‘So,’ he said to me. ‘Today? Good?’
‘I saw the careers adviser,’ I said.
I’d decided that now was not the time to mention that, after lying in a field with a girl and almost feeling the outline of her tender young breast, I’d been forced to stop off on the way home and look into the mirrored window of a hairdresser’s to be sure that my bottom lip wasn’t smeared in make-up. It was. With his eyes he goaded me, implored me to recount my day at school. And so, for him, I did.
‘So what is it that you would you like to do?’ she’d asked me.
My school careers adviser, a woman named Ms Kay, who, when asked the same question, hadn’t responded ‘Be a careers adviser’, seemed surprised that I didn’t have a ready answer.
She was dressed like an art deco super-villain, powerful clashes of blacks and whites topped neatly with a slick, angular bob that danced against the side of her head as she strode purposely about the corridors. She had pretended not to notice the gross caricature of her that someone pencilled on the wall next to the door of the staff room. There were few in existence who wanted to be elsewhere for so much of every working day as Ms Kay. Adult life for her had been a huge disappointment. It had failed to keep a single one of the promises it had made to her and liked to rub it in by forcing her to spend most of her waking hours with those of an age that facilitated the enjoyment of being alive.
In the sterile environs of her office she’d spread pamphlets on the table, detailing all manner of career paths I’d never entertained. She was busy talking me through them, making no pretence at having any passion for her vocation whatsoever. Not that it mattered to me, I’d stopped listening some time ago.
‘Are you even listening?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
I was actually thinking about Lou. That beauty, the poise of whose cheekbones alone (they formed the perfect gradient, pulling tight the skin around her cherubic chin) made dizzying bursts of adrenalin burn through my heart.
‘What do you feel that you are good at?’
Pretending to listen.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said.
Ms Kay cleared the pictures of plumbers, electricians and builders from the table, slotting them back into the corresponding files on the bookshelf. It was a process she’d be performing in reverse just five minutes later. She walked to the window, removed a smear from the glass with the cuff of her jacket, and turned to me.
‘Do you know . . . ?’ She paused. She sounded like she had too many teeth in her mouth. ‘Do you know what your brother Malcolm said two years ago when I asked him what he’d like to do?’
I’d no idea.
‘Malcolm is unemployed,’ I said.
‘“I’d like to change the world”,’ she said. ‘And do you know what I told him?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘“Don’t be ridiculous”.’
She thrust a leaflet into my hand as I walked through the door. On the front was a photograph of a man carrying a box, looking bored. I could only presume that the box contained his will to live. He looked a little like Ms Kay.
My family, at the dinner table that was so small our knees knocked and locked together, received only an edited version of this story. I left the part about Mal out of it but I thought it to myself and I watched his face as he was reminded of it, his eyes dropping to the piece of cheap cubed pork that lay alone on his plate.
33
Without the qualifications or inclination to go on to further education, after leaving school I grasped firmly to the floating detritus in the undercurrent of dead-end jobs. I resigned myself to two years of soul-destroying tedium before I left home. Everyone else seemed to be doing the same thing. This is what people did, some of them for ever.
I found a job in a butcher’s shop where the floor was a sticky bleach smell but never clean. The walls smelled of that waxy meat odour. So did the radio and so did the mugs from which you drank piping hot tea. To the touch, everything felt clammy, like holding a wet, raw kidney. By the time I arrived home from a day’s work the skin on my hands was a torrid blue from digging through freezer cabinets and covered in cuts and slices from the sharp, spiteful edges of frozen livers. My apron would be swiped with blood from helping a colleague, Ted, for whom conversation was limited to sports statistics and different cuts of meat, carry on our shoulders whole sides of beef between the delivery truck and the walk-in fridge. We looked like pallbearers on a farm, I joked, which he didn’t get.
