Die young!

One summer, there came a new boy to climb trees, to plunge into the river on days when the very air scorched your lungs. He came slowly, timid, aware of how different he was. He watched the tumble and jostle of the other children through flaccid eyelids and compared his body to theirs. He was raisin-skinned where theirs was fair and tight. He had liver spots where they had the beginnings of pimples and his veins wriggled visibly underneath his skin. Trapped in a wrinkled old peach-coloured body suit, he shyly consulted his feet on the edge of their awareness, trying to reconcile this body with the one he remembered from yesterday, the one that didn’t fail him at scrambling over walls and supported him when doing handstands. This body seemed a poor imitation of the one that fell asleep on a balmy evening, young pores perspiring gently after a long day of teasing girls, running with dogs and playing cricket on the lawn.
He awoke early in the morning, one that brought with it familiar birdcalls and summer lawnmowers throbbing, though in a strange room, with strange hands and feet scrabbling at his sheets, sheets he could have sworn held spitfires and zeppelins the night before, ancient lids revealing youthful eyes. Alarmed, the cry for his mother came from a strange old voice, as if his grandfather was lying on the bed beside him and translating his thoughts into words. This voice filled his ears like the sound of gravel crunching underfoot, coarse and shocking.
He sat up quickly and his back creaked like an old house, groaning at what felt like a foreign motion. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and gingerly put his weight onto them. As he looked at them he realised they were not his own, not that he could recall. His had been tanned, strong and bald, tapering down to flat dirty feet, but the two limbs that dangled over the edge of the mattress looked like they’d been tacked on with thread, borrowed from a dead man. They were pale and spotted, varicose veins scurried like road maps, his knees were swollen and wider than his wrinkled thighs, and beyond them on the floor were old toes with long, yellow nails. The boy gasped at the horrible prank his brother must be playing on him, wondering that this was a step up from the usual bucket of water above his door, or the trip wire at the top of the stairs.
Slowly, painfully, he edged his weight onto his legs and stood up, gripping the sheeting with both hands to steady himself as he tottered upright. He reluctantly let go of the bedclothes and shuffled away from the bed to the bathroom he saw through the open door, his hands thrust out in front of him like someone searching for a candle in a power failure. He was breathing heavily and leaned thudding on the doorpost as he reached it, his legs shaking from the effort. He took a moment to collect himself before moving into the bathroom to stand before the sink, above which was a mirror.
But it couldn’t be a mirror; it was lying. For a ten-year-old boy stood staring into the face of an old man. He turned around quickly to see if there wasn’t a great uncle standing behind him. He probed his face with his hands trying to find where the mask was attached, pulling at the loose skin and crying out when it wouldn’t give. He probed at his ears and found them to be long and dangly, each lobe feeling like an old prune. His cheeks sagged slightly and underneath his chin was the wobbly throat of the frog princes he’d caught just yesterday as he hunted in summer puddles. His face was a blotch of pink and white skin, except beneath the eyes where it sagged into two dark bags. His hair was wispy as the spider webs he’d run his hands through and was lank and lifeless as a moth-eaten curtain.
He would still not have believed it was him if it had not been for his eyes. Yes, those were the same. They were bright white, not a vein upon them, like a fried egg with a hazel yolk. Each pupil was small and pitch and young, and he knew they told the truth. He clumsily undid the buttons of his shirt with his thickly jointed fingers, the hair of his knuckles feeling like the wire he used to make fishing lures out of. He consulted his chest in the mirror. It had a path of hair from just below the collarbone all the way down over his sternum and bellybutton, marching to disappear into his trousers. It was long and thick and grey, and felt like the whiskers of his dog. His chest was scrawny and slightly sunken, his nipples the purple of winter-river fingertips. He dropped his shirt to the floor and saw that his arms were thin, with baggy skin where his muscles used to thrash and squirm. He lifted his right arm slowly and winced as he heard his protesting shoulder crack and pop.
He started to panic and stumbled back through to his bed, falling on it heavily, tears streaming from his eyes from the pain or the terror which was jolting through him. He cried out sharply before his throat caught, his huge Adam’s apple sliding up and down his neck as he gulped for air.
‘Ma? Maaaaaaaaaaa!’ He screamed for the only person he could think of, his cries carrying to the nearby cemetery where she had lain for twenty years and falling about her grave like bone dust and dead petals. The oldest child in the world cried until his breath ran out and a bewildered nurse came into the room to find a man older than her father and a boy younger than her son trapped in the same body.

