Cinnamon Twigs Read online

  Fortunately, I had to say only a few Hail Mary’s.

  I spent my childhood evenings watching movie documentaries. I loved the way actors transformed into the characters they were playing. I thought I’d have a go at acting on the stage during my fifth year in primary school. Auditions were held for Little Red Riding Hood. Five teachers presided over copies of the script, like a panel of X Factor judges. I stood on the raised dusty stage, throwing numerous shadows as they checked the lighting. But I didn’t feel nervous. Not one bit. I read my lines and skipped home.

  A week later, Mr Evans announced the cast during assembly. I would play the Big Bad Wolf, a part I could really sink my teeth into (crap pun intended).

  The Christmas plays turned actors into mini-celebrities. I’d had a huge crush on one girl a couple of years before because she’d played a donkey in a play I barely remember. Everyone suddenly knew me by my character and I found myself signing autographs for infants in the playground. The whole school thought it was a hoot when I had to dress up as Little Red’s grandma at the end of the play. Cross-dressing children are always considered funny, I guess.

  It’s difficult for me to look back at Little Red Riding Hood as a crappy children’s play. I fell in love with the stage, performing in front of parents, teachers and fellow pupils. We take small steps as children, and those steps get bigger when we reach adulthood. The play felt like a giant leap to me back then.

  Little Red Riding Hood ran for three nights. It’s all a blur to me now: the harsh lights, the shadowy audience members, the hall and its stained glass windows, the fake tail I had poking out of my arse. I forgot a couple of lines in one scene, during the second performance. But the dialogue ran on so well that I didn’t realize until afterwards. My mother told me how proud she felt - a sentiment she didn’t repeat for a long time.

  I represented the school in athletics tournaments during my final year, taking part in the hundred meter races and the hurdles. I also played for the school’s rugby side, winning the Player of the Year Award. I’d had a very successful time there.

  Warm light streamed through the casement windows on my final day as a primary school student; it tripped down polished staircases and bounced off the heads of chattering students lining up for assembly. As everyone filed into the hall, Mr Evans winked at me. A sea of vivid colors washed over us as we sat on the cool ground, gazing at the painted glass and the dusty stage we’d never see again. Mr Evans stood at the front of the hall, illuminated by the cascading sunshine. He spoke about a special student who’d contributed to school life. I’d been awarded the Pupil of the Year Award, which meant my name would be engraved on a giant plaque above the main entrance to the hall. It’s still there, my name among many other student names now.

  I walked out of the school gates that afternoon feeling sentimental. Excited students flew past me, their congratulations resonating in my ears. I’d had a wicked time at St Mary’s, playing games and performing on the stage for the first time. I’d been a little caterpillar back then.

  Soon, I would come to the cocoon phase.

  CHAPTER THREE

  First Brush with Mortality

  The summer break after I left primary school started well. The sun blazed above the battleground neighborhood as kids loaded their water pistols, preparing for apocalyptic conflicts on the cobbled paths. Stray cats meandered across the railway tracks and freshly cut grass scented the balmy air.

  Lisa, Elliott and I grew even closer that summer, riding our bikes through each bright afternoon and sitting in my front garden at night. Owls filled the air with their placid hooting, while nocturnal creatures explored the thorn bushes under the decrescent moon. The mysterious sounds in the darkness filled each warm night with the perfect atmosphere for telling ghost stories. Mine were so farfetched they were laughable. I once persuaded Lisa to believe I’d converted my attic into a laboratory, which was home to a lumbering monster I’d created (it was an odd fantasy…) using the same life-giving method as Victor Frankenstein. Elliott’s stories rarely concerned the supernatural. They were about murderers with motives. I found them boring. Elliott argued they were more realistic than my crappy tales. Lisa hushed us by telling her stories, but we’d always catch her out because she used to steal from movie plotlines.

