Rocks in the Belly (32 page)

I dig my nails into my palms to put the brakes on, my eyes are getting wet. Robert's crying too but not about the babies, biscuit goo all over his face. Dad's hair is all spiky and he's following Robert across people's graves which must be making all those people in the past shudder. Walking over graves makes them shudder in the past.

I walk through the sad people a little bit to look at the blue coat lady. I want to tell her about the mix up. She'll wrap me up in her coat and maybe walk me home to her house, holding hands.

I bet her hand is one of those ones that is extra warm and toasty.

I go over nearer her and the ground is all uneven under my school shoes and I stand very statue so I don't scare her off. She's still quietly crying about losing me. Look how much she loves me.

She gazes over and her eyes are all blue and my heart stops. My breathing. Everything.

Mum.

She looks a little bit blurred, maybe cos of the tears in my eyes. I wipe them away like a big boy and go and stand right next to her even though I'm scared to get close.

She smiles and I smile back so hard my ears move.

I'm looking at her hand and the priest is saying something out of the Bible, he knows it off by heart but has it there in case. I can see Dad behind a gravestone and Robert must be down there on top of a dead person's grave while Dad's trying to stay calm and hold on to him but I can see he wants to be rough, Robert making all his embarrassing noise and people frowning at him like always.

You can't shoosh a retard.

Dad holds out a biscuit and Robert's hand appears from the gravestone and snatches it.

The blue coat lady has her hand just there at the end of her blue sleeve and there's a ring on it and she's crying about how much she misses me.

I reach out and take her hand.

It IS really warm and toasty plus she's letting me. I don't look at her but I can feel her eyes on me. She'll recognise me any minute now, my body fizzing and standing on end like I'm a hedgehog or a porcupine or a stegosaurus.

Stego sore arse, Dad says.

I've got my eyes half shut, my hand holding on, the priest having to speak louder over Robert's shouting. People shifting from foot to foot and wiping their eyes but I'm not moving or breathing or anything. I can feel my new real mum looking at me but I'm watching the girl with the birthmark. And I'm thinking how that birthmark must be from lying on the sad rock in her mum's belly for nine months.

Then the priest says Let us pray, and the lady takes her hand away and smiles at me for a second, turns her back to me, this big blue back. She walks away around the boulder.

She doesn't know about the mix up.

I look down at my hand. It must still have some of her warmth in it and I close it up tight.

I shouldn't have used my scarred for life one.

Meanwhile a lady from the church is coming round with a tray, little lumps of rock on it just like that big mica boulder to remember the dead babies.

She lets each mum take their own lump to keep and they smile at her, wipe their eyes. The tray lady has put her lips away.

I don't want to be young anymore and I don't want to grow up.

If I have to grow up I'll make my life amazing and probably be a famous weatherman, but only in summer so I don't have to give bad news and everyone will love me.

Or I'll be a rubbish collector cos they only come one day a week and I'll get all those six other days to just have fun and be nice to my family.

I'm definitely going to have kids cos then I won't have to play on my own anymore. It should be against the law to have an only child, like in China. I can't play with Robert.

And when I grow up things won't live in my tummy anymore and people will put toys and treasure in the rubbish bins by mistake. That would be amazing.

I'll be a pirate garbage man with a gold tooth and a wooden scarred for life hand and I'll ride on the back of the rubbish truck like I'm standing on the deck of a big ship. Seagulls chasing after. I'll have ten gold teeth and get rich on all that wasted treasure people throw away, and me and my family will watch TV in bed together every night and my insides won't bully me anymore.

Now I'm thinking maybe that tablet I took from Mum's handbag
once made me a zombie too cos I want to cry but it won't come. I'm just standing on my own and thinking that zombie over there might be my mum really. Maybe I'm growing up to be a zombie too. Like we're the Zombie family. My spiky haired dad and Robert with his damaged brain. We're all the living dead.

Then everyone but Mum says Amen.

I wake up in the shed and run outside to pee, last night's bad dreams still affecting my innards even if they're already hazy in my mind.

