Submarine

by Joe Dunthorne

  I look at my mother. She’s watching my father with a familiar expression – a mixture of disgust and affection – that she adopts when she sees me use my own earwax as lip gloss. I believe in recycling.

  I turn back to Dad.

  ‘I am not delicate,’ I say. ‘And you two are no stimuli at all!’ My correct use of a difficult plural spurs me on.

  ‘So we have failed to fulfill a certain need,’ my father says, in between chews. He looks at me. He has a spot of yoghurt in his beard.

  ‘No. You just don’t care.’

  I slam my fist on to the table to no effect. It’s made of stone.

  I leave the rest of my dinner uneaten and walk down the valley’s steep side. The tangled vines are stiff as spiders’ legs squashed in a notebook. I pick my way through nettles to the river’s edge. Yesterday, I began to build a dam across to the other side.

  I am annoyed that I cannot rouse my holiday parents.

  Drinking espressos on the balcony, they cannot see me because of three large pine trees overshadowing the river. I crab-carry the largest rocks out into the centre of the current. With each splash my weir reaches further towards the other bank.

  I think about an exhibition my parents took me to at the National Botanic Garden of Wales where the artwork had been installed in and around the various ponds, streams and water features. The exhibition was called Show, which, I discovered, is also a word for a plug of cervical mucus expelled at the onset of labour.

  I imagine myself as modern art: I am in the womb. The waters break, plashing on the awkward boulders. The sun on my eyelids glows an amniotic pink. I am a footling breech, coming out feet first as if my mum were a water slide. Forceps nip at my toes. The water turns misty, my feet cloak beneath plumes of silt. I need to be crying; I think of sad things: imagine if your parents were dead.

  In history, we were shown a photo of Belsen. There were corpses lying beneath the trees, speckling the forest like fallen fruit. Their faces and upper bodies were covered with blankets so that they could have been anyone. I flutter-blink but my eyes stay dry.

  The oldest photo my parents have of themselves as a couple is black and white. It is not black and white because there were no colour photographs – it was a specific choice they made. The corners are rounded like a playing card. The photo shows them having a picnic beneath some trees during the late seventies. I imagine them setting the camera timer, then lying back, pulling the picnic blanket over their heads. Not napping but dead.

  My favourite photo, however, is in colour. It is my seventh birthday and we are in the back garden. It shows my dad, the prankster, pretending that he might pour a bowl of strawberry jelly with fruit pieces on top of my mother’s head. Mum sits on a camping stool; Dad stands behind her, holding the bowl above her, tipping it slightly. Our au pair, Hilde, myself and four of my friends sit on the grass around them. We are all grinning, looking up at Dad and hoping his hand will slip.

  Dad looks mock worried – pursed lips saying uh oh! – while Mum’s face displays genuine terror: it’s her war face. She looks so ugly. Her hands and arms are slightly blurred, as she moves to protect her lovely hair. It’s as though she has just realized that, after years and years, her husband dislikes her and – worst of all – he has waited for their son’s birthday to let everyone know.

  Further down the river, the bank changes into stretches of glistening, untouched mud, smooth as whale skin. I walk downstream, getting deeper with each step. My feet squelch and fart; the mud takes on the consistency of jelly with fruit pieces. I allow myself to sink. I think of things that bite or sting.

  Earlier this morning, a scorpion made a home in one of my father’s loafers. Dad put on his shoes in a rush, giving the creature no chance at all. He tipped it out on to the tiled floor; it landed the right way up with its tail and sting intact, claws slack and open. We watched it, waited for it to start up again. I nudged it with a thin twig, but nothing. My holiday dad lifted the scorpion to his earlobe like an earring. He Betty Booped, coyly blowing me a kiss.

  My knees slip into the gloop. Where the mud’s skin has torn I can see tiny worms, almost maggots, flailing around. As I go to move my right foot, my left foot sinks deeper – up to my paper-white thigh. I still myself, like a sculpture, and take a breath. I am in the centre of a large hippo’s back of mud. I search through my pockets: an English pound and, to my surprise, a tennis ball. I place them on the mud next to me. Neither object sinks.