  A sentimental mate of mine, who often spoke in questionable epigrams, once told me in my college years that ‘Youth gently trips before it falls.’ I had no reason to think about the end. The end of our ghost stories, our bike rides and water fights. We couldn’t make the sun stand still for us. Unattended, the thorns grew wild, infringing on the railway tracks. But the trains never stopped journeying.

  My grandmother passed away that summer. I’d never gotten to know her well, because she’d been too similar to my mother to get on with her. I wanted to console my mother, put my arm around her shoulders. She became more depressed as the funeral grew closer, staying in bed each day and sobbing into her pillow during compassionate leave from the local pharmacy she worked at. I should have comforted her, but I was too young to understand. She’d hardly spoken to my grandmother, so why did she act upset now?

  I’d never seen a dead body before. My mother told me she’d first seen a corpse at the age of thirteen. She and a girl named Ginger used to play on a nearby construction site. They would jump onto the back of big industrial lorries for fun. Those lorries rolled back slightly when they came to an incline. Ginger had called for my mother one Saturday morning, but she’d felt ill and couldn’t go out and play.

  Ginger died that day. She fell off a lorry as it rolled back, crushing her to death. My grandmother had forced my mother to see the body as a lesson against recklessness.

  ‘And now I have to see her body,’ my mother said when she concluded that story. ‘There’s a bitter irony there.’

  The dapper young gentleman gave us a courteous smile, his eyes filled with permanent sadness. He let my mother and me into the silent room. Candlelight flickered as we entered, casting shadows across the white walls. My hands trembled as I walked towards the coffin and gazed at my grandmother’s ashen face. She looked more peaceful in death than she had during any Christmas or birthday, her senses sealed to the flames and the sweet scent of a forlorn white rose beside her. I half expected her to open her eyes and laugh at how she’d fooled us into believing she’d passed away.

  Tears pricked my eyes as my mother bent down to kiss my grandmother’s forehead. I realized that every tear falling down her pale cheeks was a sign of regret, an acknowledgement of the affection she’d rarely shown my grandmother, but wished she had.

  My mother sat on the chamois leather sofa and beckoned me towards her, her eyes fixed on the shiny surface of the hard oak coffin - the brass handles glimmering under the pale light. Finally, I put my arm around my mother’s trembling shoulders.

  ‘She won’t have to wait too long to see us again,’ she whispered.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, heaven has no time…’

  I sat in my front garden afterwards as the sun beat down on me. The street buzzed with life as children laughed in the distance and neighbors mowed their lawns, watered their prized plants. I didn’t hear Lisa open my garden gate. She sat beside me and asked if I were thinking about my grandmother. I nodded and told her how strange it felt to see her body. Lisa gave me a cwtch and kissed my cheek. We were just kids, waiting for time to transcend that moment of pensive silence, waiting to grow up. I would soon move to another part of Cardiff, too far away from Canton to see much of Lisa and Elliott. Elliott and I would reach the pinnacle of our friendship and then grow apart, with only rivalry in common. I wouldn’t be reunited with my two friends for a long time.

  Funerals are grave events, but my grandmother’s turned out to be a comedy of errors. The priest had a bad lisp, which raised the occasional snigger despite the circumstances, and even had my aunties and mother suppressing smiles throughout the service.

  My grandfather had passed away, due
to a long illness, when I was very young. So it was just my two aunties, my mother and me sitting in the front row of the church, and then shortly afterwards in the crematorium.

  On the way to the crematorium, my aunties talked about how - despite the sad weight of the time - they’d found it difficult not to laugh at the priest’s lisp. My mother believed my grandmother would have struggled not to laugh as well, if only she’d been there at her own funeral service.

  Laughing during funerals isn’t something you’d even think of doing. But my aunties had drawn my attention to the comedic side of the service. I feel sorry for the poor priest who couldn’t pronounce the letter S. Had I talked to him on a less grievous occasion, I’m sure I wouldn’t have found his lisp remotely funny.

