Chapter 2 - The Surviving Troll

Chapter 2 - The Surviving Troll

The choir softly sing;
Three lullabies in an ancient tongue,
For the court of the crimson king – Yes, In the Hall of The Crimson King

Sajin stood next to his locker, wondering what to do next. He’d pocketed the floor plan of the building and his timetable, and now his arms were full of books. He couldn’t get to them with his locker closed and locked. He was considering just how to juggle the five thick textbooks around to under one arm so he could get to his pockets when he noticed the boys walking up to him. Before he could react his textbooks were spilling out of his hands, he groped wildly for them, knocking some further away, managing to catch first one and then two with graceless swipes of his hands when suddenly he started to fall as things went a deep blue, pain lashed across his head and the blue faded to black.

He came to later in a hospital bed, his mother, father and twin sister around him. They explained who had attacked him, that he’d been knocked out and had a mild concussion, and that he’d be fine after some rest. The nurse explained kindly but efficiently that nothing had been broken other than his glasses, and that no permanent damage had been done, "Except maybe to your pride," she said with a soft smile and pity in her eyes. Sajan listened, taking it all in, he’d had no pride to damage, just the ever growing ember of shame he’d carried in his the pit of his stomach for the last few months. 

He didn’t remember the books being knocked out of his hands, nor did he remember the attack. All he could recall was the enveloping deep blue blackness that overwhelmed his memory before he came to in the ward bed. His mother was ringing the corner of her dress in her hands, trying to remain calm whilst the nurse, now clearly trying to clear the bed, took on a more professional air. There was nothing wrong with him that rest wouldn't fix, and so with no great ceremony he was discharged.

Later, at home, Sajan was fussed over by his mother and sisters, whilst his brother and father talked in subdued voices in the kitchen. The sitting room of the Thapa home was a bright, warm and welcoming room, much like Garima Thapa herself. Even though they had only been in the house for a few weeks before the school year started, her personality and love of her family was the focal point of the room. Pictures and flowers, the deeply rich red and gold motif throughout the house, Garima’s warmth and joy for life imprinted every room she decorated. This warmth and love surrounded her family, and whilst he was with her Sajan forgot the pain and humiliation for a while. He was with his mother and twin sister, the two people he was closest to in the whole world, and for tonight he was the centre of theirs.

That night the feeling of security and warmth carried him into his room, but as he shut the door the glow seemed to be stuck on the outside, as though he'd walked inside from out of a glorious sunny day into a freezer room. His new room wasn’t the haven of warmth and happiness he’d left downstairs, his mother had not yet decorated it and the personality of whoever this room has belonged to in the past still held sway. 

Whereas most of the house (it was too soon for Sajan to consider this place home yet) was painted or papered in rich and warm colours, his room was a plain white with a pale cerulean carpet that seemed to suck the heat right out of the air. 

Sajan was reluctant to go to bed, he’d been told that there was a chance he’d have vivid dreams as a result of his head injury, and whilst he wasn’t particularly prone to nightmares he’d had a vague memory of unpleasant dreams from when he was unconscious. 

Sajan tried to read before he slept, he’d been given a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit as a  farewell gift by a previous teacher, and was marching slowly through it. Sajan loved the imagery of the book, the vividness of the songs and the love the author had for the natural world around him. Sometimes he imagined he was like Bilbo before Gandalf sent him off on his adventure, almost content with his lot, but some key and indefinable element missing from his life.  He felt that all he needed was a quest or a great Wizard friend with 13 dwarf adventurers to take him to find himself…

Sajan picked up from where he'd left off the night before, Bilbo had been captured by Bill, Bert and William, the three trolls. They were arguing about how best to cook and prepare the hobbit and the dwarves when Gandalf had returned and confused the trolls until dawn. As Bilbo escaped from the three trolls, Sajan felt tiredness starting to overtake him. Marking his page and extinguishing his sidelight Sajan quickly fell asleep with his head full of magic, spinning through with trolls arguing over who they would eat first.

In his dream, the first troll towered over Sajan. Whilst pot marked and ugly, the troll didn’t look vicious anymore and when he spoke, he spoke with the voice of Sajan’s father. “This won’t be the last time this happens; he should be able to defend himself.”

