Growing Up Next to the Mental by Brian Callahan

Author:Brian Callahan [Callahan, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flanker Press
Published: 2018-05-10T04:00:00+00:00

15

I can’t say precisely when my preoccupation with breaching security at the Mental began.

I suspect it was simply a snowballing desire to see the inner workings of the freaky place I’d lived next to since birth. Or maybe it was just because we weren’t allowed.

Like the field, right?

Either way, it had become an obsession now that a door had literally opened a crack.

The plan was pretty simple in and of itself: wait till Monchy was up in the field, then beat it down to that door, taking care not to disturb the little rock that he’d left for himself.

It was foolproof except for one problem: no Monchy and no rock. He’d suddenly gone AWOL or something. No sign of him for days, then weeks.

Meanwhile, spring thaw came and went, introducing summer unusually early that year, which was music to the ears of the people putting off the ’77 Canada Games. It was all anyone was talking about or going to, dominating the news cycle and pushing stories normally destined for the front pages to the back ones, if they made the cut at all.

Fickle bunch, the media.

And I was proud as a peacock with one of my older sisters playing on the hometown Newfoundland field hockey team—having honed those and her athlete-of-the-year soccer skills down in, you guessed it, the Mental Field.

It seemed the only place not buzzing with some kind of Games interest was the Mental.

It was almost as if the place had become jealous of the attention it wasn’t getting when we woke one morning to news that it had yielded yet another resident, found in the park by an early-morning jogger.

Morbidly typical scenario, I’m afraid.

As weird as it seems, I almost got sick.

I half-urged on the spot, drawing curious gazes from all parts of the kitchen. Thank God nothing came up, and they all carried on as if they were normal.

I, however, had to get out of there. Bathroom to puke what I’d been holding in, first. Park, second.

Must be Monchy, I thought as I pedalled hard downhill until I spotted the telltale emergent commotion right across from the perpetually vandalized, urine-stinking Metrobus shelter.

Could be Monchy, I thought again, second-guessing my initial conclusion.

His absence from the field had caused us all to speculate as to his fate. He hadn’t seemed like the suicide type, but then, what type was that? There were unpublished stories every day about people unexpectedly ending their own lives.

Could it really get that bad? I guess they thought so. Of course, it can always be argued that those who commit suicide weren’t in their right, rationale minds to begin with.

I didn’t think that of Monchy, though, to the point where I had myself believing that he must’ve had good reason, if in fact it was him.

Or maybe it was just some kind of freak accident.

“They had to cut him down from that big maple,” I overheard a TV reporter tell his cameraman outside the police tape, pointing to the tree just down over the hill from the road.

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