I put the Stickle Bricks away.
Mum appeared, pressing a prescription sheet into her handbag.
‘Is everything okay, Mum?’
‘Let’s get ice creams.’
I don’t suppose it was the best weather for the park – it was pretty cold and cloudy. But we went anyway. Mum bought us ice creams from the van, and we perched on the swings next to each other. ‘I’ve not been a very good Mummy, have I?’
‘Is that what the doctor said?’
‘I worry, Matthew. I worry all the time.’
‘Do you need medicine?’
‘I might.’
‘Are you and Dad going to get divorced?’
‘Sweetheart, why would you even think that?’
‘I don’t know. Are you?’
‘Of course not.’ She finished her ice cream, stepped off the swing, and started to push mine.
‘I’m not a baby, Mum.’
‘I know, sorry. I know. Sometimes I think you’re more grown up than me.’
‘No you don’t.’
‘I do. And you’re definitely too clever for me now. You do those exercise books quicker than I can mark them.’
‘I don’t.’
‘You do, sweetheart. I think if you went back to school, the teachers wouldn’t know what hit them.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘I’m allowed?’
‘Is it what you want?’
This might not have happened so quickly as I’m telling it, or reached the surface of our conversation so easily. Probably we were in the park for a very long time, drifting in and out of silences, each moving around an idea, afraid to reach out and see it sink away, and this time, to impossible depths. No. It didn’t happen quickly or easily. But it did happen. On that day. In that park.
‘It isn’t that I don’t like you teaching me—’
‘I know. It’s okay. I know.’
‘We could still do lessons in the evenings.’
‘I’ll help with your homework.’
‘And you’ll still help me type up my stories?’
‘If you’ll let me. I’d like that a lot.’
A good thing about talking to someone who is standing behind you is that you can pretend you don’t know they’re crying, and not trouble yourself too much with working out why. You can simply concentrate on helping them feel better.
‘You can push me if you want, Mum.’
‘Oh I can push you now, can I?’
‘If you want.’
She did, she pushed me on the swing, higher and higher, and when at last the grey clouds parted for the sun to shine through, it was like it was shining just for us.
a whole new chapter
‘Uh, what? Hey mon ami.’
‘Can you help me do my tie up, Dad?’
‘What time is it?’
Mum turned over in bed, and pulled off her eye mask. ‘Matthew, it’s the middle of the night.’
‘I don’t know how to do it up. Can I turn the light on?’
I pressed the switch and they both groaned, then Dad said, through a yawn, ‘Usually you put a shirt on first, mate.’
‘I just want to practise.’
‘We can practise in the morning, before I go to work.’ He rolled over, pulling the quilt above his head. ‘It’s the middle of the night.’
I switched their light off and went back to my room, grappling with the knot – too nervous to sleep. It wasn’t so long before Mum came through to sit with me though. I knew she would. I knew she would come and sit with me if I woke them.
‘You need to get some sleep, darling.’
‘What if no one likes me?’
I didn’t know who was most worried about me going back to school – me or her. She had her little yellow pills though, which took the edge off.
‘Of course they will.’ She stroked the hair behind my ear, like she used to when I was little, ‘Of course they will.’
‘But what if they don’t?’
She told me the story about her first day at secondary school, of how she had broken her arm in the summer holiday so was wearing a plaster cast. She said there were so many new faces, but the new faces were feeling exactly the same as she was. By lunchtime her plaster cast was scrawled with well-wishing messages from her brand new group of friends.
‘What happened next?’
‘It’s cold, let me in.’
I pulled back my covers and budged over so she could climb in beside me.
‘This is the good part,’ she said, propping up a pillow. ‘One of the playground monitors saw my plaster cast with the writing, and wanted me punished for breaking school uniform rules! So my very first day I was marched to the headmistress, who thanked the monitor for her concerns, looked at my cast, picked up a pen, and wrote Welcome to Pen Park High.’
It was a good story, I suppose.
If it was true.
FUCK IT
I haven’t been feeling too good these last couple of days.
This is far more difficult than I thought. Thinking about the past is like digging up graves.
