Grow Up

by Ben Brooks

6:00 p.m. – Dine on curry flavour Pot Noodles. Get high on drugs (sorry, Mum!)

  8:00 p.m. – Graciously welcome guests and accept free cans of beer and cigarettes.

  9:00 p.m. + Unstructured fun

  Do not repeat.

  ‘Are you staying over tonight, Tenaya?’ Mum asks.

  ‘If that’s all right.’

  ‘Of course, just make sure your parents know where you are.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Wolf.’

  ‘And no one else is to come over.’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  Mum kisses me on the forehead and says that she loves me.

  ‘Have a good time and make sure you two behave yourselves,’ she says, getting into our car.

  ‘See you later, big man,’ Keith says.

  ‘Yea.’

  Keith often chooses to use oddly positive and patronising colloquialisms when addressing me. On the occasions when he does address me, my internal monologue runs in overdrive, continually repeating the word MURDERER in the voice of a petrified middle-aged housewife. It is ironic that Keith uses so many friendly terms because actually he is brutal and heartless.

  Mum told me once that I don’t understand irony, which was ironic because she was holding a packet of fish fingers at the time.

  Not really, that was a joke. I was trying to lighten the mood.

  Me and Tenaya watch the car shrink to nothing, then she rolls us both cigarettes and we go inside.

  ‘Are the Layton Hill kids coming?’ she asks. I shrug.

  ‘Is Tom coming?’ I ask. She shrugs.

  ‘He said he would.’

  Tom is Tenaya’s boyfriend. He wears knitted jumpers ironically and has oversized black plastic glasses. Sometimes, when Tom speaks, I can empathise with Keith and begin to believe that he may have had a valid reason for murdering Margaret Clamwell with his trombone. Tenaya only likes him because he has cheekbones like protractor edges.

  ‘You had best be civil this time, Jasper,’ I am warned. Last time we were at a party with Tom, I put date-rape drug in his vodka and Tenaya had to carry him home. I later confessed under duress, because Tenaya was fretting that the vodka had been meant for her. She told me she was scared for her life.

  ‘Of course,’ I promise. I have better plans for Tom this time.

  We both begin to prepare the house for Saturday. We hide ornaments beneath the stairs and distribute ashtrays and buckets.

  ‘Do you think people will feel compelled to break things?’ I say.

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘We should have some sort of system in place for dealing with offenders,’ I say. ‘If the house gets trashed, Mum will not let me get my nipple pierced.’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘Did you say your nipple pierced, Jasper?’

  ‘Do you still have that rape spray?’

  ‘Your nipple?’

  ‘Okay, we will rape-spray people in the eyes if they do anything wrong. You will trip them over and I will sit on their chests and spray them in their stupid vandal faces.’

  I throw some plastic bags around the room. They will save the family home my mother has worked so hard to provide for me.

  ‘That should be fine,’ Tenaya says. ‘Do you have Julia tomorrow?’

  ‘Yea, you can stay here the whole day or meet me and Ping in town after, it’s up to you.’

  ‘I’ll decide in the morning.’

  Tenaya has enough ketamine left for us both to have a line. Mild relaxation ensues. We fall asleep watching a Royal Philharmonic rendition of Stravinsky’s Firebird.

  3

  When I wake up the living room is choked with thick yellow light and it is cold. The television is still on, showing a tired woman selling Tupperware. I redistribute the duvet so that only Tenaya’s head is left exposed. I make tea and start to run a bath.

  According to my schedule, I should still be sleeping because it is 6:30 a.m. This means that if I bathe now I will have time to work on my novel before Jeremy Kyle starts. It is important that I continue to write things, even if they do not form anything coherent. If I write incoherent passages then I will be unlikely to write a seminal novel but it will be more likely than if I hadn’t written at all.

