by Will Storr
“No, thanks.”
“Good boy.” She turned to look at me again. “You sure you’re all right, Kill? Nothing you want to talk about?”
I found myself looking at the latest scar from home, up by my left elbow. “I think I’ll just go to bed now.”
Outside the warm oasis of the kitchen, Dor could be a rather different place. Although most of the days there were soft, bright and charmed, you always had the sense that this bliss was being conferred on you. It was almost as if you were living inside the thoughts and moods of something else; something that was benevolent only because it had decided to be. At dusk, the walls seemed to embrace the end of the day all too greedily, sucking in more night than their due until the weight of the darkness was such that you’d begin to feel its pressure, pushing you out of the rooms. And of all the hostile, watching spaces that came alive in the ancient building after sundown, those old buckled stairs were the worst. Daylight always vanquished the cottage’s strangeness, but even on the sunniest afternoons, a certain trace seemed to linger over those sixteen steps.
I’d feel it as my foot hit the first one. It was as if there was something gathering in the air behind me, something that wanted to push me forward, to make me run, and that was a trick; I knew it was a trick, because the moment I started running, the fear would erupt into the back of my neck, like a great hand trying to grab me, and I’d go faster and faster and I’d get more and more scared and run all the way along the corridor and into my bed with the covers all over me, trying not to let my aunty hear me whimper.
But not tonight. Having taken my fortifying glance at Dorothy, I stood, puffed out my ribby chest and walked those stairs without stopping. One step, two steps, three steps, four. I could feel the fear behind me, bending out of the growling air. I refused to rush. Everyone knew that turnspit dogs weren’t afraid of the dark.
When I reached my room and closed the door, I heard a fly buzzing around the light. As soon as I saw its darting motion, it came for me, buzzing in and out, infuriatingly close to my skin. I flapped it away again and again, but still it came. It wasn’t quite a phobia, my aversion to flies. I’d feel a sense of panic and revulsion at their presence, but also a kind of murderous fury. It was as if there were something personal in their tormenting; as if their sole, born purpose was to pester me.
That night, though, was different. That fly was a test. I turned off the main light, switched on the wobbly old bedside lamp with the green velvet-tasselled shade and removed all my clothes, carefully folding them in a neat pile on the chest of drawers. Then I lay on top of the woollen blanket, rested my arms by the sides of my body and waited.
It didn’t take long. I flinched at the sensation of the fly’s legs on my stomach and the grotesque understanding, in its hesitant movements, of the small living thing making judgements and decisions. It took off once more and passed my eyes and I could see that it was sleek and nimble with a silvery body and large red eyes – of the type that I had only ever seen at Dor Cottage.
It landed on my cheek. My hands shook as it walked to the edge of my mouth. I thought about the turnspit dogs that had once worked away downstairs in the kitchen. I thought about Mary Dor and her fraught and magical recipes. I thought about gravy and Eton Mess and Toulouse sausages and fingers of melted cheese-on-toast, made with parmesan and three-year Cheddar and sprinkled with nutmeg and fresh cracked pepper and tangy Worcester sauce.
It lifted off again and came down at the corner of my eye. I lay there as the fuzzy lump on the border of my vision licked and drank. I willed the strength to come, opening my mouth wide to breathe deeply. In and out went the cold, thick air.
In, hold, and out.
In, hold, and out.
The fly whipped away and landed, again, on the edge of my lip. I felt the woollen blanket beneath my damp palms and imagined a lake of melted chocolate and tall flowers with caramel petals and marzipan trees and clouds of still-warm vanilla marshmallows.
Not a movement.
Not a single movement.
The fly crawled, with delicate little pricks on my skin, into my mouth. It buzzed, just once, and walked in further. A muscle in my lip contracted involuntarily and then I closed my tongue over it. The insect was pulled in. I felt its twitching incredulity as it was sucked down into my throat.
