First prayer

[Tom Scott]

Angels, answer me,
are you near if rain should fall?

The boy hung out of the third floor window of the flat, staring down at the street below. A group of kids had started a little game of street football and when the boy had noticed, he hadn’t been able to resist the urge to watch. He liked to watch soccer and see what actions were good ones and where people had been wrong. Of course this game was much simpler than the versions he had played during his own soccer matches. There were less rules. It was solely for the fun of it. But still the boy liked to watch, and every time someone missed a chance, or made a mistake, he thought of what the coach would have said to that.

The children below weren’t aware of the boy hanging rather dangerously out of the window to watch them, but to the said boy it didn’t matter. He liked to watch from a safe distance and just observe. He was usually not so fond of playing and talking with others. It made him feel uncomfortable and it was always like there were codes everyone but he was aware of. Of course it was different with soccer. In this case, the boy would actually have liked to come down and ask if he could play along, but since it was not possible anyway, he didn’t mind to watch the game from here, unnoticed.

Remembering the reason why he could not go down, the child pulled back and closed the window a little bit. He was seated at a wooden table in a small living room. He had sat on his knees on the chair, in order to be able to hang far out of the window and get a good view of the children below. But now that he had pulled back, he shifted position to that he was sitting properly on his behind again and he pulled a plastic box toward him. In the box lay several potatoes, some peels and a knife and there was also a pan on the table in which one peeled potato lay. He had been peeling potatoes but had dropped and forgotten his work when he had noticed the far more interesting activity outside.

The boy’s name was Tom Scott and he was twelve years old. Tom had finished his first year at Hogwarts about a month ago and now he was having summer holidays. But unlike some more fortunate children, he didn’t go on a holiday. His mother, his only parent and family member, had to work and they did not have much to spend anyway. Instead, the boy spent most of his days outside, wandering through Canterbury, until about an hour before he knew his mother would come back from the factory. Then he would go home, clean some things and start cooking. His mother had a new job, meaning she was gone by day, and when she would return, she would be very tired. Tom knew how much his mother hated her job, and he often wished that he was old enough to work already. His mother’s fellow workers were mean to her. Well, if they would try that while he was there, Tom would hit them right on their mean faces! But being the boy of twelve he was, he could not work yet, and therefore, he just tried to do the things he could do.

Tom picked up the peeler knife and started peeling a second potato. He was a bit of a chubby boy, though not unhealthy. Rather, he looked like a boy who liked a good meal – which was very true – and who would become a big man one day. He was less round-faced than when he had returned from Hogwarts though. Perhaps it was because his face would get a more mature shape over the next couple of years. Or, more likely, it was because here he could not eat as much as he liked, like at Hogwarts. Perhaps the most precious thing of Hogwarts, to Tom, had been the meals. There was always enough, and even if you ate til you burst, there was always food left, so that you would regret it that your stomach wasn’t bigger. At home however, he could not eat on and on. But despite all of this, Tom looked like a healthy boy. His cheeks also had a healthy red colour and his body, though that of a child, looked like it could take something. The only thing that made him look less healthy were the shadows under his eyes, because he didn’t sleep so well, and the fact that he looked rather uncared for. His shirt was dirty and especially if you would have sat close to him, you would have noticed that he had not washed in a while either. But perhaps this was what had made him strong.

Tom put the last of several potatoes in the pan and threw the knife back into the box. Then he stood up and took the box, carried it to a small hallway where he sought the pocket of his short trousers for a key and opened the front door. His mother had ordered him to always lock the door, even if he was inside of the apartment. You never knew what kind of people would be lurking out there. The boy stepped into the corridor outside of the apartment and locked the door behind him. He had to bring the box back to the shed, where the other potatoes were stored and if his mother would come home in the meantime and notice that he hadn’t locked the door, there’d be a beating for him.

He walked through the corridor and entered a hallway with a staircase, which led him two floors down. There, he entered a dark corridor that led to the sheds. When he had been younger, he had always been afraid when he had to go down here to get or bring things, but now he was of course a big boy. Tom had grown up in this flat. He had lived here for all his life. Always in that same small apartment on third floor. He had only realised how small the place really was when he had returned from Hogwarts. At Hogwarts there was endless space it seemed. There were many unused classroom, and even in his dormitory, which he had to share with the other Gryffindor boys from his year, he had more space it seemed. When he had returned to Canterbury last Christmas, he had found the apartment smaller than he remembered. The furniture was closer together than he remembered. The walls were more pressing than he remembered. But despite all of this, the apartment in Canterbury was the place he called home, and Hogwarts would never be.

The boy unlocked their shed door and entered the small shed and when he had put the box back next to the bag of potatoes, he carefully locked the door behind him again. Since there was not much room in their apartment, it was better to store the things that they didn’t directly need here. And since it was cool here, it was a better place to safe the potatoes anyway. In their apartment it could get very hot on summer days.

