Submarine

by Joe Dunthorne

  Next, the encyclopaedia – heaviest of all three. I weigh it on my palm, wondering where to aim for. I grip on to the window above my head and heave. As my arm reaches full extension, I slip forward a little on the ledge – as a reaction I yank on the window to try and regain my seating – the window unsticks and squeals down with me still gripping on until my knuckles crack on the bottom of the frame. I instinctively pull my hand free, yelping, shaking my fingers at the expanse of air between me and the sea.

  I do not fall off. I do not die.

  I wedge my hands tightly against the sides of the window frame.

  I kick my heels against the front of our house.

  Reference books twitch on the pavement.

  I know what I have to do. It is so simple, it’s almost like falling asleep.

  They love me. They cannot help it. I swallow.

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘Pops!’

  ‘Maaaaaaaaaaaa!’

  III

  Lampoonery

  I am sixteen. My mother is forty-three.

  I am thinking about yesterday – my mother’s birthday. Already, I live in the past.

  Dad said that a real surprise party should actually be a surprise and who ever expected a forty-third birthday party? It was part of his carefully planned programme of spontaneous affection.

  It is well known that men are very poor at using their voices to express their emotions. My father has learnt that it is easier to drive, or to organize or to be inconvenienced. For instance, there is nothing he likes better than picking Mum up from Heathrow Airport. If there is bad traffic, all the better. White-bread sandwiches, un-Greek yoghurt, second-rate coffee: it all adds up. The worse the service station, the deeper his love.

  The party provided a good opportunity for weeks of secretive hard work and unnecessary stress. He was having to use his office phone to ring all the prospective guests so that Mum would not catch on. He was getting in touch with friends they hadn’t seen for years. He was feigning interest in the same catch-up chit-chat ten times over. He told the same almost-joke again and again: Well, I thought to myself, a real surprise party should actually be a surprise and who ever heard of a forty-third birthday party?

  I know all this because he told me. That was the other thing that happened. For a few weeks, I was his surrogate wife. I was my own mother.

  Since he couldn’t rant at Mum about the grisly day-to-day life of a surprise-party organizer, he was forced to come to me for solace.

  He started picking me up from school just so he could soliloquize and drive quickly: ‘Barry is threatening to stay for a whole week because – if he’s going to come all the way down here– he wants to make the most of it. And that’s not to mention the food: I’ve got lactose intolerance, I’ve got peanut allergies, I’ve got a fear – not an allergy, no, a fear – of seafood. I mean, Jee-zus. And what is this rubbish?’

  He actually thumped the steering wheel. My father has a love-hate relationship with Classic FM.

  ‘Please, not the fucking Four Seasons. So Tina and Jake are bringing their young son, Atom – Atom! – and Atom can’t come into contact with cat hair, dust or even those microscopic insects that feed on dead skin. The boy has a molecular sensitivity. It’s a fucking joke.’

  And it was strange being his wife for a while – it was nice that he was being so open and I liked hearing him swear – but I can’t say that, after a few weeks of listening to him moan, I didn’t see the appeal – theoretically – of running off with the guy who comes once a month to do the garden.

  So the surprise party was a joint present really, from Dad, but also from me, because I sat in the passenger seat, nodding and saying ‘Uh huh’ and ‘Yup’.

  Dad arranged for Mum to spend the morning of her birthday having cranio-sacral therapy – she had to go all the way to Bristol. Cranio-sacral therapy is brand-new and, according to my research, does not involve taking off any clothes. The treatment is about a man placing his hands near to – but not on – her body. There is a cork board in the cloakroom of the sports hall where they do yoga. It brims with the latest treatments and classes. You can pay to have a man come to your house and test the amount of electromagnetic radiation from microwaves, radios, TVs on stand-by and mobile phones.

  So Mum spent the morning not being touched and the guests started arriving at about midday. Dad had arranged catering with The Anarkali – one of the Bangladeshi restaurants down on St Helen’s Road – so there were four different curries, marinated chicken wings, sweet and sour shrimp and aubergine with yoghurt.

