Being Small Read online

  I don’t know what I want, but it isn’t this:

  where I sit in the dark and feel as though I’m breathing for the house, for the whole house and everyone who’s in it, which amounts to me and Quin. Not Small. I don’t bring him here any more, or else he doesn’t come.

  Unless he lurks, of course, unless he just squats in the shadows and listens in and never lets me know that he’s around. That’s always possible. Maybe he’s graduated, poltergeist to stalker. Maybe they’re two facets of the same thing, the jewel in the head of the toad. There must be something about him that shines; maybe I should be grateful, to be so thoroughly watched over.

  If I am. It only feels like that sometimes, and I try not to go down there. I’ve got another life, other lives to live now, and I don’t need Small scratching at my shoulder, dribbling down my neck. I don’t need to feel supervised, accompanied, shared.

  I don’t know what I do need; it isn’t that.

  ～

  Quin has good days, good nights, and this is one of them. He’s been sipping water on and off all through my shift, so I haven’t needed the port in his arm, where we can put him on a saline drip. He doesn’t eat any more, there’s another tube we feed him through, straight into his stomach; he took that too, and kept it down, which is big on the good-news front. It’s dreadful when he pukes, messy and slimy and difficult to deal with, it goes all over the tubes and the medical kit where everything’s supposed to be sterile. And it hurts him, and then he’s difficult to deal with, and I hate to call for help, like I can’t cope with someone being sick. I’m always tense at dinner time, and for an hour after.

  Sometimes he pukes blood, great gouts of it, thick and black, direct from his liver to the light. Then it’s okay, it’s compulsory to yell. Some things nobody has to handle on their own. Needs one to hold Quin up, one to hold the bucket; that’s a minimum. And still two of us afterwards to get him clean and quiet and settled again, drifting on a diamorphine drip. We’re not really supposed to have diamorphine, but Quin has friends all over, and more than one of them has a prescribing pad. I’m not allowed to touch the stuff, we keep all the hard drugs in a locked strongbox and they won’t give me a key, but that’s cool. I guess that’s cool. It’s the price I pay for being young, not big enough, punching above my weight. I don’t belong here, I don’t deserve this; I’m still grateful that they let me through the door.

  So’s Quin, or so he says. He still says so, when he’s up for talking. Not that often now, but this has been a good day. We even had him raised up a little earlier, his eyes open for a while. I don’t think he can see that much now, but he likes to look, and he likes to look alert. So we bathe his eyes with glycerine, that helps; and he’s very good, he doesn’t complain when they hurt him. He just lets them close and keeps on talking so that we know he hasn’t drifted far, not too far, not out of touch.

  He can’t manage the board any more, even with me moving the pieces, he doesn’t have that much focus; so we play chess in his head. Gambits, mostly. All the classic openings we play, he says to make sure that I know them. We don’t often get to the endgame. Too much history, too many choices: he can’t hold it all together, he loses grip and it all frays away from him and then he’s gone again, somewhere unreachable. Or else he’s hiding. Sometimes there are tears on his cheeks, and I bring out the glycerine to cover for him.

  He hates this. He never says so, but I know. We all know. Stubborn but weak, it’s the worst, and he overdoes both. It’s the back end of charisma, the shadow-state, a kind of proud and desperate helplessness. He tries to cling, and his own personality is all he has to cling to, and even that’s not really there anymore. It’s paper-thin, the shell of memory when the core has gone, and his own shaking hands rip and tear at it like a clumsy child breaking what he most wants and the acid sweat in his fingers, that does damage too, and his bedclothes and his breath just reek of bitterness and rot. The bedclothes we can change, we do that once or twice a day, but the breath is harder to approach. He won’t lie still to have his teeth cleaned, and some days he can’t manage a spit in any case, but I’m not sure that hygiene is the issue. I think what we smell is what he breathes, what he sees, where he finds himself; and I don’t know who he is out there but the place is rank and swampy, built on loss.

  I don’t think he knows who he is out there. I think he just barely manages to keep a handle on who he used to be, and that’s the worst of it, those times that he remembers.

