by Kevin Brooks
He came over and sat down next to me. ‘It’s good to see you smile again.’
I looked at him. ‘It’s all that talk of grief and dying – it’s cheered me right up.’
He laughed quietly. ‘I do my best.’
‘I know – thanks.’
We sat in silence for a while. I gazed through the window at the night sky, wondering idly at all that space, all that blackness, all that nothing, and as I sat there looking up at the emptiness I began thinking about the creek, the hills, the woods, the water … how everything goes round and round and never really changes. How life recycles everything it uses. How the end product of one process becomes the starting point of another, how each generation of living things depends on the chemicals released by the generations that have preceded it …
I don’t know why I was thinking about it. It just seemed to occur to me.
I was also thinking, curiously, about crabs. I was wondering if they did have a memory, as Lucas had suggested. And if they did, what did they remember? Did they remember their childhood, their baby-crabhood? Did they remember themselves as tiny little things scuttling about in the sand trying to avoid being eaten by fish and other crabs and just about anything else that was bigger than them? Did they think about that, scratching their bony heads with their claws? Did they remember yesterday? Or did they just remember ten minutes ago? Five minutes ago? And I was wondering what it must be like to be dropped into a pot full of boiling water …
I was thinking about all these things and more, but I wasn’t really thinking about them at all. They were just there, floating around in the back of my mind, thinking about themselves.
What I was really thinking about, of course, was Lucas.
‘Why do you think he did it?’ Dad asked in a near-whisper.
I looked at him. Beneath the beard and the weary eyes I saw the face of a child, a small child asking his mother to explain something. Something so simple it was bewildering – why? why did he kill himself?
‘I don’t know, Dad,’ I said. ‘I’ve thought about it so much I hardly even know what I’m thinking about any more.’
Dad nodded thoughtfully. ‘Maybe it’s best not to know. He had his reasons, his secrets … let him keep them. I think he deserves them.’ He looked at me. ‘We all deserve our secrets.’
‘Yeah, I suppose … it’s hard not to wonder, though.’
‘I know.’ He gave me a long hard look, then patted my hand. ‘Wait there – I’ve got something for you. I think you’re ready for it now.’ He got up and left the room. I heard him go into his bedroom, open a cupboard door, and then I heard his footsteps coming back along the hallway. When he came back in he was holding Lucas’s canvas bag.
‘The police have finished with it,’ he said, sitting down. ‘They’ve kept the notebook for evidence but everything else is just as it was.’ He passed it to me. ‘Lenny thought you’d like it.’
I took the battered bag in my hands and felt the tears welling up. It smelled of Lucas. Sand, salt, sweat, crabs … I gripped the rough green material in my hands and held it to my chest. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even cry.
Dad leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. ‘Make it good,’ he whispered. ‘Make it part of you.’
Then he got up, said goodnight, and quietly walked out.
There wasn’t much in the bag. Two green T-shirts, a pair of green trousers, pants, his water bottle, a length of twine, some fishhooks, a penknife, a handful of pebbles and seashells, and a small wooden carving wrapped in cloth. I suppose the rest of his stuff was in his pockets when he died, or got smashed up or stolen when his place in the woods was wrecked.
I keep his clothes in my wardrobe. The canvas bag hangs on the back of my door. The rest of it is never far away. I can see it all now. As I sit here gazing out of my bedroom window, I can see the length of twine hanging from a pin on the wall, I can see the fish-hooks lined up in a row on my shelf, I can see the penknife resting in my pencil jar and the pebbles and shells sitting pretty in a clear glass jewellery box. And I can see the small wooden carving in my hand. I usually keep it on the bedside cabinet with the other one, the miniature Deefer, but I often find myself picking it up and holding it, not necessarily looking at it, just holding it comfortably in the palm of my hand. It helps me to think. It calms me. It’s a carving of a face. Just like the one of Deefer, it’s crude, but remarkably beautiful. No bigger than a finger, and carved out of driftwood, it feels smooth and warm, almost alive. I’ve spent many an hour studying it, staring at the face, the tiny eyes, the perfect nose, the beguiling mouth, and I’m still not sure what to make of it. It seems to change every time I look at it. Sometimes I’m sure it’s meant to be me. It is me. And when I look at it, I see what I feel. If I’m happy, it’s happy. If I’m sad, it’s sad. If I’m lonely, it’s lonely. But other times it doesn’t look anything like me. It looks like Dad. And it mirrors his emotions, too. It’s uncanny.