  When the chef from The Anarkali dropped off the food in the morning, Dad wanted to check its authenticity: ‘Is this the sort of food that you would eat in Bangladesh?’

  ‘No, it does not taste the same, the ingredients are not equal, this is a…’ she shook her head at my father, who was nodding encouragingly, it took her ages, and then, ‘… lampoonery.’

  I think Dad thought that she had said an Indian word or the name of a curry. But I understood.

  The house really filled up. It went to show that Mum and Dad do have lots of friends, although you wouldn’t think it from looking at them.

  With the front room full of people, Dad took pleasure in showing off his pronunciation: ‘Oli, could you pass around the gurer payesh khichuri please?’

  When I was handing out the samosas, I was asked the same question repeatedly: So Oli, what are your plans for the future?

  A question for which I had already prepared an answer.

  I said: ‘My future is history,’ and they smiled because it is a beautiful and rare thing for a teenager to want to be like his father.

  I got an A* in my mock GCSE history exam. I got a C for art.

  Although I no longer own a dictionary, I have not forgotten as many words as I had hoped. I still remember the word nuance: a subtle difference, a shade of meaning.

  I remember when Mr Hake tried to scare us away from doing biology A-level by showing us the difference between a single cell at GCSE – a circle with a dot in the middle, a cartoon breast – compared with a single cell at A-level – a wobbly shape with lots of other wobbly, spotty shapes inside it.

  Nuance is something that happens at A-level.

  I don’t know whether Dad had not looked into it properly – he doesn’t really believe in any of this holistic stuff – but I don’t think cranio-sacral therapy had put Mum in the right frame of mind for a surprise party.

  I was in my attic room – a boy can only distribute so many koti rolls – when the cry went up: ‘Here comes the birthday girl!’

  The Canes and the Clamps had been drinking wine in the front garden, ogling the view, when they spotted her at the far end of the street.

  As word spread, the herd moved. I watched from my window as they bundled in to the front garden and lined the steps.

  Jack Clamp, who has a four-inch beard and plays banjo in a folk band called The Townhill Billies, lead an a cappella performance of ‘Happy Birthday’, conducting with a chicken leg.

  As they sang, Mum smiled, waved and kept walking smoothly down the street, her upper body remaining still as her legs conveyed her forwards.

  But as she passed behind the large, thick bush at the front of our garden, she stopped. She was out of sight of the party guests.

  From my vantage point, I could see her breathing steadily, gazing into space. She reached up and gently touched her own forehead. She examined her own hand and looked a bit confused. This only took a couple of seconds.

  Then she rounded the corner, skipped up the steps with her party face on singing: ‘Right, well, who’s to blame for all this, then!’

  She did a very good impression of being glad to be there. When people asked about the cranio-sacral she said it was ‘oh, very relaxing’.

  Once everyone had gone home, we sat around a table of leftovers: bhajis, wood-apples and drifts of untouched white rice. I had drunk some pink wine and was feeling relaxed.


  I used my fingers to pick shrimps from among the vegetables. She chewed on some wood-apple. Wood-apples look like apples but taste like wood. They are a popular fruit in Bangladesh. We had seven left over.

  Mum was talking about her cranio-sacral therapy:

  ‘He put his hands inside my mouth – which was a bit strange at first – and after that, he held my feet.’ She had red tidemarks on her lips from the wine. ‘I know it doesn’t sound like much but I don’t think I’ve ever felt so scrubbed clean, so thoroughly comfortable with being human.’

  It is strange to hear your mother talk about being human because, honestly, it’s too easy to forget.

  After that, we had a short conversation about how your body can sometimes seem totally separate. She said her body can feel like a distant bureaucracy controlled by telegrams from her brain, and I said my body is sometimes like that of Mario Mario, being controlled with a Nintendo joypad. Mario’s surname is Mario.

