There was a hand now, on my arm, and I hate being touched. It was cool and for once I didn’t pull away. I stood there, slowly becoming still while someone in front of me that I still hadn’t seen waited for my arms to stop waving and my face to unwind. It took a long time, and I didn’t hear her move. After I had managed to get on top of my breathing and some of my muscles had untightened a tiny bit I tried a few times to open my eyes. Standing in front of me was a girl. It was Karen’s daughter, I knew what she looked like from watching her through my door and seeing her on the stairs, and she was looking at me through the fringe of her hair, which had fallen out of a ponytail. I squinted through the slits of my eyes at her, and I didn’t look away. Instead her eyes made me feel better and I stood, and my body unstiffened more and I felt soft and safe. She had a good, pure face and I couldn’t believe that Dr Karen was even her mother. She kept talking to me and her voice sounded as if it had a smile in it.
‘Do you live here? If she’s there I’m going to make dinner for my mum. She works really long hours and I want to surprise her. She spent yesterday and today helping my brother and I spoke to her at lunchtime, but I’m worried because my dad is threatening to call the police because he doesn’t know where Jamie is. I can let myself in, I have a key.’
I didn’t say anything, but she just carried on talking anyway. ‘Do you want to come? If she’s there you don’t have to stay, but otherwise you can keep me company. I’ve never been away from Jamie, my littlest brother, for this long before, and I’m missing him. He’s only five. He misses me too when I’m not there.’
It seemed like a rescue. I left my door closed and walked behind her up the stairs to Karen’s flat. She unlocked the door and walked over to the tap, and got me water, and put the television on. I checked the cup and without being asked she said, ‘It’s clean. I checked. It’s been in the dishwasher.’
This was a new feeling, someone knowing what I was thinking.
‘You remind me of Jamie. I look after him a lot, we’re very close.’
I had never met anyone who thought I was like anyone else before, just lots of people who told me how different I was from everybody. I wasn’t sure what she meant and I carried on watching the television. She didn’t even mind and just carried on chopping up carrots and talking slowly and gently. I began to think that this was a good day. If I could have just stayed there with Sarah, I think I would have stayed calm. She was exactly what I had thought the girl downstairs in my bed would be. She didn’t ask me questions, and she didn’t need to fill in the gaps in the conversation when it was quiet. I wished I had a sister and I wished I could stay in the room with her, listening to the sound of the knife on the wooden chopping board. It wasn’t a sharp noise at all; the wood made it dull and soft.
Her mum didn’t come, and Sarah decided she would cook the food and then we could eat it if no one else wanted to. She gave me a bowl and the potatoes and I peeled them. I liked them to be perfect with no grey bits and no marks so I had to throw two away but that was fine too. My mother used to tut and take them out and tell me how much I had wasted and then I couldn’t eat them because they had been in the bin. Then I cut them up to be the same size. That is how you cook them properly. I looked it up on my computer.
We had mince and potatoes and peas and when we had finished I said thank you, and we didn’t talk when we were eating, which was the best way to eat. Sarah ate quietly, and she asked me if I hated loud noises, and I said I did. She said her brother did too, and that I laid the table neatly just like he did. He went to the same school as her, but he was in a different part because Sarah was twelve, so she came to see him at lunchtime and break time. He didn’t like many people and didn’t have many friends and I felt I agreed with him. I didn’t really want any, and I hadn’t liked school. I hadn’t even liked my brother, but I would have been able to sit with him like this if he had been quiet. He had never been quiet. He had cried all the time when he was a baby, then he had been shouty, and pushing and messy. I would line up all my toys and he would come and throw them everywhere. But I didn’t want him to die, and I knew it had made my mother sad when he did. Even so, Sarah would have been a much better family member for me. I thought I would like to have her to visit me, but then I thought about my flat and my mother and my grandpa, and how I was ever going to let them in.
