by Kevin Brooks
The tears have dried up over the years, but every now and then they come back, and when they do I realise that nothing much has changed – I’m still that little kid lying in bed at night looking for the emptiness.
Fourteen years I’ve slept in this room. Slept, read, daydreamed, cried. It used to be crowded full of stuff – toys, games, boxes full of comics, clothes, pictures, posters – but I threw most of it out about a year ago. All my old stuff. I just got fed up with it. One Saturday afternoon I got a couple of those big green garden refuse sacks, the extra strong ones, and piled everything I didn’t want any more into them. Then I lugged the sacks down to the council tip and chucked them in a skip.
Now the room’s pretty well bare and empty, which is just the way I like it. Bed, wardrobe, mirror. Books lined up along the bookshelf on the wall. Table and chair. And that’s about it. Plain white walls. No pictures, no posters, no ornaments. Nice and clean. Functional.
I closed my eyes. I put my hands to my face and pressed my fingers to my eyelids and watched patterns emerge in the pure sightless black. Dazzling checkerboards of dayglo red and electric blue. Bright white bars of light, flashes, sparkles, fluorescent stars. Strange geometries of colour – purple pyramids, earth-red squares and flat lilac fields. There were even things that were coloured with colours I’d never seen before. Nameless colours. It was too much. I took my hands from my eyes and stared blindly at the ceiling. After a minute or two the colours and patterns faded and my sight returned.
My eyes hurt.
I turned my thoughts to the next day. Dean was due at noon to collect his money. I wondered what he was thinking about now. Was he confident? Excited? Worried? Scared? Did he think he had it all worked out? Did he think it was going to be easy? Like taking candy from a baby?
Dean, Dean, Dean ... don’t you know that babies bite?
The telephone rang.
I jumped off the bed, ran down the stairs and grabbed at the phone.
‘Hello!’
‘Martyn?’
‘Alex!’
‘Are you all right? You sound like you’re out of breath.’
‘I was upstairs,’ I said, trying to calm down. ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Out with Mum. Sorry, I meant to tell you yesterday. I forgot.’
She wasn’t out with her mum this morning. ‘Where d’you go?’ I asked her.
‘Mary’s. You know, her friend from the hospital, the one with the horses.’
Horses? ‘Oh, right.’
‘Anyway—’
‘Are you coming over?’
She didn’t answer. I heard the sound of muffled voices in the background.
‘Alex?’
‘Sorry, Martyn. Mum was talking to me. What did you say?’
‘Are you coming over?’ I repeated.
She hesitated, then spoke in a whisper. ‘I’d better not. Mum’s a bit suspicious about the car. Best if I stay in.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘What about the car?’
‘Nothing really, little things. I forgot to readjust the seat, the petrol was low.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She didn’t say anything. She just mentioned it and gave me a funny look. Don’t worry about it.’
‘Yeah, but—’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing. I just think it’d be a good idea if I stayed in tonight, you know, just to be on the safe side.’
‘I suppose so ...’
‘It’s late anyway.’
‘Is it?’
‘It’s gone eleven.’
‘Oh.’
‘I’ll come over first thing tomorrow.’
‘OK.’
‘All right?’
‘Yeah, OK.’
‘I’ll see you then, then.’
‘First thing?’
‘First thing.’
‘OK.’
‘I’d better go, Martyn. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘Bye.’
Click.
You wait all day for something, then when it finally comes you wish you hadn’t bothered.
I gave up on Sunday and went to bed.
I was too tired to sleep. All I could do was lie there staring into the darkness, and it wasn’t long before the emptiness began tingling at the back of my eyes. I suppose I could have stayed there and soaked it all up, or let it all out some more, but I just couldn’t face it. So I got up and put the light on. I took The Big Sleep off the bookshelf and sat up reading until my eyes were so heavy I couldn’t make out the words any more. For a while I just lay back half-dreaming – detectives in powder-blue suits, generals in wheelchairs, tropical orchids, men in Chinese coats and naked girls with long jade earrings – until at last my mind switched off and I fell asleep with my head resting on the open book.
