funny angles, her nose too long and
pointed. Why isn’t she picked on for that?
She reaches
across the blanket for another jam sandwich. That’s why I like her. Not many
girls still pack a chequered blanket when they go for picnics, or go for
picnics full stop in November.
‘Because it’s
hard over here.’ I always say the same thing. Those five easy words that make
my life seem more difficult than everyone else’s.
‘But that’s the
point, Callum,’ she pleads, pushing the plate of bready triangles closer to my
toes. ‘Do you think it’s not hard for us? Everyone has struggles. We all find
ourselves targets sometimes. You either learn to dodge or throw something back.
We come here because it’s different, because there’s something particular in
the romance of the two opposing manors lost in the woods.’
She looks so
suddenly embarrassed. My bald brow crinkles and my usually affectionless hand
goes out to comfort her. Touching her purple-tighted knee I panic and consider
pulling away, but decide to leave it there and she lets me.
‘You don’t talk like real people.’ Before I
can stop myself, I add: ‘You’d be interesting to draw.’ My cheeks flare and I’m
quick to avert my eyes.
‘We are weird,
Busby,’ she says, laughing. My hand slips onto the blanket. ‘And the truth is I
came here because my mum and dad did. They met over the lake just like us.
They’d go crazy if they knew we were meeting like this though.’
I think of my
parents, just for a second, the mother who died long ago, the father who
forgets my birthday: the reason why I miss my granddad so much, sitting at home
with his stacks of Irish records and dusty old draught board. My rock after Mum
died, singing me Irish songs about blackbirds when I needed comfort; now a constant
reminder that my excuse for a father is all I have left.
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘You’re a boy,
and boys are dangerous and are only interested in getting me pregnant.’
‘I don’t really
think I’d ever do that,’ I reassure, laughing and scratching my earlobe. My hand
unconsciously creeps along my brow and tugs on the sparse hairs.
‘Stop it!’ Eve
bats my hand away again. ‘You do it for everything!’
‘I can’t help
it,’ I snap. I fall silent, guilty. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t say
sorry,’ she says. ‘I just don’t want to be the one who makes you do that.’
‘I always do
it,’ I say. ‘When I’m nervous, happy or when I’m drawing or reading, I find my
hand pulling and I know I can’t stop. It’s become comfortable and I hate it.’
She has such a
pitying expression on her face I want to pull again.
‘Except…’ I
say, hesitant.
‘Except what?’
she pushes.
‘When I read
about art,’ I admit. ‘Or when I sit in the sunflower field and get caught up in
the life and death in a living thing.’ I always bring my sketchbook in my bag,
even when I’m not going to art. I aim to join great men, unappreciated in their
times. ‘That’s when my hands stop
twitching. If I could take a tent and set up camp there, away from the school,
away from Dad, then I would. I came here because he’s fed up of me. I thought I
could escape, but all I’ve found is a trap; a lie.’
Eve is smiling
and I don’t know why.
‘You don’t talk
like real people either,’ she says. ‘Come on then.’ She jumps up, taking the
hamper and the blanket from underneath me. ‘We’re going to the sunflower field;
you can draw a masterpiece and I can draw stick-men.’
*
I love art on
Thursday mornings. I always get the seat by the window and take to my work with
fresh vigour with the beautiful expanse of Norfolk spread before me. Maybe Eve
is right, maybe it is beautiful here.
I smile. I
filled about six pages in my sketchbook sitting with her in the sunflower
field, concealed by the tall stalks. She didn’t draw but danced around instead,
leaping from stones and fiddled with yellow petals.
But it’s the
separation from her, locked in my dorm room at night where my hand starts to
twitch. The silent, ever present urge to fix the stabbing pain in my brow.
I wish my
window opened more than two inches. If it did, I’d want to creep along the
ledge that runs around this old country house like a spider. Maybe I’d sneak
into their rooms and bite them as
they sleep.
