by Martyn Winters
Laurence was just fourteen years old. Though tall enough for his dark, bushy curls to brush against the lintel across the worn, wooden swing doors of the Bird in Hand public house on Bromsgrove Street, and broad shouldered enough to pass for a man in the right company, he was not going to fool anyone in the Bird, not on a Friday night.
He felt a tightness in his chest he couldn’t quite name: neither fear nor shame, but a heavy awareness he didn’t belong here, not yet, and perhaps never would. He acted as a silent postboy, carrying messages between adults, yet no one ever asked how he felt about their contents.
Always seeing more than he revealed, he noticed the cracks in voices and how grown men stared into their drinks, as if fearful they might respond. He remembered smells, sounds, and silences, storing them like relics in the corners of his mind. He learned to read rooms long before mastering his multiplication tables. Being young didn’t equate to blindness, nor did it mean he was unaware of himself.
