This Is Not An Autobiography

This is a story about a boy called Mouse.

Mouse had not left the house in three weeks, and it was during this lapse of sense that he chose the name for himself. His motives were philosophical – so he said, and we have no reason to doubt it, as he was a young person and young people have chosen to reinvent themselves forever and always.

Another word for his attitude could be “indolent”, or “self-indulgent”, or “premature”. Mouse himself wouldn’t have denied it. He described himself in these terms, too, without seeming defeated or proud. He said, “This is what I am, and there is nothing right or wrong about it.” Then he would have probably presented his views on morality or lack thereof and quoted or misquoted a German thinker or ten.

But this is merely an introduction, and I have been warned against talking about the fact itself just yet, lest I, the Author, miss my monthly pay for “narrating in disorder”.

It begins thus.

This knobby-kneed, spectacled, vaguely harmless, decidedly mousy young man had been born Charles James Whitby. He was sixteen years old, and had been bullied half his life. Of the other half, we can say he was part worshipped, part ignored; the injustice of this wrecked his brain, exaggerated his perceptions of the social variety, and all in all bound him to very specific instabilities.

Of attention, we could say he was starved or force-fed, never healthy or content.

Unlike many other only children, who are coddled from birth to young manhood, our hero was, by his parents’ own admission, raised not to indulge in emotional silliness. That is, he was not raised with love or kindness, or at least not particularly. Instead he was forced on books and rooms that smelled of naphthalene, on ascetic meals and adult conversation.

It seemed that James and Claudia – for those were his parents’ names, both failing pedagogues, had forgotten that he was, indeed, a child and not a grown spirit in an inversely tiny vessel. Play was not indulged, but corrected, and given that he had no brothers or sisters to speak of, the boy-turned-mouse found loneliness a reality.

It didn’t take long for him to become himself.

It was only inevitable.

They expected him to be brilliant and detached, and with their expert conditioning he churned the right responses. For all they knew, their son was being raised correctly, and if this was true, he would surely someday be happy.

But he wasn’t, and they never found out.

They were too deep in their heads, charmed by the dead rather than the living, by science minus the wonder. Their separate minds were happy places, and it was good that they knew nothing worth knowing. They would have suffered otherwise. Suffered more, I should specify. Like everybody else, they were utterly convinced of the tragedy of their lives. Their woes were by far the most unfortunate; their trifling fights wove stories.

It was a wonder they didn’t enjoy theatre.

Of course, this was when James still lived, and Claudia still dyed her hair once every two months, and Charles-then-Mouse still had his trousers ironed every morning.