by James Hannah
“‘Come out feetfirst in a box,’” I say.
“You see, it’s so bad people say that,” she says a little agitatedly. “It makes me so cross, because it’s not true. We do so many positive things here.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Oh, don’t be daft. I’m not having a go at you. So, what happened then, with…Mia, was it?”
“Oh—didn’t work out.”
“Tell me she didn’t end up with some consultant.”
“No, no.”
“That lot, they all need bringing down a peg or two.”
“No, no. It was all my fault. I messed it up.”
She winces sympathetically. “That doesn’t seem like you.”
“Just…I tried to live up to… I really badly wanted it to work, but I could just never seem to make it happen. I couldn’t get my act together, and I don’t know why.”
“Oh, Ivo.”
I smile ruefully. “I’m just an idiot, I think.”
“Well, my darling, you won’t find anyone judging you here, all right? You know and I know there’s plenty of people between these walls who’ve paid a very heavy price for doing nothing wrong at all. And you can bet there are thousands of people out there on the streets who’ll never pay any price for being total—yeah—jerks. It’s not fair, but there it is. It’s for no one to judge.”
She stands herself up from my chair.
“Listen, I say this to everyone, but I mean it with you, because you’re one of my specials: if you want to talk about anything, then I’m here for you. You know that, don’t you?”
“Thanks, Sheila.”
“And if you don’t want to talk about anything, then at least do yourself a favor and keep your thoughts in order. There’s your A to Z game. Or think happy things. Maybe about this ex; if you had happy times together, no one’s stopping you from going away back to them in your mind. It might be helpful, is all I’m saying.”
I draw the sheets up around my middle.
“I don’t mean to say anything untoward,” she says.
“No, no. Not at all.”
“It might help, is all.” She sighs and scratches her arm a moment. “Anyway, sounds like Old Faithful’s gone off the boil again. So give me a buzz if you want anything.”
“Will do. Thanks.”
She pads away down the corridor, and as I hear the double doors slip shut behind her, the security light flicks off once more.
It’s been lovely to talk about you with someone who understands.
It’s been lovely to feel strong enough to think about you at all.
C
Chesticles
“Chesticles?” you say.
“Yeah,” I say. “Becca used to say it.”
It’s the joy in your face that takes me by surprise, and then your infectious and unfettered laugh.
“Oh, that’s lovely!” you say. “And I suppose Becca ought to know. You wait, I’m going to use that all the time.”
I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone laugh so delightedly. And so delightedly at me.
I’m surprised.
I don’t know what to do. I sort of shrug modestly that I thought to say it.
It’s nice.
It’s the little details that get to me.
• • •
“If I had a million in the bank, I’d totally get a boob job,” says Laura.
I exchange a glance with Kelvin, and we agree with a microshift of eyebrows that we’ll remain silent. I stare back down into my nearly empty pint. Look at us, two seventeen-year-old zeros who’ve gravitated like children to the two squat little stools drawn up to the sticky dark-wood table. But here we are with Laura’s friends, all of them around twenty-two, and all sitting in proper chairs with backs. Laura’s finally deigned to let me come out with her. She’s in a bad place at the moment, having ditched her boyfriend of six years. I could almost persuade myself that she’s glad of my company.
“Because men—society—it’s such a pain, isn’t it? They’re either leg men, boob men, or bum men, aren’t they? It’s not fair. I mean, if you’re a woman, you can’t say you’re, like, a chest woman, or a schlong or a butt woman.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” says Becca. “I like a nice arse.” She twists theatrically at the outside of her Afro and looks lustily across the room.
Oh, Becca.
If there is any benefit in the world to listening to my sister whine on about her woes it’s that we get to sit at the same table as the goddess Becca. Smoldering eyes and flawless ebony skin—an instant magnet to everyone around. How pathetically feeble Kelvin and I must look in the company of Becca. And yet here we are. We’re on the stools.
