Lolito

by Ben Brooks

  *

  Macy fits herself in behind me. She shuffles her head and goes still. I’m the little spoon. Sometimes I pretend that the entire world is the big spoon, curling around me like a castle wall, endless and impenetrable.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says.

  I open my eyes. I can see drawings of crooked red flowers and cats on the wallpaper. The curtains are open and the black sky has peeled away, leaving behind a blue the colour of flames on a gas hob. Macy’s in her underwear. I can feel the damp warmth of her leg skin on mine. ‘Are you okay?’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry for hiding. You made me panic.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No.’

  Nothing happens.

  Macy rearranges herself. I can feel her breath tides going in and out of the hairs on my neck. She folds an arm over my chest. Her toes tickle the soles of my feet.

  ‘Etgar,’ she says. ‘Can I say something?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re young.’

  I try to laugh and shake my head. She can’t see it and it isn’t convincing. I stop trying to laugh. I say, ‘Okay, yes, I am.’ I awkwardly rotate my hand and lightly grab a fistful of her dress.

  ‘How young?’ She doesn’t sound angry. She sounds curious and far away.

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘Eighteen.’ Her finger traces my bellybutton. She forages in it. I think, I hope I didn’t leave anything in there. ‘Eighteen is young.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I lied too.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I don’t have a business. I stay at home all day. I play Internet poker and watch porn. I don’t know why I came here. It’s partly you and partly home. Is this making sense to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have a husband. I didn’t tell him I was coming. I just left.’ I roll over onto Macy. She grips my shoulder blades like stressballs. We are the only things left in the world. A zombie apocalypse has engulfed the planet, leaving only us intact. I feel like Macy has something else to say but she isn’t going to say it. I don’t mind.

  ‘I feel calm,’ I say. ‘I don’t feel anxious.’

  ‘Good.’

  The reason I’m calm is because of being honest, I think. I’m not having to hold and remember made-up things like being a mortgage broker and living in London. If you lie to people then you expect people to lie to you back. Hattie. That is why I pretended to be Marie. I shouldn’t have pretended to be Marie. If I hadn’t pretended to be Marie then me and Alice would be lying in her bed watching the porn musical of Alice in Wonderland and drinking rum screwdrivers. Being dishonest makes me anxious, but I mostly want other people to not tell me the truth.

  I lie on top of Macy and start to kiss her. My hands are flat on her temples. She cups my balls. I remember her saying about massive balls and I try not to laugh. I navigate her pants and slide a finger into her vag. It’s extremely wet. It feels like uncooked bacon. I think, actual human children have fought their way out of this cave. I think, stop thinking that. Country house. Igloo. Puerto Rican driftwood.

  30

  Me and Alice were sitting under a web of blankets in her living room. It was the month we stopped leaving the house, except to visit her mum in hospital, and buy vodka, and spend whole days getting drunk in the cinema, moving from screen to screen without paying. I rolled over and said it was a bad blanket fort, that it was cramped and the ceilings were too low. Alice said it wasn’t a blanket fort at all because we aren’t American. She said it was a blanket castle.

  ‘I’m bored,’ she said. Her head was in my lap. Keira Knightley was on the television, pushing out her jaw and kicking a football.

  ‘Do you want to do sex?’ I said. We had been doing sex an average of four times a day. It filled up the time and Alice said it stopped her thinking too much. School had sent folders of worksheets for us to do, but we made them into paper planes then knocked them out of the air with deodorant flamethrowers.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Is there anything you want to try that we haven’t?’

  ‘Like what?’ I pictured Alice choking me, hitting me and flailing me. I pictured Mum visiting me in hospital, tutting and saying ‘kids these days’ to a patronising nurse who quickly leaves the room to dial Social Services. ‘No hitting.’

  ‘I didn’t mean hitting.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I watched a golden shower thing the other day. The guy had like goggles on and she did it on his face.’

  I laughed. ‘I don’t know. Is that funny or disgusting?’

