Being Small Read online

  “I did,” I said. “He died,” and not such a change of subject after all, though no one had yet been crass enough to make the comparison. Except me, perhaps, and only in my head. Jack had been dependent on me too, and I was responsible for his death too, and he deserved to have his story told. Just not by me, not yet; I was still too guilty and too sore. Still hungry to suffer, my mother said, and she said I didn’t deserve it. She tried to blame Small, and I wasn’t having that. It was my fault, and I couldn’t talk about it without accusing myself, and it was hard to do that without sounding disingenuous, as though I were fishing for an absolution that I really didn’t deserve and didn’t want. So I kept quiet or did the other thing instead, did this, dropped that single heavy word and let it lie, the whole melodrama shtick that Kit had ducked away from. If he thought I was doing it for its own sake, for the impact, let him think. His thinking couldn’t hurt me, where I was hurt so much already.

  “That’s sad,” he said; and there’s no such thing as

  telepathy so I really have no idea what he was thinking, but You see? You’ve been there before. One way and another, all of that seemed to be implicit somehow, in his head or in mine. “Well, look, any time you want to borrow Nigel, just help yourself. Gerard won’t mind.”

  “Gerard?”

  “The big man, you just met him.”

  “Yes, but – um, his dog?”

  “No, his house. Sorry, did you think he was just one of the team? He lives here.”

  “With Quin?”

  “That’s right. Absolutely with Quin. The rest of us come and go, but Gerard is constant. He’s not big on dogwalking, though. Nigel is a sop to Quin and a burden to us all, so we’d be grateful. Brownie-points all round if you find time for Quin on top.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ve always got time. And you don’t need to be grateful.” Nobody could lose here. They needed me, perhaps, a little; and what did I need more than time away from my mother, my brother, my self?

  ～

  Letting myself into a dark and unfamiliar house later than I’d reckoned and more drunk than I’d thought, being preternaturally cautious as I felt my way up the stairs, determinedly not talking to a dead brother nor to a dead dog when I might have done either of those things or I might have done both if I’d been sober and easy and at home, I found at the top that it had all been wasted effort, wasted silence, because my mother was awake and waiting for me, in bed but watching through her bedroom’s open door.

  “Michael. Come and talk to me. Did you boys have a good time?”

  “Uh-huh.” Perched on the edge of her bed and still wary, still feeling my way.

  “Are you going to tell me about it?”

  “Not much, probably.”

  “No, I thought – oh. Some things you can’t hide. Let’s see,” and her bedside lamp snapped on and her hand touched my chin and turned my head to face her. “Hmm. Well, at least you didn’t do it yourselves, with a needle and a candle and a cork. That was always our trick, and the holes always went septic. What does Small think about it?”

  “I haven’t asked.”

  “No. I think perhaps he’ll let you know, regardless. Well, on your own head be it. Don’t tell him I said so, but I think it looks fine. One stud, one ring – did Adam get the matching pair?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. I’m glad you have someone other than your brother, to share these things with. United by the smell of TCP, that’s so sweet. How’s your head going to feel in the morning?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Fit for school?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good boy. While we unpack, then. Go to bed now. Clean your teeth first, and drink a glass of water. And if you are suffering tomorrow, don’t be too sixteen to say so. I’ve got plenty of nux vom.”

  VI

  BEING SMALL

  Small is not big into nux vom, or indeed anything else that I have to swallow. Nothing in, nothing out is his own chosen position, nil by mouth. He does understand how that wouldn’t work for me, and he tolerates my eating – which is big of him, I think, I’ve always thought – but he still hates it when I medicate. I guess he’s floating in the stuff himself, he reckons that’s enough for both of us. Besides, I’m all the access he has to the world; he likes me clean and clear, a window, not a distorting lens disturbed by drugs or potions.

  Self-medication, the same thing. He hates that too, when I’m drunk or doped up.

  And I was right, he really really wasn’t happy with the piercings. I lay sprawled on my bed while the room spun all around me and I felt adrift, afloat, a bubble of air in the swirl of the world, and his thin narky snarky voice went on and on in all the dizzy hollows of my skull.

