Being Small (3 page)
Authors: Chaz Brenchley
“He wasn’t a proper person, though. Er, was he...?”
“He’s my brother,” I said flatly. “Why not?” I wasn’t going to tell him about the little fat clean white grubby boy in the jar. My brother, the pickled twin. That kind of Small he might understand, where I still couldn’t get my head around it. I didn’t want anyone understanding my brother better than I did.
He shrugged, bony and awkward under the sun’s weight. “So will you be coming to my school, then?”
“I don’t go to school.”
“You don’t? Not ever?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“We never have. Mum teaches us at home.”
His eyes narrowed, and I thought he was going to ask
you and who?
If I said
me and Small
I knew he’d figure out that jar, only he’d see it perched on a schooldesk next to me and he’d be off on his bike in a moment. I held my breath, and he asked a different question altogether.
“What, are you some kind of genius, then?”
Relief was a hard, high giggle in my throat, like bubbles rising, bursting. “Me? I don’t think so. My mother says not. That’s why. She says that smart boys do okay wherever, but ordinary boys need special help, if they’re going to be special.”
He pulled a face, but it was fairly friendly. “What’s it like?”
“Dunno, I’ve never done the other thing. What’s school like?”
Another kind of face. “Holidays are better. Homework’s better, you can do that with the telly on. You’re lucky.”
I didn’t feel lucky, I never had. I was meaning to explain that, but just then my mother appeared, saw us both with our bikes and sent us off. “That’s good, Michael, that’s the best idea. You two go riding and keep yourselves out of my hair. What’s your friend’s name, Adam, is it? Which number do you live at, Adam? Well, you take my Michael away and show him around, where’s good for a bike and where’s not. If you don’t bring him back before teatime, you can have your tea with us...”
My mother is the original plague of locusts. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do but run away.
～
For a while there, everything made sense. And so, of course, inevitably, we came to this:
“Your mum’s mad.”
“This is news? Whoo, déjà vu. I know my mother’s mad. You know my mother’s mad. You knew it the day we met.”
“Yeah, but I thought mad in a good way. This is just crazy.”
“Welcome to my life.”
“I mean, you’ve got it made in that house, the old lady’s practically paying you to live there. Why would she ever make you move?”
“Because she hates to see me happy?”
We both fell silent for a moment, giving that thought the space it deserved. Then we both sat up, turning away from it, from each other. I can’t speak for Adam, but me, I thought maybe it would be fairer to say she didn’t recognise me happy, so she didn’t realise it might be a factor.
Not that it would have made a difference. Once she decided we were moving, off we went. Again.
“Is it because of me?” Adam asked, after a while.
No, no, don’t think that, why would it be? She’s always on at me to make friends. Just because I never did before, don’t think you’re someone special, someone to be run away from. It’s the six-month cycle, that’s all, her ticking clock. It starts running down the moment she has a key in the lock of the new front door.
I might have said that, some of that, all of it. It was all there to be said, and maybe he wanted to hear it. He’d heard it all before.
But I was bitter, truth was a sour thing in my mouth that day; I said, “I don’t know. Maybe it is. Maybe she wants us back the way we were, just the three of us, the story of my life. She says I can have a dog. She says that’s why we’re moving, she’s found a house where we can keep a dog.”
“You could have a dog where you are. The old lady wouldn’t mind.”
“The old lady wouldn’t notice. I know that, you know that. She knows that, and so does Small. It’s an excuse. Or it’s a bribe, maybe, a substitute for you. I can’t have a friend, but hey, I can have a dog. Yee-hah.”
“Tell you what else you can have,” he said suddenly, “you can have my old bike. Dad’s getting me a new one for my birthday.”
I looked at him. “What’s that, another kind of bribe? Make it easy from both sides?”
“No. What I mean is, I’ll have a bike, you’ll have a bike you can actually ride. The city’s not that big. We don’t have to lose touch. We don’t have to lose anything.”
That wasn’t true, we both knew it, and so did Small. Moving is always about loss. Whatever you’ve got that matters, you can’t take it with you when you go. But he was offering me a lifeline, a way to knot the string behind my mother’s blade. It might have been the first time I’d ever seen a way to work against her, and someone else had to show it to me. It might well have been the first time I ever understood the value of a friend not cut from my own body, not forced to shape himself within the cavities of my own thought. Someone who could think a different way from me, from us; someone who had resources we didn’t share, and was willing to share them with us. It was novel, it was frightening almost, it gave another axis to the world. There had been height and breadth already, not me and Small but us and our mother; now suddenly there was a third dimension, where Adam ran at right angles to us all. Of course I was frightened, how not? He was offering me a leg up, a hand to pull me out; he was showing me vistas and enchantment, and I had thought that Small was all I’d ever need, and he was showing me that I was wrong.
