A home. Not a happy one. Kai is in it. He is enraged. He has smashed his TV. When Mum asks why, Kai snarls and slams the door. He can’t say he did it because he saw his refection. Maybe she knows anyway. After all, he smashed two mirrors last week.
Kai doesn’t know what makes him feel like this. He is so frightened of this disgust for himself that he hides it with fierce fury. He thinks he’s OK but then suddenly he’ll remember there was someone before Mum, Dad and Gerda. And she, this woman who carried him, she saw this tiny bundle before he was deeds and words, when he was just Kai, and she said ‘no, I don’t want you.’ And Kai wonders what was so terrible about him and how long it will take for everyone else to see that ugly in him.
Kai doesn’t know what to do about the TV. So he grabs his jacket and goes out. He wanders to the dodgy place near the train station. There is a woman there with shimmering blonde hair who wears a tiny white crop top and brilliant blue jeans. She gives out small packages to the desperate looking people who hang round her. He looks back the way he came, and then purposefully crosses the road towards her.
Gerda heard the TV smash. She remembers when Kai was younger and how much he would talk when they were doing something like colouring, about the family who came before Gerda, and he’d wonder aloud if Gerda would leave him too. Gerda listened but she didn’t understand. Couldn’t he see, this wonderful brother of hers? Couldn’t he see that he was her whole world? That not only would she never leave him, but that if he left her, she’d hunt him down and bring him back like a fairytale in reverse. One day Kai explained about the mirrors, and how when he looked he didn’t see what Gerda saw (he was surprised when she described his laughing eyes), instead he saw splinters of an unlovable baby, someone so awful he couldn’t bear to look. Like a curse, Kai was spellbound by the beliefs of those who didn’t want him.
When Kai left, Garda stayed in her room and got our their old colouring things. She drew all afternoon. Then she put in her coat and slipped out.
She found him, of course she did. He was sitting upright on the floor, leaning against the wall, his face slumped in his knees. She tapped his shoulder, gently.
‘It’s you.’ she said, and handed him her drawing.
His eyes, laughing, looking in the distance, his mouth open and upturned as he spoke to her, his fringe too long, flopping over his unkept eyebrows. He stared at himself for the first time.
‘Me?’
‘That’s you Kai. Not the inside you. That’s my you. That’s who you are to me. I love you Kai. Please, come home now.’
Submitted by: Esther Amis-Hughes