For Maggie
Contents
My House
Donny’s Room
The Kitchen
Rachel’s Room
The Street
The Park
The Pilgrimage
Olly’s House
The Playground
The Shopping Centre
Carl’s House
My Room
Through Rachel’s Wall
Brent Cross
The Bush in the Playground
Olly’s Room
The View From Next to Blob
McDonald’s
The Sweet Shop
The Grass Behind the Busted Water Fountain
The Ironmonger’s
The Bathroom
The Station
Here, Now
Acknowledgements
Footnotes
A Note on the Author
My House
I know what it is you want. You want to know who’s to blame. You’re trying to figure out if any of it was my fault. So here’s a new theory for you. It was Olly’s aunt’s fault. All of it. She started the whole thing. I’ve never met her, and I don’t know where she lives or what she looks like, but that doesn’t mean she can’t be to blame. If you look at it logically, she’s the one you should be going after.
On the day it began, she got ill. Or maybe it was divorced. Or married. It was something like that anyway, and Olly had to go off, leaving me on my own.
If Olly’s aunt hadn’t done whatever it is she did that Sunday, Olly wouldn’t have gone, and if Olly hadn’t gone I never would have met Carl, and if I’d never met Carl, everything would still be OK. I wouldn’t know who you are, you wouldn’t know who I am, and we’d both be spared your boring, boring visits.
I should have known from his clothes that he was going to be taken away. He’s not in jeans, but grey trousers with a crease down the front, and he isn’t wearing a T-shirt, but a proper grown-up shirt, buttoned right to the top. It looks wrong with all the buttons done up, and I would have undone the neck if I’d been made to wear it, but Olly isn’t very good at figuring out things like that.
He often looks a bit funny, Olly. He has a knack of tucking things in that should hang out, and of doing things up that should be left undone. And he always dresses for two months colder than it really is. Every time he comes round, he leaves at least one jumper behind. When I go over to his, I usually have an armful of clothes to deliver. But I don’t mind any of that. It’s part of what makes him Olly. The section of his head a more normal person uses thinking about clothes, he uses for strange ideas and facts no one else knows.
‘What are you wearing?’ I ask, when he walks in.
‘Check this out,’ he says.
Slowly and elaborately, as if it’s a magic display, he points to a flap of material he’s got on each shoulder. Waving his fingers around like he’s showing off to an audience of fifty people, he carefully unbuttons them, one after the other, then he wiggles his shoulders, making the flaps flap.
‘You will never,’ he says, ‘you will never guess what these are.’
‘Yes, I will,’ I say.
‘Go on, then,’ he says.
‘They’re flaps,’ I say.
‘Wrong!’ he says, hitting the word like a bell.
‘It’s not wrong. I can see them. They’re flaps.’
‘They’re more than flaps,’ he says, narrowing his eyes to try and look mysterious.
I never fall for his mysterious look, especially not when he’s wearing a shirt buttoned all the way to the top with stupid flaps sticking out from his shoulders, so I say nothing and cross my arms to show I’m not impressed.
‘They’re hat flaps,’ he says.
‘Cat flaps?’
‘Hat flaps. Flaps for hats. For soldiers’ hats. In the navy. If it was green, instead of yellow, it’d be a proper uniform.’
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ I say. ‘They don’t have soldiers in the navy. They have sailors. And they don’t wear green. They wear navy. That’s why navy’s called navy.’
‘No, it isn’t. If navy was navy because of the navy, green wouldn’t be green. Green would be army.’
Talking to Olly is like swimming. At any moment you might just sink.
There’s an owl on the floor of my bedroom that isn’t really an owl any more. I made it at school, and originally it had eyes and nose and mouth and feet, but even then it looked more like a football than an owl, so it got kicked around all the time, and first the feet fell off, then the nose, then the mouth, then one eye. Now it’s just a football with an eye, but I still call it Owl.
I pick it up, wedge it under one of Olly’s hat flaps, and do up the button. Olly watches, all cross-eyed because it’s too close for him to see. Owl’s just the right size, so I get a bear from the back of my cupboard and button it under the other flap.
