Boy Underwater

by Adam Baron

  ‘Goblins then?’

  ‘Same thing, and they’re evil anyway. They so would not tidy up a bedroom.’

  ‘Agreed. So how did it happen?’

  ‘Nope, sorry.’

  ‘Shall I tell you?’

  ‘If you like, though no stress if you don’t want to.’

  ‘It was me, Cymbeline. I picked up all the things you just threw about the place and completely forgot about. I did it, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘And thanks very much for telling me that, Mum.’

  So it was fine to go in her room without her – but I still didn’t want to. I didn’t want to look in her cupboards or her drawers, and then there was the Art End.

  There are two halves to Mum’s room. The nearest half has her bed in and I’m allowed in there of course, though on Sunday mornings I have to wait until seven thirty. I used to come in earlier but Mum taught me how to tell the time so I wouldn’t any more. The other half is where Mum does her art. Not all her art because we do loads at the kitchen table together. But this is her private art, not connected with the workshops she runs or anything. She does this on Friday afternoons with no one else in the house, and it’s OFF LIMITS. Looking in there would get me into real trouble and I so hoped I’d find some sort of answer in the near half.

  But there was nothing in her bedside drawers apart from bras that looked like sleeping animals, and squashed-up pants, T-shirts and skirts and pairs of jeans. There was nothing in the wardrobe either, apart from jackets and dresses, including the one from Oxfam she doesn’t wear any more. Or was there? Reaching my hand forward, I felt cold. Then, reaching further, I felt even colder and, stepping up and into the wardrobe, I felt something beneath my feet, something soft and crunchy. Peering forward, through Mum’s dresses, I saw a lamppost up ahead of me.

  Only joking. I shut the wardrobe and turned round. And then there I was, staring at the Chinese birds on the folding screen that Mum bought from the junk shop in Greenwich, which separates one side of her room from the other. I took a deep breath, thinking of Jackson Pollock, the colours inside me no longer lined up but mad, and whirling, and wrong. And, thinking of those paintings, I wondered for the first time ever what Mum’s would be like. I knew it was paintings – not sculptures or collages – because she was always getting paint from the art shop near Greenwich station. But did she paint old people? Or miserable people? Did she just do masses of scribbles, or put triangles next to squares, or do shadows that made the whole world look sad? I didn’t know. And there was no point trying to guess. So I pulled the screen aside, and was amazed.

  Ghosts. Lots of them. That’s what I thought at first, though it wasn’t ghosts. It was sheets, covering the paintings, and at first I couldn’t bring myself to pull them off – because why tell me not to look in here if it was okay for me to see what she did? And, I suddenly thought, what if these paintings have something to do with my dad? Why he died. But I had to look at them, I knew it, and I pulled the sheets off and stared, totally and utterly stunned by what I saw.

  The paintings were big. All of them. They were big and rectangular and there were lots of them, on easels or the floor, each one staring back at me, and every one the same. All of them. Every single painting was identical to the one next to it.

  Exactly. The. Same.

  And every single one was of Mr Fluffy.

  We lost him once. On Juni’s seventh birthday (I was six). Juni had always wanted to go on an open-top bus round London. Clay was there and Auntie Mill and Uncle Chris (Clay and Juni’s dad) and I was and Mum, and Uncle Brian came too. We climbed the stairs up to the top deck and sat next to these American people, who had coats on even though it was summer, and more teeth than English people. I sat next to Juni and she told me all about London as we drove around. For instance, when we got to the Tower of London, she said it wasn’t really called that. The Tower of London was actually the name of the bell inside it, and its real name was St Stephen’s Tower. She knows so much stuff, Juni, which probably comes from going to her different school.

