Being Small (3 page)

V
CARBON DATING

…I
want my voice to break
, I want my heart to break. I want to be adopted. I want to learn that I was adopted. I want to go swimming, I want to go scrumping, I want to go slippery and wet and pinching apples. I want someone to pinch me. I want to sleep with someone older, someone a lot older, I want to be in all the tabloids. I want to be left alone. I want to know that I’m wanted...

I never wanted to be sixteen, neither of us did, but it happens. It does happen. We had our party on the move, halfway between houses, all packed up at one and barely started unpacking at the next. There seemed to be an ever-increasing heap of boxes, bags, plants in pots, bits of furniture and bicycles in bits. Every time we moved Mum borrowed a bigger van, and still we had to make more trips back and forth, up and down more stairs. We lived our lives in attics, in servants’ rooms and loft conversions, gazing out through dormer windows at rain on slant slate rooftops. Every year it became harder to fit in. The luggage of our lives constricted us, and I banged my head on rafters with a frequency that was close to pathological.

Actually, be fair. It was most of it my luggage. One hoarder, among the three of us; I never could bear to let anything go.

I didn’t want to let my brother go, but I could feel its happening, or the threat of it, building.

～

Sixteen was too big, was the trouble. All those accumulated years, years of accumulation, they were taking me out of his reach. He used to wind his little arms and legs around me, but I was filling out so much he could barely snatch a hold; long gone, his stranglehold.

I was growing into an imitation freedom, a first adolescent glimpse of big-sky thinking, and I really didn’t like it. Given my choice, I’d have gone back. Not far, not all the way: back to twelve, perhaps, back to a bad bike and a first friend and a fumbling after some kind of balance. Good days. I could have stayed that way for ever, swaying between brother and mother and Adam, long days out and long nights in and talking, talking all the time.

I wasn’t given my choice, of course. No one ever is. No one except Small, who got to stay exactly as he was and always had been, me in a frozen moment long ago. We might still be identical, but it was getting harder and harder to see us together, so who knew if they could tell us apart?

～

This latest move, this party-on-the-move wasn’t taking us anywhere new. There was nowhere new in the city, we’d moved so often and lived everywhere: only places to be rediscovered, histories to be reinstated,
this is where we came to fly your kite that Christmas and the bad wind took it away
and
that used to be the butcher, do you remember him, a foul-tempered man who hated kids and wouldn’t have you in the shop?
I thought I’d been a happy child, more or less, but it seemed like all the memories were bad, even if they were told these days with a smile. The good stuff leaches away, I guess, or it just doesn’t have anything to cling with. Fear and ugliness and disappointment, those are velcro.

So we were coming back to where we’d been ten years ago, a shady lane of pre-war semis that overlooked a park, to the east of the city and up. I felt like a nomad child on a long, long loop, something more than seasonal, following a call that only my mother heard. Except that I was sixteen and didn’t feel like any kind of child any more, and it wasn’t long now that I would have to go on following my mother. I could spare her this at least, some part of one more birthday.

Between one load and the next, then, we parked the hire-van on the verge of a little wood at the lane’s end, where I used to lose myself in beetle-hunts and playing hide-and-seek with Small. We sat in the empty back of the van with the doors wide and our legs dangling, and we drank apple-juice because cider would be irresponsible, she said, with more driving yet to do. I said I didn’t like cider anyway, and she said that wouldn’t have stopped her getting it in, and I said I knew that so I was glad she’d had some other reason not to do it. She asked if I was saying she was selfish, and I said yes, of course I was. All her life probably, all my life for sure, I said, had been shaped to her own desires. My life and Small’s death, I said, all this long time we’d spent just doing what pleased her. She asked what it was that we wanted instead, what we would have done differently; I said I couldn’t tell her, we didn’t know, we’d never had the chance to find out. She said that was a cop-out and I said no, we were the way she had made us, we’d been cut to fit and I just had to live with that, Small just had to deal with it, just for a while longer.

