Graffiti My Soul

by Niven Govinden

  In the fold of the letter is the 9-carat St Christopher I’d spent most of my cash on. I wasn’t trying to be sentimental when I gave him that gift, more that it was the most appropriate thing I could think of. If it forced him to think about me each time he wore it, that would be his lookout, not mine.

  Now it sits in my hand uselessly. I’m not feeling anything. Just static. There’s no point in going to the flat and pleading for anything, as I know what I’ll find there: a clothes rail cleared of tracksuits, Bedingfield CD packed up and away. He didn’t say much when he found me, but what he had said sounded final. The look on his face only seemed to back that up. Softness over anger, but still incredibly resolute. I knew when I left the flat that there was no reverse decision. When it comes to disqualification, all decisions are final. I’ve been trying to run all my life, but I’m never going to run the way Casey does. I’m not scared enough.

  It takes Jason a couple of days to say it, but he manages it eventually. No longer feeling so fucking clever. That only three of the five pictures I gave him were the ones he originally left under the bed. Either a magic trick or something we don’t want to voice an explanation for. When Casey started shouting, I thought it was because he was shocked at the pictures, I didn’t think about which pictures.

  I move on because I have to. Driving yourself mad because you’re missing your mentor is only going to fuck with your head. Trus’ me, I’ve been there.

  48

  I’m a bright boy. Pearson’s bullshit keeps me off the streets a little. Yid graffiti follows me about the school. Hey, replaced with Shalom. Simple things.

  Simple doesn’t bother me. Simple is the easiest thing to handle, but I keep myself to myself only ’cos I don’t want to waste my energy, or pull a muscle. I train with Brendan. I go to school. I come home. Strict routine. Mum twigs after about three days. She isn’t stupid.

  ‘Are you on drugs? Is that the problem?’

  Then again.

  Mum wants to know everything all of a sudden. Doesn’t like that I’m always in heavy fight mode on X Box or scrubbing myself in the shower. Outside of training and school, I haven’t left the house for nearly a week. Won’t even go with her to Tesco.

  ‘Are you being bullied?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Then what’s the matter? I don’t understand. You shouldn’t be indoors all the time like this.’

  ‘Teenage stuff,’ I say. ‘Growing pains. Nothing I want to discuss with my mother.’

  49

  Jase on his mother – this came last Christmas when he stayed over one night. A stayover sandwiched between my first two times with Moon, so I was feeling manly and all-knowing. We’d played on X Box until we were virtually blind, but still unable to sleep. It was one of those three a.m. conversations that adults are so fond of having.

  ‘Her sticking her fingers down her throat is the only happiness she gets. It sounds fucked up, but that’s how it is.’

  ‘I get it. It’s like her high, right?’

  ‘You should see the look on her face before she locks herself in the bathroom. And then the look she has when she comes back downstairs. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to contentment. Since Sophie, anyway . . . Why would I want to take that away from her?’

  ‘Don’t say any more,’ I go, but not for the reasons he was thinking. More to do with me looking at him in his boxers on my floor and thinking things I shouldn’t.

  Everyone pretends they don’t have a gay phase, but they’re all liars. This was mine.

  50

  The nights when we meet are when she practises sex with me. All socialising has gone out the window. I’m banned, thanks to the volleyball idiot and his Surrey fatwah.

  She’ll turn up at eleven when Mum is doing a night shift and Pearson is safely tucked up in bed, saying things like, ‘I need to try it out with you laying on your back tonight,’ or ‘Let’s see if I can get you off in five minutes without taking my clothes off, and by neither using my hands or mouth.’

  She says these things before she’s said hello.

  Having Moon this way, in secret, is better than not having her at all, even though I know that the next time I see her, outside her house, or in the school corridor, she’ll be looking at me like I’m some deranged dependent muppet who can’t let go.

  If I wasn’t so angry, I’d find the urgency in her voice, the hot hot heat of her breath, fucking sexy.

