What I Did

by Christopher Wakling

  Dad smoothes down his hair on the step. When Cicely opens the door he does a funny little bow which is quite embarrassing and says, — Sorry not to call.

  Cicely touches her throat. — It’s fine. Come on in.

  — We’ve brought lunch, says Dad, pointing stupidly at the bag.

  I explain exactly what’s in it. You already know because I told you, so I’m not going to tell you again: use your memory.

  — Where’s Lizzie? I ask. Normally she’s exactly behind Cicely’s legs when the door opens, but not today, today she has evaporated.

  — In her bedroom.

  — Can I take it to her if we don’t make crumbs?

  — What’s that?

  Keep up at the back there, Cicely, lope! — Gingerbread man, I say slowly.

  But Cicely is concentrating on Dad who is scraping his hand through his corn hair like perhaps he has nits. — I just needed to talk to you, he says. I should have rung ahead. But . . .

  — Of course, Cicely says. — I’ll put some coffee on.

  And to me she quickly says, — She’s doing a tea party for her animals. Crumb-free gingerbread men are definitely invited.

  I jump the right-shaped package out of the bag and drop the rest on the floor and run off without coming back even when Dad says — Hey! because I can tell he doesn’t really mean it, and anyway I have to go past the fish in their topical tank first to say, — Hello goldfish, remember me? But of course they don’t because goldfish are not elephants and anyway Cicely was wrong: when I make it inside Lizzie’s room I actually see that she is lying down on her back under a blanket in the middle of the floor with her eyes shut and a line of her animals spread out on either side of her as if she is the fuse large of an airplane and they are her wings.

  — What are you doing? I ask.

  She blinks at me.

  Small children are interesting: it’s not that possible to tell exactly what is going on inside their heads, and with Lizzie it is even harder because she still doesn’t use words. Adults are also tricky to understand, but for the opposite reasons.

  — Would you like a gingerbread man?

  She knows what I’m talking about now. Good-bye wings and up she gets. I give the slightly-less-good-because-one-of-its-buttons-has-fallen-off-in-the-bag gingerbread man to her and hold mine up and take a bite which she unsurprisingly copies. But what’s this? She’s holding her headless man out to look at and here we go again: crumply mouth, melted plastic. I push the door shut with my foot because grown-ups will only make this situation worse and luckily I only bit the arm off mine.

  — Here, I say, and I snap the head off my gingerbread man and put it down on the floor next to her feet. — You can have my head if you want. Lay your body next to it and he’ll be whole again, almost.

  Lizzie wipes biscuit muck on her dress sleeve and stops crying and does as I say.

  — But really the point is to eat all of him. I snap the legs off mine one by one and do impressive eating and it works: eventually Lizzie breaks a foot off her man and then I take back my head and we sit in the middle of her quite strange line of animal toys eating the last bits up pretty happily.

  After that I do some explaining about things to her, because if you talk honestly to a person, Son, they’ll soon start talking honestly to you, or so the theory goes, and my mission is to be the first to hear Lizzie talk. I am mostly honest about animals because I know many interesting facts about them, including cetaceans, which include massively developed dolphins. Did you know that their sonar communications are so-phisticated that they make mankind’s look like toys in a shop? Lizzie starts playing with her slightly babyish blocks of big Legos when I tell her this. Mine at home is technical because my fingers are nimbler. I help her anyway: we build a square thing with a hole in it for her bean cat to sit in, plus turrets. Then I tell her about silverback gorillas who also have posable thumbs and weigh up to four hundred pounds and are therefore earth’s greatest prime-apes.

  — Did you know that they avoid fighting each other by doing imposing poses instead? I ask, even though I know she won’t answer, because it is called a one-way conversation.

  — And my dad downstairs does the same thing, a bit. You don’t have a dad here, but if you did he might avoid fighting with your mum by not making eye contact and being imposing nearby instead before walking off.

