Walking Among Birds

by Matthew Hickson

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters and events in this book are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Walking Among Birds

  Published by Magdalen College Press

  Copyright © 2019 by Matthew Hickson

  All rights reserved. Neither this book, nor any parts within it may be sold or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  ISBN (paperback): 9781642376555

  eISBN: 9781642376548

  Printed in the United States of America

  CHAPTER I

  “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone…

  just remember that all the people in this world

  haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

  If I could run and never grow tired, then I think that I would like to run a lot. In fact, perhaps I would love it so much that I would run everywhere I went. As for me, at the moment, the most strenuous exercise I do is my many laps to the fridge and back, and the only chance of seeing me running is at the mention of “free donuts.” Like many people, I have great intention to live what I idealise as a “successful life”—you know, those people that wake up at five am every morning, go for a run, drink lemon-infused water, send emails. I once knew a person like that, he was the kindest, smartest, most tenacious person you’d ever meet. He could sort out his life by six in the morning and then go about his day solving all the world’s problems, one small act of kindness at a time. I hold dear to my heart every intention of being, crudely put, that sort of person.

  But intention is not reality, and unfortunately intending to do something, anything, makes zero difference unless acted upon. I’m sure you’ve all heard that hilarious joke about the minister that moves to a small country town and encounters a friendly ghost in his rectory that he tries to prove exists by taking a photo—you know, the one with the punchline “well the spirit was willing but the flash was weak.” Perhaps that joke and the saying it originates from is more about the need to prove our intentions than anything else. I sometimes think that the saying these days should be “the spirit is weak and the flesh is weak,” for really our flesh’s weakness should be no match for our spirit’s perseverance. Anybody, myself included, can harp on about how the world is a broken place and is in desperate need of heroes, or even useful members of society—those allusive “fellows” who build up the community and act with integrity. But without action all those words are futile. It is often the case that those who complain the most about a problem do the least to change it.

  I have a trick in the morning—a habit if you will that I do without fail. I always set my alarm for five o’clock—and when I wake up at that time each morning, a thought flashes through my mind as quickly as a blink of an eye: “Today could be the day I get up early, today could be the first day of the rest of my life.” I pause on it for about five seconds, whereby I flail an arm in the general direction of my alarm clock and switch it off. I roll over while simultaneously pulling the covers up, and comfortably go back to sleep. Perhaps comfort is our worst enemy because it is the most hidden of all our enemies. The mantra of “due tomorrow, do tomorrow” is a dangerous one: idle hands are the Devil’s workshop.

  To that end, we come inevitably as we must to the story. Fortunately, this book isn’t just filled with my witty puns and thoughtful discourse—though if you’d like more of that, please do get in contact with me. It hasn’t been an easy task, but I have taken it upon myself over the last number of months to diligently try and collect all the relevant evidence and information so that I can retell accurately the events that you are about to read.

  Our story is about a boy named Jack Lapin, although it’s not really about him as such, but our story does begin with him. Jack had acquired exactly the same habit as myself. Every morning he awoke at five a.m. and went for a run…or at least, he meant to. I wish I could say that he jumped out of bed and gaily greeted the rising sun with his head held high and his hands on his hips, that he inhaled fresh blades of air through his nostrils as if to say “come get me, world” with a twinkle in his eye and a cheeky grin on his face. But I would be lying. Though, on the other hand, he wasn’t particularly lazy for boys his age—you’ll see that if you take a cross-section of sixteen-year-old males, most of them (surprisingly) don’t get out of bed that early. He was just an ordinary boy—shorter than shoulder-length brown hair with a swept-over look at the front, intense bright, blue eyes against a backdrop tinged with bronze, and a warm smile that could convince anybody that there was nothing wrong with the world. All in all, a handsome but lanky young man.

  On this particular morning, he was woken up by his brother eating breakfast downstairs, clinking the spoon on the side of the cereal bowl every time he scooped up a coco-loop from the surrounding milk. Of course, this sound wouldn’t be annoying if the spoon was in the hand of anybody else, but to Jack, the most inconvenient truth in the entirety of human existence was his brother—especially when Jack’s wiry, lean frame was sprawled over his bed sweating after a long hot night without much sleep, lying on his stomach with one leg dangling over one side of the bed, the other leg over the opposite side. They say absence makes the heart grow stronger—well, these two had been together their whole lives. They shared a womb, shared a childhood, and now were forced (oh, the humanity) to share an adolescence.

  “Peter!” he yelled, cupping his hands like a megaphone.

  No response.

  “Peter! Eat quieter.”

  No response.

  “Oi Peter! Shut up!”

  Still no response, and so plan B kicked in.

  “Daaaaaaddddd!”

  And yet another deafening silence.

  Jack quickly weighed up the options in his mind—stay in bed and suffer the “tink, tink” in the distance, or get up and cause a stir. You know what they say, a spoon in the hand is worth two in the bowl. He decided on the latter, pulling himself out of his sweaty Elysium of comfort and marching towards the stairs scantily clad in just his pyjama bottoms, making sure he muttered the whole way down to show his indignation, thinking where he could tell Peter to shove the spoon. He stormed into the kitchen and much to Peter’s surprise, he grabbed the spoon out of his hand and threw it on the floor.

