I look out of the window onto the lawn for a new angle on where I thought I’d seen Lou. She isn’t there.
Closing the curtain, I scan around inside. None of Dad’s stuff appears to be here. The bed looks slept in by one. It isn’t a place graced by the heavy hand, clumsy foot and poorly folded clothing of man. It feels sterile and weak, trodden down and used. Dad has been spending more and more time in the attic. I decide to pay him a visit and make my way, slowly, back into the house.
From the bottom of the ladder I can hear Dad behind the hatch. The calming tap tap tap of a hammer at a quarter of a swing, or the end of a chisel. Tinkles of bolts and screws.
I bend my painful left knee and lift my foot up onto the first flat rung of the metal ladder. It feels flimsy and dentable, like a tin man, and that it might rip from the ceiling and come crashing to the ground. My dad would open the hatch to find me lying twelve feet below him, a pile of metal and cut bleeding body parts, a mangled robot crash. But it doesn’t fall, it stays rigid. He steps over my head, unawares. The wood sucks in and out. Sawdust raindrops land in my hair and filter through it to rest on my ticklish scalp.
With both palms rested flat against the undersurface of the hatch, I wait for my time. And I wait and I wait, until I hear Dad has sat down in his squeaky old chair up there that I imagine to be coated in tattered leather but I cannot be sure. Then, with all reserves of my energy and calm, I push upwards from the elbows and the power in my legs against the battered metal ladder. But nothing moves. A heavy weight rests on the hatch, an immovable one, and I am denied.
Catching my breath, I stay up that ladder for a few minutes, unsure of what to do or where to go, feeling like a child again, remembering that I am a man. Eventually I hear the bedroom door open, the test over, and I slowly bend my sore knees down the steps. Nothing seems wrong when the two psychiatrists pop their heads around the edge of the living-room door to say goodbye to me. The man has a thin streak of chocolate above his lips, just underneath his nose. Both Mum and his colleague have been too polite to tell him.
When they’ve gone, I peer back up at the hatch in the ceiling.
29
Being a teenager was boring more often than not. Sitting in silence I’d listen to the mechanics of my own body. I liked the fizzing of my stomach acids forcing tiny little growls through my throat. I enjoyed the dull wet slop it made when I allowed my mouth to fill with saliva and then swallowed it all in one exaggerated motion, like a chick necking a beetle, unhindered by peristalsis. Occasionally I could hear my own heart beat with a strength that would move my body involuntarily, thud thud. If I thought too hard about it I’d notice a faint clicking in my head, the ticking-over of my brain. I liked, for a time, to be alone.
Mal had reached a plateau, a compromise with life. He began spending more and more time at Lou’s house. Her dad even let them share a bed. He was perhaps too apathetic to object, or just not in control. They could never have done the same at our house unless they had wanted to share the room with me.
I wouldn’t have minded.
His prolonged absences left Mum bereft. She took a job cleaning in the evenings at the office of the local mayor. She’d discard the empty brandy bottles hidden in the toilet cistern and pretend, as he leered drunkenly over her petite frame, not to have noticed his disgusting purple nose, which wriggled with broken veins.
Even Dad wasn’t around as much as he had been. He had recently felt able to return to the deep shaft mines of South Africa, though this time far from Johannesburg. He had been employed as a consultant on the sinking of a new lift shaft two miles into the centre of the earth. Things seemed to be working. There was convention. There was rest. Nothing unexpected. It was as though the house was waiting for an almighty cloud to fall across it. One that never arrived.
And so I spent a lot of time on my own. I’d think of all the things I wanted, trapped inside my fertile teenage mind.
I’d sit and wish that I was Mal, his hands clumsily wrapped tight around Lou’s wrists. Using his nose, no . . . my nose, to brush aside her hair and gain access to her earlobes. Slipping a finger, and then two, and then a readily cupped hand, beneath the underwire of her bra. Roughly tugging at it in the hope it might unclasp and excitedly peppering her breast with openmouthed kisses. Tentatively sliding an open palm past the elastic of her soft knickers. Taking what I found fully in my hand and gently searching it, hoping secretly for a guide, a sign, a map of exactly what to do next. Then finally finding out on my own when what’s in there accepts me, draws me in.
