by Liz Jensen
– Ever wondered why you’ve never even been with a foster family? goes Craig, smiling.
My mouth twitches feebly and I fiddle with the small stick I’ve been using to poke in the reeds.
– Know why nobody wants you in their home?
That’s his sidekick, Charlie Lockhart. His claim to fame is that he’s blown off the end of his thumb. I look away.
– It’s because of your social infection, goes Craig.
I don’t know what a social infection is. They’re always on about this. I ran a search for it once, but no joy.
– I haven’t done anything, I go.
– You don’t have to DO anything, to be infected, goes Craig Devon, pretending to be patient, like he’s talking to someone thick. You just ARE.
I stood very still. I watched the air breathe itself on Craig’s bubble-curls, waft them round his pretty face.
– You need a disinfectant purge, he goes. Like a douche. Do you know what a douche is?
The boys behind him giggled and snorted.
– No. I don’t bloody fucking well know what a douche is.
– Voyage of discovery coming up!
They laughed at that too.
– The question is this, goes Craig, pretending to look thoughtful. Will the subject to be disinfected go into the fluid willingly, or will force be needed?
He was quite clever. They admired his way with words.
The pond was small, but deepish, and throttled with chickweed. The water in it black, stinking of rotten stalks. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes tight, till green cracked shapes danced around.
– Well? goes Craig.
I fell in slow motion, and with an extravagant bathroom splash that I heard from under the chilly filth.
I can’t remember much after that, except seeing tiny strings of bubbles fizzle from my mouth and wondering if it was the end. But the black water shocked my heart into a frantic pumping and when I got my face out and my breath back I was gulping whole mouthfuls. I pulled my torso out and looked about me. I saw the boys running off, the fluorescent soles of their trainers winking green.
A few minutes later, there was a small explosion from the direction of the Sports Hut. The boys had moved on.
I don’t know how long I lay there, but I know I felt her before I saw her. My memory of it is, simply, that a feeling began to sluice over me, calming my shivers and coating me in warmth. So that I knew when I looked up, I’d see something good.
And I did. So good, I had to keep blinking to stop it draining away.
She never looked so extraordinary as that moment when I first laid eyes on her. She was always beautiful, but her beauty sort of fizzed at that moment, like a soluble aspirin. I remember her clothes, because they were biology-pond clothes – salamander clothes, to be precise. A tight-fitting green dress with the exact markings of a salamander. Anyone else might have mistaken her for a hallucination but I knew exactly who she was even before she spoke.
– Don’t worry, Harvey, she said gently, in that beautiful caring voice that I will always love until I die. It’s me. I’m here.
– Mum! I breathed, choking on it. My mum was here, at last! And a huge weight lifted from my chest.
Bear with me. Psychology’s involved.
This miraculous, beautiful, fizzing mother in the salamander dress – more real than the real-life unremembered one ever was, I assure you – had wrapped me up in love. It was weird; she was sort of internal and external at the same time – a bit like God, I guess, or a good marketing message.
– This is what you do, she said. You’re to go straight to the matron. Now.
I was going to object, but she held up a hand to stop me. Her nails were painted a delicate peach. As we walked back towards the low red-brick building that was home, Mum told me I had a dad who’d duff Craig up, if he tried to threaten me again. And she let me know – quite how I’m not exactly sure, the memory’s hazy – that Dad was as strong as a tanker, and tough like cowboys in old movies. She also told me that Dad’s elder brother, Uncle Sid, was rooting for me too. So by the time I reached Mrs Lardy’s office, I was feeling quite euphoric about my new situation. I knocked hard on the door, high up, where a grown-up’s hand would knock, then strode in and sat down on the big chair in front of her desk. Mrs Lardy couldn’t hide her surprise at seeing a kid sitting there, dripping on to the floor.
– What are you doing here? Is that – she’s peering at my collar – is that Spirogyra?
