First Person and Other Stories (12 page)

They’re appalling, I say.

It’s music for, like, infants, she says.

And that song Angelo, I say.

I hate that song, she says. It’s crap.

It’s such a steal from the Abba song Fernando, I say. You just have to think about it and it’s so obvious.

Yeah, she says. It is. It’s like really a steal. They just took the idea Abba had and they wrote it into a so much less good song.

Her voice, for the first time since she’s been here, sounds almost enthusiastic. I don’t turn round. I rack my brains to remember something she’ll like.

I sing: Hey you with the pretty face. Welcome to the human race.

I really really like the way the piano they use in Mr Blue Sky has an electronic voice and you think it might even be the voice the sky has, if the sky had a voice, she says. I actually really really like that whole idea of an electric light orchestra because of the idea of, like, light-orchestral kind of thing, and then on top of that the idea that it’s electric and that it’s nothing but an electric light, like one you switch on and off.

It is the most she’s said so far, the whole time she’s been in the house.

Like a whole orchestra at the flick of a switch, I say.

A whole huge orchestra inside one lightbulb, she says. It’s really clever to do that like with just writing some words together, it’s really good the words doing all that by themselves. I really like it. Do you know that thing about the phrase written water?

No, I say.

That thing about the historic poet John Keats Miss Aberdeen in English told us today, she says.

The tragic pop star of the Romantic period, I say. Did Miss Aberdeen not say that?

Yeah, but when he died, my fourteen-year-old self says, like, before he died, the poet John Keats, right, apparently he said to someone, put it on my gravestone that here lies a poet whose name is written water. Not written down, but written water. Water that was written on. I think that’s really beautiful. Here lies a poet whose name was written water.

One, I say. Not a poet. It says on the stone, here lies one.

Well, same thing, she says.

And it’s writ in water, I say. It’s three words, not two.

No, it’s written, like one word, she says.

It isn’t, I say. It’s writ. Then in. Then water.

Yeah, but writ isn’t a word, she says.

It is a word, actually, I say.

Yeah, like half a word, my fourteen-year-old self says. It doesn’t mean anything.

It’s a real whole word by itself, I say. You can find it in any dictionary. It’s changed its meaning over time and at the same time it’s kept its meaning. We just don’t use the word exactly like that, in that form, any more these days.

I can hear her kicking at the bar under the table.

Don’t do that, I say.

She stops it. She goes silent again. I look out over the darkening grass. I don’t have to look round to know what she’s doing, still swinging her leg under the table behind me but just above the bar, just expertly missing it every time.

He did die unbelievably young, you know, Keats, I say.

No he didn’t, she says. He was twenty-five or something.

A joy forever, I say. Its loveliness increases. I can’t remember what comes after nothingness. God. I used to know that poem off by heart.

We did a poem by him, she says.

Which one? I say.

The one about looking in an old book, she says. And oh yeah, I forgot. Because when I got into school this morning, it was really appalling because the art teacher made me take off my clothes. In front of everyone.

I turn round.

He what? I say.

Not he, she says. Miss MacKintosh. Weirdo.

Don’t call Miss MacKintosh that, I say. Miss MacKintosh is really nice.

She’s a weirdo from Weirdoland, she says.

No she isn’t, I say.

Like, she said to me you’ve to take off the
soaking wet things and put them on the radiator and you can wear my coat. I had to sit in her coat the whole way through double period art. My hands were freezing. I had to put them in the pockets a couple of times. My tights were ripped though, from the stones on the way down on the Landscaping. Then Laura Wise from 3B said she wasn’t cold and gave me hers. She saw it happen. She said John McLintock was spazzodelic.

Wait a minute, I say. First, I don’t think you should use that word. And second. What stones? Soaking wet, why exactly?

That boy John McLintock pushed me down the Landscaping, she says.

