Rocks in the Belly (24 page)

Mandy has eyes like the statues in church do. She can probably see through comics.

Then my name started coming up a lot so I went and got in my lion's den and prayed to Grandma. I have to have a plastic cover on my bed again now and it makes scrunchy walking on snow noises when I fidget.

‘Two steps forward, three steps back,' Dad said.

I pray to Grandma a lot, asking her to stop the nightmares. Dad tries to stay calm about my wetting the bed. He used to be really calm all the time but now he always has spiky hair from sleeping in front of the TV. And he quite often shouts at me then cries when I cry.

I don't ask them about the investigation into Robert's accident but he might get taken away. Mandy even asked me about Robert's accident but I don't know anything cos I was at the park.

Besides I'll just run away if they try and take me to a new house. Or if Mum and Dad go to prison I'll just go with them and we'll sleep in bunk beds and it could be fun.

Dad says prison makes it hard for you to sit down.

Mum is asleep on the couch instead of being at the hospital with Robert. I go into the kitchen and make her a cup of tea. White with one.

Even though I'm tall for my height I have to use a chair to reach the tea things. I put the milk in after the teabag and water so I can get the shade just right. Mum likes it the colour they make it on the telly, in the ads. I get it perfect and wipe up everything and even put it in Dad's mug with Boss on it.

I creep over to her and she has the newspaper next to her on the floor and her new reading glasses on her forehead even though she's asleep. I put the tea down on the table beside her and it's all steamy.

There's some grey in her hair and I wonder if it was there all the time and I never noticed or if it might be new, like when people see a ghost on Scooby Doo.

She could break her glasses sleeping in them like that. I reach out and take a hold of them. I'm not breathing at all in case I wake her up or if my breathing might jog my hand.

I'm a spy and these glasses have microfilm in them. I pull a bit but they're behind her ears and make them curl a bit with the pulling.

She sniffs and I stop. I take some breaths to the side. I can smell her hot tea.

I use my other hand to prop up my elbow and then reach in again and hold on to her glasses, not getting anything on the lenses like the way she tells me to when she sends me upstairs for them.

I pull and the hook bit comes off one ear. I stop. Nearly set off an alarm. If I'm killed in action there'll be a state funeral without my body and Mum will be there and really, really crying so much that they'll have to carry her out and take her home and give her tablets, like the ones she takes since Robert had his accident. Ones that make her glide like an ice-skater.

Sometimes I can cry just from thinking about Mum being sad at my funeral. She's SO upset.

I take a hold of the glasses again and her forehead starts needing ironing. I pull a bit and her ear moves and she flicks awake, her arm coming out and the tea spilt on the carpet and her eyes all blurry and red and scary and looking at me for a second and then ‘What the EFF are you doing, I'm trying to sleep!'

I take two steps back. ‘I made you tea.'

‘Do I LOOK like I need tea! DO I? I need sleep!' She makes a loud sighing noise that uses her voice. ‘And what were you doing with my glasses!'

‘You might have crushed them.'

She stands up and huffs off. I follow her. She gets the cloth and runs it under the tap, squeezes it out and grabs the kitchen towel. She starts to come back but sees me and stops. Her hair is sticking up and it makes her look even scarier.

‘What?' she says. ‘What are you looking at!'

I shake my head at the floor, her little toe's nail looks like a tiny scab. Like the very last bit to come off when you've hurt your knee.

She walks past me. ‘Why don't you go play with the traffic or something!'

Mission failed, repeat, mission failed.

I go upstairs really slowly.

This is the first time I've been in Robert's room since he hurt himself. I sit on his bed, looking at everything. He got hurt because I'm wetting the bed again. And cos I burnt my hand. Cos I'm bad.
And now Mum and Dad are going to prison and I'm going to be sent away.

One day I'll get the hang of people the way Robert has. Maybe when I'm his age. Maybe then.

Patricia gives me a look as she opens her front door. ‘It's not very tidy.'