  “Hey, I was using that to…”

  “I don’t care. You damn well know that you’re being annoying, so stop it.”

  At this, Peter stood, ready to square-up and confront his twin.

  “Well, at least I’m not going to be late. We’re being picked up in ten minutes and you’re still not dressed. So, I guess I actually did you a service by waking you up, twit.”

  With that, he gave Jack a little push in the chest—a move which was sure to start a scuffle if their father hadn’t walked in at the exact same moment, whereby causing Jack to fall backwards in a theatrical stunt of choreographically crafted genius.

  “Dad, did you see that? He pushed me into the cupboard,” Jack said, grabbing his arm as if to imply he’d gotten a fatal wound on the way down.

  Their father took his eyes off his paper and peered from over the top of his glasses.

  “Peter, that’s not very nice is it. And Jack, why aren’t you ready? It’s nearly time to go. Hurry along now, both of you.”

  Jack poked his tongue out into the “so there” face and Peter just stared at him with the usual brotherly malice. Jack had always been the scamp of the t
wo, and the victim.

  At his juncture, I feel it’s important to tell you some of the history of the Lapin family, otherwise this scene we’ve just experienced might not make much sense. The twins’ father, Roger, was born into a large litter of twelve children who together all lived in a sizeable yet humble middle-class house. He had gone to university to become an economist, a place where he met a beautiful woman by the name of Beatrice. The rest, of course, “is history” so to speak. They flirted, dated, and ended up being married (with all of Roger’s large colony of a family in attendance). As economists, they dreamed of saving their money and eventually buying a mansion with a multitude of rooms and a warren of passageways. They endeavoured to be economically enriched.

  But instead of monetary glory, Beatrice became pregnant and they got the two-for-one offer, giving birth to Peter at 12:36 am on a dark night in July, and to Jack eight minutes later. Of course, this made Peter admirable to the fact that he was older and therefore, logically, wiser. A fact that he had no gripes reminding Jack about whenever he needed to. As if having children wasn’t enough of a tragedy for one lifetime, Roger then lost his wife when the boys were only two years old. There came a time when the boys had asked Roger why they didn’t have a mother, and Roger had had to sit them down after school one day and explain the horrendous story of how she had perished in a gas-bottle explosion while filling her car up with fuel on the way home from work one day, never returning home and never being able to say a final goodbye to Roger or the boys. Whether she had been using her phone at the fuel pump, we will never know. In Roger’s eyes, she was blameless.

  And so the boys had no memory of their mother—for them, “dad” was always the word for food or a band-aid or some rare ounce of sympathy. Their dad worked the normal nine to five and apart from not having a mother, their life progressed relatively uneventfully. They went to an alright primary school in an alright neighbourhood. They had a couple of close friends each and many more friends on the periphery of their lives. When they were still little, Roger would come home every Friday evening after work and throw one of them over his shoulders while they giggled their little heads off. The weekends would be whiled away flying kites, or going ice-skating or bowling, or any other number of fun and meaningful experiences. In other words, they were as thick as thieves and content in their happy, small, “alright” life together. The three were, in a way, a triumvirate—perfectly content with each other’s company but perhaps missing a fourth. They were like Les Trois Mousquetaires: Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, but where was d’Artagnan?

  I wish I could say that was the end of the story and that you could have two little rosy-cheeked cherubs dancing around in your head forever, frivolously laughing away their summers, but alas, that cannot be the case. No story worth telling is ever purely about happiness. Primary school ended and with it they moved up to secondary school, and the cocktail of emotions and hormones that come with it. As with most people that age, everything became a competition. Their dad was no longer “cool,” and friendships became more complicated, especially with girls. The bliss of weekends playing in the autumn leaves changed to a “go away, Dad,” and the endless summers of punting along the river became “I’m busy,” to the point where Roger gave up. He would trudge home from work Friday evenings and plonk himself down on the couch for a long night of TV and snacking whilst his sons did who knows what at who knows where with who knows…who?

  It wasn’t long until they got into trouble at school and were expelled for starting a fight between themselves and a group of other boys—a battle which even to this day Jack will claim they won, no matter what anybody else says. They went through a few schools, always being told to leave for one reason or another. Weeks of these deteriorating father-son relationships turned into months and months into a couple of years, until Roger had had enough. All of the stress led to him having a—to delicately put it—“large frame” (especially when standing next to his lean sons), and an odd twitch in the upper right-hand corner of his top lip. When he became agitated, the bristles of his small grey moustache would tremble in the air coming from his nostrils. Roger was the sort of man who always seemed to believe that some catastrophic occurrence was quivering unseen just over the horizon. His nervous disposition had not rubbed off on the twins. In fact, perhaps the opposite had happened. Many years of “get away from the pool—what if you fall in and drown?!” and “don’t play wrestle near the windows in case you go crashing through one of them,” had caused a sort of apathy to safety in their minds. In other words, they thought themselves bulletproof. But he worried more and more as the days went on. Because he loved them, it made it all the more difficult to tell them of his anxieties. He had made his decision last summer that they should be sent to the boarding school where his sister-in-law’s twice removed cousin’s brother’s second cousin’s aunt was the headmistress, and it is on the first day of their new school life that we have found them arguing over breakfast.