  He’s short on resources, is Small, there’s not much that lies within his ambit; but what he lacks in reach he makes up for entirely in vitriol. Sometimes I think he’s bathed in pure acid. Or else that he spits it, with a narrow focus and a lethal aim.

  God knows, he’s had the practice. One target, all my life. That thing that happens to you, where one line of a song gets stuck in your head and just repeats and repeats itself all day? Be glad of it, be grateful you’re not me. I’ve read, I’ve been told how all kids thrill with horror at the legend of a worm that digs into your ear and chews its way right through to your living brain – but not me. I was born with him already in situ, and all my life he’s been trying to chew his way out to open air.

  No blame to him for that. Be fair; no one likes to be bottled up and kept in the dark. We’d all try to change that if we could. And I’m the lucky one, whichever way you want to count it. I owe him; I’m not denying that.

  Just, I’m not sure that I owe him my life, the way he wants to claim it. My body’s not his temple, any more than it is still his vehicle. I carried him around in my belly for long enough; I’ve carried him around in my head ever since; I think maybe that’s enough. I don’t have to be his mirror image, limited to what he makes of me, what he can match up to.

  I wanted to put rings in my ears, and rings in Adam’s too. I wanted THC in my system, TLC in my life. I wanted to come home drunk and topple into the roomspin and not have Small sit sour in my ear, all green and gooseberry.

  I wanted time off for bad behaviour.

  VII

  CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION

  School was for Mum, not for me. I was the instructor.

  It was how she tested what I’d learned, that I could teach her clearly and accurately, to have her understand. I didn’t get to prepare the lessons; she said she knew all about my short-term memory already, there was little point in testing that. Spontaneity was the key, to find out how much I actually knew. She might ask for a lecture on particle physics, or else on metaphysics. Once she took me to the Ashmole and stood me in front of a Van Dyck deposition they have there, and had me talk to her about it. It was a Saturday morning; after twenty minutes I had a dozen random people listening in and the security people were getting restless, they thought it was some kind of student prank. I guess that was half the point of the lesson, to be sure that I was comfortable with an unexpected audience and the interventions of petty authority. These are the ways my mother thinks, inside and outside and all around the box.

  Schooldays were necessarily weekends or bank holidays, to suit her working hours. Now she was on shifts, they were necessarily more various. Today was Friday; I was sixteen and one day old. We listened to Woman’s Hour on Radio Four, that was sacred and inviolable, while I put together our infinitely adjustable shelving system, white-glossed bricks and scaffolding planks that we’d collected through the years. Then we both unpacked books, while I told her about glass: its chemical properties, its history and uses, the craft and the science and the art of it. That was an easy lesson. When I was eight, we’d lived next door to a man who worked with stained glass. I spent a lot of time hanging around his studio, learning from him, making little boxes with off-cuts of glass and lead and storing treasures
in them. Sealing them up afterwards, folding over the seams of lead and storing them away. I had them still, as safe as the memories. I’d unpack them later, put them in a dark and private corner and never stop to wonder what was inside each, why I’d valued it then or why I kept it now. Treasures can be as secret as you like, and still have secrets of their own.

  I ought perhaps to have tested my mother later, to see if the lesson stuck. She made such a point of keeping nothing, though, there’d be little point. Why should she hold on to this? Knowledge was my baby; I was hers. We both were, Small and I together, her specialist subject.

  We lunched among the empty boxes, pasties and milk. Then she said, “I’ve got a shift at three. I just need to hunt out my work clothes, and that’s me done for the day. Why don’t you go for a run, get a feel for what’s new around here? Take your key, I’ll be gone before you’re back. Then you can sort your own room out. You and Small will have to look after each other tonight; it’s my turn to be back late, not till gone midnight. And Michael, I do mean look after yourselves. Don’t go bothering Adam tonight. I know it’s not a schoolday for him tomorrow, but nevertheless. He’s got exams coming, he needs to buckle down. No point winding his parents up, or rubbing his nose in your freedom. Last night was a special occasion; don’t try to repeat it.”

