The Ant Colony

by Jenny Valentine

  Isabel put her hands on her hips then and clucked her tongue and said, “What lesson is it now then?”

  “Yoghurt opening,” I told her, and she laughed.

  She said being home-schooled was a lot more than wandering about the place waiting for my mum to wake up.

  “She is awake,’ I said, which was actually true.

  She said, “If your mum got a whiff of what home-school was about you’d be down the local primary in a second. Home-skiving’s what you’re doing.”

  See? That’s why Mum didn’t like Isabel.

  I didn’t look at her, even though I know she was looking at me. I ate some more yoghurt before she could ask for it back.

  “So you’ve met us all then,” she said.

  “I’ve met you and the landlord with the face.”

  “That’s Steve,” she said. “Don’t stare. It was an accident with a facial peel.”

  I asked her what one of those was and then I wished I hadn’t because it was something to do with burning your old skin off with acid.

  I gave her back the yoghurt. “Why would someone want to do that?” I said.

  She told me not to underestimate the power of getting old, or something. “Ask your mum,” she said. “Watch her closely when she hits forty.”

  I asked her who else there was to meet.

  “Well, you’ve got Mick to come – beard, bike, body odour. Met him yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “Aren’t you the lucky one.” She looked at her ceiling. “The flat above me’s empty, but it won’t be for long.”

  “What about your dog?” I said, and I asked her what it was called.

  “Doormat,” she said. “Where is he?”

  I laughed. “Doormat,” I said after her. “I don’t know where he is, I haven’t seen him. Only that time when he was peeing.”

  “He’s always peeing,” she said. “He’s trying to be macho. Go and have a look in his basket, would you? It’s by my bed. You have to boot him out in the mornings sometimes, tell him who’s boss.”

  When I was out of the room she called after me, “I’ll make you some toast.”

  Doormat was curled up in his basket with his face hidden in his bottom. He wagged his tail a bit, just at the tip, and he stretched like everything hurt. I picked him up and took him to the kitchen.

  “Don’t spoil my dog,” Isabel said. “Make him use his legs or I don’t know what’ll happen.”

  I put the dog down and he lay in the corner and hid his face in his bottom again. You really couldn’t tell which end of him was which, like a dog doughnut.

  “What does your mum do for work?” Isabel said. She had her back to me while she cut the bread.

  I said she was “between jobs” because I like the way it sounds, all grown up. I said she was having an interview at the pub down the road and she was getting ready for it right now. “She was there last night and the man offered her one, just like that.”

  “I bet he did. You tell her I can always babysit if she needs.”

  “I don’t need a babysitter. I can sit myself,” I said.

  “Well, not when you’re ten dear, that’s not really allowed. But you know where I am.”

  That’s when I told her the rules of babysitting because I found them out once in a library, to be sure. The rules are that you can leave your child at home whenever you like as long as you can get home in fifteen minutes and they are good at looking after themselves and being sensible and they have your phone number somewhere. So seeing as I’m very sensible and the pub was only down the road, I wouldn’t be needing a babysitter at all. That’s what I told her.

  Nobody ever believes me. Isabel didn’t believe me either. She scribbled her phone number on a piece of paper and then she made me learn it and say it to her without looking, and then she asked me what I wanted on my toast.

  “Anything.”

  She asked me if I slept well and I said, “Fine, thanks. Me and Mum slept like logs.” I crossed my fingers she didn’t hear Mum coming in at four in the morning. I know it was four cos she made so much noise doing it. I think she tripped over and whoever was with her couldn’t see well enough in the dark to help her up. I think it was Steve.

  I said, “Mum?” And I sat up in bed to see what was going on.

  Mum said, “Shush, go to sleep, it’s four o’clock in the morning.” So that’s how I know.

  They went into the kitchen and sat on the floor, and Steve must’ve been a very funny man cos Mum was just laughing and laughing. Maybe he told Mum about his facial peel.

