Was_a novel

by Geoff Ryman

  Jonathan loaded his new friends onto it and then he ran with his silent wagon, ran down the slope of the small artificial hill on which the house rested. The wagon rolled smoothly over the cover of the cesspit, which his mother was always telling him to avoid. He imagined it was a gate into the underworld or an entrance to an underground house, like Peter Pan’s. He ran over the cesspit to the front drive and its broad opening through the white fence that enclosed the Corndale house as if it were a ranch. He left the wagon right in the middle of the entrance where he always did, ready to be flattened.

  The people of Oz walked to Sunday School with him. He hoped that he would see no one else, just them. The Second Line West became the Yellow Brick Road. The circular tin culverts under the driveways seemed full of secrets.

  Jonathan carried his secret into Sunday School. He told no one that the Oz people were with him. They were his friends alone. The Oz people sang “Yes, Jesus Loves Me” to the colored slide that showed Jesus and the words. They sang “Suffer Little Children.” They listened to the story of the parting of the Red Sea, and on the way home, they and Jonathan imagined that they were walking between two high magic walls of seawater, pursued by Egyptians. Within the glassy green walls there were giant fish.

  The Oz people were with him when his mother undid his bow tie and changed him into his ordinary clothes. They were with him when they ate Sunday lunch, roast goose with roast potatoes. “How did you like the movie?” his father asked Jonathan, having descended from the attic. Jonathan murmured something through a mouthful of food.

  “I think he’s forgotten it already,” said his mother.

  In the afternoon, he and his friends went out and played in the mud. Jonathan sank himself as deep as he could into it. It filled the tops of his galoshes. Together with the people from Oz, he made mud pies. They made patties of the wet cold soil. Jonathan had a bottle of poison from the bathroom. It was a bright red bottle of iodine with a skull and crossbones on it. It was a magic spell. Together, he and the Oz people put poison in the mud pies.

  “We’re going to feed them to the Wicked Witch,” whispered Jonathan. He crept through he back door. He kicked off his boots, heavy with mud, and peeled off his smeared and sodden trousers and ran into the kitchen, trailing mud from his hands and socks. He put the mud pies on plates. He thought that mud was like melted chocolate and would go crisp and solid in the refrigerator.

  His mother arrived to find her best china coated in mud and Jonathan in wet socks and underpants, shivering and leaning into the refrigerator.

  “I’m poisoning the Witch,” explained Jonathan. His round face was evil and eldritch. “Those are Poison Pies, so don’t eat them!”

  “I promise not to eat Poison Mud Pies,” said his mother, endeavoring to find it amusing. “Where are your trousers?”

  “Um,” said Jonathan.

  She went to find them. “Oh, Jonathan!” he heard her cry from the back door. She came into the kitchen holding out the trousers, a twist of cloth and mud. “How did you do this?” she demanded. There were wet footprints across her green rug, her polished floor.

  Jonathan spent the rest of the afternoon indoors. He rubbed red poison iodine all over his face and lay on the green carpet, closing one eye. The fibers of the carpet looked huge, like trees, and he and the people from Oz walked through them, on their way to see the Wizard.

  “Jonathan, wash your face, now,” said his mother. He left red face-stains on the lime-green rug. “What are we going to do with you?” his mother asked.

  He and the people from Oz hid in the shoebox. It was a great wooden box that filled one end of the corridor just outside the bathroom. He and the people from Oz lifted the lid and crawled inside it and nestled down amid the smells of rubber and leather and socks, the shoes and boots alternately hard and soft underneath them.

  “We’re going to disappear,” Jonathan told the people from Oz. He burrowed down into the boots, piling shoes on top of himself. Later, when his parents began to try to find him, they even opened the lid and looked in and didn’t see him.

  Jonathan was as invisible as the people from Oz.

