Palindromic 1500 words

PALINDROMIC


The trick cyclist called it lack of emotional nourishment. Jake liked that, it spoke of something that could be solved with a trip to a chip shop rather than recourse to self harm. Jake thought how easy the trick cyclist made it sound.

The trick cyclist spoke like he understood, but how could he? Jake once asked him whether he had ever contemplated waging war on himself and the world. Had he ever wanted to introduce Auntie Lighter to Uncle Petrol in the centre of the family home whilst his parents slept and dance in the spreading light of the flames? `No`, came the answer, as the trick cyclist, with a concerned frown, inputted this development into the Mac, `No, I haven’t`. Jake nodded patronizingly, as if to say `Ah, well, each to their own`.

Jake entertained these possibilities not because his parents abused him, nor because Jake hated them. He had these flashes of red anger because they ignored him and had done for the last four years. Jake had grown increasingly unhappy since he turned thirteen and they`d moved here. Jake`s dad got a better job, Jake`s mum got a full time job, they bought a bigger house and somehow they lost Jake in it. Some parents smother you with love, some crush you with hate, but Jake’s parents ground him down with indifference. The timing was bad as his hormones were raging and, with little in the way of female attention, they manifested as frustrated anger which then turned back inside at his self. He was a tall, stocky boy, but could never bring himself to hurt another with his strength, only himself with his weakness.

One incident on his sixteenth birthday with his left wrist, a jagged Vodka bottle (recently emptied inside him) and a genuinely scared policeman had led to his mother booking him in for a `session` with the trick cyclist. Jake discovered this fact by the brown Manilla envelope that dropped through the door. His parents had not spoken to him since, not that Jake noticed the difference.

The real problems had started when he was fifteen. Jake joined a group of younger boys on the rec some evenings. Each time he did, some form of passive aggressive bullying tactic would be played out. Then things got less passive.

Jake was sat idly on the Spiders Web, a roundabout that had four small sections in the middle, spanning out to four larger ones, then four even larger on the edge. The small sections could be straddled, one leg in one section, and the Web spun at great speed by this central propulsion. The further out towards the edge you were, the faster you went.

Jake was perched on the edge when the pace suddenly picked up from trundling to dizzying. All the other boys jumped off, but Jake’s grip was tenuous, he had no time to get a better hold, nor the position to get off. The boy in the middle was an eleven year old brother of one of Jake’s classmates, although mate infers a sort of friendship. Jake’s body propelled with the movement of the Web. If you were sat in the middle, you just moved your feet and surveyed the world going by. The boys sensed blood sport. How better not be the weakest than to prey on someone else and browbeat them weak?

The child pedalled his feet into the hard granite floor in time to the cheers and Jake became almost parallel to that harsh ground as his knuckles whitened to match his face. His shaky hold on the rail was loosening as the chipped paint dug underneath his fingernails and blood ebbed down his fingers and splashed his bare arms. This was what called a halt to matters. The humanity of an eleven year old boy far outweighs that of a fourteen year old. Seeing the blood, the young boy slowed the Web to a halt. He quickly jumped out, away from the wheel and the gently sliding body of Jake and into the circle of backslaps and cheers from the older boys.
It wasn’t until one of the boys turned and jeered at Jake that the other boys followed his pointed finger to see Jake slumped over the `ride`, sobbing deeply and crying into bloodied hands. They mocked briefly and skipped away laughing at the fact that Jake was so scared.

The brevity of the mocking didn’t stretch to others though. From the next day at school, Jake was the whipping boy. An eleven year old had made him cry. It became an entry level game for any gang. You wanna be one of us? You make Jake cry. They always did.

The reason Jake cried was not through fear or intolerance of pain. It was not through the pain of hanging on, nor the pain of shards of paint drawing blood from his cuticles. It was the same reason he cried when those kids came up and hit him softly with limp fists on a daily basis. It was because he couldn’t understand why people hated him so much when he offered no harm or threat to them. He cried to make them go away, because they always stopped raining punches when he cried. No one ever left a mark on Jake`s body with their assaults. Only Jake ever did that.

If, like the boys thought, he cried because of the pain, why did he not cry when he sliced thin, but hard lines into his skin with his father’s old Bic razors? He only succumbed to tears when his father showed no interest in forging a bond by playing noughts and crosses. They could have played on either of the red grids marked on Jake’s forearms.

In his last year Jake began to eschew school for somewhere warmer. The library offered solace and education. By the time he was sixteen and leaving school with nothing but relief, he had knowledge that could not be measured by the GCSE syllabus. The employers of the area seemed to set great stock by it, however, and Jake`s career options boiled down to picking/packing footwear manufactured in sweat shops.

Jake barely afforded the flat he moved into, but he was happier and was trying to put his rage and the disappointment at the last few years behind him. These days the trick cyclist`s office just reminded him of the past.

So why did Jake still come to see him each Tuesday? Well, on two of the last seven occasions he had been here, he had noticed a pale, but pretty young girl staring at her shoes, cradling her arms around her thin body and rocking slightly. He always hoped he’d see her again. The first time he was too busy trying not to stare and the second time he was unprepared and the therapy session had not gone well; Jake had briefly encountered a `school friend` at work.
Then he struck lucky.

He opened the door to leave and there she was, still cradling herself, but looking slightly brighter. The trick cyclist came out and said "Hannah, do you want to come in?" Jake forgot his prepared speech and said "Hannah. That’s palindromic." As she looked at Jake, unsure what he meant and fearful of aggression, she saw by his eyes that he was nervous, although smiling sweetly and `palindromic` was obviously some kind of endearment. There had not been many in her life. Hannah’s returned smile ignited feelings in Jake he didn’t know were there. When he was still sat there after her half hour session, she felt comfortable enough in his glowing presence to walk to the bus stop with him. The next evening he took her out to the chip shop, but all the emotional nourishment they needed was already growing inside them.

The two of them felt so fragile individually, so scared that life would just blow them away into the ether. Together they had enough ballast to keep them steady. They found another shabby, but bigger flat in a nearby town, packed a shabby suitcase each and started living.

Once the cigarette burns on Hannah’s arms finally faded, they put the banns up at the registry office and sought out suit and dress. Asking the elderly couple who had married before them to act as witnesses, they became man and wife. Mr. and Mrs. Jake Noon.
Yes, Hannah Noon. "That’s palindromic" said the elderly woman as they sat in a cafe, post ceremony, sipping tea. Hannah and Jake smiled, today, at least, their eyes alive with happiness.
On that first date, sat on a bench sharing fish and chips, Hannah had asked Jake what a palindrome was. “Something that reads the same backwards as forwards” he said. But, Hannah knows that whatever is thrown at them, they are only going one way; forwards. “Anyway”, she says to the woman, without malice “It doesn’t work going backwards, Noon Hannah is a silly name.”