But even as a
spider I know I’d be gutless.
I think of Mrs
Turner’s last words that day:
‘All great
artists have their troubles. Sometimes great art is born in response to great
pain and terrible sadness.’
And those three
terrible boys just sit at the back, sticking two fingers in their mouths.
But Mrs
Turner’s words speak to me. My world is a picture, and if I stop and appreciate
it every now and again, the struggles beauty is born under isn’t wasted.
I swing my
canvas bag onto my shoulder. But I turn into a wall. A cigarette-breathed wall
named James Spade.
‘Why you
smiling Sput-dick?’ he spits. I assume that penis puns on satellites are the
height of sophisticated, ear-related humour.
I wish I could
articulate the thoughts in my head, the long list of scathing retorts I’ve been
building for months.
‘I
don’t know,’ I murmur instead.
‘I thought
Turner said you had to experience pain to do good stuff.’ He smirks. ‘I thought
I’d help her little artist.’
I realise his
friends are behind him, like hyenas to his prowling predator.
James seizes a
clump of my t-shirt and pushes me back onto the desk. I try to scream but he
clamps a reeking hand over my mouth. I kick but I’m weak and he’s well trained
in torture.
‘You want to be
like that guy who cut off his ear?’ he sneers.
‘It’d be an improvement.’ One of the others passes him the scissors.
I’m sweating,
and crying, and struggling but it’s pointless. I can’t move under the bigger
boy’s weight. Maybe I deserve this.
He’s still
laughing as he places the blunt blades to my ear. I hear the slide of metal on
metal and it’s so intimately close I think I’m going to throw up.
I’m shouting
‘please’ and ‘no’ but his hand is a gag. My tears are rivers down the sides of
my face and the table is paper for him to draw in my blood.
He clamps the
blades down, laughing. The pain is immeasurable, intense, spreading out from
the point with overpowering force. The cold of metal and the air on my exposed,
bloody flesh is painful and horrific and disgusting and I do throw up this
time.
He’s repulsed;
blood and vomit all over him as he draws back and I scream, scream, scream. My
voice fills the room, the school and the moor and I wish I would die.
*
It’s been two
weeks. James got kicked out of school. Of course he did. I’m due to give
evidence at his court hearing.
I have no
eyebrows left to speak of. The helplessness of it all keeps me in my hospital
bed for a week, and now in the solitude of my dorm bed a week later. Dad
doesn’t want to know. ‘Should have fought
back,’ he said. ‘Didn’t I teach you nothing?’
I can’t sleep
because my ear still hurts so much. Mrs Chudleigh in the sick room said: ‘You just have to sleep on your right side’.
As if I can control how I sleep. I end up sprawled out most nights and
sometimes on the floor.
This means I’m
awake, like usual when the rapping comes at the misty window above my bed; a
square of starry night covered by leaden criss-cross panes.
I jump up and
throw open the moth-eaten old curtains.
She looks like
a pixie in the moonlight, like Tinkerbell coming to take me back to Neverland
after I decided growing up wasn’t worth it. Her blue hair is tied back and
she’s wearing a Ramones t-shirt.
Clearly she’s
taken to desperate measures to reach me. She braces herself, seizes the frame
of the window and pulls. The supposedly ‘suicide-proof’ locks break easily with
her touch.
‘How did you do
that?’ I ask, shocked.
‘Grow a pair,
Busby!’ she challenges. ‘You’ve got to put your back into it.’
Instead of
climbing in, she stays perched there, looking at me.
‘Come on,’ she
commands. ‘This place is so much cooler at night.’
I pick at the
hem of my pyjama top.
‘Callum Busby,’
she states. ‘You’ve ignored me for two weeks and I’m willing to forgive you.
Now have you ever wondered why I bothered staying friends with you?’
I stare back,
scared of the answer.
