I run back towards our stairwell. He has frightened me and I run home, that’s how I want it to look. And perhaps I really am scared of the caretaker, but an explorer never runs away. Just before I reach the door, I turn right and race past the bike sheds. I stop and listen. I can hear cars in the street and a bird chirping in one of the trees in the courtyard, but no keys.
I stay there for a while just to be sure; I count inside my head, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, but still no keys. I’m about to move. I plan to sneak along the wall when I suddenly feel a sharp pain in my neck like I’m being stung by a wasp. My eyes well up, mostly because it’s taken me by surprise. I raise my hand to touch the spot where it hurts. Then I hear someone laugh; quietly, at first, as if he’s trying to suppress it. The laughter grows louder, the bushes rustle, and a boy appears among the branches. He’s a few years older than me; he has dark, shoulder-length hair and wears a denim jacket with fringes. In his hand he holds a white plastic peashooter wrapped in red and blue tape; it’s the longest peashooter I’ve ever seen.
“Sorry,” he says, but he doesn’t stop laughing.
“That hurt,” I tell him.
“You speak funny, what’s your name?”
This is a question you should always respond to quickly, that much I’ve learned.
“Peter.” I think it’s a good name. I could easily be a Peter.
“Have you met the caretaker?”
“Yes.”
“He eats little children. Smaller than you, I mean. He makes soup with them. He waits outside the hospital and when a baby is stillborn — do you know what that means?”
“Yes.”
“Never mind. Where do you go to school?”
I don’t want to tell him. I want to get away now, back to the apartment.
“I asked you where.”
“We’ve just moved here.”
“Which school did you use to go to?”
“I don’t go to school,” I say, and regret it instantly.
“How old are you?”
“Seven.”
“Then you have to go to school — unless you’re a retard. Then you go to a special school where they teach you to make clothes pegs. Are you a retard?”
I shake my head. I’m almost certain I’m not a retard.
“So which school do you go to?”
I make no reply.
“We’re going to be friends,” he says. “You and me.”
I walk back towards the apartment. I walk as slowly as I can, I don’t want to run. When I reach for the handle, I hear something hit the door right by my head.
When I lie in my bed that night, I miss the sound of my dad’s voice. I miss his fairy tales. My eyes are half-closed when he comes home. I don’t let my eyelids close fully until he has lit a cigarette and opened a beer.
My dad says that most people don’t see the world. We’re on the bus, sitting at the back. His voice is hushed. I’m glad he’s speaking only to me. I’m the only one who gets to hear his words.
He says: “Most people only see what they want to see. They’re afraid to see the world as it really is. Are you afraid?”
I gulp, then I shake my head. I can tell from the sound of his voice that this is important.
“Of course you’re not,” he says, and hugs me so tightly I can feel the metal buttons on his denim jacket. “Most people stumble blindly through the world. Do you remember what I told you about electricity? That we use it when we make toast and turn on the light?”
“Yes.”
Last night my dad let me flick the light switch until the bulb blew and we had to eat our dinner by candlelight. He wasn’t cross because I’d learned something.
“Have you ever seen electricity?”
I shake my head.
“We know it’s in the wires, but we can’t see it. And yet people believe it exists. Their television sets would die without electricity. Imagine them just sitting there staring.”
He laughs and I laugh with him.
“Just because something’s hard to see doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
Slowly, the bus fills with passengers. My dad looks out the window. At first I think he has finished talking, but then he leans close to me, his breath tickling my neck.
“It’s not because people can’t see. They’ve always been able to see. Books and fairy tales tell such stories. But people got scared. They lost their courage. Now they pretend they never see anything. If they walk down the stairs to the basement late one night and hear a strange sound, they just laugh it off. They laugh at themselves because there couldn’t possibly be anything there. They’ve made up their minds that there can’t be.”
My dad looks at me, squeezes my shoulder.
“I’m telling you this because you’re a big boy now.”
“I’m seven.”
“Yes, you’re a big boy.”
I look out the window. I try very hard to see the world the way my dad wants me to, but I’m not sure what I’m meant to be looking for.
“Shouldn’t I be in school, Dad?”
“Would you like to be? You already know how to read.”
I nod. I’ve been able to read for as long as I can remember.
“Yes, but there might be other things.”
“Such as?”
“Math. Things you learn at school.”
“Yes , but you know it’s too late to start school this year, don’t you?”
I nod. It’s April. April is the cruellest month, my dad always says.
He looks at me for a long time. Scrutinizes me. As if he’s amused by something and might have shared it with me if I’d been older. I can’t wait to be older.
Outside, the city glides past. It’s so big that I never see the same people twice.
My dad ruffles my hair.
“If you want to go to school, you’ll go to school.”
Little by little I get to know the city. It’s out there. Right outside the courtyard. Through the archway. Slowly, one street at a time. Less than that. From here to the corner, thirty-one steps. From the corner to the newsstand, fifty-two steps.