Sometimes, usually in the early hours of the morning, the carving takes on the appearance of Lucas. When the wind is blowing in the trees or the thunder is rumbling angrily in the distance, or when I just can’t get to sleep for some reason, I wake up and look at the clock, and in the pale red light of the digital display I see Lucas’s face gazing down at me from the cabinet. Unlike my face, or Dad’s, Lucas’s never changes. It’s always the same: calm, peaceful, and beautifully sad.
Right now, as I hold the carving up to the light, I can see all of three of us joined together. Three faces as one. I’ve never seen that before.
It looks nice.
Now it’s late afternoon, about five-thirty. Mid-summer. Hot, but not too hot. Warm enough for shorts and a T-shirt. The sky is glowing with that wonderful silver light that lazes through to the early evening, and the house is quiet. Dominic is back from university again, taking a bath after a jog along the beach. I can hear the water tank dripping in the attic – tack, tock, tock … tack, tock, tock … tack, tock, tock – like a hesitant clock. Downstairs, I can hear Dad typing in his study. And from the garden I can hear Deefer chewing on a bone in the shade of the cherry tree.
Tomorrow is the first anniversary of Lucas’s death.
I’ll get up early and take a walk down to the beach and stand for a while looking out over the mud flats, just as I do every day. I’ll probably say a few words and listen to the wind. I might even spend a few minutes searching for a glimpse of the coloured air, but I know I won’t find it. I’ll just stand there breathing in the smell of the sea and listening to the waves lapping gently on the shore, the wind in the air, the rustling sand, the seabirds … and then I’ll come back home again and get on with my life.
That’s what happens.
You just get on with it.
There are no endings.
KEVIN BROOKS
KEVIN BROOKS is the ground-breaking
author of the gripping, critically acclaimed
novels Martyn Pig, Lucas, Kissing the Rain,
Candy and The Road of the Dead.
He has won the Branford Boase Award and
the North East Book Award, and been
shortlisted for many other prizes, including
the CILIP Carnegie Medal and the Guardian
Children’s Fiction Prize.
Born in Exeter, Devon, he studied in
Birmingham and London. He has worked
variously as a petrol pump attendant, a
crematorium handyman, a civil service officer,
a vendor at London Zoo, a post office counter
clerk and a railway ticket office salesperson,
before leaving the last of these activities to
concentrate on his writing.
Wednesday
I
t’s hard to know where to start with this. I suppose I could tell you all about where I was born, what it was like when Mum was still around, what happened when I was a little kid, all that kind of stuff, but it’s not really relevant. Or maybe it is. I don�
��t know. Most of it I can’t remember, anyway. It’s all just bits and pieces of things, things that may or may not have happened – scraps of images, vague feelings, faded photographs of nameless people and forgotten places – that kind of thing.
Anyway, let’s get the name out of the way first.
Martyn Pig.
Martyn with a Y, Pig with an I and one G.
Martyn Pig.
Yeah, I know. Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t bother me any more. I’m used to it. Mind you, there was a time when nothing else seemed to matter. My name made my life unbearable. Martyn Pig. Why? Why did I have to put up with it? The startled looks, the sneers and sniggers, the snorts, the never-ending pig jokes, day in, day out, over and over again. Why? Why me? Why couldn’t I have a normal name? Keith Watson, Darren Jones – something like that. Why was I lumbered with a name that turned heads, a name that got me noticed? A funny name. Why?
And it wasn’t just the name-calling I had to worry about, either, it was everything. Every time I had to tell someone my name I’d start to feel ill. Physically ill. Sweaty hands, the shakes, bellyache. I lived for years with the constant dread of having to announce myself.
‘Name?’
‘Martyn Pig.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Martyn Pig.’
‘Pig?’
‘Yes.’
‘Martyn Pig?’
