Sixteen Years

The bedroom was always cold. There were a million words you could have used to describe the room but if you had to choose just one, cold was the one you walked away with. Small was a given, but then people often put their least loved items in the smallest rooms. Not always things they want to get rid of per se, but nonetheless, things which they don’t want to see much of. One benefit of the constant cold draft from the broken window was it seemed to be keeping the damp under control, which had pervaded throughout the rest of the flat. The catch on the window had been damaged years ago during some early morning raid, when the police’s ‘person of interest’ was being pulled back into the room through the slim glazed panel. The hinged slide bore the brunt of the encounter, eventually bending to the officers will just moments before their quarry did. He rarely slept well but that night, he had woken with a start, but didn't make a sound. He could feel a hot, large, unfamiliar hand on his inner thigh. There was hot, stale breath on his face and a pair of strange, wide eyes which turned away quickly towards a shouting and banging noises from the other room before the huge silhouettes of several policemen crashed through the flimsy paneled door taking centre stage, slamming into eachother in their haste to reach his intruder, almost taking the door off its hinges as it folded back on itself. Its handle slammed into the raw, unpainted plasterboard wall and left a horizontal dent, which he knew would never be repaired. The hand was yanked back as the stranger leapt to his feet and onto the mattress, which creaked and sagged noisily beneath the man’s weight. He launched himself towards the window, grabbing at the long lever handle. Body parts were seized upon as the man hit the polished concrete floor face-first, knocking himself unconscious. It wasn’t clear how he’d broken a rib but this was the seventies, and accidents during arrest seemed to happen a lot more back then. Sometimes at the scene, or just as often in the back of a police van or a custody suite things could escalate quickly before health and safety took over. The duty officer recognised the man, and noted he was more compliant than his last visit but the whole event had lasted less than twenty minutes, seven of which were in Ash's bedroom, the rest of the evening gradually getting quieter and quieter as the man was dragged, pushed and pulled down the six flights of the tenement stairwell and out past a growing audience of annoyed neighbours, observing from the walkway balcony onto the scene below. As people cursed and swore about the noise, their broken sleep, comments of 'good riddance' and the how the area had ‘gone to shit’, on the sixth floor a small boy sat cowering, unnoticed in the corner of the bedroom on the cold concrete floor, his small fingers clutching the thin fabric of his Buck Rogers themed bedsheet. The last voice he heard amongst the slamming of doors was his mum. Shouting and swearing in the mans defence, she too was carted away by the police, to the cheers and jeers of the baying mob. From his room, the darkness returned as the blue flashing lights were replaced by the familiar yellow glow of the streetlight on the back of his tatty curtains. He stayed there for several hours, his thin, boney frame shivering, his wide furtive eyes staring at the faint light coming through from the other room which was now empty and silent. Straining, listening intently at the wind whistling through his now broken window for voices and twitching with any unfamiliar noise. His head shot over to the window as a tin can was blown clumsily down the road and the vent cover opened and closed in the breeze but for now, it was just him and the wind. No one was there and no one was coming. He was still alone as the first rays of sunlight hit the broken glass of his window and threw a strange, rainbow across the wall on the far side of the room. Ash stared at this for a long time before slowly getting to his feet, his muscles and bones screamed to be left where they were and crawl back under his thin bedsheet as his entire body ached more than anyone his age had a right to. But it was morning, finally.. And it was time for school.