by James Rice
I haven’t always hidden away in the library. I used to sit out at lunch, on the wall over by the Lipton Building. I didn’t care that I was on my own because there was this family of magpies that nested just the other side of the fence and I liked to watch them, leaping out over the crowds, snatching things for their nest in the trees. Then one day a gang of Pitt kids noticed me there. One of them was your brother. (This was a couple of years back, when he was still in school.) They crowded round me and began to say things, the usual things, about my condition and my lisp and how weird I was and how pathetic it was that I was sitting out there on my own, etc. etc., but the magpies were out that day so I wasn’t really paying attention, I was too busy watching them, too busy listening to that little cackle they have, that miniature machine-gun squawk. Then your brother hunched down to eye level and demanded I ‘say something’. I didn’t know what to say. I was straining over his shoulder to see the magpies, picking through the bin. It made me smile because it was as if they knew exactly what they were looking for. Then one of the other Pitt kids bent down alongside your brother and reminded me that your brother had asked me to say something and told me I’d better ‘say something quick, or else’, only one of the magpies had caught something small and wriggling in its beak and I was too busy trying to make out what it was. Next thing I knew the whole gang was screaming ‘Say something!’ right in my face and they were over-pronouncing their ‘S’s and a crowd had gathered including Carly Meadows and a couple of other Vultures from my year and some people in the crowd were calling me a psycho and chanting, ‘Say “psycho”, say “psycho”,’ because they knew ‘psycho’ was a word I couldn’t say properly. It was at this point I realised I was scratching at my arm, which is something I do when I’m nervous. I lost sight of the magpies when one of the Pitt kids reached forward and poured a can of Tango over my head. Everyone stopped shouting then, started laughing instead, staring at me and laughing as Tango trickled down my neck, soaking into my collar. A few of them pointed, which was kind of stupid because everyone knew what they were laughing at. I breathed as slowly as I could, counting each drip from my fringe as it hit the pavement. After a minute they stopped laughing and just stared. It was then that I realised there were other drips hitting the pavement, red droplets of something thicker, something that splattered as it landed. The arm of my shirt was spotted red. Some of the Vultures said I was disgusting and a few made that wrinkle-face but most just stared. Then they left. I think that was the only time I ever saw your brother in uniform.
That afternoon I kept my blazer on. I had Maths and my hair went all hard and sticky from the Tango but nobody noticed.
TRANSCRIPT
Extract of interview between Detective Sergeant Terrence Mansell (TM) and Gregory Hall’s classmate, Ian Connor (IC).
TM: Thank you for agreeing to talk with me.
IC: S’all right.
TM: As you probably know, we’re here to discuss Greg.
IC: Um … well, yeah.
TM: How well do you know Greg?
IC: Well, he’s in my class.
TM: You sit next to him.
IC: In a few lessons, yeah. English. A few others.
TM: Would you consider him a friend?
[IC laughs.]
IC: God, no.
TM: So, what do you think of him?
IC: Same as everyone else.
TM: Which is?
IC: He’s nuts.
TM: Can you elaborate?
IC: He’s psycho nuts.
TM: What makes you say that?
[IC laughs nervously.]
IC: Erm …?
TM: I mean aside from the events of the past few days. I mean, what gave Greg this reputation?
IC: It’s just how he is.
TM: ‘Is’?
IC: The way he walks. The way he … watches. And there’s the scratching. The mumbling. He’s on meds, too. Did you know that? We found them, me and Goose. ‘Anti-psychotic’.
TM: Right.
IC: And then there’s the way he is with girls. He’s always, like, looking at the girls in class. You know? Like, staring at them.
TM: You never look at girls?
IC: Not in that way. Not, like, creepy, like he does.
TM: Are you aware you feature in his journal?
IC: Me?
TM: You.
IC: What’s he say about me?
TM: He alludes to your … involvement … with certain girls from your year.
IC: Really?
TM: And girls from younger years.
IC: Younger?
TM: Angela Hargrove?
IC: I had nothing to do with that.
TM: With what?
