by Neil Cross
And one night, in December, Charlie saw her. She’d changed. She wore very new trainers and smart, tight, indigo jeans. Her hair was much shorter—an asymmetric bob that hung over one eye, like Twiggy. She was wearing make-up.
Robin was there, too. He wore hair like John Lennon and circular sunglasses with blue lenses. He walked with an affected proletarian swagger; three years before, he’d been playing prop forward in the university’s first fifteen. People crowded round him because he was the singer in a band that might get signed, that might be on Top of the Pops.
He stood with his beefy arm around Sam. She dug him with a bony hip.
Charlie had always been careful not to be clingy. He knew girls hated that. And there she was, clinging away, nuzzling Robin’s neck and laughing too loudly at his boorish jokes. And when she looked away to light a cigarette, her face became sad.
Charlie couldn’t bear to look at her. He ignored her.
He went to get a drink, a fiver clutched like a flower in his skinny fist. And Sam didn’t look at him—not even a furtive, sidelong glance in the long mirror that ran behind the bar. Charlie knew, because he kept checking.
In the toilets, he scored some speed and stirred the wormwood powder into the last quarter of his pint. Drank it down.
Back in the noisy club, Jake said, ‘Mate, she’s not worth it.’
Jake was Charlie’s best mate. They lived in the squat together. Like almost everyone else in the club, Jake had recently changed the way he dressed. He wore a crushed velvet smoking jacket and lank hair and Chelsea boots and heavy-rimmed geek glasses. But Jake was overweight, always had been. He was squashed and shoved and rolled into his clothes, and the effect of all this effort was comical, and tragic.
Charlie glanced over again, and saw her. He wanted more than it seemed possible for it to be six months ago.
His hands were shaking.
He said, ‘I’m all right, mate. I’m fine.’
The music was very loud. It was battering his ears; it seemed to be inside him. Sweat ran into his eyes. The club was small and dark. Sam and Robin were in the far corner, being badgered by sycophants.
Sam always loathed sycophants. She’d rage at them; the sycophants, the pseuds, the Pod People. And there she was—a Pod Person! It was like a nightmarish pantomime, where Cinderella yielded at once to a vainglorious Prince Charming. And here was Charlie, in his rags; Charlie was Buttons.
He hated being Buttons. He wanted to rescue her; to wake her with a kiss. Her eyes would open wide and clear, and she would take his hand and they would escape this place.
Charlie stood. He walked very quickly, shouldering people to one side. They veered and twisted and stopped, to watch him; all these dicks in their Oasis T-shirts, their Jarvis Cocker spectacles, their jaunty Damon Albarn fringes.
Only Sam and Robin were oblivious to the pocket of silence working its way towards them like a stormfront: a high-pressure system. They were snuggling in the corner, her hand round his waist, fingers dipped in the back pocket of his vintage Levis.
Charlie passed through their snivelling courtiers, their slimy toadies.
Seeing Charlie’s face made Sam smile. She’d told him that, once: no matter how sad she was feeling, the thought of his face made her smile. But she wasn’t smiling now. She stared at him like he was a smear of cancer on a glass slide.
Seeing that, seeing her disgust, Charlie started to cry. He couldn’t help it.
He said, ‘You fucking lying bitch.’
Two bubbles of snot popped in his nostrils. He wiped them away, and with the snotty hand he punched Robin in the face.
Robin grabbed a fistful of Charlie’s hair and wrenched. Charlie lost his footing. Robin punched him three times in the ear. Charlie fell over, down among the trainers and the Dr Martens and the Caterpillars, the fag ends and the beer residue. Robin began to kick him.
By then, the bouncers had arrived. Three men in monkey suits chugging pompously through the crowd.
One of them chested Robin into the far corner. Robin held out both hands. His mouth was open; his nose was bleeding.
Two more bouncers, one white, one black, pinned Charlie to the floor. He struggled. He was screaming about killing Robin. But there was a knee pressed to the back of his head. His arms were yanked up behind his back.