  ‘Sexy.’

  ‘No. I don’t know. There were like things I didn’t like before you. So maybe.’

  She lifted her head off my lap.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like tits. Also eating out.’

  ‘Don’t call it that.’

  ‘What do I call it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Eating clams.’

  ‘No eating.’

  ‘Prawn cocktail.’

  ‘I’m breaking up with you,’ she said. ‘Unless we try it.’ I was drunk. I thought it might be fun, or not boring, or another, unidentified but positive feeling. I said yes. We had shots and went to the upstairs bathroom. I took off my clothes and lay in the bath. At least it would be washed away. I wondered briefly if you could die from urine. If it could sneak into my organs and rot them away.

  ‘Do you remember when we were in Chris McDowell’s bath?’

  ‘You tried to fist me,’ she said. ‘Be still. I really need to go. There’s going to be a lot.’

  ‘Can you die from urine?’

  She pulled down her pants, threw them onto the toilet seat and lifted one leg up and over me. ‘Where should I make it go?’

  ‘This isn’t –’ She started pissing. It shot out of her in a straight, solid stream that looked like an umbilical cord connecting us. Alice as the mum. The piss was warm. It made me itchy. I didn’t feel aroused.

  She slipped. Her leg came off the lip of the bath and she fell to one side and piss went in my mouth. I shouted. I grabbed her thighs and pushed her back. ‘Mouth,’ I shouted.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. She was grinning. She squatted and kept going. I wrestled her out of the bath, onto the floor, and pinned her hands to the tiles. I sat on her stomach and kissed her as hard as I could.

  31

  It’s ten-fifteen. My head is empty then it’s not. Checkout’s at eleven. Macy’s asleep. I tried to watch her sleeping because that’s what romantic men do in films but it was ultra-boring and I stopped. The sun’s wide awake and the sky’s doing a today it will be warm kind of blue. The window’s slightly foggy. I turn on the TV. Macy makes a little sound. She doesn’t wake up.

  The bald man’s inside the television. He’s laughing with his co-presenter because she said ‘breast’ instead of ‘best’. He looks at me and starts to talk. She takes a sip of coffee, starts to giggle and sprays a fine brown mist.

  ‘Okay,’ the bald man says. ‘A sports team played another sports team. Someone is still missing. Someone, somewhere, told a lie, about something boring and inconsequential. A person hit another person.’ I get up and take an orange juice out of the minibar. I sit on the edge of the bed and open it with my face close to the screen. The bald man touches his earlobe. ‘In other news,’ he says, ‘Etgar Allison has consummated his relationship with Macy Anderson, following a turbulent evening in which he befriended a homosexual couple and took three sips from a bottle of champagne before misguidedly attempting to emulate a Formula One victory.’ I smile. I don’t remember doing that. The orange juice tastes sharp and foreign. ‘A miniature replica of Alice Calloway has been discovered inside his ribcage. Sources say the doll is shrinking and will continue to do so indefinitely. In a statement made earlier today, Allison likened himself to a zeppelin and claimed that he was “feeling much better, thank you”. He has yet to confront Alice Calloway in person, and it remains unclear wh
ether he will choose to do so.’

  I turn off the TV and stand in front of the window. A man in a vest top is unloading plastic crates from the back of a van. His body’s short and his arms are long. Two people on rented bikes cycle past.

  I play At Least. It’s not heavy weather and I don’t need to. Here:

  – At least some humans want to sex me.

  – At least other girls exist in the world.

  – At least there will be a lot of tomorrows.

  Macy yawns and flicks back a corner of the duvet. I don’t move from the window because I want her to come up behind me and put her arms around my waist like in films. She puts her face into my hair. She puts her hand into my hand. The man in the vest wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. I turn and feel immediately like my body has been knotted.