– I’ve come to complain, I go. The charter of this facility states clearly that it’s your job to look after the children in your care, and I’m afraid you are failing in your duty.
Her eyes widened as I carried on. Weird, but I don’t quite know, to this day, where the grown-up words were coming from. It was true, I’d studied the charter the same way I’ll study any piece of paperwork, I guess. But quoting it at her like that – well, she must have thought I’d aged ten years in ten minutes. I knew better, of course, than to tell Mrs Lardy about my mother (who had dissolved for now, but was, I knew, on standby), but I told her the rest of the story, in a way I never could’ve done before.
– So I want something done, I said after I’d done this long spiel about the charter. Meanwhile I shall be sending an e-mail to the local authority about the standards of care in this institution.
She was pretty gobsmacked, I can tell you. But I think she was pleased too, because when I’d finished, she smiled, and said she thought I’d turned a corner.
Mum was as good as her word about Dad and Uncle Sid. They came to me that evening in the dormitory.
– I’m on your side, son, whispered Dad. And I always will be. Remember that.
– You’re our special boy, said Sid. Craig won’t lift a finger against you again.
And the funny thing was, he didn’t. The moment my family stepped out of the wings, I became immune to bullying. Nothing touched me. Nobody could hurt me. It was like I carried a bubble of safety around me. Craig got on with his career in commercials. He didn’t pick on me any more. He ignored me. No, more than that: he avoided me, like he was scared to come close.
It was the vibes.
It was only years later, when I got hauled into Head Office, that I actually had to go into the psychological mechanics of it – which were simple enough. How could any child grow up in a children’s home and not know that something big was missing? How could you avoid it, when you saw mums and dads with their shrieking kids in the open air, getting tangled in a kite and swearing, fighting over the last peanut-butter sandwich, or chucking a stick for a drooly Labrador? I knew happiness when I saw it. It didn’t all happen at once. It was organic, my family tree.
It grew from that one magic acorn of shock.
My older sister and younger brother first appeared about a year after I’d met Mum, Dad and Uncle Sid. I must’ve felt pretty much adored by the grown-ups in the family to risk introducing other kids who were a potential threat – but overall, it panned out pretty well, once I’d learned to keep my brother in his place.
The money side of things evolved organically too.
It was a labour of love deciding what they’d all look like and then doing the biz with my photomontage graphics package. For Mum, I first scanned in Mrs Lardy, and morphed her with a very skinny nurse from a TV soap, then superimposed the Tragic Princess. Somehow, through some further nifty palette-mixing, I ended up with a face that was pretty close to that of the ravishing salamander-woman I’d first seen by the biology pond after Craig Devon had administered his ‘purge’. Although I should really have called her Gloria, her official Christian name, to me she was just ‘Mum’. Dad was called Rick, and he was a combination of St Francis of Assisi, from an oil painting I downloaded from my Medieval Art CD, and a footballer I cut out from the back of a cornflakes packet, and scanned in. Uncle Sid was much older than Dad, more like a grandfather really, and I generated his picture from the policeman on the Say No To Drugs campaign. I swapped
the left and right-hand sides of his face around, and relocated his eyes to make them friendlier. Then just added a moustache, took away the uniform, gave him a pumping-iron sort of body – too young for his age, really – and stuck a big scar on one cheek.
My sister Lola had freckles and pigtails and all the usual big-sister stuff. I scanned her in from the ‘after’ picture in an advertisement for spot cream, and superimposed a girl from a centrefold. I left the breasts in, so I guess from the start there was a hint of incest. Although I’d reckoned I always wanted a brother, once I had Cameron up and running, I never quite warmed to him, and often thought about killing him off altogether. He had a nerdy, I-haven’t-got-any-friends sort of face. The basis was a kid in one of Mrs Lardy’s ancient knitting patterns, but I morphed it with three separate baseball players. I made him smaller and skinnier than me, and then gave him crooked teeth, because even then I was jealous of him. Sibling rivalry. It’s pretty much normal, I think.
