by Kevin Brooks
Another thing I learned not to say out loud was “monkem.” Monkems are all the people in the world except for Mum, Auntie Shirley, and the Doc. They’re called monkems because they come to me in my dreams as horrible scary things with hairy monkey bodies and long grasping arms and bandy legs and little human heads with vicious grinning mouths with their lips pulled back over nasty big monkey teeth . . .
That’s what other people are to me.
Terrible things that want to rip me apart and eat me.
Monkems.
The first time I said it in front of Mum she told me I mustn’t say it anymore.
“Why not?” I asked her.
“You can’t call people monkeys, Elliot.”
“Monkems,” I corrected her. “Not monkeys.”
“Well, that’s as may be,” she said (which made no sense to me at all), “but people might think you’re saying monkey, like I just did, and they might think you’re being horrible to them.” She gave me a look. “You don’t want anyone to think you’re being horrible to them, do you?”
I told her I didn’t, and since then I only ever use the word when I’m on my own or with Ellamay. Not that it makes any difference. The way I react to monkems — screaming my head off and running away in terror — they must think I’m crazy anyway, so what does it matter if they think I’m horrible as well? And besides, even at that age — three or four years old — I was very rarely seeing anyone else apart from Mum and Shirley and the Doc, so the chances of me upsetting a monkem by calling them a monkem were virtually nonexistent.
I wish this was easier. I wish I could just lay my hands on your head and transfer what’s inside me to you. I wish you could be me, if only for a moment, so you’d know exactly how I feel.
But that’s not going to happen, is it?
Wishes never come true.
shake it . . .
like this
It’s twelve minutes past three now and I’m back in my room. Still hatted and booted and gloved, still sticky-skinned from the drying cold sweat, and still sick to my bones with fear.
What are you doing, Elliot? Ellamay says, sounding confused and slightly frustrated. I thought we were ready to go. I thought we’d —
“It’s all right,” I tell her. “I’ve just remembered something, that’s all. I won’t be a minute.”
I cross the room and go into the bathroom.
Oh, right, Ellamay says. I see.
She thinks I’m going to the toilet.
“No, it’s not that,” I tell her, opening the cabinet above the sink. “I’m just checking to make sure there aren’t any pills in here that I’ve forgotten about.”
You’ve already done that.
“I’m double-checking.”
You’ve already done that as well.
“I’m triple-checking then.”
There are four empty brown-glass pill bottles in the cabinet. I always keep a few empty ones, just in case I break one or something. And Ellamay’s right, I have already checked each of them twice. But sometimes I get riddled with doubts — about all kinds of stupid little things — and there’s something inside me that won’t let me rest until I’ve hammered those doubts into the ground.
So I check all the bottles again — take one out, shake it
like this
unscrew the cap, look inside, turn it upside down and tap it against my palm . . .
Nothing, empty.
I put the cap back on, place it to one side, take the next bottle out of the cabinet. Shake it
like this
unscrew the cap, look inside . . .
Nothing.
I go through the same process with the other two bottles, but they’re both empty too, as I knew they would be.
Satisfied?
“Not yet.”
I start removing everything else from the cabinet — packets of pills (for headaches and indigestion), eczema cream, toothpaste, toothbrush — and when the shelves are completely empty, I stand there scanning the dusty emptiness for any specks of yellow, hoping against hope that if I look hard enough I’ll find a stray pill. But I don’t. So then I reach up and start running my fingers through the dust, feeling around in every little corner of the shelves, every little gap between the shelves and the back of the cupboard, every possible place where a small yellow pill could be lodged . . .
There’s nothing there.
No doubt about it.
I close the cabinet, reach into my pocket, and pull out my current pill bottle. I give it a shake
like this
and the last remaining pill rattles thinly against the glass. I close my eyes for a second and think again about taking it now. The last one I took is beginning to wear off, and I can already feel the first faint stirrings of the thing I dread the most — the beast that is the fear of fear itself — and I know that if I don’t take the pill now . . .
Save it for later, Ellamay says.
“I don’t think I can.”
You’re probably going to need it later a lot more than you need it now.
I know she’s right.
I know I have to wait.
I shake the bottle one more time
like this
and put it back in my pocket.
Is that it? Ellamay says. Can we go now? It’s going to be completely dark outside if we don’t go soon.
“I know,” I tell her, crossing over to the bedside table and picking up my flashlight, “that’s why I need this.”
I switch it on to make sure it’s working. I already know that it is — I check it every night, and I put new batteries in it a couple of days ago — but I go ahead and check it anyway.
It works. The beam’s strong and bright.
I drop the flashlight into my coat pocket, turn to leave . . .
Then stop.
And slowly turn around.
What now? says Ella.
The snow globe was a gift from Auntie Shirley. She’d been on a day trip to Whitby with her son, Gordon, and when she was looking around one of the souvenir shops, she’d spotted a snow globe that she really liked. In fact, she’d liked it so much that she’d bought two of them — one for herself and one for Mum.
