by Ben Brooks
‘Ping said we could go over to his before.’
‘Mm.’
Tenaya nods then falls asleep. I take a book off her bookshelf at random and sit on the window ledge, reading. The book is called Women on Top. It is about the different ways that people have sex in their heads.
15
7:38 p.m. Ping’s band are playing at the Twelve Cats tonight. I am going to wear my wolf t-shirt. At gigs you can throw your body around and rub it against girls and they can’t swear at you for it because everyone is just having a good time.
Ping’s band are called Deep Emotional Skaing. He believes that puns are funny. Puns are for old people and bad poems. Last year they won a local competition and some of their songs got put on iTunes and they had a CD made. The CD was called Fuck The Free World, Mary Jane. This means nothing.
When I have dressed, I go downstairs and put my head in the fridge. Cold yellow light licks my face. There is an unopened bottle of blue-top milk in the fridge. I unscrew the lid and peel off the white thing. I stand up and glug milk.
Mum appears behind me.
‘Jasper,’ she says, ‘stop that now. Other people have to use that milk.’
‘But, Mum, it’s good luck to drink straight from a newly opened bottle.’
‘I don’t care, Jasper, get a glass.’
I drop the milk bottle back into the fridge.
‘Mum,’ I say. ‘I’m going to see Ping’s band tonight. Can I have some money?’
Mum frowns. ‘How much?’
‘Ten big ones.’
‘Don’t say big ones, Jasper.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s what the mafia say.’
‘Fine. Can I have ten pounds, please?’
Mum sighs and passes me a note from her purse. I grunt at her so that she knows how grateful I am. I go out to catch the bus.
Ping’s mum answers the door. She is wearing a dressing gown. Her hair is wet. My penis is screaming in my pants. It is upset with me for not allowing it to climb into Ping’s mum’s vagina. She probably has a beautiful vagina. A perfectly shaven gorge.
‘Hi, Jasper,’ she says. ‘They’re upstairs. Go straight up.’
‘Thanks, Mrs Lin.’
I bound past her and up the stairs. Ping, Ana and Tenaya are all sat on the bed, laughing. Ping and Ana are holding hands. I wonder who will surrender first: Ping’s penis, or Ana’s virginity. Girls think that their virginities are priceless glass figurines. All they are really is three minutes of embarrassment followed by a sinking disappointment followed by the question, ‘What are you thinking?’
‘What’re you doing?’ I say.
‘I got a new phone,’ Ping says.
He holds it up. Looks like a fake BlackBerry. It doesn’t seem funny.
‘I don’t understand the joke.’
‘Jonah told me about the Psychology trip.’
I gulp. ‘Um. What?’
‘You know.’
‘Prick.’
Ana laughs. Frigid bitch. I look at Tenaya. She’s looking at the duvet pattern.
‘So he’s about to find out he’s got a little guy on the way.’
I laugh. ‘Yes, yes.’
‘Who’s going to speak?’ Tenaya says.
‘I’ll do it,’ Ana says.
‘You can’t do it.’
‘Why not?’
‘That stupid accent,’ I say.
‘Leave her alone.’ Ping crosses his arms.
‘Don’t be gay.’
‘No,’ Tenaya says. ‘Just he knows your voice already.’
‘My sister’s back from uni,’ Ping says. ‘I’ll get her to do it.’
‘Will she?’
‘Yea, I used to phone school all the time pretending to be Dad when she didn’t want to go in.’
Ping leaves the room and comes back a few minutes later with his sister. She is a hulky female with a flat chest and a monobrow. She’s wearing an Oxford Brooks t-shirt. It is difficult to believe that she came out of Ping’s mum. I think the reason she didn’t want to go into school much must have been because people called her Frida Kahlo and stabbed her with pens.
We say hellos and Ping briefs her on what to say. She nods. She doesn’t say much in response but when Jonah picks up the phone she becomes an Oscar-winning actress.
