Being Small Read online

  So she cut our hair for us whenever we’d let her, but mostly we were left alone, in a very literal sense. Which was of course what we wanted, if no one else did. Small didn’t like it at all. He could be mean that way, possessive. I understood him perfectly. I had the best of both worlds and he had the other thing; I was all the world he had and he wanted to keep it to himself. Of course he did, how not? If I’m no angel, he’s no saint.

  And this was our birthday, and I was surprised, almost shocked when he let me go. It had been harder to get away from our mother, with her ready excuses: so many boxes to shift and empty, new quarters to settle into, no night this for gadding about with my mate when I could do that any time and she needed my strong arms and my long reach. I suggested fetching Adam over, for extra arms and extra reach, but she didn’t buy it. Double trouble, she said, which was fair enough. He’d helped us move once before, and it had taken all day. Twice the boys meant half the work, she said, and I couldn’t argue. That had been half the plan. So I worked twice as hard instead, and wouldn’t stay for supper; and Adam’s family of course had eaten before I got there, so he and I were entirely out of kilter with each other.

  “Cheese sandwich?” he suggested, in that particular tone of voice that’s only waiting to be refused.

  “Kebab,” I said positively. “And chips.”

  “Oh. Only, I thought we’d stay in...”

  “You thought wrong. Me too, though, if that’s any consolation: I was reckoning to stay in. I just have to eat, is all. Come on, let’s go frighten the natives.”

  Two boys don’t make a gang but we did our best sometimes, catching a mood between us and responding to it, lifting each other by the bootlaces, greater far than the sum of our parts.

  We swaggered and whooped, we made ourselves large and loud and got in people’s way, we stopped the traffic and left a chorus of blaring horns in our wake. Adam bought a quarter-bottle of vodka from a friendly corner-shop, I bought a pint of milk; I drank half the milk with my kebab and then we mixed the vodka in and shared it, sip and sip. It’s a boy thing.

  Then we did the Thursday late-night window-shopping thing, the local version of the passeggiare, strutting our best stuff under the eyes of half the city’s teens. Spending money wasn’t quite the point, the chain-stores generally closed at eight and we just carried on. The food-courts stayed open, though, and so did some of the boutiques that clustered round them. So it was that we could suddenly snatch a whim out of nowhere and indulge it, diving into a cheap little jeweller all tanked up as we were and requesting, demanding this week’s special offer.

  “Oh, do me a favour, lads! I’m closing in five minutes.”

  “It’s in your window. Two for the price of one, it says. Him and me.”

  “I know what it says in the window, and I can count, but—”

  “It’s false advertising if you don’t do it. We’ll complain. Highest authorities in the land.”

  “You terrify me. But there’s only me in the shop, and I can’t leave the till, so—”

  “So we’ll wait. You lock up, and do us after.”

  “Can’t you just come back tomorrow? The offer’s good till Saturday.”

  “It won’t be his birthday tomorrow, will it?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. All right. Show us your money then choose what you want, that case there, while I cash up. Don’t touch anything else, I’ve got CCTV.”

  “Oh, hey, we’re not thieves!”

  That from Adam, who was wearing the self-same chain that I was and had paid for neither one of them, who could be as light-fingered as he could be heavy-handed when he chose. But we were being good tonight, we were being grand, it was my birthday and there’s actually more fun in spending money than there is in getting away with not. Besides which, he was paying, and who knew where the cash had come from...?

  We stooped over the display case, heads together, each of us shy to choose and waiting for the other; and when he did, of course we had to argue, jeer and elbow and start again. By the time the guy was ready for us, though, so were we ready for him.

  “We’ll have a pair of those, please, and a pair of those.”

  “Fair enough. Who gets which?”

  “One of each,” I said, “for each of us.” Wasn’t it obvious? “The ring in the left ear, the stud in the right.”

  “No,” Adam said, “the other way round.”

  I glared at him, drew breath to fight – then lost it, giggled, said, “Well, they’re your ears. But that’s how I want mine. Either way, your mother’s going to slay you.”

