The Insomnia Museum

by Laurie Canciani

  She kissed him on the face and wiped the dirt out of his eyes and she told him he was good and kind and lovely. He cried into his hands and she watched him. He had grown since she met him. He was fourteen and almost a man and fighting against a boyhood that he had no use for, and he was too old for childish games and too old to be cut so deeply and too high to be brought down so low and too lovely to be broken. She thought that boys who claw manhood to their chests are all too easy to hurt, and what was worse was that he was not a man yet. He was still hers. The boy from long ago who took her out and showed her how to stand on the edges of walls. What was worse was that he loved her and what was worse than the others was that when the pregnant child had moved her knickers aside with her thumb, and Tick looked up into that secret place, she saw it rise up in his jeans. She saw his private thing rise up in his jeans. She stroked his hair. He held her very tight. He cried.

  It didn’t go back down again until he learned to stop.

  31

  Boy Broken

  THE WRITING ON the wall was all scratches and swears. It was slang and rude words and bloody pictures that had been spat along the walls by the young and impatient. Some of the children had gathered to look at Tick but they didn’t point and didn’t say anything. She stood the boy up and walked with him out of the park and over the hump of concrete and through the metal doors and out into the night again. She didn’t speak. Tick didn’t kick the football that stood in his path. The children stood aside and looked at the ground and wiped their tired eyes.

  An old man slid his hand down the front of his jeans and played with himself in the concrete tunnel and looked at her breasts as she went past. In her head the estate had become like the darkest spaces of home. It was like the cracks in the walls or the soles of her mother’s shoes still kept at the back of the cupboard. It was the back of her father’s throat after he had taken his last breath. It was the sound of sirens. Dogs. Fast feet. Crying. It was a fresh howl down an old street or a layer of dust on a broken TV screen. She asked him if he wanted to try phoning Lucky once more and he shook his head and they walked without holding hands and without speaking through the grey everything. Tick stopped to tie his shoe near a newly closed factory. She stopped to rest her legs that still ached from the run. It took a while to get home. His feet were slow. So were hers. It was dark. Wet. Quiet. The dark got inside her and softened her bones.

  They went through the front door and Tick stood in the hallway and didn’t answer her when she said his name and asked him if he was feeling all right. He looked at the space three feet in front of his boots and then he looked at his hands that should have been full of money but were instead covered in piss and dirt. It was quiet all around. Quiet in her head. The noise of the estate had been blunted by the front door and his mother had tossed herself to sleep sometime during that lunatic hour and his father was outside drowning himself in sorrowful work or the black book or some other kind of horror. She and the boy were alone in the empty hall.

  The dog on the wall had followed them into the flat. A siren sang and predicted their deaths. Once, twice, three times over. She said nothing. The boy washed his face in the sink and rubbed the suds into his hair rough and hard and he filled his hands with water and tipped it on the top of his head and let it run down his face and back into the sink again. He looked at her in the bathroom mirror where she stood behind him. The dog on the wall had disappeared when the sun began to come through the windows and through the segmented glass in the front door. The boy’s eyes were different. Blunt. Sorry. They were drained of colour and spark and they no longer reflected her face back to her.

  Can you talk to me?

  He shook his head.

  She turned on the TV in the living room and the boy came and sat in front of it with his knees drawn up to his face and the sunlight creeping over his back and his mind on things that were not with them in the room. She went into the bedroom and brought a pack of cigarettes back with her and sat next to the boy and lit one up and gave it to him and lit one up for herself and they sat and smoked together. On the TV was a man in a suit who hated the poor. He said so over and over. They were lazy and what was theirs was their own damn fault and the faults of their parents who should’ve known not to have children. They changed channels. On the other side was a girl with fine yellow hair who was told to shut up over and over until she cried.

  She laughed. Smoked. She laughed and didn’t know why. The boy smoked with her and said nothing and she watched him during the adverts and ignored him when something good was on and the smoke rose into the air above them and the sunlight came stronger through the window. Dorothy was on the TV. She wasn’t an actress and she wasn’t dead. She appeared in adverts for betting shops and in colouring books and in pubs where there was whisky and crisps but no singing. She changed the channel. The boy turned to her.

  Have you ever been drunk? he said.

  No. I’ve seen drunk people. I’ve never been drunk.

  Tick stood up and went into the kitchen and stood next to the sink. He went underneath and there was a bucket and inside were two glass bottles half filled with clear liquid that she knew was not water. He sat down and faced her with his legs crossed and he gave her one bottle and he took the other and he opened his and took a drink and pulled a face and jerked his jaw. He drank again. He looked at her.

  She looked at the bottle in her lap and she thought of Dad who had bottles just like this one emptied and stacked in a pile in his bedroom and underneath the chair in the living room and beside the Hi-Fi and in the attic where he used to drink because he didn’t want her to see. Sometimes she heard him crying. She twisted the lid and smelled the acid and petrol that fed into the air and she closed her eyes and lifted the bottle. She drew her tongue back and felt the liquid running and she swallowed it and felt the sting of it at the back of her throat.