  All that winter, Jonathan withdrew from the world to be with his friends. They wandered to the woods far down the Second Line West. They walked quickly and quietly, hoping no one would see them, past Billy Tait’s house, past Jaqui Foster’s house, all the way beyond the house of his parents’ friends, the Harrisons. Jonathan looked down at his feet as he walked, as if ashamed, as if frightened of falling. When he thought there was no chance of anyone seeing him, he broke into a run.

  Under a gray November sky Jonathan plunged into the forest through the tangle of shrubs and twigs. Inside, the woods were even darker and grayer. The ground was covered with brown leaves amid the smooth trunks of ash and sycamore. There were birch trees with their magical, white-paper bark that the Indians turned into canoes.

  They were in Oz. They all sang and danced together, kicking up leaves. They danced along the banks of a tiny branch of the Credit River. Tree roots overhung the bank. Underneath them were secret houses, full of Munchkins. They would come out to join the Oz people, singing “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.” The singing went on amid showers of fallen leaves.

  Then, one morning, Jonathan got up and saw that the world had turned white and that the air was full of falling flakes. The last time it had snowed had been nearly a quarter of his lifetime ago. He greeted winter like a friend he had not seen in decades. He ran out in ordinary shoes and flung handfuls of snow into the air. The sky was white.

  He loved winter. In the dark, as he lay in bed in the mornings, there would be the comforting sound of the snowplows, rumbling past. His father would have to dig snow out of the driveway before he could leave for work. There would be sliding on the ice and toboggan rides. The inside of the living room windows was coated in great leafy patterns of frost. Jonathan and the Oz people sat at the breakfast table, wandering among them, in a forest of frost. As soon as breakfast was over, he would run outside.

  Jonathan loved sunlight on snow, and he loved the mystery of ice. One day he and the people from Oz walked on the frozen surface of the ditches, imagining water babies shivering underneath the ice. The surface cracked and Jonathan fell in, soaking himself in ice water to the knees. He kept on walking, enchanted by the world he and his Oz friends walked through.

  There were high billowing clouds. Cold made them seem solid, like icebergs in the air. Television had once told Jonathan that there were things in the air called Mushroom Clouds. People saw them and died.

  Jonathan pretended that Corndale was under threat from advancing Mushroom Clouds. Jonathan was the only person who had a coat made of Jet-Age Plastic. He was protected, no harm could come to him. He walked to the gate of each house, walking on the crisp surface of the snow on his numb and frozen feet, pretending to warn them about Mushroom Clouds. He forgot about the cold.

  There were canyons of ice overhead. White light swung around him like a sword. The people from Oz said that each sparkle of light on the snow was a fairy. The snow plains of Canada glittered with them, were spangled with laughing souls. If all the snow had taken to the air at once, with cries of joy, Jonathan would not have been surprised. He stood and looked at the snow, his trousers drenched, his feet and the water in his eyes ringing with cold.

  When he got home, his feet were frostbitten. He howled as his toes were lowered into a basin of lukewarm water. There were sad, sick patches of gray on his skin. His mother wept. “Jonathan. Why didn’t you come inside?”

  She had to go to the store for ointment. Jonathan listened to the car murmuring out of the front drive.

  Then he went to the new extension and took out a stepladder.

  “Sssh!” he told the people from Oz. “This is the best.” He climbed up the ladder and pulled himself into the attic.

 
It was cold inside the attic, with a single bare light and the smell of raw wood. The underside of the roof was coated in thick sandwiches of paper stuffed like mattresses. Some of it was wound up in rolls. Jonathan sat on them. There were wooden joists, and between them then back side of the plasterboards, still with writing on them.

  “Careful,” Jonathan warned the Oz people. “You can only stand on the boards.” Fearful, grateful for his presence, the Oz people tiptoed toward him, balancing delicately.

  He reached out for them. He was shivering and his feet were bandaged. He was not aware of what happened next. He must have slipped. Very suddenly, he was somersaulting through space. There was a lovely crisp sensation of breakage, as if falling through potato chips.