This is all we hear:
‘Jonah?’
‘It’s Susan, from Plymouth.’
‘I’m pregnant.’
(We gag ourselves with our hands.)
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
‘Well, I did a pregnancy test.’
‘No, they’re pretty much always right.’
‘I don’t know, ninety-nine-point-seven per cent or something.’
‘Yes, but it’s not a huge chance, is it?’
‘Grow up, you’re going to be a father.’
(Ana chokes on a laugh.)
‘Yes, I’m keeping it.’
‘Yes, you’ll have to pay me money until it turns eighteen.’
Ping tears the phone out of his sister’s hand.
‘Happy Father’s Day!’ he shouts, hanging up immediately to avoid Jonah’s siege of fucks and cunts and pricks. We all fold over ourselves, laughing.
12:15 a.m. Me, Tenaya, Jonah and Ana are being thrown about by a crowd of sweating kids. Deep Emotional Skaing are playing on a low stage. Jonah bought some pills. He gave me one in the toilet. He said he didn’t know what they were. I feel different. I feel okay. I feel warm. It sounds as though the band are playing one huge note without stopping. The note has grown huge and swallowed the room. We are all inside the note. It is our castle. A shirtless man’s back collides with my face. My lips taste salt. Who am I supposed to be? Tenaya is bobbing up and down. Her hair is flying about her face. Ping is grimacing. His hands are clawing at his bass. Ryan Samuels is the singer. Ryan Samuels is screaming and his face has turned the colour of a Gideon’s Bible and it might explode and it might shower us all with bloody scraps of cheek. He launches himself off the stage. We raise our hands. I support his crotch. I squeeze. I am not gay. We pass him backwards. He jumps down and steals someone’s beer and runs back up onto the stage. Ryan Samuels empties the beer over his crowd. People scream. People want more beer. They start another song. Ping is on his knees. Ping thinks that he is very good. He is just playing one note. I am inside the note. This note is our new home, for now, which is for ever.
When the band have finished playing, we go outside to smoke. Me and Tenaya sit at a damp picnic table. The pill is wearing off. I am only vibrating slightly now. People are stood in circles, talking loudly about the music. Ping is still backstage putting his stuff away. Ana runs out of the pub, holding a rum and coke, and joins our table.
‘Wasn’t that so amazing?’ she says.
‘Great,’ I say.
Tenaya smiles. ‘So,’ she says, ‘you and Ping.’
‘He’s wonderful,’ Ana says.
‘He’s Ping,’ I say. Love is a cult.
Tenaya gives me a look that means she thinks I am being a twat.
‘But you’re going back to Moscow next year?’
Ana grins. She is in love with Charles Manson. She will commit murders because he will tell her to. Nobody will understand why. The police will carry her away and she will not scream but her eyes will be the eyes of the last Bengal tiger left in Bhutan.
‘I’m not,’ she says. ‘I’m staying. I’ll get a job in a café or something. Me and Ping are going to live together. He’s going to try and take the band all the way.’
‘All the way,’ I say. ‘Wow.’
‘Jasper,’ Tenaya whispers. She hits my leg under the table.
‘I love hi
m,’ Ana says.
Girls can be so gay. Even Tenaya is finding it hard keeping the laughter in her throat captive.
Ping emerges from through the back door. His face is flushed and he is wearing a crown of sweat. Ana runs to him and buries her face in his brine-soaked t-shirt. He kisses the top of her head. Me and Tenaya tell him that the band played great. We say that they are getting much better and that their new song sounded like it could be a radio hit. I make sure to use the phrase ‘all the way’.
After a few minutes we excuse ourselves and go to catch the 96 to the retail park with Big Asda in it. It is only a short bus journey. Tenaya falls asleep on my shoulder. I nudge her awake when we reach our stop. She blinks as though she does not know where she is, then smiles.
