Kenny would always remember with perfect clarity the first time he fell in love. He had been fifteen years old and walking to the bus stop one morning on the way to school with his friend Maggie, who had lived down the road from him where he grew up.
It was a strange and memorable day for a number of reasons, not least of which being that the pair were only just returning to school after their town had been lashed by the tail-end of a hurricane a few days before.
Though much had been done to clean up the mild devastation, there remained plenty of evidence of the weather system’s passing. Absent tiles marred the uniform roofs like missing teeth, while light-coloured strips below their lips spoke of gutters ripped away. Too many twigs and branches littered the ground, and the crushed iron railings at the edge of the park spoke of fallen trees that had since been removed.
All the way to the bus stop he and Maggie had talked in hushed tones, paying unconscious reverence to the subtle but fundamental change that had roughly intruded on the golden inviolability of their childhood haven.
Half-finished repairs could be seen throughout the neighbourhood, disrupted by the return of the normal working routine in the wake of the storm. Kenny’s father had huffed and puffed, grim-faced and quietly muttering, through all of the most essential repairs over the preceding two days. Kenny’s mother had looked on, her watery eyes flashing uncertainly over well-chewed fingernails.
Both were houseproud in their own ways: his father was a stern general protecting his fortress; his mother was a hostess with an exacting desire for order, cosiness and doilies. They had each been shaken by nature’s furious attack on their home, shaken in ways that they each mistakenly believed the other would not understand.
It had been a blessed relief for Kenny to finally get out from under the cloud of frustrated tension at home and the lightning-flash arguments that accompanied it; brilliant, thunderous and momentary. He gladly left behind his father’s seemingly incessant hammering and the arbitrary incursions into his room as his mother tidied unnecessarily around him before staring absently out of his window into the back garden and the shards of the shed and back fence that littered it.
At the end of the road, where Kenny and Maggie would usually turn in to the park to cut across to the bus stop, Kenny had noticed that old Mr Barker from 37 (for some reason he had never heard the man referred to solely by his name, it was always accompanied by his house number and an allusion towards his age) had replaced his front gate. It was a simple gate made up of six vertical pointed planks with two horizontal lengths of wood studded with antique look iron bolts, and a diagonal between the two.
The latch and hinges were made from the same black, wrought iron that held it together; the latch, a simple lift and drop mechanism and the hinges, solid cylinders leading to long, thin, delicately scrolled triangles grasping the pale wood via the incongruous silver gleam of spotless nail heads.
There was a dusty innocence to the gate as it waited patiently for stain and weather-proofing with flecks of wood splinters and sawdust littering the ground in front of it, fresh from its installation. Kenny remembered thinking how it was a shame that the striking contrast of the light-coloured wood and the stark black iron details would be lost when the stain or paint was brushed over the wood’s pale, porous, thirsty surface.
It was at this point that Maggie had finally managed to get his attention, reminding him, with some irritation, that they needed to get to school. The way she told it, he had stopped walking, unnoticed at first by her, and then stared at the gate for a solid five minutes. He had dismissed the talk of five minutes as hyperbole.
Their journey to school and the resulting day had been uneventful. Fun was had catching up with friends after the impromptu break and disappointment vocalised as horrifying levels of homework were assigned, but whatever was happening throughout the course of the day Kenny had often found his mind wandering inexplicably back to old-Mr-Barker-at-37’s new gate.
He couldn’t say that he had noticed any previous fondness for gates that might have fuelled this sudden fascination, nor could he pin-point any particular aspect of the gate that had so magnetically drawn his attention, but still the image had drifted nonchalantly to the forefront of his thoughts time and again throughout the day. Maths, science, geography; the subject made no difference.
This bizarre contemplation had been accompanied by a strange sense of trepidation within himself that he found difficult to explain. He felt acutely aware of himself despite his mind being elsewhere; he monitored the symptoms of slight nausea, shallow breathing and the tense sensation of an indefinable lack, and had noted them all with frustrated incomprehension.
On the journey home that afternoon, his nerves had grown steadily more ragged until his fiercely snapped evasions had finally driven the notion of concern from Maggie’s mind and she'd left him to cross the park alone. He'd regretted upsetting her, he was rather fond of her, but ultimately he had been relieved to have the time alone to think about the feelings that had plagued him since the morning. He had kicked his way despondently through the twigs and leaves that littered the paths of the park, his pace gradually slowing almost unconsciously until he found himself approaching the gate that led onto his road.
