Grow Up (6 page)

9

I wake up at 10:20 a.m. The sun is already awake and has taken up residence in my room. Everything is very bright and warm, like a greenhouse. I open the windows and smell the air, which always smells of soil because our neighbour is an old woman who uses her garden as an allotment. Sometimes she gives Mum tomatoes. Mum says that she admires our neighbour for being pro-active despite having lost her husband. She says that women can cope alone after they lose their husbands but men cannot cope after losing their wives. This happened to Mum's dad. When Gran died, his nails used to fill up with dirt and he would forget to shave or shower. Sometimes he would go without food for days so that he could save up enough money to visit this Vietnamese prostitute who reminded him of a girl from the war.

Mum is at work and Keith is sleeping because he has been working nights. I make tea and take a cigarette out onto the decking with the newspaper. The front page details the kidnap and murder of a young girl. The world has forgotten about Tabitha because the world moves on from everything. The world is a heartless murderer. It does not stop. Tabitha's parents have probably stopped. They will feel very guilty about everything for a long while to come. Every time Mrs Mowai reaches for her Rampant Rabbit, she will see her daughter's face and drown beneath waves of guilt and sadness.

There is a picture in the newspaper of what the girl looked like before she was murdered. The girl had big, oak eyes. I realise that Keith must have murdered her because there probably aren't many murderers in this town. I write her name on my arm. It will be useful later.

I go back upstairs and turn on the computer. The carpet feels reassuring between my toes. Abby was not at the memorial so her parents must have received my letter and grounded her. This means that it is time to send the email.

I click ‘send' and recline in my chair. Abby Hall is a Great Dane I feel disinclined to feed or exercise. I am experiencing ‘buyer's remorse'.

Although I did glimpse Abby itching her groin, I cannot be certain that she has pubic lice. I did not catch pubic lice from Abby and I did not shave my pubic hair or visit my GP. I felt guilty that Abby was experiencing so much misfortune and supposed that it might do her good to know that others were suffering.

Time for more tea. Tea contains theanine, which keeps you alert yet relaxed. I am reading this off the box of teabags.

The doorbell whistles its melancholy drone as the kettle boils. Because neither Mum nor Keith are available, the responsibility of answering doors and telephones falls to me. Sometimes, when swimming in ponds of loneliness, this duty becomes therapeutic.

‘Good morning. Have you accepted God into your life?'

I blink and stare at the man.

‘This sounds serious,' I say. ‘You had best come in.'

The man is in his early thirties. He has cropped blond hair, combed tight against the contours of his skull. Two Bondi blue eyes and a well-fitted suit mean that my internal monologue is encouraging a trusting attitude.

He agrees to a sugarless tea and we adopt positions on adjacent sofas.

‘Are you currently in a relationship with God?' the man asks.

He has a gentle, flutey voice. I feel like I can trust him. I hope he doesn't abuse my trust.

‘I suffer from anxiety disorders, which means that maintaining stable relationships is difficult.'

‘Jehovah loves you, however you are'.

He sips tea from my Harry Potter mug and passes over a copy of
Watchtower
.

Jehovah's Witnesses believe that, following a cataclysmic end-time battle, 144,000 people will ascend to Heaven. They have dubbed this spiritual bourgeoisie the ‘little flock'. Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe in Hell. These are the only facts about Jehovah's Witnesses that interest me.

Keith calls them ‘God-botherers'.

‘How many people do you believe will go to Heaven?' I say.

He looks at me, then into his grey tea, then back at me again.

‘A select few.'

‘But how many
exactly.
'

I am not being pedantic, I am probing.

‘A hundred and forty-four thousand,' he says.

I think he is ashamed. We observe each other.

‘There are six-point-seven billion people in the world,' I tell him. He nods. ‘That makes me feel sad. Would you like a cigarette?'

‘We do not use tobacco.'

Cults are so oppressive. Except for the Manson Family. They got to try lots of exciting things.

I tell him to wait one second and I pull out my phone. This is the calculation I do on my phone's calculator:

144,000 / 6,700,000,000 = 0.000021492537313432835

0.000021 x 100 = 0.0021

‘Zero-point-zero-zero-two-one per cent of people alive now will go to Heaven,' I say, resting my hand on his leg, then feeling uneasy and removing it.

‘I think I should leave,' he answers.

‘I understand.'