  We saw the London Eye, which I thought only looked worth going on if it went faster. At Buckingham Palace the Queen was out because there was no flag, and this was disappointing for some reason, even though we wouldn’t have been able to see her anyway. Auntie Mill said they should have a flag at their house for when Uncle Chris was home, though they’d hardly ever have to put it up, would they? Uncle Chris laughed at that, sort of, and came to sit with me and Juni. At the Houses of Parliament he tried to point out the Burghers of Calais in a little park but I couldn’t see any burgers (though we did pass a few McDonald’s). The Americans all got off but we stayed on until Trafalgar Square, where Juni wanted to climb on the lions. We all got off and did that, and I looked up at Nelson, all lonely on his column. I wanted to bring his statue down to the ground so he could be surrounded by all the people he’d saved. Uncle Chris said that Nelson had captured the lions from Napoleon and I said that was great but why did he make them so slippery?

  We looked at a very still person pretending to be Yoda and a very still person pretending to be Darth Vader and a very still person pretending to be Gandalf and they were good, but not as good as the very still person pretending to be a soldier near Buckingham Palace. He’d looked more real because he had his own hut and his face wasn’t covered in paint.

  Back on the bus Mum said, ‘Photo time!’

  We squashed in together but her eyes went wide. ‘Where’s Mr Fluffy?’ she said.

  I felt suddenly empty as I scrabbled behind me on the seat and on the floor. We all ran down the stairs, and Mum begged the driver to let us off before the next stop. We ran back into the square, looking near the lions and the still people and by the fountain and everywhere.

  I was desperate, but I wasn’t as bad as Mum, and she was the one who spotted him. He was with a kid! The kid was about my age and was holding him. Mum ran in front of him and the kid’s mum and I saw her speaking, obviously asking for Mr Fluffy back. I thought – doh – that the mum would just hand him over, but she started to argue, saying something about proving it was hers. Eventually Mum gave up arguing and just grabbed Mr Fluffy, and the other mum got really angry. She pushed Mum and then, suddenly, a policeman turned up. Not a pretending one, a real one! The woman wanted to report Mum for pushing her kid, which she hadn’t, and it all got serious until Uncle Chris went over. He managed to sort it out, but Auntie Mill hissed at Mum that it was just a teddy bear for heaven’s sake and Juniper’s only seven once and why do you always ruin things? Then they started arguing.

  ‘Why do Mum and Auntie Mill fight all the time?’ I asked Uncle Brian, when we were back on the bus. He blew his cheeks out and I could tell there were loads of thoughts in his head, though all he would say in the end was, ‘Sisters.’

  Mum kept hold of Mr Fluffy all the way home.

  And all this time, for some reason, she’s been painting loads of pictures of him.

  I stared at Mr Fluffy for what seemed like ages, until it looked in fact like he was staring back at me. I looked around at the rug he was sitting on and at the other things in the picture, until a police siren going past seemed to sort of wake me up. I covered all the pictures up again, and hurried back to Auntie Mill’s.

  In the morning, after breakfast, Auntie Mill walked me round to Veronique’s house. Her mum was going to take me to school. Veronique pulled me inside, put away her violin, and asked me what I’d found at home. I told her (after saying how totally scary it was walking through Blackheath and how, coming back, Auntie Mill nearly caught me climbing up the stairs). She asked why my mum had painted just Mr Fluffy and I said I had no idea, so she asked me to describe the paintings. I tried but it was really hard with words – I wanted to show her, and it wasn’t long before I got the chance.

  At school, before register, Miss Phillips came up to me and I thought she was going to roast my ears again about the Tate. Instead she said she knew that I was having a bit of trouble at home.
And because of that, after assembly, she had something different for me. For a second I thought she meant taking me to see Mum, but she didn’t. As the rest of Year 4 filed back into our classroom Miss Phillips jerked her head at me, then led me into the room where after-school computer club normally is. Inside I saw that the tables had been rearranged into a big square, and a man who I’d never seen before was standing by them. Miss Phillips told me he was Mr Prentice and that he did something called ‘art therapy’.

  ‘Is that making people in Munch pictures look happier?’

  He laughed, scratching his big ginger beard. ‘No, we’re going to hang out for a bit. And make stuff.’

  ‘What sort of stuff?’

  ‘Anything. Veronique will show you if you like.’ The man smiled and looked over my shoulder. ‘She comes every week, don’t you, Veronique?’

