Alex and The Gruff (A Tale of Horror)

by C. Sean McGee

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Alex was awake. He didn’t sleep the rest of the night. He just pretended. He spent the night holding The Gruff in his arms and he drew his breath heavy and deep as if he were anchored in slumber, but his mind raced the whole night through.

  All he could think about was escape. He wasn’t thinking about his mother or his father. He wasn’t thinking about his brother or his sisters. He just wanted to be out, wherever that was and whatever he had to do to get there, he’d do it.

  Alex had never as much as punched another boy. At his old school, he didn’t really have to. He was bigger than most of the other kids and they all assumed that he was stronger and that he knew how to throw his weight around. He didn’t really, but for as long as he could remember, which for him was an eternity, he had always felt like he could do what had to be done if the time ever came.

  And that time was here and now. And he was trying to draw on that same well of self-belief. But as much as he tried, time after time, he kept pulling up an empty bale. And that was how he felt inside as if the tears he first cried had left him barren and droughted with only the air he breathed to puff up his veins, fill out his soul and dance his sapping body.

  He had never even seen someone being hit, outside of a movie that was. He didn’t know how it was done and he wasn’t sure if the sounds would be the same. In the movies, they often fought for so long. They would punch back and forth and the hero would be bruised and bloody and on his last indebted breath before he found some pulse of rebellion and knocked his fist against the villain’s jaw and they’d both fly to the ground but the villain, his flight would be over a low lying railing and his arms would flap like the broken wings of a dove as he sailed down to the pavement below.

  Alex didn’t know if he could survive more than one punch. He didn’t even know what it felt like to get punched. Would it hurt? Of course, it would. But would it kill him? The Man was so big, so much bigger than he was and one punch from him would probably knock his head clean off his shoulders. Was that even possible?

  His heart raced when he thought of that. He saw in his mind The Man walking up to him, flexing his fat arms and stretching his fingers like Alex did when he was reaching for the sun. His heart pounded. His skin felt like it was burning. His blood was pumping so fast.

  There was no way he could do it. He imagined The Man wiping his hand across his face, clearing a pool of snot from his upper lip. The Man smiled. He took something from his back pocket. It was a shoelace. He tightened the lace and snapped it back and forth, wrapping it round the palms of his hands. And as The Man wound the noose around his neck, Alex opened his eyes and fought to clear his mind, to focus on something in the room and to describe it, in detail.

  There were many things he could focus on but most of those things he had no inkling as to what they actually were. They were just shapes in the darkness. They could be anything. And with his wild imagination, that anything would be big, scary, salivating and wearing razors for teeth, electricity for blood and lizard’s tongues for fingers; even if it were just shaped like a box.

  Alex chose the newspaper. He saw it sitting on top of another shadow. He knew it was the newspaper because of the way the shadows curled up on one end. Alex used to love to fold over the corners of pages and then push them back. He would try to rub the crease of them and then blow his hot breath and rub again to see if that would work, but it never would. Once they were damaged there was nothing you could say or do, they would never go back to being how they once were. Most things were like that. You couldn’t iron out the crease no matter how careful you were.

  Alex could see, even through the darkness, the outline of a boy’s face on the front page. He followed the neck line up to the jaw line and then up and around the right ear and then around the neat parts in his hair, the shadowy mounds that stuck out like a squared veranda.

  Last year, when they had their school photos, his mother made him get that haircut. He had never had it before. His hair looked nothing remotely like it. It was just something she had wanted and that day, she whispered into the hairdresser’s ear and the hairdresser held him down and she nipped and she cut and snipped and he tucked and she combed his once lived in hair into this presentable and scholarly fold of angles.

  The whole time Alex wanted to yell stop. He wanted to shout out to the woman cutting his hair, but she was bigger than he was and every time he wiggled, she thrust her hands on his shoulders and she pinned him further to his seat and she told him, “If you move, I’ll cut your ears off.” And so he didn’t move because he didn’t want to have to get his photo taken with box hair and no ears.

  While she was cutting and parting his hair - straining her face and squinting her eyes as the comb pulled tightly on the insubordinate frizzy strands - Alex could see his mother in the background, reading a magazine and looking up every now and then.

  Alex looked at his mother through the mirror and when she lifted her brow, when her eyes met his, he fought to speak through a longing stare, but he couldn’t fit the expression on his face and so he blinked once or twice and he spoke through his eyes and through his face, a language of which his mother had no tongue. And his mother, she turned to look at herself, and she brushed her hand against the side of her hair, and she hid her ponytail in small bunch inside her hand and then she pretended that she had the courage to chop it off. But she didn’t see the look in Alex’s eyes.

  Even if she did, really, what would she have done?

  The woman who threatened to cut off his ears twisted and turned his head like she was screwing an apple onto a stick. And when she was done, she swept the dusted hairs from the back of his neck and she stared in the mirror, looking at what she had done but as she looked at the boy’s trimmed hair, her stare drifted like a truant vessel, aside to her own reflection and how proud it seemed.

