“Here, Flick, check out the rack on that!” Jamie, gesturing at the screen.
“Shut up, Jamie.”
“Someone’s in a mood,” he says. “You had a fight with the fruitloop?”
“She’s not a fucking fruitloop.”
“Her parents are both lezzers.” Limbo smirks.
I kick him. “Well it wouldn’t work if only one of them was, would it?”
“Well, these things are genetic. Her brother is too.”
I rub my eyes and groan. “There are so many things wrong with that statement, Limbo, I don’t think I can comment.”
“Bollocks.” He settles on a channel. “You just haven’t got a comeback.”
“I bloody have, it’d just be wasted on you.”
“Yeah,” Jamie laughs. “He hasn’t got a comeback.”
“For one thing,” I snap, “two women cannot make a baby so Rainbow is adopted from an orphanage, and unrelated to her brother too, so thanks for being so sensitive.” “For another, I don’t think it is genetic actually, is it? It’s not proven in any case. And lastly you’d know two minuses make a plus if you weren’t such a thick twat.” I’m half-joking.
Mike, who has been quietly starting up the Xbox, snorts and pipes up, “Flick’s got his knickers in a twist.” For some unfathomable reason they piss themselves.
Everyone’s talking shit and I decide to ignore them. I’m sat on the sofa and I spy a suitcase behind me and start playing with it. I pick up the one and only TV remote, throw it casually in the suitcase and flick the two levers which allow me to reset the numbers on the lock. I close my eyes and spin the metal rings randomly around, shut the suitcase, and put it back behind the sofa without looking, so I can’t give the combination away even under torture. I sit smugly on the sofa. That’ll teach them all to be wankers.
Nothing. Else. Happens. I walk back home early, around eleven, and play on the PS2 ’til I’m too bored to continue. I lie in bed, eat a bit, hate my end-of-the-day combo of skinny chest and soft belly (how? how the fuck does that happen?), do some push-ups, stare out of the window, think about smoking, can’t be bothered, roll over and go to sleep.
MY FAMILY AND THE WORLD CHESS CHAMPION
Mornings are either brilliant, perfect hours of heat and softness and feeling like you’re rolling stoned in a fluffy cloud usually precipitating a half-conscious wank, or bastards, where everything is sharp and too stark for your drugged brain. Your alarm clock gives you a panic attack, the sun blinds you and it’s so cold your dick shrivels up and dies in protest. This particular morning, the day after the dead-guy incident, I slept for about ten hours and, half-unconscious, am feeling in the dreamy mist of the former when I roll over onto a piece of paper that spells the latter.
“OW.” A crumpled corner pokes my closed right eyelid. “What the fuuuu—?” I roll away from it, back into my own drool. “Ohhhhh.”
“Morning love,” it reads once I’ve snatched it from under my left shoulder and wiped it dry. “Don’t come down naked, Uncle Burt’s here. He’s brought his chess set. Love, Mum.” I squint at a smaller line, quickly scribbled onto the bottom of the note. “PS: Don’t wank either,” dash, “new hearing aid.”
Fuck. Fuckety-fuckety-fuck. This is all my brain thinks before it shuts down for what feels like another hour but is actually, when I check the clock, ten minutes. Uncle Burt is my only relative I know apart from Mum, Dad, Tommo and Tee, particularly ’cause my parents don’t get along with any of my numerous aunts and uncles, except for Mum’s oldest brother, Burt, who is essentially harmless. He’s very clean, eats according to a timetable (it’s Saturday so today it’s one piece of toast with marmalade for lunch and shepherd’s pie for dinner), pees every twenty minutes and plays chess three times a day, every day, on one of his always-polished, hard-carved antique chess sets. Mam says one day, if I’m lucky, I might inherit them all.
Mam has been annoyed with me of late, regarding my behavior with Uncle Burt, because (don’t laugh) I used to be his regular chess partner. I’d even go down to the club with him, basically a pub frequented solely by retired military personnel, and him and me would batter all the rest of his rickety old navy buddies, who would then shake their walking sticks at me in contempt loosely disguised as humor as I picked up all their cash. Burt used to make them bet on every game he had, but when they got wise to the fact he won all the time, he started bringing in my innocent little eleven-year-old face to clear their pockets clean.