  Macy’s upper arms and chest are dotted with purple bruises the size of ramekins. She looks at me looking at them. She doesn’t say anything. I press my thumb against a dark spot on her ribs and gently trace the outline of it, wondering if it’s possible to feel physical pain in that many places at once.

  ‘Did you get mugged too?’ I say.

  ‘Kind of,’ she says.

  ‘Did you get mugged by your husband?’

  ‘Let’s get breakfast. You’ll be ill if you don’t put something in your stomach.’

  ‘You don’t want to talk about your husband.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ She winces and moves back to the bed, pulling on her hoodie and putting up the hood. She sits down. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, putting her arms out in a come and touch me way. ‘I don’t want to talk about him. He’s not here.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. I climb onto her lap and put my head against her tits. ‘I’m sorry too. I want to be your husband. I want us to live in a tree house.’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘A tree house at the top of a redwood, without a ladder.’

  ‘And we have tiny planes to fly around in.’

  ‘Yes, we do.’

  ‘And I wear a fez.’

  ‘If you want.’

  ‘And you wear dungarees.’

  ‘Dungarees?’ she laughs, blinks and nods. ‘And I wear dungarees.’

  *

  My train leaves at one. Macy’s flight is at six. We’re sitting on metal chairs outside a café called Ellen’s. The air is so bright and clean it feels like we’re somewhere in Europe. Paris or Berlin. Clouds race each other overhead. People with things to do and places to do them in walk past. I look at their shoes. The shoes are always so shiny. I feel grateful that I don’t have to spend any portion of my life polishing shoes. I have no idea why shoes are supposed to be shiny.

  A waitress sets a tray down between us and unloads it. We both have lattes with toast. I take a bite and realise I’m not hungry and light a cigarette. Macy eats quietly, sometimes looking up to clean her lips with her wrist.

  A cluster of pigeons gather on the kerb to stake out our crumbs. Most of them are cut or dented or missing feet. They slap each other with their wings.

  ‘Don’t you wish you had wings?’ Macy says.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘That would be embarrassing. Everyone would stare. I wish I was taller.’

  ‘Don’t say that. You’re a fine size.’

  ‘You too.’ I take a sip of coffee and crush out my cigarette. ‘What are we going to do?’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘We could run to France. Or Cuba. Or Easter Island.’ I imagine us living under a tarpaulin in the shadow of a giant stone head. ‘Not Easter Island.’

  Macy peels the crust off a piece of toast and throws it toward the pigeons. They leap into a violent huddle, clubbing each other indiscriminately. ‘You know what would be best?’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘If I could go back in time and grow up with you.’

  I try to imagine it. A smaller, more smooth-skinned Macy drinking gin under the Christmas tree. We don’t fit together. She tells me off like Alice and it doesn’t look right.

  ‘Are you scared of going back?’ I say.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What will your husband do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Will he be angry?’ She doesn’t answer. I can see the shape of him in her eyes. A red, hunched man with wide shoulders and multiple rings. He beats his chest like a baboon. ‘Don’t go back,’ I say.

  ‘I have to.’

  ‘No, you don’t. No one has to do anything. We’re all going to die. Fuck everything.’

  Macy smiles. ‘You’re still drunk,’ she says. She leans across the table and kisses me between the eyes.

  ‘Am I ever going to see you again?’ I say.

  Macy does a this laugh isn’t a mean laugh laugh. ‘Don’t be melodramatic,’ she says. ‘This isn’t a film.Yes.You will.’

  In the film version of right now, everything would turn black, one sentence would announce our unending happiness, and the credits would begin.

  Macy takes out her phone, presses keys and puts it away. ‘Let’s stay another night,’ she says.

  My heart goes doubletime. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really.’

  ‘Where will we stay?’

  ‘The hotel.’ I think about Gran’s money. I think about how she died and how I’m going to die, painfully and unremarkably, and on a day a lot of days away from this one. We will both have infinity to be alone.

  ‘So we have the whole today?’

  ‘And the whole tonight.’

  ‘What should we do?’

