The Biggerers

by Amy Lilwall

  Jinx stopped playing with her buttons, walked up to the old lady and cuddled her shoe, stroking it like she’d done that day with the Dead Bird.

  Mrs Lucas chuckled, then let her stare deaden for a while. Susan was just about to ask her what was wrong when: ‘You’re Jinx, aren’t you?’ she said to her shoe.

  Jinx looked up then clapped once.

  ‘Tell me, Jinx, do you know the other one? The one who lives next to me… Skinny little thing, he is.’

  A clap.

  ‘You do? Would you be able to ask him for me? You see…’ She turned to Susan. ‘I’m a bit wary of his owner. If it weren’t for him, I’d go round there myself.’

  Jinx held a clap between her hands as her eyes were caught by a twinkle that danced along the beaded hemline of Mrs Lucas’s skirt.

  ‘Oh really?’ Susan shifted her weight to one hip. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen him… The owner.’

  ‘He’s a big, untidy fellow; should really be under specialist care I think. He limps, poor chap, haven’t you seen him hobble up the driveway? He won’t remember you from one day to the next. Have you seen how skinny his littler is?’

  Jinx pictured Chips’s biggerer and his big boots chasing her towards the vacuum hatch.

  ‘I’ve seen him in our back yard once or twice, but he’s always had his coat on.’

  His humcoat… His humcoat that he hadn’t had when Jinx had seen him, but had somehow found afterwards.

  ‘Painfully thin.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I know it’s silly but I have to think of these things at my age. I wouldn’t be able to… you know… leave quickly or abruptly or even be particularly assertive.’

  ‘It’s not silly at all.’

  A dream played out in Jinx’s mind; all flickery and soundless. A peacock wandered about a kitchen, yelping meow, meow, like the grey cat. A flower in its hair. Big boots appeared behind it and big hands grabbed its body and pulled it into the air, little twiggy legs wiggled, looking for something to grab on to…

  This was silly, how could that have happened? It was like that thought that she’d had this morning, when she was sure that Blankey was sleeping by the dining-room doors. That was such a silly thought. But… they hadn’t passed each other in the tunnel after Jinx had run from Chips’s vacuum hatch. Maybe she’d come much later, when Chips was asleep? She thought of the day before when Chips had turned and run across her Outside, through his tunnel and away, all red and panicked. And with his humcoat on. She turned and looked at Bonbon.

  Bonbon wrinkled her eyes. ‘What’s wrong?’ they seemed to say.

  ‘Would you do that for me, little lady?’ Words dropped like feathers from Mrs Lucas’s mouth.

  Jinx caught every single one and vowed that she would look after them until… Until she could pass them on to Chips. A clap.

  ‘Good girl,’ said Mrs Lucas.

  Jinx turned and took Bonbon by the hand. The grey and green crinolines disappeared into the hallway.

  ‘I… I didn’t mean right this minute. You don’t have to go now. Are they going now?’

  ‘I guess so,’ Susan replied, wanting to call after them that they should be careful. She bit her lip and watched them disappear into the hallway.

  ‘If someone was potentially in danger and it was your fault, what would you do?’

  ‘There must be more to it than that…’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, the answer is so obvious that… How about this: if someone was in danger and it was my fault, what would stop me from helping them?’

  ‘—.’

  ‘Emma?’

  ‘Being unsure of the consequences.’

  ‘Right. Consequences for who?’

  She smirked. ‘This is all hypothetical, really. It’s just one particular incident that plays on my mind…’

  His eyes twitched over her. Leave them to rot, he wanted to say; how could anything like that be your fault? He felt his chest rising forward and stopped it, heaving it back as if it were a toddler hurtling, arms open, towards a panther. He opened his mouth.

  ‘It’s already time,’ she said.

  He watched his own feet swinging above the floor and tried to aim each swing so that the line in the tiles below was exactly in the centre. Now his feet were above it… Now they were below it. Now above, and now below. Above. Below. Above. Below. Where could she be? Having come home yesterday afternoon, and having hidden in his cupboard for ages listening to that voice as it called him a liar again and again and trying to rock it away and shake it out of his head; having done all of that, he’d spent most of the night walking around the ground floor, turning over plates and cushions and bags and boxes, shouting Blankey’s name. As long as he could hear himself shout, he was alone in the house.

