Pour les anonymes :
Un grand merci pour votre soutien ! Merci beaucoup pour toutes vos reviews !
AN: In my attempt to develop a liking for Tim's character (whom, of late, I have come to dislike immensely), I have written a series of Little!Tim drabbles to better understand why he turned into the machiavellian character he is in both film- and book-verse. I hope that this exercise will enable me to return to Shells to finish it on a more positive note. :)
Happy reading!
~ Pace is the trick
Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving.
~Martin Amis, Money
The Measure of Time
I can measure my childhood by a portion of a meter stick on the doorjamb in the kitchen. I say "portion" because somewhere around 85 centimeters the end was broken off. This actually occurred before it was attached to the door frame and covered with varnish to match the rest of the woodwork. Nobody seems to have thought it strange that a broken meter stick was used. Probably my mother said, "I wish I had a meter stick!" and my father went down to the room where things were piled when they had no more use of them and produced one from the sundry items there. And my mother would have kissed him and pronounced it perfect in spite of the reduction in length, so much did she love him.
The stick was placed at approximately sixty centimeters off the ground (I imagine the same stick was used for that initial purpose but there is no corresponding mark on the wood) and nailed in place. From the time I was three, I was made to stand straight up against the stick, my back to the jamb, my heels and head pressed hard against it in the interests of accuracy. I was interested in accuracy, at any rate. My father would then draw a short crooked line beside which he would scratch in an equally crooked hand – the pencil's lead cracking and flaking the worn varnish - Tim 1977 and Tim 1981 and Tim 1989. As I grew older, it seemed a silly tradition and I am bothered today by the archive of my physical development. But as a child I relished the moments I would step away from the wall and my father would exclaim, "How big you are! See how much you have grown?" I felt happy and proud and loved for an accomplishment I had done nothing to achieve. I was loved simply for who and what I was. I would come back repeatedly to the spot and run my finger across it so that the feel – the depth and length and width – is indelibly with me.
Sometimes when I was brave and went swimming with my mother in the sea I would rush back to the house and stand against the meter stick, measuring myself. I was careful to hold my hand very still as I stepped away and therefore very confused that I was not taller than the mark left there by my father. I felt bigger and stronger for being so brave and facing my fears; I thought it only fair that there be a physical manifestation. I did not then understand the correlation between one's sense of self and reality.
I see my childish self clearly now, though that child is a stranger to me. I understand that that happiness, that confusion, that disappointment, led me to where I am today, what I am today.