— Why did you take it from her in the first place?
— She gave it to me. It has little teeth and so does Lizzie, I say.
— What’s that?
Lizzie stops crying almost straightaway because she thinks the circular saw is incredibly interesting. She makes the whizzing sound happen and struggles away from her mum and shows me the round fake blade spinning and grins at it.
— Don’t wind her up, Billy, Dad tells me, dropping his hands to his sides. — We’ve had enough aggro for one day.
Cicely’s knees crackle as she stands up and turns back toward the kitchen. — Not going well, then? she asks Dad.
The kettle clicks off in the kitchen. With the light coming in through the window like that you can see the steam clouds pillowing in, but I don’t feel hot. No. I feel shivery all of a sudden. Is Dad planning to tell on me here, as well? I walk around Lizzie’s noise banging at her workbench and half follow the grown-ups in time to hear Dad say, — No, not particularly.
— Want to talk about it?
I immediately think of something fascinating to say about how in Yellowstone National Park, which is in America, which is across the Atlantic Ocean past Cornwall, though you could get there by going the other way, but it would take you longer . . . and then I forget what the fascinating thing was. Before I can say anything anyway, Dad is opening his mouth to tell her. No, no, no! Steam! From blowholes in the ground! Whales, dragons! I stumble forward, but too late.
— Not really, says Dad. Just that sort of morning. You know. Nothing to tell.
— What’s the matter, Billy? Cicely asks me.
Nothing to tell!
— Would you like some juice?
— Yes please. Orange without bits.
Cicely pours me some juice. Her hands work exactly like Mum’s, very smoothly, but her fingers are longer. While she’s pouring and I’m watching there’s a thump in the hall and Dad goes out and then he comes back in holding a parcel for Cicely. She looks at it one way up and then the other and takes the bag off.
— What lovely wrapping, Cicely says.
It’s red.
Danger, danger!
She puts the present down.
— Aren’t you going to open it? Dad asks.
Cicely does a little quick smile and glances at me and her fingers speed up folding the bag thing into the bin. She is shy! This is very odd because a present is nothing at all like walking past Mrs. McCabe, the head teacher at school, in a corridor which is empty because it’s only you that needs the loo.
— Not just yet— Cicely begins.
But she is interrupted by Lizzie who has crept into the kitchen and now starts to cry again. Not melted-crisp-packet crying this time, more like a dog tied up outside a shop. — What is it? Cicely asks her.
And what I think is this: it’s obvious, which means easy in your head. I open my mouth to tell everyone but Dad says, — Shh, and anyway there’s a more interesting thing to think about which I heard on the radio in the car to do with experiments they did on dogs, experiments which proved that dogs can do more than ten different kinds of barks which people completely understand. Even people who don’t have dogs! I’m angry. I’m sad. I’m excited. I’m . . . I can’t think of the others. But Lizzie isn’t a dog, she’s even cleverer, she’s a human, even though her brain is not yet hugely developed. It will get there, just you wait and see. There are whole countries in Africa, too, and the people there are less fortunate, so we pay a pound to wear our own clothes to school every now and then. It helps them develop. I wore my fuzzy spider’s-legs T-shirt last time it happened and Freddy called me babyish. I ignored him until I realized I had a plain white T-shirt in my PE kit bag and put it on instead. Spider’s-legs is too small now anyway. It would probably nearly fit Lizzie. Next time we come round I’ll bring it because I know exactly where it is. She is still crying, but louder now and I don’t actually like the sound of crying so I take a risk and ignore Dad’s shhh and say, — She just wants to open it herself.
Obvious is the opposite of oblivious, I think. Oblong has nothing to do with it.
I turn a chair round so the seat bit is facing Lizzie and yes, what did I tell you. She climbs straight onto it up to where the present in its wrapping, very nice, very red, is sitting on the table. She reaches for it. Her hands remind me of starfish but squids have excellent suckers. Have you seen Finding Nemo? I have. Nemo only has one fin so he’d be terrible at opening presents but his dad never gives up the search.
