Eyes open, a long-lasting yawn, some feeble stretches and thinking about getting out of bed is the usual “head-start” of my weekend mornings. Gazing back up at the ceiling, lying as if getting tanned, I couldn’t help noticing the plaster overhead being flooded. “Wretched old-man Warner! Why can’t he just remember to turn off that god-damn tap in the bathroom before he goes to sleep! Can’t he worry about anyone else except himself and his mutt ?!” Few people around the block liked old-man Warner, he was as they said “a grouch”; never having been married, now surely over 50 and his only companion since I could remember being Nermal, his pet Fox Terrier, he wasn’t exactly the life of the neighborhood. Except for “hello” people didn’t talk to the grim man on the second floor. And believe me, the neighborhood was pretty much a grim joke all-by-itself..

The thought that comes into any 8-year-old’s mind first thing after he gets out of bed lured me into the kitchen: breakfast!
“Mom, he came to breakfast without washing up again!” said my sweet beloved sister. Apart from the moments I felt like strangling her she was a pretty-okay girl. In fact, she was the only one in the house I was able to talk to, and by talk I don’t mean the small-talk you have with the bread-selling lady at the corner store, I mean sharing your thoughts, worries and dreams. But all that never stopped her from annoying me each chance she got. “You didn’t even go and wash your face? Get to that, right now! No breakfast until after you’ll have washed up!” Quite the ray of sunshine weekend-mornings in my family..

After eating, burping and everything else related to the issue, I took my usual stroll outside. Our entrance-door was white. Our neighbors’ doors were changing, they were getting what I heard Sis’ referring to when she was talking to mum as pine-wood doors. In a moment of sheer courage I had asked my father about us changing our door to a pine-wood one, but he said ours was perfectly fine, thank you very much!

Our stairway wasn’t exactly my favorite place in the world, the coat of paint was from before I could remember, the walls were scratched with names and other expressions such as “f… you Morgan!!” and I thought Morgan wouldn’t be to happy about was written on our walls, even though I had no idea who he was. The drawings of obviously-untalented people and the foot-marks which had been there for ages made me run down the stairs, clinging on to the dirty banister, out through the rusty door with a broken glass of the apartment building number 39 on Kensington Road. First thing that used to pop into view after walking out of the stairway was the old woman that was always surveying the place from her balcony on the other side of the road, but after 8 years of living here I had kind of got used to considering her as a part of the décor.

The first thing I noticed this time was old-man Warner who was on the other side of the street walking his Fox Terrier; I had a good mind to go tell him politely that his negligence and lack of consideration of other people had caused my family severe discomfort and wouldn’t he be so kind to turn of the god-damn tap before he goes to bed next time. However I didn’t go and tell him all of this, partly because my folks had told me never to speak to him and mostly because I was as scared as a mouse of speaking to strangers, especially him.

“Hey there, Tricky!” came an all-too-familiar voice from my right. It was Robert, my neighbor from the next stairway, in fact, the only friend I had around this place. And in case you were wondering who Tricky is, you guessed it, it’s me. And not because of my carelessly-brave behavior, quick wits and a long list of pranks I had pulled over the years, but it was just the way my mum had called me ever since I could remember. And, just for the record, the description above the very-humiliating explanation didn’t suit me at all, although I wouldn’t mind if it did. “Tricky” came from Patrick, that was my name, but nobody called me Patrick except my dad when he was angry with me, and that didn’t happened very often at all.

“Hi, Rob! Want to go to Brick Wall ? It’s ten days since I was last there.. and I got `em with me now..” “Can’t right now, I got to go help mum with the groceries this morning! wouldn’t have got up this early if it wasn’t for that this morning. But I’ll go later today or maybe tomorrow.” “Okay then, see you later!” “Bah-bye!”

I left Rob over there to wait for his mum to go shopping and headed up Kensington Road, in the opposite direction. Up around the corner, to the left, I met Mrs. Austin. “Good day, Tricky!” She was a middle-aged woman, with bright-red hair, no doubt an error from the cheap hair-dye she was using, but an error that kept repeating itself ever since I’d known her. For some reason I didn’t like her at all, but she didn’t know that as she couldn’t possibly read my mind, and she had always treated me nicely. And then I remembered.. I remembered why.. I quickly mumbled something and ran off past the rusty blue car that had been banged on the right side door for the past year, ran past the graffiti on the north side of my building, ran cross the perfectly-useless light-post that had no bulb and finally reached Brick Wall, between two apartment buildings, well hidden from nosy-people’s eyes.

I shook my Mickey Mouse t-shirt that had entangled itself whilst I was running, rubbed my sweaty forehead on its left sleeve, dug my hand into the right pocket of pair of shorts and pulled out a green ball. A tennis ball. I stood in front of the brick wall, a brick wall which city-hall had forgotten to tear down with the other part of the house that was once here, a brick wall fairly taller than the wardrobe in my parents bedroom.

Standing in front of the wall I threw the green tennis ball in the ground inches before the wall and in “magically” jumped back into my hands. I threw it again, a second and a third time and it ricocheted back into my hands. The forth time however I didn’t catch it, it went far to my left. I went and retrieved the ball and squeezed between Brick Wall and the wall of the apartment building. It was rather tight, tighter than it had been three years ago when I begun coming here. I reached into the left pocket of my shorts and took out a ball-pen and, under the title “brik wall”, under the left subtitle which read “own secrets”, I wrote “till I was five I couldn’t reach the light switch outside the kitchen and had to call mom, dad or sis to help me each time I wanted to go inside the kitchen”.

Then I went back in front of Brick Wall, threw the ball for the fifth time and caught it. The sixth time it flew out of my reach to the left. After retrieving it I went back behind Brick Wall and right under where I had written before, wrote: “for 3 years I kept the savings from my pocket money in a tin can under the loose brick on the bottom row of Brick Wall”.
The seventh time the ball went to the right, and I knew what I had to do: tennis-ball in left hand, ball-pen in right hand, I went behind Brick Wall and under the subtitle “others secrets” scribbled down that which I had remembered: “two years ago i saw mrs austin at it with another man in the parking lot while her husband was away on a business trip”. The eighth time I caught it, the ninth time I caught it, the tenth time I caught it, and went home…