I watch his lovely blond skull recede into the distance. What a brave man. It must be difficult to cope with the knowledge that there is a paradise but he is almost certainly not going to it.

In two days' time I will forget about him, like everyone forgot about Tabitha Mowai, like everyone forgets about everything, eventually.

10

When we congregated outside school this morning, Abby Hall was not there. This made me feel relieved and successful.

A fortune teller in Brighton told me last year, ‘You will be successful in all of your endeavours.' Perhaps this is beginning to be realised. Perhaps I will achieve four As and write a Booker winner and have sex with Georgia Treely. Except these things will not happen because I lack motivation, talent and charm.

We are sat on the bus. It smells of old women and travel sickness. Tenaya is reading Sylvia Plath and remaining stubbornly quiet. The air is chocolate. Everyone's mouths are occupied either with sexual gossip or salt and vinegar crisps. We are stationary but my stomach has already started to fester.

The bus driver introduces himself as Ben, attempts to win our favour with humour (What bus crossed the ocean? Columbus) and starts the engine. The engine sound, combined with the bus's drunken sway, forms a mild poison that turns my insides into a throbbing corduroy ache.

We are going on a Psychology trip to Plymouth. It is a ‘fun' optional trip that is our little treat for all the hard work that we will do during exams. It will involve staying in a hostel and attending a conference where a number of murderers and rapists will address us. They will likely attempt to include some sort of interesting twist so as to surprise and entertain us. I think I will feel bored and cynical, because we are listening to bad people who have done bad things and I would rather listen to good people who have done good things, although that is of less use in Psychology. Or the type of Psychology we do at school, anyway. They should give you the A-level options, positive and negative Psychology, because our Psychology largely involves learning about serial killers and schizophrenics but I would rather learn about people who are in love and kids who have beaten cancer.

Some of the girls will maybe find the murderers attractive. Ana Korsakov once remarked that Jeffrey Dahmer was ‘really fit' and ‘mysterious'. He is an American man who killed seventeen people and attempted to turn them into sex zombies. Some of the girls may also find the rapists attractive because I know of at least three girls who fantasise about being raped. For example, when I had sex with Sarah Ivor she tried to make me to choke her.

We will also visit a crime museum on the second day.

Mrs Norton is reading the register in her furry whine. Even though she is not a Psychology teacher, she is coming because one of the Psychology teachers is attending his sister's civil partnership ceremony. The Psychology teacher that is not attending a gay wedding is called Mr Mandalay, and today he looks particularly anxious. Mr Mandalay enjoys folk music, rambling and evenings by the fire. I found this out one night when me and Tenaya were drunk and began to search our unmarried teachers on dating websites.

‘Kimberley Acheman?' Mrs Norton reads.

‘Yes.'

‘Sarah Asti?'

‘Yes.'

‘Imran Balki?'

‘Yes, sir.'

There is a small fountain of laughter. Mrs Norton is deaf.

‘James Falk?'

‘Yes.'

‘Abby Hall?' A pregnant pause. ‘Abby?'

The girls sat along the back row fall into gigglefits.

‘She's on maternity leave, miss.'

Mrs Norton mutters ‘Heathens!' then continues to read the register. I feel slightly guilty but the feeling is not overwhelming.

‘It worked?' Tenaya asks.

‘Apparently, yea.'

‘Does she know you did it?'

‘I extricated myself from the letter by sending her an email about it. She hasn't replied. Her parents have probably banned her from using the computer.'

‘She will find out.'

Tenaya leans back into her slim book with a sagacious turn of the head.

Abby Hall will definitely not find out. Even if she does, it won't matter. At present, I am only interested in short-term consequences. These are: an Abby-free trip and an Abby-free cottage. Room to carry out The Georgia Plan. I will deal with the long-term Abby-related consequences when they confront me. This kind of short-term thinking is called myopia. It is dangerous.

‘Guess what?' Ping says, his face wedged between the two seats in front of us.

‘What?' I ask.

In answer, he produces a surprisingly large press-to-seal sandwich bag of marijuana. I grin.

‘The trip will be good,' he tells me, turning back.

