Sandy is so small for his age. Hair like sunlight on corn falls in a shock across crystalline blue eyes. His head rests on a narrow neck, above bony shoulders and skinny arms that end in hands too small to be able to grasp puberty’s first mysteries. His thin legs tremble with a youngster’s endless energy and his voice is high and black-bird sweet. Sandy looks so young.
Yet, look into those azure eyes and you can begin to see the truth. Pain makes them brittle gems, protected by the shutters of experience. Shutters that warn you to keep your distance.
Sandy looks ten. Sandy is thirty-eight.
Time flows past him, water tumbling around an intractable stone. The years mould the world without leaving anything but the faintest marks on Sandy. A small boy, standing quietly on a corner watching the traffic clip passed, he has seen everything change.
Children he was at school with are now grown, stooping under the weight of mortgages and worries about their own children. An audience of one, Sandy watches as they marry, divorce, get arrested, have affairs or break-downs, religious experiences or become redundant.
Time writes its memories on their faces. With Sandy, it wants no part. Only his soul ages. The once open heart of the boy he appears to be is now closed. Experience, at least, has left its marks on Sandy. He suffers in this half-life: a little boy who knows what is passing his eyes but cannot join in. And so pain brings down the shutters over his eyes.
In the darkness, Sandy’s mind returns to the last summer before he realised he was not going to grow any more.
The big sun soaks through his pale skin, leaving it golden brown as it turns his hair into something closer to ash bark. Cold strawberry yogurt tingles against his throat. The long, long afternoons are rich with the smell of yeast as his mother kneads dough. Sandy stands just outside the kitchen door, a huge red, green and yellow beach ball squeezed between his small hands. He watches her work, bouncing a little in his startling white baseball boots, the shoes new and brimming with the pent-up thrill of running just waiting to be unlocked by the shimmering days.
As he thinks of that distant, amber summer, Sandy remembers his dreams. Stories once filled his head: pirates and space ships, phantasms and flight, adventure and a limitless future.
He remembers and he smiles at last because, as small as he is, Sandy can fit Time and the Universe inside his mind.