  I only grunted at the lecture, but my heart leaped at the idea of a run. It was what I was aching for, all thick head and restless legs, the least worst residue of the night before: less than I deserved, but I was dragging heavily through the day. Just as well that she’d asked for a lesson I could give without thinking. My temper was as brittle as glass, and I guess my mood was as transparent. A morning of my mother’s close company was enough; I needed space and time alone, fresh air and better exercise than shelves and books and boxes.

  I pulled clothes out of bags almost at random till I found singlet and shorts and running shoes. Homer went into a pocket and I was away, turning my face into the wind, my feet up the hill. That was almost deliberately perverse; downhill and downwind, there were parks from here to the river. I could have done laps on grass, with no traffic to watch out for. But I didn’t want soft going, underfoot or in my head. This was better, hard pavements and hard work, legs and eyes and all my attention given over to the thing itself, the running. Hot suburban afternoon, there was none too much traffic, cars or people; I didn’t always have to wait at street corners and I didn’t always have to keep to the kerb, I could drop down and run on the road for stretches. Even so there were strollers and buggies and bikes on the pavement, there were parked cars and driven cars, occasionally a motorbike; there were traffic-lights and roundabouts where I had to keep aware.

  And there was a map to make, to rediscover, to refresh: street names and grids and where the shops were, where the cops were, where the bus-stops and the cafes and the pubs. What had changed since last we lived this side of town, what was still the same and what eternal. I learned that little was eternal. Whole streets were gone. A church was now an architect’s office, a ’60s concrete council high-rise was fenced off and abandoned, barren, doomed. Some other landmarks seemed to have moved in my absence, shifting further north or east or simply crossing the road to face the other way. I took that as a salutary lesson, the best that I was fit for, that not even I was a reliable witness to my own life, and ran on.

  Running and reading, refreshing, recording: they used me up, they left me nothing over. No space to store a hangover, no room for speculation. Perfect.

  And when I’d run enough, when I’d had enough, I came back hot and drained and drifting, swimming in endorphins, happy as a lamb; and I stopped a few doors short of home, went with a whim, knocked on the back door of number thirty-nine and raised a volley of barking.

  Raised footsteps too, a minute later. Raised a stranger, a fat middle-aged man in a suit who gazed at me in all my sweat and exposure, cocked a quizzical eyebrow and said, “Can I help?”

  “Uh, hi, my name’s Michael, I was round last night...”

  “Oh, yes. I read about you.”

  That made me blink, but I was still too short of breath for questions. Besides, Nigel had wormed his way through the man’s blocking legs by then, all scrabble and lick and panting more than me. So I kept it short, just, “Can I borrow Nigel? Take him to the park for an hour?”

  “With all my blessing.”

  “Brilliant. And, uh, if you could spare a drink of water, that’d be magic...”

  He smiled, opened a fridge there in the offshoot and showed me how full it was of Volvic. “We use a lot of this,” he said, passing me a chilly litre. “His lead’s on the wall there. Don’t let him loose on the road, he’s got no sense of self-preservation. He doesn’t run away from bad dogs, either, so you may have to save his life at great risk to your own; most of us have. Bring him back when you like, there’s always somebody in and none of us will miss him while he’s gone. My name’s Brian, by the way. You’ll see me again, I’m another regular on the rota here.”

  I wasn’t sure how to take much of that, but it didn’t matter. I had the dog, I had a drink, I needed nothing more. We went over to the park and I threw sticks and jogged and did a few stretches to show willing while Nigel chased sticks and butterflies and other dogs, made a hot and happy nuisance of himself but always came racing back to check on me, whether I whistled or not.

  It’s hard to whistle with a parched mouth. I swilled and spat, occasionally I tipped a chilly trickle over my head for the shiver of it as it dribbled down my back; mostly I sipped and swallowed, fighting the constant urge to

  gulp.

