CHAPTER VII: THE BALD PEOPLE

Once upon a time there was a beggar who was born in a wooden cradle, because the spirits of the universe, always indecipherable but always fair and wise, wanted to confuse his birth and wrote that he should travel his lane as a tree. And he had a crown and he had roots, and very strong roots, which provided him essential nutrients for his sap to bring him dignity, and if it is true that even the clouds of respect one day made nest in his crown, it is also true that on one occasion, as it happens to all the trees, his sap decayed and his wood dried. And if his story seems to you to be the hardest, it is true that trees need to first consume, in order to later sprout some flowery leaves.

The Pennington family had found in the art of making stained glass work pleasure for years, not to say centuries, and took great pains in what they did. They were great craftsmen, who I have already introduced, as the Pennington were the ones who made the stained-glass window for Hunter’s Arrows, then Olivia's House, the scene of hunting with swans. And James Pennington increased the luxuries of some houses of this city, not the temples, putting a personal touch in whatever he did. He was a sincere man who deserved the sincere and tender woman he had, because without having known her I know that - I have heard the words of his grandson-. James Pennington married Jessica Bowles, and lived no worse the day the Pennington were forced to transform their business into a carpenter’s shop because shortly after the window of the swans, they made one or two more, until they were forced to acknowledge that their work already was not enough for them to live.

    Jessica Bowles and James Pennington had an only daughter and called her Margaret. She grew up with curiosity for art, sculptures, with the awe of feeling that with that skill life could be given to memories, to the present time and people, of yesterday or today, and always felt the desire to know more about it and the need to sculpt one day.

  In the Capital meanwhile lived the Prancitt family, and their son Paul had always been very religious, reflective without fanaticism, like his parents, Lionel Prancitt and Cora Bayne. Having a Catholic life, he lived the experience of often talking to God and one day he was called to the priesthood. I don't know anything about his years in the seminary, but he managed to be a priest and he moved to Hazington, to the Church of St Mark, in Jerusalem Street. There he spent several years doing his ministry with faith and vocation, and helping others, understanding their needs without compassion.

   Paul Prancitt was an afternoon in his temple after mass when he stumbled across a scene worthy of being told. Already the church was empty when he believed to have a mystical experience. He felt that Virgin Mary was walking to see herself, and it took him a while to regain his sanity to know that he was seeing a woman. Then he learned that her name was Margaret Pennington, looking at the Virgin with respect for she wanted to see the sculpture, because she was religious, also Catholic, but inside she was an artisan.  

   They agreed to talk and introduced themselves, then she told him her passion for sculptures and he spoke to her of his vocation. And they became friends and the priest realized, three months later he had no doubt, that he had fallen in love with Margaret. And she noticed herself in love with him, and asked him and he actually admitted it. He had a time of anguish when he had to consider seriously what he was going to do with the rest of his life until he realized that he no longer could at least be a good priest because he would preach with her memory in his thoughts, and maybe in his words. And decided that, since he had no choice but to choose, he chose her, and finally one day he proposed marriage. Margaret did not say yes immediately, because she knew what he was and the pain that she could cause him, but in the end she accepted Paul Prancitt as husband and one morning in April they got married. They were moved to Knightsbridge Street. And a few months later she became pregnant and Paul and Margaret Prancitt had soon a boy named with two names, an evangelist and a biblical Patriarch, source of three religions, who came into the world with the name of Luke Abram Prancitt.

   Luke grew up in the security of a good home, with parents who understood well his child problems, equivalent to our adult problems, and a trunk carrying in his crown his fertile sap. His imagination and his memory were inexhaustible and he was sprouting leaves and fragrant flowers of effort and dignity. And he had time to give birth to roots and fertilizers for other trees, much before with his own later life the tree was felled.

   And at the age of 6 he lived happily the second pregnancy of his mother and was excited waiting for his sister or his little brother. And she soon gave birth to a second plantation, a son who bore the name of his maternal grandfather, James. And always the two brothers loved each other, and Luke and James Prancitt played, laughed and hugged. In his early years, Luke liked to tell stories to James. And he is fully able to remember all the stories he has concocted, and retain, if not every word, at least all the most important. He took him to the park, ran with him, played with him, they spoke, they imagined, and James was seeing in Luke a real father, brother and friend.