Then he was pulled to his feet and rushed away, past his friends, his acquaintances, a few strangers. He thought of a cow being led to the slaughterhouse.
And then they reached the main doors and the bouncers threw him outside. The air hit his face, cold on the sweat. He windmilled his arms and fell to his knees.
One of the bouncers came outside with Charlie’s coat. He helped Charlie to his feet. His face was pink and round as a Bazooka Joe, and he wore a bleached blond flat-top.
He said, ‘You all right, mate?’
Charlie brushed himself down. He had no anger for the bouncers. Bouncers were a force of nature.
He said, ‘Yeah. Yeah.’
‘Fair play to you, mind,’ said the bouncer. ‘He’s a big kiddie.’
‘Yeah.’
Charlie looked at him. The bouncer’s chest, big as a pigeon’s, filled his vision.
Charlie put on his coat.
The streets were jammed with people leaving clubs, couples snogging in shop doorways, dry-humping, stooping to get into minicabs. His heart was an engine.
He walked down to Pulteney Bridge and leaned his elbows on the wall, overlooking the weir. Saturday night was happening right behind him; but he watched the water.
Now and then, someone called out, Don’t jump! and he obligingly turned and grinned at them, raising his cigarette in salute.
He wasn’t thinking about suicide, though. He was thinking about being a kid in Africa; about the people he’d met and the places he’d lived and the things he’d seen. Growing up around lions and hyenas, baboons, monkeys, jackals, wild dogs, leopards, cheetahs; and the giraffes and the duikers and the zebras. All the predators and all their prey.
He couldn’t explain any of it to anyone. He thought of the wide, dusty corridors of Lion Manor, where he had run, unfettered and barefoot. His mum and dad in the mahogany office, making sense of disordered yellow paperwork.
He leaned on the wall for a long time, smoking, thinking about it; then he turned round and walked to the squat. Everyone was out, or asleep, or stoned.
He went upstairs, to his little room. He threw some clothes into a bag and weighed the bag on his shoulder. He looked at his CDs. They were too heavy to take with him. He stared at them for a long time. They were a diary. But they were only songs, and he knew they would never sound the same.
He slung the bag over his shoulder and left.
On the corner, he went to the phone box.
She answered on the second ring, like someone expecting a call. She said, ‘Charlie, just leave me alone, okay?’
He said nothing.
‘I mean, get over it, for God’s sake.’
A big, foxy leer.
‘And stop calling me. Really. It creeps me out.’
He growled, softly. That would be all she heard.
And he hung up.
The first words Sam ever spoke to him were: ‘Excuse me.’ She’d been squeezing past his table, to get to the bar.
And the last words she spoke to him were: ‘It creeps me out.’
That was good; to know the ending. You had to know the moment when things ended. He thought of Kurt, dead on the floor of that big house—a place he should never have tried to inhabit.
Bath was deserted. Overnight, it had become another place where Charlie used to live. He felt no connection to it.
Shifting his bag on his shoulder, he left the phone box, went to a greasy spoon and ordered breakfast. Eggs and sausage, fried bread. He wasn’t hungry, but it was the last fiver in h
is pocket. It was important that he spend it or throw it away.
By sunrise, he was hitch-hiking.
Eventually, he was picked up by a lorry bound for Exeter. He endured the same old stories about the insatiable, hitch-hiking girls the driver had fucked—none of them older than eighteen and all of them gagging for it. He thought of Sam; he thought of the trucker fucking her in the toilet of a filthy pub. Her long white legs locked around his hairy arse as he pounded into her; her skinny-rib T-shirt rucked above her pure little tits; his stinking hand pressed over her mouth to keep her from crying out; her teeth clamped down on his oily fingers; his greasy cock in her mouth.
Charlie was aroused and frightened. They sat in a fag-stinking fug of sex. The way the driver talked, Charlie knew he had an erection too, and that recounting stories of these imaginary girls was a kind of foreplay. When he reached Exeter, the trucker would pay some pale junkie mother to suck him off.
