Dream Guy (3 page)

“It’s poufy. People laugh at you.” He sounded strident—and stupid.

“They don’t any more. Not since they worked out it’s a great way to pull in girls—and you get to cop a feel.” Ben smirked. “In fact, we’ve had a few new recruits. I’m getting a bit less of a workout these days.”

“Well, you’re hardly interested in feeling up girls, are you?”

“Oh, don’t flog that old horse again, Joe. It’s dead already.” Ben stood up. “If you don’t want to talk about the fish thing, that’s cool with me. You just have to say.”

Before Joe could reply, Ben called into the kitchen, “I’ll be there to help in about an hour, Mum, but I’ve got work to do now, okay?”

“That’s fine, darling. Joe, homework. Go on. Hop to it.”

Joe stood, yawned and trudged upstairs. There was some reading to do for English and for psychology. He had to draw some triangles for maths and a rain gauge for geography. It was a worthless collection of activities. Teachers were either cynical bastards, deliberately concocting useless tasks, or even sadder, that they were pathetic tossers who genuinely believed that the work they set had a purpose.

He turned on the bedside light and the desk lamp, unpacked his bag and stacked his books on his desk. He sat in his swivel chair and twirled around. Dad and he had painted the room last summer. Now it was white with black gloss skirting boards and woodwork. They had whitewashed the floorboards, and Mum had found him black bed linen and a rug that looked like a Mondrian painting, with big red and white panels crossed by thick black lines. Three of the four walls were covered in whitewashed corkboard, and these were pinned with layer after layer of drawings.

Joe could track his progress through the drawings. Through chinks, you could see copies of Tintin and Snowy, Thompson and Thomson, Captain Haddock, Dennis the Menace, Gnasher, Desperate Dan. There had been an Asterix phase, but Joe had really only been interested in scenes of Roman-bashing, along with some of the more familiar comic book heroes—Batman and his ‘Pow! Thwack!’, Spiderman swinging through the streets of New York, a brief X-Men phase. That had been succeeded by the Matt Groening phase, not so much the Simpsons as Abdullah and the sad rabbit of School and Love being Hell. And the Sandman. He couldn’t work out which of the artists who had worked on the Sandman he liked best, but his favorite pictures were always the ones of Morpheus himself. Punk, eyes shaded, speech bubbles reversed so that his words were white in a black puddle, like a whisper from the dark. Mum had thought he had been too young for the books, but Dad had said he was mature enough and had given him the first three.

This year, for the first time since he’d been a little kid, he’d begun his own strip. It was based on his family, but the pictures weren’t on display. They were carefully stowed in the portfolio chest that Mum had found in a secondhand shop and restored for his birthday. He went over and pulled the third drawer open, where he knew that no one would look—not Gloria the cleaner, not Mum, not Liesel on her snooping expeditions. He slid across to his draftsman’s table and switched on the halogen desk lamp, pulled at the tapes fastening the folder and leafed through the sheets of A3 cartridge paper on which he’d started to record his family’s peculiarities. He hadn’t had a chance to show them to Dad, not yet. The way things were going, he wondered if he ever would. He tied the folder up again, hid it away and reached for a fresh sheet of paper.

First he taped it to the table surface, portrait layout.

Then he drew up a series of boxes—a large box along the whole width of the paper at the top, three medium-sized boxes evenly spaced in the center then a pair of boxes at the bottom, the left-hand one slightly larger than the right, and a zigzag margin interlocking the two, in a stylized tearing of the page. He took a pencil and sketched in the outlines of his characters—Liesel, Mum, Ben, himself—but this time they were animals. He gave Mum a sheep’s head. Liesel was depicted as a little weasel with mean, darting eyes and he’d drawn himself as a donkey. But Ben’s head was normal—a little vulpine around the mouth, otherwise as gorgeous as always. There they were in frame one, ready for inking.

Next came the lettering. He’d named his series the Knormal Knightleys. And this time, the final box had a picture of Donkey Joe giving Ben an almighty kick and sending him flying through the window into the moonlit garden.

