Chinaski

by Frances Vick

  His parents felt guilty. They worried. He was their only child. They had nurtured the idea of him during the dark days of failed fertility treatments, and so far nothing had happened to cloud their sunny relationship. Somewhere along the line – perhaps even before he existed – they had convinced themselves that he was a physical boy, given to boisterousness and hi-jinks, and he played along with them, because he didn’t really know himself what his tastes were and wanted to make them happy. If Dad wanted a rugby player, Mum wanted a smart brained lawyer, well, so be it. Peter loved his parents, was aware of how much they’d invested in him, and had no desire to disappoint them. So when they presented him with the somewhat bizarre present of an electric guitar, he happily accepted this, too, as something he had always wanted. It was, Dad explained, to help him get over the loss of rugby. It was also, Mum intimated, something to take out his aggression on. Obviously he had some latent anger, maybe even at them, for not being able to prevent the headaches, for not having perfect eyesight, for all of the half articulated assumed failures parents wall themselves in by. None of the doctors had said anything about loud noise being detrimental, and really, it would be good for him to learn an instrument. A loud-boy-violent instrument; the sort a rugby player might have. They even sound-proofed the basement.

  Throughout the school year, the headaches lessened, settling into a predictable pattern: stress becomes pain. Peter had never before thought of himself as an anxious person, and truth be told he didn’t really now, but the headaches said otherwise. Surprise tests in science summoned shakes and sickness; sitting too close to Lisa Pike, the girl he’d been placidly obsessed with since the first year, was now impossible. His vision would fissure and he’d rise unsteadily to drag himself to the nurse’s room, spending the next few hours in isolated, painful misery. It was a surprise that one day he had company there.

  One afternoon, in manageable pain, but with his medication at the ready, he pushed the nurse’s door and ran into an unsettling scene that he didn’t fully understand. A body shook on the bed, and the nurse’s well-muscled shoulders strained against her tabard, pressing something down, hard. Without looking round or letting go, she shouted over her shoulder:

  “Help me hold his arm down or he’ll fall off the side!” – and when Peter hesitated – “Hold him down I said!”

  Coming to the edge of the bed he saw the boy in his English class, in his art class, the boy who had the free meals, the new boy who everybody, Peter included, wanted to know. And Carl was shaking, wide eyed and pale under the panicked grip of the school nurse, saying something that she hadn’t heard, but Peter thought he understood.

  “I think he’s OK.”

  “He’s not OK, he’s fitting, he’s having a fit. Help me hold him down before he hurts himself.”

  It wasn’t in Peter’s nature to contradict an adult, but looking at the terrified eyes and now still limbs of the boy on the bed, he felt that he had no choice.

  “Really, look at him. I think it, whatever it was, is over. I think he’s OK now. Look at him.”

  Carl nodded vigorously, still scared, and the nurse took her hands off his shoulders and sat up straight. She pushed sweaty clumps of hair away from her temples, and wiped her hands on her tabard while Carl gained more control over his face, brushed his hair in his eyes and lay still.

  “Did you bite your tongue? No? Dizzy? OK. You can’t be too careful. Do you take medication? What? Valporal? Do you have it with you? Well did you take it this morning? Why not, if you’re supposed to?” She was walking around now, trying to mask her embarrassment at assuming a grand mal from a minor seizure. She hoped Migraine Boy wouldn’t talk about it, but Migraine Boy looked too sick to do anything. She got him lying down on the other bed, let him take his pain relief and left both boys together.

  That moment, the moment when they were left alone, was, Peter recognised later, the most significant of his life so far. In the ten years since, Peter would be asked, and ask himself many, many times, what they had talked about that afternoon. Both of them lying in the small room on narrow beds, close enough to touch, close enough to hear each other breathing. Both of them now apart from the crowd, singled out by weirdness, by illness; the fascinating and the fascinated, both already content with their roles.