  She looked at him and watched him lift the bottle to his lips and she watched his throat working to send it all through his pipes and into his head. She drank. Supped. The liquid poured cold and poisonous down her throat and into her stomach where it heated up and boiled and burned all the air out of her lungs. She took too much. Couldn’t breathe. Her lungs jerked in fits and snatches and Tick laughed as she leaned over and sucked the air.

  The boy drank again. They drank together until their throats and legs went numb and their bellies were warm and their minds were full of jokes and the edges of the room were blunt and their feet became fat in their shoes and nothing was bad and they didn’t need air to live only the smoke and the booze and the good time and the Hey-Dee-Dee. She laughed but she. The TV twisted around the room and on the screen there was Dorothy and standing next to her was Dad who she had not seen for all those yesterdays gone and would not see for all those tomorrows that were yet to come. Dorothy held her little dog in her hands. Dad smiled. He had the most beautiful teeth. The loveliest chin.

  The room shifted in the light that came thick through the window. Her eyes darted to the patches of sun that spread along the edge of the TV and the microwave in the kitchen and the silver spoon that had dropped on the carpet next to the settee. She drank. The boy was somewhere. He was sitting far away on the end of the black road and so close to her face that she could smell the burning at the back of his throat and the smoke that huffed out of his mouth and the piss that remained on his hair and clothes. She couldn’t find him. He was laughing mad and hysterical at something she couldn’t see. She fell forward and snatched at the thick material of his hoody and the little speck of shining glass that had been born again in his eye and she laughed and wiped her face and thought on Dad who had always told her she was a good girl. The boy took her by the shoulders and leaned towards her and pushed his lips together and waited for a kiss that would not come. She looked at him and touched his lips with her fingers. You’re so. She fell back and the boy rushed forward. He kissed her so fast and hard it hurt. The metal in his mouth was like. The kiss was heavy and his braces cut her lip and she
bit the inside of her cheek and drew up the taste of blood.

  It made her feel sick. She couldn’t breathe. She pushed him away and he fell to the carpet and he punched the floor and wrapped his arms around his face. She stood up and found her way to the kitchen and stood over the sink and opened her mouth and stuck her fingers in just like she used to do with Dad when he was. She felt the retch and she threw it all up. She steadied herself on the sink edge and closed her eyes and felt the sun rising on her back. She thought of Lucky. The moths came sputtering. She drank a glass of water and wiped her mouth. She turned on the tap and pulled the hair out of her face and watched all the sickness go down the plughole. She cried, but it wasn’t a lot, just enough to pass the rest of the drunk. She looked at the plughole where there used to be all these noises that she didn’t know. Now she knew them. It was the groaning of home, and the sound of life. She knew it now, that tremendous agony.

  She went to the boy who lay there far away and close and he said sorry and said it a thousand times. He wiped his face and drew his fists into his lap and he coughed and closed his eyes. He wouldn’t look at her. On the TV there was a cartoon and the cartoon told them it was five or six or eight in the morning but she didn’t know because she had lost time. The bird said fifteen. She looked at the boy.

  You can’t do that, she said. You can’t just do that.

  I’m sorry. I thought it was okay. I’m bad. I’m a bastard.

  You’re not bad.

  I am. I hurt you. I’m so fucking. I’m so messed up.

  No. You just made a mistake. You’re a good.

  Then.

  Then what? Look at me.

  No. No, I won’t. I can’t.

  Then what?

  Then why don’t you love me?

  They sat in silence. They watched cartoons and they drew themselves together on the carpet. The boy laid his head in her lap and she let him keep it there. They were both still drunk but sobering as the sun poured in fatter and fatter through the window. She had never seen the world drunk and through her father’s eyes. It was so dream-like and different. All the edges were blurred and there was no feeling in anything. There were hundreds of colours more than in Dorothy’s rainbow. There were sounds like the falling of water but it wasn’t rain. She loved the boy. And she didn’t love him. She didn’t know who she loved. She loved them all. Mum. Dad. Lucky. Tick. She loved the woman in the bed with the long beautiful back and she loved the beggar who scrambled to the floor whenever he stood in a crowd and heard something drop. She loved them all. She loved herself. She loved them all.

  She thought of her mother who painted oceans and yellow boats and she thought of Dad who told her more than once that her mother was a bitch and more than once that she was the best person he knew. Love changed with time. It was an ugly lovely thing that came up with the day and down with the night and lived deep in the bones of everyone old and young. She kissed the boy on the top of the ears and listened to him breathing deeply. She loved through her pores, and it was her father who taught her that.

  She slept curled around the boy with the TV on in front of them. When they woke up she was looking at the boy and the boy was looking at her. He jerked his chin and spoke. She brushed the hair out of his eyes and looked at his face and she asked him what he had said and she licked the blood off her lips.

  I don’t want to work on Sweet Street anymore.

  I don’t think you should do anything you don’t want to.

  It’s not that easy.

  It is. You decide something and then it happens. That’s how everything works.

  Sometimes you decide something and because of that you get hurt.

  In cartoons.

  In real life too. Sometimes when you decide something it’s bad. Worse. When you decide something it changes everything and sometimes they don’t like that. Sometimes they don’t like it and then they come to hurt you. And sometimes they hurt your family. Real life is so much more complicated than you think. My secret is much more complicated than you think.

