I read it twice. I like it. I like the way it makes me feel so righteous.
‘Well, that got that off your chest.’
‘I’m not a freak Pete. I’m serious. We can do this. We can kick these bastards.’
‘I dunno.’
‘What don’t you know?’
‘I’m just not sure I’m into all this stuff. I mean, what are you suggesting?’
‘I’d never hurt anyone.’
‘Look, I have to go.’
‘You’ll be back though right?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You have to Pete. I’ve got ideas. We can do things. Good things. But we’ve got to do them now, while people are still paying attention. People will keep hitting this site so long as it keeps changing. As soon as things stop happening, they stop coming, and then we’re gone forever. We never get another chance. Talk to you soon.’
‘Maybe.’
2 APRIL
So close now. The road, a concrete drive, a wall. All that separates us. The room that must be his looks onto this road. From the corner of a bus shelter, full of bored scratchings and the smell of piss, I can see through his window. Illuminated, like a screen. I watch him walk from bed to desk to door. Leaning to the right, his fingers on the keyboard. And staring for long enough, I can see him breathing. I am ready.
3 APRIL
I have been there.
I watched as the sky darkened, the curtains closed. Lights switched off. Another hour to be sure. Across the road under too-bright neon. Quick round trip. Surveillance. There’s no cover down the side path. Left across the lawn, back to the road and the fence’s shadow. No sound, lights all off. Past the clothesline, knelt scrabbling at the back door, sure that any minute someone would start to yell out, a light would come on.
Buried in the dirt of the second flowerpot, a key. Some people have no imagination. I was more desperate to get out of sight than anything. Breaking and entering. Trespassing. Close. His house twists in the wind and it sounds like footsteps. Wooden boards on the floor. Couldn’t remember if it was the middle or the edge that squeaks. It took forever, those 23 steps. Stomach and jaw tight. Tiny breaths. Waiting to be caught. The closest I’d ever been. Outside his door I almost changed my mind. But what’s there to go back to?
His door handle took so long, the deafening grate of metal on metal. Then I was in. Breathing in the same air he has breathed. Lit by streetlight leaking in round the edge of the curtains. Smaller, softer, but still Pete. I sat on his floor and watched him sleep. The way his head turned, half his hair flattened and the rest tufty. Creases from the pillow on his cheek. Eyelashes straight black lines. A sudden exhalation. Fingers twitch, curl again. His bare shoulder. The line of his legs beneath blankets. Like a guardian angel watching over him. That is what I will be now. Here with him.
I came to apologise. I owe him something. I never meant for it to happen like that. Never thought ahead. But it got me here. I sat until the streetlight clicked off. Stained grey morning. I walked home in rain. Different somehow.
School, the day before yesterday. English was third. That middle-of-the-day space, when all teachers can do is try to muffle the call of quad and canteen. Mr Williams was late. It didn’t help. Noise welled, spilled over the desks and onto the carpet. Factions vying for a piece of fame. Disdain and desire shimmer, more alike than they’ll ever admit.
When he arrived no one would settle. He wouldn’t give it up as a bad job. Fresh out of teachers’ college.
He’d picked a story for us. ‘The Fat Kid’. Real cheerful. Made us read a bit out each. Stumbling in monotones. Everyone’s attention elsewhere; on the sun shining sideways through the window, voices calling outside, the inviting blankness of a desk. It limped along until the back row boys. Jared, first on the left, balancing on a single chair leg with his beanie pulled so low he had to tilt his head back to see out.
They spend their time performing, those boys. To anyone who’ll give them the encouragement to take it one step further. One step too far. Always the most satisfying.
Jared got to read the description of the fat kid. Pudding face. Pageboy hair. Legs the same width all the way down. We were meant to be paying particular attention to the language devices employed. Jared didn’t even bother to look down at the photocopied page. He had an audience.
But Sir he said. Why do we have to read about what he looks like? Someone over there could just stand up and give us a twirl.
Heads turned to the place where the other girls sat. Those who don’t fit the unspoken criteria. To where Hannah sat, staring down at her refill, teeth fixed hard to her lower lip, so they were surrounded by a little white circle. Shame an ugly rash across the rest of her face. Just her lucky day. Her name pulled from the lottery. I couldn’t do anything. You can’t emerge from the silence. You have to protect yourself. And anyway, it was true.
Giggles, sly and furtive with widened eyes. Admiration. It caught quickly, spread around the room.
Jared!
What?
So innocent.
That was completely out of line. Apologise to Hannah immediately or go to the dean.
Rule number one: if it’s not explicit, don’t confirm it. He didn’t have to mention her name. He could have ignored it, left it to scab over. But no. Again the faces turned Hannah’s way. Hungry.
Why?
Because bullying will not be tolerated at this school. What you said was untrue and also very hurtful to a member of this class. Hannah is a very attractive young woman…
Rule number two: never call a student attractive.
Silence. Stunned silence. No one had expected that particular little gift. Someone whistled. There was clapping. Mr Williams turned red.
What I meant was…
Rule number three: don’t try and dig your way out. If it comes to that, it’s already too late.
