How to Make Boys Cry with Lavenders

By Herika L.M.

"How to Make Boys Cry with Lavenders" is a novel based on Curren Becker, a hard-hearted, self-determined young man from Queens with a complex for anything German. Curren who, amid the waves of trials to his career and few relationships, remains resilient, but, with a toll on his calloused, while seemingly flawless and urbane character.

As a successful businessman and innovative inventor, Curren had neither room nor benefit for vulnerability. Like his past, emotions are best buried into oblivion and best saved for lavenders, with which he has developed an unfounded dependence on, if not love. The story of Curren is set in 21st century Hamburg in Germany. Curren's odyssey for lavenders leads him to the arms of a young woman and his forgotten past in Simiane-la-Rotonde.

The story unravels an interesting perspective on the fragile side of a seemingly cold character Curren, and answers the questions of what makes a man, and what unmakes one. The novel flows to build mood and cohesion through glances of both Becker's past and future to gain an understanding of how his character developed at the present time. The story is not about a man, but about the reconciliation of a man with himself. Lavenders, which were the sole recipients of his affections, will piece together Curren Becker's life leading to an interesting turn of events.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Jan 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781499089790

Herika L.M.

Herika L.M., born in a small town in Iloilo City, Philippines in 1984, is a fresh-faced author gifted with invaluable insight on the psyche and the soul through her social and psychological awareness, made available to her through a life of challenges. A nomad and traveller, her first published novel, How to Make Boys Cry with Lavenders shares her passion for seeing new places and studying people during her travels. “Despite cultural differences, the heart is core and the same everywhere else in the world,” Herika L.M. believes. She travels to write, and writes to travel. She broke socio-economic barriers by equipping herself at the University of the Philippines, finishing with a Bachelor’s degree in English Studies. From writing comical pieces for consumption in class at a tender age, her essays written in college won her invitations to participate in international conferences in Europe. She is now the Founder of a web solutions company. Herika L.M. splits her time living in both Manila and Hamburg.

Book preview

C hapter 1

‘For such is the nature of things, when our souls are pristine and the timing right, life will push us into directions we have not and ought to have found ourselves.’

It was a saying Curren Becker scarcely believed in. His coffee was black because ‘I chose it,’ he would say. He’d rather acknowledge that everything happened out of one’s own making. He adhered to this so strongly; he just maybe, could be, the proponent of self-determinism.

The sun had just begun to peek out, and Curren was completely up and about, getting ready for the long-niner job. His blank mien was as game ready as he could appear.

Hoooot, the espresso machine loudly alerted Curren of a warm, steaming cup of robust coffee.

Curren took a tiny white teacup. He poured and sipped with shallow contemplation, as he had so done for the past few years of his dreary, middle-aged life, deprived of companionship, love, and laughter. He looked smug and content, however, that this is how it would always be. No aspiring for anything more. Survival . . . is key and is all there is.

Curren had lived quite a mundane life as an urbane man in his thirties, where you would expect experience and essence to be abundant. But he was a ‘man’ in the full essence of the word; he fed off instant gratification. Alas, one could only imagine how easily catalysed he was by the stimuli in his surroundings. Like a mad, catapulting ball, he would respond to every swing and hit, even the slightest touch of the paddle’s edge. Prick him, he bled and yelped; upset him, he spiralled out of control.

He simply possessed no hold over his own emotions, much like the last time he parted with a woman – his anger, cussing, and tears all happening simultaneously. He felt no doubt. He felt too much, perhaps. This was why he had opted, for his own sanity, to be alone for so long. Anyone who has felt love, like the numerous instances he had, must know it is the best feeling in the world and, paradoxically yet so equally, the most overbearing and, potentially, the most painful.

A great love is like the foundation of a megastructure; it takes significant time and effort to build. When accomplished and felt, it could give a person a sense of security and certainty. It is the threshold through which a human being crosses to proceed to other manifestations of the emotion – the sharing of plans and dreams, investing of an incredibly long time to that one special match, and the caring and nurturing of each other that could lead to a life and a future together.

Love is unnecessarily intense and yet so important. Love gives life to the most lifeless. It creates life through consummation. In its death, it can remind one who has felt it that it has been here as the strongest and sharpest pain of all pains there is. The death of love resonates as a stabbing pain, only without the messy bleeding, although the person it has left becomes a wreck.

Days, weeks, months… the pain lasts, but no one knows for sure how long. No such gauge exists to measure so that we would know how long we’ll suffer its death – be it in our hearts or in our significant others’.

Curren may not perceive the world in its deeper sense or its bigger picture. Money and success fuelled his survival. Still, people close to Curren would like to hope, to give him the benefit of the doubt, that he too would push on forwards, far away from the bête noire that he had been for so long, that he would feel again, that all this is just part of his journey through life. No matter how long it should take him, in seconds or aeons, he would get there.

