Martyn Pig (17 page)

I turned on the television, clicked through the channels, then turned it off again. The sound of it was irritating: everybody shouting, stupid music, adverts.
I feel like chicken tonight
...

I turned out the lights and sat there.

Unexplained sounds flickered in the background – a wooden creak from upstairs, a faint hum, something shifting somewhere – shadow noises. I took no notice. That kind of thing doesn't bother me. Ghosts and stuff, spooky business, there's nothing to it. It doesn't happen. Only in films and books. Not in real life.

Dad was dead, that was all. Gone. The thing lying in a sleeping bag at the bottom of a deep pool, that was just a wet sack of bones and meat. That was nothing to do with anything. An empty wrapper. Whatever it was that Dad was – his self, his being, his soul, call it what you like – had drifted away like a wisp of smoke the second his head hit the fireplace. Just drifted away. Where? Who knows? Who cares? Not me. Wherever it went, it wasn't here.

This house is empty.

Nine o'clock.

I watched the second hand tick slowly round the clock dial. Then I watched the minute hand, staring hard, trying unsuccessfully to catch its movement.

Five past nine.

At nine-thirty a car pulled up across the street. I jogged upstairs to my bedroom and peeked through a gap in the curtains, hoping to see Alex and her mum. But it wasn't them. It was a dark-coloured Escort. Two men sat in the front, faces dimly lit by the interior light. Both in their early twenties, one with a bush of frizzy red hair and a pockmarked face, the other dark and angular. I didn't recognise them. They were talking. Red opened some kind of wallet or bag and passed something to the dark one. Money? Red laughed, revealing a mouth full of strong white teeth. The other one cupped his hand to a lighter and lit a cigarette. Then they both got out of the car, slammed the doors and slouched off down the snow-packed road, nodding their heads and muttering to each other. Off to Don's, I thought. Don's a drug dealer. He lives in a shabby old terraced house just off the main road. The curtains are always drawn and a huge white dog barks like mad whenever you pass the front door. Don's all right, though. I see him sometimes walking his dog down by the river. He always smiles and nods at me, bug-eyes rolling all over the place. He's all right. His customers often park in the street outside our house. Less conspicuous than on the main road, I suppose.

I watched the car for a while to see if they came back, but they didn't. The street remained still and quiet.

I let the curtain drop and lay down on the bed.

When I was a little kid I used to think about dying. I'd lie in bed at night with my head beneath the covers trying to imagine the total absence of everything. No life, no darkness or light, nothing to see, nothing to feel, nothing to know, no time, no where or when, no nothing, for ever. It was so unimaginable it was terrifying. I'd lie there for hours staring long and hard into the dark, looking for the emptiness, but all I'd ever see was black black black stretching deep into space for a million miles, and I knew it wasn't enough. I knew that when I died there'd be no black and no million miles, there wouldn't even be nothing, there'd be less than nothing, and the thought of that would fill my eyes with tears.

The tears have dried up over the years, but every now and then they come back, and when they do I realise that nothing much has changed – I'm still that little kid lying in bed at night looking for the emptiness.

Fourteen years I've slept in this room. Slept, read, daydreamed, cried. It used to be crowded full of stuff – toys, games, boxes full of comics, clothes, pictures, posters – but I threw most of it out about a year ago. All my old stuff. I just got fed up with it. One Saturday afternoon I got a couple of those big green garden refuse sacks, the extra strong ones, and piled everything I didn't want any more into them. Then I lugged the sacks down to the council tip and chucked them in a skip.

Now the room's pretty well bare and empty, which is just the way I like it. Bed, wardrobe, mirror. Books lined up along the bookshelf on the wall. Table and chair. And that's about it. Plain white walls. No pictures, no posters, no ornaments. Nice and clean. Functional.

