The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Bobby would sit with his homework spread on the dining room table as Mum saw to things that didn’t need seeing to. There was a distracting stiffness about her actions that was difficult to watch, difficult not to. Bobby guessed that although Tony was still living at home and she was pleased that he’d taken to grownup life, she was also missing him, missing the kid he used to be. It didn’t require a great leap of imagination for Bobby to see things that way; he missed Tony himself. The arguments, the fights, the sharing and the not-sharing, all lost with the unspoken secret of being children together, of finding everything frightening, funny, and new.

  In the spring, Tony passed his driving test and got a proper job at the supermarket as trainee manager. There was a girl called Marion who worked at the checkout. She had skin trouble like permanent sunburn and never looked at you when she spoke. Bobby already knew that Tony was seeing her in the bars at night. He sometimes answered the phone by mistake when she rang, her slow voice saying Is Your Brother Around as Tony came down the stairs from his room looking annoyed. The whole thing was supposed to be a secret, until suddenly Tony started bringing Marion home in the secondhand coupe he’d purchased from the dealers on Main Street.

  Tony and Marion spent the evenings of their courtship sitting in the lounge with Mum and Dad, watching the TV. When Bobby asked why, Tony said that they had to stay in on account of their saving for a little house. He said it with the strange fatalism of grownups. They often talked about the future as though it was already there.

  Sometimes a strange uncle would come around. Dad always turned the TV off as soon as he heard the bell. The uncles were generally fresh-faced and young, their voices high and uneasy. If they came a second time, they usually brought Bobby an unsuitable present, making a big show of hiding it behind their wide backs.

  Then Uncle Lew began to visit more often. Bobby overheard Mum and Dad talking about how good it would be, keeping the same uncle in the family, even if Lew was a little old for our Tony.

  Looking down at him over his cheeks, Lew would ruffle Bobby’s hair with his soft fingers.

  “And how are you, young man?”

  Bobby said he was fine.

  “And what is it you’re going to be this week?” This was Lew’s standard question, a joke of sorts that stemmed from some occasion when Bobby had reputedly changed his mind about his grownup career three or four times in a day.

  Bobby paused. He felt an obligation to be original.

  “Maybe an archaeologist,” he said.

  Lew chuckled. Tony and Marion moved off the settee to make room for him, sitting on the floor with Bobby.

  After a year and a half of courtship, the local paper that his brother had used to sell his bicycle finally announced that Tony, Marion, and Uncle Lew were marrying. Everyone said it was a happy match. Marion showed Bobby the ring. It looked big and bright from a distance, but, close-up he saw that the diamond was tiny, centered in a much larger stub of metal that was cut to make it glitter.

  Some evenings, Dad would fetch some beers for himself, Tony, and Uncle Lew, and let Bobby sip the end of a can to try the flat dark taste. Like most other grownup things, it was a disappointment.

  * * *

  So Tony married Marion. And he never did get around to telling Bobby how it felt to be a grownup. The priest in the church beside the crematorium spoke of the bringing together of families and of how having Uncle Lew for a new generation was a strengthened commitment. Dad swayed in the front pew from nerves and the three whiskies he’d sunk beforehand. Uncle Lew wore the suit he always wore at weddings, battered victim of too much strain on the buttons, too many spilled buffets. There were photos of the families, photos of the bridesmaids, photos of Lew smiling with his arms around the shoulders of the two newlyweds. Photograph the whole bloody lot, Dad said, I want to see where the money went.

  The reception took place at home on the lawn. Having decided to find out what it was like to get drunk, Bobby lost his taste for the warm white wine after one glass. He hovered at the border of the garden. It was an undeniably pretty scene, the awnings, the dresses, the flowers. For once, the boundaries between grownups and children seemed to dissolve. Only Bobby remained outside. People raised their glasses and smiled, drunken uncles swayed awkwardly between the trestle tables. Darkness carried the smell of the car exhaust and the dry fields beyond the houses. Bobby remembered the time when he had watched from his window and the music had beaten smoky wings, when the grownups had flown over the cherry trees that now seemed so small.