If anything the second time Kenny had laid his eyes upon that gate, at a distance and through the park entrance, would come to be fixed even more indelibly in the mental scrapbook of his life's pivotal moments than the first. Having been given a few moments to gather itself, and with plenty of forewarning, his sub-conscious had up-ed its game and perfectly captured the moment in preternatural clarity.
His memory of that moment had forever been locked in as a kind of 3D map of the gate and the intervening space. Leaves had been captured in mid fall, scudding clouds hung motionless in the stilled breeze and the gate somehow conveyed the notion of swinging gently backwards in the snap-shot stillness.
A lump rose in his throat and, realising that he had not done so for an uncomfortable stretch of time, Kenny took a breath and started walking forward again. He had wanted more than anything to just turn his head away and ignore it, but it was like an itch that he could never tire of scratching.
Somehow being able to gaze upon the gate provoked a sensation in him like cool water after a long run in midsummer heat. It hadn't been the case that he couldn't look away; of course he could, it would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise, it had simply been that he didn't want to, perhaps would never want to.
With no one around to remark upon the odd behaviour, he had decided to approach the problem straight on and edged slowly toward the gently swinging gate. He would never know just how long he spent pigeon-stepping towards it but time seemed to lose any kind of meaning as he put one foot in front of the other, drinking in every detail; the swirling patterns of the delicately coloured grain, the roughly and arbitrarily faceted heads of the wrought iron bolt heads, the teasing rise and fall of the latch handle as it bounced just too gently against the catch to lock.
Finally Kenny had found himself stood in front of Old Mr Barker's house, number 37, staring with a kind of reserved panic at the gate, large as life, right in front of him and feeling his heart hammer in his chest. It had seemed at once mundane and yet overwhelming, extraordinary. It felt to him at the time as if something like this shouldn't exist, like there was no place in the randomness and indiscriminate chaos of existence for something so sublime. It was as if the very idea, the perfect unblemished concept of a gate had been plucked straight from the realm of imagination, as if there was no way in which this thing could have been made but rather that it had sprung fully formed from the ether, straight from conception to reality and side-stepped the vulgarity of construction.
Of course Kenny hadn't been able to express any of these ideas at the time, young and enraptured as he had been, but his retrospective rationalisations would gradually try their best to chip away at the abnormality of his reaction, of his fascination, of his feelings.
It was a strange and memorable day for a number of reasons, not least of which being that the pair were only just returning to school after their town had been lashed by the tail-end of a hurricane a few days before.
Though much had been done to clean up the mild devastation, there remained plenty of evidence of the weather system’s passing. Absent tiles marred the uniform roofs like missing teeth, while light-coloured strips below their lips spoke of gutters ripped away. Too many twigs and branches littered the ground, and the crushed iron railings at the edge of the park spoke of fallen trees that had since been removed.
All the way to the bus stop he and Maggie had talked in hushed tones, paying unconscious reverence to the subtle but fundamental change that had roughly intruded on the golden inviolability of their childhood haven.
Half-finished repairs could be seen throughout the neighbourhood, disrupted by the return of the normal working routine in the wake of the storm. Kenny’s father had huffed and puffed, grim-faced and quietly muttering, through all of the most essential repairs over the preceding two days. Kenny’s mother had looked on, her watery eyes flashing uncertainly over well-chewed fingernails.
Both were houseproud in their own ways: his father was a stern general protecting his fortress; his mother was a hostess with an exacting desire for order, cosiness and doilies. They had each been shaken by nature’s furious attack on their home, shaken in ways that they each mistakenly believed the other would not understand.
It had been a blessed relief for Kenny to finally get out from under the cloud of frustrated tension at home and the lightning-flash arguments that accompanied it; brilliant, thunderous and momentary. He gladly left behind his father’s seemingly incessant hammering and the arbitrary incursions into his room as his mother tidied unnecessarily around him before staring absently out of his window into the back garden and the shards of the shed and back fence that littered it.
At the end of the road, where Kenny and Maggie would usually turn in to the park to cut across to the bus stop, Kenny had noticed that old Mr Barker from 37 (for some reason he had never heard the man referred to solely by his name, it was always accompanied by his house number and an allusion towards his age) had replaced his front gate. It was a simple gate made up of six vertical pointed planks with two horizontal lengths of wood studded with antique look iron bolts, and a diagonal between the two.
