The Treehouse & Other Stories

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By the age of seven, with no internet anywhere near on the horizon, Sisyphus Sykes had arrived at the reasonable assumption that the world and most of the people in it were against him. His world, in fact, was a small American town, a conservative place with 'Christian' values. It was a narrow milieu, where the liberal and avant garde were regarded with deep suspicion. Sisyphus had noted that folk were often at one another's throats, despite their 'church' values. He had first noticed this tendency at home, in the kitchen – a dangerous place with sharp things and blunt instruments, such as saucepans, knives, rolling pins, plates and saucers, which sometimes flew.

He once saw Betty, his mother, hurl a dinner plate, like a frisbee, at his father. Tom ducked in time and the plate smashed on the wall behind him. At the time, Tom had been droning on about transmissions – the love and obsession of his life!

'If I hear the word 'transmission' again, I'm going to scream,' said Betty; and with that she screamed and threw another plate.

'Missed!' said Tom, walking out, leaving Betty Sykes to clear up the mess.

Sisyphus Sigmund Sykes would try to console his mother at trying times such as these, when she was weeping with frustration at wreckage and mess. A lot of things did get wrecked around the place. But Betty was the main culprit at breaking stuff. While doing the washing up, glasses, tumblers, cups, saucers, plates… basically, anything that was breakable, got broken. And Tom had the exasperating habit of leaving oily handprints, spanners and wrenches on pristine tablecloths. However, one day, Betty had the bright idea of using plastic alternatives. Eureka! She could at least wipe the oil off. And you could get them in so many different pretty patterns and colours. She had been inspired by one of her catalogues.

In other words, they were a pretty normal family; that is to say, normally dysfunctional. Betty didn't often throw plates at Tom, and they weren't at each other's throats all the time. It was just that the pressure in the family's emotional boiler would grow steadily, and niggle up to boiling point, occasionally. Then things would explode, and stuff would fly, such as saucers and plates. At least Betty didn't throw knives. Her husband infuriated her most of the time, and despite calling him an idiot a dozen times a day, she did love him, really. He had his compensations!

In the world at large, Sisyphus was used to being called a dork because of his odd appearance. He was thin and gangly, wore glasses, and his head was too big. And there was his ridiculous name, and all its spiteful variations. Very few people called him 'Sisyphus', including his father who, idiotically, had elected to hail his offspring as 'Sis!' – to the constant annoyance of his wife.

Sisyphus was often called 'Sissy Pussy'. Thin as a stick, a four-eyes with an overlarge, droopy head, and wearing the ill-fitting clothes Betty selected… Sisyphus was jeered at and kicked about like a rotten old parsnip. But he was beginning to become defiant about his name and derisive of conventional Christian names. The nomenclature (a word he learned when he was 9) was boring: Fred, Betty, Tom, Dick, Harriet, John, Jane, Susan, Harry, Mary, Rose, Ron, and so on to the nth degree of standard Christian names. Nevertheless, it was still unpleasant to be called 'Wus', 'Dork', and 'Sissy Pussy'.

Sisyphus sought solace in an interior world, where he was Flash Gordon, or an heroic knight turning adversaries' heads into water melons with a big mace; or a spy, a double 'O', embarked on desperate espionage capers. And he became a voracious reader. He read everything from the backs of detergent packs to Dickens. He even read some of Tom's transmission manuals, when Tom, thinking it his paternal duty to dragoon his son in some useful direction, cornered him and kept him captive in the garage for a couple of hours – usually on Sunday afternoons. The focus was, of course, on transmissions. Tom hoped his son would inherit his small transmission empire, a reasonably successful garage in town called Tom's Transmissions. Slogan: 'Our mission – a perfect transmission!'

But Sisyphus had no appetite to become a grease monkey. He immersed himself in the world of books and literature where he found he could lead, vicariously, a multitude of lives. For birthdays and Christmas, he only wanted reading matter. He didn't crave a 'Johnny Seven' machine gun (a replica for blood-thirsty boys of some death-rattler used in Vietnam), or a Meccano set, or a baseball bat, or a catcher's mitt, or a football helmet… Just books, please, or anything he could read.

