by Matthew Crow
“Bloody hell, Christopher, it looks like a bomb’s gone off in here!”
The rest of the household groaned.
“Volume!” Chris said.
“No sympathy.” Mum began rolling the Hoover to the farthest corner of the room. Fiona came in carrying a chocolate candy bar and a blanket. She kicked Callum’s legs off the couch and sat down beside him, making a show of squishing herself deeper and deeper into the recesses of the couch.
“Do you want some chocolate, Francis?” she asked, brandishing the bar at me from her nest.
“No, thanks, we had lunch in town.”
“I remember a time when I used to have lunch,” she said, pretending to be sad, and started munching her way through the chocolate. “Now it’s all Red Cross parcels and harvest festival donations.”
“Speaking of which . . . here!” Mum threw the plastic bag of ground beef toward Chris. “Courtesy of Grandma.”
“Thanks. I suppose,” he said, examining the raw meat.
Callum’s eyes widened. He shifted on the sofa, pressing himself backward like a shocked kitten, and for the first time since we’d arrived sat bolt upright. Then he lurched toward the door.
“Going to throw up!” he said, only just making it to the bathroom before the sound of damp retching started to echo off the porcelain bowl.
“Charming. Look, we’re not stopping because we’ve got things to do,” said Mum, widening her eyes at me, which meant it was time to go.
“How you feeling now?” Chris asked me.
“Fine, I suppose. The optician said I had twenty-twenty vision, which means I could become a pilot or join the army, if the mood ever takes me.”
“Worth the trip then,” he said.
“I love a man in uniform,” said Fiona, sprawling over Callum’s place on the sofa and resting her head gently in Beth’s lap.
On the mantelpiece, between the full ashtrays and the well-thumbed stacks of takeout leaflets, sat a chaotic pile of unopened mail. Mum surveyed the mess and shook her head. “Honestly, the money I spent on your education, and even life’s most basic skills are beyond you. And the state of this place . . .”
“Enter Henry Hoover.”
“Well, you do have to plug him in and use him, you know,” Mum said. “Just having him here won’t make any difference.”
Chris grabbed a notepad and pen and pretended to scribble down her instructions.
“Plug in . . . push . . . think I’ve just about got the gist.”
“I don’t know why I bother,” Mum said, kissing his forehead and slipping him twenty pounds before we left.
Just as we were about to go Callum came out of the toilet, looking hunched and sad, like he was too delicate to handle anything bad life might throw at him. He squinted up at us and his whole body spasmed once more as he noticed something on my face.
“Oh, God!” he said, with his fingers pressed to his mouth, and ran back toward the toilet.
“Are you all right?” Chris asked me, standing up from his place on the floor. He took me by the arm and sat me down as Mum rummaged through her bag for something. She came at me with a packet of Kleenex and a worryingly determined look in her eyes.
I still didn’t entirely know what was going on until I felt something warm trace the length of my lip and spread down my chin, and then gulped down on a glob of metallic-tasting blood.
“AAAAAAAAAAH!” I screamed from the couch.
“You have to apply pressure,” Mum said, with her iron fingers crushing the bridge of my nose like a torturer. “Or it won’t clot.”
“Just let it bleed!” I begged.
“Shut up, Francis, she knows what she’s doing,” Chris told me.
“See?” Mum said, pressing harder on my nose.
“Oh, my God, it hurts!”
“Don’t be so soft.”
“You’re fracturing my skull!”
“Man up, Francis,” said Fiona from the couch.
