What I Did (21 page)

Mum plants a kiss on the top of my head and all of a sudden I wish I'd finished my pudding before they'd arrived because what's left in the bowl makes me feel guilty.

— That looks . . . nice, she says.

I nod.

— Special-treat pudding again. On a Monday.

— Tessa, says Dad.

— Well, they do say the way to a man's heart is through his stomach.

— For God's sake.

— Shall I make a start on the washing-up? asks Grandma Lynne.

— No need, Lynne. It's our mess.

— But you're still eating. It's really no bother.

— I'll sort it out in a moment.

— Let me help. At least I can make a start.

Grandma Lynne puts her bag down on the side and squints at the buttons on her frilly cuff. She undoes them eventually, and rolls up that sleeve, and squints at the other, and Mum must be watching all this, too, because the hand that she's smoothing my head with suddenly grips my shoulder instead.

— For God's sake don't, Mum. It's just washing-up. Relax. Read the paper . . . watch TV. I'll bring you through a cup of tea in a moment.

Grandma Lynne spends as much time turning her sleeves back down again as she did rolling them up. My ice cream is melting. I have another spoonful when she finally goes: it wouldn't have felt right beforehand. But eating still doesn't feel normal because Mum and Dad are standing either side of me and I feel like something fascinating David Attenborough is showing to the camera.

— That does look delicious, Mum says gently. — Can I have a spoonful?

— Finish mine if you like, says Dad, edging his bowl toward her. Mum takes it and cuts out a half-moon spoonful of ice cream and mine immediately looks more normal and even tastes better because Mum says, — Mmm, delicious, so everything is nearly normal all right.

But then she says, —Good day at school, Billy? and the cold mouthful I'm swallowing turns pinecone prickly in my throat. Sometimes Richard has fur balls to cough up: they are nothing compared to this! I cough the ice cream back up into my mouth but spitting out is ugly so I swish it around until it goes back down again.

— Fine, I say at last, blinking at Dad.

He checks that Mum is still looking at me, then gives me an incredibly fast wink. — They've got tadpoles in the classroom, he explains to Mum. — What more could a man want?

— Great!

I nod hard enough to turn the tadpoles into dolphins, pliosaurs, even.

— And it must have been nice to see your friends — and Miss Hart — again?

I carry on nodding, focusing falcon-hard on the bottom of my bowl.

— Give me that, Mum says at last. — You'll scrape a hole in it!

I do as she asks but now that I've said fine and done nodding it's not nice sitting next to Mum with my wet trousers on the floor of my bedroom upstairs. I decide they would be better off buried quite far down in the washing basket.

— Can I go and play now?

— Of course.

I slide off the side of my chair and sprint out through the hall past the open front-room door, catching a glimpse of Grandma Lynne reading as I go. She's pretending to concentrate so hard on her paper that she doesn't even flinch, which means move an inch fast, but even though I only see her for a second I can tell that she desperately wants to look up, because her concentrating face is sadly unrealistic. Leaping stairs two at a time is easy when you're pretending to be an impala, and it's no problem pressing damp trousers down underneath Dad's dirty shirts when your hands have turned into a badger's paws. Once that's done I feel better enough to make a small stealth bomber out of technical Legos: I've made more or less the same thing hundreds of times before, but this one has a particularly impressive tail fin so I decide to fly it downstairs under the radar to show Mum and Dad.

But I only make it as far as the hall because Grandma Lynne stops pretending to concentrate on the news as I tiptoe past and says — Pssst, Billy, to me instead. — Leave them for a moment, she tells me. — They need some time to catch up with each other.

This makes no sense because they're right there together, not racing, but Grandma Lynne is quite old so probably hasn't done racing for a long time and therefore doesn't understand. She doesn't appreciate my stealth bomber either. I show her the loading-bay hinge and tell her how it can hold a new clear bomb with awesome powers of distraction, but she doesn't even look at it properly; she just keeps glancing across the hall at the half-open kitchen door. — Lovely, she says, flapping a new page of paper open on her lap. — Why don't you have a little play with it on the sofa while I read this; there's a good boy.

Grandma Lynne is nice but her questions aren't always real. There's no way of saying, — Because I don't want to now, even though that's what I want to say. Instead I sit on the couch next to her and both of us do pretending: she tries to look like she's reading again, and I fiddle my stealth bomber around in my hands as if it's incredibly fascinating when actually what I'm thinking is that it really does remind me of all the similar ones I've made before.

In fact what we're both doing is listening to Mum and Dad making up across the hall.

— Oh Jim, says Mum. — Of course I did.

— Why didn't you say so then?

— I didn't think I had to.

— Really?

—
Of course
.

I have no idea what they're talking about but that's not the point: the point is that they're using normal un-prickly voices again. Did you know that whales can communicate across whole oceans without any words? Our cat Richard can even do it silently, by rubbing his scent glands on the kitchen-table legs. Mum and Dad carry on for a while and I stop listening to their exact words: whatever they're saying it doesn't have to do with my wet trousers, so that's okay, until . . . it's not, because the sound of their conversation suddenly darkles.

— But you just agreed!

— I know, and I meant it: I believe you, says Mum. — We have to present a united front.

— Yes, by standing by me. You said you'd stand by me.

— I want to.

— There's a but, though. I know it. There always is.

— Don't start with that again.

— With what?

— You always say that.

— Because it's always true! Every concession you make comes with a caveat that effectively undoes it.

— It's not a caveat. I'm just being realistic. It's what we have to do to back one another up. If we don't go we will only make matters worse.

— In your opinion.

— And Mum's.

— Christ. Hers and yours, maybe, but not
mine
.

Grandma swishes her newspaper to a new page at this point, very rustling, but it doesn't do any good: when the voices come back they're almost speech-bubble black.

