EX: The Long Journey Home (standard:other, 2333 words)
Author: Shaw	Added: Sep 09 2003	Views/Reads: 3169/2115	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
TOF Project. Rewrite of "The Last Montague" with changes I hope you'll agree improve the story. "[It.] - " signifies speech is in Italics, important to show the story's transitions in time. Please read, please enjoy.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

They moved a step closer, cocking their heads, limbs wide and braced. I
looked left then right and there wasn't a face to be seen to seek help 
in, there wasn't a face with anything less than malicious intent. 

I looked past them. 

A girl I knew with long black hair was standing by the gate, urging me
to run. 

Hands reached out and tore the blazer from my shoulders but I wriggled
free before they could get purchase on the rest, I ran for the gate and 
blessed as a fast runner I got there first, I got through and was 
running down the street as fast as I could go until there was nothing 
left in me and I knew they had remained at the gate. 

I sat down on a step and shook, the tears broke at last and ran freely
down my face gathering the concerned look of those that passed me by, 
concerned at least until I spoke to them of that I had no doubt. I 
shook terribly, vast quakes in my body that heaved and lurched me in 
their terrible grip. It was all happening again and this time I had no 
hope of a place where it would stop. 

‘Come on lad, no skiving.' I looked up into the stern face of a
policeman, behind him the shoppers lingered with quizzical faces. His 
was set and determined and his hand was upon my shoulder. ‘Back to 
school with you.' 

He led me back up the road without a word and held me only to prevent me
running away, he seemed oblivious to the state he had found me in and 
led me through the front gates where the assembly bell had rung and the 
school were making their way indoors. The children looking at me with 
venomous injury, leaving no doubt they believed I had brought the 
policeman, not that he had brought me. 

He led me down to the row of offices for the teachers and knocked once
on a door, that took a moment to open before he shoved me in but 
remained outside. 

‘Found this one in the town.' 

‘Thank-you Constable,' said the deep tones of the headmaster. 

‘He's lucky I don't lock him up for the night,' added the constable
quite unnecessarily in my view, ‘is he the one?' 

The headmaster looked closely at me and for an age there was nothing in
his face, then his thick moustache twitched once in recognition. 

‘Sorry constable, this can't be him. Rainer, Michael A, this is his
first day.' 

‘First day?' said the constable incredulously, ‘and already a truant?
This isn't very proper Mr. Jenks.' 

‘Thank-you Constable. I hope you catch him soon.' 

The constable humphed, strapped his helmet to his head and glowered down
at me as he fixed the chin-strap. Then glowered once at Mr. Jenks and 
turned on his heels and went away. 

Mr Jenks left the door open and reached for his jacket. 

‘You will be here at Breaktime to explain yourself, for now I am running
late and don't have the time. I will walk you into assembly where you 
will give your apologies to Mr. Bruce.' 

That was what he did taking great strides down the hall and hauling me
forward to keep time, down past the rows of homogenous classrooms and 
stairwells painted in the same bland and neglected cream, over the same 
imitation wood towards the one impressive entrance at the very end of 
the second hall. A door ten foot high of oak carved with floral baroque 
swirls by some great, great, understudy of Wren, who had  been deprived 
a true platform in an age where demand for Cathedrals were few and far 
between. 

The door was opened and again I was shoved forward, the door closed and
the only sound after the unison of turning bodies was Mr. Jenks 
footsteps hurrying away. 

Then a few whispers began, then someone laughed and the person next to
them had to speak louder, so the person next to them had to speak 
louder still till the room erupted into a cacophony of noise and 
laughter, with me the epicentre. 

At the front of the room stood a man fiercesome to behold, one hand
raised upwards, the wrist half turned and fingers sequentially opening 
up to the heavens in thespian imitation. In the other hand was an open 
book. His enormous grisly frame did not move as the noise erupted but 
looked down upon me from the end of the hall in stunned disbelief that 
someone, like me, could so defy the authority of his stage. 

I made my way across the back of the hall hoping for a seat quickly and
his head turned to watch me walk, the eyes growing wider and wider as 
the second eruption fought to find vent. 

The hand came down to a pointing finger, the book was slung away, and he
charged – the metaphor quite accurate - down the centre aisle towards 
me. 

‘YOOUU BOOOY!' he screamed almost hysterical in his own injury, the
noise was gone leaving only the brutal force of his voice still beating 
the room when its message had silenced. 

