D and The Secret: rough draft of a section

A few weeks later The Secret told D he wanted someone old enough to have forgotten being seventeen.

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D had not quite forgotten everything. He remembered the sunsets the sulphur stacks produced in rings. Singles for Southport. The other boys emerged from their mews. Southport sunsets lasted as long as a North Pole. Sun and cider deranged them on the funfair's promenade. Glass lightbulbs burned sodiums in D's eyes, halved. Out to his left was the black hypothermia of the sea, silvering like a wet mirror.

He savved one- and two-pence coins all week to escape his family on the weekends. He sold little bird nests. Dipped his fingers into payphones. Dredged the bottom of his mother's purse.

Dad watched him from his green chair. His eyes looked like they could shoot poison darts if you stepped wrongly on the patterend lino. Could barely lift a hand. His flannels grew into his flesh like a tree will grow around obstructions.

He was shown once a fence post that had grown around a barbed wire fence. The action both proved the triumphalism of the tree as well as incorporated the barbed wire. The wire became a part of the tree, its interior. If you got to know it, fell in love with it, eventually you would have to reckon with the barbed wire.

Dad had few hobbies. He trainspotted. Erected fences for fun. Shot wild horses out of the trees. Mom trimmed his eyebrows in his sleep...