Changing Speed

CHAPTER ONE: WHERE WE WERE

I could feel the warmth of blood dripping onto my face as I hung suspended, with only the seat belt preventing my head from obeying the law of gravity and meeting the roof of the rusting van. The wheels whirred as they spun looking for the road with which they no longer had contact, slower and slower until they whirred no more. The pain of my body began to fade. Darkness surrounded me. I could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing. I was nowhere and nowhere was a good place to be. I had nothing, only memories. Some good, some bad but memories nonetheless. My memories. No one could take them away from me. While I held onto them I was alive. I had too much left undone to let go. I wanted to let go. It would have been easier to let go. I had to hold onto them. To live with them. My memories.

 She said that they'd be moving in soon. The old girl never missed a trick. She knew everybody and everybody knew her. She was a nice old dear. Nosy, but a nice old dear. She'd been a good friend of my mother's for as long as I could remember. I'm going back some forty years or so and she must have been seventy-odd then. I can see her as if it was only yesterday. Wispy grey hair that used to fly in all directions from under the yellow and blue check scarf that never left her head. Well not that I saw anyway. The clothes she wore under her pinafore bloated her figure ensuring that if any curves were still present, they remained a mystery. Her face was weathered with battles won and battles lost. She'd always been a big churchgoer. Never slow at coming forward to offer help when it was needed and sometimes when it wasn't. Still there she was. 

I interrupted. I was glared at. Mum's tolerance level for me as a new teenager didn't improve dramatically as I got older. Back then I recall often straining to hear the dear in a scarf whenever she lowered her voice to a whisper. I seemed to be fascinated by the sounds of her jaws still working when her words had gone silent. I knew that if there was going to be anything of interest, the sound of the juices in her mouth being agitated signalled that it was the time to listen. She'd just whispered to mum and I wanted to know who I was going to see moving in.

The old scarf said that they had a boy about my age. That was as much as my presence was to be acknowledged. They leaned forward towards each other as the words again fell into silence with only their jowls keeping the conversation going. My interest in their conversation waned. I was pretty much a loner even then and the thought of a boy moving into our street was not something that was about to excite me.

The street we lived in was the more up-market end of a larger run-down council estate. I'd lived there since I was born and my parents some twenty years before that. I have one older brother and three older sisters. They regarded me as being spoilt. Looking back in their eyes I suppose I was but it would never have occurred to me.

I was an ordinary thirteen-year-old with the sullen moods and bouts of anger that I was to see in later years mirrored in my own son. I dealt with them as badly as a parent as I had done as a child. I was neither athletic nor unfit but perhaps lazy. It pleased my father that I played for the school football team so that much I did, as the goalkeeper.

It was in exchange for pleasing my father or for passing my eleven plus examination that I received an old second-hand guitar which I still have to this very day. I would spend most all of my spare time playing that guitar, usually in the privacy of my own bedroom and in front of the wardrobe mirror. I still recall with slight discomfort the first song I ever learned and played for my parents.

I wasn't destined for fame as a musician though it would earn me pocket money at various times in the future. I wasn't destined for very much at all and certainly not the priesthood as my parents, both devout Catholics, had hoped. That is I wasn't destined for very much at all until that day they moved in.

The boy that I'd been expecting was older than I was by about one and a half years. He wanted to know me as much as I wanted to know him so we became nodding dogs whenever we passed each other as if we belonged on show in the back window of somebody's car. The people had girls. Two girls. One was the same age as me and the other a year younger. I was as in love as any thirteen-year-old could be.