Long Story Short

by Siobhán Parkinson

  Of course I wasn’t, not a hundred percent. I knew it, but I couldn’t swear to it. I hadn’t checked. I’d deleted the filthy message almost automatically.

  I shook my head.

  “Well, Jonathan,” he said heavily. “I might be prepared to believe your story, but it still doesn’t excuse what you did. You are old enough to know that you can’t go sending threatening messages like that, even if you are sure you are sending it to a person who…”

  “Deserves it,” I finished.

  “Well … Look, the point is, Jonathan, we can’t trust you with a young child. We aren’t sure you are in control of yourself. You may be violent. You can see that we can’t take that risk.”

  “I am not violent!” I screamed.

  Kate said, “Would you ever get a grip, Guard? He can’t live with his sister because he is too young to look after her.”

  “That is true, Miss Knight, and he comes from … well, very difficult circumstances. He’s bound to be troubled.”

  Kate shook her head. “That’s not the point,” she said.

  “Troubled!” I shouted. “Yes, I am bloody troubled. I’m troubled that you won’t let me see Julie.”

  “You can see her.”

  “Yeah, I can spend a few hours with her, with someone watching us all the time. That’s like being on reality TV. I can’t live my life like that, being watched. It’s not natural.”

  He shrugged.

  “I suppose you’re going to tell me now that you found her hair in my bed,” I said sarcastically. “Or my hair in hers.”

  “No,” he said, surprised. “Should we…?”

  I wouldn’t answer. Stupid bastards.

  “Jonathan, are you trying to tell me something?” he asked.

  “No, I’m bloody not!” I said forcefully. “I’m just saying, I know how your filthy sewer of a mind works. You think you know it all. Child abuse—it’s all the rage these days. Well, listen to me, I’m not an abused child, and neither is Julie, so you can stuff your friggin’ theories, right?”

  Paudge said, “Julie has been abused, Jonathan. You only have to look at her face. Poor little scrap.”

  I wasn’t going to buy that. He needn’t think he was going to get around me that way.

  “You know that was only a once-off,” I said. “I told you the whole story.”

  “And the whole story is one of abuse and neglect, Jonathan, and whatever way you look at it, these things go down the generations, you know.”

  Well, I’d got it out of him, his creepy suspicions, but there was no satisfaction in it. I don’t know why I’d even persisted.

  That thing about the generations, it made me think of Granda and his mad notions. He was Da’s da. But Da was totally different. I think. And as for Gramma. There’s no one else like her in the family. Not a single one.

  “You could have counseling,” he added.

  “Counseling!” I spat the word. “I don’t need fucking counseling. I need to be with Julie.”

  “No can do, son,” he said.

  * * *

  “YOU CAN SEE Jonathan every week,” they promised Julie after the funeral.

  “And we can talk on the phone,” I said, trying to make it easier for her. “Have you got a charger?” I asked Jean. “She’ll need to charge her phone up.”

  Jean looked at Kate. I swear she was wondering whether it was all right for Julie and me to ring each other. Christ almighty, what sort of a hellhole have I fallen into?

  Kate—God bless her pretty amethyst ring—ignored Jean’s look and answered my question for her. “Of course Jean will have a charger, Jonathan. Is it a Nokia? If there is no charger in Jean’s house, we’ll get one.”

  “And Kate will bring Jonathan to your house to visit,” they said.

  “Where’s my house?” Julie asked in this pathetic little voice.

  “Jean’s house is your house now,” they said.

  “I want to go home!” she wailed. “I want to go home!”

  “You’re cruel!” I shouted at them. “Listen to her! You’re worse than Ma was. All Ma ever did was thwack her one. She’ll get over that, but she’ll never get over this.”

  But they just patted me on the arm, on the back, on the shoulder. They didn’t answer.

  Julie was still wailing those words as they dragged her off and shoved her into a car.

  I want to go home!

  I hear it in my sleep, that wretched, uncomprehending cry. It curdles the very pathways of my blood; it stops up the chambers of my heart.

  16

  When I got home from the funeral I went to check on my blade.

  I’d killed my mother—I hadn’t, but I had—and I’d lost my little sister. It was none of my fault and it was all my fault. My heart was broken, and I couldn’t see any way to repair it. And you can’t really go on living with a great big gash in your heart, can you? It’s like every breath hurts, and it’s all too exhausting.

  I picked the blade up, and I slashed my wrist. Not deep. Not into the vein, just scored the skin. It still hurt like hell. I was just checking that the blade was sharp enough.

  17

  In the morning, I snuck into the sitting room and I got the blade again, and I held it to the skin of my wrist. I could feel my heart thumping. But then my stomach rumbled, so I went down to breakfast first.

  You would not believe how much blood there is in your arm. I suppose the arm empties out first and then the blood that is in the rest of you sort of comes pumping in to fill up the empty veins and then it all comes out too. Gallons of it. Red liquid everywhere, all over your clothes and your sheets and the floor and everything. Stinking hot.

  That’s how I imagined it anyway. I read about it on the computer, and that’s how I imagined it would look.