I’d never seen a snow globe before, so when Mum finally showed it to me — after thinking long and hard about whether it would frighten me or not — I had no idea what it was. I remember holding it in my hands and gazing curiously at it, wondering what on earth it could be. A small glass dome, filled with clear liquid, with a miniature woodland scene inside. It was a fairy-tale scene — Little Red Riding Hood walking through the woods with the Big Bad Wolf — and although the small plastic figures and plastic trees weren’t particularly well made or anything, there was something about them, something about the whole thing, that felt very special to me.
“Shake it,” Mum said, smiling.
I didn’t know what she meant.
“Like this,” she told me, gesturing with her hand.
I copied her, awkwardly shaking the globe, and I was so surprised when it filled up with a blizzard of tiny snowflakes that I actually cried out in delight.
Mum was so relieved that I wasn’t scared of the snow globe, and even more pleased that I actually seemed to like something for a change, that she let me keep it. And it’s been sitting on my shelf ever since.
Shirley keeps her snow globe on the windowsill of her living room, and on the few occasions when I’ve been in her house — visiting with Mum — I’ve always wondered if there’s some kind of connection between our two identical snow globes, some kind of at-a-distance awareness of each other . . .
Or something.
I don’t know.
What is it, Elliot? says Ella.
“Nothing,” I tell her, looking away from the snow globe.
What did you see?
“What do you mean?”
You know what I mean. What did you see just now in the snow globe?
“Nothing . . .”
S
he knows I’m lying. She always knows.
Just tell me, she says quietly. What did you see?
“It was snowing . . . like someone had shaken it up. That’s what made me look at it. And I saw something . . . or I thought I did.”
In the snow?
“In the whole thing.”
What was it, Elliot? What did you see?
I was in there, in the snow globe. Or something of me was in there . . . a bedraggled figure, limping along the pathway through the woods . . . snow falling in the darkness . . . great black trees all around me, their white-topped branches glinting in an unknown light . . . and up ahead of me, an endless climb of rough wooden steps leading up a steep-sided slope . . .
That’s what I saw.
It was all there, all in a timeless moment, and then it was gone again, and all that remained of it was an unfamiliar — and unsettling — feeling of deadness in my heart.
I was six when Mum took me to see a child psychologist. I don’t think she really wanted me to see one — partly because she knew it would terrify me, and partly because it meant admitting to herself that my problem was mental rather than physical, which she still didn’t want to accept. But deep down she knew it was true, and she knew she had to do something about it. So she’d asked the Doc to recommend someone, and he’d asked around and come back with a name, and Mum got in touch with her and made an appointment.
We got as far as the waiting room.
When the psychologist (or therapist, or whatever she called herself) came out of her consulting room and called me and Mum in, I simply couldn’t move. The sheer sight of her terrified me so much that I went into some kind of shock — paralyzed in my chair, my muscles locked up, my eyes bulging, my throat too tight to breathe. The psychologist lady also froze for a moment, and I could tell by the look on her face that she was a bit startled by my petrified reaction to her. But, to her credit, she composed herself pretty quickly. Forcing a friendly smile to her face, she came over to where I was sitting with Mum and stopped in front of us. I didn’t want to look at her, but I just couldn’t help it. She was fairly old, but not ancient or anything. She had longish white hair tied back in a braid, and she was wearing a big necklace made out of shiny gold discs. She had a pea-size mole or something on her upper lip, a hard-looking dark-brown lump, and as I sat there staring helplessly at it, I suddenly began to imagine it pulsing and throbbing, turning red, and then I saw it splitting open, and a big fat yellow fly crawling out . . .
“Hello, Elliot,” the psychologist lady started to say. “My name’s . . .”
I didn’t hear the rest of it. I was already up and running for the door, screaming my heart out as I went.
About six months after that, Mum and the Doc arranged for another psychologist to visit me at home, but that didn’t work out either. The night before the day of the visit, I got myself into such a state just thinking about it that I ended up being physically ill. Vomiting, diarrhea, cold sweats, a burning fever . . .
The home visit was canceled.
“How about if I talk to him?” the Doc said to Mum. “I could ask him how he feels about everything, why he’s so frightened of things, and I could record our conversation, then pass it on to a child psychologist to see what they think.”
“Would they be willing to do that?” Mum asked.
“There’s no harm in asking, is there?”
DOC: How do you actually feel when you’re frightened of something, Elliot?
ME: I feel scared.
DOC: Do you know why?
ME: What do you mean?
DOC: What I’m trying to get at is why you get so frightened. What is it that makes you afraid?
ME: It depends.
DOC: On what?
ME: Different things scare me in different ways.
DOC: Can you give me an example?
ME: Like what?
DOC: Cars, for instance. You’re frightened of cars, aren’t you?
ME: Yeah.
DOC: Why?
ME: Because they can kill me.
DOC: Could you expand on that a bit?