Monday
Sometimes I try to imagine what happens when I’m sleeping. You can never know, can you? You never see yourself asleep. You don’t know what happens. You lose yourself. Every night, you lose yourself to an unknown world.
I imagine the structure of my body idling. Ticking over. The innards at rest. I’m automatic. Electric things that work me continue to work, crackling in the dead dark of my head. I move, crawling blindly on knotted sheets, twitching. I talk to myself about things I don’t understand and I watch talking pictures, broken images, rummages of life’s rubbish. Dreams. The sleeping Me. A self-cleansing organism, scraping out the useless muck of a mind. Washing up.
As I sleep, the room is quiet. Pipes inside the walls hum unheard, the clock barely ticks. The bathroom tap drips soft and slow, discolouring the green bath plastic.
My body emits a tiny fart.
And outside, the night sky is big and magnificent. Beneath its pure black dome, the trappings of the street shrink to nothing. Toys of cars, little squares of bricks, grey lines. Unseen blobs of skin and bone. Tiny things under the moon. A white moth fluttering in the night air. Something small slithering in the rustle of dead leaves under a bush. A stunted tree, bent and motionless in the glare of a streetlight.
And I just lie there sleeping.
Something must see it all.
I woke early and lay in bed for a while listening to the sounds of the morning. The rattle and hum of the milk float working its way down the street, clinking bottles, the milkman whistling. Small birds cursing at the snow. Someone, somewhere, was shouting at a dog. Murphy! Murphy! Murphy! MURPHY! The dog was called Murphy. Then, a little later, postman sounds: footsteps, letter boxes flapping, more whistling.
Why do they always whistle?
I tried it myself as I got out of bed and dressed. Whistling a nonsense tune, I pulled on jeans, T-shirt, shirt, jumper and two pairs of socks. It was icy cold. Nice and icy.
Whistling. I got it. Whistling – it makes you feel better. It takes your mind off what you’re doing, but, at the same time, helps you concentrate. Like chewing gum.
I whistled into the bathroom and whistled as I whistled. Then I whistled downstairs, whistled through the post and whistled as I threw it all in the bin. I turned on the radio, retuned to Radio 2, and whistled along with the music while I boiled some eggs.
I seemed to have developed a craving for boiled eggs.
Through the kitchen window low grey skies threatened more snow. I dipped toast into my egg and spooned it into my mouth. Birds huddled together on the wall, fluffed up fat against the cold, their dark little bodies outlined starkly against the still-white streaks of hard-packed snow. A pigeon with only half a tail landed clumsily on the wall and the smaller birds fluttered into the air then settled again. The pigeon waddled along the wall looking lost. I wondered what had happened to its tail. A cat? Dog? Air rifle?
I killed a bird once. When I was a little kid. Shot it dead. I had this little air-pistol. I don’t remember where I got it from. Maybe I swapped it for something? Anyway, it wasn’t a very good one. Not very powerful. I’d been popping away at garden birds for weeks without ever hitting anything. Sparrows
, starlings, blackbirds, they just sat there on the fence, or on the roofs of houses, watching nonchalantly as I took aim from my bedroom window, fired and missed. They were too far away. The pellets headed off in the right direction but ran out of steam halfway there and nose-dived into the ground. I had to get closer. Or make the birds come closer to me. So I made this stupid little bird table. Just a flat board nailed to a stick, really. I stuck it in the ground right below the bedroom window, piled sliced bread on top, then went back upstairs and waited, loaded gun in hand. After a minute or two, a sparrow landed. The flimsy bird table wobbled slightly then steadied. I took aim. The sparrow was nice and close. I could see his hard little beak, his small black eyes. I pulled the trigger, the pistol spat, and the sparrow fell. Just like that. I stared in disbelief. I’d killed it. Stopped its life. Shot it dead. Just pulled the trigger and shot it dead. I can still see it now, a small bundle of limp feathers, neck broken, a pearl of bright red blood on its beak. Limp and heartless.
It left me cold. Ashamed. Scared. Dirty and bad.
