Being Small Read online

  “No, we can’t. It isn’t mine, it’s Kit’s. I’m not leaving Kit’s bike twenty miles from home.”

  “Just have to smoke slow, then, won’t we? And pedal easy. Or the other way around. We’ll be fine. Is there a shop here? If your mouth’s as dry as mine, we’re going to need more water. There must be a shop...”

  ～

  I am becoming strange to my own mother, at last, after so many years of trying. It’s a case of the biter bit. She always meant me to be unusual; she couldn’t have borne a child of the ordinary, a pink and gurgling babe, a whining schoolboy already growing into his grey suit or his greasy overalls, a garage mechanic or an office clerk in embryo. She needed difference, someone to match or complement herself, someone to show off with. That I turned out twinned, twinned with the dead, that was just a bonus: two for the price of one, me and mini-me, ten per cent extra free. She would have made me odd in any case.

  Now, though, I am too slippery for her to get a grip on what I am. Sometimes when I come in from the night shift, what is draggingly late for me is early for her as it is for the world around, the world she so reluctantly inhabits. She’ll be sitting in her upright chair at the little window table, where she may have been watching the sun rise or she may have been watching for me. She watches me now, as we exchange some kind of greeting; she’s not good first thing and I’m a teenager, I’ve been up all night, I’m either monosyllabic or my mouth is running like a river and neither one is particularly useful to her.

  I’m too tired or just too young to go to bed directly. So I slump into the sofa, and we watch each other. I might perhaps ask a question about whatever brassbound job it is that she’s doing at the moment, but if I do it’s only to have something to toss into the empty space between us. I’m not interested, because neither is she. She’s always said that work is fuel, it powers the lifestyle, no more. Specifically, she does what work she does to keep us in the manner that we have made our own – and by ‘us’ she means Small and me, she says. She says that often, or variations on the theme. She’s not a martyr, not a sacrifice, but a driving force for sure; she sees herself as the motor, she says, while it’s us who steer the boat.

  Well, maybe so. She built the boat, though, she trained the crew; she chose the river and drew the maps. Theologically speaking, God’s just the engineer and each of us gets to play captain. It’s still God’s world, God’s rules and ultimately God’s responsibility. Free will’s an illusion and choice is a three-card trick, you choose where you’re directed to choose, where you’re driven to it.

  She likes that, my mother. She’s always been comfortable setting up my choices for me. And now somehow I’ve got ahead of her and she’s off-balance suddenly, unsure of me, confused. She doesn’t understand what I’m doing, with my time or with Small’s.

  Like this:

  “You look tired.”

  “Uh-huh.” Well, I would, wouldn’t I? Sleep is a luxury, and I didn’t have time to indulge. Put it another way, I’d been up all night and most of the day before, the night before that. I wasn’t counting hours. I wasn’t counting anything or costing anything, just doing whatever was there to be done.

  “You shouldn’t let them use you this way, it’s not good for you. You’re still growing, you need to spend your nights in bed. In your own bed,” because she still wasn’t really sure that I was being truthful here, that my nights really were spent beside a sickbed. Me and a houseful of men, without Small to watch over me: she worried that I might be sleeping with one of them, with a variety of them, with the whole transient population as it passed through.

  It’s interesting how people, mothers particularly, will find entirely the wrong things to worry about.

  “I’m not sure I am,” I said. “Still growing, I mean.” I stretched out and gazed at my feet, not far enough away. “Kit weighs and measures me at the gym and I haven’t grown in six months, upwards. I think I stuck at this.”

  Outwards, inwards, every otherwards I was growing fine. They’d clubbed together to buy me a membership – though I thought Gerard had done most of the clubbing – and Kit and I did circuits together three times a week. I still ran, and sometimes I had company then too, though I’d settle just for Nigel. Adam and I cycled when we could, not often enough but absence kept us hungry. I’d never been so fit; my life had never been so populous.