  … American soap operas do this.

  In dramatic situations, I close my eyes very slowly and then reopen them. I stay in the same place, the same predicament, but things change. Where there is no way out, a plan materializes. When I am lost for words, I find them…

  It is important for my parents that I occasionally put myself in danger. It gives them a sense of being alive, of being lucky. Holiday Dad is always a good person to scream for.

  The villa sits halfway up the valley side. I try and sound as if I’ve got something exciting that I want to show him: ‘Dad!’

  ‘Father!’

  ‘Lloyd!’ I imitate my mother’s voice.

  ‘Pa! Pops!’ I bleat – this makes me sink a little further. The mud sneaks under my shorts.

  ‘Help me!’

  I hear someone – my father – coming down the hill. When he runs, he makes noises like someone clearing their throat. I listen to the sounds get louder. My father has a bad back. One day, I too will grunt at physical exercise.

  My father’s bare torso appears above the brambles and nettles. Instead of going the long way round he stomps through them, pretending they do not hurt. He is naked except for his corduroy shorts and brown leather sandals. He has at least ten dark hairs around each nipple.

  My father looks frightened. He loves me. He cannot help it.

  He says nothing, ignores the tennis ball and pound coin, does not even make eye contact with me. His one concern: prolonging my life. After searching for but not finding a branch – heroes always use initiative – he comes to the edge of the bank, standing where spears of grass pierce through the mud. He leans forward; the mud gives like dog shit beneath his feet.

  ‘Nnngh,’ he grunts while getting his balance. This is no time for vowels.

  I imagine the instrumental guitar music that they play during the cliff-hanger ending of Friday’s episode of Neighbours. Will I make it to my fifteenth birthday?

  Bending his knees, Dad stretches one hand out to me. His arms are tanned like créme brûlée. This is not the moment to mention that the mud in my shorts is warm and sexual. I reach out with both arms, only to slip a little deeper, a little further away.

  My father glances left, right and up.

  I am the only person I know whose belly button is undecided, umming and ahing between in and out – it disappears beneath a pregnancy of mud.

  There are seams of orange clay, like spatterings of paint, appearing where the mud has been churned.

  My father retreats back towards one of the pine trees. He wedges one foot into a gap where the trunk parts into two main limbs. He climbs up one of the tree’s arms, using a rough, protruding knag as a foothold. I am impressed by his style of ascent. As he climbs, I can see that he has little underarm hair, almost none.

  I imagine he will force a branch down so that I can reach it and then, with a sound like a first volley of arrows being loosed, I will be flung high into the air above the valley. A safety net on the patio, constructed by my mum using the washing line and clean sheets, will catch me and drop me into my seat at the table.

  The mud underlines my ribcage.

  The next thing that happens is very disappointing. My dad climbs further up the tree until he is entirely hidden. I can hear the flap of his sandals being heeled down on to wood. I wonder if my mother has phoned the emergency services; it’s not every day that she gets the opportunity to use the Italian for ‘helicopter rescue’. Eventually, with a limp-sounding crack and my father’s loud exhalation of breath, a long
thick branch falls from the foliage.

  The saving of my life takes less time than I had hoped. I grab on to one end of the slightly rotten branch; my father holds the other. We struggle for a bit, then there is the sound of a sausage pulled from mash as he yanks me free. I belly-slither on to the bank. My legs are covered in a darker mud – the colour of cinnamon toast. I smell like a fridge.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ I say.

  ‘Your food’s still warm.’

  From his pocket, he pulls out one of his eight handkerchiefs and dabs the corner of my eye.

  We walk back to the villa through the dried branches of the vineyard. The sun is still high; I can feel my legs start to stiffen. My father does not tell me to be more careful in future. He must be grateful.

  My parents drink their coffee and watch me eat. Tomorrow is my fifteenth birthday. The mud cracks and falls off me in pieces. It looks as though someone has dropped a precious vase.

