Mark is in an awful rush;
today is an amazingly special day, so everything should be perfect. He pulls on the classic France National Team kit from late 90s and runs down to the living room, almost quivering with eagerness. He is singing La Marseillaise under his breath, dancing through the living room, decorated with more than a dozen of different football club’s flags; parents are not there yet, so he impatiently shouts from the hallway to them to get finally ready. Berlin hosts The World Cup Final today, it starts less than in three hours, and he is the lucky one to be there!
His mother comes down a couple of minutes later, still in bathrobe and slippers. Mark stares at her in a pure shock, with his mouth widely open and eyes sparkling with tears.
“Are you kidding me?” he is nearly crying, realizing that they are not going to be on time unless coming out in five to ten minutes. “The World Cup Final, mom! How could you… Tell me dad is going to get me there, please, tell me he’s ready!”
“My boy, what are you talking about?” she sounds worried about some reason and tries to embrace him, but Mark drops her hands from his shoulders and then backs off, hitting his back against the wall. “What final, did you have a dream?”
“The World Cup Final, we versus Italy!” she is watching him as though as he was a ghost, and he chuckles a bit hysterically. “Okay, I got it. It’s hilarious, mom, but really, tell him to hurry up a little, it’s almost five o’clock”.
“Where do you think we are right now?”
“It’s getting weird, you know”, he snorts.
“In what place, son?”
“Our house in Berlin, Argentinische Allee 170!” she shushes and turns unhealthy white, scaring him to death. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Marco, please, take a seat, and then we will have a talk”.
“What talk, why? Mommy,” he starts screaming and tapping his feet heavily on the floor. “Stop doing that to me, please. Tell me dad’s about to come down and get me to the Olympia stadium.”
“Your dad left us five years ago, Marc! Sit down, baby, we will figure this out”.
“But…”
She embraces him closely and calming strokes his head, while Marco buries his tear-stained face with his beloved oversized replica. He can feel the coolness of its smooth cool material on his skin, the prickly backside of the embroidered Gallic rooster, the tiny stitches between its front and collar. The whole thing he can see is a deep blue.
“Everything’s alright? Mr. Evans?”
The deep blue of his favorite French kit.
“Mr. Evans, do you hear me?”
“What?” the boy realizes that he had been staring at the elephant statue on the bookshelf behind doctor’s back all this time. It’s a ridiculously cute toy of an almost painfully familiar shade. “I mean, I’m sorry I’m losing the track.”
“’s nothing wrong. I simply asked if you mind the new nurse checking you out in the evenings, starting tomorrow,” Mr. Rogers repeats once again with a delicate smile on his lips. The elephant playfully winks at Marc over his shoulder.
“Don’t care at all”, he cannot help but giggle, “Hope she’s not a Liverpool fan,” the man laughs briefly and lets him go.
It turns out that he had once again forgotten he is almost fourteen now, that his father has left the family in 2005, they don’t live in Berlin anymore and France has lost that final. “Schizophrenia” sounds to him exactly like the name of one of those chemicals from textbook of Natural Sciences, as well as many other diagnoses from his medical record. His mother usually visits him on Sundays, but actually the only thing tying him to this hostile reality is the worn-out T-shirt of that needed blue color right on the thin hospital pillow in his own cozy ward.
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