  The bath water is hot so all my blood rushes to the surface of the skin, as though it’s trying to find out what is going on up there. Like when people all slow down to look at car accidents, my blood is fascinated by the misfortune of my skin. I put some of Mum’s bath salts in so that the heat smells of lavender. The lavender heat makes me feel dizzy and calm. I am a relaxed and functioning human being. I read Mein Kampf.

  For History, Mr Glover always tells us to read certain chapters from the textbook. The textbook is a desert. It is ‘a pathway to exam success’ but it is also not very useful if you want to understand history well. For example, when describing a racist man, the textbook may say ‘appeared to dislike those of colour, often acted violently toward them’ while the man’s diary may read ‘their devilish hellskins blind me and eclipse the horizon’. This is why I prefer reading the original literature of our notorious historical personalities.

  Some choice quotes from Mein Kampf are:

  ‘All the human culture, all the results of art, science and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan.’

  I think that Hitler believed this because he never got a chance to listen to Wu-Tang Clan.

  ‘Halfway between man and ape.’

  I circled this. I thought it was funny. I showed it to Kobe during a free period and he laughed.

  ‘Men do not perish as a result of lost wars.’

  In Hitler’s defence, I took this quote out of context. This quote is followed by something about men only perishing as a result of impure race. This was funny because of how America is the current favourite for ‘Winner of the Earth’ and it is made up of immigrants from all over the world, breeding together in a phenomenally successful orgy of wealth and power.

  I also read books written by people in the Ku Klux Klan when we were learning about them. I had to order the books from the Ku Klux Klan website and, because my order was over $25, they sent a free t-shirt that said ‘White Knight Walking’ and had a picture of a Klan member on a horse. Because it was an XL, I wore it to bed one night and Keith glimpsed it while I was brushing my teeth. The next day he had a secret conversation with Mum in the kitchen and she said, ‘Calm down, Keith, I’m sure it’s just a phase, he’ll grow out of it.’

  Choice quotes from Klan propaganda include:

  ‘Quarantine all AIDS carriers.’

  ‘The false teachers of churchianity justify interracial marriages in order to keep the White race blind to administering God’s laws.’

  ‘We are the fog.’

  When the skin on my fingers folds up into origami swans, I get out of the bath and re-clothe. Downstairs, I boil the kettle and sit down at the kitchen table with my notebook and a cigarette.

  For a whole hour I work on a rape scene involving a man called Martin, who has a ginger beard and enjoys curry sauce, and a woman called Cindy, who only has seven toes and believes that the rape would stop if only she was able to expose them to Martin. Throughout the scene she attempts to remove her shoes while he penetrates her. She also tries to ward him off by repeatedly saying, ‘I only have seven toes.’ Martin doesn’t care. Cindy begins to feel flattered by the rape. She feels as though someone really wants her and, for that, she gives herself up to Martin so that it stops being a rape and turns into just sex.

  I feel ambivalent about the rape scene because it is poignant but also unbelievable. I tear out the pages and throw them into the bin. ‘Back to the drawing board’, as Keith would say. The hour is not wasted however,
as I have now decided that the novel should definitely contain a rape scene, maybe several.

  Tenaya enters the kitchen. She sits down opposite me and starts to roll a cigarette. After she wakes up, her hair always makes it look as though she has just has passionate sex with a crack addict in a room with Velcro walls. Personally, I prefer it that way, but girls tend to have very distorted senses of self-image, so she doesn’t listen to me when I tell her this.

  ‘Your hair is nice like that,’ I say.

  ‘Shut up, Jasper.’

  ‘I was being nice.’

  ‘How’s the novel?’ she asks.

  Tenaya is very supportive of my ambitions. I have promised her that when I win the Booker Prize we will move to Eastern Europe and live off tea and toast.

  ‘It’s getting there,’ I assure her. ‘I am going to include a rape scene.’

  ‘Sarah DiLeeso was raped by a boy from Layton Hill who had a police tag round his ankle.’

  ‘Was she really?’ I ask, fascinated. ‘Do you think she would consent to an interview?’

