by Matthew Crow
Mr. Thompson was the first to get to them. His fierce grasp on their arms immediately caused them to stop the fight and slump back, panting, glaring daggers at one another.
“You two are so bloody expelled,” he whispered to them as he yanked them through the dining room and out the door nearest to his office.
As the girls were dragged from view the sounds of the fight were still ringing in my ears. I felt myself become distant from them, as though I was observing my own body from up above, like Peter Pan trying to claw back his own shadow.
“Whoah, you’re hemorrhaging!” I heard Jacob say, but couldn’t see him anymore. My vision became narrower, like a black lens tightening around an image, until there was nothing but darkness.
I went to touch my face, and beneath my nose felt warm and damp.
“Oi, dinner lady, brother down!” Jacob yelled from what seemed like a great distance.
I felt myself grow lighter and lighter, until all I remember feeling was the welcome slap of the floor against the side of my face.
“OH MY GOD, HE’S KILLED HIM!” someone shouted as more and more footsteps echoed around my head.
After that it all went dark.
I woke up three hours later in hospital.
They took blood samples, which I barely noticed, and also some bone-marrow tests, which weren’t quite so easygoing.
Along the hospital corridor they had a chipped mural of tigers and elephants. In the waiting room there were posters of fund-raisers, and photographs of bald kids in head scarves smiling as soap opera actors handed over giant checks with plenty of zeroes.
Mum was silent the whole time. She just stared at the pile of magazines on the table beside us.
I walked over to the vending machine and pressed for a hot chocolate, watching carefully as the jet spat brown dregs all the way to the rim of the cup, and then wincing as the lavalike liquid scalded my fingers through the too-thin plastic. I had no intention of drinking it; I just wanted something to do. The literature was the same as it had been in every other waiting room. There were two pamphlets on osteoporosis, a doodled-on leaflet about antibiotics, untouched puzzle books, a well-thumbed copy of a fishing magazine, and three back issues of Woman’s Own. I spent a moment pitying the unfortunate who met the National Health Service’s intended demographic, but my sympathies would only stretch so far and eventually all I had to entertain me was Mum, whose banter was thin on the ground that day, and the hot chocolate, whose retrieval had been a short-lived thrill. So I sat and watched as the steam moved from thick plumes to sinewy wisps, and eventually cooled to nothing.
At one point I could see Mum’s body shaking a bit like she had hiccups, even though I knew she didn’t, so I put my hand in hers. She flinched but didn’t look at me. Just gripped my palm tightly as a fat tear formed and then rolled down her cheek, taking a dark line of mascara with it like debris in a landslide.
“Can we have takeout tonight?” I asked.
She told me I could have whatever I liked, but her voice was hoarse and she had to keep clearing her throat. I knew how she felt. Trying not to cry: an art in itself. Once, in primary school, Mum let me have some friends around to watch videos. She made popcorn and everything, so some of the hardest boys in school came, more for the promised refreshments than the joy of my company. But the whole way through E.T., I had to concentrate on not bursting into tears. When they found him face down in the river, I had to pretend to go to the toilet and sneak into Chris’s room so I could wail. Mum says I’m sensitive. Chris says I’m soft. Overall I think I prefer Mum’s diagnosis.
When we were leaving the hospital Mum went and sat down on a seat beside the main entrance. She still hadn’t said anything and neither had I. We were never that chatty in the first place.
She lit a cigarette and put her lighter back in her handbag, where she found a half-eaten bar of chocolate that she handed to me.
I sat chomping and Mum sat smoking, both of us thinking our own thoughts, until the crackling sound of static snapped us back into the moment.
“This is a reminder . . .” said a man’s voice, as if God had finally chosen to reveal Himself, and had done so in a slight Lancastrian twang, “. . . that there is no smoking anywhere on hospital premises. Once again, this is a reminder: There is no smoking allowed anywhere on hospital premises.”
“He’ll be lucky,” said Mum, quietly, and carried on puffing away.
I suspect Mum might have been a Punk in her youth.
“We could be fined up to fifty pounds,” I said, pointing to a bright red sign, which stated as much.
“Then we’ll flee the country and start new lives in Benidorm,” she said, taking one last drag.
She looked around and found the little camera that they must have been watching us on, then held up the tail end of her cigarette and raised her eyebrows before dropping it into a pot of shrubs.
“Odious little drone,” she said while she hunted through her bag for her keys.
“Will I lose my hair?” I asked in the car. Mum started the engine and closed her eyes.
“Not now, sweetheart, eh? Let’s just keep it together until we get home.”
As she reversed out of the parking space she slid Chris’s glum CD into the player and pressed play.
The only person I’d ever known before who had cancer was Miss Patton, our English teacher. During eighth grade she started getting thinner and thinner, and kept nodding off during lessons. Then one day she didn’t turn up, and instead we had Mr. Bryers, who just used to wheel in the big TV and put on a Romeo and Juliet video every lesson, the one where if you watch really carefully you can see Olivia Hussey’s boob pop out.