I haven’t played with him in more than a year though. He used to call for me all the time and I’d race round on my bike. Now though I beg off, more often than not. Burt says it’s just because I’ve turned into a teenager and I don’t want to get out of bed on a Saturday morning for the club chess-off, but in truth it’s because most Saturday mornings I’ve only just got to bed and would still be half-cut if I got up again before noon. Sometimes I think Mam knows. Sometimes I reckon she must hear me, stumbling in the back door at four in the morning. Other times I think she’s too busy to notice, ever at Tommo’s, or at work, or keeping up with all the American crime dramas on Channel 5.
Burt still comes round sometimes, bugs me about playing, says I could be a world champion. It’s not the only wasted talent I’ve ever had, I told him, laughing once. He gave me a strange look, hurt pride and a bit of sadness. Burt only got to the nationals, he’ll tell me over and over again. He could have been a “chess celebrity,” as he puts it.
Now . . . Rainbow knows me mam to say hello to, and she likes her, but this is why I don’t want Rainbow to meet my family properly. Don’t get me wrong, they’re all really nice people, it’s just . . . they’re a fucking motley crew of characters.
“WILL!” A sweet little voice from downstairs. My lovely mam.
“YEAH?”
“D’you want some toast with marmalade?”
I roll my eyes back into my head and turn my whole body so my face dives into my pillow. Fuck me, I’m knackered. “Yeeeeeeeah,” I mumble, my mouth buried in the jungle-pattern fabric I’ve had since I was seven. “I’ll come down for it.”
“WHAT?”
I lift my head up. “I’LL COME DOWN FOR IT.”
“Okay, love, it’s on the table,” Mum singsongs back.
When I get down to the kitchen Burt is sat at our Formica table already halfway through his toast. His top button is done up, his tie pushed severely up to his neck. He wears a V-neck sweater, neatly ironed dark blue trousers and lace-up shoes, just like he reckons an old sailor should. He salutes me whenever he sees me, and he always carries a packet of Werther’s Originals. The effect is old-fashioned, endearing and a little sad. I feel bad for him that he hasn’t found anyone to love and now he’s nearing sixty and retired from the navy and living alone in his bungalow on the Brighowgate road in Ness-on-Sea. But maybe he’s gay. Then I guess his being alone is even more sad in some ways. Round here I’d imagine if you were gay you could feel really, really alone. Ostracized. That’s right, I know how to use a thesaurus.
“There’s plenty of marmalade, Burt,” Mam says.
“Ah,” he says.
“Sit down, Will. There’s your knife. Tea, Burt?”
“Ah,” he says. Burt doesn’t speak much unless he gets onto chess. We’ve had some long discussions about chess, me and him, the tactics, the mind games, the glory. Tommo doesn’t have much patience for that sort of thing, but I like to listen. I listen to my mam when she needs to talk to someone, I listened to my grandparents (until they died), I listen to Uncle Burt. It’s like Kyle’s mam. If you call his house she’ll never let you off the phone, but she’s just lonely. Everybody needs someone to talk to.
“Will.” Burt starts up, harrumphing politely. “Did I ever tell you about the time I played Anatoly Karpov?”
“Aye, Uncle Burt, you did . . .”
Mum winks at me conspiratorially and we both sit down to listen to how Burt met the former world champion in a shorefront restaurant when he was on a navy frigat
e docking for a refuel in Malaysia, and challenged poor Anatoly to a friendly match. Burt swears blind he beat him, but even Mam doesn’t know what to believe. He can tell a tall tale, can Burt, and now with his memory going I’m not sure whether he can tell what’s true or not. Still, we’ve heard the story before and me and Mam chime in on the punch lines, grinning at each other.
It’s familial and warm, and I feel a surge of love for my mum and my uncle. We finish Uncle Burt’s story in chorus: “. . . and he would never admit it, but I took the bloody wind out his bloody sails!”
Mam looks over at me as Burt nips to the loo. “When’s the last time you’ve seen him then, mister?”
“Not long, Mam,” I lie into my cuppa. “Don’t get at me.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“I’ve got a lot on.”
“Oh yeah, busy at work is it?” she mumbles sarcastically, avoiding eye contact.