  I smiled at Isabel right through my lie, without even blinking, and she smiled back exactly the same, so maybe she knew and maybe she didn’t, but neither of us was going to say.

  She put a pile of toast on the table. Isabel made her own bread. It had all lumps and bits in it, but it wasn’t as bad as it sounds.

  I was on about my fifth bit when I heard Mum’s shoes on the stairs. She was coming down carefully cos of the heels. I could picture her, sort of sideways and a bit stiff looking, pressing her hands against the walls. I brushed the crumbs off my front and Doormat jumped up and started hoovering them straight away, like a living, breathing dust buster. He followed me when I went and put my head out the door. Maybe he thought I’d leave a trail of crumbs.

  “What are you doing in there?” Mum said. She looked pretty and important, and you couldn’t tell she’d had two late nights in a row at all.

  “Just visiting Isabel.”

  “Oh yeah?” she said and she came in the flat and almost trod on the dog. “Oh shit!” she said “Sorry, dog,” as she walked in the kitchen.

  “It’s funny cos his name is Doormat,” I said to her, but it was only me who was laughing.

  “Hello, Isabel,” she said and she sounded really loud in the tiny kitchen. “I’m Cherry, Bo’s mum. Is she bothering you at all? You all right with her in here?”

  “I invited her in,” Isabel said. She wasn’t really smiling.

  “Well, that’s nice,” Mum said. “I’m off now. Job interview. I’ll be back in a bit. Wish me luck.”

  I put my arms round her waist and she smelled all lovely, and she kissed me in that way she does when she’s thinking about her lipstick, all gentle and hardly there, like an eyelash or a butterfly.

  Mum was almost out the door when Isabel called after her, asking should she give me my lunch as well as my breakfast. There was a bit of an edge in the way she said it that made me feel bad for eating so much toast.

  “No need,” Mum said, clicking back in and looking hard at me. “I’ll be back by then. And Bo has lunch money, don’t you, darling?”

  I shook my head. It was quiet and nobody moved. I counted to three. Then Mum opened her purse and shoved a crumpled fiver in my hand. It was soft and old like tissue. I opened it out to have a proper look. I didn’t know what to think. I never normally got that much just for lunch.

  Mum told me not to spend it all at once and then she said, “Come and kiss me goodbye then.”

  I followed her to the door. She took the fiver off me and put it back in her purse. “Sorry, Bo,” she said. “It’s all we’ve got. I won’t be long. I’ll bring you back a sandwich or something.”

  And then she was gone.

  I pretended to be putting the money in my pocket when I walked back in. I didn’t want Isabel thinking anything about anything.

  Five (Sam)

  The old lady on the ground floor was nocturnal and so was her dog, probably through habit rather than choice, because she walked it in the middle of the night. I know because that’s how we met, on my eighth day. She got locked out at half past four in the morning. I believed her at the time anyway. She was the first person to speak to me in my new life.

  There was a park just round the corner. I learned to call it a park, but actually it was a patch of grass with two benches and some bushes and a bin for dog shit. It was also an openair crack house. Isabel told me, but she clearly didn’t care. She’d be
en there the night I had to let her in. She threw stones at my window. I thought I’d dreamed them.

  “Oi!” she said in this shouting sort of whisper. “Country! Get down here and open the door.”

  I had to put some clothes on. The stairs were cold and gritty under my feet and I could hardly see. I thought I might still be asleep. She stood there on the doorstep like I’d shown up three hours late to collect her.

  “Doesn’t anyone brush their hair any more?” she said.

  It felt strange, someone talking to me, like having a spotlight shined in my eyes.

  “How long’ve you been here?” she said.

  I had to clear my throat to speak, like it was rusty. “I just got up,” I said.

  “No, Einstein, how long’ve you lived here?” she said.

  “Oh. About ten days.”

  “I haven’t seen you,” she said, like that meant I was lying. She was feeling about for her spare key above the doorframe but she wasn’t quite tall enough to reach.

  “Well, I’ve been here,” I said. “I’ve been keeping to myself.” I got the key for her.