It was plain sailing after that. It’s easy enough to convince a set of machines that somebody exists. You trawl through old newspapers to get hold of dead people, resurrect their identities, generate their birth certificates by back-dooring into the Statistics Office, kick-start the automatic posting system, change their names by deed poll, generate a new set of paperwork, and Bob’s your uncle.
Or in my case, Sid.
Once I’d established their identities on-line, we were in business.
* * *
– Which would you prefer, begins John after breakfast.
We’re back in the cabin. Him sewing, me chewing A4 sheets torn from the criminal dossiers by the bed.
– Being stripped naked by Captain Fishook, who barbecues your goolies over red-hot charcoal pellets, or a JCB comes along and lifts you up on its arm thing and hangs you upside-down in a bath of piranha fish that gobble up your eyes and leave like, just the hollow sockets?
– Goolies and pellets, probably, I sigh. But actually, mate, I’m not really in the mood.
– Atlantica, he goes. He’s embroidering again. – Liberty Day, he breathes. Harbourville.
He knows how just the sound of things can knot up my intestines.
– And other stuff, I say. His Final Adjustment, is what I mean. – So can we just not talk, for a change? Can we just shut the fuck up?
He doesn’t like this. His voice changes to wheedling, but there’s menace behind it.
– C’mon, kiddie. Let’s have a conversation. Or a story. I don’t mind which.
He’s looking at me steadily. Sometimes I think he might kill me one day, just for something to do. He’s stood up now, his belly jostling about under his T-shirt. He smiles and I look at bad gums and the botched dentistry of his teeth.
– Question One, he says. (He’s pretending to be a teacher, which I guess appeals to him.) – When are you going to open your letter?
– I’m not.
– Question Two. Why?
I’m scared to, is the truth. I look away, chew some more paper. But he won’t let go.
– Question Three. Who d’you reckon it’s from, then?
– Dunno.
I don’t want to know, either. The letter, the news about Atlantica, the words Final Adjustment … Head in the sand. But John’s persistent. It’s boredom does it.
– Question Three. Might it be from the wife?
It takes me several chews to remember that I was once married. That’s how distant my life on Atlantica seems now.
– If you’re talking about Gwynneth, I go, after I’ve spat, she’s not my wife, she’s my ex. And apart from some stuff she wrote on a form once, I don’t think I ever saw her handwriting.
It was true. Who uses handwriting, nowadays?
– Question Four. Your daughter, then?
– Tiffany? He must be joking – If it weren’t for her – I begin.
Then stop. Why do I let him do this? I reach for a sheet of paper and crunch it into a ball.
– I’ve heard that she’s the one …
But by then I’ve stuffed the paper into my mouth, and I’m back to chewing.
The best, and most honest thing I could have done, once the Hogg family had custom-built itself around me, was to stick to their company exclusively. Not get involved in any other relationships – especially ones that meant practical commitment. But I couldn’t, could I? I was human. I had physical needs. I don’t just mean sex, I mean the day-to-day stuff you do as a couple, like sharing a tub of popcorn at a drive-in, choosing which texture wallpaper for the utility room, microwaving something Thai.
Gwynneth seemed like another godsend, at first. In an odd sort of way she reminded me of my sister Lola. She loved to laugh, live for the moment, act on impulse. She’d drag me off to places I’d never dreamed of going on my own – clubs, rollerblade races, and live TV shows that required audience participation, where dysfunctional families slagged each other off. She was always getting tickets for this or that.
I met her in a queue.
It was at the Taxation Centre, as it was called back then, before you did everything online or by phone; I was there sorting out some family business. Gwynneth was ahead of me, but she was dithering about, grappling with the usual problems posed by Section 9(g) of the YB408 self-assessment reclaim clause. Anyway, the long and the short of it was, I helped her with it, and she asked if she could buy me a coconut milkshake to say thanks.
– Or there’s a new diet drink with cinnamon? she goes. If you’re not too busy?
