SEBASTIAN AND DANIEL
A semi-autobiographical LGBT coming-of-age story about a pair of social outcasts who find peace within each other’s company. May contain uncompromising real-world situations.
CHAPTER ONE
It could be said, and most surely has been said, that the River Broad, running beneath the lofty nose of metropolitan Bradbury Town, has as many tributaries and distributaries as it does shipwrecks and drowned maidens. The imaginative cartographers who make such statements, sat in their libraries measuring inlets and coves, are the sort we shall not meet in these pages. However, it is worth noting that they are out there, and are the reputable academics who first gave name to the numerous offspring of the mighty Broad, including the one over which a skinny, fair-haired boy is now crossing, just as the day’s sun peaks over the surrounding trees.
The boy, who the author shall waste no more time in naming Sebastien, is crossing this particular distributary by its natural land bridge, which one can be reliably informed is termed an “isthmus”. This is true, despite it sounding like a biblical figure guilty of, most likely, diabolical heresy. Actually, the word derives from the Ancient Greek term for that area between one’s torso and head, a gangly one of which the boy Sebastian has been so unhappily fitted with.
The boy’s well-meaning father, in all his thirty-six-year wisdom, would pass by his son each morning, as the boy stood examining the ungainly figure looking back at him from the hallway mirror, and diagnose the twelve-year-old’s problem, as the boy saw it, as being down to “chronic low shoulders”, which would correct itself, rather painfully, during adolescence.
This did not comfort Sebastian, needless to say, and his father would summarily be subjected to a volley of petulant sighs and eye rolling.
This back-and-forth had happened, somewhat predictably, approximately half-an-hour before Sebastian found himself crossing the isthmus, treading particularly lightly over the two-metre wooden addition the adjoining Bradbury Gate district councils of Waddlecross and Archampton had both helped fund. Not without appeal, of course, as both administrations blamed the other for the “catastrophic” watery erosion that caused the gap, which could easily be leaped under duress, to appear in the first place ten-thousand-years ago.
Sebastian was want to tread lightly here, because, to put it simply, the boy did not like to make any sound, or, in fact, any noticeable and lasting impression on the world around him, at all. His slight frame and bowed head betrayed his overall shyness and unwillingness to be noticed, not even by his own lumbering shadow.
Nevertheless, Sebastian’s shadow stood by him, unlike society as a whole. It is a sad truth about so many people in this world that they simply do not trust the quiet and thoughtful among us, believing those who are loud and brimming with confidence to be of correct moral fibre. An outstretched hand is, to the eternally faithful, as reassuring as a pound note placed in a breast pocket. The author and reader know this to be false, however this detail did not furnish Sebastian’s life with any friends, of such. Unless one is to count his mother and father, which the boy certainly did not. As it turns out, bowing ones head and avoiding eye contact leads to a rather isolated existence, but Sebastian rallied himself by staunchly believing that such a passive demeanour would, eventually, bring into a meandering orbit a willing confidante.
As was the case, during his first year at secondary school, such a feat of mental physics simply had not transpired. His mother and father, after having paid a visit to Sebastian’s teacher on request, had asked their son to resist his usual habit of staring thoughtful out of his classroom window, instead attempting a more active role in the peer-related goings on around him.
“Even if you’re misbehaving.” His father had said, catching his wife’s disapproving glare. “Anything, just get involved!”
Sebastian’s mother had placed a halting hand on her husband’s arm.
“Or just discuss what’s going on in class.” She had said, rummaging through her memory for what she herself had done at Sebastian’s age. “Tell jokes. Just say something!”
With that conversation, on the last day of primary school, in mind, Sebastian kicked a stone from the isthmus and sent it skimming across the distributary. He was damned if he would lower himself to such social cliches. Not that he felt himself to be above the rabble, just that he abhorred obligation, and would, eventually, defeat his own academic growth with such a stubborn mindset.
According to the fortnight-encompassing timetable ground into his hand on the first day of school, he had English, Maths, and Music that day, along with the usual morning Christian-brainwashing assembly drivel, tedious lunch break, and two tiresome coffee breaks meant to facilitate the teachers rather than his patience. He had considered petitioning for the removal of any activity save for the purely academic, so as to move the day along at a brisker pace. A midday home time would please Sebastian endlessly.
“Son, we’re trying to avoid you being bullied, do you understand?” Said the boy’s father, upon being made privy to Sebastian’s petition plot.
“Normal boys and girls enjoy playing outside, you see.” Said his mother, before taking a deep swig of coffee. “They won’t appreciate you taking that away from them.”
Choosing to ignore the word “normal”, Sebastian had nodded graciously, even though his opinion remained grounded firmly in the petition camp. Quite how one defined that despicable world, and which accursed fool had coined it, was beyond even Sebastian’s quite florid imagination. Perhaps the lexicographer had been sat next to one of Bradbury Gate’s cartographers at the time. Sebastian imagined the dire person leaning over to their desk companion, currently in the process of naming our isthmus, and conspiratorially whispering:
“I’ve just figured out how to annoy that Sebastian boy. You know, the one currently walking over your silly little land bridge.”
The cartographer would surely have sighed and pushed the bookish fop away, grumbling as he did:
“Leave that poor boy alone, he already has enough problems! Can’t you see him dragging all his books to school, even though he doesn’t have those lessons today?!”
As Sebastian smiled at this play-within-a-play, or metadrama, enacting itself within his private world, he noticed, some way down the distributary on a small jete, a boy, wearing what appeared to be an ill-fitting train driver’s cap, idly fishing under a canopy of willow. Sebastian wondered, quite jealously, how on Earth the fisherman found time for such an activity with all the feverish complexities of the day looming ahead of him.
A more confident, assertive breed would surely have briefly waylaid his destination and interrogated the boy, but Sebastian, as we have learned in this first chapter, was not of such a heady disposition.
He continued on his way.
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