“But it’s men who make all the rules. And we’re all supposed to play by those rules. It’s bollocks. I think, you know, if you’ve got a lovely big pair of chesticles”—and she holds her hands illustratively in front of her imagined boobs—“you’re already a step ahead of the game.”
“So what are you then?” Becca asks Kelvin. “Are you a boob man? Do you like a lovely big pair of chesticles?”
“Well,” he says, “I don’t really know. Maybe a leg man?”
I’m suddenly aware of the crappiness of Kelvin’s hair. He’s got good-boy hair. Side parting. I run my fingers through my tangles, just in case. At least mine’s long. Kelvin looks like an office junior.
“Not a boob man?” says Laura.
He reddens but plunges on, shaking his head. “I never understood the fascination with breasts. I mean, what’s so amazing? They’re just fat sacks, aren’t they? Fat sacks with a cherry on top.”
There’s the tiniest pause, before both women collapse in laughter. I glance at him, and he looks bemused. They think he’s joking.
“Any more than a handful is a waste,” he adds.
Jesus, I don’t want to be linked with this. I’m here trying to appeal to girls—to women—and he’s giving out all the signals of inexperience. I catch myself actually shuffling my stool away from him.
“What about you then?” says Becca. She turns to me and gives me one of those smiles that could knock a man down. “Give me a shopping list so we can get you matched up. Are you a boob man or a leg man or an arse man?”
“You’re a boob man, I bet, aren’t you?” says Kelvin.
Here’s the thing: Becca has I think the most magnificent breasts I have ever seen. Kelvin and I have spent hours dreaming up wonderful new positions to take in relation to Becca’s breasts. We both know it, and we both know the other knows it. I fix my eyes firmly on her eyes, and then gaze up at the ceiling, lean back from the table, right back on two legs of my stool. “Well, I don’t know,” I say. “Beggars can’t be choosers, can they?”
“Aw!” says Laura. “Are you reduced to begging?”
“You must have a preference,” says Becca. “What’s the first thing you look at? Go on, say you’re lusty and forget everything about personality and being a gentleman and all that. You just want, y’know, a good wooargh. What is it?”
I’m thinking boobs. I’m thinking Becca’s boobs. I know I really should just say “boobs.” The word actually leaks into the middle of my tongue, but I clamp my teeth shut.
“Boobs. Totally boobs,” Kelvin says with finality.
But I can’t admit it to Becca. I’ve angled my position on the stool specifically to include her breasts in my composition of the room.
“Honestly, I really… I couldn’t choose. I’d be all over the shop. It’d be everything. I don’t think there is a boob man or a bum man or whatever.”
Mal mercifully chooses this moment to return from the bar, carrying three pints in his hands, a glass of wine in his top pocket, and a packet of scampi fries swinging from between his teeth.
“What about you, Bigbad?” says Becca, turning away
from my wriggling deceit. “Are you a boob man, a bum man, or a leg man?”
Mal grits his teeth around the packet of fries as he knocks each glass out onto the table.
“I’m a cunt man.”
He drops himself in his seat and tears open the packet.
“Jesus, Mal,” I say.
“What?” he says.
Becca gives a great big hearty laugh.
“I hate that word,” says Kelvin.
“Cunt?” my sister says brightly. “Oh, I like it. I think it’s funny. Cunt, cunt, cunt.” She puts a very deliberate clean t on the end of each word. She draws out a cigarette for Mal and one for herself.
And this is it: I’m getting the first possible stirrings of a tiny inkling that Mal and Laura have a little bit of a thing going on between them. She’s laughing now very brightly and I see Mal smile to himself, a big smoky smile, looking down at the table. Pleased with himself. It strikes me because Mal never normally gives this stuff away.
How is this? How is it that this bloke can come along and be as horrible as he wants, and still come away smelling of roses? That’s the magic of Mal, isn’t it? People are just drawn to him. They do what he says. And they don’t stop him doing anything.