Big Asda is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. 1:21 a.m. It is the last torch left lit in the retail park. Huge sheets of light fall out of the windows and lie across the tarmac night like the bodies of naked angels.
Tenaya pulls a deep trolley out of its queue and we go through the automatic doors. My body temperature jumps. A security guard filling out a sudoku grid looks up. He does a small bow as we enter. He seems like a warm, well-mannered man. I wish that Mum had married him.
‘What first?’ I say.
Tenaya shrugs.
We walk through the refrigerator aisle. It is deserted. Tenaya puts a fat bottle of green-top milk into the trolley. I put a chocolate milkshake in. She takes it out and asks me if I am eight years old. She suggests I buy an Actimel instead. I tell her that I would rather give the money to a heroin addict.
In the dried-food aisle she lowers a huge bag of lentils into the trolley. I look at her with disgust. She goes on to add raisins, prunes and cashew nuts. It is too much. I lie prostrate in front of the trolley.
‘What are you doing?’ I shout up.
‘What are you doing?’ she says.
I stand up.
‘We are two seventeen-year-old children alone in a supermarket and you are buying fucking prunes. You should be buying huge bags of chicken nuggets and Polish beers and cigarettes.’
‘Jasper,’ she says, ‘since my parents bought that fucking house all they have done is get drunk and order cheap takeaway. We eat takeaway for lunch and for tea, and then leftover takeaway for breakfast. I do not want any more shitty food.’
That makes sense. ‘Fine.’
‘Go and get some chicken nuggets, though.’
‘Okay.’
I sprint to the frozen section and pick up the largest bag of chicken nuggets I can find. Tenaya has moved on to browsing the vegetables when I find her again. She has added one iceberg lettuce, three leeks, four tomatoes and a red onion to our trolley.
‘Done?’ I say.
‘Yea, just need cigarettes.’
‘Will you cook chicken nuggets when we get back?’
‘Yea.’
‘And can we watch Gilmore Girls?’
‘Fine.’
16
I am bored. I have spent the day pretending to revise. Really I was playing 3D Pinball Space Cadet on the computer. Eventually I will reach the rank of Fleet Admiral. My perseverance will be rewarded.
6:30 p.m. I have eaten a filling dinner of sausages, mash potato and onion gravy. I called Jonah and asked what he was doing. He told me he was doing nothing and said I should come over. I am leaving the house now.
‘I’m going to Jonah’s, Mum,’ I say. ‘Bye.’
I shout this at the empty living room.
Mum appears from nowhere.
‘Be very careful,’ she says. ‘Don’t be back late.’
‘Yes, Mum.’
‘Ten, at the latest.’
‘Ten is ridiculous, Mum.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes, I will not be back later than eleven.’
I slam the door behind me.
I have had the last word.
The 38 bus goes to Jonah’s. It only takes seven minutes. I sit on one of the balding seats and watch the sky outside peel like old paint. There is a woman stood in the aisle by my seat. Her hand is curled tight around the pole. She is squeezing hard. All of the colour has fled from her fingers and up into her modest breasts and sad-looking cheeks. Her nails have been bitten down to half-size and they are flecked with specks of red.
I do not understand people very well.
I will not eat my own fingers.
I will not hang myself with a rugby sock.
I will not murder my ex-wife by punching her nose bone up into her brain.
Jonah opens the door after I ring the bell six times. We go through to his living room and collapse on the sofa. He is watching the Disney cartoon version of Robin Hood. The one where Robin Hood is a fox.
‘This bit is so good,’ Jonah says.
A small white rabbit wearing a large hat has just fired an arrow over a wall and into a game of badminton being played between a hen and a vixen.
‘Yea.’
For reasons I do not yet understand, I always cry when I see other people crying on the television. This is why I do not watch Secret Millionaire. I can only hope that the future will tame the wild horses in my eyes. I still believe that the reason Samantha Black would not have sex with me last year was because I cried during Juno and she thought that I was gay.
