Being Small Read online

  Brian was sitting in a chair by the window. He had a book face-down in his lap, a glass in his hand. He gave me a nod, and touched his finger to his lips.

  A tug on my sleeve; I was led away, down the passage to the bathroom. Once the door was closed:

  “That’s a special treat,” Kit said softly. “As we’re going out.”

  “Treat for which one?” They both looked fairly happy about it.

  “For us, obviously. We don’t often see him sleeping like that. It sends us on our way happy, and with luck we get to keep Gerard amused for a couple of hours without him even thinking about ringing home. You have to eat slowly, all the way through the menu, as many courses as you can and coffee after.”

  Fine, I could always eat. My mother starved me. And I was eating for two, I kept telling her that, and all she did was clout me.

  “Oh, and talk too, you have to talk. He’s heard too much of me, I’m only there as a makeweight, not to leave you feeling spooked. You can talk about Quin if you want to, he doesn’t mind that. Just don’t let him brood. He’s too broody, and that’s not good for anyone, him or Quin or anyone. Good, your hair’s still wet...”

  He’d learned that by playing with it, all without my consent. Now he fetched his pot of sacred clay and fixed it for me, again without any suggestion that I might have a voice in this.

  Like the last time, I thought it looked grand when he’d finished. So I thanked him, while he washed his hands; he said, “You need something to feel good about. And you’re sixteen, so we may as well keep it simple. If you look good, you can feel good.”

  As I went into the lion’s den, he clearly meant. Sixteen, and a job of work to do. “I thought this was about him making it up to me?”

  “From his point of view, it is. I’m just co-opting you into a conspiracy. It shouldn’t be that awful, anyway; Gerard can be intimidating, but he’s fun once you break him down. He disapproves of me, which is terrific. Only I’ve played that about as far as it’ll comfortably stretch, and someone else has to make the running now. Tonight, my sweet Michael, that someone is you. Not a sacrificial victim, just a resource. Not even a fresh titbit for a jaded palate; the looking pretty is for your pleasure, not for his.”

  Maybe, but I felt like a titbit all the same. He’d fed me to Quin because I played chess, and now he was feeding me to Gerard because – well, because he could, because I was there, because the need was there and the opportunity arose.

  “Okay,” I said, “but I’m keeping the clay.” He’d said it himself, those little pots came expensive.

  “Sure,” he said, “it’s yours, only it stays here. Drop in and use it, any time. Door’s always open,” and he opened the bathroom door as he said it and said, “Here’s Gerard,” in exactly the same easy voice.

  And here was Gerard coming down the hallway: big man, dressed to impress but not, I thought, to impress me. You don’t put on a suit and tie to build fences with a teenage boy. He gave me a nod and half a smile, “Glad you could come, Michael,” and then turned to Kit. “Are we ready? I thought the Mokhtar.”

  “I thought you might. Is that the closest you can come to informal? It’s fine with me, but I’m not the guest of honour. Michael? You like Indian?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Good. We all like the Mokhtar. Most of us go there for the food, which is fabulous. Gerard goes for the starched linen and the stiff service, a punkah-wallah in every booth and all the fans wafting the odour of the Raj, which they’ve preserved in bottles since 1923.”

  “Kit, if you can’t behave I’ll leave you behind.” His voice was mild enough, but his glasses flashed blankly dangerous. Kit didn’t even blink.

  “Oh, I’ll behave. The question is, how will I behave? Behaviour’s like weather, it’s like the poor, it’s always with us.”

  “And so are you.” Longsuffering was scored into every short snapped word, but I thought that was deliberately done. Just as I thought that Kit was needling him deliberately: not enough to make him explode, just enough to provoke my sympathy and swing me over to Gerard’s side. Nothing was as superficial as it seemed, and I thought all three of us understood each other very well.

  Sometimes my mother suggests that I should try just taking things at face value for a while, but how can I, when things have so many different faces?

