'Michael' - An example for Unit 3b

Controlled Assessment Exemplar Writing for Creative Writing tasks: Unit 3b

 

Dark creases lined his face, deep runnels gulleying out from his eye’s corner and off to his temples. His skin was the texture of hardened orange peel, but the colour of burnt wood. His eyes wandered along the street, looking into the eyes of pale faces passing in the rain. No one returned his look; no one saw him.

On every street corner there was a memory waiting for him: he saw himself at ten years old playing with others between parked cars, tagging each other and running off again in a mad dance of escape. Protective hands had reached out and ushered them away from the street as cars passed by, but then cars were a rare sight to the children of Grapefield Row and they danced on, their game spilling over into neighbouring streets. As they grew older, the games moved to the fields surrounding them. Open meadows, small woods and tractored fields became their playground.

His first home had been built, along with an estate of mirror image homes, in the meadow. His memory had been ripped up and concrete now filled the view. His hand reached into his pocket and he drew out a paper, standing in the eave of the corner shop he rolled a cigarette with his gnarled hands and swollen joints working easily at the tobacco and the paper. He remembered the guilt he felt as he walked to and from his new home, each step a betrayal of his childhood. His own children were relegated to the back garden; walking out to the fields was strictly forbidden.

He was a hypocrite, he knew that. An angry and bitter man. But Michael's death was the warning that kept all the parents on guard from that day on.

The cigarette rolled, he pulled it up to his thick dry lips and rested it there, hanging in wait of the flame. He heard in his mind, the distant cries of their friend. Michael's limp body floating down from the tree as they lowered him to the earth.

He remembered taking his father's petrol can and building up a fire afterwards. The tree Michael had fallen from had popped and cracked under the tortuous brush and touch of the flames and the dangling rope of the rope swing, left high in the branches, fizzled and shrivelled into nothingness.

The old man pulled the flame up to his face and sucked in the hot smoke, burying his lungs in fog and cloud. In his mind he saw the engines arrive, men dashing from one end of the meadow to the other trying to halt the spreading flames. He heard the tumble of brick and timber when the first house was pulled down to stop the spread. Saw the blackened faces of his playmates and their family, tears streaking down their faces as two tiny bodies were pulled from the debris.

No one knew. Not even now. They looked away from the face of misery and guilt every time they passed, but no one knew he had destroyed the meadow or the lives of his closest friends.

Blinking back a tear, he drew his swollen knuckle up to his eye to wipe it away. The rest was a forgotten blur of vodka and cigarettes. His children had grown up, moved away; his wife left without even a note. He lost the house, he lost his job. And now he stood in the thin shelter offered by cold empty doorways, slept in the woods and sometimes in houses left empty by their owners. Creases in his skin wore on and on, spreading like tiny shoots of cancer across his face and always he heard Michael's cry as he strung the rope swing, caught his foot, fell and broke his neck before the waiting crowd of friends could even scream his name.