I steeled myself and tried to be more macho about the ordeal. But Mum was tough. No matter how fancily she dressed, she couldn’t hide her true nature. Everyone at school was scared of her. Especially the other mums. She once knocked out a man with a single punch when he barged into her shopping cart in the grocery store. She also went around to Scott Earnshaw’s house when Chris told her about his campaign of terror against me. When Scott’s mum tried to deny it was happening, Mum gave her a final warning. After Scott didn’t heed her advice and locked me in the art supplies closet one lunchtime, Mum went back to their house and lunged at Mrs. Earnshaw. Chris and I watched from the car but they landed inside the vestibule and Mum kicked the door shut with her leg. When Chris asked her what the hell she was playing at, she just smiled and said, “Reverting to type.” Then we drove to McDonald’s and had a drive-thru. I marked it in my diary at the time as “The Best Day Ever.”
After five solid minutes of the sort of pain they make documentaries about, Mum eased her grip a bit.
“There, I think that got it,” she said, standing up and observing her handiwork.
My nose felt like it was about to drop off. I was scared to touch it, and doubly scared to look in case of irreversible damage. I’d already had it broken once and feared the worst. My eyes were watering and I could feel myself weaken with the trauma of it all.
“Do you want a T-shirt to change into?” Chris said.
I nodded feebly and he told me to help myself. Only as I got up I saw him and Mum give each other a secret glance, which I knew meant they had been talking about me in private.
I took ages choosing a T-shirt that I wanted because Chris spent all his money shopping on eBay, so borrowing clothes from him was much better than buying new ones from a shop. I saw two I liked. I put on the smallest underneath a Kiss T-shirt I’d had my eye on for some time, and dropped two pounds into Chris’s money jar, so it wasn’t really stealing. While I was getting changed I could hear Mum and him talking about me in serious voices, only they stopped once I came out of his bedroom and Chris told me he would force-feed me the Kiss T-shirt if anything bad happened to it. I promised to take care of it. We left my T-shirt in his living room because Mum said it was ruined.
“Just cut off the bloody part and use it for dusting,” she told him when he protested.
He looked sick as anything but couldn’t be bothered to argue.
“What were you and Chris talking about in the hallway?” I asked in the car on the way home.
“Just chatting,” said Mum, and pressed her foot to the floor.
“This is a thirty-miles-per-hour zone.”
“I can read, Francis.”
“In two years’ time I’ll be driving,” I said.
I had to keep doing this with Mum. She’d once promised me that for my seventeenth she would pay for a set of driving lessons, so that fourteen days from my birthday I would be a qualified driver. It was up to me to maintain the momentum until she made good on her pledge. I imagined myself with Fiona in an open-topped sports car. The wind was blowing attractively through our hair as we cruised down country lanes, one of her hands resting casually on my leg. The only downsides were I’m not too great with directions, and the fact that there weren’t many country lanes near ours. There was a patch of farmland and some hedges on the back road behind the nearby supermarket, but it didn’t look anything like my fantasy, more the sort of place that the Evening Chronicle describes as a “dogging hotspot” (which I knew about because Mr. and Mrs. Tilsdale at number sixteen got caught in the act twice in one year). So that was my plan, and in preparation for it I had already bought a pair of mock-leather driving gloves and created the perfect mix tape for our sepia-toned journeys of love.
“We’ll see,” Mum muttered to me.
“We will,” I said, putting one of Chris’s mix CDs into the radio.
“Wahwahwah!” M
um said, rolling her eyes. “Why do you always listen to this dirge?”
“It’s cool.”
“It’s depressing! In my day we only listened to music you could dance to. You’re not going to bump and grind to some postgrad with a three-chord refrain and a broken heart,” she said, veering quickly sideways when she nearly missed the turnoff.
“You can shuffle to it, and sort of bounce your head while you’re staring at the floor. Then you can pretend you’re in a Cure video.”
“Even the Cure don’t pretend they’re in the Cure anymore. Put on something more upbeat, Francis.”
“After this song. What were you talking about, with Chris? You didn’t answer me before.”
“Oh . . .” Mum said, driving faster and faster. “Just making sure he was okay for money.”
“You said my name.”
She had; I’d been listening at the door.
