Rocks in the Belly

by Jon Bauer

  After main course they bring out the cake Mum cooked for Robert, lots of candles lit and they dim the lights so everyone else at other tables stops eating. The cake isn’t burnt at all and Mum and Dad and some of the other people, even the waitress, sing Happy Birthday. Robert looks down at his lap, smiling like he just did a good secret thing. I move my lips but don’t sing.

  I make a wish really hard just as Robert shuts his eyes and blows out the candles. If you wish hard enough you can steal a birthday wish off the birthday person. I make a wish that Robert dies.

  ‘What did you wish for, Robert?’ I say.

  ‘If he tells you then it won’t come true will it, silly,’ Dad says.

  Mum is looking at Robert with her head to the side, her face all lit up like candlelight.

  Robert only gets boring books for his birthday. And a geometry set and pencil case. The books are about clouds and the sky, and Mum and Dad sort of cuddle closer together as they watch him open them, as if the gifts are for them. He doesn’t rip the paper he unpicks the sticky tape!

  ‘Those are quite boring presents,’ I say, but nobody notices.

  Robert gets down and goes and kisses Dad on the cheek and then kisses Mum and gives her a long enormous hug and I don’t know where to look so I take my balled up napkin from my lap and try to flatten it out. I always do that to napkins. It looks like a paper rock.

  ‘I suppose your real parents will give you presents,’ I say.

  Mum doesn’t like me saying real parents but I just get a look cos we’re in public and she doesn’t want to put out the fireworks.

  ‘Hurry up and eat your cake, Robert McCloud,’ Dad says. ‘Your parents will be here in a minute! Are you excited?’

  Robert smiles a small smile and sticks his head down over his cake, gives it a nudge with his fork. Then he looks up at Mum but she’s staring off into space. She’s sad. Dad looks at her too then sits forward and starts cutting some more cake. ‘Your folks should have some of this birthday cake, Rob. Otherwise I’ll end up eating it all and we can’t have that now can we.’

  We’ve finished eating and everyone’s drinks are empty but we’re still stuck here waiting. I’m bored but excited to see Robert’s parents. They’re late. Maybe cos they’ve been buying him presents.

  The waitress is back and she asks Mum if she’s Mary. I don’t like hearing Mum’s real name. Mum is Mum. The waitress says there’s a phone call for her and points over to the bar with a bar maid holding a phone and watching. Bra maid, Dad calls them.

  Mum stands up and drops her uncreased napkin in her chair, then straightens her clothes out like she’s off to make a speech. She gives Dad a look and Dad passes it on to Robert and Robert gives it to his half-eaten cake.

  Meanwhile the waitress sticks her thumb in cream as she takes all our plates away. Robert doesn’t know where to look, Mum is on the phone, and we’re just sitting here like somebody important farted and we’re waiting for the smell to go away.

  Dad opens the book on clouds and turns it round to show us a big picture of lots of heavy angry clouds with some gaps in and God rays coming down. He turns it back and leans in close to the page. ‘Bloody hell. Guess what those lovely rays of light are called.’ He closes the book but keeps his finger trapped on the page.

  ‘Crepuscular,’ Robert says without looking up from the crumbs on his bit of tablecloth.

  ‘Spot on, kiddo.’ Dad looks at the book again. ‘Would you get a load of that. Pretty rays and they call them something pus-ridden like crepuscular.’

  Mum hangs up quite loudly and says something to the bra maid who takes down a glass and tugs the cork out of a wine bottle. Mum is coming over and her lips have gone gone gone. We all watch. Dad with his finger still trapped in the book.

  She picks up her napkin and stays standing while she folds it and puts it on the table. She never screws hers up like I do. She sits down and the waitress brings over a big glass of white, the outside of it all moist like the mirror after a shower.

  ‘You’re driving,’ Mum says to Dad and he looks at his beer and sinks a bit, pushes it away. She stares at the top of Robert’s head. ‘Your parents had to cancel, Robert. I’m sorry.’

  He doesn’t do anything for a bit then wipes his face with a napkin and there’s blood on it.