  I wanted to explain by using an anecdote. Two months ago, I saw Jordana walking down the road with her new boyfriend, who is older than me and may or may not still be in education. It was not Lewis, the boy from down Llangennith, but a different boy who I have nicknamed Aesop for his miraculous, vase-like oesophagus. Jordana and I spotted each other at the same time and, out of respect or pity, she quickly unthreaded her fingers from his. I immediately crossed over to the other side of the street.

  As we got closer together, walking became very complicated. I was heavy machinery. I had to deal with each movement, one after the other: lift left foot off the ground, move left foot forward through the air, maintain balance with right foot in conjunction with right calf, thigh and arms, reconnect left foot with pavement, look straight ahead, adjust facial expression to imply nonchalance, shift weight to left foot, lift right foot, move it forward through the air…

  It was not easy.

  Worst of all, Jordana’s arms were on display – popping out of a fitted green T-shirt. I gazed into the crooks of her elbows – hoping for eczema – but they were clean and smooth. Although Jordana and I are still in school together, she is excellent at avoiding me and she always wears long-sleeved shirts. It was a thrill for me just to see her forearms.

  My brain was pleased to note that Aesop’s stride was longer than Jordana’s and they struggled to keep in sync.

  But I didn’t say any of this to my mother, even though it was one of those rare parent-and-child-in-emotional-symmetry moments.

  She even asked me outright: ‘How are you feeling about Jordana now a bit of time has passed?’ I could have told her the anecdote but, instead, I did a bit of nodding and saying some things that I have seen on TV: ‘I’m holding up, living day by day, keeping it together.’ Then I went to the upright piano and improvised the most instinctive, freeform jazz.

  After eating the leftovers, we played Scrabble. I used to fantasize about using the word ‘zzxjoanw’, meaning a Maori drum or a conclusion. A blank would stand in for one of the ‘z’s. There’d be a fifty-point bonus for using all seven tiles. But I recently discovered that ‘zzxjoanw’ does not exist. It was some lexicographer’s idea of a hilarious practical joke. It is not a Maori drum. It is not a conclusion. Instead, I turned ‘sock’ into ‘cassock’. I won by over fifty points. It was unusual that, at the end of the game, neither of them had fallen asleep. They were chatting to each other and kissing because ‘the day has come when our son beats us at Scrabble’, but I could tell this was just another way of saying: Leave the house for a few hours, we wanna fuck.

  So I went to see Chips. We shared four bottles of Hooch. I came home and they were still in the front room kissing and chatting. I went to bed. Then, an hour later, they had sex, loudly and for quite a long time, long enough that I stopped counting the minutes and, in fact, I put Blu-Tack in my ears.

  It is clear from the ghostly fluff on my cheeks that, physically, I am not a man. I am also completely odourless. But ever since Jordana dumped me, I’ve started feeling like a middle-aged person. I think it is to do with trauma. I just walk around doing an impression of a sixteen-year-old.

  Once you’ve been through certain experiences, you may as well accept that your life from that point on will be one massive Ferris wheel of the same emotional trauma, relived and recycled, over and over.

  So you were badly bullied in school? Roll up, roll up. So you got dumped for some giraffe-necked moron? Roll down, roll down.

  I will remain a victim, for ever, like Zoe, who is probably, right this moment, lounging around, wallowing in her own sorrowful existence. You can change schools as much as you want but if you think of yourself as a victim then you stay a victim. Zoe probably can’t get off of her sofa. She has bunions in the folds of her voluminous skin.

  Chips. Now, he’s still a child. He’s becoming more like an eightyear-old every day. When I went round his dad’s house a few weeks ago, he offered me a drop of acid juice. I said no because I am basically forty-three years old. He nodded and then asked if I minded him having some.

  One hour later, in Cwmdonkin Park, he said that he could see fucking in the sky. That the sky was full of fucking. Shortly after that, he ran away from me because he said my face had turned weird.

  The ageing process.

  I am sixteen. I live in the past.

  I Ask Jeeves the question: ‘Whatever happened to Zoe Preece?’ There is a lawyer, an international hockey-player, a chiropractor. I find my Zoe on the sixth page. She’s the lighting and sound engineer for Versive, a local youth theatre company. I should imagine that you can still be fat and be a lighting and sound engineer. She probably has violent fantasies about the pretty girls who always get the leading roles.