  Sinews of cloud passed over the sun and tawny leaves danced in a faint breeze as everybody entered the crematorium. I stood in the front row and gazed at the coffin. When everybody had to sing the first hymn, my mother picked up the Welsh version of the hymnbook. She couldn’t speak Welsh. It didn’t help that she tried reading the book upside down either. I let out a whispered snigger. The danger of laughter suddenly weighed down on me. I wondered how sick it would seem of me to get the giggles during such an occasion. And then the hymns ended. And the priest started reading again. And he couldn’t pronounce the letter S.

  I trembled as laughter crept up my spine. My mother noticed this and got the giggles as well. She turned away from me and stared at the white wall, running her fingers through her hair to distract herself. I bit my tongue and stared at the ground. Everyone behind me must have felt such pity for the poor boy shaking with grief. My aunties became wise to the awkwardness of the situation and covered their mouths to stifle their laughter. The priest kept reading. And he still couldn’t pronounce the letter S. I tried everything to stop myself from breaking into a fit, from multiplication to counting Carmarthen sheep, but I couldn’t help counting how many times I heard the letter S, which wasn’t often at all.

  The giggles left me when a beam of sunlight broke through a window, illuming the coffin. I still feel very guilty for getting the giggles. Nothing could have been less humorous, but I think that’s why we laughed. We smiled despite the constraints of mourning.

  I wiped my damp brow as I stepped outside. Wasps cleaved the air and speckled butterflies wandered among the delphiniums. I couldn’t look at the people congregating around the striking memorial flowers. My mother touched my shoulder and smiled.

  ‘I’m sure your grandmother wouldn’t have been bothered,’ she said. ‘She wouldn’t have wanted everybody to cry at her funeral. She would have called us sissies.’

  ‘But she wouldn’t want us to laugh, surely?’

  ‘She would have understood. She was a terrible giggler herself!’

  I examined the flowers, the lilies and wreaths of lavender. The sweet scents of the florid tributes filled my nostrils, as the clouds parted and the sun painted the turf a leonine yellow. There would be more funerals, more times of mourning. Inevitable good times and bad times. But all that would come later. I took in everything that bloomed in that current scene, as the image of sunlight breaking through the window and touching the coffin lingered in my mind.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  High School

  And then I came to the cocoon phase, those metamorphosing years of acne and pubic hair. St Joseph’s Catholic High School cast an ominous shadow over each weekday morning. The headmaster ran the place like a concentration camp, mimicking Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks while he twisted his mustache and peered through classroom windows. The place was drab, save for the colorful graffiti on the walls and the radioactive green beef burgers in the canteen.

  ‘Don’t worry. First years never really have their heads stuck down the toilet in high school. That’s just a myth!’ Mrs Parker’s final words to me resounded in my ears.

  They resounded in my ears at the very moment I had my head stuck down the shitter by a sixth former, just two hours into high school life.

  Bang, your head’s shoved down the bog and you realize that hey, you’re growing up now. You’re a teenager and adolescent life can be crappy.

  I took a giant leap backwards in the school popularity hierarchy. Older kids bullied me until I was fully ingratiated with the toilet seat, badly bruised and looking flushed. School life became a haze of fist head-butting and atomic wedgies - that’s a really, really big wedgie. Even the teachers disliked me. Mrs Bach, my Geography teacher, could send any insomniac to sleep, but if I closed my eyes for a moment’s kip she’d have me in detention faster than I could name the capital of Thailand. Most of my lunchtimes consisted of doing lines and listening to her talk about such varied subjects as pancakes and salt corrosion.

  I became a regular pizza face, no longer complimented for my blue eyes and dimpled cheeks. I experimented with acne treatment but one cream made the skin on my chin go hard and dry. I still persevered with it and during the winter my skin became chapped. A bully cut my face during a confrontation and the chapped skin turned into painful scabs, which stretched and cracked whenever I spoke.

