Jack was sitting at the back of class, alone. Around him, the other kids were whispering. Michael had been going to occupy the seat beside him, but felt it would be disrespectful. Too soon. Higgins, who had escaped to the bathroom, re-entered. His guilty eyes betrayed him by seeking out Jack’s.
Higgins lay his books down on the teacher’s desk then found his voice.
‘Okay, I’m taking this class for the rest of the year. Get out your books.’
He turned to write on the blackboard, glad he did not have to face the children, many of whom had been at that… barbecue.
The students all took up their pens, except Jack who stared straight ahead, unmoving. In his head, he was playing the Kinks song that he had decided most encapsulated him.
‘Wonderboy’ summed up for Jack in the profoundest way everything that was wrong, but also right, with life. Here were the Kinks singing about how things could be whatever you wanted them to be through the sheer power of imagination, the unfettered will to make-believe, by refusing to accept that this is all there is. And running alongside this optimism a wistful refrain that surfaced in the song like a cold splash in the face: a reminder of the seemingly irreconcilable conjunction of dream and reality.
Life is only…
Life is only…
He and Mel were ready to re-imagine this wondrous and troubling world together, this world that’s somehow only half thought through, and yet now here he was, left to his single mind’s conjurings, alone and deeply lonely.
A Wonderboy without his muse.
He found himself in a sun-drenched cornfield with Dash and Mel, singing to the song, singing, singing.
Wonderboy, life’s just begun,
Turn your sorrow into wonder.
Next, they were in a crowded street, where grey faces searched for light amid corridors of dullness. Mel pulled Jack in close and sang:
Everybody’s looking for the sun
People strain their eyes to see
But I see you and you see me
And ain’t that wonder?
But she and Dash were fading away, and that refrain, that trembling, insistent, lingering question returned:
Life is only…
‘Jack.’
Life is only…
‘Jack?’
Life is lonely.
‘JACK!’
Higgins was waving his hand in front of Jack’s eyes, panic on his face. Jack seemed not to see it, then, as Higgins lowered his hand, he looked up boldly at the headmaster. Higgins’ eyes lowered, and spied Jack’s drawing. His face filled with admiration. The drawing depicted Jack’s fantasy walk with Rush and Mel, the three the only colour among great, towering blocks of grey. Higgins eyes zoned in on Mel. Jack had captured her zest, her life.
Higgins felt his heart break with grief. He’d never given her a chance. Feeling like he would collapse to the floor then and there, Higgins reached out for support. He placed a hand on Jack’s shoulder. Jack snarled and pulled his shoulder away. Recoiling, Higgins fell to his knees beside Jack.
‘Forgive me… please.’
Higgins began crying. A flood poured up out of him that seemed to know no end. It was an accumulation of griefs and disappointments, spanning decades. One hand remained on the desk, gripping as if for dear life.
Jack felt himself sliding towards the precipice of insanity, of illogical, maddening dream.
‘Don’t give up, Jack,’ echoed Mel’s voice.
He teetered on the cliff’s edge.
‘Remember, Jack, he’s lost but we’re not. Help him.’
Jack looked down at his drawing—the dream he had got out of his head and captured on paper. Perhaps there was his solution. If he could never wholly retreat into music and imagination, what would be his ‘other’ way? A wholesale death by reality? Or… or perhaps a transmutation of one to the other? A saving grace in alchemy?
What Jack felt most in this music he’d come to love—the Kinks, Borodin, Delibes, Grieg, Tchaikovsky—this soaring, aching, maudlin, passionate, sad music—was that people had felt and been hurt deeply. It made him feel less alone but also fearful of what was to come.
He understood the solace his father found in music, the retreat and expression Juliet found in it, that Dash and Mel had shared, and realised it would become as valued, as necessary, as sustaining for him as for them. Indeed, that it already had acquired this significance, sustenance, support. In a way, a friend. A companion he could rely on for life, to connect with people living, but also people long dead through emotions as old as the hills but also as fresh, as raw, as each generation saw and experienced them.
In art, there is a truth failed at by life. Art is us at our best, our most communicative, honest, sensitive. As shocking and confronting as we have made nakedness, but every bit as natural and truthful, to the very core.
Dash had taught Jack to travel in time, and while his life might not always be wonderful, there were other lives he could dip into, be they in music, books or art. But he knew in one way, he would excel Dash, his father, and perhaps even Juliet, for he would also travel forward in time.
Because he would contribute to this greater life, because his art would one day comfort someone long after he was dead, would let that person know that someone else had seen the world as they do, has felt it as present, as alien, as beautiful, as confusing, and as tenuous in the grasp. But in the living, the striving to attain this higher life, lay the meaning, the merit.
He would tell his and Mel’s story, not just in pictures, but also in words, and Mel needn’t worry: it would fill a book.
Despite his heartbreaking sadness, he knew through Mel he’d tasted the best of life and, no matter what, he would never give up.
Jack became aware that Higgins was still bawling beside him, that his classmates were scared, confused, with many of them crying, too. And that Mel was still pleading with him, through his thoughts.
‘Okay, Mel, I will,’ he said.
Jack knew what to do.
He reached forward. Higgins instantly stopped sobbing and opened his eyes, for the man could scarcely believe what he saw. The boy had taken his hand! Was now even squeezing it! With a fervour hitherto missing in his life, Higgins placed his other, free hand, over Jack’s.
‘Thank you, son.’
That this boy should forgive him… this boy who should have nothing but rightful contempt for him… well, it was enough to go on with. Higgins made his way to his feet—aching, tired, but still firm feet—and looked long and hard at Jack’s drawing.
‘It’s brilliant.’ He tousled the boy’s hair. ‘You don’t give up, Jack. You never will.’
Higgins walked to the blackboard, giving the other students an assuring, if sad, wave, as if to say everything was going to be better now. The old prig was gone.
Smiling for the first time since her passing, Jack looked down at his picture of Mel and whispered.
They were only five words, and they were the five words that graced her and her mum’s graves, where he, Dash and Daniel had wept.
But it was okay.
Because those five words say it all:
Thank you for the days…
THE END.
Toco Productions 