I closed my eyes. I put my hands to my face and pressed my fingers to my eyelids and watched patterns emerge in the pure sightless black. Dazzling checkerboards of dayglo red and electric blue. Bright white bars of light, flashes, sparkles, fluorescent stars. Strange geometries of colour – purple pyramids, earth-red squares and flat lilac fields. There were even things that were coloured with colours I'd never seen before. Nameless colours. It was too much. I took my hands from my eyes and stared blindly at the ceiling. After a minute or two the colours and patterns faded and my sight returned.

My eyes hurt.

I turned my thoughts to the next day. Dean was due at noon to collect his money. I wondered what he was thinking about now. Was he confident? Excited? Worried? Scared? Did he think he had it all worked out? Did he think it was going to be easy? Like taking candy from a baby?

Dean, Dean, Dean ... don't you know that babies bite?

The telephone rang.

I jumped off the bed, ran down the stairs and grabbed at the phone.

‘Hello!'

‘Martyn?'

‘Alex!'

‘Are you all right? You sound like you're out of breath.'

‘I was upstairs,' I said, trying to calm down. ‘Where've you been?'

‘Out with Mum. Sorry, I meant to tell you yesterday. I forgot.'

She wasn't out with her mum this morning. ‘Where d'you go?' I asked her.

‘Mary's. You know, her friend from the hospital, the one with the horses.'

Horses? ‘Oh, right.'

‘Anyway—'

‘Are you coming over?'

She didn't answer. I heard the sound of muffled voices in the background.

‘Alex?'

‘Sorry, Martyn. Mum was talking to me. What did you say?'

‘Are you coming over?' I repeated.

She hesitated, then spoke in a whisper. ‘I'd better not. Mum's a bit suspicious about the car. Best if I stay in.'

‘What?' I said. ‘What about the car?'

‘Nothing really, little things. I forgot to readjust the seat, the petrol was low.'

‘What did she say?'

‘She didn't
say
anything. She just mentioned it and gave me a funny look. Don't worry about it.'

‘Yeah, but—'

‘Don't
worry
,' she said. ‘It's nothing. I just think it'd be a good idea if I stayed in tonight, you know, just to be on the safe side.'

‘I suppose so ...'

‘It's late anyway.'

‘Is it?'

‘It's gone eleven.'

‘Oh.'

‘I'll come over first thing tomorrow.'

‘OK.'

‘All right?'

‘Yeah, OK.'

‘I'll see you then, then.'

‘First thing?'

‘First thing.'

‘OK.'

‘I'd better go, Martyn. I'll see you tomorrow.'

‘Bye.'

Click.

You wait all day for something, then when it finally comes you wish you hadn't bothered.

I gave up on Sunday and went to bed.

I was too tired to sleep. All I could do was lie there staring into the darkness, and it wasn't long before the emptiness began tingling at the back of my eyes. I suppose I could have stayed there and soaked it all up, or let it all out some more, but I just couldn't face it. So I got up and put the light on. I took
The Big Sleep
off the bookshelf and sat up reading until my eyes were so heavy I couldn't make out the words any more. For a while I just lay back half-dreaming – detectives in powder-blue suits, generals in wheelchairs, tropical orchids, men in Chinese coats and naked girls with long jade earrings – until at last my mind switched off and I fell asleep with my head resting on the open book.

S
ometimes I try to imagine what happens when I'm sleeping. You can never know, can you? You never see yourself asleep. You don't know what happens. You lose yourself. Every night, you lose yourself to an unknown world.

I imagine the structure of my body idling. Ticking over. The innards at rest. I'm automatic. Electric things that work me continue to work, crackling in the dead dark of my head. I move, crawling blindly on knotted sheets, twitching. I talk to myself about things I don't understand and I watch talking pictures, broken images, rummages of life's rubbish. Dreams. The sleeping
Me
. A self-cleansing organism, scraping out the useless muck of a mind. Washing up.

As I sleep, the room is quiet. Pipes inside the walls hum unheard, the clock barely ticks. The bathroom tap drips soft and slow, discolouring the green bath plastic.