  On the car ride to school, the back of his neck was so itchy. He kept throwing his hand back to scratch at it but every time he did, his mother slapped it away like it was a buzzing fly circling a picnic of treats. And when Alex caught his own reflection in the back of the sun visor, he knew the other kids were going to mock him. He knew because if he ever saw anyone looking like he did, he would have mocked them too.

  Why would she make him look so silly? What did she have to gain? If this was how she wanted him to be remembered then what of every other day she had spent with him looking as he always did? Was each of those days so forgettable? And his last birthday, when at most, she made him tuck in his t-shirt and wipe away dried chips from the corner of his mouth, could she remember what he looked like before the flash blinded his eyes? Were they magnetic and smiling when he sang the word ‘cheese’? When he was happy and when he most felt like himself, wasn’t that she would have preferred to remember?

  Why this photo then?

  Why this stupid hair?

  The children were always going to pick on him. He knew it before he even brushed the first dusted hair off his shoulders. He’d walk with his shipwrecked face drawn to the floor and dragging his heavy feet behind him. And the other kids, they would be wiled not by the shape or peculiarity of his hair, but by the strangeness in which he carried himself. And they would look and they point and they’d be beckoned to laugh. And some would snigger but they were only just being polite. For children were not kind in how they treated the absurd.

  And that was how they had made him feel. The hours before the photo felt like the last days before an execution. When they sat in their class, the children all pointed and laughed and threw spit balls at him. And they called him queer names. And then, when they broke for recess, where normally he would revel with others in game, the children continued their ritual torment and pushed him to the dirt and kicked sand and spat in his face. Tomorrow they’d no doubt be friends but today, he was theirs to disgrace.

  And when it came time for the photo, Alex sat on the stool which was tall and uncomfortable. He had nowhere to put his arms that felt real or natural. He wanted to
fold them over his chest or tuck them under his bum, but the photographer kept pointing and prodding and demanding that he cross them over his lap.

  He felt in front of the camera as he had in front of the mirror, anything but himself. Why did the pictures have to be like this? Why couldn’t they be real? Why did he have to look so proper when inside he felt so reviled? Why couldn’t anyone see that he felt this way? Why did they put him in front of the camera? Why did they lend him to poking and prodding hands? Why did they push him in front of strangers? Why did they make him feel this way? And why on earth would they want to remember it?

  Alex felt every one of these questions as he sat on the tool and he wobbled back and forth and tried to steady his balance. He thought everything but without the words. He felt as if he were asking himself each and every doubt but even in his mind, he couldn’t form the words. He couldn’t form them because he didn’t know them.

  All of this, the photograph, the photographer, the hairdresser, the strangers who touched the top of his head, the dentists whose warm stinky breath pressed against the underneath of his tongue, the aunty who gave him things only so she could be gifted with his obliging applause, the doctor who touched him when the pain was somewhere else and the parents who made him act out things that they thought others wanted to see.

  “Do that thing you do. You know the one I’m talking about. Go on, do it. Don’t make me look stupid. Don’t be rude or you’ll go to your room. Stand here. Stand there. Don’t be rude. Say thank you. Tell the strange man your name. Tell him how old you are. Tell him your favorite color. Tell him what you wanna be when you grow up. Shake his hand. Look him in the eye. Tell him what scares you the most. Answer his questions or I’ll answer them for you. Be polite. Say thank you. Smile and be gracious. Act like you mean it. You must be polite. That’s all we care for is how it appears not what you are feeling inside. So shut up and take it. Pretend that you like it. It’s courtesy you rude little child. Whatever you’re thinking, just keep it inside. We don’t want to hear it. Smile and be good and polite.”

  What did it mean to be polite? What did it feel like inside?

  There had been many days like that day. There had been many more ways that he’d learned to be polite. And he’d learned very well that right and wrong was not something that he felt inside, it was a rule that he needed to learn. It could be written on a board or it could be shouted into his ear, but it had nothing to do with the feeling in his stomach. That, as he learned, was just being rude.

  And Alex stared through the darkness at the shape on the front page of the newspaper. And his mother and father had needed, even his abduction, for him to be polite. And maybe it was reverent after all for this really was the image of how he felt. If a smile should represent joy then what was the image to best show fear, desolation, ridicule, provocation and despair?

  What was the face of abandon?

  How fitting, the picture they chose was of a time when he felt despondence and derision tingling and tickling his skin. Maybe they knew all along. Maybe this was what they had wanted, the perfect reason to show the perfect picture; their perfect son looking plain and polite.

  There was a second or two of loud buzzing and then a light flickered in the hallway. It didn’t turn on at first. It buzzed and it shook the dungeon and his room from night unto day in the split of a second and so fast that his eyes could see only in a blur. And every time the light flickered on, The Man was another step closer to him.

  First, he was in the doorway.

  And he blocked out the light.

  Then he was in the middle of the room.

  And he had a crooked smile.

  Then he was standing above Alex.

  And he had something in his hands.