Catching Helicopters

Once, in primary school, a friend of mine offered to give me a locket. I was surprised but excited, having read at least one adventure story in which a mysterious secret was uncovered in a locket. I of course felt very foolish and disappointed when he handed me a cough sweet. But I enjoyed the cough sweet, appreciated his generosity, and no doubt sublimated the difficult feelings into a disproportionate resistance to getting excited about anything. In the spirit of taking a more constructive approach to such events, here is a story about childhood misunderstandings, and big feelings about little things.

This week's daily stories

Monday

Under the ice, he had two moments of certainty. The first came when the panic was about to overwhelm him, and he knew that if he let it go then he would live. The second came when he tasted the cold in his throat, and he knew that he would die. When a hand grasped his collar and pulled, he didn’t know anything at all. He thought some creature had a tentacle around his throat. He thrashed and bit with the little strength he had left, until he was on his knees on the frozen lake, unsure if he was gasping air or water.

Tuesday

Orla watered his plants while he was on holiday, because he had asked and she was nosy. She looked in everything: the books on his shelves, the post on his doormat, the way he rolled his socks. It was a kind of power, like knowing his true name. She didn’t notice that the plants were plastic.

Wednesday

Mr Grey’s summer club cost a pebble to get in. Sometimes the kids painted their pebbles gold or silver, or drew little pictures on them, or wrote messages. But you didn’t have to. It just cost a pebble, found in the park or in the gutter or on someone’s gravel driveway, and if you forgot yours then Mr Grey would give you one to pay with. At the end of the summer we looked back through the window and saw him tipping them out from a great blue bucket, and feeling the weight of them all, and smiling.

Thursday

Something roared and ripped in the return chute, but it was deep enough in the dark that I could pretend ignorance. They were good books, most of them. One I hadn’t read before it came due, and that was a shame. But the system is what it is, and it takes all of us to keep its wheels turning. Soon there will be new books on the library shelves, bright white and filled with pretty words for us.

Friday

Someone set a great flywheel spinning where my heart should be, ready to shake me to pieces if I tried to stop still, ready to tear the fingers from anyone who touched me. You could hear it whirring in quiet moments, a long low groan echoing up my throat. Every task I turned it to just turned it faster, thermodynamics shattering against the force of it. It needed something stronger to slow it: a pair of arms, and a wash of gentleness.

Saturday

Zia trained crows and I trained squirrels, and that's how we kept in touch: his messages dropped on the table where I left pumpkin seeds, mine carried off in little grey paws. Most of our friendship was badmouthing the other's choice of familiar, all in good fun. But after a time, things soured. Our notes grew cold, then angry, then cruel. One morning I caught a squirrel, paper unfurled, scratching away with a stubby bit of pencil. On the fence, a crow laughed, ha ha ha.

Sunday

They will put adverts in, Nell told me. They will put adverts in your electronic eyes that you can’t look away from, and adverts in your brain-chip that you don’t even know are adverts. You will suddenly crave an ice-cold Coca Cola, and it will feel like it comes from you. I knew all this. I knew it would be much worse than she thought. But it was that or dying.

I have been reading...

• The Book of Manchester, edited by David Sue, an anthology of short stories by Manchester writers from Comma Press. There's a real variety of stories in this anthology, all distinctly Mancunian, and while the cover bears the tagline "A city in short fiction" it rightly doesn't try to be definitive or comprehensive. I especially enjoyed “Getting Home” by Peter Kalu and “Occupy Manctopia” by Mish Green.
• Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Glück, a wonderful collection of poems, lucid in their language but with great complexity beneath, like cut glass.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: Catching Helicopters

Joey has been fizzing all week about going to the park. It made us feel we are bad parents. It is the first weekend after a cold, wet half term when he didn’t see anyone younger than his cousin Mick, who works behind the counter at Screwfix and is experimenting with a moustache. No wonder the park with his friends looked like Glastonbury. We should have given him a better holiday. But now Saturday has come, and we meet by the big sycamores, and half a minute later he is crying in that funny way of his, where he pretends not to.

I click the lid shut on my travel mug and go over to squat down next to him. I always do this, to come down level with him, but then I realise that my ankles can't take it. I have to drop on my arse and hope there's something nearby that I can pull myself up with. Today the ground isn't as dry as it seemed, and I can feel dark water leaching into my trousers. I try to put it from my mind, and ask Joey what the matter is.

It was in the classroom that it happened, when they were copying out sentences to practise their handwriting. All that imagination, capped off and pressurized, ready to whistle out of any hole that came. The frog put his best hat on. “Joey, you want to come to the park and catch helicopters?” It was a good word, helicopters, lots of those ascenders and descenders they were practising. The sentence could have been Joey and his friends catch helicopters in the park, and instead of a picture of frog wearing a top hat, there would have been a picture of them all grabbing at falling sycamore seeds, and Joey would have understood. But the lesson wasn't made for things like that. Just for straight, careful handwriting in straight, careful rows.