Idlebones

Escape Part 2

Nothing ever happens in Lincoln.

It’s one of those sleepy old towns where teenagers hang about in tracksuits outside the chippy on cold winter nights. Wind whips up the long incline to the high street, tossing litter in irregular little circular orbits as it goes. Trees bend in lazy arcs as the rain appears to come from everywhere, a mist of swirling droplets, spining and curving against each other like flocks of tiny birds gathering for their winter retreat. Careless passengers rising and falling on the wind. On such a night as it had begun, the streets gleamed with a surface of shimmering water, as if the ground itself was on the move.

The night it had started we had been sitting outside Marconis, vinegar soaked chip paper in hands, lurching like all good teenagers should on the low shop window sill, smoking ciggarettes and flicking their buts into the little river that ran down the gutter before us, watching them roll into the storm drain further down. Siddo smoked ciggarettes like his older brother, holding it between forefinger and thumb and palm faced outwards. He barely pulled the Marlborough away from his lips between sentences.

 

Siddo loves to talk. Somehow I feel he likes to talk because he didn’t get much opportunity to open his mouth at home before his Father throws something at him. Usually a fist. Siddo takes it, and says nothing. He tells me it’s becuase it means nothing, but I know that it’s because its because all the time he gets hit, it means there’s less hits for his little brother Aaronn. Siddo’s that kind of guy. Crap family, crap life, but his heart is big enough to let him rise above it. I’m kinda the opposite. I come from a family that is in danger of losing me any street cred I ever had if people knew how well we got on. I have three sisters and two brothers, all my elders and living away with partners or at college shacking up with friends or partners. The first time Sid came by our house I was 14 years old. My folks thought I was falling into the wrong crowd when they eyed his punk style haircut and death metal t-shirt (I still give him hell about that). Mum was the first to smile at him when he stood after dinner and announced that he was doing the washing up and that she should “bugger off from under his feet and watch Corrie” while he got on with it. Dad looked at him in surprise, then at Mum, and then rose to help him. They cleared the table between them and set about the dishwashing talking music and sport until I could hear Dad laughing, unusual for him at the time, as Sid told him stories of how his brother had gatecrashed the after show party at the Chilli peppers gig last year. Dad was under pressure at work at the time, and Mum smiled to herself in the front room to her him in such good humour. She even giggled when the sounds of breaking glass came from the kitchen as Sid dropped a tumbler.

“He’s as clumsy as your father, isn’t he?” Mum had smirked.

 Sids just one of those people you can’t help but like. Even when we got in trouble for cellotaping our history teachers brief case to the ceiling during a break in class, Dad grounded me for a week, but still never banned me from hanging out with Sid. I think they were just glad to see me being a normal teenager after years of worrying that I had become a bit withdrawn as I grew up. I imagined they sat up in bed that night and laughed to themselves as they thought of my poor ineffectual history teacher as he searched for his briefcase. I don’t think they wanted a perfect kid, just a happy, stupid humoured one. Sid still came around for his tea most nights, mostly because Mum realised he wasn’t getting fed properly at home. We both loved to play soccer for the school team, and it was always Dad who went out of his way to make sure Sid got to the games as well as me, even to the point of making sure I gave him some of my older brothers old kit so he could play. They didn’t see Sid as a good influence, as such, more as a normal influence on me. I think Dad saw a lot of himself in Sid. I think he Always Identified Sid as as someone who needed a break, and a good mate, just like he once probably did.

I remember the first girlfriend I brought home. I was 16, flush and blushing with pride and embarresment as I introduced her. My folks never took to her, seeing what I couldn’t see in my young exuberance, my lust. It was Sid who took me aside and pointed out the fact that she only wanted to hang around because I knew all the footballers. I hated him for it at the time. I accused him of jealousy and didn’t speak to him for weeks while I endured weeks of contrived dates that put us in situations where certain other guys were bound to be. It was Sid who turned up at my door with a soda stream bottle full of his dads whisky when I finally broke up with her. When I woke up on the floor of my bedroom the next morning, Sid was snoring like a asmatic whale on the front room couch, being woken by my mother with a cup of tea. Dad knocked on my door, and receiving no response, poked his head in to see me sprawled on the floor with the duvet half accross me and half on the bed.

“Sid told me. You alright son?”

On the night it began, Sid was reminding me of the moment my dad poked his head in my bedroom door to see me naked, sprawled on the bedroom floor.

“Jesus man, he was so quiet when he came back down! Looked like he’d seen a ghost!”

I was cringing, giggling at Sids’ reinactment,  burying my head in my hands when the first flash happened.

 

It wasn’t just bright. It was an eclipse. It wiped out everything we could see before us. For ten seconds, at a guess, the world dissapeared and was replaced by white nothing. White noise, as if we had had our very light of life turned on, in a penatrating pulse. It bled into our eyes and bent us double as we clutched our faces to protect ourselves from its brilliant flare. I believed, for just a second, we were dead. Sid had been laughing so hard his eye were closed too. But we both remember the light as if someone had shone a powerful torch right in our faces. Our Eyelids barely a defence as the flash highlighted the blood vessils beneath our skin. My overriding memory of that night is the latice work of dark red blood vessels that criss cross the skin that covered my eyes. The thin film that saved Sid and I.