   But still he hadn’t come to the bitterest moment in his life. He was already twelve years old and his brother James six, but I don't even know what month it was. One afternoon his mother returned tired from shopping and she had to sit down. At the moment she was unconscious, she recovered immediately but she fainted again. Her family wanted to convince her that she should rest a few hours but Margaret, who thought that it could be the last day of her life, would not go to bed. In the evening she was already unconscious until the end and her family preferred that she died unaware. And at 2 o'clock in the morning she died. They called a doctor to certify what they already knew, and the two children embraced their father. It was then when the father and his two sons started to weep bitterly, assuring him that they would always be by his side. And actually they did. Rest in peace, Margaret Pennington. Forever you will live in the memory of your three loves.

   The following years Luke was almost always next to his father. On coming out of High School, he watched TV with him; they read together and even the Bible. His brother James was a very kid and rarely did, but Luke came to recognize at least of which book of the Bible was such chapter and commented on the characters he was reading about with his father and gave his opinion on what he was reading. Once he finished High School he did not want to go to University and looking for a job he found one, as Miguel, in the air force, where he spent three years.

   He loved to fly and not even the first time he jumped with his parachute with fear. He jumped from 1,500 meters and he enjoyed each stretch of descent. He flied several times a week and gave sips of the air of 1,500 meters, 1,000, 500... He felt the swings of wind where he rocked, the toboggans from where he slipped. He was a bird of several nests in the air, and one at the end on Earth, where he came at last breathing and yearning to jump again. When the plane was ascending he saw an air which he knew he could fly and others could look at, but not slurp. He made friends whom he never forgot, real friends, some were like him, friends like seagulls, friends like swallows.

   But one day they told him that he had a phone call. And when he answered it, he heard the voice of his brother James, who spoke to him in tears. He told him that their father had died the night before, something of a bleeding extended throughout the body. He felt empty and spilled all over a river of tears there, in the room where he had to explain himself to the soldiers that there were. And two days later he left the army to return to Hazington, with hopes to come back again, although he did not know what to do with his life. He had gone through a great depression with the death of his mother, and was not able to resist his father's. I wish I had your faith, dad, but I don't believe in anything. So he cried on the plane that brought him back to his hometown. And thus this tree would dry one day to rot, because he had lost the roots, and had no faith or sap that fed his solid wood. Back with his brother at the funeral, with him later, he only knew he would now not be able to return to the army. And meanwhile he stayed with James in Knightsbridge Street, thinking what to do next. And in this he was when one day he met Brian Philisey again, his former schoolmate.

   Luke was surprised that he was almost bald, and asked if he suffered from some type of alopecia. Brian replied he didn’t and said he would explain later why his head was like that. His friend was a very difficult to define man. Already from a child he was reserved and sometimes a little cruel, as everyone has killed cockroaches but he took pleasure in it and when crushing them, told them that they had no right to live. They hadn’t met for a long time but there were no more remarkable changes in him that the scarce hair and that he seemed reserved, as if he wanted to say a thousand things and was keeping them. He told Luke that evening he was going to watch a football match and asked if he wanted to be invited. The Hazington Spurs were playing and they could be promoted to a higher division, although they were in a very low one. It was May and they just needed to win a match to be promoted. That night they played against the Midrover. Luke agreed to go to that match.

   Football is a sport and a show. It can’t be blamed for generating violence. Violent people go to football, as well as peaceful people. It is a competition, and I can assure you, Protch, me who has been a swimmer, that it is attractive to win a tournament for the one who competes and for the spectator, and I have heard everything while swimming, angry people who wished me the worst and insulted me or people who praised me. I'm not a football fan, but I consider it a wonderful sport where the ball can be a poem, when 22 men kick it with their beats rather than with their legs.

   The football match is not important, but I will tell you something. In the visiting team his crack player was a black man of Nigerian origins: Bill Abuye. He was a master of the ball and scored two of the three goals that the Midrover made that day. But the bald there present were the 90 minutes insulting him and began to brainwash Luke. They said that he could have stayed at home, for surely in our country there were similar prodigies. Luke mentioned that he had had a black lieutenant who had given him orders in the army and the bald said that that was the problem: had they not had those jobs, Luke could have done them, and my present mate nodded knowing that he had had no desire in the army to be promoted.

    He was introduced to Sebastian Fraser, who more or less, without having been chosen, was the leader of the bald men. He was a man who could do many things for hatred or money without excessive guilt, and the problem with him is that you did not know where he could get, though apparently he could even be a lovely person. But that day he wasn’t. He then showed his worst face. Beside him Agatha Fraser, his wife, who shared the ideas of her husband but was sweeter and more contained. She accompanied him on occasions, but one day Luke stopped seeing her and Sebastian, whom he already called Seb, explained that they had had an argument and that she had gone for a season to her mother’s.

