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July 18th 2016
There was this day, a few weeks ago. I was walking by the river, like I do sometimes, and maybe I was tired, or maybe I just felt like sitting down, I don’t know – it doesn’t matter. The point is, I sat down on one of those benches that have people’s names on them, dead people, dead people who used to sit there before you did, maybe before you were even alive. I was just sitting there, hanging out. I wasn’t doing anything in particular. Wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. Watching the ducks, mostly, as far as I can remember. I saw a few people I know – Claire, Yan, walking along, maybe holding hands. I wasn’t looking; it’s nothing to do with me whether they were holding hands or not. I couldn’t care in the slightest – but I pretty much ignored them like I usually do. Other people are overrated in my opinion. Unlike ducks. I mean, how could a duck ever upset you? Ducks don’t look at you like you’re a total freak, or say stupid things, or ask you questions they know you don’t want to answer. Ducks just hang out, like I was doing. They just get on with it.
The reason I’m telling you this is that, as far as I can remember, that day was the last time I felt happy. That is the last thing I can remember before everything changed.
But the thing about change is that it’s unavoidable. The changes you dread, the ones you think are going to ruin your life, they’re never all bad. You just have to look closely, just have to wait for the good bit to surface.
Dad’s in prison now. Turns out Patrick’s group, his political friends, they weren’t just political. Turns out they were self-styled political terrorists. They thought a spate of murders up and down the country that could be blamed on foreigners would shake people out of their complacency, make them realise that the country was being taken over by foreigners, that they were sucking everything good out of our nation, that they had to be stopped. They set Yan up. He was just one of their victims. One of many, as it turned out. Half the group were involved in the criminal justice system, which made it easier for them to hide what they were doing. Dad was just one of their converts.
I could have been one too.
Maybe.
Probably.
I go and see him every day. He has good days and bad days – sometimes he thanks me, tells me I’m a good lad, promises he’s going to be out soon. Other days he won’t look at me, says I betrayed him, says I’m no kind of son, that he wishes I’d never been born. I don’t mind. He’s right both ways. To be honest, my feelings about him waver too.
Yan’s free anyway. He’s going to medical school apparently. Claire told me. She said she still wanted to be my friend, said she was really proud of me and that I could go and stay with her again if I wanted to, what with Dad in prison.
But I said no. Turns out as well that my mother has a sister I didn’t know about. Mum and her fell out when Mum married Dad; they never spoke after the wedding. But she’s going to move into our house while Dad’s away. She looks a bit like Mum and she’s got the same twinkle in her eye. So that’s kind of a good thing, right?
Claire says I’m her project. She’s got me reading up about politics. I’m thinking about joining the party that Mum joined. It feels good. And she knows when I’m losing it too – she knows how to snap me out of it when I feel myself beginning to freeze over.
I’m forcing myself to live in the present too, not allowing myself to let the ice descend. I recognise it now; anger, then ice, then chunks of time I can’t account for. Chunks of time when I hurt people, unencumbered by conscience, by morality, by . . . me.
And Douglas is trying too. All of them are. Trying to fight back, even just in little ways.
I have normal dreams now. Ones that involve flying and turning up for exams without any clothes on. Ones that aren’t about death and suffering and torture. I still have one of the old dreams. The one about the future. But it changes now. Sometimes it’s the same as it was before, but sometimes I’m on the other side, stopping the ship from sailing off. And sometimes there is no ship, sometimes the world is different and people don’t hate each other after all. Claire says that’s because the future isn’t set, because there is no destiny, just the life you carve out for yourself. She says I can carve out any life I choose. I like it when she says that.
And so I sit and watch the ducks. I’m on my own again, but I’m not lonely, not any more. And as I sit here, I realise that maybe I will be happy again. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but I do know that it’s open. I know that it isn’t set in stone. Nothing is. Not if you don’t want it to be.
In fact, I think to myself, maybe, just maybe, I’m a little bit happy right now.