  ～

  My mother always asks for a table for three, “but there’ll only be the two of us eating.” The guy who met us inside the door of the restaurant greeted Gerard by name – I thought it was like calling to like, this guy dressed just that little bit finer, handkerchief in his top pocket and studs in his cuffs – and then said, “A table for three, is it, Dr Logan?” and for a moment I could feel both of my companions glancing at me with a touch of hesitation in them.

  I said nothing. I don’t strike attitudes in public, unless that’s an attitude in itself. Like the weather, like the poor, Small is always with us and I was pleased that they’d remembered, but he doesn’t need a seat at the table.

  ～

  The menus were vast and leather-bound. Food dressed up in a suit and tie, I told myself, and nothing to be intimidated by. Even so, I was grateful when Kit said, “We know our way around this pretty well. Why don’t we just let Michael relax, while we put together a birthday feast for

  him?”

  “Yes, of course – so long as it is a feast for Michael, not for Kit. Which means that we leave here with our tastebuds intact, Michael, yes? Nothing too ridiculously spicy.”

  “I can take it,” I murmured, in reaction to the face that Kit was pulling.

  “Of course you can, but there’s no need. Why force yourself to eat something so hot you can’t taste it? Kit’s addicted to the endorphin rush, that’s all. You and I don’t have to cater to his addictions.”

  “We’re all addicted to an endorphin rush,” Kit said. “We just look for it in different places. I eat chillies, Michael runs; what do you do, Gerard? For the rush?”

  “You know perfectly well what I do.” He took his glasses off, either to clean them or else to give Kit the benefit of his uninterrupted glare. Then the well-dressed man came back with the wine list, which was even fatter than the menus. Gerard reached towards it, then drew his hand back. “No, I think probably not tonight, thank you. Tiger beer, I think, for all of us; and another five minutes with the menus, we haven’t decided yet.”

  ～

  A tall chill glass, brimming with amber and beaded with bubbles inside, slick with condensation under my hand: I sipped and listened to their bickering over the brinjal and the bhuna, the kofta and the keema and the kurai gosht, and felt oddly and inordinately happy. Hungry too, but that was a part of the happiness; and here came a waiter with poppadums and pickles, and that was better yet. I could sip and crunch and listen, and watch the ceiling-fans that were not turned by punkah-wallahs at all but by regular electricity, and I was quite happy to say yes when they asked if I liked seafood, and to take them on trust when they assured me that I would like spinach and okra too. I felt like I was inside the bubble, accepted, under the aegis of that suit and tie. I wasn’t sure what I’d done to deserve it; a few games of chess and a dogwalker’s badge didn’t seem to be enough, somehow. But my mother had taught me that no one ever does get what they deserve, and if I was going to come out on the plus side of this particular equation, well, no doubt it would all balance up later.

  Meantime, I could just enjoy it, food and company and ambience and all. I never had been in such a restaurant, booths that were almost private rooms, all the space we needed to be discreet. Plates came and steaming bowls and breads, and this was just the starters. Kit showed me how to eat with my fingers, straight from the dishes, while Gerard spooned himself a serving and spread his napkin on his lap and ate decorously with a knife and fork.

  “You get as greasy as you like,” he said generously. “I don’t mind so long as you wipe up afterwards, and I’m sure they’ll bring you fresh napkins and a finger-bo
wl; but we have cutlery, so why not use it? Why pretend to be Indian natives, when you’re so transparently

  not?”

  “Why pretend to be an Oxbridge gentleman,” Kit shot back, “when you so transparently already are?”

  This was an old argument, and could lead nowhere but here, entrenched positions and the battle replayed I thought for my own benefit, which was kind of them but not strictly necessary. I gave my attention to the food, lamb and fish and chicken each in its sauce, in its spices.

  ～

  The main course came with a separate table added at the end of the booth, solely to support the biggest naan I’d ever seen.

  “House special,” Kit grinned, tearing off handfuls and passing them around while dishes and plates were whisked away and replaced with new. More meats, vegetable side-dishes that should have been a meal in themselves, rice and raita; I nibbled on the bread in my hand, gazed at the rest and wished that I could eat all night and not be full.

