by Liz Miles
I’m known by many names at school: Saddo, Loser, Weirdo, Geek, Nerd, or Freak. I don’t usually answer but if I do, I’ll answer to any of these names—it’s easier than making a fuss, and the teachers pretend they don’t hear how everyone talks to me. In fact, the teachers are just as bad. If they want to ask me a question they just point at me, and say, “You!” No one ever asks me if I have a real name.
• • •
There’s nothing odd about all of this. I’m completely used to it. It’s pleasantly predictable, in fact.
Even when I was very young I didn’t often speak, so my parents didn’t speak to me much either. Whenever I did speak they looked at me as if they couldn’t understand a word I was saying, or perhaps they couldn’t be bothered to listen.
When I was about eight-years-old, my father decided to make a bit of an effort with me and see if he could interest me in making things out of wood, like him. He took me out to his shed in the garden. I loved it in there—the smell of paint and creosote and the oily steel tools. I was desperate to explore everything behind this usually locked door.
And this is more or less how the conversation in the shed went. I know it’s correct because I wrote it down after it happened. I’m always writing things down so that I can try to work out what people mean and why they say what they do.
“Let’s start with a toy boat,” he’d said.
“What for?” I’d asked. (I had no interest in toys or boats.)
“Because it’s a nice first project to make and you can make some funnels and paint it. It’ll be fun and we can do it together.”
“I don’t understand why it will be ‘fun’. What does fun mean? The funnels won’t really work. I don’t need a toy boat. What would I do with it?”
“You can launch it on the pond and see if it floats,” Dad had said.
“But of course it will float, we know already that it will float because it’ll be made of wood, and wood floats. I want to see what’s in that box instead,” I’d said, climbing on a stool and grabbing a large dusty cardboard box and at the same time knocking a full bottle of whiskey off the shelf, which smashed on to the floor. Alcohol vapours filled the shed. I’d ignored this new smell because I didn’t like it. I was more interested in the box.
“Wow!” I’d said, opening the box to reveal a large quantity of brand-new, best-quality HB graphite pencils.
“You useless little freak, look what you’ve done!” my father had shouted, staring at his shattered whiskey bottle and suddenly losing it. “You’re no son of mine, you’re bloody abnormal. Why the hell don’t you want to make things and play like normal kids? What is it with you and pencils? You can’t bloody well have my genes, you little misfit, you’re nothing to do with me—I always thought your mother was up to no good!”
I’d lined up all the pencils along the workbench and counted them. One hundred and forty-four!
He’d stormed into the house and upstairs. I could see him through the bedroom window taking clothes out of the wardrobe.
So you see it was nine years ago that I found out that I was a freak, abnormal, and a misfit. That’s quite a lot to discover all at once.
When we next heard from my father, he was living at the bottom of the road with a new woman and two new children. One day I saw the children close-up and they were both wearing glasses like me and had my prominent nose and would have had my protruding teeth, only they wore braces, so I think my father was wrong about the genes. They were clearly only a year or two younger than me so I think it must have been him who’d been up to no good, not Mum. One was in the year below me at school and both were obviously drones so I had no interest in them.
I still share the house with my mother and we still only speak when necessary. I think, along with everyone else, she’s probably forgotten my name by now. And from when Dad first left, I was capable of looking after myself. I could cook eggs, buy my clothes, put them in the washing machine, and get myself to school.
Now I keep the kitchen spotless, scrubbing the floor and work surfaces and cleaning the cooker once a week. I like to try out new recipes from my Cooking for One cookbook. My mother keeps the fridge and cupboards well stocked. One day, a noticeboard appeared on the wall with a pencil attached by a string so that I could write down anything I needed. Once a year, a wrapped-up, usually pointless-looking toy, book, or game has been left on the kitchen table for my birthday. The Cooking for One cookbook is the only really useful thing my mother has ever given me. Our routine hasn’t changed in the last nine years, and the only other people who have entered the house are the meter man and the plumber.