“So, you’re the only one who’s not laid your cards on the table yet,” says Becca, looking over at me. “Boob, bum, or leg?”
“Well, I don’t know,” I say, as honestly as I can.
“Aw, sweet!” says Laura.
“No, I mean, I think I’m all of those things.”
“A sensitive lover?” says Becca, with a teasing little smile.
“Well, I’m seventeen. I’ve had one proper girlfriend,” I say. “What do you think?”
Becca roars with laughter. “Honesty! You’ll go far!”
“What do you think, Mal? Do you think I should get a boob job?” says Laura.
“Yeah, go for it.” And now, all of a sudden, Mal’s an expert on the pros and cons of cosmetic surgery. “People get too hung up about it. Some big moral thing. Especially with women. This major pressure that somehow you’re not allowed to do this with your own body. It’s stupid.”
“Yeah!” Laura says sparklingly.
“It’s just like dyeing your hair or getting your ears pierced, isn’t it? It’s the new makeup, a nip and a tuck here and there.”
“That’s what I think,” says Laura. “You’ve got all the eighteen-year-old girls getting boob jobs for their birthday—it’s totally part of the culture. It’s just like a tattoo.”
“I bet Mum would love to see you get a boob job,” I say. “Because she absolutely loved your tattoo, didn’t she? What did she call it? A slag tag?”
“Cranky old bitch,” says Laura. “Just repeating some phrase from her church group. I bet she dined out for a month on that story. The prodigal daughter.”
“I think she might want to get you exorcised.”
“Do you know what they did in the nineteenth century?” Mal dabs the ash off his cigarette and speaks out the smoke. “When they were wearing corsets, anyway, they had these two ribs removed, here”—he grabs Laura by the wrist, lifts her arm, and chops his hand at her lower two ribs—“down here, they had them taken out so they could make the corset tighter.”
“Ahhh! Mal!”
“And they’d lace these corsets so tight that all their organs would get pushed up into their chests.”
“Is that true?”
“So, you know, I don’t see the problem if you want to upgrade a couple of wasp stings into a pair of lovely fun bags.”
There’s a momentary process in Laura’s eyes, before she bursts into unconvincing peals of laughter.
I think she’s thinking, What a funny guy.
I think she’s thinking, He’s lucky I’m so fine with how I am, to say something so daring.
But I know he knows.
He knows she’s not so fine with how she is. He totally knows.
• • •
The rubber tires squeak as I am trundled along the shiny corridor by Kelvin. Nice of him to come and visit me. Ah, man, why did I let them persuade me into a wheelchair? Is this humiliating? I could walk this easily. But I’ve always enjoyed being a passenger. It’s nice being pushed. The changing perspectives wiping themselves across my eyes. Vague shift of air in low drafts, subtly swirling temperatures, mixing with billowing acoustics as the rooms pass on by.
Could pleasures get any simpler?
“I bet you’re sick of being asked this,” says Kelvin from behind me, “but if there’s anything I can do, you will tell me, won’t you? Practical stuff or anything else. Anything.”
“Thanks. I’m good. I’m all right. Better now I’m in here.”
“You only have to ask.”
“Yeah, cheers.”
“Out the main entrance, is it?”
“Suppose.”
The automatic doors trundle open, and there’s the first thrill of unconditioned air on my knees and thighs. It envelops me completely as we push on through, lingers around my nostrils and lips, cradling my head, my neck, riffling my hair. We emerge into the open, and the brightness makes me squint. Magical nature. Makes me feel so dead and dusty and plastic. I’m an indoor animal. I don’t belong out in the wilds like this. Uncontrolled, unregulated nature, coming to get me and whisk me away.
We roll down a paved slope, the chair now gently percussive over the regular gaps between the slabs. Soothing pulse. I close my eyes to the brightness. Sun warm on my eyelids. Natural warmth.
