Lolito (18 page)

This all seems big and it happened really fast. This letter was stupid. I’m sorry. It’s hard to know what things to say or whether to say anything.

Be okay,

Etgar

38

Mum and Dad are sitting on the sofa watching
The Voice
on iPlayer. Mum stands up when I come in.

‘I broke up with Alice,’ I say. I say it immediately because if you say something at the wrong time then you don’t have to spend time looking for the right time to say it. ‘No biggie.’ It feels like someone else has said the words ‘no biggie’. I don’t understand why I would say ‘no biggie’. Who am I? I turn around but there’s no one else there.

‘Oh, darling,’ Mum says. She hugs me hard. ‘I’m sorry.’ Dad stands up and claps my shoulder and walks through to the toilet. He doesn’t like to watch when me and Mum talk about emotions with each other. ‘Are you okay?’ Mum says.

‘Yes.’

Mum tries to say other tender things but when Dad uses the toilet he makes the sound that female tennis players make. She puts me on the sofa and asks if I want anything. I try to ask about Russia. She says we can talk about that later.

‘Do you want me to drive to Blockbuster and get something with that girl you like in it?’ she says.

‘Yes, please. Not
(500) Days of Summer
.’

*

I spend the day in bed drinking water. Drinking for four days without stopping has made me tired and psychotic. I watch four episodes of
Community
and read some of
Cat’s Cradle
and watch a video of a man suiciding on webcam. Macy isn’t online. I imagine her standing over a pan of risotto. I imagine her groping her husband’s giant balls and wiping dirt from the faces of her children. I hope she’s alive and okay.

I nap.

Amundsen wakes me up with his tongue.

We nap.

Mum wakes me up with Zooey Deschanel. She’s rented
Our Idiot Brother,
which has Paul Rudd and Rashida Jones in too, so I’m excited. We watch it in the living room, spread out under blankets across the sofas. Dad says things about tearing new assholes in all the
women. Mum laughs and hits him. Incidentally, the film is extremely disappointing.

*

Dad comes into my room. It’s ten. I’m talking to Connie Latterly about the Nibiru cataclysm and editing the Wikipedia pages of famous footballers to say that they are all distantly related to Barack Obama.

‘Dad, don’t be a paedo. Get out.’ I shut the laptop and put it on the carpet. I’m tired.

‘I wasn’t going to touch.’ He takes off his glasses, breathes on the glass and rubs them with the corner of his shirt.

‘Stay over there or I’m calling paedoline.’

‘Paedoline isn’t a thing.’

‘Firemen then.’

‘Why would you call firemen?’

‘Firemen hate paedos. They shoot them with their hoses.’

Dad laughs and sits down on the end of my bed. It sinks under his weight and my legs fall into the valley he’s made. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I don’t know. I drank your Famous Grouse. It was disgusting. Why is the grouse famous?’

‘Because it discovered America. I’m sorry about Alice. Try not to let it ruin everything. There are still plenty of girls out there, and most of them have bigger bosoms.’

‘Bosoms?’

‘You know what I mean. Jubblies.’

‘I don’t like big tits anyway.’

‘Paedo.’

‘Dad.’

He takes his glasses back off his head, folds them up and sets them down on his lap. ‘I remember losing my first girlfriend. I remember feeling like everything was over.’

‘What happened?’

‘She hung herself. It was very odd. She was always saying things like “I want to die” and everyone thought she was joking. She was a pretty funny girl actually.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Twelve.’

‘Dad, that’s not funny.’

‘It’s not a joke.’

‘Oh.’

Dad smiles. ‘You just need to remember to check you’ve got your limbs and your torso and your face. You’re alive. You’ll keep being alive for quite a while longer. Everything that will happen to you has already happened to me and to your mum and to your granddad. And we all survived. For now. There are no new problems, only new ways of solving them.’ I don’t think that means anything, or is related, but it sounds good. ‘Puberty.’

‘I was thinking about girlfriends and drink and acne.’

‘I have miraculously clear skin.’

‘I know. I used to put toothpaste on mine.’

‘I feel bad for feeling bad about it. Like, that there are children starving in Africa and stuff.’

‘The fact that humans haven’t yet managed a global redistribution of wealth is never going to lessen the hurt in your little heart.’

‘I don’t have hurt in my little heart.’