The second troll strode up to Sajan and lifted him off the floor, surprisingly carefully and gently. This troll spoke with the voice of his mother, with a look for deep care in the brown eyes. “Now Talwar, he’s a sensitive boy, he’s not a fighter. He’s not strong like Shoorveer or Raveena. Leave him be.”

The third troll appeared behind the second, its face seemed to morph and change as it spoke with a voice that was distorted. “I’ll look after him Ma.”

The first troll spoke again, “We all need to look after him now, he’s a special boy, and I know this.” His father’s voice boomed in his dream, leaves falling from the trees that were springing out of the ground. A fog that had surrounded the trolls seemed to billow backwards into defined shapes, the clearing that they were in came into focus as Sajan looked around. The cave the trolls lived in had the embers of a fire within the entrance, but these weren’t like the trolls in Tolkien’s story. The cave looked warm and inviting and Sajan felt safe with them. The forest that was rapidly surrounding them had a freshness and crispness that reminded him of spring, and the cloudless sky had a rich a beautiful starscape hanging overhead.

“We will all look after him as before, and when we stand together,” as the troll with his fathers’ voice put his arm around the second and third trolls’ shoulders. “When we stand together, we’re unbeatable.” The three trolls stared down at Sajan as he tried to thank them, but as is the way of dreams he was unable to make a sound. He looked back up at them, the leaves unfolding as the sky washed from black to pink and then the fierce blue of dawn. Dawn. Sajan tried to warn the trolls of the sunlight before it hit them, but he couldn’t make a sound. Desperately he tried to cry out to his troll family, Sajan watched in horror as the sun lit upon first his father, then immediately after his mother. 

In The Hobbit, Tolkien described the trolls simply turning into stone in a crack, but in his dream his father and mother erupted into flames that flowed over them, boiling the skin from their bones in seconds, their voices cutting off and screaming filling his ears. The fire spread from the two trolls to the trees which burnt to black and ash rained down onto Sajan, choking him on the ashen remains of the forest and his parents. The fire consumed the cave, as he was left held by the third troll, inexplicably unmarked by the fire. The ash was in his throat and eyes, he gagged and was blinded as more and more ash descended before finally the dawn light hit him. He felt himself being raised into the air as the light shone through him, knives of ice. 

He couldn’t see the surviving troll, he couldn’t make himself heard even though he was screaming his throat raw, and as the light burnt into his skull his eyes rolled back and he saw the sky and land curve as if he were seeing the world from space. The stabbing light exploded within him and Sajan felt every cell in his body burn white hot for an instant.

And he woke up

His mother was shaking him awake, Sajan had been screaming in his sleep, waking the whole family and possibly the neighbours. He was dripping with sweat, and it took him a long time to calm down again. The dream was already slipping away from him as dreams do, the figures and sounds of the dreams melting away, but the urgency remained. To his increasing shame, he'd asked to spend the night with his mother, she refused but she sat with him in silence.

After Garima left Sajan alone again, it took him many hours to get to sleep.

 In the years that followed that day, the Thapa family settled into their new home. Sajan decorated his room and if he ever had such nightmares again he didn’t remember then or wake in the night screaming. As the new headmaster of the school Talwar Thapa enjoyed many successful years where the majority of the student body performed well. Sajan's sister Raveena was an immensely popular girl, her prettiness growing into true beauty as she blossomed towards adulthood. She was well liked, popular and friendly. Shoorveer and Katha both left home at 18, Shooveer actually leaving England to explore the family heritage in India and Katha went to University in London. Still a very family orientated girl, she often called and visited when she could. From the casual eye of the observer, the family seemed to succeed as well as any family could do during the time, their personal victories waxed and waned, but the core love that held them together only grew.

Things did not go as well for Sajan.

Sajan always tried hard to make friends, and whilst he had many children at school he associated with, he never had many he would call true friends. People often seemed to forget Sajan when invitations were sent to parties, and he was never selected to join in games. If challenged, people seemed genuinely sorry that he'd been overlooked, yet after so many incidents like this Sajan became more and more reclusive. He began spending time in the library and art rooms during lunchtimes, he would say studying but Raveena would say hiding..  The only time Sajan seemed to shine was during art, wood and metal work, the only subjects he seemed to have any aptitude for. This was the only time his peers would seem to be open to listening to what he'd have to say, laughing with him and his jokes, rather than the stony silence that usually followed him around.

