THE SMELL OF THE LEATHER AND THE CRACK OF THE SPINE!

Timothy was a quiet shy young man and his mother often shook her head at how he was developing in ways that were so alien to her. She was strong, loud, impulsive and overbearing. While he was quiet, introverted and uncommunicative. He was so reluctant to talk that his frequent ‘conversations’ with his mother could best be called monologues where not a single word passed from his lips. In deep frustration one day just before his sixteenth birthday his mother had sank her fingers into his bony biceps and started to shake him while shouting, “What are you going to do with your life Tim? What will become of such a silent moody man? I don’t see what you can do when you might as well be mute!” She uttered a sound of disgust that almost covered over the noise he made that she almost thought was just air escaping his rattling lungs. In fact he had shoved an inhaler in and taken a puff as she released him. “What was that?” she demanded in a lower volume but most expectant tone. She forced herself to remain quiet for a moment and hope that it allowed him to repeat whatever response he had screwed up the courage or her shaking had ejaculated from his thin, pale lips.

“I said…….writer.” he reluctantly squeaked and recoiled waiting for a common blow to the back of his head. The last few years he had grown quieter and quieter as the more often response to anything he said was either a physical blow or a more painful and much longer stream of verbal abuse. Every opinion and idea was shouted or hit down. The blows were usually soon over but the tirade of crushing feedback could go on for several minutes and be repeated at random intervals for months when they rose to the shallow surface of his mother’s mind like a broken juke box playing criticisms and judgements that spewed forth as if the mind they came from was not in control. In fact Timothy had begun to believe that his mother suffered from a rare kind of Tourette's syndrome and in fact there was no actual malice behind her comments, but rather a trauma based mental illness that could easily be sourced back if you had ever met his grandmother and all the living members of her family. The word toxic didn’t do them justice because the magnitude of their toxicity in the little house was so great that everything around it was stunted, malformed and perpetually dying. He thought of the weed choked and colourless terrain as having once been nuked in a vain attempt to wipe out his whole nasty and blighted clan. He doubted that a kind or decent thought had come out of that house in the past century, let alone a kind or decent person.

He was the last of eleven children and he had no memories of his father other than the smell of pungent hops from a home brewed beer and the sound of blows landed on the face of his mother in the living room. The verbal abuse he had come to know so well had also been met in silence and gone on for a long time before his father must have cracked. It was never discussed but he must have snapped, beat his wife and left the house never to return. At least that is the version he kept in his mind when he thought of his absent father. While short and stooped these days, ten years before his mother had been physically strong and capable of doing a lot of farm work. She milked cows, dug holes and built high fences around their large block of poor quality farm land in the hills a good twenty minutes drive from the nearest ‘town’ and a long way from any nosey neighbours. He had managed to push down any memories or thoughts that the fight he recalled had ended in anything other than a slammed door and abandonment. The fact that shortly after his mother and oldest brother had dug a new well closer to the house and filled in the old one so that there was no sign of it and a new rule to never again go over to that area of the property. When he had reasonably for a six year old had asked why he was met by the first blow to the back of his head that would go on to develop into a smallish lump that was very calloused and never seemed to go away because it had been repeatedly hit for the next decade.

Timothy was used to random outburst and had become decensitised over the years to the point where he hadn’t even realised that he had all but become a complete mute. His mind had started to create elaborate fantasies and worlds in his head that gave him refuge and a world full of colours and the smell of rare roses that completely contrasted his reality. As his brothers grew up and one by one fled the focus of his mother’s ‘attentions’ was more and more on ‘Little Tim’ as he grew like a mutated weed himself and at fifteen and eleven months had to duck his head as he passed through doorways. He had grown up doing farm work from before the sun rose every day and although not excessively muscled he was strong and could have easily stopped his mother raining blows on the calloused area on the back of his head. As a matter of fact those blows had actually stopped landing on his head and had been hitting his shoulders for the past two years. He had failed to notice or even flinch as the thought of doing so would not have crossed his mind. Like the baby elephant tied by the strong chain who has grown big enough and strong enough to break the chain and escape but the possibility doesn’t even occur to his captive mentality.

Seeing as it had been so long since he had even made a single sound in his throat and out of his moth that it actually hurt his throat to make any sound out loud. It surprised them both that he made the first noise that the second or repeated sounds barely registered. He was shocked that he would have been willing to let any thought go out of his rock solid mind palace and into the pungent night air which had a combination of brussel sprouts, cabbage and liver from inside the house and chicken manure and toxic waste mutated weeds growing in the area in front of the house. The bodies of several old cars were hidden amongst the weeds and some clumps of deformed cacti that any botanist would swear shouldn’t grow in this part of the world. Old oil, battery acid and animal poop mixing with all the most noxious foods blended together. If a stranger had entered that area and caught a whiff they would most likely either turn tail and run or start the kind of retching and gagging sound that makes others join in.

