Alice and the Fly (3 page)

Sometimes your dad talks about you in work. He tells Phil about how you’re into art, how one day you’re going to university. He never talks about your brother. This morning Phil was discussing baby names and your dad said he named you the morning you were born. He’d overdosed on Dutch courage and spent the night watching a VHS of
Alice in Wonderland
, over and over, rewinding and playing it till the birds starting singing and the telephone started ringing and he found out you existed. I wonder if you know that story? Whenever they’re talking about you I tend to turn off the kitchen tap and just stare at the bubbles in the water.

There’s an older butcher called Charlie who works on the fresh-meat side, slicing ham and cooked chicken. His face is shrivelled to a point and he looks a lot like a chicken himself, especially with those little round glasses. (I know chickens don’t wear glasses, but if you saw him you’d know what I mean.) He’s always telling Phil and your dad to grow up and calling your dad a hippy. They call him the Miserable Old Cunt. Sometimes they shout back to me, ‘The Miserable Old Cunt needs a fresh bucket,’ and I have to fill a bucket with soap and steaming water and bring it out to him. I feel guilty responding when they call him the Miserable Old Cunt, it’s like I’m agreeing with them. He never even looks at me when I deliver his bucket. I guess he is a bit miserable.

There’s also this pack of four Vultures that serve out front in the shop. They’re in your year, which means it’s technically illegal for them to work, but it’s money in an envelope so I guess it doesn’t matter. Most of them take dance class with my sister and have the same bleached hair, long nails and powdery orange skin. They smell like cherries.

And then there’s me. The back-lad. I just keep my head down, concentrate on my work. In the morning I have to wash the walls and the floor and the insides of the fridges. It’s blood, mainly. Fresh blood wipes off easily but as soon as the cold gets to it it gets all hard and sticky and needs bleach and boiled water. They have all kinds of meat hanging in the fridge and I have to shift it around to clean. Sometimes there are cow legs or whole ribcages hanging there. Sometimes there are pig heads, with hardened snouts and icicles for eyelashes.

Twice a day I have to empty the fat from the chicken oven. It gathers in this large metal tray underneath. It’s very heavy and hard to manoeuvre. I have to slide it all the way out, till I can feel the heat of the fat on my face. I have to unscrew the stopper and let the molten fat dribble into a bucket, then empty the bucket into a bin out the back. Molten fat looks and smells like thick pee. The Vultures hate it. Their noses wrinkle in disgust. They don’t have a problem with meat and blood, just fat.

I make tea and coffee too, when they ask me. I have to make drinks for everyone and it’s awkward because the Vultures have never told me their names so I have to just wait for them to stop serving and notice me before I can ask what they want to drink. Sometimes they just ignore me, or do that wrinkle-face and giggle to each other.

I spend the rest of the day in my kitchen, watching the tap. I can watch that tap for hours, the water gurgling, steam in my face, warmer and warmer as the surface rises. I used to love baths when I was little. My sister and I had to share. We had this toy boat she was obsessed with. We’ve got some film of it somewhere, us both in the bath, playing with that boat. My sister never wanted the bath to end, she’d just refuse to get out. Maybe that’s what dried out her skin so much. That was before Finners Island, before I moved to Nan’s. I think about the old days when I’m watching the tap. I think about all kinds of stuff. The kitchen gets all foggy with steam.

It’s not too bad, really, being the back-lad. I keep to myself. I have my own kitchen and nobody bothers me. I’ve heard them talk about me a couple of times but nowhere near as much as they do in school. The only thing that bothers me is when the Vultures come out the back for their buckets. They need buckets to clean the counters and the only tap’s in my kitchen and the kitchen’s only really big enough for me, which means they have to stand right next to me, so close I can feel their warmth. It takes a long time for those buckets to fill so usually I close my eyes. I try and think about all the pigs and chickens in the freezer, how cold they are. I try and just listen to the rushing water.

Sometimes I don’t even realise they’ve gone until I can’t smell cherries any more.

