Being Small (12 page)

“If he’s that scared, isn’t it the, you know, the lucid times he should be scared of? I was him, I’d be looking to let
go.”

“He says we’re too young, we haven’t learned to value what we’ve got. Truth is, what he’s really scared of is dying. Being dead. When he’s switched on, he can watch it coming closer, and he dreads that; but when he’s off, then it’s like he
is
dead, except that he comes back on again. So it’s like he’s dying again and again, every sleep is another taste of death and it leaves him gasping, gagging every time. He says we’ll learn. I say we learned long ago, Small and me, I’ve been carrying a dead one around with me all my life, all Small’s afterlife, there’s nothing I don’t know; but he says he doesn’t have a brother to carry him around. So he depends on his friends, he says, to look after him in this life, it’s the only one he’s got with nothing after and he doesn’t want to leave it any sooner than he has to. So we do, we look after him, as long as he hangs in there; but fuck, he’s scared. And so’s Gerard, so are Kit and Peter, all of them, I think.”

“Everyone’s out of step except our Michael. Nurse Michael, the scourge of the bedpans.” But he reached a long arm out and found me, found my neck, slipped a finger under the chain and hooked it, twisted it, tightened it like a choker. I gathered we weren’t fighting any more. If it hadn’t been so hot we’d have been wrestling, trying to roll each other into the nettles. Lacking that chance to lose gracefully, stingingly – every separate swelling a token of forgiveness, boy-style – I lay still and let him strangle me a little, waiting for what would follow.

“Wanna get stoned, then?”

“Yeah, let’s.”

“What d’you fancy? I’ve got acid, I’ve got speed, I’ve got some coo-ool swimmy stuff from SingKong, it’s new and I don’t know what to call it...”

“Just a joint, man. We’ve got to get home yet, and you know what happened the last time we tried to bike high.”

“No, I don’t. Can’t remember a thing.” But he sat up with the makings in his hands and started rolling, stopping halfway only to strip his shirt off so that I could lie where I was and admire the tribal tattoo on his shoulder-blade, where his parents were least likely to discover it.

“That’s what I mean. I’m like Quin, I get scared by a sudden blank.” And if I was scared, how must it be for Small? Did I go away for him too, leave him stranded, or did he find himself trying to ride a whirlwind, tumbling in the dizzy chaos of a mind uprooted? I didn’t know, he wasn’t saying, but I’d made a lot of promises against his silence, not to let it happen again. Not until it did, at any rate. That sort of promise, recognising the inevitable but making an honest effort to hold it back for a while, at least long enough for the effort to register.

Adam grunted. There were getting to be two topics of conversation we had to avoid these days, Quin as well as Small; it didn’t leave me much to talk about.

So, treading valiantly on safe ground, “Where do you get all the pills and potions from, anyway? And where the hell is SingKong?”

“Don’t know much, do you? For a boy who knows everything, I mean. SingKong is a virtual city, an industrial megalopolis, all the shabby old tigers in a single brand-new shiny brand. For the ignorant among us, which is you, it just means buying stuff over the internet from anywhere in Asia. Singapore to Hong Kong, the whole nine yards, all the trading nations. That’s where my best deals come from.”

“What, all that spam that wants to sell us Viagra, you mean it’s for real?”

“Not all of it. No pill out there’s going to make your cock bigger. Sorry, and all that. But you can get prescription drugs, yeah. Easy. And it’s legal.”

“Can’t be.”

“True, it is. Here they’re prescription only, but you buy them mail order from overseas and they’re yours. Customs can’t touch you for it, nor can the police.”

“How do you pay for them, though?”

“Oh, if you want to pay, just set up an account. You’re over sixteen, that’s legal too, and credit’s cheap.”

“But...?”

“But scamming it’s more fun. Other people’s credit cards. I’ll show you. Why, what do you want?”

“Oh, nothing. I was just curious, is all. It’s really not my field, you’re the man. How’s that joint coming?”

“We have ignition. Lift-off will ensue. Pure Dutch skunk, this, you’re going to love it.”

“Oh, Christ. We’ll never get back.”

“Sure we will. There’s a bus, I checked. D’you think I’m stupid?”

“Will it take bikes?”

“Dunno, I didn’t check. We can find somewhere, leave the bikes.”