And then alone again, on my sofa, hoping for nothing but Lou’s dad’s sudden change of personality, or sudden development of any at all. Him barging that bedroom door down as fearsome as a rhinoceros, grabbing Mal, not me, by the neck and holding him high against the wall. I mouthed the words he’d say: ‘You ever touch my fucking daughter again!’ I’d picture Mal crumble as Lou realised the error of her ways. She’d dash quickly from her house to mine, to find me alone, asleep in an armchair, and take me in her embrace.
I woke to find Mum was home from work early. It was Shrove Tuesday but she’d forgotten to buy eggs. We had an apologetic-looking plate of chips and beans while she told me what the mayor’s breath smelled like. The orange sunrise of slime had dried and cracked and stained our plates and was long since cold by the time Mal walked in through the door and she stood to make him some dinner. It was almost midnight and she’d waited. She offered, he smiled and was fed, so she was happy.
When he’d finished eating, Mal placed his plate on the floor at his feet. The thick juices on it slid back and forth. Without asking, Mum, who’d been watching from the doorway of the kitchen, brought him two thick slices of soft white bread, light and fluffy, cloud-tasting, to mop up the remnants of his meal. He did, letting the softened, torn slice slip down into his stomach, where it ballooned as would a sponge to his wetted inner workings.
More bread was broken, offered and declined. Mal rubbed his stomach, tracing the lines of its distention with his forefingers. Ice cream was proffered as an option. He accepted and Mum, smiling, swung towards the kitchen.
‘You’re getting fat,’ I teased but it was barbed with malice and he knew it, he could feel its claws on its way across it, playful and nasty, cat-like towards his ears. ‘Now you’ve left school, if you just sit there all day, you’re just going to get fatter and fatter.’
He moved to respond but Mum got there first.
‘There is no rush, Malcolm, you know that.’ She nodded towards him.
‘I know,’ he said.
‘And stop winding him up, he’s done nothing to you,’ she said, aimed my way.
Mal went to bed before me, as did Mum, and I sat up late, the flicker of the television strobing my face in the dark. When I eventually retired I found that Mal had emptied my pillow of feathers. Too tired to argue, I sank to my knees and slowly picked them up, one by one, stuffing them back into their case until I had at least a chicken’s worth, which I slept on, restlessly, for what felt like seconds.
30
A ferocious banging at the front door jerked me from a dream instantly forgotten. A feather was congealed to my dry, sleepy lip and it removed a layer of skin when I pulled it off to speak.
‘Mal. Mal.’
‘What?’
‘The door,’ I said.
I could tell that he wasn’t awake, nor asleep either. He was a gargling confusion.
‘What?’
‘The door,’ I said again.
Then there was more banging, a bunched fist hammering against the wood, making the metal of the letterbox swing noisily.
‘The door, Mal!’ I shouted through clenched teeth, aware that whoever was on the other side of it wouldn’t be looking for me.
He threw a leg from the bed, then another, and with a yawn took his quilt under both arms like a huge padded shawl and, still naked but for that, walked out of the room to the front door.
I heard Lou’s voice and rummaged
in the darkness for a pair of trousers. The legs were turned inwards and knotted, and I rushed to force my feet through them, blood through arteries clogged with cheesy dollops of fat. Their steps approached. I buttoned the trousers at my waist with farcically good timing as the pair of them emerged through the door. Mal had his arm around her shoulders, like he was holding her together, and she was crying. His arm was big and strong and her slender neck rested against it. It looked like he was leading her, dazzled, from the wreck of car crash. Except that he was naked and dragging the bedclothes with his right foot across the carpet. She didn’t seem to notice, her hands were closed around her face the way a book would. I bent my stomach and arched my back. I made myself small. I did my utmost to become assimilated into the shadows formed in the corner of the room by the splicing of the moonlight through the window by the curtains.
‘Sit down,’ he said. Lou perched on the bed. He enveloped her in his might. ‘Tell me what’s wrong.’
