What are you doing?
I’m playing a game.
Don’t.
Remember when you used to.
Don’t.
She had climbed over the railing of the bridge and onto the other side where there was a thin concrete perch. The boy jerked his head and grabbed hold of her arms and she looked down at all the darkness that had fallen to the bottom of the world and she looked at her own red shoes and her thick wet socks that were standing in the middle of it all. She clicked her heels together and knocked stones off the bridge and she watched them fall down and down and. She was up so high. The rest of the world was down so low. The streetlights were like little silver fish and she moved her foot off the bridge and drew a circle in the air. She couldn’t tell which way was up and which way was down. She clicked her heels once more and said home is no place.
The boy grabbed her arms and she started and took hold of his shirt and felt the wind toss her backwards. She pulled herself and used his arms to lift her body over the rail and step to the inside of the bridge and when she was safe again he held her hand and held it to his face.
Don’t do that again, he said.
Why not?
Just don’t do it.
It doesn’t matter.
Why doesn’t it matter?
Nothing matters.
You’re crazy.
I should be dead.
What?
I think I died already after the accident. I think I died on the road.
You’re crazy.
I know. So are you. We’re both long gone.
His ears were red and swollen from where the rain and cold air had got to them and he pulled his hood up and held his hand out but she didn’t take it. She stood in front of him and took his hood in her hands and blew down the side of his face and warmed his ears. Somewhere a dog barked and Simon laughed and in another place there were people all huddled and they were hungry and sorry and there was no redemption for anyone.
This is the first time I’ve done this, he said. It’s okay. I’m okay. I’ll be fine. I’m doing it for my Mum and I’m doing it for myself. One day I’m going to take us both away from here before it’s too late. When I was seven I learned that one day my Mum will die and I decided to do something about that. I don’t want my Mum to live and die in this place. I want her to die somewhere beautiful.
What about Lucky?
He can die anywhere he wants. I’m taking my Mum to Australia or Vietnam. I’m taking her somewhere warm. Where there are gardens and beaches and mountains. I’m leaving and I’m never coming back and my Mum won’t be miserable all her life and she’ll get out of bed to come with me. That’s what it means to be older. A man. If she knows she’s going somewhere beautiful she’ll get up and get dressed and she’ll come with me.
I think she will.
Do you know how to keep a secret?
I’m good at it.
Then keep it. Or kill me.
She held him by the sleeve of his hoody and they took the stairs and not the lift that had not been safe since that time when. They held onto the railings and went down the stairs and for a moment he was a boy and then in another instant he was gone again. The moon shone and then became dull. A man shouted and then grew quiet. She knew how to keep a secret because she was a secret. She looked into the shine of a metal handle and she told him they should both feel guilty.
He looked at her and didn’t speak. They went through the big heavy doors at the bottom of the tower that still smelled like piss and eggs and she sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Tick looked at her and said that the film wasn’t real.
Don’t say that.
It’s true. Not real.
It is.
Dorothy is called Judy and Judy is dead.
You’re lying.
It’s true.
Judy who?
Judy Garland. She was an actress and she died of.
Don’t say it.
All right.
What did she die of?
What do you think?
She couldn’t think. Some of the rabbits had got into her head and now they were jumping all around and making a mess. They went into the park where the bad dog waited on the wall and began to bark and howl as soon as they came close. The dog looked at her with his one big eye and snapped at the place where the wall was broken in two and he turned around and around and watched them both where they walked and didn’t play. Tick told her to wait where she was. Hide yourself away. There. Go under there. Don’t make a sound. Watch and learn. This isn’t a game, not anymore. There are no games. There’s only this. There’s only me and you and what we’re here to do.
Are we supposed to be doing this?
No, and the passenger doesn’t know.
Will he find out?
Only if someone tells him.
What will you do if he finds out?
I’ll die. I’ll get hurt. I’ll not last the week. Be quiet.
She hid underneath the slide and looked at the boy through the slats in the ladder that she had climbed the night before to spit at insects. The bars were rusted. When she wiped her hand across them they flaked a red dust that blew back over her face when the wind caught it up. She chewed a good piece of rubber that she had torn off the end of the handle of a kid’s bike that was left to rot on the bank of the muddy river that ran alongside Sweet Street. Tick picked up a brick and chucked it at the dog on the wall and the dog moved away and snapped at the air where the brick had been swung. He picked up another and another.
She told Dad to shut up inside her head and she killed the itches on the inside of her wrist and rubbed her stomach where there was a knot that was tightening more and more as she watched the boy. Tick jerked his head and stamped his boots and tugged on his tee shirt and flashed all the silver in his mouth and said the word fuck and kept his eye on that place where the wall was split in half and the dog watched her as she rubbed the red dust from her face. She wasn’t hungry. She hadn’t been hungry for a long.
She was not. She was not. She was not.
Two shadows that were moving outside the lime green burn of the sickly buzzing streetlight came through the crack in the wall and stood on the opposite side of the park. The shadows were small and they were watchful and they stood hand in hand and warmed themselves in the light that did not give warmth. They lit their eyes beneath it. She could see the right eye of one and the left eye of the other. Burning.