‘I know.’

‘Really, I’m feeling better.’

‘I’m glad.’

‘I met someone else.’

‘Lovely.’

He leans forward to pinch my cheek. I shout ‘paedo’. Mum pushes open my door and curls her neck around it. ‘What are you two up to?’

‘Dad said “This is what adults do when they love each other” to me and then he touched me.’

‘Etgar, don’t be disgusting.’

‘Arrest him, Mum.’

‘Holby’s
starting, darling.’

‘Okay. I’ll be down in a sec.’ They nod at each other like people about to carry out a secret plan.

‘Night night,’ Mum says. ‘I love you.’

‘You too.’

She leaves.

‘You’ll be okay,’ Dad says. ‘Won’t you? No hanging or anything?’

‘Yes. But – I did something bad.’ I chew the duvet. Some poppers come undone. They taste like stale sweat.

‘Okay.’

‘I spent a lot of the Nan money. I think I spent a thousand pounds.’

Dad bites his lip and tilts his head. ‘Don’t worry. At least you’re alive. You try and find a part-time job and save up a little each week.’

‘Don’t you want to know what I spent it on?’

‘I don’t know. Do I?’

‘Maybe not.’

‘Okay. Don’t do it again. Unless it was an uncharacteristically generous donation to charity.’

‘I won’t. It wasn’t.’

‘Good. See you in the morning.’

‘Night.’

‘Night.’

He leaves quietly, closing the door behind him. His socks are violently odd. I push Amundsen over to the radiator side of the bed, pull the duvet up and think to myself, see you in the morning.

PART 5

Antlers

39

‘Is this true?’ Mum says. ‘Is what these people are saying true?’ She’s standing in my bedroom, between two police officers, holding her own hands. Her eyes are stretched wide and close to leaking. I’m trying not to look. I’m imagining myself in a warm, dark chamber, hidden beneath the deepest ocean’s bed, building matchstick models of poodles and eating fistfuls of Parma ham. ‘Etgar?’

‘No,’ I say, pulling the duvet over my mouth. ‘It wasn’t that. They’re making it up. This doesn’t make sense. She didn’t do anything.’

‘She touched you.’

‘Mum, please stop.’ This is the most embarrassing thing to have happened during the whole time that I’ve
existed. I don’t know how it happened. They won’t let me think. I think, maybe it was the Internet police, or guilt, or Macy’s husband. I don’t think it was guilt. I’m not entirely sure the Internet police exist.

‘She did.’

I force my head up and point my eyes at the tallest police officer. ‘What are you talking about? I touched her too. Why can’t people touch each other?’

‘You poor thing,’ Mum says. She sits down on the bed next to me and tries to pull me in to her. I push her away. Dad’s standing behind the policemen, with his hands behind his back, looking at a stain on the ceiling. I want him to understand. I want him to explain that this is a misunderstanding and ask them all to please leave. I don’t know what’s happening in his head but I don’t want him to think I’m smaller than he already does. Nothing appears in his eyes. He leaves the room and walks downstairs.

‘Stop,’ I say. ‘This is fucked.’

‘Language, Etgar.’

‘But it is. It’s so fucked that you think Uncle Michael marrying a woman he bought off the Internet is fine, but if I meet a woman who stops me feeling alone then the police come around because she’s old.’ The police officers look at each other, and one sighs, and the other bites his lip. ‘She’s not even really old.’

‘Your Uncle Michael did not buy Alena. And that woman took advantage of you. You probably don’t understand yet.’

‘Yes he did and yes I do.’ I’m shouting. I stand up. I should throw something, for effect. In the film version of right now, this would be the part with the murder. This would be the part where I break down and punch inanimate objects until I fall unconscious, blood running out of my knuckles. ‘He’s paying for a woman to live with him because he’s old and pathetic and lonely. I’m trying not to be. This is stupid.’

‘Don’t talk about your uncle like that.’

‘Don’t talk about Macy like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like she did something wrong.’ I run out of the room, knocking the police officers’ shoulders and tripping slightly on the stairs. Dad’s on the sofa, watching a blank TV. He doesn’t move when I pass him. I hope he heard. I hope he doesn’t think that I’m the type of child to be unwittingly groomed and used by a paedophile. I hope he realises that I have decided to start shouting.

