He wants to go and.
I’m not talking to you anymore.
He wasn’t talking to her. Simon gurgled and spat and watched the sun on the paper and time passed. She looked at the rabbits that danced and fought and raped and jumped from wall to wall with fear in their eyes and rooted deep in their pumping back legs. There was no other sound than the noise of the boy and the cartoon and the sound that Dad made in her head when she was lonely for him. She needed to piss. She held it in. In another place there was a wall and on the wall was a dog painted in black and white and it was laughing. Loud. Long. It opened its big eye wider and laughed long and hard for miles and miles all the way down that long black long yellow brick road.
When Tick was done with feeding and washing and rubbing cream and scooping medicine and taking temperature he sat down next to Simon and pulled his head into his lap and told him he was a good boy. He opened a book that he had pulled from a bag and set it in front of Simon and began to read. In the story there were children that played and trees that dreamed and animals that talked and loved with joy and courage and Tick didn’t say the word fuck, as he usually did. Not even once. She stepped closer and sat down beside them and learned to love the sound of him reading.
I’m your brother, Simon, isn’t that right?
The boy gurgled.
Your Dad is a better Dad.
The boy spat.
The bells from the cartoon became lost in the background. Tick turned the black shapes on the page into words and the words became stories and the stories were pictures that she saw playing on the projector inside her head. Simon laughed wet and lovely in the back of his throat. Tick did all the voices and played all the characters. She killed the itches on the back of her neck and pulled her hair behind her ears and played with her fingers and moved her hands closer to Simon’s that were fisted and braced tightly to his chest. Tick read on and she touched Simon’s fingers with her own. The boy’s soft miniature eyes rolled towards her and she looked at him. She moved her fingers into his hand and he released his arm from his chest and let it drop. They held hands. They held hands for a long time.
Tick looked at her and asked if she wanted to sit closer and she said she did and he asked if she was comfortable and she said that she was. The boy read and showed the pictures to Simon who wiggled happy and crooked on the bathroom towel with daredevil rabbits darting around his head. The story was over but before Tick closed the book she asked him if he could teach her how to say some of the words.
Can’t you read them?
I can’t read anything.
Why can’t you read anything?
Dad never taught me.
The boy looked at her and she looked at him. Her own face was reflected deep in his eyes once more, and she looked there at his pupil that grew and shrank and she watched a little muscle twitch in his eyelid. She was close. She could smell his salt and vinegar breath and she could hear the wind that rushed up from his lungs like autumn rolling into winter. He held the hand that was resting on the floor and he pointed to the book that he lay flat between them and he said can’t you even read this little word?
She looked at it. Her mouth was dry and the moths were gentle in her stomach and when she looked at Tick she thought of all the good things in the world and her skin tingled like there was sunlight on it. She was warm. The boy was the weather. He flashed his silver mouth and rubbed his fluttering eyelid and made a crooked face and she thought on him and thought on Lucky and she was then so sick and unwell that her mind was pulped like a wet newspaper. She was cold and hot. There and here. She was thirsty and hungry and full up with all the mess that she couldn’t forget. Tick took a pen from the kitchen and came back and sat down shoulder to shoulder with her and wrote a word on the back of his hand and pointed there.
Can’t you even read this little word?
Um.
This one here.
She looked at it and she tried to make the lines talk.
I can’t think. I can’t remember. I feel funny. I.
Try. You’re clever.
I did try. I can’t. I can’t do it and I’m never going to be able to.
Tick looked at her and she looked at him, she felt the moths coming up from her stomach and trying to fly out through her eyes but she forced them back in again and swallowed them down. She asked him what the word said. Her voice broke apart and then came together again.
What does it say?
It says Anna.
26
Heart’s Desire
ANNA. ANNA. ANNA.
Tick taught her the lines that made her name and she looked at them and copied them on a piece of paper and read them over and over and the more she said her own name the more the moths and Dad and Mum fell away down a silver track never to be heard from again. The building and the rabbits were buried and the sick spinning feeling was gone. Reading was harder than she thought. Each line made a letter and that letter looked like all the others but it was different and she had to learn why. Every letter made a sound and she had to remember the sounds and say them out loud and only then could she make words. Some letters didn’t make a sound. Some made the same sounds but they were not drawn the same.
Anna. Anna. Anna.
That’s enough for today, the boy said. You look tired.
I’m always tired. I just need to.
They stopped. Tick held her hand and kissed it and she told him that she would learn because she was clever and that was all she needed. Outside there was no sound and nothing happened. It was just as quiet as it had been before. Tick’s phone made noises in his pocket and he ignored it. The three of them lay on the floor and looked at the ceiling and watched the cartoon projected there. They laughed. Simon clapped and mewled and blurted sounds that she tried to understand. She watched the grey turn to green.
Let’s play a game with Simon, Tick said.
What kind of game?
It’s such a fun game.