  She looked me up and down and laughed once. “Pink lung disease.”

  “What?”

  “Pink lung disease. Don’t you young people know anything?”

  She told me about this policeman at the dawn of the motor age who got sent from his village to do traffic duty in Piccadilly. He wasn’t any good at directing traffic. Nobody was because it was a new thing. The policeman got hit by a car and he died. The doctor who cut him up had never seen healthy, pink, country lungs before. He was used to city lungs, all black and gooey, so he said that was the cause of it. Pink lung disease. Not a car driving over him at all.

  She looked at me the whole time she was talking. She was the very first person to see me since I’d been here. I was conscious of it.

  “You’ve got lovely country skin,” she said. “Look at the glow on you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, because I didn’t know how else to take it.

  “You stick out like a sore thumb with that healthy skin.”

  “No I don’t,” I said.

  “Put that key back for me, would you?” she said, and I reached up and put it back above the doorframe. She noticed my watch. It has a thick strap. I always wear it. “What’s the time?” she said.

  “Four thirty-six.”

  “Well, what are you standing here for, at that hour?” she said, and she sent me back to my room and shut the door behind her, like she’d forgotten I was only standing there because of her.

  I couldn’t go back to sleep. Someone was boiling a kettle in the flat upstairs. I heard the plug going into the socket, the switch click to ON, the thrum of the water bubbling on the counter top. I heard an alarm clock somewhere beep seventeen and a half times and then stop. I heard the scrape and warble of pigeons waking up on the windowsill.

  I pictured the walls and ceilings and floors separating everyone in their little boxes. I thought about how thin they were, and what might be between them, like dust and mice and lost letters, like feathers and crumbling plaster and hundred-year-old wallpaper. I thought about everyone in the whole city, alone in our boxes like squares on graph paper, like scales on a fish, like ants.

  Now I was an ant, maybe Max would’ve liked to study me, navigating my way round the Tube, walking down a crowded street without colliding, stacking shelves and watching them empty again, sweeping my floor, putting the rubbish out.

  Do ants know that they are working for the colony? That whatever little job they get to do until they die actually forms a meaningful part of the whole? Do they know that? Because I certainly didn’t.

  Have you ever done that thing where you interrupt a line of ants? They’re all moving along, no questions asked, filled with a sense of purpose, and you draw a line across their path in the mud or the sand or whatever, just a line, with a stick or your shoe or an empty vinegar bottle. The ants in front of the line carry on like nothing happened, like there’s nothing to worry about. They don’t look back. But the ones behind the line, the ones who walk into it, they lose the plot. It’s like they all go insane and run around tearing their hair out because they’ve got no idea what the hell they’re supposed to be doing. Like they’ve forgotten everything they ever knew.

  Max hated it when I did that. It drove him crazy.

  That’s what I was wondering, sitting in my room listening to other people who didn’t know that I existed. If Max was watching me then from above, what side of the line in the ants was I on?

  A few nights later I bumped into the old lady again in the hallway. It wasn’t late. I was going out for some air because I’d been in my room all day. She came out of her flat just before I got to the front door.

  “Ah, Country,” she said. “Come in, meet the neighbours.”

  I didn’t want to meet anyone. I shook my head. “No thanks,” I said, and I opened the door. I could see a slice of blackish, street-lit sky. I could smell the warm metal and dust of outside.

  “You’ve got to meet the neighbours,” she said.

  “No, it’s all right.”

  The door was properly open now. Two people walked past on the street, a man and a woman, and they glanced up at me in the light of the hall for less than a second. My shadow was long down the front steps.

  She said, “What are you on about, ‘No, it’s all right’? It’s the rules. I have to introduce you.”

  I said I’d rather she didn’t.

  “What do you mean?”

  She was standing in the doorway now and I was halfway to the pavement. I couldn’t really see her face because the light was behind her.

  “I don’t want to meet the neighbours,” I said.

  “Suit yourself,” she said. She pushed the door shut in front of her, its rectangle of light on the street disappearing in one quick, diminishing movement.

