Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod
Page 39
“Did the doc come over to see you today?” he asked for want of anything better. The hilarious intimacy of the things they had done in the night suddenly belonged to a world even more distant than that of the grownups.
“Nothing happened,” she said, spearing a herring mop on the paper plate she carried with a plastic fork. “Nothing ever happens.” She took a bite at the gleaming vinegared scale, then pulled a face. “Disgusting. God knows how the grownups enjoy this shit.”
Bobby grinned, recognising the May he knew. “Let’s go somewhere. No one will notice.”
She shrugged yes and propped her plate on the concrete bird bath. They went through the back gate, squeezed between the bumpers on the drive and out along the road.
“Do you still think you’ll never grow up?” Bobby asked.
May shook her head. “What about you?”
“I suppose it’s got to happen. We’re not fooling anyone, are we, going out, not drinking the milk? I’m sure Mum and Dad know. They just don’t seem to care. I mean, we can’t be the first kids in the history of the world to have stumbled on this secret. Well, it can’t be a secret, can it?”
“How about we climb up to the meadows?” May said. “The town looks good from up there.”
“Have you ever read Peter Pan?” Bobby asked as they walked up the dirt road between the allotments and the saw mill. “He never grew up. Lived in a wonderful land and learnt how to fly.” He held open the kissing gate that led into the fields. May had to squeeze through. The grass was high and slivered with seed, whispering under a deepening sky. “When I was young,” he said, “on evenings like this, I used to look out of my bedroom window and watch the grownups. I thought that they could fly.”
“Who do you think can fly now?”
“No one. We’re all the same.”
They stopped to catch their breath and look down at the haze below. Hills, trees and houses, the wind carrying the chime of an ice cream van, the river stealing silver from the sky. He felt pain spread though him, then dissolve without finding focus.
May took his hand. “Remember when we up here alone that time years ago.” She drew it towards her breast, then down. “You touched me here, and here. We had sex. You’d never done it before.” She let his hand fall. Bobby felt no interest. May no longer smelled of rain, and he was relieved he didn’t have to turn her down.
The pain came again, more strongly this time. He swayed. The shimmering air cleared and for one moment there was a barge on the river, a tractor slicing a field from green to brown, a hawk circling high overhead, May smiling, sweet and young as she said Let’s Do It Bobby, pulling her dress up over her head. He blinked.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said, leaning briefly against her, feeling the thickness of her arms.
“I think we’d better go back.”
Down the hill, the pain began to localise. First circling in his spine, then gradually shifting orbit towards his belly. It came and went. When it was there it was so unbelievable that he put it aside in the moments of recession. Had to be a bad dream. The trees swayed with the rush of twilight, pulling him forward, drawing him back.
Progress was slow. Night came somewhere along the way. Helped by May, he staggered from lamppost to lamppost, dreading the darkness between. People stared or asked if everything was okay before hurrying on. He tasted rust in his mouth. He spat on the pavement, wiped his hand. It came away black.
“Nearly there,” May said, half-holding him around his searing belly.
He looked up and saw houses he recognised, the postbox that was the nearest one to home. His belly was crawling. He remembered how that postbox had been a marker of his suffering one day years before when he’d been desperate to get home and pee, and another time walking back from school when his shoes were new and tight. Then the pain rocked him, blocking his sight. True pain, hard as flint, soft as drowning. He tried to laugh. That made it worse and better. Bobby knew that this was just the start, an early phase of the contractions.
He couldn’t remember how they reached home. There were hands and voices, furious diallings of the phone. Bobby couldn’t get upstairs and didn’t want to mess the settee by lying on it. But the grownups insisted, pushed him down, and then someone found a plastic sheet and tucked it under him in between the worst of the waves. He thrashed around, seeing the TV, the mantelpiece, the fibres of the carpet, the light burning at his eyes. I’m not here, he told himself, this isn’t real. Then the biggest, darkest wave yet began to reach him.
Wings of pain settled over him. For a moment without time, Bobby dreamed that he was flying.
Bobby awoke in a chilly white room. There was a door, dim figures moving beyond the frosted glass. He was still floating, hardly conscious of his own body. The whiteness of the room hurt his eyes. He closed them, opened them again. Now it was night. Yellow light spilled through the glass. The figures moving beyond had globular heads, no necks, tapering bodies.
One of the figures paused. The door opened. The silence cracked like a broken seal. He could suddenly hear voices, the clatter of trolleys. He was conscious of the hard flatness of the bed against his back, coils of tubing descending into his arm from steel racks. His throat hurt. His mouth tasted faintly of liquorice. The air smelled the way the bathroom cabinet did at home. Of soap and aspirins.