Anybody that knew Tim’s mum would have been surprised that her reaction was a simple question and didn’t take the form of a slap or a nasty comment. In fact she was in so much shock at her own response that she later thought she must have had a small stroke or a blood clot had lodged in her brain. She didn’t collapse or explode in a small shower of rancid chunks like Tim was expecting. As if she hadn’t heard his response she turned around and walked back into the house. He had flinched and ducked expecting a blow to his shoulder. So when none came he was also shocked to find that not only a lack of violent outburst and mental abuse but that she was already entering the front door and a moment later he heard the clang of her solid bedroom door banging shut too. You might think that he should be happy and rejoice at such a different reaction. However, Tim felt his stomach lurch and his whole body spasm as if he was about to projectile vomit and evacuate waste out of all of his bodily openings. He fought down the sudden impulse and struggled to clear his head from the fog that had filled it in a split second. It took almost a minute to get control again, but it felt like hours or days. He wasn’t sure which and it didn’t really matter. His brain wanted to make sense of it but the struggle to think was battling the imagined scenes of his mother bursting back into the yard with her trusty old double barrel shotgun and blasting away at him. If she had the long period he felt like since he had said those words then he was sure she would have happily ended his existence rather than let what he said come true.

If he had said he wanted to become a criminal gang member she might have wished him well. Or if he had said he planned to run for office and represent his local electorate in the next election she might have packed him a liver and cabbage picnic to keep him until he reached the city and began to work his way up in which ever criminal endeavour he selected to make his mark on the world. In fact his brothers had all gone off and never sent so much as a post card back home to give their family word of their successes. He suspected most of them were barely literate and the thought of sending a letter would make them laugh out loud. However he also knew that they too had made plans to bolt and never come back to the source of so many unpleasant memories and traumatic experiences. Each had fled in the middle of the night with any money they had scrounged and anything that they could sell when they reached ‘civilisation’. None of them had shared a hint of their plans and ambitions because they knew they would have gotten a smack in the head and endless ridicule until their self worth was so low they would have stayed on the farm and continued to live a miserable existence that they had all of their lives up to that point.

Basically none of them would have shared their dreams any more than they would have dreamt of living a long life of animal husbandry with minor physical and major mental abuse. They had all fled and tried to forget their old life as they forged a new life. Timothy knew he had made a mistake and the fact that he had not been abused did not give him any comfort. In fact it was more unsettling because he would not have thought his mother capable of any other reaction. Over the years she had only displayed negativity and malignancy like the weeds and ugly malformed cactus growing in the front yard. He never thought of her as evil or even really bad, but rather like the things growing in the toxic soil that was lying over a chemical soaked industrial waste dumping site that was their land. It might have looked like good ground but anything planted there grew up like a nightmare of misshapen weeds that would never be strong and healthy or fit for human consumption. He didn’t blame her or hold her responsible but he also didn’t expect her to be capable of a healthy response and any love or encouragement. He felt like he had been punched and scolded worse than he had ever been before that day just because he had not been abused.

He walked away in a daze and climbed the hill behind the house until he reached the fence and clambered over onto the neighbour’s property. He kept trudging higher into the raising hills but his mind was numb and frozen in a way he had never felt it before. He reached the base of a tree that was unlike any on his land, it was tall and straight with a lot of strong branches and thick leaves reaching high up from the ground but with plenty of hand and foot holds to make it his favourite climbing tree. Over the past decade, since his dad had left, he had climbed it almost every day and had a well worn nook where he could sit comfortably for hours and dream safely inside his head. He was free from his home and his life to put himself into a million far off lands and live lives so different from his own reality. His mind was full of a million stories in detail so real that he believed they existed in other dimensions or worlds separated by a thin layer of reality that he could not cross over the border into those other places. Not that they only existed in his head but that his head was a window into them.

When the sun was setting and he noticed the skin on the back of his neck break out in goose bumps that drew him back into his own reality because of the slight drop in temperature. The shock that had come over him at the lack of abuse had faded and while he still felt a little dazed he was back to what passed for ‘normal’. As he climbed back down and followed the familiar trail back to the fence and auto piloted his way over onto his own land. He didn’t need to engage any thought to avoid any of the prickly cacti or fallen rotting logs that were home to a wide range of creepy crawlies that he would have met had he tripped and fallen. He easily navigated through the obstacles and back to his house as shadows began to lengthen and a light was turned on inside the large house that had started to have a slight lean to the right as if the land under it had sunk a bit on that side. Not that the boy noticed at all and if familiarity breeds contempt it sure had made him almost blind to his surroundings.