  Sometimes he tries, though, he does try, and sometimes he has a good day, even now.

  Like this:

  “’S dark.”

  “You could try opening your eyes, it’s not so dark out here,” though I only had the one light burning, just enough to read by: Robert Graves, The Anger of Achilles. The book was his. I was working my way through his shelves, his tastes, his life in stories. In translation, I suppose. “Do you want to do that, give it a try?”

  “No... No, let be. Michael?”

  “Yes, it’s Michael.”

  “You do too much of this.”

  Which was just what my mother said, and Adam, and Small. All my significant others for once united, making common cause. But, “I like it here,” I said, which was true.

  “You mean it’s convenient.” His voice was a whisper now, but it could still be sharp.

  “That too.”

  “For whom?”

  “Everybody.”

  Dry and thin as they were, his snorts were yet expressive. I listened to this one, and flinched.

  “No, truly. Listen, Quin. Everyone works, except for me. They need to sleep, if they’re not actually working a night shift. Me, no school, no job,” you are my job, they told me that, “it makes sense for me to do this. And I’m a teenager, I’m naturally nocturnal –”

  “– And you’re here in the daytime too, as often as not.”

  “Well. I said, I like it. As a library, this house is better than the Bodleian. The books aren’t all lined up on parade, in proper order. They can talk to each other, you have shelves that are a conversation in themselves. That’s good for me; it’s all about connectivity, and that’s what I do.”

  “What you do... What do you do, Michael?”

  “I study, I suppose.”

  “Yes, but what? And why? What will you do with it all, when you’ve learned it all?”

  He was asking impossible questions, which he knew. I could have thrown them straight back: What did you do, Quin, and why? And where did it all go, because there’s next to nothing left here, just a voice that breaks and a mind that slips its gears and can’t get up the hill...?

  But I don’t do cruelty, I never did, and I’m not so good at dodging questions. Even the impossible ones. I said, “I won’t ever learn it all. You know that, you’re teasing me. It’s about understanding, how people work and what we’re doing here. Where we’ve come from, what we’ve built and how to look at that, how to read it, how to understand what people think.”

  “Is that important?”

  “Yes.” And then, in the silence after, because I really wasn’t sure, I temporised. “To me, it is.”

  “Why? Why to you?”

  “Because of what I am, who we are, the two of us. Because I have to think for two, for Small and me.”

  “Small is dead, Michael.”

  “Yes, I know. That’s the point. He used not to be. He used to be alive, inside me; and then they cut him out and he died, and I need to know what that means, and what I can do with it. I can’t just blunder around shitting and fucking like some Neanderthal before the obelisk arrives, counting on Prometheus to steal fire for me. I owe it to both of us, Small and me, I have to do better than

  that.”

  “Oh, Christ. You’re looking for enlightenment.”

  Of course I was, I thought that was inherent; but, “Isn’t everybody?”

  “Actually not. A lot of people out there are content with the shitting and fucking aspects. Aren’t you a little young to s
ee the world that sharply?”

  “So they tell me. Too much reading, I guess,” which was purely a lie, too well practised to evade. I didn’t guess, I knew, and the truth lay entirely the other way, which was why I tried never to tell it. We’re born sharp, and time is blunting; the world takes our edge away. Adult company grinds us down, but they really don’t like to hear that. When you’re a child, every adult that you talk to is trying to teach you something, and in the process rubbing away at what you’ve got. That’s why I was in such a hurry, to have things sorted in my mind before the people who loved me best could make an idiot of me.

  Books too, books are blunting, all that mass of knowledge. Every sentence is a thread that wraps around the sweet blade of the mind. Every fact is a limiting factor, the death of possibilities. I knew it, I could feel it, I was trying to outrace the rising sun by running easterly, defiantly into the dazzle. I still had my hidden advantage, though, my secret strength. I still had Small. Small who’d never learned to read, Small who dwelt in death and talked to me and me alone, unencumbered by any adult conversation. Sharp as a hypodermic needle, Small. Hollow and sharp as he should be, as he was made to be. Even as I lost my own edge, I could still depend on Small’s.

