Closed doors and open windows- Copyright- Robert Fullarton 2013

Closed doors and open windows

I the family exhibitionist stood before several of my relatives, who had gathered once again for another Easter celebration and I a small scrawny, unimpressionable child - who had not even reached his first half dozen years of life- stood proclaiming a small piece of writing, clutched in my shaky grasp, and told boldly like an entertainer before the family. My mother had insisted on me reading out aloud the work to amuse my aunts and to “broaden” and “expand” my vocation for the life ahead. I performed in front of my parents, siblings, aunts and uncles and even cousins who would occasional grace the presence of the family home with their abrupt and swift arrival and departure through the circuit of the seasons.

I would usually either sing out, with my breast thrust forward and my hands neatly held behind my bank, put firmly in place like an ornament, or perhaps some movement or compulsion of comfort. I would tell some fabricated story to the dinner guests on my days at school and how I was the captain of the under twelve’s cricket team and the most notorious and popular boy in the school and the most exuberantly bright child in the entire neighbourhood. Yet all of these rambles were complete fables which I told to enlighten the guests, to enthrall them with my youth filled, soulful exhibitions and while they watched I examined the faces of my family, the faces of the wildebeests, the warthogs, the hippopotamuses and lionesses who lingered about with watchful faces and some rang out bemused tones of boredom, with watchful glances made and often annoyance from their demeanour. The women would indulge themselves completely in the red whine- and the sour, yet sweet odour of the grapes were in the air- and the women would nurse small tinted glasses of golden brown stock brandy, while the men were crouched at the back of the dinning room, giving out their male peacock attire, wearing their Sunday best, while they knocked back tall black and creamy pints of Guinness and sipped on glasses filled with old vintage whiskey, while the smell of nicotine cursed the air around me and the atmosphere was always unnerving.

At the end of the spectacle a chorus of “hurrahs” and support hung in the air, and the fleeting glimpses of applause were all too brief- transitory moments of a child’s ambition for attention- claps of unanimous support were often given at the end of a song given when I sang some Christmas carol or when I read out the lyrics and the stanza’s of the poems learned and mimicked at school and spoon fed to me by mother at my bedside on many a school night.

Since I am the runt of the pack and the youngest of the clan, the adults in their exclusive conversations and their more mature – refined- lives would exclude me from their attention once I stopped my act and no longer stood in degradation and control.

When I was released from the rusty, greasy bars of my captors, I became outlandish. I burped at the dinner table – I ran amok with stray dogs from off the streets through the living room – which I invited in, offering the dogs pieces of mom’s Monday stew- while pretending to be a wolf running with the pack and I remember one time when I sat fingering the mash potato on the plate- like as if I were scooping up dollops of vanilla ice cream- throwing lumps of mash potato wildly around the room at my sisters head, watching her duck and dive completely aghast in protest – I did so trying to pretend to be involved in a snow ball fight- while father stood upright, with his fists clenched and his face having transformed to a bright ruby red reflection screamed for order at the dinner table. I would receive the sullen glances, quiet and awkward pauses from the family conversations and then when I had really misbehaved I would be given my marching orders and be banished to my bedroom to await my father’s instructions as he said “he’d deal with me later” – all in due course-.

Yet I never really fathomed out what unscrupulous crime I had perpetrated and I strained my mind in agony trying to unravel the perplexity of their anger directed to, surely all boys run wild as colonel Custer in the house casing invisible American Indians through the vicinity of the rooms and surely all boys ask about a gazillion questions on everything, even if one explicit slur is made once or twice.

I enveloped my imagination in the secret private world which I forged through my fantastic games played in the perimeter of the garden, while hidden in the long hairy slick fringe of the grass. The summer air left an intrinsic identity of my childhood diaries and events as I played the part of mobsters, pirates and spacemen on the swings and slides in the neighbour’s garden, inventing synonyms and alter egos while

Creating problems for the family to come and clean up once the family hurricane had destroyed everything in its proximity.

When I had once got the wrong end of the stick with my uncle Ivan – who was a big muscular bull of a man with a Kaiser like moustache that curled up on either side, with a ginger tinge to his lightly cropped hair who possessed the biggest pair of biceps that I have ever seen in all my life- once in my childhood during a weekend visit- which he frequently made to acquaint us with his vulgar vocabulary and foul temperamental moods- he had housed himself on the couch and had drank over a half dozen cans of cider and suddenly he found himself taken completely aback by the sight of me whizzing through the air like superman running from my older cousin, jumping from the arms of the wide sitting room sofa onto the barrel of his belly, to knock his drink all over the floor. His face was purple, red, viola colour and immediately he grabbed me by my arms and trusted me out of the room.

