Grow Up

by Ben Brooks

  We do nothing but sit for a while. I know what she is crying about. I feel sentimental. She is crying about Tom but also what Tom is an example of: failure. We all fail often. We fail each other and we fail ourselves. Mum failed Dad, Keith failed Margaret, Tabitha failed Life, Tom failed Tenaya, Jonah failed around thirty girls. I guess I failed Abby. Sorry, Abby.

  After half an hour or so, it starts to rain. Water raps at the wall behind our heads as though it has a bladder the size of a coin and we are sat in the only free toilet cubicle. Persistent, steel rain. The sound of rain mismatches the sauna air between us. It is like a girl screaming because she’s cut her knee when you’re warm in bed reading Harry Potter.

  When you feel sad, and then it rains, it is called Pathetic Fallacy. Like in Macbeth, when Duncan dies and there is a storm. Pathetic Fallacy in real life is like Nature being insensitive. It makes things worse. For this reason, right now, I do not think Mother Nature should be called Mother Nature any more. It should maybe be called Keith Nature or Tom Nature or Bitch Nature. My glass head has shattered and Tenaya is sad. Mothers do not piss on people when they feel like this, they hug them and curse their enemies.

  I pull out my wrap of mephedrone and give us both two corners off of my debit card to make everything better.

  I light a cigarette.

  Tenaya leans her head against my chest. I can feel the wet from her cheeks seeping into my t-shirt.

  ‘You okay?’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She takes the cigarette out of my hand and draws in from it. ‘Just feel weird.’

  ‘Yea,’ I tell her. ‘I know.’

  Tenaya lifts up her head. She stares very squarely into my eyes with her eyes. She is trying to climb into my body somehow. She is going to climb in and hide there.

  She leans closer and kisses me.

  It is a strange thing to be doing, but not too strange because she doesn’t look like Tenaya, she looks like a damp blur. I am not thinking about who she is or what she means, I am just thinking about being close to another human body.

  We kiss more. She is a confident kisser.

  She pushes open the doors of the boiler cupboard. We move out and over to the empty bathtub. She positions her body inside of it. She is a large foetus in a white plastic womb. Her pants are pulled down and off over her lovely left foot.

  I shouldn’t.

  I lay in between her legs. I make simple and enjoyable motions with my pelvis. Her mouth opens. Her head lifts up and smacks against the taps. I do my best.

  Afterwards I sit up and she lies with her head against my chest. I realise there were small pools of water in the bottom of the bathtub. There are maps of water across the fabric of my trousers. Her hair is wet. Wet like a girl that has drowned in the ocean. A tiny girl. And by accident. And only once.

  And there are tears in my eyes because, I don’t know why. I can feel my hands quivering. My heart is going fast. Her face is still buried in my chest.

  And I realise I have done it.

  I have chewed my fingernails until they have bled.

  I have hanged myself with a rugby sock.

  I have murdered my ex-wife.

  At least I’m not going to be a Dad any more.

  I draw myself out from under her and leave the bathroom.

  33

  I check the time on my phone. 3:11 a.m. I stare at the wall. I check the time on my phone again. 3:12 a.m. There is a half-full can of beer on top of the television, so I take it. I have done three laps of the house and could not find Georgia Treely. My head will not sit still. Nothing will stay in it. A boy and a girl I do not know are huddled together on the sofa. The girl is making small, high-pitched sounds.

  Because I do not want to watch people having sex again, I go outside. The air is cold and black. It hurts my throat. There are people asleep in their cars, wrapped in blankets, spooning.

  I follow the path hemmed by bushes out through the fields. There is enough light bouncing off the moon to illuminate the path.

  I walk for a while then stop. There are sounds coming from behind a section of the bush. There are clothes and shoes at the edge of the path.

  I push my head through the bush. Wow. Tom and his new girlfriend are having sex on the grass. They must be very cold. There are goosepimples all over his bare porcelain buttocks.

