Nobody Real

by Steven Camden

  Your broad shoulders rise and fall.

  “I couldn’t do it, Marcie.”

  Neither of us moves.

  “Couldn’t do what?”

  “What I’m supposed to.”

  I step from behind the counter. I can feel my heartbeat.

  “Maybe you don’t have to.”

  We sit in the back room.

  You on the bed, me in the desk chair facing you.

  The glass flower lamp is our little campfire.

  The cookies are wearing off and my ribs feel a lot less funny now.

  I meant to smash. I did. I was going to knock the whole front of the house clean off. I was.

  But I couldn’t.

  “Am I allowed to know what happened to your face?” you say.

  And I shouldn’t. But I don’t care.

  “I was in a fight.”

  “With who?”

  I have to smile. “A yeti.”

  You don’t laugh, sitting forward, taking in my bruise.

  “You fight a lot, don’t you?”

  “Sometimes. Used to a lot more.”

  “Angry.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think you took my temper with you, when you left.”

  “I didn’t leave.”

  I can feel my bones now. Raw and aching.

  “There’s so much you don’t know, Marcie. So much you can’t.”

  My skull feels like it might split in two at any second. I press my face into my paws in case it does.

  “You’re hurt bad,” you say, standing up. I watch you wobble slightly.

  “And you’re drunk.”

  “Three glasses of wine. Not exactly Lindsay Lohan, am I?”

  You smile, and everything that matters is right in front of me.

  That’s the truth.

  “Come here,” you say.

  I stand up, gritting my teeth from the pain.

  “Where does it hurt?”

  “My ribs, mostly.”

  You step forward and put your hand on my chest. “Here?”

  I nod.

  You take my paws in your hands and shake your head.

  “It doesn’t hurt any more.”

  “What?”

  “It doesn’t hurt any more.”

  “Marcie, I …”

  Then I feel a heat. You close your eyes and squeeze my paws and something is spreading through them, up along my arms. Something golden.

  “What are you doing?” I say. But it feels amazing. Like the inside of my arms are filling up with thick, warm honey, smothering the pain.

  It reaches my elbows. My shoulders. I’m watching your face. Your tongue is sticking out like a little pink flag, the way it used to when you’d draw. The warmth reaches my chest. The pain. Fading. You’re healing me, from the inside. My ribs. My neck.

  I am floating with my feet on the floor. Close my eyes. Breathe in. Breathe out. And open.

  You’re looking up at me, your hands still gripping my paws.

  “I missed you, Thor Baker.”

  You smile again, and every single cell in my body smiles back.

  Then you stumble forward

  and I catch you.

  All your weight in my arms.

  “I missed you too, my Marcie. So much.”

  I can hear you breathing.

  You are fast asleep.

  Somebody scraped my stomach out with a dinner fork.

  The same person pushed barbed wire into the marrow of all of my bones and shrank my skull to suffocate my brain.

  Sandpaper scratches my chin. A low purring.

  I open my eyes to Calvin, sitting on my chest, licking my face like I taste nice.

  I’m in the back room. It’s too bright.

  My jeans, socks and shoes are folded neatly on the floor. I lift Calvin and check under the blanket. I’m in my knickers and T-shirt, bra still on, cutting into my ribs. Flash of your face. Close. Blurry. Cara?

  I swallow, and my mouth tastes like athlete’s foot. I need Nurofen.

  Calvin tumbles into my lap as I sit up. The desk chair is turned to face me. Empty. The picture you drew of Coral’s house still looks like a robot.

  Calvin starts pawing at my thighs through the blanket like she’s kneading pizza dough. I stroke between her shoulder blades and she rolls over.

  “What happened, Calvin?”

  She nuzzles her face on my fingers, her body vibrating with each purr.

  Then something stirs in my stomach and I’m up, running to the bathroom, covering my mouth.