But at the same time I felt something else, too. Something not all bad. I don’t know. A sense of power, maybe. Control. Strength. Something like that. Whatever it was, it was too confusing. I was too young to understand. I didn’t want to understand. So I ran downstairs, out into the garden, checked to see that no one was watching, picked up the dead bird by the tip of a wing and threw it into the dustbin. Gone. Out of sight. It didn’t happen. Forget it.
I didn’t forget it.
The half-tailed pigeon was gone now, the wall outside the window was birdless. Next-door’s cat was padding along the wall, high-stepping through the snow, a smug furry grin on its face. I don’t like cats. Especially that one. Fat little sod. I banged on the window and it scarpered.
Alex seemed a little distracted when she arrived. I studied her face as she removed her fur hat and hung up her coat. The way she moved her lips, the shape of her mouth, her eyes – distracted or not, I could watch her for ever. She wiped at her brow with a finger, half-smiled, then adjusted the ribbon in her hair. It was a black one today, as black as her hair. Her faded denim shirt was black, too, worn loose over tight black jeans. Framed in black, the pale oval of her face shone with perfect simplicity. Like a china doll.
‘What?’ she said.
I was staring. ‘Nothing. Sorry.’
She gazed down at the floor, licking her lips, as if she wanted to say something but couldn’t remember what it was. I waited. Then, to my surprise, she looked up at me with a sparkling smile, reached over and kissed me on the cheek.
‘Sorry, Martyn.’
‘What for?’ I said.
‘Yesterday. For not coming round.’ She hesitated. ‘I just needed to get away from it all for a while.’
‘From what?’
‘Everything. Your dad. Dean. You. I mean, this whole situation ... it’s pretty crazy. We disposed of a body, for Christ’s sake. And now, today ...’
‘But we talked about that—’
‘I know we did. I’m not saying I’ve changed my mind, I’m not backing out or anything. I just needed some time away from it. That’s all.’ She touched my arm. ‘I’m just telling you why I didn’t come round yesterday, why I didn’t ring.’
I nodded. I didn’t know what to say.
After a moment she took her hand away.
‘OK?’ she said.
‘Yeah.’
‘Good.’
‘Right. What’s the time?’
She looked at her watch. ‘Ten o’clock.’
‘We’ve got two hours before Dean gets here. Let’s go over it again.’
We went over it again.
Afterwards, over tea and toast, I brought up the subject of money.
‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ I told her. ‘We don’t have to wait for the cheque to clear before we go spending. We could go into town this afternoon.’
‘But the cheque won’t clear until tomorrow,’ Alex argued. ‘You won’t be able to get any cash out until then.’
‘Who said anything about cash?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve got a chequebook. I could buy stuff with cheques, I can forge Dad’s signature.’
‘But—’
‘Look, I’ll show you. Hold on.’ I went upstairs and got Dad’s cashcard from the bureau, and a pen and piece of paper.
‘I was always signing things in his name,’ I explained, as I dashed off a series of signatures. ‘Delivery notes, letters to the Social Security, prescriptions ... it’s easy. See?’ I showed her my forged signatures, then the real one on the back of the cashcard. ‘You can’t tell the difference, can you?’
I did another one. W. PIG. A big droopy W, like a pair of graffiti breasts, a dot, then a pathetic PIG, three scrunched up little capital letters that looked as if they were written by a six-year-old. A six-year-old with a broken hand. ‘You’ve got to do it quick,’ I said, showing her again. ‘If you start to think about it, you lose it.’
‘That’s very good, Martyn.’
‘Thank you.’
‘The only thing is—’
‘What?’
‘Who’s going to take a cheque from a fourteen-year-old boy?’
I stopped signing and looked at her. ‘The man at the off-licence always does. He even lets me sign them in Dad’s name.’
‘Well he would, wouldn’t he?’
‘I don’t see why—’
‘Yes you do.’
I paused, looking at her.
‘Come on, Martyn,’ she said. ‘Don’t be stupid. Even if someone did take a cheque – not that they would – but even if they did, cheques are traceable. Cheques are dangerous. Just wait until tomorrow, wait for the cheque to clear, then use the cashcard. One more day isn’t going to hurt, is it? Stick to the plan.’