I finish my tea and gasp with pleasure. “You’re not wrong, lass! Paperwork is piling up. Really got to get on top of my accounting, get my millions in order.”
She rolls her eyes. “Get away!” There’s a pause and I know she wants to say something more but is resisting. I don’t know why but she hates to tell me off. Perhaps it’s because I’m so charming. She clears her throat and says quietly, “He’s been getting worse since you haven’t been playing with him, you know.”
“He could still wallop you in a move or two.”
She giggles. “Shut it.”
Then she gets all serious and says some stuff about his health, his looking a bit frail, his memory going. “He keeps repeating himself. I don’t like it. He’s my brother . . .” She trails off and looks away out the window, as if remembering something, as the loo flushes in the background. Before Burt comes back she looks deep into her mug and whispers, as if talking to no one, “Keeps telling me how to bluff my opponent into falling for fool’s mate, as if he hasn’t told me a million times, when we were kids and since. It’s all about body language, he says. I bloody know, I say every time. He’s too young to have his memory go. I don’t like it at all.”
Burt’s shuffling back into the room, and I don’t know what to tell her and I don’t know how to feel. I guess he has been more gentle and forgetful lately, but I don’t want to see it or think about it. I turn my head away from Mam, start to clear my plate, and before Burt sits down, I say, practically, “It happens to the best of us,” meaning “Pull yourself together, Mam.” I sound, for a minute, like Tommo, like a man, like Dad telling Mam to shut up and stop getting emotional. I stick my dishes in the sink, feeling my cheeks turning inexplicably red, and turn back to the table. “Another cup of tea, Burt?”
“Ah,” says Burt.
Mam glares at me, as if I’m part of the problem. I can’t bloody fix anything, I want to tell her, at the same time as wishing I’d given her a hug.
There is an uncomfortable silence while we wait for the kettle to boil, during which Uncle Burt farts, and the phone starts ringing. I make a subtle but assertive dash for it, leaving Mam to fill the teapot.
Family. You love ’em, but sometimes you have to leave ’em.
LOVE LOVE LOVE
I hear a mumble down the phone. “I just feel really sad.” Rainbow has hit one of her mini-depressions. She says it’s just hormonal but it makes her feel really crap and have low self-esteem, particularly while she’s on her period. It’s weird that someone normally so perky can be suddenly mildly suicidal. Only women bleed.
“Aww, baby,” I say sympathetically. Then, maybe a bit too happily, “Let me come over.”
“I can’t, I dunno. I’m in bed.”
“All the better, I can give you a cuddle. I’ll be there in . . .” I estimate the time needed to escape Uncle Burt and Mam. “Half an hour.”
“Urr . . . I look awful.”
“I’ll close my eyes. See you then.”
An hour later, because men are never reliable, I track my bike up Rainbow’s drive (that’s not a metaphor) and leave it leant behind the bins. I’m always a bit shy about going to Rainbow’s, particularly when it comes to meeting her family, and as a consequence we spend most of the time at my place, avoiding all parental contact. Score. Her brother, Tim, lets me in with a shy hello and waves me up the stairs. Tim is fourteen, only a year below me, but slender, small and quiet versus my stocky, tall and loud, so he appears much younger. He goes to my school in Langrick, but I’ve barely noticed him about. When I have we’ve shared the occasional nod in the corridor, but he seems mostly to keep to himself. Probably because he’s clearly gay, being a bit gentle, if you know what I mean, and if you’re gay you don’t want to stick your head above the parapets at our school. You might not get beaten up if you’re lucky, but you’d sure as shit be shunned.
They don’t look alike, him and Rainbow. Well, they wouldn’t, would they? Tim’s complexion is pasty and pink where Rainbow is pale, but turning an olive-y color as the sun works its magic on her. Tim has jet-black hair, where Rainbow has chocolate brown. Tim’s eyes are dark; Rainbow’s are blue. Tim is slim; Rainbow seems to come from meaty, muscular folk. I realize as I run up the stairs that Rainbow has never told me anything about her biological parents. Did I ask? I can’t remember.
Tim follows me up and softly walks into his own room, smiling sweetly at me as he shuts the door. Whenever I’ve been around at Rainbow’s, Tim has barely said two words to me, but he seems to like me. It occurs to me he might fancy me, good-looking fella that I am, but perhaps that’s just me being a cock.
