by Frances Vick
Where had she come from? It was a strange time of year to start a new school. She must have come from the city. Or abroad? He already knew that he was going to watch her, because he liked her so much already. David rarely interacted with the people he really liked; he just watched them, either on TV or in real life, thought about them, knew that he liked them, and left it at that. They didn’t have to be friends or anything. The irascible man who owned the Chinese take-away, for example – David liked him; he liked the way he pretended not to speak or understand English; he liked the way he feigned deafness when his squeaky daughter shouted the orders at him, but he’d never spoken to the man, and, save for ordering chow mein – he was training himself to eat Chinese food; he didn’t like it, but it was all part of his training – he’d never spoken to the daughter either. When he heard the man on the phone in the kitchen, heard that his English was fine – he even had a slight estuary accent – David was enormously pleased, and the man went to the top of his ‘Like’ list.
He paused at the end of the close. Looking around at the new houses, he understood his father’s offended dismay. Tiny, boxy, weak-looking things with windows set high and narrow like peevish eyes in a stupid face. The bricks were the nasty colour of oatmeal, and each identical door was topped by an improbable, flimsy-looking awning in plastic-coated wood. Each had a frosted glass window at the top where the bathroom was. Each had a patch of grass, about a few metres square, in front of the door, like a sad little welcome mat. The streets meandered around in concentric semicircles, but there was a spur of land to the east that jutted out of the pattern. All David had to do was work out what house she lived in – look for signs of moving: boxes, packing crates, bright lights shining through curtainless windows. Rooms emptily messy with unpacked belongings.
He closed his eyes, and Jenny, already buried down into the soft tissue of his brain, like a tick, led him down the middle of the deserted road towards exactly the scene he’d pictured – squashed boxes stacked carelessly in the desiccated front garden of the last house on the left.
On the rare occasions that David did something impetuous, the same phrase would canter through his mind – Don’t think, do. Don’t think, do. That’s what he was hearing when he plunged the compass into Francis, and that’s what he was hearing now too. He closed his eyes again then, opened them, and turned back, dodged between the houses, crossed the end of the neighbour’s garden, and headed to the hills. There he found a kind of grassy nook between two rocks that not only sheltered him from the cold, it also allowed him to see a little bit of what he was sure was Jenny’s door and kitchen window, while still being hidden himself.
Like always, his instincts had not let him down. He could only see one person in the house – Jenny’s mother, he assumed. The TV was loud. Loud enough to upset him, even at this distance. He needed to work harder on that. It was a weakness that could easily trip him up if he wasn’t careful.
He waited in the cold for an hour before hearing the sigh and squeak of worn tyres. Illuminated by the security light, he could see that Jenny’s hair had escaped her ponytail and was drifting, beautifully, around her pink cheeks. He could see her breath steaming, the light quiver of her slim fingers. He heard her tired grunt as she got off the saddle and leaned it against the wall. She wasn’t wearing her school uniform any more. Where had she been?
‘Mum?’
His flesh thrilled with the sound of her voice! Slightly gruff, throaty, with a local accent, but not harsh, not grating. Unconsciously David half stood up, to be closer to her, to hear her more clearly. Don’t think, do. And he scuttled closer to the house, into the garden, and crouched behind the bins below the kitchen window. If he made any noise, the sound of the TV would mask it.
‘Where’ve you been?’ the mother was saying. Through the open window, smoke billowed from her cigarette. ‘I’ve been worried.’ She didn’t sound very worried. The TV laughed and laughed and laughed, and David’s chest felt hot and his head started to throb. The woman shut the window then, and they must have moved into another room. Though he waited for another quarter of an hour, he couldn’t hear anything else intelligible from the house because the TV was on too loudly, and the noise was almost a physical assault. Why so loud?
When he got up, his head hurt and his legs were stiff with the cold. He’d need thicker trousers for next time, gloves too. Noise training too. If it was going to be this loud every time, he’d have to toughen up.
