I go round the edge of a hedge which rhymes and look back round it and I can see he’s running too. His red arm is waving back and forth. In PE Mr. Reilly says you should run by pumping up your legs with your arms so well done, Dad, top marks, inflatable. Mr. Reilly has a mustache and colored laces in his shoes. He lives with Mr. Sparks who teaches the Year Fives. They love each other and come to school on bicycles with suspension which is excellent. My lungs hurt. I can hear him shouting at me now from quite far away but not as far away as he was. Bats have incredibly sensitive hearing which is so good they can hear electric eels, but don’t touch one. I wish I could stop. No, that’s not quite right. What I wish is that I had already stopped quite a long time ago because now I’ve come this far I can’t stop. No, that’s not quite right either because sadly I will have to stop eventually because nothing not even wolves can go on forever, not without pausing for things like water and meat and having a sleep which actually means stopping totally and lying down.
— Stop! Stop, Billy! STOP!
His voice sounds red like his arm. In nature red is used primarily for warnings about danger so I lope on and as I lope I realize a funny thing which is this: I am not in fact chasing my prey with studs on its feet anymore because I am in fact being chased, and nothing chases wolves, so I can’t be the predator wolf but instead I must be some kind of prey.
And what does a clever prey do? Easy. It runs for cover. At home where we have beds upstairs they have covers on them which you can hide under in a game but this is not a game but a park which is big and open and desperate. The only cover was behind the popular trees and that hedge but he is already past them with his red arm pumping and I am running too but he is catching up which is called againing.
— COME HERE! STOP! BILLY!
His voice is purple now, very serious.
Reading is very serious too and grown-ups do it as well. Dad likes reading and so do I but not as much as him and sometimes it’s something I don’t want to do. Most nights he says after bathtime, — We’re going to do some reading practice, me and you.
— Why do polar bears hibernate when Siberian tigers don’t? I might say, or, — Which do you think has a better memory, African elephants or Alaskan salmons?
He’s trying to be cheerful with me so I’m talking about something interesting with him which is nice of me.
— Hmm, he’ll say. — Scarcity of relevant food in winter and elephants without a doubt. Clean your teeth and go to the loo. I’ll get the book.
Reading books can be quite interesting but they are never as good as when Mum or Dad does the reading and you just listen because the stories are more complicated and therefore interesting then. But that’s not the point, he says. The point is to learn how to read for yourself so you can read what you want when you want and make the world your oyster. In his bedroom which is also a study or office he has books from the floor right up to the roof. I’d make the world my lobster if I was limited to crustaceans and had to choose.
But dolphins are far cleverer than lobsters. They exhibit more intelligence than anything else on our planet instead of us, except hold on, what about prime-apes? It is a proven fact that both prime-apes and dolphins have powers of communication but do they read? I don’t think they do.
— Come on, sit down, let’s do this together, he says.
And I’ll sit down but the electricity will probably make me hop up and sit down again with one leg out and roll onto the other knee and wriggle forward or sideways again. I don’t know why the electricity picks then but it does and instead of sitting still which is easier if I’m watching television I just find it hard to stop moving.
— Calm down, relax, sit still, he might say. And this is a warning because if I don’t the next thing might be a grip around my arm. — Five minutes. For just five minutes, for Christ’s sake, sit still.
And there are tactics to help you, like thinking you’re a cat lying in wait or an owl on a branch or, stillest of all, a crocodile basking under a lamp in the Zoo. Keep still, letters, for Christ’s sake, keep still! Reading isn’t hard. One letter goes after another and they’re just squiggles you can learn and when you know them you look at the word and say it and what it means sort of wriggles through or surfaces like a dolphin which is a mammal too.
— BILLY!
The road is my cover.
