Rocks in the Belly

by Jon Bauer

  ‘Look. Sorry about earlier. I’m an awful son. I am. Come out the shed, there’s sharp things in here. And you’re barefoot. Your foot’s bleeding. You’ll get yerself stung, standing in the plums.’ I hold out a hand and she tightens her grip on all our pictures.

  ‘The police,’ she says.

  ‘Gone.’

  She shakes her head. ‘The police, what.’

  ‘Wow, those extra steroids are doing you the —’

  ‘What did they want?’

  We both get a jolt from that.

  ‘You’re a right little chatterbox today.’ Then I swallow, I can’t help it. She smiles, inching forward, standing up straighter, the blood from her heel sticking to the dusty concrete floor, that and the rotten plum fruit squished between her toes.

  I look at all the old metal garden implements and tools around us, Dad’s red shaving mirror hanging on the wall beside me. I wish I could see him in that mirror now, or a little more of him in me when I look in a mirror.

  There’s a faded cask of wine here that he must have sat and drunk, thinking back, full of regret. Once I was a bit older, he and I used to call this his Wank Den. He lived out his days here, fattening and isolated — the death of a Pollyanna. He was always so terrified of pain and conflict, skittering and skating miles on the thinnest of reasons to be cheerful. Anything but allow himself to fall through to the real murk beneath.

  It’s his fault then too, what happened. He’s why I had to carry it all these years.

  ‘They wanted to know about yesterday, outside Lizzy’s place. The thing that happened,’ I say, but she makes a face. ‘You remember. I got angry with that bastard driver who scared you?’

  She nods. Then something strikes her and her face saddens.

  ‘I am sorry about earlier, Mum.’ I look down at the floor, the blood purpling on her scaly foot. ‘It isn’t easy for me you know, you being ill.’

  She comes forward, up close, a picture of the four of us facing outwards, from that morning at the photographer’s. In the image, Mum is looking into the camera like she’s a queen and we’re her corgis. Dad’s shoulder eclipsed by hers. Those subtle fights a camera shows — the way a lens magnifies self-doubt. My dad putting his ubiquitous brave face over all that fear and disappointment. Desperately hanging on to his powerful, bullying woman.

  Look at her now though, contrasted so starkly with the her in that photograph, both the women looking straight at me — supposedly the same woman. I almost have to look away. How the world turns.

  She’s stroking my shoulder now, clumsy and uncertain, the pictures in her arm slipping. This present-day, unrecognisable version of Mum comforting me the way one gorilla comforts another.

  Her kindness always disarms me. I look up into the shed roof, there’s my bicycle lying across the rafters. Dad must have sat and looked at it as he sipped his consolation wine. And so I’m reminded how unlikely it is that my secret is a secret.

  She puts down the pictures and comes closer, stroking me again, watching what she’s doing to my innards — stepping forward further because I retreat from the intimacy.

  It strikes me though that if I finally said it out loud, it wouldn’t really be my mum I’d be telling, but this old lady. Look at the difference between that version of her in the picture, and what’s left of her now.

  Having imagined saying it aloud all these years, writhing in the back of the family car on long journeys with wanting to say it, Robert in his special chair to stop him crawling up front or back or climbing out the window — pulling up the handbrake. Robert with the body, eventually, of a nineteen-year-old. The strength of an adult, and yet the mind of a baby, and no restraint. I feared him as much as I pitied him. As much as I’d once hated him. Robert to me becoming this living symbol of my ugliness. Of how bad I must have been to deserve my mother’s neglect — my mother’s apparent disgust at what came out of her. If I came out of her. I used to tell people I was a foster child anyway. It was the obvious conclusion to me. That or a mix-up at the hospital.

  All this time I’ve imagined saying my secret aloud, writing it in a letter, or speaking it as a eulogy at Robert’s funeral — here I am moving towards saying it to this strange copy of my mother in my dead dad’s Wank Den. After all those daydreamed scenes of redemption and absolution, is it here, in this place, now? Is this the scene?

  It’s never like the daydreams is it.