  She sat up. Tick sniffed into his hand and brought his knees to his chest and jerked his neck and hiccupped. His face was red and his freckles bloomed. Inside his eye the little speck of shining glass was dull again and it reflected nothing.

  Are you scared?

  Yeah. I am.

  Tell your Mum. Find Lucky. Tell him.

  I can’t. I’m terrified. I’m scared all the time, Anna. All. The. Time. I can’t tell anyone. None of us can. I want to leave but I can’t do that because. I just can’t do it. I’m stuck. We’re all stuck. We can’t do anything and we can’t tell anyone about it and sometimes I wish I were as mad as my Dad. Sometimes I wish I were brave enough to swallow all the white rabbits under my bed at once. I wish I were as brave as him. Then I’ll be done with everything. Then I’ll be gone and I won’t be scared anymore.

  I don’t want you to do that.

  What’s the point? Life is shit and no one will miss me.

  I will. I’ll miss you.

  Will you?

  I miss you now. I miss you even when I’m with you.

  32

  Surrender Dorothy

  SWEET STREET WAS where the people came for pills and Lollipop Lane was where they came for something stronger. Tick was supposed to go to Lollipop Lane that night but he got dressed and went into the kitchen and made tea and sat down and told her that he wasn’t going anywhere. He had decided.

  Decided what?

  To stay here. With you.

  He looked outside at the black cat that had once again begun to purr and fuss on the edge of the wall. The cat jumped on a bird and the bird struggled and chirped and the cat sniffed and squeezed. There were feathers. Fur. Then the bird got between the cat’s paws and opened its wings and flew off into the night. The cat watched it go, looked into the window where she was sitting with soup and cigarettes. Then it jumped back onto the wall and ran into the corner and disappeared into black ink. There were sirens. Again. Tick sat in a corner and closed his eyes when they sang and then he whistled to drown out the noise. In the world there was good and bad and sometimes there was both mixed up together and she couldn’t tell which was which. It was all grey, like too much ink pumped into the same cup of water.

  The boy was waiting.

  What are you waiting for?

  Nothing. It doesn’t matter. Your clock is broken anyway.

  Sometime into the night when the cartoons became bloody and perverted and the adverts were about gambling and meat, he went into his wardrobe and pulled out a small box with electrical tape wrapped around it. He unwound the tape while she stood over him. Plastic Jesus nodded and the cuckoo clock bashed his head against his broken house until he broke his neck and his head knocked sideways. She twisted the head back again and played with the video that she had kept with her for hours. Dorothy smiled from the cover and the Scarecrow said the word fuck over and over.

  I’ve never watched this all the way through, she said.

  But you watch it all the time.

  I watch it, but not to the end. I watch it right through until that bit where Dorothy clicks her heels and everything goes into a dream. Then I stop it and look at it and I rewind it all the way back to the start and play it again. I do that because.

  You don’t want it to end?

  And I don’t want Dorothy to go home.

  The boy looked at her. He took the cigarette out of her hand and pushed it between his lips and sucked on it. He gave it back and she smoked it too. But what if something happened to you? he said. What if you never got to see the end? It’s your favourite thing in the world and you don’t even know how it’s supposed to go. It’s stupid. You have to play it through. You have to know how everything turns out.

  Why?

  I. I don’t know.

  If you don’t know then I don’t either.

  Fine.

  Fine.

  They played with a pack of cards that he had got from his grandmother who was no
w dead. The pack was new and unopened, and when she pointed to it on the shelf he took it down and unwrapped it and opened the box and pulled the cards out. They smelled like ink and bread. They were red and blue and green with shiny fronts that held the sun when they were turned to face the window. They played snap, and Tick looked up at the clock so many times that it was easy to beat him. She shuffled all the cards in her hand and looked at the cartoon faces painted on the front and back of each one.

  My Gran got me those, he said.

  They’re nice. I never had games.

  Not even when you were a kid?

  Maybe I did then. I can’t remember. Everything we got we sent back into the world again. I think I remember a stuffed bear or a stuffed dog. It’s all just fog now. It’s like something that happened in a story that I read when I was really young. And now I try to remember and it’s all washed away. Do you remember things from when you were a kid?

  Yeah.

  What?

  I remember Mum had a job but she finished early to pick me up from school. I think we used to go by the park and it was green then. It smelled good. You know? When things smell good that’s what you remember. The smell. It was cut grass and dirt. Mum always let me play as long as I wanted and then Dad would come home and he would go to the park first because he knew we would be there. Mum would swing me, but not as high as Dad. We used to get chips.

  With salt and vinegar?

  Yeah. I remember that.

  When you remember things it’s like there’s no time. I think of my Dad sometimes and then I smell his aftershave and listen to the sound of him sleeping or sitting down in his chair. It’s like. It’s like time is broken, but in a good way. There are all these pieces everywhere and you can take hold of one and think on it and then it’s there. It’s here. Now. I see my Dad, and then I’m smiling. Then I feel sad, but that’s okay. I think it’s okay to feel everything at once because that means Dad was real once. He was real, and sometimes he’s more real than anything.