Coughing and retching, I sat up and ran to the bathroom to wash my mouth out. When I was done, I caught my reflection in the mirror above the sink. For the first time in my life, I studied my face in detail. I had done it. I would be different from now on. They could hurt me as much as they wanted. They could beat me or pity me or act as if I wasn’t there. None of it would matter. I might have looked weak and repulsive but I had strength and loyalty. I was a creature of the kitchen; a controlled, ferocious beast.
I was a turnspit dog.
2
When I was younger, and she was in her better moods, my mother used to dress me up in costumes. Policeman, Red Indian, ladybird, sailor. During nights in which she had friends around, she would wake me in the early hours and force me to dance about in her underwear, which she would make fit using safety pins to take in the slack. “Be our sexy dancer!” she would say, laughing and clapping, and I would jiggle about on the living-room rug, its colours blurring through tears and cigarette smoke. There was a princess dress with a short pink skirt and glittery sleeves that she would make me wear as I cleaned the house, if the previous day’s work had been insufficiently thorough. Now and then, she would send me to the shops in it. I would run down the cul-de-sac, my knees feeling as if they might burst open with the effort, in terror of being spotted by Mark. For my seventh birthday, she bought me a king outfit, complete with plastic crown which she would make me wear as I fetched fresh ice from the kitchen and emptied the ashtray of a weekday evening. When things reached a certain point, I would have to stand still as she stared at me. “One day you’ll grow up to be my king,” she would say. “You’ll be my handsome hero. You’ll look after me, won’t you, darling? Baby darling, tell me, who do you want to marry when you’re a big strong man?”
“You, Mummy.”
“Who will be your beautiful princess?”
“You, Mummy.”
“Such a good boy, you are. Such a good, strong, handsome boy.”
And I would stand still and she would stare.
As I entered my adolescence, I grew out of my costumes. She no longer fantasised about me as her king. As time passed, my mother became more likely to remark bitterly that I was turning out to be “mediocre, just like your father”. Before the night of the fly, that had made me impossibly sad. After so many safe and wonderful hours at Dor Cottage, I had begun to muster an impossible ambition to one day be a successful cook, just like my hero, the world-famous chef Max Mann. But not now; not any more. I was a dog. And like all good and loyal dogs, I knew my place and was grateful for it. It felt good to finally accept my mother’s entirely logical point of view.
Mediocre: it was a release.
At school, I accepted that my level was down in the corner, quiet and obedient, not one of them. When I wasn’t daydreaming about food, I’d entertain myself by keeping track of my classmates’ internecine battles. It was my own thrilling, real-time soap opera and my love for its latest twists was second only to my obsession with cooking. I’d move about the corridors and locker rooms and hang by the walls pretending to be looking for something in my rucksack when really I was listening. At some point, I acquired the nickname “Eyeballs”. Cruel, perhaps, but undoubtedly deserved.
Loyal dog that I was, I came to care about my classmates deeply. And despite the violent attentions of Mark House, I succeeded in training myself to remain mostly invisible and to never cry no matter what the provocation. The only occasion on which I broke occurred when I was fourteen. By then I had grown used to quietly observing the lives of the boys and girls around me, taking pleasure in seeing what happened to people whose days were filled with friends and events. I would watch the
m and I would think about them and I thought most of them were amazing; funny and clever and alive. But something happened over the early months of that summer term. A kind of tornado swept up all of my thoughts and carried them away in one direction. In her direction. I had accidentally fallen in love.
I don’t know what it was about Sophie, but I do know that I wasn’t the only one. Not the prettiest girl in the class, no, but she was beautiful all the same. It was her extraordinary kindness that first attracted me, but it wasn’t long before her earthly properties – her hair and her eyes and her smile – burned themselves onto the backs of my eyes.
I had a fantasy about her that, over the course of those months, thickened imperceptibly into a plan. It took weeks of saving ingredients, small and dangerous robberies from my mother’s purse and so much imagining that I began literally dreaming up new ideas. My work started a week before Sports Day. Every night, at two thirty, I would creep into the dark kitchen and cook by tea-light, always with the dread of what would happen if my mother was woken by the scents. By five a.m., I would be finished, the room immaculate once more. At the end of seven days, I had them, stored carefully in baking-sheet-lined layers in a metal biscuit tin beneath my bed. Twenty chocolates and twenty sugared jellies. Forty different flavours, all for her.
