Fish Boy

by Chloe Daykin

  I’m with them or I’m not.

  I’m not.

  I look around and try to get some idea of where I am.

  Sir David says, ‘Even cataglyphis ants have to get back as quickly as possible to their nest to not risk death.’ They live in the eastern Sahara and come out in the day when everything else dies. But they don’t die. They navigate by the sun. They stop and turn and check and keep going.

  I see the shore. Miles away. The sea is calm. The sun is almost down. The sky’s gone bright pink. I breathe out and try not to panic. I take it one stroke at a time. I count twenty breaststroke dunks and look up. There’s miles to go. A wave knocks me and goes into my mouth.

  It feels hopeless.

  I feel hopeless.

  I wonder where Bob is.

  I miss him.

  The water’s dark.

  I stop swimming for a minute. I’m shaky cold.

  I wonder how mackerel keep warm when they do not have fat. But they don’t, do they. They’re cold-blooded. They’re not mammals. They don’t feel anything the same as me.

  Maybe I should have whale friends.

  David A steps over the sand dunes and up to the screen and says, ‘I think you should keep swimming.’

  But I’m thinking of whales with shopping trolleys taking up the whole aisle of ASDA superstore. Buying freezers full of krill. Their trolleys start shoving into my back, nudging me out of the way. I try to sweep them off, but they won’t go. I’m flowing along in the water, flying into hazy dreams. Floating in and out white space when my bum hits a rock.

  I look down and see Bob swimming away.

  He grumble chants off and doesn’t look back.

  I look up and see the shore.

  He was my supermarket trolley. He has nudged me home.

  A wave pushes me out and on to my feet. I bounce walk to the beach, pull myself up and go over to Patrick.

  My body feels so heavy my legs are shaking. Patrick looks up from his Rope Tricks in Five Ticks book. His head torch stings my eyes.

  He slams the book shut. BOOM.

  I jump.

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Out. In. I d’know.’

  He looks at his watch. ‘7.47,’ he says. ‘You’ve been down there for two hours and fifty-six minutes.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ My mouth is so cold it’s kind of hard to move it properly.

  ‘Your skin looks blue,’ he says. I crumple down on to the sand next to him and he rubs my arms with the towel like I’m his little sister.

  He kneels down and lifts up my eyelids. ‘I think you’re overexposed.’ I don’t even have the energy to lift my arm to dry my face. He feeds me chocolate planets.

  I don’t know how long we stay like that. I don’t check my watch. It’s totally dark when we walk back to my house. The stars are out. The wind is gone.

  ‘Eat sugar,’ he says on the back step. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow. Okay.’ His face is orange in the street light. I nod and go in and upstairs and fall on to my bed and am asleep in the towel, before I have time to get under the covers.

  Bed Slug

  Monday.

  Teacher Training Monday.

  Get in.

  I switch the lobster alarm off and go back to sleep.

  At ten Dad comes in with French toast on a knee tray. The smell of hot butter comes up the stairs.

  ‘Pellets for the bed slug,’ he says and ruffles my hair. ‘You were late last night.’ He puts the trays down. I sit up.

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘Ooh toast.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘With Patrick.’

  ‘I don’t even know Patrick.’

  ‘He’s coming round.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Later.’

  ‘Don’t do it again, okay,’ he breathes out.

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Sorry.’

  We put cinnamon and icing sugar on with the sprinklers. I use the palm tree one, he has the love heart. When you take them off the toast it leaves the perfect shape underneath. Well, it does if your hand isn’t shaking. Mine is a right mess.

  ‘You okay?’ Dad says, looking at my icing splodge.

  ‘Yeah fine,’ I say and shove the slice into my mouth. Dad raises an eyebrow.

  We have two each and go down to the kitchen and I eat five more slices. We run out of eggs and go shopping. Without the van we have to walk. I take the black wheelie trolley, I’m not pulling the pink flamingos one. No way.

  It’s much easier getting there than it is getting back. The sun is boiling. My arms ache. I wish we hadn’t bought so many beans. We sit on the wall by Loncar Lane to eat our Jive bars. I feel the heat soaked up in the bricks.

  I break my bars in half, turn them into fangs.

  ‘Nice one.’ Dad sticks his up his nose.

