Submarine

by Joe Dunthorne

  ‘I’ll do your marking, Dad,’ I say, thinking that it would be good for him to get out once in a while.

  ‘There you go, Oliver’ll do my marking. How’s your knowledge of Welsh devolution, Ol?’

  ‘Is that about how people from Cardiff are closer to apes?’

  ‘Ba-dum,’ says Dad, hitting an imaginary cymbal. He hates Cardiff too.

  ‘I’m not letting you change the topic of conversation,’ I say.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So tell me: how did you steal Mum and did it involve tearing off your vest?’

  Dad opens his mouth to speak but Mum looks at him sharply with her jaw cocked to the side and her tongue pressed against her bottom teeth.

  ‘Your father did not steal me, Oliver.’

  ‘Is that when you tore your vest off, Dad?’

  Whenever I tell Dad that he is boring, he claims he once tore his vest off. He never puts the story in context.

  ‘Graham’s an old, old boyfriend of mine but now he has a very nice girlfriend –’

  ‘Whom he mentions at every opportun –’

  ‘Whom he loves very much please Lloyd grow up.’

  All one sentence. Great.

  ‘So why is he back in Swansea?’ I ask.

  ‘A very pertinent question, Oliver,’ Dad concurs, turning to my mother like a newsreader going live to a reporter at the scene of the crime.

  Mum balances a perfect mouthful on her fork (a speared nugget from the eye of the lamb chop with couscous – two sultanas included – balanced in a pile around it). The fork jitters; a few yellow grains tumble.

  ‘You’re a prick,’ she says to Dad before yomping the whole lot, chewing vigorously. When Mum says ‘prick’, it scratches like a bramble.

  I am still doing the face that says: hey-lo-oh? I have asked a question.

  My dad turns to me: ‘Oh, he must be moving back to Swansea for the cuisine, Oliver.’

  ‘Is he going to come round here for tea, then?’ I ask.

  Mum increases the speed of her chomping.

  ‘Mmm, only if Jill cooks nut roast. Graham thinks I don’t know my pulse from my elbow.’

  Dad laughs at this on his own.

  Mum swallows. She gets up from the table, scrapes the rest of her food into the compost bin and can be heard loudly putting her plate in the dishwasher.

  Me and Dad keep eating. We stop talking about Graham. I expect Dad to wink at me or something but he doesn’t.

  Canicide

  ‘… I found out yesterday – it’s called a medulloblastoma.’ I am shaken up; this is the first time Jordana has used a word I don’t understand or told me that her mother has a brain tumour.

  We are on the footbridge on the way home from school. We stop and lean over the side, watching the cars disappear beneath us.

  ‘That’s a very long word,’ I say.

  ‘Oliver, she’s not on Countdown – she might die.’ Jordana lets a cable of spit hang from her lips.

  I think about telling her that the maximum length of a word in Countdown is nine letters.

  ‘Here comes Miss Riley’s car,’ I say, pointing at the approaching Vauxhall, but Jordana has already spotted it. She bites her sputum loose. It misses; Jordana is not well.

  ‘Unlucky,’ I say.

  She is staring down at the road, her hair hides her face.

  ‘The operation’s in three weeks. The doctor said it is a very dangerous procedure, even if she doesn’t die then, she may never be the same.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘They’re going away, just the two of them, this weekend.’ Jordana doesn’t look at me. ‘You should come round.’

  20.6.97

  Word of the day: exungulate – to trim or cut nails or hoofs.

  Dear JorDiary,

  I’ve never met Jordana’s parents. I don’t think Jordana wants me to. I am content to imagine them from hearing about what they eat for tea and from seeing the inside of their house when they are out. They have a dresser with plates behind lightly frosted glass. They have a watercolour painting of Three Cliffs Beach. They have a disconnected gas heater.

  I imagine her father’s nose is sturdy, like a hand-hold on a climbing wall. I imagine the skin on her mother’s neck, like boiled ham, mottled from holidays in Spain in the days before it was bad to sunburn.

  Fred cannot bark properly. He has a white goatee and a black body. Sometimes he opens his mouth and nothing comes out.