‘Yes. Martyn with a Y, Pig with an I and one G.’
Unless you’ve got an odd name yourself you wouldn’t know what it’s like. You wouldn’t understand. They say that sticks and stones may break your bones but words will never hurt you. Oh yeah? Well, whoever thought that one up was an idiot. An idiot with an ordinary name, probably. Words hurt. Porky, Piggy, Pigman, Oink, Bacon, Stinky, Snorter, Porker, Grunt …
I blamed my dad. It was his name. I asked him once if he’d ever thought of changing it.
‘Changing what?’ he’d muttered, without looking up from his newspaper.
‘Our name. Pig.’
He reached for his beer and said nothing.
‘Dad?’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’
It took me a long time to realise that the best way to deal with name-calling is to simply ignore it. It’s not easy, but I’ve found that if you let people do or think what they want and don’t let your feelings get too mixed up in it, then after a while they usually get bored and leave you alone.
It worked for me, anyway. I still have to put up with curious looks whenever I give my name. New teachers, librarians, doctors, dentists, newsagents, they all do it: narrow their eyes, frown, look to one side – is he joking? And then the embarrassment when they realise I’m not. But I can cope with that. Like I said, I’m used to it. You can get used to just about anything given enough time.
At least I don’t get called Porky any more. Well … not very often.
This – what I’m going to tell you about – it all happened just over a year ago. It was the week before Christmas. Or Xmas, as Dad called it. Exmas. It was the week before Exmas. A Wednesday.
I was in the kitchen filling a plastic bin-liner with empty beer bottles and Dad was leaning in the doorway, smoking a cigarette, watching me through bloodshot eyes.
‘Don’t you go takin’ ’em to the bottle bank,’ he said.
‘No, Dad.’
‘Bloody emviroment this, emviroment that … if anyone wants to use my empty bottles again they’ll have to pay for ’em. I don’t get ’em for nothing, you know.’
‘No.’
‘Why should I give ’em away? What’s the emviroment ever done for me?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Bloody bottle banks …’
He paused to puff on his cigarette. I thought of telling him that there’s no such thing as the emviroment, but I couldn’t be bothered. I filled the bin-liner, tied it, and started on another. Dad was gazing at his reflection in the glass door, rubbing at the bags under his eyes. He could have been quite a handsome man if it wasn’t for the drink. Handsome in a short, thuggish kind of way. Five foot seven, tough-guy mouth, squarish jaw, oily black hair. He could have looked like one of those bad guys in films – the ones the ladies can’t help falling in love with, even though they know they’re bad – but he didn’t. He looked like what he was: a drunk. Fat little belly, florid skin, yellowed eyes, sagging cheeks and a big fat neck. Old and worn out at forty.
He leaned over the sink, coughed, spat, and flicked ash down the plughole. ‘That bloody woman’s coming Friday.’
‘That bloody woman’ was my Aunty Jean. Dad’s older sister. A terrible woman. Think of the worst person you know, then double it, and you’ll be halfway to Aunty Jean. I can hardly bear to describe her, to tell you the truth. Furious is the first word that comes to mind. Mad, ugly and furious. An angular woman, cold and hard, with crispy blue hair and a face that makes you shudder. I don’t know what colour her eyes are, but they look as if they never close. They have about as much warmth as two depthless pools. Her mouth is thin and pillar-box red, like something drawn by a disturbed child. And she walks faster than most people run. She moves like a huntress, quick and quiet, homing in on her prey. I used to have nightmares about her. I still do.
She always came over the week before Christmas. I don’t know what for. All she ever did was sit around moaning about everything for about three hours. And when she wasn’t moaning about everything she was swishing around the house running her fingers through the dust, checking in the cupboards, frowning at the state of the windows, tutting at everything.
‘My God, William, how can you live like this.’