  “Is not. It’ll be you that she slays. You’re a bad influence, you.”

  Which was more or less what my own mother felt about him, except that she wouldn’t care about piercings. She was probably surprised I’d waited this long, probably a little disappointed; by now she likely thought I should be hiding tattoos. Alas for her peace of mind, all my secrets were much more easily disguised.

  ～

  Ten minutes later we were gazing at each other with numb and glittering ears, reeking of antisepsis and not at all listening to the aftercare instructions; and against my tentative grin Adam said, “Hell, who needs a twin? This is like looking in a mirror,” and he might as well have been handing out sober-pills, a cold shower, a sudden brutal shock.

  He was right, of course. Same hair, same neck-chain, piercings reversed so that it really was like looking in a mirror, and there was something wildly strange in that because it was always Small I saw when I looked at myself, we’d always been identical no matter how I changed. And now suddenly we weren’t, I’d done something he couldn’t, and matched up with someone else – and on my birthday too, his birthday, ours.

  I lost all my dizzy happy feelings in a moment, and walked out quiet and steady and ashamed.

  Adam caught up, caught on, said, “You okay?” in that voice that says I already know you’re not.

  “Not really. Sorry. It was a good idea.”

  “You just shouldn’t have gone along with it, you

  mean.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Bit late now. Will you be in trouble?”

  “Probably.”

  “I thought your mum was cool.”

  “Not with her.”

  “Oh. Right.” He always went silent, sooner than talk about Small. Suited me fine, as a rule and specifically just then.

  “It’s been a good evening, Adam. Thanks.”

  “It’s not over yet. Night’s young, you’re not. Come on back, we’ll raid the drinks cupboard and watch a movie. Stay over, your mum won’t mind.”

  She never had; but, “No, there’s too much to do. I need to get back,” and not for my mother’s sake. I might be growing apart from Small, but this was a bad day to be showing it.

  ～

  We had a subdued walk back to Adam’s, no clowning and not much talk. I felt a long way away from him, for all that we were rubbing shoulders. He tried again to draw me into the house, “just for a coffee,” but I shook my head, took my bike and left him.

  Pedalled slowly towards the new house, uphill all the way, my mood as dark and heavy as the sky above the streetlights.

  Not so many lights in the lane, and I wasn’t too sure of the house, to spot it at speed, at night – or that’s the excuse I offered myself, as I dismounted and pushed the bike along the pavement. It didn’t sound convincing, even to me. Truth was, I was dawdling, putting off the moment, suddenly reluctant to face what I’d come back looking for. My mother, the new house, a new dispensation – I couldn’t have stayed with Adam tonight, but nor did I want to deal with what lay waiting for me here.

  The sound of scrabbling claws and panting on the road behind me might have been a message from on high, if I believed in deities in or out of the machine; the voice that hailed me had a more earthy message of its

  own.

  “Sweet sixteen. What are you doing, what are you thinking, coming home at this hour? It’s not eleven
o’clock yet. What are you, a rebel with a curfew?”

  It was Kit, of course, coming out of the park with Nigel pulling at his lead and desperate to reach me. I might have been cynical, guessing that Nigel pulled desperately at his lead whether anyone or no one was ahead; I decided to be flattered. The bike went up against a wall, I went down on my knees, Nigel slammed into me and we did the boy-and-dog romping thing again, only a little constrained by having Kit stand over us and criticise.

  “...You know, I only brought him out for a last pee before bedtime. Now you’re getting him all wound up again... Oh, look, french kissing on your birthday is a treat, but – well, I’ve smelled his breath, so if I were you I’d be holding yours. And talking of birthday kisses, you didn’t answer my question.”

  “I know,” I grunted, my face in Nigel’s neck while he wriggled all over me.

  “So? You’re supposed to come creeping home with the dawn, all drunk and achy and trying to tiptoe upstairs so your mother won’t hear. Have you got an excuse, or are you just too good to live?”

  “Not that.”

  “Have a row with your friend?”