  ‘Ooh, your nose has started bleeding again, Robert!’ I say.

  He gets up and Dad puts a hand on Mum to stop her going to him, Robert saying that he needs the toilet. His napkin up to his face, all neat and not scrunched.

  He goes across the carpet really slowly, his spare arm not swinging. We just sit here, Mum halfway through her wine already and Dad looking at her like she might need an ambulance.

  The car is very quiet on the way home and Dad drives slowly. The radio is on but down so low it might as well be off.

  When I get to bed I can hear mumbles coming from Robert’s room cos Mum’s tucking him in. I slip out of bed and go listen and Robert says ‘You’re my best friend’ to her, and she’s all ‘Oh, that’s so lovely, Robert. But what about someone your own age? Who’s your best friend of your own age?’

  ‘You when you were younger.’

  I go back to bed really slowly like I’m walking on the bottom of the ocean.

  I think Ralph is my best friend. Except Simon is Ralph’s best friend and Ralph is Simon’s best friend. And I don’t know what the rules are, whether you’re allowed to be best friends with somebody that’s somebody else’s best friend.

  Plus it’s one of those nights when the moon isn’t out and maybe I’m sad because I start crying about Mum and Dad dying. I’ve been doing that a lot since Robert came and I haven’t told anyone in case it makes it come true. I don’t want Mum and Dad to die.

  11

  I’m on a stool, slumped against the bar as if the alcohol is weighing me down. I always sit at the bar if I’m alone. Which I usually am, initially.

  The nurse was due to come this afternoon but I cancelled, considering the state of Mum. And me. I could do with some nursing now though.

  I’m in one of these places that doesn’t know what it is. Some sort of bijou restaurant slash wine bar slash I don’t know. A place that hasn’t the guts to be any one thing so it tries to be everything. Which is why I can tell exactly who the owner is and who the staff are, just by looking at the facial expressions and the serving style.

  There’s mirrors everywhere to make the room look bigger, so I can see the reverse of me in that alternate dimension, sitting at that other bar over there — scabs forming on his knuckles, a band-aid over a bite.

  I order another drink and the bar maid gives me a face like she isn’t sure if she should. Nevertheless, she puts a fresh drink down on a new coaster and I sit here as if in the eye of a storm. All around me people are living normal lives, couples showing each other their fillings as they throw their heads back and laugh together. The laugh exceeding the joke. How couples lubricate one another’s lives — making the other seem more attractive, more interesting, funnier. Until they leave.

  The bar itself is a long, low, polished table that creates an insubstantial barrier between the bar staff and me. Friends share beers, froth lacing the inside of their glass. Others look into the glint of their mobile screen, their thumbs chasing people out of the bushes. I watch all of this, a stranger, people avoiding my gaze but staring when they think I can’t tell.

  Two women come in and take a seat at the other end of the bar. A man comes to the bar at my left, and in looking like I make room for him I move closer to the two women.

  One of them is showing the other what look like holiday snaps. She still has her tan. I imagine the one looking at the pictures is bored.

  The bar maid realises the music stopped a while ago and puts it back on, the owner giving her a frown so she turns it down a little — up again when he turns back to a wallet looking at a menu.

  People raise their voices over the music which, like their conversations, is as light and insipid as co
rdial diluted into an almost nothingness. But they speak it louder, the music forcing mouths closer to the other’s ear so that lips are moving beside hair and earrings. As if the whole place is whispering about me. Like they know.

  I burp some beery CO2 into the glass, slouched on my bar stool and looking over at those women like they’re the last cake on the plate. The opposite of the way the old lady looked at me today. A thought that makes me put my beer down too hard and faces turn my way.

  Look at that man on his own.

  I shrink a little as if Mum is screaming at me now — standing over there among all those people at tables and just wailing. Pointing. Everyone staring and she’s there, crying and balding and screaming and pointing. At me. Here at the bar.

  It’s this familiar pain that always leads me to a familiar consolation. It’s only women that comfort me. I seduce more and more of them until they’ve caressed and sighed me innocent. Each acceptance, the grace of their acknowledgement, like the glistening embrace of validation. Of forgiveness.