As usual, once Joe was absorbed into the world of his strip, he lost all sense of time and place. Nothing intruded on his concentration. All his fears for his father, all his irritation with his mother, all his loathing of his sister and brother poured onto the page. At last, rubbing his eyes, he covered his drawing board with innocuous sketches and bits of tracing paper. He stood, stretched and ambled downstairs, feeling altogether better.

Downstairs, Ben and Liesel were watching MTV, arguing about who was the prettiest member of the boy band polluting the screen. Mum was finishing off the cooking while listening to some comedy program on Radio Four. Joe went to the dresser and got out the cutlery.

“Got everything done, love?” asked Mrs. Knightley.

“Pretty much. Have you heard from Dad today?”

“Yeah, he sent an email. There’s one just for you, as well.”

“Do I have time to check it before we eat?”

“Yes, I suppose so. Go on then.” Joe heard resignation in her voice.

Joe sat down at the computer in the corner of the kitchen and logged on. The only good thing about Dad’s current job was that he’d gotten his company to pay for the installation of a broadband connection at home. There was the email in the family’s postbox. Dad had written to Ben and Liesel too, but Joe noticed that his email was longer than theirs, which was a pathetic thing to notice, he knew, but it made him happy anyway.

Dear Joe,

How’s tricks, old man? It’s dull as ever out here in the desert, but the job does seem to be moving on a bit, which is good news after all the delays we’ve had recently. The thing I wanted to write to you about is a book that one of the guys here showed me, all about a mag published in the 1980s that was all comics, called
Raw
, and I wondered if you’d heard of it. If not, I’ll try to get one of the Americans out here to get hold of it for you next time they go home.

Also, I got your latest copies, and it made me think it was probably time you did stuff of your own again, wouldn’t you say? I don’t think I told you, but when I packed to come out here, I put in the book you made when you were seven. When I look at it, it takes me right back to when you were all kids, just after we’d moved. Ben was eleven and mad about skateboards and nothing else, Liesel was just three. You were the only one I could have a sensible conversation with that didn’t involve cuddly toys or ball bearings and Tony Hawk. You stuck so many things in that notebook. Of course, there were the monsters and the robots and the stuff that seven-year-olds like—Godzilla, some superhero cartoon off the box. But you also did those really funny drawings of the family. I was wondering if you’d ever thought about doing anything like that again. You could scan them in and email them to me. Even snail mail seems to work—although none of us expected it to—if you don’t want to leave your work on the computer for the others to see.

The thing is, it looks like with all the delays so far that my contract will last longer than we’d thought. And if you could do a strip for me and send it out, maybe home wouldn’t feel quite so far away.

What about it? I’ve put this in a separate email from the others because if you did it, you probably wouldn’t want the rest of the family to find out about it. And I wouldn’t really want them to know either. Just a secret for the two of us, because then you’ll be able to draw and write exactly what you want.

I miss you all so much.

Love, Dad.

Joe swallowed hard. He could just hear his father’s voice, faintly, like an echo. He’d been away for two and a half months now. His company had offered him a pretty stark choice—the reconstruction contract or redundancy. And the money they’d offered if he’d take the contract had been too good to miss. Mum and Dad were going to be able to pay off the mortgage and fork out for Ben’s university course so he wouldn’t have to take out a loan.

“Are you ready, Joe?” Susan Knightley didn’t take her eyes off Joe as he closed the email and came to the table.

“What’s this about Dad’s contract?”

“They want him for a year. He can come home at Christmas and Easter, but basically, he’s out there until next October.”

Joe sat, his elbows on the table, his fingers plunged deep into the dense thicket of his hair, massaging his skull. “That sucks.” He could tell by the tone of her voice that she hadn’t been happy with the news either, although financially it was a miraculous break from the continual teetering on a tightrope between solvency and debt. They’d have no money worries at all at the rates Dad was getting paid. They might even have savings.

Liesel and Ben soon filled the silence with gossip and chatter about school and teachers and the endless negotiations about whom Mum would ferry where and when. Joe could stay at home alone. He didn’t play any instruments or sports that needed lessons or practice or concerts or matches. Maybe that was the reason Liesel and Ben got on so much better with each other than with Joe—hours spent in the car together and pretty much the same obsessions with music and sport. It had always been that way, almost since Liesel was born.

