Submarine

by Joe Dunthorne

to confuse you.

  Keep it on

  the hush-hush. Much love, the

  one who signs

  off with a cross. X

  • I got home from school to find my mum had cooked a lemon sponge where the middle had risen too much and popped like a volcano or a spot.

  • Each Saturday, and now on Wednesdays as well, I imagine what lottery numbers I would pick if I were of legal gambling age. I write them down on a sheet of paper. My numbers for last night’s midweek rollover were 43, 26, 17, 8, 9 and 33. My numbers didn’t come up. I saved a pound.

  Behave.

  Love, Oliver

  Pederast

  I have changed my mind. I’m going to go back to writing a full-blown diary, rather than a log. I have brokered a deal with Jordana whereby she is allowed to read my diary as long as she promises that, in future, she will not distribute it to my classmates.

  I am feeling a little emotional.

  I had a conversation with my mother. She wanted to have a ‘chat’. Mum knows I have a girlfriend but, as yet, I have refused to disclose the name Jordana Bevan. When I go to meet Jordana, I usually tell my parents that I’m going out for pudding. They think this might be a nickname for heroin. Mum made the international face for: is there anything you want to tell me?

  17.5.97

  Word of the day: compunction – a strong uneasiness caused by a sense of guilt.

  Hi Diary!

  Hi Jordana!

  News:

  • I’ve discovered that masturbating in the darkness of my empty wardrobe is excellent, particularly because of that newborn feeling as you stumble back into the well-lit room. A kind of Narnia.

  • For some time now, my parents have been slowly coming round to the idea that they can speak to me about anything. I’ve been very careful to remain in the mode of a well-adjusted young man. I wrote a log, not a diary. I acquired a girlfriend, of all things.

  But my good work was undone this afternoon. Mum was sat at the dining-room table with a glass of Rose’s Lime Cordial glowing like kryptonite. She said that she’d spoken to my therapist. That she’d bumped into him on our street when his car alarm had been going off.

  I was next door, in the kitchen, fixing myself a dessert island.

  Oli T’s Famous Dessert Island Recipe

  Ingredients:

  One wooden hut (chocolate muffin)

  One sandy beach (custard)

  Utensils: Microwave, bowl, spoon.

  Mum said: ‘I am worried about you.’

  I said: ‘That’s good to know.’

  She said: ‘I spoke to Dr Goddard, across the road, about your consultation.’

  I said: ‘Yes.’

  She said: ‘It was very kind of him to give you that lumbar support.’

  This was clever – she let me know that I’d been uncovered but, by not making a big thing out of it, she made me believe, for a few hundred milliseconds, that we have an open and honest relationship.

  I said: ‘Look, Mum, I’ve got to tell you something big.’

  I thought that, probably, the best thing I could do was tell her some sort of enormous secret. I knew that – deep down – she was hoping there would be some sort of highly classified information, a disturbing formative event, which would explain all my weirdness. And then, if she felt that I was being fully honest, she would unveil all the family skeletons.

  Like all of history’s great orators, I stood up and walked in slow circles around the dining-room table as I spoke. Here is a transcript of my speech:

  Remember, Mum, when Keiron last came over. I was eleven and he was seven. He had one upper tooth that poked outward, giving him a permanent Elvis lip. You were having coffee with his mum in the front room and we were in the music room.

  We were playing the perennial classic: hot or cold. Except I didn’t really know what it was I wanted him to find. I got him to open up Dad’s viola case. I got him to lift up the lid on the piano. I got him to search through the cupboard full of board games and shove his hand into the cloth sack for the Scrabble letters. I made him open the jar full of dice, tiddlywinks and golf tees. Then I laid out in the middle of the rug, in a star shape. Whenever he came close to me, I said ‘warmer’, until, eventually, he knelt by my side and put his hands on my chest. ‘Temperate,’ I said. Then he searched my hair. ‘Hyperborean,’ I said. Then he touched my chest. ‘Thawing.’ Then he touched my stomach. ‘Clement.’ Then he went down my right leg. ‘Algid.’ And my left leg. ‘Gelid.’ Until there was nowhere left for him to go. He cupped both his hands over the lump in my jeans. ‘Magma,’ I said.