While she makes herself busy with drinks and nibbles I set to work building the perfect joint, loading it pretty full to relax her but not so full I'll overcook her. Meanwhile our bodies are probably firing up certain systems in readiness. Our minds on our inner feelings, sifting the excitement and fear and reticence and guilt — whatever cocktail of complications we're overlaying on what is a simple, animal need. Pushing this lever.

‘It's rude to poke your tongue out,' she says, depositing the wine on the coffee table in front of me.

‘I can't concentrate without my three lips,' I say, forcing a smile then going back to building the joint.

When she's gone again I reach for my phone and it's hot to the touch from the long call but hung up somehow by my pocket. The screen blank.

I get up and do a circuit of the room, anxiety filling my innards.

Patricia shuffles into the room holding a lighted candle, her other hand masking it from the walking breeze. ‘Don't judge me,' she says in jest, nodding at the bookshelves I'm pretending to inspect.
She goes away again and I sit down, give my hair a good rummage, resigning myself to just one more hour or so before getting back to Mum — a hamster running a wheel in my chest.

I lick the joint, lighting it from one of the candles and letting my shoes slip off onto the floor — bring a foot quickly up near my face to check for smell.

‘Nice,' she says from the doorway.

‘Just checking your carpet's clean.' My turn to blush, hers to laugh. She sits down beside me and nuzzles into my neck, more out of shyness probably. I put an arm round her and just smoke, trying to keep my breathing under control. She can probably feel my heart too.

She smells faintly of alcohol, perhaps from swigging in the kitchen. Lubricating the inevitable machinery.

‘I don't get it,' I say, handing her my smoking creation then inching a little away and bringing my feet up onto the couch, wrapping myself round my legs — a weather system breaking over her face from my pulling back. She takes a drag then admires the joint, looking it up and down.

‘You don't get what?'

‘Why you want me here. You must have a thing for car crashes.'

‘Oh, shoosh,' she says. ‘We're all car crashes. Anyway, I didn't know what was going on in your life when I first met you. I found you attractive then, before I knew.'

‘Knew what?'

‘Why you being like this all of a sudden?'

I hold my fingers out for the joint and she obliges. I take a drag. ‘Like what?'

‘Belligerent.'

I shrug. ‘I wouldn't want me here if I were you, that's all.'

‘Well, you're not me. Besides I invited you in for a drink not a marriage.'

I exhale, blowing smoke rings.

‘I'm not stupid, you know,' she says. ‘You don't fool me with your sexy loner act. I know more about you than you might think. We know someone in common, you and I.'

I pause midway through passing her the joint, waiting.

‘Don't you hate small towns,' she says, excited by the information she has that I don't. ‘My mum taught you! When you were at Wilson's. Remember Mrs Stevens?' She takes in my facial expression, reassured now of her facts, and beaming at the small worldness of this moment.

I nod at the carpet. ‘I wasn't there long. Not even a school year.'

‘But you told me a different first name, or did you change it?' She sits forward but I lean away. ‘She didn't tell me much. Just about the fostering and an accident. It sounds tragic. Your mum seems like she was amazing.'

‘
Is
amazing.'

‘Yes, sorry. Mum was sad to hear she was ill. She sends her best.'

‘Right.'

My eyes are stuck to that patch of carpet, even as Patricia risks coming in close again, wrapping herself around me, my body stiff but her hands lifting each of my arms and arranging them on her in the shape of a hug.

‘Come on,' she says. ‘I come in peace,
sexy
.'

I get off the couch, away from her disgusting sympathy.

‘Oh, for fuck's sake,' she says, knees right up now, her chin planted on top.

‘What!' But I know what and I don't want it happening either. Yet here I am doing it — a car sliding on ice, all its brakes on but skidding slowly, inevitably …

‘Don't plead ignorance,' she says.

‘Why don't you tell me since you already know everything about me.'

‘Forget it.' She's firing up now, flush-faced and hurt. ‘Fob someone else off with your fake name and your depressing anecdotes about a job you don't even have anymore.'

I go to take a petulant drag but the joint's gone out and her anger breaks into laughter, me too but only for a moment, my heart pumping the levity away.

