How the Trouble
Started (2012) begins in the small town of Clifton. Donald Bailey is 16 years
old, but remembering when he was eight. He can’t forget how the trouble started
– the bottom of the road, the accident, the police, his mother’s distress,
questions about his ‘intent’, his careful responses, his withdrawal from
people, the psychotherapy, the taunts by older boys, the painted message on
their front door, and finally his mother packing up and re-starting their lives
in Rathswaite. People, including his mother, said he lacked compassion, that he
was a ‘cold fish.’ Donald speaks in the first person: ‘I tried to explain that
I didn’t mean to do anything at all –
that I was just playing outside and it went wrong.’ But even he can’t remember
everything.
Donald withdraws by
reading books and ‘vanishing’ – daydreaming about a better life, which usually
included him with a wife, a good job, and in a place he wants to be: ‘and then
you’re back to reality with a thump, and … you have to wait until you’re able
to conjure up a whole new vanishing to somewhere else.’ He pretends he is
someone else, somewhere else.
Rathswaite was worse
for his single mother. She resents the move away from her friends, and she too,
withdraws into herself. She has no male relationships, and retreats into
writing in her diary. Donald is acutely aware that her misery is solely because
of him.
Donald meets Fiona
Jackson and they see each other outside of school. ‘I know she thinks I’m odd,
like the rest of them do, but it doesn’t seem to bother her as much. I think
it’s because she doesn’t fit in either.’ It’s because one of her two brothers
is in prison, so she understands Donald. They aren’t in a relationship – just
occasional friends.
But now, at 16, and a
loner with no real friends, he sees eight-year-old Jake Dodd in the playground
of Gillygate Primary School and in the library. Jake has no father either and
‘his mum spent most of her time talking into her phone and ignoring him.’
Sometimes she stayed out all night, leaving Jake home alone.
Gradually Donald
befriends Jake. Slowly, a sentence here, a small conversation there, until he
takes Jake to an abandoned house – their ‘haunted house’ where they read books.
This is a short
intense novel, one of loneliness, of bad luck getting worse, of events that
never go the way they are supposed to in Donald’s mind, the friendships that
fade away, the envy of others’ lives, the sadness, and, above all, the haunting
thoughts of how the trouble started. The melancholic tone covers about two
thirds of the novel – the quiet, doubting, insecure mind of a 16-year-old
troubled boy. Then the sinister tone develops, along with the hurt, the fear
that people will take away his friendship with Jake, the anger, and the
breathing to control his bad thoughts. Deep down, Donald just wants to help
Jake, to protect him, but things spiral out of control.
The ending returns to
the withdrawal, the search for someone who understands him, someone who will
show him just a hint of kindness …
Dark, brooding,
melancholic – akin to J.D. Salinger’s A
Catcher in the Rye or Craig Silvey’s Jasper
Jones – but creepy, producing an uneasy nervousness and apprehension, until
the last section of the novel, which brings not relief, but the return to
sadness, and a slim chance of hope but – more likely – foreboding for the
future of Donald Bailey.
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