The best thing about my father going to live with the new woman and my half-brothers is that I have his workshop to myself. When he moved out he left everything behind in the shed without a second thought. I have no more interest in making boxes and bowls than I had in making toy boats, but his tools and large box of pencils are another matter. The smell of cedar-wood pencils and the smell of the oily precision tools make me feel wild with desire and even give me exciting feelings in my trousers. I used to spend hours laying out the tools and measuring the length of everything in the workshop and writing the results down in my notebook.
When I was eleven, I noticed a little brown leather suitcase behind the shed door. It smelled musty and was scuffed and had tarnished brass catches that snapped open and shut. I can’t think why I’d never noticed it before. From that day on I have always carried the suitcase to school, and everywhere else come to that. Every morning I pack my seven identical pencils, my sharpener, steel rule and engineer’s try square. Recently I added a pair of callipers. My father used them to check the diameter of bowls and candlesticks that he made on his lathe, but I have other ideas.
• • •
At the beginning of every day when I arrive at school I sharpen my seven pencils and lay them in a perfect line on my desk, each one exactly the same length as the others and the same distance apart, meticulously measuring with the steel rule and making sure they are square with the edge of the desk using the engineer’s square. I keep the same seven pencils until they are down to 75 mm long and then I replace them with seven more pencils from the box in the shed. It’s not an obsession; it is just something I do.
School is tedious but I work hard at math on my own at home. Although there are a few other fairly bright kids at school, I don’t think there has ever been any as clever as me. The drones make a point of not being clever on purpose. And the girls are really only drone-fodder so I ignore them—except, of course, for Trace.
It takes a lot to distract me from my pencils, but it’s a fact that I’m nearly as interested in Trace’s breasts as I am in them. I desperately want to discover whether her breasts are perfect or not. I have an awful suspicion that they might not be, and that one might be bigger than the other. This worries me a lot. I think about it so much that sometimes I can’t even concentrate on my math.
Once when Ed went out of the room, Trace seized the opportunity to tease me. First she slowly undid the buttons of her blouse, revealing a pale pink lacy bra with a deep-pink rosebud in the middle, then she snatched one of my lined-up pencils—and plunged it behind the rosebud and down her cleavage and danced around the room.
“Come and get it, Weirdo!” she taunted in a sing-song voice. “No hands allowed!”
Having only six pencils lined up on my desk brought me out in a cold sweat—I could feel it dripping down my back, down my bottom, and down my legs into my socks. On the one hand I wanted to get my pencil back as quickly as possible, but on the other hand I wanted to linger over Trace’s breasts to try and gauge which breast, if either, was larger. I rushed toward her, tripping over a chair leg in my haste, and lunged at Trace’s cleavage, with everyone (except the drones) shouting and whistling. I grabbed the pencil with my teeth and then went into a trance-like stare. Unfortunately I was so close to Trace’s breasts that instead of the wonderful view I’d anticipated, all I could see were two large fuz
zy pink blobs with what looked disconcertingly like one rose-colored nipple between them. I began to feel trembly and stirrings in my trousers.
“Hurry up, Perv!” (a new name to add to the others) Trace demanded.
“Errgh! Gross! How could you!” the girls squealed. The drones stayed stuck to their wall without a sound.
I slunk back to my desk and placed the pencil back safely with the others, after checking for damage (luckily there wasn’t any). But I was none the wiser about Trace’s breasts. Probably that is just as well, as the thought of any lack of symmetry about her—I shudder at the thought of the misplaced nipple—is too unsettling. However, I think it’s only fair at this point to reveal a little secret of my own.
Imagine my horror when one day I noticed, while standing naked in front of the full-length bathroom mirror, that my left testicle hung a little lower than my right. I panicked and tried to prise it up but of course it just dropped down to its previous level again. I realized that I’d have to devise a plan to rectify the matter.