I never really considered what my gift might achieve. It wasn’t as if I had imagined her doing anything as terrifying as actually speaking to me. The fact of her eating them, of her joy in my creation, of her taking them in and of my giving her bodily delight. That was enough. That was everything.
I knew that, during Sports Day, I wouldn’t be missed. I also knew where Sophie’s peg was, in the changing rooms. I stuck some heart-patterned wrapping paper to the tin, and had found some red ribbon, which I abandoned, after thirty frustrating minutes spent trying to tie it into a bow. During the lunch break, I hid in a toilet cubicle with my parcel on my lap. I remained there until I was sure everyone would be down on the fields, leaving me in the safe and echoing quiet.
I crept past the library, past the science lab, past Mr Ariely’s English class with its chairs pulled out and the sun on the blackboard, the flowerless pot plant, dusty in the corner of the silent room. The corridors were polished and wide and somehow still rang with the cries of the boys and girls in all their missing hundreds. As I turned into the sports block, I heard talking. I stopped. They were in the boys’ changing room. I would go slowly.
“Oy!”
It was Colin, in the doorway.
“Watcha, Eyeballs. What you got there?”
And if Colin was there…
“Oy, Mark!” he called behind him. “It’s Eyeballs. He’s got us a pressie.”
I scrambled away, my pursuers primed with their identical Dunlop trainers and their stinking muscle rub. Out of one block, into another and down towards the third-year lockers, they gained on me. I ran into a toilet, hoping to bolt myself back inside a cubicle, but Mark grabbed me by the shoulders and knocked me off balance, my skull bouncing on the floor, my tin falling on its side. Colin popped open the lid.
“Sweets!” said Mark, placing one in his mouth with his free hand. “Do you want one?”
He took a handful of chocolates and jellies, mushed them into a ball and forced them into my mouth. I spat them out, their sticky warmth crawling down my cheek and chin, and he grabbed my neck and forced my head into the urinal’s long gutter. My upper lip hit the blue detergent ball and my face was soaked in the spiky stench of boy-piss. Stephan tipped the tin’s contents into the porcelain trough and began urinating on them. Yellow-brown liquid trickled millimetres from my face.
“Here, look,” Colin screeched, holding up the lid. “It was for Sophie.”
“Do you fancy Sophie?” said Mark. “Do you fancy Sophie?” He turned to address the others. “He’s spying on Sophie now. Dirty fucking spy. Stephan, you take him.”
Stephan took my neck and Mark disappeared, returning minutes later with a large translucent plastic bottle. The label was white and purple and had an orange square with a black cross over it. Utilitarian letters spelled the words: PAINT THINNER. He unscrewed the cap and yanked down my left eyelid. Reflexively, I pulled away. I felt it tear at the corner. Blood was in my eye.
“Dirty bastard spy,” said Mark.
“Don’t do too much,” said Stephan. “He’ll go fucking blind.”
“Fuck that,” said Mark.
I looked up at them; studied them one by one. Then the burning came. Mark bit his lip in concentration; Stephan’s mouth was fish-like. Robert and Andy were standing way above me. Colin had ink smudged on his ear and a scab on his jaw.
The liquid inside my eye felt as if it was boiling. I tried to remain apart from what was happening. I stared hard at the smear of blue biro on Colin’s ear. It looked like a raindrop; like Africa; like an upside-down comma.
“He’s not even struggling,” said Colin.
“I fingered Sophie,” said Mark.
It looked like Scandinavia.
“I gave her three fucking fingers.”
I swallowed.
“Then I sucked her tits.”
I felt the heaviness, then. I felt the upset swell. A sob built defiantly in my throat.
“Then I put my finger up her arsehole and I made her suck it. She loved that. She was moaning.”