My indirectly drug-induced excitement wanes over the next two hours. Tenaya finishes her book and falls asleep on my shoulder. I roll a whole tin of cigarettes and one of the girls behind threatens to tell Mrs Norton until Ping sits up and says, ‘What's that, Susie? Excess baggage?' (Ping went down on Susie Smith at a party last year and later described her vagina as ‘a ham Vienetta'.) When Ping falls asleep, I use his phone to send ‘I'm hot for you' texts to his female cousins. I eat a Nutri-Grain cereal bar and also fall asleep out of boredom.

+

Urgh. Plymouth is a hideous concrete blitzkrieg. If it was a person, it would be the sort of person who eats the same thing every day and masturbates over pictures of steam trains. The buildings all seem to have been designed by a single manic-depressive town planner.

‘Everyone line up,' Mrs Norton says. ‘The university is only a short walk away.'

It is 11:47 a.m. Everything here is the colour of boredom and surrender. It reminds me of my mum and Keith because they are an extremely resigned couple. They do not attempt to elevate themselves or their offspring (Keith's daughters both work as lap dancers in Birmingham) and seem perfectly content living in the smallest houses of the least-green suburbs and watching grainy repeats of
Holby City
every night. They are running on a treadmill that is not getting them into shape. Luckily, this failure of my mother's has not been bestowed upon me and I will continue to attempt betterment right up until I can afford to drink squash undiluted. This is the mark of a made man.

When we step off the bus, Tenaya says ‘Wonderful' as she takes in the scenery. Mrs Norton beams. Ping then says ‘Jesus Christ', which obliterates the grin.

The only people I see while we walk have faces the colour of dry clay. They only have eyes for the ground. The pavement. Our double-file walk is a funeral march.

When we reach the university, a short, shaky man with kind eyes takes us up to a long room with a projector screen. He smiles a lot, not just at the girls. We sit on the green plastic chairs to await further instruction.

‘Shall we go now?' Ping says.

‘I sort of want to see the rapist,' I tell him.

‘Why?'

‘Deviant behaviour is interesting.'

‘You're weird, man.'

The rapist turns out to be a tall, thin man with skin like Blu-Tack and restless hands. When he speaks, the words bruise him. He makes me feel like a strong, well-rounded individual. I think this is part of the purpose of the trip.

‘H-h-hello, my name is John and I did a bad thing and I am going to speak to you today about it and you can learn from me and help people when you grow up.'

Tenaya is taking notes. She has written ‘Do not do a rape' in her exercise book.

‘C-can anyone guess what I did?'

He jerks his head around. Several girls from other schools put their hands up. Ping also raises his arm.

The rapist is apparently unaware that there were timetables left on each of our chairs.

‘Y-y-yes?' the rapist says to Ping.

‘Paedo.'

We all laugh. The boarding school girls throw disapproving stares. Mrs Norton's jaw clenches and her eyes jump forward. The rapist eyes the ground.

‘A-a-actually, no, I-I-I raped a – It was – '

‘Did you rape a child? If you raped a child, then you still count as a paedo,' Ping announces.

Mrs Norton grabs him by his hood and leads him out of the room. Everyone is laughing. John the Rapist has forced his thin lips into a plastic smile. I feel a sense of mild amusement.

‘That's sick!' someone shouts.

‘N-n-no, I didn't rape a child.'

A girl from the school seated to our left raises her hand. They are all wearing maroon blazers that have small trees emblazoned on their breast pockets. A surprisingly large percentage of them sport blonde pigtails that curl downwards like pouring bleach streams.

‘Y-y-yes?' he says to the blazered arm.

‘Why did you do it?' the girl says. ‘That's so horrible.'

‘Don't worry, nobody would bother with you,' Jonah shouts.

There is more laughter. Laughter like hidden rocks revealed only as they emerge to trip public-speaking rapists. Mrs Norton waves wildly for Jonah to leave, so me and Tenaya get up too and then we all stand around outside by the kerb, looking blank.

‘Where now?' Ping says.

‘I don't know. That guy was fucking creepy,' Jonah replies.

‘We didn't get to meet the murderer,' I say sadly. Even though I have already met Keith, I thought it might be useful research to see how he compares to other murderers. ‘I wanted to meet the murderer.'

Before the trip, Mr Mandalay gave us booklets entitled ‘Serial Killers: A Revision Guide'. In them, he describes a theory called ‘The Triad of Sociopathy', which suggests that common childhood characteristics of killers are: animal cruelty, an obsession with fire and persistent bedwetting after the age of five. I have tried various ways of eliciting details about Keith's attitudes toward these things:

Animal Cruelty

At a family reunion last year, I kicked Grandma's dog Missy and whispered to Keith ‘What a bag of shit, right, Keith?' He smiled at me. Because he enjoyed it. Because he is a murderer.

