It is the noise, or more accurately its sudden
absence, that draws him to the window at the top of the stairs. The lawnmower’s
rasping exhalations had emptied the sky of its birdsong, his habitual dozing
soundtrack on the daylight edge of sleep.
Amongst the bland repeat of back gardens visible
from the landing, his eye defaults to that alone containing movement, in which
beneath his dense black hair a tiny boy engages in an act of disorientation,
turning himself round and around in an odd hop on the broken pivot of his limp
before staggering unsteadily forward
Skunk: One… Two… Three… Four…
each accomplished step counted loud until his dizzy
little limbs spill him headlong over the thick carpet of fresh cut grass.
An unwiped line of blood runs from just below his
knee.
Hysterical at this newfound ability to exacerbate
his mild handicap, the infant revolves in ever more violent pirouettes, each
ending in the same few giddy steps that send him sprawling.
His observer marks this to be the lawn’s first
mowing since the previous owners’ departure months previous, smiles at the
green stains collected upon the child’s bright yellow shirt and black shorts,
his dirty plimsolls also thick with chlorophyll.
When the boy’s mother returns from storing their
lawnmower in the garage, he instinctively withdraws a little behind his
curtain, unwilling to risk his curiosity in them acknowledged.
He watches her enter the kitchen to fill two glasses
of orange juice fresh from the fridge.
It worries him; that these houses are now being
bought to rent is eroding any sense of local community, their inhabitants
barely there and then gone before they can ever really be known and accepted.
Emerging again into sunlight, this young woman of
whom the neighbourhood remains ignorant sits down alongside her son who is
untying his shoelaces.
There is to her a quality that has deterred their
welcome, a brittle fragility to her movements suggesting her body to be mere
framework that might at any moment implode and disappear, almost as if each subsequent
second of her very existence is on her part an act of will. Catalyst to their
gossip has been the evident lack of husband, and their suspicions run to an
absence dictated by employment, or divorce. She is of no age to be presumed
widow.
Her son stops to take the glass in both hands, his
throat visibly working to drain it in one long sustained swallow without
breath.
After wiping the back of one hand across his mouth
he pulls off each of his socks, revealing what appears to be a fresh scarlet
chafe bright upon his ankle. Ignorant of its genesis, the neighbour imagines it
resultant from these same gyrations executed upon the concrete slabs behind
their garage. The child stands to remove his shirt and stepping back out onto the
lawn resumes his amusement, giggling as the grass tickles and sticks to his
bare feet.
Setting down her own glass his mother now rises to
join him, extending her hands to his and together they begin to whirl each
other fast around before stopping abruptly apart to pick their tentative way
about the back lawn until balance fails them both and they are down, shrieking
with laughter.
He sits up, his chest and skinny arms crisscrossed
with the damp cut blades of grass.
Skunk: Now you, you just do it on your own. Just do
it on your own Mummy.
when she reaches for him again
Skunk: No. No.
and again defiant
Skunk: No I want to do it all my byself.
She laughs at this, and their unseen observer is
left to question his sense on hearing her call the infant Brother Skunk.