I knock gently on Rainbow’s door in case she’s asleep.
“Bow?” I say softly, considerate like, and the door opens and one blue-as-an-ocean, erotically-wide-and-innocent eye peers at me through the crack.
“Hello.” Her little mouth trembles. Her eyes drop to her feet and she lets the door open shyly, hunching up her shoulders, giving me a tantalizing glimpse of her belly button through massive, pink, teddy-says-love pajamas. I track my gaze over her beautiful body, face bare and vulnerable, the outline of her nipples visible under her shirt, the PJ bottoms caressing the curves of her soft thighs, purple painted toenails on olive-tanned feet. Like a little monkey. I let out what is possibly the gayest “awww” ever, shoo her back into bed, climb in beside her and wait while she wriggles around to burrow into my chest, before enveloping her in my heavy limbs. Ahhhhhh, Rainbow. I feel hopelessly clumsy and flawless and perfect.
“Ahhhhh you too,” she whispers into my T-shirt, and I cuddle and kiss her and stroke her fluffy pajamas like we’re two gay little rabbits in a Disney film. Ahhhhh, love, love, love.
TICK TOCK TICK TOCK
It feels like a clock is ticking in the back of my mind. A week has passed since the episode with Fez and Troy. On the plus side I’ve had no word from Fez and if the police are all over him like he says, then I doubt that he’ll have many opportunities to jump me. So I might be happy that his violent enthusiasm for the deal has dissipated, I might even feel free, if it weren’t for the bag of coke mingling with my boxers and condoms in my sock drawer. But life seems to go on regardless and the coke remains in my room and I manage to distract myself by becoming more and more desperately funny, chatting to Rainbow, Ash and the like about Pepsi vs. Coke, the sad disappearance of coffee roses, and Baileys liqueur—gay but tasty. I push the deal out of my thoughts and try not to worry. Fez doesn’t want to know the details anyway so for all he knows we could already be doing it. I just have to sit tight and wait for word from Kyle, who I’ve asked to look into buyers for me, and then get rid of it ASAP. In any case, I have bigger fish to fry, as one by one exams seem to be flying past (Physics was utter shite, I aced the English Language Paper 1, and did pretty good in Maths) and then, the next Wednesday, I encounter a day of utter dread and horror that has absolutely nothing to do with the deal or school life. As me mam says, things come in threes.
All the time I have known Rainbow I have been putting this off. Ever since we first started going out, her
parents (who I have religiously avoided) have been asking about me. Rather than tell them that I’m wonderful, they have nothing to worry about and she’ll let them know more in a year or so, my beautiful girlfriend has decided to completely drop me in the shit. I’m having dinner with Rainbow’s mums and her little brother. I chant to myself like a mental patient living in the normal world and trying to hide my illness for fear of being institutionalized: don’t say anything that could be mistaken for a derogatory comment, don’t refer to the meal as rabbit food, try not to look like a member of the British Nationalist Party, right-wing thugs with shaved heads and boots that could kick your door in. Vegetarian left-wing feminist lesbians can be judgmental, I remind myself, be on your guard.
Mealtime comes and I’m nervous, chatting so animatedly with Rainbow before we sit down (so her mums will think I’m witty and intelligent, or at least, intelligent enough to form sentences) that I likely resemble Gav on speed, then coming to the table, sitting down and being utterly silent, afraid to ask for bread.
“Are you all right?” says Rainbow.
“Yeah, fine thank you,” I whisper back. Thank you. Thank. You. As if she was an assistant in a supermarket and not my girlfriend, with whom I’ve spent the last two nights.
There is a silence. Rainbow’s Scottish mum comes to the table. I am calmed by her smile, then a panicked monologue explodes in my brain: Asha-Aisha-Eesha-Oona-shit-what-the-fuck-is-her-name?!
“So, Will, Rainbow tells us you’re studying for your GCSEs?”
“Erm.” I swallow audibly. The monologue wonders why am I such a tit. And then I realize I should be speaking. “Yeah, actually I’m just in the middle of taking the, err, exams for them.” Thank fuck, didn’t have to use her name.
“What subjects are you doing?” Mum-from-Hull asks. Why do you care? I think.
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