I risk a visit indoors and Alfie is sprawled on the lounge floor, her breathing sluggish and laboured, her gurgling and snoring sounding louder than ever.

I gather her up and she whimpers in pain.

I'm glad to be out of the house, low cloud covering the whole sky and the cat warming my chest. Nothing on my feet, my hair probably sticking up in angry spikes.

Alfie feels good against me but her breathing's laboured and frail, reminding me of Reg.

Suddenly the whole world seems fragile to me. People inside those moving cars, seatbelts on, windscreens reflecting grey sky, the car tyres gripping on and everyone's heart going, for now. Everything held together only by the faint beating of our hearts.

I cut across Malfour Park, talking to Alfie, my bare feet content on the cool grass. I pass the craters that are concreted over now, skaters lingering with long hair and limp postures — taking their turn on the slopes. Everest. Round The World.

Beyond the park I cross the road, the cars giving us more
space than usual in deference to Alfie's obvious sickness. A sign outside a newsagent's with the local paper's brand on it and the headline.

Chemical Plant Burns — 11 Dead.

I head into the shop and a harsh buzzer goes, an old shopkeeper staring at the state of me. Beyond the condolence cards and the wrapping paper and the glistening packets of chocolate is the stationery. I bend to grab a thick permanent marker pen, Alfie mewing out in pain.

I throw a banknote onto the counter and walk out, the door buzzer drilling again and the shopkeeper shouting after me about my change.

My knees crack as I crouch down, crossing out the
11
in the poster's headline and writing
12
.

I have to meander up the busy high street because of everybody going about their business, stopping to chat to one another about their kids, the fire, what they're spending their time and money on. People giving me
Ah cute
looks when they see Alfie in my arms.

I walk on with the pen nib under my nose, the toxic smell percolating my teenage years back into me. Memories of ducking out of school, wedging myself in behind bus stops. My graffiti all over the town like a coded distress signal.

I pass another shop and am making
11
read
12
again, people stopping to watch, one of them asking me if another person has died overnight. I stand and they stay paused and open-mouthed in front of me. Suddenly they're keen to talk to this messy man because there's something in it for them — some juicy fact. They're prepared to make me an authority if it means drama.

‘My mum died.'

One of them asks her husband or boyfriend what I said. I'm standing right here and she asks him what I said, like I'm on the TV and she can't interact with me. I'm the act. And in replying,
he doesn't look away from my face, just turns his mouth to her and says, ‘He says his mum died in it too.'

I walk into the vet's, hard-wearing lino on the floor, the smell of disinfectant. I twist a foot but since I'm barefoot there's no lino squeak.

A nurse behind the counter sizes up the scene in an instant and gives me a sympathetic smile.

I sit and wait, Alfie's head lolling down over my thigh if I don't hold it up — her fur coming out all over my clothes. Her chest going up and down. A little dog whimpering from behind the caged door of a wicker basket, its owner reading a magazine while I sit here trying to focus on a diamond of sunshine brightening on the floor because the clouds are clearing outside.
Another
sunny day.

Zero millimetres.

I stroke her and there's that feeling I get when I stroke an animal — a softness like a hug in my chest. I stay here in that feeling, gently comforting her, my face right down close.

‘The vet will see her now.' The nurse comes over to say that, rather than calling out from her desk. I follow her through to a small room with a high table and a stronger smell of disinfectant. She leaves and the vet appears. He looks like he should be on a magazine cover, all smooth skin and cheekbones.

‘Hello,' he says and shakes my hand, then gives her a light stroke in my arms. ‘I remember her well. Lovely girl, aren't you,
yesh
. I'm guessing it's your mum I met on the other appointments?'

‘That's right.'

He takes her from me, both of us working to hand her over gently. Still she lets out a sound.

Cheekbones makes a show of examining her but in his arms, her wheezing quickening. He and I both know what's happening but he makes a pretence of thoroughness, even though the nurse might be firing up the incinerator next door. Chucking another log on.

