by Nathan Filer
People always think they know what dead people would and wouldn’t mind, and it’s always the same as what they would and wouldn’t mind – like this time at school when a really naughty boy, Ashley Stone, died of Meningitis. We had this special assembly for him which even his mum attended, where Mr Rogers talked about how spirited and playful Ashley was, and how we’d always remember him with love. Then he said he was certain Ashley would want us to try and be brave, and to work hard. But I don’t think Ashley would have wanted that at all, and maybe that’s because I didn’t want it. So you see what I mean? But I suppose Dad was right. Simon wouldn’t mind if I played with his toys because he never minded. I didn’t play with them though, and the reason is the obvious one. I felt too guilty. Some things in life are exactly as we imagine.
His model aeroplanes swung gently on their strings, and the radiator creaked and groaned. I stood beside his bed lifting the comfort blanket from his pillow. ‘Hey Si,’ I whispered. ‘Happy birthday.’ Then I placed the blanket back in his keepsake box, and closed the lid.
I guess children believe whatever they want to believe.
Perhaps adults do too.
In the kitchen Dad was making a start on breakfast, prodding bacon around a sizzling pan. ‘Morning, mon ami.’
‘Where’s Mum?’
‘Bacon sandwich?’
‘Where’s Mum?’
‘She didn’t sleep well, sunshine. Bacon sandwich?’
‘I want marmalade, I think.’ I opened the cupboard, pulled out a jar and struggled with the lid before handing it to Dad.
‘You must have loosened it for me, eh?’
He lifted a rasher, considered it, and dropped it back in the pan. ‘Are you sure you don’t want bacon? I’m having bacon.’
‘We go to the doctor’s a lot, Dad.’
‘Ouch. Shit!’
He glared at the reddened flesh on his knuckle, as though expecting it to say sorry.
‘Did you burn yourself, Daddy?’
‘It’s not so bad.’ Stepping to the sink, he turned on the cold tap and made a comment about how untidy the garden looked. I scooped out four large spoonfuls of marmalade, emptying it. ‘Can I keep this?’
‘The jar? What for?’
‘Will you keep your voices down?’ The door swung open hard, banging against the table. ‘I need some bloody sleep. Please let me sleep today.’
She didn’t say it in an angry way, more like pleading. She closed the door again, slowly this time, and as I listened to her footsteps climbing the stairs, I felt a horrible emptiness in my tummy – the kind that breakfast can’t fill.
‘It’s okay sunshine,’ Dad said, forcing a smile, ‘You didn’t do anything. Today’s a bit difficult. How about you finish up your breakfast and I’ll go talk to her, eh?’
He said that like it was a question, but it wasn’t. What he meant was that I had no choice but to stay put, whilst he followed her upstairs. But I didn’t want to sit by myself at the table again, or listen to another muffled argument throbbing through the walls. Besides, I had something to do. I picked up the marmalade jar and stepped out of the back door into our garden.
These are the memories that crawl under my skin. Simon had wanted an Ant Farm, and dead people still have birthdays.
Crouching beside the tool shed with mud between my toes, I lifted large flat stones like Granddad had taught me. But it was too early in the year, so even under the bigger slabs I could only find earthworms and beetles. I looked deeper, digging a hole with my fingers – as the first drops of rain hit my dressing gown, I was somewhere else: It’s dark, night-time, the air tastes of salt, and Simon is beside me, wiping rain from his cheeks and bleating that he doesn’t like it any more, that he doesn’t like it and wants to go back. I keep digging, telling him to stop being a baby, to hold the torch still, and he holds it with trembling hands, until her button eyes glisten in the beam.
‘Matthew, sweetheart!’ Mum was standing at her bedroom window calling out, ‘It’s pouring down!’
As I opened the back door, the front door slammed shut.
I ran upstairs.
‘Sweetheart, what are we going to do with you?’ She took my wet dressing gown, wrapping me in a towel.
