by James Rice
I found the butt, eventually. It was lodged under one of the plant tubs, speckled with soil. I slipped it back into my pocket and came inside.
28/11
By the way, I wouldn’t let your dad find out you smoke. Whenever Phil smokes, your dad gets very upset. He says, ‘You’re sucking the dick of death, man.’ Phil sometimes offers him a cigarette as a little joke but your dad never laughs. He just gives Phil that stony-faced look.
This morning Phil was helping your dad carry some dead pigs to the freezer. Your dad lifted them no problem, hoisting them over his shoulder like a fireman, but Phil’s small and skinny and by the end he was panting his way past the kitchen like a wounded solider carrying a comrade.
Afterwards Phil was exhausted. He wanted a smoke. He looked everywhere for his tobacco pouch but it was gone. He got pretty angry, in a breathless sort of way, and kept asking your dad where it was, but your dad just gave one of his heh-heh-heh laughs and said he didn’t know and that smoking was the reason Phil was out of breath in the first place. He said, ‘You’re sucking the dick of death, man. Do you want your kid to grow up without a daddy?’
They didn’t speak for a while after that. Phil just hacked away at the meat. The Top 40 Chart Show was playing on the radio, that song my sister’s always dancing to. ‘Ooo you got me screamin’ boy …’ Eventually your dad took the tobacco pouch from his pocket and slapped it on the block and Phil snatched it and hurried out the back of the shop. I just kept my head down, mopped out the fridge. This week the Top 40 Chart Show was sponsored by Burke’s Clinic: ‘THE place for your boob job’.
After lunch Phil came into my kitchen, smelling like a whole lot of smoke. He gave me a handful of coins and a slip of paper and told me to go to the bookies for him. I said I was too young to go the bookies and he said not to worry, I looked old enough, and if there was any trouble to just say his name. He said not to tell anyone (meaning your dad) where I was going. I went out the back door. It was busy in the bookies so I had to queue. I handed the slip of paper and the coins to the guy with the beard behind the counter and he gave me a different slip of paper without even looking up and I went back and gave Phil the new slip of paper and he tucked it into his pocket. Nobody asked where I’d been.
In the afternoon the Top 40 Chart Show finished and there was football instead. Phil stood by the radio, scratching at his neck with mince-covered fingers. The commentators were angry with the players, shouting and calling them a disgrace. It got me thinking about Lucy Marlowe again. I remembered those times she’d sit on the steps to the Lipton Building, trying to eat her lunch in peace, whilst the boys took it in turns to kick their football at her. How they’d snigger and ask her to throw it back. How she’d still always throw it back. I remember once they hit her Star Trek lunchbox and it clattered down the stairs and smashed open and her ham and ketchup sandwich landed in the gutter and she ran inside crying and nobody even picked up her sandwich and it lay there all day soaking up rainwater until the bread had melted, ketchup veining out across the playground. The boys used to say Lucy Marlowe was a nerd because she was passionate about Star Trek and wore this baggy Mr Spock T-shirt on own-clothes day that would probably still fit her now. I didn’t understand because they all wore matching football shirts on own-clothes day and I think football’s much nerdier than Star Trek. It’s not like Star Trek host radio shows every weekend with phone-ins and episode-by-episode analysis. It’s not like Star Trek fans stand by the radio scratching their necks and chewing their lips, looking like the entire world depends on what the commentator says next.
Someone scored and Phil jumped and punched the air. He kept grinning till the match was over. Then he winked at me and went back out to his block. I didn’t wink back but I couldn’t help smiling when he started singing. He danced around your dad. He gave him a big kiss on the side of his stony face.
Your dad just laughed.
‘Heh-heh-heh.’