  Even Quin wasn’t fit to hear that. Especially Quin, perhaps, who had given his life to teaching and thought me the last of his many pupils, thought that I would always speak of him as mentor. Perhaps I would, if he was the man who closed me down, who cut away my choices till there was only the one path I could follow, broad and clear and well-intentioned all the way.

  “Read to me,” he said. “What are you reading?”

  “The Iliad, I guess.”

  “In the original?”

  “No. I’ve never looked at Greek.”

  “You should. Have someone show it to you, don’t learn it from a book. But if you’re not reading the original, you’re not reading Homer.”

  “No. Graves. The Anger of Achilles. It’s one of yours.”

  “Of course it is. Read to me.”

  We did this often when he grew tired of talking, when perhaps he felt himself a little start to slip. We used to keep a book beside his bed with the place marked, where we’d got to. Not any longer. He couldn’t manage a whole book any more, any more than a whole game of chess. The others might read him a newspaper feature, an article, perhaps a short story; I always thought that was a mistake, to offer him anything that ended. To me he seemed happier just to share a part of someone else’s journey, wherever I happened to be in whatever I was reading, to feel the run of words like a string pulling through his fingers until he lost it, until he let it fall.

  “I’m just at ‘The Catalogue of Ships’,” I said, simply to see him smile. It wasn’t true, I’d been there an hour ago, but I could turn back quietly. He’d grown to like lists, details, a world expressed by its taxonomy. The looser his own grip, the more he liked to think of things tied down, measured, recorded and defined. One time I’d been reading the King James, and nothing could have made him happier than the first book of Chronicles, the lineage of a nation spelled out in all its generations, all those long chapters of begats.

  ～

  “And that’s what you call a good day, is it?”

  Adam, hot and stroppy, neglected for days and not pacified by this promised Saturday, his temper neither burned out on a long hard ride up the Evenlode to Charlbury nor soothed by my being mounted on Kit’s spare racer, a better bike than his.

  “Yes. Yes, it is.” We lay scorched and sticky on spiky grass, in spiky sunlight above the river, the bikes and us all sprawled out where we’d dropped. We had one bottle of water between us, literally in the grass between us like a peace offering, except that neither one of us was offering either to pass or to use it. I stared up into the summer’s glare and wondered if you could have a white kind of darkness, if that was where Quin was headed, where his eyes were taking him.

  “What, sitting in the dark reading out troopship manifests from an ancient war that certainly never happened that way if it ever happened at all?”

  If I’d been sitting in the dark I couldn’t have read anything, but this would have been a dangerous time to say so. I took the other track, as usual, straight into the tidal rush. “That’s right. You just don’t get it, do you?”

  “No, I don’t. That’s what I’m saying, I just don’t get it. So explain it to me, why don’t you? I’m all ears.”

  All ears and a closed mind, slammed shut against temptation; but, “Actually you’re not,” I said, “you’re all skin and sensitivity. It’s Quin who’s all ears, pretty much, there’s precious little else left to him now. We can even take his pain away, but then his focus goes too, so he can’t really think any more. He’s breaking down, he’s fragmenting. If he manages a lucid hour, it’s getting to be unusual; if we can keep him conscious for half a day, then that’s a good day.”

  “Good for you, or for him?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure about either. It’s a victory, that’s all, a day won back. I don’t know if anyone enjoys it. When he’s lucid, he knows what’s happening to him, and he hates it. That’s all the passion he’s got left. And he’s terrified of what comes next, the real disintegration. That’s why he likes to listen to lists of things in order. It’s just something to set against the chaos.”

  “If he’s that scared, isn’t it the, you know, the lucid times he should be scared of? I was him, I’d be looking to let

  go.”