Every night I tape the testicle, or rather that side of my scrotum, up so that it is level with the right side in the hope that it will eventually cure itself. I read that, like uneven breast sizes (and feet, but I have no interest in feet other than for their normal use), a lower-hanging testicle, especially a left one, is entirely “normal”. Eighty percent fall into this category. Why aren’t the remaining twenty percent the “normal” ones? Why isn’t perfection considered normal and imperfection abnormal? What reason can there possibly be for one testicle to be lower than the other? And why would one breast decide to grow larger than the other? I start applying the tape even more tightly, giving it an extra hard yank.
• • •
Our school is in the north of England on the edge of a small town surrounded by moorland with sheep and rocky outcrops and crags. The area is famous for its beauty, but most of the kids at the school think the town is boring, and the hills are even more boring, and so on Saturdays they head for the city. I like walking in the hills and sitting reading on the rocks. Sometimes I take my binoculars to look at the other people on the hills.
One day, during a study period, Trace and others were sitting squashed together on a metal table, kicking the table legs monotonously. I was doing calculus at another table, when Trace—looking out of the window—suddenly said, “What’s up them hills?” I couldn’t help looking up at the window along with the others.
“They’re just hills,” said Ed.
“Anyone been up ’em?” asked Trace, after a pause.
(A longer pause.) “What for?” said Ed.
The drones looked round at me.
“Hey, what about you, Freako? You been up ’em?” demanded Trace, staring at me. I nodded my head and looked down. I hated being stared at, even by Trace.
“Why?” asked Trace. Here we go, I thought. Now she’d started on me I knew she wasn’t going to let go.
“To walk,” I mumbled, without meeting her stare.
“Along with all those other saddos who wear long woolly socks and hats and stupid clothes and really big unsexy boots and carry maps and smile at each other all the time like they’re in one great big la-la club together?” asked Trace.
“There’s no compulsory dress code,” I said. “You can wear what you like.”
“Good, ’cos I want to walk up them hills, too,” said Trace. “And you’ll have to come with me, Freako, so I don’t get lost.”
“What, hold on, you can’t do that Trace. Not with him!” groaned Ed. “Say someone sees you?”
Trace ignored him and continued to stare at me. I naturally assumed that she was taunting me again, but my heart beat loudly as I hoped beyond all hope that she really meant it, that she really wanted to be with me—just me—up in the hills. I started fantasizing about making egg sandwiches. I’d never met anyone out of school on a Saturday before, let alone Trace, and I felt a stirring in my trousers again, which pulled at the taped-up testicle.
“Ten o’clock in the car park, at the sign to the moors—and don’t be late,” she added sharply. “And that goes for you too,” she ordered Ed, bursting my bubble, virtual egg sandwiches flying out from my thoughts in an instant.
At ten to ten the next morning I was waiting with my case (containing three egg and cress sandwiches, among other things—yes, I did make them after all, even for Ed), near the signpost pointing the way to the moorland path.
It was a bright but slightly chilly day, and it had rained overnight so I had taken the precaution of wearing my walking boots and an anorak with my shorts, but left the woolly bobble-hat at home in case it offended Trace. At five to ten Ed appeared, wearing over-white squeaky trainers, jeans, and an Alpine fleece. He grunted to me. We shuffled from foot to foot in embarrassment, as we had nothing to say to each other and wished the other one wasn’t there. The shuffling went on for some time with each of us looking at his watch at intervals but not saying anything. Ten o’clock arrived and went and then ten past and twenty past. Perhaps Trace had no intention of coming and was just winding us up for a laugh, I thought. At half past, Ed was hopping mad and his shuffling had turned into a primitive kicking dance with some added backward and forward steps and some grunts thrown in.
“Where the hell is she?” he muttered crossly, glaring and looking round. I think he was checking that no one he knew could see him with me. He jabbed out a message on his mobile but got no reply.