  ‘What’s that meant to be?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘A warthog?’ I scan my brain. ‘A wild boar?’

  ‘The nose beast,’ he says and roars. I laugh.

  ‘You gonna eat those?’ I watch him pull them out.

  ‘Yeah.’ He puts one in his mouth. ‘Mmmn, salty.’

  He wipes the chocolate off his nose with his hands, wipes his hands on his shorts. ‘Fancy working on the Merz wall this afternoon?’ We haven’t done this for ages. I look at him and smile. ‘Keep your eyes peeled on the way home then.’ He gets up and looks over his shoulder. ‘Race yer!’ he says and legs it down the street. His carrier bags fly out, the pink flamingos trolley bounces over the slabs. I wish I could run. My arms feel like lead.

  Part Gaudi, Part Kurt

  Dad started the Merz wall in our back garden cos of this artist Kurt Schwitters. He’s German but went to live in the Lake District where he made this art wall with all sorts of things in it. Nobody really liked his work while he was alive. Dad says this happens a lot with artists. I wonder if it’ll happen with Dad.

  He says our wall is part Gaudi, part Kurt. We collect things and stick them on with cement and pointy trowels. Sometimes the things mean something, like the ones we put on for birthdays, sometimes they’re just beautiful, or interesting, sort of. Sometimes we make patterns, pushing whatever we’ve got into the cement and taking them out again. Shells, ferns, buttons, things like that. We make handprints every year. When I was seven I tried my nose but it didn’t work.

  Dad puts the shopping away and I stick my hands in the sink. I watch the water running over. There’s a knock on the door.

  ‘I’ll go,’ I say before Dad can. I wipe my hands on the front of my tiger shark T-shirt and open it.

  ‘Hi,’ Patrick says. We stand there for a minute.

  Dad comes up behind me. ‘How do,’ he says and waves over my shoulder. We go into the kitchen. I pour us a Coke each and snap ice in. The three of us clink glasses. I like the way the outsides steam up. I write my name in mine. Patrick draws a fish and a question mark.

  ‘So, what happened?’ he whispers.

  ‘Later,’ I whisper back.

  ‘We’re doing the Merz wall,’ I say in a loud voice so Dad can hear.

  ‘Cool,’ Patrick says, and shrugs. ‘What’s that?’

  Making Merz

  On the way home we found a safety pin, a stick shaped like a moustache, a white pebble and a bit off a necklace, a tiny silver heart. We go out and mix up the cement. I get some bits from the shed. It’s dark inside and I have to stand still for a minute to get my eyes used to it, so I can see. Everything’s covered in cobwebs. Dust flies up and sparkles in the light from the door. I get the tile crackers and a few old plates. I rub them on my T-shirt. One’s got pink flowers on, the other an old picture of the queen, when she was really young. I get some tiles too and rub them till they shine, green, red and glitter blue. I make three piles by the wall and crack them up with the tac hammer.

  Dad works over by the apple tree. I find a space at the other end. Patrick gets a patch next to mine by the rhubarb. I trace old parts of the wall with my fingers before I
start. Each part flashes me back to the day we put it in and why. It’s like a time machine.

  I look at the ones Zadie put in. Ages ago. A Mickey Mouse car. A plastic fireman. Her tooth when it fell out in a pie.

  Dad puts Concerto De Arunquez on and opens a window so we can hear the music outside.

  ‘What do I do?’ Patrick says.

  ‘Just make it up.’

  ‘Like animal shapes or something?’

  ‘Like anything.’ I use my hand to get the sun out of my eyes. ‘It doesn’t matter. Just do whatever you want.’

  ‘The rules are, there are no rules,’ Dad says and chucks him a trowel. I show him how to crack the tiles up into pieces with the tac hammer.

  We don’t talk while we work. We just scrape cement and stick. The patterns all flow out of our heads. Sometimes we stand back and just stare. We look at how the part we’re working on fits in with everything else. Like cameras switching from close-up to wide angle. Sir David watches an orangutan washing socks in a river and says, ‘The ability to imitate as well as to use tools were ultimately to lead us to the transformation of the world.’