IC: New Year’s. I know she was saying stuff when the police showed up. Stuff about Goose and Darren. That had nothing to do with me. I was passed out.
TM: This is the party at Wallaby Drive? The Lamberts’?
IC: Goose’s, yeah.
TM: Did you see Greg that night?
IC: Not that I remember.
TM: But he was at the party?
IC: He might have been. I didn’t notice.
TM: You didn’t notice?
IC: He’s very unnoticeable. That’s part of his creepiness too. His psycho-nuttiness. And, as I said, I was out of it that night.
TM: We’re getting off topic here. I’m just trying to get a feel for Greg. What he’s like as a person. You’ve sat next to him for, what, three years? Isn’t there anything you can tell me?
IC: Only what I’ve told you already. He’s a creep.
TM: Nothing else?
IC: It’s the way he looks at you. That’s it, it’s the eyes. It’s all in the eyes.
TM: The eyes?
IC: Exactly. Just look into those eyes. Everything you need to know’s right there. In the eyes.
TM: That’s all you’ve got to say?
IC: Sorry. I’m not trying to waste your time or anything. It’s just, I don’t really know the guy. I don’t remember ever even having a conversation with him.
TM: Well, who does know him?
[Pause.]
IC: I don’t know. He didn’t have any friends, as far as I know. I guess nobody knows him. That’s the thing. You could interview the whole class and you wouldn’t find a single person that knows him. Not really. I guess that’s what makes him creepy. I guess that’s what makes him psycho, really. How alone he is.
TM: Right.
IC: That and the eyes.
TM: Thanks.
21/11
Saturdays I work at Hampton’s in the square. Your dad might have mentioned the back-lad? Probably not. I work alone in the kitchen, tucked away between the industrial freezers. There’s a metal basin, a worktop for dishes to dry on and a single shelf with a kettle and tea bags and soft crumbly biscuits. The air in the kitchen is even colder than inside the freezers. I try not to breathe through my mouth because the cold hurts the hole in my tongue.
Your dad works with Phil on the fresh-meat block. They’re obscured from the front of the shop by the chicken oven. I guess the customers don’t like to see all that hacking and tearing. Their block is only metres from the kitchen so I always hear them joking around. Phil gives your dad a bit of stick for his ponytail but Phil’s only twenty-two and he’s going bald, so he’s not really qualified to be making hair jokes. Sometimes your dad snatches Phil’s hat and holds it in the air and Phil jumps up trying to reach it, one hand over his bald spot. Your dad just laughs. He’s got one of the biggest laughs I’ve ever heard. He laughs ‘Heh’ instead of ‘Ha’. ‘Heh heh heh’. All day long.
Sometimes your dad talks about you in work. He tells Phil about how you’re into art, how one day you’re going to university. He never talks about your brother. This morning Phil was discussing baby names and your dad said he named you the morning you were born. He’d overdosed on Dutch courage and spent the night watching a VHS of Alice in Wonderland, over and over, rewinding and playing it till the birds starting sin
ging and the telephone started ringing and he found out you existed. I wonder if you know that story? Whenever they’re talking about you I tend to turn off the kitchen tap and just stare at the bubbles in the water.
There’s an older butcher called Charlie who works on the fresh-meat side, slicing ham and cooked chicken. His face is shrivelled to a point and he looks a lot like a chicken himself, especially with those little round glasses. (I know chickens don’t wear glasses, but if you saw him you’d know what I mean.) He’s always telling Phil and your dad to grow up and calling your dad a hippy. They call him the Miserable Old Cunt. Sometimes they shout back to me, ‘The Miserable Old Cunt needs a fresh bucket,’ and I have to fill a bucket with soap and steaming water and bring it out to him. I feel guilty responding when they call him the Miserable Old Cunt, it’s like I’m agreeing with them. He never even looks at me when I deliver his bucket. I guess he is a bit miserable.