‘Look,' he says eventually, softly, ‘your mum always wanted to carry on with Alfie. And back then I understood. But now we're at a stage in her illness where she's suffering more than necessary. She's in a lot of pain, there's no doubt in my mind about that. The cancer has almost certainly metastasised.'

I take her back, focus on stroking her, give a nod. She looks so beautiful in her frail state. Animals have an innocence humans could never aspire to. Who are we to take that away with our needles. Besides, I can see a glimpse of Mum's innocence in her face.

‘Ok.'

Cheekbones nods. ‘Would you like to call your mum first?'

‘It'd be long distance.'

‘Pardon?'

‘No, it's ok.'

‘I'll give you and Alfie a moment then,' and he pats my shoulder and slips away, part of me wanting to trip him up as he goes. He slides the door shut and there's a glimpse of the rubber boots he's wearing at the bottom of his white coat.

I look round at the posters about worming and tagging your pet, an array of animals assembled and looking at the camera.

Goodbye isn't for the dying but for the end of an evening or the start of a week apart. It's See you soon. Goodbye isn't for I'll never see you again. We need a bigger word.

I stick my face in among her fur and she smells of home — of all the good things that happened too, not just the bad. The laughs. The moments of understanding. The positive times that happened when you weren't expecting them. Not necessarily at birthdays or Christmas, but when Dad's car was in for a service so all of us had to drive him to work together on the way to school. Or when I was ill or there was a storm and I could climb in between them in bed, soaking up adult warmth in stereo.

Or driving off to visit family friends in Mum's home town and
being carried out their house after dark in my sleeping bag. Tucked up and cosy in the back of a car on a night drive, the interior lights like magic, then pretending to be asleep so I could be carried up to bed still in my sleeping bag.

There's a miniature knock at the door and Cheekbones comes in carrying a kidney dish with a small towel covering it. He puts it down out of sight and we get her onto the sterile examination table.

‘Do you think she knows?' I say to him, my knee up to its usual trick.

‘That she's ill?'

‘What we're going to do. D'you think she's ok with it?'

He leans on the table while he thinks, gives her a stroke. ‘Animals are very instinctual. I think she understands why, if she does know. I think she forgives.'

Then his face is withering at what's happening to mine. I'm wiping and wiping at my eyes, subtly as I can for her. The vet making himself busy, talking sweet nothings.

‘Can I hold her as she goes?'

He looks at me and nods. ‘I just need to finish getting her ready first.'

I smile at him but my whole body is doing its own thing. And I'm thinking about the original Alfie with his ears down, the hot shower water, paws scrabbling at the shower screen. The way he still let me stroke him at night. Forgiving me over and over again — opening up to hurt again and again.

Like Robert. He'd finally found the love he needed in my mum and I couldn't share her with him, not even for a few months, just while he waited for his life to get back on its feet.

Robert McCloud, innocent as an animal.

The vet unveils a portion of the kidney dish, takes out a cannula, holds her leg, shooshing her as the needle slips idly under the skin. She doesn't complain. She doesn't pity herself the way I have.

‘Ok, if you take her in your arms, and we'd best get you seated — that chair.'

I gather her up, struggling to get all of her. She's so warm against me, her mouth open, struggling for air. ‘On the floor. I need us to do it on the lino.'

‘What?'

‘Please.' I lower myself down between the table and the door. ‘Down here, like this.
Please
.'

He looks at me then sighs a heavy sigh. I smile up at him, my eyes underwater again.

Cheekbones has the needle full of death now. He doesn't squirt it to get rid of air, no need. He keeps it out of sight but my eyes are hungry for it.

‘You're squeezing her too tight, just try and relax.'

He kneels, turning to the side table to bring everything else to our level. Then he says ‘Ok?' but brings the needle in anyway, holding the cannula with his other hand and inserting the long, thin point and we're armed and ready to go, her eyes looking up at me, losing focus but she's still with me. So pure in her opened-up vulnerability. Her mouth gasping for air. Struggling for purchase.