by Ben Brooks
I think, it would definitely make me feel better to egg her house.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Okay.’
We wait for nighttime to happen then go to the corner shop and buy twelve eggs, three tall bottles of Kronenbourg and wine gums. Alice’s house is ten minutes away, on the new estate by the primary school. Her dad’s car isn’t in the driveway. Aslam hands out eggs and does a countdown. On three, we throw and I laugh because it’s stupid and I feel good and I don’t know why but Aslam’s not sexing Alice and everything might be fine.
The house looks like it has acne.
Okay, not fine. But better.
I tell Aslam and Amy to go home and finish sex. I say thanks. Amy tells me to forget Alice. I tell her to forget that I tried to kill them.
36
Me and Alice were drinking Strongbow on a concrete ledge by the beach in Brighton. June. The sun was alone and close. Specks of salt and sea fell down over our heads and our fringes were being pulled to one side and we were smoking. It was a Monday. It was a school day but Alice’s brother had called in. He said that their mum’s cooking had given us both food poisoning. Age fourteen. Her mum wasn’t dying. We’d taken the day off because Alice had her second abortion the day before. We’d called it Malcolm via Malcolm in the Middle. We’d called the first one Albus.
Alice leaned back against my chest. Her hair smelled like just-blown-out candles. She had panda eyes. She looked sexy when she was emotionally distressed but I was still wishing that she wasn’t.
I watched a dog chase a bird. I watched a man chase a dog. I watched the sea carry on and carry on and a boat passed along the edge of it and the waves made sh sounds. My head got warm from the cider. I went quiet inside. A tiny me shuffled onstage, scratching his hands and blinking too much. Doing a this isn’t a real smile smile. I knew it was stupid but I felt too heavy to not write little letters.
Hi Little Mate,
It’s heavy weather here today. Sorry you didn’t get to visit. Honestly, it’s not that good anyway.
I know you should have been able to decide, though. Some people like it, I guess. Rebecca Talbot smiles almost constantly. She wears primary colours and never hides. I’ve seen her cry at happy things. Dolphins and people who win against cancer.
I don’t know.
It’s hard to tell.
Sometimes things are okay. Sometimes you get to stay in bed all day. Sometimes coffee actually tastes good. Sometimes you can sit down in the shower and pretend to be in a monsoon. Sometimes sex lasts longer than a TV advert. Sometimes, after dinner, the sky goes funny colours and it looks like an aquarium filled with Nemos. Sometimes the people next to you don’t make you want to eat your own hands. Sometimes sleep is easy. Sometimes there’s Alice. Sometimes you don’t have enough money but the man in the shop lets you have the cigarettes anyway. Sometimes it’s warm and you’re drunk and you’re tall.
Mostly though, it’s scary. People hit you and rob you and die next to you.
I wonder if you’d have been scared like me, or loud like Alice. I wonder if you’d have grown up to be something proper like a fireman or a carpenter. Do carpenters even exist now? Probably not. I want to think that you’d grow up to do something that would benefit humanity. I also want to think that you’d grow up to be nothing. To be one of those people who dies alone in a council house and is found three years later, partially eaten and surrounded by dead cats. If I think about that then it makes me feel less bad about you not arriving. I don’t know.
Sorry. You wouldn’t have been that.
You would have been a teacher at least.
Or a dentist.
This is starting to sound gay. I don’t normally sound like Jodi Picoult. Sorry again. And if you see Albus, say hi. He’ll help if you’re lost.
Be okay.
Night night.
People started to get out of school. They were walking in sets behind us, typing into phones and laughing. They felt far away, like uninterested aliens we were watching from our own personal planet. I found Alice’s belly button under her hoodie and pushed my finger into it. She squirmed but didn’t stop me. She was in a quiet mood and hadn’t yet told me off for anything.
‘You should get an implant,’ I said.
‘I will,’ she said.
‘Like soon.’
‘I know. I will.’
A woman with a toddler stopped near us. She unwrapped a Maxibon and passed it down to him. He looked at Alice and smiled. She did a tiny wave.
