Mantle Convection

By Sava Buncic

Mantle Convection is a thoughtful novel, with moving insight into the hard choices encountered as an identity and life are carved out in the sometimes harsh world. The dilemmas affect personal development in this unique blend of curiosity about the human spirit. Mark’s lonely and emotionally painful childhood is deeply rooted in his heart and mind as he fights to overcome often opposing, dramatic challenges throughout his life, and molds himself into a professionally and personally successful man. He endures the dark shadows of his inner self but is also enlightened by his revelations. His meditative soul and his journey are influenced by his family, friends and peers, as he explores and grows from lacking to finding personal identity; from missing to gaining confidence; from losing to earning friendships; from betrayal to loyalty in love; from naivety to manipulation in his career; from failures to successes in parenting; from illness to health; and ultimately from the path of ‘do what you have to’ towards ‘do what you want to’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9780473319502

Book preview

Point

1. Red Plum Tree Street

The street was a typical residential street, one with almost no through traffic. It was, actually, an avenue type of street, with rows of red plum trees between the pedestrians’ pavements and the roadway, on both sides.

At one end, the street ended in a T-intersection with a particularly busy road. Along that road, the traffic was very heavy at this time of year. In one direction, the constant flow of open trucks loaded with sugar beet headed towards a sugar factory situated in one of the industrial zones surrounding the city. In the opposite direction, trucks carried the shredded and extracted remains of the sugar beet, to be used as feed at an enormous cattle farm some tens of kilometres south of the city. At that end of the street, there were several tired, grey buildings, blocks of flats, and a corner shop supplying mainly bread and milk. A group of pre-teen children, mainly boys, used to hang around there throughout the day and till late at night, when their exasperated mothers finally called them home. Often, they played football in the middle of the street.

At its opposite end, the street led to a nice quiet although expansive park with white pebbled footpaths running between flowering bushes and old trees. Around that corner, the houses were tidy, painted white or cream. Children could not be seen very often playing on the street in front of those houses.

Mark lived in a flat at ground level in a state-owned three-storey house having another two flats, one on each of the upper floors. The house was situated in the middle section of the street. A small front garden, fenced by cast iron railings, separated the house from the pavement. At the right side of the house, through a metal gate, a driveway led to a larger backyard. The house was of the small villa-like style, when observed from a distance. From closer, however, flaking paint on the outside walls and stained patches around the leaking guttering and rusty downpipes were clearly visible.

That late-summer morning, as always, Mark came out from the house very early, before anybody else appeared. He moved onto the pavement in front of his garden, and looked up. The sun was just above the roofs of the houses opposite, so the street was still in shadows. However, the windows on the first floor of his house were blinding, reflecting the sunshine. He could not yet see if anybody was up and moving behind those windows. Sonia’s family lived in that flat; both hers and Mark’s families had lived in the villa since they were born nine years ago, three weeks apart. Another family with two girls, seven and nine years old and good friends of Sonia’s, lived in the top floor flat.

Mark took a sigh of fresh air, and looked to the left and the right, up and down the street. Nobody, and no traffic, was to be seen on the street that early. No other sounds apart from the chirps of sparrows rustling in the crowns of the plum trees could be heard. Mark knew that the street would stay in that quiet status for another hour or two, as it was school holidays, and too early for people to go to work. Yet, as every other morning, he waited for Sonia to appear from the house. He knew that she was still sleeping at that time, but he hoped that something unexpected might have happened to entice her out early. Actually, he was not really hoping, rather, could not help but to stand there, from where he could see both her window and the house entrance.

He looked down at his big feet. He could see the curvature of his belly sticking out over the waistband of his shorts and his cylindrical chubby thighs, between his narrow chest and the feet in sandals. ‘No muscles visible on my body; will I ever have any?’ he wondered. He was a moderately fat boy; not really very fat – more like podgy. Nevertheless, fat enough to do badly in most sports, and to carry the fat-boy nickname at school.