My bedroom window’s the fire-escape window. It’s the window that, in the event of a fire, my family would supposedly crawl out of onto the safety of the roof. A couple of years ago one of my favourite things in the world was to open this window as wide as I could on rainy winter nights and feel the chill of the rain battering the roof tiles just an arm’s length from my face. Sometimes I used to reach my arm out into the night and let the rain patter and pool into the palm of my hand, numbing it out of all existence and, when it was so numb I could no longer even feel the rain, when with a reach and poke of my warm and living hand that white-dead hand felt like a hunk of frozen pork thawing in the fridge, and when the white-dead hand couldn’t even feel the poking of the warm and living hand, I would pull both hands down under my bed sheets and curl my whole body around them and the white-dead hand would burn back to life. On those nights I’d always have the best dreams. I’d dream I hadn’t even been born yet.

Then this one night I woke and saw it was raining and decided to have a go at my arm-reaching-out thing but I must have been very tired because after what must have been only a minute of hand-numbing I fell asleep, my arm still stretched out on the window ledge. By the time I woke the rain had stopped. The sun hadn’t quite risen and the garden was filtered with that golden light they film Corn Flakes adverts in. My hand was numb, resting there on the window ledge, and my first thought was to drag it into the warmth beneath the duvet. But, before I’d even had the chance to drag it into the warmth beneath the duvet, one of
Them
had dropped from the sky, right through the window, dropped right into the palm of my hand and just sat there, perfectly still, its legs spread wide in its landing.

Later, after my fitting and my vomiting and the seemingly impossible task of regaining my breathing, my father had said that they can sometimes ride their webs like paragliders, floating for miles on the wind. He saw it once in a documentary. He said they were fascinating creatures. Then he saw Mum and I staring up at him and he stopped saying things and went back to bed.

My window’s been locked ever since. Mum’s always searching for the key. She says it’s dangerous. We could all burn to death. And anyway, my room smells like teenage boy. I’m used to it. I keep the key in with my secret things, in my
Casablanca
video-case. I used to keep my secret things in my
Brief Encounter
video-case but last week I finally watched
Casablanca
again and immediately swapped them because
Casablanca
became my new all-time favourite and therefore has to be my Secret Case. I designed the cases myself, during Retro Hollywood Season on Channel 4, when my video recorder pretty much constantly had its REC light showing. I wrote the name of each film on the sleeve of each case in my best cursive handwriting – drawing two thin lines in pencil, making sure the top of each letter touched the top line and the bottom touched the bottom line and waiting for the ink to dry and rubbing out the pencil and being left with titles both neat and straight. They look great on my shelf, lined up in their cases. At first I enjoyed the prospect of browsing the neat and straight titles and deciding which film to choose, but then the first film I chose was
Brief Encounter
and it instantly became my favourite film of all time. I couldn’t stop watching it, over and over. Every time I came to choose a film I would start out wanting something new to watch and then think of Alec and Laura standing on that platform and Alec giving Laura’s shoulder a squeeze and that shoulder-squeeze being the only way he could ever tell her that she’s his one true love, his run-away-together kind of love, and that he’s sorry that they’ll never be together and how getting on that train is the saddest thing he’ll ever have to do but he has to do it anyway, and it gave me a kind of inflation in my chest, a kind of beautiful indigestion, and I ended up choosing
Brief Encounter
every time.

I’ve since devised a brutal-but-fair rule for film-watching. I am absolutely (under no circumstances) allowed to watch the same film twice in a row. It’s a hard rule to stick to but it’s the only way I can stop myself watching the same ones over and over. I’ve also decided to store my videos in the wrong cases, so whatever film I choose is not the film I watch. This means every film is watched a relatively equal number of times. It also means (as the videos are no longer assigned to specific cases and as there is always a video in the VCR) that there is always an empty video-case. This video-case is my Secret Case. At the moment my Secret Case is
Casablanca
.

The other things I store in
Casablanca
are as follows:

• Nan and Herb’s wedding photo.
  
• The ticket stub from a bird-watching walk on Finners Island. (It’s years since we’ve been to Finners Island. I don’t even know if they have bird-watching walks there any more.)
  
• The black button-eye of Mr Snow, my old white bear (which luckily came off before I buried him in the sand on Finners Island, losing him forever).
  