I didn’t know, but I must have looked upset. Sometimes my face and my hands look upset to other people and I don’t know. I was rocking, back and forwards in my chair, and Sarah sat quietly and watched me. It was much better than being told to be quiet, or Grandpa coming round the table, and after a while I was quiet, and Sarah waited for a bit before she said, ‘Nick, you don’t have to worry about anything. What’s the matter? You can tell me, we’re all on our own and there’s no one here to make you feel sad. Tell me what’s happened and I’ll help.’
She did say that and I believed her and that caused a lot of problems. You shouldn’t tell lies, and you shouldn’t make promises that you can’t keep. That is an actual rule, not made up by me, everyone says it, and she should not be upset, I should. I didn’t look at her, but I did talk, and I explained that I didn’t like it when my week was not in a routine, then I told her about the job and she didn’t know her mother had taken me to the hospital and she stopped saying that I shouldn’t worry, so I looked at her face to see what she was doing, and she looked as if she might cry. I have seen my mother look like that lots of times so I know how it looks on a face. Tight, and upset. I stopped talking about the hospital then, but I did say I liked it there. Then I told her that I had had a routine, and that it had changed, and that everyone was making me very anxious, even her mother and my mother, and I said I couldn’t even go in my flat, and she said of course I could. I didn’t want to tell her about the park, or the cleaner, because she is twelve and you have to keep sex a secret when you are twelve. Grandpa told me that.
I cleared the table and now it was seven in the evening and I got more and more anxious, and wanted to go and get my flat ready somehow for when Grandpa came so that he would go away quickly, but he wouldn’t because he would want to see the cat. I could feel sweat coming out of my hair on to my neck and I needed to shower.
I wanted to help Sarah, because she was helping me. I needed to put the dinner things in the dishwasher but I couldn’t wash the pans because there were no gloves and the dishwasher needed to be cleaned, but I just put in the plates with the tips of my fingers and closed it up, trying not to breathe in the smell of dirt. I washed my hands a lot of times with the washing-up liquid and hot water. The soap in a dish looked dirty and had black lines in the white. Sarah told me I didn’t need to do anything, but it did make me feel better for a minute.
Sarah tried to ring her mother to say she had left mince in the fridge, but there was no answer, just the machine that tells you to leave a message. Sarah looked worried, and she said it was because she didn’t know where her mother and her brother were and it had been two days and it was the evening and Jamie liked his routine, just like me. Sarah opened a cupboard, then another one. I didn’t know what she was looking for. Then she went into the bathroom and flushed the toilet without using it.
‘There’s a horrible smell in this flat, I think mum must have left something in the bin. Not to worry, let’s go and sort you out. I’m really good at cleaning and there is nothing so bad that I won’t be able to give you a hand.’
Another lie.
I was moving a lot now, agitated my grandpa calls it, don’t get agitated. I was on my tiptoes and my hands were flapping and I was glad it had an actual name and decided I would call it stimming in my head from now on and I told Sarah that but Sarah just smiled and I saw it from the corner of my eye. It was a nice smile. I picked up my jacket, I had folded it on the sofa. I smoothed my hair and thought I must wash my hands again. Down the stairs, down one, up one, stand still. Sarah told me not to worry. Nothing too big to sort out.
I thought I should explain so that
she could be warned; what if the cleaner girl still had her eyes open? I should probably tell her how noisy she had been because she understood that I hated noise. She shouldn’t go in the bedroom. I tried to remember if I had closed the door. I remembered I had, so I didn’t explain.
‘Come on, Nick, let’s get started.’
I went in before her and she followed me, and I shut the door behind her. She gasped but I realised it was from the smell: my flat smelt like bad food and sort of sweet and not like it usually did. You could hardly smell it if you were used to the morgue, but it was there, somewhere under the top air, and it caught at the back of my throat.
‘Wow, I see what you mean. Did you leave the bin full?’
Sarah put the light on to make the flat less dark. The cushion from the sofa was still on the floor and she picked it up. The flat looked messy, and Sarah was close to the door and frowning.
‘I’m usually very tidy. I had a very bad week. A cleaner came, and she used too many wipes. I went to the park for my walk and there were people by the pond where I feed the ducks, and I always walk there. I have a routine but it’s all messed up and I got rid of some of my exercise and replaced it with walking to the Tube and to the hospital but now that has stopped and I don’t want my grandpa or my mother to visit and I don’t want my flat to be messy. I am never messy.’
