by Anne Fine
Leroy asked Stol once, when I fell into one of my brief sulks, “Don't you like any sports at all?”
“Well,” Stol said thoughtfully. “I've never tried it, of course. But I do wonder if I wouldn't quite like iceskating, if I had the chance.”
(Our nearest rink is sixty miles away.)
“Or saltwater kayaking.”
(We're ninety miles from the sea here.)
“So,” I said. “Pretty safe, then?”
Oh, yes. Pretty safe. So safe, the sports staff don't even realize who he is, so don't invent any homework to find out how he's doing.
he might be listening
At a quarter to two, Mum got so bored with magazines, she started pacing.
“I should have thought to bring a book with me.”
“They have a shop.”
“There's nothing I'd want to read in there. You'd think only people who like spy stories and romances get sick.” She swooped on a sheet of paper slipping out from beneath what I was writing. “What's this?” She inspected the tick pattern. “Is it a puzzle?”
“It's their depression survey. I marked it for all of us.”
“Which line is mine?”
I pointed. “And you came out very well.”
I kept my head down while she checked my answers. “I am not irritable. I do not have a negative attitude, and I don't avoid friends and family.”
“Sorry,” I said. “That must be Grandpa's column. You're two in front.”
She fell quiet again. But clearly I must have done a reasonable job, because this time she didn't argue with any of the ticks I'd given her. All she said when she'd finished was “So which line is Stol's?”
(Not mine, you notice. Stolly's.)
“Do you love Stolly more than me?”
“Of course not. I'd do anything for you.”
“Anything?”
“Anything.”
I thought for a moment. “Would you bungee-jump into a canyon?”
“No.”
She went back to inspecting my tick marks. Then, after a moment, she raised her head. “People like Stolly, they're so vulnerable, they make people shiver. Each day they get through is a giant piece of cosmic good luck. You feel, if you ever let up, if you ever stop worrying, something dreadful will happen.”
“I don't think Esme thinks that way.”
“No,” Mum said tartly. “Don't suppose she does.”
I said to her, straight out, “Would you rather have had a son like Stolly than a son like me?”
“No,” she said. “Though I have often thought it might have been more sensible if I'd been given both of you.”
“What? And Esme and Franklin had settled for a spaniel?”
“Shhh!” Mum said, waving a hand toward Stol in a hemight-be-listening way. And that's when he started twitching and groaning, and his fingers began scrabbling at the end of the plaster.
We both leaned over him. “Stolly?” Mum said. “Stol? Can you hear us? Are you in there, sweetheart?”
“Come in, number forty-three,” I said. (Family joke since the day Stol sulked for hours in a duck pond.)
I won't tell you what Stol muttered. If he'd been properly awake, and not trussed up in plaster, he would have had a major ticking off. But all Mum did was say, “Oh, good boy! Good boy!” as if he were a dog who'd done something clever, and she stroked his head gently miles away from the stitches.
Stol repeated the rude thing. I half expected Mum to change her tone and say, “Now, that's enough, Stol,” but she was in tears again, so it was up to me.
“I hope you know,” I said, “that you are only alive at all because of that jasmine bush. And that was a cutting from our house.”
Mum scolded through her sniveling. “Ian!”
“Well, it's the truth.”
Stol wasn't listening anyway. “It hurts.”
Mum sent me for the nurse, whose only real concern appeared to be whether he knew which foot she was tickling. When it was obvious he did, she pretty well strolled off again. For all his moaning about how much things hurt, Stol seemed to me to go back to sleep very quickly.
“You're crying again,” I accused Mum.
She lifted eyes that were so huge with tears, I saw my own reflection. “People like Stolly,” she said. “It's as if the world's just sitting there waiting to knock the stuffing out of them.”
“And people like me?”
“You're different,” she said. “You're—what's the word?—phlegmatic.”
“Phlegmatic?” (It sounded disgusting.)