— It’s for Mummy, darling, Cicely explains. — Mummy’s present.
Lizzie grabs it anyway. Also obvious: it’s all so obvious.
— She wants to unwrap it for you, I say.
— But it’s not for her, says Cicely.
— Yes, I know, I say, and I go on, nicely slow: — But Lizzie doesn’t care. It’s the unwrapping bit she wants to do. I know this because when I was small I liked tearing everything off everything, too.
Cicely glances at Dad again and it really does look as if she would prefer to open the present herself, which isn’t like Mum, who always lets me open everything, even Cheerio boxes. Careful you don’t spill them! But if Cicely wants to do something to stop Lizzie from opening that present then she should have done it sooner because Lizzie is already into the wrapper, very quickly nimble, rip, rip, rip. I’m impressed: by the time she is as old as me I bet she’ll be better than me at zips.
Inside the wrapper is a white cardboard sleeve thing with a blue velvety box inside that and with yet more impressive speed Lizzie slides the blue box through the white one and pops the lid. Cicely sees what’s inside and takes a deep breath. And I guessed right: she didn’t have to worry about Lizzie stealing her present, because Lizzie loses interest in what’s inside the box immediately. All she really wants to do is have another go on the sparkly red paper and silver ribbon, which has slip-slithered under the table. Down she slides to fetch it.
Cicely is still peering at the blue box’s insides. Some tribes read entrails to see if they’re superstitious, or tea leaves. And I lean forward to see what all the fuss is about and I see it. A necklace curled on a little cushion thing. Boring!
— Why don’t you teach Lizzie how to do cat’s muddle with that ribbon, suggests Dad.
— Not muddle, cradle!
— Not with little Lizzie it won’t be, says Dad. — Take her to her room and see what sort of new knots she can produce.
Cicely still hasn’t said anything. This is not at all like her because she’s normally very chatty as well as polite. Perhaps she doesn’t like the necklace, or its cushion. I take one of Lizzie’s hands, very hot, very small, and lead her through the hall. The door swings shut behind us. I pick up the circular saw from the mat where she dropped it, but she doesn’t care about it now, which is good for me, because the way it whirs when you press the trigger is in fact quite interesting. There’s the fish tank. The one at school had a bubbly filter, too, but someone turned it off by mistake. Fatal, Son. Lizzie has already lost the tail of silvery ribbon so no cat’s cradle for us but it doesn’t matter because I will spend the time doing something better anyway, teaching her to get ready to speak by explaining animals to her using the alphabet. A is for adder. B for bison. C, crayfish. D, E, F, and G. She pretends she’s not listening but I know better. Off she goes, inside her tent thing. Goldfish have a very short attention spam, too.
At school it is often quite boring. They teach me things I know already and to prove it I will give you some examples for instance.
For instance one day Miss Hart got out a box of vegetables and held them up and asked us what they were. The first thing she held up was a carrot. Ta-da! A carrot. Then she held up . . . a cabbage. And then she held up a tomato which is not a vegetable because it is a fruit. I put my hand up and down very quickly because I could see her mouth getting all ready to tell some unsuspecting prey that fact and I didn’t want to say the thing that might spoil her thunder. I sat on the mat with my hands
under me but on the mat and listened to Alice say, — Tomato, and Miss Hart say, — Yes, and did you also know it’s actually a fruit? I shut my eyes and opened them again as a test. Yes, absolutely everything that I could see at that moment of time was quite boring.
Dad says that it’s my job to keep things interesting. I mustn’t blame the boring feeling on anybody other than myself is what he says. I shut my eyes on the mat again and here is what I thought.
Radish.
Celeriac.
Palm heart.
Later I am at home in my own bedroom which is better than Lizzie’s. Hello house opposite, any lizard winking? No. Lizzie: lizard. Neither says anything; they’re both on mute. Did you know that Galápagos iguanas have black skin to absorb heat stored in rocks, but I only have a radiator? If I fetch my colored pencils from the drawer next to my bed and put a piece of paper on the Hungry Caterpillar book because it is biggest and the most firmly flat, and if I sit with my back against the radiator like this, brilliant, I can do a warm drawing on my lap. I have lots of paper. Galápagos iguanas are hard to draw but I person veer. If you press a normal gray pencil hard enough you can almost make it go black.