The shadows looked at Tick and he looked at them and he stood still with a rock raised up in his fist. He barked and spat. They came in each other’s arms into the patch of broken stones that spewed from the open mouth of the wall and made them stagger when they tried to walk over them. Tick dropped the stone and waited for them as they made their way into the light that stuck to the fog and sat in the middle of the park.
The rain got heavier. She could hear it typing something on the lid of the discarded freezer that Tick once pissed in.
The shadows were children. They were sisters with the same face. They came chewing gum and blowing fat white bubbles. They held hands and stretched black ties around their hair that was gathered into a tight tail at the back of their heads. They were talking that look-at-me talk. Walking that look-at-me walk. They were older than Tick but not by much and she looked at them long and hard and decided that they were fourteen or fifteen. They were using their hands to talk and talking loud and stretching their words and laughing and making faces that were lipsticked and unkind.
Oi you, the right sister said.
You got something, yeah? the other said.
They stopped in front of the beautiful boy who had spiked his long hair up so high that day that not even the rain or the hood could pat it down. She tried to see them better and she slid from the ladder and over to the swings that had not been swung for some time and she lay down on her belly and watched them with her chin in her hands. The dog on the wall snapped and grunted at her and she told it to hush so she could watc
h and listen and it growled and tossed the dirt with its nose and the girls pointed at the boy and spat into the rain and said I’m talking to you.
The sister who stood on the left laughed. She moved forward into the light and twirled her hair around her fingers and drummed her fingers on her belly that stuck out like a full balloon beneath her school shirt. She rubbed her hands over it and watched the face of the boy who looked at her and then looked down at her belly.
The girl on the left laughed long and mad at something her sister said and she watched the boy from the corner of her eye and she sucked on an aluminium can. She drank it all down and laughed high and loud and long and then she chucked the can into the fridge that was still open. The can dunked into the water that had been filling the fridge since the rain started.
Her mother came into her head and began to sing songs that she didn’t understand and she could smell the sea and hear the water and feel the cold rocks beneath her feet and then it was all gone again.
What’s that? the boy said.
He pointed to the belly of the laughing girl.
What do you think it is? Pregnant, aint she? the other sister said.
The boy pulled something from his pocket. It was one of the white rabbits that he had kept back from Sweet Street and didn’t return to the rest of the pile that he kept in an old biscuit tin beneath his bed. The little rabbit lay flat in the clear packet that Tick would not give over to the right sister when she opened her hand.
Who’s going to have this then? Tick said.
He was taller than he used to be. She was the same as she’d been before. The sisters snatched at the packet that the boy held over his head and then behind him and they came forward as he stepped back. She played with the twist on her finger and then looked up again. Tick pushed them both back and slipped the packet into his back pocket and Plastic Jesus looked out from his tee shirt with the word fuck above his head and he didn’t try to help. Tick was so much taller than he used to be.
Who’s going to have this? It’s not going to be her.
We’re gonna share it, the right sister said. We’ll share that and we’ll share dinner and we’ll share the baby too when it comes out of her fanny.
She spat into the mud and nudged her sister and the left child looked at her but she didn’t laugh. She rubbed her belly and twisted her sleeve around her thumb and the boy looked at the belly and stepped back once and then again and he didn’t look behind him as he walked because he knew the path through all of the junk that had been tossed without pity into the park.
You’re not having it if you’re going to give some to her, he said.
The boy turned and walked away. The sisters whispered together like fairytale witches and the boy shouted back and said what the fuck is wrong with you. The girls plotted and planned and seized the time and held hands and they looked at Tick and then they ran at him.
The rain got in her eyes and she took off her glasses and rubbed her face and she breathed small and quiet. The boy fought to keep the rabbit from the girls. There were sirens. A dog. Traffic. There was a car that came past along the black road. The wind. Another dog. Smashed glass. Fire. Music. Fighting. Everything was loud and all at once. She put on the glasses again and she watched the two girls as they rushed at Tick and knocked him to the ground.
The dog on the wall barked and snapped at the children as they fought and they fought so hard that they didn’t see her as she stood up and came from beneath the rubber of the swinging seat. The boy took the packet from his jeans and held it in front of him and the girls knocked him down and he lay facing the ground with the mud in his eyes and the dirt turning into dust from a bag of cement that had been dumped and left to peel away over the mound inside it. The boy turned grey as he struggled. He said no no no no no no and then he said hut hut hut when the girls kicked him in his side and all the air that was in him blew out.
She came from the swing and went around the concrete that kept the iron in the ground and her fists were pumping and her breath was short and the moths were a gale of wings. The right sister pulled the boy’s hoody and pinched his pale back and he put his hand there and rolled over and she slapped him in the eye. The sisters were laughing and so was that damn dog on the. She spat at him as she passed. She walked quickly and didn’t make a sound. The right sister snatched the packet from the boy. Little wanker, one of them said. Fucking this. Fucking that.
