He drank. She could hear the bottle.
I hit him, Sweetheart. I. I. I hit the little boy. I didn’t mean to do it but none of that matters. I fucking did it. The kid ran out into the middle of the road. He was this flash. This little white outline was there in front of my damn car before I could think about doing something. I remember his eyes. They were blue but they turned to white in the light. I could’ve counted his eyelashes. I know the shape of the scar on his chin and I know the colour of the ball he was chasing and I know the sound his head made when it cracked the window. I know the sound your Mum and Dad made too, Sweetheart, when you were flung from the back seat and flew out past us and went through the window yourself.
It was an accident. It was one terrible second. Then everything was different. There was a before and an after and this life, your life, this house, the kids, the man who sits in the car and watches us, my wife, Tick, it’s all the after. The boy had chased his ball from his parents’ back garden and he ran into the middle of the road and that was it. I was driving too fast. I looked at you. I had the radio on too loud. We shouldn’t have come back early from the beach. It was my fault. It was the worst thing in the world and it was me. I did it.
He stopped. She heard the last of the bottle emptying.
It was our fault. I mean we were in the car, weren’t we? We were on the road that day. My hands were on the steering wheel. Your Dad was screaming next to me and your Mum was screaming behind me and you were lying in the middle of the road in front of the car and the boy was lying behind us. Broken. It was my fault because I was driving and it was your Dad’s fault for talking so loud about bullshit and it was your Mum’s fault for mothering you in the back seat and it was my wife’s fault for deciding to visit her mother instead of driving us there. It was my fault. Yours. Everyone.
None of it matters though. You can tell yourself you weren’t to blame but you can’t take yourself out of the car. You can’t drive a little slower. You can’t decide not to get up. You can’t stay at the beach a little longer. You can’t change anything. That’s your life. That’s what you did and it’s never going to change. You’ll always be the one who did that one terrible thing. You see, Sweetheart, the reason I’ve tried so hard to die isn’t anything to do with Luck. I know people don’t understand. I know Tick hates me for it and you probably don’t understand either, but maybe you should just sit down and think about it. What can you live with? How much can you take? That’s what life is, for me. Fingers constantly pointing at a kid’s messed up face half-buried in blood and glass. Saying look there. Look what you did. The thoughts go round and round and they splinter and stick in me like nails. Look at what you did. Think about what you did. Drums. Drums. Banging on. Think about it every minute of every day. Remember. Every damn day. And I can’t forget. Not even while I’m talking to you. I see his face. Even now. He’s lying on the carpet right there next to the front door. Staring at me. One shoe off. Foot crushed. Little blue eyes looking at nothing. I can’t ever forget. I see him. Always. Now you tell me, does that sound lucky to you?.
She was quiet. After a long time she stood up and collected her clothes that were draped over the side of the bath and she slipped her head through the hole in her tee shirt. She put on her knickers and jeans and did the zip and button and she looked at herself right there in the mirror. Her face. Eyes. Lips. Shoulders. She stared at herself for so long that her face became distorted and blurred. She was a stranger.
After the accident, Lucky said, I was frozen behind the wheel. Your Mum and Dad got out of the car though. They had to. They picked you up and looked at you. The boy had broken the glass on the way over the car. He smashed himself on the window so that by the time you were flung off the back seat you didn’t have the same impact. When you went through the car and landed on the bonnet all you had was a graze on your neck and a few missing teeth and a nasty bump on the head. Your parents went to you first. I still remember the screams. I went to the boy. I got out and went behind the car and stood over him and I just looked at him. He was like a doll or something. He didn’t even look real. His eyes were open but he wasn’t there. His arm was bent right back and the bone was sticking out of his wrist. His back was crushed and his legs were twisted up so bad they looked like rope. I just stood there looking at him. I remember feeling the wind on my face and listening to someone’s TV talking from an open window. There was blood. Mess. The boy was gone.
I expected to see someone running for him from a back door or something but there was nobody around. There was no screaming mother or father leaping over the garden fence to tear into me. The boy had nobody and nothing changed. Nothing stopped. Everything carried on and I heard children playing in the park behind the tower and a dog barking and music from my own radio that I hadn’t turned off. I still remember the song that played. I can’t listen to it but I know what it is. It was White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane. Such a messed up song to hear while the boy was lying there dead. I couldn’t do anything. The only thing that was different that day was us. I even looked different after that day. Your Dad too. I didn’t like who I was. I didn’t like the smell of my own skin. I’d always be the guy who drove too fast and I’d always be someone who killed a little kid.