He got up and went out of the room and came back with a red helmet that had small pillows stuffed inside and he cleaned it with a wet towel and put it on Simon and he fastened it underneath his chin. It made Simon’s ears stick out like a little cartoon monkey and she thought that he was a lovely strange cartoon boy. He looked at Tick who stood above him and he laughed and grabbed at the Jesus on Tick’s tee shirt. The rabbits darted from corner to corner to huddle and twitch and leave their little brown pellets in zigzag trails behind them.
It’s such a joke, Tick said. It’s such a mad game. Leave the rabbit shit for the next boy or girl to clean up. That’s their job and not mine. We’ll play a game instead and you can see how clever Simon is.
Tick showed her the game. He stood up and clapped his hands together so that Simon would concentrate there. He looked up and whined and spat and opened his mouth and made sucking noises and stuck out his swollen tongue and rubbed it along his teeth and clapped again and again with that flash of violence in his burning right eye.
Look at me, Tick said, look at me, Simon.
The boy looked.
Simon says sit up.
The boy thought on this and then he whined and rolled his eyes back into his head and searched out thoughts that wouldn’t come to him by themselves. He uncurled his hands and forced them behind him and then laid them flat against the carpet at his sides and he rolled his eyes back and thought once again. His eyes searched and his head translated what the boy had said into his own gurgling cartoon language and then his eyes rolled forward again. He looked at Tick. He pushed against the carpet and lifted his back and rose up with pain and struggle and strength that she didn’t know he had. His head fell back as he lifted and the apple of his throat popped up like a fist and twitched as he mewled. He lifted himself further and his head came forward and rolled onto his neck and then he was sitting up. Someone said fuck over and over, but it wasn’t Tick and it wasn’t Simon.
It was her.
The broken boy’s hands were in front of him. Th
ey fell heavy into his lap and he sat looking down at them and he began to rub his fingers together fast and faster as though he was trying to start a fire in the palms of his hands. He looked at her and then at Tick and he was smiling big and fat all the way back to his gums.
Watch this, Tick said, Simon says stand up.
The happy spitting boy looked at his legs for a while. He reached to his knees and took hold of the white pyjamas and he pulled. He rocked his body from side to side and struggled and fought with his legs that didn’t want to move.
On the ceiling the picture changed and there were no more cartoons, only adverts for sweets and food and toys and all the fun and happiness in the world moulded into plastic and sold for ninety-nine ninety-nine ninety-nine.
The boy struggled in his body.
Come on. Simon says stand up.
Simon looked into his own head again and rubbed his fingers together so fast they made clicking sounds and turned red. Once the thought was fished out of his mind he rolled his eyes forward again and looked at his own two legs and took his hands and pushed them to the floor and got onto his knees and then onto his feet.
She stood back and pressed her hands against her mouth. She looked at him. Simon was taller than she had expected him to be. Taller than Tick even though he was crooked and his body was bent to one side and his head hung off the end of his neck like the bauble on the end of a woolly hat. She thought he was even more cartoonish the more he struggled to look like everyone else. Cartoon face. Cartoon hands. Cartoon voice that tried to talk and couldn’t. Tick began to clap again and the boy laughed and clapped and grew taller still as he tried to straighten himself out.
Last one. Good boy. Simon says jump.
She moved back to the walls of the room and the boy turned to look at her. He pulled his head up and rolled his eyes back and then rolled them forward again and he stepped towards her. One foot went smoothly and the other dragged behind him and had to be set right again by Tick who was watching Simon there. He took another step and Tick set him right again. The third step was better. He held his hands out and lifted his rolling head onto his neck and laughed and rubbed his fingers together and made wet noises and bleeps louder than the adverts on the ceiling that had become all about sugar and pop.
He wants you to do it with him. He likes you.
Do you think he does?
Look at him.
She picked her nail and held her hands in the air for Simon to take and he took them and his hands were burning and his face was hysterical and he pulled her into the middle of the room and she closed her eyes and bent her knees and she jumped as high as she could. She jumped so high that she thought they had fallen deep into the TV light. They went past the adverts and past the cartoons and into those films that she had loved so much when she was with Dad. She heard herself laughing. She heard Simon’s ghostly whines. She imagined that the paper dolls were hanging from the ceiling and thought that maybe she had lived there once. She imagined herself as the boy. All those yesterdays ago she had lived there and she had watched the same cartoons playing on the ceiling and she had eaten the same food and her body had lain the same way and there was a picture on the wall and it was a picture of the sea and her mother’s eye and a small fish that she had named Walter. She jumped again. She was laughing, far away. She wasn’t the boy; she was that little flash of violence that sat in the corner of his mind and forced his fingers to twist around small necks and pull. They both jumped again.