She saw my look. “Oh, I know it sounds awful. But you robust types are the salt of the earth. People like Stol—”
She stopped again. It didn't matter, though, because I knew what she meant. Stol didn't even realize the days of the week came in the same order every time, until I told him.
How robust is that?
glory everywhere
Which is odd for a person who has so many good times. I'm no damp squib. My spirits rise on frosty mornings, or thudding down hills at top speed. But Stol sees glory everywhere. We'll lie on our backs, sun spangling our eyes, and Stol will say, “This is perfection, Ian. This is the perfect moment. I am perfectly happy.”
“It's all right, isn't it?” I'll agree, thinking of the sandwiches waiting in my schoolbag. (Nothing as good as Mr. Oliver's stuffed olive ciabatta, but good enough for me.) And Stol will prose on:
“No, seriously, Ian. This is the very best moment of my life. I am so perfectly happy I could die.”
“Wouldn't that spoil it a bit?”
“Ian, you're such a clod.” (His way of calling me phlegmatic.) “But nothing can spoil this moment. Not even you.”
And nothing can spoil my sandwich. So that's all right. Stol is in ecstasy. And I am happy.
glacier
We sat as Stol slept: me writing this, Mum reading more magazines she'd found in a corner. After a while she looked up from her Bella.
“I'm bored stiff. Tell me something.”
Honestly! Sometimes, when Dad's not around, you'd think I was simply another spare husband.
“I'll tell you a story Stol told me. There was this couple. They were so in love. Their parents let them marry young—”
“How young?”
“Eighteen.”
“Too young.”
“Well, you weren't there, and so they married anyway. And for their honeymoon they went climbing in Switzerland. In the Alps.”
Mum shook her head. Rock faces. Glaciers. To her, it's all trouble.
“They had a perfect week, climbing all day and having dinner by candlelight at the hotel every evening. And on the last day of their honeymoon, the husband slipped and fell in a crevasse. He was obviously dead, but he'd fallen in so deep that they couldn't get the body out.”
“What, not at all?”
“No. He'd slid through this narrow gap and was thoroughly wedged, miles down. It was impossible and everyone knew it, so in the end they held a little service in the snow above, and left the body there, interred in ice, in his moment of greatest happiness.”
“What about his young widow?”
“She went back to England, grieved for a year or two, then pulled herself together and trained as a doctor or architect or something, and led a full life.”
“Did she marry again?”
“I don't know. All Stol said was that she lived to be ninety-four. And when she was sitting at her kitchen table one morning, all wrinkled and feeble, with wispy gray hair floating around her ancient head, a letter came from the Swiss Mountain Authorities to tell her that, over the years, the glacier had shifted—hardly at all, but just enough for them to see the body and know that, this time, they could get it out. And they wanted to know if she'd like to be there when they raised it, to bury it.”
Mum stared. “Did she go?”
“Yes. Up it came, on a roped stretcher. And the body was frozen, of course, and fresh as a daisy.”
“No!
”
“Yes! He was still young and beautiful. He was eighteen. And she stood over him, hunched, ancient and all quivery from age, with rheumy eyes and bent fingers. His shriveled ninety-four-year-old wife.”
Mum shuddered. For a while she said nothing. Then: “Stol told you that?”
“Swore it was true. Claimed he'd read it somewhere.”
“Creepy.”
Her eyes were filled with horror. She stared at him, looking so young and so pale. All he seemed to be missing was the glacier to enfold him.
Whoops, I thought, looking at her face. Wrong story. Definitely wrong story.
scar
After another Bella, Mum told a horror story of her own. “You know what we talked about earlier? Whether I'd rather have had a son like Stol? Well, when we were going through all those tiresome inspections and interviews to see if we were fit to adopt, one of the things we had to do was tick things off a checklist like that depression one you did for Stolly. Except this was about the sort of child you wouldn't want.”
“Wouldn't want?”