She went quiet at that, and I thought perhaps we were going to have an all-out row. It was still quite a recent discovery, that we could do that and go on living together as we did, half in each other’s pockets and half entirely independent, off and away. I had no temper, I didn’t fight, it was Small who was vicious and tantrum-prone; anger only made me silent, perhaps in reaction to him. Sometimes, when you’re twins, there’s an imperative to asymmetry, to unmatch, just to be sure that you each of you exist. With Small it was never such a problem, but even so I used to indulge the impulse consciously sometimes, and I think more often unaware.

My mother used to say I sulked, but that was a misunderstanding, so it had to be deliberate. For myself I just thought that I got clagged up, choked off with fury, nowhere to go but inward. That it was possible to fight without being angry had been a revelation, and remained a development that I think we were both watching with interest. Far from stirring up any anger inside me – and how could it be fresh in any case, after so long a time? Nothing but dregs and ashes at best, not worth the kindling – her utter self-absorption was a touchstone, recognition, safe home again. Still, I was quite willing to fight about it if she wanted to.

She only went quiet for a while, though, and then said, “Do you want your presents now?”

“Well, yeah, if you’ve got ’em. I’m seeing Adam later. I just thought they’d be all scrambled up in the boxes and you wouldn’t find ’em for weeks.” If she found them at all, if she’d bought them at all, if she’d given our birthday any thought at all except to fix it as a good day for a
move.

“Don’t be silly, sunbeam. Presents matter.” They mattered to her, that much I did know. She was always good at giving things away. And I was still half a kid, I could still be full-on child when I tried, they could matter very much to me also; but because I was still half a kid, I was trying very much to pretend that they did not. “I wouldn’t let them get mixed up with the move. They’re in the footwell, that carrier bag you were folding your legs around. I did tell you not to kick it.”

“Oh. Okay. Thanks.” That meant no big boxes: no skateboard, no laptop, nothing that I knew I really wanted. No matter. When did we ever get what we really wanted? Maybe they were all for Small. More likely they were just what she really wanted to give us. “I’ll fetch them, shall I?”

“No, you stay. I’ll go.” And she went, crawling back through the van’s body and stretching over the passenger seat, fumbling out a carrier-bag and dragging it into the light, puffing audibly as she settled again beside me.

“Wouldn’t it have been easier to walk round, open the door, lean in?”

“Yes, of course. When did I ever do anything the easy way? I had you, remember, the two of you. And chose to bring you up on my own and full-time, no man, no dumping either of you on grandparents or schools. I only like things difficult.”

I said that was probably just as well in the circumstances, but didn’t spell them out. I had my little history of troubles and a certainty of more to come, some she knew about and some she didn’t. No doubt the same was true of her, that there were secret struggles, private shames she hadn’t shared with me. I really didn’t want to know it all. Sometimes I wondered if she had an undeclared reason to keep us moving on, but never far. Perhaps she was afraid that something, someone might be gaining on us; perhaps she was half-hoping to be caught. I never asked, for fear she might tell me.

“I didn’t make such a bad job of you, either,” she said, eyeing me up and down. “All things considered. Open your presents. And your brother’s, his as well. Do you want them one by one, or all together?”

“I want to lay them out, see who gets what.”

“Child. Where did you get that competitive instinct? Not from me. Nor from your father, as far as I could ever tell. He was a man of great disinterest.”

“It’s not competition, it’s comparison – and I do it on Small’s behalf. There’s usually more for me.”

“Never mind the quantity, feel the wit.”

It was true that his presents tended to be better, either because she tried harder or else because she didn’t try so hard. It didn’t matter. I got to play with them all, as he did, share and share alike. Small and I, we really did have no secrets from each other and nothing private to ourselves; which only made it all the more important that our presents were separately wrapped and labelled, his and mine.

No big boxes, but the carrier bag was half the size of Santa’s sack, if not so fatly stuffed. I drew out all the contents and arranged them in two piles; as usual, mine was larger and his felt more expensive. I quickly got a pattern running: one from my pile, one from his, one from mine again and then a drink, a word with Mum, repeat. That way I could spread out the disproportion, not to be left with half a heap for me and no further interest for him.