I liked Ted. Ted listened while most were simply waiting for their turn to talk. If he didn’t know about something, he didn’t feel the need to misfire conjecture into the discussion. He was honest. He had a big honest face and a big honest chest atop legs as sturdy and true as tree trunks. He reminded me of a faithful St Bernard digging through Alpine snow to find his buried master. It was on the first day that I met Ted, covered in blood after shifting the hollowed carcasses of lambs all morning and with his outstretched hand dripping, that I decided to make him my best friend. Always covered in blood. I called him Red Ted.
Red Ted didn’t care who Mal was. He didn’t ask at any point. Even years and years later, after Day One, and even much later still, after I’d been to America and returned, broken, Red Ted would drive me to my hospital appointments in a car that was too small for him, dropping me by the door. He never asked about Malcolm Ede, even though everyone knew about Malcolm Ede by this point. That’s why I liked Red Ted. That, and his name.
Red Ted was twenty-two. He too had fallen into butchery upon leaving school, employed by the man who owns the shop to lug the bins full of bone across the yard without slipping over on errantly discarded gristle and breaking his gargantuan back. Soon after he’d joined, the owner had developed chronic arthritis in his fingers through years of exposure to cold, cuts and the infections the two bring when married together as they were here. Faced with a choice between closing the shop and giving it over to Ted, he chose the latter, mindful of the fact that few people were more trustworthy. There were also few who were more adept at carving meat. Red Ted, with a small curve-ended filleting knife clasped between his thumb and forefinger, could remove all of the bones from a chicken, neatly and wasting none of the tender meat, in under a minute. I remember wondering, all of those years later as I watched Mal expand, how much choice meat Red Ted might be able to remove from him, and how long it would take him to do so.
‘Not that long,’ he replied matter-of-factly when I asked him once, as though it were as normal an act as rolling a loin of pork, or preparing some thinly sliced lamb cutlets. He could do a cow in just under an hour.
‘There is someone here to see you . . .’ Red Ted announced one day, in his customary baritone. When he shouted, it was the pull-string horn of a speeding train.
‘Who is it?’ I asked.
I was brushing the cold, slimy, golden jelly from a roll of freshly cooked turkey with the back of my hand. To stop, clean up and reapply my hairnet only to find it was Chris, or Sally Bay, or any of the others who’d pop by unannounced in the hope of scoring a free sausage roll, would have been pointless.
‘It’s Lou.’
I straightened my apron, dosed my hands with bright blue sanitising powder that burped chemical bubbles on contact with the hot water on my skin, and threw my hairnet aside. A look in the mirror. A rub of the hands. One more straightening of the apron and a deep, deep breath. It felt like I hadn’t seen her properly for a while, since Mal had all but taken up residence at her dad’s house.
‘Hello,’ I said quietly, emerging to her surprise from the doorway underneath the futuristic neon blast of the fly-murdering machine. It buzzed like its victims. She turned.
‘Hello. How are you . . .? I like your apron.’
I laughed. ‘Thanks. I’m good. You?’
‘Good.’
‘I take it you’ve not come for some sirloin.’
‘No.’
‘We do excellent chops.’
Adult co
nversation. With Lou. Funny. Clever. Light, not too serious. For the first time. She smiled. My mind lit up and in my ears came the organ music they play at American baseball when a home run gets hit but my face stayed collected. I wondered why you never feel like you’re maturing, you just wake up one day and you’ve matured. Well, almost.
‘Have you heard from Mal?’ she said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not since yesterday. He ate all my biscuits.’
She laughed again. I get cartoon pound-signs rolling around my eyes, my mouth a frothing fountain of animated golden coins.
‘Oh. Well, we’ve found a place to live.’
‘Right.’
‘We were wondering. Wondering if you could do us a favour?’
‘Sure. OK. What is it?’
My heart began to hurt. I almost turned around to check that Ted had not jammed his cleaver through it. I could see this coming. I was at least three seconds ahead of the world.
‘We were wondering if you’d tell your mum the news?’