  ‘I did it, Mum. I hurt Robert.’

  Her gorilla hand stops stroking and my legs need to sit me down.

  ‘I’d give anything to change it, but … I hurt Robert.’ I hang my head but can still feel her gaze. ‘I was only eight. A boy.’ Deep breaths, wipe at my eyes with a sleeve, looking at the floor. ‘Why wasn’t I good enough for you?’

  I step closer to the answers I need but they take a step back, bumping against the shelving on the rear wall, an old rusty tin of Gro-fast falling to the floor. She looks round at it, then back at the questions she’s trapped in a shed with.

  I lay a hand on her shoulder, hoping there’s still enough of her left. I can’t tell though. She’s just looking at me, her chest going up and down. I lift my hand and show her the scar on the palm, frustrated with myself for not coming home and having this out sooner, before it was too late. Because by the look of her, I am too late.

  ‘I was wetting my bed until I was thirteen!’ I hit the worktop, everything jumping off it into the air, dust lifting into the weak light seeping in through the dirty windows — my bottom lip going. ‘I was wetting the bed and you still packed me up and sent me off to school camp! Do you know what that was like? Sleeping in a dorm full of boys and knowing what’d happen when I woke up in a wet bed every morning.’

  She makes to leave but I fill up the doorway. She’s crying now too, the old lady. But it’s a held-in crying, the way she used to before the comet.

  ‘Say something. You’ve got your answer. Now you’ve actually got a reason. I’m telling you I did it. I hurt Robert. Now you know. You always knew, didn’t you.’ Her face changes but I don’t know what it means.

  I follow her gaze to Dad’s shaving mirror hanging on the wall, all dusty, the reflective coating pockmarked, the red frame off-red in the places where the sun must get onto it.

  ‘You have to take your share, Mum. Saint Mary — too busy looking after other people’s sons.’ I swallow back another watery shove from my innards. ‘You hurt Robert.’

  Her teeth start then, eating at her bottom lip. I step instinctively back but she comes at me, the look on her face frightening. She snatches the mirror off the wall and brings it up and thrusts it round to show me.

  There I am — that face. There’s what I avoid. Her hand shaking and the image oscillating with it. There’s the guilt I bury under blame and anger.

  ‘You,’ she says. ‘You hurt!’ her teeth gnawing at her lip and I’m eight years old again and the mirror comes in towards me and strikes my head. Not hard, but it doesn’t need to hurt to hurt.

  Her face reappears in front of mine, the mirror flung down and smashing daylight fragments across the floor. I stumble out, squinting my way across the overgrowing garden and collapsing onto the grass, the clouds white and peaceful, harmless. I’m looking at them, Mum limping towards me, muttering.

  She makes a sound as she hunkers down to my level and I lie flatter against the lawn, feeling its support.

  She sits beside me with her cracked and mucky feet pointing at the house, her hands playing with a daisy between her legs, her eyes seeming bigger with the water loitering in them — the beginnings of dreadlocks at the back of her head from where she lies there night after night, snoring in the darkness. Such a brittle division now between her and darkness proper.

  I watch her slowly lay herself down beside me, her feet lifting a little as she grunts, her stomach struggling to lower her. Then she’s right here, her face turning to me so that I have to look away.

  She reaches out and finds my hand, the feeling of her waferthin
skin smooth against my scarred hand. My eyes clamp shut, my fingers around hers, something tectonic slipping inside me. We hold on, both of us, lying here looking at the clouds but thinking about our hands.

  And even though she may have forgotten the truth by tomorrow, leaving me alone with it again, to carry it, at least right now it’s here with us. All of it.

  She keeps hold of me but rolls onto her side, her front against me. I drape an arm over my eyes to hide, her other hand stroking my chest, her face nuzzled in close to my ear, that mouth of hers a babbling brook of broken syllables. Then it forms a shape, ‘S’okay,’ and she shooshes me. ‘S’okay.’

  It makes me want to open my chest and put her right inside. It makes me want to do and say so many things but the outpouring won’t let me. And I can’t help but wonder how many millimetres.