There’s also this pack of four Vultures that serve out front in the shop. They’re in your year, which means it’s technically illegal for them to work, but it’s money in an envelope so I guess it doesn’t matter. Most of them take dance class with my sister and have the same bleached hair, long nails and powdery orange skin. They smell like cherries.
And then there’s me. The back-lad. I just keep my head down, concentrate on my work. In the morning I have to wash the walls and the floor and the insides of the fridges. It’s blood, mainly. Fresh blood wipes off easily but as soon as the cold gets to it it gets all hard and sticky and needs bleach and boiled water. They have all kinds of meat hanging in the fridge and I have to shift it around to clean. Sometimes there are cow legs or whole ribcages hanging there. Sometimes there are pig heads, with hardened snouts and icicles for eyelashes.
Twice a day I have to empty the fat from the chicken oven. It gathers in this large metal tray underneath. It’s very heavy and hard to manoeuvre. I have to slide it all the way out, till I can feel the heat of the fat on my face. I have to unscrew the stopper and let the molten fat dribble into a bucket, then empty the bucket into a bin out the back. Molten fat looks and smells like thick pee. The Vultures hate it. Their noses wrinkle in disgust. They don’t have a problem with meat and blood, just fat.
I make tea and coffee too, when they ask me. I have to make drinks for everyone and it’s awkward because the Vultures have never told me their names so I have to just wait for them to stop serving and notice me before I can ask what they want to drink. Sometimes they just ignore me, or do that wrinkle-face and giggle to each other.
I spend the rest of the day in my kitchen, watching the tap. I can watch that tap for hours, the water gurgling, steam in my face, warmer and warmer as the surface rises. I used to love baths when I was little. My sister and I had to share. We had this toy boat she was obsessed with. We’ve got some film of it somewhere, us both in the bath, playing with that boat. My sister never wanted the bath to end, she’d just refuse to get out. Maybe that’s what dried out her skin so much. That was before Finners Island, before I moved to Nan’s. I think about the old days when I’m watching the tap. I think about all kinds of stuff. The kitchen gets all foggy with steam.
It’s not too bad, really, being the back-lad. I keep to myself. I have my own kitchen and nobody bothers me. I’ve heard them talk about me a couple of times but nowhere near as much as they do in school. The only thing that bothers me is when the Vultures come out the back for their buckets. They need buckets to clean the counters and the only tap’s in my kitchen and the kitchen’s only really big enough for me, which means they have to stand right next to me, so close I can feel their warmth. It takes a long time for those buckets to fill so usually I close my eyes. I try and think about all the pigs and chickens in the freezer, how cold they are. I try and just listen to the rushing water.
Sometimes I don’t even realise they’ve gone until I can’t smell cherries any more.
22/11
My bedroom window’s the fire-escape window. It’s the window that, in the event of a fire, my family would supposedly crawl out of onto the safety of the roof. A couple of years ago one of my favourite things in the world was to open this window as wide as I could on rainy winter nights and feel the chill of the rain battering the roof tiles just an arm’s length from my face. Sometimes I used to reach my arm out into the night and let the rain patter and pool into the palm of my hand, numbing it out of all existence and, when it was so numb I could no longer even feel the rain, when with a reach and poke of my warm and living hand that white-dead hand felt like a hunk of frozen pork thawing in the fridge, and when the white-dead hand couldn’t even feel the poking of the warm and living hand, I would pull both hands down under my bed sheets and curl my whole body around them and the white-dead hand would burn back to life. On those nights I’d always have the best dreams. I’d dream I hadn’t even been born yet.
Then this one night I woke and saw it was raining and decided to have a go at my arm-reaching-out thing but I must have been very tired because after what must have been only a minute of hand-numbing I fell asleep, my arm still stretched out on the window ledge. By the time I woke the rain had stopped. The sun hadn’t quite risen and the garden was filtered with that golden light they film Corn Flakes adverts in. My hand was numb, resting there on the window ledge, and my first thought was to drag it into the warmth beneath the duvet. But, before I’d even had the chance to drag it into the warmth beneath the duvet, one of Them had dropped from the sky, right through the window, dropped right into the palm of my hand and just sat there, perfectly still, its legs spread wide in its landing.
