The Boy

  His parents had great difficulty naming him when he was born.  They wanted to straddle those precarious lines between the enigmatic and the mundane without straying into pretentiousness.  They had performed all the basic tests, even going as far as to rent a public address system to practice reading aloud prospective names in case their child became a rockstar or athlete.  A variety of gigantic posters and great lengths of replica book spines were commissioned to compare in case he chose to go into the arts.

  His father finally developed a system in which he would pick the finest proponents of the sporting world, the arts, politics and history and would read combinations to the family cat.  He would measure the cat’s pupils with some specially mounted callipers to gauge its reaction.  After seventy-two straight hours of this he was taken away to a special home and the cat was released from its restraints.  This occurred on the child’s thirty-third birthday.

  He was known as The Boy by his parents up until this point and, thanks to his mother’s insistence on unanimous consent and his father’s newfound legal inability to give it, he would forever remain so.  His birth certificate had been deliberately smudged by his parents upon signing it and he was registered for school under a name so incoherently foreign in appearance that he was never once referred to by name.  This allowed him to escape both punishment and the crushing burden of success.  As a result the young The Boy flourished.

  At the age of eighteen he was accepted into Oxford via a complex combination of both mistaken and multiple identity and a series of certificates accrued from charity shops and carefully smudged.  The sheer gall of his blatant fraud had both intrigued and sexually excited the elderly philosophy professor to such an extent that The Boy was offered a full scholarship.

  The Boy considered the following two and a half months of education as the happiest and most productive period of his life.  Only the sudden autoerotic death of the professor and ensuing replacement by a more reputable and less amorous man caused The Boy’s complete lack of knowledge or interest in philosophy to become something of an issue.  Despite his cunning reasoning that they would have to formally write to him in order to terminate his education he was thwarted when some smartarse secretary deliberately and carefully smudged the letter.

  Unqualified, unnamed and comparatively unloved after the passing of Professor Goering, The Boy had returned to his parents’ home and found little had changed save that they had moved.  The new owners at first accepted The Boy into their home and into their lives.  They were elderly and mourning a son lost in the Falklands War.  They were told their son had died cutting down waves of Argentine commandos with machine gun fire in a heroic last stand.  They would never learn the truth that he had tripped and fallen over an unseen penguin whilst looking at another, more obvious, penguin and broken his neck.

  The Boy’s new family had referred to him as Simon and for the first time he had experienced the joys of receiving birthday cards that were not addressed to “Whomever may be reading this”.  However, as the years passed, he grew increasingly uncomfortable with being forced to utter the words “yes, I’m alive” every five minutes.  This was especially difficult during the night and almost entirely doomed all but the most functional and athletic of masturbatory acts. 

  The theoretical upside of assuming Simon’s life was that he inherited Simon’s fiancé. Simon’s fiancé had originally been quite an attractive girl called Clare.  However Clare had been hit by a bus several months before and had been, as appeared to be the family way, replaced by a homeless crack addict called Yvonne.  The family never chose to ponder how an English rose had been replaced by something found, often quite literally in Yvonne’s case, at the bottom of the compost heap.  The pair never developed a romantic connection but The Boy had enjoyed her company because the fumes she gave off made him feel rather dizzy.  It didn’t break his heart when she ran off with the postman but it did mean he had to go into rehab.

  When he was released he found that his second set of parents had left mysteriously.  The house had also taken the opportunity to leave mysteriously and had been replaced with a less architecturally pleasing crater.  He would never know that his replacement, Simon the Twelfth, had something of an affinity with matches and soft furnishings.  The Boy had reluctantly left the persona of Simon behind and returned to his anonymous existence.  This upset a number of credit card companies and the local library.  Over the next decades a pile of forwarded, rather threatening, mail gradually would build up in the Falklands, eventually forming a land bridge to Argentina and a longstanding dispute would finally be settled. 

  The Boy had joined the circus after that, believing that it was rather less dangerous than the French Foreign Legion but still would be rebellious enough to disrupt any future dinner party conversation.  He had remained there until the present day and would be fired out of a cannon on Tuesdays through Saturdays.  Sundays and Mondays usually meant he had to clean out both the lions and the freakshow. 

  The Boy would, later on that afternoon, be trampled to death by midgets startled by a firework thrown by a young vagabond.  The Boy did not know this as he did his sudoku.  His sad life would come to an end without him ever having known a name, the touch of a woman nor the fact he had just filled in the top-right box incorrectly.