David made his way back between the houses, and onto the street. He breathed great gulps of silence, imagining it running down his throat, into his organs, his bones and filling him with calm. Calm calm calm. In the middle of the road, he found a pink Post-it note, like a crushed butterfly, and picked it up, knowing that it was important. Calm now, very, very calm, but alert too… he was doing splendidly.
He put it carefully in his pocket, and hurried home. As he passed the Rose and Crown, he heard his mother’s whoop whoop of a laugh, inevitably followed by Tony’s dirty snigger. His fingers caressed the Post-it note, curled in his pocket like a fortune cookie. He’d look at it tomorrow, after his training. He’d know what it meant then.
40
The next afternoon, David returned from school, to find the house uncharacteristically cluttered and noisy. Usually, at this time, he had the place to himself, but today someone was fixing the dishwasher, and someone else was fixing the hole in the roof of the summer house that Tony had tried to repair himself, but only managed to make bigger. Tony himself was loafing about the house, trying to make conversation with the dishwasher repairman (embarrassing! With his silly faux accent and his... dramatic... pauses…). This meant that David would have to be very, very careful. His planned activities – music training, organising Precious Memories and making a Future Plan, demanded absolute concentration. Knowing that anyone else was in the house could easily derail the whole thing.
Fortunately, David’s room at the top of the house in the attic, looking over the garden, was very quiet. The white walls – he’d insisted on white walls when his mother had decorated the rest of the house in that dreadful terracotta colour – were blank, pictureless. He owned no books, no ornaments. There was no room for sentiment – all his battered toys were in his old bedroom the floor below. The carpet was beige. The bedspread was white and beige, and David washed it himself every week with a special odourless washing powder because strong scents offended him. There was nothing in the place to hint at its occupant. It could easily be a hotel room. Nobody was allowed in. He’d considered soundproofing it, just in case, but thought that might arouse the very suspicion he was trying to avoid. That’s why he hadn’t put a lock on the door either, though he really wanted to.
‘It’s like a tomb up there,’ Tony had told him once.
‘I like things to be neat,’ David had answered.
‘A therapist would have a field day with you, he really would.’
‘Don’t speak to me like that,’ David used his low-threat voice, which he’d perfected through training, though it never seemed to affect Tony, who grinned at him.
‘I’m concerned that’s all. I don’t want you to develop abnormally.’
David had said something stupid then – ‘You’re the freak!’ – but immediately realised that that was exactly what Tony had wanted him to say. He’d goaded him into it so he could bad-mouth him to Mum. And he had, too, because that night she had a Long Talk with him about Being Kind and Accepting Difference and Adult Relationships and… the memory still made him faintly sick. After that, he avoided Tony and Tony, too, backed off somewhat, only allowing himself the odd barb now and again – humming Chic’s ‘Le Freak, C’est Chic’ and smirking.
David’s room was his Special Place. Every day he retired to this careful sanctuary and trained his face and body to reflect the same blankness as the walls. Every day he stood before his full-length mirror for exactly forty-five minutes, practising blankness. He’d think terrible thoughts, and examine his face for
hints; relive embarrassments and failures, while forcing his shoulders to stay straight, his face neutral, his brow unfurrowed. He was really very good at it. He’d started the training because, a few years ago, he noticed that there was a small but ever widening gulf between what he thought the world ought to be like, and what everyone else thought. David’s world was uncluttered, quiet, isolated. There was no sex in David’s world; no music; no drugs. He had no hobbies. He had no tribe. Lately, he felt that the world of every other sixteen-year-old was a horrible, dark shadow of his own. Their world seemed to be all about friends and music, anger, stupidity and all that boys-will-be-boys stuff that was so tiresome. Alien. The frightening centre of this world, the rotten nucleus, was porn, and David hated that most of all, hated it so much that he’d never let it into his training programme. One, very brief, glance at Porn Hub was enough to put him off the whole idea for life.