We walk to the bathroom so Olly can see, and he looks a total idiot, but he seems to like it, and we run all over the house doing different moves to see if the owl and the bear will fall out, but whatever we do, they just stay there, jiggling around. After a while, the running around turns into other things, and we end up playing the game where I chuck Cluedo men up from the patio and Olly tries to catch them from the bedroom window, and he almost falls out, which is really funny. After that Olly chickens out, so we start a proper game of Cluedo, and all along he’s still wearing the animals. I can’t even tell if he still realizes.
I bet you think you know all about Olly, but you don’t. There’s nothing wrong with him. If I was given the chance again, I’d still want him to be my best friend, exactly how things were. When you’ve got a best friend, you don’t need anything else in the world. It’s like armour, or one of those force-fields you get on computer games that make a wailing sound, and you glow orange and, for as long as you’re orange, bullets and missiles just bounce off you.
Olly’s been my best friend for so long, I don’t even notice the force-field any more because it’s become permanent. When he goes off, it’s like a layer of me has been peeled away. I don’t know what to do. I can’t settle. Even if I’m busy, or having fun, in my head I’ll be imagining telling Olly about it later.
Once, when I was trying to phone home to get picked up, I rang Olly’s house by mistake, and I had to tell his mum it was a wrong number. She thought I was mad. It happened without me thinking.
By the time his mum arrives to take him off to his aunt’s, I’ve still not got round to asking why he’s dressed up, so I’m totally unprepared for him being whisked away. There’s no warning or anything. It’s like someone walking in and confiscating your legs.
It’s not really like that. If someone pulled your legs off, you’d bleed to death.
She doesn’t ask Olly why he’s wearing an owl and a bear on his shoulders, she just pulls them out and leaves them by the front door. I was hoping he’d walk out with them still on, which he almost does.
When the door closes behind him, I look at my watch, and there’s still the whole of Sunday afternoon to go.
You wouldn’t think it’d make much difference that it’s a Sunday when it’s the holidays anyway, but it does. Everyone’s about. The house always feels too full on a Sunday, but also too empty. If you want the telly, or the kitchen table, or the sunny bit of lawn, chances are someone will have got there first. But even though all the good bits of the house are taken, I sometimes feel as though my family are just wandering about, lost, without any real idea of what to do with themselves until the day’s over and everything can return to normal on Monday. It’s as if Sunday always takes them by surprise, as if each week they don’t quite believe it’s going to happen, then it does and they’re not prepared and all they can do is stagg
er around waiting for it to be over.
For hours I’m good, and I look after myself and do stuff in my room. I even try to finish off our game of Cluedo on my own, but it doesn’t work, and I end up cheating to find out who did the murder. It’s Professor Plum, which is unusual. Playing a board game on your own is like talking to yourself. You’re embarrassed in case someone comes in and finds you doing it. Also, it’s no fun.
Eventually I have to go and annoy Donny.
Donny’s Room
There are two ‘Keep Out’ signs on the door. Between them is an orange sticker showing three black oblongs with wobbly lines of steam rising from them, stamped with a big red cross. Underneath the steaming oblongs it says: ‘DANGER: HAZARDOUS WASTE’.
There’s a knack to getting the door open without being heard. Just as the handle goes past the slack bit, you give it a sharp pull towards you, while pressing a toe against the bottom corner that always sticks.
Q: Why am I expending energy opening the door silently when I know he’s in there?
A: Because those first few unobserved seconds can give a critical advantage.
I take a breather when I’ve got the door free of the latch. That’s the hardest bit. So far, the operation is a complete success. No squeak, click, thump or scrape to give me away.
I poke my nose through the gap. The skilful spy uses all five senses for the gathering of intelligence. Any early information could prove useful. I set my nasal lab team to work on the first waft.
An interesting thing’s happened to the smell of Donny’s room recently. It’s like what happens to cheese. First it smells nice, then it smells a bit funny but you still don’t mind eating it, then something amazing happens, and suddenly you open up the fridge and think, ‘Oh my God! Something’s died in here!’
My theory is that Boy Room Pong follows a cheese pattern (see fig. 1).