  I spent the next two years with an angry red scar on my face. Kids called me ‘Scarface’ and ‘vagina chin,’ staring at me as I walked down the corridors and assuming I had a skin disease. My mother laughed when I told her about the nicknames. But she reassured me that the scar would fade and I wouldn’t be an ugly duckling for much longer. To add to these calamitous trivialities, I had braces. Regardless of what anyone says, they’re not cool; they hurt and food gets stuck in them. Plus I kept breaking them every time I bit into an apple or chewed gum. The orthodontist hated my guts. She was always complaining about my lack of care when it came to brushing. She loved to scrape my gums until they bled, claiming this was due to insufficient care. But I’m guessing even Superman’s gums would bleed if you scratched them with a scalpel for long enough.

  When I wasn’t with Mrs Bach, talking about terracettes and cupcakes, I spent my lunchtimes in the library, reading about Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas. This extra reading meant my literary terminology exceeded my classmates’. My English teacher Mrs Harper asked me to stay behind after one of her lessons.

  ‘You’re very quiet in class.’ She placed a pen on her desk and smiled broadly at me.

  ‘Well, I don’t have anybody to talk to.’

  ‘You never answer any questions during lessons. But you’re the brightest student of your age I’ve ever come across.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You mention intertextuality, feminist theories and deconstruction in your essays.’

  ‘Yeah, well I don’t really know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘These are theories you’ll come across at university. You shouldn’t know anything about them in high school!’ She laughed.

  ‘I read a lot,’ I said. ‘There were some books in the library.’

  ‘About deconstruction?’

  ‘Well, one textbook mentioned the word and I looked it up. I read something by this guy named Jacques Derrida.’

  ‘You read something by Derrida!’

  ‘Yeah, but it was confusing. And then I came across this other guy. Fuckster or Foucault, I think his name was.’

  ‘You’re fourteen!’

  ‘Have I done something wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘You have a special gift. I want you to start answering questions in class. If you like, I could recommend some books for you?’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  ‘Good. Daniel, you should make the most of your talent. You need to harness it. You’re years ahead of your classmates. I think you could go very, very far.’

  Mrs Harper was my only source of light in high school. She introduced me to the likes of Dostoyevsky and Dickens, Wordsworth and Donne. And she taught me a Latin phrase I’ll never forget: ‘Ars longa, vita brevis’, which meant, ‘Life is short, but art is long’. I had it tattooed on my right shoulder on my nineteenth birthday.

  I wrote poetry und
er Mrs Harper’s guidance. She taught me terms like anapaest and spondee. I soon had a poem published in a children’s anthology, which was passed around the class so everyone could have a read. It felt great to see my name in print, and I wanted to experience that feeling again. I remember having tears in my eyes and a swelling tingly feeling in my chest when people complimented it. I’d never felt like that before. So I entered another poem into a competition, which was also published. I realized then that I wanted to be a writer.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Butterfly

  My mother had an issue with rubbish bags. Only one bag could be sent out for the garbage man each week. One wasn’t enough, I tell you! So I’d put any additional rubbish in extra bags and hide them among the bushes in our garden. I had to do it very early before school, while she slept. If she heard the rustle of a plastic bag she’d make me pull the other bags out of the bushes and empty their contents. I’d contend with the slugs and maggots feasting on the stale bread and expired milk. Then I’d go to school, smelling of trash.

  At least school life became easier. I came out of my shell, climbed up the greasy pole and made friends. The scar on my chin faded and my teeth straightened. I wasn’t an ugly duckling anymore.

  I wanted to perform on stage again, but Morning Mass was about as theatrical as it got at St Joseph’s. I missed the stage, spent most of my time dreaming about becoming a Hollywood hero. Those dreams had kept me going during Mrs Bach’s lessons about pesticides, and the times I’d gargled toilet water.

  I also dreamt about my first crush, Olivia. To my adolescent eyes, her mouse-like features and tangled brown hair made her wonderful. Heaven smiled at me if she glanced my way, but that didn’t happen very often. I finally had my chance to tell her how I felt at the school prom, the most Americanized event I’d ever attended in Cardiff (bear in mind this was in the good old days, before bratty teenage girls were broadcast on television for their sweet sixteenths or school proms). School had ended, and the trials of teenage life would soon be over.