by Chloe Daykin
I take the key out from under the juggling gnome on the top step and go upstairs. I’ve got good at going up quietly lately. The secret is socks and speed. I can move so slow you wouldn’t know I was there. It’s great for stairs and wildlife watching. Stairs is easier though cos you don’t have to worry about the angle of the sun and what kind of shadow you’re making and where it falls. If you’re at the wrong place at the wrong time your shadow moves before you do. Then you’re done for. There’s no light on the stairs unless you put one on, which I don’t.
At the top I see the door’s open a bit. I push it just enough to slide through sideways. The light inside’s really bright. It’s like that by the sea – you always get more of everything. More light, more air, more wind, more rain, more storms. It’s full on, extreme. It lets itself go wild.
I see the shape of her in bed. Her breath makes the sheets go up and down. I step over the magazines on the floor that say ‘Luxe for less’ and ‘Love your body’. Dad has drawn beards and googly eyes on all the models.
Mum’s eyes are closed. A cloud moves across the sun. I see the shadow go over her face. ‘Hi, Billy,’ she says. This makes me jump cos her eyes are still shut. Her voice sounds like she’s using lots of effort to make it come out. ‘Wanna come in?’ She pulls the duvet back. It’s white with daisies sewn on. We bought it together at Tesco. When we got home she was dead disappointed cos the daisies were only on the bit you could see in the packet and it made you think they were going to be all over, but they weren’t. I put my bag down, step over the socks and pants and stuff on the floor and climb on top.
‘Had a good day?’ she says and opens her eyes a bit, tries to smile.
‘We had science.’
‘You like science.’
‘I like nature.’
‘Righto.’ She puts her arm up and I tuck in and lie on her shoulder.
I look up and see her eyes are closed again. ‘We had a debate.’
‘About science?’
‘Microbes. Mrs Jones says I’ve got a very lively mind.’
‘Fancy a biscuit?’ She points to the Hobnobs packet behind the picture frame. It’s the photo of us all at Alton Towers on the log flume. Dad looks properly terrified. I get us one each. We eat the Hobnobs and look out of the window at the sea, the line of it at the bottom of the sky. Not that it stops there in real life, just that’s as far as we can see. If we could see the whole thing it’d be too much. It’d fry our brains. It’s like the way we can’t imagine infinity, the way space just goes on and on for ever. Brains look after themselves, they sort out what we can cope with.
The front door goes and I hear Dad’s voice and someone else’s. They’re coming up the stairs. We look at each other, brush the crumbs off the duvet. Mum props herself up on a pillow. Dad opens the door and I see it’s Dr Winsall.
‘Hello, young Billy,’ he says.
I just stare at him.
‘Want to go watch a bit of telly, son?’ Dad says.
‘Not really,’ I say. Dad gives me a look. Mum kisses me on the head.
‘Go on, love,’ she says.
I climb out of bed and wait at the top of the stairs and do my best silent listening.
I think of Sir David in the dark, in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia with the long-eared jerboa. It scurries about, blind. Totally reliant on sound. Its ears are massive, longer than any animal. David whispers, ‘His hearing is so acute he can even detect sleeping insects.’ The jerboa hears an owl and jumps a mile.
Dad sticks his head round the door. I jump clean off the carpet.
‘TV’s downstairs last I saw,’ he says and ruffles my hair. ‘Here, I got you this.’ He pulls an actual Twix out of his pocket and winks. I look at the shiny gold wrapper and go downstairs feeling very un-shiny. I put The Blue Planet DVD on and watch the bit where the seal goes up the beach. A killer whale comes after the seal but it turns round and barks in its face and keeps going. It doesn’t let itself get dead or eaten or anything. It just keeps going.
Bigger and Blacker
That night I have this dream. I’m on the beach, but it isn’t really the beach cos there’s cactuses. You have to watch where you’re walking cos of the spikes and I’ve got bare feet. I’m trying to get to the sea, but it keeps getting further and further away. The closer I get, the further away it goes. Then there’s this cave and Jamie Watts is standing by it. Sir David is nowhere to be seen.