‘Where did Dad go?’
‘He’s gone for a walk.’
‘It’s raining.’
‘I doubt he’ll be long.’
‘I wanted us all to have breakfast together.’
‘I’m so tired, Matthew.’
We sat beside each other on the bed, watching the rain against the window.
a different story
Only fifteen minutes today, then puncture time. I have a few compliance problems with tablets, the answer – a long, sharp needle.
Every other week, alternate sides.
I’d rather not think about it now. It’s best not to think until the injection is actually going in.
I want to tell a story. When Click-Click-Wink Steve first got me started on the computer, he said I could use the printer as well. ‘To share your writing with us, Matt. Or take it home to keep safe.’
Except the other day the printer didn’t work. I’d been thinking about the time Mum took me to see Dr Marlow, but we saw a different GP instead. I couldn’t remember the details, like what exactly my mum thought was wrong with me, or why Dr Marlow wasn’t there. So I made something up about the mole beside my nipple, and Dr Marlow being on holiday. Perhaps that was even true, it’s not important. The important part was this new doctor asked to speak with Mum in private, and their conversation was the beginning of a whole new chapter in our lives. But when I tried to print this, an error message flashed up and no paper came out.
So that was that.
Until this morning at Art Group – where whispery Jeanette gives out bottles of poster paint, glue, knackered old felt tips and tissue paper, and we are supposed to express ourselves. I sat beside Patricia, who must be sixty years old, or maybe even older, but wears a long blonde wig and pretends to be twenty. She wears dark sunglasses, bright pink lipstick, and today she’s wearing her bright pink catsuit too. She usually draws colourful patterns in crayon, which Jeanette says are beautiful. But this morning she was doing something else, quietly absorbed, making precise cuts into sheets of paper with a pair of blunt scissors, then carefully arranging the cut-out pieces onto a square of cardboard.
I suppose the printer must have finally coughed up my pages, and they ended up with the scrap paper. It was a strange feeling, and for a moment I wanted to shout, but I didn’t because Patricia’s a really nice person and I think if she’d known it was my writing, she wouldn’t have taken it. She shook her head, turning away from me slightly; PLEASE STOP READING OVER MY SHOULDER. You can see why this was different, though? But I didn’t want to upset her, so I carried on doing my sketches, whilst she carried on rearranging my life, sticking it down with Pritt Stick.
I waited until just before the end of the hour, when we have a few minutes to share what we’ve done with the group, but I knew Patricia wouldn’t, because even though she wears those clothes, she’s actually very shy.
‘I’ll clean the brushes,’ I offered.
‘Is it that time already?’ asked Jeanette.
I want to tell a different story, a story belonging to someone else. It will not be the same as mine, and though it might be sad in some ways, it will also be happy because in the end there are beautiful crayon patterns and a lady with long blonde hair who stays twenty years old forever.
I moved around the table collecting paintbrushes, and glanced over her shoulder. What we can know about Patricia’s story, is that she’s
second opinion
She ran the tip of her finger over the small dark mole beside my nipple, and I felt my face grow hot.
‘It doesn’t itch?’
‘No.’
‘Has it grown or changed colour?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘We usually see Dr Marlow,’ Mum offered for t
he third time.
I pulled my top on and shrank into the chair, self-conscious of my changing body, of how it had started to stretch and stink and grow wisps of hair, so that with each passing day I knew myself a little less.
‘How old are you, Matthew?’
‘He’s ten,’ my mum answered.
‘I’m nearly eleven,’ I said.
She turned back to the computer screen, scanning appointment after appointment. I stared absently at the two framed photographs of Dr Marlow’s daughters – the younger one riding her horse, and her sister in graduation robes, grinning, with eyes half closed – and I wondered if this new doctor would get her own office, and have pictures of her own family for me to stare at every couple of weeks, until I felt I’d met them.
‘How are you getting on at school?’
