EVERYONE knows cats like to 'help' when you are writing. My main character Michael Morrison is a novelist and he has a cat, Romeo, who tends to take a walk on his keyboard as he works.
My cat Belle does the same. Here she is looking disapprovingly at some of my work. ""Cut this out," she says. "It's too introspective, self-obsessed and it's before my time..."
So I did - and here it is...
ONLY 218 steps around the playground in his shiny slip-on brown shoes. He would discover it would be many more when he got to big school, but only 312 to get there as he lived across the road - as opposed to the 882 it took him at primary school.
Eventually he would tell certain people he counted like this and they would just laugh. No-one ever noticed.
No-one ever noticed, not even those who did it, how much it hurt him when he got pushed down the steps between the lower and higher blocks at secondary school. It wasn’t the physical pain, that was minimal and brief, just the memory and the amount of time it caused him to spend wondering why they had chosen him.
Just like no-one noticed how he stayed indoors one entire school summer holiday after the two lads who had captured and held him said they would kill him if his friend, who they had let go, did not come back with the money they asked for. He did not come back with the money they asked for. No-one noticed anything. He noticed that.
On that first day at primary school he had stood alone in the corner of the playground having lapped it once, shivering in blue shorts and wondering whether the story he had been told that he would have to live upstairs above the classrooms and would never see his mother again was true. That would only be the case at a boarding school, but he didn’t know about those yet and the kind of people who went there.
He counted to cope, to survive by blocking out the pain. Not every day. Some days were good, but there were swings in moods, swings in fortunes and the unlikely arrival of a swing in the back garden brought about an apparent upturn in his popularity.
Backwards, forwards, up, down, further forward, further back, higher and higher, then not so far forward, not so far back, not so high, lower, lower, lower, struggling, struggling, stop.
They had not come to see him, these other kids, they had come from his street, the next street and the one after that only to have a go on the swing, blue and rusted, and now he had come to a stop they could do that and they did, and they went further back, further forward and higher, and when they jumped off they didn’t fall and graze their knees like he did, planting them and his hands into the concrete slabs that sat just beyond the small patch of grass that housed the swing, landing face down, eyes staring into the ground, wishing it could swallow him up.
For today though, just keep counting with no thought, no clue, no idea that this horror will continue into your teens and through your adult life. Just keep counting and ignore the rest, those other souls probably also alone and lonely in this tiny area of the world.
He would remember every single one of them, everyone he ever met, all their names, even though he knew they did not ever think about him, did not remember him.