“Your eyes are open. Bobby, can you see?”
The shape at the door blocked the light. It was hard to make it out. Then it stepped forward, and he saw the soft curve of May’s cheek, the glimmer of her eye.
“Can you speak?”
“No,” he said.
May turned on a light over the bed and sat down with a heavy sigh. He tried to track her by moving his eyes, but after the brief glimpse of her face all he could see was the dimpled curve of her elbow.
“This is hospital?”
“Yes. You’ve grown up”
Hospital. Growing up. They must have taken him here from home. Which meant that it had been a difficult change.
May said, “You’re lucky to be alive.”
Alive. Yes. Alive. He waited for a rush of some feeling or other—relief, gratitude, achievement, pride. There was nothing, just this white room, the fact of his existence.
“What happens now?” he asked.
“Your parents will want to see you.”
“Where are they?”
“At home. It’s been days, Bobby.”
“Then why…” The taste of liquorice went gritty in his mouth. He swallowed it back. “Why are you here May?”
“I’m having tests, Bobby. I just thought I’d look in.”
“Thanks.”
“There’s no need to thank me. I won’t forget the times we had.”
Times. We. Had. Bobby put the words together, then let them fall apart.
“Yes,” he said.
“Well.” May stood up.
Now he could see her. Her hair was cut short, sitting oddly where her fat cheeks met her ears. Her breasts hung loose inside a tee shirt. Along with everything else about her they seemed to have grown, but the nipples had gone flat and she’d given up wearing a bra. She shrugged and spread her arms. He caught a waft of her scent: she needed a wash. It was sickly but somehow appealing, like the old cheese that you found at the back of the fridge and needed to eat right away.
“Sometimes it happens,” she said.
“Yes,” Bobby said. “The bitter milk.”
“No one knows really do they? Life’s a mystery.”
Is it? Bobby couldn’t be bothered to argue.
“Will you change your name?” he asked. “Move to another town?”
“Maybe. It’s a slow process. I’m really not an uncle yet, you know.”
Still a child. Bobby gazed at her uncomfortably, trying to see it in her eyes, finding with relief that the child wasn’t there.
“What’s it like?” May asked.
“What?”
“Being a grownup.”
“I suppose not.”
His head ached, his voice was fading. He blinked slowly. He didn’t want to say more. What else was there to say? He remembered waiting stupidly as his brother Tony sat up in bed watching TV that first morning after he’d grown up. Waiting as though there was an answer. But growing up was just part of the process of living, which he realised now was mostly about dying.
May reached out to touch his face. The fingers lingered for a moment, bringing a strange warmth. Their odour was incredibly strong to Bobby. But it was sweet now, like the waft from the open door of a bakery. It hit the back of his palate and then ricocheted down his spine. He wondered vaguely if he was going to get an erection and killed the thought as best he could; he hated the idea of appearing vulnerable to May. After all, she was still half a child.
“You’d better be going,” he said.
May backed away. “You’re right.” She reached for the handle of the door, clumsily, without looking.
“Goodbye May,” Bobby said.
She stood for a moment in the open doorway. For a moment the light fell kindly on her face and she was beautiful. Then she stepped back and all her youth was gone.
“Goodbye, Bobby,” she said, and glanced down at her wristwatch. “I’ve got things to do. I really must fly.”
Afterword
Physically, I was what you’d call a “late developer”. When other kids were shooting up and growing fuzz in all sorts of surprising places, I was still a small, squeaking kid. The experience perhaps only lasted a couple of years, but it’s strange and a difficult place to be. By the time I was about sixteen I was convinced that, like Bobby, I would never grow up. And, if I’m honest, part of me welcomed it. This was the kind of world I found myself moving in again when I wrote Grownups. A place where sex seems comical and peculiar, and adults self-obsessed and strange. In many ways, I suppose, it’s a place we all know and never quite leave.
About the Author
Ian R. MacLeod is the acclaimed writer of challenging and innovative speculative and fantastic fiction. His most recent novel, Wake Up and Dream, won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, while his previous works have won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the World Fantasy Award, and have been translated into many languages. His short story, “Snodgrass,” was developed for television in the United Kingdom as part of the Sky Arts series Playhouse Presents. MacLeod grew up in the West Midlands region of England, studied law, and spent time working and dreaming in the civil service before moving on to teaching and house-husbandry. He lives with his wife in the riverside town of Bewdley.
Gillian Bowskill
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