Susan Knightley was in the kitchen, leaning over the table where Liesel was slumped over some homework. They both looked up as Joe came in, still rubbing his hair dry with the towel.
“Good day?” asked his mother.
“All right. You know.”
“See if you can help Liesel with this stuff, will you? Then I can get on with making supper.”
Joe sighed. “I don’t know why you can’t be just like everyone else and get us stuff to microwave.”
“A, because it’s expensive. B, because it’s bad for you. C, because I want us to sit down and talk to one another occasionally instead of living like strangers occupying the same space, and D, because I like cooking. How many times do we have to go over this one, Joe? I’m never going to be ‘like everyone else’, and you might as well accept it.”
Her voice was beginning to sound plaintive, so Joe rushed to help Liesel to avoid any further discussion. He just couldn’t seem to say anything to her these days without getting some ratty answer. Liesel shifted her book away as Joe sat next to her.
“Joe’s no good. I’m better at maths than he is. I’ll wait for Ben.”
Joe rolled his eyes and curled his lip at her. Ben was best at everything. Ben was the one everyone wanted to wait for. Ben was the reason girls like Becky Sutton and Chloe Hance even spoke to Joe. It wasn’t exactly original to hate your own brother, but increasingly, Joe found himself unable to resist loathing Ben—Mr. Perfect. He wished that girls liked him for himself, not because his brother was the best-looking boy in year twelve. And if they found out the truth about Ben—which they would any day now that Charlie Meek had seen him coming out of the Rainbow Hacienda down in Brighton entwined with his boyfriend, snotty Zahid—they’d think Joe was gay too. Bloody Ben.
Chapter Two
Home
“That’s not very fair,” said Mrs. Knightley to Liesel, as Joe lumbered off to slump on the sofa and mess with the remote. “Joe is actually quite good at maths, and you were really mean.”
“So?” Liesel thumped her books into a pile and stood, the wooden chair legs screeching against the tiled floor.
“Liesel, how many times have I told you not to do that?”
“You shouldn’t have put in your soppy old quarry tiles then. Dad wanted to put lino down, and it would have been miles better—and cheaper,” Liesel answered.
Before Mrs. Knightley could say any more, Liesel had flounced out. Joe peered over the sofa and saw his mum pursing her lips in frustration. Instead of following Liesel, his mum began dicing onions like a fiend. Ben would be back soon. He would smooth things over.
In the sitting room, Joe checked out the PS4 but all the games seemed lame. He flicked through the channels on the telly. Every channel was showing hours and hours of stuff that had been on a hundred times before. It was like supper being nothing but leftovers. He flicked to The Simpsons. It was one he’d seen before, but it was still better than all the other rubbish sitcoms.
So what exactly happened in Crosbie’s class? So bizarre, the bright colors of the fish, the slop of the water, the graininess of the plaster. There had been a moment between wakefulness and sleep when something had tipped him out of the solid world he had known, a shiver of awareness like the moment you know when you’ve made the wrong move in a computer game, and it’s too late to back off. He’d lied to Smokey. Well, he hadn’t denied it point-blank, but he certainly hadn’t told the truth, because he’d known that he had made the dream happen. He just wasn’t sure how.
By now, Joe was lying full stretch along the sofa, his feet propped on the armrest at the other end. He gazed at his feet distractedly as his eyes drooped closed, trying to work out the exact sequence of events and simultaneously thinking that his feet seemed outrageously enormous. They reminded him more and more of those pictures drawn by Elizabethan explorers of the one-footed tribesmen who used their feet as umbrellas to protect themselves from the heat of the sun. His eyes snapped open, but his feet were up there, entirely the right size. Big, as Mum never tired of pointing out, but not bizarrely huge.
He closed his eyes again then heard the scrape of a key in the lock, and he sat up quickly, adjusting his T-shirt and crossing his arms as Ben came in. Joe listened as his brother took off his coat, hung it on the rack in the hall and went through to the kitchen, where he exchanged effusive kisses and hugs with his mother. Liesel came running downstairs and joined in, her earlier grump forgotten. Joe idled on the sofa, his gaze fixed on the patterns in the carpet.
