Dignity's Worth

Chapter One

PART ONE

Chapter One

TOKENTOWN, 1962

So this is where my story started. And if you have the slightest bit of curiosity about what was the truth behind what happened in this town of ours, you'd want to hear it from me. I'm the only one who can tell you the truth, you know. The real tragedies all struck in the 80's, but I'll probably set up a background first. Because if you don't know what the conditions were like, I doubt if you'll be able to understand anything that happened later.

So do we begin then? Good.

It was the usual routine for my parents, from home to work then back to home. They used to work real hard, those two. She worked as a nurse in one of those small hospitals and he used to work in some bookstore as a janitor. Life for those two was never out of the blue, always predictable, always the same. They'd go to bed at ten in the night, wake up at around six or seven. Then there was breakfast, a bath after that perhaps, and before you know it, back to work.

They lived in one of those old clusters of houses we used to have back in the time. There were these small rows of nice little homes lined up on the outskirts of the town. And although the places themselves were not spacious enough for a family to live in, the both of them got along pretty well. They were happy with what they had, at least I thought they were. We had a small kitchen, one bedroom, one living room, one bathroom and that was about it. There was a small garden in the outhouse and we used to have deer prancing around from time to time to eat whatever little vegetation grew there. Now sometimes the deer got annoying as well. But when their little children used to come and play around, then we took no offence to their activities. They were one of the very few animals who'd warmed up towards the human intervention in their natural habitat, mainly because both my parents never refused to help someone in need. Then it didn't matter if that 'someone' was just a hungry deer. Everybody got to eat, and everybody had to share.

They'd never thought about having a kid, my mum and dad. Hell, there was hardly enough money for even the both of them to get along. How were they gonna bring a child into the world without knowing where to get the money for that child, huh? They already had a small family with the deer in the garden, and though they only got to meet that family once or twice a week they were quite content with it. There was no need for a kid of their own to come around.

But these things are never planned are they? Something unexpected always tends to happen and before you know it my mother was gonna be having me in nine months. I couldn't wait to get started. Perhaps it was my excitement then that lead to me being born two months earlier than I was supposed to.

I wasn't your ordinary kid. And you could tell that the very moment I came into this world. I was underweight, I cried a lot more than I should've, I didn't feed properly, and I had to spend the first week of my life in a glass box that was something called the 'incubator'.

I wish I could say that everything became alright after that and we all had a jolly good time. But that wasn't it. See as a kid you don't know just how much you're parents are going through, and that's because you're selfish. All you really care about is your timings and your tantrums and your wants and your comfort.

There wasn't enough money in the house to keep it going. By the time I was six months old I'd spend most of my day in a cradle or on the ground trying to learn how to crawl. Can you believe that? Six months old already and couldn't even crawl. I was such a disgrace.

They'd named me Alexander after my grandfather who lived in Sicily back then. I liked my nickname Alex a lot better than my real name, but I ain't had no choice over who called me what. How did it matter anyways? Now I know what you're thinking. Italian kid, Italian family, must be fluent in the language right? Didn't work that way. See, my parents came to Tokentown a year after they got married. And this city's miles away from Italy. My father had to learn English because they wouldn't give him a job without that. My mother had to learn English because no one in the hospital understood what she was saying if she was speaking in Italian. And time is a weird thing. In just two years my parents were more English than Italian and that was just something that stuck.