Born Different by Faye Aitken-Smith

not with the luxury brands
like The Beautiful had, but brands all the same.
    Even looking at
his friends now as they were pulling on their black gloves and
putting up the hoods of their black hoodies, he could see that they
were branded. It was everywhere.
    Everywhere Gabe
looked he saw advertising for brands, on the bus that passed, on
the windows of the bus stops, the over flowing bin was even full of
branded consumer products. It was everywhere, on every magazine, TV
programme and on every webpage worth looking at.
    There was
plenty to keep The Middles busy, following all the self and
socially imposed routines and behaviours and purchases, from the
shoes that they wore to the thoughts that they thought. Following
false beliefs blindly. Looking at them Gabe imagined that they were
all whistling in the dark. Scared as hell but keeping up
appearances.
    Gabe had a big
decision to make and he thought about everybody else generally
without exception, and to him they all seemed to be playing dress
up and make believe. There seemed to be no substance. Not one of
them was real. The Middles, their ways and their lives were so
completely alien to Gabe. The Middles were ordered and they knew
where they were going. They did all the things that everyone did.
They all watched the same things and did the same things and wore
the same things.
    In the middle,
there appeared to be no passion, no real celebration or
commiseration, no all good or all bad but everything else that was
in the middle and grey. The Middles were just one big wave of the
rest, all pretty much indistinguishable from each other. All normal
and boring. All keen and eager and pleased to keep up the pretence.
Gabe thought they lived with no depth of thought or consciousness.
They didn’t even know that they were alive. Not really alive! Not
really living their one and only lives. They were too busy ticking
boxes and toeing the line and pretending to look busy and doing as
they were told.
    They were all
totally brainwashed and ruled by fear so taking the Valium, the
heroin of the masses like Ambrosia, and now so addicted to
believing in everything that they were told and sold through all
medias and advertising that they were always hungry for more, but
in this glazed eye state they were oblivious. Gabe thought that
they were oblivious to everything.
    “Did you hear
they caught the flasher? He’s only a bloody doctor! See, I told
you.” And Frank had told them it wouldn’t be a weirdo, an obvious
weirdo, like them. That it would be one of The Middles. The same
people who pointed the finger at The Damned always had three
fingers pointing back at them.
    The Middles
were even oblivious to the fact that they let the real sickos of
society hang out among them. Because that was the truth of it, as
far as Gabe and the rest of them were figuring it out. Really
freaky people; the child abusers, the fraudsters, the wife beaters;
these people had to blend in, they had to get close to other people
and install trust and earn respect. This was the trick. This was
invariably their modus operandi. The way and the only way that they
could operate. Authorities and tabloids always blamed the young and
the under classes, the punks and the underbelly of modern society.
The outcasts and the loners. But if you actually read the
headlines, heard the true stories, invariably, in fact almost
without exception it was the man next door. The scout leader, the
nurse, the bank clerk, the judge, the millionaire, the head of the
child protection unit. The unmasked monsters were in reality, the
‘you never would have guessed it’ man or woman. Nearly always. The
ones hidden in the camouflage of a ‘nice life’ were the ones that
committed the crimes from the absurd to the most heinous. Strange
people were often blamed as a smoke screen, using their differences
to incite a hostility and distrust, while the ones hiding out in
the mass of The Middles got on with the real crimes of the day. The
Middles