Everyone else called my dad Billy, but Aunty Jean always called him by his full name, pronouncing it with a wover-wemphasis on the first syllable – Will-yam – that made him flinch whenever she said it. He detested her. Hated her. He was scared stiff of the woman. What he’d do, he’d hide all his bottles before she came round. Up in the loft, mostly. It took him ages. Up and down the ladder, arms full of clinking bottles, his face getting redder and redder by the minute, muttering under his breath all the time, ‘Bloody woman, bloody woman, bloody woman, bloody woman …’
Normally he didn’t care what anyone thought about his drinking, but with Aunty Jean it was different. You see, when Mum left us – this was years ago – Aunty Jean tried to get custody of me. She wanted me to live with her, not with Dad. God knows why, she never liked me. But then she liked Dad even less, blamed him for the divorce and everything, said that he’d driven Mum to the ‘brink of despair’ and that she wasn’t going to ‘stand by and let him ruin an innocent young boy’s life too’. Which was all a load of rubbish. She didn’t give a hoot for my innocent life, she just wanted to kick Dad while he was down, kick him where it hurts, leave him with nothing. She despised him as much as he despised her. I don’t know why. Some kind of brother/sister thing, I suppose. Anyway, her plan was to expose Dad as a drunkard. She reckoned the authorities would decide in her favour once they knew of Dad’s wicked, drunken ways. They’d never allow me to live with a boozer. But she reckoned without Dad. His need for me was greater than hers. Without me, he was just a drunk. But with me, he was a drunk with responsibilities, a drunk with child benefit, a drunk with someone to clear up the sick.
After he was given notice that Aunty Jean had applied for custody he didn’t so much as look at a bottle for two months or more. Not a drop. Not a sniff. It was remarkable. He shaved, washed, wore a suit, he even smiled now and then. I almost grew to like him. Aunty Jean’s custody case was dead in the water. She didn’t stand a chance. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, Mr William Pig was the ideal father.
The day I was officially assigned to Dad’s loving care, he went out drinking and didn’t come back for three days. When he did come back – unshaven, white-eyed, stinking – he slouched into the kitchen where I was making some tea, leaned down at me, grinning like a madman, and slurred right into my face: ‘Remember me?’
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Then he stumbled over to the sink and threw up.
So that’s why he hid the bottles. He didn’t want to give Aunty Jean any excuse for re-opening the custody debate. It wasn’t so much the thought of losing me that worried him, it was the thought of staying off the drink for another two months.
‘Bloody woman,’ he muttered again as I started on the empty beer cans, stamping them down into flattened discs, filling up another bin-liner. ‘She’s coming at four,’ he went on, ‘day after tomorrow, so make sure the place is cleaned up.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, wiping stale beer from the palms of my hands and reaching for another black bag. Dad watched for a while longer, then turned and slouched off into the front room.
Christmas meant nothing to us. It was just a couple of weeks off school for me and a good excuse for Dad to drink, not that he ever needed one. There was no festive spirit, no goodwill to all men, no robins, no holly – just cold, rainy days with nothing much to do.
I spent most of that Wednesday afternoon in town. Dad had given me some money – four dirty fivers – and told me to ‘get some stuff in for Exmas: turkey, spuds, presents … sprouts, stuff like that’. It was too early to get the food in, Christmas was still a week away, but I wasn’t going to argue. If he wanted me to go shopping, I’d go shopping. It gave me something to do.
Halfway down the street I heard a shout – ‘Mar’n!’ – and turned to see Dad leaning out of the bedroom window, bare-chested, a cigarette dangling from his lip.
‘Don’t forget the bloody whasnames,’ he yelled, making a yanking movement with both hands, tugging on two invisible ropes.
‘What?’ I called back.
He took the cigarette from his mouth, gazed blankly into the distance for a moment, then blurted out, ‘Crackers! Get some bloody Exmas crackers. Big ones, mind, not them tiny buggers.’
In town, outside Sainsbury’s, the scariest Father Christmas I’d ever seen was slumped in the back of a plywood sleigh. He was thin and short. So thin that his big black Santa’s belt wound twice around his waist. Stiff black stubble showed on his chin beneath an ill-fitting, off-white Santa beard and – strangest of all, I thought – a pair of brand new trainers gleamed on his feet. When he Ho-ho-ho’d he sounded like a serial killer. Six plywood reindeer pulled his plywood sleigh. They were painted a shiny chocolate brown, with glittery red eyes and coat-hanger antlers entwined with plastic holly.