  Then he was lying facedown, amid dust, bouncing slightly as if dropped by a cyclone.

  He had fallen through the ceiling. He screamed in terror at the idea. By sheer chance he had fallen onto a roll of wire netting that was used to hold plaster to walls. There was blood.

  Then he looked up and saw a rough and broken silhouette of himself punched through the smooth white surface of the ceiling. It was like Bugs Bunny running through a door.

  When his mother got back, she arrived to hear peals of laughter. She went in the extension’s front door and found Jonathan, bruised and bloody, looking up at the hole he had made and roaring with laughter.

  “You fell through the ceiling?” she shouted. She couldn’t believe it. “You fell through the ceiling?” Each time she shouted it, Jonathan laughed even louder.

  His parents left him alone after that, for a while. His mother discovered that if he was left to do as he chose, he grew quieter and quieter, and more safely housebound. He no longer rocked in place, but he did sing to himself all the time, drawing layer on layer of colors on paper or making castles out of plasticine or sugar cubes that sparkled like snow. Sometimes he spoke to people who were not there.

  He had never been happier.

  Winter became spring, filling Jonathan with misgiving. Where there had been snow, there was mud, and on the branches of the pussy willows were buds that hung like centipedes. There was a thaw, and Jonathan peered out of the window down the Second Line West toward the schoolyard.

  There lay his future, crowded with other children, more outgoing and physically larger than he. He could see them sunbathing, leaning against the white wooden walls of the schoolhouse, or sitting on the steps. He retreated from the window and went back into his room for his afternoon nap.

  He imagined that he and his friends went to a circus. There were no fast or terrifying rides in this circus. There was a Ferris wheel, slow and gentle, and the Cowardly Lion was the most fearsome beast among the donkeys and sheep and friendly pigs. Even so, in this gentle circus, someone got hurt. Perhaps it is not possible to tell a story without someone being hurt, without a witch appearing.

  The Scarecrow was wounded. Jonathan knew you were supposed to tell an adult as soon as a friend was hurt. He didn’t want to tell anyone. He had never told his mother about his friends. If the Scarecrow really was hurt, then he had to. Why didn’t he? Jonathan challenged himself. What was he afraid of? Jonathan steeled himself. Feeling fateful, he left his room and went to his mother.

  “The Scarecrow caught his penis in a door, but Judy Garland kissed it better,” he told her.

  His mother was alarmed on several counts. “No, she did not,” she said, not appreciating how truthful and dutiful he had been. “It’s a lie, and I don’t want to hear you talking like that again.”

  “But he did,” protested Jonathan, in a voice that was almost too weak for even him to hear.

  “You are going to go outside,” said his mother, “and find some other children to play with.”

  Jonathan found Helen and Matty Quicke. They were sisters who lived two doors down. Helen was the same age as Jonathan. She had a floppy pageboy haircut and there always seemed to be a dirty stain of orange juice around her mouth. Her nose was always running. It was always running, Jonathan’s mother said, because her parents didn’t feed her properly.

  Helen’s elder sister Matty took care of both her and Jonathan. She liked to boss people, which meant that if Helen and Jonathan started to argue, she would stop the fight and make a decision. The great thing about the girls was that they understood the point of playing pretend. The point was to believe, not to win. The girls made up rules and stuck to them.

  They played House. Jonathan always played Father—they needed a boy for that. They went through elaborate rituals of cooking meals and washing up and taking care of babies and fixing cars. It was so much like real life, that each one knew what to do, except that Jonathan had two wives.

  They played Vikings. They would stand together on the prow of a longship, and they would attack a castle, but they were always on the same side. “Okay, men!” Matty would say, and they would all run together, brandishing swords.

  They went to Sunday School. The Oz people came as well, but Jonathan couldn’t concentrate on them. He got confused and stumbled over the words of the songs and couldn’t answer the questions asked by the Sunday School teacher. The teacher wore tartan trousers, and her nose ran, like Helen’s.

