Ben Barrett Saved My Life by Sally Curtis

Diaphanous. You were my favourite.

I saw words like you written here and there, glimpsed through a crack in a door, heard whispered in other rooms, other worlds, but those words had no place in my mouth. I tried my best, my rough tongue licking the vowels, my teeth crunching the consonants, scraping the flesh from my cheek until I was forced to spit them out, unused. What was the point? Fancy words don’t feed the electric meter; fancy words don’t put bread on the table.

Mrs Collins tried to help unravel the mysteries that gave those symbols sound. Sitting as close as I could, the warmth of her woolly skirt against my leg, her gentle breath brushing my ear, I stumbled over one letter at a time but was unable to find the key to unlock the secret code. I heard other words then: struggler, immature, needy. I didn’t tell her I had never held a book before or how she smelled of kindness.

At the end of the long school day, she would utter those magic words.

“Come and sit on the carpet, everyone.”

I would slip from my chair and nestle amongst the others, crouched in invisibility, fingers crossed, eyes closed, willing the words I knew were coming to be silenced.

“Michael, bring your book.”

And, as the others gathered at Mrs Collins’ feet, wide eyes, smiles wider, I was pulled away to learn my sounds but not their melody. While she transported them to imaginary lands and times gone by, I was left in a world where there was no Saint George slaying dragons, no Rapunzel unfurling her flaxen hair, no wolves huffing and puffing or giants fe-fi-fo-fumming. My sounds were ch and cl and th; merely chunks and clunks and thuds. My books had levels on the back. One sentence on each page. Five words at the most. I wasn’t allowed to choose from the shelf and, for the first time, I tasted the hollow hunger of envy.

Each September I hoped for different but whilst my classmates gasped at giant peaches and rode glass elevators, I learned Peter had a dog. Rather than step through wardrobe doors or plunge down rabbit holes, I stood with Sally who had a cat. The Famous Five adventured without me because I spent my time with Peter and Sally and their fucking cats that sat on mats and their fucking dogs that sniffed logs until I stopped hoping because hope didn’t work.

My secondary school had a special class where I met Peter and Sally’s friends. Ear to the wall, the clever kids talked of savage boys on deserted islands and red ponies running free. I longed to be with them and, when I thought no-one was looking, I took a timid bite but the teachers hooked their fingers into my mouth, clawing out my attempts like contraband, leaving room for more relevant learning – more functional.

They had no time for words I had already learned: names of cheap cider and cigarettes; filthy whore and useless bitch; the medical name for a bruise. Unable to enter their world, I went unnoticed to the park, unfinished cans and tab ends my companions but eventually they searched me out and forced me to keep failing, until I became the new words pinned to me: unteachable, disruptive, failure.

“Why are you so confrontational?” they asked, as if that was the start of it.

That was never how it started.

It started with them asking where my tie was.

It started with them asking why I hadn’t done my homework.

It started with:

“Where’s your pen?”

“Where’s your planner?”

“Why haven’t you got football boots?”

“Money for the trip?”

It started with the snap of a can, laughter turning to accusations turning to shouts, pleas drowned by anger.

It started with neighbours banging on the walls.

Police at midnight.

Social workers clambering through the mess.

Empty cupboards.

The smell of dope.

And it ended with criticism.

“Take that look of your face.”

“Watch your tone.”

“You’ll never get anywhere with that attitude.”

Each humiliation punched at me until there was no air left and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t explain, couldn’t find the words so I did what I knew: I smashed up their world to show them none of it mattered. I flipped tables and threw chairs because the only sounds they listened to were the thuds and clunks and chunks they had taught me, their predictions come true, their words following me from class to class, and year to year.

It ended with me in The Unit where I sat waiting for time to die.

And then Ben Garrett saved my life.

He strode into the classroom, threw his donkey jacket on a chair, and sat on the floor, back against the wall.

“Hi,” he said. “Listen to this.”