I remember the Landscaping; we used to hang around the Landscaping a lot. I don’t remember anything about this, though. We used to pass the Landscaping every day on the way to school then home again. It was the green slope at the back of the houses where they kept what was left of the original wasteground they built the two estates on. Presumably there was some planning prohibition and that was why they couldn’t cover the whole thing with houses; instead they pulled up the trees and grassed over the stubby bushes all the way to the new car park. The Landscaping was quite steep, if I remember rightly.

A boy was pushing people off it? I say.

Just me, she says. He only pushed me off it. Nobody else. There were loads of us.

And you were on top of the Landscaping because? I say.

Because of the new snow, she says.

Let me get this right, I say. He pushed –

It was slippy, she says.

She covers her face. She’s smiling under her hands, still sitting at the table with the cold coffee in front of her, swinging her leg underneath the table just above its bar. I realize I don’t know whether she’s smiling because a boy pushed her down a hill, because a girl picked her up at the bottom of it or because an art teacher I know she’s got a crush on asked her to take off her clothes.

Then I realize it’s because of all three. I remember my hands in the warm pockets of the adult coat.

It moves me. She can see this on my face and she gets annoyed again. Her smile disappears. She scowls.

Written is so much better than writ, she says.

It might be better but it isn’t what it actually says on the gravestone, I say.

Weirdo, she says.

Don’t be rude, I say.

From Weirdoland, she says almost under her breath.

She gives me the quick look and then, with perfect timing, the artful look away.

Completely night now out beyond my house and only six o’clock in the evening. All the streetlights are on. All the cars in the city beyond are nosing their ways home or their ways away from home, making the noise traffic makes in the distance. Closer to home, out on the unlit common, under a sky that promises frost, someone invisible to us is rattling across one of the nearby paths on a bike, shouting and shouting. I love you, he shouts, or she shouts, hard to tell which, and then calls out what sounds like a name in the dark, shouted into the starry air above all the thousands of old dead, and then the words I love you again, and then again the name.

My fourteen-year-old self looks towards the window and so do I.

You hear that? we both say at once.

A parcel arrived. It looked really creepy. There was nobody in the house but me. I phoned you. You were still at work and very busy.

Uh huh, what now? you said.

A weird parcel came, I said. It’s got our house number on it and the correct postcode and everything, but it’s not addressed to us and I didn’t notice until after the postie had gone.

I told you the name on the parcel. You said you’d never heard of him or her.

Me neither, I said.

It’s just a misdelivery, you said. We’ll put it back in the post tomorrow. Look, I’m busy. I’ve got to go. Are the pills working? Are you still sore?

A bit, I said.

Have a sleep on the couch, you said.

I can’t, I said. I am less than one person in a hundred and the pills are keeping me awake.

Go and watch daytime TV, then, you said. It’s your prerogative. You’re signed off.

I can’t, I said. I am less than one person in a hundred and the pills are making me sleepy. Plus I am now unable to operate machinery.

I’ll bring supper, you said laughing. Listen, I’ve got to go.

You hung up. The laughing had made me feel a bit better. But when I went back into the front room the parcel was still there.

Last week we were in the supermarket and saw they were selling Swingball. I hadn’t played it for twenty years and got nostalgic about how good I used to be at it. We bought it, stuck its metal stick in the lawn and played it. The next day I kept hearing a crackling noise, first when I was on my bike, then whenever I went up or down stairs. The noise was coming from under the skin of my left knee. Then the knee got sore, then the leg. Then I woke in the middle of the night unable to move anything from the shoulders down without it hurting. For the past three days I had been taking anti-inflammatories and lying on the couch monitoring myself for any of the fifty-nine side effects the leaflet warned were to varying degrees possible (including stomach pain,
dizziness, changes in blood pressure, swollen legs, feet, face, lips, tongue or all of these, indigestion, heartburn, nausea, diarrhoea, headache, itchy skin, abdominal bloating, constipation, chest pain, vomiting, ringing in ears, weight gain, vertigo, depression, blurred vision, hair loss, serious kidney problems, inability to sleep, sleepiness, paranoia, hallucinatory episodes, and heart failure). So far I had possibly had two or three of them. But I wasn’t sure if my ankles and feet had always been that shape, or whether I was imagining the high airy humming in my ears, like a faraway sea. Was I depressed? I had been getting up off the couch every few hours and checking myself in the mirror for weight gain.

