Bitter Sixteen

by Stefan Mohamed

‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Errrmdunno.’

  I emerged from beneath the duvet at about eleven the next morning. I hadn’t had a stocking since I was twelve, so the old excitement wasn’t really there, but when I went downstairs everyone was in a good mood and my dad had made pancakes, and Mum had put a Christmas CD on, and Daryl was doing a pretty passable Nat King Cole impression, crooning along to ‘Chestnuts Roasting On an Open Fire’. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘This is festive.’

  ‘You almost sound as though you mean that,’ my mum said, smiling.

  ‘I almost do.’ I gave her a hug. I hadn’t felt this Christmassy in years.

  We ate pancakes, and presents came and went. I’d bought my mum some candles, a plate, a stuffed cat and a Rolling Stones CD, and I’d got my dad some tedious-looking book about economics that he’d been going on about, and The Towering Inferno on DVD, as I knew he was a big fan of both Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. Neither of them asked when I’d had time to go shopping or how I’d travelled and I didn’t tell them. They gave me two CDs, two books, some guitar music and a special edition two-disc Casablanca DVD, and I gave Daryl a Humphrey Bogart poster, quite a lot of chocolate and Fargo on DVD. My parents had got him a basket. It was really nice, as baskets go, and Daryl seemed to genuinely like it. I put it by my bed and stuck the Bogie poster on the wall next to it.

  Dinner was chicken, as my mum had a strange irrational issue with animals that gobbled, and there were roast potatoes (a household speciality) and too many dishes of vegetables and chipolatas, and extra stuffing because Mum knew how much Daryl and I liked it. ‘Dad?’ I asked, after ten minutes of contented, silent eating. ‘Do you think that maybe you could give me some driving lessons sometime?’

  My dad stopped eating mid-chew. He exchanged a bemused glance with my mother, swallowed his food and nodded. ‘Of course. Er . . . yes. Fine. How about tomorrow? Most people will probably be inside sleeping off their hangovers so town should be pretty empty. We could do it in the community centre car park.’

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

  Nobody else spoke for the duration of the meal except to say ‘mmm’ and ‘that’s lovely’, and afterwards I helped with the washing up, enjoying my parents’ obvious confusion.

  That evening I sat and tried to work out some of the music that my parents had given me, and Daryl ate his own body weight in Doritos and read magazines. Suddenly a thought struck me. ‘Do you believe in God?’ I asked.

  Daryl didn’t look up. ‘I am a dog.’

  ‘Which is relevant because . . .’

  ‘Because . . . because I’m a dog. I don’t think about stuff like that. I’m not human. I don’t subscribe to your newsletter.’

  ‘Your favourite film is Casablanca, you love The Beatles and you can recite Trainspotting backwards. You’re human enough to tell me whether or not you believe in God. It’s even an anagram of you, you’re closer to it than I am.’

  ‘That’s well ffffrigging funny,’ Daryl deadpanned. He paused for a moment then said, ‘Which God do you mean, anyway?’

  I raised both eyebrows and made a noise that sounded like “nguh?”.

  ‘Do you mean the Christian God? The beautiful merciful divine presence? The guiding light behind their self-defeating, hypocritical dogma?’

  ‘That’s well ffffrigging funny.’

  ‘No pun intended. Or do you mean Allah, or one of the many heads of Hinduism, or Odin, or the Egyptian sun deity Ra, or perhaps —’

  ‘Are you saying “no” then?’

  Daryl shrugged. ‘I think the notion of God is flawed and the way most religions put it into practise is a load of divisive, puritanical sex-fixated bollocks. As a way of life I suppose Buddhism isn’t so bad. It’s basically a lot of sitting about under trees being nice to one another and eating lots of rice, and doesn’t involve lashings of bigotry and irrationality.’

  I shrugged and affected a country accent. ‘Fair dos, like. Fair dos.’

  ‘What’s brought on this bout of theologising?’

  ‘Well . . . it’s Christmas.’

  ‘Are you joking?’

