Here is a short story about telegraph poles, recently read so well on Dartington Arts Radio by my friend, talented actor Julie Mullen.

I wrote it as a member of a writing group, where I’ve met so many other brilliant writers and artists. As a writer, I think it’s a real privilege to belong to a creative group, where all types of writers share their work and give feedback. So here’s a big thanks to Gill and the Totnes writing group and Peter and the Solitary Writers in Wellington. Groups provide us with a platform to make our single thoughts shared ones and to give our simple ideas the potential to become complex. Without the encouragement and dedication of group members, so many writers would be scribbling away alone.

 

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Telegraph Poles

I see the crowd, a dozen people, all staring up. I push my way through to the front and look up, where they are looking. A dot of a green hat, a smudge of red anorak, a boy dangling.

Callum has the gift. His Daddy has it too, although he’d see it more as a curse than a blessing. His Daddy works away on the oil rigs most of the time and Callum’s Mammy is long gone, so the boy lives with me now. I thought the days were behind me when I’d be turning a teenager with a forehead full of acne out of his bed in the morning, but Callum only has me to look after him.

Of course, being fifteen is the hardest time for the boy. It was the same with his father, but I was younger then and I had a husband to help me and no rheumatism in the legs. Not that my Jacko was a lot of use to me: he’d spend most time in his arm chair with a Guinness in one hand and the horse racing pages in the other, but at least there was another breathing body in the house, another person besides me to patter around the place. Now there’s just me and Callum.

He is a bright boy, Callum. His teachers always said so. Of course, they said a lot of other things too. Like he was a bit mad, a bit different. Anti-social was the usual phrase. Just the same as his Daddy.

I first noticed the gift when he was two. I was reading The Irish Times and he was on my knee with a bottle of milk, sucking at the empty teat. Callum never let go of anything, especially his baby habits. He still sucks on the thumb now. Anyway, he’s on my knee and I’m reading The Times and he says ‘T- for Tiger, I for Ink, M for Monkey, E for Egg, S for Swan.’ I just looked at him. Then I realised it: he wasn’t reading. He was saying the letters from the alphabet book in his room. He’d memorised them. He could say them back to me, at two.

His nursery school teacher said he was incredible: she could send Callum to the library for any book. ‘Go and get ‘The Hungry Giant,’ Callum,’ she’d say and he’d come back with the right book. ‘Go and get ‘The Wind in the Willows.’ Go and get The Holy Bible.’

Every time he’d bring the right book back, and he was only four. He had seen all the covers and he remembered the colours, the words and the pictures.

Then came the Maths and we knew he was a genius. He’d counted a hundred and three telegraph poles between my house in Hamlyn Street and the school. There were sixteen lamp posts between my house and the corner shop. There were seventy two poles between home and The Flying Pig, where we’d go to find his Granddaddy on an evening. And then he’d add them all together.

‘I have seen 382 poles today, Grandmammy,’ he’d say.

Of course, Jacko would take him on: ‘No, Callum, lad, you’ve seen 191.’

‘Yes, Granddaddy, but that was on the way there- we came back as well. That’s 382.’ He was five years old.

The school said he was bright for his age. Then they said he was disruptive, then dysfunctional and finally unteachable. He bit Denis Brady so badly the blood dripped from his arm for ten minutes. He pulled Mollie Flanagan’s hair out by the roots because she called him weird. The head teacher told him to play football downstairs but she took exception to him booting the ball from step to step on the stairway and she was even more angry when she asked him what he was doing and he told her: ‘Exactly what you told me to do- play football down the stairs.’ He didn’t understand why she called him insolent.

Callum doesn’t go to school now. He is home educated, but he is rarely in when Elizabeth Dooley comes round to give him lessons. And I can’t keep him in. He takes off to the fields and spends all day there.

Today’s no different. I woke him up at eight- he likes to be exactly on time-and he came down in his pyjamas, ate his four sausages and two eggs and one piece of buttered white bread, then went to the cupboard looking for the wagon wheel biscuits. His food has to be on the same plate, the same amount, and I’m not allowed to change brands – he’ll know it right away! He is six feet tall almost. Of course, with Callum it has to be exact. ‘I’m 1.8034 meters tall today,’ he tells me, and I believe him because he knows all about meters and I don’t. What I do know is he is tall for his age, he’s growing fast, he eats me out of house and home and his Daddy doesn’t send enough money back from the rigs in the North Sea.

So this morning, Callum puts on his red anorak, the one he chose that had to be red, and his green woolly hat that makes him look a little demented along with the little map points of acne that flare on his face, and his size ten trainers that are now too small but he won’t take them off and let me buy new, even though the water seeps in through the sole. And away he goes, goodness knows where. I imagine he is in the fields down by Massey’s Farm, as he comes back smelling of hay and cow dung and grass. There are a lot of pylons and telegraph poles down there to count and it’s quiet, not many people to disturb him, and I remember his Daddy used to spend a lot of time by the farm at his age and later too, when he used to take Susie Duggan over to the barns and he got her in the family way with Callum.

The day goes fast, what with me deciding to clean the oven and it wears me out so I fall asleep in the big chair Jacko always used to doze in, with the telly on. When I wake up, the air is cold and my skin is prickling, so I put on a jumper. I realise it’s gone seven and I’ve not started to make tea and Callum’s not back yet.

I feel a surge of worry, a little fist at my heart, as he’s always on time. My knees ache a little and my knuckles are swollen from cleaning the oven, but I put on a thick coat and go out.

I turn the corner to Massey’s farm and I see the crowd, a dozen people, all staring up. It’s growing cold but the people smell warm, of sweat and cigarettes, as I push my way through to the front and look up, where they are looking. A dot of a green hat, a smudge of red anorak, a boy dangling from a telegraph pole. He’s shinned right to the top and now he’s calling down at me, waving an arm.

‘I can see the estate from here, Grandmammy. Seven hundred and five houses, a hundred and twenty two bungalows and I can even see The Flying Pig. I can see all over the farm. There are seventy nine cows and fifty six sheep and that makes 540 legs in total.’

Then he lets go; the body falls in an arc and lands with a thump. The crowd are on the move and, despite my aching joints and swollen knees, I am running in front of them. Callum is lying on his back, and his green hat has fallen sideways over one eye, showing dark curls and a livid rash of spots across his brow. He smiles up at me.

‘Seven hundred and five houses, a hundred and twenty two bungalows. If an average of 3 people live in each house…’ His eyelids flutter. ‘…that’s two thousand four hundred and eighty one people…’ I see blood coming from his mouth. Someone has phoned for an ambulance: its whine is in my ears. I kneel down and take Callum’s hand. It is limp.