Betty was proud that her son was such an avid reader. In her fantasises, she saw the letters on some fancy calling card: Dr. Sisyphus S. Sykes. But Tom was easy. It meant he didn't have to think too much – just go out, buy a birthday card and stuff a few bucks in for books. And sometimes, he even went and bought Sisyphus a book. There was a bookstore three doors down from his garage. Tom ordered all his books about transmissions from them.

Sisyphus spent his allowance on books, saving up for the more costly items, such as a handsomely bound collected Shakespeare. He procured the weighty tome when he was nearly 9 (8 and three quarters to be exact), and could make head nor tail of Shakespearean syntax. He had done it because he had read somewhere that it was okay to buy books you weren't going to read just yet; that way you built up a treasure trove of literature, and you would never be starved of something good to read.

Books piled up in his room. Pillars of literary wisdom formed precarious stacks around his bed. Then, one day, when he was 11, (a Saturday morning after his mother had broken a cup while stumbling over his books and Tom had ruined another tablecloth), Betty blew her top and ordered Tom to build Sisyphus a bookcase. Tom had to drag himself away from transmission matters, but he knocked up a decent and capacious pine bookcase over the rest of the weekend. Sisyphus was thrilled; he liked seeing his books on display. The array of spines with their intriguing titles and authors' names was a beautiful and inspiring sight.

What with all the reading, and all the time he had without any friends to bother him, Sisyphus learned stuff. He would read almost anything he could get his hands on, and he developed the knack of finding and acquiring knowledge, fast. When he was 8, he read Tom Sawyer, imagining he was Tom smoking a home-made corncob pipe with his buddy Huck. He read A Christmas Carol and felt empathy for poor Bob Cratchit, and genuine sorrow for the plight of Tiny Tim. Sisyphus haunted the local library on Main Street, where he was great friends with Mrs. Beatty, the librarian. He loved going to the library. It was more or less in the centre of town, a red brick building with a massive clock that clanged on the hour. Inside was an Aladdin's Cave of books and periodicals. Sisyphus felt at home there, and Mrs. Beatty never called him 'Phus', 'Wus', 'Sissypussy', or anything like that. She even turned a blind eye when he returned books late, which was quite often.

Sisyphus wasn't some kind of Mozartian genius, one of those kids who can do integral calculus and spout string theory at you when they're five, but he was a very smart lad (considerably above average intelligence), and he had an enquiring mind coupled with dogged determination. He spent a lot of time on his own, consuming books and periodicals, voraciously. History began to fascinate him: the blood and guts, death and destruction, treachery and intrigue, the politics and the endless calamity of war… It was history that led to an early downfall and marked Sisyphus for life.

School was a trying experience. He was teased, cajoled and bullied, constantly. The fact that he was extremely bright isolated him even further. His classmates knew deep down that he was the cleverest, and they resented him for it. Even his teacher, Mrs. Jean Weathervane, became ill-disposed, after he corrected her in a geography lesson. He pointed out that Mount Everest was not in The Alps. Jean Weathervane was a spinster of moderate intelligence. Enough to be a school teacher but she had to cover a number of subjects in junior high, and so she messed up, occasionally. Sisyphus spotted her gaffs and sometimes had enough diplomacy not to correct his teacher. For instance, she had once asserted that General Custer had been killed at Gettysburg, whereas, in fact, the overconfident Custer copped a deadly custard pie from Crazy Horse at Little Big Horn. Sisyphus knew that! And unwisely, Sisyphus stated in public that he thought Custer had deserved it!

'I never said Everest was in The Alps!' screeched Mrs. Weathervane, making the whole class jump. She was backtracking, trying to think of an excuse.

Sisyphus, undiplomatically, persisted: 'I am sorry, Miss, but you did