Always holding my dad’s hand. Sometimes we just go for a walk, other times he stops to buy tobacco and cigarette paper. We buy a big sack of potatoes from the grocers and the two of us lug it all the way home.
Slowly the apartment becomes “home” — as in “Do you want to go home?” or “Where’s your teddy? It’s at home.”
Every morning my dad gets up early and we eat breakfast together. From the window I watch him cross the courtyard and disappear through the archway. I wash our plates, get dressed, and go downstairs.
I’m still an explorer, but now I keep to the bushes and I always listen for the jingle of keys.
I discover new nooks and crannies in the courtyard. I find a plant growing between two paving stones, it has purple leaves and tiny white dots on its stem.
When the sun is at its highest, I go back to the apartment. I know the courtyard is no longer mine then. The boy with the dark hair is the first to arrive, then women on bicycles with shopping bags and crying babies.
I sit in the kitchen, where I draw and wait for my dad.
When he finally walks through the door, he doesn’t say anything. He shuffles over to the table and flops down on the chair opposite me. I know exactly where he has been. All day he has been walking around the city asking “Any jobs going?” and been told no, hundreds of times. He smokes half a cigarette before reaching for my drawings.
I’m lying in bed; my dad has moved a chair from the kitchen into my bedroom. I can hear a television from one of the other apartments and a toilet being flushed. I can smell tobacco on his clothes.
“Where were we?” he asks me.
“They had just escaped the White Men.”
“
Yes, so they had.”
Every night my dad tells me a little more of the same fairy tale.
The story of the King and the Prince who no longer have a home.
The King and Prince have gone out into the world to find the White Queen and kill her. With an arrow or a knife, a single stab through her heart will lift the curse. They’re the only ones who can do it because the King and the Prince are the last people who can see the world as it truly is. Only they haven’t been blinded by the Queen’s witchcraft.
“Is she really called the White Queen?” I ask my dad.
“No, of course not. She has a name, everyone has a name. But when she was little, she looked so much like her sister that one of them dressed in white and the other in black so you could tell them apart. And the name stuck.”
Two weeks later my dad gets a job.
He comes home one Friday with an advance of his pay and we eat Wiener schnitzel with potatoes and melted butter for dinner. My dad drinks beer and laughs, and I drink so much soda I need to go to the bathroom all the time. My dad comes with me down to the bathroom, I’m too scared to go there on my own after dark.
Monday morning my dad gets up early and goes to work. He doesn’t come home until late in the afternoon, then his clothes are soaked with sweat and he smells of wood. His hands are covered with splinters. I grow the fingernails on my right hand so I can tease out the tiny wooden splinters that stick out of his skin.
Every other week my dad gets paid and we celebrate. And every other week we go down to the caretaker to pay the rent.
“When it’s cash, there’s nothing to stop people from taking off,” the caretaker says, and grins.
When I’m with my dad, I’m not scared of him. Then he looks like a small whale in overalls.
“Though I know you’d never do anything like that.” He grins again.
I’m sitting on the back stairs with my legs crossed. The old man who lives below always spends a long time in the bathroom, hours sometimes. He uses old-fashioned expressions as he wails. I’ve met him once. His face was contorted. He pointed at his fly in the grey fabric and said that everything down there was ruined. Everything was rotten. Then he apologized.
Sometimes I pee in the kitchen sink. I have to stand on a chair in order to reach. But the sink is often blocked and I don’t want the whole apartment to stink of pee when my dad comes home.
The tears well up in my eyes. I haven’t wet my pants for over four years and I’ve no intention of starting now. Slowly I walk down the stairs, hoping all the time that the door to the bathroom will open.
It’s the afternoon and the courtyard should be full of children playing. I don’t know if it’s the caretaker who keeps them away or if they’re scared of the boy with the dark hair. Every now and then I hear children’s voices out of one of the open windows. But only very briefly, as if they’ve reminded one another to be quiet. I find a corner between a bush and a wooden shed. I manage to undo my trousers just in time. I hold my breath and paint the tree with the stream. While I pee, I listen for the jingle of the caretaker’s keys, but all I can hear is a bird tweeting and cars driving in the distance. I carry on peeing. There’s a rustle in the bushes behind me. The voice is high-pitched and a little hurt.
“I thought you were my friend?”
It’s the boy with the dark hair.
“You haven’t been down here, I haven’t seen you,” he says.
I quickly zip up my trousers.
He scrapes the soil with the toe of his shoe as if he’s drawing a picture.
“I thought we were friends, but you’ve been avoiding me, haven’t you?”
“No.”
He pushes the dark hair behind his ears in a way I’ve only ever seen girls do.
“Please would you be my friend?” He tilts his head slightly.
“Yes.”
“And you won’t do a runner, will you?”
