by Jon Bauer
A last look at her house then I’m running home, the burning chemical plant showing up orange in the distance. The quiet wail of sirens.
23
Robert can come out of hospital today. Plus the police are here again with the Mandy social worker.
Dad doesn’t join in. ‘Lots to do round the house.’
He’s making everything Robert proof. There’s a folddownable seat thing in the shower now just for Robert but I like to stand on it cos it makes the shower sprayer come almost right onto my head, the water really noisy in my brain like I’m inside a shaken up can of Coke. Plus I can’t really think about anything with the water noisy and hitting my head.
There’s a metal thing around Robert’s bed now too, like in a hospital. To stop him falling out. Dad calls it a Robert proof fence.
I don’t mind Robert coming home, I don’t think. Except he might not if the investigation decides it’s our fault he fell off the ladder.
I go into his room and there are tools and leads all over the floor and Dad’s head is under Robert’s bed, a bit of his bum crack showing. Normally that makes me laugh.
‘Dad?’
He turns round then goes back to what he’s doing. ‘Hey,’ he says.
‘Why aren’t you shaving anymore? Is it because you’re sad?’
He stops for a second then carries on. Looks like he’s going to put squidgy stuff on all the sharp bits on Robert’s bed. Robert might fit a lot now apparently. And he won’t be going to school for a while and he’ll never go back to the same one and we only just got him his school uniform. I’ll probably have to grow into it.
‘Can’t you go and play or something? Your dad’s got a lot to do and Robert’ll be home in a while. You done the things Mum told you to do?’
I nod.
‘Have you?’
‘Yes.’
‘All of them?’
I nod. ‘Yes.’
‘Good boy.’
I’m staring at his drill. I try not to but I imagine it drilling into my hand or my head. Or I’m picturing picking it up and putting it into Dad sort of suddenly accidentally. The drill going right between one of those spine lumps in the middle of his back which are a bit like a dinosaur’s. He gets them when he leans forward.
Thinking about doing that sort of thing always makes me nervous and anxious and hold my hands as if I might suddenly do it. I don’t want to do it. Maybe my body does.
‘Dad?’
He sighs and stops working but doesn’t turn round. Most of his head is under the bed still. ‘Look, I’m not shaving because I’m not being paid to shave for now. Until I find a new job.’ He turns and gives me a fake sort of smile for a second. ‘You don’t like my beard?’
I shake my head and he shrugs, goes back to working.
‘What you doing?’
His voice sounds harder then and he says ‘I’m fixing this soft foam to his bed, once I get the drill plugged in, there’s no fucking power sockets in this house.’
Rude word. ‘But he’ll get better?’
His shoulders start wobbling like I’ve made him laugh without trying. He stays under the bed for a bit and takes a deep breath. Then he comes out and wipes his face, which turns into a big hair rummaging session.
‘Shall I make you a cup of tea, Dad? How about I make you a cup of tea!’
He shakes his head at the floor.
I get scared when there’s crying. Everyone’s crying all the time now and I wonder how many millimetres.
I jump when he starts the drill, the wood bits landing all over Robert’s bed sheets. Dad stops, says a bad word, then rips the sheets back and they’ve put a plastic cover on Robert’s bed too.
He starts drilling again. Then he stops, half looking round at me.
‘I will have that cup of tea.’
‘Ok!’ Black with none, cos of his weight. I start to go.
‘Better give yer dad some milk and a couple of sugars, for strength. And see if you can’t sneak me a biscuit or three.’
‘Ok.’
He turns away from me and leans over the place he’s about to drill, the drill nose already in the right spot where he made a mark. ‘Hey …’ he says.
‘Yeah?’
‘I fixed up your bike wheel for you yesterday, she’s going like a dream now. No need to tell yer mum.’
I go to say something but he’s already started up the drill.
When Robert arrives he looks like a different person even though he only banged his head. Like he’s been replaced, a spy. And he’s always making faces as if he’s a puppet and somebody isn’t pulling his strings right. Even his hair is different and there’s a big scar on the back of his head with angry metal things in and it scares me. They shaved off a bit of his hair and Dad tries to crack funnies about Frankenstein but Mum gets all explosive.