“That's right. Whatever would get on your nerves. Greedy, say. Or untruthful. Selfish. Or noisy. Or sniffing all the time. That sort of thing.”
“Can't see the point. After all, it's not as if they can look at a baby before they give it to you and know what it's going to be like.”
“It's an exercise. And it makes sense. Up until then, people like us have usually only been thinking, ‘Oh, goody! They might give us a baby!' This is a sort of reminder that babies grow older, and though you might be able to stop them doing some really annoying things like sniffing without a hanky, you won't be able to train them out of their deep-down temperament, and maybe you won't like that.”
“Sort of Beware! Here be dragons!?”
“Exactly. So Geoff and I sat down to do our lists separately, as we'd been told. And since the adoption specialist had left her other papers in her car, to pass the time she filled in one for herself. ‘My three are all my own,' she told us. ‘But it's helpful to think about things you'd like clients to consider.' So me and your dad and Daffodil—”
“Daffodil? This lady was called Daffodil?”
Mum ignored me. “We all sat wondering what to tick. It was interesting. In fact, your dad and I had quite a good long chat about the qualities in a child we would have found a little trying.”
“Absolutely hated, you mean?”
“Well, yes. Absolutely hated. He wanted to tick ‘sneaky' most. And I was thinking, What if we end up with one of those ghastly children who sits like a lardy lump, taking no interest in anything? I couldn't stand it.”
“Lucky to fetch up with wonderful me.”
She shoved her tiny foot out to press my huge one— “Oh, not half!”—and went on with her story. “We finished first, and waited while the adoption specialist—”
“Daffodil.”
“—sat there, merrily ticking off her absolute hates, the same way that we had. Then all the blood drained from her face. She went quite gray. It was terrible, Ian. Terrible.”
I pinned my ears back. As stories go, not quite as good as one of Stolly's, but getting better.
“She hurled the clipboard on the floor. ‘Oh, God!' she cried. ‘I've just ticked off the four things in a child I can't stand most. And it's my Andrew!'”
“Ouch!” I said. “And no returns within the month for a full refund.” Then, knowing Mum had somehow fallen in the mood for it, I dared to add, “So, tell me. Any regrets about me?”
I can't think what I was expecting. Certainly not for her to reach across and push the hair up from my forehead. “That.”
“What?”
“That scar.”
“What scar?”
“For heaven's sake!” Mum dug in her bag for her compact. I wiped the film of powder off the mirror, and then the smear that I'd made doing that, then took a look.
“That? That is tiny. You can barely see it.”
“It looked a whole lot bigger when you were small.”
“Still,” I said. “Biggest regret? This scar is practically invisible. I don't even remember getting it.”
“Well, you wouldn't. You had it already when we were given you.”
“PD?”
(Stol-Speak for “before my adoption”: Pre-Dustbin.)
“Don't use that expression, please. And, yes. That's what I hate about it. I know where you got every single other scar. But not that one. Yet somewhere out there in the world there is—or was—some other woman who does know. I've cared for you all your life, and I don't. And I hate that.”
She snatched back the powder compact and snapped it shut. She was so wound up I thought it best to drop the whole subject. She picked up a Sailing Weekly and flicked through, not even pretending she was reading it, and I went back to my writing. But I couldn't help feeling a little bit pleased, and a little smug really. For, after all, if that's the worst thing my mother has to regret, then she's certainly turned out much luckier than Daffodil.
a tongue so long …
And Esme, if you don't like getting notes from school. The problem was that Stolly would say anything. The times I've heard him complaining to Mrs. Chambers, “I honestly can't believe that you're teaching us this right,” you'd think he'd be toast. But all she says is, “Stol, your tongue's so long it ought to have a knot in it,” and carries on teaching.
But that's the thing about him. He treats everyone as if they're the same. It is as if he doesn't even notice that some people are older, or stiffer, or more important. I've heard him ask head teachers if they want to swap yogurts, and excuse himself for being late to lessons by explaining that he and the janitor were discussing Mesopotamia.