I make a final really fast run which is called a sprint for it very impressively. There are no railings on this side of the park because they couldn’t get them back after killing people with them in the war. Instead there is a low wall thing which I try to jump over but sadly I don’t make it and the brick edge of it bites the inside of the top of my leg very hard which makes me yelp. And it’s his fault, not mine: he may as well have leopard-bitten me himself. But I am quickly up because I’m a tough one, very durable, and I’m onto the wet pavement and my coat is sort of falling off because the zip is completely undone but never mind. There are cars parked along the road here. James at school can tell you all the makes if you ask him but I prefer animals. Black car, gap, gray car, gap, red car red car, bus stop, bins. My leg bite hurts. I can hear Dad’s feet behind me now and cars ripping more Cheerio-box lids in the wet road and he’s panting and I wish I hadn’t woken up early and I wish I’d put my shoes on more quickly and I didn’t mean to spill the coffee and it wasn’t my fault his phone brought bad news so I duck round the back of the bin to get away.
But sadly I’m too slow.
He’s got hold of me.
He’s gripping my arm.
— BILLY, YOU LITTLE . . . he roars in my ear, so his voice goes black.
But wait! My arm is coming off! Not my real arm ripping off my body but the arm of my coat sliding off my real arm and sometimes even in the most impossible situations the prey can still get away if it person-veers.
I shut my eyes and wriggle like hell and the coat comes off. There’s a lady coming toward us and there’s Cheerio noise in the road and I am spectacular. He plunges for me again. I duck and run. Modern cars are shaped quite like trainers. I dart off the curb between parked trainers and I’ll make it across the road because sooner or later the wildebeests must cross the river to spite the crocodiles.
Dad’s voice goes from black to white. — NO!
Something big flashes past screaming horns.
I feel the wind of it just there, like spray off a wave.
I stop.
Then with tremendous peregrine speed he’s there. He gets hold of my real arm again and yanks me back through the gap and onto the pavement as the car horn fades.
— JESUS FUCKING CHRIST! he yells.
And his bad hand is pulling at my trousers which are suddenly below my knees which is a very effective technique for hobbling a horse or a wildebeest or me.
And he’s yelling NEVER in my face.
And it’s cold here for my legs, like on a tundra. They have no fur.
And all I can do is look straight at him as he gets ready to do it.
He pauses.
Then does it.
His good hand smacks me once, then again, and another time, very, very, very hard across my bum and thighs, the backs of my legs.
Then there’s somebody else with us, a woman. She is shouting, — Stop! but I don’t understand why because I’m not running away anymore, I am crying instead. I sit down. The ground is hard and my bum is steam-from-the-kettle hot. I burned my wrist on it once.
— You can’t do that, the woman says.
— What? Dad is breathing hard. — What did you say? he says again.
— You mustn’t.
— Who are you?
— He’s a child.
— I said, who the hell are you?
— You mustn’t hit a child.
Very quietly Dad says, — Get away from us or I’ll . . .
— You’ll what? Hit me, too?
Dad goes very still. Then he says, — Christ, I’m not listening to this. Pull your trousers up.
The woman is quite largely bulgy and she is wearing very white trainers and pink jogging-legging things and a ripply black top. Her face is pink, too, with red lipstick in the middle of it. She is standing quite close to us and she has her hands on her hips.
I am not brilliant at my clothes and suddenly my legs don’t work because my energy has involved into sap. I am crying quite loudly. Dad lifts me up by the belt and shoulder and winces because of his bad hand. He pulls my trousers up un-gently and as he is doing that he hisses quietly but loudly, — Interfering bitch.
— Pardon?
Dad explodes. — HE NEARLY KILLED HIMSELF YOU FAT FUCKING BUSYBODY BITCH. MY SON! GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM US. JOG THE FUCK OFF!
Then he drags me past her back into the park.