His waking baffled the local doctors and it wasn’t long before their colleagues from out of town sombrely queued up to study him, rocking back and forth on their heels as they considered this ancient child, uttering more ‘Hmmm’s’ and ‘Ha’s’ than a convention of philosophers. His knees were raw from reflex hammers and he had had to open wide and say ‘Ah’ so many times his jaw was stiff and his throat quite sore. Furious scratchings on note pads were the soundtrack to these visits, entire tomes surely being written, but for all their rapid note-taking, whenever he stole a glance at one of their pads the scribbles were completely unintelligible. His daily appointments with the physiotherapist were painful and challenging, and she did not have to adjust her tone of voice for this special patient, seeing as she spoke to children and the elderly in exactly the same way; sweetly and with unintended condescension.
When not being minutely examined by sternly bespectacled men and women in white coats, he was allowed to wonder the town during the day. His original doctor (whose attitude about his celebrity patient had changed from scorn and burden to pride and boastfulness) said it would be good for his health after so many years of inactivity, and none of the nurses had the heart to deny him anything after having his whole life stolen by sleep.
At first on his wanderings, he had been dogged by journalists eager for a human interest piece, but he was shy and would not speak to them, which left them trailing him like beleaguered dogs after a butcher, hoping for a morsel but not truly expecting one. They eventually left him alone and published their stories anyway, either fabricating quotes or allowing local town folk to piece his story together for them.
No matter which direction he left the hospice, his meandering always brought him to the park, which held swings and monkey bars and roundabouts. He’d watch at the fence shyly, listening to the children’s laughter and giggling at the jokes he overheard about Van der Merwe, the Englishman and the Irishman. When the children were all called home for supper or homework and the playground sat empty, he would walk through it and touch things. The swings would still be moving, losing their inertia slowly, the roundabout would click to a stop as he got to it and the monkey bars had mud and ice cream handprints. It was in the decaying light that he would try to lift himself up on the monkey bars, or swing as high as a rooftop, but his body just wouldn’t listen to any of his commands. He tired too easily and would have to lower himself to catch his breath onto a half-buried tire the other children hopped on.
It was on one of these evenings that another boy was walking home alone, lost in his own thoughts, when he came to the playground and paused. There was that old man who everyone said was really a boy sitting on one of the swings and trying to push himself into the air. His feet scrabbled ineffectually at the sand and he could not launch himself forwards. The boy watched him quizzically for a few minutes before whining the gate open on its reluctant hinges and going to stand before the old man, who stiffened when he noticed him.
‘I’ll give you a push,’ was all he said before walking around the swing set. Suddenly the young boy felt himself getting pulled backwards, the ground sinking slowly beneath him. He gripped the chains tightly with his hands so that the knuckles bulged largely, and then suddenly he was hastening toward the ground before being swung into the sky, the horizon dropping below his feet as they raced towards the clouds. He came to a brief standstill before charging backwards at such a speed his belly was left a few feet in front of him. Everything seemed to rewind quickly before he was back at the beginning and young hands pushed him gently forward once more. He whooped and shouted and laughed, arcing back and forth like the pendulum in a grandfather clock.
And then there were no hands at his back, and his next ascent was not quite as rapid, did not shoot him into the stratosphere. His cries died down and he eventually swung to a gentle creaking, like a dull wind chime on a still day. He did not leave the swing for many hours, returning to his drab room when the night was strong and deep, ignoring the admonishments of the nurse. He had, for a few minutes, gone back to those days he felt he’d just left behind but would never discover again.

Saturday mornings were his favourite. He woke at a time familiar only to fishermen and Christmas morning children. He put on his brown tweed trousers and wished for some shorts, yearning to run barefoot as he put on his leather shoes but knowing his feet were too soft and fragile. He shivered as the sunlight flew horizontal to the earth, only touching the trees overhead, before it came in to land as its trajectory changed. On these days there was already the rumour of children, giggling and running. He heard small feet slapping somewhere to his right. A sinker dropped somewhere down the road rolled into his shoe. Bits of shirt sat like flotsam where thorns had grabbed at them greedily. Glistening mango pips littered the dirt path. And then he was at the river and watching the children, his dowdy clothing hiding him easily as he looked upon their kaleidoscope morning.
Boys ferreted like hadeedas in the dirt, searching with blunted fingers for worms or crickets which they skewered on hooks and cast into the water. They sat tensed for the strike of a fish and yelled insults at the girls nearby who were checking hopefully for sleeping visitors to their handmade fairy houses, finding none and replacing the dry bedding with freshly peeled moss.
The children made forts and threw sand clogs at each other. They pretended to be pirates searching for treasure, scurrying up trees to crow’s nests to spot new land beyond the water. They jumped into the river and played Marco Polo and Torpedo and Sharkey-Sharkey. They lay baking in the sun on the grass and swapped stories and boasts and apples. And everything they did was watched by the drab boy hidden in his geriatric suit, taking part in his mind and remembering clearly when his weekends looked just like this. He decided it would again, just one last time.

There was one tree which was never without a visitor in its branches. It sat in the middle of the park, which was on a hill and looked out over the entire town, just to the side of the playground, and it was wise and old. During the day children dangled from it like drops of resin and when the sun sank there was always a young couple which climbed it giggling and held hands and kissed as they watched the moon rise and the lights of the town flicker on one by one. And this day was no different.
A boy altered but much the same climbed the biscuit brown branches early in the evening just as the shadows slowly crept behind him, after the children had carelessly swung through it like vervet monkeys and before the couples would come, still applying makeup and deodorant and gazing into doppelganger mirrors. He wheezed his way to the top little by little, painfully, and making it saw again the view from the last tree he’d climbed over half a century ago, breathed in a high wind and sent his laughter away over the town to mingle in the hills and high places beyond, pleased that some things stayed the same. He searched a nest and allowed a sparrow to land on his hand. He saw a young girl scurrying home and threw an apple at her, laughing at her shriek of fright as it bounced into her legs. He stayed up there for sixty years worth of sights and scents and sounds.
And as the shadows reached his eyes he dropped casually out the tree, as the other children dropped with confidence into the river from rope swings on sticky days. The last thing he saw as the wind rushed past his ears was a red kite high in the sky, ignited in the fading sunlight, grappling with thermals and shouting joyously to him, ‘Die young! Die young!’