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It was January 16th, 1957. In a small blue cold room, a small blue uniformed midwife was dragging a fat blue baby into the world. It was a big boy: nearly eleven pounds. For a few seconds, baby was silent. Then he let out a sound. ‘Tin!’ he said, quite distinctly, screwing up his face in a gesture of slight revulsion. ‘Well, that’s a bit special,’ mother and midwife pronounced in chorus, smiling as baby confidently latched onto the breast and took a decent couple of drags like an addict.
The baby was beautiful and healthy. At the clinic, he was declared a champion in the weight-gain competition. He continued to screw up his face when feeding and continued to say ‘Tin’ a great deal. Mum and the midwife continued to say in chorus ‘Well, that’s a bit special,’ and the other mums joined in enthusiastically.
At school, Tin, as the boy was now called, was top of the class. While his talking continued to be limited to one word, his reading, writing, and arithmetic were exceptional. The teachers liked him because he was clever and polite. He had lots of friends because he was never sad and always eating, but somehow avoided getting fat and unpopular. The grimace he made before eating was so good his friends would look forward to it, and would invite new friends to see it. Tin’s social circle grew bigger and bigger, until it was so big he was voted best person in the whole school.
From time to time, people wondered why he only said ‘Tin’. They worried that he might have got brain damage by being born blue; but, then again, his brain seemed very healthy. They thought it might be a code, a secret message, something very important that only spies would be able to understand. They wondered if it was a joke. After all, if you say it backwards it would come out as ‘nit’, and that could be funny. They speculated that it had something to do with Tintin, and that Tin was born a big fan of the Belgian boy-hero but forgot the second part of his name. This was ruled out because Tin seemed to be able to remember everything, so it’s unlikely he would forget something so easy.
When he left school, Tin did not go to university. Instead he went to work in London, where he could do the numbers faster than anyone else. This made him very very popular and very very rich. Soon he was able to get a shiny black sports car and a shiny blonde wife and a shiny brown dog and two shiny perfect children who said lots and lots of words and sentences and didn’t grimace when they ate. Tin played golf with his enormous circle of friends, and his best friend Michael helped him by shouting ‘fore’ for him, to avoid hitting people with his golf ball. He enjoyed holidays in the Maldives where he went diving, and skiing in the Alps where he went skiing off-piste. He bought a house in Cornwall quite near a tin mine, which everyone said was funny because Tin was living near tin. In fact, the tin had long since been dug up, but it was still quite funny even if it wasn’t true.
Tin led a life blessed by good fortune for fifty years, but never ever said anything other than ‘Tin’.
On January 16th, 2007, on his birthday Tin fell ill. His back hurt so badly it made him cry out. ‘Tin!’ he cried in the middle of the night. His wife called an ambulance, and he was admitted to hospital as an emergency. A doctor X-rayed his back and sent him to a specialist. The specialist looked at his X-rays and told him he had cancer of the back and needed to have chemotherapy straight away. His shiny blonde wife was very sad and frightened for Tin
because she thought he might die soon and she loved him. The doctor told him all about the chemotherapy, how it stopped the cancer cells from growing and gave the bones a chance to build up their strength so his back would stop hurting. How the chemotherapy might make him sick, but how he needed to eat lots and get fatter even though he might experience an unpleasant metallic taste. ‘Tin,’ said Tin. ‘Exactly,’ said the doctor.
So Tin started the chemotherapy and started to get better.
He stopped grimacing when he ate and started to say new words. ‘Yum,’ he said first. ‘Well, that’s a bit special,’ everyone said. ‘Liver and onions,’ he said next, when he had some.
‘Croissant,’ he said at breakfast time.
‘Eggplant – no, aubergine,’ he uttered, correctly. ‘Mmmmm,’ he hummed, ‘cream donut cannot be bettered.’ ‘Sushi so fishy is my favourite dish.’
So, as it turned out, Tin said ‘Tin’ when he ate because everything tasted of tin. The chemotherapy that usually tasted of tin tasted of liver and onions, croissant, aubergine, cream donut, and sushi, and got rid of his cancer and made him able to say words other than tin.
But…
Michael stopped shouting ‘fore’ for Tin.
His shiny blonde wife divorced him, saying he was shit. The shiny children decided to take drugs.
His shiny brown dog died.
And he crashed his shiny black sports car into a roundabout.
So Tin was sad for the first time ever. ‘I am sad,’ he said to nobody.
January 22, 2022