I stared back at the ceiling. I held myself still as a cold tear slid from the outside corner of my eye, down my temple and then lost itself behind my ear, as if hiding in shame.
“Is he dead?” said Stephan.
I lifted my head, blood and chemical spilling onto my cheek, and said, “I’m fine.” For some reason, this seemed to terrify them. With a squeak of rubber heels and a piggery of sniggering, they were gone.
I poured water from a tap into my eye and walked home slowly. The moment my mother saw me, she ordered me to hospital. Three hours later, I returned with a white bandage over a blob of cotton wool for a patch.
“What did they say?” asked my mother. She was sitting in her armchair in front of Coronation Street, an iceless Martini in a port glass in her right hand.
“It’ll be fine,” I said, from the open doorway. “Except that my eyelid might not go back to the same shape it was. But it’ll be fine.”
The point of her tongue licked slowly along her lower lip.
“Did it hurt?”
“Yes,” I said.
“How much?”
“A lot.”
“A lot?”
“Yes.”
She unfolded her legs, from where she’d been sitting on them. On the television screen, northern actors carried on obliviously.
“Turn that off,” she said.
I pushed the heavily springed power button on the bottom of the old Pye set, and took my usual place, standing in front of her. She held her arms out towards me. I walked into them, stiffly, and felt her cold skin wrap around my neck.
“Do you love me, Killian?”
I knew what to say.
“Yes, Mummy, I love you.”
“How much?”
I knew exactly how it went.
“I love you more than anything in the whole wide world, Mummy.”
I could feel a vein pulsing in her neck; smell the cigarettes and perfume in her skin; feel the pressure around my throat tightening and then releasing as her mind worked on something, over and over and over. Tightening and releasing; tightening and releasing. I wanted her to put me down, but I had to pretend. I knew what happened when I didn’t pretend.
“Who did this to you?” she said, eventually.
She released me and I stood there, hands straight down against my sides.
“It was an accident,” I said.
“Who did it?” she said.
“Nobody.”
“If you loved me, why would you lie to me?”
“Sorry, Mum.”
“So why are you lying to me then?”
“Sorry, Mummy.”
There was t
hat sense of stirring and strength; the drawing down of trouble.
“If you don’t spit it out, so help me God, I’ll have you put into a home. Do you know what I do for a job? Have you forgotten? One stroke of my pen. Ten seconds’ work. You will never see me again. Is that what you want?”
I closed my eyes and whispered, “It was Mark.”
“Mark House?”
“But I didn’t do anything,” I said, pleading. “He just did it.”
I wanted to tell her that her hair looked nice. She had had it coloured, that day. All her greyness had gone away.
“I was just giving this thing to someone in my class and he – ” I said.
“What thing?”
“Just some – ”
“What?”
“Chocolates and things.”
“Chocolates?”
Her nostrils narrowed.
“Who to?”
“This girl.”
“A girl?”
They had been getting bad, her grey roots. And now they were all gone. All nice. All back to normal.
“God help us. Fourteen years old. Ogling women.”
“I’m sorry, Mummy,” I said.
“Perving over girls at your age? Pestering them? Disgusting.” She leaned forward. “You’re as bad as your bloody grandad.”
I lowered my head and looked at my socks; my pink toe, the white fringe of its nail poking out of a hole in the material.
“You need to learn something, if you’re going to keep living in my house. You don’t go bothering women. You don’t go treating them like lumps of meat. Do you hear me? Dirty little boy. Filthy dirty rotten.”
She took her tortoiseshell cigarette lighter and clicked up a flame. Placing a long Belair Menthol cigarette between her lips, she sucked the fire into its tip and then laid it carefully on the edge of the blue cut-glass ashtray.
I would trim that toenail later on, with the nail clippers that I got from the cracker at Aunt Dorothy’s on Boxing Day. And then, tomorrow night, I would get the needle and thread and try to darn that hole.
“Come on then, big man…”
She pulled a second cigarette out of the packet and lit that one too, laying it next to the first.