  “No. Not really. Just – oh, I don’t know. I did something I maybe shouldn’t, and I think there’s going to be trouble.”

  “What, with your mother? I thought she seemed quite laid-back.”

  “Not with her. My brother.”

  A little pause, then, “You’ve got another brother?”

  “No. Just my twin.”

  “Sorry, I thought he was dead...?”

  “He is. That doesn’t stop him having opinions.”

  “Oh. O-kay. Interesting. You want to talk about it? You’d better come in anyway, it’s far too early to go home. And you can play tug-of-war with Nigel, he won’t settle now without and you’re the one who got him so excited, so you’re the one can have his shoulder wrenched out of joint. He may look skinny, but he’s got a wicked pull on him. And then you can meet Quin; he won’t be

  sleeping.”

  “Uh, who’s Quin?”

  “Quin’s the boss. Master of the house. He’s the reason we all keep coming round. Come on, sixteen. I’m not letting you home in this condition.”

  “My name’s Michael.”

  “Sweet.”

  ～

  He wouldn’t even let me take the bike home, he said he didn’t trust me to come back. I left it chained to a telegraph pole and followed obediently where he and Nigel led me.

  Like Mrs Alleyn’s up the lane, number thirty-nine was a big semi-detached house set back behind a small front garden steeply banked. There was a garden gate with a stepped path climbing to a tiled porch, the front door, a big windowed bay. Mum and I didn’t get to use the front door, and neither apparently did Nigel; he towed Kit up the drive beside the garden, where three cars were parked nose-to-tail. No Merc, no Peter. Kit’s silver Mini was the middle of the three. He’d said they didn’t live here, but I wondered if he’d be staying the night. I was wondering a lot about this household, and determined not to ask, if only because I thought he was waiting for the

  questions.

  Curtains masked the front windows but soft light was leaking out at the margins, carried on a thin wash of music. The third car, a big old Volvo estate, squeezed us close to the side of the house. Our new lodgings had a separate door for us in this wall, opening onto a staircase that took us straight up to the mini-flat among the gables. Not so here; Nigel dragged us around to the back, to a flat-roofed recent offshoot with enough glass in the walls that they might have called it a conservatory when it went up. Now it was part garage, part garden shed, mostly dog-room. Here was water, that Nigel thrust his face into and splashed; here were empty food-bowls, that he investigated in a spirit of hopeless optimism; here were toys that he fetched to drop at our feet, and a basket-bed that he ignored entirely.

  Tug-of-war was the game of choice, to be played with an old rope bound into two loops, each end wet and chewed to fraying. My arms and shoulders were aching already, at this back end of a day spent hauling boxes down stairs and into van, out of van and up; so at first I just hung on two-handed, leaning back against the frantic jerking heaves that utilised every last bone and muscle Nigel had, from gripping teeth to counterweighting tail. There’s a pleasure, though, in working to exhaustion, and in the growing pains next day. Once I was sure I could hold him, I took him on one arm at a time, testing biceps and deltoid, lifting till he was almost hanging, front paws pedalling the air. He was wild for it, locked jaw and glittering eyes, a menacing growl quite denied by his rotary tail. Me, too. I couldn’t see my eyes, but I was doing my equivalent of the threatening growl: “Come on then, if you think you’re hard enough; is that all you’ve got, you wuss...?” in a constant undertone, and if I’d had a tail I would surely have been threshing

  it.

  My right arm was done and my left was doing nicely by the time Kit came back. He’d gone on into the house murmuring something about coffee, which wasn’t what he’d offered in the street outside; and he’d been gone a while, and his hands were empty, and he said, “That’s better. It’s a new game, or else it’s a psychological theory I’ve just come up with, based on the scissors-paper-stone model: boy tames wolf, wolf exhausts master, master humiliates boy. Where wolf is the purely animal, master is the purely intellectual and boy is something borderline between, all shaken up and waiting to settle. Nigel, go to bed. Michael, come through; Quin’s ready for you now.”

