Joy

It’s the things we don’t have to do which we enjoy most, isn’t it?

Puddings, the first single malt after sundown, behaving chivalrously; pleasure hatches where nothing is expected of us.

George Farrington, a sculpted beast of a boy, came from a background of privilege yet found joy—true feverish passion—in little. Despite his cemented neutrality and shoulder-shrugging disinterest in the world around him, he excelled at everything he did. He was one of those grating children who became one of those annoying teenagers: effortlessly handsome, the fastest rower, top of every class—yet his eyes carried no flame for life. His body was a cold hearth full of cinder; ash left from a fire that no-one had witnessed.

He was not depressed as such, for how could one be down when one suffers no emotional ebb and flow, no fluctuation? He was simply a flat ocean, a fisherman’s dream, a permanent state of insensibility. Farrington had cashed in his chips at birth to spend life waiting for a boat that would never arrive to carry him to a timeless destination whilst the world blew hurriedly around him. Life felt to him like a balled chore bashing at his shins; pointless. Too unperturbed to kick it away, he tolerated existence.

Not even freedom from the mundane, prescriptive education that adulthood delivered brought him joy.

Whilst knee-high to a high-knee and undoubtedly a tedium, draped around calves and heels, ma and pa—his parents, wealthy sorts—parcelled him off to a city centre boarding school. In character, he went without fuss, caring not for the kiss goodbye his mother planted nor the stuffed bear his father gifted. Days, weeks, months, a term passed as knowledge and sport, sport and knowledge sunk in via osmotic exposure. He didn’t look forward to returning home to see his family for the holidays and did not care where he spent his vacation period. He would just have readily spent summer alone in the woods of his parents’ estate, trapping pheasants, as at school with the skeletal holiday staff, strolling the pavements each day until term recommenced, surrounded by city strangers with whom he did not have to interact, kicking stones and pigeons. It wasn’t that people brought him displeasure, or the eyes of others pricked at his skin, he just didn’t care for folk.

He received a good schooling— measurably the best—and his knowledge of the world, of science, history and mathematics was second to none. Unceremoniously, he found himself shuttled down the corridor of education, propelled forwards by the harping hands of time and overpaid staff, towards something he still felt nothing for.

Plummeting unaware from his birth nest, collecting qualifications like the slow creep of middle-aged spread which gathers without notice along the way until one’s trousers simply fit no more, he did not feel the pull of gravity tugging him earthwards down, towards adulthood. Of course, he aced medical school with minimal effort whilst coincidentally sleeping his way through the undergraduate catalogue— persuaded by many, chasing none— and ended up specialising in cardiothoracic surgery at the most prestigious hospital in the west. It was as if one day, as the bird fell, he simply awoke, scalpel in hand.

Day in, day out, the earth span on its stick as Farrington cut, cracked and splayed ribs with mechanical precision; his fingers plumed and stitched defunct vessels and gave first class people a second chance at life. Some nine hundred patients he’d saved by the end of his first year in practice—never a patient lost on his table was. He’d have kept a personal tally—if he’d cared. It paid the bills, kept blue fillet steak on the table, gave him reason enough to move his meat each day.

One evening after a day that had been just like all the others, whilst walking the diagonal to his penthouse through the city park under the linear arch of tipped trees, each tickling its opposing partner’s canopy, he heard a bird—a sparrow—lying under a red maple.

What beauty.

Fallen from its roost? Dropped by a hunter? He stooped to looked down at the thing of insignificance all-a-twitch by his boot. He watched its tiny chest rise and fall and rise and fall, staccato, an oscillating spring undoubtedly coming soon to rest. Both wings were twisted, bent from how they were happy to be and a vermillion rivulet of fresh blood seeped: a slow balloon of red inflating on the path. Injured, its eyes still shone more life than his ever had—

Until he lifted up his colossal foot and brought it down on the bird. Down hard and fast and meteorically; crater-inducing, sudden.

Crunch.

Snap.

The bird, quashed and as flat as his temperament had been until this day, now took on its angelic wings. Its soul rose heavenwards, a gory residue of cherry-grey tissue still smeared on the path now lifeless left.

George cleaned his booted foot where grass tufts hugged an edge of cement and walked onwards, back towards his pad with pace. A tingle in the pit of his stomach spread swiftly to his fingers and toes. An internal glow spread torso to limb like the rolling in of a high tide awash with firefly shrimp, each wave crest spilling with hundreds flicking their lights on and off, wriggling and writhing and pushed sandwards, shrimpwrecked, desperate to breed. An orgasmic feeling, a serotonin celebration exploded in his heart: a ticket with six matching numbers, a thousand candles all lit at once, euphoria.

He could suddenly smell the sunshine.

Joy.

Joy struck, crashing into the walls of his chest as if a million sparrows had taken flight within its containment. Heady emotions capriciously flooded the shadowy citadel walls of his constitution. No longer flat, his joy bled into the three dimensional world, smacked and lifted as if served with a true love’s first kiss.

Farrington operated the next day, but, onwards, his track record of unmitigated success slipped fast.