An Irregular Piece of Sky
An Irregular Piece Of Sky
“Life,” she said, “is a bit like peeling Brussels sprouts.”
He had been sitting at the dining table worrying at a jigsaw puzzle with too much sky, her words coming through the hatch that separated him from the kitchen. Increasingly uniform blue shapes stared back at him defiantly. The space that remained to be filled openly challenged him.
“You start with a decent sized one, but then, by the time you’ve taken off the blemished leaves round the outside… Well, they’re half the size.”
From the timbre of her voice and the way it was slightly raised, he could tell she had assumed not only was he still sitting at the table but that he was also listening.
“And you can spice them up with tiny bits of bacon and whatnot, but in the end they’re still sprouts.”
As if in defiance of the puzzle, his fingers picked up a piece at random and, more by luck than judgement, instantly found its location. The small segment of sky fell into place with a satisfying ‘snap’, the result of slightly tensing the card to get the desired effect.
“How are you getting on?” she asked, prompted by the sound.
“What do you mean about sprouts and life?” he said, returning with his own question.
“Don’t you mind me and my nonsense.”
She smiled over her shoulder as if he could see her.
His eyes sought out another piece, a darker shade of blue with just a fragment of a wall intruding on one corner.
Sean had only been fourteen that day but thought he knew well enough what she meant about life being like peeling sprouts. As well a fourteen-year-old could, anyway. He now knew it was an age when, in reality, you didn’t really know anything at all. You were a sponge, soaking up information and experience, trying to dissect and refine things, catalogue them, apply learnings to the world. Your education was all about trying to make sense of the kaleidoscope in which you lived, and because there was so much going on, so much to know and see and learn, most teenagers mistook being a sponge for gaining knowledge. But it wasn’t knowledge at all. It was ‘data’. And even though you could pretend to yourself that you were acquiring wisdom, in truth that only came later, once you’d harvested it through living your own life and making your own mistakes. Only then did things start making sense. There needed to be a catalyst to turn ‘data’ into true knowledge.
Back then his belief that he understood what his mother meant by her sprouts comment was based on recognising some of the influences behind it, primarily the reality of their shared life together and their divergent experiences of his father. It was only now - years later - he realised he had been subsuming those things through the protective filter of a shallow veneer; he had not ‘lived’ them in the same way as she had. Her perspective was entirely different, as was her starting point. The fact that new and uncontrollable hormones were then raging through his body did nothing to aid understanding, even if he naïvely interpreted them as helping. Not that Sean suffered from the wildness many teenage boys embraced; if he had, he wouldn’t have been sitting at the dining room table trying to fill a sky-shaped hole in a thousand-piece jigsaw. He would have been in town with his friends, trying out cigarettes or Special Brew, and then chewing spearmint gum to mask the smell; he would have been hanging around the park with Chrissie and her friends, trying to ‘big himself up’, to make out he was already man enough to accept the favours she was rumoured to dispense on a Saturday evening despite her relatively tender age. But that was probably more fantasy than reality too - even if he’d been unable to see it. The Chrissie he’d known in the Fourth Form was, after all, just a hormonal cauldron too.