Bed Read online

  If Mal was to become the first person checked onto a flight as luggage, it wouldn’t be today.

  We missed our plane. I had been looking forward to seeing how big it was.

  12

  We screeched into the driveway, where Dad got out of the car and slammed the door loud behind him. This awoke Mal next to me in the back, wrapped tortilla in a red blanket with badly crocheted pictures of sheep all over it. His clothes nestled in the footwell.

  Mum twisted in the passenger seat. It creaked and she blushed.

  ‘Malcolm, I think you should go and talk to your father.’

  Mal slowly climbed out of the car, leaving the blanket on the seat, and walked naked to the front door in full view of the neighbours.

  Mum sat quietly for a moment. I watched the reflection of her face in the rear-view mirror. The corners of her lips trembled. They made great efforts to leap to the bottom of her chin. Her brow was a concertina, her eyes and nose a-glisten. I laid my fingers on her shoulder gently. Seeing her upset made my lungs shrivel to the size of fists. I took tiny baby breaths so as not to cry. I didn’t want to cry in front of her. And when I felt like this I hated Mal. There was such joy in his giving that it was an agony when he took away.

  ‘He’s a lot like your father, you know.’

  She spoke in tones a semi-octave too high. The tears fell from her eyes into the corners of her mouth. Her face wore watery braces. ‘He can’t always get what his imagination wants. That’s how life works though. That’s how life works.’

  ‘Shall I help you tidy up, Mum?’ I asked.

  If Mal was like Dad, I was like her. I was a pleaser. That was where I fitted in.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that would be nice.’

  Inside the house I took the spray from under the kitchen sink, which was well stocked in neon products with loud names, the forbidden Las Vegas of the cupboards. I removed a yellow duster from the drawer and began to dust the surfaces of the furniture in the living room. Mum’s favourite object was a fold-down bureau. It had been made during the war, when all the good material had been saved for use in the war effort, and as such was purely functional. It reminded me of her.

  I dusted the skirting boards on my hands and knees, speeding around the floor. I was not doing the job properly but being seen to do the job. At the oven I stirred the mixture and partook of the intense sugary high from licking the bowl clean of the fluffy chocolate batter. I helped unpack the cases, hung the coats and tidied the shoes. And Mal sat in the bedroom with Dad, their chatter inaudible even to my prying ear at the door, though they were definitely talking because the air had that whistle and fizz of silence with something else in it.

  It was my holiday too, ruined. When tiredness took me I seethed and cried, shouted and kicked and Mum held my head in the warm plate of her lap until I slept. My anger, though, was everything. It made my eyes heat up even when they were closed. It wasn’t often that Mum and I were alone. Her gaze felt good. To gaze upon us made her happy, to be our one, our woman. She would have despaired to know how little time was left with things remaining as they were.

  13

  That same night was warm and prickly, so Mal and I erected a small green tent in the garden. It was old, Dad had first used it in South Africa, and when you tugged loose the drawstrings of the bag it kicked out a moth-eaten funk that tasted like old dust and made your whole face pucker. The groundsheet had long since rotted to tatters, so we took a gingham picnic blanket from the posh hamper Mum had won in a raffle and never used. We flapped it in the air before laying it flat and inviting on the grass.

  Like the house the garden was small, and surrounded by other small gardens attached to small houses. We were to whisper because even the slightest rise in the volume would guarantee the complaints of Mrs Gee.

  Mrs Gee lived in the bungalow next door. If you were to shave it, her head would have been perfectly spherical. With it sat atop her rotund midriff she took on the silhouette of a cartoon snowman. Barely five feet tall, you’d see her in the summer shuffling about the garden, her feet never leaving the floor. The constant tch tch tch of her slippers grazing the path served as warning she was coming and meant it was time to dash inside. She wore stretchy dresses that hugged her lumps, the only things that ever held her.