There were books, of course, there were always books. Books were half the furniture of my life. Second-hand furniture, for the most part. There was Greek and astronomy for me, the poetry of Robert Lowell and Gerard Manley Hopkins, all of last year’s Whitbread winners – those bought new in paperback, to keep me au fait with contemporary tastes, she said – and a random selection of charity-shop crime. Those last would be deliberately hit-and-miss, all part of her campaign to teach me that it was good to pass things on, okay to throw them away. So far, the lesson wasn’t taking. Even the bad books I hung on to, along with all my childhood reading, all my elementary textbooks, everything.

For Small there was just the one book, as he’d never learned to read. I used to enjoy reading to him, but my mother found it hard going to persuade me now, though she did persist.

Just the one book, then, but a fat one. “
Le Comte de Monte-Cristo
?” I murmured, gazing at her, as neutral as I could manage.

“Your accent needs work,” she said crisply. “I can listen in sometimes, to correct you.”

“Every time, then, or I don’t start.”

“I can’t promise that, with shiftwork. You know I can’t.”

“That’s okay, I’ll read in shifts.”

She frowned at me, and sighed, and said, “Your poor brother. I’ll try, Michael. Open something else.”

Summer clothes for me, jeans and T-shirts in bright mother-colours, with ostentatious logos that weren’t quite right, weren’t at all what they were hoping to be mistaken for. For Small something better, a pocket electronic chess game. It looked twenty years old and maybe older, but the batteries were fresh and all the pieces were there. Who cared if the logo was missing and the plastic cover had a crack in it, the hinge was held together with gaffer tape and the edges were worn shiny? Not us.

“It’s got an ‘undefeated’ level,” my mother pointed out, like a challenge.

“So’ve I.”

“I know. That’s why Small needs to practise.”

It was true, my little brother never had beaten me yet. I made the ritual protest, “That’s just an excuse, to give him the best presents.” She said, “Of course it is, I don’t need telling that,” and I went on cheerfully unwrapping, with the odd gloating glance back at the ChessLord.

That was prime, the prince of presents, but the last of mine had its own happy talent. It was light, it lay in the palm of my hand, it gave a little metallic jingle as I tossed it palm to palm. We don’t play guessing-games, my mother and I, so I said, “It’s the key.”

“Open it and see,” she suggested, smiling with a hint of smug.

So I opened it, and of course it was the key to our new lodgings. I had a collection that had been growing for six or seven years now. My mother always had one cut for me, so I saw no need to give it to our landlord as we left. Each one came with its own key-ring and fob, as a treat and a distinguishing feature; I could remember which key belonged to which house, all the baker’s dozen of them with all their hoarded, sordid histories.

A couple of the fobs had my initials on, carved in wood or etched in steel. Others were pretty things, polished stone or silver plaitwork. One wasn’t a fob at all, it was a beaded leather string for wearing round my neck. That had given me the necklace habit; when I’d had to take it off, next time we moved, Adam replaced it with a thick gold chain that hung heavy on the nape of my neck, rippled over my collar-bones and pressed into the point of my throat when I lay back. There’d been trouble over that, my mother thought it was too expensive to accept. I might have told her that it had cost him nothing, that he’d stolen it for me, but I was fourteen and not actually stupid. I told her it had been a gift to him but he had enough already, too many to choose from; he was thinning out his dressing-room, I said, passing on what he didn’t need, she had to approve of that. She grunted, and let me keep it. I made him pinch another, made him wear it visibly to lend
verisimilitude.

I was wearing the chain now, I wore it always: in bed, in the shower, everywhere. I slipped my thumb beneath to pull it tight and slid a finger over the smooth suppleness of its links, as I grinned at the finger-sized Homer Simpson in my hand, with the key-ring hanging from his grasp.

“Throw it away,” my mother said.

“Do what?”

“Throw it away. Oh, no, you can’t do that, can you? Here...”

And she did, she just picked it up and tossed it, a casual five or six metres into the shadow and the undergrowth of the wood. I saw where it fell, but only dimly.

“Mum...!”

“Now whistle.”

“Do what?”