“You may have cropped up in our conversation, yes, but only in passing. You’re really not the most gripping of topics, love.” As she spoke Mum poked her hand out of the car window and flipped her middle finger at a man in a Toyota who had tooted at us twice. Then she went quiet and sighed.
“I do love you. You know that, Francis?”
“I know,” I said. “I love you too.”
“Good,” she said, and nodded, speeding up even more as the traffic lights went from green to amber. “Glad we got that sorted. Now change this song before it kills us both.”
CHAPTER TWO
It all came to a head on a Monday morning. The tests and the diagnosis and the strange, eerie dinners where there seemed to be a million things Mum and I wanted to say, but couldn’t because we were pretending to listen to every single syllable the newsreader was uttering.
When I started feeling unwell she had tried to diagnose me herself. I knew she was doing it because she’d close the laptop every time I went into the front room, then keep behaving strangely the next day. At first she thought I might have gastric flu because of the amount of time I spent in the bathroom. I played along for a while, but in truth I was in there for personal reasons. Mum was not one of life’s “knockers,” and consequently all self-exploration had to be done behind the bathroom’s bolted door.
Then she figured it might be an allergy of some sort, so she threw out all the toiletries and replaced them with white bars of soap that said soap-free on the packet (!?).
We were on nothing but meat and vegetables for two weeks until she got sick of it and bought two loaves of sliced white and a frozen lasagna from the corner shop.
Then she thought it was depression, so she took the lock off the bathroom door and left a leaflet about “talking therapy” on my pillow one night while I was asleep. Eventually she took Grandma’s advice and started doling out iron supplements before school every morning, which had a negative effect on my stomach and caused an almost-disaster during double Chemistry. Fortunately I am quite swift. I have been a consistent silver medal winner in the one-hundred-meter sprint since kindergarten.
To be honest, before we knew what was really wrong with me I secretly blamed Mum anyway. She’d always had a cleaner coming around to polish the house top to bottom, and kept Air Wick antitobacco plug-ins set all the way to eleven, even with the windows closed. Because of her my immune system simply wasn’t up to coping with the threat of alien bodies. I was practically the Boy in the Bubble; all my autoimmune responses stripped bare by chemical representations of pine forests and summer meadows.
I had to get the Metro bus to school that morning because Mum was running late.
“Remember I’m at Jacob’s tonight, so if you need me you’ll have to ring my cell,” I called through the living room doorway.
“Bye, love,” she said, and kissed my cheek, handing me a five-pound note. “Get yourself a sandwich at breakfast club. Chris cleared me out last night. He even took the leftover veg.”
School hadn’t done breakfast club for over two years by this stage, but it seemed pointless telling Mum as she was always in a hurry in the morning. The extra stress might have tipped her over the edge. Anyway, from the fivers she had been doling out instead of nutrition for the previous two years, I’d saved enough to afford a new laptop and probably still had change for an easyJet flight to Kraków or similar, so I wasn’t about to buck that trend.
Jacob wore a thin tie to school and carried around foreign books that he pretended to read on the bus. He thought he had Gallic charm because of his French lineage, but Mum said his family weren’t actually French at all—his aunty just ran a caravan site in the Ardèche once but now she bred dogs in Salford with her new husband. I didn’t mind so much as Jacob had served as my best friend for over ten years. On his part our friendship stemmed from the fact that I was loyal and amusing and had at least three stories that were guaranteed to entertain, one of which involved a minor local celebrity and was told to me by Chris ages ago. On mine it really was down to the lack of any other option. Jacob was someone I could sit with and look like I was being social and entertaining. High school was definitely not My Moment. I was wasted in Tyne and Wear, having read at least one book a week since I was in first year.
Until the end of sophomore year, though, Jacob would have to do.
“I just want a quick look, to make sure my answers are right,” he said as we walked from the Metro station toward school.
“No.”
“Please?”
“You should have done it yourself.”
Jacob kicked a can onto the road and an old lady swore at him from across the street.
“I did,” he whined.
