I believe mental illness is not talked about enough. There are hundreds of statistics to support that and I don’t need to repeat them here as that is not my purpose. I have written a new story where a character has depression and this fact drives the story. This is because it is important. I am not a crusader and this is not a story about depression. It is no way to be considered as a guide to dealing with depression or any mental illness. It is simply my idea about how one resourceful little boy copes in a difficult world. There are thousands of little boys and girls, and a fair few big ones too, who are coping better than my characters.

This tale is me raising a glass to the children of the world that don’t have it easy, the bullied, the carers, the victims and the troubled. My message to them is:

Life is tough.

You are tougher.

Now that I have said my piece, enjoy the story of Cem on his quest for Happiness.

(love you)

Pete

 

Happiness – number 1

His name is Cem and he hated it. People would say, “Isn’t that a girl’s name?” and, “Like a Gemstone.” It was not a girl’s name and it was not like a gemstone. It was spelt C. E. M. and teachers would call him Cem as in cemetery.  Everything was wrong about his name, but the worst thing was the reason he had it.

It was a Turkish name because his dad was Turkish. His mum had met him on holiday, ten years ago, in Ankara. He worked as a waiter in the hotel restaurant. He was young and handsome and exceedingly charming. His mum was convinced he would come home with her and they would live happily ever after. He did not. Mum discovered on the last day of her holiday that he was already married. Not only that, he already had a small family that was about to get one bigger. His mum went home, heartbroken but she held on to a glimmer of hope. Nine months later, Cem was born and was given his Turkish name to please a father that he would never meet. Over the next four or five years that hopeful spark was slowly extinguished. People told Cem that she used to be different. She used to go out, have a laugh with her friends, had a good job in a travel agency and, most of all, she had smiled a lot.

Things were different now. As Cem grew from a baby to a young boy, he became more and more like his father. Cem’s mum found it harder and harder. She loved Cem, and Cem knew that, but she found life with him hard. The doctors described it as chronic depression. They tried fix it with pills, but his mum did not want them. Cem knew pills would not help because she did not have enough happiness.

He tried his best to fill her life with happiness. He would give her lots of cuddles, pick her flowers from the neighbour’s garden and make her lots of cups of tea. At school, he got the best grades, sparkling reports and plenty of good news postcards home. However it was never enough to fill her heart with happiness. Her happy bucket had a hole in it and it would drain quicker than he could fill it.

It was too much for one little boy of nine years old to do, way too much pressure for his little shoulders, even though Cem was a boy genius. Cem understood things easily. What made it easy for him was his phenomenal memory. He only needed to read something once or be told something and he remembered it. He had a head chock full of facts. You could ask him anything, if he’d read it, he would answer.

His uncles, who lived in Newcastle, would play a game, ‘Ask Cem’. They would try and think of questions to ask him. If Cem failed to answer a question, they got a point. If Cem knew the answer, he scored a point. Last Christmas, Cem scored 70 points out of 75 questions while his uncle ended the game with a measly 4 points (one question was disallowed for being rubbish). Cem did not enjoy this game, but his uncles were the only ones who could make his mum smile, so he played along and humiliated them year after year.

Cem didn’t have much luck at school either. He was a funny looking kid and the other children tended to avoid or tease funny looking kids. He had a crop of unruly black hair that mostly stuck up at right angles to his head and a pair of thick glasses that were slightly too big and frequently slipped off his nose. His sharp cheek bones and angular chin might make him a good looking man in ten years’ time but right now it just left him looking waspish.

If that was it for Cem, his life would have been terrible. Luckily he had Joyful, his best friend. Joyful lived next door with his mum and dad. Cem and Joyful understood each other because Joyful’s dad was always away on business in Tanzania and his mum never seemed happy either. She was always shouting but Joyful says that is just her way. She can make the simplest thing sound furious. Here are a couple of examples of Joyful’s mother having an everyday conversation.

“PASS ME THE SALT.” She would bellow when sat around the dinner table.

“OK, mummy, here it is.” Joyful replied.

“THANK YOU!”

Or another day when she left Joyful and Cem at the school gate she would shout.

“HAVE A LOVELY DAY AT SCHOOL, BOYS.” Cem daren’t not.

Despite this, Joyful was always cheerful, a hopelessly optimistic chappie. Last Tuesday, the conversation went like this.

“What did you get in your spellings this week?” Joyful asked.

“Ten again, what about you?” Cem said.

“Three…” after a thoughtful pause, Joyful added, “Isn’t that great! Two better than last week.”

That was just how he approached life. Every cloud had a silver lining and even the darkest nights had a dawn. Joyful’s happy bucket was over flowing. This gave Cem an idea. He was going to put his big brain to good use. He was going to figure out a way to fill his mum’s heart with happiness.

A question occurred to him. It was a good job his uncles never thought of this question, they would have definitely won a point.

What is happiness and where can I find some?

Joyful, as dim as he was, seemed to have loads. He was more than willing to share, but it didn’t work like that. You have to have your own happiness.

It’s like McDonalds. You can get your own and eat it but if you try and take someone else’s, you get in trouble. He had to find his mum some happiness of her own. He decided that the following weekend he was going to go in search of a jar of happiness for his mum to fill her up and plug the hole in her heart.

But where to start?

When he googled “How to find happiness”, he got many random and strange things. He could not be bothered reading all that new age hippy dippy stuff; he was not that way inclined. He could find what he need in magazines; they were normally full of happy, shiny people. In glossy bibles of fashion and fun, people seem happiest when buying things. Glistening pages and tv adverts promise that your life will be complete if you buy the latest make up, or have the biggest telly. Happiness will engulf you if you drive a new car or eat fast food. So Cem reached the conclusion that he needed money. Lots of it and fast.  That was a problem for Cem; he was nine years old.

He began his search for happiness with a search for wealth.

The rest of Cem’s story can be found on Kindle here or in paperback here.