Short Fiction

The Box

I don't know if I ever really understood Sammy Johnson. He was a strange kid and he grew into a strange kind of man. He was big, too, when he was grown, both tall and broad and he had a way of occupying space that made you feel like a child even when you were grown yourself. Well I don't know if he really considered me grown, being somewhat on the small side, but Sammy and I were the same age and while I say I didn't understand him it wasn't for a lack of trying. By the time he disappeared we'd known each other for going on thirty-five years. 

The thing about Sammy was that he could be smart one minute and dumb as hell the next and the thing he was most often dumb about was people. Ask him anything about electronics and you'd get a lot more of an answer than you’d bargained for but at least it made some kind of sense. With people he had a habit of coming in at the wrong speed and an awkward angle. He could rub almost anyone up the wrong way. Even when he had some gentle thought to share the words had other ideas, coming out so crooked that before you knew it he'd offended everyone in hearing. What was worse, he’d realise things were coming unstuck and he’d panic, talking louder as if the size of his voice might somehow smother the embarrassment in his heart. Maybe that’s why he had this way of hiding himself most of the time. You could tease him out now and again but given the chance he’d retreat just as quick.

Now I admit that none of this is very strange. There are plenty of people you come across in this life who are fools when it comes to others and who bluster their way through conversations. It's about as normal as it gets, I guess. No, the thing about him that I could never completely get my head around is what I can only describe as his lack of continuity. There's no real easy way to unpack that for you.

I was already living in the boarding house when Sammy arrived. I was ten years old, which would make Sammy the same, and I’d been there around three months. I had arrived at the start of the school year, but Sammy was a late arrival. It was a Sunday afternoon and as usual I was watching TV and thinking about food, specifically, what I would buy if I had ten dollars and I was allowed to go to the diary. I did not have ten bucks, and I was not allowed to go to the diary, so I just sat there and imagined having a bag of burger-rings and a moro bar and a coke. I didn’t have any place I could go to in the holidays or weekends so I stayed at the house with the country boys. We were largely left to our own devices. Waiting for school to start is a lonely time. Dusty, is what I’d call it, the noise of children in abeyance and with it the life of the house. That’s when I heard the car, fan belt screaming, rattling up the drive to break the afternoon in two.

I went over to the window to peer through the curtains. I watched as the red Cortina pulled a wide circle in the drive until it was facing the gate again. I want to tell you how it skidded to a stop with a squeal of tires and in a cloud of dust, but I don’t think it really did that, that’s just how it would be in the movie version of our lives, the version my brain has since filled in where necessary when I think of these things. 

Behind the steering wheel was a woman with red hair and sunglasses. As the car came to a complete stop, rocking on its suspension, she turned her face up to the rearview mirror and said something to somebody in the back seat. I couldn’t hear her on account of the distance, but a few seconds later the back door of the Cortina opened with a loud complaint, and out stepped this skinny kid with coke bottle glasses. He was dragging a bag behind him, struggling with the weight of it. He dropped it on the drive beside him and then turned back to shut the car door. It didn’t close properly. The woman leaned out and said something sharp to the boy, and he reached back to grab the handle, opened the car door wide, and gave it an almighty slam. 

By this time Hayworth, our Housemaster, had wandered out the big glass door and down the front steps. He took a moment to contemplate the withered collection of weeds he liked to call his flowerbed, then he looked up and, as if remembering why he was there, gave the Cortina a thorough appraisal through his narrow glasses. He shuffled forward again and came to a stop in the middle of the drive beside the driver's door, his arms resting by his side, his shoulders stooped. The woman leaned out the window only to have her hair catch in the wind and blow across her face. She pulled her head back in, pushed her sunglasses up to hold the hair back, and then leaned out again and flashed him a smile.

