The Other Lives

by Adrian J. Walker

  Finished, she pulls down her sleeve and drinks her water, looking away. I get a sense that she’s made up her mind about me, and the sting is terrible.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I blurt out.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I said I’m sorry.’

  The power of that word, when it’s spoken in truth. She turns, reevaluates, and finds me again.

  ‘Who was your first?’ she asks.

  ‘A teacher. She died in a car crash in the school car park outside my maths lesson, and I saw it happen before it happened. I was her. I died. I flew through the windscreen and broke my neck and then found myself standing up, babbling, and pointing outside. I’d wet myself, apparently, too. Then it actually happened.’ I smile. ‘Not such a popular boy at school after that. How about you?’

  She fondles the glass, lost in the water’s ripples.

  ‘I got lost in a little girl on a train. I was eleven. Couldn’t help it — she looked so happy. I was there for an hour, and all she thought about was jungles.’

  ‘Well then, that’s that riddle solved.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Happy little jungles for you, violent death for me. It’s no wonder we’ve turned out differently. You see the good; I see the bad.’

  ‘I see the bad things too, which means you must see the good. In fact, fuck it, no, I don’t see “good” or “bad”. One big struggle, that’s what I see; that’s what I see when I look at a person’s face, even before I remember them.’

  She leans forward, fixing me with a look of resolve.

  ‘You see in other people what you see in yourself. You don’t need to be able to do what we can do to know that.’

  ‘Perhaps you just haven’t seen as much as I have.’

  She sits back and seems to considers this.

  ‘Perhaps. Like in the café, you could see everyone but Morag and I could only see some. Perhaps it really is stronger in you than in me.’

  From the corner of my eye I can see her looking at me as if I’m a puzzle she cannot piece together.

  ‘But what is it about the rest of us you hate, Elliot?’

  ‘Why? You told me in London you didn’t care. You told me you thought I was everything that was wrong with the world.’

  ‘Things change.’

  Something strains inside of me, like a dog on a leash.

  ‘So what do you want me to say? Do you want me to give you a list? Some simple words? Fine. All you can eat.’

  Zoe stares back at me.

  ‘More? OK. Two-for-one. Ladies’ night. You go girl. Amazeballs. Just big-boned, BMI, five-a-day, safe space, don’t feed the trolls, hashtag, retweet, like, share, you OK hun?, swipe left, swipe right. Izzit? Innit? OMG, LOL, WTF, ROTFL. Pay-as-you-go, payday loans, pay it forward, scream if you want to go faster, share if you agree, just do it, because I’m loving it and you’re worth it. May contain dairy, may contain nuts, may contain traces of nutrition, may cause offence, may cause headaches, nausea and in all cases death. You’re fired. I’m out.’

  I finish what’s left of my wine and slam down the glass. Zoe stares back, deadpan.

  ‘I don’t buy it. Those are just annoyances. They’re not anything to judge humanity by.’

  A dizziness overcomes me and I lean forward, holding my brow.

  ‘Oh, Christ.’

  ‘Elliot? What is it?’

  I can’t stop the words now. My voice sounds suddenly small and shaky.

  ‘I can remember things, OK. Things I don’t want to. I always have done. But I kept them buried, and now I can’t. They’re everywhere, all over me, and I want them gone.’

  ‘What things?’

  I hesitate, staring at the shallow red pool at the bottom of my wine glass.

  ‘An oven with a hatch at the top. The heat from it burning a man’s eyes. A gun at his neck, the pain of the fire not enough to deaden the sound of the tiny screams beneath him. A hand shaking, sweating, struggling to tighten the Velcro on a vest swarming with wires. A woman at a drawing board lost in the design of a bullet, her brain idly calculating velocities, trajectories and the densities of human organs, suddenly drawn by a shaft of light that makes her remember herself as a girl on a winter’s morning, stuffing her hands into mittens to feed ducks. Drowned toddlers, orange suits and barbed wire, shaven heads and tracksuits, a numb paramedic at two am looking out at a vomit-filled gutter and a pale whale-like figure in stilettos and a shiny dress beached beside it, pill-stretched knuckles flying next to piss-drenched cash machines, politicians with bare chests, politicians with silk suits. Drones. Targets in dark circles. A young, blank face reflected in a laptop screen of smoke and rubble. Trained eyes drawn to the corner, and a tiny figure crawling from the ruin of a school. Homeopathy. Black Friday. Clogged doors, trampled hands, a fat man brawling over a television set wearing the same expression his grandfather did as the whistle blew and he trembled his way up the trench ladder.’