  The staff would be furious. Not the cleaners, though they would not actually be all that very delighted either, I suppose. But I mean the care staff. The ones who are supposed to be keeping us alive so that blokes like Paudge Rooney can go on thinking up awful crimes we might have committed to torture us with.

  Most days I just stayed in bed. They didn’t like that. They came and tried to haul me out. They said I had to go to school. I had to get dressed. I had to get washed. I had to eat. I don’t see why, I said, but they clucked and they argued and in the end I would say, Come back in an hour, and I will get up then. But I wouldn’t. They said they’d have to get a doctor for me. I said, Yeah, yeah, cool. That calmed them down for a while. They mean well, but they’d drive you to drink. Or to suicide. Nice to know I have that blade, just in case.

  They set me up with this school. It’s not really school, it’s more a kind of training course. I wouldn’t go, though. I couldn’t bear to get out of bed, much less go and face a classroom full of people I don’t know.

  In the afternoons, if Kate came, I would get up for a while and sit in my robe to talk to her.

  She came to see me most days, and once a week she took me to see Julie. For the longest time, I couldn’t work out whether it was more painful to see her or not to see her, but Kate kept saying that Julie needed me.

  I wasn’t sure if she really thought that or if she was just saying it to make me feel better. But I got up on the Julie days.

  18

  They found the goddamn blade in the sitting room one day, and there was blue murder, as Gramma used to say. I hadn’t thought about her for days, and then I suddenly missed her like mad, like an ache in my guts.

  They lined us all up and shouted at us. You couldn’t blame them, I suppose. Their jobs were on the line. Suppose some inspector-type person had found the blade? They’d all be sacked, I’d say. I wouldn’t much care, I don’t exactly like any of them, but I suppose I might feel a bit guilty. Maybe they have little kids and need the money, you know?

  They said nobody was going to leave the room until they found out about the blade, and the other lads were furious because it was swimming that day and they were going to miss the bus, so I owned up, and t
hey sent me to my room and got the doctor. The bleedin’ doctor! You have to laugh. What is the doctor going to do about it? But they don’t know what else to do, so they call the doctor. I suppose she is a head doctor. I wouldn’t talk to her.

  So then bloody Kate came, and she read me the riot act. They’d put the blade on a saucer, like it was Exhibit A, and they actually brought it into the room to show Kate. As if she needed to see what a blade looked like.

  You could see she thought this was a tad over the top. She put the saucer on the windowsill, out of the way, so she wouldn’t have to keep seeing it on the coffee table while she was talking to me.

  “Jonathan,” she said, “I am not going to ask you what the blade is about. I think we both know what it’s about?”

  She is dead clever like that. Anyone else would have started into me, shouting and screaming about why did I have the blade and I would start having to think up ridiculous reasons.

  I shrugged.

  “So we’re on the same hymn sheet, are we?”

  “What? What hymn sheet?”

  “Page, then, Jonathan. We’re on the same page, are we?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I suppose.”

  “Okay, then. So if you are thinking like that, you need to stop thinking like that, Jonathan. And think about Julie.”

  “I am thinking about Julie,” I roared. “It’s because I can’t bloody stop thinking about Julie…”

  “Rubbish,” she said grimly. “It’s not Julie you’re thinking about at all. It’s yourself.”

  “How do you make that out?” I snuffled into my sleeve.

  I thought, The one person in the world I might get a bit of sympathy from, and here she was scolding me.

  “What?” she said.

  “I said,” I said, “how do you make that out? That I am not thinking about Julie.”

  “Because I am enormously clever and I know and understand everything,” she said sourly.

  I knew that meant Because it is as plain as the nose on your face.

  “How could you be so sel—?”

  She stopped herself from saying it, but I heard it all the same.

  “I’m not,” I hissed.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I know that, Jono. Sorry. Okay, tell me about it. Explain it to me.”

  “I am just nothing but trouble,” I said. “Julie would be better off.”

  I don’t know what made me say that. It’s what suicidey people say on the TV, I suppose. I thought it was as good a line as any, but you can’t fool Kate.

  Kate shook her head and sighed and ran her fingers through her hair. Then she put a hand on my arm and she shook it a little bit, as if to try to get through to me.

  “Listen,” she said. “You are all that little girl has. The only family in the world. Don’t—”

  She could see I was going to point out that there was Da.

  “He doesn’t count,” she said before I could bring his name up, “because he doesn’t care. What about you?”

  “What about me? Do I care about Julie? Of course I care about her.”

  “Well, you have a funny way of showing it. Would you get a grip, Signor Antonio, and stop moping about and start thinking what you can do for that little girl? She needs you. You know she does. You keep saying it. Aren’t you being inconsistent?”

  “But they won’t let me look after her, so what’s the point?”

  “The point is that she needs you—not to look after her. There are adults who can do that. She needs you to be her bloody brother, Jonathan. That’s what she needs. Her alive brother.”

  I stopped sniveling, and I looked at her.

  “You’re thinking about how much you want to see her. Start thinking about how much she wants to see you, and just bring a modicum of logic into it, Jonathan.”

  A modicum, if you don’t mind. Whatever that is.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that … if you are alive, you can see her. If you are dead, she will never see you again. Gettit?”