When you turn the sound on the television off it is called muting it. Swans are also mute and so is Dad in the park and so am I because I do not know what to say and anyway I am not going to say it first. Sometimes we have blinking competitions where the competition is to not blink, and sometimes Dad says Tell you what how about this for a game, competitive shutting-up. He is normally the winner. But did you know that ducks have webbed feet underwater? Although the duck is just sitting there bobbling along, its feet could in fact be going quite fast beneath it very unnoticeably. I have to half run to keep up. Paddle, paddle, paddle, silence, silence, silence, nothing to hear here, nothing to see. Good job, ducks. Dad doesn’t let go of my hand. Interestingly I can feel that his own hand is shaking to start with, then it’s just hot, then I can’t feel anything, not even where my hand stops and his starts.
I am you, Son, and you are me.
We walk home the short way, not past the café, which I hate, because in a way it’s the café’s fault, and I’m going to put the chocolate coin in the bin when I get home, but then I notice something else, something quite interesting. It is a reflection in the stake agent’s window, a moving reflection of something pink. I try to turn round to look at it but Dad jerks me forward so it’s not until I get to the corner of our road that I can check and yes I was right! Pink jogging things. Not jogging though, just wobbly walking. It is the woman with a busy body who did interfering and she is coming into our street.
I want to tell Dad about this development but I would be the one speaking first if I did so I don’t.
I go inside upstairs to my bedroom without talking because I know that is the next thing, to go and wait for him there, but he doesn’t come, not straightaway. He goes to his bedroom-study-office and shuts the door. Since it is half-term that should be brilliant because I have time to play with toys and make a fantastic tent out of the duvet and the chair and the edge of the bed, but I don’t feel like it. I look out of the window instead. My bedroom has a rubbish slash window which you mustn’t touch. The view from it is okay though, of the other side of our street. At the top of the view is the sky. It is gray today like the bit you peel off the underneath of a fish you’re going to eat. Then there’s the roof of the house opposite which has a thing on top of it for catching television pictures sent from the olden days. Not a net. More like a fish skeleton in fact, and it makes a wonderful perch, hello pigeons, well done keep it up. And under the roof is the house with two windows upstairs and one big one downstairs next to the door. The top windows are like eyes. Unfortunately they have curtains, not a blind, but did you know that some lizards have no eyelids? My window has a rolly-blind and I’m allowed to use it if I want but not yank on it like a monkey on a vine. Sometimes I roll the blind down and up again quite carefully a few times so that our house does some winks, but the house opposite could only lizard-wink back, and it hasn’t yet, but it might. Otherwise our house and that house are symmetrical. I spend some time counting the bricks which is boring but helps me not listen to the sound of him moving around downstairs and thinking of him thinking about it because it isn’t over yet.
Eventually the footsteps come upstairs again.
I decide that the best place to be is actually sitting on my bed.
There’s a knock on my door.
There’s no point trying to puff myself up like a toad in front of a grass snake, so instead I just hunch over my knees and barnacle back a bit so that I’m up against the wall.
The door opens.
Dad is there but what’s this? He’s carrying two mugs.
— What have you got to say to me? he asks.
I don’t say anything to begin with, but then I think, hold on, he’s actually said something first now, so I know it’s all right, I can say my thing now and still in a way be a bit victorious.
— Sorry, I say.
He gives me one of the mugs which is extraordinary because, yes, it is hot chocolate upstairs near the carpet!
Then he sits down next to me on the bed. I take a sip. It is pretty lovely. It makes me think about the chocolate coin which I haven’t thrown away yet. I decide I might not. Then again, I decide again, I might, because he’s taking his here-we-go breath. But it’s only because he wants to tell me very strongly not to run away or ever go in the road ever again without looking, ever, and he does tell me this for quite a long boring time. And at the very end he pauses and says That’s it, it’s okay now, it’s behind us. Best forgotten. But interestingly, before he gets to that bit, or even the strict bit about the road and never, he says something different to start with. Shall I tell you what it is? Okay, I will. After I say sorry he looks at me and rubs his eyes with his fingertips and looks away and takes a sip from his mug and then looks back at me and gulps and says, — Me, too.