The latch and hinges were made from the same black, wrought iron that held it together; the latch, a simple lift and drop mechanism and the hinges, solid cylinders leading to long, thin, delicately scrolled triangles grasping the pale wood via the incongruous silver gleam of spotless nail heads.
There was a dusty innocence to the gate as it waited patiently for stain and weather-proofing with flecks of wood splinters and sawdust littering the ground in front of it, fresh from its installation. Kenny remembered thinking how it was a shame that the striking contrast of the light-coloured wood and the stark black iron details would be lost when the stain or paint was brushed over the wood’s pale, porous, thirsty surface.
It was at this point that Maggie had finally managed to get his attention, reminding him, with some irritation, that they needed to get to school. The way she told it, he had stopped walking, unnoticed at first by her, and then stared at the gate for a solid five minutes. He had dismissed the talk of five minutes as hyperbole.
Their journey to school and the resulting day had been uneventful. Fun was had catching up with friends after the impromptu break and disappointment vocalised as horrifying levels of homework were assigned, but whatever was happening throughout the course of the day Kenny had often found his mind wandering inexplicably back to old-Mr-Barker-at-37’s new gate.
He couldn’t say that he had noticed any previous fondness for gates that might have fuelled this sudden fascination, nor could he pin-point any particular aspect of the gate that had so magnetically drawn his attention, but still the image had drifted nonchalantly to the forefront of his thoughts time and again throughout the day. Maths, science, geography; the subject made no difference.
This bizarre contemplation had been accompanied by a strange sense of trepidation within himself that he found difficult to explain. He felt acutely aware of himself despite his mind being elsewhere; he monitored the symptoms of slight nausea, shallow breathing and the tense sensation of an indefinable lack, and had noted them all with frustrated incomprehension.
On the journey home that afternoon, his nerves had grown steadily more ragged until his fiercely snapped evasions had finally driven the notion of concern from Maggie’s mind and she'd left him to cross the park alone. He'd regretted upsetting her, he was rather fond of her, but ultimately he had been relieved to have the time alone to think about the feelings that had plagued him since the morning. He had kicked his way despondently through the twigs and leaves that littered the paths of the park, his pace gradually slowing almost unconsciously until he found himself approaching the gate that led onto his road.
If anything the second time Kenny had laid his eyes upon that gate, at a distance and through the park entrance, would come to be fixed even more indelibly in the mental scrapbook of his life's pivotal moments than the first. Having been given a few moments to gather itself, and with plenty of forewarning, his sub-conscious had up-ed its game and perfectly captured the moment in preternatural clarity.
His memory of that moment had forever been locked in as a kind of 3D map of the gate and the intervening space. Leaves had been captured in mid fall, scudding clouds hung motionless in the stilled breeze and the gate somehow conveyed the notion of swinging gently backwards in the snap-shot stillness.
A lump rose in his throat and, realising that he had not done so for an uncomfortable stretch of time, Kenny took a breath and started walking forward again. He had wanted more than anything to just turn his head away and ignore it, but it was like an itch that he could never tire of scratching.
Somehow being able to gaze upon the gate provoked a sensation in him like cool water after a long run in midsummer heat. It hadn't been the case that he couldn't look away; of course he could, it would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise, it had simply been that he didn't want to, perhaps would never want to.
With no one around to remark upon the odd behaviour, he had decided to approach the problem straight on and edged slowly toward the gently swinging gate. He would never know just how long he spent pigeon-stepping towards it but time seemed to lose any kind of meaning as he put one foot in front of the other, drinking in every detail; the swirling patterns of the delicately coloured grain, the roughly and arbitrarily faceted heads of the wrought iron bolt heads, the teasing rise and fall of the latch handle as it bounced just too gently against the catch to lock.
Finally Kenny had found himself stood in front of Old Mr Barker's house, number 37, staring with a kind of reserved panic at the gate, large as life, right in front of him and feeling his heart hammer in his chest. It had seemed at once mundane and yet overwhelming, extraordinary. It felt to him at the time as if something like this shouldn't exist, like there was no place in the randomness and indiscriminate chaos of existence for something so sublime. It was as if the very idea, the perfect unblemished concept of a gate had been plucked straight from the realm of imagination, as if there was no way in which this thing could have been made but rather that it had sprung fully formed from the ether, straight from conception to reality and side-stepped the vulgarity of construction.
