So the cans exploded. Well, I guess we knew that would happen. Hoped it would happen maybe. Even a ten year old knows the inherent dangers of playing with aerosols and bonfires. But wow! You should have seen it go. I mean, I’m not advising that anyone should try this at home (for obvious reasons), but it was really something.Sally and I had been friends for a couple of years. She was (and still is) a little older than me, so you could say that it was a kind of mentor/protégé relationship that we had. She was a tomboy - hair cut short in a bowl, gingham shirts and flared jeans. Last I heard she had shacked up with an Indonesian man, and was fast squeezing out puppies in a suburban yawn somewhere. Life sucks in the very best of us.
We’d taken to hanging out by an old slag heap, Sally and me. We’d do the usual kid stuff - build ramps, race go-carts, torture Barbie dolls. Anyway, I can’t remember who had the original idea. In fact, now I think about it, they were two separate ideas that occurred at the same time, so maybe we’re both to blame. The first idea was: we could make this toy jeep go faster if we attached an aerosol to the back of it, and lit it on fire. The second tangentially related idea was: let’s build a bonfire.
You can see where this is going. And I guess that this is the part of the story where we need to introduce my kid brother, Drew. When you’re ten years old, you don’t want to hang out with a four-year-old. But on those long summer days, we would be bundled out of the house together, and Drew would just follow me around. He never spoke a word. I mean, he wasn’t an elective mute or anything. Just shy I guess. So Sally and I began the walk to the slag heap as usual, with me carrying a can of Sure deodorant, an Action Man jeep and a roll of parcel tape, Sally with a tin of Silvikrin hairspray and a box of matches, and Drew just silently tailing behind like a dog on wheels.
Our attempts at rocket-science failed. We couldn’t get the tape to hold down the nozzle for a continuous spray. Even Sally was too nervous to actually hold the can and light it. So we gave up on our propulsion system and set to work building a fire, using whatever we could find lying around. Once we got a fire burning, that’s when Sally started waving around the canisters, dancing around the fire and laughing like a madwoman. It was pretty funny.
We taped the two aerosols to the back of the jeep, and then Sally pushed the jeep pretty fast into the fire. It was a perfect punt: the jeep parked itself directly in the middle of the flames. There was a pause of a few seconds and then a deafening CRA-CRACK as both cans exploded. There was a flash of light, and bits of debris flew out of the fire all around us. We covered our heads in our hands, Sally and I, and as the dust settled, I looked up at Sally with a stupid grin.
‘ARE YOU OK?’
‘I’M FINE – YOU?’
‘Yeh’
Then, suddenly, the smile dropped from my face.
‘Where’s Drew?’
The smoke above the fire leaned to accommodate our view, and there on the other side was Drew. Embedded in his cheek was a triangular shard of metal, curled like a lazy Dorito. A single line of blood ran from the shrapnel down his face and onto his shirt.
We both ran over to him, and he just looked at us – too stunned to cry. Sally squatted down to Drew’s height and slowly reached her hand up to his face. As she did, the clouds opened above us, and a magical unicorn flew down from the sky. As the unicorn landed, she enveloped the three of us in her golden wings, and for a moment, everything was calm. Just for that second, there were no pretences, and we could all be exactly who we were, and we were comforted and happy. Everything was going to be OK.
Just for the record – this is not the way that Drew ends the story. When Drew tells this tale (and he does – often) he points to the scar on his cheek and, in a really melodramatic way he says:
‘And if this had been just an inch higher…’
And he just hangs it there, and looks at me accusingly.
Never even mentions the fucking unicorn.
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