Where the Moon Isn't (11 page)

‘You’re my best mate, Jacob.’

‘I should fucking hope so.’

I felt his fingers brush against mine. Not quite holding hands, not quite not holding hands. Each of us gripping at the bench slats.

The third evening, I was home by myself.

I had a shower before bed. As I dried, I caught sight of myself in the steamed-up bathroom mirror.

Ha.

You don’t know what I look like.

I only just thought that. I haven’t once said what I look like. I did say that I’m tall and getting fat. I did say that much, but you might not have remembered. Getting fat is a common side effect of my medication.

Denise Lovell gave me a Patient Information Sheet, with them all listed in microscopic letters.

COMMON SIDE EFFECTS, it says:

Happy days, eh? You don’t want to know about the less common ones.

Nah, fuck it. Why not:

Severe allergic reactions; infections; abnormal thoughts; abnormal gait; itching; drooling; mask-like facial expression; fever; severe anxiety; sexual dysfunction; convulsions; suicidal thoughts or attempts; breathing difficulties; irregular heartbeat; trouble concentrating, speaking, or swallowing; trouble sitting still; trouble standing or walking; muscle spasms; seizures; nightmares; killing your own brother, again.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

I wasn’t on the fucking stuff yet. In the bathroom mirror were the blurred edges of a healthy young man with a new job, a new home, and the promise of a whole new life. I should have wiped away the condensation and taken a proper look at him.

I wish I’d done that now.

But I didn’t, so you can’t either.

Matthew Homes

Flat 607

Terrence House

Kingsdown

Bristol

Mon 8th Feb ’10

Dear Matthew,

I’m a bit concerned about you. I was hoping you might have got in touch with the team over the weekend but we didn’t hear anything. And we didn’t see you at the day centre again today.

    I know you don’t like us to make a fuss Matt, and I respect that, but we do need to stay in contact. And it’s still very important you have your depot injection. This is what you agreed to in your Community Treatment Order. We can talk about this.

    Please give me a call on 07700 900934 or ring the office on 0117 496 0777 as soon as possible. Hope you had a nice weekend, anyway?

Kind Regards,

Denise Lovell

Care Co-ordinator

Brunel CMHT – Bristol

P.S. I’ve filled out my part of the new DLA forms too, so perhaps we can go through those together. I think you might even be entitled to a bit more money!

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK knock knock knock knock. She was there for ten minutes again, propping open the letter box, peering through. Knock knock knock. Hello, Matt. Are you home? Knock KNOCK KNOCK.

I could feel her breath.

She didn’t see me though because I was sitting down here, with my back to the door, keeping a close ear on things. Since you ask Denise Lovell, no I did not have a nice weekend. I’ve been feeling a bit sorry for myself as it happens.

Nanny Noo tells me off for that. She says it doesn’t help to dwell, how it’s important to be grateful for the everyday things, that there’s happiness in a cooked meal or a stroll in the fresh air. I know she’s right too. Except it’s easier to find happiness in a cooked meal when there’s somebody else to pass you the ketchup. For all our plans together Jacob didn’t live with me for very long. Perhaps four or five months.

We never had a Christmas here together, we didn’t reach our eighteenth birthdays. I know it’s stupid to care too much about stuff like that. It’s my own fault anyway.

I should write about why he left.

But there are different versions of truth. If we meet each other in the street, glance away and look back, we might look the same, feel the same, think the same, but the subatomic particles, the smallest parts of us that make every other part, will have rushed away, been replaced at impossible speeds. We will be completely different people. Everything changes all the time.

Truth changes.

Here are three truths.

Knock

KNOCKKNOCK

Truth No. 1

I didn’t have my armchair yet. The main room seemed bigger without it, and he looked small, crouched on the carpet in the dusty light beneath the window. He buried his face in his hands. I couldn’t say how long he’d been there, but I think for a long time.

I’d been sleeping after a night shift and was still holding my expensive pillow. It was a gift from John Lewis that Nanny Noo and Granddad bought me, to help with my bad dreams; the dreams that had started to follow me outside of sleep, so that sometimes I would have to cut a little at my skin with a knife, or burn myself with a lighter, to make sure I was real.

I can’t speak for Jacob, but when I think about things now, there was more to it than his mum; I was becoming a problem.

We didn’t talk straight away. The only noise was the faraway sound of traffic, drifting through the window. You can hear it all the time, but only notice it when there is a silence that needs filling.

I wasn’t sure he’d seen me, until after a while he said, ‘She was slumped forwards in her chair again, with the neck rest too high up.’

‘We can say something.’

‘It’s more than that.’

They sent different people round, that was a problem. Each morning it could be a new carer getting her up. Nobody knew Mrs Greening properly, or the way things had to be done.

‘It was her hair,’ he said.

I’ve replayed the conversation in my head so many times. I imagine myself saying different things, then what he would say differently. I move the memory around the flat like it’s a piece of furniture, or a picture in a frame that I can’t decide where to hang.

‘What are those things, like little girls have?’

‘What?’

‘In their hair.’

‘I don’t know. Pigtails, is it?’

‘Yeah, them.’