• The spare key to my father’s study.
  
• Money.
  

1. The slick black feather of an American bald eagle.

Apart from my video shelf, my bed, my wardrobe, my TV stand and my brown and green striped draught-excluder snake ‘Sammy’ that lies over the crack at the bottom of my door, my room is virtually empty. Mum calls it minimalist. I just don’t like clutter. I like to be able to see every possible inch of my bedroom at all times. I also like parcel tape and have used it extensively, taping the edge of my carpet to my skirting board and the foot of my bed to my carpet and taping all the cracks in all the walls and even taping over the air vent, leaving my room pretty much impenetrable.

Nan and I always used to tape the cracks back at Kirk Lane. We’d do it every winter because winter’s when they come inside, trying to escape the cold. Nan called it the Great Influx. She’d say, ‘We need to prepare for the Great Influx.’ To be honest the term ‘Great Influx’ probably didn’t help reassure me, but the parcel-taping did – it let me relax a little. She used to collect conkers, too, down at Crossgrove Park, scatter them all over the house. Apparently it was meant to scare
Them
away. I don’t know, it’s not something I’ve carried on since moving back because rummaging through leaves on the ground is the last thing I want to be doing if I’m hoping to avoid
Them
.

Mum won’t let me parcel tape downstairs so I seal myself into my bedroom. It’s the one place I don’t have to worry about
Them
so much. I don’t have to shake out my bed sheets or shine a torch down the back of my desk or check the insides of my slippers before use. I still do these things, but more out of routine than anything. It’s just nice to lean my head against the wall without worrying about anything dropping down the back of my neck.

Sundays are hard. Saturdays are OK because I’m with your dad and occasionally he’ll talk about you, but Sundays I have to just sit here with nothing to do all day but think. I think of our bus rides. I think of the times I’ve seen you in school, laughing out on the field with Angela Hargrove. I think back to under the bridge, back to the first time we met. Sometimes my thoughts stray to bad times, unwanted memories, and I try and think about nothing instead, try and just clear my head.

Today I watched
Gone with the Wind
(one of Nan’s old favourites – a lucky selection from my random video system). Trust me, there’s nothing like a four-hour-long epic romance to clear your head. Especially when there’s Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable up on the screen with all their quick one-liners and chemistry, Clark clutching Viv in that kissing-embrace of his, all slicked-back hair and moustache. That’s the thing I love about old movies – they had taste back then. They knew that all they needed was a kiss, an occasional shoulder-squeeze. That’s the difference. In old movies, whenever the characters are kissing, it always cuts to black. A kiss is enough. The rest is left to the imagination. In modern movies a kiss is never enough. They never cut to black. Nothing is left to the imagination. It’s like that’s the whole point of the film: the non-cut-to-black parts. It’s disgusting.

I’d just fast-forwarded through the intermission when Sarah woke up. Sarah’s time is spent sleeping or dancing. I can tell when she’s awake by the dull thud of bass through the wall. She only leaves her bedroom for school and dance-rehearsals. (Sometimes she comes out at night, too, to do whatever it is that keeps her out past 04:00 and makes her fall asleep on the stairs with lipstick smeared down her chin.) Her room is like a house of mirrors in a fairground – if you peer through the crack in the door, fifteen other yous peer in from fifteen different crack-in-the-doors all over the walls and ceiling. A dancer needs to make sure they look good from every angle.

Sarah’s been dancing to a new song this week. It goes:

Ooo you got me screamin’ boy,

Eat me like a cannibal.

Butt in the air boy,

Take me like an animal.

It’s the song she’ll dance to at the Christmas Dance Fantastical. She’s working on her routine. She’s decided that, until that night, she’s going to use all her available time to practise.

By 16:14 the dull thud of bass was giving me a headache. It was impossible to concentrate on
Gone with the Wind
. I went down to the dining room, huddled on the window seat. Mum was preparing dinner. A few years ago Mum knocked down most of the ground-floor walls. (‘Open-plan’.) It’s pretty draughty but it means I can see right through to the kitchen from my place in the dining room.