  And then when he put his hand on my zip, I said, ‘Thermal.’ And when he unzipped me, I said, ‘Igneous.’ And then he looked at me for a moment and he seemed a little unsure. Then he put his clammy hand inside my trousers and flopped out my wazzock. ‘It’s hot,’ he said.

  Please don’t be angry, Mum; I came on to the Turkish rug.

  Keiron asked me: ‘What is it?’ And I said: ‘It’s glue. Like Copydex.’ And he said: ‘I like Copydex.’ He rubbed it on his hands. ‘It peels off like skin,’ he said.

  Afterwards, I didn’t want to do anything but stare at the ceiling rose. He sat on my chest and fed me back my own cum off his fingertips, laughing and saying: ‘This’ll glue your throat closed!’

  Jordana, if you’re reading this, the truth is that I don’t even know what cum tastes like. And I did not tell my mother any of this. I made up that whole soliloquy. Diaries are gullible.

  In actual fact, the conversation between me and my mother was much longer, we talked for what seemed like hours and I drank sugary tea. She wanted to know if I was okay. She wanted to know about my emotions. She wanted to know if anything had been worrying me. I said that I was worried about a number of things: global warming, GCSEs and girls. She seemed to buy it. She hugged me and did some crying and said she loved me and called me her little pot of clay.

  Out,

  O

  Quidnunc

  It is Sunday. My parents have gone to Gower for a walk. They didn’t ask me to join them. They did not say that I would enjoy myself once I was there.

  Jordana is lying on her front on the large Turkish rug, reading my most recent diary entry. She’s about a third of the way through.

  I’m sitting on the piano stool, watching her read and thinking about the relative merits of being a convincing liar. It may seem like a useful life skill but it has its downsides. Part of the process of sounding like you are telling the truth is that, in some way, you have to believe in what you are saying. This leads to all sorts of problems.

  Yesterday, Jordana and I caught the train to Cardiff. It was slightly romantic. We couldn’t meet at each other’s houses because I didn’t want her to meet my parents, she didn’t want me to meet hers, and there would have been too many schoolfriends in town or the park – so we went to Cardiff.

  We planned to dodge the ticket-collector by hiding in the toilets. But we were too busy kissing and groping – we didn’t hear the hiss of the carriage doors – and he asked us for our tickets. I made up a story about how, earlier that day, we had got mugged on the High Street. I said they’d taken my wallet which contained both our tickets. I said that it was Jordana’s birthday and that I was taking her to Cardiff as a gift. Jordana was tapping my leg as if to say, don’t bother, he’ll never believe you. But I carried on and I talked about our visit to the police station to report the crime. I mentioned a female police officer who said that there had been a spate of muggings. I used the word spate. Jordana slyly pinched my side as if to say, give it up. She was about ready to fork out for tickets when I burst into tears – man tears – and started sobbing about how one of the boys punched me in the neck. The neck, of all places. And the other boy had said that he was going to knife my girlfriend. On her birthday. And how they had Irish accents. It all just came to me, off the cuff. I felt genuinely traumatized.

  And even though I saved her a tenner, Jordana hardly spoke to me fo
r the rest of the day.

  ‘The word custard always makes me think of cancer,’ she says. ‘I don’t know why.’

  She is reading my recipe.

  ‘Maybe that’s what tumours are made of,’ she says.

  I don’t feel well.

  In my diary, I pretend that the episode with Keiron’s clammy hand is just another of my ridiculously imaginative lies. This was a kind of double bluff. It was something that actually happened, except I didn’t say all those long words. Seven-year-olds do not understand words like gelid.

  One of the icebreakers that teachers use with a new class is: tell us one thing about yourself that is true and one thing that is not true. And I am always jealous of people who have done something in their life that is so remarkable you assume it must be a lie. Abby King came second in Junior Masterchef. Fact. Tatiana Rapatzikou was in the Russian Circus. Fact. I cannot say I have had sexual relations with a seven-year-old boy. They would make me go and see Maria, the school counsellor.