  Pulling my head out of the bush, I unzip my fly. I aim my penis at one of Tom’s shoes and shoot neon yellow piss into it. This makes me feel like justice has been done, sort of. Tenaya would definitely approve.

  Where are you, Georgia?

  Come to Jasper.

  I am an extremely creepy young male.

  Further down the path there are more sounds coming from a field on the other side of the bush. They are different kinds of sounds. It sounds like yelping and swearing and mooing. Very intriguing.

  I climb through the bush. On the other side of the bush Ping, Jonah and Ana are all naked and running around a group of three cows. Why is everyone getting naked? Ping is holding a large stick and a cow is chasing him. I am laughing.

  When Jonah sees me he runs over and encourages me to take off my clothes. I tell him to fuck off. He does not take fuck off for an answer. Jonah and Ana and Ping knock me to the floor and begin pulling off my clothes. I struggle but I’m laughing. I scream that I’m not going to be a Dad. I wonder what they have taken. Jonah and Ping tug at my trousers and Ana pulls my t-shirt up. Soon I’m on the floor in my boxers with the grass scratching my legs. Jonah’s about to try to take them off me but then a large mahogany cow comes running right at us.

  I get up and run.

  We start running up the field, away from the house.

  Jonah stops.

  ‘What?’ I say

  He points into the distance. I can vaguely make out a hovering light. I do not have very good eyes. I would not be allowed to become a pilot or a professional hunter.

  ‘It’s the fucking farmer,’ he says. His voice sounds scared but he’s grinning.

  ‘Listen,’ Ping says.

  We do.

  Barking.

  ‘He’s got dogs.’

  Immediately we all turn on the spot and begin running back towards the cows and the cottage. Cows are far less terrifying than an angry farmer with large dogs.

  We run blindly in the opposite direction to the yapping dogs. I pause only to pull my jumper out of a cow’s mouth.

  I do not stop to look for my other clothes.

  I do not stop until I am outside the cottage and can barely breathe.

  Ana, Ping and Jonah aren’t next to me but I’m not worried for them. I’m sure they got away. I’m sure nobody got eaten. I pull the arms of the jumper over my legs. My boxer shorts slouch down out of the head hole.

  Inside the living room of the cottage, I pause.

  Georgia Treely.

  Time for The Georgia Plan. Look sexy. Look confident.

  She is sat alone on the sofa, holding her head. Her hair is full of bright clips and slides. It looks like a nest of fireflies. I want to wear her fireflies across my shoulders. I want permission to touch her skin and squeeze her hard and not think about Keith or Tenaya or Tabitha Mowai or Abby Hall for just a few minutes. I stare at her feet and say nothing. The bones in her feet catch shadows from the light of the dull ceiling lamp. The second Jackass film is playing on the television.

  For courage, I pick a half-empty beer can off the floor and down it. Doing this is called Dutch courage. That is offensive to Dutch people because it implies that they cannot do anything without drinking first.

  ‘Hello, Georgia Treely,’ I say, standing directly in front of her.

  ‘Oh, Jasper. Hi.’ She looks me up and down. ‘Jasper,’ she says, ‘why are you wearing a jumper on your legs?’

  ‘No r
eason,’ I say. I sit down next to her. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. I feel a bit ill. I think I drank too much. I don’t usually drink.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry.’

  I put my hand on her back and move it up and down. I am showing sympathy. Sympathy is seductive.

  ‘Do you want something to make you feel better?’

  ‘Not drugs, I don’t take drugs.’

  ‘Not drugs, no. Well, sort of drugs, yes, but legal drugs. So, like coffee really.’

  ‘My mum drinks coffee.’

  ‘Great. Come on, let’s go upstairs for coffee.’

  I take her hand and lead her upstairs.

  Upstairs, in the guest bedroom, me and Georgia Treely have rather large coffees. I assure her that people always have coffees this large.

  Georgia Treely stares at the wall for a while. I imagine her head must be fizzing, because this is her first time taking anything.