‘Catch a load of this, Billy,’ he says. ‘It’s a beauty.’ He’s pointing in the cave. I can’t see in cos it’s too dark. The cave gets bigger and blacker, like it’s a mouth opening up, like’s it’s not a cave at all.
The cave mouth keeps coming at me, stretching out, like all the pointy rocks are teeth. The cactuses all get closer and higher. I have to put my arms over my head so they don’t scratch. I put my hands over my ears.
‘Don’t yer like it,’ Jamie Watts says. ‘Don’t yer?’
I try to run, but there’s an ice-cream van blocking the way. It puts a cone in my hand and scoops chocolate chip on top of toffee fudge and strawberry cheesecake and bubble gum and crunchy mint. I can’t hold on to it all. I’m just about to drop it when the ice-cream man sticks his head out right up close to my face and I see it’s Dr Winsall. The cave turns into this giant fish head and swallows everything into its big black toothy mouth and everything goes dark. And then I wake up.
Bang and Blast
My lobster alarm clock is beeping its pincers off. Normally it doesn’t go off. Normally I wake myself up.
Usually I shut my eyes before I go to sleep and tell my head what time I want. It’s pretty effective. I don’t know how it works. Once I googled ‘head sleep programming’ and got 14,600,000 results in 0.3 seconds. They said things like ‘Free Science and Engineering software downloads’, ‘Sleep to succeed’ and ‘Sleep and dream your way to brilliant ideas’, so I still don’t know. Sometimes there just isn’t an answer, even in 14,600,000 suggestions. I think that nature is magic and mystical and best left to get on with it (this gets 6,270,000 results). Bodies and brains are amazing.
I put a cross on my brain-versus-alarm-clock chart. It’s only the second cross in the alarm clock column. The first one was after me and Dad had stayed up late watching The NeverEnding Story, which Dad had said would be brilliant. We also ate a giant slab of Dairy Milk Mint Crisp and half a bag of marshmallows. My stomach did a lot of gurgling and I had dreams about flying dragons. People with swords kept charging at me and trying to chop my arms and legs off. I don’t think this was a fair brain-versus-alarm competition. It’d be like taking the alarm’s battery out and dropping it into a glass of Irn-Bru and then putting it back in again to see what happens. It might completely break the clock. Not that I’m saying my brain’s broken. It’s just that its usually top turn at doing what I ask it, when I really need it.
I go downstairs. Dad’s in the kitchen. ‘Ay up, chuck,’ he says and does the funky chicken. He holds his coffee mug up. ‘Strong stuff, keep well clear.’ He’s already wearing his work T-shirt. ‘Bang and Blast’ it says on the front in blue. On the back it says ‘Done and Dusted’ and there’s a picture of a pile of rubble getting swept up with a broom with a smiley face. Dad drinks the last bit out of his mug. ‘Gotta go to …’
‘Bang!’ I shoot him down with a finger gun before he finishes. He staggers into the fridge.
‘Blast,’ he says and detonates me. I explode on the carpet. We lie there dead on the floor for a minute. ‘Early shift,’ he says and gets up.
‘Again?’
‘Non-adhesive vinyl tiles await.’ He pours me a bowl of Hoops, gets the milk out the fridge. Dad’s shop is called Bang and Blast. It’s not actually Dad’s but it is where he works. The owner is Howard. He smells of chickens and only comes in on Wednesdays. Howard is like one of those elasti-men you get in party bags. His arms pop out the ends of his checked shirts. He has hair like open curtains, a moustache the colour of Crunchie wrappers and many toothpicks. He’s the o
nly person in Stepson with cowboy boots.
‘All righty.’ Dad points his fingers up to the ceiling and shoots. This is what Howard does too. He also says ‘sure thing, partner’ and ‘howdy’. Dad dances two Hoops out of my bowl and on to the worktop. ‘Aargh, don’t eat us,’ he says. I lick them off and crunch them down. ‘You okay for school stuff?’ He opens my rucksack, and looks in. I nod and zip it back up. ‘Good lad,’ he says and ruffles my hair. The kitchen clock sings the call of the barn owl. It has different birds for different hours: the nightingale is ten o’clock, the great spotted woodpecker four. The barn owl means six. Dad sticks a banana in his pocket and heads for the door.
