Page 19 - WTP Vol.IX #3

I knew where she was.
I knew what she was doing.
Secretly Always Terribly Sad.
I got dressed for school, had breakfast, cleaned teeth, picked up my school bag, made sure I had my pencil case and the numbers still written on my arm. It was 8.35am—the time when I always set off.
But I didn’t.
Instead I sat on the bottom stair in the hall opposite the mirror and the little table with the keys on.
“Ametaphor is when there is one word over here, like
this end of a marble run tube, and another word over there, the other end of the tube.”
I just sat there.
Slowly And Terminally Sinking.
All morning.
I didn’t do the SATS. I just sat. (That’s a joke.)
At 10am I closed my eyes and thought of all the other kids sitting in the hall, using 3.1416 and metaphors and similes. And Mrs Chestnut, locked in the staff toilet stuffing herself with comfort food.
I sat till lunchtime and then went back to the kitchen. A fat bluebottle was standing on last night’s pizza regurgitating the contents of its stomach on the hardened cheese. I had another bowl of cereal and another glass of Iceland Cola.
I went up to the bathroom and washed away the five numbers and the decimal point. I rubbed with the pumice stone, the one Mum kept on the corner of the bath and used on the hard skin of her feet. I rubbed until the last trace of blue ink was scoured away. My skin was red and sore as a dog bite. But I didn’t care.
I spent the rest of the day making my marble run.
I’m not stupid, it didn’t take me all afternoon to con- nect up just six pieces.
I also used:
dominoes balanced on edge which fell when the marble knocked them,
a margarine tub with a hole in,
the old Brio set kept in the loft,
a plastic Spiderman lunchbox,
four toilet roll tubes,
the empty box of the old lubricating gel that Mum had thrown in the bathroom bin,
two pieces of old guttering from the shed,
slopey things (I had no idea what they were),
a chutey thing from the recycling bin.
a bean bag,
the old unused hamster cage,
a colander,
a toy basketball net,
and the six bits of marble run tubing
of course.
When it was finished, I looked at the huge spidery contraption that filled the room and I loved the mess of it. The random pieces all fitted together like a huge cause and effect machine. Like a journey. Like a story with a beginning and lots of twisty middles and an end. And I realized the marble run I’d made was a like a rickety, haphazard, scrap-sculpture metaphor of my whole rickety, haphazard, scrap-sculpture life.
I put the marble in and watched it run.
The beginning—the marble plopping out the round hole cut in the margarine tub, was me coming out of my mummy’s tummy.
Then it went through the toilet-roll chute, that’s me, age one, pooing a lot.
Next into the double gutter section—where the marble could choose to go left or go right—this was my mum and dad splitting up for the first time. Then it crashed down—me in the kitchen, my first memory, in my nappy looking up and seeing a tin of beans roll off the worktop onto the floor.
Then the click-clack of the dominoes—that’s me learning to walk, and being picked up by mum, her
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