Football
Lewis is my best friend in the world. Lewis is my longest friend in the world.
We have been friends for five months. He is a boy, like me, he goes to St. Luke’s School, like me. He likes football, like me.
We are different in some ways, but I like to think of the ways we are the same.
I don’t like playing some of the games on his playstation because they make me sad, but I can’t tell Lewis why I am sad, so I pretend not to like the games. I say they are rubbish.
I have other friends now but for a time I didn’t have anybody. No friends, no body. No mother, no body, not even my annoying little sister was there, and I miss her when I can remember her.
I tried to forget everything that happened before. Not before when Mummy and Daddy, and Tania and me were all together, but before I was here with Lewis as my best friend. The in between before time. This time is after my family stopped being.
When I was home I used to make believe that I was a soldier and was fighting great action battles and I became a hero and Mummy and Daddy, especially Daddy, was proud of me. But I don’t play those games anymore. Mummy would call me from the garden and say, “Anton, come in for dinner now.” I just carried on playing until she came and grabbed me and forced me to wash the camouflage dirt off so that we could sit down and eat together.
I’m not supposed to cry, because boys don’t cry, but I do almost every night because I’m forgetting what Mummy looked like and what she sounded like when she kissed me on the top of my head and told me to go to sleep or I wouldn’t grow. I don’t tell anybody that I cry because I do it quietly when I’m in my new bed.
My new bed is part of my new life, so is Lewis, my new best friend.
At first I didn’t speak. I didn’t speak for a long time. I don’t know how long the time was that I didn’t speak but I was trying to make it old again so I didn’t speak anything new that I’d have to lose. I was good at watching when I was silent. I learned all the new people’s routines even though I pretended that I didn’t notice anything.
On the third day here I saw a boy playing with a football, he never smiled but kicked the ball against the wall over and over. I think he was trying to break the football but he just got tired and sat on the floor holding the ball between his legs while he cried.
I was still looking for my family so I didn’t have time to play football or cry because I had to keep watch. And I couldn’t talk to any strangers because they stopped me from looking, so I stayed near the door and waited. Lots of people came but they weren’t my family.
The waiting was not like the waiting that I had to do in my old bedroom when I was being punished for playing out for too long, I knew that waiting, I knew it would end. This waiting was cold and lonely. I didn’t like it, I wanted it to stop.
It did. But not how I wanted it to. That’s why I started playing football.
I was my old self again and I remembered Daddy kicking the ball to me and Tania trying to get in the way. I pushed her over once – I wasn’t sorry then, but I am now. I just wanted to play a proper game with Daddy.
Lewis plays football with me. It’s good, but it’s not the same. But I am trying not to remember why I try to forget because when I remember I cry or just get so sad that I can’t talk to any one for a long time. In those times I feel like I’m shaking and it’s so cold again, and the soldiers are there with their guns, tanks and loud voices. It is very bright as if someone put all the lights in the world on and made them shine just on my house. Then everything is loud and I cover my ears. The next thing I know is that it’s very dark and I can hear the engines getting quieter as they drive into the distance over the rough roads.
I remember hearing some men laugh, but it was not a laugh that I recognised. I did try to make the laugh sound like the laugh of my cousin Stanimir, or my uncle Franjo. I tried to make the sound into something I had heard when it was the time before the bright light and the darkness – somehow it never works, not even when I dream it.
So, I play football with Lewis, and Ryan his brother, and I am OK for a slice of time.
It’s great to have a best friend. Lewis gave me a pencil on my first day at school, but I didn’t take it because I didn’t trust him, he was a stranger. A boy, just like me, yet I was afraid. Now he’s my best ever friend and we share everything, except his silly games on his playstation.
The only thing I don’t like in my new house are the combat pyjamas – they’re not funny. I screamed when I saw them on my new bed.
When I was in Serbia my birthday was exciting. I got lots of presents and felt special all day long. I was nice to my sister on that day as well because no bad words were said on birthdays in our house. Mummy always made a cake and Daddy organised the games for me and all my friends to play. It was always a long day full of fun. I loved my birthdays and I thought that they all would be the same for ever: me, Mummy, Daddy, Tania and my friends.
My birthday last week was different – it was nice but empty without my old family, my real family.
My new family, who I call Auntie and Uncle, they bought me lots of gifts, more than I’d ever had before, and they were kind to me all day. Lewis and his brother bought me a mini football – I like that. Stefan, my previous best friend, who lived next door to me and was in the same class as me at our old school, he never bought me a football but we shared each other’s games since we were born. I’d known Stefan for ever. I’d known him almost as long as I knew my mum and dad and even longer than I’d known my sister, Tania. Stefan didn’t make it to the old town hall where I ran to a few days after the soldiers had been. Nobody else from my neighbourhood made it there either.
I’d always been the fastest runner in our class, so I ran and hid until the loud noises went away. Mummy told me to run, she was crying when she called out to me, “Run, Anton, run!” I’d been playing in the shed, and was still hiding there when they came. The soldiers had grabbed her and Daddy had finished fighting and was lying on the ground.
I couldn’t move at first but her voice begged me to go, and when she screamed I went to help her, but she shouted at me in her angry voice mixed with her sad voice, “Do what I tell you, run Anton!” So I ran away and left the soldiers hurting Mummy. And I stayed hidden in the woods for days and it was scary when it was dark. I was always cold and hungry. I don’t like the dark, it frightens me. Tania doesn’t like the dark either. We always have a light on outside the bedroom at night so the shadows don’t come in.
I still have the light on.
© Marjorie H Morgan 2007
(1,370 words)