  She didn’t answer. She was nowhere.

  Above. Below. Above. Below. Try. The. First. Floor. Above. Below… Above. The first floor. He stopped swinging. He had to try everywhere. He had to. Because not finding her here would be just as good as finding her here. Well, not just as good… Pushing himself out of the cupboard, he launched himself towards the stairs. But at least they could be sure of one place where she was not. And… and perhaps this voice in his head would stop. Or quieten down a bit. Pulling himself up onto the first stair, he remembered the last time he’d climbed stairs and screwed his eyes up. He remembered liking the feeling of the nice soft stair brushing against his body. He remembered the noises that had pulled him upwards; what he’d found at the top… No. No. He couldn’t think about that now. Certainly not. And anyway, these stairs were horrid; some were sticky, some were rough. Some had carpet, some didn’t. All of them smelled bad, so bad that he held his breath each time his face got too close to one. He got to the sixth step and stopped, panting. His stomach made bubbly noises. It was difficult to climb when nothing was pulling him upwards. Bad smells, horrid carpet… And now his foot was stuck to something. His stomach rumbled again. ‘If you find Blankey, you can ask her for some flakes,’ said the voice. Disgusting, he licked his lips, that thought disgusted him. But he allowed it to pull him up the next few stairs.

  She lay in front of the door, arms tangled in the fluffy rug that stretched next to the bed; one giant footprint glowed and faded on the whitish door as her eyes sharpened and dimmed, but never closed. The sound of her own breathing hissed in her ears and sometimes a squelchy pumping noise echoed in her head. She dragged one hand under her armpit and sucked at the fingers. Two tiny droplets dissolved on her tongue. She sucked her tongue, dry like that dusty rug, she thought, before sucking it again then biting it, hard, the pumping beating at her ears. The blood flowed. The pumping calmed. She sucked it all up and bit again. This time it hurt; tears rose in her eyes like bubbles and burst at the surface, spilling over the eye’s edge and sliding over her temples. She scooped them up in her fingernails and fed them into her mouth.

  That big hairy hand had pushed her to the back of the box, ‘I must get you some water, Tilda.’ And he’d left, pulling the bedroom door closed behind him. Luckily, he hadn’t closed the lid on the box. But that was yesterday. She hadn’t had a drop of water since she’d left her own house with Chips’s humcoat in her grey bag and a flower in her hair. Why hadn’t Chips found the humcoat and the flower? Maybe they were completely out of sight. She thought for a moment: where had she left them? A skinny hand of memory tried to pull itself up behind her eyes, but another fat memory was waiting to stamp on the hand: that big hairy hand curling around her, lifting her up to the face that smelled her, and the breath that surrounded her with the word ‘Tiiiildaaaa…’ She had shut her eyes. But now she would have given anything in the world to see him, to have that big hairy hand put a nice dish of water next to her and breathe ‘Tiiiildaaaa’ all over her again.

  She tasted her own mouth. Sore patches of tongue remembered where her teeth had bitten. ‘Help,’ she whispered, then coughed. Then closed her eyes.

  A noise broke through the door, weird and echoey as if
it had passed through a tunnel in order to get to her. She rolled her head to face the door. Her name… Someone was calling her. ‘Ho…’ she croaked. Again, the noise tunnelled through the door. ‘Blankey!’ it called.

  Her arms twisted out of the rug and tried to push her body onto its elbows. ‘Ho…’ she tried again, breathing out as hard as she could. ‘Ho!’ she sobbed.

  ‘Blankey!’ The voice was not calling any more; it was shouting. Had it heard her? ‘Blankey!’ it shouted again, followed by a thud against the door.

  ‘Chips,’ Blankey whispered.

  CHAPTER 10

  ‘I have to go through there?’

  ‘That’s the only way to get to his house.’

  Bonbon looked into the dirty tunnel. ‘Are you sure about this, Jinx?’

  Jinx nodded. ‘Mmm-hmmm.’ She watched as Bonbon locked her teeth together and closed her eyes the way she did when she got put in water. ‘It’s alright, Bonbon, look; take my hand.’