Dad’s voice is gray-black at Mum downstairs. — Follow-up medical? She said what? Beyond a joke.
I press my pencil down harder and keep shading in the rocks until little gritty puffs of lead start coming off the end. It looks like the tip is burrowing into iguana world.
Mum’s voice is colorless: whatever she says doesn’t make it all the way up the stairs.
— Of course I’ll take him, won’t I, Dad shouts. — It’s not like we have a fucking choice!
Something inside me decides to stop shading in the rocks and put my drawing down instead. Butterfly had a jeans-pad but I’ve only got plain paper and a caterpillar book to rest it on and I’m trying to create something spectacular, not write horrible notes. And that’s what they’re talking about down there, her, her and me, her and me and Dad and what I did. I feel the hollowness rush inside me as I realize this because it is evidence of lies, more lies and yet more lies. He said it was over but he is still cross and he hasn’t stopped talking about it at all because he was lying.
I close my bedroom door. Shutting hard is not the same as slamming.
Mum gives me my bath before she sets off for her night shift. There’s bubbles in it. I also throw lots of plastic toys into the water, including the two Tiddlos. Shall I tell you why? It’s for defense. When I was smaller Dad used to get into my bath because it saves energy and anyway it’s fun, and sometimes he still gets in with me. But he never likes baths having plastic toys in them as well as me because rolling around on those buggers hurts like hell, Son; ouch, they’re murder! Well they don’t hurt me so there!
Normally these days when I jump out of the bath I dry myself because I’m six, but Mum is there with one of the large towels for grown-ups today. She folds it around my shoulders and pats me dry very softly, as if I was made out of tissue paper wrapped round old people’s bones instead of young bendy ones and highly effective skin. Arms up. Legs apart. Something about the gentle way she’s touching me makes me go still and breathe more slowly. I feel smaller again, vertically minute. She smoothes everything dry and then turns me round to face her and I see she is biting the inside of her lip.
— These bruises, she says.
— They’re fine. Can I have some milk?
— But they’re worse than . . . The state of your back. God, Billy. The inside of your leg.
— Don’t worry, Mum, I tell her. — I am durable.
— What? What did you say to that lady about how you got these?
— I don’t want to talk about her.
— But —
— I really don’t really.
— Listen to me, Billy. That lady is very important. Understand? And she’s worried about you because somebody saw . . . somebody said they saw . . .
I’m holding my sides very tightly and shivering a bit even though I’m actually quite warm, because it’s a sort of tactic for making myself not hear what she’s saying, because I just want her to stop talking about it.
— What’s the matter? asks Mum.
— It’s forgotten!
— What is?
— It! Dad said! So I don’t want to talk about it!
She gathers me up in the towel again then and leans into me and strokes the back of my head while I cry a bit. The towel doesn’t taste as nice as it smells. Dad used to eat Shedded Wheat when he was a boy, with hot milk, and cats occasionally suffer from fur balls. I calm down. And Mum, using a very soothing voice, and without taking my head off her shoulder, says that it’s all okay, it’s all fine, and all I need to do is tell the truth about what happened in the park, how I got the bruises, to the doctor the nice lady has arranged for me to see in the morning. Dad will take me. And yes, I can have some hot milk. I just have to tell the truth tomorrow and it will all be tickety-boo.
Do you have dreams? I do. But I can never remember them.
When I wake up the following morning the light is already coming through my blind which means I may be nearly late for school which makes me quickly roll over and stick my head back under my pillow like a lizard going for cover under a rock, only this rock would be useless defense because it is soft. Talons would punctuate it: it doesn’t even smother out all the morning light! I shut my eyes and remember all of a sudden that it’s not school today, it’s excellent half-term instead, which means I don’t have to hide under a rock to keep the day away or do the thing that always happens next anyway, which is getting out of bed to make a start, Son, because we all have to.