  “Feeling delicate?” says Dad, stretched out on the sofa, cigarette in hand, still in his clothes from yesterday. Calvin is sleeping at his bare feet, something violiny playing quietly through the shelf speakers.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “I’m OK,” he says. “Good to kill a few brain cells once in a while. Dead wood.”

  “Well, I’m dead wood all over.”

  I pull up the collar on his dark dressing gown. “She seems peaceful.”

  Dad smiles at Calvin. “She peed in my shoes.” The dark wine stain on his chest looks like he was shot with an arrow.

  “There’s coffee in the pot,” he says, holding up his mug, and waking up in the same place as him feels strange. It hasn’t happened for so long. I like it.

  The pills are working, but it still feels like my stomach has turned itself inside out. I’m never drinking again.

  Then the phone rings downstairs.

  Dad looks at me and shrugs. “Nobody I know has the number.”

  The shrill ring bounces round the empty shop.

  Cara’s number is written in Sharpie on the top Post-it note next to the till. It’s the only number I know off by heart. That’s how I phoned her. What did I say?

  I stare at the phone until it stops.

  I look at the shelves. Books stare back at me like a judgemental amphitheatre audience. Whatever I did, they saw it all.

  I turn to go back upstairs, and the phone starts again. Cara doesn’t accept defeat easily.

  “Car?” My throat is sore from throwing up.

  “Marcie?”

  It’s Coral.

  “Yeah?”

  “I need you to come home.”

  “What’s wrong? Are you OK?”

  “Just come home, now.”

  “I’m not feeling very well, Coral.”

  “Don’t give me that. Get your dad to drive you.” She calls out to someone. “Yes, I’m coming!”

  “Coral?”

  “Do you hear me, Mars?”

  “What’s going on? Who are you speaking to?”

  “Home, young lady. Now!”

  Sitting on the landing. Staring at your door.

  I can still feel your hands on my paws.

  That sounds like a song.

  I wish I could sing.

  Should be with Alan now.

  Picture him staring across his desk at the empty chair.

  I remember something Leyland said to me near the end of my first week. It was the first time he’d taken me out on to the roof. The pink and purple stripes of a Fridge City sunset. Cradling the mug of hot chocolate he’d made me.

  “Rules have reason, Thor,” he said in his grandmaster voice, tapping out a cigarette, “but all reason begs argument.”

  I remember trying to pull a serious expression, pretending to understand. Leyland could clearly sense my confusion.

  “Just because something was there before us,” he added, smiling, “doesn’t mean it can’t be wrong.”

  I think that’s what he said. Long time ago now.

  Last night happened. The way you looked at me.

  Before you passed out. Before I put you into bed.

  Whatever that was, it felt good, didn’t it, Marcie?

  Good enough not to give up.

  No matter what the rules say.

  There’s a white van outside the house, and the front door is open.

  Dad leaves the engine running. I still feel roug
h.

  “Say hi from me,” he says.

  “You’re not coming in?”

  “I don’t think so, Mars. Can’t face big sister with this headache.”

  Then Nick Fury comes out, pulling a suitcase.

  I get out.

  “Dom? What’s going on?”

  “Who’s that?” says Dad.

  Dom does a double take when he sees my hair.

  “You better speak to your aunt.”

  The bath is in the kitchen.

  Everything is soaked with water, the table is completely smashed, there’s plaster and rotten wood everywhere and, through the dripping hole where the ceiling used to be, you can see up into the bathroom. It looks like a tidal wave hit the house.

  A chunky, sunburnt man with a shaved head and an Aston Villa shirt is shovelling soggy debris into a metal wheelbarrow. Past him, through the open patio doors, Coral is sitting outside, smoking a cigarette.

  “Holy shit!” says Dad. “What happened?”

  The chunky guy stops shovelling. “Flooded,” he says, pointing up at the hole.

  “Somebody left the sink tap running with the plug in, and the toilet was blocked. Must’ve been going all yesterday and last night, old floorboards couldn’t take it. Lucky no one was in. I’m Pat.”

