The Shock of the Fall (Special edition) (12 page)

Truth changes.

Here are three truths.

Knock
                

KNOCKKNOCK

I didn’t have my armchair yet. The main room seemed bigger without it, and he looked small, crouched on the carpet in the dusty light beneath the window. He buried his face in his hands. I couldn’t say how long he’d been there, but I think for a long time.

I’d been sleeping after a night shift and was still holding my expensive pillow. It was a gift from John Lewis that Nanny Noo and Granddad bought me, to help with my bad dreams; the dreams that had started to follow me outside of sleep, so that sometimes I would have to cut a little at my skin with a knife, or burn myself with a lighter, to make sure I was real.

I can’t speak for Jacob, but when I think about things now, there was more to it than his mum; I was becoming a problem.

We didn’t talk straight away. The only noise was the faraway sound of traffic, drifting through the window. You can hear it all the time, but only notice it when there is a silence that needs filling.

I wasn’t sure he’d seen me, until after a while he said, ‘She was slumped forwards in her chair again, with the neck rest too high up.’

‘We can say something.’

‘It’s more than that.’

They sent different people round, that was a problem. Each morning it could be a new carer getting her up. Nobody knew Mrs Greening properly, or the way things had to be done.

‘It was her hair,’ he said.

I’ve replayed the conversation in my head so many times. I imagine myself saying different things, then what he would say differently. I move the memory around the flat like it’s a piece of furniture, or a picture in a frame that I can’t decide where to hang.

‘What are those things, like little girls have?’

‘What?’

‘In their hair.’

‘I don’t know. Pigtails, is it?’

‘Yeah, them.’

I used to brush Mrs Greening’s hair, whilst Jacob prepared her tea and got her medicine ready. I’d wash it sometimes too. She had this special sink, like you see in hairdressers but with padded bits that fold over the edges. She didn’t have much feeling in her arms and legs, but her head felt tingly and nice when I rubbed in the shampoo. That’s what she said, anyway. And she said I was better at it than Jacob because he pulled too hard, but I wasn’t to tell him because we were both her angels.

‘What are you smiling for?’

‘I’m not.’

‘It’s not fucking funny, Matt.’

‘I wasn’t smiling about—’

‘I bet you’re exactly the same. In that old people’s home, you probably treat them like fucking children too.’

He didn’t mean that, but it still hurt.

‘No I don’t. You know I wouldn’t—’

‘Well quit fucking smiling then. She was there trying to pull the things out all morning. But the more wound up she is, the worse her hands get. Now these three fingers—’

His voice trailed away. He didn’t cry, I’ve never seen him cry. But I think he was close. ‘These three fingers, they don’t really work at all.’

I dropped my pillow on the carpet and sat beside him. The acne that had clung to his face all through school was finally clearing away. He’d started growing a beard too. Except it didn’t reach his sideburns, so there were these two lopsided islands of soft pink at the top of his cheeks.

He smelled like he always smelled: Lynx deodorant and cooking fat from the Kebab House.

‘I don’t know what to say, Jacob.’

He sniffed and wiped at his nose with the back of his sleeve. ‘You don’t get it,’ he said softly. ‘She’s all on her own.’

It was a strange moment. Not because of what he said, but the way he looked at me. He’d looked at me like that once before. This was a long time ago but it was the exact same look. I knew what I had to do, except I didn’t want to. So I replay the memory a different way.

I place us in the kitchen, and because I don’t want to say anything that will make it worse, I swill out dirty mugs to make tea. Problems seem less if we have them with a cup of tea, that’s another thing Nanny Noo says.

I noticed the CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR NEW HOME card Mrs Greening had made, still stuck to the fridge door, spotted in fat from all the frying we did. When she gave it to us I didn’t understand the feeling it gave me.

Now I did.

For my brother’s tenth birthday our mum arranged a huge party. It was in our local Beavers and Brownies Hut, decorated with balloons and banners. On a long table at the far end were bowls of Hula Hoops, biscuits, and sausages on sticks. There was pineapple and cheese on sticks too, except one of Simon’s friends got to them first and bit off all the pineapple chunks so they were just cheese.

Loads of people came because Simon was allowed friends from his school and I was even allowed some from mine.

Nanny Noo and Granddad were there, and Aunty Mel who came all the way from Manchester with Uncle Brian and our three cousins, and my other aunt, Jacqueline, who lives much closer, but who we didn’t often see because her and Mum don’t get on, and because she dresses all in black and talks too much about magic and spirits, and will never not smoke even at children’s parties.

We played a game where we had to put on a hat and a scarf and thick woollen mittens, then try to eat a bar of Dairy Milk with a knife and fork. But the most fun was at the end when we ran around the hall stamping on the balloons, making them pop.

Simon called it his best birthday ever.

I made him a card, and you have to remember I was still only little. What I’d done was draw a house with a smiling sunshine over the top, exactly like Mrs Greening had done, but what made it good was that I’d put diagonal lines coming off the house so that instead of being a flat square, it looked three-dimensional. Nobody had told me how either, I’d worked it out by myself.

It was just one of a hundred cards he was given, and for ages Mum let him keep them up around the living room, cluttering the mantelpiece and the coffee table. I didn’t know if he liked mine, or had even noticed it. Until the day Mum said they had to come down.

She was in a bad mood and had been telling me off for the mess my room was in, how I made her life a bloody uphill struggle, she couldn’t wait until the holidays were over and I was out from under her feet.