  They compared notes on teachers, and Carl surprised Peter by saying some scathing things about Ms Clancey. They agreed that she needed a good fuck and Peter hoped his blush didn’t show. They talked about books they liked. Peter was reading Kerouac and talked a little too long about On the Road, losing Carl’s attention. Carl was more of a Clive Barker fan, and he promised to lend Peter Books of Blood once he’d finished it. He never did, to Peter’s secret relief.

  Blowing cigarette smoke out of the window, Carl talked about music, which he seemed to know a lot about. There were, he explained, two types of performer. You had the worker type, and then you had the showman. The showman was someone like Iggy Pop, John Lydon, David Bowie. The worker type wasn’t expanded on, because Carl wasn’t interested. But the showman, that lit him up. The showman’s job was to draw people in and push them away at the same time, because music should upset people, it should make people angry, but keep them wanting more. Peter remembered later that, even at the time, he’d thought that these phrases seemed oddly adult, rehearsed. A fourteen year old offering a sober but confused analysis of old rock stars – it was incongruous. But Carl seemed so certain, and Peter, his knowledge of music confined entirely to what his dad played in the car, was happy to agree with him. When he mentioned that he was learning the guitar though, Carl’s face assumed a peculiar expression and Peter gathered that he’d somehow said the wrong thing. The silence grew, lengthened, conversational gambits were ignored. Peter felt bereft. And so when it was pointed out to him that, no, he wasn’t a guitarist. No. He was a drummer, well, he felt so happy that they were talking again that he agreed. Yes, of course, that made much more sense. Of course he was really a drummer, he was that type. Carl played the guitar.

  And so it was that Carl decided that Peter liked music, just as his parents had decided that he liked rugby. Carl urged music on him in various subtle and not so subtle ways. He introduced him to Darren King as his friend the drummer; he’d sidle up to him at lunchtime with a secretive air and a record bag under his arm, and Peter, prodded to take a look inside, learned how to make the appropriate response, the one that Carl wanted. It was in Peter’s blood to acquiesce to what other people wanted him to enjoy, and so he learned. He learned to feel genuinely excited about coloured vinyl. He learned to listen to John Peel from 10 every week night, one finger poised over the pause button on his tape recorder, ready for anything that sounded promising. They began to arrive at school dark under the eyes and eager to compare notes and swap tapes. If it happened that they had recorded the same things, a feeling of deep kinship would come over them both, and they would nod almost shyly at each other, aware of how similar they were becoming, how far they were moving beyond their classmates.

  Sometimes though, Carl was too tired and said that he hadn’t been able to listen the previous night. Sometimes he looked as if he’d slept in his clothes, smelt unwashed, and he would hide his swollen eyes behind his tangled hair. In class, his heavy head would droop and he’d be asleep in moments. Peter assumed it was the epilepsy. They hadn’t spoken about that since the fortuitous but peculiar day they’d met, and the subject was understood to be off limits; only once had Peter awkwardly suggested that Carl go to the nurse’s room to rest, and Carl had shunned him, very obviously, for a week.

  One time Carl disappeared from school without explanation. After the third day, Ms Clancey took Peter aside and showed him a note, dirty in the folds, the letters clumsy and hesitant, like someone writing with broken fingers: ‘Please excuse Carl from school this week,’ it said, ‘he has felt ill and poorly all week so I let him stay home. Yrs sincerely Mr Howell.’

  “I need to ask you Peter,” she was blinking anxiously behind her g
lasses, “if you have seen Carl or spoken to him this week? Perhaps on the telephone?” It was typical of Ms Clancey to say telephone rather than phone. Everything had to be nicely and perfectly enunciated, proper and upright. “It’s unusual to receive an absence note after three days, and I haven’t been able to speak to Carl’s father myself...”