  To my surprise and perhaps a little to his own, Nigel did go to bed: a little slinky, a little downcast, tail low and sidelong glances as though this were a punishment undeserved. Kit reached into a bag on a shelf, found a biscuit the size of a small bone and tossed it casually underhand. Nigel took it on the fly and in the manner it was meant, as ritual compensation for a ritual complaint. He curled up in his basket, crunching woefully; Kit turned out the light and beckoned me through.

  This was the back door proper, opening into a scullery – washing-machine, dryer, big chest freezer that looked old in itself but newly come, not fully fitted in yet, standing proud of the wall and slightly at an angle, inconvenient in its size and placement both – and then the kitchen. I was an expert on kitchens, I’d seen and used so many, trying first to encourage and then to teach my mother to cook for me. This one was not big enough for the house. What must always have been too cramped for comfort had become breathless and busy, cupboards everywhere and every surface cluttered. It was scrupulously clean, which might have been surprising and somehow was not; but the toaster and food processor and mixer and blender and juicer and breadmaker and coffeemaker and knifeblock and breadboard and so on left precious little room for cooking.

  No matter. There was a smell of coffee in the air; there was an open doorway and a passage on, and Kit was there and looking back to find me. I hurried forward, and found myself suddenly walled in with books. They were floor-to-ceiling, on either side of the passage and in the hall beyond, running upstairs and out of sight.

  “Quin reads a lot,” Kit said. “Used to, at least. He gets tired now. The house is built of books, but we’re going to have to move these, they’re in the way. Just the thought of it makes me tired. Strong young volunteers welcome. I’ll let you know.”

  And then he opened another door, that must lead into the front room; and he went inside, and actually I was feeling unnerved and would rather have stayed out there and looked at books, but he didn’t give me the chance.

  “Quin, here’s Michael. Loves dogs, loves to read. The rest he can tell you himself.”

  ～

  So I walked in; and if I thought it was shadowy in the passage outside, under the watchful weight of all those books – well, I was wrong, that’s all. You need light, to make shadows. Quin had plenty of lights, dim little lights all around him, and all they did was make shadow. That was what they were for. The longer I knew him, the more truth I found in that, and the less comfort.

  That first night I edged in, not looking
for comfort, not sure what I was looking for, or what I ought to find; and found myself confronted, jarred by answers to several of the questions I hadn’t asked, all at once and unexpectedly.

  This again was lined with books, this room. Heavy sun-struck curtains made another wall, just as dark, that followed the curve of the bay; but there was a standard lamp dressed in an old shade, there were desk-lamps and table-lamps, plenty light enough to say how pleasant it must have been to sit in here and read, in the days when he could do that without thinking.

  Actually Quin never did anything without thinking, but I didn’t know that yet. All I knew was that I was looking into a world well lost, a place displaced from its purpose. The desk and sofa and easy chairs were all pushed back to the sides of the room, hard against the bookcases, all to make space for a bed. A high bed, a hospital bed, tubular metal frame designed for lifting and lowering and moving around on polished hygienic surfaces, not at all designed to have its castors sunk into an ageing, fading Chinese rug.

  “Michael. Come and sit, be welcome. Kit, he needs a drink.”

  In the bed was a man, was undoubtedly Quin, and no more was he designed for this. His bed had been transposed, imported; he’d been shrunk to fit. Even half-sitting as he was, with the mattress raised at an angle and pillows banked behind him, he still had to look up to see me, who would never be as tall as he was. As he used to be. He’d had his height and lost it, that was written into him, in the length of the legs that wouldn’t hold him up. And his weight had gone too, leaving his hands like wicker where they jutted from the sleeves of his silk kimono and his face ill-fitted to his skull or his age or his history. His hair was salt-and-pepper, white and grey and brown sifted together in an unexpected crew-cut, the last least vigour left to him. His eyes were wide and dark, and I wondered what drugs he was on, what could keep a man so tired and so alert. Fear could do that, and desire could do it, and together they were sovereign but you can’t get those on prescription.