“No, we can’t. It isn’t mine, it’s Kit’s. I’m not leaving Kit’s bike twenty miles from home.”

“Just have to smoke slow, then, won’t we? And pedal easy. Or the other way around. We’ll be fine. Is there a shop here? If your mouth’s as dry as mine, we’re going to need more water. There must be a shop...”

～

I am becoming strange to my own mother, at last, after so many years of trying. It’s a case of the biter bit. She always meant me to be unusual; she couldn’t have borne a child of the ordinary, a pink and gurgling babe, a whining schoolboy already growing into his grey suit or his greasy overalls, a garage mechanic or an office clerk in embryo. She needed difference, someone to match or complement herself, someone to show off with. That I turned out twinned, twinned with the dead, that was just a bonus: two for the price of one, me and mini-me, ten per cent extra free. She would have made me odd in any case.

Now, though, I am too slippery for her to get a grip on what I am. Sometimes when I come in from the night shift, what is draggingly late for me is early for her as it is for the world around, the world she so reluctantly inhabits. She’ll be sitting in her upright chair at the little window table, where she may have been watching the sun rise or she may have been watching for me. She watches me now, as we exchange some kind of greeting; she’s not good first thing and I’m a teenager, I’ve been up all night, I’m either monosyllabic or my mouth is running like a river and neither one is particularly useful to her.

I’m too tired or just too young to go to bed directly. So I slump into the sofa, and we watch each other. I might perhaps ask a question about whatever brassbound job it is that she’s doing at the moment, but if I do it’s only to have something to toss into the empty space between us. I’m not interested, because neither is she. She’s always said that work is fuel, it powers the lifestyle, no more. Specifically, she does what work she does to keep us in the manner that we have made our own – and by ‘us’ she means Small and me, she says. She says that often, or variations on the theme. She’s not a martyr, not a sacrifice, but a driving force for sure; she sees herself as the motor, she says, while it’s us who steer the boat.

Well, maybe so. She built the boat, though, she trained the crew; she chose the river and drew the maps. Theologically speaking, God’s just the engineer and each of us gets to play captain. It’s still God’s world, God’s rules and ultimately God’s responsibility. Free will’s an illusion and choice is a three-card trick, you choose where you’re directed to choose, where you’re driven to it.

She likes that, my mother. She’s always been comfortable setting up my choices for me. And now somehow I’ve got ahead of her and she’s off-balance suddenly, unsure of me, confused. She doesn’t understand what I’m doing, with my time or with Small’s.

Like this:

“You look tired.”

“Uh-huh.” Well, I would, wouldn’t I? Sleep is a luxury, and I didn’t have time to indulge. Put it another way, I’d been up all night and most of the day before, the night before that. I wasn’t counting hours. I wasn’t counting anything or costing anything, just doing whatever was there to be done.

“You shouldn’t let them use you this way, it’s not good for you. You’re still growing, you need to spend your nights in bed. In your own bed,” because she still wasn’t really sure that I was being truthful here, that my nights really were spent beside a sickbed. Me and a houseful of men, without Small to watch over me: she worried that I might be sleeping with one of them, with a variety of them, with the whole transient population as it passed through.

It’s interesting how people, mothers particularly, will find entirely the wrong things to worry about.

“I’m not sure I am,” I said. “Still growing, I mean.” I stretched out and gazed at my feet, not far enough away. “Kit weighs and measures me at the gym and I haven’t grown in six months, upwards. I think I stuck at this.”

Outwards, inwards, every otherwards I was growing fine. They’d clubbed together to buy me a membership – though I thought Gerard had done most of the clubbing – and Kit and I did circuits together three times a week. I still ran, and sometimes I had company then too, though I’d settle just for Nigel. Adam and I cycled when we could, not often enough but absence kept us hungry. I’d never been so fit; my life had never been so populous.

“You could still put on a spurt. Be a late developer, why not? You’ve tried the other thing, walking early and talking first. Just wasn’t me you were talking to, you and Small always had your own language. So good for you, so much stimulation so young, I didn’t have to do a thing to help. You two did it all, you practically brought each other up. I often wondered, did you share your dreams? Back when he was alive, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t remember.”

“No, of course not; but he might. You might ask him sometime.”

