Grow Up

by Ben Brooks

  I bet Mum votes for him.

  Do you reckon I could go on this?

  I reckon I could win, you know.

  Then he sings that song from Lion King.

  I tell him I’m leaving.

  ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘See you, man.’

  I like Jonah a lot. I hope he does not join the army. He could be a young Russell Brand.

  Outside, I can see no stars. The only lights in the black are the things that we have put there: streetlights, houselights, blinking planes. I feel as though I am intruding on a large piece of conceptual art. I am leaving tiny, muddy footprints.

  While I am stood waiting for the bus, two boys pull up beside me on bikes. They press only the front brakes so that the bikes come to a stop after long, arced skids. The boys have scarves pulled up to their eyelines. They both have hoods up; one blue, one black. I am extremely scared.

  ‘All right, mate,’ blue hood says.

  ‘Yes, mate,’ I say.

  It is important to speak how you are spoken to in situations like these.

  ‘Give uz ya phone, mate,’ black hood says.

  He smells of body odour and wet dog.

  I do not move.

  I am in a state of shock.

  ‘Givuz ya fucken phone,’ he says again.

  I am not worried about being punched. I am worried about pissing in my pants.

  ‘Givusyafuckephonenow,’ he says. A single long compound word. It will never catch on.

  I fidget in my pocket. I pull off the back of my phone and pluck out the sim card. At home, I will put the sim card into my old Nokia 3210 and everything will continue as normal. That will show them.

  I hand over the phone.

  ‘Andyawallet,’ blue hood says.

  I think about pulling out my penis and spraying them both with piss.

  ‘I do not own a wallet.’

  Neon yellow acid piss that will make them both permanently blind.

  ‘Whyzat?’

  Cunts.

  ‘Uh.’

  Black hood pushes me.

  ‘Go on, fuckoff.’

  I begin to walk defeatedly off into the night. My heart is a snare drum.

  One of the boys throws a rock and it catches the back of my head. I press my hand to it and it comes away red. I wonder if I am going to die by stones.

  And another.

  This time my neck.

  They are the Taliban, I am a woman falsely accused of adultery.

  I run.

  Back at home, in the warm light of my room, I sit in front of the computer. I swivel my head. My neck hurts. I do not know what to do. I decide not to tell Mum. If I do, then she will become extremely scared for my safety and will not allow me to leave the house without either an armed guard or a large and grumpy mastiff.

  I know what to do.

  Sometimes, when I feel sad or ill, I play the old Avril Lavigne album and think about how happy I was in 2003, when kissing a girl who tasted of Panda Pops at a school disco was enough to make everything seem as though it couldn’t get any better.

  I am listening to that Avril Lavigne album now. I am mouthing lyrics to the ceiling. If Mum saw this, she would be scared that I was gay. I am not gay. I am young, and a bit scared.

  17

  I am sat at the kitchen table across from Mum. We both have cups of tea; hers has two spoons of sugarless sugar-substitute, mine has four. Sunday. She is wearing her Lycra trousers and smelling of sweat because she has spent the morning at the gym. I have not told her about the brutal assault that took place last night. I have only just woken up. My hair is a fistful of straw. It is 11:15 a.m.

  ‘Jasper,’ Mum says, ‘I hope you realise that these exams are extremely important.’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘And it is very important that you use Study Leave to study.’

  ‘Very important,’ I say, nodding.

  ‘Perhaps even important enough to consider waking up before midday?’

  ‘It’s only eleven, Mum.’

  ‘Nonetheless, Jasper, when I was studying for my O-levels, I woke up at seven o’clock every day to get enough revision in.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a . . . whatever it is you are.’

  Mum sighs. ‘You are too young to know what you want.’

  Keith comes down the stairs in his dressing gown, rubbing his eye and scratching his genitals. His grey hair is stuck up at funny angles and his yellow toenails are plodding. Definitely a murderer.

  ‘Morning, champ,’ he says.