Robert can’t sit still and makes lots of noises and sort of seems happier than he did. He gets excited easily and has this thing happening with his mouth as if he’s chewing his tongue or his cheek. Almost like Mum’s angry face but cos of happy.
He does do angry too, which is new. And cries and gets upset which is also mainly new. The bang must have loosened everything in him that was stuck and couldn’t come out.
He’s had his sound turned up.
He takes up all Mum’s attention now but I don’t sort of mind so much anymore. I watch TV a lot. Mum and Dad say I have to look after myself more and be good and quiet and just that basically I’ve got some quick growing up to do. Which probably explains the growing pains.
Mum and Robert have the same bedtime now. I stay up later than both of them. I ask Dad if Robert is better at all and he doesn’t really answer even though he’s always shouting at the politicians on telly and saying ‘He hasn’t answered the question!’ Sometimes he throws his slipper at the TV. Which means I have to go get it for him. Then he ends up throwing it again.
When he does this Robert usually squeals. Robert squeals a lot. Sometimes when he’s happy, sometimes when he’s angry. Sometimes when he’s sad. Sometimes he’s all three.
Robert’s noise wakes me up in the mornings now, not Dad’s reversing.
Dad’s supposed to be looking for a new job since he lost his last one. Any job. He doesn’t even need to do balance the books work now. Mum says he’s dragging his heels. Plus his beard is quite long which must be why she won’t kiss him.
My bedwetting makes everyone angry but it isn’t my fault, it’s God’s.
‘Don’t you dare!’ Mum said when I said that. ‘Don’t. You. Dare.’ Then she hugged me so hard my eyes popped out.
Mostly I watch TV in my room. Normally in my lion’s den holding my eyes up close to the zip so I can see, and it’s like really heavy eyelashes I’m looking through, as if I’m Madonna.
I’m upstairs and Dad is in the lounge eating. Mum has headphones on in front of a little TV outside Robert’s room after his bedtime. She lies on a couch in the corridor that’s too big really and you sort of have to squash by. I like running over it. Sometimes Mum’s still there in the morning if she isn’t fighting with Robert in the bathroom. And sometimes Dad goes and whispers to her late at night when I’m half asleep, trying to convince her about something.
They don’t bother to go out to the car to argue anymore.
Robert wears nappies now and Mum and Dad have to change them. They’re enormous and he’s always taking them off and Mum getting upset and angry with him. She does that a lot, gets upset and angry at the same time. Like she’s confused. Robert takes them off and Mum has to be careful how she handles him. He headbutted her once and she had a shiner for ages.
Robert is younger than me these days, even though he’s older. I’m the eldest now and I like it.
Dad says it will all get better.
Newsflash! If I go a week without wetting the bed I get any toy I want and I definitely want a remote control car like Ralph and Simon have. They’ve got this really cool enormous suspension and are really
fast, only the batteries don’t last that long.
Mum and Dad won’t let me drink anything after about 5 o’clock and sometimes I get so thirsty but Dad says drinking anything after 5 is silly cos we may as well cut out the middle man and pour it straight on my bed.
Mum takes Robert back to the hospital heaps of the time. For his fits. They might have to snip his brain so that one side doesn’t talk to the other anymore. Dad showed me with a cauliflower. He makes the best cheese sauce.
This week I’d made it up to three nights without wetting the bed but Robert’s parents are coming today.
I’m the only 8 year old I know who can use a washing machine. I’m growing up fast and there’s even a little stepladder for me to be able to hang up the sheets in the garden. I like using a chair instead.
It is not me wetting the bed it’s my bladder but when I tell Dad that he says ‘Well, then it won’t be me spanking you but my hand.’
I’m allowed to eat dinner in my room in front of the TV these days and use the cooker to cook for myself. I make things like cheese omelette and sometimes my recipes still taste good without ketchup.