  ‘Alright, Jinx.’ The tiny white hand climbed into the air without knowing where it was going as its owner still had her eyes shut. Jinx found it and pulled it towards her.

  ‘You can stay here if you want to.’

  ‘I don’t want to be without you.’

  ‘Right.’

  Bonbon let herself be led but took the tiniest, slowest steps she had ever, ever taken.

  ‘You know what you found out yesterday? About Blankey?’ Jinx said in her kindest voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you hadn’t have found that out, then we wouldn’t have asked Chips if he’d seen her, and so we wouldn’t be doing any of this.’

  The steps got a little longer. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, Bonbon. Really. If you hadn’t heard what you heard then poor Blankey… Well… Poor Blankey wouldn’t be being looked for right now.’ The steps were almost normal. ‘So if we do find her, she’ll have you to thank.’

  ‘And you, Jinx,’ Bonbon breathed. ‘You’re the brave one.’

  Jinx smiled in the dark tunnel. ‘We’re almost there.’

  ‘I’m frightened, Jinx.’

  ‘It’s alright. I was too, the first time, but I was all on my own. You’ve got me.’

  Bonbon took a deep breath. ‘Right.’

  ‘Now, listen. The inside of Chips’s house is very different to ours.’

  ‘Different how?’

  ‘Well… It’s not very lovely.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You’re not going to like it.’

  ‘—.’

  ‘What I want you to keep thinking about is that if Blankey is in there, then we need to get her out. Alright?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Good.’ Jinx lifted Bonbon’s hand and kissed the back of it, then covered up the kiss with a little rub.

  ‘My feet are caught in something.’

  ‘Really?’

  Bonbon’s hand-squeeze got tighter. ‘What is that, Jinx?’

  ‘I’ll check, Bonbon. Don’t worry,’ she replied, bending down to run her fingers along it.

  ‘Don’t touch it!’

  Jinx recognized the slidiness between her fingers. She’d pulled it out of that blue tube the night that Blankey went missing, but, what was that thing?

  ‘Let’s pull it into the light.’

  They stepped into Chips’s Outside, pulling the thing that curled behind them like that long hairy thing that was stuck to the grey cat’s bottom. Bonbon looked around her then ducked back towards the tunnel.

  ‘It’s alright. Just hold on to my coat.’

  Bonbon reached forward and grabbed at the green fur, arching her gaze from the tunnel behind her, up along the grey wall, higher up to a clouded window, down towards a corner full of dirty shadows and right down over Jinx’s shoulder at the little square of she-one held between Jinx’s hands. She squished her eyelids almost together and peered closer. It had black hair and a black face and see-through lips but Bonbon was sure it was: ‘Blankey,’ she almost gasped.

  Jinx pulled the long thing through her hands to another square, and another. One smiley, one with the lips all pushed out, one holding a flower. ‘They’re all Blankey,’ she said.

  * * *

  ‘We’re going to do the candles, Isabel!’

  ‘Alright. I’ll be there in a minute,’ she said to the photo of a Kayan tribeswoman. Isabel stared at the woman’s neck, and for a minute, pictured herself with golden coils around her arms and legs and waist, hyperextending her own body. She gripped her neck with her hands as she read the text that wrapped around the photo. Ah… So the gold coil didn’t actually extend the neck, it pushed the collar bones down, giving the illusion of a long neck. Sounded rather painful, actually. She turned the page to the smallest man in the world and skipped right over it. She’d seen him a thousand times in various books and articles. She’d even written to him once or twice. The first time was when she was about ten, she’d written to him to say that she suffered from dwarfism and that he was one of her heroes; was he really as happy as he looked in his photos? A few months later a parcel arrived, inside was a list of societies and associations, as well as a baseball cap signed by the smallest man in the world. He told her that he felt very lucky to have this ‘gift’ and that Isabel shouldn’t say that she ‘suffers’ from dwarfism as there was no right or wrong way of having a body that works properly. The second time she wrote to him was to thank him for his letter and all of the links and addresses for various societies that he’d forwarded her. And the baseball cap. She told him that although she really liked the baseball cap, it was a bit big as the circumference of her head measured only twelve centimetres; in fact, she thought he should know that the only reason she was writing to him was because she was much smaller than he was, and it made her feel good to know that she was better than someone else at something, and that he should be worried about his job. Drew found the letter before she sent it and went bananas; told her that it was very unkind to say things like that and that she should be ashamed. She was made to rub out the last three lines and replace them with: ‘I like the baseball cap because it is blue and my bedroom is blue.’