  Lizzie breaks up some of my turrets and swaps them with ones of her own which do look better, in fact, because they are in a repeating-color pattern of red then white then green. I tell her about how countries have colored flags. White is a very boring color and means stop, I surrender. Lizzie tries to make a bridge thing on the front of the round thing and can’t and starts to cry instead. I don’t help her with it either because what she wants to make is actually impossible. It’s gravity’s fault, and other laws of nature, like the one about four-dot Lego bricks not fitting into three-dot spaces. I think about surrendering but go to the kitchen for reinforcements instead.

  Have you ever built a hide? I don’t mean the skin you slice off a dead animal, but a hide you can hide in? I built one with Dad once, using a lawn-mower box. It was as tall as me: huge! And when Dad took the lawn mower out of it there was nothing left inside so it was empty. Waste not want not, Son: what shall we make out of this? Easy: David Attenborough’s hide! First Dad cut a letter-box slit in it with Stanley’s knife, and then we stuck the box behind the big bush next to the compost heap. After that, I spent the whole afternoon camouflaging it with branches and leaves and twigs and mud and colored chalk and glitter and sellotape. Then I hid in it. I looked out at the garden for a long time, whispering what I was seeing to myself, just like David Attenborough.

  — There he is: our cat Richard, appearing from over the wall! And yes, just to the side of him, some bees are buzzing around by that lavender plant. Is Richard going to try to catch one? No. He’s walked off.

  I knew I’d probably have seen those things anyway, but I tried not to be disappointed. Catching a glimpse of something rarer — a buzzard with strips of flesh for its young, perhaps, or some fox cubs digging a hole — would simply require better technology. David Attenborough often uses a mote control camera when he wants to film a rattlesnake striking a mouse in the middle of the night, so I asked Dad if we had a mote control camera I could use. But he just laughed and said, — No, which made me shiver angrily, nearly cry, and go back into the hide.

  Half an hour later Dad’s face appeared in the letter-box window slit. — The closest we have is your old baby monitor, Son. I’ve charged it up. Stick the microphone here in the garden and take the receiver up to your bedroom. You can spend the evening listening to the grass grow . . .

  Dad and Cicely are sitting with their knees close together across the corner of the wobbly table. His head is in his hands and she is stroking his arm with her thumb. It’s posable.

  — You poor thing, Cicely says. — You have to let me speak to her.

  It looks like Dad’s hands are shaking his head. — No, no, no.

  — Or at least tell Mum to butt out.

  — You mustn’t get involved. Dad looks up at her. — Can’t you see?

  — Of course, but . . . you can’t do nothing.

  I fizz forward then, saying, — I can’t do anything about Lizzie’s Lego tower thing either and she’s crying about it quite hard.

  Dad rocks back sharply in his chair and takes a big breath through his nose; Cicely gives his arm one last pat and pushes herself up from the table, which squeaks.

  — I have been telling her about dolphin sonar, I say.

  — Lovely. Cicely smiles and pats me on the head on her way past, then pauses to look back at Dad. — See, communication, Jim. That’s what it’s all about.

  Have you ever tried not to laugh? I have, and it’s incredibly hard not to laugh if you’re having to try not to, but if you’re not thinking about it it’s easy because you probably don’t laugh most of the time anyway.

  It’s quite
like catching a ball.

  Dad is fantastic at catching balls but sadly I am not, and when he last tried to teach me I noticed that the muscles in his jaw kept crumpling up. Crocodiles have the strongest bite in the animal kingdom, which you might guess, but I bet you don’t know what comes next? Snapping turtles! Yes, a turtle. Its jaw pressure is bigger than a Great White’s, and a lion’s, and even a hyena’s.

  — Relax, Son, just keep your eye on the ball. Stop thinking. Let yourself catch it.