34
My walk home from the butcher’s that night was prolonged by the lazy warmth of an orange dusk. It was stretched beyond recognition, like the walk behind a family hearse.
By the time I was home I was a wreck. I forgot to take my overalls off. A dirty apron. A splattered white coat. Boots dashed with the ghostly spots of the bleach Red Ted would use to clean the floor. A white netted hat with animal blood coagulating on its rim. I looked like a mental umpire.
I took off my stinking boots outside and placed them neatly side by side at the step leading in. With surgical care I slid my key into the slot and turned it. Inside I found Mal, surprised to see me, loading a cardboard box with an assortment of uncoordinated clothes.
‘If you’re here . . .’ I said, ‘why do I have to tell her?’
No room for hellos. No time for how-are-yous.
‘Because she’s not here,’ he said. ‘She’s at the mayor’s office, working, and I won’t be here when she gets back.’
‘But you can be.’
‘But I won’t.’
He scooped entire bundles of his own things from the wardrobe with both arms, as though shifting boulders with a growing urgency, and with no regard for the sharp creases and folds Mum had loved into them dropped them into the boxes arranged on the floor until they spilled out over the sides. I flung my bloody hat onto the bed but it rolled onto the carpet. I sat down where it landed and watched him as he packed.
‘OK. I’m going. Tell her I’ll be back tomorrow to get more stuff.’ He waddled through the door, a box under his arm, Lou waiting in a car parked in the street. ‘And tell her it’s fine. It’s normal, that’s all. People leave home all the time.’
He shut the door behind him with his hooked left foot. He’d gone to enter a world he never before wanted to be a part of. He’d started his run-up with a plan to make a dent in a surface he’d once told me wouldn’t bend.
The house felt dormant. I could hear the dull mechanics of the clock on the wall. I could hear the bubbles pop pop pop in the can of cola Mal had left on his bedside table, and I silenced it by drinking it down in one go.
35
Mum came home late. Her key rattled loudly in the door, her bag swung on the peg meant but never used for hats. In one practised move she scraped her flat shoes from her heels with the other foot until they plopped to the floor below her and chased them with her big toe to their hiding place like they were mice. Before they’d touched down her feet were already in new slippers. She shuffled into the kitchen. In the flicker of illumination she filled the kettle with water and switched it on, the opening bar to a piece she knew well played out again then by the kitchen orchestra she conducted. Clicks and whistles and beeps. The thump of tins in bins and the clack clack of a chopping board fighting a knife.
I sat quietly in the living room.
An omelette for two, mushrooms, lightly salted. I’d meant to bring meat for her.
‘He’s gone,’ I said.
‘I know,’ she said.
That night in bed I heard her cry as she folded her clothes with meticulous care and put them to sleep in a deep wooden drawer. I heard it close. I fell asleep.
Around three hours later there was weight on my bed, a hand on my shoulder, a kind whisper of, ‘It’s just me, don’t worry.’ A shadow part caught by the light through the window made the half of Mum’s face it hit moon-coloured. Nighttime chameleon.
‘What’s wrong?’ I said. Sleep talk, slow and tired and confused.
‘Nothing,’ she whispered. But there was worry in her voice for a bird flown. If I’d been Mal, she’d have sat there all night. I fell asleep again and she left.
36
Day Seven Thousand Four Hundred and Eighty-Three.
I stumble about the house in a melancholic stupor that stops me from feeling the breeze of daily commotion as it passes. Mum runs between the trailer and the bedroom, trays of food wobbling like the jowls of a huge, slobbery bloodhound. I stand still at the foot of Dad’s ladder, still unconquered. I was silly to even attempt to scale it, I think, my legs as they are.
She doesn’t notice me scrabbling through the airing cupboard, where I discover my trophy from sports day all those years before. It wears a cape of cobwebs and nestles in the damp bedding of old blankets and children’s toys. I am, for ten quiet minutes, an archaeologist of my own childhood. I brush clean the dinosaur bones of the times it wasn’t like this. I piece together the broken pottery of the long days our family would spend together and wonder just how it had been smashed into so many tiny fragments as to have become unrecognisable. This was, perhaps, a job for a better archaeologist than me.
