Open Writing

I should have pulled over. Something was urging me to do so, mentally screaming at me but I chose to ignore it and I drove on. After all, I wrestled with my conscience, two ambulances had just come howling up in front of us and were now blocking our view of some sort of nasty accident, so what more could I possibly add to help the situation? Besides, I had my twelve year old son in the passenger seat next to me and I had no wish to unnecessarily expose him to a traumatic sight. He was hungry, tired and uptight enough with the daunting prospect of starting high school the next day. I needed to get him home and fed, not waste time with macabre gawking at someone else's misfortune.

It seemed only yesterday that he'd eagerly started school, his soft, young feet firmly imprisoned into shiny, blister-hard shoes and an elasticised tie strapped around his neck. Unbeknown to us, he was under the false impression that school was something that one undertook for a few weeks only and then moved on. It was my father who broke the shocking news to his grandson that his parents and society had, in fact, committed him to this institution for the next thirteen years.

I reminisced at how quickly we'd found our niche in that first little school. My son had most generously volunteered me for fish tank duty. Together, he and I transformed the sludgy, gloomy tank which had one gasping, geriatric fish in it, into a sparkling wonderland of pirate chests, sunken galleons and coloured stones. It instantly became a feature in the school lobby and the children would gravitate towards it before the first bell of the day.

It was here that I gradually formed a friendship with a lonely boy named Shaun. His parents were acrimoniously divorced and his struggling mother could not afford to pay for childcare so she had resorted to dropping him off on the premises an hour and a half before school started each morning. She was a drained and strained woman who looked like she needed a good feed and a long cuddle. Shaun appointed himself Chief Fish Feeder but it was, in reality, an excuse for him to spend ages talking to me.

One morning, when he was feeling particularly down, I cheered him up by consulting him as to what sort of new fish I should buy. He surprised me by suggesting an unusual fish called a Bubble-eye Goldfish. This bizarre looking creature has sacs drooping under each of its eyes, somewhat like balls of unpopped, blown out bubblegum. I gave him the honour of naming our new addition to the tank and he christened it "Sweet Cheeks." I smiled at him and said, "That's a very clever name" and he ran off happily with his self esteem puffed up a good few notches.

Two years later we moved away from the school and the area but I would hear from friends about Shaun. He remained troubled and would punish his mother by running away from time to time. Sometimes the police and emergency services were called and once even a helicopter was summoned to search bushland for him.

I should have stopped. To this day it still haunts me. I could have identified him. He had come screaming out of a side street on his bicycle and slammed into the windscreen of a car. His body was tossed onto the pavement where he'd fallen, by complete coincidence, at the feet of a friend of mine. She knew he'd gone when he fitted and turned purple. I could have comforted her. No-one knew who he was. His body lay unidentified in the morgue for two days, his tormented mother too embarrassed to report him as missing yet again.

Vale Sweet Cheeks.