The Boy Who Could Keep a Swan in His Head

by John Hunt

  “Look super Spaz wearing school shirt. Especially button tied up to top neck and sleeves tied to bottom hands. Roll up! Why not? Want to match spaz dog? He got bump on head like extra bone, or what?”

  Just to have Jimmy speak to him makes Phen feel important. Although they’re virtually on the same street and are in the same class, they don’t see much of each other. When he’d just come from Athens, they were almost close. There were cinemas to introduce him to. “What why you call this bioscope? And the Milky Lane, what why not call it Ice Cream Place? Milk nowhere. In shop, not lane. And why steak house? No home anywhere. No garden, nothing. And monkey gland sauce? You take pieces from apes and spread on T-bone? Africa, savage, savage country.” He pounded his chest powerfully like an angry and disgusted Tarzan.

  Most importantly, Phen could show him the best angles to take when sliding down Nugget Hill. The winter kikuyu, baked dry and flaky, offered the perfect slippery slope. All you needed was a flat piece of cardboard and a little courage. “Important you stay on, or grass toilet paper for you your arse.”

  It was not long before Jimmy’s ability with a soccer ball put a distance between them. He was a brilliant centre forward and Phen was a last-pick goalkeeper. Everyone passed to Jimmy. Phen tried to hang around with him at break but whenever they played five-a-side, he never made the cut. Once he knocked on Jimmy’s door at the Chelsea Hotel. His mother, dressed in black, opened the door and said he wasn’t back from school yet. Phen saw Jimmy’s satchel next to the rubber plant and understood. He thanked her anyway as she waved him away.

  Since then he’d kept his distance. He missed sharing their tuck at second break. Exotically, the Greek’s lunchbox often contained nuts, usually almonds, and biscuits covered in a thick, white dust. For this, he would gladly exchange a disproportionate amount of thick bread coated with apricot jam, or last night’s chicken leaking tomato sauce.

  Everyone was attracted to him even when he wasn’t kicking a ball. All the teachers liked him. He could make a mistake and lighten everything with a shrug of his shoulders and a smile. Nothing stuck to him or flattened him. He could spray words everywhere and no one cared.

  “Okay, Spaz, got to go.”

  “Me too.”

  “Maybe next time I take your dog. What why? He pull me on skates like Alaskan dogs. Call of the Wild. Mush, mush.”

  Phen watched the Greek jump the kerb and land right in front of an oncoming car. The angry hoot was met with a cheery wave and an over-officious salute. The driver of the Vauxhall shouted behind the windscreen to no purpose. The perpetrator was already a disappearing dot in his rear-view mirror.

  Once Phen had walked past the prams all neatly parked on the diamond-shaped tiles of the old synagogue and turned left, the back end of the block was not that interesting. Everything had been smothered in tar or forced into submission by square paving stones. Huge metal rings protected the bases of trees from this new sea of solid. Here circles of soil clung to their trunks like black plug holes waiting to drain the summer rain. Nature had no place on the pavement. Wild plants and tufts of green had to be eliminated. There had even been talk of parking meters being installed. Poles of steel to guard over the freshly painted brackets that demarcated where cars were allowed to stand. His grandmother, who’d never learned to drive, found it unbelievable that you could be charged for keeping your car stationary.

  By the time he had walked around the block, the sun was low and his hand was forced to his forehead like the peak of a cap. It was still in this position when Mr Trentbridge closed his car door. Phen couldn’t see but heard the car keys whoosh through the air. He caught them waist high.

  “Howzat?”

  “Out!”

  Though Phen wouldn’t admit it, he’d sat down on the stairs outside Duchess Court to wait for the man’s arrival. Mr Trentbridge was very punctual and always got home before anyone else. He said he liked to beat the madding crowd. He was also very proud of his car and needed to secure a parking space in the front where he could keep an eye on it. “Not just a Ford Cortina. A 1500 GT Mark I.” Mr Trentbridge did most of the talking, which suited Phen fine. He was always friendly and enthusiastic, which is what his mother said salesmen were meant to be. “He could sell ice to Eskimos in winter,” she’d said. “Look at the ridiculous price he gets people to pay for those imported shoes of his.”

  “So, Boyo, how’s life?”

  “Good.”

  “Good’s good!”

  Phen felt guilty to admit it, but he wished his father was more like Mr Trentbridge. Open-faced with lots of well-behaved hair, he looked fit and healthy and always smiled. His aftershave made him smell of the sea and success. He described himself as a man-on-the-move, a go-getter. He had two young daughters and Phen wondered secretly if he’d like a son. He was always throwing things at him and girls didn’t catch very well. Once, during a test match Mr Trentbridge had peered down from the fire escape and offered to bowl. Phen had scored a scintillating half-century. “Magnificent!” Mr Trentbridge had said. “Maybe you should think of turning professional.” His daughters didn’t know how to cover-drive.