  The cement dries fast. I have to keep pouring water over my head, down my back. My hands get dirty, so do Patrick’s, so do Dad’s. We don’t use gloves. I watch the grey crack over my knuckles and feel it tighten on my skin.

  At five we break for lemonade and cheese and pickle sandwiches. It feels like snapping out of the Us.

  ‘Nice work,’ Dad says and slaps Patrick on the back.

  ‘Thanks,’ he says, staring at the wall and nodding. He looks genuinely proud.

  We go back to work till it’s nearly dark. A moth buzzes past my face. They never know their own space, moths. The garden light clicks on and we jump.

  ‘Had enough?’ Dad says.

  I look at Patrick. He nods. ‘Okay,’ I say.

  ‘Sure thing, partner,’ Dad says and does the Howard gun salute.

  I pick up the leftover bits of tile. The snapped edges graze my skin. A trickle of red runs over the grey.

  Patrick follows me into the shed.

  ‘Where’s your mum?’

  ‘Resting.’ I turn my back on him. I want my body to put a full stop to that conversation. I pile the tiles on the shelves.

  ‘Your dad’s so cool,’ he says. ‘My dad would never let me do stuff like that.’

  I think of his big posh house, his new car. ‘Your dad’s pretty loaded though.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So? I’m just saying.’

  He passes over more tiles. ‘So what happened?’ he says.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Well, duh!’

  Dad sticks his head round the door. ‘Ice cream?’ he says. Perfect timing.

  We sit with our backs to the opposite wall on the grass and look at our work. Me and Patrick have minty cones. Dad has a lager. I like the click and hiss of the ring pull. Not the smell that comes out after though.

  ‘Where’d you put the heart?’ Dad says.

  ‘There,’ I point next to the purple quartz.

  ‘Nice.’

  We sit watching the midges, the white fly, more moths, there’s loads of moths. 160,000 different species. Sir David says, ‘Death head hawk moths fly across the Mediterranean using the moon to hold their northward course.’ The moth flies across Africa, over the Himalayas and into a beehive. ‘Now the hungry traveller restores his energy before looking for potato plants upon which it will lay its eggs,’ he says. The moth sticks its tongue into the honey.

  I lick the mint.

  We’re a hot bank of bodies, warm against the wall, warm against each other. Dad puts his arm around me. I feel his fingers on my chest, they’re not twitching any more.

  ‘When Billy did that first one.’ He points at the baby handprint. ‘He cried his eyes out, didn’t yer.’

  ‘I was only like, one or something.’

  ‘You wouldn’t stop crying till we washed it off.’ He holds my wrist up. ‘Look at them now, hands like shovels.’ Mine still looks small next to his. ‘Nature calls.’ He gets up. ‘See yers in a bit,’ he says and goes inside. It feels very quiet when he goes.

  ‘I like your green bits,’ I say.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘It looks like a labyrinth.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Yeah, it looks like lots of passageways.’ I tilt my head to see the shapes, ‘With no way out.’

  ‘Oh,’ Patrick bites the last of his cone, ‘right. Yours looks like a mouth,’ he says, pointing at my white patch. It looks silver in the moonlight. ‘With teeth.’

  ‘I thought it was a lobster,’ I say.

  ‘SO?’ he throws his arms up. ‘What happened?’

  I take a breath. ‘Weird stuff. Weird stuff happened.’ I feel the dog tags nudging me under my T-shirt. ‘He came back.’

  ‘Bob?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And, I said it.’

  ‘Kesz?’

  I think of how when you say a word loads of times it feels like it makes no sense anymore. Not that that one ever did. ‘And he took me away. To the Us. And we went deep and it was nice and we went round and round and it felt … you know …’

  ‘No. As a non swimmer, I have absolutely no idea.’

  ‘Easy, like I didn’t have to think about anything anymore …’ I snap up stems of grass. ‘Like everything was far away.’

  ‘Oh,’ he doesn’t laugh, he just nods like he’s thinking really hard about what I’ve said and I think he is probably the only person in the world who I could ever tell this to and also the only one who would ever believe it.

  Why?

  Monday. In science Mrs Jones draws a lifecycle of the mayfly diagram on the board in blue and red pen. We copy it into our books. Egg, Nymph, Emerger, Adult, Spinner, Spent Spnner. I don’t know why we do this, why we don’t just stick a photocopy of it in. That would be so much easier.

