by Jan Carson
‘And that,’ he whispered, pointing out a particularly innocuous-looking section of the sidewalk, ‘is where Ronnie threw up after the July Fourth barbeque. You can still see the puke stains on the ground. The day after he was too sick to stand up so they took him to the Center and we never heard from him again.’
Malcolm Orange delivered the last line of this soliloquy with sober intensity, hoping to instill in Soren James Blue his own healthy fear of the Center. Sorry popped a bubblegum bubble loudly and itched her naked midriff. She appeared overwhelmingly unconcerned. Malcolm Orange was a muddle. He found himself trapped between the desire to punch Sorry hard on her insolent little nose and the urgent need to possess the half-chewed gum protruding from between her lips. Resentment he could handle, out-and-out violence seemed bearable, but after eleven years of seasonal friendships, of halfwit mothers and senile conversations, Malcolm Orange could not cope with yet another disinterested player.
Driving a reaction out of Soren James Blue was absolutely imperative now. Malcolm Orange stood tall in his drugstore flip-flops and shouldered the challenge like a full-grown man. Staring Sorry straight in the eye he leaned against the door of Chalet 13 and said the most shocking thing he could think of.
‘I live here,’ he confessed with a carefully affected nonchalance. ‘Not for long though. I’m starting to disappear. By next week there probably won’t be anything left of me.’ He folded his arms and waited for a reaction.
Soren James Blue laughed in his face. She sounded like fireworks going off, indoors and underwater. It was a thick and wonderful noise to stand under. Though it was hard to tell with cats, Malcolm Orange could have sworn Mr Fluff was laughing too. Her marmalade belly expanded and contracted several dozen times in quick succession until, with a noise like a dying hairdryer, she hacked an enormous hairball onto the Orange doorstep. Forgetting for the moment that he was in the presence of a lady, Malcolm instinctively went through the vomit with the toe of his flip flop. He was fascinated by the chocolatey mess and wondered how on earth an all-over-orange cat could cough up mud-brown fur. ‘Perhaps,’ he concluded, keeping his thoughts to himself, ‘Mr Fluff has been licking other cats or eating the trimmings from the hairdresser’s floor.’ Far from disgusted, he deeply respected Mr Fluff for her chocolate-colored vomit.
Whilst Malcolm poked around in the cat sick, lamenting his lack of a magnifying glass, Soren James Blue continued to laugh over his shoulder. ‘You’re a weird kid, Malcolm,’ she muttered between huge, choking gulps of laughter. ‘I like you. Here’s hoping you don’t disappear before I get to know you.’
Malcolm blushed all over. It was a new experience for him. He wiped the vomit off his toes and fished the front door key out from beneath the welcome mat.
‘Do you want to come in?’ he asked, hesitant and half-inclined to leave the strange girl and her cat standing on his front doorstep.
‘Sure,’ she replied, ‘but we don’t, as a rule, do doors. We’ll meet you inside.’
By the time Malcolm had made it through the front door and down the hall to his bedroom, Mr Fluff was fast asleep on his X-Men duvet, sweating ginger fur all over the pillow. Sorry was still entangled in her entrance, wriggling the last few inches of foot and ankle through the open window. Malcolm stood in the doorway watching her flop around, belly flat on his bedroom carpet as she extricated her left bootlace from the window latch. She looked like a drowning trout. It was hard to feel intimidated by her, tangled as she was becoming in the bedroom curtains.
‘Do you need some help, Sorry?’ Malcolm asked.
‘Piss off,’ she snapped back, and in her panic tore the curtains right off their hooks.
Soren James Blue was not the kind of girl given to apologies. She snatched the broken curtains from the floor, bundled them into a large gingham bushel and stuffed the evidence under the bed. Malcolm said nothing, but made a mental note to blame halfwit Irene, who was occasionally prone to stealing soft furnishings – flannels, scatter cushions and the odd electric blanket – when the opportunity presented itself. Shot of the incriminating curtains, Sorry wiped both hands on the back of her pants and strode purposefully towards the open dresser drawer. Malcolm Orange, overcome with embarrassment, made a kind of lurching dash for the drawer and managed to make it there at exactly the same instant as Sorry. The Oxford English Dictionary had come undone and fallen to the floor, landing open on the page outlining Fr words. Grabbing the book from the floor, Sorry read aloud, ‘Freak: a thing or occurrence that is markedly unusual or irregular.’ Malcolm blushed again. This time he could feel the hotness in his throat leaking, like spilt soup, down the neck of his T-shirt.
