Boy on the Edge (2 page)

He’s not sure how this teacher will react to his silence. Shout? Wait? Sometimes they sent him out of the classroom. That’s what he’s hoping for now; that’s all he wants. To leave, so he can be alone. No more people, no more words.

Was this school number six or seven? He wasn’t sure. Soon enough Mom would lose her job, or the apartment, and they would move again.

Maybe it was all because of the way he looked. His tiny eyes and big nose, his small mouth with crooked teeth, his big head with a tuft of coarse red hair. And then there was his clubfoot, crumbling under his weight, as if he was falling over with every step. He had never seen anyone as ugly as himself. Nor had anybody else, it seemed.

The kids never talked to him; they shouted. But he could never reply. And then their words turned cruel. In every school a fresh crowd of pretty boys appeared, with their sweet mouths full of wicked words. Schools taught him nothing but wicked words, to keep his mouth shut, and eventually to fight back.

In the beginning, though, he hadn’t fought back. He took the punches and the kicks and the wicked words. He’d kept his mouth shut and his fists clenched. And he learned very quickly to hate himself, even more than everyone else seemed to hate him.

“Where did you get that head of yours? What small eyes you’ve got! Is your mother a pig? Hey, Dog-face! Pig-face! Rat-face! What’s with your leg, Limpy?”

No, he couldn’t fight back with words. Talking had never been easy, because he stuttered, fighting the same letter for an eternity. His tongue tripped up sounds as they made their way out.

Back in the classroom he would wait in silence until the teacher got mad or threw him out. No matter how hard they tried, no teacher had managed to get him to utter a single word from a book, not that he could remember anyway.

Besides, he couldn’t read. The letters swam before his eyes, changing their places in the lines, so he had to chase them around the page while his heart punched hard against his chest and sweat poured down his face. He knew them, of course, and the sounds they were supposed to make, but from
his
mouth they sounded wrong. His writing was clumsy and full of mistakes too, but it didn’t matter to him.

And there would always be a new school anyway. What was the point? A fresh start, his mother called it, but it was the same for him everywhere. There was never a fresh start for him, because he couldn’t change.

And here he was again in a new school. This time it wasn’t because Mom had lost her job or the apartment, but because he’d finally snapped. And it had made him feel better than he’d ever felt in his whole life.

He’d been sitting alone as usual when it happened, in the corner of the playground, by the concrete wall, which was hidden from the school. The kids called it the “swear-wall” because it was covered in rude graffiti. Large, bright letters spelled out the worst words the kids could think of. Sitting here he almost felt invisible, and therefore secure, watching the kids run around the playground.

It had been a Friday, but this Friday was different from the others, for it was his birthday. Of course nobody knew that except him. It didn’t make him feel happy, but it made him somehow softer on the inside. He remembered some good times with his mother. When she’d looked much younger, almost beautiful, and how she had smiled when she’d handed him a present. How happy she’d been seeing him so excited. Now she didn’t smile anymore. And he knew it was his fault.

The bell rang, but he was slow to get up.

Suddenly the playground was empty, except for a group of older boys inching toward him, laughing mockingly, looking forward to their little game with him, right behind that concrete wall, where the teachers in the staff room wouldn’t be able to see them.

He tried to quicken his pace, but his clubfoot slowed him down. They pushed him around, mocking him. Oh, how they longed for him to cry and beg for mercy. But he swallowed the lump of fright in his throat; his eyes were dry and his mouth was shut. Even when they pulled the tuft of red hair on his monstrous head, nothing happened. He just clenched his fists and took the kicks.

But then one of them said something about his mom. Later he couldn’t even remember what the boy had said, he just remembered this one thought, this powerful emotion rushing through him: attack!

He rose up screaming like an animal and pounded his clenched fists into the face closest to him. He felt jawbone smashing under his thick knuckles. The boy fell to the ground, and Henry kicked him hard in the stomach, again and again with his heavy, specially made clubfoot shoe, all the time screaming at the top of his voice; a horrifying sound, like a crazy cartoon monster or a wild beast howling. The others backed away, suddenly terrified, then fled while Henry stood over his victim like a monster from hell set on devouring its prey. He felt immensely large and strong; his anger had the power of a bulldozer, his fists could go through walls.

But the boy who he’d attacked had proper parents who demanded a meeting with the principal. Even with his jaw wired the pretty boy managed to describe in detail how Henry had attacked him for no reason at all, sweet tears streaming from his bright, innocent eyes. The other boys confirmed his story. Henry had nothing to say. He just felt extremely happy with his newfound strength. He didn’t have the rich vocabulary, the sober mind of a kid from a proper home with proper parents, to describe the event from his point of view. And he didn’t care. His fists had spoken. He smiled a little without meaning to, a feeling of contentment within, but it looked like a malicious grin to the principal and the parents. Henry was the guilty one. And it felt immensely good.

After that they’d moved to another part of town. And now he was here, at another school, and he wasn’t going to give anyone the pleasure of mocking him because of his stuttering speech. No, he was going to endure in silence until the teacher threw him out.

Then a day came when Henry really exploded, and did the most horrible thing.

He was brought to an institution, a short-term center for young criminals, junkies and the like, for them to decide where to send him next. His room was locked at night and he spent his days in the psychologist’s office.

Sitting for two hours every day with the psychologist was actually rather pleasant. Henry was relieved that the psychologist called him only by his first name, instead of using the whole row of names he was christened by, the names his mom had chosen for him to suffer under: Henry William Richard Charles.