Liesel showed Ben the maths homework. While sniffing at the pot of whatever stuff Mum had on the stove and agreeing with her disquisition on which herbs to use to bring out the flavor of beef, Ben also managed to give Liesel a tutorial in long division. He was such a suck-up. Then he came through to the sitting room.
“What’s up, mate?” Ben sat on the arm of the sofa and clapped a hand on Joe’s shoulder, nearly knocking him off. Joe shrugged his hand away.
“Nothing much. You know. Just school.”
“I heard something weird happened in Crosbie’s class. You must have done something pretty amazing to freak Tucker out. He was gibbering like a chimp in the nurse’s room.” Ben threw himself into the big armchair, plonked his feet onto the coffee table and looked at Joe, who averted his gaze.
“It was nothing. He was just imagining stuff. He probably picked up one of those weird pills that Charlie Meek is punting around the place. He’s such a dodgy geezer, Meeky.” Joe leaned forward, picked up the Radio Times on the table and stared at it as though Jane Asher’s recipe for a stress-free dinner party was massively gripping. But Ben wasn’t about to be diverted onto the topic of Charlie Meek.
“I heard something about tons of water coming out of the room and everyone’s heads going weird, except yours.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Michaela Potts. You know. Big hair, thinks she’s God’s gift to Terpsichore. She’s in your class, isn’t she? She’s always hanging about, but she doesn’t usually say much. A bit different today.”
Ben’s dance classes…argh. “It’s embarrassing you doing dancing.”
“You know why I do the dance class. It’s good for balance, and it’s given me upper body strength, hoicking all those girls around.” Ben’s pained expression reminded Joe of the way their mother had reacted to him over the dinner business.
“It’s poufy. People laugh at you.” He sounded strident—and stupid.
“They don’t any more. Not since they worked out it’s a great way to pull in girls—and you get to cop a feel.” Ben smirked. “In fact, we’ve had a few new recruits. I’m getting a bit less of a workout these days.”
“Well, you’re hardly interested in feeling up girls, are you?”
“Oh, don’t flog that old horse again, Joe. It’s dead already.” Ben stood up. “If you don’t want to talk about the fish thing, that’s cool with me. You just have to say.”
Before Joe could reply, Ben called into the kitchen, “I’ll be there to help in about an hour, Mum, but I’ve got work to do now, okay?”
“That’s fine, darling. Joe, homework. Go on. Hop to it.”
Joe stood, yawned and trudged upstairs. There was some reading to do for English and for psychology. He had to draw some triangles for maths and a rain gauge for geography. It was a worthless collection of activities. Teachers were either cynical bastards, deliberately concocting useless tasks, or even sadder, that they were pathetic tossers who genuinely believed that the work they set had a purpose.
He turned on the bedside light and the desk lamp, unpacked his bag and stacked his books on his desk. He sat in his swivel chair and twirled around. Dad and he had painted the room last summer. Now it was white with black gloss skirting boards and woodwork. They had whitewashed the floorboards, and Mum had found him black bed linen and a rug that looked like a Mondrian painting, with big red and white panels crossed by thick black lines. Three of the four walls were covered in whitewashed corkbo
ard, and these were pinned with layer after layer of drawings.
Joe could track his progress through the drawings. Through chinks, you could see copies of Tintin and Snowy, Thompson and Thomson, Captain Haddock, Dennis the Menace, Gnasher, Desperate Dan. There had been an Asterix phase, but Joe had really only been interested in scenes of Roman-bashing, along with some of the more familiar comic book heroes—Batman and his ‘Pow! Thwack!’, Spiderman swinging through the streets of New York, a brief X-Men phase. That had been succeeded by the Matt Groening phase, not so much the Simpsons as Abdullah and the sad rabbit of School and Love being Hell. And the Sandman. He couldn’t work out which of the artists who had worked on the Sandman he liked best, but his favorite pictures were always the ones of Morpheus himself. Punk, eyes shaded, speech bubbles reversed so that his words were white in a black puddle, like a whisper from the dark. Mum had thought he had been too young for the books, but Dad had said he was mature enough and had given him the first three.