  So I’m sitting here in this bar bistro restaurant reaching out to the women in the room. Noting each caught glance my way. Noting more each moment in which they aren’t looking at me. Sat here playing peek-a-boo with people who don’t know we’re playing.

  The women to my right are locked in on one another but the one with her back to me is giving me the corner of her eye from time to time. She has a slender back, a red sweater clinging to her, a large leather belt wrapped around over it — not holding anything up but a belt all the same. She’ll be naked under that sweater, barring the bra I can see. I like the way it cuts into her flesh. I imagine unhitching her and her ribcage expanding. The skin red beneath the bra, a little sweat where the under-wire is, her breasts dropping that unique distance and I’m cupping them but my grip is around my beer and I’m staring.

  I look down and my hand is really squeezing and I can still see my old lady’s ankle in the car door, her head thrown back. She was quiet as I bandaged it for her when we got home. As if she’d already forgotten how it happened. I fed her a nice meal, then escaped as soon as she was asleep on the couch.

  The sweater girl has a corduroy skirt on and stockings. I’m using my teeth to eat away at the crotch of them, eating at her tights until they start to give, and she’s not looking at those photos but at the top of my head — a mixture of fear and consternation and excitement on her face. Flushed with desire and this piquant thrill at my unpredictability — the way I’m showing her I know what I’m doing. My hands touching her without trace of shaking or doubt or holding back. Her mouth trundling out lame words for me to stop. Her fingers sliding among the hair on the back of my head.

  And yet I’d still be alone. With each sexual encounter I’m usually standing somewhere in my childhood. Just me and the empty corridors of the past. That habit sex has of vanishing me. Of making me haunt my own childhood — standing deserted in memories of loneliness. Aloneliness.

  I swig my beer again, order another. Sweater Girl looking out of the corner of her eye, and her friend frowns for a moment.

  Sex is always like that for me, the way it brings back images of childhood. As if the thread of a muscle or ligament tears fractionally from the exertion, and gives off where I was the moment it first formed — every cell in me like a time capsule full of the past. So that I might be having sex, but in my head I’m standing by the garden shed, or the wicker washing basket I used to hide in outside Mum and Dad’s room, until they found out and moved it into the bathroom.

  Or I’ll be standing on that spot where Robert changed.

  Sweater Girl’s friend asks her if she’s alright and gets an enthusiastic nod. She probably took most of those pictures in order to come home and show them. As evidence. Most people can’t enjoy a holiday because they’re always standing outside themselves wondering what sort of holiday they’re having and how it would look to those at home and how to capture it so that it looks like they had the experience. They don’t take the pictures for themselves, to remember, they take them to show. Doesn’t sound like much of a holiday.

  The friend heads for the toilet and Sweater Girl swivels to face her drink, gives me a look. I slide my stool a little closer and lift my glass to her, give her a smile. She smiles back, looks down, her elbow on the low bar, her other hand playing with the twirls of black hair spiralling out from under her ponytail, her neck smooth, pure, the hair curling.

  In this moment she looks like Perfect.

  She fidgets and her corduroy skirt rises up a little and there’s a tiny ladder in her stocking. I’d tear them there.

  ‘Holiday snaps?’ I say and she blushes, leaning closer to me because she hasn’t heard over the music, and I have to wilfully relax my hand around the beer glass.

  ‘Holiday snaps?’ I say again and point at the pictures sitting near a puddle of something on the bar.

  ‘Oh. Yes,’ she says, touching the photos. ‘The Gambia. Looks nice.’

  I raise my eyebrows, sip my beer. ‘Impressive. Stay with me for a drink if you like, once the intrepid explorer goes home.’ I say it as if I’m not connected to her answer at all.

  She leans closer, blushing again, and I watch her bum inch to the edge of her seat. She hasn’t heard what I’ve said again, her friend weaving her way back between the tables.

  ‘I said, once you two have finished catching up, you might like to share a beer with me.’