Charlie felt old and bitter, crippled by fetid lust.
Outside Taunton, he was picked up by a curly-haired man in a rusty old 2CV that leaned on its springs, such that Charlie sat higher than the driver. The car screamed and shuddered.
He dropped Charlie near Washford where, closer to his destination than he could endure, he waited for many hours.
It was dark by now, and surgically cold, and there were no cars. The few that actually passed did so with a wary grunt of acceleration. Charlie was working hard to look cheerful and harmless, but he looked deranged—grinning from the side of the road, jogging on the spot to keep warm and cradling his busted hand in his armpit.
His teeth were chattering and his feet were numb and there was a dull, dehydrated thump behind his eyes. His hand was tender like an abscessed molar. He wanted to lie down, sleep, never wake up.
But in the darkness close to midnight, a Mini hissed to a stop. Two blokes, on the way home from the pub. Charlie hobbled to the car, shivering.
They dropped him two miles from the house. He hated them for it. He was sick, and he looked it. Pale, purple round the eyes, shivering. And two miles was nothing to them, in their warm little car.
But he got out at the junction all the same, and thanked them, and stood there, not believing it, as they drove off.
Then he trudged down the dark lane for a long, long time. The rhythm of his footsteps entranced him, and he almost passed the house. He’d only ever seen it in a photograph.
Patrick opened the door—and there was his boy.
He was thin, hugging himself, babbling with cold and fever. Patrick half-carried him inside while Jane ran upstairs to draw off a hot bath. In the living room, Patrick mixed a large shot of whisky with hot water.
Charlie sat huddled on the sofa, draped in a heavy blanket like a boxer.
Jane knelt to examine his hand. She turned it round in hers. She stroked the swelling with a forefinger. Charlie yelped.
The whisky made him light-headed, then they frog-marched him into a hot bath while they got his bed ready. Neither had asked a single question.
His new room was long and narrow, into the eaves at the end of the hallway. His bed was in there, and his old bedroom furniture. It was as if he’d gone home, but home had changed shape.
The comedown and the exhaustion twisted his perception. Shadows menaced; cold patches made him shudder. It was a very draughty old house.
He wriggled under the covers, curled into a ball, and soon he was warm. He masturbated, and soon after that he was asleep.
He couldn’t eat breakfast; and anyway, it hurt to grip the spoon. Jane took him to the nearest GP, and from there to casualty in Barnstaple.
Two knuckles on his punching hand were fractured. Diagnosing a punch fracture, the doctor looked down his nose like a man driving into the sun, and Charlie came home with his forearm in plaster.
Wednesday, he drove to Monkeyland with his dad.
They found the bachelors surly and bored. Knuckle-walking. Grooming. Sucking on orange halves.
Patrick said, ‘So what are your plans, mate?’
Charlie huddled in his coat and walked on, down the hill, Patrick following.
They went to the A Troop. They too were sucking oranges, grooming, listless and watchful in their rotting jungle gyms.
Patrick said, ‘It looks bad. Everything looks bad, in winter. But we’ll make it better.’
One of the chimps was down by the moat, washing off an apple quarter.
Patrick said, ‘That’s Rue.’
She was slow and arthritic, dignified with it. Feeling their scrutiny, she raised herself erect on bandy legs. Her coat was grey-flecked and her beard was white, and her eyes, beneath heavy ridges, were moist and chestnut.
Charlie said, ‘I could work here. For like a year or something. Get my head together.’
Patrick hadn’t known that kids still got their head together. He felt closer to his son, and farther away.
He said, ‘You’ll be shovelling monkey shit. Cutting up oranges. All that.’
Charlie nodded. Triangular face pale beneath his long, dark hair.
He started before the plaster was off. There he was, in his nylon anorak and his Wellingtons, his hair tied back. Cutting up food, dumping it in tin buckets, carrying it to the enclosures; distributing it for the chimps to forage.
When they saw him coming, the chimps whooped and slapped the floor. Charlie smiled. To a chimp, a smile could be a sign of fear. But it could be a sign of happiness too.