  “You could still put on a spurt. Be a late developer, why not? You’ve tried the other thing, walking early and talking first. Just wasn’t me you were talking to, you and Small always had your own language. So good for you, so much stimulation so young, I didn’t have to do a thing to help. You two did it all, you practically brought each other up. I often wondered, did you share your dreams? Back when he was alive, I mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t remember.”

  “No, of course not; but he might. You might ask him sometime.”

  I might. Forgetting’s not my thing either, just that babyhood’s an exception; my records don’t go back so far. Actually I don’t think anyone ever truly forgets, they just mislay the information. Forgetfulness isn’t a delete function as far as I can see, it’s only bad indexing and broken links.

  But we’d talked about all of this before, and I thought something more was coming, and I was too tired to play games. Maybe this was how Quin felt inside: his fingers slack on the pieces, his hands sliding off the board. Except that he must feel this way every day, all the time, and always would for all the time that was left him.

  I waited, and she produced her killer question. “How does your brother feel, about you spending so much time in that house, and being so tired otherwise? You only come home to sleep, how fair is that?” Except that the real question was how do you think your brother feels etc, and that made it not really a question at all. It was an accusation, and I really didn’t need to answer it. Just as well, as I didn’t have an answer. I haven’t asked, and I don’t care – not a possible thing to say, to my mother.

  So I just shrugged and sat there, the very image of sullen adolescence; and after a while she stepped back, as she had to. She said, “All right, love. How is your friend, anyway?”

  And I said, “Quin? He’s dying,” but I said it softly where it could have been vicious, it could have been another accusation flinging back. No point in that. It was just what I always said, it was always true; dying was a steady state with Quin, so question and answer were more or less meaningless. I might equally well have said, “He’s fine,” the way I always did about Small if anyone asked. Kit did ask sometimes, teasingly, except that I wouldn’t be teased.

  And then even the shrugging and the muttering became too much for me, and I settled for just sitting with my eyes closed, not really listening any more when my mother spoke; and then I was dreaming and then rousing from a dream, rousing to an empty room and sunlight on the table to show where my mother had gone, where she had left one of her Moleskine notebooks behind.

  And when I picked it up it opened as they do, to the page with the rubber band snapped around it; and she’d sketched me as I slept, and it was like a confession, she might as well have written it down in capitals, stood up at Mothers Anonymous and said it aloud, My name is Alice Martin and I don’t understand my teenage son.

  Her sketching was usually neat and quick and precise, the pin through the butterfly. This was hesitant, anxious, troubled. She had my features, my body in proportion, the stretch and slump of me across the sofa, but I thought she’d missed me altogether, seen me and not known me. It might have been the portrait of a stranger, or she might not have known at all what she was looking at, the butterfly gazing at the caterpillar and wondering what it was, bloody hell, all she’d done was lay a bloody egg...

  ～

  Singkong is also the Malay word for cassava. I found that in independent research. It’s amazing what you can find, if you only go looking.

  You are what you eat, you are what you wear; you are what you read online, maybe. Maybe you a
re, at least. Not me, I’m not that gullible. I just take what I want, what I think I might find useful.

  Sometimes I get it delivered.

  ～

  You’re never alone with a Strand. You’re never alone with a good book. I’m never alone, full stop.

  Quin, though: Quin can’t smoke any more, and he can’t read, though there’s always someone here to do the reading for him and there’s plenty of books. I don’t think that stops him being alone. There’s always someone here, sure, but he doesn’t always know it. He doesn’t always know us, now. Sometimes he gets scared, just by our voices. Sometimes he strains an eye open and squints at us, all dry and shrunken, and his hands pluck fitfully at the covers – floccillation, that’s called, if you ever need the word for it: or carphologia, that’s a true synonym; or crocydismus, that’s another – and his thin pinched mouth maybe shapes words at us and he might be saying who are you? or he might not, he might be mumbling syllables at random and it really doesn’t matter because what he means is clear enough. He’s frightened and alone in a roomful of strangers, he doesn’t know what’s happening, he has no control. Perhaps he remembers other days, when none of that was true. Perhaps not. Again, it doesn’t matter. He is here now and this is what he’s doing, and you could call that being alone.

