Whiskey & Charlie

by Annabel Smith

  The year she moved to Everton, she had dressed up as a Rubik’s Cube. The rest of the kids paraded through the village in costumes that had been cobbled together the night before. They were ghosts with eyeholes chopped out of old sheets; cats with cardboard ears and ripped stockings for tails; miniature brides in communion dresses, wearing veils cut from curtain netting. The Rubik’s Cube caused a sensation and established Alison’s reputation.

  The idea for the pharaoh costume had come from a picture in Alison’s encyclopedia. According to the picture, the pharaohs didn’t wear much in the way of clothing. Charlie supposed this was on account of it being so hot in Egypt. All he was wearing was a towel wrapped around his waist. But he had a magnificent headdress and a golden collar, and when he put them on, Charlie truly felt like a king.

  “That towel used to be a nappy,” William said when he saw the outfit. Their mum said it wasn’t true, that diapers were square and the costume was wonderful, and anyway, she had given all their diapers to Auntie Sue when their cousin Hayley was born. Alison said that William was jealous because Charlie had a better part in the play. Charlie thought hard about this. William was better at soccer, better at telling jokes, better at yo-yoing and marbles. When he added it up, William was better at anything Charlie could think of. It was something quite new for William to be jealous of him, and Charlie found that he liked the idea of it.

  Besides, he deserved a good part this year. Last Christmas, when they performed the Nativity play, Charlie had been given the part of an angel. He had asked if he and Timothy could be shepherds instead, but Miss Carty-Salmon had said there were already too many shepherds and that the boys should be honored to play the angels.

  “But the angels are girls’ parts,” Timothy said.

  “If you took the time to read the Bible, Timothy, I think you would find that the angels were men.”

  “Well then, why do they have girls’ names?”

  Charlie’s mother had told the boys it was bad manners to talk back to a teacher. Timothy had obviously been given different advice. In the end, it made no difference to Miss Carty-Salmon, but Charlie thought Timothy was right. Gabriel was a girl’s name, and if they were supposed to be boys, why did they have to wear costumes that looked like dresses?

  This year the play was a shortened version of the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, adapted by their teacher, the beautiful Miss Parker. All term they had been practicing “Any Dream Will Do,” and Miss Parker, who had been to London to see the show, said they sang it even better than the real cast. The main part was Joseph, but the pharaoh was the second best part, and Charlie had spent weeks practicing his lines, shouting, “Throw him in jail!” until his mother said if he wasn’t careful, he would wear out the words.

  The night before, Charlie was so excited he couldn’t get to sleep. He couldn’t wait for his mum to see that there was something he was good at; that for once, William wouldn’t be the first, the best, the fastest. But on the morning of the play, their mother had a migraine. Their father had a big job to finish. So Aunt Audrey came to watch the play in their mother’s place. Charlie was bitterly disappointed.

  But as it turned out, Aunt Audrey was a far better audience member than their mother had ever been. She shrieked with laughter at all the jokes, started all the other mums and dads clapping along to “Any Dream Will Do,” and, best of all, when Charlie stepped forward to take his bow, she stood up out of her chair and shouted, “Bravo! Bravo!” Charlie thought he had never been so happy. Bravo, he said to himself as he went to sleep that night. Bravo was the word that meant there was something Charlie could do better, and he held on to it like it was a life buoy.

  x x x

  The night before she left for Australia, Aunt Audrey came around to say good-bye. She told the boys she had a special going-away surprise for them, which they couldn’t have now, but which would be waiting for them when they got home from school the next day.

  Charlie and William ran all the way from the bus stop the next afternoon, rushed out of breath into the house to find their mother sitting in the armchair with Audrey’s dog, Barnaby, at her feet.

  “Are we looking after him,” William shrieked, “until he can go to Australia?”

  Their mother smiled and shook her head. “We’re going to keep him.”

  “Forever?”

  She nodded.

  “Does Dad know?”