I used to brush Mrs Greening’s hair, whilst Jacob prepared her tea and got her medicine ready. I’d wash it sometimes too. She had this special sink, like you see in hairdressers but with padded bits that fold over the edges. She didn’t have much feeling in her arms and legs, but her head felt tingly and nice when I rubbed in the shampoo. That’s what she said, anyway. And she said I was better at it than Jacob because he pulled too hard, but I wasn’t to tell him because we were both her angels.

‘What are you smiling for?’

‘I’m not.’

‘It’s not fucking funny, Matt.’

‘I wasn’t smiling about—’

‘I bet you’re exactly the same. In that old people’s home, you probably treat them like fucking children too.’

He didn’t mean that, but it still hurt.

‘No I don’t. You know I wouldn’t—’

‘Well quit fucking smiling then. She was there trying to pull the things out all morning. But the more wound up she is, the worse her hands get. Now these three fingers—’

His voice trailed away. He didn’t cry, I’ve never seen him cry. But I think he was close. ‘These three fingers, they don’t really work at all.’

I dropped my pillow on the carpet and sat beside him. The acne that had clung to his face all through school was finally clearing away. He’d started growing a beard too. Except it didn’t reach his sideburns, so there were these two lopsided islands of soft pink at the top of his cheeks.

He smelled like he always smelled: Lynx deodorant and cooking fat from the Kebab House.

‘I don’t know what to say, Jacob.’

He sniffed and wiped at his nose with the back of his sleeve. ‘You don’t get it,’ he said softly. ‘She’s all on her own.’

It was a strange moment. Not because of what he said, but the way he looked at me. He’d looked at me like that once before. This was a long time ago but it was the exact same look. I knew what I had to do, except I didn’t want to. So I replay the memory a different way.

Truth No. 2

I place us in the kitchen, and because I don’t want to say anything that will make it worse, I swill out dirty mugs to make tea. Problems seem less if we have them with a cup of tea, that’s another thing Nanny Noo says.

I noticed the CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR NEW HOME card Mrs Greening had made, still stuck to the fridge door, spotted in fat from all the frying we did. When she gave it to us I didn’t understand the feeling it gave me.

Now I did.

For my brother’s tenth birthday our mum arranged a huge party. It was in our local Beavers and Brownies Hut, decorated with balloons and banners. On a long table at the far end were bowls of Hula Hoops, biscuits, and sausages on sticks. There was pineapple and cheese on sticks too, except one of Simon’s friends got to them first and bit off all the pineapple chunks so they were just cheese.

Loads of people came because Simon was allowed friends from his school and I was even allowed some from mine.

Nanny Noo and Granddad were there, and Aunty Mel who came all the way from Manchester with Uncle Brian and our three cousins, and my other aunt, Jacqueline, who lives much closer, but who we didn’t often see because her and Mum don’t get on, and because she dresses all in black and talks too much about magic and spirits, and will never not smoke even at children’s parties.

We played a game where we had to put on a hat and a scarf and thick woollen mittens, then try to eat a bar of Dairy Milk with a knife and fork. But the most fun was at the end when we ran around the hall stamping on the balloons, making them pop.

Simon called it his best birthday ever.

I made him a card, and you have to remember I was still only little. What I’d done was draw a house with a smiling sunshine over the top, exactly like Mrs Greening had done, but what made it good was that I’d put diagonal lines coming off the house so that instead of being a flat square, it looked three-dimensional. Nobody had told me how either, I’d worked it out by myself.

It was just one of a hundred cards he was given, and for ages Mum let him keep them up around the living room, cluttering the mantelpiece and the coffee table. I didn’t know if he liked mine, or had even noticed it. Until the day Mum said they had to come down.

She was in a bad mood and had been telling me off for the mess my room was in, how I made her life a bloody uphill struggle, she couldn’t wait until the holidays were over and I was out from under her feet.

I was probably too sensitive because it’s normal for mums to lose their temper once in a while, especially during summer holidays with two boys causing havoc. It isn’t like she ever hit us or anything, so I know I was too sensitive. By the time her attention spilled to the cards and Simon got his turn, I was whimpering like a baby.

Simon marched straight up to the windowsill and took down my card. He scrunched his face and bit at his tongue in the way he did when he was concentrating. Then he told me that I should be a professional. Except he couldn’t say professional properly and had to try about six times to get the word out. He asked me to show him how I did it, and we spent the afternoon sitting at the kitchen table, drawing pictures together. I told him that he should be a professional too.

He shook his head and looked away.

The card I made him was the only one to make it into his stupid keepsake box, and when I found it there after he died, and when I think about it now, I’m happy and sad all at once.

Jacob was leaning against the counter. Perhaps he felt the same as me, for all his own reasons. But what came out of him was anger. I dropped teabags into the mugs and filled the kettle. He didn’t need me to say anything. He could be angry all by himself.

‘She wouldn’t even talk about it. She asked me to take them out and not to talk about it.’

I took the milk from the fridge and poured some into one of the mugs. Jacob is one of those people who likes the milk and sugar in first. As the water began to boil, he did too.

‘Who does that? Who puts a fucking grown adult’s hair like that? Like she’s a little girl. Like she’s their fucking doll.’

My mind was snatched away.