The tires of the wheelchair crackling consistently through microscopic grit. I register every grain, fresh and high-definition. My hearing has been calibrated for too long by the beeps of machinery, acoustics of plaster and glass, jangling fridge, throb of corrupt blood in my ears. The wind opens up the distance, wakens the trees; the leaves wash briefly and recede. It’s beautiful. It’s overwhelming. I want to inhale it all, breathe it, take it all in. But I can’t. I can’t draw deep. I manage only a pant.
We turn a tight little bend on the slope and pass through an archway into the hospice garden. And it’s beautiful too. Grand lawn with paths ribboning its low banks and gentle inclines. High wall all around. Old-looking wall, soft blushing pink bricks, crumbly pointing. Tailored, tamed nature.
The sun chooses this moment to radiate through to me, through me. It feels like…it feels like life. I can sense my corrupt blood bubbling and basking beneath the surface. All these things remind me of you: you and me in our favorite place up at the top of the valley, gazing down.
“Beautiful,” I say out loud to myself. Out loud to you. “Beautiful.”
“Yeah,” says Kelv, the only ears to hear.
Rolling peacefully forward, we pass the flower beds, all these carefully chosen specimens. Amazing, amazing, that these delicate petals have unfurled from the earth, vivid sunlit colors, calling out to nature, calling the humans to come, come and cultivate.
“Look at that,” I say. “Still got their verbena. They’re lucky.”
“Yeah?”
“They were all wiped out the last couple of years. Hard frost. Must be the wall keeping them sheltered.”
“Right.”
“And alliums,” I tut fondly.
Of course it’s you I imagine I’m talking to, not Kelvin. It’s you I can sense pointing at the seed heads, looking over at me, your eyes delighted at the collection of bobbing heads. You speak a sentence to me, all blurred enthusiastic tones, and I can hear you say—
Huuuge!
—and you grin and turn away.
“There are roses, and there are nonroses,” says Kelvin. “I only see nonroses.”
“The big globey flower heads, there. They’re alliums. And look, there’s scabious. Bees land on it, get the nectar, and it sends them to sleep. All zoned out.”
&nbs
p; “Oh yeah, look. Stoned.”
“Yeah.”
I’ve bleeped ten thousand little packets of allium bulbs through the checkout at the garden center in the late summer sales. Plant early autumn. I wonder how many of the ones I’ve sold are reaching out to this warm sun, dappled across the region’s back gardens? I wonder if I sold these ones here? That could be my life’s achievement. Maybe I’d settle for that.
We resume our journey and round a corner of gentle, wispy grasses that bow and flutter in the soft breeze. Poppies. The sun urges warmth onto my knees as it burns through the thin cloud.
Given time, you and I would have had a garden. We would have had a little plot, and we would have taken such good care of it. We’d have had a clump of scabious to please the bees, and wispy grasses lining a pond.
Given time.
I remember all the times you tried to get me to apply for the garden design course. All those reminders to get my résumé into shape.
I can see you now, pulling on your coat, gathering up your keys, pointing at your desk, saying, “It’s all there in that bundle of papers. Three courses you could apply for. The deadline’s in July, so you’ve got time.”
I don’t know why I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Too soon, too soon. July was an age away. And how is anyone supposed to get enthusiastic about scratching their résumé together? A few aimless, basic qualifications. Who would ever want me?
“Just have a look through them,” you said. “You totally know your stuff. Come on, one small change is all it takes. If you fill in this one piece of paper now, you’ll thank yourself as you cherry-pick the best jobs and sip champagne through the summer.”
It was a good fantasy.
Kelvin and I crest the top of a low rise, follow a gentle curve and roll down the other side, and arrive alongside a bench. Kelvin heaves the chair into a stable position and settles on the seat beside me. We exchange a brief look, a brief smile, before gazing at the garden, letting the silence set in with the sun. Kelvin takes off his glasses and begins to clean them with his T-shirt.