She looked at the boy in that suit of skin that was drawn too tight on his bones that were always leaning to one side or another. His eyes rolled back to check for answers to questions that she had not asked and she was there with him because. She was herself and she was the boy. She had been happy and sad and clever and furious like him, sitting or lying down in an empty room with no windows, staring long and hard at a black and white TV and an outside that Dad had drawn on the walls in crayon and paint and jittery rabbit talk. Staying awake. Trying to stay sane. Looking for Mum who had disappeared down the drain. Trying not to suffocate in her father’s sad moods. Wondering what was different. Looking at all the light that fell into the room, and tearing the world from the skin of white rabbits.
27
Twister Town
EVERYTHING WAS A GAME.
A boy came to the door and he was sad and he didn’t talk and he walked past them and waved goodbye and went to see Simon and didn’t say a thing and even that was a game or so Tick said. The quiet boy went into the room. He turned the sound of the TV down low and went to work on Simon’s dinner and they left through a different door to the one they had come in. There was another boy working on the main door of the building downstairs and he looked exactly like the quiet boy because they had lived in the same womb at the same time. They were twins, Tick said. The other twin didn’t stop talking.
Hi Tick. Haven’t seen you in a while. How’s your Dad? We all love your Dad in my house. He helps us all the time and he helped my uncle really well. Wish he was my Dad. You’re lucky because my Dad was a cunt. I mean what I say. Your Dad is invincible. He doesn’t care about himself at all. You know what he did? He went into the middle of traffic on the main road to help a dog that had been clipped by a car. Nearly got clipped himself. Mad. It’s your turn to work on Sweet Street tomorrow. Did you know that? My auntie wants to know what’s wrong with your Mum. She said she used to be different and everyone always asks what happened to her. Your Dad is great but everyone thinks your Mum might need to be locked up or something.
On and on.
When they were outside they lit their cigarettes and walked along the back of the estate where the wooden wall wrapped right around and they couldn’t see anything on the other side. They smoked. She sang a song and taught him the words when he asked her and he taught her a few letters that were spray painted on the wall in deep greens and morbid blacks.
What’s Sweet Street?
I’ll show you.
When?
I’m working down there tomorrow.
Can I come?
You have to come.
Why?
He told me you did.
The cold air sank all the way into her bones and shook them up. The eye of the moon blinked at her and she held hands with the boy who knew the way better and they hit the long wall with rusted pipes as they went and watched the clouds drop to the ground and stick to the road and turn into sticky graveyard grease all eerie and black. They went through a tunnel and into the park and up the steps and over the bridges and past the other doors with the numbers that she couldn’t read and all the words that began with F. He turned his key in the lock and they went into their home laughing like all the world was good and there was no death or mayhem or reason to think otherwise.
Lucky was standing in the living room. He had a book in his hands and he was reading from it out loud with his finger pressed against the page and he read so fast she couldn’t understand him. She let go of Tick’s hand and looked at Lucky and Tick watched his father too as he spoke a hundred words at once. He read and questioned what he’d read. He pointed to a page and then flicked the pages over and muttered to himself and paced to one side of the room and then into the kitchen where he took hold of a brown bottle and drank deep from the neck. He wiped his mouth and came into the middle of the living room again and when he saw them standing there he dropped the book to his side and looked at his feet. He was quiet.
She looked at Tick and Tick looked at Lucky who screwed the lid back onto his bottle and walked it into the kitchen and threw it into the bin. He came into the room again and wiped his mouth and swiped the hair out of his eyes.
I think I might sell the car tomorrow, he said. I think we can manage without it. Don’t you think, my boy? It should give me a little extra so I can get some clothes and nappies for the woman down the way with the new baby. I might have some left over for the man who just had his benefits stopped. Did you know that people are hungry? Did you know people a
re failing? I don’t know how many times I have to do this I’m so tired. I’m trying.
The boy looked at his father underneath the hair that had lost its spikes and fallen across his forehead. The room was almost empty. It had been emptied of books and furniture and curtains and photo frames and all the things that turned a home into a museum. Tick threw a punch at the frame of the door that cracked beneath his knuckles and he said fuck loud and he turned and she watched him go out of the room and into the corridor and into his mother’s room. She followed him and tried the door but the door was locked and she stood and listened there instead. Tick was inside shouting I’ve had enough, I’ve had so much, over and over and there was banging and then things were quiet. She listened as hard as she could.
I want you to stand there so I can look at you, she heard the woman say.
No, Mum.
I’m lonely.
Don’t, Mum.
Your father doesn’t belong to us.
Please.
Oh mercy. Not that.
Shut up. Everyone just.
It was quiet again and she listened and tried the door but there was no way she could get inside and no way to know what was going on. She came from the door and went into the living room and she sat next to Lucky who was holding his head in his hands on the settee. She took the book from his lap and turned the pages and the book was small and so were the words and she couldn’t read anything because the writing was not meant for her. She looked at Lucky.
A boy talked about you, she said. A boy we saw said that you were kind and you helped his uncle and you helped a dog and he said that everyone loves you because you’re crazy and invincible.
The Insomnia Museum Page 16