rich boy, poor boy // frerard

rich boy, poor boy

The city seemed to always be cold to Gerard. The cold was a straight jacket, encasing him and making him shiver and quiver. The cool air blew around the bare bottoms of his legs where his shorts cut off and, although he wore a long sleeved shirt, it was very thin and worn out, and the arms were a little too short where he had grown out of it over time. No matter how hard the poor boy tried, he just could not get warm. His mother was trying her upmost to get him something new to wear, but she could not find the money, since the factory paid her a pitiful amount, even for the hours she worked.

The fifteen year old was unclean and ratty, with long black hair that was knotty and in need of a trim. A worn brown cap was placed atop of it, hiding some of the rodent's nest that was his hair. Gerard was a little on the chubby side, even though he only ate in pathetic quantities. His mother told him it was puppy fat, and that it suited him very well.

Gerard lived in a small, cramped little home in the 'scummy' parts of London, as people liked to call it, quite close to where the posh, rich people lived. There was no glass left in the windows - it had all chipped away over time and the local little boys had been kicking their footballs at the wall, and they had smashed it. The front door had a large hole in it, meaning the chilly, smoggy air was free to flow through the room. It was barely even a house. It was more like a shed.

The shed had just three rooms - a downstairs room and two upstairs rooms. There was a single bed in each of the rooms, one for each family. There was another family, along with Gerard, his younger brother Michael and their mother. The other family consisted of a mother and her four children. Gerard knew not what their names were, for they had not been living there for long, and he had forgotten after his mother had told him before. The other family had been sent to the workhouse - poor buggers. None of them worked, so the government kicked them out and sent them off to be separated and forced to work.

The bed had a thin mattress with springs sticking out all over the place, yet the three still managed to sleep there. There were grimy curtains draped across a rusty bar, only just clutching the wall. There was one blanket that the family shared, and it was awfully thin and filthy. Freezing was a common occurrence for them, especially in the harsh winters, when the snow would blow in through the missing window and the planks of wood boarded over the hole.

They didn't even have a toilet. There was a yard outside, and that was the closest thing they had to a toilet. It was particularly uncomfortable when it was raining and freezing to go outside and do your business. It was like a thousand piranhas nipping away at you.

Long story short: being poor was awful. Both Gerard and Michael - or Mikey as people called him - worked in a factory. The machines were dangerous and there were rumors of people being killed by them. Mikey was missing his little finger and his ring finger, after they got caught in a contraption as he was working. However he still continued to work. He worked in a different factory than Gerard, so they only really saw each other at night; Mikey left earlier than him in the mornings and he worked longer days - six o'clock in the morning until nine o'clock at night, while Gerard worked from seven thirty 'til eight.

They were both lucky with the times they worked - some children worked from four in the morning to very late hours at night. The boys always felt sorry for them.

As Gerard walked home from the factory at night, he trudged under the dim streetlights along the border of where the rich met the poor. On some occasions, snobs had looked at him disgustedly or spoken to him rudely. However being spoken to was very rare, as the rich would find it terribly embarrassing to be seen talking to a penniless boy such as himself.

Curiously, he would sometimes look over the black metal fences at the glorious houses on the other side, with their perfectly trimmed garden plants and neatly polished windows. He always dreamed of living in homes you could get lost in, with hundreds of rooms with no set purpose. Huge feasts for dinner every night, oh! How lovely it would be! But he knew his fantasies could never become reality, so he would just keep walking on home, just to sleep then work again.