The sun was slowly rising but, in contrast, Mark was slowly sinking in a very familiar melancholic mood – a mixture of boredom and loneliness. He did not know why, from where or how that feeling came. When doing nothing, he would just slowly become overwhelmed by a lack of desire for anything. He would not have a wish to do anything or go anywhere, yet it would slowly become unbearable just to stand there. Then he, hesitantly, went along the short driveway to his backyard, looked around there aimlessly, and walked back to the pavement on the street. He skipped the same way again and again, while the empty time was dripping away…

His mother opened the double window of his parents’ bedroom facing the street, and put pillows out in the sunshine just at the time it reached the bottom of the window sill, as she would do every sunny morning. She smiled at him when he heard her and turned his head towards her.

‘What’s my young man doing?’ she asked.

‘Oh…nothing really…’ He replied quietly and with slight hesitation.

She looked silently, and intently, at him for a while.

‘Well, Mark, why you are there all alone, aren’t there any boys to play with on the street?’ She asked the same question as she had so many times before.

He hated that question. He looked up towards the shop, and saw Ivan and the boys gathering around that corner of the street. They were just hanging around there, as Ivan obviously had made no decision yet as to what they would do; the other boys usually just followed him. Now, they all looked up and down the street and could certainly see Mark leaning against the railing in front of his house, but did not show any sign they noticed him. His mother could not see the boys from the window.

‘I don’t know, I don’t feel like playing right now, Mum,’ he told her while quickly glancing at Sonia’s window above his mother’s head. ‘I think I’ll go and read for a while.’

He slowly moved into his house and into his small dark bedroom; one window, bed, armchair, bookcase. He stood quietly for a few moments in front of the bookcase filled with books, listening attentively for any sound of Sonia moving about her room just above. On the shelves, without any particular order, some children’s books were mixed with a number of serious literature books, mostly classic novels, but also reference books. The books were somewhat worn, obviously being frequently taken out and put back on the shelves. Mark had read them all, and most of them several times. He looked down, and picked up a book lying on the floor by his bed. Carrying the book, he passed along the hall and by the open door of the bathroom. Kneeling in front of the bath filled with foam and laundry, with her head in the steam, his mother was doing some hand-washing of items made of sensitive fabrics. She was usually snappy when doing that, so he quietly headed outside, unnoticed. His father was not at home; he was on one of his frequent and long business trips away, as his job required.

Mark sat on the knee-high wall surrounding the backyard and started to read. He frequently lifted his eyes to see if anybody had come out of the house. However, the reading was gradually sucking in his attention and, as always, spontaneously and effortlessly, he started to visualise the descriptions of places and people as they emerged from the text. Once deeply involved in his reading, Mark felt as if he were moving along with the events described in the book and observing them from some not far distance. The book and his mind, together, were taking him away, to some other place, in a way that he perceived as if it were all very real.

Suddenly, while turning the page, he noticed a movement on the ground in front of him. Two pairs of small feet in white socks and black plastic sandals appeared on the grass and, even without looking up, he knew that they belonged to the two sisters from the top floor flat. They obviously had asked him something, and their voices were now slowly becoming louder in his ears, as if he were waking up from a deep sleep. ‘Are you deaf, or what, Mark?’ the older sister’s voice appeared to come from a distance. ‘For the third time – what’re we gonna do, any ideas?’

Mark glanced quickly at Sonia’s windows – nothing there yet – turned to the girls and, squinting up at the silhouettes of their heads against the bright blue sky, said in a flat voice: ‘Well, I don’t know…shall we just stay here and maybe play quiz?’

He knew that the sisters enjoyed playing quiz with him, although he was very good at that game, regularly winning. The game was simple: they took turns to ask each other riddles, and tried to answer them, until nobody could give a right answer any longer. When they ran out of riddles, the questions would turn to names of places, or movies, or books, or songs, or anything else. As much as they liked to play quiz, the girls weren’t interested in getting better at it by actually reading any books as a source of knowledge – or maybe the quiz was a reading substitute to them. They moved under an old apple tree in the middle of the backyard, and sat there on the grass, facing each other.

‘You start,’ said the younger sister.

Mark, without any obvious thinking, started: ‘If you had…’

But he was bored with the game even before they started. He was thinking how many times, over the years, they’d played it. After some time, inevitably, they would repeat many of the questions but, unlike the sisters, he would never forget any answer given. Their parents thought that he played so much with the girls because he was the only boy in several neighbouring houses. But he knew, deeply in his soul, that the real reason was that they spent a lot of time with Sonia, and he was seeking as many opportunities as possible to be in Sonia’s company.