  Right now, the bread was treat enough. Inside the soft and flaking crust I found minced meat on one side, sweet coconut and raisins on the other, and I thought perhaps I’d misjudged Gerard just as he had wanted me to. Perhaps he didn’t dress to impress at all, perhaps he dressed to conceal. Perhaps we all did. Perhaps Kit was dressing me to conceal whatever it was that he thought I shouldn’t show around.

  A new shirt, new hair and a gaudy pair of trousers couldn’t contain Small. You couldn’t hide him under a bushel, he’d still shine through. Actually, I’d wondered if all this evening’s dance was just cover, to make a situation where they could quiz me about Small; but they didn’t ask, they didn’t acknowledge his presence for a moment after that first quizzical pause at the door.

  Instead, when they weren’t picking at each other, they talked about Quin. Quin the professor, the rising fiery light, the savage intelligence; Quin the clubman, the doubly clubbable, white tie in London society with Gerard or leading his pack of acolytes around the student night scene here, “like wolves to the slaughter,” Kit said, doing his best to look the innocent lamb. Quin the patient, the terribly impatient, bedridden and hagridden and howling to be free as he never would be again.

  “He ought to be in hospital,” Kit said, because Gerard clearly couldn’t ever allow himself to say it, “only he made us promise not to do that, after the last time. He hates being sick, he’s terrified of dying and he says that hospitals are factories for the preparation of corpses, so he won’t go back. We had to promise to look after him, to help him die at home.”

  It seemed to me that they were doing the opposite of that, they were helping him to keep alive, fighting that losing battle in the long home of lost causes. If it didn’t make them happy, perhaps it made them feel good. I played with my hair until Kit slapped my hand away, both of us quiet now while Gerard talked softly about one more Quin, Quin the lover, tender and painful and precise, and I thought that if there should have been a fourth sat at that table, it wouldn’t have been Small the empty place was set for.

  ～

  Later, it seemed much later, we came back to number thirty-nine with a doggy-bag for Nigel and a fat, fizzing feeling in me at least. I couldn’t speak for the others, but I had too much food in my belly, residual spices on my tongue and an airy, beery frothiness in my head. I was just composing a careful goodnight, in hopes of not having to use it yet, when Gerard told me briskly to sit down, there in the offshoot, a high stool at the high counter.

  I did what I was told. He went into the kitchen, and from there into the bathroom, and so back.

  Whether Kit was expecting this, whether he’d budgeted for it, whether he’d worked for it I didn’t know, I couldn’t tell; but Gerard came back with a large orange, a bottle of distilled water and a packet of syringes.

  “I should probably ask your mother,” he said, “but I’m not going to, you can do that yourself. If she says no, never mind. And I hope you never need to do this anyway, I don’t ever want you to find yourself alone in here; but if you’re going to be on the team – and Kit and Nigel have set this up between them, I can read a conspiracy when it licks me in the face – then you need to know how to give Quin an injection. Kit’ll show you how, you sit there and practice, then I’ll come back and check. I’ll test you again in the morning, see if you can do it sober, but I need to be sure that you can do it drunk. Try not to jam the needle through your own finger, that’s counterproductive.”

  Kit unwrapped a syringe, pulled off the protective cap and held it horizontally in front of my eyes.

  “Sharp end, blunt end. Fill it like so...”

  I want to be on the team. I want my mother to say it’s okay. I want my brother to say it’s okay. I want to be a part of this. I want a reason to get up early, to stay up late. I want to eat with my fingers and drink beer from a glass, I want to sing for my supper, I don’t want to be a skeleton at the feast.

  I don’t want to see a pear in a bottle, or blood in a syringe. I want blood in my oranges, a dead king on a chessboard, shah mat, no place else. I want to be a courtier, a parasite, a nurse. I want to drink Quin’s pain, I want to grow fat on it so that he need grow no thinner. I want to give as good as I get, but I don’t know how. I want to outreach myself, to be better than they expect, to be more. I want to be greater than the sum of my parts...