  Thrifty as I could be, though, I still ran out too soon. Hot to the core, I was still sweating, and a litre of water couldn’t touch the depth of my dryness. I stayed out as long as I could, for Nigel’s sake and because I’d taken him and because there was so remarkably little to go back to.

  Too soon for him, too late for me, I hauled him back to number thirty-nine. I rang the bell, and Gerard answered. I explained that I’d borrowed Nigel and was now bringing him back, and he said, “Thank you, we appreciate that. Are you coming in?”

  “I’d better not. I’m all sticky, I’ve been for a run,” and the sun must have baked me stupid if I could only say what was transparently obvious as I stood there in all my kit, with all my effort written on my body.

  “Yes, I think I can see you steaming. I expect I could find a newspaper for you to sit on, if you’re worried about our furniture. Alternatively, you’re welcome to use our shower. Or the bath, perhaps? A cool bath on a hot afternoon?”

  I felt my face change. Apparently I could hide nothing today. We didn’t have a bath at Mrs Alleyn’s, only a shower-room. A long slow soak, heat-sink and rehydration and the simplest of ancient pleasures all at once: I yearned for it and couldn’t pretend otherwise, couldn’t begin to stammer reasons why I shouldn’t. Gerard laughed, took my elbow and steered me inside.

  ～

  The bathroom was newly fitted out, almost industrial in scale. Much of that was for Quin’s benefit, clearly: the door was wide enough for a wheelchair or for two men carrying a third, the bath had a lifting device built in, there were grab-handles everywhere. But the wall-to-wall tiling was as expensive as it was practical; the shower was a spectacular construct in stainless steel and too proud to contain itself in a cubicle or conceal itself behind a curtain, it just stood four-square in the room there above the green slate floor; the shelf above the bath had more ointments and unguents than I’d seen outside of Body Shop, and very few of them could even pretend to be medicinal.

  Gerard slid a mirrored door aside, to show me towels behind. He said to take as long as I liked, Quin was asleep and there was another bathroom upstairs. Then he left me, and I went to lock that impressive door and found no way to do it.

  Ah, well. He knew I was here, no doubt he’d tell anyone else who turned up. I stripped off while the bath filled, slid into the water, stretched out in purest contentment. It was almost deep enou
gh to float me; I played with the taps until the temperature was exactly right, closed my eyes and drifted while the water soaked up heat and weariness and what little temper I hadn’t run off already. There must be soap and shampoo among all those bottles above my head, but no hurry for that, no hurry at all...

  I was distantly aware of voices, footsteps going upstairs, coming down; then the door opened, and in walked Kit.

  I gaped at him; he smiled easily, and showed me what he carried.

  “Jeans and a T-shirt, when you’re ready. We all keep a change of clothes here, for when things get messy. These are mine; it’s lucky you’re small.”

  “I am not...!”

  The protest was instinctive, ritual, routine and too swift to bite back, though I did try. He rolled his eyes at his own clumsiness and said, “Damn. Sorry, that was gauche. You’re not big, though, and nor am I. These should fit, and they’re in much better taste than some of the other choices you might have ended up with. Take your time, though, I’m not trying to hurry you out. Fancy a drink while you

  wallow?”

  “What? Oh, no, no thanks. I’m fine...”

  “No, you’re not, you’re just too shy to be waited on in the bath. If you change your mind, shout. But – oh look, this is ridiculous, you’re not even trying. All this stuff is here to use, you know.”

  And he came over and stood above me, picking through the bottles on the shelf till he found something green and glassy, uncorked it and tipped a stream of aromatic oil into the water.

  “Don’t panic, I won’t swirl it around for you. Run a bit more hot in, though, to get the benefit. And relax.”

  “I was relaxed,” I muttered, “till you came in.”

  That earned me a chuckle, and, “You can’t be body-shy in this house, it doesn’t work. The wet-room’s communal, it has to be, sometimes we all need to clean up together. Or sometimes we just want to show off our tats. That’s some scar you’ve got on your belly there, and you must be used to people looking. Don’t tell me your school has shower-curtains in the changing rooms?”