Daniel Josham was a twig of a kid, made up of layered shirts hung loosely on his frame, no doubt hand-me-downs from some bulkier sibling. Or worse yet, scavenged from a Salvation Army bin past midnight. His features stick in my mind where my wedding anniversary won’t: cheeks flecked with freckles like the speckle of eggs; spectacles with thick lenses that bent his eyes to bulging; a bloom of bright orange hair like brushfire crackling from the top of his head. You could spot him in a crowd without thinking, a fact that only made the disregard of others bite harder.

He never bought lunch from the canteen; it was always dutifully brought in rent shopping bags, and never more than a sandwich and a red apple. Maybe if he’d given the apple to teacher he’d have made one friend in the school, but instead he used the sweet to rinse the taste of ham and stale white out of his mouth. It wasn’t that he had no redeeming qualities; he was smart enough to answer questions when he was asked to during class, and he could do things like whistle with a gum leaf clamped firmly between his lips, or make his voice go high and funny like he’d inhaled half a helium balloon. But such tricks were worthless if you didn’t have the confidence to sell them to an audience, so it did gangly little Daniel no favours to be seen sitting by himself on the limestone blocks leading up to the playground, whistling to the wind.

Because he made so little impression day-to-day, the occasions when he acted up stayed in the minds of those bearing witness for years. He wasn’t one of those crazy kids, the real nut-cases who would bite and scratch and kick, throw desks around and cuss. He was quite placid in everyday life, so when the tougher kids at our primary school started experimenting with the fine art of bullying, he was the obvious target. But when Daniel was backed into a corner by Dustin Jones (’D.J.’ to his friends, which was just about everyone), he didn’t lower his gaze to the floor like he did when berated by a teacher. No, he bared his teeth and leapt for the throat.

It was a simple need to survive, a frame of mind switched into without pause so that Daniel’s attacks seemed especially vicious. Fortunately the Principal was good at his job, and knew enough of the back-story to ensure Daniel didn’t get expelled. But if he had trouble making friends before that first incident, he had a snowball’s chance in hell afterwards. Apart from a few hurried ‘hello’s in the corridor when his searching eyes made it unbearably necessary, he was left whistling in a vacuum. I’m sure that during that time he would have dreamed for a pinch or a punch, at the very least it would be an interaction he could remember in the slow purpling of his pale skin.

What I forget to mention is that throughout our school days, Daniel would occasionally turn up with one side of his glasses patched up with masking tape. The teachers would never make an issue of it, and us kids were intrigued by each appearance, but never enough to actually ask him about it. It was only years later, on a train or a bus someplace when my thoughts were free to wander through my memories, that I realised that it wasn’t a technique to correct for eyesight or the prevention of some infection that I had innocently supposed. It seemed that the need for survival skills had been forced upon him at home, rather than sought out and learned.

The teachers must have known, and the parents surely did when they saw him at our fairs and sports days, alone with his plastic bag and no gold coin donation to spare for a go at the tin shoot which he stared at hungrily. But there was something in his stance that prevented people feeling any pity for him. A backbone that held his head at an angle which suggested if condolences were offered, none would be taken. He had an inner strength, one that just needed the right circumstance to burst out and provide him the steel he so desperately sought.

It was a forty-plus degree day, a scorcher that nowadays would see all the kids laughing and screaming through sprinklers on the way home to their air-conditioning for being ‘beyond heat regulations’ or some such. But for us, it was just another day to be enjoyed out in the sun with daggy school hats making sure we didn’t fry our brains.

The cricket ball was hard, the bats were made of real wood, and the helmets gathered dust in the sports shed. I was at bat and I had smacked a good one for what I imagined to be a six some fifty metres away, across the oval and down the ditch to roll up to the feet of Daniel who was playing with some rocks, making some sort of tower with them. He picked it up and stared at it through his one un-patched eye, turning it this way and that like he’d never seen a cricket ball in his life. We hollered at him to throw it back and when he didn’t move, the pleading turned to insults, us having never been shy of giving him stick when the need arose. This seemed to get through to him. He stood up, pushed his glasses back up his nose, and started to run.

We’d never really seen Daniel run before. He was more to be found daydreaming into space when the other kids were playing chasey. Seeing it now was like watching a giraffe gallop. We didn’t expect that someone so gangly could work up such a speed, but boy it surprised us when he did. And there was something more to it than just pure speed, it was the purpose with which he moved. His shoulders were set and his head barely moved on top of them; he knew where he was going and there was nothing short of a concrete wall that was going to stop him.

I was at the batting crease, shitting myself at the look in that cyclopean eye of his as he charged full pelt in a beeline for the crease. Seeing his arm swing around was like watching the arm of a catapult fire, all weight and stored energy, and when that ball released I could swear it hummed and crackled as it flew through the dry air. I stood stock still with my cricket bat aloft, not even bothering to swing as the ball smacked into the hard clay of the pitch and bounced perfectly up into the dead centre of middle stump.

The snap the stump made as it broke clean in two must have loosened something in Daniel’s head because as he stood there huffing and puffing, completely blind from losing his glasses in the thunderous approach, he started to laugh. And as he laughed, he cried tears that evaporated in the heat as quickly as they streamed down his face. His head held high and his neck tilted back, he cried and laughed while the rest of us kids stood in complete silence; my cricket bat still raised in a willow salute, the cicadas rasping their applause across the oval.