Perhaps the nap or small stroke she had suffered had cleared out the incident from the morning from her head altogether. She acted as if it never happened and he was happy to pretend it was a figment of his imagination. He’d go so far to believe that it was a daydream and just his wishful thinking about how he would dream of a reaction to anything important to him being exposed to his mother. She all but ignored him and he slunk away to bed, relegating the whole experience to a bad nightmare. He hoped she would continue to ignore it and if he could make it through a few more weeks he would escape like all of his brothers before him.

He wasn’t prepared for the fact that she not only never mentioned it but seemed to have stopped with the abuse all together. They passed each other and did their normal chores that kept the farm going but the slaps and verbal assaults stopped. He was unsettled at first but just decided that she must have had a stroke after all which had led to a complete personality change.

As the weeks crept by he too forgot the incident and crept away to the tree as much as he could out of habit. He could have stayed in his room and dreamed up his stories but he was used to the distant spot and the isolation. Each adventure he locked in his mental castle and each room of the long hallway was a different adventure and in most cases a whole universe of exotic people and places.

SO as the eve of his sixteenth birthday approached he prepared to leave his home and go out into the world like his brothers. His room was pretty bare and he had few possessions. He couldn’t recall a single birthday party or even the discussion of anybody’s age in the house. Most years he had barely noticed and he had never kept a calendar or crossed the days off towards any important event. In fact he would be hard pushed to locate a piece of paper or a pencil in the house. He had learned to read at school and had brought the first readers home. However when a dog had chewed one up he made up his mind that nothing good lasted in that house and he never brought another book home.

On the morning of his birthday he rose before the sun was up and dressed in the dark. However he gathered the old bag that held his three other changes of clothes and four pairs of socks. There was nothing else in the room to take and nothing else in the house he would want. There were no pictures, keep sakes or mementos that he wanted to keep. He barely paused to take note of the bare room and he certainly didn’t contemplate leaving a note for his mother. He walked without making a sound, given his recent lack of speech and his usual habit of leaving to milk the two skinny cows and the six grumpy goats before the sun was up. He had been sort of surprised to see an old kerosene lantern on a low flame on the kitchen table. He almost kept walking past but the black rectangular object caught his eye and he settled on a bright red ribbon wound around the object with a tag attached. In a spidery script he saw three words that took all the strength out of his leg and his knees all but buckled.

‘Happy Birthday Timothy’ written in what he realised from vague memories was his mother’s hand writing. He dropped his bag and managed to sit down before he fell down. The sharp brain was having trouble focusing. Granted he rarely engaged it for his early morning chores and after so many years he virtually never thought until the sun was up and he had finished the milking and egg gathering. He reached out and lifted the object from the table and held it in his hands. It weighed about half a kilo and felt like the rump of his favourite old milking cow, smooth and black as a midnight sky if no stars were shining down. The black leather was in fact so dark it seemed to absorb light and suck in the meagre light given off by the old lamp. The weight felt nice in his hands and he cradled it for several minutes as his brain started to function again.

Finally he reached to the middle of the object and tugged on the narrow red ribbon to see it come undone with surprising ease. As the ribbon twisted around the object came away he realised there was a cylinder attached to the end of the ribbon. He undid the ribbon and the examined the attached object closer. He saw two words engraved into the metal tube, Monte Blanc, and with that realised it must be a pen. The dominoes fell and his mind delivered the identity of the first object, a small, thick lined notebook, the kind that fits into a coat pocket held shut by a rubber band. He lifted it again and noticed the way it felt like it belonged in his hands. He sat it back on the table and opened the front cover. The smell of the leather and the crack of the spine filled his senses completely and his head spun like a top and he was overcome with a bout of dizziness. His eyes swum and he might have passed out completely but forced himself to stay with it.

He took a good ten minutes to gather his wits and rise from the table and gather his bag up. He opened the bag and pushed the book inside with the pen on top. He stumbled out the front door and out of the house, through the stunted noxious weeds then through the solid gateway in the thick steel wall. He didn’t look back and he kept walking until he fell down in exhaustion at the bus stop.

When he got to what passed for a town he still felt like a zombie and passed several days with no food or sleep as he emptied the rooms in his mind into the book. Page after page, story after story. One day he got himself a Facebook account and an old laptop to keep writing his stories into. There was even a writing competition and he managed to submit something from the old Moleskine notebook to win the prize money of $20,000 and go on to fame and fortune as a polarising author with over a million followers on social media. If he was ever short of a story idea he returned to the notebook and delved into the many rooms of his mind, as if the book was the source of inspiration and intoxicating muse all in one.

The END