Chapter Text
The world was too loud for Jonathan Sims.
That was what his daadi would tell him, in a soft voice that didn’t do much to hide the disappointment like a cloth worn too thin to conceal what lay underneath. After the police would leave, their halfhearted concerns about Jon’s welfare muffled under cups of tea and homemade cardamom biscuits, after the headteacher would let them leave her office, everyone well aware how little had been achieved in that latest meeting, she would take his face in her hands, look him in the eyes and say it to him as she stroked a thumb across his cheek.
It wouldn’t be an accusation, not really, or an attempt at comfort. It would just be a statement of a fact that made life harder, a geography textbook’s explanation for floods or earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, something he just had to accept, just like the fact that everyone saw him as a girl no matter how many times he tried to correct them or tell them the name he’d decided for himself. The world is too loud for you, beti.
But daadi never told Jon what he could do to fix it. He was left to figure that out for himself.
The closest he’d found to a real answer was down on the beach.
Not that Jon had ever left Bournemouth to confirm this but, if he did, he imagined people sighing romantically at the idea of living there. They’d imagine it like residing in a postcard, the sea a perfect watercolour blue, the sand a butter yellow, the sunshine washing over everything all the time. The reality was very different. Postcards didn’t show the dense crowds that gathered on any day with a little sunshine, the rain that fell the rest of the year, the litter all those people left behind to blow across the grey sand like decorations left behind after a party. Or how the amusements always looked more than a little sad when the streets were empty, their garish paint peeling and their tinny songs becoming a headache.
So when Jon told his daadi he was going down to the beach- if he bothered telling her at all- he didn’t mean the same beach everyone pictured when they thought of Bournemouth. He avoided that place like the plague. The world was too loud for him so he needed somewhere that felt like it wasn’t part of the world at all, somewhere everyone else had forgotten so completely that it felt disconnected from everything else. He meant his beach.
It was hard to get to, especially for a pair of ten year old legs, involving a long walk along the striped cliffs of clay and sand, a perilous half climb, half slide down a particular face to find a little closed off bay tucked safely behind the curve of the land. Away from the wind and the rain and, more importantly, the rest of the world. It was a pebble beach rather than sand, the seaweed washed up thicker, the gulls were always screeching overhead but Jon didn’t mind. He would pack a book or two in his rucksack, whatever snacks he could find around the house, an extra jumper, a raincoat, everything he needed to maximise the amount of time before he had to come sloping back to civilization. He would tuck himself into the little natural caves and read, he would skim stones in the water, he would take off his socks and shoes and walk through the little shore, finding crabs and starfish and sea snails.
There he could be Jonathan for real, not just in his head.
Whenever he went there, he could feel the weight on his chest lift with every step he took away from the town proper, finally able to take a deep, full breath once he’d staggered down onto the little scrap of a beach.
Today, it felt like it had come just in time, a few seconds before he would have suffocated.
Jon scrubbed at the burn in his eyes that definitely wasn’t tears, silently begged his chest to stop heaving, his shoulders to stop shuddering. Now it was quiet, now he could actually think, his body finally listened. He took the rising, overwhelming emotion he’d carried all the way here, packed it into a box and shut the lid tightly, sent it away to somewhere far from here. Jon gulped down those things that weren’t tears, feeling such a sense of relief as the sea resolved in front of his eyes and became clear. He counted the whitecaps he could see, digging his fingers into the pebbles under his knees to feel their reassuring rattle and clack.
He was here. He was in his one quiet place, the one place he belonged, the one place that knew he was Jon and accepted it without question.
Once the steady roll and crash of the waves on the shore had cleared away the panic, Jon shifted to sit cross legged on the stones. He felt wrung out, hollowed, the way his favourite jumper had gone all thin and unravelled after he’d tried to put it in the washing machine. He couldn’t even find the anger anymore, there was just nothing.
Just the aching, echoing gap left behind when he just didn’t understand.
Jon’s stomach had already been a writhing mess of snakes as he’d walked out of school. They’d ended the day by working on making family trees, all the other students settling in excitedly for an hour spent with the colouring pencils. They moved around Jon, ignoring him as per usual, laughing and chattering away about whatever it was kids his age were supposed to talk about when they had someone to listen.
