LITTLE RED TIE

Someone I went to school with has been arrested for doing something unspeakable.

I went through a range of emotions. Anger, certainly, but a whole heap of sadness too. And I’ve been processing why I felt that way about someone I haven’t seen for thirty years.

Thirty years. That seems huge. This is how life goes I suppose: yesterday turns into last month, then last month becomes last year, and you blink and it was all ten years ago, then twenty, then… well, you get the picture. Your memories feel like they belong to a different world, but really they’re connected to you in a sequence of days you can’t ignore.

He wasn’t someone I’d have called a friend. I knew who he was, but I wouldn’t have hung around with him. Like me, in September 1989, aged just 11, he would have fumbled his fingers around a little red tie, slipped into a pair of solid black shoes and poked a curly head into a navy blue jumper. One shiny bag over both shoulders and off to secondary school for the first time he went. We went.

I shudder when I think about where that path takes him. He’d been a nice enough boy - slightly insecure, good at football, but not the best. He had the tendency to be silly like the rest of us, but I don’t ever remember him being mean or nasty. Funny, yes occasionally, even kind sometimes, but in all respects just part of the gaggle of fresh-faced eleven year olds, crowding through the school gates on a sunny September morning. 

“Vile,” wrote someone on flumpbook. “I’m sick to my core.”

Yeah. Me too. Me too.

A lot of people at school made bad choices. It’s part of growing up, learning, adapting to change. It’s a tumultuous few years of wrestling with identity and relationships, with French vocab and quadratic equations as well as friends and hormones. I get that. He made the choice to hide behind the school bully: a tall, bruising boy who was mysteriously captain of the football team. A cigarette here, a spattering of F words there, turning the air blue behind the gym. I remember thinking how sad that was, watching on from the sweaty games of football we used to have on the field. They laughed at how bad we were and suggested we went back to chess club.

Not blessed with the bravery to be the actual bully, he quickly morphed into the sycophant - the guy who sneers from behind the shoulders of his bigger, tougher friend. He laughs a second later, he cackles with glee at kids barely weaker than himself. He snivels like Grima Wormtongue - pathetic, greasy, cowardly, but he knows he’s protected by wizardry you really don’t want to go anywhere near. It was the worst combination.

I had the good sense not to engage with any of them. But I did feel sad for the nice kid, caught up in the middle of it all. Somewhere deep down, I thought maybe he would pull through and grow up.

Sadness now though. He never did. And now there are big consequences.

Sometimes I think consequences have a sort of depressing effect on a person’s behaviour. You can’t escape them, so everything’s already ruined; what does it matter if I make things worse? If only, you think, I could disconnect myself from those who love me, then they won’t have to suffer from my spiralling mistakes…

It’s not true though is it?

“It’s his Mum I feel sorry for,” commented another friend. I remembered my Mum suddenly, helping me to do a tie in the mirror that first day.

“Yeah, and his kids.”

We are never able to disconnect ourselves. And consequences ripple through love, whether we like it or not. We’re also someone’s son, someone’s daughter.

I guess though, it’s a reminder about the tiny choices we make. Wisdom is picking a path when it looks like it doesn’t matter. It’s standing up to something wrong that’s also quite exciting; it’s seeing where a path might take you, long before you choose it. It’s knowing when to turn back, when to let your conscience whisper to you, and whom to listen to.

I wish I could rescue that nice kid from himself… and maybe someday, someone in a prison or chaplaincy uniform will do just that. There is still that chance. I wish I could rewind time and stop the path swirling before him in 1989. But that’s not how time works.

All I can do is pay it forward, praying for the eleven year olds who are standing fresh-faced in front of mirrors, practising how to do up little school ties around pink necks and white shirts. Maybe I can write, maybe I can teach, or something, anything just to help at least one person!

And maybe in my own life, I can recognise the micro-moments where wisdom can save me from a path I wouldn’t wish on my foulest enemy. It’s a sickening, sad, desperate reminder. But it’s also one that’s full of hope.