Faris and Jack – An Elemental Short Story
Copyright © 2004 by Melanie Cusick-Jones
First published 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover.
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For Rebecca Emmerson, who took Faris and Jack for their first outing in 2004 and for Ephraim, who in 2016 helped me to get this book over the finish line by reading it once again.
It is a truth – universally acknowledged – that every person believes that they are special. This becomes even more of a truth, when the people in question are the inhabitants of an orphanage.
Who doesn’t want to be the lucky boy that discovers he’s the long lost heir to a wealthy family? Or to find that being in the orphanage was all a big mistake, and that he has loving parents who will be overjoyed to find him safe and well?
Unfortunately, for the majority of the boys who inhabit the Grimbaldi Foundation for the Potentially Lacking, no such fortunate discoveries exist in their future. If they are lucky, they will survive their time at the Foundation, but that is all.
People say that life is hard. That may be true, but most children are fortunate enough that they do not find this out until they grow up. I am sorry to say that this is not the case for the boys that live within the grey walls of the Grimbaldi mansion. For them, every single day of their lives was hard and long…
Chapter 1 – The Beginning
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!!
The morning alarm bell rang out. The loud, piercing noise jolted the sleeping boys from their beds half-scared, half-awake. They looked around the room with wide, staring eyes, whilst the fog of sleep quickly cleared from their heads.
Many of the boys had no memory of life outside the walls of the Grimbaldi Foundation and for that reason their dreams and waking lives were not particularly different from one another. Sleep might come easily for the boys at the end of each long day, but that was only because they were exhausted from working a twelve-hour shift in one of the Foundation’s ‘creative rooms’. It was exhaustion that kept them in their chilly beds through the night, not sweet dreams, unfortunately.
Faris tumbled out his bed just like the other boys. He followed his feet as they pulled him automatically into line with his roommates and they all slowly moved towards the dingy bathroom at the end of the dormitory.
As Faris walked, he tripped over his toes a couple of times. His eyes were bleary from having too little sleep – the wake up call had come at 5:00am, as always – and he had been up until well after midnight. Unlike the other boys, Faris found that he did not fall asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. In fact, it was quite the opposite: when bedtime came, he would find his mind waking up in a way that it never did during the long days of hard labour.
“Sorry,” Faris mumbled, as he staggered again and bumped into another boy. There was no response. Why waste your energy on talking when there was work to be done? Was a favourite saying of Mister Grimbaldi – the short, fat owner of the Foundation – and one which most of the boys seemed to live by.
Each group of boys had just three minutes in the bathroom each morning. It was enough time to splash their faces with icy cold water from the rattling taps and brush their teeth with their fingers. Why do you need a toothbrush when you have eight perfectly good fingers? Was another gem of wisdom from Mister Grimbaldi.
Slightly more awake, the boys made their way back to their beds to change into work clothes for the day ahead. The air in the dormitory always smelled a little stale in the morning and so – as was his habit – Faris opened the small window beside his bed. Fresh air rushed into the room, it was chilly, but the boys were used to the cold so it didn’t bother them. The air carried away with it the smell of boys who only got a bath once a week and helped wake everyone up that little bit more.
Dressed and ready for action, the straggle of boys formed a straight but ragged line beside the main door and waited. Faris was towards the back of the queue, not especially bothered about getting to breakfast first. No matter how hungry he got, he just could not get excited about breakfast gruel. FOOD IS FUEL was the inspiring motto emblazoned on the wall of the boys dining room/work room. It was a waste of space really, as only a handful of the boys could read.
Ahead of him, Faris heard the door click as it was unlocked and watched, as it swung wide on squeaky, old hinges.
“Mornin’ boys.”
Faris did not need to look at the face behind the rasping voice to recognise Gamage. He was a tall, wiry-looking man, with grey-brown hair and hollow, muddy eyes. Gamage was the caretaker at the Foundation and although Faris had never asked, there was a rumour that Gamage was the oldest boy lacking in potential ever to be housed at the Foundation.
Every now and then a lucky boy was collected from the Foundation by long-lost relatives. There were also tales of cold, dark nights when boys from the Foundation had disappeared, never to be seen again. Neither of these two things had happened to Gamage: he had been at the Foundation longer than anybody could remember. Always there, and probably always would be too.
Faris believed that the stories about Gamage were true, because when you looked at him closely – which wasn’t often, as he wasn’t the most handsome of men – Gamage’s eyes were filled with an empty sort of doom.
He glanced at Gamage now, shivered and then looked away. Faris always felt a twinge of fear when he looked at Gamage – as if something bad might happen to him, if he were caught staring.
“Ready for work lads?” Gamage asked, giving the collected boys a cruel, toothy grin.
No one replied. No one looked at him. Direct eye contact was only for the incredibly brave or incredibly stupid.
“Let’s go then.” Gamage shoved the boy at the front of the line to encourage him along. “I’ve not got all day and neither ‘av you!”
With this last instruction barked loudly over their heads, the line of boys moved forwards, their eyes cast down at the floor and shoulders curving downwards like a row of unhappy mouths.
Breakfast was a quiet affair. Rusty spoons scraped every last morsel of food from the cracked bowls and shovelled it into hungry mouths. Aside from the odd gurgling stomach, protesting that it wanted more than the small portion of food that had been offered, there was no other sound in the dining room except for the gentle clinking of cutlery.
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