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Who wants to see a dead body?
How the body of a recently deceased man interrupted a youthful game of football, albeit temporarily.
In the movie Stand By Me and in the Stephen King novella The Body upon which it is based, four friends go in search of the body of a dead boy named Ray Brower. In typical Stephen King style, the titular body is almost incidental and appears only near the very end of the story. Instead, both the book and the movie are a memorable coming of age tale in which four 12-year old boys bond as they trek to find the last resting place of a boy who was hit by a train.
Weirdly, I also saw my first dead body when I was 12. Even more weirdly, the body in question had also been killed by a train. I too witnessed the dead body with several of my friends. But that is where the similarities end.
Five or six of us were playing football (soccer) on some waste ground close to my family home when another of our group walked over and said, matter of factly, “who wants to see a dead body?” It was a stupid question — We were 12-year old boys; of COURSE we wanted to see a dead body. And yet, as I recall it, we were in no real hurry to get to the place where the body lie. Maybe there was some latent fear lurking just beneath our pre-pubescent bravado.