  “I will,” I said to nobody at all.

  I wasn’t out for long. I walked about. I sat on a bench at the canal. I watched people in cafes and bars to see what they were doing with their time. I got a newspaper and stared at some TV through the window at Dixons for a bit.

  When I got back the lights were still on at the old lady’s house. I could see them from the street. Inside, the door to her flat was open. I heard her moving around, heard the muffled sound of her voice and the tap of the dog’s feet somewhere, like fingers on a table. I leaned my head against the edge of the front door and watched the sky slice squeeze to nothing while I closed it without making a sound.

  “What’s your name, anyway?” she said suddenly close behind me, before I’d even turned around.

  “God, you made me jump,” I said.

  “Sorry,” she said. She asked me my name again.

  “Sam.”

  She repeated it, like she was testing it for something.

  “I’m Isabel,” she said. “Meet the neighbours for five minutes and I won’t ask you to do anything ever again.”

  What a good liar.

  Her place was crowded and tiny, like someone had pushed the walls together after she’d moved her furniture in, like the storeroom of a bad antique shop.

  Steve was there, the landlord, wearing sunglasses inside, something I think you’re allowed to hold against a person as soon as you meet them. The dog was in one chair, his nose tucked down between the arm and the cushion, the whites of his eyes new moons as he glanced up at me and breathed out hard with pure boredom. In the other chair there was a hungry-looking bloke with a big pale beard his face was way too small for. He frowned at me and licked his lips, which looked lost in the middle of all that hair. His sweatshirt was the colour of dead grass. He had a full size tattoo of a gun on the side of his calf. It was poking out of his sock like it was a holster. I couldn’t keep my eyes off it once I knew it was there.

  And on the arm of his chair there was a woman called Cherry, thin and blonde and pretty, and just about the tiredest person I ever saw. Her nails were bitten so low, s
o close to where they started, I couldn’t look at them. Her fingers were covered in rings.

  Isabel introduced me as Country. Steve nodded at me behind his shades and clinked the ice cubes in his glass. Cherry waved with one hand and covered a yawn with the other.

  “Mick,” the man in the chair said. “You walked in on me in the bathroom the other day.”

  Steve said to Mick, “You probably woke him up the night before chucking your stuff out of the window.”

  “Sorry,” I said, and he grunted at Steve, something about getting a lock on the door that worked.

  “Oh, cheer up, Mick,” Isabel said. “There’s always someone worse off than you. Take Country here. Not a friend in the world.”

  “Really?” Mick said, perking up a bit, like this was good news.

  “Not a soul,” Isabel said, patting me on the arm.

  She started explaining where everybody lived: Steve in the basement, her on the ground floor, me and the bathroom on the next, Mick on the third floor and Cherry and her daughter at the top.

  “Welcome to the madhouse,” Steve said, and drained his glass.

  There was a silence then that I wasn’t going to fill. Cherry stared out of the window, chewing at her nails. Isabel said she was going to get me a drink. Steve followed her out.

  Cherry lit a cigarette and dragged on it like there was something at the very end she was looking for. She had too much make-up on. When she brought her hand up to her mouth it looked like somebody else’s hand entirely, somebody paler and older.

  Mick said to nobody in particular, “Why are we here?”

  I didn’t know if he meant there, in Isabel’s room, or in London, or even alive, and I had no idea of how to answer him.

  I got up and tried to see out of the windows. There was a spiral staircase down to a tiny yard, like five hay bales side by side. There were window boxes crammed with rainbashed petunias. Inside, Isabel’s sofas matched the curtains and the carpet was a pond-weed green. There were a couple of paintings on the walls, of ships and insipid landscapes, and they might have some value to an old lady, but they didn’t mean anything to me. The most interesting thing in the room by a mile was a clay head on top of a bookcase, a peaceful man with a wide nose and closed eyes. I liked the tight curl of his hair, the fingerprint marks of the hands that had made him on his skin.