‘What?’
She was looking right at me, not buried in a prescription sheet or tapping on her keyboard, but looking right at me, leaning forwards.
Mum coughed, and said she thought my mole had grown, but maybe it hadn’t.
‘You must be starting secondary school after the holidays?’
I wanted to turn to Mum for reassurance, but there was something about how the doctor was leaning forwards that held me. I don’t mean I felt trapped. I mean I felt held.
‘I don’t go to school.’
‘No?’
‘We home tutor,’ Mum said. Then, ‘I used to be a teacher.’
The doctor kept looking at me. She had placed her chair near to mine, and now I found myself leaning forward as well. It’s difficult to explain, but in that moment I felt safe, as though I could say anything I wanted.
I didn’t say anything though.
The doctor nodded.
‘I don’t think there’s anything to worry about with the mole, Matthew. Do you?’
I shook my head.
Mum was on her feet, already saying thank you, already ushering me to the door, then the doctor said, ‘I wonder if perhaps we might be able to talk in private for a moment?’
I felt Mum’s grip tighten on my arm, her eyes darting between us. ‘But. I’m his mother.’
‘Sorry, no. I wasn’t clear Susan. I wonder if you and I might talk in private for a moment?’ She then turned to me and said, ‘It’s really nothing to worry about, Matthew.’
The receptionist was telling a woman with a pushchair how Dr Marlow was on holiday until the end of the month, but a young lady doctor was covering and she was very nice, and they even hoped she might stay on. I sat on the rubber mat in the corner, where they keep toys for children. I guess I was too old really, and after a while of glaring at me and sighing heavily, the woman asked whether I’d mind making room for her child to play.
‘Can I play with him?’
‘Oh.’
Her little boy reached out a hand, and I gave him a Stickle Brick, which he dropped to the floor and laughed like it was the funniest thing to ever happen. I picked it up and we did it again, this time his mum laughed too and said, ‘He’s bonkers, I tell you, absolutely bonkers.’
‘I’ve got a brother.’
‘Oh, right?’
‘Yeah. He was older than me. We were good mates. But he’s dead and stuff now.’
‘Oh. I see. I’m sorry—’
The bell chimed and a name scrolled across the sign by reception. ‘That’s us I’m afraid. Come on mister.’ She picked up her little boy and he immediately began to whimper, stretching his arms back towards me.
‘Someone’s made a new friend,’ she said, before rushing him down the corridor.
‘I’ve got a brother,’ I said again to no one in particular. ‘But I don’t think about him so much any more.’
I put the Stickle Bricks away.
Mum appeared, pressing a prescription sheet into her handbag.
‘Is everything okay, Mum?’
‘Let’s get ice creams.’
I don’t suppose it was the best weather for the park – it was pretty cold and cloudy. But we went anyway. Mum bought us ice creams from the van, and we perched on the swings next to each other. ‘I’ve not been a very good Mummy, have I?’
‘Is that what the doctor said?’
‘I worry, Matthew. I worry all the time.’
‘Do you need medicine?’
‘I might.’
‘Are you and Dad going to get divorced?’
‘Sweetheart, why would you even think that?’
‘I don’t know. Are you?’
‘Of course not.’ She finished her ice cream, stepped off the swing, and started to push mine.
‘I’m not a baby, Mum.’
‘I know, sorry. I know. Sometimes I think you’re more grown up than me.’
‘No you don’t.’
‘I do. And you’re definitely too clever for me now. You do those exercise books quicker than I can mark them.’
‘I don’t.’
‘You do, sweetheart. I think if you went back to school, the teachers wouldn’t know what hit them.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘I’m allowed?’
‘Is it what you want?’
This might not have happened so quickly as I’m telling it, or reached the surface of our conversation so easily. Probably we were in the park for a very long time, drifting in and out of silences, each moving around an idea, afraid to reach out and see it sink away, and this time, to impossible depths. No. It didn’t happen quickly or easily. But it did happen. On that day. In that park.