Curren sipped his last drop of the coffee that turned lukewarm in his hand, all the while standing at the marble kitchen counter where he had been since his day started. He laid out a slice of crusty, day-old bread and slapped on a generous amount of butter and child-like spoonful of Nutella on top. He ate with haste after peering at his Eco-Drive watch.

As he tipped the cup to the ceiling for the last golden drop, his pinkie flicked out of natural tendency, the sun that veiled over the big city rose ever gently, its first ray-painted radiance on the right side of his face, where, suddenly, his eye revealed a soft, sky-blue tinge, much more humane than his steely grey eyes, as if at that moment, he had become a normal person, like the rest of us.

C hapter 2

No sooner, the time was thirteen seconds short, and the wall clock at the twenty-sixth floor of the Rosenberg Tower would ring five times. Ablaze with excitement at the prospect of home and abuzz with stacked papers thudding against desks, the employees would make sure to leave smack before the clock struck its fifth, in anticipation of the delighted giggles or disturbed growls of their brood, who awaited on them as much. Such was the scenario at Curren’s little castle… one that he built with his calloused hands from the ground up.

And yet, the forsaken man lingered leisurely in this sizeable four glass walls of a fort, devoid of hurry and nostalgia. He had too little to anticipate, except for, maybe, a warm, decent dinner made of the finest produce at an eight Michelin star restaurant in Hamburg, spun from the magical hands of a top-class chef from Australia, one of the world’s best supposedly. Even then, with a lack of zest, his taste buds could appreciate the expensive flavours but could no longer experience content from the filet mignon so tender that his silver knife rendered hardly any resistance.

Here was the life of a self-made man… a self-made fool, as his family, friends, and colleagues saw and said of Curren Becker. On his black, glossy, custom-made Swiss fountain pen, Founder/CEO – Green Spades GmbH was embossed. He pushed himself from effort to exhaustion all day, and all day, he broke and mended his dreams. Perhaps, this was how he had overcome the challenges of his brainchild – an ecologically sound, innovations manufacturing – for eight years. However, ‘one need not be an emotionless prick to be successful—’, Finnlay, one of his ‘esteemed’ employees spoke of him.

To be certain, whatever Curren put his heart into, if he had one at all, turned into gold. People would seriously doubt and debate this in their minds, but not those who knew him well. Before he carefully put his treasured pen, one that he consistently held in his left hand as a reminder of his empire – the product of his hard labour – inside a special compartment in his equally jet-black, Italian leather attaché case, he had already decided on the future of a man named Ronson Jones.

‘Goodbye, Ronson,’ he muttered under his breath, as cold and simple as that first day of winter in the port city of Hamburg.

He, too, had decided that he would take on his overburdened shoulder the responsibilities Jones would leave until he could find a fitting individual to fill in Jones’s shoes.

‘Better than the last tool,’ he said, referring to Jones without remorse or indebtedness, as he stared outside the office window at the gigantic, scarlet-red H&M handbag print advertisement across it,

‘—and German preferably,’ he added.

A true fearless leader, Curren was neither anxious nor threatened of the additional time and effort a hasty decision would cost him when he banged the gavel down on the future of the vice-president of Green Spades. The odd and sad thing was, he anticipated rash and radical changes in and for every aspect of his being, and without a twitch or flicker in his eyes, he would put his foot down and deliver with the unassailed dedication and focus of a falcon swooping down at its prey.

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You see, at the tender and impressionable age of ten, Curren had forced himself to believe that Germany was ‘the land of the best, unpretentious minds’, from Beethoven and Kant to Einstein and Marx. After sitting in front of a red, boxy fourteen-inch tube for ninety minutes to a special on then The World’s Cleanest Country in the World, Germany, to be sure, he had been resolved with a passion that as he could not be German anymore by choice or by birth, he would attain some degree of association with the great country. He had held on to that dream ever since, that no matter how incredibly impossible, he would set foot in the heart of Europe and become as great as her many heroes, if not greater.

Yet oftentimes, dreams remained dreams for children who grew up in a home for those left behind (by choice or situation). Their ultimate hopes would only reach to being adopted into a family – any kind of family, as long as it qualified as one. The soul of an orphan is never without deep wounds. Being left behind would always cut and mar the heart. The unfortunate truth of abandonment would instil in those left behind a seed of rejection that eventually and uncontrollably buds into fear.

The young man of Hamburg had been different this way. Even as a child, he knew what he wanted, and he knew to fight for what he wanted.

‘I can barely remember anything until I was ten…’ he would talk of his childhood, pretending at struggling to reminisce when asked.