Mark could not remember exactly when he started to feel that never-satiated need to be around Sonia; it had welled up gradually over time, not appearing suddenly, but had been surging around since he was very young. However, with time, the need was growing and becoming never ending. Even on days when they spent many hours playing together, usually accompanied by the sisters, he felt a great disappointment when her family called her inside for the evening. As soon as he had become aware of that urge to be around Sonia, he started to hide it from everybody, including her. Without understanding why, he felt guilt about that need, and that it was inappropriate. He did not understand his feelings, nor exactly what he needed from her, but it was much more than being a playmate: he wanted her to need him in the same way as he needed her. At the same time, he was certain that, should Sonia or anybody else discover the real nature of his feeling for her, he would be judged and rejected by her and everybody else.

‘OK, Mark, we give up, what’s the answer?’ the younger sister was pulling his sleeve.

But he did not hear her; Sonia was walking those several steps between the back door and the tree they were sitting under. Without hesitation, she sat on the grass next to Mark, and turned her smiling, slightly rounded face and brown-green eyes towards Mark. She looked at him calmly, in a friendly way, and with the ease of knowing somebody very well: ‘Winning as usual? Anyway, could I join in?’

‘Doesn’t matter who’s winning, really. But Mark’s very knowledgeable,’ said the older sister. She paused a little. ‘And he’s a very good boy. Not like other boys, Ivan and the others. They’re stupid and rude…’ Somehow, she was talking to Sonia as if Mark was not present.

He’d heard that comment many times, not just from Sonia and the sisters, but also from the adults. He didn’t like it, and every time he heard it he disliked it more. But, as ever, he didn’t say anything. Now, he was concentrating on his heart, beating almost audibly since Sonia had appeared. After a few moments, when he was confident that his voice would be normal, and while looking at the ground, he said almost indifferently: ‘Oh, hi Sonia. You can have a turn now if you’d like.’

‘It’s true, Mark, you are very clever… Maybe we could drop the quiz, and you could tell us something from that book you’re reading?’ Sonia turned towards him.

Mark enjoyed that; he was a good story teller, and he liked to see the changes of expression on her face as he talked about the exciting things, places and people he felt as if he’d really met during his travels through the books. That was all he wanted in the world, to feel Sonia close, looking just at him, listening just to him…

Suddenly, the main gate at the entrance from the street to the driveway squealed and swung back and forth on its hinges. Mark looked over his shoulder, and to his big surprise, saw Ivan and another two boys coming along the driveway towards them. The three boys stopped and stood just above their heads and looked down at them for a few moments in silence.

‘Here is Mark, the king of the girls’ kingdom,’ said Ivan while looking at Sonia.

Mark looked at the ground and nervously but quietly laughed, and the other two boys burst into loud laughter.

‘He’s just another girl, isn’t he, Ivan?’ said the smaller one.

Sonia turned her head and looked at Mark. He felt like the blood was leaving his body while he desperately tried to think of some reply.

But Ivan, turning his head towards the smaller boy, whilst not moving his eyes away from Sonia’s face, said coldly: ‘You just shut up, I didn’t ask you anything.’

Then, in silence, Ivan slowly moved around them, still seated on the grass, and stopped just under an almost horizontal branch a metre above his head. He looked up, jumped elastically, and reached the branch with both hands. While holding his body and legs perfectly vertically, he lifted himself up by his arms, almost effortlessly, until his chin came above the branch. Then, he let himself down but remained hanging on the branch; he kept repeating this up and down chin-up movement, smoothly and rhythmically, and while doing that, he said in an ordinary voice: ‘Our ball got punctured; we need a ball so we can play football, we got a game goin’ on. Thought I saw you here playing with some ball the other day?’

Nobody said anything. After another minute or two of pumping the branch, Ivan jumped easily to the ground and asked ‘How many chin-ups?’

‘Twenty-four,’ said the smaller boy.

‘Now, you,’ said Ivan flatly, and the boy jumped up to the branch, and pulled himself up seven times, with great effort.

Ivan laughed with derision, and Mark almost stopped breathing, expecting in horror that he’d be called up next, to do the same. He knew that he could not pull himself up by his arms only, not once. He’d tried it when alone, and he just could not do it. But if Ivan and the other boys saw that, they’d humiliate him forever; and he did not want Sonia to see him failing miserably.

