is what’s interesting. Because there, at the edge of my vision, the branches wiggle again at the water’s edge.
In the usual spot.
I sit forward, unsurprised but eager. I’ve been looking forward to seeing him, to seeing the scrape that had upset me yesterday bandaged and a boy back to being a boy. Sure, the injury may have been unpleasant, but there are times when unpleasantness brings rewards. Now the boy will have war wounds to prove his courage and offer bragging rights before his peers. Every boy needs to have those: stories connected to little scabs, scars, offering fleshy proof that ‘I was brave, guys, and all grown up.’ Men seem to need them, too, though their scars tend to be deeper, their falls more brutal, and the evidence of maturity even more fleeting.
He dutifully emerges, as if on cue, and promptly takes his customary three steps down to the edge of the pond. Then, as always, he stands like a statue, his stick in hand, its tip just piercing the water. The familiar scene. My own comforting reassurance of normalcy. My heart loosens with gentle satisfaction.
But my breath chokes in my throat. The blood, I immediately realize, is still on his arm, just as fresh as yesterday. It glistens in the grey light seeping down from the overcast sky: moist, liquid, fresh. Even at the distance, I can see a stream of it flow along the path of his dirty skin towards his hand, trailing brown edges where the red blood meets dust and grime.
There is no bandage. His wound hasn’t been cleaned. Hasn’t been tended to at all.
But it’s not just the blood that stops my breath and keeps it halted. The blood’s not even the worst of it. There’s more, today. I’m glued at first on the injury I remember – poor child, still all scraped up – but finally my glance wanders a few inches to my left. Initially, I think it’s the shadows, a trick of the light; but then a sunbeam pierces the clouds and I see directly. The boy’s other arm is overwhelmed by something oval, black. I think at first it’s a patch of some kind, maybe a dark bandage over a different scrape. But it’s not fabric. Almost mirroring the wound on his left arm, I can see now that the large mark on his right is a bruise, deep and discoloured. The kind so dense it looks like it digs down to the bone. It extends over the whole of his forearm, from his elbow to the hand that clutches his favourite stick. Blues and purples and almost-greens that should never be the colours defining the skin of a boy.
I can’t fully focus. This isn’t right. A child so small should not be walking around with such wounds. I try to look into his face, into his eyes, to see if they’re watering, filled with pain. They ought to be filled with pain. But I can’t make out his features through the shadows and distance. Only the basic outline of his face, a few details – the bumps of his ears beneath his hair, the shadow that barely defines his nose. If only I could see him a little better; but the sunbeam is interrupted by tree branches high above, restricting its light to his shoulders and below.
I really have to approach him. Someone must take him to get cleaned up somewhere, at the very least. Get that scraped arm washed off.
But the boy senses my thoughts – his motions are almost that synchronized – and turns. Three steps and he is gone, the bristly green leaves of the Cryptomeria japonica brushing closed behind him.
EVENING
I cannot sleep. Not tonight. It’s not my usual insomnia, either. My normal night-time torture is more gentle: a sustained, unwavering, yet calm refusal to let sleep come, with no specific cause and no specific cure. I’ve grown accustomed to the ruthless consistency of its long-game attack. I know what it’s like to have no thoughts fill my head but still find sleep a foreigner, and to start counting sheep at number one, knowing I’ll easily make it to a thousand without my eyelids growing the slightest bit heavier. One sheep after another, waiting their turn without drama or protest, each mocking the sleep I crave.
But tonight’s insomnia is different, a punctuated sort of thing. Pokes and prods that bolt me to alertness every time I start to fade. And my body is actually fading, that’s the strangest part. I’m genuinely tired tonight. Exhausted. But each time my body starts to give way, to give in, my mind pounces and shoves sleep off.
I am thinking of the boy. He’s all I’m thinking about. Those arms, bloodied and bruised. The fact that I did nothing. I don’t understand his silence and I can’t fathom his threshold for what must be tremendous pain, but mostly I feel guilty that I saw a child with wounds he shouldn’t have had, whom no one had tended to since the day before, and now I’m here comfortably in bed – awake or otherwise – and I didn’t so much as say a word to console him. I feel ashamed, and embarrassed with myself.
This all must change, I resolve, and the change must begin with my behaviour. It’s not socially responsible just to sit on one’s own in such circumstances. I must take my courage in my hands and get my posterior off my bench.
Tomorrow, I’m going to say something.
The new day hasn’t begun well, and that’s not entirely a surprise. The organic Vitamin-C-and-Zinc tablets in the yellow jars are selling themselves, but my mind is otherwise occupied. The sun is brighter today – none of the half fog / half overcast sky that sullied yesterday – so I ought to be in brighter spirits. My mood so often follows the weather outside the window: bright when it’s bright, grey when it’s grey. But I’ve spent the morning grey when it’s orange, troubled, as I knew I would be, from the moment I awoke, by the memory of the boy.
Memory allows the space for analysis, and in the scope of such analysis I recognize that there are a few features about this child that should, just possibly, not have me in quite such a state over his present circumstances. He’s never looked entirely in top form, not on all the many occasions I’ve seen him. That’s the first reality that sinks in. He’s never been one of those made-up children that urban parents produce as if from a factory or mail-order supply. The kind sculpted out of name-brand ‘playwear’ that’s stain-, wrinkle- and pleasure-resistant, trained to hold their autographed football rather than throw it, ‘because the grass is so dirty, Junior, and leaves marks.’ The boy is rougher than that. A little out of place for the middle of San Francisco, as if the Midwestern prairies had lost one of their member in this peninsular metropolis; and this child, who would have looked at home on an Oklahoma farmstead, had found himself wandering through the cultured greenery a stone’s throw from Silicon Valley. Out of his environment, caught askance out of time, with a body and a posture not quite sure what to make of this different jungle. The kind of boy who inserts himself into a tyre swing and kicks until his feet are above his head and the arcs so high the rope goes slack when it crests. Who sits in the muddiest patch of the field, just to sense what it’s like to feel the liquid sludge seep over his ankles. Who’s never owned a ball, because balls cost money; but has also never wanted one, because he’s always had access to sticks, and sticks are so easily horses, and rocket ships, and swords and sceptres.
But children don’t wander alone from Little House on the Prairie to the Inner Sunset, I know this full well. The fact that he’s not an Abercrombie Child doesn’t mean he’s not from around here. Not everyone in the City on the Bay is rolling in start-up fortunes and Union Square attire, and it’s possible to be poor and haggard in the city. Perhaps more normal than I generally appreciate. It’s the glitter that catches the eye, they say. Beneath it there’s usually a lot more glue and bare cardboard than we care to notice.
I’m