   At his side was a neighbor of Luke, called Bart. He has not told me his surname, although I can guess it. He was the cruelest of them, the most offensive. The others were almost bald, but not completely. He had no hair. He had fun insulting and humiliating and he is capable of anything. The time they were neighbors, not companions of this dirty creed, they had hardly spoken, though they lived very near. For Luke it was a surprise to find him there and of course he did not have to be introduced.

   A great friend of Bart’s nevertheless was Gareth Gains. He was the youngest and the most smooth-faced. In other circumstances it might have been a pleasure to have come to know him. And he spent hours telling secrets to Bart and they often laughed together, even during their frequent fights with punks.

  He did not know him in the match, but the next day. Bill Dempsey was his name. A reserved man. It is not easy to find out what he is thinking. Somewhat violent, surely but when he speaks he can be read but you don’t know if he is cruel. Black-haired and with close eyebrows, he is the only one who had a stable job as a ticket seller at the bus station, near the regular meeting place of the bald men, a basement of Brian Philisey, in Churchway.

   The match ended 3-0 for the Midrover. Anyway the Spurs were promoted the following week, as visitors, and all of them saw some matches of the next season as local, already a top division, because Luke was with them until November.

   The story of the skinheads won't be easy because I do not know much of these things. I only know what my fellow mate Luke has been telling me, but you can have some surprises. Who wouldn't give it for granted that they are necessarily violent and neo-Nazi? Many of the early skinheads were Jamaican blacks who migrated to our country. How is it possible that they might later turn against blacks? They never did, Protch. Several groups that sometimes were springing up influenced by a xenophobic political party, became racists. But all kinds of political thought are in them, from left to right, from anarchists or communists to Christians. And they should not necessarily be violent. Of course many are, as every human group, and many are hooligans and fight, but later they respect color, sexual orientation or circumstances, such as to be beggars. All music unites them and they hear ska or ska reggae, mostly. They tend to carry, in addition to short or shaved hair, similar clothes, identified with workers, and tend to go with jeans and braces, as well as the bumpers, a type of jacket. In this city even in May, June or September, Luke and the others wore them with pride. The neo-Nazis, often called boneheads, did fight with the punks, but by mutual agreement. Both groups wanted to fight and from what Luke has told me no punks or boneheads have been seriously injured.

   They were six months in which he was corrupting, nourished with that creed, which later in his life hurt him. For years he was afraid to make the same mistakes. He shaved his head completely, because everyone did, and had problems with his brother, because he noticed that he had the bald hair, that he wore different clothes and had suspicions that he had changed his way of thinking, although Luke did not speak to James of his doctrines. He really started to believe all those ideas and that there were superior humans and other inferior that had to be got rid of or at least put aside. To redeem a day, he first had to sink into the mud, and I will not hide it to you because among other things to be fair with Luke now you have to first know what he was. Basically they were six months of continuous fights, but with punks, and after all that is not to blame, because it is an absurd violence, but both sides agreed, and Luke had several injuries but was willing to pay that price.

   Sometimes he humiliated or insulted some human being included in the list of people who he had to despise. And sometimes he beat somebody, even though he had indeed only a victim. Walter Venture was in the street and there he continues. One day he decided to drink, he never does, because it was very cold and he wanted to get some heat. He had finished already begging and was about to go to sleep on a bench in a square of the village, when the bald men were walking thereabouts and saw him. He was insulted; they put the fear in his body first and then went on to beat him. They broke him nothing, but they were hitting him for ten minutes, all, Luke also. In the end, they left him. Walter was ok in the end, having had the shock of his life, but nothing worse, and I can assure you as I see him often. The other five had enjoyed, Luke hadn’t, but he did so aware that certain human beings deserved it.

   But there would come a November 18 that would change his fate. Miguel and John were begging together in St Paul's square. These cowards always attack as a herd, and only because they have seen two beggars they would have attacked them already. But suddenly, Miguel and John, unaware of who was watching them decided to kiss there, a kiss in the mouth. If they hadn’t been close to the Basilica, the bald would have killed them, but in that square they did not dare to do anything, but they were to mature their plans. More so when Luke told them that he was virtually sure of having ever seen them. They were, say, neighbors. If he was right, those two camped in Knights Hill, opposite his house. And he wanted them to move away from there. So he was willing to go up and talk to them, to give them a fright or a good lesson. He would go alone because Bart, also a neighbour, had things to do. He would meet them later in their hideout of Churchway at 9; it was 6 then, to tell them what had happened. And with that agreement, he recklessly climbed Knights Hill. His thoughts were divided with some remorse and a beginning to place himself in the skin of those he hated. There was no fog then, but his emotions of that moment, like the colour of the landscape, were dismal.