  I tell her that I stare at her in Psychology and that I tried to talk to her on Facebook chat but she wasn’t there. She nods at me. She touches my hand. This is the first time she has done drugs. She is going to think she is in love with me.

  ‘I love you, Jasper,’ she says.

  Is this okay? It seems a bit bad. Slightly unethical. Slightly rapey, maybe.

  I conduct a very brief moral trial in my head. I use the characters from Animal Farm.

  Pig: I strongly object. This is hideous. Doing this would be like pissing into a bone china Ming dynasty vase.

  Dog: Objection, you are victimising the defendant.

  Pig: Objection, only a victim can be victimised.

  Rat: Grammatical confuzzlement!

  Judge: Irrelevant.

  Cow: What is?

  Dog: She is pretty fit.

  Pig: Very fit, actually.

  Judge: Then go for it.

  Jasper J. Wolf: Thanks, everyone.

  ‘I love you, too,’ I say.

  I stand up and go over to the bed. The passed-out girl is still on it. I lift her up and lay her on the floor. Georgia Treely lies on the bed. I lie on Georgia Treely. I want a nuclear holocaust to leave nothing but me and Georgia Treely intact.

  I think it is probably obvious what comes next and how superbly lovely it feels.

  34

  7:23 a.m. My head is warm and aching. The room is filled with weak light and the air is heavy like glass. I turn to my left. Georgia Treely’s head is next to my head. It looks like the nicest head in the world. She looks a bit dead. I hope she isn’t dead. I wonder if this is a joke. If someone has put a fake Georgia Treely head in bed next to me so that I wake up and feel very happy until I try to kiss it and realise that it’s plastic. I poke the head. It isn’t plastic. I drop a kiss onto her forehead.

  Some women only look beautiful to certain men at certain times of the morning in certain light. Georgia Treely is not one of them.

  Then I remember what happened last night.

  It looks like I may have raped her. I mean she wanted to but she probably didn’t want to want to. It was the drugs that made her want to. In court, I’ll say I had no idea. In court, I’ll cry until they let me go.

  I slide out of the bed. I feel very dizzy. Someone has left their clothes on the floor. I pull them on and quickly leave the room. I am escaping from the scene of the crime.

  A girl sprints past the doorway as I am leaving. She disappears down the staircase and out of the house. Her face is the face of someone who has narrowly escaped death. Jonah emerges slowly from the room with a duvet held around his shoulders.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ I say.

  Jonah waves an empty packet near my face.

  Catholic condom.

  I laugh, hard.

  ‘It seemed funny,’ he says. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Funny doesn’t last that long,’ I say. ‘A baby lasts for ages.’

  ‘I know. It was stupid.’ He presses his hands against his eye sockets. ‘I’m going to sleep now. Night, Jasper.’

  ‘Night night.’

  He throws up the duvet so it covers his face and he stumbles back into the bedroom.

  There are people asleep in the hallways and on the stairs and on the floor downstairs. Two boys from Baccant High are still awake and smoking a joint in the kitchen. One of them nods at me. I go to sit outside.

  The sky is wide and white, with a wash of early morning mint-green. Pink clouds push together and mate. They move in slow teams across the edge of the fields. Everything is very quiet. The quietest quiets always fall after the loudest louds. This is because the quiet can put its arm around you and gesture at the loudness right behind it and say, ‘Look at that thing compared to me.’

  I walk round to the side of the house and find Tenaya sat crosslegged on the bonnet of Ping’s car. She is smoking and cradling a cup of tea. I climb up next to her.

  ‘Morning,’ she says.

  ‘Yea,’ I say. She passes me the teacup and I take a sip then pass it back. ‘Last night was—’ is all I manage to say next.

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘We were both scared and sad and drunk. Let’s talk about it later.’

  She smiles at me.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ she says.

  ‘Yea.’

  ‘So what happened afterwards?’