  Jordana traces across the page with her index finger. She’s about to get to the confession. My face is heating up. Tricking Keiron into unzipping my trousers is the single worst thing I have done in my life, thus far.

  Recently, I’ve been thinking more about Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance. I think of myself as a thoroughly good egg. And yet the incident with Keiron is the behaviour of a bad egg – a splodge of blood in the yolk. I have the sort of brain that can just forget things or pretend that something was a dream, if it suits me. It would probably be easier for me to believe that this event did not happen.

  I think about the time Chips was suspended from school for flooding the toilets and writing the word SHIT in faeces across four mirrors. His mum sent him back to school the next day with a note saying that she knows her son and he would never do such a thing.

  Jordana turns a page. She is near the end of my confession.

  ‘Oliver, I didn’t know you were a paedo,’ Jordana says casually. She thinks she is making a joke.

  When I was round at Chips’s dad’s house – Chips lives with his dad in the week and his mum every other weekend – we watched a programme about an American murderer-slash-rapist whose name was Curly Eberle. The programme focused on his most famous crime, whereby he raped and murdered a nineteen-year-old girl at a bus stop, then phoned the victim’s mother to tell her about it.

  In court, they had evidence to spare: his fingerprints on the girl’s mobile phone; his sperm in the usual places; her blood on his clothes. The testimony of the driver of the car that cruised past but was too wimpy to stop. They even had a recording – somehow – of the phone call he made.

  And they showed footage of the court case. It may have been a reconstruction. The camera focused on Curly Eberle’s face as they played him the recording. He listened to it. Listened to himself describing the girl’s facial expression, telling the girl’s mother how her daughter had sounded, doing a squeaky-voiced impersonation. All the while, the girl’s mother is freaking out at the other end of the line: squealing, wailing, animal noises.

  They asked him: ‘Mr Eberle, do you recognize this phone conversation?’ ‘No,’ he says. Everyone in the courtroom made their give-me-strength-in-the-presence-of-evil face. ‘Mr Eberle, is that your voice?’ ‘No, it’s not.’ Curly already knows he’s going to be in jail for ever. The evidence is overwhelming. It’s not going to change the verdict either way. ‘Is that your voice?’ ‘No, it is not my voice.’

  The programme tried to make out that this made him an even worse person, but I was thinking, fair play to him, he’s just being pragmatic. The series is called America’s Most Evil Killers and maybe Curly thinks of himself as a decent chap, on the whole, apart from one or two fairly major slip-ups. And here he’s being asked to admit to being the devil, and if you agree to that sort of thing then it tends to swallow up your whole self-image.

  ‘Ha!’ Jordana says, shaking her head at the page in front of her. ‘You’re mental.’

  Maybe a lady fainted on the train – it was the hottest day of the year – and Curly caught her under her arms as she fell. She was a deadweight. And with the help of another passenger he lifted her out on to the platform. She came to and Curly gave her some of his bottled water. She thanked him, said she was okay, then Curly got on the next train and went about his business.

  But if he admits to being one of America’s Most Evil Killers then all his memories – even the really sunny ones – will be tainted. He’ll start to remember being aware of his fingers near the sides of her breasts as he carried her out of the carriage. And that he liked the way her shirt and skirt had ridden up a bit in transit. He’ll remember hoping that she would need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. More than that, he’ll remember that the only thing keeping him from tearing her tights off and doing something demonic right there on the platform was the crowd of commuters that had gathered to watch. He’ll have to go through this process for every single memory. Rewrite his entire life story. Draw little devil horns on every childhood photo.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ Jordana says. She’s close to the end of the entry.

  I don’t want to lie to myself like Curly Eberle. I want to have a realistic picture of myself. The truth is that Keiron did come round and we did play hot or cold and I don’t even remember why – maybe I thought it would be funny – but I made him unzip my trousers. Maybe I just thought it would be interesting. It is the worst thing I have done in my life, thus far, and I will never forget about it or pretend it didn’t happen.

