The Christmas Delinquent
Ty Mam Duw
He was a delinquent like any other delinquent; dull eyes, school failure, no work. His clothes hung on him, yet he was not a pathetic figure; his bent face was a picture of futile spite and anger.
He sat resentfully in the room to which they had taken him.
Another officer came in and reproached him in the legal terms of his accusation with having broken into the garden and hacked the branches and fruit off the one-of-a-kind tree. Wanton, destructive, senseless, empty..... Then they left him alone.
He felt tired, irritable and a bit frightened. But he did not think. He had learned how to feel without thinking years ago - except on the practical edges of his mind .
He could hear the ticking of a clock that he could not see; a wheezing clock that seemed to drag every second to its final agonized extreme before the painful click of time passed.
The room was completely bare and windowless, lit from the ceiling. Ther was a hard white table and a scuffed chair. The steel door, which had a 20 centimeter grill, was complicated by protected hinges.
He sat crouched, tensed to do something. There was nothing to do. Time passed.
He did not hear an approaching footfall. The double latches geared and shot back and a man walked in. A plain clothed officer, very tall, heavy, imposing.
Instinctively, the boy stood up and backed to the wall. The officer sat on the seat the boy had vacated and looked at him.
“It wasn’t my fault,” the boy said. The officer looked at him and the boy hooded his eyes. “It never is,” he replied. The clock obtruded its slow tick into the room.
The officer crossed his legs. “How would it be if we offered you another chance? You know the sentence for what you’ve done, but there can be an alternative. The alternative is an obstacle race” - The officer laid a stop watch on the table - “against time. First of all you have to escape from this room. I’ll drop you a hint. The way out is different from the way in. Then you have to get through the combined obstacle course and I.Q. test. Again, I’ll give you a hint; you are the only person you will meet on the course and your choices will depend on you. If you complete the course you will receive a billion dollars and inherit the earth. If you fail to complete the course you will be destroyed. Do you want time to think?”
The boy looked up, fear and hate almost equally balanced.
“Alright.”
“Alright, what?”
“I do the course.”
“You try the course.”
“I try the course,” the boy echoed, with shrill sarcasm.
The officer stood up, making the boy seem even more trivial. He started the stopwatch, turned, and passed through the steel door. In the second it shut, the boy was on it, clawing at the sophisticated fitments, pressing levers, trying skeleton wire, and the old plastic card trick, with no result. He assumed that the door must be the way out because the man had said that it wasn’t. It took a long, wasted time to convince himself that it wasn’t.
Then he put the table against the wall, and dragging the chair up with him, he began to beat in the light panel. But behind the glodex sheeting there was merely a niche with a fluorescent tube Three quarters of the way round he hit too hard and the lights went out.
The dark was complete.
Gritting his teeth, he felt round every inch of the walls. Then futilely, he went over the door, again. There was nothing.
Cold and sweating, he groped for the chair and sat down. He forced himself to think. He had tried the door and the walls. He had not tried the ceiling or the floor. To try the ceiling would require standing on the table on a chair in the dark. He would start with the floor. It was his first analytical thought.
He worked from side to side systematically, carefully, amongst the shattered glass and plastic of the light panels. In the centre of the room he felt the outline of a trapdoor or manhole cover. He fingered the fitted square, carefully. There was nothing to get hold of.
He felt hopelessly tired. He had no knife or screwdriver. He scrabbled at the neatly tiled edges. Something thin to slip down.... the glodex panels! He felt for a piece that was big enough and prized it down the sides. The plastic bent but the trapdoor moved. He forced apart the opening and pulled the heavy iron top away. A coldness rose up from the empty space. He could feel no bottom. Once again he was forced to the dilemma of thought. He could not stay where he was. He had to escape. He would lower himself slowly and if his feet did not touch the ground he would let himself drop at arms length to minimise the fall. He got to arms length and he could not feel the floor. His nerve rebelled in terror and he would have climbed back up. But his fingers slipped and he dropped about eleven metres onto a sandy floor. He lay trembling where he had fallen.
It was no longer absolutely dark. To his horror he became aware of light from the manhole space he had fallen through. Then he heard the unmistakable grinding clang of the manhole being replaced. Feverishly he began to crawl away. It still wasn’t completely dark. He was in some sort of cave or natural tunnel. Still on all fours he made his way to the light.
He came out. It was the night of a brilliant full moon. He leant back against the rock face and breathed deeply with relief. Before him was a desert valley strewn with jagged and pillared rock formations. He was so tired he would have laid down and gone to sleep, but suddenly, behind him came a snarl and a roar. He started to run.
His mind wanted to lie down and die, but his body kept on grimly running. Every time he slowed the beast roared a few feet behind him. Creased with stitch and shaking with exhaustion, he stumbled on into the dawn.
The day when it came, burned. The beast had gone, but now he was driven on by thirst.
The days that followed were alike in this; he was driven on - thirst, beasts earthquake, terror. He was made to run and made to choose. It seemed like a whole lifetime. It seemed like three lifetimes.
Exhaustion, fear and choice were his constant companions. But of other people, he saw nothing. His isolation was absolute. Sometimes there were hints of human habitation in the distance, but the inner forces of his journey drove him away.
He knew himself to be a man with the plague, bearing the mark of Cain.
He ran for ten, or was it sixty thousand years? Then he came to a cave in the twilight. He was old, worn out, destroyed inside himself, but he had learned to think.
There was a sound. He had almost forgotten what it meant. It was a woman singing.
The woman’s sleeves were rolled up. She reached over the manger, straw clinging to her apron, and picked up the baby whom she had just been washing. The woman reminded him of someone he had once known. So did the baby. He stood before the manger, awkward, strung up, out of place.
The woman held the baby under its armpits, its legs dangling, its shouldered hunched. It dawned on him that she was holding the child out so that he could take it.
“Welcome, Adam,” she said.