  She was irritatingly unhappy. Peter didn’t enjoy adults stepping out of role, becoming subservient to children, being needy. So Carl’s dad had sent in a note that she found suspicious, why did she have to involve him? Why not take matters into her own hands, like an adult should, and just go over there herself? Ms Clancey’s eyelashes trembled with tears, her voice began to shake as she said, “I’ve noticed that you boys have become quite close, I just wonder if there’s something he’s been keeping from me, from the school, I should say. Something that we can help him with. Carl is a very special case, and I’d never forgive myself if something, well, unfortunate, had happened...”

  And Peter understood that she, too, had fallen into respectful worship of the boy, and she was imagining terrible scenarios, to the point that she’d even lowered herself enough to beg a teenager for information. Irritation fought with sympathy and sympathy won. He laid a paternal hand on her quivering shoulder,

  “Carl’s OK, I’m sure. If you like I can go over and check up on him.”

  Ms Clancey’s gratitude was embarrassing, and when her tears dried up, Peter felt that the world was settling back into its proper balance. In reality though, close though he and Carl were, he had no idea where he lived, or who he lived with. With his nan, supposedly; that was the consensus in school. So why was the note signed Mr Howell? Peter knew that Carl’s parents weren’t together, but he had no other information. Brothers? Sisters? Peter didn’t even know if he had a pet. Spending the evening imagining ways to keep Ms Clancey at bay until he found Carl, he slept uneasily, and woke up worried, only to find Carl shuffling about at the bus stop outside school, apparently waiting for him. He didn’t explain his absence but Peter shamefacedly accepted Ms Clancey’s thanks for his help anyway.

  Carl was rarely seen without his record bag; sometimes it was so full he could barely carry it. After school he would scurry away on his own using a short cut to the city centre, a slip road by the canal that all the school kids avoided. He never told Peter where he went, and, by now, he knew better than to ask: it was wiser to wait until Carl decided to include you. One day Peter’s patience was rewarded and they walked together, not only from the school gate to the corner, not only to the shop at the top of the main road, but finally down by the canal, past grimly smelling alcoves and trashy corners. Peter stayed a few paces behind Carl, away from the edge. An escaped lunatic had killed seven people in twenty minutes along the canal – just knifing them and dumping their bodies in the water. Everybody in school knew it. Maybe Carl didn’t, he wasn’t from here after all, perhaps that’s why he wasn’t scared to walk this way alone. But when Peter told him the story, Carl just laughed and gave him the bag to look in.

  In it there were a dozen or so records: Elvis, The Beatles, The Kinks. The kind of stuff old people listened to, but not Carl’s usual stuff at all. He was, he explained, taking it all to DiscKings to sell. Peter should come too.

  Peter had never been there, never dared. DiscKings was an institution, established first as a market stall in the Seventies, it now had two branches in the city, one for new and second hand records, and one much smaller outlet selling CDs. The largest shop was two floors of music, posters and memorabilia, punks and posers. Old sofas and a few frayed wicker chairs were scattered about, next to tables of Melody Makers, NMEs, and (ironically) Smash Hits magazines. You were even allowed to smoke at DiscKings, so long as it wasn’t over the stacks themselves, and you could listen to records on headphones in special booths, for hours if you wanted, and smoke there too. While students staffed the CD shop, the record shops were manned by people who knew their music; no-one younger than 25, and most of them with a history of band membership. It wasn’t unheard of for them to refuse to sell a record to someone they thought wouldn’t appreciate it, or was buying for the wrong reasons. Their criteria for accepting used records were stringent – pristine covers and original dust covers. If you knew one of them by name, that was quite a coup. If you knew one of them by their nickname, and had managed to have a conversation for longer than the time it took to complete your transaction with them, well, you were practically part of the family, and might, if the gods allowed, work there yourself one day.

  Threading through alleys, crossing the corner of the graveyard, dipping through the police station car park, they arrived at the door of DiscKings far sooner than Peter would have thought possible. In the short time Carl had lived in the area (he was hazy about where he’d lived before), he’d mastered its geography and figured out all the little wormholes that could get you where you wanted to be.