‘He wouldn’t be smiling if he knew what you did to people like him.’ She simultaneously punched my thigh and kissed my ear. I imagined Malcolm as a miniature adult that we’d put into a spaceship and sent away. I imagined his tiny, unformed limbs tumbling through infinite blackness.
We napped on the train home and spent the evening in bed watching mondo films. Faces of Death, Traces of Death, Faces of Gore, Mondo Cane. Mondo Cane Two. Mondo Cane Three. Mondo Cane Four. Compilations of clips of people dying in gory ways. I think the best way to escape in your head isn’t to think about things that aren’t real, it’s to think about things that are and then imagine them happening to people who aren’t you.
37
I’m cleaning Alice’s house with an old mop I found under the stairs. I couldn’t sleep. I was anxious. I kept imagining Mr Calloway stepping out of his car and sighing and heavy weather happening in his head. I kept thinking about Alice’s mum and Albus and Malcolm. They’re at home so I’m being quiet. The eggs are almost gone.
The front door opens. I think about running and know that I won’t try.
It’s Alice.
‘Etgar?’ she says.
‘Oh, hi.’ I lay the mop down and put my hands in my pockets. There are three coins in the left one and a wad of crumpled receipts in the other.
She stays in the doorway. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Cleaning your house.’
‘Why?’
‘It has egg on it.’
‘Oh.’
‘I’m sorry. It was Aslam’s idea. He has a girlfriend.
She has like fifty thousand views on YouTube.’
‘Oh.’
‘I wrote you a letter.’
‘Are you drunk?’
‘A little.’ She comes close. We are lit up by one streetlight and the blue glow of the TV from her bedroom window. I can see the black pits in her nose like strawberry skin. She’s not wearing any make-up. I think, I’m going to miss you. I push the paper into her hand.
‘Etgar, I’m really sorry.’
‘I know. I did a letter.’
‘It’s going to be weird.’
‘I know.’
‘Do you want to be friends?’
‘I cover that in the letter.’
‘Why are you talking like that?’
‘I don’t know how to talk.’
‘The same as you talked before.’
‘Okay.’ Nothing happens. ‘See you at school.’
Her eyes are wobbling. I want to step forward and grab her head and put it against my head. I know I won’t do that. I know we’ll grow taller and further away and we’ll be adults and this will be a tiny corner of our lives that gets forgotten except for certain days under certain lights when it rises like a hot-air balloon from endless forest.
‘Okay,’ she says. She blinks. A tear comes out of one eye. She turns around. She goes back into the house. I realise that talking like we don’t know each other has been the heaviest weather. I want to go home. I want to sleep everything away. I kick four stones at some railings. A car goes past. Alice’s TV turns off.
*
Aslam lets me sleep at his house. Amy’s still there. He doesn’t ask what’s wrong. Me and his little brother sit watching CSI: Miami in the living room. Thayyab wears monkey pyjamas and I wear Thayyab’s Power Rangers duvet.
‘I think that one did it,’ he says, pointing out a skinny man with cuts around his eyes. ‘He’s the one.’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘He’s the one.’
Dear Alice,
It’s me, Etgar, writing from beyond the grave. Because I killed myself. Because you gave Aaron Mathews a handjob.
Joking.
Hi.
I’m sorry for calling you a walrus. You are not a walrus. If anything, you’re underweight. Not in a close-to-death way. It’s attractive. Like a model. You know that. I was being drunk and upset. It didn’t mean anything. Your body is a good shape and size. I’m being honest.
I’m also sorry for going onto your Facebook and pretending to be you so that Marie would tell me what had happened. I wish I hadn’t done that. It’s too late. Please don’t blame Marie. We were together for three years and I can do an excellent impression of you. Here:
I miss you come over!!!!! we can drink Fanta and watch Buffy. I got a new duvet so we have 2xxxxxxxx
Sorry, that was mean. I’m still a little drunk.