‘It’s because
you impress me.’ She smiles. ‘You take sticks of graphite and tubes of paint
and you create the most beautiful things. You’re picked on because you’re
amazing. And you know what? I like you because I can relate to you. You think
it’s not bullying when every bloody person in this school, bullies or not, sees
right through me because I’m different, because I have weird hair.’ She pauses,
like the words are a struggle. ‘Because I’m not beautiful. I like you because
you are the only one here who actually sees me as a person. Now let me try and
do the same.’
I move towards
the windowsill.
‘Really, Busby?’
She raises her eyebrows. ‘You think you can scale the walls in your jammies?
Get dressed!’
I redden and
turn my back so she can’t see anything. When I turn back round, fully dressed,
she seems curious, even smiling a little.
We edge along
the building and I tremble. I didn’t think I was afraid of heights, but tiptoeing
along a ledge, five stories above the hard, November ground is either wildly
brave or mindlessly stupid.
‘You alright,
Callum?’ Eve asks, as if she is walking through a field with miles of space
either side of her.
‘Fine,’ I snap.
‘Is it the fun
you’re afraid of?’
‘There’s fun
and there’s having a death-wish,’ I hiss.
‘What was
that?’
‘Nothing,’ I
mumble.
‘Better. Now
it’s not much further and it’s worth it.’
We walk past
window after window, with arches far too fancy for boy’s dorms. Sometimes we
pause and dart across, one at a time, because the curtains are open.
There’s a
window ajar and Eve ducks inside. I follow cautiously, grateful to move away
from the scary Ledge of Doom.
I hear a
scratch and hiss and Eve’s face bursts into orange by the flame of a match. Her
eyes are shadowed as if she’s about to start telling a ghost story.
There’s a door
beside a narrow staircase, apparently winding up into nothing.
I look to the
door, then to Eve, no-brows raised.
‘It’s locked,
Sherlock,’ she says. ‘Come on, it’s amazing.’
She grabs my
hand and pulls, her fingers sliding down my palm. I shiver.
I follow her up
the stairs and pray my palms don’t start to sweat.
It’s narrow and
I think I’m going to get stuck as we weave our way higher. Eve slips through
easily with her small, boyish frame.
I collapse
through the hole and flump to the floor. I straighten up, cough and gasp all at
once.
We’re in an
attic, but it’s unlike any attic I’ve ever seen. The ceilings are vaulted, with
beams as thick as a car and heights too dizzying and dark to make out. All
along the sides are windows; arched like the dorms, though these are glassless
and skinny. I imagine I’m an archer, firing my bow against the horde of
oncoming foes.
In the middle
of the room there’s a little camp stove and two sleeping bags.
‘We’re making
s’mores,’ Eve states, as though that’s a normal thing to do at 2 o’clock in the
morning on a Tuesday. ‘And you’re going to tell me which of those pricks did
that to your ear.’
I’m silent.
‘Stop it.’ She grabs my arm.
I look down and
there they are, the eyebrow hairs between my thumb and forefinger; staring up
at me with accusing looks on their follicles.
‘I heard what
happened, Callum, everyone across the pond is talking about it. So there’s no
point lying to me. Sit and talk. I’ll cook.’
‘They cornered
me,’ I begin, my voice cracking a little.
I think it’s
better to just start. My hand aches from the effort. I want to pull. I want to
deface my features because they made me feel insignificant.
The smell of
marshmallows and chocolate fills the cavernous space. Eve cooks and listens.
‘There were
three of them, like always. I started to cry.’
Eve doesn’t
well up for me. She only keeps eye contact, not sad or happy. Neutral: a blank
canvas ready for my expression.
‘You know what
they usually do; hit me where I can’t show people, dunk my head in the toilet,
draw penises on my paintings. But this time it was different. I don’t know why,
it just is sometimes I guess. Maybe it was because I cried. Maybe I looked
weak. Maybe it looked like I deserved it.’
My hand is up
again and Eve doesn’t move, just looks and I see her. I lower it.
