I was distracted by the connections, I’d find them everywhere, because we’re all made of the same stuff, the same interstellar dust; a little girl and a doll, the salt in the air, the rain soaking through my clothes. He is begging me, Stop. Stop. Stop. His trembling hands are clutching the torch. He tries to run, his stupid way of running, hunched right forwards with his legs wide apart. She wants to play with you, Simon. She wants to play chase.
Jacob slammed his fist hard on the surface, rattling stacks of dirty plates, sending cutlery clattering onto the greasy lino. ‘You ain’t listening. You never listen.’
‘I am—’
‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well fucking listen to me then.’
‘I’m sorry—’
‘She won’t say anything because she’s too embarrassed, or she’s scared she’ll embarrass them. Like they give a shit. She just sits there, staring at the wall, staring out the fucking window whilst they do whatever they want.’
He stopped as abruptly as he’d started.
I wanted to shake him. I wanted to shout that he couldn’t stay at home with her forever, that it was his idea we lived together in the first place. He couldn’t abandon me now.
I didn’t do that though. I listened to the kettle boil. I watched steam turn to water droplets on the wallpaper. I could feel Jacob looking at me, and I remembered him looking that way once before.
Truth No. 3
He didn’t say much at all.
He isn’t the sort to talk about stuff, not the important things like mothers and brothers and the way we feel inside. You won’t find Jacob Greening hunched over a typewriter, staining paper with his family secrets.
We were in my bedroom. We put on a CD for a bit, and I can’t remember what we listened to, only that it kept skipping and that he turned it off. We were stoned, I know that.
He’d been getting us some decent green from that Hamed guy, and we had upgraded from our home-made Buckets to a tall glass Bong we bought from St Nick’s market as a sort of moving-in present.
I don’t smoke much any more, but at the time I was easily getting through half an ounce a week. Denise Lovell reckons that was a big part of the problem. When I told her about the designs I used to draw, how it felt like my hand was being moved for me, she said that I was probably fucking mental already, it was just that nobody knew it yet.
Jacob was background noise. There was something about his mum, the way they’d done her hair.
He was holding my pillow, hugging it.
I had my sketch pad open in front of me and was watching the pen scratch across the page.
It was happening so fast, I didn’t know what I was drawing. Only that it was taking shape exactly as it was meant to. In the middle was a box, not flat to the page, but in three dimensions, like a card I had drawn for Simon years before.
‘Stop it.’
And stretching out around it like tentacles were a series of tubes, each connecting to smaller boxes. Not boxes, cylinders.
‘For fuck’s sake, what are you doing?’
They formed a ring around the centre. In turn, more tubes connected these to each other, and again outwards, to a second ring of cylinders and a third.
He snatched the pad away, ‘It’s fucking stupid, stop doing it.’
It wasn’t only that page. I’d drawn it over and over. I might have been drawing it for days.
Jacob tore them up, ripping each sheet into tiny pieces.
‘They were mine,’ I said.
‘You’re losing the plot, man.’
‘That was my last sketch pad.’
‘Then do something different. Play XBox with me.’
I stood up and walked over to the far wall. It wasn’t like I was moving the pen myself, it was like I was watching it happen.
‘We’ll lose our deposit,’ he pleaded.
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Please—’
‘What? What do you want? I’m busy! You can see I’m fucking busy!’
I shouted at him. I didn’t mean to, but my voice tore out of me. He looked afraid, and suddenly I felt ashamed. I turned back to the wall and watched another cylinder take shape in front of me. ‘I’m sorry. I’m busy that’s all, you can see I’m busy. I have to do this, right.’
The sound of faraway traffic drifted through the open window, and another sound too. I couldn’t make it out. Jacob smoked two cigarettes before he spoke another word.
‘Remember at school,’ he said at last. He spoke so quietly, like he was afraid the memory might hear him and run away. ‘Remember the first day, when you loaned me your tie?’
I felt my pen drop to the carpet. ‘That was a long time ago, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeah. I’ll never forget.’
I had given him my tie and he wrapped it inside his collar. Then he turned to me, helplessly.