  ‘This is sick,’ I tell her, usually when she’s on top of me. ‘You’re just trying this stuff out like it’s a recipe you’re perfecting for a dinner party.’

  ‘That’s exactly what it is.’

  ‘Why don’t you just do this with Pearson in the first place? Forget the dry run. It’s not about making mistakes, sex. It’s about the moment, the connection, or something.’

  ‘Like you’re the big expert all of a sudden. I suppose we have Kelly Button to thank for that. I’m not interested in the unknown, Veerapen. I’d rather get the new stuff or the tricky stuff out the way with you, so that when I’m with him I’m in control.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound too healthy.’

  ‘Well, it’s either this arrangement or exercise control over food. Which would you prefer?’

  Moon had a problem with food for a couple of years when she was about eleven. It’s kind of common round here. Everyone looking for perfection and not finding it, having to keep it all in their head and out of their bellies. Her parents had to get outside help to sort it. It’s why they always go crazy at the first sign of trouble because they never know if she’ll cave in and pull the inner trigger. Wheel out the crutch when things aren’t going her way. It’s also why they don’t like having the computer on in their house, after she tried to make her own proana webpage, sending a hyperlink to her dad instead of saving it.

  It’s like living with a suicide bomber who’ll never take his coat off.

  I hate her. Right now, I hate her, but there’s no way I want her going back to how things were before she got help; a skinny unsatisfied undernourished hell.

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ I say. ‘Keep fucking me ’til you think you’ve got it right.’

  We carry on, silently, like Scientologists.

  51

  Stoicism is bollocks. I’m no good at letting go. Ask anyone. When Dad left, I’d creep downstairs after Mum had gone to bed, and sleep in the garage, pulling down his old sleeping bag that he’d used about three times on a fishing trip and then forgot about, and the cardboard boxes from the Christmas stuff that no one had got around to chucking away. (Mum was never very good at getting rid of clutter, maybe that’s why he went.)

  I slept in the garage every night for two weeks, thinking that he was going to find me, or that I’d wake and find his car towering over me and realise that it was all a bad dream. Kids are so stupid. No wonder people lose patience with them. First sign of trouble, and they start doing rubbish like that. Like that’s going to solve anything, retreating back into your shell, regressing to toddlerhood.

  Looking back now, I get it. It wasn’t so much that I wanted it to be a dream, I just wanted to be near him. The garage was his place, it had his stamp all over it. He wasn’t a practical person, the only things he knew about were books, food and screwing opticians, but he liked gear. He liked having the kind of stuff all dads have, even if he wasn’t ready to use it: tools, nails, tins of paint, ladders of varying sizes, lampshades, varnish, off-cuts from the old carpet, stacks of old magazines. Wonder why Mum never noticed.

  She didn’t notice a lot of things. Too fucked up at the time to notice that her kid had stopped speaking. She was taking a few pills to get her through the day, pills that made her rabbit on. She talked to me, to herself. All the time, yak yak, trembling tone, everything’s rosy, what are we having for dinner, yak yak. Never a comment to register that no sounds were coming from my mouth, that I’d become Dad’s unwilling counterpart, the silent ghost. It took the same amount of time, a fortnight, before I started talking again
, when I realised that Mum needed more help than I did.

  Not sleeping in the garage, making myself not do it, was the biggest hurdle. I tried tying myself to the bed, but it didn’t work. I had to rely on willpower. It was like I was being operated on without any anaesthetic. Doctors ripping my guts out and me feeling every second of it. Knowing that I could stop feeling so empty in a minute, if only I’d get my ass downstairs and meld my body into the concrete floor, the site of multiple botched DIY attempts and car repairs. A place where it was just the two of us. But I didn’t. I gritted my teeth until I felt my incisors sinking into my gums, and I stayed in bed. You can’t always be a baby. You have to grow up eventually.

  52

  Mum’s moved the computer from the bottom of her wardrobe, where it’s been confiscated, to the dining room, and creates her own tech area. Whilst I’m at school, she clears out some of the crap and pushes the desk right into the far corner, next to the piano that nobody uses. It’s all for Mike, of course. She and him get online and swap instant messages on the nights when they’re not on dates.