  Now in her seventies she’d lived alone for almost half a century, polishing the taps, feeding the cats. Dad told me she’d been married to a postman on her seventeenth birthday, but that he’d left her that very night when she’d refused to consummate the relationship.

  ‘She’d been returned unopened.’

  That evening Mal and I hid behind the relative sanctity of the tent’s damp canvas wall and spied her shadow in the yard. Tch tch tch. She stood motionless, watching the clouds cut across the sky with sourness daubed on her face, sucking on a piss-washed thistle. It seemed she was angry at them for being late, or at the sky for hanging high. Curved bones hunched her shoulders upwards to buffer her neck. Her hands were permanently fists. The world was ignoring her until she disappeared. She was one of those people. So we ignored her until she disappeared. Tch tch tch. Tch tch tch. Gone.

  We clicked our torches on and hung them from the dented metal bar that formed the tent’s spine. Neither of us was cold or tired enough to climb inside our sleeping bags, so we lay atop them and the cheap polyester gripped sticky to our skin. We played travel versions of popular games. We didn’t have the full versions. We never really travelled.

  ‘Oh,’ I flinched.

  We’d been playing the game for over an hour. I had pins and needles invading my left leg through my big toe and I’d slobbered down my right arm where I’d propped my sleepy head upon it.

  ‘I forgot to tell Mum, at school, they are going to give me trumpet lessons.’

  ‘Tell her tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll tell her now,’ I insisted.

  I got up slowly and unzipped the tent.

  ‘Play another game of Connect 4,’ he moaned.

  ‘I won’t be long. And I’ll get us something to eat, crisps or biscuits or something.’

  I gently pushed open the back door and made my way through the kitchen, which shone with after-dinner soap suds snail-trekking their way down clean pots. In the living room the curtains, heavy and old in thick purple felt, were open so as to be able to watch us and the TV-chanted quiz-show mantra. Host says catch-phrase, audience reply. Mum and Dad loved but were not united by it, each of them sitting on opposite sides of the room, communicating in random but perfectly understood hand signals.

  Turn it up a bit.

  Turn it down a bit.

  Thingy is on the other side.

  What’s this?

  What was she in?

  Is that him from . . .?

  Then they were watching Ray Darling. Newscaster Ray Darling reporting on the issues of the day, his charm tinged with a great unease, his hair a surreal thatch atop the crescent of his powdery face. Dad ticked with frustration as he watched. He had never liked Ray Darling, and by association neither had I. His scripted authority, his wavering interview technique, his flirtation with the poor weathergirl. His reek was one of a man petrified of being found out.

  Sometimes I suspected Mum and Dad only loved each other during the advert breaks. I waited for one for fifteen minutes. Neither acknowledged me but both knew I was there. Like being on hold.

  I returned to the tent. Malcolm was asleep.

  14

  ‘We just have to visit some people, so get up, please.’ I was in bed with just a sleepy recollection of Dad bringing us in from the garden. I wasn’t sure it still counted as camping.

  Visiting people is what Mum called it when she took Mal to see specialists. Behavioural experts they called themselves. We’d get the bus into town, just like on Saturday mornings when the market filled the thin street with the smell of pungent cheeses and men shouting the names and prices of fruit. Bath Sunday nights. Eating fish on a Friday. Bus to town on Saturday morning and home ag
ain, carrier bags brimming so heavily with groceries that the handles of them stretched, turned to plastic wires and garroted the palms of children. These were our rituals, the hoops we jumped through.

  It was the first day of half-term, and the thought of not returning to school for another week made me feel reborn in an explosion. I slipped both legs from the side of the bed, used my toes to detect whatever I had discarded the night before, and climbed quite willingly into yesterday’s clothes. Only then did I turn to face Mal.

  Sharing a bedroom with him divided me. I’d lie there sometimes, at the end of a happy normal day and think about how everyone would like to share a room with someone like Mal. Those were the days when I liked him, loved him. Those were most days. Normal days full of nothing unusual. And then sometimes I would loathe it. I’d imagine hitting him as he slept and it would keep me awake, watching him, hearing him, the days when what he did ruined everything. I couldn’t wait to be able to escape.