The s’more is
on the plate now, gooey and chocolaty. She crosses the space between us and
holds my hand.
‘God it hurt so much Eve. I felt the steel
beneath my skin and I wanted to move it but I couldn’t. I thought I was going
to die in the one room I feel like a person. And there was so much blood.
That’s why James ran away. That’s how they caught him and expelled him in the
end. But you know what? I’m glad I stayed here.’
Eve smiled and
came and hugged me, squeezed me on the dusty floor.
‘You know what
I want you to do?’ she says. ‘I want you to paint and trap that day forever in
the paper. Then you take it to the art room and hang it on the wall to show it
doesn’t scare you any more. Because, to be quite honest, Busby, I think you’d
look better with eyebrows.’
I nod slowly,
face buried in her neck. I always love the curve of her collarbone.
‘I’m sorry I
ignored your problems,’ I whisper. ‘I see you, I see you all the time.’
She snuggles
her face into my hair; her warm breath prickling the nerves that never thought
they’d be touched.
I know that in
Eve I’ve found the person who grabs my hand in the middle of the night and
takes me on an adventure when I’m supposed to have grown out of them. She
smiles when I’m stupid and doesn’t mind when I’m naked.
In the end, I
need Eve because I love her and she loves me in one way or another.
In the end, she
makes me feel at home.
*
The
sun rises bright and true the very next morning, and I wake with a
determination I’m unaccustomed to. Eve looks completely at peace where she lies
in her sleeping bag and I leave her there. I don’t even know if I’ll tell her
it was me when she sees what I’ve done. She’ll know.
I cross the open
space and travel back down the staircase, the cool warmth of the morning sun
giving me the strength I need to travel forward.
Late last
night, lying awake in my sleeping bag, I decided to take matters into my own
hands. Eve has shown me that sometimes a leap of faith is needed. You need to
do things for yourself if you’re ever going to pull yourself from a rut. Eve
deals with her loneliness through exploring this old place, and now she has me.
She’ll always have me.
I have to make
a statement. And now, in the early hours of the morning when everything seems
like a good idea, I move with purpose.
In a few
minutes I’m along the ledge outside, travelling back to my room and grabbing my
bag. It has everything I need.
Creeping
through the school at this hour makes me feel powerful, like the old house is
mine along with everything in it.
I exit the
building and the wall of ice-cold air hits me and fails to knock me down. I
don’t shiver as I round the building, the dew on the long grass wetting the
hems of my trousers.
Setting my bag
down on the grass I survey my canvas. The image I’ve had in my mind for so
long, the painting screaming to escape me finally has an exit.
I unzip the
rucksack and tip everything to the ground.
I work with a
feverish grace that only finds me when I have a brush in my hand.
My arms move as
though possessed, creating great sweeps and swathes of colour. I work for an
hour at least, deeply in my artist’s trance.
The wet of cold
acrylic sprays my face with every brushstroke. A rainbow of colour washes over
my hand, making me a mix of every painting I’ve ever created. The colour finds
my bed hair, sticking out at odd angles, now coloured with the black of
feathers and blue of clear sky and shimmering white of softest clouds.
Eventually I
step back, happy with my work. I’m out of breath, quite proud of my own daring.
It’s graffiti
of the highest order.
I stand, my
brush in one hand. Soaked by the grass, sweat, paint and the morning.
On the wall is
my blackbird. Swooping through the air with cold wind in its feathers. Eve told
me to hang a painting in the art room for everyone to see. I did one better.
I’ll do as she
does and look at the eternal black smudge on my hand, and the paint under my fingernails
as badges of honour. I relax, knowing that I’ve found someone who sees the
world in colour, not just black and white. I turn it outwards and feel the
spread of warmth and thrill in my chest.
The blackbird
on the wall is my moment of daring, my guide and my inspiration.
I am free.
I am the
blackbird. I whistle and sing.
