The Six is a story about the strength of family bonds, the fallibility of wealth and a deception that challenges the deepest of trusts.

They stood side by side on a line at the side of the non-descript hall, barely moving. The kind of well behaved that borders on obsessed or hints to a history of abuse. A fear to twitch first, a fear of what would happen if they did. They looked worthy of a calendar spread: blonde hair, blue eyes, a perfect diagonal from youngest to eldest, left to right, as if they had freshly stepped off a conveyor belt and were being checked for faults.

They wore the same expensive looking dark purple jackets. The youngest could have been off to his communion, the eldest preparing for his high school prom. In another life. This line of children, all boys, seemed to reflect the ages of childhood. Boyhood. A time-lapse film sculpted and frozen in flesh.

It was clear no one would be able to take them altogether. It was equally clear that they, the six in the line, hadn’t considered anything else.

They had known nothing and no one else. This had always been their reality, a world of six. It had been seven before the accident and a perfect eight three years before that. Now the six that remained had made their way down from the mansion and stood stock still as they tried to take it all in. Take in more all they never knew existed. Social virgins thrust into an orgy of city living. Naivety ready to be traded into the harsh touch of reality.

Is it imprisonment when you have no desire to leave?

Is it when you are ignorant to a world beyond known walls?

They had never been trapped at home exactly. The mansion on the outskirts of the town was big enough for any child to get lost in their imagination. The high gate and walls were the edge of the known world and none had thought of wanting to scale them. They lived ignorant of their isolation within a loving nucleus of blood ties. It was life and it had never needed changing.

Their Father had been in gold, had done well enough. When more was needed, he moved to the modern imitation of gold. Stocks and shares. He began a family, built a home, gambled with numbers that didn’t really exist. Filled the emptiness with golden denial and a singular attention. Filled the emptiness with an investment in a family he would protect at any cost.

And their Mother, who had been pregnant for half a decade, who had carried them and raised them inside those walls. She had taught them since each arrived in their tiny world, nurtured them into language, articulation, understanding. Those who were old enough remember her laugh, her lessons, remember the day she disappeared and the days that followed: the funeral, the mourning. The remembering that is not packaged neatly into a time capsule. The remembering that rises like a constant ache, the questions, keys to Pandora’s box. Better kept shut, better kept tucked away and quiet.

In the end she also taught them how loss, how grief, bonds the strongest ties even more tightly. Makes for an impenetrable unit, a singular entity. After carrying six children they thought her invincible, but parents never are. It is a hard lesson to learn. The fallibility of your superheroes.

So here they were, six identically dressed children in a line waiting to find out their next step and understanding only the threat of separation as an abstract concept. Like when they would play Cowboys and Indians. But games would always end with the dropping of roles.

One by one, potential foster parents came and went, cooing and sighing as if they were touring a rescue dog home and excreting pitying wishes from Samaritan glands. Wishes that they could take them all home, away from the coldness of all this. These artefacts on display, these items for sale. But none could and most departed empty hearted.

Three hours later, however, the next chapters were already in motion.

The older two were thought too old to be taken by foster parents so were placed in an orphan’s home. Well educated (thanks to the home schooling efforts of their mother) but lacking paper validation to prove it. It was considered best for them to sculpt their knowledge into a single clear direction. A professional career born before either could vote. Put straight on a ladder they would climb until their hair has greyed and fashion has been through 3 or 4 cycles. By 5pm they were hanging their jackets next to countless others in the anonymity of the city.

The others were all separated to individual families. Some good, some bad, some wealthy, some loving. A couple who had failed to conceive took the youngest, a substitute for what could never be. The middle two were to go and live upstate, one in a small city with little hope for the future, the other in a small town with even less. These three will all but disappear from view, their existence alone enough for us to know.

And the final child, the 5th in the line, was taken by a single mother, Joan. He would join her and her own son Michael in the suburbs of this city. This child was Simon. 

Simon stared at the ceiling. He’d hung his jacket on the back of his door and collapsed onto the hard mattress that still smelled like the showroom or store room or factory. Wherever it had been laid last was full of plastic and exhaust fumes and their ghosts still lingered in the aura. Oratory newness surrounded him. He closed his eyes and blocked his ears and breathed in.

He imagined himself in the den they’d built two years before. He’d helped his Father by carrying him the planks they’d cut from the tree they felled from the woods. Father and son, rekindling lost rituals of bonding. Learning lessons passed down through the paternal line.

He had remembered the morning that they opened the door for the others. Finished. The scent of achievement hung victoriously in the air. Varnished wood lined all 6 surfaces and a single light hung bare in the centre of the room. Like a wilderness lodge in some endless Scandinavia landscape. An Eden of isolation. There was a day bed in one corner that could fold out so when they felt like sleeping out there three of the boys could share it comfortably. Tops and tails. A great adventure in the back garden.

And there was a desk that looked out of the window down into the woods whose leafy border would brush the window in late Autumn winds and whose stripped twigs would tap in Winter. As if asking to come in and shelter from the cold, to join this clan wrapped up in the familial warmth. Phantom’s fingers marking out the night, or trying to tell them there were others out there.

The ceiling in this small room was two-tone: white and curls of off white. Scars of cigarette smoke or something, relics of long nights or long days in the recent past. Like the skin of a man who should’ve known better, who was smarter than that but couldn’t stop what he’d begun. Simon felt like an intruder on someone else’s life. He wondered whose room this had been before and whether they now felt as displaced as he did. Ghosts in foreign lands.

How do you talk to people you’ve never met before?

How do you talk to people you have not shared your entire life with?

Hey.

Echoes of intent listening

Hey?

A little louder. The creak of the door audible in the density of silence.

Here’s your juice. It’s orange. It’s got bits in. Do you like bits?

Simon had never thought about it before.

Is the bed comfortable enough? They said we can swap it if it’s not right for you.

It wasn’t the bed he’d always known. So no it wasn’t comfortable. It was foreign, this was all foreign. And he didn’t even know what foreign meant before today.

After the hall, they had driven through town in Joan’s small car. She had spoken the whole way, he had never met anyone who could fill air as she did. She asked questions but Simon had no answers. He wasn’t even sure if he’d said anything since that line-up, he wasn’t sure he’d agreed to any of this.

Is numbness the same as amnesia?

Feeling nothing of the present, are we really in it?

He stared at new words along the new road. He wondered why on earth posts needed an office, why banks lined the road rather than the river. He wondered if his Father would know the answers and knew that he would have done. He wondered where he went in the mornings all day and why he had never wondered to ask before the last time he left. The morning they hadn’t seen him, just heard the car pull away and out of sight. Left them alone.

The door to Joan’s house, his new home, was bright red. It was set back from the pavement by a short gravel path that wasn’t very tidy and a little porch that was bare save a spiders web in the top right hand corner. Simon stared at the colour red, some memory or other sparking in his mind, a ghost of a thing he couldn’t grab hold of. The door swung open and the moment passed. He walked into the house last of all and the door clicked shut behind him.