  ‘You have to get up,’ I said.

  He ignored me and turned to face the window. Propped up on one elbow he roughly fluffed his pillow and then pulled it down on top of his head. Any amount of reluctance to do something meant that Mal simply wouldn’t get dressed. His nudity, by now, was an embarrassment for everybody but him. What little charm there was in his tendency to disrobe had lain in his choice of occasion but now, now that he was hairy and real, there was no charm at all. If you’re naked and an adult, you don’t have to leave the house.

  I looked at him. His skin glowed a healthy pine. I thought about the time when he was nine and I was seven, and as was the tradition at Christmas up until that point and never again, Mum took us to see a pantomime. Being in the theatre felt like being inside a really expensive chocolate box from Belgium, reds and golds and layers of people lining the walls, looking like it could all collapse in one big bite. I’d glanced across Mum’s lap at Mal as the lights went down and we were greeted on stage by the forgettable faces of actors too creepy to be dressed as women. I sang and I clapped and I shouted when you were supposed to but in the dark Mal sat silently. No one looked at him but me. I watched him as he slowly moved a hand towards his ankle, hooked a thumb inside his sock and peeled it off with fluid ease. Then the other. As Mum wondered where she’d seen the buxom young woman playing the naive young boy before, Mal balled the socks together. He discreetly dropped them on the floor and let them roll under the seat of the elderly man in front of him. Carefully he wriggled free of his jeans and underpants at the same time, like a butterfly emerging from its yawning cocoon. His best shoes rocked upturned on the floor. Pulling it by the neck, he slid quietly through his cherry-red jumper until, unnoticed, nothing but his lithe torso, bare and unblemished, sat in the chair.

  My heart was sagging and scratching the bottom of its case. I was shackled.

  Suddenly, the big denouement, where the girl dressed as a boy and the boy dressed as an elf fall in love. The lights came up, the audience was invited to sing. And there is Mal, standing on his chair, naked. He sang.

  Mum was stone. I crawled under my seat.

  People around us made stunned sounds, a surprise so large it forced noise from within them. Make it end. Make it end. The elderly man went to grab Mal’s leg, disgusted at his behaviour and Mum’s inability to do anything about it, but Mal skipped free. And he continued to sing. The big chorus, second verse. He hopped into the aisle and danced along it. All eyes on Malcolm Ede, two shows in the room, one entry price. Women Mum’s age jabbed each other in the side and pointed and scorned and tarnished reputations. Men tried to catch him. I cried until we were ejected, Mum scattering ‘sorry sorry sorry’ in our wake.

  By the time I’d finished breakfast, toast because there’s nothing else in until the weekend, Mum finally had Mal dressed. We walked to the bus stop. We didn’t hold hands any more. I only noticed then.

  15

  We waited in the waiting room. When Mum and Mal were called through into the office, I sneaked a glimpse inside it. It was brown and leathery and reminded me of Sherlock Holmes. A miserable-looking spider plant guarded brassy ornaments that hummed with the smell of polish. There were anatomically correct pictures of children on the wall and frosted glass with writing built into the top of the door. It shook as the important-looking man with the moustache slammed it behind him and continued to vibrate like it had eaten Mum and Mal and was chewing them up into a paste, ready to spit them back out at me.

  I moved to the corner of the room, where the chairs lining the longest two walls meet in a pile of toys haphazardly plonked there to stave off tantrums. I dug through them briefly, conscious not to show too much enthusiasm for anything I found that was actually meant for really young children, and eventually settled on a yoyo, only to discover it had no string. And the remote-control car without the remote. And the plastic woman with the snap in her leg that births a shard so sharp you could cut your own throat with it. Broken toys for broken children. I took a magazine that was three years old, torn and faded, and pretended to read it with it right up in front of my face, like the spies in cartoons who have eye holes through which to study their prey. I peered through the slit by the staple in the centerfold to see what Mal was up against.