  She is silent for a moment, blinking.

  ‘So you do care.’

  ‘I don’t care. It’s useless to care. Why care about that mother trapped beneath a beam in a nuclear firestorm, trying to reach her burning child? Why care about that monstrous mushroom billowing in the heat haze, or the man in a suit and dark goggles, smiling in celebration? Why care about another update, another upgrade, another little box for us to claw at? Why care about the label on your shirt? Why care about the Chinese father crying at the factory gates, or the sweat shops and misery that still rages despite the fact that everyone knows about them now?’

  ‘Elliot, how many times have you — ?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if I remember them or not. It’s just as you said — you can see them with your own eyes every day, but even then, they’re just ripples on the surface. Beneath it all, that’s where the real horror lies. The things we don’t see, the desires, the stowaways we each keep to ourselves. The thoughts we take for granted but would never say out loud, the yearnings, the lies, the words unspoken, the affairs, the cleared histories, the pictures kept in hidden folders, the just curious, the blank-faced child, the shattered constable trawling through disc drives, losing his shock by the second. And to be connected to all that? That’s what terrifies me.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘And even if all of that went away, if we levelled the world and made it pure, if we found ourselves in some utopia when all of these things were just sad stories from our past — we still wouldn’t be free. There would still be that little thing inside us all, waiting to shout, the little child that screams me. Me, me, me, me, me.’

  She watches me as I refill my glass, rubbing her fingers. When at last she opens her mouth, she speaks slowly and measured — it’s the girl cornered with her hands out, steadying the boy with the knife.

  ‘You are right about the world. Mostly it’s terrible and there’s not much to believe in. But that’s why we need people like you.’

  ‘What? What do you mean, people like me?’

  ‘You’re a television presenter. You have a voice, and the ear of millions. If you wanted to, you could say anything. You could show everyone that there is a way out of all this shit, that life is worth living. You could show us the good parts of ourselves, instead of just the bad.’

  ‘Nobody wants to watch preachers anymore, Zoe. They want the circus.’

  She watches me for a while, then sits back, defeated.

  ‘Then you’re right,’ she says. ‘Maybe we really did just turn out differently.’

  She takes her glass and stands, making to leave, but before she does I grab her arm. The glass drops, shattering on the kitchen floor. I stand. We’re face-to-face; the same height. Eyes, nose and mouth in perfect lines. I can feel the fierce warmth of her body up against mine, and the short, trembling breaths passing between our lips. I can feel her anger, her fear, her hope.

  This other person, this other being, this other life — this is the closest I have been to anything but myself for as long as I can rem
ember. None of the dressing room fucks or escorts, none of the drunk nights at Patti’s — none of it made me forget myself this way. And right now I know that’s what I’m trying to do — forget myself.

  My right hand holds her arm. My left finds its way beneath her T-shirt and moves over the soft, burning flesh of her hip and lower back.

  She pulls me to her and we kiss, and there’s no question of how much or how deeply it should go. We fall into each other completely. And if you’ve been asking yourself the question: Will they or won’t they? The answer is that they will, they do, and they did, right there on my father’s kitchen table.

  I wake some time later on the sofa, where we moved to afterwards. It is still dark and the storm is in full force outside. Zoe is awake and dressing.

  ‘It didn’t mean anything,’ she says, pulling on her jogging bottoms. ‘Good night.’

  I watch her walk upstairs. She’s wrong — it always means something; it just doesn’t always mean something good.

  CATS

  I LIED TO ZOE. There was a moment.

