What I Did

by Christopher Wakling

  WHAT I DID

  Christopher Wakling

  Dedication

  For Lucas and Zoë, with love

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  What I Did

  About the Author

  Praise for What I Did

  Also by Christopher Wakling

  Credit

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  What I Did

  This is the first bit and shall I tell you why? Okay I will. It is to make you read the rest.

  Don’t worry, it isn’t a trailer. Trailers are the first bits before films which are actually really adverts and Dad says adverts are where they try to get you to buy something you probably don’t want. Then again Mum says maybe you do. I often want it.

  You want this story. It has already started.

  Normally things pull trailers not the other way around, which means they should really come second, so the whole thing is a mistake. And unlike this bit, a trailer isn’t really part of it. When you’re watching a trailer it won’t even be before the right film! That’s great, I love that it looks fantastic, let’s watch that. No, we can’t. It’s not here. That is called frustrating.

  Dad says they put all the best bits of a film in the trailer to reduce you into watching it, and that quite often the rest of the film isn’t up to much, but he is wrong. They don’t put the best bits in there, not always. There’s no bit where Luke actually blows up the Death Star in the trailer for Star Wars but they do have light savers which are magnificent.

  Sadly there are no light savers in this story. It is all real. It is about a terrible thing which happens to me. But watch out because the thing you think is the terrible thing isn’t really it. Other things come later and they’re worse. I’m not going to tell you what they are yet because now isn’t the time. That is called suspension.

  I also have to warn you that nobody is bad or good here, or rather everyone is a bit bad and a bit good and the bad and good moluscules get mixed up against each other and produce terrible chemical reactions.

  Did you know cheetahs cannot retract their claws?

  Here is the real beginning.

  — Get a move on!

  The stair carpet is full of good friction. I am sitting halfway up it with my shoes in my hands because we are going out because it is too early in the morning. You can sit right on the edge of a stair if you want and go a bit closer and a bit closer still until there’s not enough friction to hold you back and you slip down bump to the next step. If you start slipping fast enough the stair carpet will be powerless and you will slide down three or four or more steps in one go. Bump, bump, bump.

  — Stop that banging.

  My shoes have Velcro straps. Rip rip: more friction. If you put your hands inside the shoes it’s impossible to do the straps up because your hands are on the inside which makes them not nimble but useless like caterpillars inside cocoons. Unless you press the Velcro shut with your knee or a bit of wall. Like that. Yes, it works.

  — I said get a move on.

  That is Dad. He is waiting by the front door. We are going to the park. He does not want to go to the park and I do not want to go to the park but we are going out to the park because that’s what he thinks we both should want to do because it is so early. Mum is still not back from her night shifting. I woke up very early because it just happened and I didn’t realize it so I woke up Dad. When there are dandelions in the lawn you should dig them out with the handle of a spoon to get the root as well as the leaves, he says, and that is what his eyes looked like when he rolled over and opened them: dirt holes. He also smelled of the rusty gate.

  — Christ. What time do you call this? he said.

  I open up the shoes now and turn my feet into hermit crabs wriggling back into their shells but it is difficult and boring. This banister has a big chip out of it. David Attenborough would know how to interrupt such an interesting sign. It might be a claw mark from the Pliocene area.

  — For Christ’s sake. What’s keeping you? Come on!

  Dad is just round the corner by the front door but when I shut my eyes I can see him. He has on a red plaster cast. Shall I tell you why? Because it’s red and his hand is broken. It doesn’t hurt anymore though. It’s fine now. Sometimes Dad says How are you, Billy? and that’s what I say: — I’m fine.

  The cooker broke Dad’s hand. Dad was lifting the cooker and he was doing it on his own which was wrong.

  — That was my mistake, Son. The cooker slipped and fell on my hand.

  The cooker crushed his hand so he went to hospital.

  — And the man there offered me a choice of plaster casts. Can you believe it? He had a set of swatch cards, like I was choosing carpet or curtains. For a second I wondered if it was a wind-up. One grown man offering another a choice of colors for his plaster cast. How can the color be important? God help the NHS, wasting time on that. I chose red. Reminds me of a boxing glove. What do you think?

  Mum laughed a laugh that didn’t feel like anything was funny and said, — How ironic.

  I think it was good to get a red cast instead of a blue one or a yellow one or an orange one or a green one or a purple one or even one that was black. White would have been the most boring. But a white thing is easiest to understand. Nothing tricky going on here just white you can all run along home, there’s nothing here to see. Except perhaps an arctic fox.

  Chameleons are always changing their color to fit in with the background, which is called camouflage. It’s a clever trick, which is not the same thing as lying.

  — What are you doing? Come on.

  People sometimes make their faces play camouflage tricks so they fit in with the background of what everyone else’s face is looking like just then. Hey hi how are you, they say. Me? Everyone does a trick smile back. I’m fine.

  But tricky is in a way different from a trick and shoes can be very tricky customers to put on, particularly if nobody really wants to go outside in them.

  — Come here NOW.

