What's Necessary

-John Thieme

Every morning, before classes started, they had to deposit their phones into the little pouches that the school had introduced the previous year. At first, they had resented this, but by now it was accepted as a done deal. The moment of the hand-in occasioned a certain amount of banter, most of which centred on who owned iPhones and who had Androids, but Kent’s mobile was another matter altogether – a Nokia. Ted described as ‘a relic from prehistory’. He said, ‘I mean, it ain’t even smart, is it?’  And that was just one of the ways in which the boys saw Kent as different. Some of them said he was ‘boringly ordinary’, but, in Ted’s opinion, that didn’t ‘go nearly far enough’. He said it would be more accurate to call Kent ‘sub-ordinary’. Kent was completely unlike anyone else. George said he was a ‘weirdo’, Tony labelled him ‘the missing link’, and they all agreed he was ‘a total misfit’. He even lived ‘beyond civilization’, in one the five terraced cottages in the clearing in Coldstock Wood, just this side of the main road. Of course, Alice also lived down there and she was ‘a bit out of the ordinary’, but, the general view was, she passed muster because she was both smart and ‘nice-looking in an old-fashioned sort of way’. Not to be compared with Kent. He was ‘completely off the wall’. Mostly, though. they were guessing at what Kent was really like, because he said so little, and he didn’t even use social media. He was subjected to taunting, but this never blossomed into outright bullying, mainly because he never rose to the bait. Seemingly impervious to the actions of others, he grinned neutrally when provoked.

Alice wondered if Kent had a speech disorder and so one day she asked him the question point blank. To her surprise she got a direct answer. He spoke slowly and with a slight lisp, but his words were clear enough.  ‘Just don’t have much to say really.’ And then, after a long pause and a deep breath, he added. ‘The world here goes round, doesn’t it? It doesn’t really need me to take part. It’s not necessary.’

None of her girlfriends was keen on Kent. They were at an age when boys were their main topic of conversation and the consensus was that he was ‘a creep’. They joked about what they would say to him, if he asked them for a date. ‘Go fly a kite’, ‘Get lost’ and ‘Take a running jump’ were among the more popular choices, along with a few more colourful expletives, which Alice thought went ‘a bit too far’.  But the idea that Kent might ask anyone out was really just speculative. Chloe said it would happen ‘when pigs fly’, and Majorie embellished on the cliché by adding that ‘hell would freeze over’ before Kent ventured far enough into language to invite a girl out.

Whether or not, Kent was really sub-ordinary remained debatable, but he was certainly sub-ordinate, docile to the point of seeming almost completely passive. When Ted called him a ‘no-account cipher’, he mumbled in agreement, ‘Yes. Waves. I don’t make waves.’ So, for the most part, he was ignored, seen as a non-participant in the online and offline activities that were engulfing his classmates in their hormonal teenage years. It didn’t seem to bother him. He appeared to be content to live in his own private universe, like them in the margins between childhood and adulthood, but on the face of it immune to adolescent angst.  He avoided sports and after-school social activities. He sat squarely in the middle of his class academically, safe from being labelled either a ‘swat’ or a ‘moron’. Alice wondered if he might be a closet Einstein, but, aware that her friends would laugh at any such idea, she kept that thought to herself. Her relationship with Tony was promising and she didn’t want to be seen to be interested in the ‘freak’.

So, although they lived close to one another, in the two end cottages of the woodland terrace, it was something of a surprise when, that Thursday, she found herself thrown together with him. Miss Hawthorn, the physics teacher, stopped her just as she was leaving school and asked her if she could take Kent’s phone to him, since they were neighbours. He’d forgotten it and it was important for him to have it for ‘emergencies’. She heard herself saying, ‘I don’t think Kent does emergencies, Miss.’ Miss Hawthorn smiled, ‘I believe he does. More than most people.’ Alice wanted to ask what that might mean, but she could tell that, although Miss Hawthorn clearly knew more, she wasn’t going to reveal anything. So, she simply said ‘OK’ and took the phone.