  ‘Yeah. I . . . dunno. I was just thinking about my powers.’ I strummed ineffectually as I spoke. ‘Wondering whether they were . . . I don’t know. Divine or something.’

  ‘Do you believe in God, then?’

  ‘No . . . once upon a time I did, though. Well. Sort of. I basically thought that God was like a sort of Super Santa Claus. I’d be really good and then pray for a bike or a Playstation or whatever. As far as I could see if you were really good and then prayed to God then it didn’t matter whether it was Christmas, May Day bank holiday or the fourteenth Wednesday after Pentecost, you’d get what you wanted. It never happened, of course. Then one day a vicar came into school and told us all this stuff about being nice to one another and I told him about my plan and he was a bit shocked. He told me off.’ I sighed, and stared pensively into the middle distance. ‘That was the day I . . . lost my faith. So to speak.’ I tried to keep a straight face, but cracked almost immediately.

  Daryl laughed. ‘Priceless.’

  ‘To be fair, I can kind of understand people believing in bullshit to make the world make sense,’ I said. ‘I quite like my world unexplained though.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Daryl. ‘Don’t you try to corrupt me with your Atheist propaganda. I’m happy with my dog delusion.’

  I laughed. ‘You’ve changed your tune since about thirty seconds ago.’

  ‘I pride myself on being both irrational and bewilderingly changeable.’ Daryl sneezed. ‘’Scuse me. So did you ever really believe in God?’

  I shrugged. ‘Don’t think so. It was more wishful thinking than anything.’ I played a riff and it sounded pretty good. ‘Finally!’

  ‘Shiny,’ said Daryl. ‘Hey. Appropos of absolutely nothing . . . if you go to ye olde London town, which I’m still not sure is a one hundred per cent kosher plan, will you take me with you?’

  I looked at him. ‘What kind of a question is that?’

  ‘A perfectly legitimate one,’ said Daryl. ‘Are you going to take me with you?’

  ‘Of course!’ I said. ‘How could I leave you behind? You’re like my good right arm or whatever. Plus my parents would just drive you insane and you’d blow your brains out all over your Bogie poster.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Daryl sounded relieved.

  ‘Why do you ask? Something on your mind?’

  ‘No. I just . . . your talk about God made me wonder if there’s really a place for me. You know . . . anywhere. I’m a talking dog. I’m not something that was ever meant to be. So that begs the question – what would I be if there was no-one who needed me?’

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ I said. ‘Is it really time to get metaphysical?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Daryl shrugged his dog-like shrug. ‘I don’t know. I was just wondering what I’d do if you left.’

  ‘Can’t you think of anything? Besides waste away?’

  ‘I don’t know. Walk the Earth like Caine in Kung Fu.’

  We both laughed. ‘We could do that together. I mean, if I was going to try being a globe-trotting superhero, what better companion than a talking dog?’

  ‘True.’ He didn’t seem convinced, though, so I said, quite seriously, ‘I’ll never leave you.’ Inwardly I cringed at the inspirational teen movie corniness of the statement – not to mention the homoerotic subtext, which would have felt a wee bit odd even if I hadn’t been saying it to a beagle – but Daryl seemed grateful. ‘Thanks,’ he said. And he meant it. I carried on trying to play but I could sense that Daryl still wanted to talk. ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘What would I be if there was no-one who needed me?’ he asked.

  ‘Um . . . I don’t know,’ I said, setting down my guitar. ‘Are you sure that’s how it works? I would think that anything – dog, fairy cake, pilla
r box, whatever – is the same whether it’s needed or not.’

  ‘Not necessarily. A pillar box, if you’re not using it to post letters, it’s just a red shape, isn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe?’

  ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it? Like . . . when you’re not playing the guitar, is it still yours? And where does the music go once you’ve played it? And —’

  ‘You are currently having an excess of thoughts,’ I said, picking up my guitar again. ‘And I am not qualified to address any of them. Watch a film.’

  Daryl did his funny shrug. ‘OK.’

