Primary School, 2008
Small Moments, That Take On Significance Later
I’m in the playground, maybe aged 9 or 10, and two slightly older boys come up to me. I’m eating Walkers Ready Salted crisps, which must have felt like a treat because we usually bought own-brand, and the boys ask me for some. One of the boys was taller than me with a head noticeably smaller than his body demanded, and the other was J-. Two kids my senior asking me for my special crisps – I must have felt so cheated. They take a few each, but the ones in J-s’ hand are green, the chips of unripe potatoes. Brilliant! I am a winner and nobody asks for my shit unbidden: I wouldn’t have touched those little morsels with a barge pole, I was a hellishly fussy eater back then. For my own private victory dance I tell J- “Oh, a green one, that’s means you’re lucky.”
Seven years on from the theft of my crisps I’m in an art class with Tom, Dean and David and we’re discussing J-. None of us have seen him in years because he went to another Secondary School, and even though we’re all in the same quiet little suburb we just don’t run in the same circles: Kids never do for long. Anyway, J- had been having trouble at his school and as a coping mechanism he started drawing up a list of the students and teachers he would kill if he could.
We found this out because he had decided it was all too much, that he was going to kill the fuckers on the list for putting him through hell. J-, long-lost crisp thief, then walked into his sleeping parents bedroom and fatally stabbed his father with a kitchen knife. He attempted to kill his mother too, before snapping out of whatever frenzy he was in and phoning the police. You see, his parents were at the top of this list, on the grounds that they shouldn’t have to live with the guilt and shame of what he was about to do.
© Matthew Sheret, 2008