Ross was still sleeping. He’d shifted slightly over the course of the morning and his head was now in the place previously occupied by his elbow. Malcolm’s socks had parted to make a nest for the dozing baby so Ross was now buried up to his chin in off-white cotton-polyester mix. He was not dissimilar to Baby Jesus in the manger. Soren James Blue stood over the baby, staring intently and pressing the Oxford English Dictionary against her chest. Malcolm feared she might drop it on his brother’s head. Eventually, when the silence had become an ever-expanding cloud sucking the room dry, Sorry spoke. ‘He’s a funny-looking baby,’ she said. It was a sentiment Malcolm Orange could easily agree with.
‘I think it’s because he has no hair,’ he speculated. ‘It makes his head look out of proportion.’
‘Like an alien.’
‘Or a turtle. I think he looks really like a turtle most days.’
‘Do you like having a brother who looks like an alien turtle?’
‘I don’t like having a brother at all. I asked my mom to get us an alligator and she got herself knocked up with Ross instead. What about you, do you like having a brother?’
‘Oh, there’s just me – no brothers, no sisters – just me and dad.’
‘Where’s your mom?’
‘Where’s your dad?’ Soren James Blue fired back defensively. Her chin had begun to wobble slightly. Having no previous experience with girls, Malcolm Orange was unsure as to whether she was about to cry or punch him. He answered her question truthfully. (Sometimes, Malcolm had discovered, telling the truth in an offensive manner could be just as effective as a well-placed lie.)
‘My father’s run off to Mexico by himself in the car,’ he confessed. ‘That’s how we got stuck here in Portland. It’s just me and mom and Ross now. I don’t mind it too bad. It’s much worse to lose a mother than a father.’
Soren James Blue reached across the open drawer and punched him succinctly and with surprising force, square on the tip of the nose. Malcolm Orange, unused to the pleasure of being punched in the face, leaned forward and thus caught the full force of the blow somewhere approximately two inches north of his open mouth. His nose made a noise like a plastic ruler snapping. Two thousand outdoor fireworks exploded simultaneously, cascading round the inner sanctum of his head and, with a noise like the Willamette in full flood, a river of blood burst forth from his left nostril. Without further ado Malcolm Orange lay down on his bed and succumbed to his third funny turn of the day.
Several seconds later he woke to the now familiar sight of Soren James Blue towering over him. In her right hand she held one of his mother’s recently laundered dishcloths, in her left, force of habit had her clinging to the Oxford English Dictionary for comfort.
‘Take your shirt off,’ she commanded. ‘It’s covered in blood.’ And before Malcolm had a chance to protest, she’d yanked his arms out of their sleeves and was dragging the shirt free of his head, splattering the walls with a generous constellation of fresh, red nose blood. Malcolm was mortified but too dizzy to protest. He lay there, semi-naked on his X-Men duvet, and attempted to cover his perforations, first with his hands, and then as good sense slowly crept back into his temporal lobe, with an X-Men pillow hastily located from behind his head.
Soren James Blue, seemingly undeterred, slammed her butt onto the bed beside Malcolm and, in
the process, budged him several inches closer to the edge. Her breath was audible, whistling through the stained tracks of her braces. One sneaker slid loose at the heel and dangled delicately from the end of her big toe. Her thumbs brushed, intentionally he assumed, against Malcolm’s thigh as she scrambled to drag Mr Fluff on to her lap. It was almost too much for Malcolm Orange. He hugged the X-Men pillow tight to his chest, relishing the damp comfort of his own breath, breathing back, and contemplated the possibility of an enormous panic attack, right here in his very own bed.