Jared was eventually removed and apart from a small lecture on impolite personal comments and the effects of bullying, that was it.
As if they are terrified of admitting the truth. When something is said that is singularly unflattering and close to the bone, the shutters come down. We feel we have to twist around the truth, pretend that there are more ways than one of looking at the world. That beauty is on the inside, and it doesn’t matter what you look like because everyone will love you for who you are. Bollocks.
Hannah may be many desirable things but attractive is not one them. And that doesn’t matter. Or it shouldn’t.
Why can’t we say that? Resign ourselves to the reality that yeah, we don’t have a perfect hand but maybe we can bluff through on what we’ve got.
Mr Williams wasn’t able to say that. He wouldn’t even have thought about it that way because it was Wrong and things like that Should Not Be Mentioned.
We can’t just laugh and say who cares? Because people do.
4 APRIL
I am sick of living here. Sick of the fact that what you look like can set you up to glide through life or equip you with leaden shoes. Sick of people being so conscious of what they don’t have that they allow themselves to get hurt. Sick of pretending. Sick of feeling alone because of what you know. Sick of this house with its hard silence and its closed doors and the look my father gives me across the dinner table as he passes the wine. As if he were still worth looking up to. I am not going to fake it any longer. I am not going to watch people shutting their eyes. I used to try to shut my eyes. But then I saw Pete.
I came home to the computer. Updated the site, checked the messages. Someone was there. Called himself Pete. Could only be my Pete. I checked.
It was a sign. This was the moment I’d been waiting for. Waiting for him to come to me. The site was bait, if I’m honest. Guess I’m the hook. Counting on curiosity. Maybe I shouldn’t have found out about his mother’s name. Almost lost him there. Had to fight beneath a veneer of not really caring one way or the other. Totally untrue. But he couldn’t know that yet.
This was meant to
happen. Unstoppable. We are tied together through belief and difference and rhyming breaths in a midnight room. But he couldn’t know that yet. No amount of flattery would have brought him back then. A fucked in the head computer geek like he thought at first. I don’t think he meant it really. I’m not fucked in the head. I’m just getting to where I need to be. By the scenic route, yes, but I couldn’t tell him I was Sophie. Too real to be believable. This sort of thing doesn’t happen in real life. And the stupid thing with the grades. Trying to help turning out all wrong.
It was seductively easy, slipping into a new skin. No secrets. No past save for an on-screen history window. Rob. A sensible, solid name. A name to believe in. To bridge the gap between Sophie and Pete. Guilt and excitement took over, the lie became a person. Full, fleshed out in my head. Pete spoke to him directly, like he never would have to me. So close. Playing every card to keep him there. Letting out the line, letting him think he had a choice in the matter.
And he came back. Hope is no longer part of this. This is real. This is what it feels like to matter. To communicate. Not just talk, but actually speak.
I missed school. Attention is a drug. There’s no going back. Talking to him makes me think. About the things you read and see. How you accept it all completely until the light falls in a different way. It makes me feel clever. The words don’t have to try as hard. With Pete I can be me.
I went back, the next night, to his house. Dark clothes. A woollen hat in my pocket. Dressed for crime. Every step taking me further from who I was. I am a blank. No history, just a purpose. Even just for one night.
I have to keep going back. There is no other option. No substitute for that feeling. Watching from the outside. Part fascination, part sheer freak out. Partly that feeling you remember from hide and seek as a kid. Being the last to get caught.
Every time it gets easier. I know the mint in the flowerpot, which floorboards to avoid. The shush of his door on carpet. I belong there. It makes up for almost everything.
4
Two more days pass this way. I sleep in as long as I can, get up, shower, breakfast, flick through Sky. Tell myself not to go back on to the ’net. It’s just lame. Rob is lame. But then The Sadness creeps back in, and I dial up, plug into the site, enter the password. He is always there. Always waiting. Always ready to talk.
On the third day I wake early to the knowledge this can’t continue. Being and doing are two separate things. I’m not like a painting hanging on the wall, or a puddle of water resting at the bottom of a pothole. I have to do something.
I am in the kitchen before my mother, and because there are so many things I do not tell her, it pleases her to see me up.
‘You’re up early.’
‘Yeah.’
‘What are your plans?’ She’s making peace, and I don’t have the energy to unmake it.
‘Dunno. Might go into town or something. Check out some courses.’
These are the lies that bring families closer together. Dad emerges from the bathroom. Freshly shaven he looks older. His skin is pale, red at the neck. Sensitive, pensioner skin.
‘Morning. Got a job?’
A joke. The peacemaking variety.
‘Yeah, they’ve given me yours.’
‘Excellent. I’ll go back to bed then. You got the mortgage covered?’
‘Thought I’d sell up and buy a place by the sea.’
‘Even better.’ He smiles, loads the toaster, offers me coffee.
They leave together, wish me luck in town. Smiles all round. I’m bluffing, empty, not looking forward to the day at all. They don’t need to know. They piss me off most days, but I love them.
I leave the house. Not sure where I’m going, just knowing I can’t spend another day at home by myself. I walk down to the school. Habit. It’s just after half past eight, peak flow time. Deliberate. I sit myself up on the concrete wall at the gate, wipe the dirt off my shoes against a faded sign that welcomes nobody in particular to Education for the New Millennium. I wait for somebody I know to walk past. Think of Rob.
