Chapter 2

Loose arrow, fly
Sight on sight
Let murder by
Into the night
Of war.
Hold back the Horde (B. Lake) 2008

INTERLUDE

To understand why Phoebe did what she did, crushing my soul and leaving me barren of feelings, someone would have to understand a little more about me than I’m usually comfortable in revealing.

When I got my first laptop, I used to write songs in the woods behind the village. My song writing was my private thing, and I definitely didn’t want that to get around, so it was better to do it far away from human earshot. I’d played something for my grandma once, and she’d said how proud she was that I had a nice little hobby; which was patronising, at best. I’d later heard my parents agreeing with her, and wishing that I could get interested in doing something useful – something they could be proud of, which, I have to admit, hurt a lot.

None of my family was musical, and none of them really understood or took my ambitions seriously; not even Janie, my sister. If she ever heard me playing one of my own compositions, she’d memorise the words and then sing them back to me in front of other people, pulling faces and singing it wrong until everyone was laughing. She could be mean at times, could Janie. At least she didn’t tell people I wrote the words and composed the tune. Her meanness only went so far.

Janie was the world’s worst music critic. Well, she used to be. Now – not so much. Not since...

As a twelve-year-old kid, I was the most miserable person in the world. I was huge. I was so huge that I had my own gravity system – little kids getting pulled into orbit around me and circling endlessly until rescued by an adult. My belly appeared around corners before the rest of me, and my arse remained in view when the rest of me had already negotiated that corner.

I got hit a lot. Not hit on. Just hit – especially on my gut or my arse. Oh, and my moobs were an especially favoured target for some of the nastier kids. Believe me, it’s hard to impress a girl even enough to get them not to sneer at you when some kids half your size are grabbing at your man-boobs and comparing them to hers. No friends at all then; never mind dates. Not ever. My size seemed to bring out the bully in everyone – even the nicer kids. It was as if my bulk alone offended them on some very basic level.

Even my own mother would look at me and tut, usually when I needed bigger clothes, and she was a large part of the problem.

Mum came from a really poor family, and I found out later – when I was adult enough to have really honest conversations with her – that they often went without food, usually when her dad had drunk his way through his wage packet as soon as he got it, and then pissed away the proceeds of that up against a wall in some alley. When she had me, she was more than determined that her first-born would never go hungry.

Right from the start, I was almost force fed. Even Italian families, who in my experience try to feed everyone who steps foot in their house with at least twice as much food as they need or want, would have been shocked by the amount of food she shovelled into me. And the food itself? Well, my mother seemed to consider anything in the salad family an invitation by the devil to starve her family to death, and any vegetable was treated with extreme suspicion. If it wasn’t rich with butter and cream, fats and carbohydrates, then it wasn’t worth the effort of eating it. Over-compensation of course - it was obvious to anyone who knew her history. Not a lot of people did.

It’s astonishing that I didn’t end up with at least one of the premier forms of diabetes. I mean, I’d heard her in full-on rows with the local doctor about my weight – her trying to convince him about the size of my bones, he trying to convince her that I was becoming a danger to an orderly solar system – and both of them ending up angry and frustrated. She’d whisk me back home and make a special lunch or dinner for me – heavy with great tasting but wildly unhealthy food. If I ever said I wasn’t hungry and didn’t want to eat, she would turn on the water works. Let’s face it; no boy wants to make his mother cry.

When I turned ten and was the size of a sixteen-year-old, Mum calmed down, mostly because my seven year old sister would very loudly and determinedly refuse to eat any more than she wanted – and still remained alarmingly healthy, despite all Mum’s fears. Her relaxing was partly because my dad did pretty well at work and none of us were ever in danger of going without, and partly because she finally learned from Janie’s blithe disregard that it was okay not to stuff kids like they were geese and you fancied some really good pâté. She gave up on her mission objectives to give me the status of a moon, but it was too late for me by then. I had established patterns of eating, and seemed determined to hit the grave before I hit the legal driving age. Biscuits and crisps at bed time after a big pasta meal, hot salted chips with pizza for lunch, a chocolate bar or three for dessert after a rich breakfast, and a bag of sweets to nibble on throughout the day – all with Mum’s tacit and explicit approval.

Part of my growing up was the realisation that she lied to me non-stop. Everyday ... Everyday! I would head for the front door on my way to school, and she would grab me for a hug and a kiss, and tell me I was her beautiful boy. Over her shoulder, in the full-length hall mirror, I could see the back of her, and parts of me hanging out on each side of her. How could she possibly consider me beautiful?

Of course, I was miserable from the time I woke up to the time I fell asleep – sometimes halfway through a snack. Because inevitably, the fatter I got, the more miserable I became – and the more unhappy I became, the more I would turn to food to try and find even the smallest measure of pleasure I craved in my bleak life.

By thirteen I’d turned completely inward, staying silent unless absolutely compelled to say something to someone at school. I still needed to release my inner voice somewhere, anywhere, so I began to write poetry – which was awful, and then songs – which were better. I loved writing those. Somehow, when I wrote the words down, I would hear voices singing the tune behind them – clear and pure and clean in my head. They were usually women’s voices, and I sometimes wondered about those women, but allowed that they were probably muses. Those were the easiest to remember, and I’d carefully pick out the notes on my guitar. After a while, all I needed was a trusty hound, and I could have been a tramp and busked for food – although I would have needed to busk 24/7 in order to keep me fed. I don’t know how the dog would have survived.

I was solitary, so I turned to my second great love; my little magic box, which sat on my desk and hummed quietly to itself 24 hours a day, no matter what Dad said about his electric bill. I’d discovered that most computer equipment failures happened during the powering up and down stages, so the hell with doing that! It was too valuable to me. I mean, who wants to lose their one and only friend just because of a few pennies on an electric bill?

Being a loner, of course I got into every aspect of programming. I mean, I was truly alone but for my sister, and she could only stand having a boy around her for limited periods at that stage of her life. Besides, what else was I going to do – nip out for a game of football, or do a few laps at the local swimming baths? I could have been effective as a goalkeeper, the opposition would probably never have the space to squeeze the ball past me, as I probably could have filled that goal from side to side. In the pool, I stood a good chance of being harpooned. I was sentenced to the worst of nerd lives.

To combine my two hobbies, I wrote a program. I ran it and tried singing and playing one of my compositions to my electronic friend. Dissatisfied, I tried again, and the program got bigger and bigger as I rewrote the code three more times, importing and adapting free code posted online by other programmers. The next time I played my guitar to it – as badly as ever – it faithfully recorded the sound and then allowed me to alter just about everything about it until my playing sounded almost as good as Knopfler, Page, either of the Hawkins, or Santana – and I was still trying to step it up to try and get even near to Hendrix. I kept at it and added whole sections to the program to allow me to artificially add other instruments; strings, brass, percussion – pretty much anything I wanted.