She was right, of course. It was a stupid idea, embarrassingly stupid. I wished there was a hole I could sink into.
I tried a grin. ‘What would I do without you?’
‘You’d think of something,’ she smiled, then stood up. ‘I have to go to the bathroom. Give me the cashcard and I’ll put it back in the bureau.’ I passed her the card. She picked up the paper with the forged signatures on. ‘You don’t want to leave this lying around, do you? I’ll flush it.’
‘Thanks, Alex,’ I said. ‘For everything.’
She looked at me and laughed.
I smiled. ‘What? What’s so funny?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, controlling herself, ‘nothing’s funny.’
It bothered me sometimes, the way she changed. One second this; the next second that. It was hard to keep up. But then we all have our odd little ways, I suppose.
At eleven o’clock I walked her to the bus stop. The dark sky looked as if it had never been anything else but dark. Icy winds whipped through the alleyways between houses, scattering ragged arcs of loose snow across the road.
Dean was due in an hour.
‘What time will he leave his flat?’ I asked.
‘Probably about eleven-thirty, eleven forty-five.’
‘You’ve got the key?’
She nodded, patting her pocket. ‘It was funny, really, when he gave it to me. It was as if he thought it was a really loving thing to do, you know, like he was asking me to marry him or something. I think he expected me to swoon.’
‘Did you?’
‘All he really wanted was someone to clean up his flat while he was at work.’
The bus shelter offered little protection against the wind. We sat shivering on the folding seats. Alex clutched her bag close to her body, staring straight ahead.
‘It’ll be all right,’ I said.
‘Yeah.’
We sat in silence. There was nothing else to say.
Five days ago we’d sat here. The picture was clear in my mind. Wednesday. Alex waiting for the bus, going to Dean’s. Me with bags full of Christmas shopping and a runny nose. Alex making fun of the turkey, leaning over and peeri
ng into the carrier bags, nudging one with a foot.
Nice looking chicken.
It’s a turkey.
Bit small for a turkey.
It’s a small turkey.
I think you’ll find that’s a chicken, Martyn.
Grinning at each other. Her eyes shining in the gloom of the bus shelter, like marbles, clear and round and perfect. Just sitting there, chatting, doing nothing, watching the world go by—
‘Here’s the bus,’ she said, digging in her bag for her purse.
Was that then, or now?
The bus pulled in and the doors pished open. Alex stepped on. I watched her pay. I watched the bus driver click buttons on his ticket machine. I watched the bus ticket snicker out. I watched the way her eyes blinked slowly and I watched her mouth say Thank you and I watched the coal-black shine of her hair as she took the bus ticket and rolled it into a tube and stuck it in the corner of her mouth and walked gracefully to the back of the bus. And I watched and waited in vain for her to turn her head as the bus lurched out into the street and juddered up the road and disappeared around the corner.
She didn’t look back.
Back home I tidied up. Without Dad around, the place was easy to keep clean. I used to hate the mess he made. Stuff all over the floor, dirty plates and cups, glasses, bottles, newspapers, cigarette ash, clothes, shoes – it was a tip. As soon as I’d cleared it all away there’d be more. A never-ending supply of rubbish. I couldn’t stand it. All that jumble and dirt, it made me so I couldn’t think straight. I need to see clean surfaces, flat and uncluttered. I need to see the true shape of things, the lines, the angles. Mess messes me up. Dad couldn’t care less. He’d just sit there in his armchair, surrounded by his own debris, smoking and drinking, happy as a clam. Not a care in the world. Lord Muck. King of the Dump. Sometimes I think he did it on purpose. Messed the place up just to annoy me. He enjoyed it. Thought it was funny.
Now, although I couldn’t do anything about its overall shabbiness, the house was as clean as a whistle. Clean and clear. No mess. No rubbish. No debris. Clean floor, clean kitchen, clean tables, clean everything. Clean and staying clean. And it was a pleasure to keep clean. There was nothing to it. Strolling around, flicking a duster here and there, pecking a stray piece of cotton from the carpet, adjusting the settee cushions. Whistling as I worked.