Then the parcel had come. I had limped to the door and taken it from the postman without hesitation. But as soon as I had taken it I had known there was something wrong with it. It looked like it should have been heavier than it was, but when I had it in my hands it felt unnaturally light. It felt unnatural. There it still was. I wasn’t wrong. It was odd. The writing on it was a crazy person’s writing, scrawled all over the place. It was funny to see the address of our house in that unstable writing. The brown paper was old and soft, sellotaped very stiffly all over, as
if it were a kind of shell rather than a parcel. It looked as if it had been going around the postal system for years. But it was postmarked yesterday. I couldn’t make out where from.

I blinked. I was being paranoid. It was a side-effect. It looked nothing more than, nothing worse than, an old-fashioned sci-fi TV programme prop, some pretend-evil creature with a name like molluscopod jerkily sliming across a makeshift landscape to evil synthesizer music chasing the sidekick girl.

I tried to think this, but the parcel defied me. It had been sent. It had been meant for someone.

I picked it up and carried it through to the kitchen and put it on the table, then I had a terrible urge to wash my hands. After this I went back through to the couch and switched on the TV. I watched the quiz where people are given random consonants and vowels and have to make up words. Then I watched another where people are eliminated if they give enough wrong answers. In the ad break I went back through to the kitchen. I had to. It was there on the table, too close to things in the fruit bowl that we would eventually eat.

I broke a banana off the bunch and poked the parcel over a few inches, away from the bowl, right to the edge of the table. I went to put the
banana in the bin, holding the end which had touched the parcel well away from me. This was when you arrived home.

Why are you throwing away a perfectly good banana? you asked.

Then you looked at the parcel.

You looked at the writing on the parcel, the name and address. You picked it up and shook it. You shook your head. You looked at me. I shook my head too. You put it back down on the table and we both stepped back. We stared at it for a while. Then you said: it’s something horrible, isn’t it?

I nodded.

What if we just opened it? you said.

Well, it’s something horrible. And it’s not addressed to us, I said.

All through supper it got harder to breathe. I could hardly swallow. I felt dizzier and dizzier. You looked pale, appalled. You sat on the carpet, leaned against the armchair. You didn’t eat; you flicked little bits of jalapeno off your pizza back into the pizza box.

What if, you eventually said, it had arrived here actually open? Split, you know, by accident.

Just split enough so we could see what was actually in it? I said.

Uh huh, you said.

I took the knife through and washed the pizza off it and dried it. You came through to the kitchen. You turned the parcel round on the table and took the knife. You cut right into it.

Christ, you said.

The smell was awful. We both stepped back. Then you took a deep breath, held your breath, unlocked the back door and took the sagging parcel and the knife outside. I heard you cough and I heard the ripping noise the knife made in the side of it. You coughed and then spat. I went out into the garden.

On the path beside the gaping parcel was a pile of filthy rags. The smell was foul.

Look, you said. I think it’s pyjamas.

There was a jacket and a pair of small trousers for a six or seven year old. They were dark blue under the filth, and patterned with soiled and ruined little pictures, a child dressed as a guardsman, a child on a hobby horse, a child in a sports car, a child making a sandcastle.

There was a note. It said, in the same wild ballpoint writing: W H o S A n A U G H t Y B o Y t H E n.

Well, it’s definitely not to either of us then, you said.

Jesus, I said.

Very weird, you said.

Beats me, I said.

Someone’s mother? you said. Or father?

Someone’s lover? I said.

Someone very angry, you said. Or unhappy.