by Jan Carson
Mr Heinz and his mysterious lover were just offstage, most likely concluding business in the bedroom or washing up in the bathroom. Malcolm knew from the naked lady programs that most people liked to brush their teeth after sex. He was, as yet, unsure as to how intercourse directly affected one’s teeth but suspected it was something to do with the kissing, which, in his eleven-year-old opinion, seemed like a most unhygienic use of the mouth and tongue.
Malcolm Orange perched himself on an upturned bucket and angled around for a better view. Inclined at a ninety degree angle, with one foot raised for balance, he could just about discern a set of female heels struggling to wedge themselves back into their ancient Reeboks. They were olive, white and cracked as a pair of sun-bleached pebbles. The left ankle bore the mark of the cross in faint indelible ink. It had stretched out over at least three decades’ hard labor, becoming blurred around the edges like a well-worn photocopy. Based on the back of her legs, Malcolm Orange placed Mr Heinz’s lover at approximately fifty-five or sixty: not quite old enough to be officially resident on the cul-de-sac. Malcolm leaned further forwards, risking chronic imbalance, for further clues as to the woman’s identity. He could see nothing more than a solitary varicose vein snaking up the inside of her calf.
After a substantial pause, during which the sound of tired elastic and frantic zippering suggested post-coital redressing, Mr Heinz broke the silence. ‘You’re right, Sonja,’ he yelled, ‘I should be thinking of my back. Best to stick to the bedroom. Great idea keeping your dress on this morning. Probably for the best, my love, the porridge goes cold if we take more than ten minutes and I don’t want to get you in trouble again.’
‘Sonja,’ Malcolm made a mental note of the name, fully intending to start a new page in his research notebook as soon as he returned to Chalet 13. As far as he knew, there was only one Sonja who frequented the cul-de-sac (though he would, for the sake of scientific accuracy, interrogate his mother discreetly over tonight’s evening meal). Mr Roger Heinz, the elderly man who occupied Chalet 7, and had in his pre-retirement days been a semi-successful salesman of used cars and trucks, was having a secret affair with the Meals on Wheels lady.
Though Malcolm was yet to realize it, most everyone on the cul-de-sac had been aware of this setup for the better part of two months. Rising early, as most elderly folk do, they’d been treated to the same open-window talk show Malcolm was now party to, most every morning for the entire summer. Roger and Sonja – who was Portuguese, substantially hipped and twenty-three years his junior – did it twice daily; once at 7am, mere moments after she’d trundled her heated trolley up his garden path, delivering porridge and reconstituted eggs to the elderly residents of the cul-de-sac, and once again at 6pm whilst his evening meal slowly cooled in its microwaveable dish. In the evenings they kept the windows closed, guarding against the mosquito epidemic which was currently plaguing Portland.
‘Lord Almighty,’ Malcolm Orange whispered and almost toppled off his bucket with the shock. Mr Heinz was at least eighty-three years old. Malcolm had previously imagined that the necessary mechanics quit after one’s sixtieth birthday.
Just as this thought had begun to settle into the soft space between reality and fiction, the Meals on Wheels lady emerged from the bedroom, patting her well-lacquered hair into place as she walked. Mr Heinz appeared two steps behind, rubbing her backside affectionately as she fished her purse out from under the coffee table. Suddenly disturbed, a generous stack of magazines toppled and fluttered to the ground, coating the living room carpet in a maelstrom of unfortunate images: gardening aids, fly-fishing shots, incontinence adverts and glossy photos of foreign ladies, all-over naked in outlandish positions.
The noise caused Malcolm Orange to start suddenly, readjusting his position in a maneuver which made the bucket rush suddenly left, then right, forwards and back, before finally coming to rest in its original position, emitting the sound of two dozen plastic-hooved horses stampeding down the alleyway.
Mr Heinz, who was naked from the waist up, exposing a foot-long bypass scar, quit feeling up the Meals on Wheels lady and made an arthritic dart for the living room window.
‘Who’s out there?’ he yelled, his lack of aural discernment causing the very windowpanes to reverberate in protest. ‘Come out and show yourself you old pervert.’