Joe made good his escape as soon as he’d finished shoveling up the last of his stew.

“Don’t you want any pudding?”

“I’m all right, Mum. Honest.”

The other two smiled uneasily and said good night in chorus before returning to their conversation. Joe went back upstairs.

Chapter Three

Lamborghini Gallardo

Nirvana on the iPod, a sole halogen light over the drawing board… First the blue pencil for the rough outline then the heavy pencil. Then the color and finally, the ink. And there it was, the dream—voluptuous curves, steel hubcaps, cruel grills, a shade somewhere between gold and cadmium lemon, black leather upholstery with yellow stitching, six-gear transmission and, lurking in the center of the car, the V10 engine that delivered five hundred horsepower at seventy-eight hundred revolutions.

If only… It wasn’t as if he were greedy. He wasn’t aiming as high as the Murciélago, but even the smallest Lambo was as expensive as a house. Money was a weird thing. If you said it fast, one hundred and forty thousand pounds didn’t sound like so very much, not when the radio bombarded you with all those boring statistics about how many billions the National Health Service cost or how much credit card debt had been run up in the last six months. But in real life, where you had to take the rubbish out and make sure you did your share of the ironing before Mum would part with a tenner, where next year, a job at McDonalds or at the local Tesco’s on minimum wage was going to be the only way to get any spare cash, the price of a Lamborghini was a crazy number, like the number of matches it would take to build a scale replica of the Houses of Parliament—seventy-eight million three hundred thirty-three thousand six hundred twenty-five—or the number of elephants it would take to stretch between earth and the moon—give or take
about fifty-two million five hundred eighty.
Unfortunately, there weren’t enough elephants in the world to run that particular experiment, although it would be interesting to design a spacesuit for an elephant.

Joe went to the bathroom to brush his teeth and check his pimple status before turning out the light. The thing was, if he could make people turn into fish, why couldn’t he make a drawing turn into a real car? It would be inconvenient, though, to have a full-sized car in his room. So perhaps, if he put the drawing outside in the drive, it would be there, ready for the morning.

Joe slipped on a pair of combats and his hoodie. Then he dug around his desk for a plastic wallet and slipped his drawing into it. He quietly eased his door open. He clung to the wall, taking each step one at a time. Now was not the time for an interrogation from Mum or Ben. But it was dark downstairs, all the lights switched off in the living room and the hall. A dull orange glow from the streetlight shone through the stained glass in the front door. Joe eased back the bolts then carefully pulled at the lever on the lock. He put it on the latch and went into the front garden. There was a pile of bricks tucked below the front wall, left over from the last lot of repairs. Joe took one to anchor down the drawing, hoping that a Lamborghini had sufficient clearance for a brick. He positioned the car so that it was facing out of the drive. He could almost imagine it there. Almost, but not quite.

After locking up properly, he went to the kitchen and poured himself some mineral water from the fridge. A light flicked on at the top of the stairs.

“Joe, is that you, love?” Susan Knightley sounded sleepy and a little hesitant.

“Yeah, Mum.”

“What are you doing skulking about in the dark?” Relief sharpened her voice. “Honestly, I thought we were being burgled.”

“I couldn’t get to sleep. I just thought I’d get some water.”

“Fine. Go to bed, sweetheart. It’s past midnight.”

Which reminded Joe that he had done absolutely no homework. He could blag the reading, but he knew he had better do the drawings for maths and geography. It didn’t take long, twenty minutes or so with a protractor and a set square, and both assignments were done. He repacked his school bag and climbed into bed, turning his alarm clock on before taking one last look at the picture of the Gallardo, which he had taken from a brochure and stuck on the wall. Then he switched off the light.

* * * *

The next thing Joe knew was his mum ruffling his hair and stroking his cheek.

“Come on, love. I don’t know what you were doing up half the night, but it’s time for breakfast. You’ll be late if you don’t get up now.”