  Pets mimic their owners; Fred is very protective. A few days after me and Jordana had done the dirty for the first time, he swiped me across the ear. I would like to exungulate Fred.

  He is ninety-six in dog years. He has a birthday every sixty days. In the book Parenting Teens with Love and Logic, it says that pets are important because they die. They allow children to adjust to death and mourning. It is in Jordana’s interest that Fred should die before her mother does.

  Jordana says there’s been talk of putting Fred down – which is a way of phrasing non-voluntary euthanasia. He’s been shitting halfway up the stairs – I think this is because he is old and frail and gets vertigo on the way up. Fred also has arthritis. This means he runs in the manner of a rocking horse.

  Because I am an excellent and attentive boyfriend, I take an active interest in Jordana’s physical health. According to my internet research, pets can encourage eczema. The problem is twofold. Firstly, eczematics – a word I have invented – are often allergic to pet hair. Secondly, microscopic dust mites feast on the dead skin and hairs which pets distribute.

  On an unrelated note, I went to the hardware store on Sketty Road today. They had snap traps called Lucifer and The Big Cheese. I settled for Ratak, which is a tube full of pellets. Kills rats and mice, including those resistant to Warfarin. I will never forget the day I saw a tremendous rat, checking out the bin bags outside number thirty.

  I like the word Warfarin.

  Howl,

  O

  Saturday morning.

  I am in Jordana’s kitchen. I arrived at ten o’clock, knowing that Jordana would still be in her pyjamas. They are not sexy pyjamas; they have pictures of clouds and rainbows on them. She is upstairs getting changed.

  In the cupboard below the sink there are tins of dog food and a big bag of Canine Crunch balls. I take a handful of Canine Crunch and then a handful of Ratak and drop them in Fred’s bowl. The rat poison looks convincing enough, if slightly off-colour and too small, among the Crunch.

  Fred stumbles in, pushing the kitchen door open with his head.

  Ratak is actually made of cholecalciferol. I put this word into Yahoo and discovered more about its effects. As luck would have it, the website – an online scientific journal called Isis – warned that this chemical is specifically dangerous to dogs.

  I tell Fred what will happen although, of course, he does not understand human words.

  ‘First off, your lungs, stomach and kidneys will calcify.’

  He looks at me dumbly.

  ‘Then a few hours, maybe days later: internal bleeding, heart problems, kidney failure.’

  Fred’s on his last legs anyway. I am sure that, on balance, he would be willing to put up with some discomfort and a slightly curtailed life span in order to safeguard Jordana’s long-term emotional stability.

  Fred opens his mouth but no sound comes out.

  I wash my hands and go upstairs to tend to Jordana.

  Later, when I come downstairs to see how he is getting on – Jordana is worn out – only the rat pellets remain, huddled together in the centre of his bowl. Fred is sat in his basket with his eyes wide. He opens his mouth but no sound comes out.

  I take the rat pellets out of the bowl and put them on to a chopping board. I use the handle of a carving knife to mash each ball individually, like my dad crushing garlic. Fred jumps stiffly up on to the wooden stool by the counter to watch. I look at his black lips.

  I take the can of Pedigree Chum, heart, liver and paunch flavour, from the fridge and sprinkle
in the death dust, mixing it with a fork.

  ‘You are very noble,’ I say, putting the tin back in the fridge.

  He stares at the fridge door.

  Monday afternoon, walking Jordana home from school, I ask: ‘How’s Fred?’

  Jordana cocks her head towards me and narrows her eyes.

  ‘I’m just curious,’ I say. ‘I like him.’

  She opens her mouth to say something but then closes it.

  Then opens it again: ‘He’s stopped eating actually.’ Jordana looks suspiciously at me: ‘I think he knows that something’s wrong.’

  She is suspicious because I am taking an interest, not because she thinks I am planning an assassination.

  ‘Oh. Dogs are very intelligent,’ I say.

  We walk in silence down the middle of Watkin Street. I have a Tesco bag for my PE kit which I am prepared to wrap around Fred’s muzzle.

  ‘Shit,’ Jordana says stopping, as if she’s remembered something important. She bares her teeth guiltily.