  The show they are putting on is about the most recent world war. It’s called Ghetto. It runs for two days, four performances, matinée and evening, at the Taliesin Theatre, Swansea. I write down the box-office phone number on my hand.

  I go downstairs. I open my dad’s briefcase, which is hanging from the newel post. I pull out his wallet, which he has never kept condoms in. I borrow his Lloyds TSB Platinum Card.

  Opsimath

  I walk down through the botanical gardens in Singleton Park, reading the bench plaques:

  IN DEDICATION TO HAL KALKSTEIN 1930– 1995:

  FATHER, SON, FRIEND, COLLEAGUE, CYCLIST AND HIKER,

  FROM HIS LOVING FAMILY.

  IN MEMORY OF ARTHUR JONES: HUSBAND, SON, GODFATHER.

  HE LOVED IT HERE.

  I stop opposite an old bloke on a bench. I stand in his eye line and cup a purple trumpet carefully, delicately, in the manner of the girls from his youth. I know how happy it makes old people to see teenagers seeming to enjoy flowers. He sits with his hands resting on his crotch. He looks quite pleased with himself; it is spring and he has seen off another winter. I pout slightly and cock my hips. I reinforce everything he has learnt about certain modern boys.

  Once out in the fields, I avoid the paved pathways and stride across the grass towards the grey concrete waffle-stacks of the university’s halls of residence.

  They are starting to mention university in school nowadays. Mr Linton told me that if I worked hard enough for my GCSEs I could get into the fast-lane streaming class for history A-level, which will hydroslide me to a top university, flume me into a top job, turn me into my father.

  Old people only say that life happens quickly to make themselves feel better. The truth is that it all happens in tiny increments like now now now now now now and it only takes twenty to thirty consecutive nows to realize that you’re aimed straight at a bench in Singleton Park. Fair play though, if I was old and had forgotten to do something worthwhile with my life, I would spend those final few years on a bench in the botanical gardens, convincing myself that time is so quick that even plants – who have no responsibilities whatsoever – hardly get a chance to do anything decent with their lives except, perhaps, produce one or two red or yellow flowers and, with a bit of luck and insects, reproduce. If the old man manag
es to get the words father and husband on his bench plaque then he thinks he can be reasonably proud of himself.

  I remember from seeing King Lear at the Grand Theatre that some of the seat backs were dedicated to people or local companies. Maybe that’s what Zoe’s aiming for. Her big ambition is to have a memorial plaque on one of the wide seats.

  It was all down to bad timing. If Zoe’d had the chance to read my pamphlet before she moved schools, there’s no telling where she’d be now: she’d probably be one of the girls who gets photographed by the Evening Post opening their exam results.

  But, as it is, she’ll be exactly the same, worse maybe. It says a lot about someone’s self-esteem if their major aim in life is to keep other girls well lit.

  They probably keep her out of sight in the control booth, hooked up to a gravy drip. The faders and switches of her control desk are the closest she gets to interacting with the outside world. In the dark, Zoe watches the lead actor sing with his eyes gazing up into the lights; she knows he is singing to her. She turns up the spotlight, pushing the fader with a clammy finger before reaching under her swollen belly, slipping her hand beneath the elasticated waistband of her jogging bottoms and groping at the patch of sodden mud that she has come to know as her sex organs.

  The Taliesin’s café is bustling with proud, healthy-looking parents. I walk downstairs to the box-office-cum-gift-shop-cum-gallery and ask for my reserved ticket, passing my father’s credit card to the woman behind the desk.

  A capillary has burst on the woman’s right eyeball; there’s a dash of Tabasco blood in the corner of her cornea. I notice a brushstroke of yellow bruising on the skin beneath the eye. I do not invent a story for how she got this injury.

  She reads the envelope and says, ‘One ticket for tonight’s performance: Lloyd Tate,’ as she passes it to me. I wait for a moment, hoping that she might question my age. She smiles as she hands me the credit card.