Two minutes later a four-wheel drive with darkened windows swerved into the car park and a back door opened. A long, shapely, tanned leg appeared, followed by another one. Trace jumped out, her high blonde ponytail swishing behind her. She was wearing the tiniest pair of white shorts, a low-cut black T-shirt showing a perfect cleavage, and a little pair of slip-on shoes. Ed and I both stared at the cleavage. “Hi!” she waved. In her hand was a pink cord that was attached from her hand to something in the back of the car. She gave a little pull and a small creature with four tiny legs, a sparkly collar, and a ridiculous pink waistcoat appeared on the other end. She scooped it up and slammed the door. The car roared off in a cloud of dust.
“Oh my God, what the hell is that?” asked Ed.
“I think it is a diminutive dog,” I answered.
Trace skipped toward us. “Meet Froufrou,” she said.
“What the hell d’you bring that thing with you for?” asked Ed.
“’Cos it’s a dog and dogs are s’posed to go outside, right? So I’m taking her outside. Froufrou’s never had a walk before, she’s—like—delicate, so you’d better carry her. Right?” Trace thrust Froufrou into one of Ed’s large hands.
“Weirdo, I like the sexy white knees!” she said to me, staring at my thin white legs. “D’you like my tan?”
“It’s great,” I stammered, looking at the evenly colored golden cleavage.
“Out of a bottle, of course,” she laughed, and bounded off up the path like a mountain goat.
“It’s really nice up here,” sighed Trace. She danced around with the delight of a small child and effortlessly climbed higher up the rocky path toward the crag on her long tanned legs. “Aaah, I love those cute little sheep, they look really cuddly,” she said, pointing to the woolly black-faced moorland sheep who were staring at us warily. “And look at all them teeny little purple flowers like bells!”
“That’s heather,” I said.
“Heather’s lucky, isn’t it? We must all have some of this, then we’ll always be lucky!” She bent down and picked little bunches of heather and stuck one enticingly down her cleavage.
“For you, Freako, so you can have a long and weird life,” she said solemnly, pushing another sprig through my buttonhole. Then she ran back to Ed and Froufrou who were lagging behind. Ed was sulking at being left with the dog. “Look what I got!” she sang. She stuck some in Froufrou’s collar. “Who’s my gorgeous? You’re my gorgeous, of course, Froufrou! And now you’re gonna live a long time too, ’cos you’ve got your very own lucky heather,”
she announced while stroking the little dog’s head.
“Here, Eddie, babe, this is for you so we’ll have a lucky life together, just you and me—and, of course, little Froufrou.” Trace laughed and tickled Froufrou under the chin, then stuck a sprig of heather through Ed’s zip pull. “Look a bit happier about it,” she pouted at him, stroking his face.
Ed ripped the heather out and chucked it down on the ground, before grabbing hers from her chest and chucking that down too.
“That’s not very nice,” said Trace, putting on a whiny little girl’s voice. “Don’t you want us to be lucky together?”
“Bloody superstition! I don’t need no stupid lucky heather and nor do you!” he said angrily and stomped along in his too-white trainers, which by now had gathered large splotches of mud.
Ed looked foolish and cross at having to carry Froufrou, who in turn looked up adoringly at him with saucer eyes. He scowled back at her. Passing walkers stared at Ed, said hello politely, and then laughed at him behind his back.
“Even the really weirdo ones are staring at me, damn them—no, especially the weirdo ones—the saddos with beards and woolly hats and compasses. It’s humiliating. I’m a footballer, for God’s sake, not an effing pansy!” he muttered through gritted teeth.
We plodded on in silence on a narrow path alongside the edge of the crag. I was just wondering when we should stop and have the egg and cress sandwiches from my suitcase, when Ed suddenly exploded with anger.
“This rat-thing is meant to be a dog, right? And dogs are meant to walk, right?” he announced, looking like a thundercloud. “Okay, so let’s see if it can walk. Right!”
He threw Froufrou down on the path in front of him. Froufrou propelled herself forward in a frenzy of excitement at her first taste of freedom, racing at full speed on her ridiculous tiny legs. As she’d never walked anywhere before in her life, she was unaware that if a path goes round a bend you have to go round with it. So Froufrou carried straight on instead.
