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One

Home

They say that's where the heart is. If said heart had been ripped, still beating, from your chest and thrown to the floor for the dark shadows to feast upon then yes, 'home' was where my heart resided.

Fond memories wanted to swim to the forefront of my mind to play a smile across the strings of my lips. Unfortunately, they swam against the tide of dismay and tragedy which flooded my thoughts.

Still. Home. The elastic of Life always seems to twang us back somehow. Mentally, emotionally or physically. Sometimes all three – a heady cocktail, part the sense of being enveloped in a warm blanket and part the desolation of having nowhere else to go.

Click your heels together three times and repeat: "There's no place like..."

Yes. Indeed. It's funny what people say - or don't. Nobody mentions there's no place like a good restaurant with a decent bottle of wine and a well cooked steak, smothered in peppercorn sauce. No one seems to say there's no place like a hot bath after a long day.

No.

Home.

Always home.

And so I'm here. Back to where my heart apparently is. Back to where I grew up. Or was dragged up. Or crawled up. It's all a matter of perspective, though I suppose it doesn't matter at all. Whichever way I became who I am today, I am who I am. Whether it was painful or a field of dreams, it made me this person. That may not be a good thing, but I don't think it's a bad thing. I've turned out... ok.

Was that because of or despite my childhood? Did the past push me towards my present with a future of misery in mind? Or did my present, all the presents between now and then, fight my good fight and stick two fingers up to the then?

I don't know. All I do know is that I'm me, and I'm back.

I suppose it was obvious that I'd be drawn here first. I could easily have driven past my old school and on to my mother's. She still lives in the same three-bedroomed house she did when there were five of us there. Now she's on her own. My dad died. My brothers too. She just rattles around the house like one of the many pills she has to take. I should visit. Say hi. Say bye.

The school. Immense from a child's point of view. Not so from an adult's. I still remember the first time I walked the halls. I was still in primary school and we were visiting the 'Big School' we would be moving up to after the summer holidays. I remember feeling lost and tiny in the huge corridors. Now, I realise there's effectively one corridor. Only one. It snakes through the buildings like a millipede, the rooms coming off like hundreds of feet. Perspective. It changes so when the years dust away the sands of time with their wrinkles hands. What's left is a view of previous times only less warped than it once was.

I walk onto the grounds. They echo with the laughter and shouts of the thousands of children that ran and played and, hopefully, learned here. The building itself, however, is a bare husk, empty since its closure years before. A cast off tarantula skin still looking exactly like the original but merely a ghost you can actually touch. Do so, though, and it's likely to crumble under your fingertips. I reach out to touch the bricks, but my hand hesitates. What if the school, too, crumbles? What if the school stands but I, instead, disintegrate?

You can't live your life on 'What ifs', I told myself such a long time ago. Take life by the balls and swing it around.

Hence my hand not quite daring to touch the wall. Hence the rest of me not quite managing to force it.

A deep breath is meant to calm your nerves and steel your spirit. I take one. It seems to steal my spirit. Well, that worked.

My hand drops to my side without me knowing. Chicken. I walk further. A few steps and I'm at a corner, around which is the outer door to the sports hall. My hand, possibly because of my earlier berating, lifts and takes hold of the door handle. Locked, obviously. Still, the old tricks may still be effective.

Lift, pull, twist and push. The body remembers even when the brain has long since buried.

Summer nights breaking in to play football with my friends. Winter nights breaking in to play alone when my friends were not allowed out in the cold and the rain. Play or shelter. Take your pick. Sometimes a cardboard box is preferable to a warm bed if said bed is in a place where you're not welcome. Cardboard box or sports hall. Again, take your pick. Toss a coin. Heads or tails. Flip and catch.

The faint wind behind me squeezes past, eager to beat me over the threshold. Dust leaps up to dance in the sudden breeze, happy to be given a second of life. I watch until it settles back down and resumes its slumber. Then I follow the wind.

"Guilders, over here!" I shouted.

Tony hammered the ball across to me. Instead of stepping back to intercept, I moved forward. My innate misjudgement with anything involving sports came into play and the ball connected sharply with my groin. I fell to the floor, gasping as my fellow teammates alternatively laughed at my predicament and moaned at my usual rubbish footie skills.

The teacher tried his best to hide a smirk and nodded towards the changing room door. My exit. I did my best to walk proudly but managed only a pained shamble. The only aspect for which I could feel proud was holding off the tears until I was out of sight. Then they flowed. Then I thought my testicles were somewhere in my upper stomach. Then I felt my knees buckle.

Then I saw the blood.