I hope nobody cries.
The small rabbit does not look very happy.
‘Jonah,’ Jonah’s mum shouts from the kitchen. ‘Jonah, get out of the living room, I want to watch the news.’
Jonah’s mum has watched the news every day since her husband died in Afghanistan. She is just looking for someone to swear at. She swears indiscriminately. I have witnessed it often. She swears at Trevor McDonald, Hannah Montana and Gok Wan. She calls them all cunts.
‘Let’s go upstairs and play Xbox,’ Jonah says.
‘Do we have to?’
‘Yes. We can play Halo on Xbox Live.’
Jonah knows that I like listening to angry people shouting on Xbox Live.
‘Okay,’ I say.
Usually I do not like computer games because they are dull and bad for character development, however playing Halo on Xbox Live is good because you can converse with aggressive foreign people and then shoot them. Usually, behaviour like this is not allowed.
In the first game that we play someone called BurgerThing424, who has a Northern accent and a shotgun, calls Jonah a noob and then laughs at him. Jonah calls the person a fucking Paki. I ask Jonah how he knows the person is a Paki and Jonah tells me he knows this because BurgerThing424 keeps shooting him in the back of the head. I do not really understand the joke.
Jonah goes up to the top of the water tower. He says he is going to snipe people from there. He tells me just to hide or ride around in the jeep or something. If I attempt to engage in the game, he says, our team will definitely lose. I nod. I only want to listen to the talking, anyway. I strut around the bunker, collecting useless weaponry and body armour.
‘Got you, you Paki cunt,’ Jonah says, grinning.
‘Stop being racist,’ I say.
‘Don’t be gay.’
‘And homophobic.’
‘I’m not scared of you.’
To prove this Jonah throws a large explosive from the top of the water tower. Despite being safely in a bunker, my half of the split screen shivers. Jonah chuckles.
‘This is shit,’ I say.
‘What? Did you see that?’
‘Oh?’ I say. ‘You mean that small collection of pixels that just shifted around on your television screen while the voice of an unemployed Mancunian man shouting “Fuck you” invaded your bedroom?’
‘Don’t be a prick.’
‘I am not being a prick, this is
just boring.’
‘Fine, let’s finish this one, then we can go out for a joint.’
‘Okay.’
Our team gradually accrues points. Jonah remains on his viewpoint, picking-off members of the other team while they continue to re-spawn and hurry around the virtual environment.
Eventually I get bored and begin running wildly through the most exposed areas.
I die many times.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Jonah says.
‘I am seizing life by the horns,’ I say.
He drops the controller and sighs.
‘Let’s go outside.’
Outside, our breath makes ghost jellyfish in the air. Marijuana smoke claws at my insides. I relax. We sit on the edge of his decking, our feet wetting themselves on the damp grass.
‘Jonah,’ I say, ‘have you thought about what you’re going to do once school is over?’
He shrugs.
‘Still got another year to think about that.’
‘But you must have some idea.’
He crushes the joint out with a grinding motion in the grass by his foot. He lights a normal cigarette and passes me one.
‘The army,’ he says. ‘I think the army.’
I light my cigarette. My body feels tense. I am trying not to be loud and insensitive.
‘The army,’ I repeat.
‘I know what you think of it, don’t bother.’
‘Okay.’
‘What about you?’
I try to alter my body language so that it looks less negative.
‘I am going to be an award-winning novelist,’ I say. ‘I am going to buy a house on the Costa Del Sol. I am going to sleep all day and fuck all night.’
Jonah laughs.
‘Can I visit?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, you can.’
Back in the house we watch X Factor from Jonah’s bed. I do not say anything. Jonah often interrupts with comments.
Things Jonah says while we watch X Factor:
Man, she should win, she’s so fit.
Seriously, man, she’d get it.
Is he gay, or what?
He is gay.
Everyone votes for the gays.