(Malcolm Orange had been suffering for years from the possibility of panic attacks. Though he had yet to experience an actual outbreak of anxiety, many, many situations had had him almost hyperventilating. Diarrhea was also a constant, worrying possibility. Guarding against the potential of being caught short or breathless he had, for years, kept an empty popcorn sack folded in the seatback pocket of the Volvo. However, after the untimely death of his Step-Nana – bolt upright in a Ghostbusters matinee – the very thought of popcorn was enough to instigate the possibility of a panic attack and thus the empty sack found itself unceremoniously tossed from the rear window of a speeding station wagon, somewhere south of the Illinois border.
Malcolm Orange had a number of odd and oftentimes inexplicable phobias. These included bathroom hand driers, movie rental stores, unnaturally colored candies and, for a brief and torturous period in Kentucky, an intense horror of stoplights which had him digging his heels deeply into the driver’s seat each time his father paused at a red. Though incapable, at the tender age of eight, of expressing a logical reason for his stoplight fear, Malcolm later came to realize it had everything to do with a particularly adult zombie movie he’d once been positioned in front of whilst his parents indulged their carnal needs in a motel bathroom.
It would be many weeks and months before Malcolm fully recovered from the fear of stoplights. During the interim he traveled exclusively on the right side of the car, hanging from the passenger window and calling red lights from half a mile out in the hope that his father might show a rare benevolent streak and slow his pace in anticipation of the green. His mother – an Orange by marriage rather than blood – might have indulged Malcolm’s lesser oddities. However, she’d never progressed beyond tractor-handling, and so the family’s driving responsibilities fell solely at Jimmy Orange’s feet. Jimmy Orange rarely, if ever, indulged anyone who wasn’t in the market for second-hand tires, so Malcolm Orange was forced to go cold turkey on his stoplight fear.
Throughout his youth and early childhood Malcolm remained chronically incapable of conquering the possibility of panic attacks. The fear of hyperventilating, or indeed succumbing to bowel thunder, kept him safely buckled to the Volvo’s ample backseat whilst any number of small-town adventures passed him by, unsampled.
‘No, mama,’ he’d invariably whisper, when offered a sample of some zany new ice cream flavor, a rare family outing to one of the midwest’s many hokey amusement parks or a new cassette tape for his Walkman, ‘I think I’ll just stick with what I know best. I can’t be sure it won’t give me a panic attack.’
Though his father attempted to scare the fear right out of his son – employing elaborate horror stories, cold, hard facts and, when all else failed, the mean side of his belt buckle – Malcolm continued to suffer from the crippling possibility of panic attacks. ‘Let him be, Jimmy,’ his mother would eventually mutter, coming a little too late to her son’s defense, ‘there’s no harm in it and he always grows out of it in the end.’
And for the most part when the end came, five days, four months, or – in the case of adults in fancy dress – six years into the problem, Malcolm Orange almost always got over his fear and moved on to nurture a brand-new hysteria.)
Soren James Blue shuffled her butt several inches closer to Malcolm’s and made a feeble attempt at an apology.
‘So,’ she said, rolling up the left leg of her pants to pick at a weeklong scab, ‘I’m sorry I hit you, but you deserved it.’
Malcolm Orange said nothing. He was unsure whether the blow had been deserved or not. Teenage girls and the terrible reasonings of their teenage minds were an absolute mystery to him. He continued to breathe damply into the edge of his pillow, counting each individual exhalation in a dumb attempt to slow his racing pulse.
‘I don’t like people bitching about my mom,’ Sorry continued, flicking the crusty edge of her knee scab towards the open window. ‘It makes me mad and when I get mad I usually punch people, or throw up. I throw up a lot when I get angry.’
‘I have diarrhea,’ Malcolm confessed. ‘But mostly when I’m nervous.’
‘Gross,’ Sorry replied, screwing her mouth up like a grimacing gargoyle. ‘You’re disgusting.’ But Malcolm could tell she was secretly impressed. The curiosity got the better of his fear. He continued with his interrogation.
‘Did your mom leave?’ he asked, raising the X-Men pillow to protect his nose against a second onslaught.
‘Kind of … but not really. It was sort of my fault. Look Malcolm, it’s a personal story and I barely know you. I’m not sure I want to tell you any of it.’