  Keiron’s eleven and next year he’s going to be in the same school as me and I’ve got this image of him standing up in assembly and telling everyone. Then the police will come round and shine an ultraviolet light on to the Turkish rug, which never gets washed because it is too delicate and valuable.

  ‘Weird,’ she says, slapping the book closed and pushing it away. ‘I don’t buy it. Gelid, algid. How would a seven-year-old even understand all these words?’

  ‘Exactly,’ I say. ‘It’s totally ridiculous.’

  Sometimes, if my mind tries to tell me that the whole incident was a dream or a fantasy, I feel around on the rug for the small patch of stiff, tough bristles.

  Jordana turns on to her back and spreads her arms and legs into a star. She starts writhing.

  ‘Warmer, warmer,’ she says, in the posh voice that is supposed to be an impression of me. She makes me sound like a homosexual. ‘Magma! Magma!’ she says, laughing.

  She is kicking her arms and feet in the air like an overturned ladybird. She is wearing a red polka-dot skirt, too. The backs of her knees are scratched raw.

  ‘Come on! What’s wrong?’ she says, holding out her hands and legs to me. ‘Don’t leave me stranded.’

  I can see her knickers, clear as day. White cotton knickers, crinkled in the crotch. I feel nothing. Sex-purse. I am cold.

  ‘Pederasty is a very serious offence,’ I tell her.

  ‘You’re no fun,’ she says, sitting up into a cross-legged position.

  I drop to my hands and knees and start feeling around on the carpet for the patch of dried cum.

  ‘Lost a contact lens?’ she says.

  I turn my back to her and keep on searching.

  ‘Cor blimey, sir,’ she says, in the voice of a Victorian orphan, ‘feel the ’eat off ’em.’

  I look over my shoulder. She has the palm of her hand cupped near the crotch of my jeans. Fred, her sheepdog, has notoriously warm balls.

  She beams. Like this is the happiest day of her life.

  ‘Come on. The fuck’s up with you?’

  Jordana is good at swearing.

  My face feels hot. I am alight with guilt.

  ‘Jordana, I have something to tell you.’

  I turn and sit opposite her on the carpet. I make the serious eyes.

  ‘You love me?’ she says.

  ‘No, not that.’

  ‘You have bought me a moped.’

  ‘I have not done
that.’

  ‘You love me.’

  ‘About Keiron.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The story is true. I was lying that I was lying.’

  ‘Your face is puffy,’ she says.

  ‘I needed to tell someone.’

  ‘Are you going to cry again?’

  ‘You can’t understand Oliver Tate without knowing his dark secret.’

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘You’re not taking me seriously. His name’s Keiron. He’s a family friend.’

  ‘I think that you just think it’s cool to have a dark secret.’

  I move my tongue along my bottom teeth.

  ‘I am morally damaged,’ I say.

  ‘You’re a good liar.’

  ‘I’m not lying.’

  ‘Prove it.’

  ‘The proof is beneath you.’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘I mean it’s on the carpet.’

  Jordana frowns and rolls out of the way.

  I run my hands over the patch where she had been sitting. Something scrapes against my palm. I open my eyes.

  ‘Rub here,’ I tell her.

  She rubs her right hand back and forth over the same spot of carpet, flicking at it with her index finger. It makes a scritch-scritch sound.

  ‘What does that prove?’ With a great deal of effort, she raises one eyebrow.

  ‘That’s dried cum. You must recognize it. Abby King’s sleeves are covered in this stuff.’

  ‘So he actually wanked you off?’

  I bow my head.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How would a seven-year-old boy know all those words?’

  ‘I was lying about the words – I only said hotter and colder.’

  ‘And he actually wanked you off?’

  ‘Keiron started things off but his technique was very poor so I ended up doing most of the work.’

  ‘So he didn’t wank you off.’

  ‘Morally, he did.’

  She puts a finger under my chin and lifts my head up.

  She’s smiling.

  ‘Have you told anyone else?’ she says.