  I look at Ben Nicholson’s while he is sharpening his pencil. He does this every five seconds. His Spinner is perfect. He puts an arm across the page when he sees me. I look down at mine. The head is too big for the body and the legs are kind of limp. I think about rubbing it out but don’t. I draw tiny hairs coming off the knees.

  Jamie Watts walks over to the bin and bumps me. My pencil shoots across the page. ‘Aww sorry, mate, sorry,’ he says. ‘I just tripped yeah.’

  The line goes straight through my Emerger’s head, Oscar Pierce laughs. ‘Sit,’ Mrs Jones shouts and points at his empty chair. Ben Nicholson offers me one of his rubber collection.

  I think of the oxpecker on the hide of the hippo, cleaning ticks out of the cracks. The hippo wades out into the swamp and the oxpecker hangs on. Sir David whispers, ‘They have two toes pointing forwards and two backwards, so they can cling on at any angle, even on a slippery hippo.’ The oxpecker flies off to get earwax off a zebra, dandruff off a giraffe. ‘These partnerships between birds and other animals have become very beneficial,’ he says.

  I take the rubber from Ben and nod thanks. His eyebrows look sympathetic.

  I look at the Emerger and think that living for just one day would be pretty good. Unless it was a bad one. But if it was a good day it could solve a lot of problems. I think of all the best things you could do in a day. Although you’d have to do them alone, unless you’re a fast friend maker, which I am not.

  According to the diagram though, all mayflies do is fly, eat and mate. I look over at Zadie. She sits two tables away from mine, next to Sarah Collins. They have identical purple pencil cases. Zadie is staring out of the window. Smiling at something. I can’t see what. She has shaded her eggs light blue – they look very 3D.

  The bell goes while I am still rubbing out. Oscar Pierce pretends to hold the door open for me when Mrs Jones is looking and then shuts it in my face when she isn’t.

  When I get out into the corridor Jamie Watts is taking Ben’s PE shorts out of his bag. He chucks them to Oscar who chucks them bac
k. ‘Catch!’ He throws them so they go into my face. I try to pass them back over to Ben but Oscar swipes them. He chucks them to Archie, who chucks them back to Jamie. Jamie throws them to other kids in the hall. It goes on like this for five more throws. Everyone’s too scared not to join in with the gang. With the people Us. They won’t stick out. Jamie Watts just stares at them. Do what I do or it’ll be you next. No one ever says that but everyone knows it. I think of the angler fish. The bright bulb it dangles in front of its face. The massive teeth that hide behind it, that bite chunks out of anything that comes close.

  Ben just leans against the wall and waits.

  Jamie walks past him into the toilet, comes out and blows his nose on my PE bag. Oscar and Archie laugh. Everyone else just looks away.

  I go in to wash the bag in the sink. Ben fishes his shorts out of the toilet. I look at the floor and think of biting chunks out of Jamie.

  Mrs Curtis sticks her head round the door. ‘Everything okay?’ she says. We look at each other, back at her and nod. Round the corner I hear Jamie Watts laughing. ‘Outside!’ Mrs Curtis shouts and I hear a door slam.

  I stick my bag under the drier and go out. To the fall wall. Patrick’s talking to Sheree. She walks away when I get there. ‘What’s she doing here?’

  ‘Talking.’ He shrugs.

  ‘In our place?’

  ‘It’s just a place. Anyone could come here.’ I think of him coming here with other people, people who aren’t me. It feels like the ground is moving.

  ‘She’s always laughing at us,’ I say. ‘With Becky.’

  ‘No she isn’t.’ Patrick tilts his head. ‘They’re probably just laughing about something else.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘I got you this.’ I pull out a carrot from my bag. ‘For the trick.’

  He turns it over in his hands and sees the scared carrot face I’ve drawn on one end. ‘Cool,’ he says and smiles. I lead the way over to the chestnut tree at the far side of the field. Nobody goes there any more since someone scraped RABIES into the trunk with a pen knife. Melissa Hardy touched it for a dare and was off school for a week with shingles. Now everyone thinks it’s kind of cursed. That it makes you get diseases.