He was approaching the town’s main square. An open semicircle surrounded by the post office, cop-shop, paper-decorated Chinese takeaway, a couple of forlorn-looking stores, and a courthouse. A tall wooden statue of a forestry worker, with his shirt’s sleeves rolled up and holding a chainsaw, stood in the middle, his gaze fixed on the town below. Cigarette butts and empty bags of potato chips were scattered around the man’s feet.
Charlie looked down the road past the courthouse and the corner where a library and the town’s only high school stood. The library entrance was much bigger than he remembered, vivid colours of the mural painted around it glistened in the sun. For a moment Charlie felt the urge to walk into the school’s yard and check whether the opening in the fence he cut all those years ago might still be there. He went to a lot of trouble to make it big enough for the two of them to pass through. Smuggling tools was not a problem. He was always good at woodwork and had almost free access to the school’s workshop. The trouble was how to work on the fence without being seen by anyone, especially any of his classmates or the school’s janitor. In the end, he did it all at night and returned the tools before school started. He wanted to make sure nobody found out.
As if slotted into an old-fashioned projector, a picture of the day he had shown her the opening for the first time appeared in Charlie’s mind. It was winter, and snowflakes twirled in the sharp air before landing on the heavy branches of the tall pine trees planted in a small cluster at the edge of the field. He had chosen that part of the school field to cut the opening because of those trees. They sheltered the fence perfectly. It was what he always wanted; to keep her safe, sheltered. Ever since she first arrived at their school.
Charlie was in his final year for the second time because his old man was adamant all of his boys would finish high school and did not give up even when Charlie had to repeat the year because of his absences. What Charlie really wanted was to quit school and find a job with the local forestry gang. The money was good, and almost all his mates were doing the same. But the old man threatened to throw him out on the street and break his neck in the process, so Charlie returned to school.
It was a dusty afternoon of late summer, bronze and gold shimmering across the desks, when the teacher walked in with a blonde girl in tow. The teacher was a slim woman wearing an oversized pair of glasses and a bright orange scarf. She tapped her desk a couple of times and introduced the girl standing next to her, “It is my pleasure to welcome Ines to our school. Ines has only recently moved to our town and is still getting used to it. I am sure we will all do our best to make Ines feel part of our little community.” A few boys sniggered. The blonde girl did not raise her eyes or swipe the long strands of her blonde hair off her face while the teacher was talking. She walked to the desk the teacher indicated and slipped into its empty seat.
Charlie thought, “the girl has an odd name and does not look like someone who is meant to be at school.” She did not carry a school bag, and her long, flowery dress reminded Charlie of the photographs in the magazines his Ma left behind, that he had stashed under the old schoolbooks in the attic before his old man had a chance to throw them out. He still sometimes leafed through pages filled with willowy young girls wearing dresses similar to the one the girl was wearing, and sometimes flowers pinned to their long hair.
As class ended, Charlie walked to Ines’ desk, stretched a grin across his face and said, “Hi, I am Charlie.” Ines did not raise her head or unclasp her hands from her lap. When Charlie asked if the cat had gotten her tongue, Ines stood up and walked away. Charlie felt like he had been slapped. He let out a soft whistle for the lack of knowing what else to do.
At the end of the school day, Charlie went looking for Ines. He saw her walking across the school’s rugby field then turning towards Bond Street. He knew he could follow her without her noticing. When she turned into Elizabeth Street, Charlie could think of only one place she was going to — Fat Betty’s foster home.
Fat Betty went into the fostering business after her fellow ran away with the local pub’s new waitress and left her to fend for herself and their three kids. Betty figured that taking in others who had nowhere else to go or have been thrown out of all other places, could feed her and her children. The social welfare cheques helped.
The place was cramped and smelt of piss, burned milk, and stale cigarette butts. Some of Charlie’s schoolmates were Fat Betty’s kids. They came to school without lunches on most days, but Fat Betty never laid a hand on them, and they had safe beds to sleep in, which was more than they had in the places they came from.
When he saw Ines opening Fat Betty’s gate, Charlie knew he had guessed right, turned around and walked home. That evening while sitting at the table with his brothers and their old man, eating baked beans and chips, Charlie decided to make Ines talk to him even if just once.
Years later, squatting on the bench of the prison’s exercise yard, Charlie would come to think of that evening as the exact moment his life started to slide out from under him.
Charlie used every trick he knew to get Ines attention. He would try to sit next to her in classes under the pretext of helping a newbie, ignoring his classmates’ sniggers. Ines was younger than Charlie, and while the school-work was not something Charlie cared much for, he was familiar with most of the material for her year. Ines kept on turning up with a single notebook she mainly used for doodling during classes. With her blonde hair hanging loose, flowing dresses and colourful pieces of string tied around her right ankle, she looked like someone who just stepped out of a folktale without noticing.
On the rare occasions when teachers called her name, Ines looked up like someone who had been rudely woken up from a deep slumber. She never used the answers Charlie whispered to her, even when the teacher commented that she should honour Charlie’s efforts by repeating the answers he was so gallantly providing her with. Ines remained silent. During the mid-term test in biology, Charlie slipped the answers inside a tightly wrapped note. Ines squeezed it into the palm of her hand without opening it. She then walked to the teacher’s desk, placed the test on it and walked out of the class with the answers still scrunched inside the palm of her hand.
Watching her walking out, gliding through the door, oblivious to anything around her, Charlie made up his mind to visit Fat Betty’s home that evening and find out what’s really going on with Ines. He could not name it, but an odd sensation of being pulled towards and away from her at the same time was bothering him a little bit more every day. It was not something Charlie had ever felt before.
To be continued…
Thank you for reading.
This is the first time I’ve serialised any of my short stories… I guess it is an experiment. Let me know if you would like to find out what happened to Charlie and I’ll let you know next week — same time, same place -:)!
