Bumble

Imagine being eight years old. You’re probably able to walk to and from school by yourself, and fix yourself breakfast, and somehow throw some sandwiches together for lunch and use a microwave for dinner. Imagine being eight years old and having access to a big house, and a basically stocked fridge, and clean clothes and electricity and running water and a TV and whatever you needed. But that was it. You had nobody and nobody loved you and nobody cared for you and you just had to exist and survive at school and still make sure your hair was brushed and you weren’t looking physically neglected.

Imagine waking up sadly in the morning to your Sony Dream Machine clock-radio crackling out the Triple M news jingle. And you get out of bed and pull on a school uniform and then take forever tying and re-tying your shoelaces because if they're too tight they hurt the top of your foot, and if they’re too loose they feel weird. They have to be the same tightness.

Then you go to the kitchen but it’s still dark so you feel around the corner for the light switch before entering the room because you're eight and the dark still scares you, and you have a little ‘don’t be scared’ chant that you repeat in your head when your mind starts imagining scary scenarios. You go to the pantry and get the cereal out, and get some milk out of the fridge, and some sugar, and you sadly eat breakfast but it’s difficult because you’re sad and nervous and school makes you more sad and more nervous, and your friends all get driven to school right as the siren sounds so you just have to wander around alone in the school grounds. And you’ve got math that day, and math combined with the loneliness and helplessness you feel just makes your stomach knot, but there’s nobody you can tell about it because there is nobody. 

After your sad little breakfast you need to make your sandwiches and play-lunch. You twist open a loaf of white bread that’s a few days old so it’s still edible but it has that hard skin on it that gets carved up by your clumsy little hand buttering it with one of those flat butter knives with the beige ivory handle. You spread on some vegemite and put a Kraft cheese slice on top and you know it’s going to be terrible but it’s what you have for lunch mostly. And you buzz sadly between the counter and the pantry and the fridge, and you pack the sandwich and a fruit juice and a roll-up and a brown banana that you won’t eat into your light green lunch box, and you put that in your school bag, and you swing it over both shoulders and open the front door. It’s too cold for shorts in the morning, but you know it will be hot later and you’re committed now anyway. So you close the door and walk to school with your head down. You wouldn’t dare take your walkman to school in case it gets stolen, and you hardly listen to music at this stage, so you can just think about horrible scenarios and how you might overcome them, and how you can’t fucking wait to be an adult.

You have a horrific day at school, but you have a loose concept of time so horrific days are horrific lifetimes. You sadly eat your play lunch then play some downball, and it’s still cold and you’re really not good at downball so you mostly stand there shivering while waiting for someone else to go out.

After school you sling your backpack back on your back and trudge home by yourself. You still haven’t quite worked out that traffic will always approach from the immediate right when crossing the road, and from the far left on the other side, so every road you cross is still a “look right, look left, look right again” affair. 

You get home and nobody is there, but you’ve still got a routine to which must be attended. You always take your shoes straight off, because you once attended a basketball camp run by Bruce Bolden of the South-East Melbourne Magic who said to always take your shoes off when you get home so you can do a slam dunk one day. You watch the same awful kid’s shows on the ABC until the room starts to get that blue-grey colour and you need to turn the light on, but the light is only about as bright as the blue-grey room. The kid’s shows give way to bigger-kid’s shows like Vidiot and Heartbreak High, and you need to venture to the kitchen and make dinner. 

The fridge has been magically restocked, and there’s a plate stacked high with way too many boiled potatoes and way too many green beans and boiled broccoli and a really tough bit of steak. It’s lukewarm still, having only recently been magically cooked and put in there. You choke down as much of the potatoes as you can but they’re dry and clag in your throat and no amount of butter can make them palatable, but you are compelled to eat them or there’s going to be trouble. You hate beans and you hate broccoli but you have to eat those too. You wretch on the rapidly cooling leaves of the boiled broccoli and chew for ages before finally swallowing it with water. The steak can hardly be cut, and is so tough and tasteless and chewy that you spit out more than you swallow. But you sit there sadly until the entire meal is eaten and the plate has a film of grease and butter on it. You sadly scrape the plate into the rubbish bin, nervous that you’re about to get in trouble for the waste, but no trouble comes. Luckily in this house there is a dishwasher, but you have to run the plate under the tap first before stacking it a very specific way. 

The living room looks menacing and black from the bright light of the kitchen, but you have to brave it if you want to watch some television before bed. You do the familiar 'hand reaching timidly around the corner, searching for a light switch’ thing that you do every morning, and creep toward the TV. You sit on the same place on the couch that you always do. You feel like a fruit platter with orange and apple and grapes and two pieces of milk chocolate that you make yourself eat last even though the fruit takes an age to get through. You don’t have a fruit platter tonight though. How do you even know about fruit platters?

You sadly watch TV. 

It’s time for bed now. Now. Because now it is time for bed. You switch off the TV and retrace your steps back through the lounge room, through the kitchen, turning off lights as you go. You timidly enter the bathroom and brush your teeth, and you go to the toilet one last time just to make sure you don’t have to get up in the night and brave whatever horror is waiting to scare the living fuck out of you in those dark, creaking hours where nobody on earth is awake in that big, quiet house.

You turn on your bedside light, then you turn off your bedroom light, then you make sure the door is open just enough to let in a crack of light from the still-lit hallway. Just enough. It sometimes takes minutes before the door is open just enough to let just the right amount of light through.

You turn on your Sony Dream Machine clock radio and make sure the volume is set for the exact right volume so you can sleep but still hear it. You check five times that you’ve set the radio’s alarm to wake you up. You hit the 'sleep’ button so it will automatically turn off after one hour, but you need to make sure you hit the 'sleep’ button again and again because the idea of the radio turning off while you’re still awake and leaving you to poke your hand through the dark silence of the night to reactivate it is just so horrible. 

You think about fantastic scenarios where you’re the only kid left on your basketball team against a team of bigger boys, and yet you still fight on through the sweat, and you can slam dunk, and you still lose the game but everyone is impressed by your drive and your grit. It’s all anyone talks about at school the next day, and they want to make basketball cards of you.

There’s starvation and amputation and rape warfare and mothers who take out well-meaning loans that they can’t repay. There’s misery in the feeling that even grown men get that they’re still eight years old and lonely and constantly terrified and the butter is always too hard for the old bread, and living rooms are dark and light switches are never where you left them. And if you’re still awake when the Dream Machine cuts out, awful things will happen to you.