Your mother came and grabbed me. She stood in front of me and turned my face away from the boy and then I was looking right at her while she was talking and I didn’t hear a damn thing she said. She was shouting. Her mouth was so wide and her eyes. They were. I’ll never forget her eyes. She was pulling my face and she was screaming and she was pointing back down the road. I turned away and looked there and your Dad was standing with you in his arms. He was looking down at you with his hands right in front of him. Your mother was pointing, screaming, frantic and all I could hear was that damn song. I looked at your Dad standing there with all that blood on his hands and then I heard everything all at once. Your Mum told me the boy was dead and she screamed at me to take you to the hospital. We’ll come back, she said. We can’t stay here. I turned and took you out of your father’s arms and laid you down on the back seat and I told your mother to get in the car. She got in and held your head on her lap and your Dad went into the passenger seat still looking at the blood on his hands. I opened my door and got in. I stopped. My hands were shaking. Your mother was still screaming at me to drive on. In the mirror I saw a little foot that stuck out from behind on the road. I wanted it to move. I wanted some sign that he was still alive, but he never moved. So I started the car and I drove away. We got you to the hospital and we sat in the hall in the children’s ward and nobody spoke. We didn’t talk and nobody said anything about the boy and we didn’t talk after that day. We weren’t the same Nothing was. I think we all sort of fell into our heads. I’m the only one left now. That’s my punishment. I sat behind the wheel and then I drove away and I’m the one who God’s never going to let go. We all learned later on that the little boy hadn’t died. There was a newspaper spread about it. We made everything worse by leaving and we couldn’t go back after that. We couldn’t confess. The boy was still alive. I found out later that his mother was a junky and she’d been asleep when it happened. The boy’s father was in work. I found out that the boy had been lying there like that for ages. I didn’t go back and the boy stayed on the ground, looking up at the sun, for hours.
He fell against the door on the other side and she listened to him breathing slow and deep. She closed her eyes and saw the blood on her mother’s face and the open hands of her father and Lucky’s eyes that were framed in the black edged mirror. She remembered the painful snow, that broken windscreen that she saw falling down around her and the horror in the voices that stayed with her all the way to the hospital room. Lucky had been young and so had Mum and Dad though she couldn’t imagine them like that. Young. Happy. They were a little older than her, and their lives were split in two by the sea and the sand and by dangerous games inside fast cars. She wiped her eyes and let her cheek rest on her knees.
Simon, Lucky said from the other side of the door.
The boy’s name was Simon.
30
Fly My Pretty
LUCKY TALKED FOR hours.
Something happened to the estate after that, he told her. The whole estate was different. It changed. Something hung over everything and drained the colour out of the sky and people sometimes stand outside for hours at a time and look up as though they expect to see something there. Simon’s mother moved away and didn’t want to be found. I’ve seen the father though. I’ll never forget the look on his face in the newspaper. He doesn’t know who I am and he doesn’t know what I’ve done. I see him all the time. He’s a tattoo between my eyes. Right here, on my memory.
There’s chaos on this estate. Punishment. Suffering. Judgement. Sometimes Simon’s father comes to the middle of the park and he holds his finger up and points from balcony to balcony and he shouts out. Screams. Howls. He tells us that we’re all guilty. He knows it. We’re all judged. We’re all at fault. Cowards. Thieves. Reptiles. We’re the wretched cunts of humanity. I listen like a coward when he comes, I hear it all, then I crawl away and hide.
If you and Tick ever see a man in a silver car you should stay away. Don’t go near him. Don’t talk to him. Men who are hurting are dangerous. They’ll stamp out everyone and everything just to try to stop the pain. I don’t want you or my son to ever have to suffer him. Can you promise me that? I don’t want you to have to suffer that. What one man does to another should be kept between them. The suffering should be mine. Not yours. Not Tick’s. Sometimes I imagine putting a gun in his hand. Sometimes I imagine a lot of things when it’s dark and the darkness feels like fists in my eyes. I think about it all the time. His hand. A gun. My head lies between the barrel and the cool concrete. I close my eyes and then.
She didn’t speak. After he finished talking she heard him shuffle and rise and open another bottle and zip up his coat and she felt him lean once more on the bathroom door before going off down the hall. Then she heard the front door closing. She felt the cold of the outside rushing in, and he was gone then into the night. She stayed where she was a while longer, the weight of everything pressing her so low she thought she’d fall through the floor. She imagined being pushed through the tiles and then through the ceiling of another room, another floor, another ceiling, all the way down to the concrete steps and then the cool earth where the mud was like butter. She knew the faults of her father and the faults of Lucky and Mum and Tick and everyone who had lived and died in those rows of concrete. She knew herself. Whoever she was. Small. Bad. Alone. Ugly. Pretty. Lovely. She had turned eighteen behind a bathroom door, talking to a beautiful wizard, and one who had drained the last ounces of magic from the world.