Just as he waited, with cramps in his stomach, for Ivan’s call, unexpectedly, Sonia said ‘I’ve got a ball, I’ll just go and get it. Be back in a minute.’ Then she stood up and ran into the house.

The older sister, still sitting, said enthusiastically: ‘Ivan, Sonia’s got a very nice ball, really, don’t you worry.’

But he did not show any sign that he’d heard; he looked at the door through which Sonia disappeared for several long moments and, uncharacteristically, appeared as if he was deep in his thoughts.

Finally, he turned to Mark: ‘So, fat boy, why don’t you ever get out from this backyard?’

Luckily, before Mark could say anything, Sonia reappeared, carrying the ball.

‘You’ll return the ball, after the game, won’t you, Ivan?’ her voice was somehow soft.

Ivan took the ball, and said indifferently: ‘You can come with us and watch the game, make sure that your ball’s OK. Unless, of course, you’re too worried about getting your pretty dress dirty, or something like that…’

He very slowly moved along the driveway towards the main gate, but looked at Sonia over his shoulder. She hesitated a few seconds, and then moved to follow Ivan and the other boys.

‘Sonia, wouldn’t you like to stay so we continue the quiz?’ Mark’s voice was full of hope.

‘No thank you,’ she said, showing sudden impatience.

Mark thought of how frequently they played quiz together, and how much she enjoyed it, so could not believe that suddenly she preferred to go with Ivan, who represented all the things she always said she didn’t like in boys.

‘Sonia, stay, please, I’ve got lots of new questions and answers…’ Mark’s voice was weak and slightly squeaky.

However, the friendliness and care with which Sonia usually talked to Mark suddenly evaporated.

‘Oh, would you leave me alone now, and do whatever you want yourself,’ she said coldly and nervously. Mark felt as if she’d slapped him on the face.

‘What an annoying guy…a fat bore,’ Ivan laughed and kept looking at Sonia while walking ahead of her.

‘He never does anything exciting, like you do,’ she laughed and catching up with him, playfully, gently pushed him on the shoulder with her palm. The two of them, walking alongside each other, disappeared onto the street, as well as the other two boys walking behind them.

Mark felt a huge hand squeezing everything inside his chest, and a kind of fibrillation in the muscles around the corners of his mouth.

‘Why didn’t Ivan ask you to play football with them?’ the younger sister asked.

Mark made a great effort so that his voice sounded normal: ‘Well, he probably knows that I don’t like football very much…’

He had a strong desire to just disappear somewhere; he stood up on his little shaky legs and walked into the house. He passed by the kitchen door – his mother was cleaning the stove and didn’t notice him – and went into his room. He stood there in silence for a while, facing the wall, feeling very cold and as if the whole of his body was shivering, but his eyes were dry and open. He tried to understand the feeling that was slowly, but completely and increasingly, overcoming him – it was familiar. On the surface, it was a mixture of being betrayed and at the same time defeated. As those feelings grew, he could not bear to stay put, he wanted to go somewhere far away, to the end of the world, but he had nowhere to go.

So he curled up in his armchair, his chin on his knees, arms wrapped around his shins. Deep in his soul, he felt very sad and very alone, the feeling almost reaching a form of physical pain. A thought crossed his mind, foggy, but quickly disappeared, and then came back again and again, slowly becoming clearer. The pain didn’t come because he was alone; it came because he was with others. If he were not with others, there would be no pain. The clarity of that thought surprised him. Also, for the first time, it was followed by another thought; that being alone was not such a bad thing, after all. Moreover, with these new thoughts, he started to feel less helpless.

He stood up, went to the open window and looked out onto the street. He could see neither Ivan playing football, nor Sonia watching him, but he could hear them both. Ivan was shouting and ridiculing some apparently incapable boy, and Sonia was cheering and calling Ivan’s name… Actually, the pain was there with them, and not with him being alone here.

They are the pain, in fact! It flashed through his head.