David knew he was absolutely In The Right, but he also knew that being Right wasn’t Normal, and he’d noticed that people cared a lot about what seemed normal; if he didn’t master how to pass as normal, his life would be very very difficult. All those childhood trips to the doctor had taught him that. The doctor had said he should see a psychiatrist if this ‘anxiety’ continued into adolescence, and there was no way David would have let that happen. Psychiatrists were for weaklings and social cripples, and he wasn’t like that. He just had... issues with some things, that was all.
For the first few years of his life, he slept below a battery-operated mobile – revolving, twirling circles of red, black and white accompanied by tinny excerpts of Mozart. Later, in conversation with the doctor, his mother seized on this being the cause… perhaps the music, coupled with those disorienting spirals had created some nightmarish vision in his child’s mind? That would explain the times she found him curled up in the corner of his room, eyes staring, catatonic with fear. The garbled, fearful explanations – just that he had to run from the noise, and run quick; how he’d stiffen in her arms when she sang him a lullaby. He suffered until the age of four, when the mobile was retired, and he was moved into a big-boy bed. He still had nightmares though. And he walked in his sleep, sometimes spent days not speaking to a soul, just lying on his bed, stroking his cat, his face as scrupulously blank as an egg.
Father had spent a lot of time reassuring her.
‘He doesn’t seem to have any friends,’ Mother had said. ‘He’s so terribly alone.’
‘He’s just his own man,’ Father had said, and ten-year-old David, listening behind the door, blushed with pleasure, because Father understood.
‘—The school?’ Mother was saying. ‘Maybe boarding?’
That scared him. Boarding school meant no privacy. It meant noise and enforced sports and choir. To his horror, his father wasn’t disagreeing with her. Their conversation petered out into frustratingly opaque phrases – ‘Reading the room’. ‘EQ’. ‘On the spectrum’. Right then and there, David vowed to learn how to behave like everyone else. He had no choice, as they’d send him away otherwise. For the first time in his life, he listened to the way other children spoke to each other, memorised their inflections, their slang, took notes on the clothes they wore, the TV shows they watched, and in the safety of his room, he practised hard until he’d assimilated the act. At secondary school, he noticed that having the right haircut was important, as was how to wear your school tie (Fat Windsor knot, the rest tucked in between shirt buttons). Being bright was OK so long as you weren’t too bright, so he was careful to do well, but not too well, in school. Swearing was big. You were expected to swear, at least a bit, and so David learned to drop a few fucks and bastards into his speech, and tried to remember not to hesitate or wince when he did. He rebuffed overtures from obviously Weird Kids, and at the same time kept his distance from the powerful elite, knowing that they, out of everyone, would be best equipped to sniff out his oddity.
The only thing he hadn’t mastered by the age of fifteen was music. He could disguise or deny his antipathy towards porn and sports, but music was harder, because music was everywhere. Yes, the arrangements of notes were arbitrary, ugly, and prodded him into panic, but he simply couldn’t afford to let that happen any more. He was a teenager. Teenagers Like Music.
He started the weaning process via television. Father liked peaceful things like University Challenge and Grand Designs, and, because these programmes only had short theme tunes, David watched quietly with him, nodding appreciatively at their respective scores, or sharing sparing opinions on the virtues of eco building. It was fine to wince during the music round of University Challenge, because it was always opera or something, and nobody liked that.
Gradually, he’d progressed so that now so that he could cope with sudden, unexpected bouts of music from a car radio, or a shop speaker, but he knew he had to do better than that.
A while ago, he’d appropriated the bulky 1980s stereo system from the study and ordered headphones from Amazon, as well as a selection of CDs – compilations, mostly, all of different genres. Beginning with The Best Classical Album Ever!!! – a series of relatively soft, short, pieces of classical music, some of which he recognised from adverts, he forced himself to train for forty-five minutes a day, and each day, turned the volume up one notch. He’d managed to get through The Best Classical Album Ever!!! in under three weeks, relatively unscathed. Now That’s What I Call Classic Rock! was trickier. He’d been stuck on the intro to ‘Pinball Wizard’ all week. Today, he was determined to get all the way through it.
