Charlie Shields
“Grandad, tell us again about Charlie Shields,” Danny said, dropping onto the sofa next to me.
“Alright, sunshine,” I said, putting my arm around him.
His sister, two years younger and just as blonde, climbed onto my knee and settled herself into the crook of my other arm.
“Best friends we were; we played together, fought together, and crapped together,” I laughed, remembering how we would each be sitting on the carsey at the bottom of our gardens, shouting out jokes as we did our business. “Those were the days when you shat out and ate in,” I whispered, making sure their Grandmother didn’t hear. “Not like today with all these fancy restaurants. No one wants to cook anymore.”
The children giggled and snuggled down further.
“He was a good-looking little fella, gaps in his teeth, and you’d never see him without his cap on. Tufts of hair sticking out from the bottom, colour of brown sugar it was. The only thing he’d ever talk about was being an explorer; he was going to go all the way to the other side of the world, and when he’d got there, he was gonna keep going.”
“But there’s nowhere further than the other side of the world,” Sally said.
“That wouldn’t stop Charlie Shields,” I told her, “He was going to explore the whole universe!”
“Did he go, Grandad? Did he make it to the other side of the world?” Danny asked.
“Well, there’s the funny thing, we don’t know where he went,” I said, sadly. “The last time I saw Charlie Shields was one Wednesday night, we’d played marbles in the backyard. Charlie was talking about his adventures, as he always did; Venezuela was his favourite place that night. He’d been reading all about it, he wanted to go to the Amazon, he did. He was going to search for tiny frogs and giant birds, find all the things he’d been reading about. But then, as we were playing, the heavens opened. Raindrops as big as eggs were falling from the sky, soaked in seconds, we were. Our mums called us in quick sharp, didn’t want us catching colds and getting sick. We scooped up the marbles, Charlie ducked through the hole in the fence and went home, and I ran indoors. As I stripped off my wet clothes, I looked at the marbles. My favourite one was missing, the lilac one; the prettiest colour I’d ever seen. I hoped Charlie had it. I couldn’t bear the thought of it getting washed away by the rain. Mum wouldn’t let me go out again that night, the rain just didn’t stop. I watched the sky for hours, on and on that water fell; I didn’t know the sky could hold so much!
Come the morning, everything was back to normal, well, so I thought. But then there was a knock at the door. It was a policeman. Charlie was missing. They asked me lots of questions: where might he have gone? Had he told me anything? But I didn’t know, I had no idea where he was. The policeman’s face was very serious, ‘are you sure you don’t know son?’ he said, ‘You’re his best friend, he must have told you something about where he was going.’
I thought about our game the night before, and all the things Charlie had told me about the Amazon. ‘He might have gone to Venezuela,’ I said. The policeman puffed his face out and clipped me around the ear. ‘This is no time for jokes, young man,’ he told me. But I wasn’t joking, just trying to help. I didn’t really know where Venezuela was, I only knew about the animals that lived there, all the ones Charlie had told me about.”
“So where was he, Grandad?” Danny asked.
“Nobody knew, everyone was very worried, he was only nine years old after all.”
“Did he come home that night?” Asked Sally.
“He didn’t come home that night, or the next night, or the one after that. In fact, he never came home again.”
“Not ever, Grandad?” Sally asked.
“Well, that’s not quite true,” I said, giving her a squeeze of reassurance.
“I was sitting out in that very back-yard one cool summer’s evening. The decades had rolled on; my parents were long gone – just like the outside toilet. I’d got married, had a family of my own. But after all the years that went by, I still thought about young Charlie Shields. I’d often look up at the window that used to be his bedroom and wonder where he was. His parents passed away a long time ago, and lots of people have lived there since. They died never knowing what happened to their little Charlie.”
“So what did happen to him?” Danny asked.
“Well, that’s the funny thing. There I sat one day, out in my little backyard, enjoying the last of the evening sun, and your Grandma came out. “What’s up, love?” I asked. She looked at me with a frown, “I was just coming in the front door, and a young lad asked me if you still lived here, asked me to give you this.”
She handed me a marble; the lilac in the middle was as bright and beautiful as I remembered it from all those years ago, there wasn’t a scratch on it, ‘What did he look like, this lad?’ I asked.
“I couldn’t see his whole face properly,” she said, “he was wearing a tatty old cap. But he had a lovely big grin, a happy-looking boy he was. His hair was just sticking out the back, it was the colour of…”
“Brown sugar”, I said.
She frowned again. “Yes,” she said, “it was exactly the colour of brown sugar.”
Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash