‘Stand over there.’
‘Why?’
‘Just do it.’
‘Is this a game?’
‘Yes, it’s a game.’
“Who am I in the game?’
‘My son.’
‘Who are you?’
We’re in the back garden at home and my little brother is beginning to exasperate me. ‘William Tell, of course.’
Since I first watched The Adventures of William Tell on TV I have been obsessed with Tell and his weapon of choice, the crossbow (I can’t look at a picture of a crossbow, even now, without experiencing an odd pang of longing).
‘What do I do in the game?’ asks Paul.
’Put this apple on your head.’
He takes the apple from my hand and places it atop his shining little bell of hair. It falls off.
‘Pick it up. Now, hold it in place this time.’ I turn and pace away from him, counting my steps. When I get to fifteen (the number is arbitrary) I stop and crouch down.
Paul eyes me suspiciously as I begin assembling the Triang crossbow which, after years of lobbying, has recently been gifted to me as a birthday present. It is of green-painted metal, fairly crudely fashioned; the lath fastened to the barrel by a single wingnut. I spin the wingnut. ‘What are you doing?’ asks Paul.
’Evil Landburgher Gessler will execute us both if I don’t hit the apple’. I select one of the three wooden bolts that come with the crossbow and contemplate for a while the red rubber sucker on its end. I know from experience that these don’t really work very well. Somehow it doesn’t seem likely that the sucker will adhere to the apple. I remove it and, taking a penknife from my pocket, sharpen the end of the bolt.
‘John-John,’ says my brother; ‘I’m scared.’
’Don’t worry,’ I say soothingly; ‘it will be all right. I’m a crack shot.’
I notch the bolt and take careful aim.
The instant the bolt is fired, time slows and I see at once that its trajectory is too flat. The elastic is weaker than I thought: I should have aimed higher. At first I am worried that the bolt will fall short. Then anxiety of a different order kicks in as I see that the bolt will not fall short enough, but appears to be headed straight for one or other of Paul’s eyes, the whites of which are now, even at fifteen paces, clearly visible.
I glance away, too horrified to witness my brother’s blinding at my hands, then look back and see with something like relief that the sharpened bolt has hit his leg instead. It has pieced the skin and is stuck in his calf. It hangs there as we both stare at it. Relief fades. This is bad, I think to myself. Worse than the time I untwisted that wire coat-hanger and poked its ends in two holes of an electrical wall socket. Worse than the time I emptied a bottle of Dad’s Old Spice aftershave into a biscuit tin lid and lit it with a match. This time I’ve actually killed someone.
Uttering a piercing shriek, Paul runs terrified for the house. ‘Mum ..! MUM! John-John shot me!’
I flush hot and cold.
Just as when I fused all the lights in the house, or scorched my eyebrows off, there is this moment of hot-cold panic, this collision of two realities, fantasy collapsing into disaster; like waking from a dream to find yourself in a nightmare. Here once again is a hard lesson in the dangers of the imagination – something that seems to be hyperactive in me, producing an exaggerated capability to disappear inside the role of scientist, secret agent or Swiss freedom fighter to the point where any normal conception of what is possible or appropriate for an unsupervised eight year-old boy to get up to with his brother flies right out of the window – a lesson for me to learn, could I only open my ears to the voice of common sense.
* * * * *
It’s worth saying that my brother has a slightly different take on this incident. According to Paul it was not the crossbow I shot him with but a home-made bow and arrow, fashioned from a piece of bamboo and the short, thin sticks our Grandfather, a keen gardener, used in the cultivation of his roses. This would make sense. Robin Hood was also a TV hero of the time, though his weapon of choice, the longbow, never inspired quite the same level of devotion in me as the crossbow.
Paul also adds the detail that while I was, following the child-rearing tenets of the time, soundly walloped for this and all my other misdemeanours, each time he too got punished. This seems massively unfair.
Given that I have no memory at all of any of these beatings, it is quite possible that Paul has the better memory: so he’s probably right about the weaponry deployed – bow-and-arrow, not crossbow. However what this Rashamon-style double-take on the story shows clearly for me is my childhood obsessiveness about weaponry of all kinds. I loved weapons. I once swapped a go-kart my father had made me for a tiny pearl-handled penknife which was clearly of much less value – just because it was a knife. The first thing I ever made with Lego was a gun. I remember the frustration I felt that the squared-off Danish bricks wouldn’t allow me closely enough to simulate Napoleon Solo’s luger.
Where it came from, this urge, I don’t know. Perhaps it came along with my Scandinavian heritage: after all, every Christmas my family received a large box of presents from a Finnish aunt which would contain knives for me and my male siblings. On the other hand, all the other boys at school, whatever their heritage (highly mixed at my Catholic primary school), seemed to share the same fetish. In the playground, we would link arms and chant ‘all join on for War’, our little hands forming easily into gun-shapes, or cradling imaginary tommy-guns as our throats issued guttural sounds of gunfire. We were weapon freaks to a man; deeply in love with our deathly toys.
Beyond even the crossbow, my own most all-consuming weapon-crush was on a Johnny Seven OMA (the acronym standing for One Man Army), a meta-weapon that comprised seven guns in one, including a grenade launcher and armour-piercing shells. Its promise of ultimate defensive potency inspired intense pangs of longing, but despite loud and prolonged pleading, I never got one, a lack that rankles to this day.
Eventually, of course, the obsession with weapons faded — only to transmute into something else, no less passionate but less connected with violence. In a quite small space of time, months perhaps rather than years, I went from obsessing over guns, knives, crossbows, bazookas and any other type of ordnance that could kill or maim people (though preferably not little brothers) to fetishizing guitars.