The Tigerboy

Начало книги

There was a boy.

Nothing peculiar about him. His name was ordinary too, Fred. Nobody noticed him. In his gang of friends, he looked just like the others. At home, where he was the middle of a family of five children, he mixed in unnoticeably with the rest. He ate whatever was given.

Only Fred knew he was different. As he went about, doing what everybody else did, he had this idea all the time that he was different. He was special.

But he never did anything different. He slept in a room with his two brothers. He had the same toys as them. They had rabbits and he had a rabbit. They sailed boats and he sailed a boat. They made model aeroplanes and so did he. When his elder brother brought in comics, they all read them. When his brothers went fishing, he went with them and caught fish. When they went to the woods he went to the woods. When they went to school he went to school.

Only at night sometimes he lay awake after they’d gone to sleep. How was it he was here, in this strange thing of a body, that ended at his toes and his fingers and his hair? What had happened to him before he came? Why was he only himself, and not somebody else? He lay awake thinking about this. How was it he was himself, inside this funny skin? How was it, among all the millions and millions of people there was only one of him, and he was it? And he would lie there, clasping and unclasping his hands slowly and thinking, So this is me! And he would whisper, This is you, Fred.

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