  Dad comes round the corner and I’m still sitting on the stairs and my shoes are still in my hands and he’s cross, I can tell, but he’s trying not to be. That is called pressing it. He slaps his good hand flat on the front-room door and a quick hard sound bounces round the hall and I feel myself twitch which is instinctive behavior.

  — I’m coming, I say.

  — You get me up at the crack of dawn, he says. — And I’m trying to rescue the situation. I’m trying to take us out for a walk, get us some air. But you’re on a go-slow it seems. You haven’t even put your shoes on!

  — I know. I’m sorry. It’s friction.

  — Eh? Come here.

  He squats down and bends forward and takes the shoes out of my hands and grunts as he helps me put them on. Straps too, done. Then he grunts again and rocks back up onto his heels and shuts his eyes and holds his breath a moment. It looks like he’s trying to remember some spellings. He steadies himself on the banister and shakes his head as he stands up and holds out the good hand to me. It is trembling and damp. Topical rain forests are very humid.

  — Let’s get a move on, he says.

  We have a beanbag. It does not have beans inside it because it has squashy white bits instead. But don’t undo the zip and pull out handfuls of the bits and throw them around whatever you do, Dad says, because that is what an idiot would do because they are a bugger to pick up.

  Most of the time, though, we sit on normal chairs.

  At the table I sometimes kneel up instead of sitting properly and that’s okay so long as I don’t wriggle around, and sometimes it doesn’t matter if I wriggle around but most of the time it does. For Christ’s sake sit still. The ta
ble is quite high.

  Upstairs where we sleep we have beds. My bed is narrow and Mum and Dad’s bed is wide because there are two of them but sometimes Dad sleeps downstairs on the sofa. Everybody has a duvet unless they don’t have one in Africa. In the winter it is cold and we had to stick sellotape over the gaps around my slash window and in the summer it would be nice to open the window but Dad says no in case the glass falls out. The frame is rotten so sometimes Dad inspects the window. What are you looking at it for, I say, and he says nothing which means he’s concentrating on it. Once he got out a measuring tape and a piece of paper and he wrote down some numbers but I don’t think he knows much about slash windows because later he called somebody up who came round to say how much it would cost to mend it and Dad laughed and said you’re having me on and the man said you obviously don’t know anything about slash windows. I am an expert about animals. Come here, let me look at you, Dad sometimes says in the evening, and he looks into my eyes and says I know you, I know you, I know you. I can see your soul.

  We walk up the hill toward the park. It is very boring.

  My shoes flash. Everybody was excited by this when I first got them but nobody notices it now and most of the time that includes me. Sometimes when I am bored though I look at them winking away down there and I think well done, keep going, keep at it shoes.

  I am best at downhill walking.

  The fastest thing there is is a blackbird jet, but the fastest thing there is that isn’t a thing is a peregrine falcon, and the fastest thing there is that isn’t a thing or a bird is a cheetah.

  When a cheetah runs on four legs it counterbalances everything with its enormous tail. Just you watch it go! The tail flies out from one side to the other as the cheetah is chasing an antelope with its head going one way and then changing direction and its tail flying out to the other side to balance everything first one way and then the next. The head stays absolutely still but not the tail, oh no! Cheetahs cannot run as far as wolves but like wolves and unlike other cats their claws are . . . I’ve already told you.

  If I was a peregrine falcon I’d be very careful with my wings. They’d be incredibly delicate. When I did a swoop I would fold them out of the way at the last minute and hit my prey with my talons which are strong because if I damaged my wing feathers that would be a disaster of tremendous portions. I would starve.

  Sometimes when we walk around Dad says, — See that lamppost, go go go! and I have to run toward a lamppost. It’s okay. I can be a cheetah and run incredibly fast, but I don’t have a tail to swish balances with and it is hard to run with your head still, so normally I tuck my arms behind me a bit and go like a magnificent peregrine falcon. When Dad catches up he says — What a specimen, and rubs my head. I quite like running as long as the lampposts aren’t too far apart, but it would be better if instead of a lamppost I could run toward something that I could kill.

  Today I don’t run until we get to the bit of pavement with the shops beside it. The pavement there is flat and my energy levels become fantastic. Does that ever happen to you? It happens to me quite often and when it does it fills me up with electricity.

  The electricity is a fizzy thing in my arms and legs and the bits called joints where they bend that makes it hard to sit still and Don’t move and for Christ’s sake just stay put. I sometimes don’t feel it but not often because most of the time I do. It’s very electric!

  Sometimes I do a thing that’s very clever which is to look at people and say which animal are you then in my head. There’s normally an answer. Like if Dad was an animal he’d be a leopard because he’s actually naturally more active at night and he can sleep anywhere in the day, even up a tree, and he’s got a very impressive roar and a whole ray of sort-of-grunts, and young leopards like play-fighting and you shouldn’t ever get between a leopard and its cubs. Mum would be a fantastic prairie dog. She’s never tiring! She can keep on going the whole time, there and back and there and back again. Slow down, Mum! She won’t hear you. Last year she ran all the way to Marathon. Prairie dogs are very copulative animals. They copulate together very well in hunts and that is why their hunts are among the most successful in the animal kingdom.