Alice sauntered home slowly, enjoying the mix of gold and green in the autumn foliage. She’d heard that there was a dearth of horse chestnuts this year, but the woodland path was strewn with them. She stooped to pick some up. Her little brother, Lenny, would see them as treasure. Dreamily she thought to herself how fortunate she was to live in one of the cottages, even if her school friends regarded it as the wrong side of the tracks. She and Lenny were, she decided, uniquely lucky to live here amid the trees and plants, even if they didn’t have a father and her mother often suffered from her endometriosis.

Her reverie was brought to an abrupt end as she entered the clearing. An ambulance was there and her mother was being carried into it on a stretcher. Kent was walking towards her. He spoke quickly, but calmly. Lots of words. A different person. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t call you, Alice. I seem to have forgotten my phone.’ She handed it to him wordlessly. ‘You see, I was next door, with Jenny and Don, when I heard your mother screaming with the pain. So I used the landline there to phone for the ambulance. Your Mum was bleeding badly. Fortunately, they came really quickly, down the track from the main road. You should go with them in the ambulance. I’ll look after Lenny.’

Later in the evening, when she got back after spending several hours in the hospital, reassured to know that her mother was ‘going to be alright’, she went to collect Lenny and thank Kent. He had reverted to what she saw as his usual self.

‘It was nothing,’ he said. ‘Glad to help.’ He offered her an open hand to invite her into his house, the ‘spooky’ house where he lived with his grandmother. She asked him how he had happened to be next door with Jenny and Don.

‘Oh, I try to help out there. Didn’t you know? Jenny has MND and she struggles to look after Don now that his dementia is so bad.’

‘You’re their carer?’

‘Oh no, I wouldn’t say that. I just do what I can, when I’m not looking after my Nan.’

‘You’re a hero!’

‘Course not. I just do a bit here and there. Thank you for letting me look after Lenny. We’ve had a great time playing Dragomino. I learned a lot from him.’

Alice was stunned. ‘You’re a one-man social services department.’

Kent laughed. ‘Course not. I just do what’s necessary. When I can, that is.’

‘Is that why you don’t have much time for after-school activities?’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I suppose so. Never really thought about it. I just do what’s necessary here, don’t I?’

And suddenly all those remarks about Kent asking someone out flooded into Alice’s mind. Of course, he wasn’t going to ask her out – he never would – but she knew she wanted him to. Forget Tony. He was nice enough, but oh so immature. She heard herself blurting out, ‘Do you like films, Kent? Do you ever go to the cinema?’

‘Well, I don’t really go to the cinema, but yeah, I watch films on the TV sometimes. If they’re half-way decent, that is.’

‘You could come over to ours and watch some with me.’

‘I guess I could. Then I could make sure your Mum is OK, once she gets home. And Lenny and I are friends for life now, aren’t we?’ He gave Lenny a playful nudge.

‘You could come after school tomorrow?’

‘I could, but I’ll need to check on Jenny and Don first. And what about Lenny? Who will take him to school while your Mum is in hospital? And you’re going to want to be visiting your Mum, aren’t you? So tomorrow won’t be any good, will it? I’d better look after Lenny tomorrow. I could collect him from school and take him to Jenny and Don’s. Jenny loves kids. But the weekend is coming. Maybe we could watch a movie then. If your Mum is OK, I mean. There’s a lot that’s necessary, isn’t there?’

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About the Author

John Thieme is Professor Emeritus at London South Bank University. He has held professorial positions at the Universities of Hull and East Anglia and has also taught at the Universities of Guyana and North London. His academic books include Anthropocene Realism: Fiction in the Age of Climate Change, Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon, Postcolonial Literary Geographies, The Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, and studies of Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul and R.K. Narayan. He is the author of the novels The Book of Francis Barber and Cabinets of Curiosities and two collections of verse: Paco’s Atlas and Other Poems and Digitalis and Other Poems.