Mark closed the window, turned to the bookshelf, reached for the first book, sat back in the armchair, and started to read. At first, he had to read the same paragraph several times, but slowly he became involved. And as he kept reading, the book at last started carrying him somewhere else… Finally, he did manage to move somewhere far away – at least his mind and soul were travelling, and that was what counted. There was a way for him to disappear when he wanted after all; so he was safe…

2. Communicating Vessels

It was Monday morning and, according to the primary school rules, students were supposed to be lined up and waiting in front of the school entrance by exactly five minutes to eight o’clock. At that time, and not a minute earlier, the school caretaker would open the main door to let the pupils into their classrooms. The rule applied to all the forms equally, but each form would queue separately, lined up in pairs, and enter school in order of seniority, the oldest forms first.

As always, in his form’s queue of eleven-year-old students, Mark was one of the front pair, together with Alexander. Mark’s habit of never being late was well-known, and actually he was always too early for the start of the school day – in fact, as he was for the start of anything else as well. On one hand, he just felt that rules have to be obeyed if you’re responsible, which he certainly felt obliged to be. On the other hand, he couldn’t imagine a situation where he would have to explain to his teacher, in front of all his classmates, how and why he was late.

His front-pair queue companion, Alexander, was a non-memorable, quiet and almost invisible boy. He had a wide and pale face, and a skinny, weak, slightly disfigured body with narrow shoulders dropping onto his barrel-shaped ribcage. Nobody from school ever talked to him for any reasonable length, or really knew him, or visited him at home, but everybody knew that he was from a poor family. He always smelt, somehow, musty. Alexander spoke very little, even when asked questions by his teachers, and was widely perceived by the children, and also by some teachers, as of limited academic ability. This was largely due to his below average marks for most subjects, and to his expressing himself poorly – but nobody really knew whether he was a poor communicator, or a poor thinker, or both. In any case, the kids just shunned him.

He would usually arrive at school around the same time as Mark, much earlier than the other children. Mark and Alexander would, although they stood together in front of the school door for some time on countless mornings, talk rarely with few words. When they talked, Alexander didn’t look at Mark’s face, but his big watery eyes would be jumping around, just like he was looking to escape from something. He would never speak to Mark unless he was addressed first. However, when Mark happened to say something to him, he would glance at Mark with sudden gladness and smile timidly. In contrast, when talking to Alexander, Mark’s mind was usually somewhere else and he looked like he was almost unaware of Alexander’s presence.

Often, while standing in the queue and looking at the cracks on the wooden door just a metre in front of him, Mark was actually listening to the sounds coming from the queue behind him, trying to figure out whether Ivan and his group of boys had arrived and what they were doing. Normally, they’d meet and waste time hanging around on a street corner a few blocks away before arriving at school together. They’d take their usual places at the end of the queue, and immediately would start making a lot of noise, telling rude jokes about the girls, play-pushing each other around and aggressively challenging any boys outside their group. The girls would laugh and respond to the jokes not with offence or anger, but with some unconvincing, giggly shouts in the vein of: ‘Oh, stop it…!’ or ‘You are being really silly…!’ Usually, none of the boys outside Ivan’s group would respond in any way, but would just try to go unnoticed.

When listening to the horribly noisy Ivan and his group, Mark was unable to pay attention to anything else. He knew that he himself would never participate in that noisy chaos. He was perceived as unusually mature for his age, a thoughtful and responsible boy, by adults including his teachers. As long as he could remember, those were attributes that adults would associate with him only a few minutes after meeting and talking to him, and he’d heard them a million times. He didn’t know whether he was born with those character traits or he became like that more by fulfilling the expectations of those adults.

Occasionally, though, he felt that behaving naughtily and being disorderly, as Ivan and his mates did, must be really fun. They were free to do things as they pleased. Sometimes, a desire to experience that freedom would even pop up in his mind. Next moment, of course, he’d brush that desire aside; being naughty just wasn’t for him… Besides, he was aware that Ivan’s group would certainly ridicule him if he tried to do the same things they did, regardless of whether he tried to join them or to do it alone. He just didn’t fit in.

This morning, the girls in the back of the queue giggled louder than usual, and Mark concentrated to hear what Ivan was saying to them. It seemed that he could hear Sonia’s voice as well…but he wasn’t sure. However, at that moment, Alexander suddenly got into some coughing attack. The harder Mark tried to listen to the back of the queue, the louder Alexander’s cough became, and he felt anger quickly rising inside him.

Finally, he tensely but quietly hissed at him: