(Loosely based on Andersen’s The Girl Who Trod On A Loaf)
You’ve probably heard about the boy who trod on an Indian take away meal so as not to spoil his brand new training shoes, and of how badly he fared. It was in all of the red top newspapers at the time. The boy in question was well known locally for his fastidious way of dressing, and although his choice of clothes wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, he had already become something of a legend in his neighbourhood for his sharp temper and his vain and overbearing nature. In short, he was the sort of boy who, when five years old, delighted in picking the legs off crane flies to see if they could still fly, and if they could still fly he plucked off their wings as well.
As he grew older the boy’s manners and his sulky disposition became steadily worse, but he was blessed with a strapping physique and sultry looks that turned girls’ heads. He knew he was handsome and as his school days wound down and he matured into a young man, his looks and his personality were the very undoing of him. His physique and his winning smile were all that stood between him and many more beatings than he ever received.
His father often said to him, “It’ll take something desperate to cure you of your mean little ways. You’ll be the ruin of us all if you don’t grow up and accept some responsibility”.
But try as they might, his family couldn’t cure him of his pride and his temper. His friends, such as they were, had neither the wit nor the inclination to take him to task. He preferred it that way and chose his friends accordingly.
Having left school without many qualifications, trusting his fortune to his smile and the forcefulness of his personality, the young man started work at a factory run by one of his father’s friends. Because of the esteem in which his father was held, his new employer treated him very well and Billy almost became part of his employer’s family. He was trained and paid a good wage for his age, all of which allowed him to indulge his passion for designer label clothes, shoes and jewellery. He looked good, he felt good, and his arrogance increased with the purchase of every new shirt and every new pair of tight fitting trousers.
He spent so much time with his new employer, both at work and on a social basis, that it soon became clear that he preferred money to blood. After a year had passed his kind and considerate employer said, “Really, Billy, you should spend more time with your parents. They’re not getting any younger and your Dad could do with some help around the place. Why don’t you make a bit more of an effort?”
Billy could think of nothing worse than having to spend an entire weekend with his folks, much preferring the company of his employer's spoilt and wealthy sons, but he had also learned that it was good to listen to his surrogate father, that it was good for his image and for his prospects, and so, one fine summer weekend, he stayed at home as a means of garnering brownie points. He managed to grunt his way through breakfast and even managed some meagre civility when his father asked him to help in the garden, but as the morning dragged on and as his father prattled away about trivial rubbish and the incomprehensible doings of maiden aunts, Billy started to scream inside his head. He had to get out of there. As soon as his father’s back was turned he slipped out of the garden by the side gate, gunned his small but heavily customised hatchback car down the drive and fled towards the nearest decent shopping mall.
Billy was ashamed of his parents. He was ashamed of their petty little lifestyle and of their inane and constant chatter. His father, who was a book-keeper for a local firm and had worked there all of his adult life, was a grave disappointment to Billy. His mother, who worked as a cleaner at the local primary school, was beneath him. He felt humiliated by the fact that he was making an effort, making a real splash in the world, and his parents were so boring and tedious. Billy had no regrets about spending the rest of the day drinking Cappuccinos and hanging out in designer clothes shops, being, by now, quite experienced in the use of retail therapy as a way to mitigate the irritations caused by the thought of his home and of his family.
As soon as he was able to, Billy rented a small studio flat and left home for good with his stereo, his compact disks, his wardrobe and his collection of soft porn magazines. For six months he carried on working, going to the shops, drinking luridly coloured alcho-pops and dating girls for a week at most. Not once did he visit his parents or pick up the telephone. He even set his email account to automatically delete any communications from them.
Then, at work one day his employer called him over and said, “I was having a chat with your father in the pub the other night. He was telling me that since you moved out they’ve seen neither hide nor hair of you. I know you’re young and eager to make your own way in the world, but you really should try to get on with them a little better. Blood is thicker than water, after all”.
“Right”, replied Billy from under his fringe, shifting his weight from foot to foot, “suppose you’re right, it’s been a while”.
“Good boy. Now, I’ve got an idea. Mrs Spencer and I are having a take away curry with your mum and dad on Friday night and I think it would be a lovely surprise if you turned up with the take away and joined us for the meal. What do you think? They’ll be delighted to see you”.
On Friday night Billy put on his tightest jeans, his most flamboyant French shirt and his latest purchase; a pair of red and gold trainers made by the coolest sportswear manufacturer this side of last month. Despite the fact that it was raining, Billy parked his souped up roller skate of a car a couple of streets away from his parents’ house and walked round to the local Indian take away. After all, he might manage a visit but he didn’t want to advertise the fact that he was spending a Friday night at home with his mum and dad.