Little shit. Boy. Shit. Piece of. Grubby little.
The right sister laughed and waved the white rabbit above her head but it was the other sister, the one with the big moon belly and the wordless mouth, who did it to him. The boy was breathless on the floor and his eyes were pinched shut and he was holding his guts with one hand and rubbing his back with the other and one sister whispered to the other and they both laughed and then the sister with the belly stepped over the boy and stood above his head with her legs wide apart. She lifted up her skirt and slipped her thumb through the crotch of her knickers and moved them to one side until her private lips were showing. She squatted down. A little lower. Fucking this. Fucking that. Then she did it. She pissed.
The girl squatted down and pissed on him.
The boy didn’t move at first. He looked at the girl in that place and watched as the piss came to him and then he stayed there for seconds longer and then he cried. He cried hard. He closed his eyes and tears collected in his lashes. He rubbed his face. Spit collected between his teeth. His nose ran. The girl told him he was thick as shit. Your family is shit. Your Dad is dead and your Mum is mental. Little prick with a little. Prick with a little. The girl pissed and cursed and she cursed him and she cursed his Mum and she cursed his Dad and his grandmother who had moved to the estate to become a whore, they said. The boy cried.
He turned on his side with his hands on his face. She had stopped somewhere around the dog because Tick had told her not to interfere no matter what happened. He was a man and he could take care of things himself. He told her that things could go easy and he told her that things could go hard and he told her that things could go violent because that’s the way it was with kids. There was always violence that was built up underneath like roots growing thicker and thicker until one day something bursts. She felt them inside her then. There was a root for herself and there was a root for Mum and Dad and Simon and Lucky and there was a root for the grandparents that she couldn’t remember and those she had never met and on and on for many mothers all back in the past. She felt them. They throbbed. Like hearts.
The girls walked away from the boy with the prize in their hands and they tossed it from one hand to the other and then into the air where the light chased the packet in the air. They laughed. They walked along the wall that was peppered with the names of a hundred children that were still living and a hundred others that had died when their bodies had grown old. They came to the stones that had rolled down from the break in the wall and they stopped to look at the white rabbit and to smoke.
Tick was on the floor and the moon burst from behind a travelling silver cloud and she looked at the two girls who laughed and. And she ran. She ran. She ran. Fast. Faster. She ran in those shoes that were bright red and too small for her feet until she reached the sisters who turned towards her as she came and screamed when she took bunches of their hair in her hands and pulled them back into the park.
She let go of the sister with the fat round belly and she took the other one instead and took her hair over her shoulder like a sack and yanked her down from the stones. The sister with the belly screamed and the dog on the wall howled. She twisted the hair up in her hands and she yanked it hard one time and brought the girl down to the ground and then she dragged her backwards along the dirt and mud that pressed around her shoulders. The girl snatched at her hair and dug her nails into her hand and into her fingers but she had no feeling there. The girl pulled her little finger but there was no feeling there either and she couldn’t feel anything but the cold and the shape of the no-nail twist o
n the end.
She cursed the girl and spat. The sister with the baby inside screamed on the edge of the park with one hand on her belly and the other on her face and she didn’t stop while her sister was being dragged. The one in the dirt offered up what she had stolen and she stopped dragging her and she took the white rabbit and looked at it in the light. She let go of the girl and she put the rabbit into her pocket and she took hold of her by the collar of her school uniform and she looked at her crying face that was swollen and green through the lenses of her glasses and she slapped her. She slapped her once. She slapped her hard in the face and the noise of it was like a firework. The slap bounced off the towers then it disappeared somewhere above the estate.
The girl looked at her.
The dog was quiet then. Everything was.
She stood up and let the girl go and watched her stumble through the dark and through the hole and out of the park holding onto her hair and her cheeks and everything as though she was afraid it would all come away. The dog on the wall began to bark again but she was not afraid. She went over to Tick who had pulled himself onto his knees to watch her as she stole back the rabbit.
The muscles in her legs were still twitching from the long run across the park and her fingernails were still covered with red mud and she felt sick and it was a good sickness. Whole. Strong. She wasn’t scared of anything, not the man in her head or the mother in her eyes or the twins who cursed and pissed or the moon in the sky or the fish in the sea or the silver poet or the root inside that went back a hundred years to a place she had forgotten or the museum she had forgotten or the men and women who loved that junk or the smell of gone off food or her own mind or the dark plughole or any of the days that were left or the face of Plastic Jesus that could answer all the questions she didn’t want to ask or the passenger or that lovely ugly love or the way the beautiful boy looked at her then.
Tick didn’t have a voice and the hoody he was wearing had been lifted over his pale belly that was now red where the blood had rushed to the pinch. His eyes were red and his head was still dripping with the piss that came from the girl and had a bitter rotten apple smell. She sat down next to him and pulled his head into her lap and wiped his face with her sleeve and she rubbed his hair out of those spikes and she sang a song about Dorothy that came to her then.
The Insomnia Museum Page 20