Short story: The Man In The Hat By Karl Whitney - - - - That day I ran into the man on the high street who wore a straw hat identical to the one we had seen in the garage of Gary’s house revealed a lot about my marriage to me. I had met my wife many years after I was a child, and we had never before discussed the time I spent running around the backstreets of my estate, scuffing my knees when I fell off my bike, bullying children smaller than me and throwing stones and running away from children bigger than me. In many ways you could say it was an idyllic childhood. The first time I cycled a bike, it was my friend Gary’s bike. He wasn’t my friend then, but he was the only person I knew who was the same age as me and could ride a bike. We didn’t really become friends until we had seen the hat and become aware of what the hat could do. One day, while watching the turning of the wheels as he cycled around the cul-de-sac that curved in a circle, he said to me: “Do you wanna have a go?” “Okay,” I said, nervous. I was a nervous child, and have preserved my nervousness into adulthood. Someday I hope to pass those nerves on to a child of my own, but maybe not today, as my wife has just left me. That’s the door slamming downstairs as I lay on the bed and stare at the ceiling here in the indifferent coolness of the bedroom. I got on the bike, which was now propped against a garden wall to balance it. But at first I couldn’t even get my feet to sit on the pedals, and I shuddered too much to manage it for the first couple of minutes, then I was on the bike and away from the wall and Gary was pushing me and I was rolling down the hill and there was a combination of fear and exhilaration that resulted from the lack of control I had over the whole thing: it was like being thrown out of a plane without a parachute. When Gary caught up to me I was embedded in Mrs Mooney’s garden hedge, and the saddle of the bike had come off when I had hit the wall. “Are you okay?” he said. “My arm,” I said, and pointed with the one that still worked at the one that just sort of hung there, useless. We walked to his house, around the corner from the foot of the hill. Gary was going to have his mother look at my arm and tell me what she thought. She was a nurse, so had seen arms before and knew what to do with them. She wasn’t there, but we heard noises around the back of the house, where there was a dusty laneway that linked the back gardens of all the houses on the road, and the one behind, together. In the summer it got dusty and the dust blew in your eyes, in the winter it turned to mud and you couldn’t walk there, and sometimes even cars got stuck. The garage door at the back of the house was open, and inside it was dark, and there was a tall plump man in green overalls with oil stains all down them standing there with clear plastic goggles strapped above his eyes. He looked past me at Gary and said: ‘Hello Gary. Who’s this?” He meant me. “He’s my friend, Niall, from up the road. He hurt his arm off my bike.” And then I remembered the bike that Gary had picked up from the wall and wheeled along behind me as I stumbled towards the house, not really knowing where I was. I had hit the wall, and then bounced into the hedge. That’s the way I remember it, anyway. Gary’s uncle took a look at the bike, the saddle twisted off centre and the wheel slightly bent out of shape, and said: “It doesn’t look too bad. I’ll fix it later.” “Lads,” he said, addressing me kind of for the first time. “I want to show you something.” And it was here that he wandered back into the gloom of the garage, and emerged with a straw hat in his hand. It was a straw hat like Englishmen wear on sunny days when they’re on boats on the river and there’s nothing to do but just lay there with a hat on your head. He held it aloft like it was magical or holy. “This,” he said, staring me in the eye, “is no ordinary hat.” It was the first time since we had arrived that he had actually looked at me, and the intensity of his gaze threw me a little. “What is it?” Gary said. “Why is it special?” “It’s special because this hat, this hat I hold here in my hands, is part of a very special experiment.” “What kind of experiment?” I asked, interested in what he was going to tell us. “From this hat,” he said – and here he tapped his knuckles neatly on the crown of the hat – “I am going to grow a fully-functioning human being.” “What?” Gary said. “A man,” I said. “He’s going to grow a man from the hat.” “From this straw boater,” he emphasised, “I am going to grow a man. I’m growing a man from his hat down. Someday I plan to grow one from the boots up, but I thought I’d start with this first.” Before he left, he told us about how he was going to employ all manner of fertilizers and chemicals in his attempt to be the first to grow a man from his hat down. It would make him famous. It certainly elevated him in our eyes from just a strange man who fixed the odd bicycle to a god who could somehow confer life on the unoccupied space below headwear. Gary’s Uncle Joe wasn’t around for the next while, but every few days we’d creep into the garage expecting a fully functioning human being to spring out and beat us to our deaths. We knew that leaving a newly grown human being locked in a garage with no clothes to speak of, apart from the straw hat on his head would probably make him pretty angry. And it smelled bad in there too. One day we crept in to the garage, and the spot where the hat had lain – the shabby wooden tea crate in the corner – was empty. The hat was gone. “He’s got up and he’s left,” Gary said. “Who?” I