Born Different Read online

  Now that he was free, Gabe looked at his dimly lit reflection again. He looked at the contours of his image, at his wings, at himself. In this pose he was as no other human being would ever see him.

  This was who he really was and no one would ever know.

  Gabe stood tall and straight with his wings expanded proud and he held this position for as long as he could. He tried to remember to breathe. And as he breathed into the pain he tried, with each breath out, to stretch his wings that little bit further. The pain was intense but Gabe was always determined to hold out for just that one second longer. His stamina fought an internal battle with the lower voices telling him that if he gave up now then he was a failure. An ugly failure. And that failure was all that he was capable of. Gabe told himself he was weak and unlovable if he couldn’t hold out any longer.

  With every second, Gabe bullied himself, taunted himself worse than any other human had tried to. He pushed forward through the pain barriers until he was tortured. Until the pain threshold finally overtook the powerful strength of his rarely expressed and usually repressed anger and self-hatred. Until he started to shake, the trembles graduating to full body convulsions. Until it was physically impossible for Gabe to hold his wings out expanded for another second more... only then did Gabe collapse his wings down, exhausted.

  He had broken a sweat and had to bend over, hands on knees, to support himself as he panted, red faced, trying to get his breath back again without retching. Gabe focused on the pattern of his rug and he tried to stare beyond the solid object in an effort to try and take his mind off the sharp as a knife, stabbing pains and agonising aches that he felt down to the bone. Way down to the marrow. Right down to the very core of his being.

  Pain crossed Gabe’s back and it burned so deep, Gabe felt like he was on fire. As usual, he knew that he had opened some of the old wounds with his efforts. Gabe felt the sensation of the wet, colder blood trickling down over his skin; almost tickling in the reflection of the more intense sensation of the burning furnace beneath.

  Gabe knew that he needed to exercise more. He really should make more of an effort to get some fresh air and natural light onto his back, shoulders and wings. He had been forced to mix with the general public for too long and it showed in his health. He needed to build up his strength and do something more about helping himself to heal.

  “But how exactly am I supposed to go about doing that?” Gabe angrily muttered to himself. “I can’t exactly strip off in the city and just start flapping my wings about!”

  Gabe shook his head and had a wry laugh to himself. It wasn’t that funny but Gabe was in no mood to cry about it today.

  What was he supposed to do? If he exercised them, they got bigger and he didn’t want his secret getting any bigger. It was enough to cope with as it was. At least, when he let them wither, that despite the extra pain they were easier to bandage, to hide, to conceal and keep hidden. He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.

  The only time Gabe had the chance to live with his wings out, was when he isolated himself away from the rest of the world in his art studio in the back garden. So Gabe spent whatever little spare time he had in there, painting with his wings out, getting some much needed exercise or just doing nothing but staring up at the sky dreaming of a better future, a future filled with sunny days and carnivals. Of living life with his wings out all the time and never hidden; of being a great and celebrated artist, rich and famous; of talking to Grace, the girl he had had a crush on but never spoke to; or of being reunited with his long lost dad.

  Day dreaming of all these things was preferable to Gabe’s reality, which was that he was usually sat, dying of boredom, in lessons at school or hanging out, in the cold and damp outdoors, with his friends that he didn’t really like anymore; courting trouble and committing, mostly by proxy, but Gabe was certain that was illegal too, crimes.

  Gabe could put a lot of his issues and problems in life down to the fact that he had been born this way. The wings had set him apart, physically, socially and so too mentally. He may not have resembled anyone physically but Gabe was just as sure that no one felt, thought or saw like he did either. Only he wasn’t sure if the wings had made him this way or whether it was another defect of birth.

  Gabe often held the debate with himself about having his wings removed. Cut the problem straight off with a surgeon’s knife. At least then he would look normal. It was an argument that was never far from his thoughts. He was sure that there were talented surgeons out there that could do it and getting ‘corrective’ surgery seemed to be like a national past time these days.