I think of the dream, of Dr Winsall. ‘What did he say?’
‘Who?’
‘You know who.’
‘Dr who?’
‘Yeah, him.’
‘He said he wanted to save the universe.’ He winks at me. ‘Take it easy, buddy,’ he says and waves. Then he’s off, out the door, into the street, off into the world.
I finish the Hoops, have a glass of no-bits orange and take a tin of beans out of the cupboard.
Beans?
Yeah beans.
Beantastic
Beans are a signal. A tin of beans left out means I’m off swimming. You might think that tuna would be a better choice, cos it has a picture of fish on it. But it’s on a higher shelf than the beans and sometimes we don’t have any. But there’s always beans, loads of beans. Beans are a cert. Me and Dad get them from Aldi. I say, ‘Do we need more beans, Dad?’ and he says, ‘I’s bean wondering if you were going to ask,’ and I say ‘four tins?’ and he says ‘beantastic,’ and I say ‘bean anywhere good lately,’ and we make up as many bean jokes as we can think of. Sometimes I say, ‘How about the ones with sausages?’ and he says, ‘You could get two tins for the price of those.’ So I say, ‘Shall I get two more then?’ and he says ‘righto, beanio.’
After, in the car, we have a Twix each, cept they’re called Jive bars. I make mine into fangs. Sometimes Dad makes his into eyebrows, but not on hot days.
I think about this when I get the tin out and it makes me smile. This is another reason why I choose beans for my signal. Tuna just makes me think of dolphins getting stuck in nets.
So …
Dive
I stick my trunks on, the ones with the floating slugs on surfboards. Which I like as they are an anomaly. I have different suits for different seasons. Right now it’s that autumn in between. And sunny. So I go with the trunks.
Kids round here roam. Everyone does it. We have territories like African wild dogs. Sometimes people fight it out. Mainly we just know it. Jamie Watts rules on land. My space is the sea.
I swim before school. Every day. Early.
Mum says I was born in a blow-up birth pool and I haven’t stopped kicking since. I cried when they took me out the water. Stopped when they put me back in. I was a water baby, a bath baby, a slithery pink thing. The sea is in my blood.
I wrap myself up in the penguin towel, I don’t put any clothes on, no shoes either. No one can nick them if I haven’t got any. I grab a bag of Scampi Fries, put my goggles round my neck and leg it down to the beach. When I get to the sand I roll the fries inside the towel, chuck it behind a rock and keep running into the sea till it’s deep enough to dive. Then I do. I let the water go over all of me, like its swallowing me up. The cold stings my brain. I stretch my arms out and kick and Jamie Watts and the dream and Dr Winsall and everything flow out of my head and into the water like ink leaking out, like a little black cloud floating away.
Until I open my eyes.
What?
The THING is there.
It’s very real and unimagined.
It’s a mackerel. Staring right at me, its face is so close its lips knock into the front of my panoramic lens. I don’t know if it’s the same one as last time. I don’t know how you tell. It’s like people with tortoises who say one is called Colin and the other is Theresa and they both look exactly the same. Do they really know or are they just guessing?
I look left and right. Up and down. Seabed and shadows and rock and blue. The rest of the shoal is nowhere to be seen. I look straight out.
The eyes are still there.
Staring.
Mackerel swim at 5.5 metres per second. They are the prey of tuna, whales, dolphins, sea lions, sharks, tortoises and pelicans.
They’re scared of everything.
This one should be scared of me.
It isn’t.
We flow in and out. Together. Like there’s magnets stuck in our brains.
Up on the surface it starts to rain. Just a bit.
The fish looks twitchy.
Maybe he doesn’t like rain.
Maybe he’s bored.
He cocks his head like he wants something. I don’t know what.
We float.
We bob.
We stare.
I need air. I surface, breath and dive. Is he gone?
Nope.
The water blocks my ears. My head buzzes and tinks. It’s a strange kind of no sound. Like me and the mackerel are stuck in a lift together.
I wonder if it’ll let me touch it.
I bring my hand up.
He looks at me like I’m crazy. Hurt. Like a cat that you’ve just offered a fruit pastel to.
Okay.
He doesn’t want to be my pet then. Not a petting pet anyway.