“You little pup, you never learn”, he said contorted in his anger.

I’d say “But I was only messin…. I…I”

“Get out and stay out, what’s wrong with you, have you got mental disabilities, are you slow, you should be put in a school for the mentally deranged. Stay out or I’ll thump you.”

Then the feelings of dissipation came to my stomach and my bowels and the silent protests of my siblings were hidden and yet almost unseen to me.

                                                      II

Many a door was closed on me and I would stand almost forever outside of the living room awaiting my admittance back to the living room so to rejoin the family gathering, or I would sob and wilt in my bedroom by myself. It must be heaven to be an adult, (so I thought!) with no restrictions, with freedom from our superiors, becoming a big and strong lofty man, a grizzly bear wrestling adventurer, a Pulitzer prize winning literary genius with a mountain of achievement and imagination in his profession and an explorer travelling through the hidden pathways of the ancient Greeks and Hebrew sites – the dwelling places of immortals- and I believed that childhood to them must have been a purgatory since they knew nothing of my

hidden agendas, games and adventures.

I would sit on the duvet covers of my bed in the vicinity of my bedroom chamber, frozen and seemingly inanimate gazing into the wonders of my imagination, which the perfect microcosm in the macrocosm all around me.

I would often gaze out my bedroom window like some clairvoyant whose mind has been awakened, or a seer of old antiquity gazing into the mystery of the future to survey the wet, damp, dense, sprawling street, to watch pedestrians come and go like matchsticks on the tarmacedon in a game of restless energy drawn habitually within them. I watched the silver clouds turn, violent black in their isolation and witnessed the sun go down behind the church steeple, the sequence of council houses and the great contingent of cars which were parked in columns lying opposite the avenues in the distance form my house.

Father insisted that the family be assembled before half nine at the breakfast table and he would- during his daily ritual – wake both me and my older brother up out of our beds, like a drill sergeant made with too much self made autonomy or a prison warden watching over the prisoners every morning and while he woke us up he’d say “its half nine get up while the day is still here! Do you not have a recollection of the time?”

“No”, I’d say innocently in response with a poisonous look of resentment and a face swollen in confusion. Then he would as always proceed towards my brother’s room to

Inspect the situation there. I eventually found myself becoming familiarised with the bedroom monitor routine. For much of the day my father would keep a several mile distance in his emotions from me and I always wondered why.

                                                      III

My brother Kevin was approximately 7 years in advance of me, he was lofty in stature, naturally gregarious in his nature, popular amongst his peers, athletic and a sporting man with an appetite for all manner of sport and games, he had green piercing eyes and when he talked he chattered like a chimpanzee in a frenzy – when in a jovial mood. He and his friends formed an association of friends that would gallivant around together in the neighbourhood and would go out purposely to pester and annoy a pack of cantankerous young girls –who dwelled at the opposite end of the street- taunting them with the chant “ugh girls, carries of cancer” or “girls don’t give us that damn disease”, and yet the boys were ignorantly oblivious to the true nature of cancer. Kevin and I would aggravate each other and we certainly did not see eye to eye, we fought incessantly through the years on a whole multitude of issues, but when we did fraternise together we sounded like a pair of howler monkeys in jest chattering on about comic books, super heroes super villains and which ones we preferred over others, this was the profuse and profound interest which we could bond on. On the hot and balmy nights both me and Kevin would play cricket on the lawn together taking scores and records of which one could better the other.

Over time, as I slowly sprouted in stature I saw the closed doors of our differences, he went his way in life and I went my way, he became a man made in his secrecy and I grew accustomed to the fact that I saw less and less of him as time crawled forward and once watched him sneaking in through his bedroom window and looked to see him slowly zip up his dark, bulky, leather jacket, and I watched him place his pack of cigarettes with diligent care in the bottom drawer of his dresser. There and then he pursued his new awakening for girls, he body changed and transformed and the temptations and yearnings of adulthood stood beckoning on the horizon for him. He looked me in the face for a moment and then he closed the door and in an instant this disgruntled boy pursued his own destiny, his own inklings but sought many things which were different to the common needs of adolescence and adulthood.