  ‘Whatever we want.’

  I decide I’m hungry now and eat my toast. Macy finishes hers. The pigeons quarrel and the sky fills with colour and I try to think of places we can hide.

  32

  Me and Macy are facing each other, topless, and with bottles of Tiger pressed against our chests. We are standing on our new hotel-room bed. Her sides are like the sides of a woman in a film who swims naked and makes the other characters feel insecure enough to begin diets. She nods at me. I shake my head.

  ‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘You go first.’

  She finishes the last of her beer and flicks the bottle onto the floor. She makes a Jesus shape with her body. Squares of muscle appear below her tits. ‘You have to go first.’

  ‘What if neither of us go first, we just climb under the duvet and watch David Attenborough.’ I gently bounce. A trickle of Tiger escapes my mouth and runs down my chin, throat and chest.

  ‘You asked what I wanted to do. This is what I want to do.’

  ‘I thought you’d want to go on the London Eye or binge-eat Mini Cheddars and watch TV.’

  ‘Are you saying I’m overweight?’

  ‘What? No. You are not. You are.’ She lunges forward and digs her fingers into my sides, tickling me until I topple onto the floor. I scream and thrash until she stops, her head resting against my collarbone and my head resting against the bedside table.

  ‘So will you?’ she says.

  ‘Okay,’ I say.

  We get back up and face each other again. I start to slowly count down from ten. At six, Macy tells me to stop. She points a finger at the blank skin over her belly button, closes her eyes and says my name. I exhale.

  I punch Macy in the stomach.

  It is a harder punch than any of the punches I’ve done so far. I didn’t mean it to be so hard. The sound that happens is like what I imagine a child would sound like hitting the pavement after falling three storeys. Macy immediately crumples to the carpet. She curls up. I curl up next to her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry. I did it wrong.’

  She turns to face me and she’s smiling and she unfolds my hand, pressing it against where the punch connected. I picture thousands of tiny people emigrating through my fingers, moving into her pores and pitching tents. I imagine them setting up a post office that we’ll later use to communicate during heavy-weather nights.

  Macy kisses me. ‘Your turn,’ she says. I stand up
. I try to remember if you’re supposed to tense the muscle or not tense it and I can’t but I decide to tense it anyway, because that looks best. It still doesn’t look very good. There are only nine hairs connecting the waistband of my jeans and my belly button.

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Do it.’

  She does it.

  Her fist drives all of the air out of my body and I fall forward and I wonder if I’m going to vomit. Purple stars and yellow planets drop into my eyes. I’m dizzy. I hold my stomach like a person in a war film trying to keep their bowels from escaping. ‘Help,’ I say. ‘Child abuse.’

  *

  On the Underground, Macy puts her hand underneath my t-shirt and rests it against the bruise. It feels familiar against the dull throbbing. No one is watching us. Everyone is watching their own feet. I push my cheek against Macy’s cheek.

  ‘This is really definitely what you want to do?’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I want one that makes sense.’

  ‘It’s going to hurt.’

  ‘Less than the punching.’

  We get off after twenty minutes and walk without talking down a street of Victorian houses and patchwork pavement. It appears. Macy already phoned ahead and the girl at the reception desk knows our names. She has an owl wearing glasses on her neck.

  We fill out forms and a man comes to tell us that his name is Mitch.

  ‘What are we doing?’ he says. There is an upturned umbrella under his left eye, a swallow on his hand and a tiger on his Adam’s apple. I take a step back.

  I lift up my t-shirt, nod, and drop it. ‘The outline of that bruise,’ I say. ‘Please.’

  Nothing happens.

  ‘The bruise,’ he says. ‘In black?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay.’

  We move to a giant chair. Mitch gestures at me to take off my t-shirt and I do, feeling conspicuously tiny and underweight. He doesn’t notice. He roughly shaves the non-existent hair over the bruise on my belly with a disposable plastic razor.

  ‘What made you want this?’ he says.