  I’ve got so much going on right now, I’ve forgotten about being a cyber-geek. It’s the real world I want, not the one that comes in a flat screen, but Mum’s taken the baton and is pegging it for all she’s worth. She’s hooked. You know it’s getting serious when you start eating in front of the thing. Mum says she’s got a strong mind, that it’s hard to pull the wool over her eyes. She isn’t. She’s putty. Three days in and all her snacking time is at the keyboard instead of during EastEnders.

  ‘What’s a grown man doing cruising the internet all night? Doesn’t this strike you as odd?’

  ‘He’s not surfing anything. I thought you were supposed to be one who knows everything about the internet.’

  ‘That’s how I know about the cruising.’

  ‘Veerapen, he’s chatting to me, nothing else. There’s nothing very strange about that.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he just pick up the phone like normal people?’

  ‘Online is better. Cheaper, for one thing, and he likes to mix it up a little.’

  ‘“He likes to mix it up a little”? Mum, that’s what young people say.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I forgot. Your generation invented everything, including, it seems, the English language.’

  Mum’s a proper joker when she wants to be. It still doesn’t make me trust whatsisname. I don’t know anything about him. He could be the world’s biggest internet pervert, for all we know. These legal people are very good at hiding their sick sides. Best alibi in the world.

  53

  Like all couples, they have their places: Yates’ Wine Lodge if one of his older mates is riding with them, or up the Bowl if he isn’t.

  Bowling’s different. It isn’t about the booze, it’s open to anyone. You can just bump into people by chance. There can’t be any talk of following or creeping about when you’re down the Bowl. You have as much right to be there as anyone.

  Jase’s idea, the bowling.

  ‘Nothing else to do round here, unless we want to watch some shitey film, so we may as well show our faces.’

  Also, the place stays open until one.

  Double also, the new guy behind the bar used to do security at Tesco. Means we get our beer poured discreetly into Pirate Jack kiddie cups without having to drop our voices to baritone or flash the fake ID, which looks ropier and more bogus by the day.

  ‘Yeah, Keith’s a good bloke. He’ll get us loaded, and if we’re lucky we won’t even have to pay for it.’

  What could be better?

  The Bowl kids itself that it provides entertainment for all, but in reality past nine o’clock the only people you find here are the fifteen-year-olds. Every so often you come across a group of twenty-something couples, the men usually being lardy meatheads with Alpha-male competitive streaks, their girlfriends with fat asses in their ponchos and bootcut jeans, who spend more time deciding on which size ball to use than actually throwing the thing.

  You see, this lot still have these phases where they kid themselves that they’re young, and that’s when they start hanging out at our places and getting under our feet. Mate, you’re over the age of twenty, forget it! Unless you can buy us a proper drink, or find us someone who sells decent weed, you’re redundant. Stay out of our faces and we’ll stay out of yours, yeah?

  Just sending out the signals does the trick. Crossed arms, the kind of stares they shy away from returning. They stay mostly on the outer lanes where they’re out of harm’s way and near-invisible.

  The staff are acting like we’re a pair of dorks without dates, but we’re not actually here to play bowling. That’d be ridiculous. We’re just here to hang out and take the piss out of everyone else. If we bump into certain people, we bump into certain people. No need to make a whole song and dance about it.

  Jase doesn’t tell me that the guy behind the bar is a Sri Lankan. Birthname Roospen, stage-name Keith.

  Short. Moustache. Thick black hair that’s both wiry and wavy, cut into the style of a university lecturer circa 1975. Pudgy. A face that looks like it enjoys a great quantity of food. He has round and heavy cheeks that were born to be smothered in curry sauce or mayonnaise. He looks like a guy who couldn’t stop traffic, let alone stop thieving down Tesco.

  ‘What’s all this Keith business?’ I go. ‘Couldn’t you have given me some prior knowledge or something?’

  ‘Leave him alone. Keith’s all right.’