It’s warmer outside. I go to the field. A couple with two Golden Retrievers are hurling Frisbees through the sky and four boys are smoking by the oak tree. I locate the gap in the hedges where Amundsen and I hid from rain and I fit myself in and sit down on the bank of mud. It’s unstable from days of rain. I pull my t-shirt up over my face and gently trace laps of Alaska.

I picture a sequence of time-lapse photos on a nighttime motorway, with me unmoving between the streams of headlights. I picture a car swerving dumbly into me
and my bleeding body being knocked into a ditch. I picture Macy being led away from her house. I picture the tree house and I imagine its windows made dark with metal bars.

‘Oh dear,’ a voice says. ‘Someone looks underneath the weather.’ I feel the weight of a small dog settle in my lap. ‘Are you okay? Should I give you advice? I suppose that’s what old people are for. Good evening.’

‘Um. Hi.’ I wipe a length of snot from my nose and take my head out of my t-shirt.

Mabel’s pulling a leaf apart in her hands. ‘So,’ she says. ‘What sort of advice would you like?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘To hell with it!’

‘What?’

‘To hell with it!’

‘Um.’

‘It’s not too good, is it? I expected I might say something more insightful, to be totally honest with you, Etgar.’ Mushroom rears up and drops his paws on my knees. He licks the gap between my thumb and index finger.

‘It’s okay.’

‘And nap.’

‘What?’

‘Take naps.’

‘Okay.’

‘Is that useful?’

‘Not really. Also yes, in general, but not now.’

‘The pen is mightier than swords.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Let sleeping dogs do what sleeping dogs want to do.’

‘I’m not sure that’s one.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m beginning to think there isn’t any particularly useful advice anywhere in me.’

‘What would you do if you really liked someone but the police put the someone in jail?’

She drops the leaf and bites her lower lip. Her eyelids droop slightly. Mushroom does a whine. ‘Be very angry,’ she says. I nod. I don’t know how to be angry but I think it will happen, grandly and in one step, like reaching the moon. I say goodbye. I go home and try not to look at Mum. I leave with the police officers.

40

We’re sitting in a row on the sofa, watching a programme about assisted suicide and passing a bowl of stale cornflakes between us. There was nothing else in the cupboards and no one wanted to go outside. It’s eight and the sky is starting to roll down. Mum tried to talk with me about Macy, but her mouth didn’t make the right words, and she sounded like a deaf person, so we turned on the TV and watched the first thing that appeared.

A silver-haired talking head says that death is a right, and it should be available to everyone, instead of only people rich enough to fly to Switzerland. There are shots of the room where it happens. It’s small and painted impersonal colours.

Dad nods. ‘Would you kill me if I asked?’ he says.

‘I’d shoot you in the face,’ I say. ‘If you asked.’

‘Where would you get a firearm?’

‘I’d just do it with a catapult and a rock.’

‘Stop it,’ Mum says. She stands up and goes to the window, pressing her face and hands against the glass.

‘And if I wasn’t of sound mind?’

‘I wouldn’t be able to tell probably. I’d do it anyway.’ Mum turns and tells Dad off again, saying that he shouldn’t be saying things like that. Turning back, she freezes. A bright, sudden flash fills the room, blanking everything out for a quarter of a second. Mum snaps the curtains closed. ‘Oh my Jesus wept,’ she says. ‘Pete, there’s a man outside our house.’

‘What man?’

‘I don’t know what man. How do I know what man?

He took a photo.’

‘A journalist,’ I say.

She plants her hands on her hips. ‘How do they know our address?’

‘What? Why would I tell them?’

‘I don’t know. It’s hard to tell with you sometimes.’ ‘Is it?’

‘Pete, do something.’ She does an
if you don’t move now, I am going to throw something
look to him and taps her foot three times against the carpet.

Dad nods and forces himself up from the sofa. He steps into the pair of mudstruck wellington boots waiting
at the door, calls Amundsen and goes outside. I don’t know what Dad expects of Amundsen. He’s not a threatening mammal and will likely lick the enemy. He will roll over, offer up his belly and make sounds like a sleepy toddler.

Mum opens the curtain partway and watches him walk down the garden path, towards a thin man with no neck and a skull-sized camera lens. He’s dragging Amundsen by the collar.