Hayworth was a thin man, thin with dark, leathery skin and a moustache that looked for all the world as if he’d trimmed some of the greasy hair from the top of his head and glued it in place over his lip. He had no appreciable sense of humour and he spoke in short sentences with a reedy, almost pleading voice. It was impossible to overhear him from where I stood in the TV room, but I could imagine what he was saying all the same. 

“We will expect to see you at Chapel at least once per term, Mrs Johnson…”

“That’s Ms…”

“It is good for the boys to see you there, Mrs Johnson. Being at this school is a privilege, do you understand?”

I don’t know what he was actually saying of course, but I could see that the smile had left her face. She nodded along, her lips pressed together.

Perhaps Hayworth had started with his “This is not a free ride,” speech. Oh he said that often, even though we all knew that for the parents who left us in his care each term that was exactly what it was. I guess they were only wrong about who was expected to pay.

I looked on as Sammy’s mum said something in reply to one of these utterances. Despite the confines of the small car she moved with a great deal of passion as she spoke, waving her arms around and moving her head, then leaning forward when she wished to emphasise some salient point. It was quite something to watch. She and Hayworth talked for a few minutes more, and Sammy just stood there in the middle of the drive staring up at the sky. When things reached some point of mutual agreement, Sammy’s mum pulled her head back in through the window, put the car in gear, and hurtled off back the way she’d come. 

This is how I remember Sammy entering my life. Dropped off like luggage, lost in a dream and within minutes, as legend has it, pissing off Hayworth by asking him a question about his moustache. Whether that is true or not can no longer be determined, as no witnesses to the event have ever come forward. But legends need no evidence to be true. All I know is that by way of orientation, Hayworth dragged Sammy around the house, Sammy hauling that heavy bag of his the whole time while Hayworth introduced him to the boys that were already in. That wasn’t many of us, it being still early in the afternoon. Most of the boys would be dropped off after dinner but before the Sunday service. 

When the pair reached the TV room I’d made myself comfortable again in front of an episode of MacGyver. I remember their faces peering around the door, one above the other; Hayworth’s moustache twitching like it was trying to get away and Sammy expressionless, scanning up and down the length of the room, cataloguing the ragged cushions, the wooden chairs, the small colour TV bolted high on the wall. 

Hayworth’s introduction was perfunctory. “That’s McAlistair,” he said, “this is Johnson,” as though we were old men at a club. Sammy gave me the smallest of nods, then dragged his bag after him as Hayworth continued his tour towards the prep room. I knew this tour. It would end beside a bare steel-framed cot with a plastic-covered mattress. Piled on the mattress would be a set of sheets and a single blanket. Beside the bed would be a wooden locker with no door. It was not a good tour.

I sighed to myself. I got up and headed towards the dorms, reaching them just as Hayworth deposited Sammy by his bed.

“McAlistair,” said Hayworth, “good that you’re here. Show him how to make his bed properly. Pay attention, son, your bed will be inspected each morning and if it is not up to standard you will be punished.” He gave Sammy a stare. Twitched his moustache. Then he left.

Sammy dropped his heavy bag on the bare mattress then sat down and looked around the room. The house was old, at least a hundred years, and it had high ceilings that followed the slope of the roof. It was almost like being in a chapel but instead of pews there were two rows of six beds on the shiny linoleum floor, arranged on either side of a central aisle. At one end was a low partition.

“What’s behind there?” asked Sammy.

“Prefect’s bed,” I replied, “Don’t go in there.” I stood there patiently, thinking Sammy would move so we could make the bed properly, like Hayworth had asked, but Sammy seemed quite content to just sit. I waited a bit longer, wanting something to happen. Sammy was still, like he’d taken himself away somewhere.

“You’ll have to move,” I said, eventually “and your bag too.” Sammy blinked a few times, then turned to look at me as though realising for the first time I was there, “So I can make the bed,” I continued. He stood up, and dragged his bag onto the floor. I set the bedding to one side and opened out a sheet across the mattress.

“You’ll only want a couple of things from your bag,” I said as I worked, “anything personal will probably only be nicked. You can store most of your things down by the bathroom lockers. That’s where we keep our schoolbags and so on.”