  Plastic surgery, once the domain of the rich and the damaged, was now just another consumer item ‘must have’. Anything you wanted done or changed was achievable and for sale right there on the high street. It was just another one of the millions of consumer choices available. Surgery was just another fashion house, only it happened to trade in human skin. Bigger boobs, flatter stomachs, lifted faces, pouting lips like the movie stars, pert ripe round butts…wing removal?

  As Gabe began to wrap the bandages around himself he thought of how much he would love not to have to go through with this rigmarole every single day.

  But so far Gabe had convinced himself to keep his wings, for all sorts of reasons and excuses, but mainly because there was no way that he was going to go showing them to anybody else. Let alone rooms full of doctors, specialists and nurses and God knows who else. No way! And Gabe thought, What if? What if he did have his wings removed, what then? He would look normal but he knew that he could never be normal. If he no longer looked the way he did now, what would he be then? Just like one of the masses? Gabe couldn’t think of anything worse.

  Half bandaged Gabe looked at himself again in the mirror. He was a freak of nature. He’d had no other choice than to become an outcast, a loner even, although he wasn’t as keen on that term. Loners are odd in a bad way and besides, Gabe had friends. There were other freaks, other outcasts and they had banded together too and were as much a group in the school dynamics as any other clique. Gabe had Frank, Dave and Johnny. All of them damned.

  One of Gabe’s favourite tracks came on and he turned the volume up even louder in an attempt to drown out the voices in his head. He closed his eyes and let the music touch his soul. He let the baseline beat with the rhythm of his heart and he felt the melody lift his spirit. Gabe listened to the words being sung, speaking of exactly the way he felt. The music Gabe loved expressed all the things that he identified with deep within himself, but was never able to verbalise so well.

  “It’s eight darling!” Gina shouted on cue like she did every single weekday, telling him what he already knew. And, as if her voice set off his mobile phone, it vibrated across his bedside table, letting him know that he had another message.

  But it could wait.

  The daily ritual of the wrapping up of the wings was quite complicated to get exactly right but Gabe was an expert at it now and could do it with his eyes closed. Oil, massage, bandages cut to size and wrapped around, pinned and secured. Scissors. Another length of bandage cut and wound the other way, pinned and secured. Again, another length of bandage cut and wound around to bind the other two together, wrapped, pinned, taped, secured. Done. Then a vest, T-shirt, shirt. Check, double check. Finally, always a heavy jumper to cover the whole lot; whatever the weather, rain or shine.

  It was now the end of the last summer term of school that Gabe would ever have and he had been relieved that, so far, it had been a cold damp one. He preferred the cold, well that was not strictly true, but the heat was unbearable dressing the way he did, with all those layers. The fact that he had never peeled off even one item of clothing in his entire school life, even when there had been heat waves, just exacerbated the situation and made the other kids view him even more ‘different’ than they already did.

  Weird mentally, as well as physically, was what they all smugly calculated and whispered even if they weren’t the type to
shout it at him.

  He wasn’t stupid. Did people presume that, because of the way he was, that he couldn’t hear or be affected by what they were saying? That he didn’t notice them all stop and point and nudging their friends who would, unsubtly, turn too and pretended not to stare in his direction?

  Perhaps they assumed the weird mental thing meant that he couldn’t quite comprehend them delighting in their own disgust or simply, and more than likely, they just didn’t care. Judging him made them feel that much better about themselves. Gabe liked to think that he didn’t care too, that it sorted the wheat from the chaff. And anyway, he would never be friends with people like that so it did him a favour. He didn’t have to bother!

  But how was he going to explain it away anyway? There was not a sufficient enough excuse for acting like a weirdo other than being a weirdo.

  Gabe sniffed the arm pits of a t-shirt and threw it into the far corner in a make shift, ‘needs to go in the wash’ pile and he opened his drawer to see if any clean ones had magically appeared in there.