That’s when our eyes sort of met and locked. Hers were very round and wide, like Pacific Ocean shells with mother-of-pearl in. She had a nice body too. By nice, I mean it was a sensible size and shape that looked welcoming. Not madly sexy and outrageous like Lola’s – just well, OK. I liked that.
One thing led to another, and in a little bistro, on our third Mexican beer, I realised how badly I wanted her to like me. Soon I found myself pouring out all sorts of stuff to her about my folks, and the computer consultation service we ran as a family concern. I was enthusing about them, like you do when you’re proud of something and it’s all yours. She was very impressed with the business side of it (I didn’t use the word ‘fraud’), and our complicated deals. It was obvious from the way I spoke that I had money. That’s never a turn-off for women, is it? But I think I genuinely appealed to her too. You got the feeling she’d maybe had a hard time with men, and that I might be an experiment in something different.
– So what do you call yourself, exactly? she goes. I mean, when you’re talking about your job? I mean, mine’s simple, I just say beauty therapist.
I hesitated. Technically speaking, I was a criminal.
– I’m a flexecutive, I went.
That seemed to hit the spot. And it wasn’t a complete lie; it’s a broad church.
One thing led to another; tickets to a show, a Korean restaurant, more talking, some rather fumbling sex. It was odd, doing it in the flesh for the first time, rather than in my head. I had trouble keeping my eyes open, even though I was keen to see what was going on. I was so used to imagining things. But Gwynneth’s hotness and wetness and – well, fleshiness – they really drove me wild. There were all sorts of things I hadn’t expected – the grappling with clothes, the grunty panting that goes on, the tropical nature of the atmosphere you somehow build up between you, the urgency of it all, and the whoosh of release. What a fandango!
– I love this! I blurted to Gwynneth, as I exploded into her – joy of joys! – on the turquoise leather settee of the three-piece suite she called her Best Bargain.
– I love you!
I couldn’t help it. It was my first time doing it for real. And I did love her. I loved everything that she brought me. I loved being normal. I even loved going shopping with her! She was a true Atlantican that way; it’s in the blood. She was a choosy and discerning consumer. She knew what to buy to suit her mood, knew when to purchase, and when to window-shop. She liked theming, she liked self-assembly – or rat
her, she liked to buy things I could put together with an Allen key while she made us something from a sachet. It was a kind of a foreplay thing.
The trouble was, as things progressed, she wanted to meet my parents.
– And Lola and Cameron too, she goes, all pink with enthusiasm. And your Uncle Sid! They sound just brilliant! God, Harvey, you’re so lucky! My parents are awful. My brother’s an arrogant jerk, and I haven’t spoken to my sister since she deliberately smeared taramasalata on my basque.
Well. All relationships have their sticky moments. Gwynneth was shocked and disappointed when I finally broke the news to her about my family only existing on paper.
– And in my heart, of course, too, I added, trying to smile winningly. In my heart, they’ve always been very much around. I can hardly remember a time when I didn’t know them.
She didn’t like this one bit, though. In fact, she said, she was shocked to the core.
– Frankly, Harvey, she says, I’m just a bit worried that you might have a mental illness. I’ve never come across anyone inventing a whole family before.
– How many orphans d’you know? I snapped. Look. My real father was just some bloke with sperm, as far as I can gather. No record of him. And my real mother drank bleach when I was three. Can you blame me for craving a spot of normality?
She looked at her nails for a moment. They were impressive, because they were made of acrylic that was stuck on, and then decorated with twirly sea-horses and glitter. When she looked up, she blinked tears.
– I’m sorry, Harvey. It’s just I mean, have you ever thought about seeing someone – professional?
This hurt, but strangely enough, in the end I managed to sway her. It took time, but I knew she wanted to give me a second chance. What I did was I persuaded her to come and see things for herself. Back in my apartment, I showed her my CD ROM, and all the downloaded paperwork that had accumulated over the years, and talked her through it.