  ‘Jeremy Kyle is starting,’ she says. She has ignored my question because it was inappropriate.

  If someone tried to rape me then I would do my best to give them a handjob so that they cummed before they had torn my anus and would not want to go ahead with the rape. If this was not a viable option, however, then I might suggest that I was the ‘giver’ and they were the ‘receiver’ because that way it would be less painful for me. I might say things like, ‘You have been having a hard time lately, let me do the work,’ in order to persuade them.

  We go back through to the living room and turn on Jeremy Kyle. It is a television programme where the relationships of especially aggressive humans are repaired using intense circular arguments and lie-detector tests. Tenaya asks to borrow a t-shirt, so I go and get my Ku Klux Klan one. She scowls as she pulls it on over her head. It reaches her knees. She is an eight-year-old dressed as Satan for Hallowe’en.

  The episode we are watching features a man called Jay and a woman called Kayler. They are both suffering severe acne. She is overweight and he is underweight. This is not the problem in their relationship. The problem in their relationship is that he smoked a lot of pot and then had sex with their dog, which she counts as cheating. He admits this but suggests that it is not cheating. They talk it over for a while. She makes him take a lie-detector test because she believes he may be ‘a serial dog-raper’.

  Before the results of the test are revealed, I go upstairs to change for Julia. She often makes observations about my progress through how well-fitting and seemingly ironed my clothes are. I opt for blue skinny jeans and a white shirt. Mum would call this ‘presentable’.

  ‘Okay, I’m leaving now,’ I say.

  ‘I’ll stay here. In case you were wondering, Jay was lying about not being a serial dog-raper.’

  ‘Okay, thanks.’

 

  The sky is grey again. The sky is always grey in the suburbs. It is rarely, if ever, any real colour between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m.

  At the bus stop, I meet the old woman from number 26 who has schizophrenia. Mum scolded me once for laughing when I heard her talking about growing dogs from trees at the Village Fête.

  They call it a Village Fête even though it is really a Suburb Fête.

  This particular woman’s name is Mrs Mulberry, and she believes that it is possible to grow humans from seeds made of paper tissue and urine. Me and Tenaya pressed our faces against her bay window once last year and the whole living room floor was covered in soil and tiny paper pellets.

  We learned about schizophrenia in Psychology. It causes a distorted perception of reality. Mrs Mulberry is remarkably original in her schizophrenia because she does not believe that a secret governmental organisation/alien horde/religious cult is hunting her.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Mulberry,’ I say.

  ‘Hello, dear.’

  She has a vellum moustache and is wearing a blue Mackintosh.

  ‘How’s the farming?’

  ‘Not so well, I’m afraid. A nasty virus infected all the seeds and so I had to eat them so that I wouldn’t grow children with Down’s syndrome.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Maybe next season will yield a better crop. Did you know that people with Down’s syndrome are technically a different species to us because they have a different number of chromosomes?’

  ‘Flat-faced rats,’ she says.

  I feel uncomfortable with Mrs Mulberry’s commentary but, in line with Mother’s wishes, I nod and smile.

  The bus pulls up. It is being driven by the bus driver with dreadlocks like old kebabs. I go up and sit on the top deck so that Mrs Mulberry can’t follow me. For a while after the bus starts, I hear a distressed scratching sound that means Mrs Mulberry is trying to follow me up the stairs using her walking stick and broken Meccano knees. Eventually she sighs and sits down on the bottom floor.

  I have had a therapist since me and Tenaya were caught killing a cat. We only killed the cat because I accidentally fell on it and it was in a lot of pain. I killed it with my foot. Tenaya was not appointed a therapist because her mother could not afford one and also because she insisted that animal abuse was perfectly normal for children of our age. She said that we must have been testing the boundaries of our relationship with the natural world. My mother said that Tenaya’s mother was a ‘fat hippie whore’ and Tenaya’s mother said that my mother was a ‘rich bitch’.