I didn’t need to see him now. I knew he was looking at me in the exact same way. I move the memory around like it’s a piece of furniture, but it always ends up here. He didn’t only need to borrow my tie. He needed me to tie it up.
We are selfish, my illness and I. We think only of ourselves. We shape the world around us into messages, into secret whispers spoken only for us.
I did one last thing for someone else.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I understand.’
Jacob couldn’t stay, it wasn’t fair to make him.
‘I’m sorry, Matt.’
I didn’t cry. He’s never seen me cry. But I was close. ‘You should look after your mum,’ I said. ‘She needs you.’
I tied us up neatly for Jacob. I gave him my permission to leave. He said we’d still hang out all the time.
I suppose that makes us friends.
Knock
KNOCKKNOCK
THERE IS A DEAD BIRD. It’s on the ground beside the yellow bins, and it’s making me feel a bit messed up.
I didn’t notice it to begin with because I was keeping a lookout in case Denise rounded the corner in her car and I had to run back inside. I’m out of tobacco so I was smoking one of Nanny Noo’s secret menthol cigarettes, and I only noticed the dead bird when I threw the butt onto the ground and went to stamp on it.
It’s a chick. I don’t know what sort, but it’s really small and it doesn’t have any feathers or even eyes. It’s in a patch of melting slush and I know that I should put it in the bin or something. It doesn’t seem right leaving it in the cold. But I can’t do it. I can’t bring myself to do anything today.
AFTER JACOB LEFT I decided that I would go home too.
I made up my mind as he disappeared in Hamed’s van, leaving me standing on the pavement waving like a fucking idiot. As I climbed the stairwell I had no energy; I didn’t want to be here on my own. I thought about phoning Mum first, asking her permission, even though I knew I didn’t need to. I still had my key. I could let myself in the back door and she would come rushing downstairs.
‘I couldn’t do it,’ I’d say. ‘You were right. I’m too young. I should be at home.’
She would smile and roll her eyes, and we would break into teary laughter.
‘Come here, come here.’
She wraps me in her arms. I bury my face in her dressing gown.
‘I’m so sorry, Mum.’
‘Oh my baby. Baby boy.’
‘I tried my best.’
‘What will we do with you?’
‘Is it too late for me to go to college, do you think?’
She kisses me and I smell her breath, a faint smell of decay. I try to move away, but she’s holding too tight.
‘You’re hurting me a bit.’
‘Shhh, shhh.’
‘I mean it. Let go.’
‘What will we do with you?’
‘Stop saying that.’ The smell is more powerful, filling the room. It’s not her breath. There’s something on the kitchen table. I see it over her shoulder. ‘What is that? I don’t like it, Mummy.’
‘Shhh, shut up.’
‘I don’t like it. You’re scaring me.’
‘What will we do with you?’
‘What’s going on?’
The doll is naked, covered in wet mud. Her pale arms stretch across the tabletop, her little face is angled towards us. Button eyes look right through me.
Ha.
It’s make believe, that’s all.
After Jacob left I imagined going home. But I never did that. I was far too busy going mad.
‘You’re an asset to the team,’ the manager said.
He leant back in his chair and stroked his Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer tie, making the LED in Rudolf’s nose flash. I had worked a whole Christmas and was asking for shifts over the New Year too. ‘Keep up the hard work, young man, and we’ll get you on … one of those, uh, National Vocational Qualifications.’
That’s how he said it, stretching out each word, like me doing an NVQ would be the making of me.
I can’t have given the right response; he let out a slow wheeze and seemed to deflate, ‘You’re allowed to smile, Matt. I’m paying you a compliment.’
‘Can I work the night shift?’
‘I’ve already said you can work the night shift.’
‘And the long day?’
He pulled this constipated face at the Duty Rota. ‘We’ll have to be careful you don’t work too many hours. There’s legislation about—’
‘I need the money.’
He gave me the shifts, he always did. I was working every hour I could to pay my rent, and because I didn’t want to be at home by myself. To be honest, I was feeling pretty lonely at this time. So when I wasn’t at the old people’s home I’d immerse myself in my Special Project.
I never really stopped.
This illness has a work ethic.