  Afterward, Matty would be elated by the idea of goodness and became insistent on righteousness. She would say that you should do whatever Jesus told you. You should never say “ain’t,” though Matty otherwise said it all the time. Enlivened by religious instruction, they would play Jesus. Jonathan stood on a fence post, his arms outstretched, being crucified while the sisters adored him on their knees. He liked that game. His mother made them stop.

  His mother did not entirely approve of Helen and Matty. Their family offended against the world of style and grace she was trying to build. The Quicke home was ugly, with roof tiles over all of the walls. Helen and Matty’s elder brother was only ten, but he wore his hair greased up. He smoked cigarettes and had a dog called Nigger. His eyes were hard, and he trained them on Jonathan.

  Once, it was their father’s birthday. Jonathan joined Helen and Matty in singing “Happy Birthday” to him. Helen’s father was a big man with big red hands and orange hair. Helen and Matty sat on his knees as they sang, and his rough face went kindly and soft. “I can’t think of anything nicer,” he said, “than to be sung to by two cute little girlies like you.” Jonathan wondered why he felt so different from them.

  The real world was pushing the Oz people to one side. They watched from the corner while Jonathan pondered the fact that rough Mr. Quicke could be kind. Outside again in the muddy backyard, the Oz people could only watch as Jonathan and Matty and Helen dug a hole to the Center of the Earth.

  Why didn’t he speak to the Oz people when Helen and Matty were around? He would try to, but fear would grip him. What was he afraid of? Jonathan decided that he would force himself, force himself to act as if the Oz people were there.

  Jonathan knew how to behave. He had been drilled in politesse. He knew that you introduced people properly.

  So one day, toward the end of that spring, he ushered Helen into his bedroom. He was going to do it. He really was going to do it.

  “Helen,” he said. “May I introduce the Oz people.” He pointed to each one of them in turn. “The Lion. The Tin Man . . .”

  He couldn’t finish. Panic overcame him. Helen gasped and covered her mouth. He looked at her arms and the very fine, pale down on them. Helen stared at him, grinning, eyes wide. She knew what was happening. She knew that Jonathan thought the Oz people were really there. Jonathan tried to say something else, but the words stuck.

  Helen squealed, hand over her mouth, and turned and ran. Disturbance seemed to follow her, swept in a spiral like a dust storm. It spun out of the doorway of Jonathan’s bedroom, taking something with it.

  Jonathan turned back to the corner of the room. There was no one there. He saw
that there was no one there, that there never had been anyone there.

  Shame covered him like darkness. Helen would know. Helen would tell. “Sissy,” her brother called him. And he was a sissy, to make up people who were not there.

  His room had been stripped bare of magic. It consisted now only of his parents’ cast-off chest of drawers, the trampolined bed, some toys in which he had no interest. His room was devoid of interest. So were the grass and the trees beyond. It was this stark world from which he had been trying to hide.

  He wanted to break every single toy, wrench off their heads, their butterflies on wires; he wanted to tear up all his books and rip to shreds all his drawings, everything he loved that was so thin and frail, and which could not defend him. The rage seemed to rise up into his eyes as an ache. He was blinded by anger, rising up in his gorge to choke him, overwhelming and complete. There was nothing that could satisfy it, but himself. He broke himself. He took the self he had been and broke it again and again. He called himself all the names he could think of: stupid idiot dope nincompoop sissy crybaby brat. Worm. He called himself a worm and seemed to see himself crushing himself underfoot. He stood absolutely still, with his elbow wrapped around his eyes. Then, very suddenly, he flung it away from his face and glared.

  The world was diminished. It was smaller, duller, and he was unutterably bored by it. He didn’t want to play with his crayons, his coloring book, his papers, his toys, his stupid plasticine. He prowled the field of his vision like a caged beast, restless, made aged and jaded and grim. He was five years old.