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Ifan is the shy little toddler hiding behind his mam’s leg at the grocer’s because the cashier only speaks English, and he doesn’t know any English. Mam’s mad because Tad was supposed to teach him a little by now, but he was too busy doing important grown-up things to teach Ifan how to say “hello” and “goodbye” and “my name is Ifan Jones” in English. And besides, he didn’t want to learn English anyways– his Nan didn’t like how it sounded, so he never spoke it around her, and she was over a lot.
He blinks, and he’s the ten-year-old sitting on the swings for hours– so long his head spins from the motion– because it’s better than dealing with Rhi’s nagging and Tad’s scolding and Mam’s worrying. He knows a lot more English now, but he still gets teased for his accent and he gets marks off his assignments because he can’t make sense of anything. It’s not his fault that the words don’t want to make sense to his stupid brain. Apparently he does so well sometimes that his teachers are sure he’s cheating, but he doesn’t remember any of that happening so it can’t be true.
Time passes and suddenly he’s the fourteen-year-old sitting on the empty staircase at school smoking his first cigarette– a gift from someone Ifan’s apparently friends with (but honestly he can’t even put a name to his face, so he wonders if they actually are friends. Still, he won’t turn down a gift. His parents taught him better than that). He’s walking home from school and trying to hide how he’s spraying himself with deodorant to cover up the stench.
Then he’s the fifteen-year-old truant who takes up lifting smokes from the old corner store down the street because the old man behind the till spends all his time reading magazines instead of paying attention to the store. It’s not like he can’t afford it– he has money in his beat-up Spiderman wallet he can’t remember earning– but he really doesn’t want to get sent to Juvie or something because the clerk decided to card him. Better not to risk it for the sake of a couple fags. Besides, he’s got nimble fingers.
Even more time passes and he’s the sixteen-year-old who refuses his birth name for that silly little nickname and hangs out with the sketchy kids from the next street over, spray-painting vulgar words on the undersides of overpasses and throwing the finger at coppers as they drive by. He hangs off the side of the bridge one day on a dare, fingers purposefully loosening their grip just the slightest bit.
Then he’s the nineteen-year-old who gets arrested because he’s too careless and gets caught shoving fags into his jacket. He’s sitting in the station waiting for his tad to pick him up. His tad gets there and he can’t remember what happens after that, but he thinks it was bad because he doesn’t wake up for two days after that and he has a bottle of well-used antiseptic cream on his nightstand.
Next he’s the twenty-year-old who abandons that stupid little nickname and his stupid little life and moves to London, and he thinks this is where it all went wrong, because he was fucked-up before, but never this fucked-up.
He’s the twenty-year-old who takes up a job in a beat-down coffee shop because it’s the only place that would take him with his record. He thinks he had a good time there. He’s the twenty-one-year old who drops out of uni because he got an internship at some company he thinks is important enough that he should know, but he doesn’t, and it doesn’t bother him.
He takes it up because he needs to find his tad, and then suddenly he’s the twenty-two-year old junior archivist falling in love with the nice coworker who brings him coffees when she goes on break.
And then his tad dies, and he’s the twenty-three-year old John Doe found wandering in the middle of a back-alley street and admitted to St Thomas’ with symptoms of what the doctor calls a fugue state. He remembers Lisa telling him how vacant he was, how he walked out to her car with nothing but her hand on his arm to guide him and barely blinked once the whole time. He thinks she must have been scared. Maybe she was angry at him too.
And then the year passes, and suddenly he’s the twenty-four-year old who goes into work one day and comes out smelling of all kinds of copper and iron, and he thinks only some of it is from the blood and bits of innards he finds on his hands. He hears Lisa’s moans of pain from the bedroom and it makes his stomach twist itself into knots. He knows he should check on her but he can’t make himself do it. He spends the night sleepless with a heavy quilt over his head, eyes squeezed as tight as they’ll go, trying to ignore Lisa in the background.
And now he’s the twenty-four-and-a-half-year old flirting and flaunting his way into Torchwood Three, and he doesn’t remember how but it works and that’s all he needs to know. He doesn’t even know why he’s going back. He doesn’t think his love for Lisa is worth siccing a Cyberman onto the world (because yes, he read the UNIT reports after the incident), but clearly some part of him disagrees, and who is he to stop it?
Then he’s the twenty-five-year old who wakes up in the arms of the handsome man he flirted with, and he’s gasping for air and doesn’t know why. The man shushes him and Ifan hears the clanging of metal boots on the concrete and realizes it’s Lisa.
He’s twenty-five-and-a-half now, and he thinks he must also be five and fourteen and nineteen and twenty-three and everything in between, because he feels so young and so old at the same time.
He doesn’t know what’s happened or why. He doesn’t know where he lives anymore. He doesn’t know the name of the nice Asian lady who sometimes brings him coffee and smiles at him. He doesn’t know the name of the guy in the medical scrubs who curses at Ifan when he doesn’t clean up after his messes. Ifan thinks he resembles a weasel. He doesn’t know who the tall, pale lady with the curly hair is– he thinks her name is Suzie because he overheard the weasel guy call her name once but he can’t be sure– and he doesn’t know what happened to her. He doesn’t know the name of the girl with the bangs and the gap in her front teeth who seems to take her place.
He doesn’t know the name of the man whose arms he wakes up in. He doesn’t know what happened to Lisa. He remembers the sting of bleach on his hands, so he thinks he knows on some level what happened to her. But he can’t remember, so he can’t be sure.
He doesn’t know where Rhi is, or what happened to Mam after he moved out of the estates. Sometimes he forgets he’s not at home anymore. Sometimes he forgets Lisa isn’t there to bring him coffees on her break. Sometimes it seems like his life is bleeding into someone else’s.
Sometimes he thinks that something’s wrong with him, and maybe there is, but he can’t be sure, so he doesn’t say.
Ifan stays quiet, and that’s how it’s always going to be.