  It’s impossible to stop thinking, too, when somebody says stop thinking, so I don’t even try; I do try to watch the ball, though, and there it is, looping up and dropping down with the bright yellow hedge and crooked fence behind it. Ready, hands, ready! But as the ball dips right down close, getting faster, my knee sort of jumps up a bit and my shoulder goes with it and my face decides to twist itself away slightly in case the ball hits it. Go, hands, go! Too late. The ball hits my cheek and the eye that’s looking sees it hop-run off right under the thickest bit of hedge. Tennis balls are bright yellow as well and Dad’s jaw muscles start showing off again.

  — It will be a tricky customer to find, I say.

  — Yes. Never mind. We’ll get it later.

  — Sorry.

  — Forget about it. You’re okay?

  — I’m fine.

  Sometimes Dad turns the trying-not-to-laugh thing into a special game.

  — Look at me and try not to laugh, he says. — You’ll fail. I’ll have you laughing in under a minute. Not with tickling or pulling funny faces. Just by sitting here looking straight at you. Don’t believe me? Give it a try.

  I normally get ready by shaking myself and moving my lips all around and crossing my eyes and blinking hundreds of times before finally looking straight at him. But even if I hold my breath and squint until I nearly can’t see him, just his outline sitting there not moving but staring straight back at me without even blinking, I can only last for ten or twelve seconds. I don’t know why. It’s like popcorn in a hot pan: normal, normal, normal, normal, pop: totally funny.

  And sometimes when I go pop and laugh I feel angry and growl as I’m laughing and kick him in the shin relatively hard, but he just sits there and says, — Come on then, tough guy. If you’re that cross surely you won’t laugh next time. Get yourself ready: let’s go again!

  Mating is crucial. Without it David Attenborough would have much less to do on the African plain. Every animal mates there and quite often David Attenborough watches through his camera so we can, too, and that is necessary for the survival of the fittest, otherwise everything would die out, including us. We don’t live in Africa but in fact that doesn’t matter because mating happens on every continent and even in the sea, where dolphins seem to enjoy it.

  — Anthropomorphization, Dad said, when I told him that, which made no sense at all. — Who can tell anyway with those fixed grins?

  Not everybody at school understands about mating.

  Mum said I should wait until one of the teachers brought it up before explaining.

  But Red Steve in my class does know a bit about mating in humans because he’s seen it happen. Red Steve is called Red Steve because the other Steve has normal hair and Red Steve’s is red like his brother Joseph’s hair in Year Six. That’s how Red Steve knows a bit about mating: he’s watched it with his brother Joseph on their computer.

  David Attenborough has never shown me humans mating. Mum said it wouldn’t be right, seriously, and Dad stopped smiling to agree. But still I think Red Steve either wasn’t concentrating or remembered it wrong, because his explanation didn’t sound correct. He was right about the first part: it makes sense that mating happens when the man aims his willy up the woman’s bottom, because vertically all mammals do that, but he got the rest wrong: it doesn’t make sense to put your willy in a woman’s mouth for the last bit when the sperms come out because the eggs are in the ovaries not the stomach; the pipes don’t join up, so the sperms would be swimming in a pointless direction. Red Steve got that part wrong and that is why he only knows a bit about mating.

  If you do mating wrong nothing terrible happens; it’s just the end: dead sperm, dead eggs, no new young. The ingredients have gone stale. When one person’s pieces can’t move anymore in chess the same thing happens: stalemating.

  Nobody in our house moves normally over the weekend apart from Grandma Lynne who goes away, which is normal, but then she comes back again.

  And after that it’s not half-term anymore but time for more school, and the strange thing about that is that although I don’t want to go back to school at all, and nearly cry when Mum first tells me it’s time, a part of me knows that school will probably be more normal than home, and this is in fact quite luring. We have hot chocolate the night before as well.

  But sadly I was wrong! School is not normal at all. Normally we have planning time after assembly but on the first day back they swap it round and then at lunch the packed lunch tables are up the other end of the hall. It feels wrong. Even the little scissors-in-the-tree thing has moved from the create corner to Miss Hart’s desk, so that instead of just taking a pair to cut out with and putting them back when I’ve finished I have to go up to Miss Hart and ask to use them specially.