Once-upon-a-time we buried the memories we didn’t want. We found a little patch of grass at Ocean Cove Holiday Park, beside the recycling bins, or further up the path near to the shower blocks, and we kept hold of the memories we wanted, and we buried the rest.
But coming to this place every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, spending half my life with NUTTERS like Patricia, and the Asian guy in the relaxation room, slyly pocketing pieces from the jigsaw puzzles and rocking backwards and forwards like he’s a pendulum, and the skinny BITCH who skips along the corridor singing God Will Save Us, God Will Save Us, when all I want to do is concentrate, but can’t because the stuff they inject makes me twitch and contort, and fills my mouth with so much saliva I’m actually drooling onto the fucking keyboard – I’m just saying this is harder than I thought.
‘The thing is Mum, it wasn’t the same for you, was it?’
‘In some ways—’
‘No. It wasn’t. It wasn’t the same because Nanny Noo didn’t stop you going to school in the first place, or make you sit by yourself for a whole year making pretend mistakes in your exercise books and wondering when—’
‘Matthew, no. I didn’t—’
‘Wondering when I would have to go to the doctor’s, if you’d drag me there past the whole school, staring and pointing—’
‘Matthew, please—’
‘Staring and pointing at me—’
‘It wasn’t like—’
‘It was! It was just like that. And you made it like that. So now I have to see them all again. I don’t care about the new people. I don’t care about the people who don’t know me. I don’t care about not having anyone to write on a stupid plaster cast. I don’t—’
‘Matthew, please listen to me.’
She tried to put her arms around me but I pulled away. ‘No. I don’t have to listen. I don’t have to listen any more. I’m never going to listen to you. I don’t care what you think.’
‘You need to get some sleep, Matt.’
She wobbled a bit as she got to her feet, and for a second looked down at me as though balanced on a cliff edge.
I had one more thing to say, but I didn’t want to shout it. I forced each word into a tightly bound whisper.
‘I hate you.’
Mum closed my door softly behind her.
handshakes
I didn’t describe the special handshake I do with Dad.
When we became
amis
we decided on a handshake. I think I’ve mentioned it already, but I didn’t say how it goes. It’s a special handshake, not a secret handshake. So I can tell you.
What we do is reach out with our left hands and link our fingers, then we touch the tips of our thumbs together. We must have done this thousands of times.
I haven’t counted.
Each special handshake takes a brief second, but if each one was placed end to end they would stretch for hours.
If somebody took a photograph every time, at the precise moment our thumbs touch, and viewed the photographs in a flip book, it would make a time-lapse film – like you get on wildlife programmes to see plants grow, or weeds creeping across a forest floor.
The film begins with a five-year-old boy, on holiday with his family in France. He’s been trying to delay bedtime by talking to his dad about the hermit crab they caught in the rock pool. The handshake was his dad’s idea. Their thumbs touch, and the camera clicks. In the background, on the hotel balcony, the boy’s Mum and older brother look on. They reveal a hint of pride, and jealousy.
Day and night flash in a strobe, seasons collide, clouds explode, candles melt onto icing sugar, a wreath rots way. The boy and his dad rush through time, thumbs pressed together.
The boy grows like a weed.
And in every moment is a world unseen – beyond balconies, outside of memory, far from the reach of understanding.
I can only describe reality as I know it. I’m doing my best, and promise to keep trying. Shake on it.
prodrome
n
. an early symptom that a disease is developing.
There is weather and there is climate.
If it rains outside, or if you stab a classmate’s shoulder with a compass needle, over and over, until his white cotton school shirt looks like blotting paper, that is the weather.
But if you live in a place where it is often likely to rain, or your perception falters and dislocates so that you retreat, suspicious and afraid of those closest to you, that is the climate.
These are the things we learnt at school.
I have an illness, a disease with the shape and sound of a snake. Whenever I learn something new, it learns it too.
If you have HIV or Cancer, or Athlete’s Foot, you can’t teach them anything. When Ashley Stone was dying of Meningitis, he might have known that he was dying, but his Meningitis didn’t know. Meningitis doesn’t know anything. But my illness knows everything that I know. This was a difficult thing to get my head around, but the moment I understood it, my illness understood it too.