Malcolm Orange sensed that this was the appropriate moment for yet another of the Oranges’ infamous speedy getaways. Without thinking he jumped backwards from the bucket. It was his intention to crouch upon impact with the ground and thereafter crawl, commando style, all the way back to Chalet 13.
Malcolm Orange had not figured Chalet 8 into his plan.
Propelling himself backwards from Chalet 7 at a rate of some thirty miles per hour, the back of Malcolm’s skull collided with the gable wall of Chalet 8 approximately four feet and seven inches into midair. Before he could even register the stupidity of his own plan, Malcolm passed out, plummeting to the ground where he lay, comatose, for anything up to three minutes. During the interim his presence went undetected by Mr Heinz, whose eyesight was only slightly better than his hearing, and Sonja, the Meals on Wheels lady, who kind of liked the idea of someone watching at the window.
Anything up to three minutes later Malcolm Orange came to. He was no longer lying in the alleyway between Chalet 7 and Chalet 8.
Turning his head slowly from side to side, a movement which required gritted teeth and superhuman levels of concentration, Malcolm managed to ascertain his location. If his calculations were correct, he’d managed to walk, or perhaps crawl, unconscious from Chalet 7 to the privet hedge which bordered the Center on three out of four sides. For a few seconds he lay quietly under the hedge, eyes wedged shut, trying to work out how long he’d been unconscious for – weeks perhaps, or even years. He lifted his hands to his face. They were still the hands of a pre-pubescent boy. ‘Thank God,’ Malcolm Orange thought, ‘I can’t have been out for more than a couple of years.’
‘What are you doing with your hands, pervert?’ a voice asked from many miles above Malcolm’s head. It was a girl’s voice; shrill, sharp, incessant as tinfoil wedged between teeth.
Malcolm tried to open his eyes; left first, then right. The sunlight swaggering through the privet hedge punctured his head in fourteen million separate spots.
‘I saw you,’ she continued. ‘You were watching those old folks doing it through the window. You’re such a pervert.’
‘I was not,’ said Malcolm, not yet sure who he was arguing with.
‘Were too. We saw you.’
‘Who’s we?’
‘Mr Fluff and me.’
‘Mr Fluff doesn’t sound like a real person.’
‘You can argue that out with her yourself,’ the voice continued, upon which a particularly angry, orange puffball of a cat was deposited suddenly and with great force upon Malcolm’s middle.
‘There you go. Now you can see she’s real and she says you’re a pervert too.’
‘She’s a cat. She can’t say anything.’
‘She’s a talking cat but she only talks to me. See, we have this special bond. It was me that rescued her. Anyway, all that’s beside the point. What were you doing watching those old people screwing?’
‘I wasn’t!’ Malcolm shouted. He felt weary beyond his almost twelve years.
‘Were too. We saw you.’
‘Look,’ replied Malcolm, realizing the circular nature of the conversation. ‘You’re right. I was trying to watch Mr Heinz and the Meals on Wheels lady, but I couldn’t see anything and it was for my Scientific Investigative Research. Anything’s OK if you do it for scientific research.’
‘Well, we were doing research too. We’ve been following you for the last few days. Bet you didn’t even notice.’
Malcolm Orange felt himself all of a sudden ready to faint for a second time. The need to fall over, though technically impossible from a prostrate position, came over him in undulating waves like five thousand nauseated butter
flies flittering round his brain.
‘You’re lying,’ he whispered. ‘I’d have noticed you. I’m incredibly observant for an eleven-year-old.’
‘Nope,’ she said, ‘you’re the only kid in the Village and we’ve been following you since we moved in.’
‘Prove it.’
‘Easy peasy. Porridge for breakfast, every morning, PB and J for lunch yesterday, X-Men duvet on your bed, small baby – a brother I assume – in your underwear drawer AND you spend an awful lot of time looking at yourself naked in the mirror.’
Malcolm Orange struggled not to swallow his own tongue.
‘Who are you?’ he asked when the gagging fit had finally subsided.
‘Soren James Blue,’ she replied. ‘You can call me Sorry. My father says it suits me.’