My body emits a tiny fart.

And outside, the night sky is big and magnificent. Beneath its pure black dome, the trappings of the street shrink to nothing. Toys of cars, little squares of bricks, grey lines. Unseen blobs of skin and bone. Tiny things under the moon. A white moth fluttering in the night air. Something small slithering in the rustle of dead leaves under a bush. A stunted tree, bent and motionless in the glare of a streetlight.

And I just lie there sleeping.

Something must see it all.

I woke early and lay in bed for a while listening to the sounds of the morning. The rattle and hum of the milk float working its way down the street, clinking bottles, the milkman whistling. Small birds cursing at the snow. Someone, somewhere, was shouting at a dog.
Murphy! Murphy! Murphy! MURPHY!
The dog was called Murphy. Then, a little later, postman sounds: footsteps, letter boxes flapping, more whistling.

Why do they always whistle?

I tried it myself as I got out of bed and dressed. Whistling a nonsense tune, I pulled on jeans, T-shirt, shirt, jumper and two pairs of socks. It was icy cold. Nice and icy.

Whistling. I got it. Whistling – it makes you feel better. It takes your mind off what you're doing, but, at the same time, helps you concentrate. Like chewing gum.

I whistled into the bathroom and whistled as I whistled. Then I whistled downstairs, whistled through the post and whistled as I threw it all in the bin. I turned on the radio, retuned to Radio 2, and whistled along with the music while I boiled some eggs.

I seemed to have developed a craving for boiled eggs.

Through the kitchen window low grey skies threatened more snow. I dipped toast into my egg and spooned it into my mouth. Birds huddled together on the wall, fluffed up fat against the cold, their dark little bodies outlined starkly against the still-white streaks of hard-packed snow. A pigeon with only half a tail landed clumsily on the wall and the smaller birds fluttered into the air then settled again. The pigeon waddled along the wall looking lost. I wondered what had happened to its tail. A cat? Dog? Air rifle?

I killed a bird once. When I was a little kid. Shot it dead. I had this little air-pistol. I don't remember where I got it from. Maybe I swapped it for something? Anyway, it wasn't a very good one. Not very powerful. I'd been popping away at garden birds for weeks without ever hitting anything. Sparrows, starlings, blackbirds, they just sat there on the fence, or on the roofs of houses, watching nonchalantly as I took aim from my bedroom window, fired and missed. They were too far away. The pellets headed off in the right direction but ran out of steam halfway there and nose-dived into the ground. I had to get closer. Or make the birds come closer to me. So I made this stupid little bird table. Just a flat board nailed to a stick, really. I stuck it in the ground right below the bedroom window, piled sliced bread on top, then went back upstairs and waited, loaded gun in hand. After a minute or two, a sparrow landed. The flimsy bird table wobbled slightly then steadied. I took aim. The sparrow was nice and close. I could see his hard little beak, his small black eyes. I pulled the trigger, the pistol spat, and the sparrow fell. Just like that. I stared in disbelief. I'd killed it. Stopped its life. Shot it dead. Just pulled the trigger and shot it dead. I can still see it now, a small bundle of limp feathers, neck broken, a pearl of bright red blood on its beak. Limp and heartless.

It left me cold. Ashamed. Scared. Dirty and bad.

But at the same time I felt something else, too. Something not all bad. I don't know. A sense of power, maybe. Control. Strength. Something like that. Whatever it was, it was too confusing. I was too young to understand. I didn't want to understand. So I ran downstairs, out into the garden, checked to see that no one was watching, picked up the dead bird by the tip of a wing and threw it into the dustbin. Gone. Out of sight. It didn't happen. Forget it.

I didn't forget it.

The half-tailed pigeon was gone now, the wall outside the window was birdless. Next-door's cat was padding along the wall, high-stepping through the snow, a smug furry grin on its face. I don't like cats. Especially that one. Fat little sod. I banged on the window and it scarpered.