And no one puts him down for “being smart.” Right back since nursery, the whole world's known that Stol has passions, and anyone who drifts in his sight line is risking a lecture on dinosaurs or astronomy, arctic expeditions or insects. His homemade family tree from Genesis spilled over all four sides of our dining table for months. For my project on Vikings, all I did was take dictation. And since what Stol doesn't know about weather and stuff could be written on a fly's wing, we've always got top marks in natural science—except when Mr. Pinkerton has made me sit where it's difficult to make sense of Stol's attempts to send semaphore.
The trouble is, he hasn't simply fetched up knowing things. He has opinions. And he speaks his mind. I can't describe how close to tears poor Reverend Hubert got when Stol spent a whole lesson insisting God was just “the grown-ups' imaginary friend.” Some teachers get ratty. Others forbid him to open his mouth till the lesson is over. Mr. Havergill once lost his temper. “One single word more, Stol, and your head's in that holly bush!”
And most let off steam when it comes to report time. We play an end-of-term game at my house, translating Stol's reports.
“Now, this is Mrs. Tarraway. She's written: ‘Whilst expressing his views with admirable vigor and conviction, Stol could occasionally make allowance for the slightly more tentative opinions of others.' ”
“She means you're an opinionated little cockroach.”
“A menace to her happy classroom.”
“One giant pain.”
Stol doesn't mind. He seems to have accepted years ago that he's not quite normal. I don't think it bothers him. It takes all sorts, as people say. And even when thinking deep thoughts and staring down from high viaducts, he has generally been cheerful. Putting aside the odd bad time, he's always seemed to me to wake to face each day as if it might turn out quite fun. I look at him flat out in front of me, too bashed to wake, and it's hard to believe that his spirits could slip down so fast, he'd go after that tea towel, then up to that rafter.
But things in his mind do have a definite habit of turning strange. Take a few weeks ago, when for once he'd been flushed out of his locker and out onto the sports field. We took a break behind the roller and Stol said to me,
“Remember that little black devil on my shoulder?”
“That one I couldn't see because it jumped so fast.”
“Because it wasn't there,” I corrected. “Because you were only imagining it. Because you're bats.”
“Yes, that one. Well, it's sort of back again. Except that, this time, it isn't a little devil on my shoulder. It's like another me.”
Sometimes he quite defeats me. “Sorry?”
He put a grass stalk in his mouth and let it dangle. “What I mean is, I feel I have another self hiding inside me. I know him well because he's with me all the time, everywhere I go. But it's like being haunted.”
“Haunted.”
“Yes. Because he's really my enemy, out to cause trouble, and he keeps trying to tempt me.”
“Tempt you to what?”
“Be more like him instead of me. Do things he wants to do. Think thoughts he's thinking.” Stol spat out the soggy grass blade. It landed on my shorts, but I didn't say anything. “And since I really am him too, of course, it's very tempting.”
I thought of Dad, making his curly-wurly cuckoo sign whenever Stol starts up like this. “So what's he like, this shadow self of yours?”
“Like a dark side. You know, like when they're giving you a ticking off and they say something like ‘You know your problem? You're your own worst enemy.' Well, he's like that.”
“Seriously spooky.”
“Not half.” Stol spread his hands. Under each nail, there was a line of black. “What can you do?”
“Exorcism!” I shouted, and threw myself on top of him. We rolled about, me shouting all the snatches from old horror films I could remember along the lines of “Depart, ye gibbering fiends from hell!” and “Begone, foul black devils, I command thee!” Stol played his part, first scrunching up his face in the agonies of demonic possession, then affecting an expression of intense inward struggle followed by pure peaceful bliss.
Then we lay back to rest.
“See that cloud?” Stol said. “Wheelbarrow.”
“See that one? Double bass.”