None of the teachers ever told us what was wrong. Sometimes they could be crueler than the children. I thought Miss Patton knew this as she never used to eat her lunch in the staff room. She’d just take her sensible sandwiches to her sensible car, and eat them behind the driving seat with the radio playing a sensible lunchtime play inside.
Word got around, though, because Michelle Harman’s aunty was a nurse and told Michelle’s mum that one of our teachers had been in hospital and hadn’t had a single visitor.
For some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about her, so Jacob and I organized a collection. We got over sixteen pounds for a card and a bunch of flowers, only Mr. Hall said we weren’t allowed the time off to deliver them, so Mum had to drive us to the hospital one evening. By the time we got there Miss Patton had been discharged.
She came back for a while, but seemed even more distant than usual. It was as though she’d seen something she couldn’t forget, no matter how hard she tried. Then Callum Roberts made a joke about semicolons and she quietly collected her things and never came back. We had two hours to ourselves that day. Or we would have if Callum hadn’t attempted to assassinate David White with a fire extinguisher. Mr. Bennett came in to find David curled up on the floor, drowning in a mass of white foam like someone had popped the Pillsbury Doughboy.
The entire class was put on a month’s lunchtime detention, so everyone stopped speaking to Callum for nearly a week.
All I could think about was who Miss Patton would tell about her awful day.
Back home Mum did stick to her word and got us takeout, so the day wasn’t entirely without perks.
We ate it in silence as neither of us really knew how to behave. It felt like the strange week between Christmas and New Year where something has happened and something is going to happen, but until then all you can do is sit, and wait, and think about it all.
I suppose you do try to imagine things like this happening, but when they do they never pan out the way you expect. When you imagine them there’s always music playing in the background, and a camera pans around and catches each emotion on your face as you move from hysterics to terror to verbose “moments” with your loved ones. But life isn’t real
ly like that. Because that would make life a feature-length BBC drama that wins awards. Real life is quieter, more understated. No one is backlit and nothing has a soundtrack and no one has someone cleverer than them writing their lines. And so they just say nothing and get on with it. More’s the pity, if you ask me. I quite like the idea of my own soundtrack.
Mum hadn’t wanted to phone anybody but she did text Chris at some point, though she must have only asked him over for the Chinese takeout because when he arrived it was like nothing was different, which I suppose nothing really was except that it had now been given a name.
“Evening, loved ones,” he said, slumping down straightaway on the couch and knocking me out of the way. “There were two people arrested on the Metro for heavy petting. How bad is that?” he said, using my fork to pile some leftover noodles onto a plate. “It was like a porno. The woman . . . and I use the term loosely . . . she had her leg up like this,” he said, chewing a prawn cracker as he reclined on the sofa. “And the bloke was . . . well . . . you could only really describe it as rutting.”
Mum didn’t say anything. She just put the cork back into her bottle of wine in an act of unusual restraint. The wheels on our recycling bin would practically buckle beneath the weight of all her empties. After a talk on addiction at school I once did a ten-question quiz on her, pretending it was for homework. The outcome was that she might have been a functioning alcoholic. When I told her this she laughed and said no one had dared accuse her of being functioning before.
Denial is the first of addiction’s five stages. The lady who gave the talk at school said so.
“Still rocking the heroin chic vibe, I see?” Chris said to me, and punched my arm playfully. I smiled but didn’t say anything. I had lost over twenty-eight pounds and the bags under my eyes had grown six shades darker in hue. I’d measured them against the diagram on the whitening toothpaste box, roughly equating the brown shades there to the purple-green that had started to spread around my eyes.
“What’s wrong? Has someone died?” Chris asked.
“Jesus,” Mum said, getting up and going into the kitchen with her hand over her mouth.
“What?” Chris said as she left. “What?” he said again, this time to me. “That was a prime opening anecdote. Funny, topical . . . it had everything going for it. I’m wasted on this family,” he said, and turned on the TV.
“I think you should follow Mum.” I nodded toward the kitchen, looking dead mournful. I thought it was a really blunt, poignant thing to say, and Chris would simply know from it that something bad had happened. But the dumb home videos they aired on You’ve Been Framed destroyed the mood I’d intended to set and Chris just shook his head, giving a big, elaborate moan before pushing a spring roll, whole, into his mouth.
“This better be worth it,” he said, and left me on my own.
One of the first things we learn is that people die. Then we start to learn why. Old age is the starting point. It’s more or less palatable, something everybody can just about stomach; the Soup of the Day to mortality’s grand buffet. People have long and happy lives, we are taught. Then they get tired. Then they just stop, fall asleep, forever. It’s why grandparents are so useful. For most people our first death is one we always knew was coming. The one we’d been prepared for from day one.
Then we learn more. Guns. War. Disease.
Cancer.
The big words. The bad words. The words that never end well.
And now I was one of them. And for a moment on the sofa suddenly that was all I was. The sound of the TV fell away as I stared down at my own body. The body that had never cooperated. The hair that never stayed molded into the shape I wanted. The spots that appeared out of nowhere. The small mound of belly that stuck out over the waist of my jeans like I was constantly recovering from Christmas dinner. And those stupid, soft patches of fuzz that sprouted on my face but never fused into the sophisticated five o’clock shadow that I needed to wear so that everybody would know I was a tortured poet.
