Rocks in the Belly (3 page)

I hold my breath and time myself anyway.

38 seconds. My lungs are still growing.

I make a note on my chart. Then I take off my clothes and put dry ones on and go and look at my rain collector on the window ledge. 34 mm. Which is quite a lot. I make a note on my chart. Then I imagine 34 mm spread out across the whole area of where the rain has fallen. Then I imagine it all across the weather map and the weatherman taking his arms and gathering up all the rain
from the map and putting it in a big rain collector measurer on the official weather centre window ledge. I wonder how tall it would be to catch all that 34 mm spread out over that far. Imagine. That's why 34 mm of rain is a lot, when I think about it like that. Cos 34 mm may be the size of Robert's doodle, but take all the 34 mm fallen on the whole country and it would be an enormous doodle. It's scary how big the world is.

Then I try to picture how much dirt has fallen if there's been 34 mm of rain but it makes my brain itchy.

I'm still in my room when Dad comes home. He sneaks me a yoghurt (strawberry) and an apple (apple) for dinner. Plus he gives me a talking to but is actually kind. He says it's a bit rich to be stroppy about Robert being up in the business end considering he's legal in a few months and I'm closer to being a baby than legal and yet still get to ride up front.

He has a point, except for the baby thing. I ask him to tuck me in and stroke my forehead until I fall asleep.

He tucks me in and strokes my forehead which always calms me down but he's never done it all the way until I've fallen asleep, my dad. A little bit because he always gets bored, and a little bit because I have to try so hard to fall asleep fast before he gets bored that I never feel too sleepy. Plus he always ends up pretending to pick my nose as a joke and I always get exasperated or flabberghastlied and he just laughs and kisses me goodnight but I beg for one more minute and he gives me thirty seconds.

This is our routine ritual and doing it after what happened today makes me feel less bruised in my tummy.

‘What time is Robert's bedtime?' I say as Dad is leaving but he tells me not to pay so much attention to Robert who is older than me. Then he says ‘Comparisons bear no fruits,' which is one of his sayings that doesn't make sense but you can tell it means No.

‘But does he have a set bedtime?'

He hushes me and comes back and strokes my forehead some more. He smells of boiled carrots and beer. Then he says, slowly, in time with each gentle head stroke he does, without picking my nose at all, he says, ‘You. Are. My. Son.'

There is a short, happy period between waking up, and realising I'm in my childhood bed in my childhood home. My feet hanging over the end of the mattress gives it away.

I open my eyes and it's past eleven, another morning almost gone. No messages on my phone and my head still clogged with all the drink I plied myself with last night, sitting in the garden while the old lady snored on the couch.

Day 3 of my paused life.

I pad out into the hallway and her bedroom door is open. There's a little trepidation that she died in the night but her bed's empty.

I stay in the shower as long as possible. Then dry myself, dressing slowly in order to postpone downstairs and the woman I'm stuck on my childhood desert island with.

When I do eventually venture down the washing machine's going, its powder drawer still open with some undissolved powder in it, most of it, though, is on the floor. A pair of knickers on the tiles that look way too small for her now she's all blown up on medication and ice-cream.

The steroids that shrink her cancer also grow her appetite but to me it's like she needs to eat all the food she would have eaten if
she weren't going to die so young. Sixty-two. They lived longer than that in the 1800s.

I wander into the kitchen, the freezer door open and a puddle in front of it on the floor. There's an empty ice-cream container on the counter and Mum standing by the sink, gazing out the window, her jaw working on something. She finishes chewing and puts her hand back into the sink, comes up with some titbits and tilts back her head, puts them in, some of it falling onto the floor via her shoulder.

I move a little closer. ‘Mum, don't eat that stuff!'

She turns her head, her fingers out in front of her, all mucky. I clean them off with the tea towel then lift the little metal sieve that catches the gunk from the washing-up and show it to her. ‘Don't eat this, Mum, it'll make you ill!'

She looks at me, swallows, makes a contented noise. I open the fridge — we
are
overdue for a shop. I rest my forehead on the door, my socks soaking up the defrosted freezer ice.