  ‘Poor old Miss Riley,’ she says.

  Miss Riley is our Religious Education teacher.

  ‘I really think we went too far,’ she says.

  *

  Since Jordana has known about her mum’s tumour she has changed in two ways. Firstly, she’s more sympathetic. She calls people by their first names instead of their nicknames: Scab and Rid are now Joseph and Rhydian. When a teacher has clearly made a special effort, like when Mr Linton brought in his electric guitar, she pays attention and looks interested. She hasn’t slagged off Janet Smuts in days.

  Secondly, she values her own life. She waits for the beeps before crossing the main road. She has bought a cycle helmet although she hardly ever rides her bike. She puts her bag on her lap to hide the fact that she wears her seat belt on the school bus.

  Miss Riley has a large mole above her right eyebrow. While she was out photocopying, we stole her Blu-Tack. On Chips’s command, all eighteen of us moulded our own attachable moles. Chips even went to the trouble of plucking one of his pubes – he has them to spare – to give his some decoration. Jordana seemed reluctant but, knowing the rules, she still conformed. We wore our benign accessories above the right eyebrow. Miss Riley must have been surprised that our heads were down, working hard, when she came back in.

  ‘What’s wrong with you lot?’ she asked, as if she’d finally made a breakthrough with her problem class.

  We looked up from our work. It took about four seconds before she started to cry.

  Her classroom has one of those doors that you have to lock or it keeps swinging open; it took about twelve seconds of jiggling with the key before she could run out into the corridor.

  We keep walking. Jordana is biting her bottom lip.

  ‘Shit,’ Jordana says again, stopping in the road.

  ‘Well, nobody expected her to cry,’ I say, remembering Chips’s exact words: I bet she weeps.

  I stop and look back: her eyes are wide, staring past me into the road. Jordana needs to control her empathy.

  ‘It was probably symptomatic of deeper emotional turmoil,’ I say.

  ‘Shut up,’ she says, her eyes are fixed on something.

  I follow her gaze to the middle of the road a few metres ahead.

  A black dog is laid out, its legs twitching.

  ‘It’s Fred,’ she says.

  I step a bit closer and see that his gut is split, tiny intestines spilling out, spag bol on the tarmac. His eyes are coming out of their sockets like zits ready to pop. His jaw is slack. His teeth are mostly yellow but the tips are white – snow-capped. Just beyond him, there is a gory comet-shaped splat of blood on the road.

  ‘Fred’s dead,’ I say, trying not to enjoy the rhyme.

  And then, for the first time in his sixteen years, Fred makes a noise to be proud of. He sounds like a failing hedge-strimmer: half gargling, half squealing.

  ‘He’s still alive,’ Jordana says, and I wonder whether she is going to try and save him: press his eyes back in, sew him up with her shoelaces. I think of the old guy from the St John’s Ambulance who came to morning assembly and showed us how to snog a plastic twelve-year-old girl whose heart had stopped. One of the things I like – liked – about Fred was that he didn’t have bad breath.

  Jordana disappears. I assume that she’s gone to get help, that she can’t handle the horror of it. I kind of know what she means. It’s the way his legs are twitching that’s really making me unhappy.

  I ought to put him out of his misery. That would be the humane thing. There’s a skip just down the road which I could get a brick or a plank from. I wonder how Fred would prefer to go. Brick or plank? Which carries more dignity? But I don’t do anything because I can’t stop staring at him. The hair on his back is spiked up – punky – in tufts of gore. A trail of blood leaks toward the gutter. I turn away from Fred so I can think more clearly.

  I’m surprised he can manage it but Fred makes the sound again – a caterwaul.

  I think that at least Fred is dying with an obscure word.

  Jordana returns carrying a breezeblock.

  The look on her face is focused and sad. It’s the same face she puts on when she’s doing a maths test.

  ‘You’re joking,’ I say.

  ‘We can’t just leave him.’

  ‘I don’t think the breezeblock is the way forward.’

  ‘We’ve got to do something.’

  ‘Maybe we should just wait for another car?’

  ‘Oh God,’ she says.