  Or you could wait a while, and there comes a time when he doesn’t know who he is himself, or that he has a body to inhabit. You can see that, look, I’ll show you, it’s like this: when his fingers twitch and there’s a shudder in his skin and his breath comes fast and shallow, and you wish he could be asleep and dreaming and you know there’s no chance of that, so you talk to him but that’s nothing, it’s meaningless, and his eyes will not be opening this hour because he’s forgotten that he has eyes, there is nothing but the little candle of his consciousness lost in the long darkness, a questing where there is nothing to be found or known, and the word for that is despair if ever you should need it, but the feeling and the foundation of it, the definition is entirely being alone.

  Or you could wait a while longer, sometimes it really is a long wait now, until he comes entirely back into himself, and the eyes are his and the voice is his and what they say between them. And this is the worst of it, for him and for us too. Because he smiles at us and he speaks to us and he tries terribly hard to be Quin, even if it’s only Quin-the-patient and much reduced from anyone he used to be; but Quin never was alone, he never lived or slept alone, he never went alone to work or party. And now he’s there in his big high hospital bed and that’s a statement in itself, a strong metallic tubular bell of a statement, long and bright and sonorous, this was bought for you and no one else to share, where you can lie alone, because there are two worlds in that one room and he inhabits one and we the other, and there is no sharper way to say that he’s on his own now. His friends are here about him and his partner too, and we all of us only serve to stress how very much alone he is and going solo.

  Sometimes I feel most guilty, being most young and probably furthest from him, but in truth it’s himself that makes this hard for him. When he’s most himself, he’s most aware of what’s happening, where he’s been and where he’s going, how he has to get there. He knows when he’s been raving, he knows when he’s been lost entirely, he may perhaps have some ghost memory of each. And he knows there will be more of each to come, and less of this. Ultimately he knows there will be nothing, and that for him is worse than either. He can lie there and savour his own dying, feel the slow determined tread of it, chart every separate step he’s yet to take. This terrifies him, but not so much as what follows, that logical final step, the being

  dead.

  If he were further gone, if he were raving altogether or else lost altogether, then all this might be easier. I might forget how scared he is of extinction, where to me it seems so much the better choice if I could make it for him. Without his craquelure eyes and creaking voice to remind me, I might persuade myself that there’s a mercy yet in simple death, where I have no hope at all of ever persuading him.

  ～

  My mother on her morning shifts, she always left before the post arrived. Not me. Late home last night or early in, whatever today might promise or threaten or withhold, I could still be sure to be around to greet the postman, to open to his knock if what he carried needed signing for or simply wouldn’t fit through our letterbox.

  It was a handy habit to acquire. My mother knew what cash I had, it was what she gave me; she didn’t always see where it went. Sometimes she asked, “What do you do with it all, for God’s sake? Tell me you’re not stashing it against a rainy day, tell me you haven’t got a savings account. You’re not seventeen yet. I know you can’t get rid of things, but surely money’s different...?”

  Money was different, and I could assure her so. For once I couldn’t blame Small, I couldn’t say “I give it all to Small, I don’t know what he spends it on,” even she wouldn’t buy into that; but I could mumble and turn my head away, I could let her find the odd brown-paper wrapping and perhaps a foreign stamp, and that was good enough. I was sixteen, after all. Of course I’d buy porn on the net, what red-blooded boy would not? And of course I wouldn’t let my mother find it.

  ～

  Running with Kit on a Sunday afternoon, this is serious work; we’ll do seven or eight miles around the city’s rivers, he says he’s training me up for a half-marathon. We don’t take Nigel. Nigel is not serious.

  Kit is not always serious, but he can be. So can I.