I slam both doors and she's rushing out the room, me in pursuit. ‘Where's your tablets, Mum? Have you taken them?'

The washing machine is beginning its noisy spin cycle, hopping quickly from foot to foot. The same machine that was here when I left, its ancient motor whining, the sound bouncing off the floor and filling the house — Mum still walking away from me, raising a hand to dismiss my question.

I catch her up, halting her by the arm and she emits this enormous shriek.

‘If you don't take your tablets you'll get
worse
.'

The washing machine's like an air-raid warning and the old lady is shouting out and crying, trying to unpeel my hand from where it has her arm. The cancer makes her hold nothing back, her emotions raw and unbridled, her mouth open, her tongue coloured by the washing-up gunk she ate.

I march off into the kitchen looking for the little white box of letters and doors with her tablets in — her days of the week drug regimen.

‘Please take your tablets, Mum. It doesn't just impact on you. I'm here too.'

I'm the one with my life on hold.

She's making these strained grunting noises from the other room so I march back, hitting out at the ice-cream tub on my way and it flies at the freezer and makes a plastic thud, skids away along the floor into the table leg — oozes some melted vanilla goo on the lino. Another job.

When I get to her she's tugging on the washing-machine door even though it's still spinning, tugging at it and grunting and crying, wrenching at the handle.

‘You can't open it while it's
going
.'

But the machine's coming in to land now, juddering faster and faster like a dropped penny settling onto a table. Mum sitting back on the floor, giving up, her head in her hands, deep breaths. She looks up at me with tears rolling down her face but she isn't actually crying, you couldn't call it crying. She wraps herself round my legs, her head on my thighs, holding on tight.

This is not what I've imagined all those times I've thought about coming home and confronting this woman. I've been picturing a confrontation with the woman she used to be. A woman who was just as disappointing but a hundred times as strong.

‘Mum.
Please
.' I extricate myself from her and retreat back to the kitchen, looking for her drugs again and eventually find the box wedged under the tablecloth — the lump conspicuous in my sadness where it wasn't in my anger.

I open up today's day and there they are, the little steroid tablets that keep her from deteriorating. The only thing stopping the pressure in her skull from affecting her brain. Such as it is. That
tumour turning up the heat all the time, growing, forcing itself into that finite space in her head. Pushing her out of her own life.

I get some water from the tap and chuck the plughole sieve away while I'm at it.

When I come back she's gone, the front door swinging on its hinges. I go out into the sunlight, still holding the tablet box and a glass of water, one of her shoes lying on the path. I get to the road and there she is hobbling away up the hill, one shoe on one shoe off. I call to her and she accelerates, doesn't look round.

I give chase, frustration and tiredness pulling me in two directions, making me talk to myself, the glass of water spilling over my hand until I empty it onto the verge — my socks still wet from the freezer water and now grimy from the pavement.

I easily catch her up and she isn't crying, just this lost and determined woman. I stand in front of her and she stops, waiting, breathless, not meeting my eyes.

Looking at her now I see how afraid she is. Not necessarily of me. She's just afraid. Everything softening in my centre, my hand that's holding the tablets dropping, rattling, down by my side because I can see Mum now, in among all that deterioration. There she is.

We're standing here and I'm looking at her, a breeze shuffling what there is of her hair.

Maybe she recognises the change in me too, or rediscovers who I am, because she turns and faces the way I'm facing and I hold out my elbow for her and she smiles, her wet eyelashes half black and half mousy-blonde from where she last had them tinted. We link arms and she drops her head gently onto my shoulder for a second and we make our way back down Hawke Street Hill together, towards our house and Dad's out-of-control hedges sticking up over the neighbour's fence.

‘You have to take the tablets, Mum. Please?' She's looking down at her feet as she walks, confused suddenly at the distinction between
her shoed and shoeless foot. She stops and looks up the road.

‘Your shoe's in the garden, Mum. Don't worry, I'll get it for you.'