  Taking the bag from Peter, Carl pushed open the heavy glass door, all covered with stickers and flyers, and hesitated. It was the only time he’d paused since leaving school, maybe he didn’t know this place after all, perhaps he, too, was intimidated. His body shrank, his shoulders hunched. He chewed his lips and smiled shyly, brushing the hair into his eyes before walking, almost knock-kneed, to the cash register, carrying his heavy record bag tight against his chest. His voice had altered too: usually it rang with authority, he was someone who made sure that you listened to him. At DiscKings he was practically inaudible and the tattooed sales assistant behind the desk had to lean down to hear him. The murmured conversation went on for some time before they both began to laugh, a boom from the assistant, and an unfamiliar titter from Carl. The records were handed over, examined, frowned at and an offer was made. Carl, with the same quiet simper, held out for more money, brushing the hair slightly out of his blue eyes and offering a fearful smile. The assistant hesitated, and agreed. Carl ducked his head, counted his money and wandered back to Peter. The whole thing had taken less than five minutes. Carl had his money and Carl’s dad had half a record collection left.

  Once outside, Carl straightened up, lost the simper, and led the way to the nearest off licence. They spent the rest of the afternoon in the park, drinking cheap cans of lager and smoking. Carl spent a lot of time trying to teach Peter how to blow smoke rings, before giving up and leading the way to the City Hall steps. He had friends to meet.

  By five or six o’clock each day, the tourists and office workers who normally sat on the steps consulting their guidebooks or eating lunch were replaced by the all-day drinkers, the punks, the homeless. As soon as dusk threatened, a lurching, stumbling exodus began, out of the pubs, squats and parks. By the time Carl arrived with Peter, the top tier steps were full, and they had to hang around at the bottom with the goths and the wannabes. After only a few minutes though, Carl’s name was called from above, and space was made at the top table of the dispossessed between an aged skinhead and a dishevelled woman with the tremors.

  Everyone knew Carl. Peter was introduced to Angie, a glazed eyed punk in her thirties; Cookie, the skinhead; and Dom, the owner of five or six visible teeth and a collection of facial tattoos, who was the obvious leader. Later, Carl told Peter that Dom lived in a flat in the archway over the entrance to the cemetery and lived off Temazepam and speed. He cast astrology charts for everyone he knew, hinting darkly that he knew the date of your death. All this might have been true, but Carl knew how to spin a tale. Dom leaned in paternally and shook Peter’s hand, “Friend of the boy’s? Good. Needs them. Good.”

  Carl gave Dom half of the money he’d got for the records. Dom nodded thanks, tucked it into his shorts pocket and said something else indistinct that made Carl smile. Then they all sat quietly together, drinking and smoking until it was almost dark. Eventually the guilt at worrying his parents got too much for Peter, and he prepared, shamefacedly, to leave. Carl showed no signs of moving, in fact Dom had just sent Angie to buy more lager, and so Peter said his goodbyes to the uninterested
group, called his father from a phone box and apologised all the way home for worrying him.

  * * *

  Peter had finished a couple of beers before it began to get cold by the canal. Remembering the old story about the psycho killing the seven people, he felt frightened, like a child, in the gathering dusk. Getting up quickly, he decided to walk to the flat Carl had lived in when they first met. It seemed fitting. He’d died there, after all.

  The house looked even more peculiar now than it had then. It was a strangely disjointed building, the bottom and the top were mismatched pairs. The downstairs flat was obviously well cared for. Its well-tended front garden led smoothly to a welcome mat; the windows were clean. But the top flat ruined the effect. Rotten window frames pulled back from the glass like diseased gums, and the net curtains were smudged black at the bottom. The front bedroom curtains were closed and roughly folded on the sill at the bottom, the window was partially open. That was the room he’d died in, Peter realised, with a shiver. Some bunches of flowers lay by the side door and he read the cards. ‘You were our sunshine. Take care my angel. Aunty Kathleen’ – ‘See you in Heaven babe! XX’ – ‘We passed upon the stair, we spoke of where and when, Although I wasn’t there, I was his friend. D.’