She’d said these were the names of his fathers, but even he knew that a person could only have one father. Maybe she wasn’t sure herself who his father was. There had been so many men: staying for a while, but then leaving suddenly. None of them kind, all of them ugly. Sometimes he hated her for her stupidity and ignorance, her vulnerability, her lack of strength, how fragile she was, how lonely and so utterly lost, sobbing quietly in her troubled dreams in the night, like a child that’s been unjustly punished.

But when she was awake, she never shed a tear. When he was still small enough for her to scold him for something he’d done, she said that crying wouldn’t change a thing.

“Life is as it is and crying won’t make it better,” she said. “Never let me see you cry again. It’s useless.”

That’s about the only thing he learned from her: not to cry.

But he didn’t tell the psychologist about that. The guy tried to be nice and friendly, but he was impatient: he wanted answers. When he asked Henry to explain why he did this or why he hadn’t done that, his voice was calm enough, but his eyes pressed him for an answer.

“So, tell me, Henry; why did you attack your mother? Take your time. There’s no hurry.”

It was such a simple question, but there was no simple answer.

She had been pleading with him to behave in school, never again to fight back. “I’m too tired to move again,” she’d said. “Soon I’ll be too old to get a decent job anywhere; you don’t want your mother to be a cleaner in her old age, now, do you?”

He didn’t. So he promised to behave, no matter what, promised to take the beatings and the insults so they would never have to move again.

At first he thought it would be easy; after all, that’s what he’d done most of his life. But now he had changed; he’d found his strength and experienced the joy of victory.

When he lay still in the darkness of his room at night, he could hear their dark, threatening voices echo in his head, accompanied by the distant laughter and happy, playful sounds of the schoolyard in the background. He felt a pain in his stomach and an uncontrollable tingling in his legs, like he needed to run, very fast, very far.

But he couldn’t run because of his clubfoot, and he couldn’t fight back because of his promise. Week by week, a dark power grew steadily inside him. And, slowly but surely, it began to turn against his mom.

After all, she had denied him the pleasure of fighting back, now of all times, when he knew that he could crush his enemies.
Now
she made him promise to do nothing.

Eventually, the evening came when she had to pay the price for bringing him into this world. Later he couldn’t recall what triggered it — her whining voice, her frail body hunched over the kitchen sink, the lousy food on the table in front of him. Maybe all of this and then some other things as well, darker things, distant memories from childhood, bottled up inside him, ready to explode.

He remembered throwing the table over and smashing a wooden chair against the kitchen wall. He remembered the terror in her eyes. She tried to grab his hands to hold him still, push him into a chair; she shouted for him to stop it. But he caught her by the arm, twitching it hard so it snapped, fragile as a bird’s bone. She fell on the floor, screaming in pain, and then he was scared.

He limped all through the night, around the docks, hitting and kicking everything in his path. Cursing, hissing, growling, banging his fists furiously on the rough concrete walls until his knuckles bled. He was terrified of the anger boiling inside of him. It had taken control of him, possessed him like the devil.

During the night he hid in an old, wrecked car in the junkyard, right next to the docks. When morning came he didn’t dare go home. He dragged himself to school, perhaps hoping that when he came home in the afternoon, everything would be back to normal, somehow; that it had just been a bad dream.

When he arrived in the schoolyard everyone was already inside. The bell had rung for the last time, so he sat down in the playground. The windows were full of curious faces looking at him, their mouths moving fast, their eyes wide with terror. Maybe everyone already knew what he had done. But he really didn’t care what happened next.

The police arrived to pick him up and he went with them willingly. He went to the station, where they took his photograph and fingerprints. Then he was brought to this place, this institution for young criminals, and he spent his days sitting with the nice psychologist who did most of the talking to begin with. But then the psychologist expected Henry to give some answers, and there were no easy answers to his questions.

The guy tapped his fingers on his writing pad. Henry sighed and finally came up with an answer he imagined the psychologist would like.

“I’m evil.”

The man just nodded. A few days later he’d finished his report. He didn’t declare Henry retarded, not in the strict clinical sense of the word. He wrote that the boy obviously had difficulties expressing himself, but seemed to understand much more than he was able to express.

Henry has been a victim of bullying for a long time, and this has seriously affected his social skills. He does not mix well with other children and has limited linguistic abilities. Bullying and neglect seem to have colluded to give Henry low self-esteem and the impression that he is evil. This conflict of comprehension, without the skills for expression, perhaps explains his violent outbursts of uncontrollable rage.

One day the warden told Henry he had a visitor. He was hoping it was Mom, but when the warden led him into the visiting room he saw a man in a gray suit, sitting at the table.

He stared at Henry for a long time, with a kind smile. “Henry, your mother can’t care for you anymore.” He waited again, maybe hoping for a reaction. “Do you understand what that means?”

Henry nodded.

“The state will take care of all your needs now.”

Then he told Henry he was going to be sent to a lovely home in the beautiful countryside, where so many boys had become better men through the years.

“It’s called the Home of Lesser Brethren.” He smiled. “It’s a proper farm, run by a good Christian couple,” he said, reading from a paper in his hands. “And they have lovely animals there,” he added. “Sheep, I believe — and cows even! I’m sure you’ll feel much better there,” he said warmly, his eyes glowing with sincerity.

He talked about the freedom of the countryside, the beautiful scenery, the peace and the quiet. He made it sound as if he regretted terribly that he couldn’t go there himself, as if Henry should be counting his lucky stars that he’d gotten this opportunity, as if he was being rewarded. But Henry knew he was being sent away because he was trouble, because he was evil; he was being sent to the edge of the world so nobody would have to worry about him anymore.