Arjun and the Heavy Feeling

It rained all Sunday, the boring kind that does not even do anything dramatic, and Arjun was on the iPad.

He had been on it after breakfast. He had been on it after the thing on the telly. Somewhere in the middle he had eaten a sandwich without really noticing the sandwich.

Time had gone strange, the way it does. It had not felt like a long time. It had not felt like any time at all.

At some point Arjun noticed that he did not feel very good.

His eyes were hot and scratchy, like when you have been in a swimming pool. His neck ached from being bent. His legs had gone sort of buzzy from not moving.

And he was cross. Cross with his sister for existing near him. Cross with the game. Cross about nothing at all, which is the most annoying kind of cross there is.

The strangest bit was this: even though he did not feel good, he did not want to stop. He wanted to keep going, and keep going felt like it might fix it, even though it never had before.

Dad came and sat on the arm of the sofa. He did not say "you've been on that thing all day", which was lucky, because that is the sort of sentence that makes a person want to be on the thing all day out of pure stubbornness.

He said: "How's your body feeling?"

Arjun had to think about it, because nobody had asked him that before.

"Heavy," he said.

"Ten minutes outside," said Dad. "That's all. You can come straight back in after. I'm not being tricky."

It had stopped raining, mostly. Everything was dripping and the garden smelled like the inside of a plant pot.

Arjun went out in his wellies in a fairly bad mood, and then he ran to the end of the garden and back because his legs sort of made him, and then he did it again to see if he could be faster.

He found a worm on the path and moved it onto the soil. He found four snails on the fence. He turned over the big stone by the shed and underneath it was a whole busy city of woodlice, which he immediately decided was a dig site, which meant he needed a stick, which meant the stick had to be the right kind of stick.

Ten minutes was up ages ago. Nobody mentioned it.

When Arjun came in he was muddy to the knee and slightly out of breath and — he noticed this himself, without anyone pointing it out — not cross any more.

"How's your body now?" said Dad.

Arjun checked. His eyes had stopped being scratchy. His legs felt like legs again instead of like cushions.

"Light," he said. It was the only word that fitted.

So that became the thing they did, the two of them: the body check. Heavy or light? It was not a telling-off and it was not a rule. It was just a question, and Arjun was the only one who knew the answer.

Some days he checked and said "light" and carried on playing, and that was allowed.

And some days he checked and said "heavy", and then he went and found his wellies without anyone asking him to, because by then he knew exactly what heavy meant and exactly what fixed it.

The woodlice, by the way, are still there. Arjun checks on them most days. He says they are excavating.