This year, for the first time since he’d been a little kid, he’d begun his own strip. It was based on his family, but the pictures weren’t on display. They were carefully stowed in the portfolio chest that Mum had found in a secondhand shop and restored for his birthday. He went over and pulled the third drawer open, where he knew that no one would look—not Gloria the cleaner, not Mum, not Liesel on her snooping expeditions. He slid across to his draftsman’s table and switched on the halogen desk lamp, pulled at the tapes fastening the folder and leafed through the sheets of A3 cartridge paper on which he’d started to record his family’s peculiarities. He hadn’t had a chance to show them to Dad, not yet. The way things were going, he wondered if he ever would. He tied the folder up again, hid it away and reached for a fresh sheet of paper.
First he taped it to the table surface, portrait layout.
Then he drew up a series of boxes—a large box along the whole width of the paper at the top, three medium-sized boxes evenly spaced in the center then a pair of boxes at the bottom, the left-hand one slightly larger than the right, and a zigzag margin interlocking the two, in a stylized tearing of the page. He took a pencil and sketched in the outlines of his characters—Liesel, Mum, Ben, himself—but this time they were animals. He gave Mum a sheep’s head. Liesel was depicted as a little weasel with mean, darting eyes and he’d drawn himself as a donkey. But Ben’s head was normal—a little vulpine around the mouth, otherwise as gorgeous as always. There they were in frame one, ready for inking.
Next came the lettering. He’d named his series the Knormal Knightleys. And this time, the final box had a picture of Donkey Joe giving Ben an almighty kick and sending him flying through the window into the moonlit garden.
As usual, once Joe was absorbed into the world of his strip, he lost all sense of time and place. Nothing intruded on his concentration. All his fears for his father, all his irritation with his mother, all his loathing of his sister and brother poured onto the page. At last, rubbing his eyes, he covered his drawing board with innocuous sketches and bits of tracing paper. He stood, stretched and ambled downstairs, feeling altogether better.
Downstairs, Ben and Liesel were watching MTV, arguing about who was the prettiest member of the boy band polluting the screen. Mum was finishing off the cooking while listening to some comedy program on Radio Four. Joe went to the dresser and got out the cutlery.
“Got everything done, love?” asked Mrs. Knightley.
“Pretty much. Have you heard from Dad today?”
“Yeah, he sent an email. There’s one just for you, as well.”
“Do I have time to check it before we eat?”
“Yes, I suppose so. Go on then.” Joe heard resignation in her voice.
Joe sat down at the computer in the corner of the kitchen and logged on. The only good thing about Dad’s current job was that he’d gotten his company to pay for the installation of a broadband connection at home. There was the email in the family’s postbox. Dad had written to Ben and Liesel too, but Joe noticed that his email was longer than theirs, which was a pathetic thing to notice, he knew, but it made him happy anyway.
Dear Joe,
How’s tricks, old man? It’s dull as ever out here in the desert, but the job does seem to be moving on a bit, which is good news after all the delays we’ve had recently. The thing I wanted to write to you about is a book that one of the guys here showed me, all about a mag published in the 1980s that was all comics, called Raw, and I wondered if you’d heard of it. If not, I’ll try to get one of the Americans out here to get hold of it for you next time they go home.
Also, I got your latest copies, and it made me think it was probably time you did stuff of your own again, wouldn’t you say? I don’t think I told you, but when I packed to come out here, I put in the book you made when you were seven. When I look at it, it takes me right back to when you were all kids, just after we’d moved. Ben was eleven and mad about skateboards and nothing else, Liesel was just three. You were the only one I could have a sensible conversation with that didn’t involve cuddly toys or ball bearings and Tony Hawk. You stuck so many things in that notebook. Of course, there were the monsters and the robots and the stuff that seven-year-olds like—Godzilla, some superhero cartoon off the box. But you also did those really funny drawings of the family. I was wondering if you’d ever thought about doing anything like that again. You could scan them in and email them to me. Even snail mail seems to work—although none of us expected it to—if you don’t want to leave your work on the computer for the others to see.