As you can see from the graph, there are two theories of what the future holds for the Donny Room Pong. I favour the up-then-down curve, since I don’t think a room could smell worse and still sustain human life. The DRP is probably at its peak right now. But who knows? Maybe it’ll just go up and up, until plastic objects in his room start to melt, and we discover that Donny’s an alien who can survive without the need for oxygen.
Today, the DRP is bad, but not so bad that I’ll have to abort my mission. It tells me nothing I don’t know already: that he’s in there, that he’s been in there for several hours, and that none of the windows are open.
I open the door a few more centimetres, giving myself a view of half the room. He’s at his desk, in the homework crouch. This means one of three things:
FIGURE 1. BOY ROOM PONG
a) He is doing his homework.
b) He has assumed the pose having heard the door open.
c) He is gazing blankly out of the window like a total mong, thinking, ‘If I hadn’t been sitting here for the last two hours, gazing blankly out of the window like a total mong, I’d have finished this by now and would be out having fun.’
My money is on c).
Not that I have any money. It’s what you call a turn of phrase.
I’ve never once got the door more than half open without being seen. Even if they don’t hear or see anything, people just know when someone’s walked into a room, doubly so if they’re Donny because that makes you paranoid and secretive, triply so if the person walking into the room is me because Donny’s greatest joy in life is chucking me out of wherever it is I want to be, and quadruply so when Donny’s term’s already started (ha, ha) and mine hasn’t.
This time, all records are smashed. I get the door fully open, all the way to the point where it bonks against the bed if you let it. Donny hasn’t heard a thing.
I take a couple of steps into the room on tiptoe. If this had ever happened before, I’d have the locations of all the squeaking floorboards memorized, but there’s no precedent for such a brilliant and silent entry. We’re in virgin territory here. The history books are being torn up with every step I take.
Five steps later, I’m right behind him. This is amazing. If you’d ever tried to get into my brother’s room, you’d understand. This is like someone running the 100 metres in 5 seconds. This is like someone driving a car so fast that it just takes off without even trying.
Today, a great victory for younger brothers all over the globe has been scored. Feel the adulation.
‘BOO!’ I shout, thinking, this is going to be big. There’s no road map for how angry Donny’s going to be when he realizes where I am.
But there’s nothing. No reaction. He just stays in the homework crouch and doesn’t even jump.
I tap him on the shoulder. Still he doesn’t twitch or speak.
‘Hi,’ I say. ‘Are you pleased to see me?’
The corpse act continues.
OK, so he’s ignoring me. This changes everything. The history books will have to be Sellotaped back together again. He’s not reacting, even now, so there’s no way of knowing how far I got undetected.
Donny’s like that. Just when you think you know where you stand, he’ll flip everything upside-down. It does my head in, and sometimes it makes me hate him, but most of all it makes me want to get into his room and think of something to do where I win and he loses.
So this is the state of play: he won the getting-in-undetected game (by a particularly sneaky means), but this has segued into a Donny-ignoring-me challenge which I know I can win because now he’s exposed his greatest weakness. He’s laid himself completely open.
Q: The weakness?
A: His stuff.
He hates me touching his stuff. Now I’m in his room, and he’s facing away from me, and if he turns to look at me he’s lost, and I’ve got a whole room full of Donny’s Stuff to pick up and put down at my leisure.
Oh, the moment is sweet.
I look around me, trying to choose where to start. There are piles of tapes and magazines and books on his bedside table. There’s also a shelf in the corner, piled with mysterious tubes and bottles and sprays and lotions. So many things to fiddle with and clank and jostle, to open and shut with satisfying clicks, squelches and snaps. And if we’re talking untouchables, there’s his guitar, propped up against the wall, just begging for a big, fat, noisy strum.
Then there’s the holy of holies – the total exclusion zone – the drawer in his bedside table. God knows what’s in there. Normally, Donny twitches if you so much as look at it. Now I’m blatantly staring at the drawer, and nothing’s happening because Donny’s trapped himself into ignoring me.
Victory will come at a price. I know that. The greater the victory, the greater the physical pain he’ll inflict on me. Do I dare go for the drawer? Can I risk the reaction that would be provoked by this, the supreme triumph?