  16

  I cry a lot in bed now and I’ve been thinking about it and decided I cry for two reasons.

  1. I don’t know why we’re here. Humans. Which makes me really sad. I ask Mum and Dad but they always shrug and give small answers like ‘We just are.’ Or ‘To tidy our room.’

  But not knowing drives me a little bit crazy. There has to be a reason but I can’t find one anywhere and I asked Santa Claus when I sat on his knee, even though he was really just some guy.

  Plus Dad told me to wait until I was on Santa’s lap then shout ‘Hey what’s that lump in your trousers, Santa!’

  I asked Santa why we’re here and he got flustered and said ‘To love each other.’ But that’s what we do ONCE we’re here and doesn’t explain at all why we come here in the first place.

  2. The second thing I cry about much more than the why are we here thing is that one day Mum and Dad are going to die.

  Mum comes home from hospital tomorrow and I can’t sleep. Robert’s awake too, I can hear his floorboards. Only he’s awake cos of different feelings. Robert has the feelings you’re supposed to have.

  I’ve got my TV on even though I’m not supposed to after 9 cos that’s when it’s the news and films and people dying. Daytimes are school and singing and work and talk shows.

  Alfie’s here for comfort but I have to hold him to keep him on my bed. Eventually he’ll get tired and it’ll be like he wants to be here.

  All over the world people are dying. Right now even. I try to think about good world things like how many people are sitting on the toilet or sneezing or picking their nose, but at night and with Mum coming home it just ends up being about how many people are crying or dying. As if sadness is nocturnal. Like foxes and owls and burglars.

  Everyone dies and that means Mum and Dad will die and I can’t stop crying about it even though crying is scarier when it happens to me when I’m on my own. And even though I’m trying not to cry so I can sleep and not be grumpy but happy and loveable tomorrow for Mum coming home, I’m still all curled up and crying and I can’t call out to Dad because I don’t want him to talk about it because if I talk about it to anybody it will make it happen and I don’t want Mum and Dad to die and I don’t want to die and I don’t think anybody should have to die. Because dying means you’re dead.

  Alfie’s trying to get away even though I’m holding and stroking him. He doesn’t care that I’m sad. I hold him harder and he scratches me and it’s my bad hand he gets. I push him off my bed. Then go get him, try and make friends again but he’s struggling in my arms. He wants to go downstairs. He doesn’t CARE.

  I open my door and carry him to the stairs.

  If people stopped being born maybe God would cut back on the deaths. Grown-ups should just stop making babies, like Mum and Dad have stopped. Which might mean they won’t die after all.

  I creep down the stairs really slowly, Alfie trying to get away even more cos he thinks I’m going to give him his flying lessons.

  I think when Mum and Dad die I’ll ask God if he can let me die too. Or for us all to die in bed together watching TV.

  Dad is busy laughing at a comedy. He’d probably laugh at the news tonight he’s so happy. I hold Alfie tight and his body is all stiff, claws out. I open up the washing machine and now he wants to stay in my arms, his claws hanging on but I put him in and shut the lid and hold it down. His meowing sounds funny from inside.

  I look at the machine’s dial, trying to decide. I turn it really slowly so Dad doesn’t hear the clicking. Delicates is probably best. I turn it to Delicates but don’t switch it on yet cos he needs some bubbles in his bath but ever since Dad’s been in charge nothing is where it should be. I can’t find the washing powder.

  Darkness changes normal things into magic evil, like when I wake up in the middle of the night and there’s a crouching monster about to pounce but in the morning it’s turned back into a school bag and a football.

  Darkness is why animals cry out at night and why owls have to be wise.

  Alfie’s crying now too, like me. Mum comes home tomorrow which should be good but I’m going to have all the feelings that happen to me when Robert and Mum are around.

  Because Mum and Robert are like having darkness around.

  Maybe I’m a fox. Foxes cry alone at night too. I hear them sometimes and it’s the saddest sound, after seagulls.

  The world’s so sad even animals cry.