  Not that he thought it really mattered if he stank, no one ever got that close to notice. Gabe, like a spare part, had spent his entire school life sat at the back of classrooms on his own, due to his size and the potential obstruction to others visibility of the teacher that his deformity might cause. People didn’t seem to know how to communicate with him and in all honesty Gabe had trouble following them. He noticed that people rarely, if ever, looked him in the eye. They might stare from a distance or even clock him in their peripheral vision but not one of them ever really looked Gabe straight in the eye. The ever present paradox of it all was that Gabe’s deformity that was so obvious, had also made him disappear.

  At least it was all over now. Gabe had hated school. Hated everything about it. The teachers had quenched his desire to learn by their insistence on the forced leaning of irrelevant facts and probably false theories and one-sided debates. And they had miraculously made even the most interesting of subject matter, mundane and stressful. Gabe was sure that it wasn’t just him that thought this as all the other students were now hysterically revising for these exams. No one seemed to have actually learnt anything in the two years of sixth form. If they had, surely there would be no need to revise, they would have already learnt it in the lessons and stored it for life in their brains to be easily recalled when needed? But as far as Gabe was working out, nobody had lucked out on this, there was an obvious flaw in the system.

  There had to be a better way. Gabe found he learnt more on the internet or even just watching a documentary on the TV. He could learn the words to a song after hearing it only a few times, but when it came to remembering anything he’d been taught in school...it was impossible. Gabe hoped that one day they would realise that. Maybe one day the people who decide these things will figure out that no one really learns without passion and excitement, and to turn great subjects into monotonous tasks was monstrous.

  But Gabe had his suspicions that the deal of school was to turn out brainwashed humans behaving like malleable robots that could be easily controlled. Gabe suspected that the main aim of school was for the masses to learn to do as they were told in the pursuit of a civilised society where the rich and powerful didn’t have to deal with ‘out the box’ thinking and creative minds which would only causing rebellion and uprising. If the masses were clued up and free thinking, then those in power would have to share their wealth and everything would change and people might then start to live with nature rather than destroying it, and no big business or current government could survive that. They knew that, as long as you kept people warm, fed and entertained separately, all in their own little box of space then they weren’t going to have too many issues with the world outside their front door. The only issues the masses would have would be the ones ‘they’ let them have. To increase fear and thus consumption of whatever it was ‘they’ wanted you to consume next. It was all business really. Control, power and money. The three mistresses of the Gods of the modern world. Everything was just clever tools to manipulate the people through their inherent human natures and manufactured human desires. Human beings are easily brainwashed. Gabe was aware of the traps and he didn’t want to fall into them.

  Gabe tried to do something with his hair, it wasn’t short and it wasn’t long, he hadn’t had it cut in years but it just seemed to grow up and out and not down like it was supposed to. He ran his still oily fingers through it to give it some weight but that only made it look greasier.

  He gave up, every day was a bad hair day and Gabe thought that everything would be different in his ideal world.

  Gabe had long ago come to the conclusion that he and most, if not all of the other kids in the city were kept at school more as a mass child sitting and brain washing exercise as opposed to anything else. Like an enriching education. School kept them all in one place and off the streets and off their parent’s hands, so that they could go to work to pay for it all. School broke their spirit so that they could all be rebuilt, moulded and controlled, so that everybody was pretty much the same as everybody else by the time they left. Gabe thought that this was what everybody strove for; to fit in, to conform, to join the masses. It wasn’t for him but he had no doubt that most kids must enjoy school enough; being in an institutional environment, being controlled and instructed what to do and believe every hour of their day. Living by the bell. They must do because most chose to continue to live like it for the rest of their lives.

  But Gabe wasn’t like everyone else. Gabe would never fit in, he would always be different. To live like other people? It was impossible, even if he had wanted to. But, he didn’t want to.

  He could have done better in school if he concentrated the teachers had said. But Gabe did concentrate; it was just that he was concentrating on all of the things that interested him, which was not what the teachers were talking about. Do the maths, he thought.