  And Miss Hart is not quite normal either.

  First, when I ask her about the scissors, she leans a bit close to me and blinks kindly before saying, — Of course, Billy, be my guest. And the way she says Billy is just odd; it’s either as if she’s not heard my name before or thinks I may have forgotten it, or for some other reason wants to make it sound special.

  Then, after I’ve cut the teeth out for a model of a shark I’m making with Fraser, and I’ve left Fraser red-felt-tipping the crumpled bit of paper we’re using as a seal carcass so that I can take the scissors back, Miss Hart says my name again, — Billy.

  — Yes.

  — How are you today?

  — Fine.

  — That’s good. What are you up to?

  Over her shoulder I can see Fraser finishing the coloring bit.

  — Making.

  — Making! That’s great. And what are you making?

  — A thing with Fraser.

  He’s crumpled up the seal paper now and . . . no, no, no: I told him not to stick it into the shark’s mouth until I came back. Paper teeth are delicate and anyway we agreed: it was my idea so it’s my job!

  — Great! What sort of thing?

  — Can I go now, please, it’s just—

  — Of course, in a second. You can show it to me after school, perhaps. I wanted to have a chat with you then anyway. Okay? Nothing to worry about. Just five minutes after the day ends.

  — Okay okay, okay, I say, and I immediately run-walk round her desk back to Fraser who is cramming the last bit of the whole dead crumpled red-seal paper through the shark into its cardboard tube stomach. And I can see that the teeth are all twisted and bent and . . .

  — No! I told you not to! I try to grab it off him before he makes it worse but he just holds it annoyingly behind his back so I have to grip his arm. He yanks me toward him trying to pull away, and before I know what I’ve done, oh no, I’ve done judo, and Fraser is on his back crying incredibly hard. He is nice but weak.

  Miss Hart arrives immediately, picking Fraser up and pulling us apart and telling everyone else to carry on carrying on because it’s none of their business. She takes us to the corner by the chipped sink next to the stork cupboard and it’s amazing how quickly Fraser stops crying: doing judo on him is like letting go of a balloon. Easy throw, scream, cry, stop: totally un-flated.

  And shall I tell you why what happens next is not normal either? Okay, it’s this. Even though it really was me who threw Fraser over and made him cry, and even though I admit it, because she probably saw it anyway, Miss Hart still listens carefully when I tell her my excuse about the bent shark’s teeth and torn red-paper seal carcass model which Fraser broke, and when I’ve finished all she does is stare at me for a lon
g time blinking, before telling Fraser he really should keep his word and asking us both to — Carry on nicely.

  That’s it! Just that!

  No trip to Mrs. McCabe’s office. No golden-time deduction. Not even a sad-face mark. Miss Hart is a brilliant teacher. Just carry on nicely!

  But later, during cross-legged mat time for the story before the end of the day, my stomach feels like a pinecone: light and prickly. To start with I don’t know why, until I stop listening to the story about the boring dragon that doesn’t kill anybody or even get killed himself, and remember instead that she wants to see me after school. The pinecone pops. She probably knew I was about to be naughty before it happened, and that’s why she told me I would have to stay behind later. Have you ever made a smoothie? I have, with Mum. Imagine if we’d put a dry old pinecone into the mixer thing. As the chunk of pages left to go in the dull dragon story grows thinner and thinner, my stomach mixer speeds up so much it makes me need the toilet, and by the time there are only one or two pages to go I am desperate.

  — Miss.

  — One moment, Billy.

  — But Miss . . .

  — The story is nearly over. Just sit tight and listen.

  — But Miss I need—

  — Shh, Billy. We’ll talk later.

  But I already know we are going to talk later. That’s the whole problem. So when she tells me we are going to talk later again it just makes the pinecone blender whiz down faster from my stomach to my bladder balloon chipping sparks and did you know that pinecones are very flammable and no, no, no . . .