Georgie

Georgie is vermillion.

More than this.

Georgie is frankincense. Georgie is nightingales. Georgie is hashish.

When Georgie walks around, forgotten words and exotic intonations crackle out of him like old Spanish folk songs from a wind up record player.

The kids in the village don't like it.

"Fucking hippie!" They yell out.

"Jew boy!"

"Queer!"

It's "Jew boy" that Georgie hates the most.

Sure, he always wears the same baggy, faded jeans. He prefers hoodies and long jackets to sparkly dresses or bra tops, even on the hottest day of the year. But Georgie isn't a boy. They aren't a girl either.

Georgie is all possibilities. A rain storm. An oboe concerto. Christmas cake.

Georgie keeps a piece of old rope in their bedroom. They find it one day walking through the marshes, knotted around a snapped branch and snagged on an old hip bone. They use it to count the abuse the kids in the town throw at them. One ridge for one slur. Georgie doesn't measure in metric or imperial. They measure in twists of wounding. Ninety eight twists is about three and a half meters or however many feet that is.

They keep caterpillars from Uncle Walters garden in an old tobacco tin next to the wounding rope. Big, fat, red and hairy caterpillars that might be dangerous but never bite or sting or explode their hairs at Georgie. They all look after each other. Georgie gives them water and green cabbage leaves whilst they give Georgie information. You might think caterpillars can't speak, and you'd be right, but they die deliberately. Each one dies on a particular day and that day, every day, is a letter on a wildlife calendar that Georgie has adapted. Death spells out a word. Then words.

"Hey" is the first word, then "Please".

Georgie thinks they might be spelling out a whole sentence, but the next word is "Canal" and Georgie thinks that doesn't make any sense at all, so they just jot them down as single, miracle caterpillar words instead. Important words that will mean something to someone else one day if someone just keeps a note of them.

Georgie wets the rope sometimes with rain water from the blocked gutter underneath their window. It makes their room smell like the sea and old bones. Broken grass from underneath a tent. Dad.

Dad takes them camping by the sea in an old bell tent that's almost white and has little patches of mildew around the peg holes. They collect fish bones and crab shells from the tide line and tie them together to make aeroplanes and star maps. At night they take the maps and aircraft up to the cliff edge and read the messages in the stars, before throwing the aeroplanes hard into the wind and watching them float up towards Capricorn.

Georgie misses Dad. One day he just isn't there anymore and nobody talks about him ever again. When Georgie asks Uncle Walter, he says he doesn't know what they mean. Georgie is Dad, always has been as far as they know and they must be dreaming. When Georgie gets cross the doctors give them pills that make them feel sick and sleep for a week. When they wake up, the kids from the city have stolen their bike and they have to do the washing up every night with a person they've never met.

When everyone is asleep, Georgie creeps back downstairs and opens the cupboards and drawers all around the house looking for clues about Dad. They find a letter addressed to someone called Ash that just says "not yet", an old bus ticket to Glastonbury and a single dark hair on the back of an armchair that looks a lot like Dad's when he was younger.

In one room there's a baby standing up in its cot. It smiles at Georgie when they come in and offers them a soft fabric bunny. They take it and stroke down its ears, but it makes Georgie feel a little sad so they give it back with a half smile. The room smells of old milk and stale nappies. It makes Georgie want to get out.

There's a short piece of rope in the cot. Georgie almost doesn't see it, what with the pillows and knotted up blankets. But it's there in the top corner. It has three twists. Georgie smiles at the baby and runs a sympathetic hand through their fine straw hair. They whisper an apology and pick a sippy cup up from the floor, sprinkling a little apple juice on the rope to make the room smell nice.

When Georgie disappears everybody goes looking for them. The police, the neighbours, the kids from the nation, but they can't find them anywhere. Dad is back, talking quietly and crying on TV as if he knows who they're looking for, but he doesn't. He only talks about purple t-shirts and punk rock and lop eared rabbits and nobody knows what that means. He says Georgie has brown eyes, is six foot two and has three parallel scars on their left arm, but Georgie doesn't have any of those things. They wonder how anyone will find them looking for all the wrong stuff.

The police hunt all over the house, in the small backyard with the rusty basketball hoop, in the alley ways that criss cross the estate and in the wasteland behind the garages behind the off license. At one point somebody calls out that they've found something and everybody rushes over. There's a body there, but it's not Georgie's body. It's the body of someone no one even knows is lost.

An old person. A writer apparently, who everyone thought was writing away in their caravan but wasn't. They've been here for so long that their hair is spread out through the soil like mushroom mycelium and their phone won't turn on anymore. The forensics team who dig them out say that their hair reaches all the way across the wasteland, under the paddock where the gypsies keep their horses and down to the canal. It tumbles out bank side in delicate grey ribbons that intertwine with the branchlets of a willow tree.

In a few months they stop looking for Georgie altogether. The laminated signs fall off the lampposts. The media go to Tokyo. Nobody wears their t-shirts anymore. Detective Hunt is still looking though. He has a picture of Georgie on his wall and lots of red string that knits together faces and places like a fisherman's map. He shuffles notebooks about and calls youth hostels in-between checking his Twitter feed and drinking green tea.

But Georgie isn't on Twitter, or TikTok, or CB radio. They don't have a handle, a hashtag or a page. They don't follow anyone, share stuff or like things and they aren't disappeared either. They're right here wondering why everyone is ignoring them.

They drop things in Detective Hunt's tea and rustle the pictures on his wall. They call out into Dad's face so many times their voice goes hoarse. They sing sea shanties into Uncle Walter's ears with their new found folk voice and tug at his huge leathery hands.

The baby is in Georgie's room now, so they kill four caterpillars over seven weeks to spell out "Help", but the baby isn't writing it down. They slap it across the face to make it cry, but no one who comes seems to understand that it's their hand pinking its cheek. They just wipe the baby with cream and give it juice and chocolate.

Georgie even finds the kids from the world and begs them for abuse, whatever they have they'll take it. They give nothing, so Georgie curls up at their feet, amongst the cigarette ends, drinks cans and little splats of greasy spit. They twine around their ankles, snuggling into the folds of their track pants and drifting in and out of sleep as they mouth the words of their banter absentmindedly.

Georgie is a galaxy. Georgie is the sound of wind in young chestnut leaves. Georgie is dark inside when it's still light out.

Image: Frederick Trapp Friis, "Woman Floating in a River Attended by Two Female Spirits", c1895