  The headlights of the rented limousine swept out of the darkness. Everyone ran to the drive to see Tony and Marion duck into the leather interior. Uncle Lew squeezed in behind them, off with the newlyweds to some secret place. Neighbors who hadn’t been invited came out onto their drives to watch, arms folded against the non-existent chill, smiling. Marion threw her bouquet. It tumbled high over the trees and the rooftops, up through the stars. Grownups oohed and ahhed. The petals bled into the darkness. It dropped back down as a dead thing of grey and plastic. Bobby caught it without thinking; a better, cleaner catch than anything he’d ever managed in the playing fields at school. Everyone laughed—that a kid should do that!—and he blushed furiously. Then the car pulled away, low at the back from the weight of the three passengers and their luggage. The taillights dwindled, were cut out by the bend in the road. Dad swayed and shouted something, his breath reeking. People went inside and the party lingered on, drawing to its stale conclusion.

  Uncle Lew had Tony and Marion’s first child a year later. Mum took Bobby to see the baby at his house when he came out of the hospital a few days after the birth. Uncle Lew lived in town, up on the hill on the far side of the river. Mum was nervous about gradient parking and always used the big pay and display down by the library. From there, you had to cut through the terraced houses, then up the narrowly winding streets that formed the oldest part of town. The houses were mostly grey pebbledash with deepset windows, yellowed lace curtains, and steps leading though steep gardens. The hill always seemed steeper than it probably was to Bobby; he hated visiting.

  Uncle Lew was grinning, sitting in his usual big chair by the bay window. The baby was a mewing thing. It smelled of soap and sick. Marion was taking the drugs to make her lactate, and everything was apparently going well. Bobby peered at the baby lying cradled in her arms. He tried to offer her the red plastic rattle Mum had made him buy. Everyone smiled at that. Then there was tea and rock cakes that Bobby managed to avoid. Uncle Lew’s house was always dustlessly neat, but it had a smell of neglect that seemed to emanate from behind the old-fashioned green cupboards in the kitchen. Bobby guessed that the house was simply too big for him; too many rooms.

  “Are you still going to be an archaeologist?” Uncle Lew asked, leaning forward from his big chair to take both of Bobby’s hands. He was wearing a dressing gown with neatly pressed pajamas underneath but for a moment the buttons parted and Bobby glimpsed wounded flesh.

  The room went smilingly silent; he was obviously expected to say more than simply no or yes. “I’d like to grow up,” he said, “before I decide.”

  The grownups all laughed. Then the baby started to cry. Grateful for the distraction, Bobby went out through the kitchen and into the grey garden, where someone’s father had left a fork and spade on the crazy paving, the job of lifting out the weeds half-done. Bobby was still young enough to pretend that he wanted to play.

  * * *

  Then adolescence came. It was a perplexing time for Bobby, a grimy anteroom leading to the sudden glories of growing up. He watched the hair grow on his body, felt his face inflame with pimples, heard his voice change to an improbable whine before finally settling on an octave that left him sounding forever like someone else. The grownups themselves always kept their bodies covered, their personal actions impenetrably discreet. Even in the lessons and the chats, the slide-illuminated talks in the nudging darkness of the school assembly hall, Bobby sensed that the teachers were disg
usted by what happened to children’s bodies, and by the openness with which it did so. The things older children got up to, messy tricks that nature made them perform. Periods. Masturbation. Sex. The teachers mouthed the words like an improbable disease. Mum and Dad both said Yes they remembered, they knew exactly how it was … but they didn’t want to touch him any longer, acted awkwardly when he was in the room, did and said things that reminded him of how they were with Tony in his later childhood years.

