Published 'Next Phase' 1996

I was murdered by my mummy and daddy.

The bars of the cot stretched up on either side of me and conjoined along the top like my own bones grown into a prison, shuddering in the candleflame... a roofless prison, since the warders knew I could not fly or float, nor even become old enough to climb.

I dreamed of a loose clutter of farm buildings where nobody seemed to work or live - or, if they did, kept their curtains closed so that outsiders would pass through ignoring their presence. The trees and chimneystacks were picked out against a sky of mottled grey... the air peppered with birdsong and cockcrow. An orange volkswagen had settled upon splayed tyres in a pub car park. A red sign indicating that Wem Ales were once  sold here - when there existed real customers to buy and staff to cock the pumps.

    If I were to live beyond childhood, I would one day visit such a place... and maybe understand the machinery of buildings and open space.

"He's asleep".

    I heard mummy's voice, always on the brink of hysteria. It was as if she were that I slept too long, never waking her with squawls of hunger and pain. How could she obtain the fulfilment of parental duty and be disturbed from herr beauty sleep to tend my cares? I was therefore a selfish baby.

    Daddy's monotonous response was poised on an undercurrent of learned responses; he was hug-toeing a tightrope I had prepared for him by means of my listening mind.

    Reincarnation reversed, I slept the conscious coma of an intensive care ward. My future life flickered through me like the past, memories with no scaffolding of experience.

A squirrel had nervously tempted itself into the gravelly car park. It took one glance at me and disappeared with the flick of a tail. I merely saw it by the corner of my eye, but I thought it was probably the only real thing in the whole dream.

Dozing, undozing, I fleeted between the dream and the shimmering nursery. Two large faces rose above me, each with tears rolling down their cheeks. I reached out with my tiny hand towards them in the guise of touching these moons back to health. But my fingernails, by their own volition, sharpened and jutted from their fleshy beds, a beast unsheathing its claws... wanting to leave its mark on reality.

Towards the end of the deserted car park, a swing jabbed with the freshening fitful wind, as if a ghost were studying  up on the art of childhood.

Mummy and daddy stirred me from the stupor of near birth, tickling my chest as they cooed in the nonsensical jargon of second childishness. I vowed to turn their tears to blood, for the act of giving me birth.

            And I wake cruelly into full middle age in the foreign land of the future ... where my own children must await my return from a business trip, from a business I shall never in my own heart be able to master.  My car, in which I sit, is parked alongside the volkswagen.  I gather myself to drive towards a meeting which, according to my diary in the glove compartment, I'd arranged.  I wonder how I learned to drive ... I badly need a refresher course.  I riffle rapidly through the pre-printed part of the diary ... and, finally, reach the page of personal details where I find someone has written out my name, address and blood group.  I twitch like a startled squirrel, with nowhere to scuttle.

            On glimpsing up, two red-ribboned faces are reflected in the blurred windscreen with parts of them more sharply focussed in the rearview mirror ... and they curse me Orphan!

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