  Voodoo

  Chips is a traditional bully; he leads us behind the bike sheds. Except they’re more like bus stops than sheds. There is one bike locked up, its front wheel has been stolen, its back wheel kicked in.

  Chips, Jordana, Abby and I stand in a circle, or perhaps a square. Chips drops Zoe’s diary on the floor and stamps on it with his heel. The lock holds out.

  Chips stole the diary during double music. Mr Oundle, our teacher, used to be a successful opera singer, a bass. He has perfect pitch. Dad even has a CD with his full name on the inlay: Ian Oundle. Dad is sad about Ian’s career.

  Mr Oundle was in the store cupboard and Zoe had her head-phones on while Chips, with his sleeve rolled up, rummaged through her satchel.

  The diary is covered in purple felt and has a gold-coloured lock as if to signpost to bullies: reading this book is what will hurt me most.

  Chips stamps on the lock again. This time it breaks.

  Picking it up, he scans through, looking for his own name. He tears out each page as he goes through. A small pile starts to form at our feet.

  I pluck a page from the air as it falls:

  Sunday: B+

  Showed Mam the lumps in my armpit. She says there are glands in your armpit, though I am too young to get glandular fever. Which is what cousin Lewis had when he stayed in bed for a month and didn’t have to go to school. Must check my armpits every day.

  Got an email from D. He says he can’t wait to see me at West Glam this summer. He thinks that I should try out for the part of Esmeralda. I told him that they won’t give me the part because I’m not skinny.

  I think Dad got bored of letting me win at badminton this week. We went to Joe’s Ice Cream afterwards and I had a Chocolate North Pole.

  We visited Nanna. She looks weird with no hair, but she won’t wear the beret Mam bought her.

  We are all reading separate pages, shouting out the most relevant bits, like a comprehension exercise.

  ‘“I wish I was dead,”’ Abby quotes. You can see the join on Abby’s neck between her foundation and her real skin.

  ‘“I hate my life,”’ Jordana says.

  I grab another page as it falls:

  Tuesday: C –

  School today was shit except I found a fiver on the way home. Did trust exercises in drama, where four people stand in a circle around you and then you have to close your eyes and let yourself fall. Gareth made heaving sounds and Gemma shouted timber as I let myself go. They didn’t drop me, though I thought they would.

  Came second-highest in Mrs Griffiths’s maths test. She handed the tests back so that the people with the best marks got given their papers first. Tatiana Rapatzikou came first. Eliot came last. Apparently Eliot’s dad ran off with one of his elder sister’s friends. The girl is only eighteen. Mam thinks it’s terrible.

  Got a letter from D today. He had included a Lego figure with four changeable heads that he said I could use as a voodoo doll for anyone.

  ‘Ah ha,’ Chips says, finding a page upon which he cameos. He adopts a whiny voice that is a bad impression of Zoe: ‘Jean who works breakfasts understands. She says that I am very mature for my age. She says that she has had a fluctuating waistline all her life and it’s never done her any harm. She says that kids can be cruel. I told her I felt like crying in geography when Chips said: “I bet you eat your dinner off a tectonic plate.” ’

  Chips looks up.

  ‘I forgot I said that.’

  He holds the diary by its front cover and lets the pages hang open.

  ‘This looks like a case for Inspector Zippo,’ he says, but Jordana has already had the same thought – the smell of oil, then flame. Chips waits for the fire to catch hold before dropping the book to the floor. Jordana itches her forearm, scramming it red.

  I imagine Zoe thought that recording the cruel things we say to her would be cathartic. A reminder of past embarrassments: like when you don’t bother wiping the pus off the mirror.

  We watch the diary burn.

  ‘Don’t feel bad,’ says Chips. ‘It’s best that Zoe doesn’t remember.’

  Except for Jordana and me, everyone vacates the crime scene.