Later, after my fitting and my vomiting and the seemingly impossible task of regaining my breathing, my father had said that they can sometimes ride their webs like paragliders, floating for miles on the wind. He saw it once in a documentary. He said they were fascinating creatures. Then he saw Mum and I staring up at him and he stopped saying things and went back to bed.
My window’s been locked ever since. Mum’s always searching for the key. She says it’s dangerous. We could all burn to death. And anyway, my room smells like teenage boy. I’m used to it. I keep the key in with my secret things, in my Casablanca video-case. I used to keep my secret things in my Brief Encounter video-case but last week I finally watched Casablanca again and immediately swapped them because Casablanca became my new all-time favourite and therefore has to be my Secret Case. I designed the cases myself, during Retro Hollywood Season on Channel 4, when my video recorder pretty much constantly had its REC light showing. I wrote the name of each film on the sleeve of each case in my best cursive handwriting – drawing two thin lines in pencil, making sure the top of each letter touched the top line and the bottom touched the bottom line and waiting for the ink to dry and rubbing out the pencil and being left with titles both neat and straight. They look great on my shelf, lined up in their cases. At first I enjoyed the prospect of browsing the neat and straight titles and deciding which film to choose, but then the first film I chose was Brief Encounter and it instantly became my favourite film of all time. I couldn’t stop watching it, over and over. Every time I came to choose a film I would start out wanting something new to watch and then think of Alec and Laura standing on that platform and Alec giving Laura’s shoulder a squeeze and that shoulder-squeeze being the only way he could ever tell her that she’s his one true love, his run-away-together kind of love, and that he’s sorry that they’ll never be together and how getting on that train is the saddest thing he’ll ever have to do but he has to do it anyway, and it gave me a kind of inflation in my chest, a kind of beautiful indigestion, and I ended up choosing Brief Encounter every time.
I’ve since devised a brutal-but-fair rule for film-watching. I am absolutely (under no circumstances) allowed to watch the same film twice in a row. It’s a hard rule to stick to but it’s the only way I can stop myself watching the same ones over and over. I’ve also decided to store my videos in the wrong cases, so whatever film I choose is not the film I
watch. This means every film is watched a relatively equal number of times. It also means (as the videos are no longer assigned to specific cases and as there is always a video in the VCR) that there is always an empty video-case. This video-case is my Secret Case. At the moment my Secret Case is Casablanca.
The other things I store in Casablanca are as follows:
Nan and Herb’s wedding photo.
The ticket stub from a bird-watching walk on Finners Island. (It’s years since we’ve been to Finners Island. I don’t even know if they have bird-watching walks there any more.)
The black button-eye of Mr Snow, my old white bear (which luckily came off before I buried him in the sand on Finners Island, losing him forever).
The spare key to my father’s study.
Money.
1. The slick black feather of an American bald eagle.
Apart from my video shelf, my bed, my wardrobe, my TV stand and my brown and green striped draught-excluder snake ‘Sammy’ that lies over the crack at the bottom of my door, my room is virtually empty. Mum calls it minimalist. I just don’t like clutter. I like to be able to see every possible inch of my bedroom at all times. I also like parcel tape and have used it extensively, taping the edge of my carpet to my skirting board and the foot of my bed to my carpet and taping all the cracks in all the walls and even taping over the air vent, leaving my room pretty much impenetrable.
Nan and I always used to tape the cracks back at Kirk Lane. We’d do it every winter because winter’s when they come inside, trying to escape the cold. Nan called it the Great Influx. She’d say, ‘We need to prepare for the Great Influx.’ To be honest the term ‘Great Influx’ probably didn’t help reassure me, but the parcel-taping did – it let me relax a little. She used to collect conkers, too, down at Crossgrove Park, scatter them all over the house. Apparently it was meant to scare Them away. I don’t know, it’s not something I’ve carried on since moving back because rummaging through leaves on the ground is the last thing I want to be doing if I’m hoping to avoid Them.