  Veronique walked in, while I frowned. I knew she missed class on Thursday mornings, but I’d always thought it was to go off and do genius things, like extra maths or science. Why did she need to come here? She’s super clever, can swim really well, and has an even number of parents.

  ‘Why do you need therapy?’ I asked.

  ‘It helps me calm down a bit. Mr Prentice says it’s because he doesn’t ever give a mark or anything. It’s relaxing. So Miss Phillips lets me come.’

  ‘To do art?’

  ‘Yes, though last week I did Mr Prentice’s tax return.’

  ‘You weren’t supposed to mention that, Veronique,’ the man said. ‘Now then, Cymbeline. What do you fancy doing?’

  I tried not to sound too keen but I didn’t need to think about it. I asked for some paint and a big sheet of paper, Veronique asking if she could just watch me that week. Mr Prentice said fine, and I began painting Mr Fluffy to show Veronique what Mum had done in her pictures.

  It was hard. For a start, I didn’t have her painting in front of me like I’d had with Jackson Pollock at the Tate – Mum’s were too big to carry back to Auntie Mill’s. Also, in Mum’s paintings, Mr Fluffy was wearing a T-shirt. Mr Fluffy doesn’t actually have a T-shirt, but Mum had painted him in one. There was writing on it but I’d have to wait until the paint dried before I added it or it would smudge. Instead, once I’d finished Mr Fluffy and told Veronique who he was, I started on the picnic rug, which Mum had painted him sitting on. I should have done that first of course but I managed to make it look okay – blue-and-white check.

  ‘That’s from Decathlon,’ said Veronique. ‘We’ve got the same one.’

  There were two paper drinks cups on the rug too, and I did those. They’d fallen over next to Mr Fluffy, so I also did the coffee stains on the white bits of the rug. Something made me stop then and think of Mum in the hospital.

  Two sugars. Two sugars.

  Did that have something to do with this?

  I carried on, doing my best to remember Mum’s pictures. I added the shadows from Mr Fluffy and the cups, and Veronique grabbed hold of my arm.

  ‘Midday,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The time. We copied De Chirico paintings at the Tate and his were in the afternoon; you could tell because of the shadows. But these shadows are tiny so it must be near midday.’

  I shrugged, not knowing what that really told us, and carried on painting some red flip-flops on the rug and a little beaker like a baby uses for water. Next to them I put a scrunched-up brown ball.

  Veronique’s finger flew out to it. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Paper,’ I said. ‘Though it’s hard to do.’

  ‘What sort of paper?’

  ‘No idea. For sandwiches maybe?’

  ‘But where are the sandwiches?’

  ‘Maybe someone ate them.’

  ‘Then why didn’t they put the paper in the bin?’

  ‘How do I know? Maybe they were in a hurry or something.’

  ‘I still think you should put litter in the bin,’ Veronique said.

  I agreed and got on with the picture, adding another screwed-up piece of paper next to the other one before remembering the rug’s tassels. After them I did the grass around it, which was quite long and had daisies and buttercups here and there. After that I did a thin slice at the top of the picture where Mum had painted a pathway, with people walking dogs on it, or in bright clothing going past on bikes. I put the brush down and looked at what I’d done.

  ‘Very good,’ Mr Prentice said, looking up from his phone. ‘I mean, really. But aren’t you going to finish it?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘But what about that bit?’ he insisted, pointing at a big section in the upper half of the picture.

  I’d left that part blank. I hadn’t touched it at all. But I couldn’t put anything there because Mum hadn’t either. She’d painted Mr Fluffy on a rug – over and over – but she’d left almost all of the top third of every single painting blank. You could see Mr Fluffy, and the rug, and the grass, and a little path at the top, but you couldn’t see anything else.

  ‘Did she run out of time?’ Veronique asked, but I shook my head.

  ‘She can’t have. She went on to the next painting, didn’t she?’

  ‘So what was in that bit then?’

