Being Small Read online

  She might have agonised over that, for my sake and her own. But she was always bold, my mother, and leaving things undone was never one of her sins. If there was something for me to see, I would be shown it. If Small was there to be visited, we would visit, and whatever price to pay, we could face that later.

  She knew me better than she thought she did, or else she had wasted a whole lot of worry. Now that I had seen, I understood exactly, and nothing in my world was shaken. I nearly turned to Small at my side to explain it to him, to be sure that he was keeping up: this is your body that was cut out of me, because you were growing inside me where you shouldn’t have been; and look how funny your hair was, just those long little wisps like a troll, and you were growing fat on my food, you can see that, what a pudge you were, and I was so skinny, we’ve seen the photos, remember? That’s how they knew you were there, because of the lump you made in my belly. So you had to come out, and it’s been ever so better since for both of us, although you died; you had to be dead but that’s never mattered and they kept your body, see, and this is it. Oh, look, fingernails...

  ～

  Only that once, we ever went to see him. It was interesting for all of us, but there wasn’t any point in going back. He wouldn’t have changed at all, bobbing about in his jar there, and change is what matters. Growing out of your clothes, growing into your life, chasing difference. Like this:

  I want to be older, bigger, smarter, happier. I want to be an orphan, I want to be a cat. I want to learn to ride my bike. I want to be that boy’s friend, or that boy’s. I want to be somebody’s friend. I want a television in the house. I want a television in my bedroom. I want to go to school and get a new haircut and another pair of shoes, I really want to want those sorts of things...

  II

  BEING SMALL

  What can he say, what can he do...?

  He squats in my shadow, in my pocket, in my mind’s eye. He rides my shoulders like a cat with all its claws out. He is the monkey on my back, but he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother. No dead weight.

  His name isn’t necessarily his description, it depends how you’re looking at him at the time. What time of day it is when you’re looking, what year it is, how old we are, like that. Like a shadow, he grows as I grow. Like a shadow he grows and shrinks, stretches and collapses and stretches again as the light shifts, as it changes. He never changes, though. Of course he doesn’t. He can’t, he’s dead. I change, all the time I change; he stays the same, the same as me, identical.

  All through my childhood, he is my unimagined friend. He does those things that imaginary friends most famously will do, only Small does them all for real. Constant companion, familiar as an old scar, he shares my games, my dreams, my bookshelves, my wardrobe and my bed. He’d share my friends too, surely, if I had any. He reads over my shoulder, he follows in my footsteps, he leads me far astray. Reliable as a squashed and sour bear, comfortable as a bed of nettles, he laughs at me, cries for me, whispers to me like an aching tooth. The only thing he can’t do is die alongside me, any of our games that call for dying. He’s been there already, he’s dead and you never can go back for a second try at that. Not allowed. One time pays for all, with no returns.

  How I see us then, we’re always running: uphill to the park, my voice shrill in the chill of an Oxford morning. People stare at me in the street, thinking me mad, thinking I’m shrieking at myself. They’re wrong, and they can’t know it, never will – he is not me, how could he be? and where’s solipsism when you need it? – so they’ll always think they saw a mad boy in his fever, ducking his own shadow, unaware. But I never can keep Small bottled up. That’s someone else’s job. I know that, I have seen. It frees me, perhaps, a little; perhaps it frees us both. If the haunted, the married, twinned souls ever can be free.

  I don’t feel haunted, nor married. Not then. Neither free. I feel avid, immediate, observed. As though I have to live for both of us, at double speed. Have I read 1984 yet, or has my mother read it to me? Almost certainly one, and maybe both. I know Little Brother is watching me, I always have known that; but the sense I have that the big man in the novel is floating, bobbing, passively watching, having his people accumulate experience on his behalf while he lies back and soaks it up like a sponge in water, that’s got to date from this time, round about. It can’t be retrospective.

  Whether this really is what Small wants, what he wants to watch, all this dashing about, conspicuous consumption – well, that’s another question and you’d probably have to ask him. Not that I’d ever trust the answer. Who can tell, in the end, what any other person ever wants?

  Who can ever tell what he wants himself, come to that?

  III

  CHAOS THEORY

  …Iwant to stay here. I want a home that doesn’t move, that doesn’t move and move and move again. I want my own hat-peg in my own house, I want never to move again. I want a mother who doesn’t keep making me move. I want to go back to bed – to my bed, I want it to be my bed in my room, mine for keeps – and I want to curl up and pull the duvet over my head and listen to the radio under there and have a torch and read books and drink coke till I fart fizzy and never move at all, not ever again.

  The room was damp and the bed was spineless, saggy and full of creaks, and the mattress was being eaten away inside by its own springs, so that I had to use blu-tack to fix coins to the sharp points of them to stop them piercing me when I rolled over or stretched out. It was no bad room to be leaving, no great loss. I was twelve years old, I badly needed a bed that didn’t creak.

  And yet, and yet...