I smoothed out the sheet, then opened the other and spread it on top, leaving it untucked, then the grey blanket. Sammy stood motionless beside his wooden locker while I did all of this, watching me through those thick glasses.

“You have to do the bottom corners right,” I said, and I showed him how to fold the sheet and blanket in such a way that each fold was at a perfect angle, then I worked my way up the bed tucking in the edges, folding the top sheet back in a neat line over the edge of the blanket exactly 20 centimeters deep. The blanket was tucked-in so hard the entire bed was taut as a drum.

“If it’s not like this, you get deductions at first, but if it doesn’t get better in a week you get detention.”

Sammy looked at the bed and ran his hand over top. “It’s bouncy,” he said, but then he sat down on top of it and crinkled the blanket. He said nothing else and after a while I went back to watching MacGyver. Strange kid, I thought to myself.

Sammy doesn’t remember meeting this way. The way he would have it, he arrived alone, abandoned in the empty house all afternoon to wait on the arrival of the other boys. My presence is not even a ghost in his memory. Of course I tried telling him differently. He only suggested it was one of my flights of fancy. I told him where he could put his flights of fucking fancy. But that’s how it always went with him. The most basic facts, things you'd seen with your own eyes, could never be agreed upon. He would tell me about something that had happened ‘just the other day’ when what he really meant was three years ago. He would confuse memories of meeting people with scenes he had watched on TV shows, he would muddle the punchlines of every joke. But wherever it was he went when his eyes went blank, I always hoped it was better than here.

From that very first day there was something about him that I felt compelled to figure out. It was evident pretty much immediately that he was good with technical things. Machines or computers, the movement of gears or electrons. He liked biology too, at a cellular level. He told me this was because things were predictable below a certain size. It got so that if anyone had a disagreement about an obscure fact they went to Sammy to decide it. This did not extend to sporting facts or recalling anything any of us had said or done. We knew the limits of his expertise, but even so, his knowledge of the natural world was encyclopedic.

In our fourth year I remember that Sammy had this box. It was one of those joke boxes with an on/off switch on the top, and when you flicked it on the box would open and a hand came out and flicked the switch off again. Then the hand disappeared right back into the box. Sammy got it from his uncle who was this crazy guy that ran a sort of store in the middle of nowhere. I want to say Morrinsville because from the way Sammy described it, it was somewhere with a lot of fat dairy farmers and I had a distant cousin in Morrinsville who fit the bill. Anyway his uncle had this shop and he sold all kinds of junk and Sammy lived there for a little while helping his uncle out. This was in the summer holidays, and when he came back at the start of the school year he had this box.

It was made of plastic but had been hand-painted so that it looked like old planks of wood that had been nailed together in a clumsy, TV prop kind of way. On the bottom of the box was a small cover that you could open to put the battery in. It took one of those square nine-volt batteries. When we got bored, we'd pull that battery out of the box and dare each other to stick the end of it on our tongue, which is how I learned that electricity has a taste.

Sammy got a lot of cool things from his uncle's store over the years, not just the box. I mean it was all junk because that's the kind of store his uncle ran but by comparison to my stuff it was a pirate's hoard. By our fourth year we were senior enough to get our own space behind a partition, which meant you could keep more of your personal stuff around. Each dorm prefect had their own desk, some shelves, and their own locker with a working door. The juniors were always too terrified to step foot in your space, just like we had been, and anyway they were banned from spending time in the dorms until it was time for bed so the opportunities for them to nick anything were small. 

I don't think I owned a single thing at that time except my school books and I guess you could say that I didn’t really own those either. But Sammy had a stack of books on a small shelf, and a pile of comics, he had a couple of potplants on his windowsill, and he had the box, some double-happy firecrackers and a whole mess of electronics he kept in a drawer, and a small clasp knife with a wood and brass handle. This last one was the prize, at least as far as I was concerned. I guess Sammy felt the same way because he never let me touch it. I could flick the switch on the magic box all day long or I could stick my tongue on the battery until it went flat if that's what I wanted, but his goddamn knife was off-limits.