I am very scared about not being your boyfriend any more. You were like a sexy foster mum to me. The world seems big and angry again. I am scared but I also think that maybe it’s a good thing. If you kissed Aaron Mathews, it was because you wanted to. You were drunk, but you wanted to. I understand. He has very large feet and symmetrical features. It’s okay, I want to kiss other people sometimes too. And that probably means we only stayed together because it felt comfortable and familiar and safe. I said ‘only’. That seems like the wrong word. I think ‘partly’ might be a better word (actually, ‘ratatouille’ is a much better word than both of them, but it doesn’t really fit).
You know that we were never going to get married and have a baby and buy a house and be buried next to each other. It’s hard to think that far ahead but sometimes useful to try.
(For reference, if I die without a will, please mix my ashes with tripe and feed them to Amundsen. My tiny people are already friendly with his tiny people and I know that he’d be more than willing to take them on. I’ll be in his blood and drool. If you need me for anything, you can ask him.)
(Oh, so you know, I’m not planning on dying soon. I read about suicide on the Internet and it seemed ultra-scary.)
(Sorry for all these brackets. It’s hard writing on paper. You can’t delete things and I don’t have any Tipp-Ex.)
We were together for one thousand and thirty-seven days. I just counted. That’s a lot of days. In those days your tits happened and my dick went kind of brown and we both got taller and sat exams. I think that means it’s different to other times when we’ll go out with people. Going out with other people seems impossible to imagine. I don’t know. Everyone is scared of disappearing things, I feel.
That’s why in films people say ‘let’s be friends’ when they break up. I don’t think we should be friends because I’ve seen your vagina and it would be awkward. When I forget how it looks, we can be friends. We might be old. We might have espresso machines. I don’t want an espresso machine, Alice. I really don’t.
This all seems big and it happened really fast. This letter was stupid. I’m sorry. It’s hard to know what things to say or whether to say anything.
Be okay,
Etgar
38
Mum and Dad are sitting on the sofa watching The Voice on iPlayer. Mum stands up when I come in.
‘I broke up with Alice,’ I say. I say it immediately because if you say something at the wrong time then you don’t have to spend time looking for the right time to say it. ‘No biggie.’ It feels like someone else has said the words ‘no biggie’. I don’t understand why I would say ‘no biggie’. Who am I? I turn around but there’s no one else there.
‘Oh, darling,’ Mum says. She hugs me hard. ‘I’m sorry.’ Dad stands up and claps my shoulder and walks through to the toilet. He doesn’t like to watch when me and Mum talk about emotions with each other. ‘Are you okay?’ Mum says.
‘Yes.’
Mum tries to say other tender things but when Dad uses the toilet he makes the sound that female tennis players make. She puts me on the sofa and asks if I want anything. I try to ask about Russia. She says we can talk about that later.
‘Do you want me to drive to Blockbuster and get something with that girl you like in it?’ she says.
‘Yes, please. Not (500) Days of Summer.’
*
I spend the day in bed drinking water. Drinking for four days without stopping has made me tired and psychotic. I watch four episodes of Community and read some of Cat’s Cradle and watch a video of a man suiciding on webcam. Macy isn’t online. I imagine her standing over a pan of risotto. I imagine her groping her husband’s giant balls and wiping dirt from the faces of her children. I hope she’s alive and okay.
I nap.
Amundsen wakes me up with his tongue.
We nap.
Mum wakes me up with Zooey Deschanel. She’s rented Our Idiot Brother, which has Paul Rudd and Rashida Jones in too, so I’m excited. We watch it in the living room, spread out under blankets across the sofas. Dad says things about tearing new assholes in all the women. Mum laughs and hits him. Incidentally, the film is extremely disappointing.
*
Dad comes into my room. It’s ten. I’m talking to Connie Latterly about the Nibiru cataclysm and editing the Wikipedia pages of famous footballers to say that they are all distantly related to Barack Obama.
‘Dad, don’t be a paedo. Get out.’ I shut the laptop and put it on the carpet. I’m tired.