‘Ay'm sorry . . .' my voice limped across that great chasm of silence
but could not reach him, his fury so absolute that he swept them away 
like crumbs before a feast. The pointed hand was upon me and my ear was 
being crushed between two clammy fingers that pulled me bodily towards 
the front of the assembly. There he released my ear and glared with 
such hatred, such bottomless disgust, that my heart felt distant from 
me and my bladder even farther. 

‘YOOU ARRRE LATE !' 

‘I'm sorry sur . . . moy – ' 

‘STAND UP STRAIGHT WHEN YOU SPEAK TO ME BOY!' 

I straightened up as he circled me, his eyes never losing their
intensity. 

‘I wuz – ' 

‘I CAN'T HEAR YOU BOY!' 

‘I ... wuz lost - ' 

‘LOST! LOST IS RIGHT!' he roared triumphantly wheeling away to address
the assembly, ‘BECAUSE YOU HAVE BEEN FOUND!' 

His glare changed became more focused and intense shedding back my face
with his eyes like it was a mask to reveal a new and true culprit. I 
stopped speaking, it was useless anyhow and he was so consumed in this 
new bout of loathing that he himself stammered to speak. 

‘ARE . . .,' he swallowed and began again, ‘ARE YOU NEW?' 

‘Yessir,' I replied and trembled with the aftershock that affirmation
had upon him, he had gone white, those eyes continued to protrude ever 
outwards and I was sure that when he did at last speak, they would be 
the last words I ever heard. I was certain of that. 

‘NNNEWWW! LATE!' 

He was beside himself, he ruffled his hair, gripped his face and was in
such a state it seemed his end would not be long coming after mine. His 
composure did return, whilst he paced the front of the stage stealing 
appealing glances at those silent faces in the audience that regarded 
me with awed abhorrence. 

It struck me then that although I did not know a soul in this room there
wasn't among them a single thought of fellow goodwill. The children, 
all of them, thought I had called the police on them, thought I was a 
coward for having run away too I have no doubt, the teachers thought I 
was a truant, an undisciplined taint upon their school. It was unfair, 
it was unjust and wrong but as I looked from Mr. Bruce to the lines of 
cold identically set faces I knew the past would repeat, I knew the 
days would be long, the nights terrible and lonely, each day a fresh 
taunt or beating and each evening a fresh fortress would rise up to 
scale.  In time it would settle perhaps and so long as I kept my head 
down and my voice quiet they might leave me to my silence. The hatred 
was a living thing beside me, the loathing a wind upon my face, the 
isolation, loneliness and distance an ice encasing. Pain became me. 

At that moment of my worst and most desperate despair, when the
resolution lay poised in my heart, its brand forever, from within the 
rows and lines of cold faces she stood. A single contrast standing 
apart from them all and though she looked frail and lonely apart and 
single, she shone out, a beacon in a cold ocean and said across space a 
wordless promise of future as openly as if she whispered them, her hand 
cupped over my ear. She told me there was hope here. 

It was so much, too much, the world dimmed, grew darker, black now as I
fell down. 

[It.] - Ye killed ma feckin da'! Ya killed ‘im! All ye Eng-Lish feckers
did it! Ah'll get ye! I'll feckin' kill ye! You an' yer feckin' sister! 


‘Wake up Mike.' 

I opened my eyes in a small nursing station, laid out on the cot
surrounded by the bottles, jars, papers and charts strewn to every 
surface of the whitened chipboard furnishings. A dense musk of surgical 
spirits and white mask, light shards breaking through a half closed 
blind, laying streaks of white light over the plasterboard and cream 
linoleum and my legs beneath a coarse brown nursing blanket. 

‘Why did you leave?' 

She lifted a loose strand of her black hair from her ashen, sorrowful
face and smoothed her lap, massaging her index finger before patting 
her hands flat in abstinent redress as a droplet trickled down her 
cheek. The droplet was black red. 

The memory was upon me and I was running. I wasn't fast enough and they
didn't stop, running me down in a terrace back alley. They beat me, 
beat me till I was senseless and cursed my name, cursed my accent and 
cursed the stable I was born in. I tried to stand when they were 
finished with me, I tried to stop them, but they beat her too, they 
beat her with a fucking metal bar. She didn't stand a chance and when 
they found what they had done and they ran, I went to my sister. The 
bar had crushed her skull of long black hair and left her eyes vacant, 
absent, waiting for the mineral earth. 

‘I have to go Mike,' she said, ignoring my question, ‘I have to go
home.' 

THE END


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