The streets were full of puddles and dirty brown mud where people had been walking on the grass verges and Billy trod as carefully and as delicately as he could through all of the muck and grime, desperate not to spoil his pristine shoes. He’d borrowed from the rent fund to afford them and he was not going to see them ruined on account of a stupid family obligation.
After Billy picked up the curry, the popadoms and the pot of minty yoghurt, he set off at a brisk pace for his parents’ house, but at the bottom of the road where they lived Billy came face to face with his worst nightmare. Somewhere, somehow, one of the drains had backed up and was spilling a cold and dirty mixture of rainwater and sewage right across the pavement and into the gardens on both sides of the street. The stream of murky brown liquid was just too wide to jump across. Billy was stuck. There was no way on this earth that he was going to put his shiny new training shoes in that mess. Billy had an idea. The curry was in a plastic bag. If he put the bag into the middle of the stream and used it as a stepping-stone, then his trainers would be saved. “After all”, he thought, “I can say I’m broke and they’ll just have to get their own bloody curry”.
Billy pushed the plastic bag full of cartons into the stream of dirty brown sewer water and, attempting something akin to levitation, he tried to step as lightly as he could on the bag so as to avoid both the water and the possibility of curry sauce splashing his designer trainers. But as Billy’s right foot landed on the carrier bag and his left foot started on its arc towards dry land on the far side of the stream, the take away meal started to sink. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion, but try as he might Billy couldn’t reach dry land. The bag of curry sank deeper and deeper, taking Billy with it, until he disappeared completely and there was only a thick, gurgling stream of water to be seen in the cold and empty street.
Billy continued to fall and fall until he thought that he was going to end up on the other side of the world, but then, with a sudden bump in the darkness, he came to rest with his cheek against a cold and clammy brick wall. Billy was in the great hall of the King of the Sewer Rats and the King of the Sewer Rats loves rain and dirt and all things foul. He brews his potions out of the world’s stinking detritus and Billy knew from the smells all around him that he couldn’t stay here for long. The stink that rose up from King Rat’s cauldrons made Billy’s head spin. He searched desperately for a chink of light, for any sign of a doorway, but there was no way out because all of the exits and entrances to the hall were full of squirming, wriggling, horn tailed rat soldiers. Billy sank to his knees in the middle of this loathsome, writhing mat of warm, twitching flesh and he started to shiver and shake and moan.
On this foul weather day the hall was full of commotion because King Rat was playing host to a much-esteemed visitor for whom he was conjuring potions. He was entertaining the Devil’s grandmother, who is a virulent old woman at the best of times, spending her days sewing unrest into people’s shoes so that they can never settle down. She is keen on needlework of many varieties, embroidering unfulfilled wants and needs in people’s pockets and crocheting lies and thoughtless remarks in busy people’s underwear. In short she does anything based on the sewing crafts that will cause harm and corruption in the daylight world of men.
The old woman looked at Billy as he knelt in the mire and said, “Now, there’s a man-child with attitude! Give him to me as a token of my visit here and I’ll set him up for eternity as a Toby Jug in my grandson’s living room”.
Of course, King Rat was only too pleased to be able to make a gift of this foul creature of the sun, and that is how Billy ended up spending the rest of his days in the Devil’s living room as part of the his prize collection of amusing caricature pottery. The Devil’s living room is really quite small, unlike his eternal and unending halls of pain, and he likes to relax in a well-worn armchair that stands beside a cosy fire. In fact, the room looks like the parlour of a small Victorian terraced house, except for the fact that the walls are lined with shelf upon shelf filled to the gunwales with grotesque faced Toby Jugs.
Perched high up on one of the shelves, Billy felt as cold and as stiff as an earthenware flower pot, for cold glazed pottery was what his body had become. Like the rest of the damned souls immortalised in pottery, Billy could still move his eyes and as he did so his head filled with shapes and dreams of absolute horror. Huge bulbous bodied spiders were spinning thick strands of silk over the jugs, building webs that lasted for a thousand years or more and Billy could sense the torment in the souls around him. The contorted faces of loan sharks and estate agents, of fat corporate cats and smug warmongers, filled his view of the room. It was a truly dreadful thing for Billy to find himself stacked on these shelves.
“This is what you get for wanting to keep your shoes clean”, he whimpered to himself in a terracotta voice. “It’s awful, dreadful, quite the ugliest thing to see them all glowering back at me like that”.
It was true. Every one of the Toby jugs flashed an evil grin at him, shooting stars of menace across the room. Billy could hear their demonic mumblings even though none of them could move their mouths, set as they were for eternity beneath paint and glaze. Billy looked down at the bulbous shape of his own jug and saw that it was painted to look like just like the clothes and shoes that he had been wearing when he set the Indian take away in the stream of water. “Well, at least I still have a sense of style”, he mumbled to himself, “which means they’re all jealous. What a terrible pleasure it must be for them to see me in all my glory”.