  So we run, and this is not jogging; it’s a steady lope, a wolf-pace that we can keep up easy as it eats the distance that we do, that makes us both confident of more. Which is the thing about Kit altogether, that wherever he takes me, whatever we do, he always makes me confident that we can go further and do more. If you’d asked me when we met, that day in the woods, of the two I’d have picked Peter as my likely friend: older and more comfortable, less edgy. Even despite Adam I’d still thought I would gravitate upwards, towards my mother’s generation, always wanting to be bigger than I was.

  So Kit is a surprise to me, as Adam was before; and he’s a challenge and a temptation, a snare but never a delusion. No one is more real than Kit, or ever could be.

  So we run his course, towpaths and bridges, like a thread that stitches all the city together despite its dividing waters; and then we head home and just before we get there we duck into the park for a lap of hard running, a race around the fence and first to touch the old oak wins an acorn. This particular challenge, sometimes, I can win it. Never in the gym, we only pretend to compete there; twenty-four can lift more than sixteen, that’s just biology. Running gives me a chance, even if it’s only a chance to cheat.

  Then I play dog-boy and fetch Nigel, and we do a lap of jogging, stretching, doggie-wrestling and throwing sticks. Maybe we talk now. Talking’s often good, when you’re hot and sweaty and cooling down.

  Then back to the house and into the bathroom, under the shower together and he washes my back if I’ll wash his, and then one day it’s like this:

  Water like a scalding flow of glass, enfolding me like a bottle, like time gone liquid, the flow and the drag of it over my skin and how it can beat me down, so hot, so hard it can numb me altogether and batter me out of my body almost, out of any sense of myself; and how it hammers on the back of my neck and the heavy run of the water downwards is counterweighted somehow by a shivering rise in my spine, a tingling that is neither warm nor chill but fierce and focused, that climbs in pulses like fists to the base of my skull and then dissipates like bruises, and it’s all about possession, personality, this is me and this is mine...

  ～

  “Are you done, then?”

  “Yeah, I’m done.”

  So he shuts the shower off, and I just stand there for a second or two, running my hands across my scalp, as if I were squeezing the water out of my hair except that there’s no hair there now, Adam’s sister is shaving our heads this month so that we’re bald and beau
tiful together, cheap on shampoo; and when I blink my eyes open again Kit’s looking at me through the steam, and I say, “What?” and it’s a real fight to keep it light, to sound amused and nothing more, not sullen or embarrassed or flirty when I could somehow be feeling all three of those at once.

  “Oh, nothing. Just you. God, if I could bottle you...”

  “Well, you can’t,” sudden and harsh and inappropriate.

  He quirks an eyebrow at me and says, “Well, no. But if I could, I’d make a fortune. Essence of Boy, the pure thing, unadulterated.”

  “Essence of Scar, more like,” I say, glancing down in a major misdirection.

  “Oh, the scar’s all part of the charm. Every boy should carry a scar or two. You just take it over the top, as usual. What, you wouldn’t want rid of it, would you?”

  “No. No, I wouldn’t,” and not such a misdirection after all.

  “That’s good. Be a shame to waste a feature on someone who wasn’t grateful for it. Michael, you will let me know when you’re ready to hit the clubs, won’t you? We’ll rustle you up some ID, get you through the door, and then it’s downhill all the way. Everyone is so going to love you.”

  “Thanks, but I’m loved enough already.”

  “You say that now. Give it another year, for the other shoe to drop. And then just let me be there when it happens, yes? I want to watch. Now play towel-boy for us, there’s a sweetie; then you go and sit with Quin a while, and I’ll see what’s cooking in the kitchen.”

  And double it, he means, or put a pan of rice or pasta on the boil to go with, just for us. No one in that house ever ate enough, or thought we really needed more. We burned carbohydrates like coke in a furnace Sundays, gym days, pretty much every day. Sometimes it was easier just to take him home with me, my mother understood about starving age but feeding adolescence; except that then I’d have to put up with questions, teasing, who knew what. That could go on for days, and it never felt the easier choice at all, in retrospect. Best days were when we did the cooking ourselves, or else went out for fish and chips.