SICK

Nobody need know he was there. After only a few moments he could surely back up a step or two and retreat to the comparative safety of the family home. But he had compassion in abundance as is children’s wont, even those we call “little bastards”. At six years old there were no police to call when witnessing a wrong. It was his grandmother that fulfilled that role along with judge, jury and executioner. Justice was an arbitrary emotion that Martin had to manipulate as best he could if he wished to survive it. His life was lived in a sometimes hostile and dangerous environment, which Martin as an adult presumed to be like that of all children. Those that told him otherwise had merely suffered a forgetting, strangely only recalling the sunny days of summer, snow blind to the cold of wintertime. To Martin his parents and most particularly his omnipresent grandmother, were all powerful gods who could both give and take away. At turns too weak, leaving Martin and is brothers at the mercy of their own emotional storms or too overbearing, crushing and damaging the as yet unopened blossom.

He had stepped from the sunlit family hallway into the darkness of the enclosed stairwell. This led down into the basement’s windowless central corridor. The house was large and Victorian, tinged with gothic. Balham in the late sixties was a predominantly African affair. His grandmother’s basement nursery and his home were islands of white barbarism in amongst the tightly packed rented rooms of his street. It had happened once that there had been a fire at the back of a similar sized house opposite and Martin had watched from the lip of is grandmother’s windowsill as twenty or thirty tenants disgorged down the front steps. His family numbered just six. A bedroom each and one to spare. Ice cold in winter, his bedroom a cooking pot in summer, eaten by the acid of his own sweat as the slate tiles baked. But here it was. He stopped at the top of the stair adjusting his eyes for a moment to the terracotta and green gloom.

Vomit had been spilled out over the tile floor. It was nothing more than part undigested canned food and slightly yellowed water. His grandmother was forcing the small black boy to pick up and eat his own malady, he, gingerly fingering the less digested of the peas. This must have been a punishment. Even a child of six knew that illness was not the same as naughtiness and he wondered at the sight. If this was justice then Martin was duty bound to baton down the hatches and wait for life at the end of the long and sometimes foul weathered scrubland of childhood. But he was a son of the house and could wield his power too, did he but know it. He need not stand there and watch as a boy just two years younger than he was mistreated so. He could call on the love of his grandmother. She loved him dearly with the free and open love that only the elders of a family can. She lived with him and cared for him when his mother could not. He had power over her. He need not be merely a witness to his life but could be a player too and right now his sympathies lay not with her, his blood, but with that small boy. He took a step and then another until he was at the top of the stair once more. Slowly he opened the door and retreated silently into the light.