The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms. Ian Thornton

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СКАЧАТЬ was serendipity’s day off,” insisted my grandfather Ernest. “By all rights, Johan Thoms should have been blinded, if not killed, as a seven-year-old.”

       June 1901. Near Sarajevo.

      Johan’s boyhood nightly routine had been an odd one.

      First, he would close his eyes and mentally check off each of the continents on his father’s huge ancient globe, which Drago had requisitioned from the school where he worked. The spherical atlas held center stage in the living room, its pink, yellow, and red landmasses enveloped by the blue oceans. The globe also held special status for the boy, as it was larger (however marginally) than his own head. He would spend hours in bed remembering its countries, its capitals, and its seas. As time went by, he increased the difficulty of his nocturnal examinations, testing himself with the capital of Ceylon, the neighboring bodies of water to the Yellow Sea, or the longitudes of Costa Rica’s coastlines. His spongelike brain soaked up everything.

      After this initial task, he would transport himself mentally to the side of a deserted rural road. In his reveries, a leaden sky threatened a premature dusk. In a lay-by sat an empty mustard-yellow carriage. The horses had been released. This abandoned cart marked the part of the forest where he would meet his friend. Young Johan then had to stand absolutely motionless next to the wood, and stare in until his pal arrived. This would complete his nightly duties.

      His chum was a stag deer, and possessor of the land’s largest antlers—fourteen blades, to be exact. Some nights Johan would lie there for hours, staring at the vivid canvas on the inside of his neuronized eye, awaiting the appearance of the friendly, beckoning deer thirty yards or so into the thick forest. Other nights the deer appeared within minutes, even seconds. Johan had no control. He could only get there and stare into the dense green and brown. But after a glint in the eye and a nod from his imaginary buddy, he would be allowed to enter a restful, deep sleep. If he did not obey these rules, he believed, the world would be nudged off its axis.

      * * *

      Johan had been visiting the same spot in his mind every night for a couple of years when his parents sent him on a holiday to the countryside. Rudimentary tents; appalling food with grit and burned grass, cremated on campfires; mildly disgusting ditties sung around the campfire every night by the older boys.

      On the final afternoon, the group was taken to a local landed estate, where various wild species roamed. It had been a tinderbox of a summer, the hottest in living memory. Ten minutes after arriving, the group was led off to a crumbling canteen at the edge of a lake to hydrate themselves before the afternoon’s exertions. That is, everyone apart from one melon-headed, blue-eyed, stick-legged youth who had spotted one of the most common species in the park, a deer. Johan was in a trance. It was his friend!

      At last, he could meet him and talk to him, as he had wished for every night since he could remember.

      No one saw the boy stagger off in the opposite direction to the rest of his group. He stumbled in the field’s divots and potholes, like the town drunk leaving the tavern at midnight, toward his buddy. Mothers the world over would have picked him up, wrapped him in cotton wool, and stolen away to the hills with him.

      His target was minding his own business, eating grass in the clearing with several other deer. Johan had never been so excited. How come they had not told him he was going to see his friend today? He reached the beast with unusual confidence and speed, and greeted his pal.

      “Hello you. I have come to see you. They never told me I was coming; I don’t know if they told you.”

      The deer stopped munching for a few seconds and eyed him with mistrust.

      “I’m on holiday. I guess you’re on holiday from the woods, too. Sometimes I wait hours for you, but I want you to know that I do not mind,” Johan said.

      A couple of the other deer had now raised their heads.

      “Do you like it better out here than in the woods?”

      No answer.

      “Your antlers are bigger than usual.

      “It’s so hot today, though. Aren’t you hot under all that fur?”

      No answer. Johan moved closer to try to pat the deer but had to delve between his huge antlers to reach the promised land of the beast’s fuzzy forehead. This was permitted for all of two seconds. Johan felt a rush of love, then something else inside his brain. The deer had raised his head back and taken Johan part of the way with him. The antlers ripped deep into the young boy’s head. Johan had whispered the words I love you, as near the deer’s ears as he could. From the canteen, the group gasped as the creature lifted Johan clear of the long grass and catapulted him like a rag doll into an expanse of nettly gorse. Wads of blood caught the light of the sun. The deer volleyed back six feet from the human debris, calmed himself, and carried on grazing. Johan was left facedown, rapidly leaking rhesus positive from his temple. The last thing he remembered thinking before a blackness overtook him was, What have I done to upset my friend? Should I have let him know last night that I was coming?

      He did not cry.

      * * *

      He regained consciousness swaddled in bandages that magnified his large skull. He was in a crisp sterile linen hospital bed, stitched up, wrapped in white, and as high as any seven-year-old could be.

      Over the coming days, he started to piece together what had happened. His friend Deer had butted him, punctured his head, and put him firmly on the seat of his little blue shorts. Friends can be so cruel. Every night for almost two weeks after, Johan would return in his mind’s eye to the side of the forest, to the lay-by, next to the mustard carriage, to wait for his friend and forgive him. He needed to apologize for turning up at the park without warning; it had just not been polite. If there was one thing he was learning from his parents, it was the importance of manners.

      Johan did not want to lose his best friend. However, over the coming weeks, no matter how long he stayed awake, no visitor came from the woods to tell him everything was all right. Some nights he would not sleep. No deer appeared. The only time he would drift off without Deer’s permission was after the administration of another batch of opiates.

      He had been a lucky lad. The antler had entered the skull in that tenderest spot to the north by northwest of the temple. He had come within a fraction of an inch of losing his eye, of permanent brain damage. (This would perhaps explain his tendency later in life to don a pirate’s patch.) The doctors proclaimed it a miracle that he was not dead. While he was being lifted clean off the ground, Johan’s medicine-ball head had acted as a buffer, and so he lived to tell the tale.

      * * *

      The anguish of Johan’s parents was outweighed only by the relief they felt when it became apparent that this had been one very lucky escape. They battled through all the obvious parental horrors: thoughts of burying him, of no life in his corpse; of his wispy blond hair and tiny fingernails still growing underground, his lips turning green before fully decomposing; of him rotting in a tiny coffin while the world went on in the marketplace and the classroom around their absolute hells. Of placing favorite chess pieces on a fresh mound of earth as they returned each day to stand Johan’s figurine soldiers back up on the sinking turf. Parents are not supposed to put any of their kids into the ground; to have two out of two dead would probably have been too much for Drago and Elena.

      The hospital staff adopted Johan Thoms as their mascot. This was the same precocious child who had also almost СКАЧАТЬ