These are the things we learnt.
We learnt about atoms.
This illness and me.
I was thirteen.
‘STOP THAT, STOP THAT AT ONCE!’
His face turned purple, and a thick vein started throbbing on the side of his neck. Mr Philips was the sort of teacher who wanted lessons to be fun. It took a lot to make him angry.
Jacob Greening could manage though. I can’t remember what he was doing, exactly. This was in science, so probably it had something to do with the gas taps. In the science block there were these gas taps on the tables for fuelling Bunsen burners. It might have been that Jacob put his mouth over one of them and was sucking at the gas to see what would happen – it might have been his face that was turning purple, his neck veins throbbing. Perhaps he was set to exhale it onto a lighter flame, to breathe fire.
Jacob wanted to make lessons fun too.
We’d met on the very first day.
It happened like this:
Dad had taught me to knot my tie, as promised. Jacob turned up to school without one. In registration he started whispering into my ear, as though we’d known each other for years. He was going on about needing to see the Head Teacher, how it was private, and really important. I didn’t listen properly. My mind kept taking me back to what I’d said to Mum, about hating her. She’d driven me to school in silence. I pressed my face against the cool glass, and she flicked through radio stations. I’d hurt her feelings, and was trying to decide if I cared. Jacob was still talking, only now I realized he was anxious. His words were tripping over each other. He had to see the Head Teacher, but he didn’t have a tie. That was the crux of it.
‘You can have mine if you want.’
‘Can I?’
I gave him my tie and he wrapped it inside his collar, then looked at me helplessly. So I knotted it for him. I turned down his collar and tucked the end inside his shirt. I suppose it made us friends. He sat next to me in lessons but at breaks he’d be gone, bolting through the school gates with his rucksack held tight to one shoulder, and his anorak flapping in the wind. He had special permission to go home. This wasn’t something he talked about.
Mr Philips crashed a fist onto our table, ‘It’s not good enough Jacob! This constant childish, dangerous behaviour—’
‘Sorry sir.’ Even as he said it, a smile crept across his acned face. It is strange how fast we change – he wasn’t the sort to give a shit about school ties any more.
‘Get out! Get out of my classroom!’
He slowly moved to pack his stuff away.
‘Leave your bag. You can get it after the bell.’
‘But—’
‘Out! Now!’
The problem with sitting next to Jacob was that whenever he drew attention to himself, everyone looked at me too. I felt a surge of anger towards him then. Here is a question:
What do you have in common with Albert Einstein?
1) You are made out of similar kinds of atoms
2) You are made out of the same kind of atoms
3) You are partly made out of
THE
SAME
atoms
Jacob Greening slammed shut the door behind him, and Mr Philips asked that we all settle down again and look at the whiteboard. It is a good question, I think.
‘I’d like you all to decide which statement you think is true, and write down one, two or three in the back of your exercise books.’
‘Sir?’
‘Yes Sally.’
‘What if we don’t know, sir?’
‘I don’t expect you to know. We’re going to work it out together. Let me ask you another question. How much do you think I weigh?’
‘What?’ Sally shrugged, and I imagined how it might be to kiss her neck, or what her tits would feel like.
‘Have a guess.’
‘About twelve stone?’
‘Good guess.’
Sally smiled, then saw me staring. You’re weird, she mouthed silently. I turned away and picked up Jacob’s pencil case. He was the kind of boy who drew knobs on his own pencil case.
I never worked him out.
Mr Philips stood beside the whiteboard. ‘I weigh nearer to eleven and a half stone, or seventy-four kilograms, which means I have approximately, 7.4 x 10
27
atoms in my body.’
That is a way of abbreviating really huge numbers. Here is the number written out in full:
7,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Jacob was kicking the wall in the corridor. Sally was copying out the zeros. Someone else was looking out of the window. Someone else was imagining their future. Someone else could feel the start of a headache. Someone else needed a piss. Someone else was trying to keep up. Someone else was bored and angry. Someone else was somewhere else, and Mr Philips was saying, ‘This is more than every single grain of sand on every single beach.’