  It worried him that the night after the match, he’d dreamed he was an orphan and Mr Trentbridge had arrived to adopt him. As always his jacket matched his tie perfectly and the three white mountaintops of his handkerchief ranged equally above his breast pocket. The flying duck that was his tiepin promised to lift him to a better life far away. The matron of the orphanage, dressed in a white uniform, also carried a cricket stump to confirm her authority. She asked if Mr Trentbridge intended doing a thorough job and he confirmed Boyo would find his new life top-notch and crossed his heart. “He’ll get better shoes, too,” he’d said. The Cortina had magically become a convertible. As they drove away, Pal barked happily and tried to chew the wind.

  “Well, I suppose I should go up to my beloved and the two tykes.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s fish night and she-who-must-be-obeyed does not like to be kept waiting.”

  “Yes.”

  “Still practising your googly?”

  “Medium-pacers.”

  “Well, Boyo, when they sign you up for the Springboks, remember you promised I could be your agent.” He leaped the three outside steps, sped into the foyer then turned around. “And remember, a goal is a dream with a deadline – Napoleon Hill.”

  Phen opened the door to his flat as quietly as possible and took Pal off the lead. The metal links of the chain were carefully snaked around a sofa cushion to ensure they coiled silently. He tiptoed into the kitchen and filled the dog’s water bowl. The linoleum bubble waited near the sink. There was no reason to chase it into the corner and place the dustbin on top of it, but he did anyway. This was a mistake. As he delicately trapped the bunched air, his foot caught the pedal. The lid opened wide as if eating what had just been placed underneath it. It hovered then slammed shut. The thud was faint, yet enough. Pal, resigned to the moment, clipped across the parquet and curled under the telephone table. Before the kettle could be switched on his father’s voice called out. Phen pushed tentatively at the bedroom door. The blue-and-white-striped body was sitting upright, its head turned towards him with wide, expectant eyes.

  “The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there’.”

  “In Cold Blood.”

  “Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border.”

  “I said In Cold Blood.”

  “Find it then.”

  3

  Gullible

  /guleb’el/ adjective

  Phen put great store by words and tried to treat them with respect. He knew that if they were understood, arranged and delivered correctly, they earned considerable power and meaning. He fully appreciated how some words, better chosen and aligned than others, created a much more forceful trajectory. Yet words continued to play practical jokes on him. They were always testing him, waiting with a bucke
t of water balancing on top for him to walk through the door. The gigantic Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary he’d inherited from his father was a constant source of reference, although often of little help. Finding the actual meaning of the word was one thing. How people chose to twist it out of shape was another.

  It didn’t help that Phen stuttered badly. Nearly always on the Ses, often on the PS and occasionally on the BS. The words themselves were there, waiting patiently; they just couldn’t be delivered. Like a parachutist who’d received the green light but couldn’t get himself out the door. Although the word had clicked through from the brain, the first letter of that word would catch on some r-r-r-rotating piece of machinery on the way down. He could feel his lips repeating the word soundlessly as people stared, trying to use their eyes to evoke a dialogue.

  Phen wasn’t sure which was worse: this guessing game, usually well-meaning, sometimes cruel, or the silent blocks that often involuntarily descended before he could speak. Silence in this case meant stupid. The inability to reply to a question. Even if the answer was a simple yes or no. On a bad day, every letter would run away. It was a game of hide-and-seek. Sometimes he would count to ten, sometimes a hundred, and still he couldn’t find them. It was pointless smiling to buy time; this just confirmed he was the village idiot.

  The worst was when the lazy circles of Mrs Smit’s ruler would suddenly stop and point at him. Who didn’t know the first Governor of the Cape of Good Hope was Simon van der Stel? It was even there, in black and white, in his history book lying open in front of him on his school desk. Yet the fear of the opening and closing S stretched the block of silence to such an extent he was eventually asked to sit down. He knew the answer. He could see the words. He just couldn’t get them through the dense forest in his head. And in some moments, on some days, the pathways were more overgrown than on others. A sniggering Hettie Hattingh supplied the answer and did a little curtsy on receiving the teacher’s compliment.

  Confirmation of his stupidity was not needed by his classmates; however, it was nonetheless supplied by what he would only later know as dyslexia. “Thick” was the adjective most often used to describe him. And anyone who turned a dog into a bog while up at the blackboard certainly deserved it. No wonder the chalk was irritably snatched from his hands, its white dust spreading wide as it fell and covered his shoes while he stood waiting to be dismissed. His internal reading of the word was fine. There was no back-to-front switch, no silent block or stammer to ambush him here, it was just that, by the time it reached his hand, it came out incorrectly. Usually he saw this mistake, sometimes he didn’t. Either way, if it was in public, it was too late. Spaz is as spaz does.

  The teacher’s comments, written in red ink in the margins of his books, were always the same. He was an untidy worker who should pay more attention in class. Rows of exclamation marks, like angry pinpricks, highlighted her mounting frustration. If he worked in pencil, he’d often rub a hole in the paper to correct his spelling. If it was ink, the page would look like a war zone, railroads of crossing out and ink blobs leaving craters on almost every line. The more he panicked, the smaller he wrote. The corrections to his words and sentences became indecipherable. This was often interpreted as a peculiar kind of cunning, a craftiness the teacher would not fall for.