  I guess there comes a time when you want just to hold on to what’s familiar. When the liquid rush of change

  turns acid, when it starts to dissolve your bones because they’re the only solid thing left to you and you want to scream against the bite, the burn, the betrayal of it, and your mother’s voice has just the same acidity as she says, “Honestly, Michael, I don’t know why you’re making all this fuss. I can’t wait to be shot of this place, the old man with his halitosis and that dreadful hair. He was charging too much, anyway. We’ll be much better off in the new house. We’ve got the whole attic to ourselves, and there’s a shower in the box-room, practically en suite. That’s better than sharing. We’ll be better off all round. It’s a nicer neighbourhood, there’s a park, I’ll find a job that pays more. We’ll be happy, you’ll see. So stop sulking, pick up that box and come along. Every time, we have this palaver. It’s getting boring. You didn’t want to move here six months ago, so why are you suddenly so keen to stay? It’s not as if you’d made any friends around here. And you were right when we came, that room of yours does have a smell to it. I’d think you’d be glad to leave. Forget this place, shake the dust from your feet and move on. A child your age, you should always be keen to go. Stillness is stagnation. Think about waking tomorrow in a new

  bed...”

  Which reminded me: I left the box on the stairs and darted back up to retrieve four two-pence coins from their precarious balance in the body of the mattress, poised like spinning plates on poles to save my poor sore skin from further punctures. I worked the blu-tack off them with my thumb as I clumped heavily down again, and played with it like a bogey in my hand all the way to the new house.

  ～

  New house, new room, new bed. New view, night and morning. It was light and air and music to my mother, not to me. I ached for permanence, for roots. Sometimes I longed to be discovered by social workers, seized in a dawn raid, taken into care for my own wellbeing. Locks on the doors and a watch kept at night, I’d like that. Or I thought about being picked up for shoplifting, held on remand; it was easy enough to get caught, surely. And when they saw how feckless my mother was, how unreliable, how unlikely to surrender me for trial – well, they couldn’t conceivably let me go. It would be custody or nothing. Somewhere strong and stern and Victorian for preference, barred windows and high walls. Secure accommodation. That was what I wanted, more than an
ything. I wanted to see a full four seasons through the same pane of glass. And my mother wouldn’t have it: stale she said, dull, bourgeois she said when she wasn’t saying peasant. Stability was death, she said; if you were sitting still you might as well stop breathing. Roots? Just look at roots, she said. Pale and limp and insipid, growing downwards, always down into the dark to sip sour liquids from a matrix enriched with rot.

  Look at Small, she might have said, dead and still in his jar, floating in formalin, pickled and preserved. Now that’s stability for you. Is that what you want?

  She never did say that, of course not; but it was subtext, it was there. Maybe that’s why she rushed me on so often and so fast, because I had to rush for both her boys. But I knew that already, I was doing it every way I could. Sometimes I felt I was sprinting ahead – calculus, chaos theory, carbon dating, bring it on – and leaving them both behind, my mother and Small together, doubling the distance between us every day. Sometimes I felt all my brother’s weight on my shoulders – Japanese, Judaica, James Joyce – and I was ready to stumble any step now, trying to carry the both of us and her expectations too. He ain’t heavy, no, but she could make him seem

  so.

  And always, always she made him the excuse for this motility, the constant cycle from Banbury Road to Cowley Road, from Jericho to Hinksey as though we were nomads following the grass, or planetoids in an unstable orbit around the gravitational hub that was intellectual Oxford. Never too close – she had a job in Bodley for a while, but not a long while – and never ever breaking far away. “If you want to move,” I said to her more than once, often, time and again, “why don’t we move properly, why don’t we go and live somewhere else?”

  She cited the advantages of a university city, and I said that there were others. She mentioned her graduate status here and the access that it gave her, that she could use on my behalf; I pointed out that she never did use it, on my behalf or her own or anyone’s else. But at least it’s there, she said, it’s a facility. Potential educative energy, she said, stored and available, like nowhere else on Earth. Even the brickwork has gravitas, she said, learning is osmotic; just brush your fingers along the college walls and feel the tingle of it, feel the bite. We can’t leave here, she said, you were born here, you were born for this. Both of you, she said. Living in Oxford, she said, it’s like being annealed with knowledge, every day a passing through the furnace. You wouldn’t be so wise, she said, if you hadn’t done your growing here.

  I said but I had, I’d been here and done that and maybe it was time to let me cool off somewhere else. She said I was still –

  And then she checked herself, on the very edge of saying entirely the wrong word; and stumbled almost as she turned the sense around and called me not so big yet, said I had room for a lot more growing.

  All of which meant that we weren’t going anywhere, except round and round again in our private endless trek, the pursuit of something unattainable. Didn’t matter what it was that we pursued, I sometimes thought, so long as it was guaranteed to keep out of reach, to keep us reaching. My mother might name it excellence, or betterment, or learning – except that she never learned, nothing ever got better and the only thing we excelled at was being ourselves, our own spectacular conceit.