In woodwork, Sajan seemed was relaxed and his work was always flawless. He was able to see shapes in the wood, and with the right tools he was able to gently retrieve them. Soon, the Thapa house was full of bird feeders, coat hooks and other small pieces of furniture. It was the same in metal work, where Sajan seemed to know instinctively how to manipulate the metals and how to shape them into beautiful pieces of almost art. It was somethig that was a delight to his mother and a constant source of amazement to his father, who was not at all practically or artistically inclined. 

In art class, working with pencils and charcoal he could capture shocking likenesses of people, and with water colours he was able to replicate beautiful scenic views, with a movement and serenity that was so unlike the boy himself. When using clay or sculpting he showed the uncanny ability to identify the essence of the subject as he brought them forth. 

In these classes Sajan was not the timid boy often forgotten at the side, in these classes Sajan was magnetic and energetic, every inch the brother of Raveena that Sajan knew he could be.

Yet in his other subjects though, Sajan suffered more and more as time went by. Sajan was two years younger than Thomas Prince, so shared no lessons with the boy who had knocked him out. Yet when Prince retuned, there was an unaccountable overlap of the pair’s lessons that often had them passing in the corridor. For Sajan this was terrifying. For Prince, it was maddening.

For Thomas Prince, the three weeks at home had been a traumatic affair. Thomas’ stepfather Ben was deeply unhappy man who drank, and the sight of Thomas excluded from school for fighting enraged him. Ben worked unusual hours, overseeing unskilled warehouse staff at a local depot. Ben hated his job, his colleague and anyone he perceived as being brighter than he was. This came down hard on Thomas.

“You stupid little shit, I didn’t raise you to be caught fighting!”

Ben Callahan roamed the house like a stalking tiger, and whenever he came across his son he’d launch into a new verbal attack.

“Something wrong with you, little shit stain. Picking on some podgy Punjab and getting suspended. Glad you ain’t my fuckin’ kid.”

As the days wore on, and Ben got drunker and drunker, he’d occasionally take a swing at Thomas, often missing, but when he connected it was always somewhere Thomas wouldn’t show. His chest and his back were the favourites of Ben to hit. Midway through the second week Ben caught Thomas square in the back as he was walking away and he sprawled headlong into a door well.

“Oh well, ‘ow does this feel you fuckin’ little prick? That’s what you did to that fat paki and now I’ve done it to you. What you gonna do? Fuckin’ cry?” Ben spat at his step son who was trying to pick himself off the floor. Tears welled in Thomas’ eyes as he cradled his forehead which had connected with the wood, and Ben lashed a kick out at Thomas’ side, knocking the wind out of him. “Yeah, that’s right, ya fuckin’ thug, crawl back to that pit of a room and stay outta my fuckin’ way!”

Thomas spent the rest of his suspension in his bedroom hiding from his stepdad, sometimes successfully. He spent hours at a time on his games console, or surfing porn on his laptop. The games were mindless slaughter fests that he played like an automaton and the pornography got progressively more violent as he descended deeper and deeper through some of the websites. 

Eventually Ben got tired of hearing the electronic bleep of a kill counter on the game Thomas was playing and forcibly ejected him out of the house to spend some time outside, Thomas would spend the afternoon hurling stones at cats on the estate, roaming alleyways and kicking holes in fences. He walked down to a bridge over a motorway and wasted an hour spitting onto passing cars, before progressing onto emptying his pockets of all his litter and stones into the traffic below. Yet none of this brought him any joy or satisfaction.

Thomas still did not blame himself for being excluded. The blame as he saw lay at the feet of three people: Sajan, his head teacher dad and that fucking dobber Easton. Whilst he was at home there had been some letter and phone call correspondence between the school and his mum. From what Thomas understood, he’d been kicked from the school football team, and he was to go to a hub room every lunchtime to review go over notes his teachers had written about his behaviour, all because someone had decided he’d beaten up Sajan because he was a Paki. That wasn’t it at all!

Thomas Prince had never thought of himself as a racist, and didn’t like it when he knew people thought he was. It twisted up his insides to know people thought he was lesser due to some silly mistake. Sure, he’d made a few jokes in his time, but he hadn’t picked Sajan because he was Indian, he’d just been in the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time. It didn’t have anything to do with his weird sounding name, or that stupid topknot bun he wore, or the colour of his skin. Thomas Prince would say he never hated anyone because they were a different colour to him. But he did hate the three he blamed for the worst three weeks of his life. 