  Deep down they were good kids, they just attracted trouble. As we grow, we come to learn that there are two intentions to our misdeeds: there is malicious bad behaviour, and there is jovial bad behaviour. We generally begin our lives practicing only the jovial bad behaviour, and by middle age, the malicious penchant within us bubbles up. As we grow old—for some of us—the jovial intentions often make a comeback. There is malicious bad behaviour, and there is jovial bad behaviour, and the twins were almost exclusively the latter. They may not have been conventionally labelled as “well behaved,” but at least they intended to be “good kids.” Just as Jack had every intention of being ready in time to be picked up – but, nonetheless, the doorbell rang and he was nowhere near ready.

  Peter was first to the door, looking very dapper in his new school uniform: a white button up short-sleeved shirt tucked into grey shorts with long grey socks to match and freshly polished black shoes. The school crest sat on his breast pocket—a green shield surrounded by some foliage and the words printed almost microscopically on a banner: “Etiam capillus unus habet umbram,” which, for the less Latin-inclined among us, roughly translates to “Even One Hair Casts a Shadow.”

  He opened the door and in front of him stood a sombre looking man with a long face and a black jacket.

  “Good morning, sir,” said Peter, giving a little smile and nod.

  “Good morning, good morning. My name is Mr. Swinburne and I’m your chaperone to St. Benedict’s today. Our driver’s name is Mr. Algernon,” he waved vaguely towards the car whilst opening up a piece of paper. “Do I have the pleasure of addressing Peter, or Jack?”

  “Peter, sir.”

  “Very well, and where is your accomplice?”

  “One second,” Peter replied, holding up his index finger and then running off to find his brother.

  “I’m so sorry, they’re not ready on time, Mr. Swinburne. I assure you it won’t happen again,” Roger squeaked.

  “Quite alright, Mr Lapin, quite alright.”

  And thusly they set forth on their journey, unknowingly on their way to events that would change their lives forever.

  CHAPTER II

  “The caterpillar does all the work, but

  the butterfly gets all the publicity.”

  —George Carlin

  I always find it funny how people say that long trips are “all about the journey and not the destination.” Well, when you think about it, they’re often not, unless you intend on taking a trip without going anywhere. But I’m not sure many people do just get in a car, drive for a few hours without stopping and then complete the roundtrip home. If I really wanted to spend time with the people in that car, then I could’ve invited them all over to my place to have a meal and we could’ve saved some petrol money. Just like in life, if we focus on the journey and not the destination, then we are already setting ourselves up for failure. When we set a goal, we think, “but what if I don’t succeed,” and of course the next step is to justify our failure with “oh well, it’s all about th
e journey and not the destination.” If we focus on the journey, we may never reach the destination. Or perhaps it will only seem as though we’ll never reach the destination.

  This was the case for Jack and Peter as they stared out longingly at the passing flora and fauna: an endless array of bark, leaves, and birds beckoning to bored travellers to come and have a look, to change their destination. It seemed that they would never reach St. Benedict’s College. Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Algernon had been discussing poetry the whole way with the usual interjections of those well versed in poetry such as “oh, I say,” and “yes, I quite agree” when Peter decided to interrupt mid-sentence.

  “Oh, yes, Charles, I much prefer it out here, where the world is qui…”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Swinburne? May I ask what St. Benedict’s is like? What should we expect?” Mr Swinburne was quite taken aback by this interruption to his grand and unnecessary explanation of the countryside, but thought for a second and then decided to humour his request.

  “Well, expect the worst and you may be mildly surprised, Peter. As soon as we get there you have a meeting with the headmistress and she will welcome you and then get someone to explain the details and intricacies of school life to you.”

  “Headmistress?” Jack sneered.

  “Yes, Jack, it’s the word for a female headmaster,” Peter said.

  “Thank you, kind spirit. You’re such an oracle of wisdom. Oh, thank you enlightened one. You twit, I know what a headmistress is…but don’t you think it’s strange to have a woman running a boys’ school?”

  They heard their father’s voice in their heads—“Now now, boys, play nice.” The night before, they had promised their father that they were to change their ways. In earnest, they had made that promise, and in solidarity they intended on keeping it. Again, the word intended rears its ugly head—for the thoughts of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are often marred with obvious suppression and disillusionment. As for Jack’s confusion, there are a couple of obvious answers. The first is, of course, that there is no reason why a woman couldn’t or wouldn’t be running an all-boys school. The second is that St. Benedict’s College had a sister school, St. Scholastica, and the headmistress was in charge of both schools together, overseeing the general running of both of them whilst delegating much responsibility to a deputy Headmaster for the boys’ school.