  VIII

  BEING SMALL

  Sometimes, often, I wonder how it is that Small sees the world. He uses my eyes, sure, as his own can only see through glass, and that darkly. But does he, can he, would he want to see what I see? I think not, he’d find it jarring.

  Eyes are just the optics, that give good measure of what patterns of light come their way. It’s the mind that sorts and shuffles, adds meaning, understands. In every way that matters, then, it’s the mind that does the seeing. Small’s mind is a closed book to me, like last year’s diary closed and locked away, all the writing in it long since done. Unchanging, unchangeable: stroppy little mannikin, what does he truly make of all these data I supply, what world has he built in his little head to contain them?

  It’s easy to turn him into metaphor, easy and false. He can be a pupa caught forever short in his metamorphosis, the imago that never was, cocooned in vitro and perpetually baffled by this adult insect world: all bright colours and sharp edges and rough raw sounds, how is he ever to understand it who never had the chance to live in it? Like an alien I can see him squatting in his spaceship bottle, on his universal shelf, watching and not sharing whatever goes on beyond his cupboard cosmos. If he took notes, it would only be a way of recording his own bewilderment. He can’t learn from us, from me, from what I do; he doesn’t have the capacity.

  On another day he can be the puppet-master, the spider squatting in the centre of his web with a leg on every string and all the strings attach to me, so that he twitches and I jump, how high he has determined. All my choices are his own, I dance for him who cannot dance at all. And speak for him, and eat for him, and all my body is just him, out there distance-learning in the world. I am his periscope and his torpedo both, his prosthesis. Wonderful what they can do these days for the disabled.

  Or he can be my cold and unreachable heart, the figure in my carpet, the ghost in my machine; or he can be my saviour, my criterion, deus ex machina, the point of my perspective. Or the sign and symbol of my mother’s hand in mine, the control she keeps over me, how she displaces any focus else: so long as Small is the mote in my inward eye, then how can I turn my gaze elsewhere, outside the family, away from her?

  Analysis breeds paranoia. What’s the point? He is not a metaphor, for my use or anyone’s else. He is my brother, my twin, my mother’s other son. He is himself, in his jar and in my head, in my heart, in my life. If I have to live a second life on his behalf, if I have to divide my time between us, I won’t complain at that.

  But I would like to know the way he sees things. The way he sees me, I suppose, and what I do. We don’t talk any more, the way we used to. It’s like living in a
silent movie: we sleep together and eat together, we share books and walks and party invitations when they come, but we can’t have conversations. The most we can do is mouth at each other like fish in deep water, gesticulate wildly and hope that someone walks on with a caption to spell out what we mean.

  It’s bad, when you need someone else to interpret between your brother and yourself; worse, when your brother can’t or won’t talk to anyone but you. Never mind my mother’s claims to understand, she knows nothing. I am the world’s living and only expert on Small, and I don’t pretend to follow the convolutions of his mind. All I know is this, that he and I are poles apart, but opposite poles attract. We cling like magnets and redraw all the world around us like patterns in iron filings, dance and twist in filigree, in tandem, he in his small bottle and I in mine.

  IX

  CHEMOTHERAPY

  …Iwant to lose a game of chess. I want to lose a friend.

  I want him to go gentle into that good night, no more raging. I want the night to be good to both of us. I want to say good night, God speed, and mean it; I want him to wish me well. I want to wish him well, but I can’t do that.

  I want to be stronger than I am, but I don’t want to grow into my strength. I don’t want to grow at all, I don’t want to be big. I want to be small. I want to be Small. Shock horror, but I do. Not Small-in-a-jar, a shrill acid gnome in vinegar, never that; I want to be Small-as-he-is, in my head and heart, in my belly, bedded down, the one with the easy ride. I want to be the eunuch in the harem. I want to be carried around, I want to watch, I want to criticise, I never want to do anything. I never want to have anything to do. I never want to have to lift a finger.

  I don’t want to be responsible. I don’t want to be the butterfly, living with the knowledge of the storm.