Matthew Homes
Flat 607
Terrence House
Kingsdown
Bristol
Wed 10th Feb 2010
Dear Matthew,
Please do get in touch with either myself (07700 900934) or any of the staff at Hope Road (0117 496 0777) as soon as possible. It’s important we arrange for you to have your depot injection, which is now a week overdue.
I hope everything is okay,
Denise Lovell
Care Co-ordinator
Brunel CMHT – Bristol
persisent, isn’t she?
I’m fine
I’m fine.
fuck off
fuck off
fuck off
I’VE GIVEN YOU THE GUIDED TOUR.
You saw it in the corner, and stretching across the far wall. Were you too polite to say anything, to ask any questions? The sprawling tubes and dirt-encrusted jars.
Strange, isn’t it?
I didn’t know what it was at first because it wasn’t me drawing the designs. He was moving my hand, scratching my pen across the sketch pads and the bedroom wall.
His interstellar dust.
His atoms.
I would wake up in my living room, still wearing my work clothes from the night before; a pair of grey trousers and a white nursing tunic, creased and sweaty. My mouth would be dry, my neck and shoulders aching. All around me would be new materials. I couldn’t think where they came from. It was the same every day, more stuff appearing. Reaching into my rucksack once I cut my thumb on a shard of glass. The pain sliced through the fog; I had scavenged from wheelie bins and recycling boxes. For a nucleus, an ice-cream tub. Glass jars and bottles for the orbiting electrons. I had filled carrier bags full of damp earth, spilling onto the carpet. There was more plastic tubing stolen from work. Tubes for sucking air from a tank, tubes for pissing into a bag.
And Sellotape. And Blu-tack.
It might even be fun.
As the sharp pain gave way to a dull throbbing, I felt my hands start to move. I could work for hours on end without eating or drinking. Six, seven, eight hours, carefully puncturing holes in jam-smeared lids with the screwdriver from my Swiss Army Knife, feeding in the tubes, and sealing up any gaps.
‘Are you home darling?’
I didn’t hear her knock. It was only her voice that broke through. The letter box dropped shut.
Nanny Noo was standing in the blue light of the corridor with a Tesco bag in each hand. She smiled, ‘I thought I could hear you. I’m not interrupting am I? I was just passing and—’
‘You can’t come in.’
‘I’ve brought a few groceries, I thought we could—’
‘You can’t come in, Nanny.’
‘But—’
‘I’m late for work.’
‘It’s late, it’s dinner time.’
‘I’m working the night shift.’
‘Then let me drive you. We can quickly put this lot in the kitchen, it’ll only take a minute.’ She started to push the door to let herself inside. I stayed standing in the way. ‘Whatever is the matter?’ she asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘Matthew, sweetheart. You’ve mud all over your trousers.’
‘Do I?’
‘Is that blood?’
‘What?’
‘On your top, there.’
‘I cut my thumb.’
‘Let me see.’
‘I’ve got to go Nanny, I’m late.’
‘You haven’t even put a plaster on.’ She put down the carrier bags and started to rummage in her handbag. ‘I know I’ve got some somewhere. You never know when—’
‘Please don’t make a fuss.’
‘It’s not a fuss. Here we are. Now give me your—’
She reached to take my hand. I pulled away. ‘I mean it. I have things to do. You can’t just turn up and expect to be let in. I’m busy, I have things to do.’
‘Yes. Of course. Of course, sweetheart. I’m sorry.’
I guess she looked a bit hurt. She dropped the plaster back into her handbag, and fastened the clip. She started to say something else, but I shut the door.
I watched her through the peephole.
She looked worried, but she didn’t knock again. She lifted her hand to the door and held it there a while, but she didn’t knock. That’s the thing with Nanny, she would never force her company on someone, no matter how much she might want to.
Ha.
She’s like a vampire. She has to be invited in.
I’ll tell her that when I next see her. She’ll like that a lot. She visits every other Thursday, but it’s not my turn today. I’ll have to remember the vampire joke for next week. You’ve got your granddad in you, she’ll laugh. The same wicked sense of humour. She says she doesn’t know what to do with us, but you can tell she likes it really. What she will NOT like is what I’m up to now; all this skiving from the Day Centre to write my story and ignoring the letters from Denise Lovell and not having my medicine.