“Then show me yours and I’ll tell you if it’s right.”
Jacob always wanted to copy my homework. This was largely because I was quite the intellectual, having achieved all A to Cs in my mock final exams.
Jacob was SparkNotes clever at best.
“But you’re just so gifted and inspirational. I want to be you when I grow up, Frankie,” he said, perhaps not wholly seriously.
“Fine,” I said, and picked up my pace so he was forced to do a skip every third step to keep up with me.
After first registration we had General Studies. School had given us our own laptops. They were supposed to be for schoolwork only, but Chris jigged mine about so that I could download music. The plus side being that I had the most extensive music collection of anyone my age, possibly ever. The downside being that it had contracted most major viruses and one or two minor ones, and would perform elaborate and spontaneous emergency reboots halfway through whatever masterpiece I was working on.
The computer warmed up slowly and told me that it was under serious threat and danger. I swore at it and pressed the small orange X at the top right hand of the screen.
We were supposed to be researching the importance of local government, for a PowerPoint presentation at the end of the week. No one really was, though. Beside me Jacob was watching videos of cats falling off things. And at the other side Gemma Carr was Googling “Period Two Months Late Cystitis?” with a frantic look in her eyes.
With my screen still open I checked my Homework Diary—or Personal Planner, as we were supposed to call them, even though they were just Homework Diaries with sticky labels on the front—to see what delights I’d missed out on the previous night.
It told me that I was analyzing three children’s stories for English Language using the framework provided for tomorrow’s lesson, and planning the Othello lunchtime discussion group, which I ran in an attempt to seem like a rounded individual. I had done neither, and just as I was about to start I began feeling funny again. Not sick as such, but hazy, like I’d suddenly just woken up there and then, in the middle of a school day, and didn’t quite know how to conduct myself. My eyes became more blurry and I could feel my head pounding, so I pushed my chair back and rested my forehead on the desk.
I di
dn’t know how long I’d been asleep because when I woke up everyone had left and Miss Spence was standing over me looking concerned.
“You were dead to the world,” she said.
“Ugh,” I said, and stood up quicker than I should have. I felt dizzy and queasy and had to sit back down again.
“Is everything okay, Francis?”
“Yes, Miss,” I said, collecting my things.
“And things are okay at home?”
“Yes. Sorry I fell asleep. It wasn’t a comment on the quality of the teaching or anything like that.”
“That’s fine. If you ever do need to talk, Francis, you know my door is always open.”
I didn’t quite know how to respond to this, so I just nodded and left, feeling stupid.
I sat with Jacob in the dinner hall but didn’t eat anything because my head was still pounding and even the thought of food was turning my stomach.
“Shall we head off in a minute?” he asked as a commotion started at the far end of the room.
“Suppose,” I said, going to collect my bag. “I don’t think I’m going to make it tonight though. I still feel rough.”
Before Jacob could say anything, two freshman girls started shoving each other beside the serving hatch.
“I told you to leave him alone!” the prettier girl, Rameela, shouted in the blond girl’s face while trying to claw out clumps of her hair.
The other girl yelled back as Rameela slammed her to the floor and started dragging her in a horizontal line by her hair. Rameela started to kick out at her but found herself being dragged down too. Soon they just became a blurry mass of fists and flying locks of hair as they writhed on the floor, hammering punches into each other.
The teachers sprang to their feet and began running toward them. The only time our school ever really pulled together as one was in such situations, when we formed the Human Barrier, like demonstrators at an antiwar protest. As soon as the teachers stood up and began running toward the eye of the storm, everyone in the dining room pushed their chairs back a foot, so that each adjacent seat at the long rows of tables was touching, creating an impenetrable obstruction that, try as they might, nobody could pass. Eventually they gave up, red in the face and ranting like madmen, and took the long route to the scene of the crime, all the way around the perimeter of the dining tables, by which point the girls were back on the floor, pulling each other’s hair.
