Antennas To Heaven Big Trev
I still like to think he was smiling. Even though I couldn't be there to see it, I hope he understood that we were laughing with him, not at him. That there was a fondness amongst us all. He wasn't the joke, he wasn't the monkey in the corner to entertain and dance. He was one of us. And I know this wasn't like the time he played tennis without a shirt on. And I understand that it wasn't like when he tried to sniff the metal in the middle of his ring binder and the pincers closed on his nose. It wasn't even a misheard line retold for the next 10 years or the annoying songs he used to come up with. It was meant well. It was meant as I intended. And when I'm standing in supermarket aisles, trying to see what's free in what cereal this week or what sauce isn't the spicy one I'm not keen on, the image drifts across my mind. But there's something missing. I can see him standing by his moped in the front garden, school bag open to pull out his high visibility jacket. And I see him pause slightly when he realises that that there is something under the plastic that should have read AMBULANCE, on the back. And there, in crude, biro letters (my crude, biro letters) is the phrase ,BIG TREV. But when I see it there is no face. Not no smile or sneer or scowl, but no face at all. Just blackness. Just nothing. And when I try to imagine it, to force it through with my will, I can't even remember what it should look like. And no matter how many times I tell myself that he was fine, that we was laughing and he was fine, what I really believe is only the black hole where the face should be.