  ～

  Like this:

  New house, new street. Back to North Oxford, big Victorian houses and mature trees, shadow and substance both at once; land of dons and little businesses, ditto ditto. Our landlady was a crispy little woman who had inherited both the house and the business that had bought it, a small textile company. She rented out her attic floor not for the money, which she didn’t need – which was why we could afford to live there, because she had let my mother batter her down far and far from a commercial rent, because she didn’t care – and not for the company, which she didn’t want. We had a key to the main door, but were

  encouraged not to use it. Our way in and out was the iron fire escape that clung to the back wall and climbed among the ivy. As near as I could work it out, Mrs Tilson took in lodgers out of a general principle, because she was a single woman in a large house with more space than she could possibly require. I’m sure she took in us specifically because my mother leaned on that

  principle, with all the significant weight that she could muster: a single mother with a part-time job, a boy on the near edge of adolescence, both greatly in need of better quarters than they could afford on the open

  market.

  Being entirely unprincipled herself, she’d have done that as a matter of habit. And once we were in, of course she reached for more. The room on the half-landing below our floor, not used except for storage, what a school-room it would make, now that I needed space to that degree. And textiles meant off-cuts, and my mother could do so much with off-cuts, run up bags and belts and little fabric gifts to sell at market, for the money my education so sorely needed...

  ～

  All of that and more and too much more, but I took comfort from it. It took time, she invested time in squeezing poor little Mrs T who thought herself so sharp, so brisk; and surely she wouldn’t waste what was so valuable to her, all that time, for the sake of a few short months in residence? Surely she must be thinking to stay this time, to hold on to what we had, so much better than we’d ever had before.

  Almost, I let myself believe it. Absolutely, I let myself grow lazy, accepting, assuming.

  ～

  Like this:

  “Hi.”

  “Hullo.”

  A boy with a bike, and just the low garden wall between us, that and a world of strange. We knew these conversations, Small and I. We were twelve years old, and we’d been having them all my life.

  “You’ve just moved in.”

  “Last month, yes.”

  “I saw you.”

  He’d been watching, from his end of the street. I couldn’t have known that unless we’d been watching him too, on and off all that month. He looked my age, he had a bike, we were the only boys visible in the immediate neighbourhood. We should gravitate by nature, at least for the little while that it took to learn if we were going to fling apart. I expected that. I was a pessimist by training and by experience; usually it needed only the one conversation. Perhaps I should learn to lie. I was sure my mother would teach me, and back me up where necessary, if the result was that I could buy or borrow or steal a friendship.

  This boy was as cautious as I was, though. It had taken him a fortnight to coast casually past just at the time that I was out there and alone, unmothered, available. He’d had a dozen chances already, and let them all go by. I liked that. So no, no lying. Let it happen, and let it be.

  “What’s your name, then?”

  “Michael. And you’re Adam.”

  “How d’you know that?”

  “It’s painted on your bike.” On the frame, in blue capitals, very uncool.

  “Oh. Yeah. My dad’s idea. It’s got the postcode on the other side. He thinks that’ll stop it being nicked.” Adam thought it was a humiliation, clearly.

  I grunted, with that kind of tempered sympathy that becomes a speciality after a lifetime, even a short lifetime of always being worse off than everyone else. That’s too bad, but starts off as a phrase, becomes a tone of voice, eventually just a cough. “You should see mine. No one would want to nick it.” Certainly no one would want to ride it. Only my mother could ever imagine that anyone might, that I might. We lived in a bubble, yes, but I could still see out.

  “Yeah? So what is it, then?”

  “I don’t think it’s got a name. I don’t think it ever had a name. It’s just a bike.” It had adjectives – generic, geriatric, decrepit, disused – but none that could qualify even as description. I was angling noisily for a dog just then, and that was just my excuse for walking everywhere. See how much walking I do? Of course I need a dog. Truth worked the other way: I wanted the dog to give me the excuse to walk, not to have to ride my bike.

  “Let’s see
.”

  Nothing I could do, once he’d asked. I went to fetch the thing from where I kept it beneath the fire-escape, cloaked in a tarpaulin, “against the weather” was what I said to Mum. Adam sucked air through his teeth, and clearly felt much better about his own embarrassing machine.

  “It’s too small for you, though. Haven’t you got a little brother you could pass it on to?”

  Here we go. Round the mulberry bush, round and round again. “Yes and no,” I said, still not good at lying, never having had the chance to learn. “I’ve got a brother, he’s Small, he’s my twin, but he can’t ride a bike.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s dead.”

  A blink, a shuffle, a glance aside; a curious look back. “I’m sorry. That’s awful. When did he...?”

  The real question was how did he...? This was old ground, familiar ground, and I’d never really cared. Of course they wanted to know, who wouldn’t? And Small was mine, his life had been mine and his death was intimately my own and I could afford to be generous with the news of it. No boy’s gossip could diminish me, or us.

  “Oh, he’s always been dead, he was born dead, almost. He was born out of me, and then he died. In my arms, but I was asleep, I don’t remember that.” Except in dreaming, and maybe the dreams were only what my mother told