Fast-Tracked And Other Stories

The Great Slingshot

If I ever have the time to sit down and pen my memoirs--how do famous people come up with such witty titles for theirs? I don't have that kind of imagination!--I reckon this childhood story would be the centrepiece. Overall, my spin on this merry-go-round they like to call life has been patently beige in terms of the colourful rags to riches retellings you'll get in a stocking-filler celebrity autobiography. No boisterous fame, no ghastly addictions succumbed to, toiled with and conquered just in time for a phoenixlike return to the public eye, nope, nothing really remarkable to report.

Beige.

If you take anything from this, let it be the understanding that everyone (even those who, like me, have excelled at keeping things on a fairly even keel) has something to tell. Because if I have this story in my locker, there's no doubt the most mundane person you ever come across has been through at least one astounding experience, too.

And when I refer to this as a story, I do of course mean true story, otherwise I wouldn't have claimed it to be memoir-worthy.

Back when we were seven, playing outdoors was our escape. We were the first generation born into this world of Wifi, app stores and social distancing. As you know, with everyone being confined to their homes, virtual reality would go on to be the world's escape, but back in 2020, a quirky little games machine called the Nintendo Switch was all the rage. Like everyone at the time, me and my mates were always logged into an old battle royale game, which was cool and all, but when it wasn't raining we dropped it in favour of meeting up in the street to hang out in person and dig holes in the muck with our bare hands.

Some nights, when the forecast was clear, we were allowed to camp out in Ellis' backyard. Under the twinkling stars in the wee small hours, with our Switch batteries drained and our bodies coming down off sugar rushes, was when things were apt to veer a wee bit off-piste.

Global warming, a nuclear winter, never getting a job due to the advent of robots, were all current-day fears. It's a great motivator, fear--how else would humankind have scraped by for the last two and a half million years? Running from predators on the plains, finding somewhere safe to sleep, stamping out newly discovered civilisations before they could fashion boats to invade our homelands, we think of ourselves as being so far removed from these primitive times and yet, we wouldn't be here if not for them. Fear has gotten us here.

Fear binds us across the ages.

"So, what are you scared of, Bamford?" Ellis asked me, halting his monologue to draw a half-burnt marshmallow from the fire and take a bite. "Hot!" He laughed as it oozed down his chin. "But so worth it!"

Just then, I was scared of getting an upset tummy from the soot my marshmallow had been caked with, but that was small potatoes compared to the fear-driven existence of our ancestors, and with Ellis being in one of his moods, it was best to oblige him with a good answer.

"Remember that night you brought out your flipchart and showed us your plan to steal sweets from Thwaites Sweetshop?" Morrison asked. "I never said it at the time, but I was feared you'd make us go through with it. Could you imagine what Thwaites would have done to us if she caught us?" He shivered, then swished his skewer through the dirt, scoring out whatever he'd been doodling.

"That plan was foolproof and you know it! Thwaites is as deaf as a doorknob; half the time I come out of there hoarse from shouting what sweets I want."

What Ellis said was true enough, Thwaites was hard of hearing, but she'd still have had our guts for garters if we tried to enact Ellis plot to steal a handful of chews.

"You two are no fun any more," Ellis pouted.

Living on Penn Street, we didn't have to concern ourselves with attacks from wild boars or anything else Ellis had expounded about early man's touch-and-go survival. There was something in him that wanted to manufacture that conflict, that danger, and now, with all these decades of hindsight under my belt, I understand where he was coming from--in-game it was trivial, we died and retried all the time; it would have been far more dangerous to wrong Thwaites because that would have had real-world repercussions. For Ellis, pushing the envelope of what we could do and survive in the real world was where the thrill lay.