  He longed for the silver and gold stars of Hettie Hattingh and Vernon MacArthur. From a distance he envied the perfect slope of their writing and the whiteness of their unblemished pages. Their sense of control, both verbal and in written form, created a gulf he couldn’t cross. When Vernon MacArthur wrote a love letter to Margaret Wallace and signed it with Phen’s name, she immediately knew it didn’t come from him. “It’s too neat,” she said. “Nothing’s crossed out or going the wrong way.” To confirm her forensics, she showed it to him. His nodding head agreed that he could not write like that. Though the ink arrow through the ink heart joining their names together seemed to pierce his chest clearly enough.

  If words hijacked him when he tried to talk or write, they were much better behaved when he read them in his own mind. Here they flowed without bashing into anything. In fact, sometimes they took on a speed and a life of their own. Like flying down Nugget Hill on a flattened cardboard box, they accelerated to a point where he was barely in control. Words zoomed past, blurred but recognisable, just managing to stay connected to sentences and barely holding on to paragraphs. Pages flowed into chapters and the end suddenly appeared like Mr Otis slamming to a halt.

  Often the words would leave the page and softly bounce as if on an elastic thread. Phen would lean back and give them a chance to settle. They took their time as they drifted on those magic thermals somehow created between author and reader. He loved these moments. It was proof of the other life that existed between words written and words read. As each letter floated down, he’d start again, this time a little slower, not wanting to tire the story unnecessarily.

  So he read continuously, understanding he had a place to lose himself in. It was comforting to know there was somewhere else to go. When he overheard Philip Denton, who always tried to talk like his older brother, calling him “the dumbest fuck since the dodo” and suggesting the polony in his school sandwiches had more brains, he could always call on Holden Caulfield. He knew he could go home to The Catcher in the Rye and find someone else who was “concealing the fact that he was a wounded sonuvabitch”.

  Yet even in his head, words continued to play games with him. The more he read, the more he understood they often carried meaning well beyond their formal and published explanations. His father had called him gullible. He’d looked it up and had to agree. Phrases deliberately camouflaged themselves. Metaphors twisted whole chapters out of shape and anything to do with adults was never what it seemed. They could never say what they meant. There were always secrets. Their words had hidden compartments. If they said it with a smile, they usually meant the exact opposite. “Of course,” she said with a smile, “my balcony door will be locked tonight. Besides, you would never be able to climb the tree to reach it.”

  This was never more evident than with Miss Zelda Hillock in number forty-three. When he first moved in to Duchess Court, Phen watched her intently. He was barely eight years old and in addition to being gullible tended to be very literal. As she walked back from the shops he waited for her to fall apart. He wasn’t sure how this would happen. Maybe a leg would become unhinged or possibly an arm would suddenly drop off. At the very least he expected a foot would be left behind and she’d have to hobble back to fetch it. The more this didn’t happen, the more intrigued he became. The walking of the dog, carefully planned to coincide with her return from the supermarket, showed from close up that she seemed sturdy enough. Not only that, she smiled, waved and, over time, even engaged in conversation. She understood his stammering shyness and didn’t rush to fill his silences. Best of all, she laughed a lot and usually at herself. Burning the toast three times in a row was hilarious; so was finding her cat in the wash basket. And the time she ordered her steak tartare medium rare, well, she was in stitches.

  Although Zelda worked in a bank she called herself “free-spirited” and “a child of the sixties”. Phen didn’t know what that meant but he liked what he saw. Most of the women in Duchess Court called her other names. Zelda said this was a “happening time” and asked him why she had to be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. A somewhat startled Phen could find no good reason. “Fab!” she’d said, and straightened his hair.

  Still, the more her condition didn’t manifest itself, the more Phen was convinced she was being brave and hiding it. The way his grandfather had told him his cancer was indigestion, sometimes severe. He looked for signs of her ailment from every angle, yet could find none. As his puzzlement grew, so did his fear that something terrible would happen to her, just as it had to his grandfather. It began to affect his sleep. He imagined her strewn across her flat. Her hand still mixing the pot on the stove while her feet tapped in the lounge to the music ev
eryone said she played too loud. After months of anxiety he decided he’d have to ask her. He tried to cover his apprehension by casually lying across the bonnet of the Cortina as she walked past. Zelda asked if he’d hurt his back. He immediately sat up straight and enquired if she was alright.

  “Why?”

  “Just asking.”

  “But why?”

  There was a long silence as he groped for the words. He’d rehearsed it many times in his head, yet the sentence had scattered. There were also a number of Ses waiting with a smirk. He breathed in deeply. Zelda seemed to have all the time in the world.

  “S-s-some women s-s-say …” Having got over the first hurdle he perversely decided to reconstruct the sentence. “I was wondering if there was any way I could help hold you together.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “They s-s-say you s-s-suffer from being a loose woman. They s-s-say s-s-sometimes you’re very loose.”

  Zelda smiled and kissed him on the forehead. “Pancakes upstairs if you’re interested.”

  When Phen told the story to his father, the upward curve of his mouth widened past the tight plastic edge of the oxygen mask and stayed there for some time.