I might. Forgetting’s not my thing either, just that babyhood’s an exception; my records don’t go back so far. Actually I don’t think anyone ever truly forgets, they just mislay the information. Forgetfulness isn’t a delete function as far as I can see, it’s only bad indexing and broken links.

But we’d talked about all of this before, and I thought something more was coming, and I was too tired to play games. Maybe this was how Quin felt inside: his fingers slack on the pieces, his hands sliding off the board. Except that he must feel this way every day, all the time, and always would for all the time that was left him.

I waited, and she produced her killer question. “How does your brother feel, about you spending so much time in that house, and being so tired otherwise? You only come home to sleep, how fair is that?” Except that the real question was
how do you think your brother feels
etc, and that made it not really a question at all. It was an accusation, and I really didn’t need to answer it. Just as well, as I didn’t have an answer.
I haven’t asked, and I don’t care
– not a possible thing to say, to my mother.

So I just shrugged and sat there, the very image of sullen adolescence; and after a while she stepped back, as she had to. She said, “All right, love. How is your friend, anyway?”

And I said, “Quin? He’s dying,” but I said it softly where it could have been vicious, it could have been another accusation flinging back. No point in that. It was just what I always said, it was always true; dying was a steady state with Quin, so question and answer were more or less meaningless. I might equally well have said, “He’s fine,” the way I always did about Small if anyone asked. Kit did ask sometimes, teasingly, except that I wouldn’t be teased.

And then even the shrugging and the muttering became too much for me, and I settled for just sitting with my eyes closed, not really listening any more when my mother spoke; and then I was dreaming and then rousing from a dream, rousing to an empty room and sunlight on the table to show where my mother had gone, where she had left one of her Moleskine notebooks behind.

And when I picked it up it opened as they do, to the page with the rubber band snapped around it; and she’d sketched me as I slept, and it was like a confession, she might as well have written it down in capitals, stood up at Mothers Anonymous and said it aloud,
My name is Alice Martin and I don’t understand my teenage son
.

Her sketching was usually neat and quick and precise, the pin through the butterfly. This was hesitant, anxious, troubled. She had my features, my body in proportion, the stretch and slump of me across the sofa, but I thought she’d missed me altogether, seen me and not known me. It might have been the portrait of a stranger, or she might not have known at all what she was looking at, the butterfly gazing at the caterpillar and wondering what it was, bloody hell, all she’d done was lay a bloody egg...

～

Singkong is also the Malay word for cassava. I found that in independent research. It’s amazing what you can find, if you only go looking.

You are what you eat, you are what you wear; you are what you read online, maybe. Maybe you are, at least. Not me, I’m not that gullible. I just take what I want, what I think I might find useful.

Sometimes I get it delivered.

～

You’re never alone with a Strand. You’re never alone with a good book. I’m never alone, full stop.

Quin, though: Quin can’t smoke any more, and he can’t read, though there’s always someone here to do the reading for him and there’s plenty of books. I don’t think that stops him being alone. There’s always someone here, sure, but he doesn’t always know it. He doesn’t always know us, now. Sometimes he gets scared, just by our voices. Sometimes he strains an eye open and squints at us, all dry and shrunken, and his hands pluck fitfully at the covers – floccillation, that’s called, if you ever need the word for it: or carphologia, that’s a true synonym; or crocydismus, that’s another – and his thin pinched mouth maybe shapes words at us and he might be saying
who are you?
or he might not, he might be mumbling syllables at random and it really doesn’t matter because what he means is clear enough. He’s frightened and alone in a roomful of strangers, he doesn’t know what’s happening, he has no control. Perhaps he remembers other days, when none of that was true. Perhaps not. Again, it doesn’t matter. He is here now and this is what he’s doing, and you could call that being alone.

Or you could wait a while, and there comes a time when he doesn’t know who he is himself, or that he has a body to inhabit. You can see that, look, I’ll show you, it’s like this: when his fingers twitch and there’s a shudder in his skin and his breath comes fast and shallow, and you wish he could be asleep and dreaming and you know there’s no chance of that, so you talk to him but that’s nothing, it’s meaningless, and his eyes will not be opening this hour because he’s forgotten that he has eyes, there is nothing but the little candle of his consciousness lost in the long darkness, a questing where there is nothing to be found or known, and the word for that is despair if ever you should need it, but the feeling and the foundation of it, the definition is entirely being alone.