‘You’ve seen me naked,’ he said, smirking. It was an uncharacteristically bold move on his part; a little strand of his father’s malignant DNA finally clicked into place even as he formed the sentence, ‘We’re pretty much bonded for life, Sorry.’
She laughed awkwardly – like a garden sprinkler struggling to force the water out – and ran one hand through the front of her hair. It rose obtusely and stayed risen long after she’d removed her hand. Sensing the onslaught of a story, Mr Fluff stood up, shifted her furry hindquarters one hundred and eighty degrees clockwise, and settled in for the duration.
‘So,’ she said, for most of her stories, it would transpire, began with a deep-stacked ‘so’. ‘My parents got a divorce when I was seven years old.’
(She pronounced the word ‘divorce’ with a long emphasis on the first syllable, stretching it sixteen shades of southern so it emerged sounding like ‘deevorce’. Malcolm Orange enjoyed the way she said it. Under her tongue it sounded less like cruelty and more like an actual possession, most probably a small, domesticated animal or kitchen appliance.)
‘The divorce was no big deal. My mom didn’t like my dad. Neither did I. He smelt too strong of cologne, even first thing in the morning. He smelt like he was trying to cover up something terrible. I think he had an affair with a hairdresser or a real estate lady, maybe both. My mom never talked about it but my grandma filled me in over Thanksgiving dinner. My grandma’s dead now, but she was a great lady, a little crazy sometimes but pretty awesome for an old person. Towards the end she got a bit muddled and mixed me up with mom a lot. She bought me a rape alarm for my first day at kindergarten and taught all the kids how to top a beer bottle at my tenth birthday party. She swore like a trooper and boy did she hate my dad. I couldn’t repeat some of the things she said about him when she thought my mom wasn’t listening. She decided that I should know the facts about him, even though I was only seven years old. Turns out my dad had a second apartment on the other side of town just for screwing around. My mom only found out about it six months before the divorce. For a smart lady, my mom can be pretty dumb about certain things.
‘Even when he wasn’t screwing around dad would still go round there a lot so he could get wasted and play video games without my mom seeing. My mom disapproves of video games. She doesn’t let me play them, even at the arcade. “They stunt your growth,” she says. Complete bullshit! My dad’s the tallest guy I know.
‘After dad left we rented out the California house and moved to Chicago for the summer. It was only meant to be a temporary deal but my mom got offered a job in the university so we stayed for a year and then a second year. When I got to junior high I started asking how long we’d have to stay in Chicago for. It turned out the answer was permanently. The California house had been sold years ago and no one had bothered to tell me. I was pretty mad about that.
I kept thinking about the other kids who were living in my house now. They were probably sleeping in my bedroom and coasting down the sidewalks on my skateboard. Well, eventually I got so mad at those dumb kids I made myself physically sick. I spent an entire week continuously throwing up about the California house and ended up in the emergency room with dehydration. I was pretty proud of my own persistence. It’s not everyone that can keep vomiting regularly for more than two days. I’m a master at the art of puking.’
(As if to prove a point, Sorry stuck two fingers down her throat and made a convincing attempt at simulating a gagging fit. Mr Fluff, having previous experience of Sorry’s gastric acrobatics, leapt from her lap and took cover under the bed. Malcolm quickly moved the X-Men pillow from his face to his lap, ready to protect his only clean pair of shorts, but the whole exhibition proved a mere preview of expulsions to come.)
‘Eventually I stopped vomiting and the hospital told me I was better and could go home. But I didn’t stop. I kept right on throwing up after every meal. I always left the bathroom door open so mom could hear. I made a real big deal of the puking. I wanted my mom to freak out and she did. I was thinner than any kid on our street, even the foreign kids, and my eyelids started to turn gray from not getting enough food. Plus, I sort of stopped talking to my mom, unless there was something I really needed; you know, like toothpaste or clean underwear or cigarettes. The silence thing really freaked her out. She tried to send me to a shrink to get me talking but I wouldn’t speak to the shrink either. I could tell I was getting to my mom. By the third week of throwing up she’d started staying home from class to watch me. By the fourth week she’d upped my allowance to fifty bucks and I caught her crying in bed with the television turned up. I figured that by Christmas, if I kept quiet and continued throwing up, she’d give in and move us back to California.
