This is the third part of A Story in Several Parts, by Matthew de Kersaint Giradeau, the first and second parts can be further down the page. (The painting is by George Shaw and is taken from here;http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/online_shop/ikon_catalogues/artists_monographs/item/what_i_did_this_summer/image/806/ )
Alex is in town with his friends when he sees a woman with no legs in a wheelchair. He knows that he is meant to look in her eyes and not at the stumps where her legs end. He looks away and then stares at her face, trying not to see her eyes. She does not notice him looking.
Alex is walking home from school on a wet, rainy October day when he sees his mum walking quickly towards him from their house. She meets him and takes his arm and walks him quickly home. She says that they must get home before the big storm comes. Alex likes the rain. He likes how when it is a Saturday and normally his friends come round and ask him to come and play, but when it is raining they don't come round. He can watch television or read, or just lay on the floor with his face pressed against the window watching the rain make holes in the mud of the front garden. He can sit by the heaters in his house, which aren't radiators, but a ventilation system that judders warm air around the house. His room doesn't have a heater, but the landing does, so when it rains he lays by the heater on the landing, trying to look inside. Then his eyes get hot and he has to close them.
But on a school day, the rain is different. It is cold and your trousers get wet on the bottom. Then your coat gets wet outside and it is hard to take it off without getting your arms wet and then you have to sit in the classroom in the afternoon and you have wet arms. So when Alex's mum comes and meets him on his way home from school, Alex is wet and annoyed by the rain, and the news that there is going to be a storm doesn't excite him. He just feels annoyed that his mum is hurrying him and holding his arm.
Alex's parents are worried about the storm. It will be the worst for years and if the river near them breaks its banks then they might flood. The storm doesn't seem that bad to Alex, and when he goes to bed, he is enjoying the sound of the rain, as though it was a Saturday. He sleeps peacefully.
When he wakes up it isn't raining any more. The house isn't flooded and his mum and Dad are leaving for work and don't mention anything about the storm. When he leaves the house he walks the back way to school, which means going through the woods. He sees the big tree, which is a big tree in the woods that he and his friends often climb or make dens near. It is laying on its side and its branches are sticking out at angles; some cruel violence. Alex is annoyed, it was his favourite tree. He looks around the woods and notices that other trees have been forced to the ground by the storm.
When Alex and his friends are older, no more kids play in the woods. Years later they tear all the trees down and begin to build houses but after six months the building work comes to a halt. Recession tears through the industry and Alex's school friend who is now a carpenter tells Alex in a London pub that he was meant to be working on that site, but he now scrapes a living doing private jobs, which are less secure and don't pay as well. But he doesn't pay tax, so it is not so bad. When the building trade collapses, archaeology comes to a halt, because most archaeological digs happen before a new build can happen.
He takes a detour to the last den they built (they only build dens in the summer, when the time is long and violent, and Alex wakes early and bored, and the rest of them wake late and slow, and the grass and nettles in the woods are wet, and they lay ferns down to sit on, and choose sticks as weapons and sit and peel the bark in silence) and finds it overgrown with brambles and two trees, fallen one on top of the other, lay across what was the entrance. Alex is angry. He picks up a stick and hits the brambles, and then the fallen trees. He makes little impression in either. The ground is muddy and pathetic. He stamps in it, and his shoes are splattered and his trousers are splattered too. He throws the stick like punching a friend in a dream and it bounces without sound off another tree and on to the ground without satisfaction. He stands for a minute in a trance, excited by the time slipping past him. He is not late for school yet, but he will be. The future is present and he may as well not even exist, but he does, so he takes down his trousers, all the way, the way he did when he first used a urinal, and he pisses, and he spins round while he pisses and tries to piss on the stick that he has thrown and piss goes on his shoes which has the odd effect of making them cleaner and then he pisses in the mud till it forms a little puddle and then it spreads and mixes with the rest of the wet ground. He finishes and stares again. He hears a dog bark in the distance which brings him to his senses. He pulls up his trousers and walks out of the woods and on to school.
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