An Obsession With Fire

When Mum lights a fire in the living room, Keith gets angry and says she should have let him do it. He tries to hide his penchant for starting fires by claiming this is simply because ‘Women are shit at that stuff.'

Bedwetting

This was difficult. In the end, I had to swallow my pride in the name of research. It tasted of dirt and old sick. When Keith came downstairs one morning, I took him aside for a man-to-semi-man chat. He enjoys these. I confided in him that I had wet the bed and asked whether this was normal for a boy of my age. He assured me that it was fine. Because he persistently wet the bed during his adolescence. Because he is a murderer.

We all light cigarettes then walk to a bar across from the university. It is called Ezee. There are echoes of soft jazz and silence ringing through. Jonah orders the beers because he is the only person who is eighteen, and we all sit around sipping them.

‘What do you want to do tonight?' Ping says.

‘We should stay in, then we can go out on the second night.'

‘Why do you want to stay in, blood?' Jonah has taken to referring to me as ‘blood' because, conveniently, it is both a lower-class colloquialism for friend and also a nod towards my drunken sex act. ‘Abby isn't even here.'

‘Yea, why isn't she here?' Tenaya says, mocking, turning her head round to face me.

‘She takes Psychology?' Ping asks.

‘She sits by you,' I say.

‘Sorry, blood. I didn't notice because I was busy learning while you were having staring competitions with her pussy.'

Everyone laughs. Ping is not a learner. I am beginning to grow accustomed to these eruptions of laughter. I can't believe I had red sex with Abby Hall. I had red sex with Abby Hall. Abby Hall. Red sex.

When we have finished our expensive beers, Jonah goes to buy a crate of cheap beers and some vodka from one of the corner shops, then we wait outside the university. When she emerges, Mrs Norton looks surprisingly stable and well, considering her earlier ordeal. Her and Mr Mandalay lead us to where we will be staying: Hope House Hotel.

‘Good day,' Mrs Norton bids the receptionist. ‘We have a reservation for eighteen, it's under St Mary's.'

The receptionist punches some keyboard and rifles through some paper before delivering her conclusion.

‘I'm sorry, I can't find anything.'

‘But we do!'

‘I'm sorry, miss, I can't help you.'

Mrs Norton and the young receptionist eye each other for a while.

‘Peter, do something,' Mrs Norton says. Her hands are swelling.

‘I think we do,' Mr Mandalay whispers.

The receptionist's face fractures into a fat smile.

‘Only joking!' she says. Mrs Norton does not get on well with humour. ‘Welcome to Hope House Hotel!'

+

We are sat on the carpet in our eight-bed dormitory. Ana is lying with her head in Ping's denim lap and Jonah is sitting in his underwear, rolling cigarettes. He has very slim but defined calf muscles. That sounded gay.

A surprising fact about Jonah is that he is a devout Catholic, despite his promiscuity. Every time Jonah has sex, he bathes in cold water afterwards to ‘cleanse himself'. He says that this is the only reason he has not had outdoor sex. As a testament to his faith, Jonah let one of the boys from the year above tattoo the Virgin Mary onto his back using a tattoo machine he bought off eBay for a fiver. The boy only had black ink, so it's just an outline. Sometimes, when flirting, Jonah lets girls colour it in with felt-tip pens.

‘What's the plan?' Jonah says.

‘I don't want to go out,' I tell him.

‘Does anyone have cups?'

‘Yes, I bought fucking loads of cups.'

Jonah takes the bottle of vodka out of its plastic carrier bag. We swig from it. Ana declines. It is a match down the grit length of my throat.

‘I don't like vodka,' Ping says.

‘No one likes vodka, you dick,' Jonah says. ‘That's the point.'

We open beers and use them to soothe the burn. Ana's fingers are playing over the top of Ping's hand. Jonah plays music on his iPhone.

Tenaya tells me she wants to go out for cigarettes so we follow the concrete stairs down and outside the hostel's plywood doors. The convivial receptionist is also stood outside, drawing carefully on a Richmond. Ping says Richmonds are the worst kind of cigarettes. He says they are potent at making men impotent.