  Lizzie is not in our family, but she’s nearly in it. She is my cousin and she lives in a street near us with my aunt called Cicely. Lizzie is actually an owl. Owls have big eyes and they don’t say much except now and then they sort of hoot, and their head can turn right the way around. Lizzie’s head can’t do that. I know because I tried to make it once. But she does have huge eyes and she doesn’t say anything much except oooh. We saw an owl in the Zoo once sitting on a man’s hand. Not far away at all. Right there. It had eyes the color of marmalade with spokes in when you hold the jar in front of a window, which is exactly the same color as Lizzie’s when she’s looking up at the sky. And when the owl turned and stared at me and blinked and then kept on staring at me it felt exactly the same as when Lizzie sometimes looks at me and blinks, like although she’s just little and doesn’t speak she exactly knows what I’m thinking.

  Did you know there is also electricity in your heart?

  Not like a battery although old people do actually have pace-takers but just in your normal heart doing its pulsing, that’s electricity. I think I may have too much. I told Grandma Lynne.

  — My electricity has escaped from my heart and got sent to other bits of me, I said.

  — That will be your nerves, said Grandma Lynne. — Don’t worry, it’s entirely normal, we’ve all got electricity there too.

  She gave my back a rub when she told me that and I know why. It was to make sure I was very reassuring. And in a way I was but not in the way she meant because I didn’t believe her and think okay that’s all right then, everyone feels this way, because they don’t. What I thought was that’s nice of Grandma Lynne to make that up for me to make me feel very reassuring.

  Have you ever put your finger in a plug?

  I don’t think so, because if you had you wouldn’t have a finger! It would be black and stuck to the plug. Dad once saw a man who hit a man with a shovel to get the man off a plug he was stuck to with electricity. And so when we were in the supermarket and I fizzed into the jars of green pasta sauce with bits in and couldn’t help it and accidentally knocked some off and told Dad, when he asked why oh why had I done that, that it was the electricity, he said perhaps he should hit me with a shovel too.

  The thing about the electricity is that it wants you to use it. So now I run away and flap my arms. I hold them out and beat them up and down fast like the wings of a bat which are serrated. Then I run back.

  — Hey Dad, I say. Hold your arms like this as if they are wings and flap them like this.

  He’s looking at his phone.

  — Or you can just hold them out without flapping and do soaring if you want, I say.

  — Eh?

  He looks up and it could be good or bad but hooray it’s good.

  — Straight out like an albatross, he says, or swept back like a peregrine falcon?

  — Wandering albatrosses have a wingspan of up to 3.4 meters, I tell him.

  — True.

  — They are capable of staining uninterrupted flight for weeks.

  — Marvelous. Sustaining.

  Dad ruffles my head which is fine, but then he looks at his phone again and his mouth changes. I know from experiments that the best antic now is to do things on my own and probably shut up too. But it’s difficult because of the electricity and actually impossible so I put my arms out for wings again and beat them hard like a seagull climbing into a gale or even a hurricane, flap flap vicious hard flap, and he’s there too so it’s impossible not to say it.

  — Hey Dad, you do it too. Go on, flap your arms.

  He doesn’t join in or even pat the top of my head and say not now, Son, or even do the ignoring, but grabs me by one wing and grips it.

  — Don’t. I’m not in the mood, he says.

  It’s hard to think then but albatrosse
s along with other seabirds are sometimes lost flying into storms. And when they’re lost what do they do? They just keep on flapping, of course, until they die. The storm doesn’t mind. I would prefer not to flap but I can’t and it’s annoying, I know that, and Dad sees my free arm flapping.

  — Don’t ignore me, he growls. — Stop waving that arm about before I . . .

  He lets go and shakes his head and I run off up the road with my wings held tight to my sides, controlling my tragedy with tiny movements of my finger feathers only!

  — Don’t go too far ahead! Dad shouts after me.

  Don’t, don’t, don’t. Very boring. And it’s going to get worse because look, look, here’s a cat flap.

  — Don’t!

  It’s not a real cat flap, but a cat-flap sign hanging on a square stand that they stick outside shops to make you buy ice cream and newspapers. Very entertaining!

  — Don’t!

  I won’t, but I will, because I’m far enough ahead. He might be saying don’t about something else and even if he isn’t I have to do it anyway. I have to duck down and push my way through the cat-flap sign to pop out the other side. Victory! But oh no a bit of paper slips out of the sign as it flaps back down again. This is the problem. I jump up and down near it until he catches up with me.

  — What part of DON’T don’t you understand? he growls.

  I pick up the bit of paper and try and push it into the slot between the two plastic halves of the cat-flap sign thing but sadly they have suction. Imagine if you had to put sandwiches together like that, by posting the ham in edgeways between the two bits of bread that were already stuck together with butter. It is too tricky and the paper tears and falls onto the ground again. It has some words written on it. Horse, I think, and Pies.

  — Give me that.

  Dad bends over to pick up the paper. Some grapes are green but his face goes like the other ones, red grapes. Ribena doesn’t come from them but I like it. Even with only one good hand he manages to stick the sign back together again. Prime-apes have posable thumbs too.