‘Come on,' she says, softening. ‘Or can you only stand it when it's straight sex —
me Tarzan, you Jane
. Then you can cope alright.' She tries to infect me with a laugh but gets left out in the open with it because I'm staring at that face of hers and imagining telling someone like her about someone like me.

I pick up my phone and jacket. ‘You're right, Trish. Forget it. I take it all back, ok.
All
of it.'

She stands up, sensing an opening. ‘What?
What
do you want to take back?'

But I've realised this is hunting season for
her
. She's the one in charge. I'm the wild horse in the paddock, she's holding the head collar.

And I'm bolting, her voice calling after me but I'm out into the night, her front door slamming behind me and pretty soon I'm fifty metres from her house with wet socks, cold feet and a gone-out joint. Panting in the middle of this pathetic little park, watching her door. Feeling four foot six. Afraid she'll come, terrified she won't — the same worldwide conflict between the unbearable heat of intimacy and the cold of isolation. As if there's nothing in my solar system but a choice between Mercury or Pluto.

Leeks or broccoli.

I walk towards a bench at the park's edge, near a path — the night quiet. My chest going up and down, my arms wrapped around myself, giving myself the hug I should have given her.

Out in the cold again, an idiot with goosebumps.

I take a seat on the park bench, listening to the distant interruption
of sirens. I'm not the only one with an emergency then.

Down the way an old man is wandering along the path, through the puddles of light at the feet of the lampposts, his dog just ahead of him, its claws making little clicking sounds on the pavement, pausing at each post to sniff and maybe pee.

When the old man nears I ask him for a match and he pats his pockets, his eyes rheumy in the orange streetlight, a sad look to him but also that fearlessness old men can have. Like they're too old for violence to find them now.

‘Just taking Rocket here for our constitutional,' he says, still patting pockets. His border collie looks back and wags its tail, wanting to go on but having reached that unwritten distance he likes to be from his master — trotting about with his tail in the air and his bum looking at me. Quite a happy sight really, I decide.

‘Rocket,' I say, trying on the name.

‘Yep, he's a one,' the man says, love coming off him. ‘If I don't take him out his wet nose gets me up in the middle of the night. Little bugger.'

He finds his pouch of tobacco, opens it and digs out the lighter, hands it over and I light the joint, thank him, hold his lighter back out to him. He doesn't take it, doesn't notice, so I stand here with it in my hand, blowing my smoke away from him. He has his pouch under his armpit while he gathers a cigarette together in expert fashion, then spits a little tobacco from his tongue after he's licked the gum and rolled it, just like that.

‘You'll catch yer death out here,' he says, nodding at my socks. His work done, he gathers up his accoutrements and puts them in his pocket.

‘Argument with the missus,' I say, rolling my eyes, inviting him into a gentle conspiracy against women.

‘Ah, the fairer sex.'

He's patting his pockets again, frowning, a hand coming out with
his pouch of tobacco. He looks inside it, puts it away, patting again, eyes upwards to help his hands feel.

I hand him the lighter and he chuckles to himself, lights his rollie and returns the lighter.

‘Thank you,' he says.

‘It's yours.'

‘Oh, I couldn't. Very kind and all that but I have my own. Somewhere.' He pats at his pockets again.

‘No seriously, it's
yours
.'

‘Oh, yes!' He laughs louder than old people usually do, he really laughs. ‘The slippery slope. You know, ageing. Taking my chances buying green bananas nowadays.'

I laugh along for him. ‘You're not that old.' I glance at Patricia's front door, take a drag of joint, bouncing a little on my legs, trying to warm myself.

He stands up straight, as if for a photo. ‘
How
old?'

‘I'm not playing that game.'

‘Go on, I can take it. How old?'

Rocket barks at us and the man shooshes him.

‘You guess my age first, then. That's fair.'

‘Oh,' he says.

‘Exactly. It's an awful game.' I take another pull of smoke and so does he, looking at me, something else in him shining out suddenly.