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Great Writing - Home > Short S. > Mocking Bird Nights (part one)
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For Children
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| Mocking Bird Nights (part one) | |
| By TomtomKent | ||||||||||||
| 01 April 2007 | ||||||||||||
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The prelude to what I am hoping will be a selection of short thrillers, based around a former Famous Five / Secret Seven style child detective, trying to re-invent himself to match up against a much darker modern world. Mocking Bird Nights Prelude: Whatever happened to the Six Spies? An excerpt from “World Wide Magazine”: Ten years ago children across the world thrilled at the adventures, and misadventures of the six spies, that rag tag gang of teenaged sleuths not to mention Sergeant Bird of the East Sussex Constabulary and of course good old Aunt Nelly, in those innocent days before Time Travel and Teenaged Warlocks became the vogue. But have you ever stopped to ask where they disappeared to? Why the wonderful little stories stopped so suddenly? Scratch away the veneer of the books, the endless summer holidays, old fashioned Public School education, and the clean cut moral compass of the square jawed hero and you might just reveal a shadowy world of sex, violence and cut throat economics. We asked the people closest to the tight knit chums if Life really was stranger than fiction... I remember when they wrote that article, for a few terrible weeks we were caught in the glare of the lime light once again, only this time instead of being told to stand still and pose for a picture that would never quite look real, our dirty laundry was being dragged out of the gutters and hung out for the amusement of others, by the sort of newspapers that had red banners and head lines that thought words like “Scorcha!” were thrilling and exciting. If it hadn’t been for reality television stars daring to have relationships I might have even made it to page one. They asked “the people closest” to us, but they never asked us. They never asked me. This isn’t a confession of my sins, it’s not a condemnation of others. This is me recording as much of my life as possible so that when I die there might be a little bit of me left that IS me. Not the fiction of me created to make the books “right”, and not the fiction of me created out of the worst possible assumptions of newspaper hacks tawdry “evidence”. Believe that if you want. Or believe the psychologist. Believe that I don’t know how else to talk to you anymore. Believe that I can’t speak these words if I don’t know you can hear them, so I sit here typing them away in the hope that somehow you might be able to read them some day. So the first thing I have decided you would need to know is that, despite everything that has happened I don’t hold any ill feeling towards “Aunt Nelly”. I don’t think she held any of the prejudices that she was accused of before she died. I don’t think she hammered away at the truth to make it fit her own politics, more... To make it fit her own idea of how stories should go. Nathan was her dear nephew, in her eyes he was tall, and handsome, and smart. So of course he was the hero. Of course he always led the charge and saved the day. To Nelly, they were Nathans stories, and we were his supporting cast. And you? You were the oldest girl, with blue eyes, and blonde hair. You were athletic, and kind, and smart, and heck, you got into Chaplains on a scholarship. You two shared so many adventures together you just HAD to be best friends. To fall in love. Just like Nadia had to be bookish, and shy, and oh so sweet, but oh so plain, and always be the book worm who unearthed the vital clues in the library or public records. She wore glasses, and didn’t have a boyfriend. Because George wanted to be in the Army, and he was on all those sports teams he HAD to be the slightly dumb, but well meaning knuckle head who always came through in the end. I found one of the books the other day, I almost wet myself laughing. It was the one from that summer we uncovered the smugglers working out of that cove. Nathan had the bright idea of sneaking into that office and “digging around” in the files, but George said he thought we needed the Police. She made it sound like George was a coward, and missed all the swear words out of the conversation. I mean, that was always the way wasn’t it Wendy? No swearing, mild violence, and gallons of homemade lemonade. George was right of course, and Nathan was a prize plonker for going in anyway, but by then he was starting to believe he was the same guy as in the books. So of course George was a coward for running to the Police, or if he wasn’t a coward then it had to be Nathan who suggested it. For the same reason that Dad was an amiable buffoon of a policeman who always needed a bunch of kids to spoon feed him evidence and would ground us from our adventures to “Stop that ruddy tomfoolery!” (I don’t think he said “Ruddy” in his life.) It was never because he thought that, you know, letting his fifteen year old daughter chase after robbers, thieves and smugglers was just a little negligent. Oh yes. And there was me. Little Mark. Your brother, a third of your age, half your size. I was young, therefore an idiot. I had to ask stupid questions, say stupid things. I was the comic relief. The bloody dog got more characterisation and more credit than me. I know we come from a working class background, I know I didn’t stand a chance of getting a musical scholarship to Chaplains, but I was never a cockney. How could I be? I wasn’t born within earshot of the bell, I wasn’t born in London. But I was the cheeky, silly, clumsy, cockney, uneducated halfwit who had to ask Nathan to explain things so the plot could be moved on and the readers can keep up. Do I hate Nelly for the fact that she made a fortune of our lives and we never saw a penny? No. God no. By the time I was in secondary school I was eternally grateful to have sunk into obscurity. Sure, I got picked on for being “Little Mark” (eleven year olds can turn anything into a euphemism), and there are a lot of people who think a lot of things about me without bothering to ask the truth. No, so much of what she said was fiction that she deserved the money for fantasising it, and Nathan deserved to inherit it for trying to be the fantasy. I saw him recently. Nathan I mean. He’s a CEO in one of his dads companies. He has given up speaking English and talks entirely in Buzz-Words and Management-Lingo now. You have no idea how grateful I am that you ignored the rules of the story and never fell madly in love with him. I would see him buried beneath an overpass before I saw him as a brother in law. Nadia is doing great. She is a lawyer, her Girlfriend (Rhonda) is also her partner in the practice. (I don’t think the red-tops are quite over that yet.) George is a Doctor. A good one (according to his Friends-Found home page at least). And for us there was that night. It’s strange, there wasn’t an ominous chill in the air, or the mourning roll of thunder when we got in the car. There was dad’s ford, and the radio, and the autumn trees casting a spiders web of shadows over the country road and a full silver moon lighting the road. Then there was a boy racer in a hatchback over taking a slower van on a blind bend. Some stupid boys stupid mistake that turned both cars into mangled wrecks of metal, and showered the road with broken glass. Everyone asks if the world turned to slow motion, like in films. But it didn’t slow down, everything spun around as fast as the cars had been travelling. The world was a blur of metal, and sound, and pain, and the tarmac rushing up to meet my window, and the terrible wet thud as your head snapped against the side of the car. Then you were asleep, and I was trying to move, and Dad was... No, you don’t need to know what Dad was like. The Doctors say you were asleep for that, and if you missed that memory, you should be grateful. So now Mum is coming back from America, and she wants to drag us over there. She says there is a private clinic that has a far better chance of treating you. She also says we ought to be with our family, though it’s hard to think of them as family. A step dad who has no idea how old we are, two half sisters we have never met. But I guess they are the only family we have. And I’m a minor, so I don’t get much of a say. I suppose things would be different if I could think of a single reason not to want to go that didn’t make me sound like a moaning teenage windbag. Maybe mum is right, maybe we need the change. Maybe they can help you. Maybe this is just a beginning.
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