The Shadow by Cornelius McCarthy
Ever since Sparrow suggested that I should write this story I’ve wondered where I should begin it. The beginning is a very good place to start but the problem is that, because this is a true story about me and many others, the beginning isn’t so clear-cut.
Do I begin with the moment that I was born? or the moment that my mother knew that she was going to give birth to me? What about the moment that the parents of the eldest person in this story knew that he was going to be born? See, the beginning of this story is just like the beginning of the universe: you can’t pinpoint exactly where it starts. You can come up with ideas, like Hawkins did with the Big Bang theory, but there’ll always be the question of what came before.
With that said, I think I’ll begin this story with something that happened in the spring-time, two months after my eleventh birthday. School was over for the day. I was walking home, humming the theme-song to one of my favourite videogames. It had been a very interesting day. Mr Fagan had spent all of classtime talking about nothing but trains. I find this interesting because it was so different than the stuff that we normally talked about, like fractions and grammar. I don’t always like people changing the timetable because it makes me feel unprepared but I really liked this change. He knew so much about trains and, if I had had a chance to go to the Model Railway Village after this lecture, I’m sure that I would have been able to tell my foster parents a lot more about its trains than my twin could, despite the fact that it was his favourite place in the whole world.
Mr Fagan was a very good teacher. He was old, with wispy, grey hair that seemed to drift upwards like smoke, and he had a large pot-belly that put strain on the buttons of the white shirts that he always wore. He also always wore black shoes, that made squeaky noises whenever he walked so that if pupils ever felt like daydreaming they’d hear that he was still in the classroom and so they’d immediately return to their work. He was definitely a man who had done a lot of stuff in his life, and he had learnt a lot of interesting facts like how the heartrate of a hedgehog, which is usually 190 heartbeats a minute, drops to only around 20 heartbeats a minute during hibernation or how Golden Eagles, the ones who live in Greece, eat turtles: they bring them up into the sky and then drop them, making their shells smash off rocks.
I often thought that Mr. Fagan must have been born in the very first stone age, and had lived throughout history, which is how he knew so much about everything.
He wasn’t just a great teacher: he was my favourite teacher ever. He had a great taste in stories. Every year, on the author’s anniversary, he’d read Frank O’Connor’s First Confession to the entire school, through the intercom system. I love that story and whenever I read it, I always read it in Mr Fagan’s voice because he put on interesting accents for all the different characters. Also, he had a similar name to a character in one of my favourite musicals, which was based on the story Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. He even did an Irish play with us. He had written it himself. It was about a royal family who got visited by the king and queen of another country. The visitors wanted to steal their gold and they had a witch to help them. I got the role of the nerdy professor who taught the princes and who carried a massive dictionary around with him wherever he went which is why he knew that the only way to defeat a witch is to throw a bucket of water over her head. It was a lot of fun and we got to enter it into a competition. We didn’t win the competition but we were one of the high runner-ups. I got to go to Dublin with Mr Fagan and another teacher to collect the prize because I was the best in the class at Irish. Ethan Hummingsforth also got to go, because he was the second-best at Irish. We even got to go inside Croke Park, the biggest sports stadium in the country. I don’t like sports but I found this interesting because it had a huge role in the War of Independence: during one of the matches, tanks came into the pitch and started shooting the spectators.
The rest of our class was dead jealous. We even got to go on the train (we boarded the train at Kent Station. I like the name of this station because it reminds me of Clark Kent, the real name of Superman, who is my twin’s favourite superhero.) In fact, it’s because of this voyage that the lecture on trains came about in the first place.
Anyway, enough about that. As I said, I’m beginning this story with something that happened on the way home from school. I guess I should have seen it coming. I didn’t believe in fortune-telling but the signs were pretty obvious. I had felt sick all week. I had even told my foster mum that I was too sick to go to school but she thought that I had made this up. (Why would I make this up? I love school!) I didn’t even know why I felt sick. I mean, I wasn’t vommiting or anything. But, boy, did my head feel fuzzy! So yeah, I fainted. Right then and there, in the middle of the street. Lubomir, a Polish kid who lived five-houses-down, saw me fall and helped me to get home. I was taken to the doctor’s. I had to wait outside for ages, looking at the mock aquarium in the waiting room while Doctor Redbrook spoke to my foster parents. Then they told me that I was very, very sick and that I’d have to go to hospital.
Hospital wasn’t all-bad, I guess. Yes, there were loads of sick people everywhere. But I got to bring my favourite games machine with me and I even got a new game for it. That is why, one-and-a-half months after I had entered the hospital, I could be seen sitting upright in the bed, holding the controller very tightly. My focus was fixed firmly on the television screen: it was my job to stop the videogame world from its apocalypse. That is when my twin came to visit me. He had visited me every day this week.