Raising himself up on one elbow Malcolm Orange forced both eyelids open at once. When his eyes had finally focused he found himself staring into the pug-nosed face of a furious demon girl. Two thick black braids framed her face. A tight black T-shirt, puckering around the section where her breasts would soon be, clung to her chest, riding high to reveal a thick slice of milk-white belly. Her ears were pierced three times individually on one ear, five times on the other. Her teeth were still fenced off in a set of junior high retainers. She couldn’t have been any more than thirteen, fourteen at very most.
Malcolm Orange smiled up at her, squinting into the sunbeams which were busy forming an ironic halo around her head. Aside from his mother, she was the most beautiful lady Malcolm had ever seen with clothes on.
– Chapter Five –
Scientific Investigative Research
On normal days in normal circumstances, Malcolm Orange struggled to see the point in having a younger brother. Ross was little more than a ten-pound earthworm, passing food from one end of his fat, pink body to the other with little concern for the noxious odors this process produced.
The older ladies on the cul-de-sac (halfwit Irene and Emily Fox who liked to suffocate Malcolm daily, pressing him against her papery bosom so he smelt for weeks of lilac water and Johnson’s Baby Powder) were very fond of Ross. ‘What a cutie,’ they’d say, tugging on his lardy little cheeks. ‘Can we keep him, Malcolm?’ And Malcolm Orange would inevitably feel his hopes rise, buoyed by the possibility of finally being rid of both his father and Ross, the vulgar fruit of his father’s loins. Adopting his most convincing smile – the very same smile which had kept the pastrami sandwiches rolling throughout his exile in Idaho – Malcolm would reply, ‘Of course you can keep him, ladies. He’s all yours. Will I get his diaper bag?’ Both ladies would laugh long and hard, as if party to some tremendous joke. Malcolm automatically felt the need to run away, rather quickly in the opposite direction, for halfwit Irene looked a lot like the Joker from Batman when she laughed.
Neither lady had ever taken him up on the offer, so Malcolm Orange had begun to explore alternative options for the disposal of his unwanted sibling. On several occasions since the advent of Ross, Malcolm had seriously considered listing his brother in the classifieds section of the Oregonian.
‘We should charge a little for him, mama, maybe five or ten bucks,’ he’d explained to his mother, who was busy at the time, feverishly kissing the back of a wooden spoon. ‘People are suspicious of free things. We’re much less likely to get rid of Ross if we offer him for free.’
After which, in a rare display of physical affection, Martha Orange had removed the wooden spoon from her lips and administered five quick clips to the back of her son’s thighs. Malcolm Orange remained confused. Fully aware of his own gifts and abilities, he could only assume his mother perpetually disappointed by this second, substandard child. Stranded in Portland, Oregon with no friends or living relatives to tell tales, every day offered her a fresh opportunity to abandon the baby and return to a simpler, Ross-free set up.
On normal days in normal circumstances Malcolm Orange would have paid the gypsies half his annual allowance to take Ross away. This morning, with his head rolling round the underside of the privet hedge and his outer extremities disappearing at a righteous clip, Malcolm Orange felt something equating to affection for his long-lost brother.
‘You should check on Ross,’ he whispered, struggling to raise himself up on one elbow. ‘I don’t think I can move yet but you could climb in through my window. It’s the front one with the blue curtains.’
‘I know which bedroom you sleep in,’ Soren James Blue replied, balancing her hands adamantly on her hip bones. ‘But I’m not going. Go yourself if you’re that worried.’
‘I’ll faint again!’
‘Bullshit!’ she replied and dragged him into a standing position, digging her heels into the bark dust for leverage. She was surprisingly strong for a girl.
Upright now, Malcolm Orange observed Soren James Blue from a vertical perspective. Her proximity was unsettling. He could smell the breakfast bacon still lingering on her breath. He could see that the fourth earring on one side was actually an unfortunately placed mole.
‘You have a mole on your ear,’ he said. (This was Malcolm Orange’s first experience of talking to an actual, real-life girl. It was like learning Spanish. He could understand small sections of what she said, but hadn’t a clue how to respond.)
‘I’ve got moles all over me,’ Sorry replied. ‘Do you want to see? It’s only fair. I’ve seen you naked already.’