  Don’t start loading me up with Munchausen’s By Proxy or whatever it’s called, I don’t have Sri Lanka-phobia or anything. I just have a problem with anyone whose eyes start gleaming whenever they bump into a guy who’s painted the same shade of brown. Don’t get me wrong, I’m nowhere near as dark as Birthname-Roospen-Stagename-Keith, but I doubt that’s going to stop him. In the ethnic desert that is North East Surrey, I appear as a mirage, an oasis. The temptation will prove too much.

  ‘All right, lads,’ he goes, friendly enough, but still proving me right. Looking me up and down in a couple of seconds like he’s getting a biometric print, going at it until he’s satisfied he’s identified my full genetic history and is able to tell me the exact vendor from which my great-aunt gets her milking goats. Is it any wonder that I do my best to avoid eye contact? I just want my beer, not a layman’s account of my family tree.

  ‘How’s things going at home? Your mum looked much better when I saw her outside the pharmacy last week.’

  ‘That’s great that you think so. She has been a lot better the last couple of weeks. Having my auntie down has helped. You met her, didn’t you? That time they came down to Tesco.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Maureen. Tall lady.’

  ‘That’s the one. She got Mum to break some of those routines she’d gone back into. You know, staying in bed all day, keeping the curtains drawn, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Your auntie sounds like a good person.’

  ‘She’s amazing. She, like, saved my life. And Mum’s.’

  ‘I’m pleased to hear it. Is your mother ready to be receiving visitors? This place has a shift system too, can you believe it? And I’m on earlies next week, so I could come by after work one afternoon, if that would work.’

  ‘That would definitely work! She’d love that. So would Auntie Maureen. Any excuse to get the china out.’

  Jason’s voice had changed completely. He lost the drawl and got a grip on his consonants, kept the vowels tight and clipped. His hair wasn’t parted to the side with a cowlick like some under-the-thumb church boy, but it may as well have been. The grown-up conversation with an adult without an ounce of cockney, it wasn’t how I was used to seeing him. I stood there, my mouth open like a fish, looking a dork.

  Second time tonight, the dork-isms. I was keeping count.

  I don’t know what I was more surprised about, that I didn’t know he was so friendly with the darkie, or that I was completely oblivious to how bad his mum had gotten again. I was too busy checking the darkie out to wonder
why Jason had stopped confiding in me.

  The thing with Sri Lankans is that they have this kind of dark skin, kinda like old sodden wood left to rot in a derelict house, which makes it impossible to tell his age. You can call me racist if you like, but it’s my own parents’ fault for not making a proactive effort with me to mix with other darkie children when I was growing up. There were a couple of brothers I vaguely remember when I started infants, father from Madagascar, mother from Uganda, and there was this Brazilian kid Gabriel who came round to tea a few times and who Mum used to think was so polite and charming, though that didn’t stop him nicking five pounds from my birthday money jar. But they were only moments, brief friendships that never came to anything. Once we moved to Surrey it was game-over at the Commonwealth Institute. Not that my parents did anything underhand, they were busy working. We were the only spot of beige in an area that was blindingly white. They just didn’t think. And then Dad ran off, and I was the only brown spot left. It’s the kind of upbringing that’s meant to turn you into a radical black panther, or, in my case, an enlightened Jew-Tamil Tiger. But I’m dead inside, man, blunted by TV, and girls, and the promise of what I can do when I slip on my running shoes, and the sniff of freshly burning weed at five paces. I got no energy left to be all radical, no time left for brotherhood – maybe for a kid who’s grown up the way I did, but not for some be-pleasing-you-sir who’s just stepped off the boat. They mean nothing to me. It might sound rough, but that’s just how it is.

  We did get what we came for, however, two kiddie sippy cups filled to the brim and covered with a lid to avoid any awkward questions.

  ‘Christ! What’s his game?’

  ‘Leave him alone, I said. He’s all right.’

  ‘Your mate “Keith” has given us shandy, like we’re kids or something. Go on, taste it!’