  “Yeah,” I muttered.

  “So button up your overcoat, sunshine,” she said.

  “What?”

  She really does talk in riddles, that one.

  “It’s a song. It means, you need to keep well and healthy for the sake of the people who love you. Right?”

  “Sing it,” I said. “Go on. Sing it.”

  She laughed. And she did. It was a really stupid song, but the tune was great. It made me smile.

  “She’s only a little girl,” Kate said. “Just remember that, big boy.”

  “How come it’s always down to me?” I said. “It’s not bloody fair.”

  I was waiting for that line, you know the one, Life isn’t fair, Jonathan. But she didn’t say that. That is the single best thing about Kate. She never says, Life isn’t fair, Jonathan. I hate people who say that, as if they have this great insight into how the world ticks and they need to share it with you. Bloody smug bastards they are.

  What she said was, “It’s not because you’re special, Jonathan. It’s not even because you’re you. It’s because you’re the only one, Jonathan. That’s why it’s all down to you. You have no choice. You are the only thing she’s got.”

  Great, I thought. Bleedin’ marvelous. It all depends on me. I’m like the fella in the story that’s holding up the earth. He’s thrown forward onto his knees, and he’s got the world on his back. Poor eejit. Hercules. No, Atlas.

  I said that to Kate, about Atlas, and she said, Well, maybe it feels like the whole world, but it’s not, you know. It’s only Julie, and she’s not heavy.

  She ain’t heavy, she’s my sister. Yeah, yeah, very amusing.

  She took the blade with her when she left.

  19

  They’d decided not to press charges, Kate told me one day.

  “Really?” I said. “That’s nice of them.”

  “Sarky. Good sign,” said Kate comfortably.

  You can’t win with her. She’s always a step ahead of you. But I might as well go on being sarky, I thought, since it made her feel so positive.

  “Would that mean that they are not going to charge me with killing my mother, or beating up Julie, or holding up the petrol station, or sending the threatening text message, or are there some other crimes they’ve invented not to charge me with?”

  “All of the above,” she said.

  We sat there for a while, not speaking. Then I sighed and I looked up at her and said, “Well then.” Meaning, more or less, So that’s that, then.

  She nodded, and then she said, “The quality of mercy is not strained, Jonathan. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blest: it blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”

  I stared at her.

  “Jeez, you’ve lost it, Kato,” I said. “You’ve really gone and lost it now. What are we going to tell your mother?”

  She laughed.

  “It just came into my head,” she said, “when I was telling you that they are not going to prosecute you. It’s from The Merchant of Venice. Remember?”

  How could I forget? I still had the copy belonging to Mr. O’Connell that Julie had brought for me from home.

  “You’re smiling,” she said. “So maybe you won’t kill yourself today?”

  This was a joke she had, that every time she made me laugh, I was one step further away from suicide. Some people call that black humor, but it suits me.

  “Not today,” I said.

  “Remember when you thought I was going to try to save you with Shakespeare?”

  I smiled. “That was a stupid idea.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But it wasn’t an idea I ever had.”

  “Say it again,” I said.

  “Sam,” she added.

  “Yeah, Sam. Say it again, Sam. I liked it.”

  So she repeated it, about the quality of mercy. I didn’t understand it all, but I liked the sound of it.

  “So basically it means it’
s great stuff altogether, this mercy,” I said. “Double portions all round.”

  “You’ve got it,” she said.

  “Are you trying to tell me they are being merciful?” I asked then. “Like, they’re being nice to me, not pressing charges?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not trying to tell you anything. I just remembered the quotation.”

  “It blesseth…” I said.

  “Him that gives and him that takes,” she finished. “Yeah, that’s why it’s twice blessed, see?”

  “And I am him that takes?” I said. I was starting to feel the smallest bit uncomfortable about this.

  “No. Not necessarily,” she said.

  “I could be the one that gives?” I said, puzzled.

  She shrugged.

  “You’re a smart one,” she said. “You should go to school. It’d do you a power of good.”

  After she left, I went and got the book and opened it at random, to see if I could find the speech about mercy, but instead I noticed where it said “Dermot O’Connell, Second Year” on the first page, in faded ink. It must have been his copy from school. I didn’t know his name was Dermot.

  I found this line I liked, and I wrote it out on a piece of paper and left it propped on my table, so I could show it to Kate next time. We have to have something to talk about, and I don’t always want it to be me.

  She laughed when she saw it: “Love me, and leave me not.”

  I was shocked that she laughed. I thought she would start banging on again about Julie and I would be able to say, Yes, I understand now, but instead she just gave this throaty gurgle and shook her head in amusement.

  “What’s so funny?” I said. “It’s like a line from a song, isn’t it? Like Bob Dylan or some kinda crap like that, isn’t it?”

  “Wash your mouth out,” she said. “Bob Dylan isn’t crap. You’re just too young to appreciate him.”

  That wasn’t what I’d meant, but I didn’t argue about it. I just waved the quotation at her, and I said, “So why is it funny?”

  “Well, put it like this, Shakespeare thought it was a terrible line.”

  “He wrote it,” I said.

  “Maybe, but as a kind of joke.”