Robert’s parents will be here soon and Mum looks like Frankenstein in a dress cos Robert is taking everything out of us. I sleep with tissue paper in my ears to stop Robert’s nightmares and screaming. Everything in the house is very loud or very quiet nowadays. Robert won’t be helping me with my homework anymore.
Plus Mum isn’t letting me fix my own wet bed sheets today but shouting at me to pull myself together and that I’m 8 years old and when she was 8 she wasn’t wetting the effing bed. Only she doesn’t say effing, she says the word, then she comes and gives me a hug, Dad running in with a Robert nappy brown all over his hands and Mum just lets me go and slumps down right in front of the washing machine and she’s holding my wet bed sheets and is going to cry.
‘Don’t cry, Mum.’ But I’m crying too.
Now I can hear them shouting at each other downstairs, even from inside my lion’s den.
I can hold my breath under water for forty seconds. I have to block my ears if it’s in a swimming pool though in case my skull fills up with water and I sink. My head is already the heaviest bit of me. Except maybe my legs. Heads weigh a lot.
It’s nearly time for Robert’s parents and I’m on the toilet when Mum barges in and takes some of her gliding ice-skating tablets then dashes out.
I spy from the stairs when they come. There’s the big Mandy social worker woman with them who kind of runs the show and I giggle a little cos when she’s gone I know Dad will say the thing about ‘boobs like zeppelins’.
Zeppelin was a famous woman during the war.
Behind the zeppelin woman is Robert’s parents. I remember them from intensive care. They’re skinny people who are all pale and shifty like baddies in films. They see me which is strange because nobody normally notices me up in this spying spot when they come in the house. But they do and I want to run away but I don’t. They’re the ones that caused it all and I’m worried about them knowing where we live in case they come and steal Robert back. Or me even.
The mum looks quite a lot like Robert but the man doesn’t, even though he’s a man and Robert’s a boy. It’s the mum Robert looks like. Dad was the one who answered the door, Mum is in the garden with Robert.
After they go under me where I am on the landing I run to my bedroom and stand on the bed with my shoes on and there are no sheets just the slippery plastic cover and Mum outside struggling to keep Robert still and a pack of his biscuits there and him all slippery like he’s covered in plastic too.
I’m scared Mum will cry but I also want her to because then Dad will beat up Robert’s parents and Dad looks like he could take Robert’s dad unless he has a knife which he looks the type to have.
I run downstairs to warn Dad but stop to get a knife for him so it’s a fair fight. Usually the knife holder sits on the surface next to the sink but I get there and it’s been moved. I look for it and think maybe they hid it so the parents couldn’t pull a fast one.
Now I can see the knives up high out of reach. Dad says I’m tall for my height. He always says that cos he tried to say I was tall for my age once but it came out wrong and now he always says it the wrong way. I like being tall for my height though.
I get a chair and put it in the right spot and climb up and hear shouting outside already and Dad doesn’t have a knife. Mum says ‘It’s not about the money. How DARE you say that to me! This is about ROBERT!’
The chair isn’t quite high enough for me to reach the knives up on the cupboard. I stand on tippy toes and in one second the chair wobbles over and I feel this sharpness and a noise in my head, a purple flash and I’m on the ground. I jump straight up and hop around squeezing my doodle, holding on to my bladder, bouncing on tiptoes until the white light pain stops but it won’t stop. My leg is really hurting inside my thigh, just below my important bits and I think I caught it on the hot tap cos the tap is running a bit.
My leg is damp.
I quickly write on a piece of paper HE MIGHT HAVE A KNIFE. Three Lips Macavoy knows these things. I fold the paper and run out and the women are up close to each other and pointing and the dads are quite a way away talking and watching, Robert eating biscuits and looking up at the clouds, on his back in the grass with this happiest look on his face and I jump over him holding my doodle through my pants. I run over to Dad and Robert is all squealy about me jumping over him. I hand Dad the note like they do on the news sometimes, handing it to the newsreader. I tell him to read it. I jump over Robert again and he squeals so I jump over him again and again until I’m all puffed out and his mum is shouting so loud she isn’t even making sense anymore and Mum is laughing in her face and Dad is between them and he hasn’t read my note. He’s got his chequebook out.