For a while, I didn’t pay much attention to him. I was determined to save the game world. But then, after dying, I decided to give the game a break and talk to my twin. His name’s Noah, like the guy who built the really strong ship that was able to hold lots and lots of animals and survive the most powerful storm in history, despite the fact that it was built centuries before the Titanic,
which was said to be the most powerful ship of all before being knocked down by a single iceberg.
I really like Bible stories: they don’t always make a lot of sense, but they are very interesting to think about and they teach us good morals, like don’t steal or don’t get your hair cut in case a massive temple falls down on top of you. My school seemed to have forgotten that last moral, as they always gave out to me for having long hair. I wonder what they would have said if I had left the hospital and went back into school because my illness had now made all my hair fall out.
Noah and I talked for a while and then we played a kart-racing videogame. He beat me but it was a lot of fun. And before we knew it we were both asleep, me lying in the bed, a huge smile on my face, Noah in the chair next to me. We had had several challenges in our life and we had always gotten through these challenges together. I always thought that he would be the one to help me survive the hospital.
“Jamie, Jamie wake up!”
I opened my eyes. A boy was sitting at the end of my bed. He was the same height as me. Bits of twigs were stuck into his hair as if he had been running through a forest and had fallen.
“Who are you?” I asked, rubbing my eyes and making myself comfortable in the bed.
“I have many names,” the boy said. “At the moment, I’m known as The Shadow Kid. But you can call me Shadow, if you like.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “Are you another hospital patient?”
“Oh no,” he said. “I never get sick! No, I’m here to see you.”
“Why?” I asked.
Shadow seemed to struggle for a moment. He made an odd clucking noise. Then he said, “It’s kind of like a job I have. To visit children who are in hospital; to make them happy.”
“Cool, but can you come back later?” I asked. “I’m kind of tired right now.”
“I can’t come back later!” he said. “Just trust me, okay?”
He held out his left hand. I looked at it for a very long moment. It was filthy, as if it hadn’t been washed in years.
“Well,” he said, after the long moment. “Aren’t you coming?”
“Aren’t I coming where?” I asked.
“Well that’s up to you,” he said. “It’s my job to take you to somewhere cool as it will make you happy. But it’s up to you to decide where you want to go.”
“I don’t know where I want to go,” I said. All I wanted to do was to go back to sleep.
“What do you dream about?” he asked.
“Umm, videogames,” I said, looking at my games machine and smiling.
“Then we’re going to go to the videogames word,” he said.
“But there’s no such thing as the videogame world!”
Shadow laughed. “Don’t be silly! Of course there is!”
“No there’s not,” I said. “It’s just a … videogame!”
“Take my hand.”
“What?”
“Take my hand and I’ll show you,” he said.
So I did. I don’t like holding people’s hands and I don’t know why I held Shadow’s but I did. And I suddenly felt myself rising up out of the bed. Shadow was also rising into the air. His eyes were fixed on my frightened face, a mischievious grin was spread across his own.
“I’m flying!” I said. “But that’s impossible!”
I didn’t like this. It didn’t make any sense. I wished that I could close my eyes and cover my ears and hope that this would somehow make it all go away, make me stop flying and make everything make sense again. But I was too afraid that if I let go of Shadow’s hand to cover my ears I’d fall and hurt myself.
“Nothing’s impossible,” Shadow said. He was still smiling. Was he smiling at my suffering or was he just oblivious to it? I scowled at him like how I scowl at a teacher when he or she thinks I’ve gotten a question wrong and makes a big deal of it in front of the entire class, when really I’ve gotten it right. (Thankfully, Mr Fagan was never like this.)
“Now come on!” Shadow said. “Let’s get you to the videogames world!”
“But I don’t like this. This can’t be happening. None of this makes any sense!” I said. “There’s no such thing as the videogame world!”
“Well, there’s also no such thing as boys being able to fly. Not in this decade anyways. Yet here we are,” Shadow beamed. His grin was now so big that I could see his teeth; they were very, very white. It looked like he still had all his milk teeth.
“Wait,” I said. I looked at Noah, who was still fast asleep. “Can he come with us?”
Shadow looked at him for a split second.
“No, I’m afraid not,” he said, shaking his head and giving a deep sigh.
“Why not?” I asked. “He loves videogames as much as I do!”
I secretly wished that Noah could come with us because, if Shadow was telling the truth and there really was such a thing as the videogame world, I didn’t want to be in a strange place, surrounded by people that I didn’t know. If Noah came with us, I’d at least have someone who I knew. Speaking to Shadow was hard enough, as he was a stranger. And a very strange stranger at that.
“I know but it’s not the right time for him,” Shadow said. His head was now turned away from me so I could not see his face. I wondered if he was still smiling. He was now speaking so quietly that I had to move closer to him to hear what he was saying.
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“I only visit every child once,” he said. “And I only visit children who are sick. Noah isn’t sick.”