I pull my hand back.
I look at his scales. There’s a scar on his side, like a tree trunk that’s grown round barbed wire. I wonder if he got stuck on a plastic can holder? I’m embarrassed about our wastefulness.
He stares at me.
I stare.
He stares.
The water pushes us about.
He opens his mouth. The inside is smooth and pearly white.
he says, and my heart stops.
He moves his fins as if trying to get me to talk, to coax some words out of my mouth. His eyes are bright and bouncy. His voice is deep like tunnels. I don’t know what to say. What does he want me to say?
‘WHAT?’ I say.
The fish cocks his head like I’m a total idiot for having no idea what kezdodik means and swims off. I get the feeling that if fish had doors, it’d be slamming one in my face right now.
Run
I get out, grab the towel and run.
I boy run through the rain, I fish dodge the hawthorn hedge with thorns like razors, I fish boy jump over the ‘Look Out For Frogs’ sign and into the kitchen. I look at my watch. Seven minutes eleven seconds. First best-without-shoes time.
Mum is up, in her nightie. In the garden. She’s sitting on the green and white striped swing chair reading Take a Break.
I stand by the chair, dripping. My chest goes up and down fast. I try to make it stop, to make it normal again.
‘Hi,’ I say.
‘You okay?’ she says.
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Great.’ My heartbeat makes my head say Kezdodik, Kezdodik, Kezdodik. I wonder if I’m going crazy.
‘Do you believe in …’ I fiddle with the hem of the towel, ‘stuff.’
‘What stuff?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say and look away.
‘God, ghosts, the marshmallow man? What?’ She makes her hand into pincers and grabs my leg.
‘It doesn’t matter.’ I pull away and wrap myself up in the towel and sit next to her on the swing. We rock together. I look at the photo in the magazine, of Angelina Jolie in a swimsuit stroking her hair back, coming out of the sea. It makes me think of when we used to do that, when Mum taught me to swim.
‘Dr Winsall is doing some tests,’ she says.
‘Why?’
‘You know why.’ She strokes my arm.
I don’t actually. All I know is that last June Mum got chickenpox. She had a fever so high she didn’t know who any of us were. And then she got better. Except she didn’t. Not really. A ball of water drips down my forehead off
my fringe and runs down my leg. I wonder if it’s a drop the fish has touched. ‘I don’t like microscopes,’ I say. ‘People should stop poking things about. People should just let stuff be. Let it live.’
‘What if the thing’s not working,’ she says. ‘What if it’s gone wrong?’
I look at the drip soaking into the concrete. ‘Nature’ll sort it out. Nature’s the best. Nature can fix things if we just leave it to it. It always does. It always finds a way.’
The sun shines in Mum’s hair making it go all different colours. Her best friend Leslie dyes it every month. So far they’ve got through every dye except Starry Night Blue Black on the Personal Hygiene shelf of John’s Corner (which is actually in the middle of the street) Shop. Right now it’s Chestnut Brownie, with bits of Honeysuckle that never quite washed out.
‘It’s like king fish,’ I say still staring. ‘It’s like flashes.’
‘Where?’ Her eyebrows go bendy.
‘Your hair looks kind of stripy.’
‘Tell me about it,’ she says and shuts her eyes.
‘The king fish or the hair?’
‘The fish,’ she says and bats me on the leg.
‘They’re massive,’ I say. She nods, so I know she’s listening even though her eyes are closed. I switch my brain over to my David Attenborough Africa DVD box set. ‘They’re as big as a man and really good hunters, really savage. But there’s this one time every year when they stop doing what they’re doing. All over the ocean they all stop and they stop being themselves and being by themselves and they all get together. Which is really unusual. They swim into fresh water out of the sea and when they go they all calm down. They stop being savage and they stop hunting. They just swim round and round and round in a big circle, this massive circle of fish. And they don’t go there to breed, or hunt or feed. They just swim round all chilled out and it looks beautiful, like a painting. Then they go back down the river. No one’s told them to stop and no one knows why. They don’t need to know why, do they. Cos it’s what they do, what they need to do. It’s just how they are. They don’t need poking about to find out. They need to be left alone to get on with it.’