01/12
Miss Hayes has a new theory. She thinks I’m not really scared of Them. She thinks they’re just something to blame my anxiety on. She thinks I hide my real fears behind Metaphorical Phantoms. Miss Hayes said when she was little her dad gave her a ventriloquist’s doll, a clown, called Mr Fungal. Mr Fungal was her favourite toy in the world. Her and Mr Fungal used to joint-host shows for her mum and she’d swear she couldn’t see her lips move. She said that when she was a little older her and her dad had a falling-out. Well, she said it was like a falling-out, only secret. She couldn’t tell anyone. She said she fell out with Mr Fungal, too. She’d wake up in the night crying and Mr Fungal would be there, grinning away from her bedside table. She hated him. She couldn’t even stand to be in the same room as him. She wanted to throw Mr Fungal out but then her mum would want to know why she didn’t like him any more. Mr Fungal belonged to her dad and by this point her dad had gone and her mum liked to keep the few things he’d left behind.
Miss Hayes said that she stuffed Mr Fungal right down at the bottom of her wardrobe, under her boxes of books and cuddly toys and shoes. She ignored him for a while but in the back of her mind she always knew he was still there, grinning. By then she was becoming a teenager and going through a rebellious time, so she took Mr Fungal out to the woods. She walked for hours without even thinking. She came to a clearing and sat Mr Fungal right in the middle, on the dry grass, and poured a bottle of methylated spirit over his head and set fire to him. She said he gave off a lot of smoke, a big column of it pointing into the sky. She said he crackled. She couldn’t leave till she was sure he was all burnt away, till she was sure he wouldn’t end up back on her shelf the next day, grinning with his lips all blistered and popped.
By this point in the story Miss Hayes’ voice was breaking. She clutched her skirt. Her hands were red but for a thin border of white round her engagement ring. There was silence – and not a nice silence. Miss Hayes wiped the side of her face. She said that sometimes our Metaphorical Phantoms can seem like the root of all evil but they’re not, they’re just a barrier between us and our real problems. She said that even if there was some natural phenomenon and all of Them were wiped out forever, I still wouldn’t be happy. She said they’re just a symbol.
I’ve heard similar theories. A couple of years ago when my phobia was getting out of hand again Mum took me to see her doctor, Dr Filburn. Dr Filburn was different to the other doctors I saw because he was a doctor of the mind. He wasn’t like the others who just palmed me off with pills. Dr Filburn was going to cure me.
Dr Filburn said it was the concept of Them that scared me. He said I could happily coexist with Them if I could just overcome my irrational brain. Dr Filburn also used the term ‘Metaphorical Phantoms’, only he said I needed to face my Metaphorical Phantoms head-on. Dr Filburn was old. Not age-wise – he just looked like he belonged in the past. He had a moustache. Mum seemed to like him, though. He really helped her when she went through her sick stage. The whole time I lay in that comfy white chair Mum stood there, smiling back and forth between us. It was that same smile she dons while showing off a new item of furniture – the smile that forces you to smile right back.
Dr Filburn told me to close my eyes. With the click of a remote his office was engulfed in low, moaning whale music. After a few minutes he began to speak, softly. He told me to imagine a mountainside, shrouded in mist. He told me to pretend I was walking through the mist, searching for something, an animal. He told me to find the animal. I found an American bald eagle. It was perched on a rock overlooking a misty beach. Apparently this was my ‘Safety Animal’, and Dr Filburn told me to approach it, which I did. Then he told me to stroke it, which I also did and which, I have to admit, felt relaxing. Its wings were spread and I could feel the ribbed bones beneath. It made me feel light-headed.
Dr Filburn told me to open my eyes. He placed my right hand on his desk, which was empty apart from a pen, a pad and a picture of a blonde lady that could have been his wife or his daughter. Then he left the room, retur
ning with a little plastic one of Them. He told me to maintain the peaceful state of mind I’d created stroking my Safety Animal. Mum was still smiling.
Dr Filburn placed the plastic one of Them on his desk. He asked if I was OK with the plastic one of Them on his desk and I nodded. He told me to close my eyes and imagine my animal. When he asked me to open them again the plastic one of Them had moved across the desk, a little closer to me. He asked if I was still OK. I nodded again. He told me to close my eyes again.
This continued until the little plastic one of Them was perched right in front of me. Then Dr Filburn lifted the plastic one of Them and placed it in the palm of my hand. He asked if I still felt scared. I wanted to explain that I’d never been scared of the little plastic one of Them because it was plastic and right at the start I could have just walked over and picked it up, Safety Animal or no Safety Animal. Instead I just shook my head. Dr Filburn nodded and left the room again.