  ‘How long do you think he’ll last?’

  ‘Poor Fred,’ she says.

  His mouth isn’t even open but he makes a noise again. The sound comes from his throat. It is closer to gargling.

  ‘Oh, Fred!’ Jordana’s face has gone red. She stands over him with the breezeblock. ‘I’ve got to.’

  ‘You can’t,’ I say.

  ‘It’s for his own good,’ she says.

  ‘But…’

  ‘Help me hold it.’

  ‘He’ll be dead soon.’

  ‘Help me hold it.’

  Her eyebrows are scrunched low over her eyes.

  We stand either side of Fred’s skull and hold the edges of the breezeblock. Patches of dried skin run up Jordana’s wrists where she’s been scratching. It looks like when you scuff carpet the wrong way.

  I think that if Jordana’s mum was in Fred’s situation we would not have this option unless they flew her to Switzerland, where there are no rules.

  ‘Hitler did this to disabled people,’ I tell her.

  ‘Shut up, Oli.’

  ‘The word is euthanasia,’ I say.

  ‘Shut up!’

  It used to be one of my favourite words.

  ‘Right, after three,’ she says. She’s blinking furiously.

  ‘I can’t,’ I say.

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Stop.’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘One.’

  ‘God.’

  ‘Go.’

  Neither of us lets go.

  ‘Shit,’ she says.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say.

  ‘Shit.’

  His legs stop spazzing after four and a half minutes. I help Jordana slide a sheet of cardboard under Fred’s remains. The smell, I can only assume, is of half-digested faeces. We stretcher him into the skip, tossing him beneath a mattress, among a load of coat hangers.

  We hug in the middle of the road. I spare a thought for Fred the martyr. At least he died under his own steam. His death will be a huge help in the event of Jordana’s mother’s death. And it may help reduce the dust mite population. I feel Jordana crying against my shoulder.

  I am happy because I see the bigger picture. She has passed the mock exam for losing a loved one.

  Two days later. Two weeks before the operation. We are sitting on the swings. It is nice to be able to sit here and not have to worry about Fred running off or shitting in obscure places.

  ‘My
parents asked me to thank you for helping me with Fred. I told them that you liked Fred. That you worried about him.’

  Jordana’s face is fixed in the expression that means she thinks she understands me, knows my good side, sees how caring I am, even if I do not. She does this face more often nowadays.

  ‘Jude said she wants to meet you,’ Jordana says, looking across at me. Jordana has started referring to her mother by her first name: Jude. This is an unfortunate symptom of Jordana’s rampant empathy; she sees her mother as a fellow human being. ‘She’s invited you round for dinner.’

  Again she is making the face. She thinks that I am endearingly nervous because I want to make a good impression. I try not to think that this may be the one time I get to meet Jude before she dies.

  ‘Don’t look so worried. They won’t kill you.’

  I look away. I’m thinking about the rat poison on the chopping board.

  Trojans

  Last Sunday, Mum went for lunch with Graham at Vrindavan – the Hare Krishna café. Dad stayed home.

  I once had the misfortune to be taken to Vrindavan. Vegan chocolate cake was the safe option. Their menu is partly a manifesto. Vegans claim that bee-keepers are slave-owners, that honey is theft.

  I believe in market forces and I think that if bees had the power of rational thought they would be willing to exchange their surplus honey for clean, free-standing, man-made hives that are reminiscent of upmarket beach huts. Bees already work in a pleasant environment – flowers et cetera – and they would want the classy living arrangements to match.

  When my mother came back from the luncheon, she went straight upstairs and had a long conversation with Dad. Then she came to speak to me. She sat with me on the floor of my bedroom. She explained that their friend Graham volunteers at a meditation retreat in Powys and that he had offered her a spare place. I said, ‘Congratulations’. She said that she’d always wanted to try something like this. She said it was a good opportunity because these courses are normally booked up for months in advance. I asked her if she felt indebted to Graham. She said that the introductory course was going to take ten days. I said she should be careful not to believe everything she hears in Vrindavan. She said, ‘It starts next Saturday.’ She told me that Dad would look after me while she was away.