The thing is, it looks like with all the delays so far that my contract will last longer than we’d thought. And if you could do a strip for me and send it out, maybe home wouldn’t feel quite so far away.
What about it? I’ve put this in a separate email from the others because if you did it, you probably wouldn’t want the rest of the family to find out about it. And I wouldn’t really want them to know either. Just a secret for the two of us, because then you’ll be able to draw and write exactly what you want.
I miss you all so much.
Love, Dad.
Joe swallowed hard. He could just hear his father’s voice, faintly, like an echo. He’d been away for two and a half months now. His company had offered him a pretty stark choice—the reconstruction contract or redundancy. And the money they’d offered if he’d take the contract had been too good to miss. Mum and Dad were going to be able to pay off the mortgage and fork out for Ben’s university course so he wouldn’t have to take out a loan.
“Are you ready, Joe?” Susan Knightley didn’t take her eyes off Joe as he closed the email and came to the table.
“What’s this about Dad’s contract?”
“They want him for a year. He can come home at Christmas and Easter, but basically, he’s out there until next October.”
Joe sat, his elbows on the table, his fingers plunged deep into the dense thicket of his hair, massaging his skull. “That sucks.” He could tell by the tone of her voice that she hadn’t been happy with the news either, although financially it was a miraculous break from the continual teetering on a tightrope between solvency and debt. They’d have no money worries at all at the rates Dad was getting paid. They might even have savings.
Liesel and Ben soon filled the silence with gossip and chatter about school and teachers and the endless negotiations about whom Mum would ferry where and when. Joe could stay at home alone. He didn’t play any instruments or sports that needed lessons or practice or concerts or matches. Maybe that was the reason Liesel and Ben got on so much better with each other than with Joe—hours spent in the car together and pretty much the same obsessions with music and sport. It had always been that way, almost since Liesel was born.
Joe made good his escape as soon as he’d finished shoveling up the last of his stew.
“Don’t you want any pudding?”
“I’m all right, Mum. Honest.”
The other two smiled uneasily and said good night in chor
us before returning to their conversation. Joe went back upstairs.
Chapter Three
Lamborghini Gallardo
Nirvana on the iPod, a sole halogen light over the drawing board… First the blue pencil for the rough outline then the heavy pencil. Then the color and finally, the ink. And there it was, the dream—voluptuous curves, steel hubcaps, cruel grills, a shade somewhere between gold and cadmium lemon, black leather upholstery with yellow stitching, six-gear transmission and, lurking in the center of the car, the V10 engine that delivered five hundred horsepower at seventy-eight hundred revolutions.
If only… It wasn’t as if he were greedy. He wasn’t aiming as high as the Murciélago, but even the smallest Lambo was as expensive as a house. Money was a weird thing. If you said it fast, one hundred and forty thousand pounds didn’t sound like so very much, not when the radio bombarded you with all those boring statistics about how many billions the National Health Service cost or how much credit card debt had been run up in the last six months. But in real life, where you had to take the rubbish out and make sure you did your share of the ironing before Mum would part with a tenner, where next year, a job at McDonalds or at the local Tesco’s on minimum wage was going to be the only way to get any spare cash, the price of a Lamborghini was a crazy number, like the number of matches it would take to build a scale replica of the Houses of Parliament—seventy-eight million three hundred thirty-three thousand six hundred twenty-five—or the number of elephants it would take to stretch between earth and the moon—give or take about fifty-two million five hundred eighty. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough elephants in the world to run that particular experiment, although it would be interesting to design a spacesuit for an elephant.
Dream Guy Page 2