He returned with a jar. Before the lid was even off I was clutching the leather and starting to fit. Everything went cold and dark. Mum was screaming. That was the day I bit the hole through my tongue. I never saw Dr Filburn again. I remember how angry he was when I bled all over his comfy white chair.
But anyway, they’re not real. I guess that’s the point. That’s what I have to remember.
They’re just Metaphorical Phantoms.
They’re not real.
04/12
It hurts because you are still there and I know you are there and I don’t know how to take you away. And it’s not your fault but you could have come to school. You could have to come to school anyway and just worn your glasses and nobody would have known and I would have walked you home and everything would be the same.
But nothing is the same.
And it was hard for me. I waited for you. At 08:18 I was pressed against the gate, holding my breath, watching your bus arrive. I was examining each Pitt kid as they stumbled from the steps. By the time the last kid had departed and the bus had pulled away I’d nearly forgotten how to breathe.
And I waited again, at lunch, in the library, staking out the hole in the hedge. But Angela Hargrove crawled out through it alone and returned, an hour later, still alone.
And all I could think about was you. The lack of you.
So at 15:30 when the final bell rang I waited one more time, in my usual waiting-place, with the ducks. I waited for the 17:32. I guess some part of me still expected to see you, shivering at the bus stop outside the Prancing Horse, but you hadn’t gone to work either.
But I stayed on our bus. I rode it all the way out to the Pitt. I closed my eyes and pictured your sleeping face in the driver’s mirror. I told myself you were OK. You were fine. You were at home. You had not been hit by a bus. You had not been attacked by a gang in the Pitt. You were not at the hospital having contracted cancer from all that smoking and you were not going to die like Andrew Wilt, shaky and milky and bald. I got off at our usual stop, walked our usual route. I watched my feet. That way I could pretend you were up ahead of me. I could imagine the click of your heels on the pavement. I could even sniff for your cigarette – I swear at one point I could even smell it. But you seemed further ahead than usual. I couldn’t keep up with you. Every time I lifted my head you’d disappear again and I’d be alone again and in the end I started to run, up all the dark and empty streets, run with the cold air biting my face.
By the time I reached your house I was panting. I sat on the wall opposite. The air was cold and stung the hole in my tongue. I focused on your red and peeling door. Your curtains were drawn. Your father’s car sat outside, rusted browny-green, its backseats packed with Hampton’s cardboard boxes. I could hear a sound, a voice. Canned laughter.
Your house backs onto Crossgrove Park. I hurried across the field, counting the houses till I reached your back hedge. Your garden was overrun with weeds, foot-long grass, white plastic patio furniture. Any intentional plant life was dead – the hedge patchy, the few scattered plant tubs at the back housing only shrivelled brown remains. Your father was spread across the couch in the lounge, lit by the TV. Laughter murmured behind the glass. Your father wasn’t laughing, he was swigging from a bottle. His eyes were shut and he was swigging from a bottle.
There was a shed in the corner: shelter from the light of the house. I found a gap in the hedge just behind it. The shed itself was rotten. There were several crooked or missing planks. The roof was held up by four wooden beams, one in each corner, planted into the surrounding mud.
A strip of light shone from the first floor of the house. A bedroom. The curtains were thick and purple, giving nothing away but a thin square of light round the edges. Every few seconds a shadow passed over it, flickering, back and forth. Back and forth.
That’s when I heard a growl – deep, nearby. I was leaning on the shed and I assumed it was the boards creaking but as I turned the growling increased, snarling and guttural. I turned too sharply, slipped in the mud. The wet grass broke my fall. A sharp pain spread from my palm – the burn, the scab from your cigarette butt, I’d grazed it on the side of the shed and now it was bleeding. There was mud and blood on the arm of my coat. I tried to wipe it but my hands were muddy too, even muddier than my arm and all I could do was make things muddier and bloodier and worse.