  She nodded again. William and Charlie threw down their schoolbags and did their Zulu warrior dance twice, slapping their thighs and beating their chests before dropping onto the carpet to roll around and bury their faces in Barnaby’s fur.

  “Let’s call him Bravo,” Charlie said.

  “No,” said William, “let’s call him Tomahawk.”

  “His name’s Barnaby,” their mum said. “You can’t change a dog’s name.”

  Barnaby was a golden retriever with velvet ears, and his name was engraved on a silver tag that hung from his collar. He held his right paw in the air when his tummy was rubbed, would fetch a stick or a ball no matter how far it was thrown, stood on his hind legs with his front paws on the bench when the boys were putting food in his bowl. He had a leash, but they never used it; they let him run ahead through the fields behind their house, let him get so far away they could hardly see him, and then they sang out his name to call him back.

  “Baaaar-na-beeee!” William would call.

  Braaaa-vo! Charlie would silently correct him.

  x x x

  They had been looking after Barnaby for three months when he was hit by a car. Charlie was walking him that day, and Barnaby was racing ahead as he always did, crossing the High Street, when the car came around the corner from Tempsford Hill. Charlie saw the car clip Barnaby from behind, heard him yelp, watched the car slow and then speed up again. He ran to where Barnaby was lying, panting, his fur already soaked with blood; he knelt down and pulled the dog onto his lap, screaming and screaming until someone came out of the pub to see what the commotion was.

  Then they were in Mary Partridge’s car on the way to the vet, Charlie in the back holding Barnaby, stroking his head, begging him not to die, while his blood seeped onto the backseat, Mary Partridge behind the wheel, crying so hard she could barely see the road in front of her.

  The vet came out to the car to carry the dog inside.

  “Hit and run,” Mary said to him. “What a crying shame.”

  “What’s his name?” the vet asked.

  “Bravo,” Charlie said. “His name’s Bravo. Is he going to die?”

  “We’ll see what we can do.”

  Mary sat with Charlie in the waiting room and held his hand until his mother arrived, and then all three of them sat, and the waiting went on and on.

  When the vet opened the door to the examination room, Bravo was lying on the metal bench with his eyes closed, breathing slowly. Charlie stood beside him and stroked his ears and said his name, over and over, so he wouldn’t have to listen to what the vet was saying to his mother. When they came over to the bench, Charlie’s mother put her arm around him, and Charlie held his breath.

  “One of his hind legs is broken,” the vet said, “but otherwise the damage isn’t too bad. He’s badly bruised, but that’ll heal. We can have a go at pinning the leg—he’ll never run like he used to, but he’ll get by.” The vet paused. “There’s a small chance of gangrene setting in, in which case we’d have to amputate. Your mother thinks we should give it a go, but she said it’s up to you.”

  The whole time the vet was talking, Charlie had been stroking Bravo’s ears, looking at his dry black nose, his whiskers twitching. He had thought Bravo would die on the road where the car hit him. He had thought Bravo would bleed to death in the back of Mary’s car. He had sat for a long time on a hard chair, waiting for the vet to come out and tell them Bravo had died on that cold metal table while they were t
rying to put him back together. He had wondered how on earth they would tell Aunt Audrey.

  He couldn’t believe it was only a broken leg. He was so relieved he couldn’t speak. Even if they had to cut it off, it would be all right. Three legs were enough; Charlie had only two, and he found it plenty. He was laughing or crying, or laughing and crying; it didn’t matter which. Bravo would still be there, wagging his tail, pushing his wet snout into their hands when they got home from school. He’d still be able to catch a ball and hold a stick in his mouth and gulp his dinner down in five seconds flat. Broken leg or not, he’d still be their very own dog, their Bravo.

  Charlie

  For a long time, Charlie had wished he wasn’t called Charlie. In his school class alone, there were three other boys with the same name. His mother, who loved the royal family, who years later would cry uncontrollably when Princess Diana died, said it was a fine name, a strong name, the name of the Prince of Wales, the man who would be King of England. Their father said Prince Charles was a pompous, jug-eared fool, but your name was your name, and once you had it, you were stuck with it.