  “He says we’re too young, we haven’t learned to value what we’ve got. Truth is, what he’s really scared of is dying. Being dead. When he’s switched on, he can watch it coming closer, and he dreads that; but when he’s off, then it’s like he is dead, except that he comes back on again. So it’s like he’s dying again and again, every sleep is another taste of death and it leaves him gasping, gagging every time. He says we’ll learn. I say we learned long ago, Small and me, I’ve been carrying a dead one around with me all my life, all Small’s afterlife, there’s nothing I don’t know; but he says he doesn’t have a brother to carry him around. So he depends on his friends, he says, to look after him in this life, it’s the only one he’s got with nothing after and he doesn’t want to leave it any sooner than he has to. So we do, we look after him, as long as he hangs in there; but fuck, he’s scared. And so’s Gerard, so are Kit and Peter, all of them, I think.”

  “Everyone’s out of step except our Michael. Nurse Michael, the scourge of the bedpans.” But he reached a long arm out and found me, found my neck, slipped a finger under the chain and hooked it, twisted it, tightened it like a choker. I gathered we weren’t fighting any more. If it hadn’t been so hot we’d have been wrestling, trying to roll each other into the nettles. Lacking that chance to lose gracefully, stingingly – every separate swelling a token of forgiveness, boy-style – I lay still and let him strangle me a little, waiting for what would follow.

  “Wanna get stoned, then?”

  “Yeah, let’s.”

  “What d’you fancy? I’ve got acid, I’ve got speed, I’ve got some coo-ool swimmy stuff from SingKong, it’s new and I don’t know what to call it...”

  “Just a joint, man. We’ve got to get home yet, and you know what happened the last time we tried to bike high.”

  “No, I don’t. Can’t remember a thing.” But he sat up with the makings in his hands and started rolling, stopping halfway only to strip his shirt off so that I could lie where I was and admire the tribal tattoo on his shoulder-blade, where his parents were least likely to discover it.

  “That’s what I mean. I’m like Quin, I get scared by a sudden blank.” And if I was scared, how must it be for Small? Did I go away for him too, leave him stranded, or did he find himself trying to ride a whirlwind, tumbling in the dizzy chaos of a mind uprooted? I didn’t know, he wasn’t saying, but I’d made a lot of promises against his silence, not to let it happen again. Not until it did, at any rate. That sort of promise, recognising the inevitable
but making an honest effort to hold it back for a while, at least long enough for the effort to register.

  Adam grunted. There were getting to be two topics of conversation we had to avoid these days, Quin as well as Small; it didn’t leave me much to talk about.

  So, treading valiantly on safe ground, “Where do you get all the pills and potions from, anyway? And where the hell is SingKong?”

  “Don’t know much, do you? For a boy who knows everything, I mean. SingKong is a virtual city, an industrial megalopolis, all the shabby old tigers in a single brand-new shiny brand. For the ignorant among us, which is you, it just means buying stuff over the internet from anywhere in Asia. Singapore to Hong Kong, the whole nine yards, all the trading nations. That’s where my best deals come from.”

  “What, all that spam that wants to sell us Viagra, you mean it’s for real?”

  “Not all of it. No pill out there’s going to make your cock bigger. Sorry, and all that. But you can get prescription drugs, yeah. Easy. And it’s legal.”

  “Can’t be.”

  “True, it is. Here they’re prescription only, but you buy them mail order from overseas and they’re yours. Customs can’t touch you for it, nor can the police.”

  “How do you pay for them, though?”

  “Oh, if you want to pay, just set up an account. You’re over sixteen, that’s legal too, and credit’s cheap.”

  “But...?”

  “But scamming it’s more fun. Other people’s credit cards. I’ll show you. Why, what do you want?”

  “Oh, nothing. I was just curious, is all. It’s really not my field, you’re the man. How’s that joint coming?”

  “We have ignition. Lift-off will ensue. Pure Dutch skunk, this, you’re going to love it.”

  “Oh, Christ. We’ll never get back.”

  “Sure we will. There’s a bus, I checked. D’you think I’m stupid?”

  “Will it take bikes?”

  “Dunno, I didn’t check. We can find somewhere, leave the bikes.”