  17

  I wake to the sound of Alfie snoring even though she’s awake. Her face is up close to mine, the growth bigger than her nose now and I realise her snoring’s been percolating thunderstorms and bears into my dreams.

  It feels late but I refuse to give up on sleep, my eyes shut, my body stilled, willing my mind to slip away again but it’s thinking about how I let the cat out of the bag yesterday. And wondering whether Mum’s addled brain will have ushered the cat straight back into that black bag. Which will mean maybe I’ve had the relief of finally saying it, without the shame of her knowing.

  Or the pain of sharing it, without the freedom of not having to carry it anymore.

  Mum fell asleep on me in the garden yesterday and wouldn’t rouse properly so I carried her in and put her on the couch, wrapped her in blankets and took those strangers down off the walls.

  The longer I lie here the more nervous I’m getting so I dislodge Alfie and get up, check on Mum’s bedroom in case she made it off the couch in the night and up to bed.

  Empty.

  I pad quietly back, turning off the landing light I left on for her — stand here at the top of the stairs listening for signs of life.

  Silence, except for Alfie’s impersonation of Darth Vader.

  I dress slowly, the cat gone now that my bed has cooled. I check my phone again — no Patricia. I put in my Canadian SIM card in case there’s any love coming from there. Another silence.

  Downstairs, I look in on Mum from the doorway and she’s in a tight ball on the couch, the blankets on the floor. Alfie is with her now, breathing that incessant noise.

  ‘Mum?’ I say from the threshold, examining her all curled up, foetal and frowning, wet with sweat.

  I cross the room and pick up her bedding, touch a hand to her shoulder. ‘Mum.’ I check for a pulse, the skin clammy but there’s a beat there. I shake her and she brings a hand up to her forehead.

  ‘You got a headache?’ A slight nod. ‘I’ll get you your tablets.’ I’m rushing out to the kitchen. ‘And painkillers.’

  I don’t bother with the days of the week box but empty a load of steroids out of the giant pill bottle, adding a few paracetamol. I grab a glass and turn on the tap, stuff the glass under the stream and the water cascades round and out over my clothes.

  I cradle her head like it’s made of burnt-through matches, still she winces from the pain. It takes an age to get all the tablets in, her gagging in between — the pressure in her brain pushing her up against those white and immovable skull walls.

  I start dialling emergency then hang up and try the nurse instead, bullet points sitting on the card she gave me:

  • Are you sure your question isn’t answered on our website?
<
br />   • Is your call absolutely necessary? You may be preventing another caller with a genuine emergency.

  After the phone call I put Alfie and her nasal earthquake outside with some milk then head round to the front and smoke, pacing in the garden, checking on Mum through the window — pacing again, looking up and down the road for the nurse who said she’d be here soon.

  The hedges are still half cut from where I told myself I’d do the top later but left it at what I could reach from the ground.

  It’s a long time before the little branded car pulls up about fifteen metres down the road. I head for the gate to go and meet her but peek round instead, watching her leaning into the rear-view mirror, applying make-up, doing her hair. This takes her something like two minutes. And despite the genuine emergency, seeing her do this wakes up the doughboy.

  She gets out and I head quickly inside and click the front door shut, wondering why I’m taking the trouble to pretend I don’t know she’s arrived. It’s stupid. Another of those little-white-lie acts we put on. Like when you’re meeting someone and you’re there first, eagerly looking for them but when you see them you pretend not to have noticed — assume the pose of someone engrossed in the paper, the menu, a book. White liars, all of us.

  ‘The nurse is here, Mum.’

  I watch her through the security eyelet as she comes up the path. She looks even more volumptuous seen through that glass. Dad’s word, not mine. He always noticed volumptuous women, but married the opposite.

  I watch her through the peephole as she does her hair on the doorstep, looks down at her cleavage, undoes a tunic button. Does it back up, then reaches in and lifts her tits higher in her bra. Finally she rings the bell and I wait a bit, my heart going.

  ‘Vicky, I was starting to think you weren’t coming.’ I step back only a little so she has to squeeze by. She goes to give me her front side but does an awkward exchange and gives me the back.