  Gabe was concentrating on what was going on outside of the classroom window. Gabe was focused; it just was not on the class but on what was happening out in the car park or on the street beyond or even the park beyond that. Gabe was studying the colour of the light that day, or the way the clouds were rolling across the sky. Sometimes Gabe was observing everything with such a thirst; it was like his eyes were drinking up every little vivid detail. A sweet wrapper discarded, a dog taking a shit, a figure in the distance that could be a ghost, a leaf falling down off a high branch in a swaying Waltz. These were the things that were occupying Gabe’s mind.

  Mostly though, Gabe just clocked out altogether and went on a mad day dream where he wasn’t there in the classroom at all. Gabe could go anywhere for hours in his own head. But more often than not, Gabe was just wishing that he was back home alone in his studio where he could paint and just be, free from the bandages.

  He tried to listen to the teachers, he promised himself to focus on the class but his brain wouldn’t let him. He might hear the first sentences at the beginning and that would set him to thinking, to questioning, to daydreaming. Gabe was concentrating on all the things that you couldn’t necessarily see with the naked eye. Gabe was constantly thinking, analysing and having ideas and fantasies and he couldn’t stop doing it as much as he couldn’t stop having wings.

  He hadn’t wanted to go on to the sixth form, he didn’t know why he couldn’t just work on his art at home and attend The Exhibition, but that was not possible. They ‘saw potential’ they had said and Gabe hadn’t known whether to be offended or take it as a compliment. They had added that he ‘needed to get some more guidance with his art and take some ‘real subjects’ too as a back-up plan for the real world.’

  The ‘real world’? All Gabe knew about the real world was that people just got into other routines and put their heads into the sand and lived out there lives like robots. And Gabe thought that perhaps it was wise not to take advice off of people that didn’t seem to be having great lives themselves. Why should he take advice off anyone who wasn’t living th
e sort of life that he thought he would like to live? If he’d of wanted to be a teacher in this dirty city...then sure. But he didn’t, so they could shove it!

  But as Gabe had less idea then than he had now, which was still nil, about how he was going to go about living his life and his mum and the teachers had basically insisted with a heavy dose of emotional blackmail. Making it clear he could not attend The Exhibition if he didn’t attend the school. What else was he going to do? There weren’t any jobs to go to, let alone ‘good jobs’. Staying in school would keep him away from his gang of friends and their dodgy ways of making money. And, probably as important as The Exhibition, there was Grace; the girl who Gabe had still not managed to summon the courage to speak to yet. She would be going on to the sixth form, so in the end, Gabe had signed up.

  Within the first week, Gabe had a panic attack. He hadn’t had one before. Gabe had since come to believe that the panic attack was obviously a warning sign. His body was trying to tell him something. His rational voice had not been listened to, he was doing something that he really didn’t want to do and his body had rebelled.

  He had been in the long corridor before classes when suddenly, for no obviously apparent reason, he felt like he was choking. What his body usually did without Gabe having to think about, suddenly decided that it wasn’t going to do it anymore. Like breath. His throat had just constricted tight shut and his heart had started beating loudly and faster than he thought was possible. The blood and feeling had drained empty in his arms and his legs, from the tips of his fingers and toes up, leaving them cold and numb. And Gabe thought, after a few long seconds, that he was going to die.

  This was it! Right here and right now in this hellhole place, in front of all these idiots and strangers would be where he experienced his last moments on this earth. And as he had struggled to breathe and not pass out, when he was sure that his whole life was going to flash before his eyes like he was told it did in your dying moments, various other kids had stopped and had started pointing and whispering behind their hands to each other and looking at him with shocked, repulsed and twisted faces. And as seconds passed in slow motion, Gabe could see that some had begun to dither about whether they should approach him or not. He then had the impounding fear that he was going to be exposed, that someone was going to stroll over ‘the hero’ and take his jumper and shirt off of him. Someone would inadvertently reveal his secret. Reveal his wings.