‘I wasn’t going to touch.’ He takes off his glasses, breathes on the glass and rubs them with the corner of his shirt.
‘Stay over there or I’m calling paedoline.’
‘Paedoline isn’t a thing.’
‘Firemen then.’
‘Why would you call firemen?’
‘Firemen hate paedos. They shoot them with their hoses.’
Dad laughs and sits down on the end of my bed. It sinks under his weight and my legs fall into the valley he’s made. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I don’t know. I drank your Famous Grouse. It was disgusting. Why is the grouse famous?’
‘Because it discovered America. I’m sorry about Alice. Try not to let it ruin everything. There are still plenty of girls out there, and most of them have bigger bosoms.’
‘Bosoms?’
‘You know what I mean. Jubblies.’
‘I don’t like big tits anyway.’
‘Paedo.’
‘Dad.’
He takes his glasses back off his head, folds them up and sets them down on his lap. ‘I remember losing my first girlfriend. I remember feeling like everything was over.’
‘What happened?’
‘She hung herself. It was very odd. She was always saying things like “I want to die” and everyone thought she was joking. She was a pretty funny girl actually.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Twelve.’
‘Dad, that’s not funny.’
‘It’s not a joke.’
‘Oh.’
Dad smiles. ‘You just need to remember to check you’ve got your limbs and your torso and your face. You’re alive. You’ll keep being alive for quite a while longer. Everything that will happen to you has already happened to me and to your mum and to your granddad. And we all survived. For now. There are no new problems, only new ways of solving them.’ I don’t think that means anything, or is related, but it sounds good. ‘Puberty.’
‘I was thinking about girlfriends and drink and acne.’
‘I have miraculously clear skin.’
‘I know. I used to put toothpaste on mine.’
‘I feel bad for feeling bad about it. Like, that there are children starving in Africa and stuff.’
‘The fact that humans haven’t yet managed a global redistribution of wealth is never going to lessen the hurt in your little heart.’
‘I don’t have hurt in my little heart.’
‘I know.’
‘Really, I’m feeling better.’
‘I’m glad.’
‘I met someone el
se.’
‘Lovely.’
He leans forward to pinch my cheek. I shout ‘paedo’. Mum pushes open my door and curls her neck around it. ‘What are you two up to?’
‘Dad said “This is what adults do when they love each other” to me and then he touched me.’
‘Etgar, don’t be disgusting.’
‘Arrest him, Mum.’
‘Holby’s starting, darling.’
‘Okay. I’ll be down in a sec.’ They nod at each other like people about to carry out a secret plan.
‘Night night,’ Mum says. ‘I love you.’
‘You too.’
She leaves.
‘You’ll be okay,’ Dad says. ‘Won’t you? No hanging or anything?’
‘Yes. But – I did something bad.’ I chew the duvet. Some poppers come undone. They taste like stale sweat.
‘Okay.’
‘I spent a lot of the Nan money. I think I spent a thousand pounds.’
Dad bites his lip and tilts his head. ‘Don’t worry. At least you’re alive. You try and find a part-time job and save up a little each week.’
‘Don’t you want to know what I spent it on?’
‘I don’t know. Do I?’
‘Maybe not.’
‘Okay. Don’t do it again. Unless it was an uncharacteristically generous donation to charity.’
‘I won’t. It wasn’t.’
‘Good. See you in the morning.’
‘Night.’
‘Night.’
He leaves quietly, closing the door behind him. His socks are violently odd. I push Amundsen over to the radiator side of the bed, pull the duvet up and think to myself, see you in the morning.
PART 5
Antlers
39
‘Is this true?’ Mum says. ‘Is what these people are saying true?’ She’s standing in my bedroom, between two police officers, holding her own hands. Her eyes are stretched wide and close to leaking. I’m trying not to look. I’m imagining myself in a warm, dark chamber, hidden beneath the deepest ocean’s bed, building matchstick models of poodles and eating fistfuls of Parma ham. ‘Etgar?’