I hear Dad clambering about the attic still, the tools in his work belt angrily striking at his hips clank clank. And as I lift my crisp white butcher’s overall from the radiator and violate it with cruel, urgent creases, I walk to the window.
Lou. I’d not imagined it.
Lou. Right now.
Lou. On the lawn.
Day Seven Thousand Four Hundred and Eighty-Three, according to the display on the wall. I see Lou.
37
She stands there in the sunshine, looking much the same. Still that pinprick of light in her eye, her thin porcelain neck a matt white, rolling into sharp collar bones in an angle-free descent like the ornate, curved legs of a Victorian coffee table. Lou is beautiful. Some people are so attractive that looking at them makes you feel as though your own skin doesn’t fit properly, and Lou is like that. She has blonde, tumbling hair that wisps and frays as though she’s washed it in the sea each morning, combed it through with finest shells and rinsed away the foam in a freshly formed rock pool. She looks like a mermaid. Her eyes are mint green, her nose straight and strong. Back then, before she left, I would look at her every day and still find new secrets, new details in the shapes she made.
I wave, clumsy and graceless, unsure. She waves back a smooth, elegant half-moon. I can see her at twelve again.
I look at my watch to record the time. All around me is noise, this endless cycle of ordinary repetitive action by which our extraordinary lives has become defined. But no one seems to have noticed her out there, certainly not Mal, whose snore has re-fired once more.
Mal. I dreamt sometimes of standing on him, my feet disappearing up to ankle height in his flab, schloop schloop schloop as I stepped, like in quicksand. Losing my boots in his belly, wading through his fatty quagmire, being pulled deeper and deeper into his gut until I was, at waist height, halfway inside him, clinging to Lou by the wrist and trying to pull her out. But she’s disappearing, and I pull and pull and sweat and struggle but it’s hopeless, and soon she is gone, eaten up by his skin, lost in the marsh of his great stagnant body. And by then it’s too late for me too, and I follow her down inside him never to be seen again.
She is still there and waving back. This sight, it lifts and swings me through extremes of hot and cold. I know then I still love her. I know then this is coming
to an end.
She is wearing sunglasses, big ones that panda-circle her eyes. She gestures, a flattened hand turned on its side, chop chop chop. To meet her at the butcher’s shop. And a time. Eleven o’clock tonight. After the interview is finished, of course. And then she turns and walks, stepping over the guy ropes of the tent on the lawn. Soon she has disappeared, my phantom limb lopped off.
‘Where are you going? You can’t go anywhere. What about the interview?’ Mal says as I struggle to bend down over my stiffened legs in their surgical scaffolding and put on my shoes in the bedroom. His voice, powerless, wafts through the tyres of flab that hoopla his neck.
‘Out,’ I say.
‘You never go out,’ he says.
‘You can talk.’
We both laugh. But I’m not going anywhere just yet. I wouldn’t miss this, the interview, the big reveal, for the world.
Mum is on her hands and knees by the side of the bed, unravelling wires and tubes dreadlocked together from the back of Mal’s machines. They bleep a perpetual chorus. They remind me of the doctors who have now all been and gone. Now on to the serious business.
The stretched patches of hair on Mal’s enormous chest are turning silver. Clinging in amongst them are the charred crumbs of well-cooked sausage and the crumbly sponge morsels of last night’s cake. Red Ted would need to dig for a long long time to find Mal’s bones. Burst a spade with a sharp downwards jab through that dirty, thin top layer of skin. Force the shovel with his foot through the sinew and the meat. Lift, drop and dig, spooning out the maggoty-white tubes of fat. And dig and dig and dig until he hears the chink of his blade upon the skeleton, the treasure, all that was there in the beginning. A journey to the centre of the earth.
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