  There were three other children with three other mums, six sets of eyes wishing they were home. One of them, a young girl with jam smeared into the feathered ends of her hair, rested her head in her mother’s bosom and wept the entire time. A boy whose badge said ‘I AM 8’ stared at a yellowing stain on the wall as though he could see the individual atoms swirling through the air the way a bag does in the wind. He was white like milk, topped with bright blond hair and eyes the size of golf balls that a cough could unlodge. His mum ignored him. The third boy was called Ron. As in: ‘Sit down, Ron!’, ‘Calm down, Ron!’, ‘Be good, Ronald, please be good!’ His mother twisted the skin of her own hands as the invisible ants amassed between her fingers. Her shape was rigid, her shoulders great knots and her brain a tug-of-war.

  Be Good Ronald was smashing through the pile of toys. He stamped on them, bringing his feet up and marching like a victorious general celebrating the end of a great bloody battle by walking across the broken bones of his enemies. He took the big red fire truck with the little firemen inside long since lost in his chubby little hands, hoisted it above his head and brought it down hard on the floor, where it shattered. His cheeks bunched with delight. His mother mapped her face with her trembling fingers. And then Ronald, naughty little Be Good Ron, took the sharply pointed edge of a small yellow fence that had been attached to an animal-free plastic farmyard and slammed it down into my thigh with astonishing force. It punctured my trousers, lacerated my flesh and drew blood with it as he pulled it back out. I tried not to cry. I held the old magazine up in front of my face just in case, the redundant TV listings hovering inches from my nose. Ronald’s mum scooped him from the floor by his arm and struck his behind, leaving a distinct sweaty print on his cheap shiny trousers. He yelled that he did nothing wrong, the little liar, as I carefully slid my hand over the spreading rose-shaped patch on my leg. She dragged him outside, the two of them in tears, and I hoped she’d push him down the stairs.

  In the waiting room for children with problems, I was bleeding out of my leg. I was the child, that was the problem.

  The big door opened and Mal bounded out, followed by Mum and the doctor, ten pens peeking over the lip of his starched pocket.

  When we got home I slung my trousers straight into the washing machine and sat in my underpants on the bed, picking at the nick of skin on my thigh for hours. Then Mal came in to fetch me. I looked down and it had started bleeding again.

  ‘Come in here,’ he said. ‘Come and meet my girlfriend.’

  16

  She was coming through the door and Mum was clapping seal hands, a smile on her face so big her teeth were trying to escape it. Dad, not a man who let his emotions betray him, had risen to his feet in honour of the fact. Mal shut the front door behind them and
the grin on his face when he saw Mum’s reaction circumnavigated his features. The chemical in my brain that brought jealousy with it had flooded its little storage tank and was flushing around the space between my skeleton and my skin.

  ‘Mum, Dad, this is Lou.’

  And it was eroding my bones.

  In the melee of meet-and-greet, I sat back and watched. It wasn’t that she was a girl. It wasn’t that she was pretty, which she undoubtedly was. It was that she was with Mal. Not that their relationship was a close personal one, they were teenagers, and the fact that Mal and I shared a bedroom would scupper any plans for pubescent romance before they had even formulated. It was that she was drawn to him the way people were. It was the way he paraded her for Mum’s approval, like it was the opening night of his own exhibition. It was the idea of it. I could see what she liked in him. She didn’t know what a tyrant he could be. I did, though still what good there was shone through brightest. But I’d never take my clothes off in the supermarket.

  I took boundless delight in the awkwardness that ensued.

  Mum flapped and squawked, a wild bird trapped in a chimney breast.

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘Comfortable there?’

  ‘Too hot? Too cold then?’

  Dad hopped from one foot to the other, peddling small talk. Mum plied Lou with biscuits and questions. I saw Mal’s teeth grinding, boats on icebergs, back and forth back and forth.