My leg hurts and is wet but I don’t look.
Then the zeppelin social worker comes out of the house and the toilet is flushing and she gets between everyone and telling them in a big, boomy teacher’s voice to ‘Sit down and air your feelings like ADULTS.’
She has this voice and so everyone sort of looks like they might sit but they don’t sit. The mum goes to pick up Robert but he cries and holds out his arms to my mum.
This is like a moment off the TV that Mum always covers her mouth for.
Mandy picks him up instead and I can tell he’s heavy for her cos she looks like she’s going to tear something. She hands him to the dad.
‘Go inside!’ Dad tells me and I sprint indoors and bounce around holding my bladder shut and scared of the pain in my leg. I look down and it’s a little bit red on my trousers. I run upstairs and stand on my bed and watch their mouths moving and there’s lots of crying.
How
many
millimetres?
My window is breathing up fast and it seems like Mandy and Robert are the only ones not crying. My thermometer says 21 and the bad mum gets up and walks away and Dad says something to her and she turns halfway round and is shouting. She looks ugly.
Then her face changes and she holds out her hand to the bad dad and he digs in his pockets and gives her something. She gazes at Robert like Dad looks at Mum, then goes into our house.
I run top speed through to the front, open the curtains and the window is open and Robert’s mum comes out there and stands on the spot that … and she’s smoking.
Cigarettes are death sticks, Mum says. I stick my head right out and some of the smoke reaches me but it smells of different smoke than I’ve ever smelt before. I hold my breath cos I don’t want to die.
Robert’s mum is crying like it’s the end of the world. And she’s pacing a bit and smoking really fast. Adults look funny when they cry cos they’re out of practice.
I can see right down her top from here. She looks up and I bang my head on the window and have to rub it really fast which is all you can do when you bang your head. And frown.
‘What’s your name?’ she says, wiping her eye
s with her hands and one of them has the cigarette thing in it and I think she’s going to set her hair on fire.
‘Do you love Robert?’
She starts flooding again and nods at me, her face a funny shape. Then her mouth makes words but the sound doesn’t come. I can tell she’s trying to say ‘very much’. Her lips are this shape.
‘Why aren’t you his mummy then if you love him?’ Which makes her look like a tree that’s just had the last cut made out of it and it’s the tiny moment before it has started falling. I like doing that to her face.
‘I am,’ she says, her voice all higher like she’s in the choir or holding her balls.
‘It’s your fault he’s ill.’
TIIMMMMMBERRRRRRRRRR!
Some people look really ugly when they cry. She looks older than my mum. Dad always says that people who look older than they should had a really tough paper round as a kid. That’s why.
Her face looks like lemon tastes.
She wipes her eyes again and her stomach does that judder thing. ‘I can’t be his everyday mum right now that’s all.’ She says it in a crying voice.
‘Why not?’
She thinks for a long time, her arms round her body to stop it shaking. Her cigarette thing might set fire to her clothes now. I might like that. Then she looks up at me. ‘Some people find life a bit harder than other people do. Not everyone’s got what your parents have. Silver spoon. Some of us have a lot on their plate.’
‘My mum says everyone has a lot on their plate but some people just have small appetites.’
She looks at me and sniffs, smiles this sort of smile.
‘And no table manners,’ I say, remembering the rest of the saying.
‘I think you’ll find Robert’s ill because he was left home alone, you jumped up little shit.’ She wipes her eyes.
‘That’s a rude word,’ I tell her. I’m braver up here. ‘Do you still think it’s the 60s?’
‘What?’
‘Dad says you and Robert’s dad still think it’s —’
Zeppelin Mandy appears down there looking up at what bad mum is looking at and I bang my head again and go inside and am rubbing at it really hard. My jeans are wetter and sticky.