  Bobby’s first experience of sex was with May Barton, one afternoon when a crowd of school friends had cycled out to the meadows beyond town. The other children had headed back down to the road whilst Bobby was fixing a broken spoke on his back wheel. When he turned around, May was there alone. It was, he realized afterward, a situation she’d deliberately engineered. She said Let’s do it, Bobby. Squinting, her head on one side. You haven’t done it before, have you? Not waiting for an answer, she knelt down in the high clover and pulled her dress up over her head. Her red hair tumbled over her freckled shoulders. She asked Bobby to touch her breasts. Go on, you must have seen other boys doing this. Which he had. But still he was curious to touch her body, to find her nipples hardening in his palms. For a moment she seemed different in the wide space of the meadow, stranger almost than a grownup, even though she was just a girl. Here, she said, Bobby, and here. Down on the curving river, a big barge with faded awnings seemed not to be moving. A tractor was slicing a field from green to brown, the chatter of its engine lost on the warm wind. The town shimmered. Rooftops reached along the road. His hand traveled down her belly, explored the slippery heat of her arousal as her own fingers began to part the buttons of his shirt and jeans, did things that only his own hands had done before. He remembered the slide shows at school, the teacher’s bored, disgusted voice, the fat kids sniggering more than anyone at the back, as though the whole thing had nothing to do with them.

  May Barton lay down. Bobby had seen the drawings and slides, watched the mice and rabbits in the room at the back of the biology class. He knew what to do. The clover felt cool and green on his elbows and knees. She felt cool too, strangely uncomfortable, like wrestling with someone who didn’t want to fight. A beetle was climbing a blade of grass at her shoulder. When she began to shudder, it flicked its wings and vanished.

  After that, Bobby tried sex with several of the other girls in the neighborhood, although he tended to return most often to May. They experimented with the variations you were supposed to be able to do, found that most of them were uncomfortable and improbable, but generally not impossible.

  Mum caught Bobby and May having sex one afternoon in the fourth year summer holidays when a canceled committee meeting brought her home early. Peeling off her long white cotton gloves as she entered the lounge, she found them naked in the curtained twilight, curled together like two spoons. She just clicked her tongue, turned and walked back out into the hall, her eyes blank, as if she’d just realized she’d left something in the car. She never mentioned the incident afterward—which was tactful, but to Bobby also seemed unreal, as though the act of sex had made him and May Barton momentarily invisible.

  There was a sequel to this incident when Bobby returned home one evening without his key. He went through the gate round the back, to find the French windows open. He’d expected lights on in the kitchen, the murmur of the TV in the lounge. But everything was quiet. He climbed the stairs. Up on the landing, where the heat of the day still lingered, mewing sounds came from his parents’ bedroom. The door was ajar. He pushed it wide—one of those things you do without ever being able to explain why—and walked in. It was difficult to make out the partnership of the knotted limbs. Dad seemed to be astride Uncle Lew, Mum half underneath. The sounds they made were another language. Somehow, they sensed his presence. Legs and arms untwined like dropped coils of rope.

  It all happened very quickly. Mum got up and snatched her dressing gown from the bedside table. On the bed, Dad scratched at his groin and Uncle Lew made a wide cross with his forearms to cover his womanly breasts.

  “It’s okay,” Bobby said, taking a step back toward the door, taking another. The room reeked of mushrooms. Mum still hadn’t done up her dressing gown and Bobby could see her breasts swaying as she walked, the dark triangle beneath her belly. She looked little different from all the girls Bobby had seen. Through the hot waves of his embarrassment, he felt a twinge of sadness and familiarity.

  “It’s okay,” he said again, and closed the door.

  He never mentioned the incident. But it helped him understand Mum’s reasons for not saying anything about finding him in the lounge with May. There were plenty of words for sex, ornate words and soft words and words that came out angry, words for what the kids got up to and special words too for the complex congress that grownups indulged in. But you couldn’t use any of them as you used other words; a space of silence surrounded them, walled them into a dark place that was all their own.

  Bobby grew. He found to his surprise that he was one of the older kids at school, towering over the chirping freshmen with their new blazers, having sex with May and the other girls, taking three-hour exams at the ends of term, worrying about growing up. He remembered that this had seemed a strange undersea world when Tony had inhabited it; now that he had reached it himself, this last outpost of childhood, it hardly seemed less so.