And he did not lie. Such was the truth – he simply did not remember anymore. He had forced himself to forget what his favourite food as a young boy from Queens was and what first language he spoke. What was also true was that Curren used to be a spirited young man, always hopeful, and ever-loving to his fellows and caretakers.

C hapter 3

On a toasty, sunny day, the clickety-clack of women’s shoes of eight young, single, and married sorts bounced off the walls and halls of White Cross. Curren sat inside the learning room with twenty-five other children or thereabouts (the numbers do change). On an ordinary school day, little Curren would be impossible to distract. However, this day, with his worn-out, blue-and-white striped shirt, black denim shorts, and clean, while faded-out, sneakers which he had woken up before the crack of dawn to clean, he had been no different. No expectations, as yesterday, for today or tomorrow.

Soon, led by Ms Knoll, the feminine whisper and chatter had echoed all over White Cross, in its white walls, high ceilings, and crimson floors. At that moment, with a handful of hair clipped behind her left ear, as she had done every day, the tiny and frail Ms Knoll briefed the guests about the institution, talked of the orphanage’s architecture as one of her father’s masterpieces, as ‘the first building of inclines in the world’.

Meanwhile, there was nothing minuscule about Gertrude’s boasting of her father, Albertus Knoll, American National Artist for Architecture.

‘No stairs, as you can see!’ her thin lips had spoken, as she beamed with shameless pride.

The normally focused Curren had been instantly interrupted.

As if someone had whispered into his ear, Curren got up from the cold, reddish-tiled floors which he had been sitting on the last hour or so and led himself straight outside his classroom, walking without pause and hesitation, to that stunning and slender lady in a black blazer, black tailored shorts, magenta camisole top, and black-and-white T-strapped, heeled sandals.

Perchance, he was drawn to her straight, long, dark-brown hair, her silky legs, or her gentle angel-like demeanour. Whatever it was, the boy had hugged the lady’s thighs with magnanimous, unconditional love. Surely, the lady had been taken by surprise, but she had not denied what little Curren desired at that time and gave this feeble sheep the warmth of her arms.

Only a few minutes earlier, at the sight of an open area where more than twenty babies were laid out, crawling and rolling about and around, the lady had said, under a struggle of tears, disgust, and disbelief, ‘How can their mothers live without them? Some people have no right to have children!’ And here she was, in want of what other women had in abundance and disposed of in cruelty.

It was no wonder why or how, as Curren hugged this lovely young thing, tears she had held a fort against flowed out her eyes within tenths of a second. Lovingly, she looked down at the boy wrapped around her legs, with his face squeezed tightly against her smooth, hairless thighs. As she had smiled with understanding and compassion, little Curren had beamed back at her.

‘You’re a beautiful crier…’ the boy had said with pure innocence, ‘—and you smell really nice, miss,’ he had said, slightly pulling away but not letting go.

Of the very few and little truths in Curren’s life, what he had just now told the miss, to him, held the most truth. The normal lot of people he knew would cry ‘like a sponge,’ as he would put with disgust, ‘where the face would look like it was wrung and wrinkly and tears streaming everywhere.’ Erin, as he would later on find out was this miss’s name, had cried with a smile, without interruption to the sweetness of her Irish features.

‘—and your tears go down in straight lines, too,’ he had continued, drawing parallel lines down his cheeks with his forefingers. He had replied, only briefly pausing in thought when asked what he meant, as if the direction of one’s tears were a normal observation people made.

Young Curren had always been keen on things that appealed to his senses. He had been perceptive especially to scents he associated with events. Scents had helped him remember one or the other. That grapefruit-raspberry lotion – only his second-most favourite scent in the world – would be one that he would love, hate, and, surely, never forget!

Erin had responded with a soft chuckle as she had gently wiped her tears with the top side of her right forefinger, careful not to smudge her subtly painted face. The swirl of warm air that had escaped that young woman’s nostrils had been the only warmth Curren had ever received from another human being for as long as he could recall in his short life of eight years. He had thought, This is that love at first sight that everybody talks about. On that very spot, she would decide on Curren’s future and change the boy’s life forever. The young lady would celebrate her upcoming twenty-sixth birthday with her aching dream of a child fulfilled, and Curren would be the happiest boy in and from White Cross. Alas! It was a match made in heaven.

Well, it would have been a match made in heaven, had it happened, Curren had thought as well. But inasmuch as Erin had loved, within minutes, the little boy who adoringly and tightly clung to her like a koala, she would be incapable of decision that day, like the rest of the group, and, hence, leave the sprawling, white structure barren and childless, still.

Erin had let out an arduous wisp of breath as she slowly sat down on her ankles to see Curren eye to eye. Gently running her hands along Curren’s prickly, shaven