From a battered satchel he pulled a book, its cover faded, the spine creased.

“’Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end …’”

He read for half-an-hour and then left, another volunteer, another do-gooder ready to turn bad kids good, one more who wouldn’t return because the anticipated gratitude didn’t come. But Ben was different. The next day, slouched against the wall, he picked up from where he had left off, doing the same the next day and the next until the book was finished, and Jim turned his back on a life at sea.

“Did you like it?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Good. See you tomorrow.”

He didn’t have the softness nor the scent of Mrs Collins, but I drew closer to him, watched his lips, listened to his voice as he read aloud, as much to himself as to me. No judgements. No lectures. He just read from his well-thumbed books while I listened to the harmony of the words, his voice full of love for what he held in his hands. At last I could imagine, absorb, escape even though I didn’t understand it all.

Finally, I was allowed in.

“Here,” he said one morning. “Your turn.”

He passed me a book, settled himself against the wall and, eyes closed, waited. The letters stared from the page but, pulling them together, I stuttered through and he listened as if I were an orator.

“Take it home. Tell me what you think on Monday.”

Like a newborn, I wrapped it in a page torn from an unused exercise book and hid it in my backpack, protected from greasy crisp crumbs and flakes of tobacco. I need not have bothered.

“You can keep your fucking books,” I spat Monday morning, hurling it at him. “What use are they to me?” My father’s words leapt from my mouth. “It’s all made-up shit. What’s a Catcher anyway? It doesn’t even make sense.”

“I thought you enjoyed the stories.”

“So what? Reading that stuff won’t get me a job. Quoting bloody poets isn’t gonna get me anywhere. I know where I belong. Here. This is it. And no stupid book is gonna change that.”

He picked the book up like a parent comforting a hurt child, rubbing his thumb along the broken spine, and left.

The next day he kept his coat on.

“Be respectful,” he said, handing me another book, and left.

It was thin with few words scattered across the pages, the lines were sharp edged. I flicked through, reading titles: A Lad with Nothing but Himself, Angry Man, Dirt and Grime in Hopeless Town, A Bad Trip, I Didn’t Want To Be Him Anymore.’ I began in the middle – the one with the easiest title:

Zero

They’ll tell you you’re a nothing

Nobody

No good

They’ll say you’re heading nowhere

A dead-end route.

No face.

No place.

No trace.

Put you bottom of the class.

You’ve failed every test.

Your life

Doesn’t score

Doesn’t grade

Can’t protest

The noughts on your card.

You’re nix.

Nada.

Nil

by bad-mouth

loud-mouth

smash-mouth.

They’ll tell you you’re heading nowhere.

Tell you there’s no place to go.

You’re a nothing.

Null and Void.

Zilch. Zip.

Zero.

But they won’t ever tell you

Zero is the strongest number in the world.

I went back to the beginning and read the book straight through. These words were from my streets, my life, spitting the truth of me, the life waiting for me: a cycle of ignorance, poverty, debt, boredom, drugs, petty crime. It was all laid out in verse. But as I read further, the words softened, despair turning to possibility, pessimism replaced by hope, dejection growing into self-respect, and the message became clear. There was a decent life out there. Not by way of three wishes from a fairytale but in a refusal to accept there was no escape, a pride that wouldn’t be crushed under mocking eyes, and a strength to push against the weighted expectation of failure. I saw what confined me, defined me, was nothing but a gauzy façade and, like a cobweb, I could blow it away if I wanted to.

I turned to the front cover. In the End it was All Up to Me, by Ben Garrett.

I had trodden the path carved for me, accepted the labels they pinned to me, thinking I’d hidden what was inside, but Ben saw straight through me.

I clasp the brand-new lanyard around my neck, fingering the plastic card, reading my upside-down name, the word Volunteer in large black print. I open the door and sling my coat on the back of a chair ready to share my words.

Diaphanous – you are still my favourite.

End