Then, to top it all off, my body had borne its own would-be killer, and if I died now it would be all that anybody remembered about me. It would be my death that mattered. Not my life. It would be that word. The word that was bigger than me and stronger than me and more famous than I ever would be.
For a second the weight of it seemed so huge that I had to concentrate hard to catch my breath.
Then there were the other, strange things I felt. Excited, a bit. That things were going to change, to become different and focused. And on me, which was a plus. It was like the time Granddad died (which was bad) but I got my first-ever suit, which everyone agreed I wore exceptionally well (which was good.) It was sort of like yin and yang, where every white bit has a corresponding black bit, and the black bit has a white bit.
Nothing’s ever all bad if you think hard enough about it.
There was also the thought of school. I’d already been told I’d have to miss quite a lot. The doctors had talked about treatment and staying on a special ward and weeks and months and other timescales, which didn’t seem to mean anything to me. I didn’t like the idea of falling behind in lessons. But on the other hand, the idea of having to resit a whole year did hold a certain appeal. To my future classmates in I would have the wit and wisdom of a village elder or veteran rock star. Girls would flock and boys would flash green with envy. I could hold court and wow them all with tales of my experiences.
I might even consider affecting a cravat.
By the time they came back in, it was like they’d switched bodies. Mum was worryingly upbeat and Chris looked like he’d signed up for Disneyland and got a trip to the dentist.
He sat down next to me and didn’t say a word. Didn’t speak. Didn’t blink.
“God, this is ridiculous,” Mum said bouncily. “Come on, let’s put a DVD on. Francis love, you pick something,” she continued, popping the cork on her bottle and pouring herself a small glass.
“I don’t mind . . .”
“Anything you like, really.”
“I don’t. Well, maybe Chris . . .”
“Just pick a bloody DVD, Francis.”
I took the first thing that caught my eye and pressed play.
Everyone sat back and we watched the film. Only no one really watched; we just had an excuse not to look at one another for one hour and twenty-nine minutes precisely, after which I said good night and went to bed.
That night I lay in bed and tried to pinpoint exactly how I felt. I wasn’t sure, so I tried crying, but that didn’t work out too well either. I even tried having a deep thought about it all, about what it meant and why and how, only there didn’t seem to be anything to think. It just was.
The one thing I did wish was that I had someone to tell, to have a big, heartbreaking scene with, where my quiet bravery would be expressed through their tears and hysterics. In truth there was no one. There was Grandma, I suppose, but she was even tougher than Mum and only cried once at Granddad’s funeral, and that was when she realized she’d forgotten the corned beef pie for the wake. And there was Jacob, but he wouldn’t get upset because he was emotionally stunted, due to the lack of a positive male role model since his dad had been arrested for embezzlement.
My lack of friends had never bothered me before. I’d had other things to occupy my time, like Chris and books and music and plans for the future. It used to worry Mum, though. Once she had me tested for autism, but the tests proved futile. She had asked me why I didn’t have any friends except for that idiot with the lank hair (meaning Jacob). I said it was because my real friends would come later. She asked me why I didn’t at least try in the meantime, and I told her that I didn’t like meeting new people as the ones I did meet I generally didn’t like.
I tried to sleep but couldn’t and kept tossing and turning, so went back downstairs for a drink. Mum never cried in front of us. Or she never had before. Even wit
h Emma, and when Dad left, if things got too much for her she’d go upstairs and turn on the TV in her room, then come back downstairs five minutes later with red eyes and a fixed grin. She was crying that night, though, crying hard and breathlessly, like she’d been waiting her whole life to cry that way. Chris was holding her tightly to him, as if trying to squeeze her into silence. He looked determined, like he was hatching a plan.
I thought about going inside but didn’t know what to say. I felt oddly guilty, so snuck back upstairs before they saw me, and went to bed.
CHAPTER THREE
When I used to learn big words, I would use them over and over again until eventually they lost their splendor, like a rare coin thumbed so many times it begins to tarnish. I once filled out a feedback form using the word “superfluous” on six occasions in the Further Comments box, a box that amounted to three dotted lines.
When I realized that “embellish” was the fancy way of saying “exaggerate,” that was all anyone seemed to do for a while. At Christmas I proudly told Grandma that Mum and I planned on embellishing the tree on the fifteenth and had selected a palette of red and gold embellishments from a store that year, and that her embellishment of the cake had been dead resplendent (another quality find that month).
It was different when I started learning swear words, particularly when I realized what they meant. I would keep each one secret, like the last bar of chocolate on a doomed voyage, and then when no one else was around I would let it dance and melt on my tongue over and over again. Only this particular routine was cut short when Mrs. Lyle from number forty-two went blackberry picking one day and overheard me muttering a refrain of “wanker . . . wanker . . . wanker . . . wanker.” She wrote Mum a letter informing her, and posited undiagnosed Tourette’s. I was grounded for a week and had the TV taken out of my room.