Of course Kenny hadn't been able to express any of these ideas at the time, young and enraptured as he had been, but his retrospective rationalisations would gradually try their best to chip away at the abnormality of his reaction, of his fascination, of his feelings.
He remembered flicking his eyes up and across the windows of the house, hunting quickly for any sign of movement or surveillance from within.
Finding no watching eyes, Kenny had returned his attention to the gate for a moment before gathering his courage with a nervous gulp. He drew in a deep and shuddering breath, running his eyes languorously over the gate from his high angle and tremulously lifted and stretched out his hand.
His fingertips had brushed over the top of the centre-most plank of bluntly spiked wood and a thrill shuddered through him. He pulled his hand back slightly from the course grain and the soft, sandy sawdust-covered feel of the wood with a confused half-smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. Slowly he had lowered his hand again and settled it gently over the top of the gate with a shuddering sigh.
The sensation of wholeness, of relief, had been almost too much to bear. In his recollection Kenny would never bee sure whether he had, in fact, started to moan softly but he knew for certain that he had begun to raise his other hand and had closed his eyes when he felt the hand grasp his shoulder.
Kenny had turned quickly, panicked and disoriented, to find himself looking into the smiling face of Old Mr Barker from 37.
"Do you like my new gate, Kenny?" Old Mr Barker from 37 had asked with a proud smile, "I put it up myself."
Kenny's body had been flooded with testosterone and confusion, and consequently his panic had suddenly risen to wildly inappropriate levels.
"IT WAS SWINGING OPEN!" He had roared in Old Mr Barker from 37's face. The unexpected outburst caused Mr Barker to pause and the thin skin of his face had concertinaed into a map of confusion. Kenny remembered feeling the grip on his shoulder tighten ever so slightly, stoking his desire to break free and run away before he was found out.
"TELL IT TO THE JUDGE!" He had roared before starting to run. However, as he was still facing Mr Barker from 37, he had bounced straight back off the man's stomach with a justly surprised exhalation from both parties. After looking around for a moment in glassy eyed panic, Kenny had turned and dashed into the park.
"Kenny?" The call had come after him.
"I WASN’T TOUCHING IT!" Had been the shrill, quavering reply as Kenny disappeared into the trees.
Finding no watching eyes, Kenny had returned his attention to the gate for a moment before gathering his courage with a nervous gulp. He drew in a deep and shuddering breath, running his eyes languorously over the gate from his high angle and tremulously lifted and stretched out his hand.
His fingertips had brushed over the top of the centre-most plank of bluntly spiked wood and a thrill shuddered through him. He pulled his hand back slightly from the course grain and the soft, sandy sawdust-covered feel of the wood with a confused half-smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. Slowly he had lowered his hand again and settled it gently over the top of the gate with a shuddering sigh.
The sensation of wholeness, of relief, had been almost too much to bear. In his recollection Kenny would never bee sure whether he had, in fact, started to moan softly but he knew for certain that he had begun to raise his other hand and had closed his eyes when he felt the hand grasp his shoulder.
Kenny had turned quickly, panicked and disoriented, to find himself looking into the smiling face of Old Mr Barker from 37.
"Do you like my new gate, Kenny?" Old Mr Barker from 37 had asked with a proud smile, "I put it up myself."
Kenny's body had been flooded with testosterone and confusion, and consequently his panic had suddenly risen to wildly inappropriate levels.
"IT WAS SWINGING OPEN!" He had roared in Old Mr Barker from 37's face. The unexpected outburst caused Mr Barker to pause and the thin skin of his face had concertinaed into a map of confusion. Kenny remembered feeling the grip on his shoulder tighten ever so slightly, stoking his desire to break free and run away before he was found out.
"TELL IT TO THE JUDGE!" He had roared before starting to run. However, as he was still facing Mr Barker from 37, he had bounced straight back off the man's stomach with a justly surprised exhalation from both parties. After looking around for a moment in glassy eyed panic, Kenny had turned and dashed into the park.
"Kenny?" The call had come after him.
"I WASN’T TOUCHING IT!" Had been the shrill, quavering reply as Kenny disappeared into the trees.
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