He made his way back to the staircase, stopping for a moment to look through the window of the entrance door at the children who were still playing. He wished that they had been playing this morning, when he had gone outside, instead of now that he had to cook. For a moment he was tempted to go outside and see if he could play along, but thinking of what his mother’s reaction would be, he held himself back. He did not want to be ungrateful and irresponsible. And he realised that he had already lost much time watching the game earlier. Therefore, Tom pulled his gaze away from the playing children and ran his way up the stairs, back to the apartment.

Lyrics: Enya – Angeles

[Tom Scott]

Am I to believe
you will rise to calm the storm?

The third floor corridor was as deserted as he had left it, but just as the boy crossed it to reach their apartment door, the neighbour woman, Mrs. Doyle came out of her own apartment. Upon seeing her, the small boy quickly walked over to his door and pressed his key into the keyhole rather aggressively, wishing to open the door fast. Mrs. Doyle was a nosy person. The brunette woman – always clad in a long dark blue skirt and a white blouse with a large brooch and her hair pinned up; in other words, not the average style in this flat - had lived next to them for as long as the boy could remember. He had never talked to her before he had been eight years old though, ignoring her like his mother had taught him to. Now and then there was a Mr. Doyle too, it seemed, but he was gone usually, and Tom’s mother said that the man was playing games with Mrs. Doyle, who was stupid enough to believe it. Tom had never been quite sure what was to be believed about playing a game with someone, but he had just nodded in agreement with his mother back then.

“Hello, Tom...” The woman greeted him and, as Tom turned the key in the keyhole and quickly opened the door.
“Hello...” the boy answered, before closing the door behind him quickly without even a glance at the nosy woman. In his hurry to get away from there, he almost forgot to lock and only when he entered the living room he remembered. The boy quickly moved back and locked the door after all, before he put his key back in his pocket and went back to the living room.

He rather avoided Mrs. Doyle and he didn’t like her. One night, when he had been eight, his mother had been really angry with him and in the end, she had put him outside of the apartment and had told him she didn’t want to see him anymore and he was to his own. It had left Tom standing in the cold corridor in the underwear he had been sleeping in. Shivering, he had finally sat down against the wall, waiting until he’d be allowed to go inside again. He hadn’t known if that would be a few minutes or the next morning, but his mother would always change her mind in the end. But Mrs. Doyle and her husband, who had turned out to be there too at that time, had apparently been awakened by his mother’s death-of-night’s yelling and the door slamming and they had come out to see what was wrong.

They had been shocked to find Tom sitting there in the middle of the night and though the boy hadn’t wanted it, he had obeyed when Mrs. Doyle had told him to come inside. He had been too cold, sleepy and scared to object. Inside, the two adults had debated about what to do. Mrs. Doyle had seemed rather upset and had asked herself if it wasn’t better if they called the police and if this didn’t go too far. Tom had burst into tears at that point and had told why his mother had put him outside, only he had made the thing he had done something far worse. He was a bad boy. That was why his mother had shut him out in the cold. At this point, his mother had apparently realised that her son was at the neighbours’ for she had knocked on the door and had demanded that they would leave her son alone. Tom, though he had been scared of his angry mother, had been more scared of what the Doyles could do at that point and he had been all too glad to leave them and go back to his own apartment with his mother. Later, Tom had taken revenge on Mrs. Doyle by chasing her cat with a football and shooting it at the creature. But ever since that night the woman had been trying to pry into their life, and always tried to make a chat with Tom. The child shivered. Stupid woman!

But now he was safely inside and he shook the frightening memory off. The boy walked back to the table, where the peeled potatoes were waiting in the pan. He carried it over to the kitchen, which lay behind the living room. It was a small kitchen, with the only light coming from the lamp the young boy had just turned on. The tiles of the floor were of several blue hues, though here and there a tile was missing, or sometimes partly missing, and it revealed the brownish cement below. Right in front of him there was an oven with a stove on its top and to his right there was the sink unit and several cupboards.

The boy started cooking the potatoes, turning the fire a little higher than he’d usually do, since he had lost some time, earlier. When he had been younger, he had used a wooden box to be able to reach the stove, but now he was of course tall enough. Sometimes his mother would cook, but when she was working, Tom usually did. Like he did the other chores around the house. He didn’t always like it, like when he would rather be playing football outside. But it had to happen. The boy didn’t want to make his mother work harder than she already had to, or make her sadder than he already did, or make her sick, like she often was. He was her big man.

Tom laid the table while he waited for the potatoes to be finished. Etiquette was not his thing. In fact, if you would ask him, he wouldn’t be able to tell you what the word meant, but he could eat with a fork and knife if that was necessary. And in the case of hot potatoes, that was necessary, if he didn’t want to burn his fingers. But other than that he wouldn’t have a clue of where to lay a fork and knife ‘officially’. It didn’t matter much once you ate.

He had returned to the kitchen and was almost done cooking, when he heard the key turn in the key hole.

Lyrics: Enya – Angeles