  ‘Both of us?’ she says, probably looking for clarification it isn’t her friend I’m interested in. Her friend who’s standing behind her now. Not sitting down but watching the interaction like she’s in a wedding dress and there’s nobody waiting at the altar.

  I know who Sweater Girl is. She’s the person who sits listening to others, resenting them for taking up all the airtime and yet not daring to broadcast herself. She thinks she’s boring and so is great at remembering facts about everyone she meets. She probably already knows what beer I drink. She’s a master at detail so that when she sees someone for the second time, in that desert that is a social function — dry, unforgiving, endless, lonely — she can say, ‘Oh, how did your x, y, z go?’ Or, ‘Did you manage to make it to blah blah on time?’ And she’s the type that puts a little light touch on you at that moment, to emphasise her sheer niceness. She is nice. She gives head. She doesn’t like all the attention in bed. She’s used to selfish lovers. She’s been with a string of those weak men who feel threatened. Men who like women that don’t say much. She falls for men who take. Not men like me who need vindication, who need to give back too.

  Sweater Girl has selfish lovers and so her orgasm face would probably be one of surprise.

  My beer arrives and I let the bar maid flirt with me a little, watch what it does to SG. How she waits, forcing her friend to wait too — nausea rising in me from all the alcohol.

  The problem though is that after that orgasm, life will shrink everything again as I succumb to my view of myself as second best. At best. Right now I’m going through life like one of those fluorescent bulbs that can’t jump start itself. I’m only blinking towards lighting up. Everyone is, aren’t they? You need another to spark across the gap, someone to meet you halfway so you can rest in the glow awhile.

  But for a brief spell after we’ve gorged on each other, our bodies lying there humming, I’ll get to feel as if a chiropractor has just clicked my brain back into the right shape and maybe for the rest of the night it will sit in its white bone throne in my head and look down on its kingdom, and feel glad. Me and Sweater Girl will both be there, holding hands, our chests expanded. And for a brief moment I’ll experience that elusive wholeness.

  Sweater Girl says ‘Maybe’ to me over the music, then turns her blushing to her friend. Her friend who is not used to Sweater Girl being the focus. Her friend who is with her because Sweater Girl is second place.

  Not to me she isn’t. To me she looks like a temptress out of one of those 1950s films. The way they always first appear on screen in that
soft focus, as if viewed through the beginning of tears.

  And I’m sitting here like a bell that’s just been struck. If the other people would shut up for a second they’d hear that almost inaudible resonance coming off me. Sweater Girl having left me ringing with the promise of escape. Togetherness. Because she will stay late with me after her The Gambia friend has waited as long as possible to leave. The Gambia enhancing her own total insignificance by staying, because of her very outrage and refusal to be insignificant beside Sweater Girl. But The Gambia is surplus.

  And you know what’s most beautiful about this situation? That Sweater Girl, my woman, is going to turn on her friend in a minute. At this chance of glory she’ll turn on The Gambia and accentuate every ounce of her new insignificance. Drying up all attention, stopping all feigned interest so that her non-friend will leave totally shrunken. Probably feeling betrayed almost. Cheated out of the usual hierarchy of attention.

  I go to order another beer to celebrate on SG’s behalf but the bar maid looks at the fresh one still sweating here in front of me.

  I am the drunk bell, ringing at the bar. Because Sweater Girl and me will leave together and for tonight at least, I’ll feel loveable.

  12

  Dad’s gearbox wakes me up like usual but I don’t get out of bed straight away. I’m thinking about last week when Robert’s parents forgot him. I’m not allowed to talk about it and Mum’s been nicer to him than before, even though she found out he’s been hoarding again. Weirder stuff than EVER.

  I go downstairs. Mum’s normally up by now but only Robert is. He’s polishing our shoes.

  ‘What do you think happened to your parents last week then, Robot?’

  He looks at me. ‘Your mum says I don’t have to talk about it.’

  ‘Your mum says I don’t have to talk about it.’

  ‘Shut up, crazy brain,’ he says and chucks one of my shoes across the room and starts walking out.