  The school’s end-of-year show was Cats, an ambitious production led by our breathless drama teacher, Mrs Daniels. Lacking any talent for performance or music (my ability to hold a crowd was yet to bloom), I found myself, along with a French foreign exchange student named Luc, helping Rob Potter run the sound. Potter was a nervous sixth-former who had been held back a couple of years and, it was rumoured, drank with some of the younger teachers. He ran a mobile disco on the side, so the equipment was his. He was territorial and particular about how things should be done, and our only real input was during the final scene, a two-man job involving one bank of faders being swept down whilst another set was raised to play the final music.

  Luc — a small and skinny boy with dark, thick hair and a half-cocked grin of white teeth — and I took it in turns to execute the fade-up whilst Potter took care of the fade-down. The only other time we got to touch the equipment was when he took a cigarette break.

  ‘Crafty fag time, boys,’ he’d say, grabbing his jacket. ‘Don’t touch the board.’

  We would, of course, sweeping faders up and down and pretending we were mixing The Police. Luc even did a passable impression of Sting’s vocals on ‘Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic’, his ‘theengs’ and ‘mageecs’ drawn out in his Gallic drawl.

  We took care to reset the faders to their original positions when we heard the fire exit door squeak and Potter returned, reeking of Regals.

  We spent most of rehearsals sitting at the back of the hall, happy and safe behind our mixing desk, watching our gaffer scurry about with cables and enjoying the unusual pornography of female pupils leaping in tight leotards.

  Becky Fisher was in the chorus. Her route on and off the stage took her directly past the desk, which gave me exquisite pleasure. I never missed a chance to look at her. The shape of her mouth was a scar on my retina. During ‘Memory’, I watched her silhouette until my chest hurt.

  The show was staged three times, the last one on the final day of term. The excitement of the proximity to the summer holidays — fuelled by backstage camaraderie, cold weather, costumes and makeup — created an electric sense of possibility. Mrs Daniels gathered us together in the dressing room. Her bangles clicked as she spread out her arms to beckon us closer.

  ‘I am so proud of you, my kittens,’ she gushed. ‘So proud. All of you. You’re a credit to the school.’

  As a joke, the chorus decided they would put lipstick kiss marks on the cheeks of the band and stage hands, which included Luc and I. We loitered around the makeup desk, waiting to see who would do ours. Luc was grabbed by Jennifer Eggton, a large and powerful girl known as Egg, which upset him no end. She pinned him against the wall, and I watched him struggling against the plasterboard like a cornered puppy. I laughed, which drew looks from the rest of the room, then further laughs, until we were all laughing together at nothing more than a French boy being kissed by an overweight girl. Egg finally released him and walked away grinning, leaving him sprawled on the floor and wiping his face.

  ‘Elliot?’

  I turned, still laughing, to see Becky Fisher looking up at me. My heart floundered, seeming to grab for my jugular in a bid to steady itself.

  ‘Kiss?’ she said, holding the lipstick in her hand and cocking her head.

  I must have made some kind of noise, because she smiled. Then she stood on her tiptoes and placed her lips gently on my cheek. They lingered there for a few seconds, warm and wet, for longer than was necessary. Her hand was on my chest, and I felt her glorious breath in my ear. I felt dizzy, ten feet tall, no longer an awkward boy.

  ‘Break a leg,’ she said, giving me a playful whip with her tail. And then she was gone.

  Hope and possibility flooded me like the blood in my loins, so it was hard to notice, as I followed the rest of the stagehands out to our stations, that other feeling creeping in. My head was beginning to loosen its shackles on the world. I concentrated on the afterglow of the kiss, but the more I tried, the more even that wonderful memory seemed to be flitting and jerking, ready to crumple at any second. The yellow-lit corridors, daubed with school notices and art projects, seemed to puff like dust in a boot stamp with every step, threatening to disappear completely if I stepped too hard. Something else was behind it all, something more important and relevant. Luc called me back.

  ‘Elliot?’ he said. ‘You OK?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I replied. ‘Just nerves, I think.’