This was all before he stabbed me with it.

I was sitting on his bed, tired of my own dorm and looking for someone to annoy, just to break up a slow afternoon. He was sitting at his desk bent over some small pieces of wire he was soldering together. I asked him to pass over his knife. Without looking up he said no. His lamp was bent down close over the project in front of him and a small curl of smoke was coming up from the end of his soldering iron. Another cool thing he got from his uncle. He was trying to get a small circuit he was making to squeeze inside a matchbox.

I kept asking him about the knife and I could tell he was getting angry, which is kind've what I wanted but you know how it is when you're bored and the people around you are not and all you really want is for everyone to be as miserable as you are. Eventually, I guess, it worked and I was able to draw him out. He turned towards me and said, “Alright I'll show you the knife.” There was a weird look in his eye.

“OK then.” I said.

He put down his soldering iron in its holder, nice and carefully, then he reached over his desk for the knife. He held it up and unfolded it with a flourish, the blade clicking into place with that small satisfying sound that made me so badly want to unfold it myself. Then he spun it around in his hand until the blade was pointing down and stabbed me right in the fucking thigh.

Like all of us I was in my uniform shorts and for a second I just stared at that small knife sticking out of my skinny white hairless leg. I think it only went in a centimetre and Sammy quickly let the knife go. It balanced for a moment in my leg, then toppled to one side and clattered to the bare floor. A bead of blood welled up in the cut and I clamped my hand down on it, too horrified to say anything. I could feel hot tears on my cheeks. I couldn’t look Sammy in the eye. 

I stumbled off his bed and into the dorm, my hand still pressed against the cut as though if I released it for even a second my soul might fly out. I tripped on the leg of one of the steel beds and stumbled to the floor, smashing my shoulder into the lino. If I’m honest this probably hurt more than the stab wound. I lay there on the floor, gasping, hand on leg, unsure of what had just happened. A few of the boys walked past the open door and saw me there. It was Dingus, Head, and Toby, a trio of idiots. They kept asking me questions like “Are you alright?” which everyone knows is the question you only ask when things are quite plainly not alright.

Hayworth, who had hearing that was deeply attuned to the illegal activities of boys, soon appeared behind them, clearing a path with a series of short duck-like commands. I was pretty sure that if Hayworth found out about Sammy's knife he would come down hard on all of us. That’s the way he was. There would be some sort of house-wide ban, perhaps early lights-out for a week. Collective punishment was his go-to. Even if that wasn’t the case, none of us was a narc. That sort of shit was beaten out of you in the first term. So I kept one hand clamped on my leg and tried to use the other to brush away any tears. Head had earned his name because he had an abnormally large head, or at least, someone once thought so and said it out loud and we all had a laugh because he looked so uncomfortable about it and that’s all you really needed for a nickname to stick. For once he seemed keenly aware of what was going on and he piped up with what he clearly thought was a mollifying explanation.

“They were just fighting sir,” he said, “Some stupid shit.”

“Watch your language Arnison,” Hayworth replied.

“Sorry sir,” said Head.

“What’s wrong with your leg?” he quacked at me.

“He gave me a dead leg, sir” I said.

I could see Sammy from where I was lying on the floor, still sitting at his desk, hunched over the circuit, acting as though nothing was going on.

“Johnson,” Hayworth said, “get out here.”

Sammy reluctantly put down his soldering iron again, stood up and took the three steps from his desk into the aisle of the dorm.

“Get up McAlistair” he said. I clambered to my feet, hand still pressed against my leg, and stood awkwardly bent over next to Sammy.

”Stand up straight boy!” snapped Hayworth. I closed my blood smeared hand into a fist and pulled the hem of my shorts down so he wouldn’t see the cut.