  Sometimes I wonder how he manages to come up with a new name every single time he sees me. He must watch Friends every day and take extensive notes. I imagine that the inside of his wardrobe is filled with Post-It notes that offer suggestions for friendly names to use each day. One day I will follow him around for ages and see if I can exhaust his supply.

  ‘See,’ I say, ‘Keith only just got up as well.’

  ‘Keith doesn’t have important exams coming up.’

  ‘Give the kid a break, hunny, it’s hardly life or death.’ Keith says. I don’t know why he does that to himself. He ruffles my hair. There is blood on his hands, metaphorically.

  I place my hands on the table. Mum looks down at them, then up at me. She screws her face into an unattractive shape. She knows that I am going to ask for something.

  ‘Mum,’ I say, tilting my head slightly to one side to remind her that I am a wonderfully adorable and charming son, ‘if my exam scores are above the national average, can I get my nose pierced?’ Nipple was probably too much. Nose is reasonable.

  Mum allows her face to fall. She does not believe that this is a serious issue.

  ‘No, Jasper,’ she says. ‘No, you cannot.’

  ‘The key to a successful mother–son relationship is compromise,’ I say. ‘I will work hard at school if you promise to give me the personal liberties I deserve.’

  Mum pulls her mouth to one side. I do not know what is happening inside of her head. Mum has a simple mind. It cannot hold many thoughts.

  She turns to Keith.

  He grins.

  She turns back to me.

  ‘Okay,’ she says, ‘here’s the deal. You can get one earlobe pierced if your exam scores are above the school’s average.’

  Mum has tunnelled under my plan! She knows that the school’s averages are higher than the national averages.

  ‘Earlobes are gay,’ I say. ‘Eyebrow?’

  ‘Ear.’

  ‘Lip?’

  ‘Ear.’

  ‘A dermal implant above my left collar bone?’

  ‘Ear.’

  ‘Belly button?’

  ‘It’s the earlobe or nothing, Jasper, that’s the deal.’

  I exhale. I wish she would stop saying deal. My Mum thinks that she is Noel Edmonds.

  ‘My penis, then?’

  ‘Don’t be disgusting,’ Mum says. ‘One day you will thank me for stopping you from mutilating your own body.’

  ‘It isn’t disgusting, Mum. Actually, it’s very sensual. It heightens the sexual experience for both partners. You are so close-minded.’

  Keith nudges Mum and makes a sexual sound. Mum ignores him. She leans in close to me. She is Julia.

  ‘Jasper,’ she says quietly, shifting her teacup to one side as though she is scared I might hide behind it, ‘are you sexually active?’

  What a tricky situation. I decided to use a trick that I have learned from Julia. Leaning back, I glance at my wrist, even though there is no watch on it.

  ‘Ooh,’ I say, ‘look’s like time’s up. Sorry, Mum.’

  I go upstairs.

  I lie on my bed and try not to think about the blonde mother. It is di
fficult because my imagination fills the room up with a crowd of people screaming ‘You did WHAT?’, and I have no answer for them. I play Los Campesinos! on the laptop. I erase my head with a pillow.

  The phone rings.

  ‘Jasper?’ It’s Tenaya.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are you doing tonight?’

  I stand up, look around and scratch my groin. ‘Nothing, I guess. Why?’

  ‘Can I come over?’

  ‘Sure.’

  She must be tired of sitting alone with Tom’s ghost. She must have realised that real company is better than ugly stains on happy memories.

  ‘Thanks. Is six okay?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘See you later.’

  ‘Bye.’

  I sit on my blue swivel chair (Keith stole it from his office skip) and pull myself up to the fake wood desk. A Psychology textbook is already open, sprawled like a naked woman in front of me. Actually, no, not like a naked woman at all; it’s a thousand times less seductive. If it was a naked woman then I would be learning her body with my eyes and running my hand over my dick like it’s a tube of toothpaste with not much left in. But it is not. It is something about autism and how to detect it. I don’t want to be a autism detective. I want to go to sleep.