  The strangeness was shared by all the children of his age. It served to bring them together. Bobby remembered that it had been the same for Tony’s generation. Older kids tended to forget who had dumped on whom in junior high school, the betrayals and the fights behind the bicycle sheds. Now, every experience had a sell-by date, even if the date itself wasn’t clear.

  In the winter term, when Bobby was fifteen, the children all experienced a kind of growing up in reverse, an intensification of childhood. There was never any hurry to get home after school. A crowd of them would head into the bare dripping woods or sit on the steps of the monument in the park. Sometimes they would gather at Albee’s Quick Restaurant and Take Away next to the bridge. It was like another world outside, beyond the steamed windows, grownups drifting past in cars or on foot, greying the air with breath and motor exhaust. Inside, lights gleamed on red seats and cheap wood paneling, the air smelled of wet shoes and coffee, thinned occasionally by a cold draft and the broken tinkle of the bell as a new arrival joined the throng.

  “I won’t go through with it,” May Barton said one afternoon when the sidewalks outside were thick with slush that was forecasted to freeze to razored puddles overnight.

  No one needed to ask what she meant.

  “Jesus, it was disgusting!”

  May stared into her coffee. That afternoon in biology they had seen the last in a series of films entitled The Miracle Of Life. Half way through, the pink and black cartoons had switched over to scenes that purported to come from real life. They had watched a baby tumble wet onto the green sheet from an uncle’s open belly, discreet angles of grownups making love. That had been bad enough—I mean, we didn’t ask to see this stuff!—but the last five minutes had included shots of a boy and a girl in the process of growing up. The soundtrack had been discreet, but every child in the classroom had felt the screams.

  The voice-over told them things they had read a hundred times in the school biology textbooks that automatically fell open at the relevant pages. Chapter thirteen—unlucky for some, as many a schoolroom wit had quipped. How the male’s testicles and scrotal sac contracted back inside the body, hauled up on some fleshy block and tackle. How the female’s ovaries made their peristaltic voyage along the fallopian tubes to nestle down in the useless womb, close to the equally useless cervix. A messy story that had visited them all in their dreams.

  “Where the hell am I supposed to be when all this is going on?” someone asked. “I’m certainly not going to be there.”

  Silence fell around the corner table in Albee’s. Every kid had their own bad memory. An older brother or sister who had had a
hard time growing up, bloodied sheets in the laundry bin, a door left open at the wrong moment. The espresso machine puttered. Albee sighed and wiped the counter. His beer belly strained at a grey undershirt—he was almost fat enough to be an uncle. Almost, but not quite. Every kid could tell the difference. It was in the way they smelled, the way they moved. Albee wasn’t an uncle—he was just turning to fat, some ordinary guy with a wife and kids back at home, and an uncle of his own with a lawn that needed mowing and crazy paving with the weeds growing through. He was just getting through life, earning a living of sorts behind his counter, putting up with Bobby and the rest of the kids from school as long as they had enough money to buy coffee.

  Harry, who was a fat kid, suggested they all go down to the bowling alley. But no one else was keen. Harry was managing to keep up a jollity that the other children had lost. They all assumed that he and his friend Jonathan were the most likely candidates in their year to grow into uncles. The complicated hormonal triggers threw the dice in their favor. And it was a well-known fact that uncles had it easy, that growing up for them was a slow process, like putting on weight. But for everyone, even for Harry, the facts of life were closing in. After Christmas, at the start of the new term, their parents would all receive the brown envelopes telling them that the doctor would be around once a week.

  The cafe door opened and closed, letting in the raw evening air as the kids began to drift away. A bus halted at the newsstand opposite, grownup faces framed at the windows, top deck and bottom, ordinary and absorbed. When it pulled away, streetlight and shadow filled the space behind. Underneath everything, Bobby thought, lies pain, uncertainty, and blood. He took a pull at the coffee he’d been nursing the last half hour. It had grown a skin and tasted cold, almost as bitter as the milk Mum made him drink every morning.