Somewhere in the clouds over London around 15:00.
The feeling was unnatural to Remel. He felt uplifted, both literally and figuratively. He was free. It was a brute fact that he felt in his body as he flew. Nothing stood against him apart from the wind greeting his face. Whilst he was level with the clouds, Remel realised that he had forgotten what happiness was. The sky had helped him to remember. He could touch the heavens. It was an aspiration from his childhood dreams that he gradually believed to be unrealistic. Being five again was amazing, and he didn’t want it to end. But it did.
Keys and Remel landed on the floor heavily as gravity ended the fun. Remel looked around to see if anyone was surprised to see a masked man and sidekick fly down from the clouds. No one noticed. Remel assumed that this must have either been due to Keys’ abilities or that he had someone working with him to ensure that they didn’t alert anyone’s attention. Without walking for more than a minute, Remel could see what Keys had brought him to. He was familiar with the area, because it was where he used to come to meet Rasharn. Where the White household should have been, there was a half-burnt house surrounded by fire engines and police cars. Rasharn White lay on a stretcher. He was a chubby boy, but on the stretcher he had been reduced to a skeleton. He had been famished, abused and bruised. Hastings White stood 100 feet away, handcuffed, next to a police van. Miranda and Steven White, the parents of the twins, cried heavily at their family home which was turning into ashes and at the state of their sons.
Remel felt sick at the sight of the destruction unfolding in front of him. It was painful for him to watch. It was painful for anyone to watch, but a crowd still amassed. They always did so. They took out their smartphones and recorded all they could for social media to see. The other parts of the crowd were neighbours coming in the frenzy with the intention of helping the White parents along with the medics, policewomen/men and firewomen/men.
James Cooder was one of the medics at the scene. He was stressed and tired. The NHS had practically been his home for 30 years. During this time, he had seen some gruesome things. There were also occasions when he arrived on scene once the damage was done, and no lives could be saved. The miserable scenery around James supported his decision to quit his job. He had considered it for a long time, but the working conditions and lack of government funding pushed him further towards sending his resignation letter. He had already applied to work a paid position in ‘The Change Maker’s Charity’. As he helped lift Rasharn’s stretcher into the ambulance, he saw a young gentleman arrive alone and stare at the mayhem that was happening. James thought the gentleman looked familiar (like a patient or the family of a patient he had once treated). The gentleman’s familiarity distracted James for a second before he carried on his work.
The police handled the situation relatively quickly: Rasharn made his way to the hospital by ambulance; The White parents made their way to a hotel by police car; and Hastings made his way to a prison cell by police van. The crowd disarticulated itself when the fire was put out, and there was nothing left to do, but some people stayed to weep at the tragedy. Others comforted their families.
“What happened?” asked Remel, the inquisitive.
“Hastings killed Emmanuel,” started Keys bluntly.
“Rasharn disliked his brother’s actions. He couldn’t handle the paranoia and threatened to call the police. Hastings beat him up and locked him in his room. Rasharn somehow managed to call the police. When Hastings caught his brother, he locked him in the wine cellar with a box of burning matchsticks and tied him to a carton of petrol. He tried to run away, but his neighbours stopped him when they smelt smoke.”
Keys pointed at two tall, muscular, adult twins with identical Rottweilers. They turned to him and waved kindly. He did the same back.
The twins who lived across the road from the Whites were in their thirties, and they both stood straight in identical stances staring at the scene of chaos which had now calmed down. Hastings had no chance of running away.
Remel shivered whilst he wondered what would’ve happened if he still had been close friends with Rasharn. He searched for words to encompass his sadness or pity, but in truth, he felt none of the two. The only victims were the White parents who had lost their home after coming off a two-week cruise holiday. The path of gang member/affiliate was a destructive one. Hastings, Rasharn and Emmanuel had done all they could to become the most evil and notorious possible. They had searched for their own demise. Remel’s thoughts were screaming out of his head. The noise gave the poet a headache.
“Can’t you empathise with them? All of these young men haven’t had easy lives. They’ve gone through difficulties that would be hard to bare for anyone. The problem is that they haven’t had any support to help them cope with what they’ve gone through. The only help they’ve received is from those who have set them on this path. Maybe if there were governmental schemes or family members who had been there to help these young men, all of this wouldn’t have happened,” Keys argued.
He wasn’t lying. Remel could see it, but he was firm on his stances. He rarely changed his mind.
“There are people who have been in the same position and have made the best of their lives. There’s no excuse,” Remel replied with an attitude that showed that he had almost been offended by Keys’ contrasting point of view.
Keys almost agreed with Remel’s argument, but he had to try not to laugh at the irony of Remel, someone who was recently amidst their conflict, being so firm in his condemnation.
“I have something else for you to see,” stated Keys, quickly changing subject before flying back into the clouds.
Remel learnt rapidly to savour the moments he spent in the sky. He was sure that he was dreaming, but he had no care. It was a vivid illusion utilising every single one of his senses. He started to cry tears of joy. The reason for his doing so was vague until the memory of his superhero father appeared in his mind. Remel once believed his father could fly and that he saved lives on a daily basis. In Remel’s mind, his father was invincible. When he was a child watching his father die, he wasn’t just watching his father: it was the end of the greatest comic book arc ever. Remel’s father, Remel sr. was the most powerful, courageous and loved superhero ever, and he died in front of his son. Remel grew to be cynical of flight without technology or aircraft, but as he soared through the skies, reaching the boundaries of the atmosphere (against all scientific reason), he realised his father may truly have been everything he believed him to be.
Gravity seized Remel and the poet. They landed in Westminster. It was busy as usual with tourists taking selfies next to the Big Ben. Just as they landed, a speck of snow landed on Remel’s shoulder preceding a shower of light frost. The people of central London loved the weather. Keys nudged Remel and pointed at Westminster Central Hall. The masked telepath waved his finger from left to right like a painter putting all of his effort into a single line. Remel failed to understand what King Keys was doing until the scenery started changing. The weather stayed the same, but a mass of people started flooding into the central hall. Remel and the telepath followed them in. Once they walked into the hall at ground floor, they walked upstairs to where there was an audience of people, some seated and some standing, watching a young, sharply dressed gentleman speak. The young man spoke with anger and passion. The young man was Remel. This was not the speech he had written. He turned to King Keys to ask him what was happening.
“This is a shared illusion. You are also feeding it. That is why you can hear your speech. I however cannot hear it. I just see a young man moving his mouth with no sound. So the answer to your question is I don’t know.”
Remel’s interest in his doppelgänger diminished just as the illusion did and was replaced by a hazy sense of uncertainty and confusion. Westminster returned to its usual identity as a tourist hotspot, and the duo left Westminster Methodist Central Hall. Remel went home. By tube. Words were inadequate to depict Remel’s time in the sky. Time inefficiently attempted to sustain Remel’s joy. Alas, flying was like an opium that gave the most exhilarating feeling whilst it lasted but quickly faded.