— I've told you: I'm not going. Full stop.

— But . . . how do you think that will help? It's just stubbornness. Insane, pigheaded—

— Here we go.

— But it is: can't you see? What you
don't
say will carry weight. Because it does! At best you're running away, at worst it's a tacit admission. It makes you look guilty!

— But I'm not.

— I know.

— And is that not enough for you?

— No, no, no! Because—

— Because what?

— Because it's not me that counts.

— But it is, isn't it?

— What's that supposed to mean?

— You don't actually believe me, do you?

— I haven't said that.

— Yes, but what you haven't said counts, too. You just said—

— Don't twist—

— We're back where we fucking well started!

At this point Grandma Lynne flaps the newspaper so hard it lifts her from her seat to shut the front-room door with a bang. The face she turns round with is very bright: it reminds me of the man who does the art show on television. He's okay but desperate.

— Can we watch some television? I ask.

— Good idea, says Grandma Lynne, scrabbling for the remote. — How do we turn it on?

I show her and it's brilliant because even though the quite desperate but okay bright-faced art man isn't doing any projects just then, Grandma Lynne says I can watch something else which has a cartoon fish in it which blows raspberries and says
what you lookin' at
the whole time instead. It's loud.

 

Fucking is quite loud, too. Dad explained it once: — Most words are quiet, Son, even if you shout them, but some are explosively noisy no matter how softly you whisper their name.

This made no sense at first; even Dad looked into his beer bottle to find a better way of explaining it.

— Some words are too loud for most places. For example . . . He looked around the kitchen. — For example, you wouldn't beat a big bass drum in the downstairs loo, would you?

I didn't know what he meant by that, either, but he did start to make sense about the operating theater and the instruments, because as well as being noisy and quiet, like instruments, words are in fact either useful or pointless as well, depending on where you use them, like tools.

— What I'm getting at is this, Son. You only want to use the right tool for the job. Tweezers are for pulling out splinters and sledgehammers are for knocking down walls. See what I mean?

— What's a sled hammer?

— Sledge. A big heavy one. You wouldn't use a big heavy hammer to cut your hair with, would you? No. And it's the same with words. He took a sip of his beer and put it back down very carefully onto the wet ring he'd made when he spilled it before. — What I want you to realize is that words aren't offensive in themselves. They're just offensive when you use them in . . . the wrong places. Like school. Never say the “F” word at school. It would be like using a pneumatic drill in the dentist's. Totally . . . wrong. In fact, come to think of it, children should never use pneumatic drills. Not without supervision, anyway. But that doesn't make pneumatic drills evil, does it?

— What's a new mat tick drill?

— You know, those horrible noisy things workmen use for digging up roads. You see my point?

— What about if a dentist was digging up a road?

— Precisely! Dad peeled the label off his bottle. — Clever boy. Now. You're supervised here, by me, so we'll do a demonstration. What word must you never say?

— The “F” word.

— Right. It's not a tool for children, or dentists. But when can you say it?

A trick question! But I am too quick for him, too clever! — Never, I said. It rhymes.

— No. Normally you'd be right, but not here. The right answer begins with super and ends with vision.

— Supervision.

— Yes. Some tools children can only use under supervision.

— Like when Superman burns things with his eyes?

— Eh? Not quite. Like now, though. Now you're under supervision, so now you can say the “F” word. Say it.

— The “F” word.

— No. Actually say fucking.

— Fucking.

— Fuckity fuckity fuck fuck fucking.

— Fuckity fuckity fuck fuck fucking.

— Brilliant! And we're still here, aren't we? We haven't melted or gone pop.

— Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

— That's enough. But essentially . . . yes. And there are more. Loads more. For example: Shit. Bugger. Wanker. Cunt. Nigger. Say them.

— Shitter bugger wanker cunter nigger.

— More or less. All of those are strong words, some viciously so, and you must never, ever say them in the wrong place; in fact just about everywhere is the wrong place for all of them when you're you. But they're only words at the end of the day, loud words, some louder than others, and here's the point . . . He jumped up and went to the fridge for another bottle of beer, then, which was great because I got the froth. — The point is this, Billy . . . he said when he'd taken the bottle back from me. — The point is that . . . what was the point again? Oh yes. It's this . . . The point is that all those bad words have a place and a purpose, and it's your job to figure out what that place and purpose is . . . and never, ever, use one when you're not sure . . . because if you get it wrong, if somebody finds you offensive, you'll wind up in trouble, serious trouble . . . but always remember . . . remember . . . yes, that every word has its right place and purpose . . . because they wouldn't be words unless they had one . . . they simply wouldn't exist.

— What's a fence sieve?

He rubbed the top of my head and dug a thumb and forefinger into his eyes when I asked that, and said — Priceless and laughed quite annoyingly loud for a reasonably long time.

 

Halfway through the strange cartoon with the raspberry fish I hear the front door slam and Dad's head bobs past the window.

And he's not back for stories at bedtime, or even my that's-it-the-end-of-another-great-day-lights-out-kiss later on, and that night I don't just have one dream, I have a whole load of little spiky ones followed by a big loud sad one. Like trailers leading up to the main film. I'm still not going to tell you what the dreams were about though, don't worry. I haven't forgotten what Dad said: hearing other people's dreams is boring.

 

Have you ever killed one of your pets? I have. Not our cat, Richard, which is lucky, because Richard is older than me and when he dies it will be sad. I'm talking about the goldfish Dad brought home in a plastic bag ages ago, when I was vertically four or maybe even three. He won it on a stag night. — No, Son; it's a night for staggering about on; there aren't any no eyed deer.

I was quite pleased with the goldfish, but couldn't understand why he was called a goldfish when he wasn't gold or even silver, and that's how we came up with his name: Orangey.