  I had no idea, and it was really frustrating. I’d gone all the way home through the night to find out about Mum. What I’d discovered was that she liked painting Mr Fluffy. What did that tell me about the swimming pool? I was disappointed. I’d hoped that doing the painting myself, in the daytime, might make me see something new about it that I hadn’t seen the night before. But nothing came.

  ‘She only painted this?’ Veronique asked.

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘Then it must mean something. Your mum took Mr Fluffy to the hospital, so he must be connected to what happened with Billy at the pool.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘And so must this place.’

  ‘This place?’

  ‘Where the rug is of course.’

  I turned back to the painting and realised that Veronique was right, though I hadn’t thought about that at all. I’d just focused on the fact that it was Mr Fluffy, but the rug had to be somewhere. Veronique leaned forward and squinted at the picture.

  ‘Where is this, Cymbeline?’

  That question obsessed me for the rest of the day. I thought about it as I helped Veronique with her project, something called DNA that she was making out of little straws. She told me what DNA was and I stared at her.

  ‘There are billions of straws inside us?’

  ‘Oh, Cymbeline!’ Veronique said.

  I thought about it at lunch, sitting next to the climbing wall in the playground with Veronique, so focused on the problem that I didn’t quite realise how amazing it felt just to be doing that. We stared at the painting for ages.

  ‘It’s not the city.’

  ‘It could be a park. Her hospital’s in a park.’

  ‘No, the grass is too long. But it’s not exactly countryside either.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it has to be somewhere they sell coffee, doesn’t it?’

  She was right but it didn’t get us any further. We stared and stared but there was no way we could know any more that that. Veronique said she wished she’d seen Mum’s paintings herself and I got angry because my version showed everything.

  Veronique sighed. ‘Then I wish she’d finished it!’ she said, before going off to lunchtime music club. I stayed where I was and wished that too, wondering why Mum had never shown me her paintings if this was all they showed. And why she’d put Mr Fluffy in a T-shirt. I squinted at him and shook my head because I’d forgotten to add the writing, hadn’t I? I’d have to do it later. I squeezed my mind up and saw the words from Mum’s paintings again.

  Eglinhs Hretigae.

  I had no idea what they meant.

  It was no good – the painting just wasn’t going to tell me anything. So there was only one thing left to do.

  I had to see my mum.

  I had
to just ask her: what is your thing about swimming really about?

  But how could I get to the hospital?

  That problem vexed me all afternoon. I couldn’t concentrate on the video about the Romans that Miss Phillips showed us, and I didn’t even care about tag rugby in PE, which I’d been looking forward to ever since Year 1. The trouble was, Uncle Bill, who had taken me last time, was away. Maybe I could go on my own? I’d gone home on my own, hadn’t I? But that was at night. I’d have to go to the hospital in the day, and someone would miss me, either school or Auntie Mill. The only way I could think of was to get Auntie Mill to take me herself, but she was still ‘livid’ with me for getting called by Mrs Johnson when she was 4–1 up.

  When she picked me up, I decided to say I was really sorry about that and promise to be really good – if she’d take me. But Juni was with her and I didn’t get the chance because Juni talked all the way home: some girl in her class had said this, while some other girl had said that, which meant that some other girl, again, had said something else, which had started yet another girl crying, which led to the first girl saying the first thing all over again. I didn’t interrupt because I thought it would be easier back at theirs. I’d get Auntie Mill on her own when Juni and Clay went off to their rooms.

  Except they didn’t. Juni dumped her bag on the floor and slumped down on the sofa.

  ‘Aren’t you going on your PS4?’ I asked. Juni raised her eyes and did this big exaggerated sigh.

  ‘Not on Thursdays.’

  ‘Oh, why not?’

  ‘Because Thursdays is “family time”.’

  When I asked what that was, Juni didn’t answer. Instead she put her hands round her neck and pretended to strangle herself, her tongue sticking out until she fell over sideways into the cushions. Auntie Mill explained for her. On Thursdays, said Auntie Mill, computers weren’t allowed. On Thursdays they got a takeaway and did things together. In contrast to the face Juni was making, Auntie Mill sounded very jolly about it, though the first thing they all did that Thursday was have a massive argument about the takeaway.