She stammered, her voice mired in the back of her throat. Slowly she cleared it, got stronger and began to speak of what it was that brought her here in the middle of the night.
‘Mum has gone and left him,’ she said.
Mal had told me once about Lou’s mum. He’d called her selfish and arrogant and bullish, and it was obvious from the times when her dad would come to pick her up from our house that it was him Lou would turn to rather than her. Now it seemed it was Mal rather than either of them. Mal rubbed her shoulder. It fitted perfectly inside his palm. And after some deep breaths she spoke again, and I realised I was hearing only the end of a long-standing inevitability.
‘After you left tonight she told him. Just like that. She walked into the living room, and she told him. She said she was going. Leaving him, she said. That she’d been with someone else, for years. That man, the real estate man. The estate agent, the one with his face on the signs. Him. And that’s why she was never there. And that’s why she didn’t love him any more, because he just sat there in that chair watching television. She said she couldn’t remember the last time they even spoke. And then she went. She left.’
Lou’s shoulders shuddered like her spine was the pump-action arm of a shotgun. I shrank smaller and smaller in my bed and listened.
‘What did he do?’ asked Mal.
‘Nothing. He did nothing. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t move or raise his voice. He didn’t even speak. He just sat there like an empty shell. Like a ghost.’
Her lips flickered as she inhaled a sob and a silence where a wail was expected.
‘But it’s not his fault. She did that to him. She broke him. He would just sit there all day because he didn’t know what else to do.’
He massaged the thin muscle of her upper arm in his hand, up down up down as though he were raising a flag, and she leaned into it like a cat, back flexed, to a fond leg. She cried more and the words sounded watery.
‘He loved her. It’s like she’s killed him and left him alive at the same time. She was never there. She was always out. Always with him. And Dad knew, all this time he knew.’
There was quiet for a while but for the gentle, tired whimpers she made.
‘The woman he’s devoted his life to, and he never gave up because he believed that he loved her. Total devotion, and slowly it broke him. Can you imagine that?’
Mal told me once she looked like her dad. Never her mum.
‘I tried to hold him but he didn’t move. He was never really there. Now he never really will be.’
She nestled her head in Mal’s neck and he embraced her. It was as if he had grown around her, like ivy, like exactly what was needed at exactly the right time.
I pulled my own quilt up over my head and thought until I could hear the two of them sleeping. That poor man.
In the morning neither of them had moved.
31
Though I was never destined for the summits of academia, the older I got the more I enjoyed school. I sought and needed it. But it was not what I learned that I’d remember, it was the proximity of that lesson to the first time I felt a girl’s lips placed upon mine.
Sally Bay, Sal, was in my class. She wore make-up, the pinks and blues of a parakeet, which bestowed upon her an allure the other girls hadn’t yet figured out. Boys liked Sal so much that a playful punch from her was consigned an altogether different meaning. Even if it hurt, it was a pleasure. It was attention. It was everything that I’d wanted but had lost now that Mal’s was being so frequently shared, and that because of him Lou would never give me.
It was a warm spring day, the air swirling with pollen and floating seedlings. We were sitting in the park, me, Sal, Sporty Chris, others, pulling those thick yellow strips of straw from the ground with sharp tugs, the way one might pluck the coarse hair from a pig’s back. People were disappearing, home for tea, for television, other callings, until there were just the two of us left. No boys to say funny things before I’d thought of them. No braggarts, no liars, no better faster stronger runners jumpers or thinkers, just me and her.
We were spread out on the grass, unnaturally, pricklingly close. So close I could hear the short bursts of her quick, crisp breath, and it was exciting.
‘Have you ever kissed someone?’ she said.
‘Ha!’ I snorted. ‘Yes,’ I lied.
The anticipation sawed into my skull, a mouth full of frozen ice cream.
‘Want to kiss me?’ she asked.
I turned to face her, our noses almost Eskimo lips brushing. Her eyes were closed, a thick pastel blue. Her face was warmed by the sun and tiny flies buzzed whirlwinds at her ear. You, I thought, you, are the most normal person I know. And I liked it.