He set the volume at 3, then changed it to 4, and, shuddering, pressed play. Guitars jangled, drums pounded a maddeningly repetitive beat, and he watched himself in the mirror, noting with approval how calm he appeared, even as gorge rose. When the splintering vocals began, rather than turning it off as he always had, he gritted his teeth and turned up the volume to 5, telling himself to look, keep looking. Stand straight. Smile. Keep your eyes open. Now look around. Bink. Blink. Remember to blink. He was exhausted by the time the song ended, and covered with sweat, but after he’d stopped crying, after he’d splashed his face and spoken sternly to his reflection, he was ready to start all over again. Then again. Then again.
Forty-five minutes later, he allowed himself to stop, and again studied himself in the mirror. Drying sweat on too-tense shoulders. He felt his lungs begin to billow more easily, his fingers stretched. This was good. This was progress. This was all down to Jenny, he knew. The knowledge of her spurred him on...
Now that he had earned his reward, he crossed the room, dragged out ‘Precious Memories!’ from under his bed, said a little prayer, and clicked open the catch.
David had always been a collector. An archivist really. Two years before, when he was still making the mistake of keeping everything in an unmarked box under his bed, he came back from school to see that the cleaner had come into his room and removed it. Nobody understood why he was so upset about what the cleaner insisted was just broken pens and old paper. Later, that night, he’d overheard another one of those anxious conversations between Mother and Fathers, realised how stupid he’d been, and told himself off very sternly. It had been very very stupid to get… upset like that. If he got upset, they’d worry, and if they worried, they might start talking about psychiatrists again, boarding school again. The best way to handle this was to… go full Normal. Be honest. Frank, uncomplicated.
Back in the sitting room, he confronted his worried parents and apologised. The thing was, after watching all of those episodes of Grand Designs, he’d found himself fascinated by architecture… it was silly, really, but he’d been making some plans? For the kitchen extension they were always talking about? He wanted to draw up his own plans and show them, and he’d been working really hard to surprise them, but all of his work had been in that box.
‘Oh, darling!’ Mother cried.
Father huffed with shy pride. ‘Do we have a budding town planner in our midst?’
David ducked his head, nodded, smiled. ‘But i
t’s silly. I shouldn’t have been so angry—’
His mother got up then. ‘Not at all. Not at all. Now we understand.’
David hesitated, wondered if he could push it just a bit further. ‘But secrets are wrong. I’ve learned my lesson.’
‘They’re absolutely not wrong! Piers? Piers!’
‘Absolutely not wrong,’ his father said.
David went even further. ‘But families shouldn’t have secrets.’
‘Privacy and secrecy aren’t the same thing,’ his father said firmly.
David left it at that, but he knew that he’d been lucky. A doctor’s letter he’d filched from Jeanine’s bag had been in that box (what was chlamydia anyway?), as well as two of Tony’s cheque books (David didn’t know what to do with them, but having them made him feel powerful). If his parents had seen them… He’d have to be a lot more careful in the future, no leaving things out to be discovered. He had to go further than that though: he had to make his parents feel too guilty to even think about snooping again, let alone let a cleaner in his room.
So, over the next few months, if Mum or Father mentioned anything to do with Grand Designs or the kitchen, David would smile sadly and back away from the conversation. He wrote some truly atrocious poetry, left it in the sitting room where he was sure his mother would read it. Sometimes he drew – amateurish skyscrapers or shakily sketched ground plans for eco homes and left them half-finished, half-screwed up, half in the bin. The message was clear, his confidence, badly damaged by that stupid cleaner, and his parents’ stupid reaction to his privacy being invaded, had yet to recover.
‘He’s sensitive.’ He overheard Mum telling Tony. ‘He feels things deeply.’