  ‘Do you want them to come here and see how small you are?’

  ‘Yes!’ she had screamed.

  Drew had been shocked at this answer. The only really unkind thing in the letter was saying that the man should be worried about his job. The rest of it was worrying… Drew had squatted down in front of her and sighed. ‘How about we take you out for a drive – would you like that?’

  That was the first time Isabel had ever been out in a car. It was the first time she had seen real cows in real fields and real bunny rabbits in real bushes. She’d gasped so much that she could remember gasping. That was the year when Watty and Drew couldn’t believe that they’d never thought of living in the country; the year that Isabel got a new bedroom with a view of the cows, a dwarf hamster and her first book about becoming a vet.

  She turned another page. Ah, the Elephant Man, poor guy; she knew his story well and it always triggered one thought: if she turned herself into a curiosity, the world would have to accept her. In fact, she’d be famous! She was much smaller than the smallest man in the world. But this thought was exactly that: a thought. It was what she liked to call her ‘chocolate cake thought’. She’d occasionally sit up in bed at night and eat it, thinking about the hotels she’d get to stay in, what she’d say to journalists, what she’d wear to television interviews, conversations with film directors – The Borrowers would be made into a film and she would play the lead – maybe she’d release her own perfume…

  As soon as she had finished the slice, she was very careful not to take another piece. She would make herself think about something else: just lately it was feline castration, and her online quest to re-house Bonbon and Jinx, the French brown bears living in an impossibly tiny park enclosure. These were important things. Fame was such a superficial thing… Her laptop bleeped. Oh! Two emails pinged into her inbox. The first w
as entitled ‘Still in Captivity’. There was an attachment. She clicked on the link to see two very sad bears chained at the foot. The head of one of them swung droopily from side to side, side to side. She glanced at the message underneath:

  ‘Sign the petition to end their eighteen years of misery.’

  Her eyes burned and blurred. She signed the petition under Drew’s name, as she’d been told to do with everything, and went back to her inbox.

  ‘Happy Birthday, Izzy, from the Amazon team.’

  Isabel smiled and scraped a knuckle under one cheekbone, then the other. She’d made a secret Amazon account earlier in the year, and although she’d never ordered anything (Drew would go nuts) they had sent her a birthday message. Her, Isabel Mahlik, alias ‘Izzy’.

  ‘Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you!’

  Isabel closed the window on the screen as Jasper’s nose peeked around the door; Drew was shuffling towards her holding a glowing, cow-shaped cake while Jasper danced in circles underneath it. Two other people followed behind: Watty and Watty’s brother, Uncle Reg. They were the only people in the world who could be trusted with Isabel’s secret. Isabel stood up on her chair; when had Uncle Reg arrived? She would have abandoned her books much sooner had she known.

  ‘Happy Birthday, dear Isabel!’

  Isabel laughed as Drew said her name but Watty and Uncle Reg stretched her nickname, ‘Quail’, over two booming syllables.

  Happy Birthday to you!

  ‘Blow them out!’ yelled Drew.

  She leaned forward, and in eight little puffs, she’d blown out her seventeen candles.

  * * *

  Chips scratched at the white carpet that he could just about reach through the gap under the door. ‘I can hear you, Blankey! I can hear you!’ He tried to push his head under but it was much too narrow. ‘I’ll get you out!’ he called. On his belly, he crawled backwards and craned his neck to see the door handle. It hung so high above him that it was all blurry. ‘I’ll get you!’ he shouted up towards the handle. He looked around for something to climb up. A three-legged stool lay on its side in the doorway between the landing and another room. He leapt up, bounded over to it and started to push. The seat rolled, but its legs stayed where they were. Why? Running towards the legs, he pushed them. They moved, but the seat stayed where it was. He ran back to the seat and pushed it a little, then back to the legs, then to the seat. ‘I’m coming, Blankey!’ he called.