That’s when the barking started. I could see it now, the dog, through a gap in the shed. Its head was long and snouted, just a foot or two from mine. Its breath was hot and smelt like boiled ham. The only thing holding it back was a length of chain, knotted round its neck. I don’t know one breed of dog from another but it was a pretty mean-looking dog. It had lots of teeth, most of them yellow with black bits in between. Its gums were the colour of chopped liver.
I was halfway to standing when the back door opened. Your father’s voice echoed out across the garden. I dropped to the ground, once again facing the roaring stinking dog. Your father shouted for a minute, stuff like ‘Shut up, Scraps’ and ‘I’ll give you something to bark about’ but the dog didn’t shut up, if anything it got louder. I closed my eyes. The barking stabbed into my ears. Everything was wet and tasted like soil.
And then there was you. All it took was your mumble across the garden and the dog stopped its barking and turned to face the house. It whined from deep inside itself. You told your father to go back indoors. Liquid clunked from his bottle. He coughed and swallowed and breathed.
He said, ‘If you don’t shut it up, I will.’ And the back door slammed shut.
I tried to catch a glimpse of you then, strained to see over the long grass. Your feet rustled past. They slowed to step over the patio furniture, slapped the concrete steps up to the shed. The dog scrambled over to greet you. I glanced at the house. Your father was across the couch again, head back, swigging at his bottle.
Your footsteps creaked into the shed. I saw you then, kneeling beside the dog, scratching its ears as it whined. You had your back to me, your hair tied in pigtails. You wore a pink dressing gown, a pair of black Wellington boots. You rubbed the dog’s head, pulling the skin back to show the red of its eyes.
You told it, ‘There-there.’
Then you stood and reached, high up into the shed, returning with a clear plastic bag of bone-shaped biscuits. You rattled a few into your palm. The dog chewed noisily. It drooled onto your dressing gown. When it’d finished it rested its head on your lap. You stroked its belly. Rubbed its ribs.
You said, ‘Good boy, Scraps. Good boy.’
You lay its head beside me. Facing me. It breathed, soft and warm. The boiled ham smell was stronger than ever, probably because of the biscuits.
It closed its eyes, let its tongue loll onto the shed floor. Its ribs rose and fell in time with my own.
I closed my eyes.
You locked the shed. You crunched across the lawn, back to the house. I waited till I heard the kitchen door, then climbed to my feet.
You had stopped in the doorway. You were staring over at the shed, right at me. I
hunched down. You mustn’t have seen me because a second later you turned and disappeared inside, locking the door behind you.
I can still see you now, that image of you I glimpsed for just a second. Your red hair parted, your eye all swollen and black.
05/12
This morning I watched your father through the blinds of the back fridge. He hacked at the hunks of meat on his block. He sipped tea and read the paper. He joked with Phil, holding his hat in the air with that big hand of his, too high for Phil to reach. Always with that laugh: ‘Heh-heh-heh.’
I only realised how long I’d been standing there when Phil stepped in and asked me to go the bookies. I was shivering but he thought I was nodding so he just placed the money in my hand and gave me a thumbs up.
It was 09:55. I had to sit on the step and wait till 10:00 for the bookies to open. The square was empty. There were two pigeons hopping around the car park. One of them was missing a leg. The other was missing an eye. They picked at a carton of chips. When the man from the bookies opened the door they scrambled into flight, landing the other side of the square. Pigeons never fly very far.
When I got back to Hampton’s your father was in the kitchen. He was enormous in my tiny kitchen, his head right up near the ceiling, where the steam gathers. He smiled down at me. I smiled back. I was numb and empty and smiling back seemed almost natural. He asked me to make him and Phil a tea. Phil shouted back that he wanted a coffee. Your father said cheers and called me ‘mate’.
In Hampton’s we use T-Rex Bleach. It’s ‘The wild way to clean’. The bottle has T - R E X written across it in jungle-style font, a teeth-marked chunk missing from the T as if an actual T-rex has taken a bite. Bleach is something I’ve got used to, working as a cleaner. It stings my nostrils and makes my fingers peel and sometimes at night I can still taste it, burning the back of my throat, but it’s the only way to shift real grime – the kind of grime that’s hard and black and no longer resembles what it used to be.