Breaktime by Aidan Chambers

Morgan, thou shouldst be with us at this hour. Crap. He’d say I was a timid sod. Mayhap he’d be right. How do you get like that? The prisoner is of a nervous disposition, m’lud, and when attacked by five armed warders cowed in a corner of his cell in a cow hardly way. Man’s a fool. Yes, m’lud. I sentence you to eternal anxiety and don’t let me hear from you again. Or is it learned? Mother always worrying. Was she worrying when I was born? Was she at that mystic moment wondering whether Dad had remembered to leave a message for the milkman? Two pints today, please, we have an extra mouth to feed. Was she, even, Shandy-like, unnerved by some mundane distraction at the climactic moment of my conception? Or maybe Dad’s right: that I know nowt except from books, am a pseud. Wonder how the old bloke is, poor chap. Always loathed being ill. Incapable. Like a hobbled animal. Raging against the indignity, the frustration, the loss of control. Rage, rage against the dying of the light, old man. With nowhere else to live except in his body what else do you expect? But that’s an insult. To say he can’t think. He can think. But he thinks by feeling and knows what he thinks by seeing what he does. Me, I know what I think by seeing what I say, like the poet said. Is that the difference, the real difference between us? Is that why I can’t understand him and he can’t understand me? Not the generation gap—crap that is—but the education gap? The thinking gap. Is that why he can’t explain him to me and I can’t explain me to him? He wants me to show him what I am, I suppose. Wants to see I’m like him by acting like him. Is that it? God knows. And He isn’t too chatty. Is that why I’m here now doing all this? To try and show him? To try and convince myself I am more than he says? Could be all he wants, if
I
want? And are Robby and Jack what he wants? Jack reminds me of him a bit, as he was before his illness, as he must have been, judging from photographs, at my age. Good boozer, hard worker, one of the lads, a bit of a joker, good looking. A handsome feller, they say my dad was when he was young. They say that about Jack, I don’t doubt. But there he is having a hard time with his dad, so what’s his dad want of him? And Jack says Robby is always rowing with his father. Though in his case it sounds like he wants his father to be something different from what he is instead of t’other way about. A flipping father trio. Morgan doesn’t have
    Salutation
    ‘A penny for them.’
    Helen. In full flesh bloom. Better than the photograph. I could hardly look at her but in snatched glances. Shyness is an illness and ought to be medically treated.
    ‘Hey! What . . .?’
    ‘Meeting you, chump.’
    ‘But I thought . . .’
    ‘To get here I had to tangle a web. Officially, by which I mean parentally speaking, I’m here on a three-day state visit to my father’s brother, otherwise known as my uncle, and his family who live in Gunnerside. I told you I’d find a way.’
    ‘Very convincing.’
    ‘In one hour I embark on United’s three-o service going forward to Reeth, where I shall be picked up by father’s brother’s wife, a child-weary mother of eight, one more being imminent, a prolific breeding record I regard as more suitable to rabbits than human beings. On arrival and after a suitable time has passed, I shall casually mention to my bucolic uncle that I met by chance here in Richmond, as indeed I have, an old friend, verily a school pal from my Darlington years, who invited me to a social evening (ahem ahem) . . . well, go on, invite me . . .’
    ‘O, of course, please join me for an ahem social evening tomorrow.’
    ‘Thank you kindly, kind sir. Tomorrow it shall be. And, I shall continue, I would appreciate it if they would allow me to accept and keep the appointment. They, of course, only too glad to be spared an evening of my stay without my adolescent presence, will say yes, but be careful. And I