Sporting a livid black eye from hitting the door well, Thomas had at one point been passing blood from the kicks he’d received from his stepdad. He had hidden from his mum, who would have kicked off about what Ben Callahan had done to her son, and Thomas was fully aware of what his stepdad would do to his mum again, last time Ben had had crossed words with his wife she’d not been able to walk for two days. Thomas hated Ben utterly and completely, and imagined taking his revenge on his stepdad as he waited until all the lights went off before he went back inside. He didn’t want to talk to anyone in his house, he had nothing to say to Ben and his mother simply wasn't interested. 

He spent his last night before returning to school angrily masturbating over revenge porn.

The next day when he was back at school, Thomas was no longer the centre of attention he had once been. He was now an outsider and old friends distanced themselves from him, girls gossiped behind his back (“Yes, HE’s the racist who beat up poor Sajan Thapa”).

All the sports he'd previously been so active in had banned him, due to his aggressive behaviour. At lunch when he'd always been able to spend sometime playing a quick game of football, he was forced to a hub where he ate separate from the rest of the school whilst a teaching assistant reviewed his behaviour. Like a delinquent. 

Thomas hated it, and because he hated it he acted out. First he would throw books onto the floor in exasperation, or slam doors, but that quickly escalated. He began to get into shouting matches with teachers and prefects, which he'd barely restrain himself from making physical threats. On two occasions Thomas Prince had to be physically restrained after he flipped over tables in a rage that he was now unable and unwilling to rein in.

In short order, this meant that Thomas Prince was under observation far longer than originally promised or expected, and he was again excluded from school for a week a few months later. Thomas had quickly gone from what he thought of a popular pupil at the school to someone to be avoided, someone who was a liability to know. And every day he saw the faces of the two of the people he blamed for this. Sajan and Easton.

Elliot Easton and Sajan Thapa shared a few classes, and these classes were always found near the classes of Thomas Prince. This meant that on every single school day, Sajan or Elliot found themselves shoved into walls, or tripped up, or dead armed. 

On one particularly bad day, Elliot Easton had two teeth knocked out when Thomas Prince punched him in the side of the head and swaggered off before he was caught. The months after Prince’s return to school were a nightmare for Elliot and Sajan, but it did form a bond of camaraderie between the two boys who were both short of true friends.

Elliot Easton was considered by many to be a quiet, conscientious young boy, one who was very polite but did not take much care in his appearance. His parents weren’t cruel or abusive by any means, but their son was an utter mystery to them. 

Elliot’s father wasn’t able to talk to his son, though there were never any arguments, and it wasn’t as if there weren’t any shared interested between them; Elliot and his father were both avid football fans and players, it was just like at school there seemed to be a wall between Elliot and the world, one that Elliot seemed to construct brick by brick until very few could pass through. Only Elliot’s mother was able to talk to her son in any meaningful way until Elliot met Sajan, but even then Elliot kept many things guarded from her. Elliot didn’t believe that anyone could truly understand him, as he didn’t truly understand himself. Wiry, bordering on petite, the young boy spent many hours alone reading, or walking his dog. Elliot was not a depressed or ill young man, but Elliot himself never felt comfortable in his own skin and this gave him a melancholy from a young age that prevented him forming true friendships until he was much older.

Elliot became a target of Thomas Prince because Elliot had been there on that fateful day, but the animosity had grown due to his quietness, his shyness and his effeminate nature. To Thomas Prince, this girly little poofta was a direct challenge to his own masculinity. He saw Elliot walking through school with his long blonde hair, far too long to be considered cool, and his softly spoken ways and took it as an insult that this kid was still allowed to play football on the school teams when he wasn’t, regardless of what he'd done. From what Prince heard, the little faggot didn’t like getting changed around the other boys on the team either. For these simple reasons, Thomas Prince lashed out at Elliot Easton, and it drove Elliot toward Sajan.