*
She had not seen Lucky for a long time. Weeks. Months. Maybe. Time went different since she knew how to count it. The mad bird reminded her that fifteen was fifteen was fifteen and there was nothing she could do about that. Lucky was gone since he. The woman cried and Tick turned from uncaring to angry to upset until he panicked about his father and showed it by punching walls and doors and trying to set fire to the school. He was home after that. Home to worry and to think and thinking was worse at home, he said. While they flew and raged and spat words out like sour pips she didn’t say anything and the winter ended in grief. Then the days were warmer and the road was hot and the heat lifted to her knees and she could smell the burning of the tarmac as she walked on the road. The schools wouldn’t keep the children during those hot weeks so they walked the road in their special groups and wrote their names on the high wall and sold their rabbits and ran when tall men came and handed money to the passenger who sat gazing out from a rumbling silver car. She didn’t play with the children again. The last of the balls had been broken and none of the children asked for another. There was a red balloon that came and floated low in the air and then began to rise up next to one of the towers and off towards the fat sun. A pale boy stood looking there and then his eyes moved beyond it to the swirling green clouds and then beyond that where there was nothing but the blue air. The boy looked deeply, as though trying to remember something that was pushed too deep to dig up. Then the balloon lifted, floated high, swung around cables and drifted to the tops of the clouds until it was too high to see. The boy watched it go, and then he looked back to the road again, then to his feet, then to his hands as though for a moment he had not been himself.
On the way home from Sweet Street Tick took all he’d made and divided it into three parts and slid one part into his back pocket and one part into his front pocket and gave her the rest. She had been collecting her money but she had no reason for that. She didn’t know what she could buy and she didn’t know what she wanted apart from cigarettes and lipstick and fairytales in books that Tick taught her how to read. Tick told her to save it for something big.
I don’t want anything.
Nothing?
No.
Everyone wants something.
I don’t.
Well, what’s the point in making money?
What’s the point in anything?
In the night she worked on the cuckoo that was still mad and had not released her or anyone else from that long fifteenth hour. The bird flew at her and smiled with its doll face and stared at her with its sugary eyes as she worked it to the perch. She got it trapped and screwed it tight and pushed it back into its house and kept her hands on the door until the bird was still and quiet. She thought of Lucky. Then the bird bashed its head against the doors one more time and stopped.
Let’s go out, Tick said when he came out of the bathroom.
Do you want to look for Lucky again?
No, I’m done with that.
He’s coming back.
He might not.
He’s coming back.
Stop it. We can’t think about that. I have to be the one now. If I say we’re going out, we’re going out. I’m in charge. I have to be. I have to make more money if I’m going to take care of everything here. That’s natural. I was just looking into the bathroom mirror and I realized something. I looked into my eyes and I thought that my eyes were the eyes of a man. Do you understand? A grown up. An adult. In that second I grew up because I decided it. It doesn’t matter if I look like a boy because I’m not a boy. Not anymore. I have to be the one now. I have to take care of you and Mum and that’s just. That’s just how it is.
Fine, she said.
The boy was right. He had exploded and raged from the funny boy to the serious and silent shadow of what once there was, one that could sink into the alleys or fill up the room with hot white light. Since Lucky left he had taken care of the woman in the bed and he had taught her things in books and he had not talked about jokes or games and he no longer balanced on the edge of a bridge. His eyes were tired. The skin beneath was swollen. Sometimes he had bruises. Cuts. Burn marks. He would come home and his face would turn away or look into the fabric of a chair and chew on thoughts that she couldn’t see. He was disappearing. Stripped of flesh. Hollow like an iron rail, beaten into the ground.
Let’s go to the park first, she said.
What’s the point?
The swings. The slide. The.
We’ll go to the park, but not to play.
What else is there to do?
They dressed in their dark hoods and Tick put on his boots and tied the laces around his ankles and she put on a pair of thick socks and a scarf that Tick had stolen from a rich kid, and they both went out. It was dark. Cold. The days were hot but as soon as the sun went down and the moon came up everything froze. She could see the moon, her mother’s right eye, which was working to arrest her where she stood. She looked up and set her hood over her head and pulled it just above her eyes and looked back towards the sky street with her head and sight darkened.
The concrete bridges seemed to last forever when it was night. They stretched out in the white glow of the moon and the orange glow of the streetlights that fli
ckered and made the bridges seem like they were moving. Breathing. The estate was like a lung and the black streets were veins and the concrete grew thin as the slit of moon above them and everything unfolded brick by brick to fill all the cracks and broken bones of the world. Tick walked quickly with the hard rain coming down and soaking into his hood. She yawned. Lightning in the sky cracked her eyes awake and for one half second it lifted the estate into day before sending it all back to dark again. Everything was different. She missed Lucky. She wanted to be bad and she wanted to follow Tick to the end of everything that had been good before.
Rain tinked and tanked off a satellite dish and a curtain closed and opened and a door slammed and the noises of sex came from a window that was part opened. She stopped to listen and to be aroused and then she looked at Tick who sped over another bridge in front of her. She ran to catch him. The boy was a quick shadow. The light made green paths in the rainwater that fell all along the narrow corridors of the estate. She shouted for no reason. Mum’s eye beamed down and Dad’s face was set in all the windows. She ran and Dorothy ran in the windows beside her.
She was a shadow and she disappeared in a patch of dark and the boy stopped and looked back for her and she was not there. He called her name and walked slowly back along the bridge and called her name again and said this isn’t funny and he said the word fuck over and over quiet and afraid. She watched him through the railings of the bridge and when he was close enough to touch she sprung up and shouted and the boy spun around and clutched his chest like she had killed him. He looked at her.
The Insomnia Museum Page 19