  I gulp. ‘Um,’ I say. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Fine.’ Tenaya is always able to make me admit everything. ‘I think I may have raped Georgia Treely.’

  Tenaya laughs. ‘I don’t think you raped anyone, Jasper.’

  ‘Well, I gave her lots of drugs then had sex with her.’

  Tenaya laughs again. ‘That sounds like most of the sex most teenage girls ever have.’

  ‘I’m not sure, it seems bad.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’ Tenaya finishes the rest of the tea in one long swallow. ‘Now can we go find Ping and get out of here?’ she says.

  ‘Yea,’ I tell her. ‘I’m fucking starving.’

  We wander around the house a while before finding Ping and Ana asleep in a large cupboard full of socks. We wake Ping for a lift home because neither of us wants to do the walk back to Jonah’s car. Ping swears a while when we shake him awake but he realises that he’s hungry, too, and agrees to take us back.

  The café Ping drives us to is a plastic, kitcheny type of place, with stained mauve tabletops and badly laminated menus. The waitresses are all foreign. They talk in hurried landslides of hard letters. It is sexy when pretty girls speak ugly languages.

  ‘I’ll have the Earlybird Breakfast, please,’ I say to the waitress.

  ‘Ze vat?’

  ‘Uh, the Earlybird Breakfast?’

  ‘Vat?’

  ‘UHR-LEE-BURD.’

  I hook my lips around the words as though I’m giving head.

  ‘EH? I no undersan’.’

  It’s not so sexy any more.

  I flap my arms like wings then gesture with my hands toward my mouth. She smiles. Jonah and Tenaya laugh. In the end, I point it out on the menu.

  We eat quickly and in silence. When Ping drops me off outside my house, I am only thinking about sleep. Mum isn’t thinking about sleep. Mum is stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips.

  35

  The police interrogation room in which I am sat smells of old wood and coffee. It smells like a room that people do not like to go into. Even the paint on the walls is trying to leave. I want to leave.

  ‘I want to leave,’ I say. ‘I’m really tired.’

  Opposite me is a man who says his name is PC Holloway. PC Holloway has a very faint moustache and large blue eyes. His hands are clasping each other on the table. He is looking at me. The l
ook he is giving me is a neutral one. I am having trouble reading his body language.

  ‘You need to understand that this was a serious waste of police time,’ he says.

  He is talking about Keith. About how Keith isn’t really a murderer and I got it wrong because sometimes I think too much and too hard and for too long. A way of explaining it might be to say that my imagination is a fast-running river and my body is a boat in the river and the boat is just being carried by the current but it has to learn not to. My head hurts.

  ‘I understand,’ I say. ‘And I am very, very sorry.’

  He stands up. I stand up.

  ‘Sit back down,’ he says.

  I sit back down.

  ‘Only joking,’ he says.

  PC Holloway has a very good sense of humour. Some of the funniest people in the world are men. His wife is a very lucky woman.

  He leads me to the police station doors and ruffles my hair.

  ‘Be good,’ he says.

  I wish PC Holloway was Mum’s husband.

  I find Mum sat on the steps leading up to the police station doors. She is smoking a cigarette. I sit down next to her.

  ‘Mum?’ I say.

  ‘Yes, Jasper.’

  ‘Cigarettes contain tar, which will make your lungs turn black and eat themselves,’ I inform her.

  ‘Yes, Jasper,’ she says, crushing out the cigarette. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You shouldn’t take up smoking again. I know you are stressed but cancer is more stressful, I expect.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say, standing up. ‘Can we go home now?’

  ‘Yes, we can.’

  Mum is angry at me for getting her husband arrested but she still loves me because I am her son.

  36

  8:30 a.m. I wake up. Radio 4 is still playing. A man and a woman are discussing the future of 3D cinema. I climb out of bed and walk through to the bathroom. In the shower I cough and shiver. My lungs have been ruined by the graffiti of cheap, foreign cigarettes. The water warms. My head clears.