  My dad gave me my driving lesson the next day, and another the following weekend. He said I had a knack for it, which was nice, although I felt horrible considering why I was doing it. But I squashed the low-level self-loathing under a heap of ‘necessary evils’ and got on with it. If I had to do it, I had to do it. There was nothing more to say.

  The holiday shuffled on with little incident, and suddenly New Year’s Eve arrived, bringing a party kicking and screaming along with it. My parents told me about it a few days before.

  Mum: Stanly? We’re going to have a party for New Year.

  Me (impassive): We are?

  Mum: Yes! Won’t that be fun? Do you have anyone you want to invite?

  Me: Not really.

  Mum: Oh.

  The party ship landed and party people debarked, none of them younger than forty and none of them particularly interested in me. I wasn’t especially interested in them either, and was planning to go out and spend the night training with Daryl. However . . .

  ‘No,’ said my mother, closing the front door a second after I opened it.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re going to stay and be sociable,’ she said.

  ‘Oh what . . .’

  ‘You heard me,’ she said. Her tone was resolute. ‘We hardly ever have parties and whenever we do you never even show your face. I want you to stay and talk to people.’

  ‘I want to go out.’

  ‘It’s freezing cold! Why do you want to go out?’

  ‘I want to try out the new abilities that I got for my birthday. I want to dance across the rooftops of Tref-y-Celwyn and I want to mess with chavs by throwing snowballs at them with the power of my mind. Daryl was going to come. We were going to toast marshmallows.’

  What I actually said was, ‘I just want to go for a walk.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s too late anyway.’

  ‘I’m sixteen years old!’ I protested. ‘It’s ten o’clock! I can’t just go out for a walk?’

  ‘No.’

  An hour later I was up in my room, lying on my bed, listening to early Eminem and sketching pictures of dinner parties set on fire, their horrendously over-dressed attendees running around in flames and exploding like overripe melons full of viscera. ‘That’s disgusting,’ said Daryl.

  I didn’t answer. Daryl sighed and switched off the music. ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘I was listening to that.’

  ‘How old are you?’ my dog demanded.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Sixteen.’ I had to fight the urge to add duh.

  ‘And you’re sulking in your room. Why don’t you just make the best of the situation? Go downstairs, socialise with the boring grown-ups, see in the new year, maybe get a little kiss off the younger and more attractive ones . . .’

  ‘Nope,’ I said, snapping my fingers to bring back the music. ‘Not in the mood.’

  Ten to twelve. A knock at my door. I made a flippant gesture to lock the door, and twirled my finger so that the volume on my hi-fi went up.

  ‘Stanly!’ yelled my mother. ‘Open the door!’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘Open this door immediately!’

  Zero.

  ‘If you don’t open this door I’m going to donate your guitar to the Air Ambulance.’

  She wouldn’t.

  ‘Stanly open the door this instant!’

  Daryl leapt off the bed, nosed the hi-fi off and jumped up on his hind legs against the door, sliding the lock back with one paw. My mother opened it and stood there, dressed in a red sari, her face tinged crimson with anger and booze, a hefty glass of wine in one hand. ‘Stanly,’ she said, trying to keep her voice level. ‘Come downstairs.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ I said. Every second I felt more like a horrible sulky teenager, the type that usually pisses me off so much that I have to lie down in a darkened room after more than fifteen seconds’ contact with them, but equally, calming down and being rational didn’t feel like an option.

  ‘Stanly, everybody wants to see you.’

  ‘No they don’t. You just want to cover up the fact that your marriage is failing by presenting a well-behaved child as a symbol of harmony.’

  What? Where the hell did that come from? She hadn’t deserved that and I was an evil, nasty little shit and I instantly hated myself. Daryl went and hid under the bed. My mother looked deflated. She stared at the ground. The colour had left her face. She didn’t say anything, just turned and went downstairs. Several minutes later I heard people cheering. Party poppers. My stomach was full of battery acid. I switched off my light but I didn’t sleep for a long time.