Yes, that’s right, Me, too is what he says.
Can you ride a bicycle? I can, and in the shed there’s a bicycle I got for my birthday when I was five with a bell shaped like a football. I don’t really like football, but I like riding my bike, but I didn’t at first. When I first got it it had stabilizers on which Dad immediately took off, saying, — He doesn’t need stabilizers, he’s got good balance from that scooter. He’ll be fine won’t you, Son.
— Are you sure? asked Mum.
I could see he wasn’t sure by the way he squeezed my hand three times: short-long-short. That’s the signal to say I love you. I was quite pleased about this because I was sure myself because it was only a bicycle and I’d even seen very old people riding a bicycle as well as kids who didn’t look much older than around four and a half.
— No problem, I said. — I’ll give this a go.
We found some sloping grass in the park leading from one path down to another path and Dad held the back of the bike and I got on it. I concentrated very hard; I was very focusing, like a bird of prey with the two bits of lenses in its eye, one for normal-range things and the other for tiny mice cowering beneath hedgerows. Cower, mice, cower. And that was part of the trouble because I wanted to think about the two bits of lens and Dad said Come on, sort yourself out, get your feet on the pedals. Pedals are very simple things but I hadn’t really used pedals before and they got in my way. Dad started running with his hand on the saddle and I used my feet to stop the pedals hitting my legs and the steering was quite easy if you didn’t try to steer too much, even when Dad let go. But the trouble was the pedals. I couldn’t think about anything else and even when that’s all I thought about it wasn’t enough. They turned a bit and then stopped if I stopped pedaling and then the steering didn’t work and the bike was quite high up and wallop, over I went. It was only grass so I didn’t mind.
— Are you sure he wouldn’t be better off with some stabilizers? asked Mum.
Dad was hot from the running probably. — No, no, no, he said, wiping his face. — No.
I tried again. This time I concentrated on being very poised and very balanced because Dad said, — It’s genetic, he’s got very good balance, quite loudly to Mum who looked away. Genes are like viruses only smaller. And seals balance things on their noses in zoos. But how did they learn that? There are no plastic footballs in the wild to practice with. In fact there are very few perfect spheres in nature except for
the planets we marvel at. A watermelon would be too heavy. The pedals were extremely tricky characters. They were in charge of my feet and not the other way around and trying to keep up with them meant I stopped pressing and even though we were going down a hill with Dad running behind holding me steady and then letting me go, the pedals weren’t pushing the bike and it slowed down to one side and I came off again harder this time.
— Son, are you all right? he said in a quiet are-you-actually-hurt voice.
— I’m fine.
— ’Course you’re fine! he said for everyone to hear. — Good boy. Jump on again and I’ll push you back up to the top of the hill.
Mum arrived and she said, — Are you all right? too.
— I’m fine.
— Sure?
— ’Course he’s sure, Tessa. You’re a toughie, aren’t you. Dad held the bike straight and said — Here you are and patted me on the back just a bit hard and over his shoulder a magpie landed black and white in the yellow-green grass and started drilling at the ground. One for sorrow so there had to be two and it was the other one I had to look for instead of getting back on the bike. Where was it? Magpies are attracted to flashy things so perhaps the magpie wanted the bell off my bike. He could have it. No, instead I decided to use it to lure his mate out of hiding like a skillful hunter. Ping, ping. I stood in front of the front wheel and pinged the little silver football boot into the silver ball of the bell.
— Let’s try him with some stabilizers, Mum said.
— No need. Stop playing with that.
There was no sign of the second magpie. In New Zealand, which is as far away as America, farther perhaps, they have birds called kia birds which will actually rip your windscreen wipers off! There is one in the Zoo with a curvy sharp beak like a dagger that is curved. They put bits of mirror in its cage to keep it simulated.
— Stop ringing that bell, breathed Dad.
— Jim, said Mum in her warning voice.
What I Did Page 3