‘It isn’t that I don’t like you teaching me—’
‘I know. It’s okay. I know.’
‘We could still do lessons in the evenings.’
‘I’ll help with your homework.’
‘And you’ll still help me type up my stories?’
‘If you’ll let me. I’d like that a lot.’
A good thing about talking to someone who is standing behind you is that you can pretend you don’t know they’re crying, and not trouble yourself too much with working out why. You can simply concentrate on helping them feel better.
‘You can push me if you want, Mum.’
‘Oh I can push you now, can I?’
‘If you want.’
She did, she pushed me on the swing, higher and higher, and when at last the grey clouds parted for the sun to shine through, it was like it was shining just for us.
a whole new chapter
‘Uh, what? Hey mon ami.’
‘Can you help me do my tie up, Dad?’
‘What time is it?’
Mum turned over in bed, and pulled off her eye mask. ‘Matthew, it’s the middle of the night.’
‘I don’t know how to do it up. Can I turn the light on?’
I pressed the switch and they both groaned, then Dad said, through a yawn, ‘Usually you put a shirt on first, mate.’
‘I just want to practise.’
‘We can practise in the morning, before I go to work.’ He rolled over, pulling the quilt above his head. ‘It’s the middle of the night.’
I switched their light off and went back to my room, grappling with the knot – too nervous to sleep. It wasn’t so long before Mum came through to sit with me though. I knew she would. I knew she would come and sit with me if I woke them.
‘You need to get some sleep, darling.’
‘What if no one likes me?’
I didn’t know who was most worried about me going back to school – me or her. She had her little yellow pills though, which took the edge off.
‘Of course they will.’ She stroked the hair behind my ear, like she used to when I was little, ‘Of course they will.’
‘But what if they don’t?’
She told me the story about her first day at secondary school, of how she had broken her arm in the summer holiday so was wearing a plaster cast. She said there were so many new faces, but the new faces were feeling exactly the same as she was. By lunchtime her plaster cast was scrawled with well
-wishing messages from her brand new group of friends.
‘What happened next?’
‘It’s cold, let me in.’
I pulled back my covers and budged over so she could climb in beside me.
‘This is the good part,’ she said, propping up a pillow. ‘One of the playground monitors saw my plaster cast with the writing, and wanted me punished for breaking school uniform rules! So my very first day I was marched to the headmistress, who thanked the monitor for her concerns, looked at my cast, picked up a pen, and wrote Welcome to Pen Park High.’
It was a good story, I suppose.
If it was true.
FUCK IT
I haven’t been feeling too good these last couple of days.
This is far more difficult than I thought. Thinking about the past is like digging up graves.
Once-upon-a-time we buried the memories we didn’t want. We found a little patch of grass at Ocean Cove Holiday Park, beside the recycling bins, or further up the path near to the shower blocks, and we kept hold of the memories we wanted, and we buried the rest.
But coming to this place every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, spending half my life with NUTTERS like Patricia, and the Asian guy in the relaxation room, slyly pocketing pieces from the jigsaw puzzles and rocking backwards and forwards like he’s a pendulum, and the skinny BITCH who skips along the corridor singing God Will Save Us, God Will Save Us, when all I want to do is concentrate, but can’t because the stuff they inject makes me twitch and contort, and fills my mouth with so much saliva I’m actually drooling onto the fucking keyboard – I’m just saying this is harder than I thought.
‘The thing is Mum, it wasn’t the same for you, was it?’
‘In some ways—’
‘No. It wasn’t. It wasn’t the same because Nanny Noo didn’t stop you going to school in the first place, or make you sit by yourself for a whole year making pretend mistakes in your exercise books and wondering when—’
‘Matthew, no. I didn’t—’
‘Wondering when I would have to go to the doctor’s, if you’d drag me there past the whole school, staring and pointing—’