Sarah had stepped towards me and away from the bedroom door, and she picked up the bowl of soapy water from the floor that I had used to wash the girl in my bed. I watched her pour it into the sink, and she hummed to herself as she wiped down the surfaces. She hummed very quietly and it didn’t make me upset. I tidied my papers until they were square in a pile and put them by the computer and made that straight. My grandpa and my mother didn’t usually go in the bedroom; if this was all tidy then maybe they would just go home. At my mother’s house he made me go into the bedroom to be corrected, but we mustn’t tell anyone about that or about the sofa here or they would know we had been bad.
I realised that I was saying all this out loud. Well, not loud, but it was coming out of my mouth and Sarah was just looking at me now and she wasn’t humming, and then she looked like she might start crying again and I gave her some paper towel. I like it because you can tear it off really neatly. She wiped her eyes and then said to me, ‘Why does your grandpa make you keep secrets, Nick?’
I closed my eyes then, because she was looking at me the same way everyone else looked at me, and I tried to remember that she had said she would help me and not to worry. But I was worried. I dug my nails into my hand hard and tried to explain what had happened and how much trouble I had been. You are nothing but trouble. My grandpa had told me so many times, and my mother had sat quietly in the corner crying. I don’t like people touching me, or my things, and it makes me very agitated when they do. Grandpa used to scoop all my things up into a huge bag when I lived with him and Mother – all my toys, then all my clothes, just to make me cross. Sometimes he laughed, and when I was on tiptoes or waving my arms it made him laugh more.
‘My grandpa makes me go into the bedroom because he loves me and he has to teach me about the nasty side of life even if I don’t want to learn. He’s done everything for me, and looked after me even when my mother couldn’t do that. My mother told me she was sixteen when I was born. I am much more than sixteen and I don’t have a baby. I didn’t even like my cat.’
Sarah hadn’t moved, and she was listening carefully, and didn’t say anything, so I carried on talking.
‘She didn’t have a husband and she wasn’t old enough to have a baby and I was a very difficult baby and I didn’t want to have milk from her, and I was getting thin. She lived with my grandparents and they helped her and helped me and gave her money and then a nice place to live and we went there together, but one day my grandpa came to get me because my mother had stress and needed a break from my nonsense. Grandpa said I had made her bloody miserable and I think I did because she was always crying. My fault because she just wanted to sit together and kiss me and cuddle me and I hate being squashed or having someone next to me or arms round me with armpits at the end, and I didn’t like her food and I didn’t want to talk and she got so cross she went and made another baby. He was born and he was my brother. My grandpa said he was funny and liked to cuddle and every week I went round to my mum’s for my visits and Mother told Grandpa she was happy now because of her new baby but not because of me. He would sit on her lap with milk dribbling down his chin, or apple sauce all over his front, and he didn’t mind the germs. I didn’t like to touch him, and everyone got cross with me because I didn’t like him sucking my finger, or grabbing my hair. If I screamed it made him cry, but all he had to do was stop touching me. I told him lots of times. Having me and him together was too much trouble and I had to stay nearly all the time at my grandpa’s then, and my granny wasn’t there any more because she died from being old and it was just us, or on Tuesdays and weekends it was me with my mother and my brother. My brother didn’t like quiet, or clean. He liked wet and mud and breaking things. Once he sprayed me with a hosepipe, and once he tried to cut off my hair when I was asleep with sharp scissors. He kicked me, and even though he was only four it was painful on my leg and went blue then purple and after a long time yellow. I stopped being in the same room with him then and I didn’t like watching my mother with him.
X marks the spot with a dash and a dot,
A dot and a dash and a big red question mark,
A stab in the back, blood rushes up, blood rushes down,
Little spiders crawl all around.
Winter’s come, a cool breeze, tight squeeze,
Crack an egg and let it freeze.
