Kensuke Kingdom

I disappeared a night before my twelfth birthday. July 28 1988. Only now i can tell the whole extraordinary story, the true story. Kensuke made me promise that i would say nothing, nothing at all, at least ten years have passed.It was almost the last thing he said to me.I promised, and because of that i have had to live out a lie.

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I could let sleeping lies sleep on, but more than ten years have passed now. I have done school, done college and had time to think. I owe it to my family and to my friends, all of whom i have deceived for so long, to tell the truth the truth about my desperance, about how i lived to come back from the dead.

But there is another reason for speaking out now,a far, far better reason. Kensuke was a great man, a good man and he was my friend. I want the world to know him as i knew him.

Until i was nearly eleven, until the letter came, life was just normal. There were four of us in the house: my mother, my father, me and Stella- Stella Artois, that is, my-one ear up and one-ear down black and white sheepdog, who always seemed to know what was about to happen before it did. But even she could not have foreseen how that letter was going to change our lives for ever

Thinking back, there was regularity, a sameness about my early childhood. It was down the road each morning to 'the monkey school'. My father called it that because he said the children gibbered and screeched and hung upside down on the climbing-frame in the play ground.

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And,anyway, i was always 'monkey face' to him-when he was in a playful mood, that is, which he often was. The school was really called St Joseph's,and i was happy there, for most of the time, anyway. After school everyday, whatever the weather, I'd be off down to the recreation ground for football with Eddie Dodds, my best friend in all the world,...