Hayworth looked us up and down over that wriggly moustache of his. “I want the pair of you to stop being idiots,” he finally said. He looked us both in the eye, before coming to a stop in front of Sammy, “You hear me Johnson?”

I could see Sammy nod in my peripheral vision.

“I asked you a question, Johnson,” said Hayworth.

“Yes, sir, I will stop being an idiot.” Sammy said.

“Good. The rest of you, back to your own dorms. Go!” and with that Hayworth, in his usual abrupt way, stalked off. 

Ignoring Sammy, I hobbled down the hallway to the toilets. I went into one of the stalls and sat down, pulling my shorts back from the gash in my leg. Some of the blood had smeared under my hand and was drying up, but fresh blood was welling up behind it. I heard someone scrabbling in the stall next to me and Dingus’ mop of curly blonde hair appeared over the edge of the stall. 

“Woah,” he said, “what happened?”

“Sammy stabbed me,” I replied.

“He stabbed you?”

“Yeah, like I said, he fucking stabbed me.” I grabbed a wad of toilet paper and tried to staunch the bleeding.

“Are you going to see the nurse?” asked Dingus.

“She’ll tell for sure” I said, then, thinking about it I added, “you better not tell.”

“But what if you die?”

“I’m not going to die, it’s just a small cut.”

“It’ll probably scar,” he said.

“It’s not going to scar, Dingus, now piss off will you?”

Dingus, of course, told everyone he could, all of which worked out pretty well for Sammy. He’d always been given a lot of shit for his glasses and for being strange and for how smart he was, but he earned his new nickname that day: “Stabby Sam” and it was kind of badass. It didn’t stop him being picked on entirely but it introduced enough uncertainty for the bullies that the worst of the abuse sort of dried-up. And I know he felt bad about stabbing me in the leg because he let me play with his knife whenever I wanted after that.

I smile at the memory. I trace my finger over the small white line on my thigh, barely visible under the thick hair that covers my stubby legs nowadays. I guess Dingus was right after all, it did scar. When I wasn’t around him I sometimes wondered if Sammy was real. There was no continuity with that guy. He would come and he would go just as quickly again, off to that dreamworld of his.

We looked for him, of course. A man our age who walks away from his life, well, you tend to think the worst. Some people described him as ‘troubled’. I didn’t hold with that. He was just Sammy. 

I sit in his study and I look around and I am transported to my fifteen year-old self, amazed by the small wonders that fill this quiet corner of my friend’s febrile mind. There are stacks of books on genetics and biology, computer parts strewn over a workbench. There are at least three partially-working 3D printers crowding the desk. Potplants send out tendrils from where they perch on a high windowsill, and several unmarked jars hold some kind of specimen that I cannot identify.

I wonder for a moment if he has any double-happys in a drawer somewhere and if so whether they would still go off, I wonder too if he still has the knife or whether he took it with him. As I think of this I imagine the small Sammy, hauling a heavy bag through the wilderness, cutting at vines with that tiny blade. I think of the big Sammy, hiding here where the small things made sense.

In the middle of the desk a space has been cleared, and on it sits the box, a cheap toy that seems sad to me now rather than funny. It is smaller than I remember. The paint has worn off in some places, exposing the brown plastic body. I flick the switch on top but nothing happens. I turn it over and open the panel that holds the battery. Inside is an old 9-volt and I wonder for a moment if it is the same one from thirty years ago. It sure looks as though it could be. I pry it loose and I can see that the contacts are rusty. I resist the urge to stick it on my tongue.

I don't know if I ever really understood my friend Sammy Johnson, but perhaps I knew him better than most. I close the cover on the box. I flick the switch to the off position and set it back down on the desk. There is a fantail chirping in the tree outside the window of his study. I sit for a long time, looking at the box and wishing for something to happen. Eventually I stand up, I borrow a book from his shelf about bees, then I close the door behind me on the way out.