Then I think of a whole other avenue. He’s trying to play it psychological rather than physical today, and there’s a way – yes, there’s a brilliant way – to beat him using his own methods. He won’t be able to hurt me so much, either. It almost makes me laugh out loud when I think of it.
I pace for a few moments, drawing out the tension, then I go for it. I clatter a couple of tapes together to make it sound like I’ve picked something up, then I say, ‘What’s this?’
His head spins round. Yes! Victory!
And there’s nothing in my hands!! Double victory! Oh, yyeeeeesssssssssss! The genius of it!
Donny glowers, then turns back to his desk.
This is annoying. I have scored – as any neutral referee would definitely confirm – a great victory, but Donny hasn’t done the decent thing and got angry. He hasn’t even thrown me out.
Then I notice he’s drawing something. I can’t quite see what it is. I think it might be a woman, but it’s hard to tell because the legs and arms are at funny angles. He’s shielding it from me with his body. Suddenly, the piles of stuff that seemed interesting to fiddle with lose all appeal. I want to see what he’s drawing. But if I ask to look, I’ve lost. If
I even just go closer and show I’m interested, I’ve still lost.
When I’m seventeen, I’ll know how to be evil, like Donny. He’s the ultimate adversary. You can never win.
I turn away and decide to go for broke. There’s only one way I can come out of this on top. He’s raised the stakes at every turn, and I can’t just back down. There’s only one place to go now. The bedside table drawer.
I slide it open as quietly as I can. I turn and check, but there’s no reaction from Donny. The minute he recognizes the sound of the drawer, he’s going to go nuclear. If this happens before I’ve successfully taken anything out, I reckon that makes it a dead heat, which isn’t worth the beating-up I’m going to get.
I can see something blue in there. A lid. The lid of a tub. It’s not a square tub, and it’s not round, either. I’ve never seen a tub that shape before. I gently, silently lift it out of the drawer and take a good look. It’s a squidged rectangle, about the size of my palm. There’s a word on it that I’ve never seen before.
I open it up, and it’s half full of colourless gunge. It looks like glue. I take a sniff, and there’s something about the smell that’s just not gluey. It’s an oily, slippery smell, not a sticky smell. You can see his finger marks in the dent where he’s been scooping it out.
‘What’s this?’ I ask.
He doesn’t turn or speak. He stays in the crouch, drawing.
‘What is it?’
No reaction.
‘It smells funny.’
Still nothing.
I take another look at the word on the lid. ‘Vaseline,’ I say. ‘What’s it for?’
Suddenly, he’s on me. His hand’s round my wrist and he’s squeezing it till I drop the tub, then he gets me by the trousers and lifts me off the ground, right up to head height, and I’m saying, ‘Don’t! Don’t!’, but I’m also laughing because I actually like this bit, and he throws me down as hard as he can on to the bed, and I can tell he’s really cross because he throws me right into the corner so my head bangs against the wall. Suddenly I want to leave, but he picks me up again, and I scream as loud as I can, ‘Get ooooooooooooooooooooffffffff!’, but he chucks me down just as roughly. This time it doesn’t hurt because I cover my head, so I get up quickly, faster than he’s expecting, and butt him in the stomach, which he isn’t prepared for. I dive between his legs, making a dash for it on my knees, but he gets me by the ankle, and pulls me back, and I’m yelling, ‘Aaaaaahhhhhh! My faaaaaaaaaaace!’, because I’m getting a massive carpet burn on my cheek. Then he drops my ankle and as soon as my feet slap against the floor, he sits on me and bounces up and down like he’s testing my suspension, and he tells me that if I ever go in that drawer again or even come into his room without asking, he’ll pull out chunks of my hair until I look like a cancer victim. I don’t want him to have the satisfaction of thinking I’ve heard him, so I just shout, ‘VASELINE! VASELINE! VASELINE!’, at the top of my voice, then I’m upside-down in mid air, and suddenly I’m flat on my tummy on the landing, and his door’s slammed behind me.
Bad Influence Page 1