  Luc, his face, his words, all losing their meaning, smearing into blobs and drones. He looked around, then reached into his pullover and pulled out a hip flask.

  ‘For the party after. I stole it from my father. Here.’

  He opened the flask and held it to my lips.

  ‘Take some. It’s brandy, good.’

  I felt the liquor hit me — the first time I had tasted anything stronger than cider — and started to cough. Luc chuckled and slapped my back.

  ‘Better, right?’ he said.

  I nodded.

  ‘Good, let’s go.’

  We found our places at the desk, but Potter wasn’t there. Through the crowd of parents shuffling into the hall, we spotted him near the front office talking on a pay phone. He was talking animatedly into the handset, which he suddenly slammed down. He seemed distracted when he finally came to the desk, wreathed in his now familiar stench of cold air and Regals.

  ‘All right, boys,’ he muttered. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

  We let him do his stuff, occasionally responding to his curt commands to hold this or press that. Mostly I spent the performance seeking out Becky, whose movements around the stage I had now memorised.

  At the interval, Potter darted off and didn’t return until seconds before the second half. More Regals, gritted teeth, shaking hands.

  During the final act, the light-headed feeling returned. The room was dark already, but the stage began to break apart before me. The heads of parents tried to drift away like balloons. I shook my head to regain control. I was barely aware of Potter pacing up and down behind the desk, rubbing his brow.

  Eventually he turned to us, just before the final scene:

  ‘Right, boys,’ he whispered in as relaxed and hip a way as his nervous, West Country accent would allow. ‘I’ve just got to shoot off for a bit.’

  ‘What?’ I heard Luc say. ‘But it is the final scene.’

  ‘You’ll be all right. You take the fade-out; Elliot can handle the fade-ins. Right, Elliot?’

  I tried to disagree but was transfixed by the stage’s slow explosion before me. Whatever was behind was winning the fight and oozing through the cracks in my reality.

  ‘Good lad,’ said Potter. He gripped Luc’s tiny shoulders and bolted out the back door.

  At which point reality finally disappeared. At least, my own version of it did.

  Music thumped from another room. It was dark and close and dangerous. I felt the presence of somebody else close to m
e, somebody who was taller, older, stronger.

  I was being kissed.

  It was not an enjoyable kiss. I don’t say that because I was being kissed by a man — I was female, I knew that by now. I felt the same physical shift I had felt with Miss Craven — the lighter arch to my back and shoulders, the faint gravity around my belly, precise and streamlined between my legs (surely, if anything proved the existence of the evolutionary machine in which homo sapiens was a work in progress, it was the lumbering cock and its two dumb balls) — except less so, as if I was not quite the woman Miss Craven had been. Not yet.

  Sharp whiskers grazed my mouth and chin. I was trying to close my lips a little to prevent the darting, wet tongue of whoever this was from reaching the target of my tonsils. I think I wanted this in some way, perhaps some way which was rapidly agreeing with all the other ways in which I did not.

  Sound came first, then sight, then touch, then finally the double shot of smell and taste together. This is how it had been before.

  Muffled music, hot darkness, and the shadow of a face pressing against mine. I felt the whiskers and a rough hand moving down my young body. I smelled and tasted old cigarettes.

  Regal cigarettes, to be precise.

  ‘Come on, Becky,’ he said, his voice a lukewarm whisper, trying its best to find the intonation he had absorbed through Miami Vice or Magnum PI. ‘It’s all right, baby. It’s all right, you’re all right. Huungh.’

  Potter’s hand slithered clumsily down my side. A finger caught in the knicker elastic beneath my leotard. I was trying to feel something, a spark of desire that I was sure I once had, but for the life of me could not rekindle. This is not how I imagined it would be. I tried a gasp, a twitch of my hips, tried to remember the moments I had caught Potter’s eye in the corridor, tried to remember what I had been feeling when I lay awake at night thinking about him, tried to remember what had made me wink at him, my tongue pushing strands of Juicy Fruit through my lips.