‘Mother would pull off his T-shirt and tickle him and he would laugh and laugh and I would stand with my face against the wall and my hands over my ears and wait for it to finish and Grandpa to come back and get me and take me to his house and a quiet place, but inside I didn’t want to go. I didn’t like being on my own with Grandpa and I didn’t like being in the noise and dirt with my brother and mother. I couldn’t even sit on the carpet at Mother’s because no one ever cleaned it. I was scared at my grandpa’s house, and I stopped reading books and doing maths and I didn’t do my homework and I had no one to talk to because if I talked to school then they would take me away and I would have nowhere to live.’
My whole life seemed to be spilling out of my mouth and Sarah just stood there looking at me, but her eyes seemed bigger now, and I couldn’t stop talking, I knew I was talking faster and faster but I couldn’t make it stop.
‘My brother was never in trouble. If I put my hand over his mouth to make him stop being noisy, Mother shouted at me and he would smile at me and stick out his tongue, but he was the one laughing, for nothing, all the time.
‘One Saturday I went to my mother’s and my brother had a temperature, and he was very quiet, just sitting on my mother’s lap, sucking his thumb and rubbing a dirty blanket and being still so my mother put him down on the sofa and put cushions round him. He had very red cheeks and his eyes were opening and closing but they looked like glass and I didn’t like them. He was making a funny noise like a far-away train, and my mother was on the phone to the doctor, so I went close to see what he was doing. I stayed out of reach but then his arm dropped off the cushion and he went to sleep with his eyes open. The train noise stopped but his eyes were still open and I put out my finger to close one, and behind me my mother screamed. BUT I DIDN’T HURT HIM!’
For a minute I could remember, the screaming and the shouting, and the ambulance, and the lights and the siren and the dark and the machines bleeping and the tiptoeing panic, and doctors asking me what happened and the look in my mother’s eyes. Clenching fingers, nails in my skin, pushing in and blood coming, pulling my hair, the muscles in my body pulled up as hard as I could pull, teeth clenched together. My brother still and little, and quiet. Too small for his bed, and not attached to my mother at all, he was on his own in a room full of machin
es and plastic floor, very clean. My mother’s body was going in and out in great gulps of air and she put her hand on his face and reached for my hand. I lifted my hand up away into the cool and said bye and then went and waited outside. My mother never tried to hug me again.
I had never told anyone before, not about my brother, or any of it, and I waited to see what Sarah would do, but she didn’t do anything, not really. She looked different, as if she was going to leave, but she took the wipes and quickly tied up the bin bag, not neatly but it didn’t matter, it was an emergency. I watched her pushing tears off her face, crossly, and I went to tear some more paper towel but she did it herself and blew her nose and just put it on the side, and I wanted it in the bin and out of the flat with all the germs. She put the bin bag by the door, and ran the tap, and poured some bleach into the sink, then went into the bathroom and did the same to the toilet.
I heard her talk, I think it was to herself, but all she said was, ‘Fucking retards, fucking parents.’
I had been called that before, and I wasn’t sure why she was saying it now.
She asked for the hoover and went back over the carpet, all the way to where it turned into tiles by the border of the kitchen, and as she turned around to do the thin strip by the wall the hoover banged the bedroom door and it swung open, and the sweet rotten smell came out and Sarah was looking at me with a sad smile and it stopped when she smelt the smell from the bedroom, then she looked back and the bed caught her eye and she started screaming, and as she started screaming I looked towards the window and saw my downstairs neighbour on the path, and then he was looking up towards the window, and my shouting mixed with Sarah screaming and Sarah banged so hard on the glass that it broke and now someone would probably tread on that and cut themselves, and my flat was filling with cold air. I tried to think what to do, but I knew it was all over. Grandpa’s eyes met mine and my hands were waving in panic. Sarah didn’t comfort me this time, and then her dad and one of the brothers were outside too. I heard the slamming of the front door and I backed towards the bathroom to get away from the smell and the noise, but someone was coming up the stairs now, maybe all of them were, and then there was a huge bang at my door and it mixed with my noise and Sarah’s screams. I got on to the floor and against the wall and closed my eyes. I was so glad the week was over, I just wanted to go somewhere peaceful.
The Man on the Middle Floor Page 19