He’d been left to sit and stare at the name that everyone kept telling him was his, scrawled at the bottom of the template, his eyes following its dark lines up to the many branches with their own spaces for other names to go. Names he didn’t know. Names he’d never get to know. A whole family tree that had withered and died before he’d even gotten a chance to learn what the word even meant. Just him and his daadi, who already had a bad chest and doctors visits written onto the calendar in the kitchen that she didn’t want to talk about. When she went away, like his papa and his mama, his name would be completely and totally alone.
That’s when his eyes had started to blur and burn.
Miss Andi had done her circuit of the classroom, the only person to notice Jon sitting there, frozen under the weight of the grief he didn’t know how to hold. She’d been kind, of course, speaking in her soft voice, you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, dear, you can go read in the corner if you like .
But her voice hadn’t been quite soft enough, the other children had still heard her, that damning sympathy carrying over the waves of chatter somehow. And then he’d felt the prickle of eyes on his back, wide stares like Jonathan Sims was just something behind a thick pane of museum glass and a little white card explaining just how sad and lonely he was. Though the card would probably call him the wrong name too.
He’d fled to the reading corner, even if none of the books there interested him anymore. He’d just needed to hide his face.
Maybe it was that tight, storm in the stomach feeling that had made him do something so stupid as standing up to those older kids. Most of Jon’s mind had still been running fruitless, frantic laps around the base of that blank family tree, he hadn’t even noticed his feet changing direction, striding towards the knot of hollering secondary school boys.
Jon’s voice hadn’t been nearly as forceful as he’d hoped for, it didn’t come along with the comic book style speech bubble announcing the arrival of a hero that he’d envisioned. But the boys had been surprised enough by anyone, even a stammering ten year old girl to their eyes, daring to tell them ‘stop’ that they’d turned regardless.
Jon had seen a glimpse of the stray cat they’d been tormenting, the same one those boys always went after when they saw her, just because she didn’t belong to anyone and they knew they could get away with it. A black streak fled between their legs the second she saw her chance, darting between some wheelie bins and disappearing. He’d felt a moment’s fierce pride, the solid certainty that he’d done the right thing.
Until it ended the same way that feeling always seemed to. With a heavy, painful thump as his legs were swept out from under him and he went crashing down.
Jon’s eyes were burning again. They weren’t tears but they really stung as they rolled down his face and into the scrapes on his cheeks, the split lip. He could tell himself that taste on his tongue was the salt in the air, that he couldn’t hear his own ragged, sobbing breaths over the scream of the gulls. He was alone, nothing else had to matter.
He didn’t have to think about how silently angry daadi would be about the blood on his collar and the rusty brown trail that had dripped down his front, how it was another school shirt and jumper ruined that they couldn’t afford to replace. Though of course the skirt he hated was unscathed. He didn’t have to think about how he’d pass those boys who’d seen him cry, again and again in the tight little maze of their streets, running and hiding from them like the poor cat. How he was sitting at the bottom of that bare and empty tree, completely alone, trying to take shelter in a world that was too loud for him.
So he decided it was a good thing. What other choice did he have?
Jon stood up, wiping his eyes, his jaw tight and determined. If the rest of the world wanted to chase him away then he’d let it. They could keep their noise and their rules that didn’t make sense, their expressions he couldn’t read, their cruelty and their wide eyed staring. He would just stay here forever and never go back. He’d sleep on a bed of seaweed, catch fish and eat seagull eggs, never having to hear another human voice full of anger or pity or disappointment or confusion.
Of course Jon knew it was a childish fantasy, something out of a Robinson Crusoe book he constructed to make himself feel better, to get the same kind of release as throwing pebbles at the cliff face to shatter. The reality was inescapable. He didn’t have any clothes or food or books with him, daadi would call the police when he didn’t come home before the sun went down, just like she always did. They’d find him as he trudged his way home, stomach growling and his whole body shivering with the cold, defeated.
But he also knew something else, deep down inside himself in a place he hadn’t explored yet. The place where the adult man he’d be one day was growing, half formed but crystallising slowly. That part knew he didn’t need to become a hermit on a beach to make sure he’d be alone. That he could choose it for himself, build up walls that didn’t need to be physically real to do the job.
As Jon walked up and down the beach, the life he painted for himself in his head was imaginary but the decision he made was very, very real.
He didn’t know how to fix the world. He didn’t know how to fix himself.
So he would just spend his life alone.
At least then it would be quiet.