  My therapist is an art therapist called Julia. She insists I call her Julia and not ‘Mrs Hawthorn’, so that I view her as a friend and open up to her, which I do not.

  Julia is pleasant and naïve. She believes everything that I tell her.

  I am watching the sky melt into puddles on the tarmac through Julia’s small window. She has already asked about Sebastian (I have confided in Julia that I am a homosexual in a long-term relationship), Cunnilingual (I have confided in Julia that I write short stories for an erotic magazine) and meditation (I have confided in Julia that I practise Mahayana Buddhism and am nearing partial enlightenment).

  ‘Have you had any more dark thoughts recently, Jasper?’ she says.

  Sugar is pouring out of her lips. Sugar is only good when it is in tea. It is not good when it is coming out of the mouths of overpaid women in suits who think that they are emotionally shampooing me.

  Julia leans in.

  Her thin face is folded in a way that suggests she used to be attractive and hasn’t yet realised that she no longer is. She has green eyes and cropped blonde hair, the kind of cut that middle-aged women ask for when they want to look like Victoria Beckham. Julia does not look like Victoria Beckham. Julia looks like Susan Boyle.

  ‘I saw a snail this morning and wanted to crush it under my foot but then I thought about how doing so would prevent the snail from having future pleasurable life experiences, so I stepped over it instead.’

  She weakly pats her hands against each other in understated feminine applause.

  ‘See, Jasper? I told you we could make progress. You just need to remember to imagine yourself in the shoes of others.’

  I nod.

  ‘Empathy,’ she says.

  ‘Empathy,’ I repeat.

  Julia removes a sheet of paper from beside my folder. My folder is where she writes down all of the lies I have told her in the past year.

  The sheet of paper has three ovals on. Each oval has been given a name; Sebastian, Mum, Keith. Julia asks me to draw onto each oval the expression that best illustrates my feelings towards the person.

  When I first visited the therapy clinic, I was promised that art therapy was a ‘healing’ and ‘life-enhancing’ practice, whose effectiveness has been scientifically proven with research studies of large samples. I am an experienced user of Google and still could
not find any of these studies. In reality, art therapy is patronising, or it would be were I to embrace it seriously. Julia thinks she is patronising me, and I think I am humouring Julia, so sessions swing like carousels and fairgrounds, and are very exciting.

  I draw a winking face with a quiff on Sebastian’s oval, a smiling face with curly hair on Mum’s, and a moustached face doing a thumbs-up on Keith’s. Julia nods encouragingly. The right answer.

  After an entire hour of drawing faces, animals, buildings and ‘abstract objects which represent tangible feelings’, I am told to stop.

  Julia is smiling.

  ‘I think we have definitely made progress. Do you think we have made progress, Jasper?’ She asks.

  ‘Yes, Julia. I think I have progressed well. I feel like a healthy, well-balanced individual, thanks to your care and attention.’

  She blushes. Her cheeks are empty poppy fields.

  ‘How is the Klan?’ she asks.

  A month ago, I decided to put my Ku Klux Klan t-shirt to good use by wearing it to a therapy session and telling Julia I had joined. I explained to her that I held bi-monthly meetings in my bedroom with other Klansmen from around Ivythorne.

  ‘Are there many Klansmen in Ivythorne?’ she had asked.

  ‘Yes, lots. Do you remember that prominent local Afro-Caribbean artist who died last year?’

  ‘Yes, John Ducell. He died of cancer.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’

  Julia opened her mouth and stretched her eyes very wide when I said this. Then she changed the subject.

  ‘It is going well, thank you,’ I tell her. ‘Next week we are going to spray graffiti on the Caribbean social club.’

  Every time Julia fails to spot my lies or to dissuade me from engaging in hate crimes, I feel a sinking disappointment in the year 2010. I do not like the way people act now. Mr Hutchinson calls it ‘the plague of the post-modern era’. The plague is tolerance. The plague is being made to tolerate even the intolerant. This is why you can go to www.KKK.com and buy t-shirts with White Power slogans on them.