  The next few days bled unbearably into one another. My mother wouldn’t talk to me and my father, who wasn’t a fantastic communicator at the best of times, didn’t try to act as a neutral party. He was as curt to me and as distant with Mum as he usually was, and the atmosphere was so thick with awkwardness and misery that I had to go outside. I went for long walks in the snow with Daryl, the cold doing its best to numb my body although its work had already been done. Daryl was quiet. We had talked about the incident and I told him I wished I hadn’t said anything, and to my surprise he said that what I’d said wasn’t necessarily wrong. He just thought I could have been more tactful, and maybe brought it up at a more appropriate moment, and in a less confrontational way. I laughed at that. The idea of my dog, the acid-tongued guided missile of tactlessness, lecturing me on being diplomatic was ridiculous, especially seeing as how he was completely right. I knew I should apologise, but I couldn’t. It was too hard. Too much time had gone by.

  I’d never felt less like someone with superpowers.

  Luckily, though, I did have superpowers, and they were an excellent distraction from feeling like a twat. I went up to the woods alone the next day and tried to see how high I could go. I couldn’t just take off and fly Superman-style, not yet. I had to concentrate, and rise, and keep concentrating in order to rise further, but it was definitely getting easier. I managed to get to the top of a pretty tall tree today, aware that this was extremely dangerous.

  Oh well. Serves me right if I break my legs.

  I grabbed the top branch and sat down to catch my breath, and realised that there was someone walking through the woods towards me. My heart nearly stopped. Had they seen me? Probably not. They were walking normally, not looking up. I squinted. It was a man in a grey suit, looking fairly out of place. He had his hands in his pockets, as nonchalant as anything, and as he walked past the tree he glanced up and nodded. ‘Afternoon.’

  What did that mean? He had seen me fly up the tree? Or was he just aware that I was there? I nodded back. ‘Hi.’

  He kept walking, never breaking stride, and within half a minute he’d disappeared. I made absolutely sure that I was completely alone before descending, trying to make it look like I was climbing.

  Must be more careful.

  Can’t be seen yet.

  When I got home, I found my mother crying at the kitchen table. My dad wasn’t around. Mum was smoking a cigarette. I had never seen her smoke before – and inside the house, no less – and it was quite unsettling. I put my arm around her and didn’t say anything, and she cried and cried.

  Th
e following morning relations between us were fine, but my dad was in a towering bad mood. Everything he did was accompanied by a bang. He slammed doors. He slammed the toilet seat. He slammed down mugs and chairs and books. He threw newspapers at nothing. He took great satisfaction in being as noisy as possible when putting coal on the Rayburn. He kicked things. He swore and shouted at the slightest provocation. It was unutterably tedious, and my mother evacuated to see her friend Perdita and I went up to the woods with Daryl to practise flying again. I also tried using telekinesis at the same time, but it was a huge strain. I could just about manage to throw a couple of pebbles while running vertically up a tree trunk and then I had to lie down. The dog suggested that I make this my next target, so I made sure to get as much practice in as possible before school started again.

  Finally, on the last night of the holiday, Daryl came into my room to find me sitting cross-legged in the air about two feet off the ground, with a cushion levitating next to me. He nodded approvingly. ‘Nice one.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, through gritted teeth.

  ‘Feeling the burn?’

  ‘Kinda.’

  ‘Want to lie down?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Thump.

  Chapter Seven

  ROMEO AND JULIET was scheduled for the fourth, fifth and sixth of March. We had just under three months and I knew it was going to be fine. It was going to be special. Miss Stevenson gave me her phone number in case I wanted to discuss anything and I put it on the first page of a new notebook. I didn’t think I would actually use it because I was in such a good mood about the play, but it was nice to have the option. It was also nice to be congratulated by students from the lower years for my performance at the previous night’s rehearsal, and it was great when Ben King witnessed it, to see the look of robbed triumph on his face. I was being petty again, but it was worth it. Sometimes being petty is therapeutic. Kloe-wise, there were no new developments, although I felt slightly more confident about engaging her in conversation outside of rehearsals, and I started to think that any attraction had all been in my head. It was disappointing, but OK – at least I got to act with her.