  He holds out his hand. Dad shakes it, staring up through the hole.

  “Someone left a tap running?” I say.

  Pat points out at Coral. “Better speak to her.”

  Dom comes back down the hall. “Did you call the skip?” he says to Pat.

  Pat nods. “’Bout an hour.”

  Dom looks at Dad. “You must be Karl. I’m Dom.”

  Dad looks at me as he shakes Dom’s hand.

  “I’m gonna need some room here,” says Pat, trying to reverse the full wheelbarrow.

  Dom and Dad back up down the hall. I squeeze past Pat and step over the wet rubble to the patio doors.

  Coral smokes like a movie star.

  Taking long drags, she stares down the garden. I haven’t seen her with a cigarette in years.

  “Are you OK?” I say, not sitting down.

  Coral doesn’t answer.

  “Coral?”

  She nods to herself. “I was going to do sea bass.”

  “Pardon?”

  “For dinner. I watched that Rick Stein guy – he did this sea bass, simple really, olive oil, lemon, bit of parsley.” She takes a drag. “Little rocket salad.”

  “Coral …”

  “Ten thousand, he thinks.” Her lips shake as she exhales.

  “What, pounds?”

  She looks at me. “Yes, Marcie. Pounds.”

  “Man …”

  “I only popped back for my glasses this morning, on my way to the market. I forgot them yesterday.”

  I sit down. “Good that you were at Dom’s, right?”

  “Where’s your phone?” she says.

  “No idea. Somewhere upstairs probably, forgot it yesterday. What’s that?”

  She’s holding up a plastic sandwich bag, cloudy with condensation.

  Inside, lifeless, is my phone.

  “He said it must’ve flipped on its side and blocked the U-bend.”

  “But he said it was the sink.”

  “It was the sink. But he found that too.”

  “I don’t understand. How did it …?”

  She stares at me. Are you watching this? Can you see?

  “It’s going to take a couple of weeks, he says. The whole floor needs replacing before he can fit a new suite.”

  “Coral, I don’t remember leaving the tap on, and I only realised I couldn’t find my phone in the afternoon. I didn’t know it had happened. Honestly.”

  Your face. That smile.

  “Dom’s offered to let us stay with him,” Coral says, stubbing out her cigarette. “While it’s being done, seeing as how we’ll have no access to the kitchen, or a bathroom.”

  My phone, in the bag, like a dead fairground fish.

  You did this.

  “Coral …”

  “Just tell me, Marcie. Tell me it was an accident.”

  “Coral, I swear. I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”

  The doubt in her eyes.

  That hollow, broken feeling.

  How long has it been?

  Years.

  And yet it still feels exactly the same.

  I feel the call.

  The buzz in the pit of my stomach. The crackle up my spine.

  Staring at your bedroom door, I smile and let the light fill me up.

  What will you say, about last night? What did that feeling mean?

  Something good.

  I know you felt it.

  Close my eyes. Feel myself crossing.

  I’m so excited, Marcie.

  Me and you.

  A pigeon flutters above us in the bandstand rafters. I don’t speak.

  Down the slope, near the playground, a little girl in a white dress is chasing a red ball across the grass while her mother lays out a picnic blanket next to their buggy.

  The girl trips and falls on to the ball, trapping it under her.

  Her mother calls out, worried.

  The girl pushes herself back up like a tiny weightlifter, holding the ball above her head, smiling proudly. Her mother applauds as the little girl runs back to the blanket.

  Will either of them remember this moment?

  Will either one of their brains, capable of storing everything that ever happened, choose to put this perfect short film on one of the shelves they regularly browse? What will they remember? A colour? A facial expression? A feeling?

  I have a shelf in my mind for my mother, and most of it is empty space.

  “Marcie, please …”

  “What if Coral had been home, Thor? What if she’d been in the kitchen?”