Meeting officially for the first time in the harsh and unforgiving light of the nurse’s office, Elliot Easton and Sajan Thapa were aware of each other from shared classes, but the two shy young boys had never spoken to each other. The nurse had left them alone in the room whilst he had gone to alert the head teacher of yet another suspected Thomas Prince attack (whilst Sajan and Elliot were the most frequently attacked they were by no means the only victims of the new terror that stalked the halls, none were stupid enough to identify their attacker), and Elliot was holding a compress to his nose to stem the flow of blood. Sajan was sat on the examination table, nursing some bruises to his chest. 

Windows from the office looked from the austere school playground onto a local green, filled with lush trees, grass and beckoning flowers. Approaching the Easter holidays, Sajan felt an elating sense of approaching freedom where he could spend two weeks away from Thomas Prince and his swinging fists. 

Elliot’s awkward home life prevented him sharing the same anticipation of the time away from school, a place he was generally able to become part of the background, but even he was looking forward to be spending time away from Thomas Prince, who was able to find him with an uncanny urgency.

The green at the end of the road was lit by the bright April sun, bursting like rivers through the clouds, dancing across the early flowers and glinting off the rain on the grass. The window, a portal to a better world and the two boys were trapped on the wrong side of it.

The anatomy charts loomed above Elliot, and as Sajan turned around he saw the boy unconsciously mirroring the pose of the chart, organs and arteries labelled and named, until the nose bleed started again and broke the spell.

“Lookth like you got off eathy,” mumbled Elliot from beneath the tissue blooming crimson. “I’m thick of Printh. He’th got it in for uth.” He gingerly removed the tissue from his nose, and tapped his nose to see if the blood was still flowing. With a look of dejected disgust he dropped the tissue into a waste bin, where a litter of like stained tissues were already drying. “You’re Sanjay, right?”

“Sajan. Sajan Thapa.”

“Oh right, sorry, I’m ...”

“Yeah, I know who you are, Elliot Easton, right?”

Elliot squirmed. He’d never liked the name Elliot, and in recent weeks he’d grown to truly hate it, he’d convinced that his friends had given him the nickname El and that he wanted to be called El at home, when in reality no one called him at all. The opportunity to spread the new name was in front of him, and he didn’t want to squander it.

“Everyone calls me El now.”

Sajan cast Elliot a quick glance.

“Really?”

Something about the glance caught Elliot unawares. He wasn’t used to people making eye contact with him, often people passed by El without a second glance, or sometimes even a first. Even teachers missed him, sometimes even missing his name off registration lists, or seeming surprised when he handed in homework at the front of the desk. This wasn’t a look of surprise, this look saw El and it spoke to him of another boy who was often ignored and not seen, except by Thomas Prince.

A grin split across El’s face, a grin that was echoed on Sajan’s face.  “Well, I prefer it to Elliot anyway,” El said. “Do people call you Saj or Sajan or what?”

Still grinning “They don’t really call me anything here, I mean my family call me Sajan, but yeah, Saj sounds pretty cool.”

“Ok then, Saj, I’m El.”

“Hi El, I’m Saj.”

Both boys found this funny, bursting out into fits of giggles, which continued until the nurse returned from his phone call. After giving the boys another quick check, the nurse sent the newly renamed Saj and El out to get an early lunch.

Unusually for both boys, they found that the conversations that usually were forced and uncomfortable with others came easily between the two of them. Whilst they laughed and joked their way to the canteen, they were stopped by two separate prefects and one teacher. A note of passage from the nurse had them continue their journey, and by the time the boys had sat down to eat, they were both in much higher spirits than they had been for months. 

For Saj, having a friend that was from the area was a big deal, the school immediately was more welcoming and less oppressive now there was someone here to talk to, and doubling down this was not a friend that he'd made through Raveena. For Elliot, it was another outside to talk to. Saj was not the only Sikh in the school, but he’d not been able to integrate with them as Raveena had. The two boys shared the horror stories of being bullied, the overwhelming work load and their burgeoning adolescence with the frivolity of youth and the joy of an experience shared.

From that day onwards, Saj and El were firm friends, and through their friendship they discovered much about themselves that can only be discovered when the young are free and unconcerned with the judgement of others. The families of the boys noticed a dramatic change as well, no longer were they concerned about how distant and unhappy Saj or El may be, as they both were now becoming chatty and expansive around each other, and some of that carried home whilst they were apart. The boys text and messaged each other constantly, revealing in their newly discovered friendship.

Another thing that the boys discovered during their lunches together was that they were magic.