I want to love my brother, I want to love my life. I want a life that I can love. I want to see past my mother, I want to squeeze past my mother, I want to run ahead. I want to run with my friend, I want my brother at my side and running too. I want us all to run together in a world where we all want to do that. I want not to be weird. I want to roll down a hill in the sunshine, laughing, and lie all tangled at the bottom, all three of us, my friend and my brother and me, and not know whose leg that is, or who I’m lying on. And then I want to grow up...
IV
BEING SMALL
H
andsome is as handsome does
, and so is Small. What he does gets me into trouble, which is small of him, but that’s the thing with brothers. They are, they can be small; they’re certainly not heavy. I suppose he’s my little brother, any way you want to measure it: born my twin inside me, or else born after me, a couple of years delayed. Born out of me, if you reckon it that way. Younger than me, whichever way you want to reckon it. Two years old at best, a couple of minutes at worst, and the gap between us just keeps on stretching as I grow and move on and he never does. Death is the oil of time, it keeps things moving, rolling along, we’d all be static else; but oil also makes a great preservative.
Born of a virgin – me – and born to die: I could come over all theological, but it’s not very useful. God and Small, they’re both immanent, they’re both allusive, neither one stands up well on their own but they go very well together. The God of Small Things, Small Gods – the parallels are as easy and obvious as the word-games, but ask me what the difference is between them and that too is easy and obvious. Small exists.
You don’t believe me? Well, there’s the genius in the bottle, I told you about that, but that’s the least of him. He’s the genius in my life, evil or otherwise; he plays cat’s-cradle with my destiny between his chubby and foreshortened fingers. I’m the strong one, the survivor, but it doesn’t always feel that way.
Small is as Small does, which is handsome of him. It’s always good to know just where you stand. Me, I stand in his shadow, in his tiny shade, it’s a thing big brothers have to do. Being there is what matters, and of course I always am.
Small has always, always been the trouble in my life. When we were little, when we were alone together and something got broken or spilled, even where I took the blame it was his awkward hand that had made it happen. I made myself his whipping-boy, because I could; at the same time I made it clear to my mother, to be sure she understood, because there was no point in being a martyr if no one noticed. When she came into our room in the dark of the night and found us with the radio on, the World Service whispering news we had no other access to or opinions that were strangely in opposition to hers, it was always Small who had switched it on. Sometimes I wasn’t even listening, sometimes I was sleeping till she woke me. I used to tell her that, every time. She used to smile and say, “I know. He’s a bad boy, that Small. It’s a wonder that we still put up with him. And yet we do, don’t we? He must be worth something, then. Go back to sleep now, both of you, it’s a long day tomorrow and the nights are short.” That was her slogan, her soundbite, the shout-line that she lived by; we heard it time and time again, and it was nothing to do with the season or the sunrise. She was all signed up for the march of time, onward and upward, do-it-yourself improvement. Every day in every way we had to get better and better, and that required room to grow, the space and freedom of an eternal summer. Nights were short because she insisted on it.
We were boys; for us the night hours could be long. Sometimes, the best times, when she went back to her own room and her own bed, she’d forget to switch off the radio as she went, so we could go on listening. Batteries were the only issue. She rationed us, one new set a month. I could be angry with Small if he listened while I dozed. When we had silent nights, sometimes whole weeks of them if he’d drained too much power too soon, I could be so angry I wouldn’t speak to him for days. Being dead, he didn’t need much sleep; he must have been terribly bored, in the dark, without me. But I couldn’t always keep a hold on his perspective when I lay in the dark myself, wide awake and nothing to listen to.
Nothing except Small, whispering to me. Sometimes that was why I liked the radio. He wanted it to drown the silence, and I wanted it to drown out him. He was my brother and I loved him, but I could still be glad of another voice in my head. He could be really annoying when he tried.
No, I take that back. He never had to try. Not like my mother, ours, she really worked at it. With Small it was second nature. First nature, maybe, the only one he knew. He was my twin and he died, which was bad; he came out of me to do it, which was worse; and then he didn’t have the grace to go away. The dead should leave us alone, us the living. Sometimes I believe that with a fervour that even takes me by surprise.
Small, though, he doesn’t believe it at all. At the start, when he’d done with filling my belly, he filled my head and my imagination instead, all the time my mother left me and more besides, so that I had no space for friends or anyone. Then when I showed signs of finding a world, a life apart from him, he did his best to trash it. He made me weird, so that all those friends-in-embryo decided that they had no time for me.
And when I found one friend despite his best endeavours, one friend and then slowly, cautiously more than one, when I started reaching, stretching beyond the bottle, swimming outside the glass – well, that’s when he really got mean.
Short, pale and anything but handsome, even without his jar, Small makes a great pickled gooseberry.
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?”