Eyes open, whap!
This news that I don’t have to leap out of bed immediately is so exciting that I immediately do leap out of my bed.
And I didn’t wake Dad up early today either because it’s late and I’ve only just woken up so I can’t have. The news just keeps on getting better!
But have you ever had cold hands? I have, and once Mum suggested that a good way to warm them up would be to put them in a basin of warm water, but sadly I let the hot tap run for too long before I pressed the plug lever down and the water in the basin wasn’t warm anymore because it was hot. Only I didn’t know that. Basin sounds a bit like bison and yet I don’t think you get water bison only water buffalo which doesn’t matter. What mattered was that I plopped my hands deeply into the basin of hot water without knowing what I was doing, and unfortunately my hands were too cold to tell me about the mistake quickly enough. They sort of knew something was wrong, and so did I, but it was like we were shouting at each other across a windy park. What’s that, hands? I can’t quite hear you. Shout louder! Then, and it felt like ages later, but Mum said it was probably just a few seconds, my hands started screaming at me, and I knew exactly what a stupid idiot I had been, and I burst into tears.
And that’s exactly how I feel this morning after I realize I haven’t woken Dad up early, which is good, but suddenly strangely bad. Because, because, because . . . because I woke him up early the day before, which was awful, because of something I can’t quite remember which happened after that, until I nearly can, and then do . . . which makes the whole thing come screaming back at me very loudly and with agony, too.
For breakfast Dad makes porridge with golden stirrups. I always want a second spoonful of stirrups because the first one is inefficient and normally Dad says no way, one’s enough, Son, and then gives me a second spoonful anyway, but today he gives me spoon two before I’ve even asked, which is so excellent that I nearly ask for a third, but I strain myself very wisely and don’t. He is concentrating on the radio, which is full of people interrupting each other because it is the morning. Today they are arguing about the new clear threat which the first man says isn’t going to go away on its own. The allies have to show we mean business. But we don’t even know for sure they have the capability says the other man. There’s not enough evidence.
— Precisely, mutters Dad
.
— Like for God, I say.
— What’s that?
— No evidence.
Dad laughs unfunnily and says, — Exactly. But it doesn’t stop people believing.
After breakfast we take the bus into town. I sit next to Dad on the window side and he looks out, too, leaning on the top of my head with his chin. It is not scratchy this morning because he has shaved it.
Shop windows are like televisions, very full of adverts. The bus stops by one which shows a massive picture of a lady on a beach bending over with a measuring tape around her waist. Dad uses his for slash windows. We wait for people to climb on and off which is called boarding and is very boring, and I stare at the picture and try hard to work out what it is trying to make me want. Not the measuring tape because of the beach, and not the beach because of the measuring tape, which only leaves the bendy thin lady. She is staring past the bus with a two-headlamp smile on her face, very pleased.
— We don’t want one of those, do we?
— What’s that?
— A bendy lady.
Dad laughs and says, — Oh I don’t know.
— We’ve already got Mum.
He stops laughing and says, — Of course, you’re right.
Then his phone rings and he checks it and winces and sucks in his cheeks and lets the ringing happen again before he presses a button anyway and holds the phone to his ear with his eyes shut and says very cheerfully, — Morgan, hi! So, where do we stand?
The bus rolls forward. Good-bye bendy woman. Dad’s good hand is on my knee. It stretches into a waiting starfish, much bigger than Lizzie’s, then gradually balls up into a fist.
We arrive at the hospital and go slowly up the front steps with Dad still talking very pretend cheerfully on his phone, and we come to a halt in the hall. Actually it’s not a hall but a bigger bit called a lob-in where they lob in all the sick people. In you go, go on, into the bright lights and excellent colorful pictures. Here’s one of a whale grinning. But sadly the artist got the eye wrong. It’s way too near the blowhole and it’s all long and slitty. His brush must have slipped. As a result the whale’s smile looks a bit fake. Dad’s phone snaps shut behind me so I turn round and tell him about a superb species of fast-swimming and edible fish.
What I Did Page 8