  You can’t look at me.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What don’t you know? That she would’ve been squashed? My only aunt, flattened? Look at me!”

  The guilt on your face.

  “Why did you do it?”

  Acid bubbling in my stomach.

  “I never meant to hurt anyone, Marcie. I swear! It was just … there. I can’t explain. I didn’t plan it. It just happened.”

  I sip from my water bottle and stare at you, guilt and anger mixing with the bile.

  “Nobody else is getting hurt. You understand me?”

  “Marcie …”

  “Don’t speak. Don’t you say another thing.”

  You look down, dejected, paws in your lap.

  “It’s not fair, Thor. You understand that, don’t you? Thor!”

  Then you growl. A low rumble, and I watch your paws ball into fists.

  “Fair? What do you know about fair, Marcie Baker?”

  “What?”

  “You don’t know anything at all.”

  And you’re gone.

  I stare at the silent space where you were, somehow louder than a scream.

  Feels like someone has their hands around my throat.

  The dark hall. Your bedroom door.

  Fair?

  My head is spinning.

  Stumble towards Coral’s room. I see spots, like fireflies, hovering.

  Not fair?

  I push against the wall either side of her door to steady myself. Force my breath out. Press my feet into the floor.

  Close my eyes.

  Fair?

  Push my full weight against the wall.

  Not fucking fair?

  Nobody’s getting hurt?

  Push.

  What about last night? Push.

  I know you felt it.

  Fire fills my arms. Lava in my legs.

  Nobody else is getting hurt?

  What about Thor Baker, Marcie?

  Burning.

  Push.

  Fire.

  What about me?

  Open my eyes.

  And smash.

  Dad and Morgan are deep in dis
cussion at the till, looking like some crappy eighties cop duo. Morgan’s distressed T-shirt for the day is dirty white; Dad’s vest/open-shirt combo is set in stone. The old man who’s in love with Diane is sitting on the sofa, reading a thick hardback.

  “Here she is!” says Dad. “The demolisher of houses!”

  The old guy looks up from his book. His mouth falls open when he sees my hair.

  Morgan laughs along with Dad. My stomach is still churning.

  “That’s not funny,” I say, and they both stop. “Where’s my stuff?”

  “In the back room,” says Dad, like a little kid who’s just been told off. “Calvin’s guarding it. New phone?” He points at my Carphone Warehouse bag.

  “Yep. Coral’s orders.”

  “She’ll cool down, Mars. Give her a day or two.”

  I feel like I’m going to puke.

  Morgan holds up a pale book with a picture of medicine cabinet shelves on the front.

  “It came,” he says, like I’ve been holding my breath for it to arrive.

  “Brilliant,” I say, and walk through to the back.

  Calvin is trying to destroy what looks like the brown skeleton of a small Christmas tree. She’s got it pinned on its side, front paws holding it while her back paws pummel it like a little UFC fighter. I push the chunky suitcase against the wall, plug my new phone in to charge and lie down.

  Close my eyes.

  Your face. Hurt and angry.

  Coral’s face. Hurt and angry.

  Dad and Dom sitting on the sofa, both trying to hold the strongest posture. Dom saying he has room for me and Coral. Dad shaking his head, saying I can stay with him. Coral unsure. Dad puffing his chest.

  Breathe.

  It’s been a while since I felt like the eye of the storm.

  “It’s a scratching post.” Morgan’s voice makes me jump.

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. I found it in the shed at home.”

  “You didn’t scare me.” I sit up. We both watch Calvin.

  “Why’s she trying to kill it?”

  Morgan smiles, leaning on the door frame, book in his hand, a little too familiar.

  “It’s full of catnip.”

  “What?”

  “Crack for cats.”

  Calvin stops for a second and looks at us, like she knows we’re talking about her, then flicks back into attack mode.

  “So who are you then?” I say. “The cat crack dealer? Turning innocent kittens into fiends?”