Читать книгу The Epitome of Perfection - Ryan Reynolds - Страница 8

This is your savior, when he was a gangster.

My parents split when I was young. They both moved on and got married to other people. When they split however, I moved from the scumbag streets of Denny, Scotland, to the scumbag streets of Stirling, Scotland. it didn’t bother me too much, either way, I was in a bad place. More specifically in Stirling, I was in the Cornton, filled with drug abusers, alcoholics and criminals. Not a good area.

When my parents split, me and my sister Aimie. Yes, Aimie. VERY stupid spelling of the name, I know. But my mother liked to be awkward, innovative and hipster, so that’s how that came about. Anyway, me and my sister, moved with my mother to the Cornton, to live with my grandparents for a while. Just until we could get our own place to stay. Now I’m going to leave this here before I bore you about the details of life at this point. Instead, I am just going to explain some key events, during my childhood, living in the Cornton.

Living in the Cornton, I saw and learned a lot of things. I learned more from riding the bus through the Cornton, than I did from eight years of French at school – which was squat, but I’ll get to that later when I go onto rant about school – I saw an old lady die, a man being robbed, a baby being born, heck I even saw a baby being made. I was 5 years old, I didn’t know what was going on, I thought two people were fighting over a seat.

I remember one time when I was seven years old. I was in the park with my friend, when this man walked over to us. He just stood next to us for a few minutes, then walked away. I was on edge, I wondered who this man was, I had never seen him before. My friend was scared, he decided to go home. He left me all alone in the park. I played on the swings for a good half hour after my friend left, then I saw the man again. I saw him getting out of a large white van. He started walking towards me. I froze for a second. When the man reached my position, he sat on the swing beside me and started swinging back and forth. He was singing along to himself, I couldn’t make out his twisted words. Eventually, I realised that I should leave.

But as I got up from the swing, the man jumped up too. I hurried forwards only to be met with the mans screams: “NO WAIT! PLEASE! DON’T GO! DON’T LEAVE ME HERE ALONE!” I turned around slowly to witness the man dropping to his knees in-front of me and begin to shed tears. At first, I figured that he was just lonely and needed a friend, so I offered to play with him on the seesaw, to which he accepted.

We played on the seesaw together for a good hour or so when suddenly I was launched into the air and fell to the ground. The man had come down to earth too fast and hard. His fifty-two year old, two hundred pound body was probably not the most compatible for playing on a seesaw with my seven year old seventy-five pound body. So what happened happened.

As soon as my body hit the ground, the man rushed over to aid me. This is when I realised the truth.

The man started rubbing my arm and asking me where it hurt. He took out some bandages from his back pack and fixed me up. He then told me that he was deeply sorry for what he had done and he wished for me to forgive him. I told him that I forgave him, but that was not enough, he began ranting about how he was not good enough to be forgiven by me. A few minutes later, the ranting came to a halt. The man pulled out a small blade from his bag, along with a load of pain killers. He proceeded to swallow a hand full of painkillers and then slit his throat in-front of me. He lay dead.

At that very moment, I realised the truth. The man was not lonely, he did not need a friend and he was not crazy either. No. This man knew about my greatness. He wanted to spend time with my greatness. He hoped for my greatness to rub off onto him while he spent time with me. Unfortunately for him, his dream never came true. He never became great like me. But the reason that I will always remember this experience, is because it was the first time, that someone other than myself, had caught onto and appreciated my greatness in its full form.

Another experience that I will never forget came when I was fourteen years old. I was walking home from my grandparents’ house. It was pitch black outside. If a random black man was in-front of me, the only way I would have seen him would have been if he smiled, or opened his eyes wide.

Anyway, I was walking home, when out of the corner of my eye, I see something moving in a bush. I slowly approached the bush, only to find a couple of naked teenagers going at it amongst the thorns. I don’t know why anyone would go through that much pain for pleasure. Then I heard screaming. It wasn’t just me that heard it, the naked couple heard it as well. I knew this because they both emerged from the bush and looked around acting paranoid. I slowly edged myself away from them and towards the constant screaming.

As I made my way towards the screaming, I heard a voice from behind me say: “Stop. I have something for you.” I turned around and an old woman threw a bar of chocolate onto the ground in-front of me, then she walked off.

I knew what she was doing, and I wasn’t falling for it. I knew that I wasn’t supposed to eat chocolate before dinner! So I kicked the bar of chocolate to the side, and I made my way home, ignoring the screams of the helpless.

But just wait, if you think what I’ve told you so far is bad, then you are in for a huge shock with this next story.

I was waiting patiently at a bus stop, I was around nine years old. There was a police officer only a few feet from me, and there was a man that must have been in his early twenties standing right in front of me. The man throws a chocolate bar wrapper on the floor. He publicly litters. The police officer saw everything, but he didn’t do anything. That’s how bad our streets were and still are. We had chaos, we had anarchy at times, but no one did anything to change it. You don’t know how good you have it. You haven’t been to the scumbag streets, of the Cornton.