asked. “The man, the man, the man,” Gary gibbered, and I immediately knew what he meant. Overnight, the man had grown from the hat down, just like Gary’s uncle had told us. And now he was roaming the open spaces all around the estate. I pictured him down by the school, shuddering along like a robot, shuffling past the windows and scaring classes full of children. I pictured him passing below the electrical pylons on the way to the football pitches, passing below the H of the goalposts, a look of indifference on his face. His face. What would it look like? Gary and me talked about it as we walked down the lane and back up to my house. All we had seen was the hat, we agreed, as we sat in my back garden, Gary sitting on the swing, me on the grass beside it. “I think he’d be scarred, from growing up so quickly on a tea chest in the dark. He woke up, saw his reflection, and ran away,” Gary said. “Where would he see his reflection?” I said, sceptical. “In the glass or somewhere,” Gary said. “Would not,” I said. “Yes he would,” Gary said. He wouldn’t have, because there was no glass in the garage. There was no window. It was dark there. In my mind, the man hadn’t seen himself yet. But maybe he had got up and walked to the shopping centre, up the slope by the church. Maybe he stood outside the automatic doors staring at the mirrored glass, seeing the deformed character facing him, walking slowly forwards and slowly backwards, before deciding that the ghoul facing him was, in fact, a reflection of himself. The shock would have sent him on a rampage, tearing the shops apart, spilling blood and sinew on the cream marbled floors and the red squared lino of the supermarket. I couldn’t think about it anymore, and me and Gary just sat there in silence, him in slight motion still on the swing. He should be stopped, I thought, but where could he be found? Days went by, and there was no sign of the man in the hat. Then weeks went by. Then months. The summer was over and we went back to school. A year went by; two, then three years went by, then more. Gary and I were no longer friends. Me and my family left the estate and moved somewhere else. I went to school somewhere else. Then I went to university. I forgot about the man in the hat. It was a question raised in my childhood that had never been satisfactorily answered. I met a girl and we fell in love. Then we fell out of love and I met another girl. We fell in love, this other girl and I, and we got married. And the thing was, I never met her father. She talked about him all the time: how her mother and him had split up years ago, and how he had moved away and was living now in the Far East. Then one day we were out shopping, on a street that was thick with people who looked the same to me: all in colourful clothes that were meant to make them look individual. From a distance I saw it: a straw boater, identical to the one the man in the garage had worn. Immediately the memories came flooding back: the horror of this man walking the streets, born from a hat and angry with it. I mumbled something to my wife about meeting her by Eason’s in half an hour. “What?” she shouted, but it was too late, I was gone. I had a mission: to follow the hat, and to track down the man under it. To explain the whole thing to myself, to find out the truth. I hadn’t felt so alive in a long time. I knew what had to be done. I followed the hat as it bobbed along the sea of people, just far enough ahead of me to draw me onwards. I followed it around the corner and down the side street. The crowd thinned out, and I could now see the man who the hat possessed. He wore an unusual red vertically-striped suit that struck fear into my heart. It was him. “Hey!” I shouted as he rounded a corner into a lane I knew was a dead end. He turned and looked at me with cold eyes and in a dead, stoney voice said: “What do you want?” “ I want to know about the hat,” I said. “Where did you get it?” “The hat?” he said, taking it from his head and holding it in his hands. “I got the hat in a joke shop. It’s fancy dress.” “Lies!” I shouted. “You were grown from it. Twenty years ago. You disappeared from a garage in a housing estate in Tallaght!” “What?” he said. “Listen: I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is fancy dress. I’m on my way to a party. It’s my nephew’s birthday and I’m going to do some magic tricks.” “Oh, really?” I said. “Yes. Really,” he said. It was at this point my wife, who had followed me arrived on the scene. We sat down on the kerb and I told her the whole story. She said she had been considering leaving me for some time, but held off. But now this, she said, I don’t know who you are anymore. The man in the hat made his excuses and left. I waved to him as he went. She said she had spent time thinking it over, and this wasn’t the first time I had done this sort of thing, running off after things that weren’t really there, leaving her to pick up the pieces. I said that the whole chase was based on the assumption that the hat was the same one I had seen when I was a child. I said that assumption was rational, and if she wanted to leave she knew where the door was. We got home and she packed up a bag and took the car somewhere. The problem with a major scientific breakthrough is that it breaks the boundaries of what most people think they know. It takes them time to adjust to the changes, the breaks in perception. Major breakthroughs like growing a man from a hat, or your wife leaving you for another woman. -------- Stories | Home | About This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.