I licked my lips, not too wet, and then padded them together just how girls did to remove the grease of a purple cherry lipstick like the one she was wearing that made her lips look both alive and like plastic. And then I pursed them, like in magazines, and drove them forward slowly, like in soap operas, until the faintest of contact was made.
‘Wait!’ she said, and she pulled the coat she’d been using as a pillow up over our heads, as if to prevent the sun from playing witness to our illicit little tryst. As an added bonus, in the unthinkable event that either of us would open our eyes midway though the act – or, God forbid, both do so at the same time – the terrible embarrassment would be muffled by the dark.
And then she drove forward herself, her hand tentatively resting on my belly so as not to embrace it but to be there, scared and rigid. I repeated the act, mirroring her movement but taking the utmost of care not to accidentally brush her breast. Instead, and much to my instant regret, my hand came to rest on her bony rib cage with the static positioning a sprinter might adopt at the starting blocks. She smelled like teenage woman, sticky in the back of my throat. Her lips, as they came to mine, were slightly open, warm and syrupy. Mine, no saliva, were dried instantly so that we scratched and jarred together until I too was coated in a layer of her balm. And soon we were slipping off each other, our bodies wrought iron but our mouths two eels. Our jaws two engines, pumping away, sliding in and out of each other’s hopeless youthful timing.
I opened my eyes as the cymbals clashed inside my head. This felt wonderful. I looked at her, and though I couldn’t see I forgot very briefly everything else that had ever mattered and enjoyed the moment so completely that tears pretended they might form in the corner of my eyes. It lasted mere seconds.
She pulled away and giggled. I smiled back. And then a blankness caked me. I knew nothing to say. There were no correct noises, nor incorrect ones, to be made. Just the rustle of the long grass and the last dregs of pleasure. But I had to speak, to rescue us both. And so I panicked. I imagined Mal speaking to Lou.
‘Do you want to come to my house?’ I said. But I wasn’t him and she wasn’t her. And I was fifteen. And this was ridiculous.
‘Erm . . . no.’ She said. She was blushing. ‘I can’t. I’ve got to go home.’
She climbed to her feet, said goodbye and
waded through the long grass circle our supine bodies had carved on the ground. Home. But it had been instinct, nothing more. Drummed into me over all these years, an unease with the real world that only then could I start to abandon. Home had always been safe. Home had always been easy. But I didn’t want easy any more. I wanted to lie in fields, kissing girls.
I watched her leave. I imagined Lou’s back.
32
An hour after my first kiss, the residue of euphoria still remained, the way it does when you’re lucky to still be alive. I walked slowly home as the sun set and the sky dozed a melancholic purple. I was blessed with a new confidence. I imagined myself in an old film, doffing my cap to ladies and jumping into the air to bring both heels together with a charming clickety click. I pictured myself swinging effortlessly around lampposts for the full three hundred and sixty degrees. Maybe twice. I was grace and cool. Something about the evening had aroused in me an untested superpower. I felt the faintest tingle of it across my forehead and down each arm.
I turned into my street in time for the sunshine to outline the chimney stacks. Dad was sitting in his car, the door open, his legs swung to the side the way you’d lower yourself into a well. He was smoking a cigarette, the ghost of which made fragile designs. I hadn’t even known he smoked. He did that Dad nod, a neatly compacted ‘Hello, how are you?’ that signalled some level of familiarity. He looked heavily weathered, a stranger almost.
‘You’re just in time for dinner,’ he said, then bounced the butt of his cigarette against the drain.
Dinner was an unloved oven-ready pizza. Pineapple chunks flanked sore-looking meat, glazed in a shiny coat of grease and sitting on an old, chipped plate Dad won in a raffle. The television was switched off and we were perched on each side of a haggard, square, self-assembly trestle table we never normally used. It didn’t bode well. Happy families eat off of laps. I took extra time to chew through the lightly browned cheese and thick crumbling crust in the hope that it would render me exempt from any duty to break the silence. Dad examined the serrated edge of his knife before buttering another piece of bread.
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