I know Rob’s a loser. But it’s like the song says. At the end of every hard-earned day, people find some reason to believe. And I don’t know which is sadder, believing in Rob or believing in an old song lyric, from an album my dad bought some time before I was born, but there you are. I’m sitting at the gate of the school that doesn’t want me, hoping to find someone to talk to. And no one comes.
I think about moving on when Ms Travers drives madly by, a speed bump the only thing between her and the staff briefing she’s already late for. And me. She sees me. Her brake lights flash an angry red and she rams her Japanese import into reverse. It isn’t necessary. I’m not hurting anybody. Teachers though, they’re not like you and me.
‘Good morning, Ms Travers,’ I smile. ‘You look like you could do with a coffee.’
I never liked Ms Travers. Some people say she’s alright, if you give her a chance. I figure these things should cut both ways.
‘What are you doing on school property?’
‘Hormones. I was missing you.’
Ms Travers does anger well. She’s not alone in this. Road rage, airline rage, shopping rage, good old fashioned pissed-out-of-your-skull rage, it’s all the rage these days. Teacher rage though is so common, so expected, it doesn’t even get its own name.
‘You are trespassing you know, sitting here.’
I smile back sweetly. The smile of I’m already expelled, so really what the fuck are you going to do about it, call the police?
‘I’ll call the police.’
‘No you won’t.’
She stares at me, hard and long, and I know what she’s thinking. She’s thinking you might believe you’re so big and clever, but you’re nothing. In ten years time you’ll be stuck in a dead-end-job, or worse you’ll be stuck outside one, banging your fists on a dead-end-job door, living in hope of it opening. You think you’re so original, opposing everything, making your big brave protest, but in the end you’ll find out what everybody else already knows. You’ll find out that you have to pull your head in, get in line, offer to help. If you don’t there’s no place for you. Not here. Not anywhere.
And I’m not stupid. My face stares back but my brain is flinching. There’s a chance she’s right; that people like her, who wear their compromises like a badge of honour and feed off their own dissatisfaction, fantastical machines of perpetual bitterness, are only doing what they have to do. That the fight is useless. That the pulsing of teenage life, bleeding out of the world and dribbling through the school gates, is doing what it has to do. What we all have to do. Of course that only feeds the Pissed Off more, and makes me ruder.
‘I’ll call your parents you know,’ she tells me. ‘How do you think they’ll react to hearing how rude you’ve been?’
‘They won’t give a shit, Ms Travers,’ I reply. ‘See, like most parents who have met you, they think you’re a total bitch.’
Her car lurches forward then, the window still down. I don’t feel satisfied, or clever the way she probably imagines. In fact I’m almost sick with it. Pissed Off is the fast food of the soul. It feels good but leaves you hungry, with a funny taste in your mouth.
I sit a while longer, watching the parade of learning go by. The incurably almost-late, rushing up the driveway, checking their watches as they run. The bewildered, never-been-late-before, not sure what to make of it all. The deliberately-late, so the world won’t see them dropped off by their parents, taking it on the chin, the unteenagerly kiss goodbye. The don’t-give-a-shit late, diverting down to the pines for a cigarette first. And then, nothing. Just me. The never-to-be-late-again. The expelled guy. And maybe it’s a head still clouded up with internet talk, or adrenalin from the fight I didn’t invite, or the drooping grey sky overhead, the smell of the freshly mown field below me; autumn, rugby trials, walking home in the dark. Whatever it is, I begin to cry. I’ve never cried at school before. Somehow, no matter what happened, I never cared al
l that much, and that kept The Sadness at bay. But now I miss it, every last apathetic drop. Yeah, sure it’s bullshit, but you try holding a rational argument with your own tears. I climb down off the fence and walk back around the perimeter of the school, through the trees so no one will see me.
I take out my phone and txt Jeremy. [email protected]? I wait 15 minutes for a reply. Nothing.
The train shakes and rattles me the whole way into town. I bounce around, lightweight and unimportant. I hang at the station for a while, sit and watch people come and go. I wonder what it is like inside their heads. They look happy enough, most of them. Students from the Hutt, coming in off a sleep-in for a late morning lecture. Mothers with small kids and shopping lists, racing the clock. Office workers keeping lucky hours. And leftovers like me, stopping and sitting and watching. Facing a day without a plan. I feel small. Too small for a story. And the longer I wait the smaller I get, shrinking inside my own head, a world away from the boy who stood on the counter at PBs and started … what? Started what?
I walk. Into the city, with its mysterious offices and welcoming cafes and desperate shop fronts. Movement helps. The blood carries The Sadness away from my brain, I feel my body sweating it out. I see a shop and I think, what’s it for? Show me a single item on a street like this, I challenge myself, that could change my life. A single thing here worth affording, worth sacrificing a life to have. I start stopping off at all the shops then, making a list inside my head. The Pissed Off is coming back, and this time I’m pleased to see it. It’s better than nothing.
Deep Fried: A Novel Page 5