ME: When I’m in a car, all I can think about is what happens if something goes wrong with it and it swerves off the road, or if something goes wrong with the driver and they lose control and drive into a wall, or if something goes wrong with another car or its driver and that car loses control and smashes into us . . . that’s why I’m frightened of cars.
DOC: Because you think they can kill you?
ME: Because they can kill me.
DOC: So it’s a fear based on a possible future reality.
ME: I don’t know what that means.
DOC: It means you’re frightened of something that could happen. It’s highly unlikely that it will happen, but there’s always a possibility.
ME: Right.
DOC: What about when you’re scared of things that don’t pose an obvious threat? Like colors. What is it about the color red that scares you, for example? Is it the actual color itself?
ME: Not really, no.
DOC: What is it then? Does the color red remind you of something scary?
ME: Blood.
DOC: Blood?
ME: Yeah.
DOC: Red reminds you of blood.
ME: Yeah.
DOC: And that scares you?
ME: Yeah.
DOC: Why?
ME: I don’t know . . . it just does. When I see something red, the redness of it just kind of fills my head with blood.
DOC: Is that why you ran away from that Santa Claus when you were little?
It happened eight years ago, when I was five years old. I was in town with Mum, clinging on to her hand as we made our way through the crowds of festive shoppers. It was so noisy and chaotic that I was already scared out of my wits, but that was nothing compared to the utter horror I felt when a hunchbacked Santa Claus suddenly appeared right in front of me.
I don’t know where he came from — he was probably part of some Christmas carnival or something — and I don’t know what on earth he thought he was doing either. All I know is that as he loomed toward me out of the crowd — stooped over (so his head was level with mine), and with his arms stretched out toward me — I was so shocked and horrified that I actually wet myself. He was hideous. His face all scabby and broken-veined, his eyes unfocused, his teeth just a row of rotten black stubs. His dirty old Santa’s beard was yellowed with nicotine stains and dotted with cigarette burns and ketchup drips and God-knows-what-else, and underneath the beard, clearly visible, was a thick growth of bristly black stubble.
Although he had all the Santa gear on — red hat, red jacket, red pants — he didn’t look anything like he was supposed to. He wasn’t very old for a start — midtwenties at most — and he wasn’t fat or jolly either. He was just horrible. A blood-red nightmare. And he smelled bad too, like rotten fruit . . . rotten fruit mixed with cigarette smoke.
It must have been obvious how terrified I was, but as I cowered away from him, desperately hiding behind Mum’s legs, he just grinned and kept coming after me, as if it was some kind of game.
“Don’t be scared, kid,” he said, his voice all wheezy and croaky. “It’s only Santa . . . hey, come on, I ain’t gonna hurt ya . . .”
This all happened so quickly that I don’t think Mum knew what was going on at first, but when this monstrous Santa reached around her legs, pawing at me in what he must have thought was a playful fashion, and I tore my hand from hers and ran off into the crowd, she suddenly sprang into action. When the devil-Santa stood up straight, swore under his breath, and started to come after me, she lashed out at him, kicking him hard in the groin, and as he doubled over in agony and sank to the ground, she ran off after me, calling out my name as she went.
ME: I would have been scared of him whatever color clothes he was wearing.
DOC: Do you think you would have been less scared if he wasn’t dressed all in red?
ME: Yeah, but I still would have run away fro
m him.
DOC: What about all the red things you see every day? I mean, that Homer Simpson mug on your desk over there, the one with all your pens in . . . that’s got bits of red on it.
ME: I’m okay with bits of red. It’s only when there’s a big solid lump of it that it really gets to me. Like if someone’s wearing a red coat or something. And it doesn’t happen all the time either.
DOC: What do you mean?
ME: Sometimes I can see the scary colors and they don’t do anything to me at all, and other times they only bother me a bit. But on scary-color days . . . that’s when it’s really bad.
DOC: What other colors are scary?
ME: Black, blue . . . purple sometimes.
DOC: Do they fill your head with frightening things in the same way that red does?
ME: Yeah.
DOC: What does blackness fill your head with?
ME: Death, darkness, night, nothingness . . .
DOC: Blue?
ME: The sea, lakes, and rivers . . .
DOC: What is it about the sea that scares you?
ME: Drowning.
DOC: Do you have scary days and nonscary days with these colors too?
ME: Yeah.
DOC: Different days for different colors?
ME: No. A scary-color day is the same for all colors, and so is a nonscary day.
DOC: What kind of day is it today?
ME: Not too bad. Not completely nonscary, but not totally scary either. Somewhere in between.
DOC: And what about all this, Elliot? All your books, the television, your laptop . . .
ME: What about it?
DOC: Well, a few minutes ago, you were telling me about your fear of cars, but if the television was on now, you’d almost certainly come across a car on one of the channels. It might be in a film, an advert, a documentary . . . cars are everywhere on the television. So how can you watch it?
ME: It’s not real. A car on the television isn’t a ton of speeding metal, it’s just a digital image made up of millions of pixels. Pixels can’t kill you.
DOC: Doesn’t it remind you of cars though, like red reminds you of blood?
ME: No.