 

  Tenaya arrives at 5:30 p.m. She is wearing a white summer dress and old boots. She looks pretty again and she is smiling. In the kitchen I boil the kettle and she sits on the marble top, swinging her legs.

  ‘How is thinking about Tom?’ I say.

  ‘I think I’m over him.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes. I think getting over something isn’t forgetting it but learning to live with the memory of it.’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  She laughs. ‘Like how you managed to cope without Abby.’

  ‘Losing Abby was hard,’ I say. ‘I went through many sleepless nights and hours spent weeping into my cupped hands.’

  ‘Did she ever find out it was you?’

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘I’m guessing she had some suspicions.’

  We take our cups of tea upstairs and lie on the bed. I play Feist on the laptop.

  ‘We are exhuming Margaret Clamwell tomorrow,’ Tenaya says.

  ‘Shit, yea,’ I say. I had completely forgotten. ‘I think Keith has some balaclavas somewhere, we can wear those.’

  ‘You really want to wear a balaclava?’

  ‘Yea, why not?’

  ‘Well, doesn’t it seem a bit criminal?’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe. But as soon as we get the body, everyone will know that Keith is the criminal and not us. We will be heroes.’

  ‘And what if there isn’t a body?’

  ‘There definitely is a body.’

  ‘If you’re sure.’

  ‘I am sure.’

 

  When I wake up the only light in the room is a thin beam shooting out of the DVD player’s display panel. The television screen has switched to standby. Tenaya is sleeping bent into herself like a horseshoe on the right side of the bed, her dress still on and bunched in pockets around her back.

  I go downstairs and eat four Weetabix with four tablespoons of sugar and half a pint of milk. The kitchen clock says 6:30 a.m. but the kitchen clock is always ten minutes fast. Ten minutes fast but not fast enough to outwit me. I have learned its little trick. As a clock, it has little else to do but try to pull its feeble jokes on people who actually have places to be. I have a place to be. I have to save my mother’s life.

  ‘Here,’ I say, licking Tenaya’s forehead to wake her up. I pass her a cup of tea. ‘Rise and shine.’ We both sit on the end of the bed, sipping the teas, staring at the wallpaper.

  ‘If there is a body . . . ’ Tenaya says. She doesn’t finish.

  ‘Shh,’ I say. ‘We will just pull the head out of the ground and then phone the police.’

  ‘You can be the one who touches the head.’

  ‘Okay, I will touch the head.’

  My phone vibrates. A text from Ping. U coming tnite? I look at Tenaya.

  ‘Did you want to go up the hill tonight?’ I ask her.

  ‘I don’t know. Not really.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I text back cnt sry, busy. Then I look at the time on my phone (6:40 a.m.) and add y u up? After a second Ping texts back hvnt slpt yt.

  When Tenaya has finished her tea, I get the balaclavas and we quietly leave. Outside it is a typical bright suburban morning. It is not a very long walk and the only people we see on the way are an overweight man in a polo shirt who is walking a pit bull the colour of conkers, and a blonde milf jogging in Lycra with a serious and motivated expression on her face. Tenaya scolds me for following the progress of the woman’s buttocks with my eyes. She says that the woman is not an object. I say that I know the woman is not an object, but her anus is.

  18

  Before the exhumation I drew a penis on back of Tenaya’s balaclava in Tipp-Ex so that, if we were seen, people would report a penis balaclava to the police and they would find it in Tenaya’s possession and she would be arrested and I would go free. Unfortunately, she noticed before she put it on and insisted we swap, so now I am exhuming Keith’s ex-wife with a crude white phallus drawn on the back of my head.

  We have been digging for around half an hour at the suspicious mound using only our hands. Tenaya hasn’t been doing much because she doesn’t want dirt in her nails. I told her that this was a matter of life or death but she didn’t believe me. The sun is full up and the sky over our heads is clear blue, as clear as the skin on Georgia Treely’s cheeks. In order to brace myself for the horror that waits, I have been picturing Georgia Treely winking at me in a yellow bikini. The family who live at the house will wake up soon. We still haven’t found anything.