  But Charlie knew that wasn’t true. After all, it was only a few months ago that Bravo used to be called Barnaby, and no one ever called him that name now. And if a dog could have a new name, then why couldn’t he? The name Charlie had chosen for himself was Steve, after Steve McQueen, with whom Charlie had been obsessed ever since he and his dad had watched The Great Escape one Saturday afternoon when his mother was at the theater.

  It was Buddy who made Charlie change his mind about his name. Buddy had lived next door to Charlie’s parents when they were first married, and he was stationed on the air base at Chicksands. Until Buddy came to visit them, Americans had existed for Charlie and William only on television. They were enthralled by Buddy, by his accent, by his strange habit of eating with his fork in his right hand, the way he said, “Aw, c’mon, guys,” or “You betcha!” No one had ever called them guys before.

  Since Audrey bought them the walkie-talkies, the boys had put away their LEGO space station and their Playmobil fort, their Star Wars figurines, and their Scalextric. Instead, they played at being cops and robbers, private detectives, or secret agents. They used phrases they had heard in films and on television, words they didn’t even understand, but had used so often in their games they had come to have a real meaning. They said, “Do you read me?” and “Get the hell out of there!” They said, “Meet me at the southwest exit at eighteen hundred hours.” They said “roger” and “niner” and “over and out.” They said these things without embarrassment, with that nine-year-old conviction that they were saying all the right things in exactly the way they should be said. But when Buddy overheard them, he started to laugh.

  “LAPD, twenty-six hundred!” Buddy repeated, slapping his leg as he laughed. “What the hell kind of crap are you guys spouting into those damn things?”

  So Buddy had taught them the two-way radio alphabet. And that was how Charlie found out that his name was a useful one, that it stood for something. That it was the third letter of the NATO phonetic alphabet, established in 1955 and approved by the International Civil Aviation Organization. It had represented the letter C to the U.S. Navy, the British Army, the RAF, and, best of all, it had been used on board the aircraft in the Dambusters raid.

  William was put out that his name wasn’t part of the phonetic alphabet. To compensate, he started calling himself Whiskey. Their father, whom they had always called Dad, became Papa. Their mother, of course, remained simply Mum, and Bravo, lucky Bravo, was spared a second name change, since his name was already part of the alphabet.

  Knowing the alphabet made the walkie-talkie games even better, though William could never remember the whole thing and would make up his own words under pressure, saying silly things like Mouse instead of Mike and Lulu instead of Lima. Charlie never corrected him, but he remembered the words William could not, learned to recite the two-way alphabet backward as well as front ways, and his command of it, his place in it, was one small thing he had that his brother did not.

  * * *

  Charlie goes to the hospital first thing. He wants to be in and out before his mother arrives, dreads the thought of having to talk to her about the situation or, worse still, talk around it. Easier to avoid her altogether. Rosa will be there, of course; she hasn’t left yet, as far as Charlie knows.

  Standing outside Whiskey’s room, Charlie sees her through the glass pane of the door. She is sitting with her head bowed, as close to the bed as she can get. Charlie thinks she must have fallen asleep, opens the door gently so as not to startle her, but she looks up at once and speaks without greeting him. Charlie knows then she has been awake all night, thinking, wanting to talk, waiting for someone to come.

  “This is not the way he want to die,” she says. Her Spanish accent, somehow thicker in a whisper, makes what Rosa is saying sound even worse than it already is.

  Charlie flinches at the word die, the word no one else in his family will say. He doesn’t know if he believes that Whiskey can hear them, but he doesn’t want to stand right next to him and talk about him as though he’s already gone. He pulls Rosa away from the bed.

  “You mustn’t think like that, Rosa,” he whispers. “You know what the doctors said. There’s a good chance he’ll recover.”

  “Fifty-fifty, they said,” Rosa insists. “That means good chance of dying.”

  “Well,” Charlie says lamely, “that’s the worst-case scenario.”