  We watch the cremation; the flames glow green as the felt burns. Jordana gets smoke in her eyes; she looks upward and blinks. Everything about Jordana reminds me of fire. The skin on her neck is inflamed and, as a symbol of independence, she has singed the end of her royal-blue tie.

  I see that the diary’s lock is burning. It must be made of plastic, not gold.

  Nepenthe

  I have decided to type Zoe a pamphlet explaining to her how to fit in. I am feeling compunctious.

  Clearly, she is not getting the guidance she needs from her parents. Last Christmas, my parents bought me a book called Seven Things Every Successful Teenager Should Know.

  I have learnt from it that the most important thing about self-help guides is to use nearly every feature that your word processor has to offer: pictures, text boxes, diagrams, abundant sub-headings.

  Also, the key to being a successful teenager is choosing the correct font. Headings should be particularly unattractive.

  I use Centaur. Centaurs come from Greek myth; they are creatures with a human head, torso and arms but a horse’s body and legs.

  How to Fit In With People You Don’t Like Even When You are an Endomorph

  or

  The Art of Being Two Species at Once

  I

  Breaking the Victim Cycle

  Victims stay victims because they behave like victims.

  Zoe, if something bad happens to you, ignore it. Do not try and talk it out.

  Chips is very astute. He knows you are weak because you chat to dinner ladies at lunchtime. He has also seen you write in your diary and, in the same way that he would want to see the X-rays if he broke your nose, he wants to see his name immortalized.

  II

  Harnessing Your Inner Bully

  Bullying is an art form; it can be learnt.

  It’s all in your attitude.

  Here are some hints on tapping into your latent bully:

  Learn to show no shock, pain or embarrassment.

  Here are two examples:

  I. Do you remember when Rhydian Bird pulled down his trousers in the playground to fart? When he followed through, curling an unhealthy-looking turd on to the tarmac, he didn’t look embarrassed – quite the opposite, he screamed with laughter and pointed. Nobody can tease him about it because he is so proud.

  II. During maths, I famously stabbed Paul Gottlied in the back repeatedly with my compass. He said nothing, showed no discomfort as his shirt blossomed with blood poppies. His stoicism reminded me of the brave men who died in the First World War. Every year, on that day, I hold a minute’s silence in his honour.

  Exercise I: How to give a Chinese burn

  Practise on kitchen roll: how many sheets of Bounty extra-absorbent can you twist and tear through? One sheet is poor, five is excruciating.

  III

  Finding Your Special Skill

&n
bsp; With some training, you will notice that everyone who is not bullied has a special skill. You must find a skill of your own if you wish to fit in.

  Fo Chu should be your idol: he is fatter than you, can hardly speak English and yet he flourishes on account of combining two special skills:

  I. He always wears brand-new trainers.

  II. He propagates the belief that he is a respected member of the Triads.

  A nepenthe: something that helps you forget sorrow and suffering, like a bottle of poppers.

  IV

  Tricking Your Older Self

  Bullies don’t write diaries.

  Bullies never remember all the bad things they have done, they just remember the good times. Part of the reason for this is that they keep no record of their cruelty. Here is an example of a diary that will never exist:

  Diary,

  I feel so shitty about Zoe – she’d probably be alright if I got to know her. I can be such a meanie sometimes. I just see her as this emotionless blob. How the fuck would I feel, being teased all day? I’m no stunner myself. At least Zoe does something with her life. She helps out with the school plays – painting the sets and stuff. What do I do?

  Exactly.

  Chips

  If you feel that you must write a diary, be aware that you are writing not to document your misery but to make your future self happy. Your diary should be a nepenthe.

  Exercise II

  Write a diary, imagining that you are trying to make an old person jealous. I have written an example to get you started:

  Dear Diary,

  I spent the morning admiring my skin elasticity.

  God alive, I feel supple.

  In the late morning, I met a girl in the bandstand. We did cartwheels, headstands, the crab. Then we shared our perfect bodies.

  I read small print without squinting. I hear all sorts of minute noises. I never ask the question: Am I happy?