somewhere beyond a window view | fiction

story telling

In a bedroom with bunkbed and little else, freckled twin brothers with thick curly hair would spend hours in each other’s company. Especially on rainy days full of punishable behaviour. A sentence was handed down by a single parent who had long since lost patience in her sons. The understanding required in moments of heated exchange between two siblings was swallowed up by a need to earn money.

   Throughout a mother’s struggle for independence, came the dawning adolescence of two growing boys who had too much energy. Energy that bounced from wall to wall across a shared bedroom like a bouncy ball. Energy that misted glass with heavy breaths that contained the screams of injustice. Often the twin boys felt life was not fair when kept inside. But detention gave them time to contemplate their actions and realise, through the honesty a mother had installed in them; they were usually wrong. In acceptance they would consider that beyond their window view, life could be worse.   

   Excess energy was often taken out on one another over little more than boredom:  a punch, wrestle, submission. Often the brothers retreated to their low ceiling room with the reluctance of having nowhere else to go. They went ready to argue, but also cautious of a new world in which they now existed, one lacking a father to calm things down. But there were old routines. By morning, they would wake the same. Throw on creased white shirts and muddied trousers found on the floor the same. Splash lukewarm water across their face, toast and juice for the breakfast the same. Drowsy, they would walk a mile to school along a busy main road. Arriving at a school full of council estate kids raised on anger and addiction felt like prison.