  “Do you think so, Charlie? I think worst case is for months he stays alive like this, for years he lives, these machines doing the things he used do for himself. Worst case is he wakes up with brain damage, and the Whiskey we know is gone.” Her Spanish accent, somehow thicker in a whisper, makes what Rosa is saying sound even worse than it already is.

  Charlie sits down in one of the hard hospital chairs. It is less than twenty-four hours since he received the phone call from his mother, and in those hours, his only thought has been that Whiskey must not die. He must not die because he, Charlie, needs more time. He and Whiskey have not been friends, have not talked or laughed together for months, years. But he had never thought it would end like this. They’re still young, only thirty-two; there should be forty or fifty years, at least, for them to sort out their differences. He had always thought there would be time.

  Now he sees that there might be things worse than Whiskey dying, that they might have all the time in the world and it wouldn’t make any difference.

  “He want to die in that crazy car, or jumping out of airplane,” Rosa says.

  Charlie thinks that if Rosa hadn’t come along, Whiskey would have died like Elvis, of booze and drugs and too many cheeseburgers, although knowing Whiskey, they would have been hundred-dollar cheeseburgers made of Japanese beef from calves that had been massaged with milk. He doesn’t say this to Rosa. She is sitting with her palms up in her lap, and he notices for the first time how small her hands are. He wants to give her something.

  “You’re right,” he says eventually. “Whiskey’s always been a daredevil, even when we were little kids. Once, when we were about six or seven, he dressed up in his Superman suit and jumped out of a tree in our driveway with a rope tied around him. He probably would have broken his neck, but the rope got caught under his armpit, and he dislocated his arm instead.”

  “He never tell me that,” she says.

  Charlie smiles at the memory. He had almost forgotten it himself.

  Delta

  Charlie found out about Delta of Venus on the first day of term because it was Whiskey’s friend, Grainger, who owned the book. But he didn’t actually read any of it until a couple of weeks later, by which time every boy in the school was talking about it. Grainger had been on holiday to France and claimed to have bought the book from a kiosk, an ordinary kiosk, selling newspapers and chewing gum and cigarettes. It was a well-known fact that
France was a land of sex maniacs, that you could buy things there that you couldn’t possibly get your hands on in England, and there were plenty of other boys who’d come back from holidays with dirty French comics. But Grainger’s book was different. For starters, there were no pictures. In theory, when you read something dirty, you could make up your own pictures. But some of the scenes described in Grainger’s book were beyond Charlie’s imagination; he could find no place for them within his own concept of sex.

  Not that he would have called himself an expert. At the age of fifteen, sex was one of those subjects you pretended to know everything about while knowing almost nothing. If you asked questions, you were exposed, tainted with the word virgin, and would never live it down. Finding out more without risking exposure, that was the challenge.

  Charlie had no sexual experience of his own to speak of, except for a fumbled kiss with Michelle Perry in a cupboard at a party, during a game of spin the bottle. Other boys had come out of the same cupboard with different girls and much better stories to tell. Tom Costello had put his hand up Louise Barker’s skirt, Chris Lennox had felt Claire Corbell’s breasts, and, allegedly, Charlotte Graham had put her hand down Joel Orton’s pants.

  Would things have been different if it was Charlie who had ended up in the cupboard with Charlotte Graham? Would she have put her hand down Charlie’s trousers—down anyone’s trousers? Or did Joel possess some skill that Charlie had not yet mastered? Could Charlie have touched Michelle’s breasts if he had tried? How did you know if a girl would or wouldn’t? How could you change her mind?

  These were the questions that plagued Charlie, questions he could not ask and could not find the answers to: not in the encyclopedias and medical books at the library, not in their father’s awkward and incomprehensible talk about the birds and the bees, not in the explanation they had been given in health education by the dried-up, flat-chested Miss Pennacombe, who, it was agreed, could not possibly ever have had sex herself and therefore could have nothing to teach them. Certainly her interminable description of the sperm fertilizing the egg had done nothing to help Charlie decipher the dirty jokes he heard, though he always laughed anyway, hoping he was laughing at the right moment.