Rue approached him and squatted. Charlie gave her half a pear. She extended a slow hand and took it, clasped it to her chest.
When Charlie was done feeding the group, Rue loped up and closed a leathery hand around his spindly wrist. She pursed her lips. Made quick, soft, appeasing vocalizations.
Charlie put down his bucket. He hunkered down. And, with great deliberation, Rue began to groom him.
And actually, Jo didn’t like the school, and she did miss her mum and dad.
She didn’t like getting up in the morning, surrounded by stinky people; she didn’t like girls borrowing her tampons (as if a tampon could ever be borrowed). She hated the lack of privacy.
Separately, most of the girls and most of the teachers were all right. But en masse, she disliked and feared them.
She worked hard at athletics and netball and hockey, knowing it was important for an astronaut to be physically fit. She ran track at all possible angles, like an emu with big, flapping feet. It wasn’t tenacity she lacked, or—obviously—the ability to calculate the elliptical trajectory of a descending sphere. The odd thing was, she had problems with concentration.
Usually, she found it easy to concentrate. But on the sports field, she became unfocused. Once, suddenly diverted by the rolling, fractal edge of a white cloud in a blue sky, she took a hockey stick in the guts. She’d seen the cloud for what it was; a large, sky-sailing agglomeration of water vapour.
She was lucky the stick hit her in the belly and not the head, where it might have done some real damage. But it still made her throw up, and she still had to be carried off the pitch.
Now, she only got to go home at weekends, and it wasn’t even home, not really; it was just her mum and dad’s new house in Devon. But a family bathroom, even an old-fashioned and dirty one, had never felt so private. At the Higgledy House, she slept late and had long baths and made wholegrain toast with honey and ate it while lying on the bed with the curtains open, listening to the sea and the radio, and reading.
She missed Charlie, and didn’t know why; for a long time now, they’d barely acknowledged each other’s existence. They rarely spoke, or ate together, because usually Charlie was out somewhere, smoking weed in some spotty dork’s bedroom.
When they lived in Bath, they rarely found themselves in the same room at the same time. And when they did, Charlie affected a mostly benign indifference. But once, after one o
f his friends—Jake—made some cruel joke about the state of Jo’s teeth, Charlie giggled uncomfortably, and moved the conversation sideways. He looked away, when Jo looked at him.
And two days later, Charlie came home with a present for her.
‘What is it?’
‘Open it and see.’
It was a CD called Nevermind. Its cover showed a naked baby boy swimming underwater, apparently in pursuit of a floating dollar note.
Jo had no interest in Nirvana, who were a noisy, smelly boys’ group, but she accepted the gift with a swell of gratitude. She knew that, for whatever reason, Nevermind was the most important thing in Charlie’s life. Charlie went to Nevermind like the pious went to the Bible; Charlie went to Nevermind like Jo went to the night sky. Giving her this copy, he was giving her the best thing he could imagine.
Pressing it, ineptly wrapped, into her hand, he was bumbling and shy, and she was proud of him. She felt the beginning of tears, but didn’t show it.
What she did do was thank him, and ask Patrick if they could play her new CD on the old boom-box in the kitchen; neutral ground.
They sat at the kitchen table while Charlie told her what Nevermind meant. He pressed pause to explain the significance of a particular lyric or image—
Monkey see, monkey do. I’d rather be dead than cool.
Not since he was a blond-haired child, her adored big brother, had Jo seen his eyes shine like that—and that was a long, long time ago, in Africa.
It hadn’t occurred to her that Charlie’s absence could make this new home feel so strange, but it had. It was a variable, one of those surprise vectors that can sneak up behind you, if you’re not careful, upsetting an entire equation.
She wished she lived there, with Patrick and Jane. She wished they all lived together. But they didn’t.
Oh well, whatever. Never mind.
Patrick came to pick her up and drive her home for the Christmas holidays. She was excited, to be spending three weeks with them. She dumped her bag on the back seat and belted herself in.