Bitter Sweet

by Robert Young

Sonny was the snot nosed kid with the streak of muck perpetually smeared across his mush. He was the one with the torn trousers, the awesome toys and the mischievous grin. The skinned knee and the plan. I was new in school and terrified. For the first week all I could really manage was a brave smile for mum at the gate for long enough that she left without crying.

  I remember seeing him charging around the place in a blaze of glorious chaos, nowhere to go and no time to get there, leading the charge of a half dozen other gleeful filthy boys.

  But there were other kids in the playground and there was me and joining school so late meant that groups had formed already and those allegiances seemed at the time forbidding and impossible to breach.

  I wasn't sitting alone each playtime mind you. I joined in with kids and played games. But it was never automatic and rarely the same group twice.

  Then one day I found myself staring down three bigger boys who were not malicious or evil but stewing up that odious blend of boredom and hormones all the same and had decided to make me taste it.

  Names were called and jokes made and I was scared and wanting to not want my mum but wanting her anyway and when the biggest boy felt spurred on by the watery look in my eye and the tremulous lip and shoved me back against the fence I felt lost and cornered and in want of a rescue.

  Enter Sonny.

  Not planned of course. No cross-playground mercy mission launched like a rapid response unit to take down bullies, but rather a galloping whirl of super-heroes striking down injustice and terrorising terrors left and right. Turning up with the kind of perfect timing that he would demonstrate this one time in his whole entire life.

  He and his band of accidental saviours dashed between us and with scarcely a moment to register the dynamics of my situation Sonny had clapped a hand on my shoulder, hauled me away with him with a cry of ’let's go Dr Hulk’ and a flat palmed hand right in the bully's face.

  The other boys clarified the point with a volley of unambiguous POWS and BAMS before we cantered away to safety and there followed no initiation, no awkward introduction and swapping of names. Just a swift resumption of those breakneck tours of the playground, spraying the screams and laughter into every corner and a trail of smiles in our wake.

  Now, it isn't like I carry that debt with me now, heavy and unpayable, like some usury of friendship. Sonny was and is a genuinely good man who surrenders frequently to his impulses, has a spectacular capacity for poor decision making and a boundless and boundlessly infectious enthusiasm for whatever it is that may hold his attention at any given moment.

  It seems to get him through life, after a fashion, though what passes for his life does not resemble the sorts of pathways and trajectories that form and define other people's existences. He's lived in squats, worked every menial job you can think of and a shit load you don't want to. Never sticks them out and whatever it is that pays the bills for him now has been there in the background for years and we don't talk too much about that mainly because I don't want to know. I have overwhelmingly strong suspicions and frankly that's quite enough.

  Sonny was the kid that made his parents and teachers despair because he was and is by no means stupid. He's plenty clever but was never bothered about it. He was the kid that aced exams by accident, or skipped them altogether when something more interesting turned up on exam day, like a lie in. The grown-ups just had to watch him squander it and lament the waste.

  So our lives took different directions but criss crossed all the same, as much as anything because we made the effort to criss cross them and because friendships aren't formed on the basis of satisfying a sufficient number of criteria, they just form. Like crystals, or snowflakes. When the conditions are right, some chemistry occurs and some unknowable process conjures them into being.

  He means well, always, and he tries hard, sometimes, and he seems to stagger through life like a dizzy drunk; all wobbly, chaotic perpetual motion. But if the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, Sonny paved it, somehow making things harder than they need to be, forever eschewing the simple and the easy way for randomness and improvisation. I would worry about him, but he's been doing it this way forever. It's like he's been made wrong, something assembled not according to the instructions but from guesswork and instinct and luck and all those wrongs have made a right. He should probably have come apart by now, unravelled, but hasn't simply because he doesn't know it. This lack of awareness is his glue. He is the scarecrow and the tin man and Pinocchio and the fucking Terminator all in one mental package.

  Oh, and he's a drug dealer too. Or so I ’strongly suspect’. Like I said, we don't really talk about it. I figure that what I don't know, can't hurt him.

  But what those inverted commas mean when I say ’strongly suspect’ you and I both know. You know what I mean and I know you know it and if I were digging you in the ribs right now and winking at you I'd be insulting your intelligence. Let’s not treat each other like idiots.

  So you have a good taste for what Sonny is like and a flavour of how things have progressed with Sally, who is by a considerable margin the very best specimen of girlfriend I've ever had the good fortune to snare. But you have a whiff in your nostrils too that something's in the air and that these two ingredients will not mix well. No Tom, you're thinking, don't stir that dollop of Sonny into the Sally, don't do that you fool, it will curdle.

  Sure. Where were you when I needed you? Just grab a fucking spoon.

  There's little else of relevance to tell by way of further contextualising so I'll skip us all forward to the bit that matters.

  Chapter 11