We turn in through the gate but she halts me when we get to her shoe sitting on the spot where Robert came undone. She gazes at it and sighs a ten-ton sigh, turning to me with that familiar look on her face. Her eyes flicking from one of mine to the other. Searching me.

‘Let's get you inside,' I say trying to tug her away.

‘No.' Her body stiffens against my tugging so I leave her there and walk in, conscious of my walk, conscious of those eyes looking at me as I go. Her discarded shoe marking the spot. Her face marking the question.

There was always that question.

‘Elbows off the table. And we don't want to see what you're chewing, thank you.' Mum is a manners Nazi. Dad said so. She puts her knife and fork down while she chews. ‘More meat, Robert? A piece of fruit after? Perhaps something sweet, eh?' She's got her best foster child voice on tonight, and her war paint. ‘We can watch a video after, if you'd like?'

‘Dumbo, Dumbo!'

‘Robert's too grown up for Dumbo. Aren't you, Robert.'

After dinner she sends me upstairs early as if I've been bad, but I can play in my room and go to sleep when I like as if I've been good.

I think Dumbo is lonely. I wrote a poem at school once called Alonely Only Child. Miss Marshall said it was perfect, especially as I'd made up a brand new word. But when I showed Mum she got really funny and screwed it up and threw it in the bin. I was already in bed when Dad got home that night but next morning my poem was all creased up on the fridge under a magnet.

I don't want to go to bed and leave Robert with them but I'm being as good as possible so I decide not to argue. I creep past the big vase which is never full of flowers but always has my grandad's homemade walking sticks poking up.

Grandma died of cancer and Dad had to clean up all her blood in our bathroom when she collapsed dead in the night. He did it for Mum before he woke her up so she wouldn't have to see what came out.

They know Grandma was dead before she hit the ground cos she didn't use her arms to protect her face. And I know that because I spied a conversation Dad had once. He had to pick her teeth out of the blood.

Nobody knows but there's still a spot of Grandma's blood on the back of the loop the loop pipe behind the toilet. I look at that spot of dead Grandma's dying blood almost every time I pee or poo. Sometimes it makes my doodle go all strong, just from looking at it.

The foster children are normally really naughty but Robert is quiet and good which means I'm having to try extra hard. I run my toothbrush under the tap and put some toothpaste in my mouth, then get into my jimjams and climb inside my secret lion's den which is actually my sleeping bag but I go inside it head first. I like it in here and I've got my torch and my Transformer which turns from a green and blue monster to a blue and green robot. Only it looks more purple cos the sleeping bag is red inside. Like I was swallowed by a snake.

There are two all time amazing times in my life. Number 1 is the times when they've run out of foster children and it's just Mum and Dad and me. That's like Christmas and birthday and the roads closed, all packed into a big chocolatey ball. I like chocolate but it gets me in trouble, all energetic and electricity. That's when Dad calls me Nutella the Hun, which is funny only cos of how he says it, plus I can tell he loves me when he does. Nutella the Hun was a baddie from the olden days.

The foster kids spoil everything when they're here. Plus they make Mum and Dad work really hard and are almost never polite or grateful or love them back. I love Mum and Dad and I am grateful
so I don't see why they won't just stop nasty people coming.

The last boy persuaded me to climb a tree then wouldn't help me down. He just left me. Mum had to wait for Dad to come home to get me down, which was TWO HOURS. I had to pee from the top branch.

That was Marcus. He belongs to the government now.

The second most amazing moment in my life was one time after I'd thrown up and Mum let me get into bed with her and Dad and they had the TV on and it was about dolphins and we all snuggled up together.

Together is my favourite word.

If Robert threw up I wonder if they'd let him in bed with them. It might be against the fostering rules hopefully. Except Mum says they're mainly silly, the fostering rules, and they can damn well send her to jail for properly caring for a child if they want to.

There's always a reason why a foster boy is here. Like sometimes the parent is in jail so we take the kid for a while. Or sometimes the mum or dad is ill, or they're arguing in court.