“No.”
“Right then, we’re friends,” he says, and takes a tennis ball from his jacket pocket.
“Let’s play Hit the Monkey, do you know it?”
“Yes.”
“You’re lying!”
“No.”
“Yes, you are. I know you are because I invented Hit the Monkey. It’s a really good game. Do you want to be the monkey?”
I shake my head.
“Are you sure? Are you quite sure . . . ?”
When I don’t reply, he shrugs his shoulders.
“Then I’ll have to be the monkey. Too bad for you!”
I follow him to a corner where there’s a small patch of worn tarmac. He stands with his back against the wall.
“Can you count?”
“Yes.”
“Walk backwards while you count to ten.”
When he’s satisfied with my position, he rolls the ball to me.
“If it’s a bit slippery and gross it’s because a dog chewed it once.”
He stretches out his arms and legs.
“Now you have to hit the monkey.”
I throw the ball and hit his chest. I’m convinced that he’ll try to dodge the ball, but he doesn’t move.
“You throw like a girl,” he says. “The game’s no fun then.”
He picks up the ball.
“Remember that if you miss, then you’re the monkey. Remember that.” He rolls the ball back to me.
I throw it again, a little harder now. He doesn’t move this time, either, just stands there smiling as the ball hits his shoulder.
“Not bad, but I’m sure you can throw harder.”
I hit his stomach. It must leave a red bruise under his T-shirt.
“You’re getting good at hitting the monkey. But you need to throw even harder.”
Each time I throw the ball harder. I hit his stomach, his chest, and his arm. I clip his ear.
“Hit the monkey,” he shouts. “Hit the damn monkey!”
The ball leaves a large red mark right under his left eye. He blinks away the tears.
“Good throw,” he says. “I’m so glad you’re my friend. Now hit the damn monkey.”
I throw the ball again; it flies past his right ear and hits the wall. I clearly missed.
The boy smiles as the ball bounces lazily across the tarmac.
“You didn’t hit the monkey, now that’s not good.”
He rubs his cheek, massages the red bump that’s merging with his swollen lips.
“It’s my fault. The monkey moved and it’s not allowed.”
He rotates the ball in his hands. “And it’s filled with dog spittle, too.” Then he rolls it back to me.
“It’s a foul ball. Hit the monkey.”
I’m drawing when my dad comes home.
“I want you to see the city,” he says.
We go out in the early evening.
There is a big greengrocer’s a few streets from our apartment.
The man in the shop cuts off a piece of cheese floating in a cloudy liquid. He talks funny and smiles at us as he passes it across the counter. I don’t like it, it’s too salty, but I keep smiling at the man and I force myself to swallow it. My dad gets a small bag of olives and he doesn’t have to pay for it. We walk on.
I ask my dad where he comes from, the greengrocer. He had dark hair and didn’t look like the Chinese man in the chip shop.
“A place completely different from our city. Or maybe not so different after all.”
I notice that my dad now thinks of this as our city and though the city scares me, I hope that we’ll be staying here a little longer.
We carry on walking. Down streets, around corners, past benches and bars where people talk loudly and yellow light spills out through the windows. I’m convinced that the city must end soon. Surely it can’t go on forever? The fields must begin around t
he next corner. Or there will be low concrete buildings, main roads, or motorways. My dad eats olives from the bag and spits out the stones. If we get lost, we can use them to retrace our steps.
We reach a large open square.
“They once sold hay here,” my dad says.
We pass girls in short dresses. Their heels click as they take tiny steps on the spot.
I ask my dad what they’re doing.
“Making a living,” he replies. “Everybody has to make a living.”
I nod. We’ve lived in other places where the girls sold the same thing, though my dad didn’t know that I knew.
He spits out an olive stone and it hits a trash can.
We ride through the city early in the morning. I’m sitting at the front in the bicycle’s large basket; it’s an old, black butcher’s bike my dad has borrowed from the man he works for. The chill of the night still lingers in the air. The sun is rising, but it’s not warm yet and my dad has wrapped me in a blanket. My nose is running and my eyes water, but I’m smiling so much that my lips hurt and my teeth dry out, and I have to moisten them with my tongue. I lie back and look up at the sky. I see gulls high above us. I see clouds big and white as milk.
My dad stands up on the pedals; I can see his head above me.
“What, then, extraordinary stranger, do you love?” he says, looking down at me.
I know what to reply. “I love the clouds — the clouds that pass — yonder — the marvellous clouds.”
We ride under an archway and into a yard. I jump out of the basket.
“If the boss turns up, you should probably make yourself scarce. He doesn’t like children.”
My dad unlocks the door to a small, dark workshop. Many of the windows have been smashed and are boarded up.
At the back of the workshop there’s a door with a huge padlock. I ask my dad what’s behind it. He says it doesn’t matter.
A Fairy Tale Page 2