Billy continued to stare at his own painted body. The general effect was pretty cool, but now that he looked closely he felt that something, somewhere was wrong. As he stared and stared he realised that he must have been covered in grime and filth after his fall into the hall of the King Rat, and someone had painted all of that grime onto his pot bound body. It was awful to see how his trainers were covered in thick globules of mud. At least he hoped it was mud.
“Still”, he muttered, “none of the other ugly pot bellied bastards are looking too hot to trot either”.
It was then that Billy noticed the smell of burnt chicken Madras. He felt pangs of hunger rising from the pit of his earthenware stomach all the way up to his painted eyebrows and he felt a lump of something settle in the bottom of his hollowed out body. Billy screamed silently inside his own head as he realised that he was full of cold chicken curry. His hunger pangs drove him into a frenzy but there was simply no way that he could satisfy his ravenous appetite despite the ample source of food that he held within his own portly shell.
And then the flies came, attracted by the smell of coagulating Madras. They came in their thousands, swarming all over his eyes and his mouth and his ears. He couldn’t even blink. Billy was stiff and cold. He shuddered and started to cry non-existent tears when he realised that the flies were wingless, legless crane flies, but worst of all was the endless hunger. It seemed to Billy that his entrails were eating themselves and he felt nothing but emptiness inside, nothing but hollowness and loneliness.
“I can’t stand it”, he yelled at the top of his voice, but stand it he did, for he had no choice.
It was then that Billy felt a tear fall upon his glazed face. The tear trickled down his cheek, down his chin and all the way down to his china training shoes. More tears fell upon him, each hotter than the last, because up above him, through the darkness and the cold, his mother was crying over her lost son. She was crying tears of grief and a mother's tears always reach her child, although in this case they were of no comfort for they burned as they fell, adding to Billy's torment. He was consumed by hunger and by the knowledge that he was full of chicken curry and couldn't eat a drop of it. He was convinced he was devouring himself from the inside out. He was like a black hole sucking everything into his black heart, which was how he came to hear the words of his parents up there on earth.
What he heard was harsh and painful. Although his mother wept deep tears of sorrow, her words were full of anguish and anger.
"Pride goes before a fall", she moaned. "That was your undoing, boy. That’s why we suffer so".
Billy was mortified.
"If only I'd never been born", he thought, "then we'd all be so much better off. Now my mother is snivelling and crying like a banshee but she's no help to me. They should’ve cured me of my attitude, should’ve made me into a better person, should’ve cured me of my temper... not that they’re bloody saints, the miserable bastards".
Billy's attitude was cast in hard, eternal relief, just like his face and his hands, and he fumed quietly on the shelf as he heard every word that was said about him up on earth. None of it was complimentary. He consoled himself by thinking, "Well, if I'm as bad as they say it’s their fault and they should be punished for their sins as well. Oh yes, then these shelves would be full to overflowing. Can't they see how tormented I am?"
Billy's soul grew progressively harder and colder, his heart filling with icy fury and spite. He ranted and raved over many, many years, until he realised that his story, that the words that he could hear from the world above were fading almost to silence. Billy realised that his parents, that his employer and his friends were all dying, one by one, and that his story was passing into folk-lore.
Now all that he heard were other children's parents telling them not to be like the boy who loved his shoes so much that he sank down into the pits of Hell. Children everywhere were told Billy's story to stop them being hateful and full of pride. Most of these children just stood there silently or cried in fear, but one day, as he listened and ranted back at these disembodied sounds, Billy heard a little boy cry not in fear but in despair.
"Mummy, please, won't Billy ever rise up again, won't he ever be saved?" pleaded the little boy. "He can't be punished forever just because he liked his shoes so much, can he?"
The little boy's heart was breaking for Billy. He showered tears of compassion down upon Billy's hard coated face, but unlike the tears of Billy's mother, these tears were soft and gentle. One of the little boy's tears ran in through a crack in the glaze and reached all the way to Billy's soul, filling him with warmth and hope.
As the years have drifted by, and as Billy has continued to shout back at the human voices that he can hear, that one tear has worked its slow magic. Billy’s anger has gradually waned and his voice turned to a gentler tone. Billy knows that he can never expect anything more than this darkness. Billy knows that the flies will still come to gorge themselves on the never emptying slops in his pottery body. Billy knows that flames will lick and crack his glaze, turning his once bright colours to shades of grey and black, and that his hunger will never abate, but he also knows the love of a small innocent child. He just wishes, when the flies stop buzzing and the flames stop crackling, that he’d put the plastic bag down a few yards to the left all those years ago.