  ‘I think we should go,’ Tenaya says.

  ‘Do you want my mum to die?’

  ‘I don’t think your mum is going to die, Jasper.’

  ‘People didn’t think Martin Luther King was going to die, either,’ I explain. Tenaya sighs hard.

  I keep scooping dirt up with my hands. All I find is a Pog with a picture of Taz the Tasmanian Devil on it. I put the Pog in my pocket and keep digging, my hands turning the colour of chow mein. After a couple of minutes Tenaya pulls me down onto the dirt so we are both laid flat on our stomachs.

  ‘What the fuck did you do that for?’ I ask.

  ‘I saw someone move in the house.’

  ‘Then why didn’t we run? How is lying in their garden going to help?’

  I notice that a small pebble is pushing against my crotch and I move my hand down to pull it away.

  ‘Jasper, what are you doing?’

  A girl dressed in pyjamas covered with small cartoon elephants steps out of the house into the garden. She doesn’t see us straight away. The pebble is still pushing against my penis and left testicle. The girl removes a cigarette from behind her ear and lights it. The girl sees us.

  Tenaya is the first to stand up. She removes her balaclava. I leave mine on.

  ‘Thank you for not screaming,’ Tenaya says.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ The girl says, quieter than expected. The cigarette stays in her hand, fast turning to a cylinder of ash. Neither of us say anything. My groin hurts so I rearrange my penis with my hand through my trousers. ‘Can you stop touching your cock, please?’ the girl says. ‘And take off that fucking balaclava.’

  I take off the fucking balaclava.

  ‘Sorry,’ Tenaya says. ‘We were looking for our cat.’

  ‘With balaclavas?’

  ‘Human faces scare Rupert.’ The girl stares at us. ‘We are going to leave now.’

  The girl nods. Her face is red
. Her face is an exploded can of tomato soup.

  Me and Tenaya turn, run and vault back over the fence at the end of the garden. We run until we are three streets away and then we stop to pant. I roll and light a cigarette. Tenaya takes my tobacco and does the same. We sit on a low brick wall.

  ‘Rupert is a shit name for a cat,’ I say.

  ‘It was a better excuse than rubbing your dick.’

  A bald-headed man hand-in-hand with his small ginger son passes us with a funny look spread across his face like an ugly oriental fan.

  ‘Do you think she’ll tell her parents?’ I ask.

  ‘No.’ Tenaya shakes her head. ‘She woke up early and went outside to smoke. It would be easier to say nothing than to try and explain that.’

  Once we have regained our breath and finished our cigarettes, we walk back to my house for breakfast. Mum and Keith have already left for work so we do not have to make excuses. We sit at the kitchen table with bowls of Cheerios and mugs of tea. I use my Harry Potter mug and Tenaya uses Mum’s ‘Best Mum in the World’ mug. I did not buy the mug for my mum. Keith bought it and wrapped it up and gave it to me to give to her on her birthday. He did this because he knows that I am selfish but he does not want Mum to know this because it will make her unhappy, and if she is unhappy she will maybe leave him and he will not get to murder her. He does not want to miss out on murdering her. For Keith, murder is even better than anal sex.

  ‘It didn’t work,’ Tenaya says.

  ‘Yea,’ I say. A stream of milk runs down my chin, swallowing the small hairs like poverty-stricken children in a tsunami. ‘I feel bad.’

  ‘We should revise.’

  I do not want to leave Tenaya alone, especially after a failed exhumation, especially in the company of textbooks. ‘We could go to the party tonight.’ Her arms will thank me.

  ‘No, we need to revise.’

  ‘Do you remember last time we went up the hill?’

  Tenaya laughs.

  The last time we went up the hill was back when we enjoyed setting things on fire. We would wander around the emptiest suburbs, looking for old sheds and houses. Both of us were excited when we found the shed on the hill. It was locked so we just stuffed newspaper balls in its gaps and cracks then lit them with matches and sat back toasting with beers.