Malcolm Orange took his second funny turn of the day, this time slowly and with all the grace of a wilting tulip. Sorry caught him before he hit the ground. The feeling of girl hands snaking under his armpits was both pleasant and slightly nauseating. Malcolm hung there limply for half a minute trying to make sense of this, the latest in a number of unsettling new experiences.
‘Right,’ Sorry said, forcing him once more upwards, ‘quit feeling me up and let’s go check on Ross. I’m assuming Ross is your kid brother … the baby in the dresser?’
‘Uh-huh,’ Malcolm replied and, for the first time ever, wondered if it was normal practice to keep a baby in the underwear drawer. Had he been better balanced he would have run ahead of Sorry to remove the Oxford English Dictionary before she had the opportunity to further judge his parenting skills. No such opportunity arose, for Sorry was already off, half-stomping, half-running in the direction of Chalet 13. Mr Fluff followed at a safe distance, pausing every quarter block to sniff eagerly every suspicious looking stain on the sidewalk. As they proceeded from one end of the cul-de-sac to the other, Malcolm Orange found himself giving an impromptu guided tour of his new neighborhood.
‘Bill and Irene live in there,’ he said, indicating their front door with one extended finger. ‘They run the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs. Irene’s not all there but Bill’s a decent enough guy. Sometimes we play tennis over his hedge. I let him win because he’s really old.
‘Here’s the mailbox,’ he continued, instantly regretting his decision to state the glaringly obvious. ‘And the public telephone if you need to make a call.
‘Emily Fox lives in the house with the pink door. She’s really, really fat. She sleeps sitting up on her sofa because if she lay down she’d never be able to sit up again and she’d die and she can’t fit in the bathroom any more so a lady comes to wash her and empty her pee once a week. They pour water over her with a hose. I’ve never seen because they close the curtains first, but my mama told me all about it. Emily Fox is probably going to die soon because she’s too fat for her heart. You want to stay away from her until she dies because she always hugs children and it hurts a lot and smells funny.’
Sorry said nothing. She stared at Emily Fox’s chalet. The living room curtains were tightly closed. Emily Fox was in Minnesota visiting her nephew, Francis.
(This visit had been the talk of the cul-de-sac for almost a month. Since her departure, residents had taken to stopping each other on the street corner to speculate on the logistics of long-distance travel for the morbidly obese.
‘I heard she’d booked a
mini-van and driver all to herself,’ Bill had suggested at the penultimate meeting of the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs, cutting himself off quick sharp when the sound of a creaking access ramp heralded Emily Fox’s imminent arrival.
‘Bullshit,’ Roger Heinz had continued. He had quit wearing his hearing aid and was chronically unaware of anything less subtle than an earthquake. ‘That woman’s so fat she’d need a flatbed truck just for herself.’
Emily Fox had, by this stage, lowered her legendary backside on to the three seats immediately to Mr Heinz’s left, and was busy repositioning both of her enormous legs. They quivered in protest like two Jell-O tree trunks, sweatpant sheathed. ‘I,’ she’d stated adamantly, addressing the entire room, ‘am flying United, Portland to Minneapolis. I’ve two seats booked for myself, just in case one’s a little too cozy.’
‘Damn, girl,’ Roger Heinz had interjected and slapped her thigh complicitly, setting off a series of deep, undulating ripples which moved simultaneously downwards and upwards, threatening to instigate an avalanche across her massive belly. ‘You want to give United a call and make sure they don’t put you in the tail or they’ll never get the G-D plane off the runway.’
Emily Fox had taken Roger Heinz’s comments in good humor. She was old enough and fat enough to view her three hundred and something pounds as a battering ram rather than a dead weight.
Thereafter, Malcolm Orange had spent the week watching the news eager-eyed but had yet to hear of any plane crashes between Portland and Minneapolis. He could only assume Emily Fox safely absconded to Minnesota, eating her unsuspecting nephew out of house and home.)
‘They’re probably hosing her down now,’ he whispered to Sorry, hoping to impress her with yet another small-town lie. ‘They only close the curtains when they’re washing her.’
Soren James Blue remained frustratingly unresponsive. Malcolm Orange began to wonder if she might be made from the same mould as Ross: another of life’s crippling disappointments. It had, however, only been fifteen minutes since their first acquaintance, so Malcolm swallowed his skepticism and proceeded with the tour.