I was probably too sensitive because it’s normal for mums to lose their temper once in a while, especially during summer holidays with two boys causing havoc. It isn’t like she ever hit us or anything, so I know I was too sensitive. By the time her attention spilled to the cards and Simon got his turn, I was whimpering like a baby.

Simon marched straight up to the windowsill and took down my card. He scrunched his face and bit at his tongue in the way he did when he was concentrating. Then he told me that I should be a professional. Except he couldn’t say professional properly and had to try about six times to get the word out. He asked me to show him how I did it, and we spent the afternoon sitting at the kitchen table, drawing pictures together. I told him that he should be a professional too.

He shook his head and looked away.

The card I made him was the only one to make it into his stupid keepsake box, and when I found it there after he died, and when I think about it now, I’m happy and sad all at once.

Jacob was leaning against the counter. Perhaps he felt the same as me, for all his own reasons. But what came out of him was anger. I dropped teabags into the mugs and filled the kettle. He didn’t need me to say anything. He could be angry all by himself.

‘She wouldn’t even talk about it. She asked me to take them out and not to talk about it.’

I took the milk from the fridge and poured some into one of the mugs. Jacob is one of those people who likes the milk and sugar in first. As the water began to boil, he did too.

‘Who does that? Who puts a fucking grown adult’s hair like that? Like she’s a little girl. Like she’s their fucking doll.’

My mind was snatched away.

I was distracted by the connections, I’d find them everywhere, because we’re all made of the same stuff, the same interstellar dust; a little girl and a doll, the salt in the air, the rain soaking through my clothes. He is begging me, Stop. Stop. Stop. His trembling hands are clutching the torch. He tries to run, his stupid way of running, hunched right forwards with his legs wide apart. She wants to play with you, Simon. She wants to play chase.

Jacob slammed his fist hard on the surface, rattling stacks of dirty plates, sending cutlery clattering onto the greasy lino. ‘You ain’t listening. You never listen.’

‘I am—’

‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Well fucking listen to me then.’

‘I’m sorry—’

‘She won’t say anything because she’s too embarrassed, or she’s scared she’ll embarrass them. Like they give a shit. She just sits there, staring at the wall, staring out the fucking window whilst they do whatever they want.’

He stopped as abruptly as he’d started.

I wanted to shake him. I wanted to shout that he couldn’t stay at home with her forever, that it was his idea we lived together in the first place. He couldn’t abandon me now.

I didn’t do that though. I listened to the kettle boil. I watched steam turn to water droplets on the wallpaper. I could feel Jacob looking at me, and I remembered him looking that way once before.

He didn’t say much at all.

He isn’t the sort to talk about stuff, not the important things like mothers and brothers and the way we feel inside. You won’t find Jacob Greening hunched over a typewriter, staining paper with his family secrets.

We were in my bedroom. We put on a CD for a bit, and I can’t remember what we listened to, only that it kept skipping and that he turned it off. We were stoned, I know that.

He’d been getting us some decent green from that Hamed guy, and we had upgraded from our home-made Buckets to a tall glass Bong we bought from St Nick’s market as a sort of moving-in present.

I don’t smoke much any more, but at the time I was easily getting through half an ounce a week. Denise Lovell reckons that was a big part of the problem. When I told her about the designs I used to draw, how it felt like my hand was being moved for me, she said that I was probably fucking mental already, it was just that nobody knew it yet.

Jacob was background noise. There was something about his mum, the way they’d done her hair.

He was holding my pillow, hugging it.

I had my sketch pad open in front of me and was watching the pen scratch across the page.

It was happening so fast, I didn’t know what I was drawing. Only that it was taking shape exactly as it was meant to. In the middle was a box, not flat to the page, but in three dimensions, like a card I had drawn for Simon years before.

‘Stop it.’

And stretching out around it like tentacles were a series of tubes, each connecting to smaller boxes. Not boxes, cylinders.

‘For fuck’s sake, what are you doing?’

They formed a ring around the centre. In turn, more tubes connected these to each other, and again outwards, to a second ring of cylinders and a third.

He snatched the pad away, ‘It’s fucking stupid, stop doing it.’

It wasn’t only that page. I’d drawn it over and over. I might have been drawing it for days.

Jacob tore them up, ripping each sheet into tiny pieces.

‘They were mine,’ I said.

‘You’re losing the plot, man.’

‘That was my last sketch pad.’

‘Then do something different. Play X-Box with me.’

I stood up and walked over to the far wall. It wasn’t like I was moving the pen myself, it was like I was watching it happen.

‘We’ll lose our deposit,’ he pleaded.

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

‘Please—’

‘What? What do you want? I’m busy! You can see I’m fucking busy!’

I shouted at him. I didn’t mean to, but my voice tore out of me. He looked afraid, and suddenly I felt ashamed. I turned back to the wall and watched another cylinder take shape in front of me. ‘I’m sorry. I’m busy that’s all, you can see I’m busy. I have to do this, right.’

The sound of faraway traffic drifted through the open window, and another sound too. I couldn’t make it out. Jacob smoked two cigarettes before he spoke another word.

‘Remember at school,’ he said at last. He spoke so quietly, like he was afraid the memory might hear him and run away. ‘Remember the first day, when you loaned me your tie?’

I felt my pen drop to the carpet. ‘That was a long time ago, wasn’t it?’

‘Yeah. I’ll never forget.’

I had given him my tie and he wrapped it inside his collar. Then he turned to me, helplessly.

I didn’t need to see him now. I knew he was looking at me in the exact same way. I move the memory around like it’s a piece of furniture, but it always ends up here. He didn’t only need to borrow my tie. He needed me to tie it up.