True love, p.9
True Love, page 9
They’re at least three sizes too big for him, but without them he’d have to go into the river in his own trainers. He can’t go in barefoot. He’s tried once before, but he cut the sole of his foot on a piece of glass, and had to spend a week trying not to limp when near his nan, so she’d not fuss over him and ask him what happened.
When he looks down again at his palm, he sees that the ends of his fingers have started to shrivel; but the object, now that it’s dried, has changed again. Very fine cracks score its surface, and when he turns it upside down, he finds that he can see through it, through a small hole to the other side of the river, where the weeds grow tall and bits of rubbish – bags and cans and wrappers – are snagged on the rusty barbs of an old chain-link fence.
He slips it into his pocket and heads back under the shadows of the bridge. He takes off the sodden boots and tucks them neatly away, hoping, as he always does, that they’ll be waiting for him the next time he’s back. His nose wrinkles as the smell of them drifts up from his hands. It wasn’t long before they’d started to stink. One time, he’d slipped his foot into the right boot, only to find that a rat or mouse had made a nest of it and, when he lifted it up and shook it, five or six pink, hairless bodies fell out and groped blindly on the ground. For several minutes he’d panicked and, crouched low by them, he’d desperately tried to corral them with a stick to a place of safety. But the little bodies squirmed and writhed without response to his efforts, so he’d had no option but to leave and hope that the mother would return to take care of them. When he returned, they were gone, and he’d spent weeks afterward worrying he’d caused them harm.
He steps back out from under the bridge and climbs up the bank in his bare feet, doing his best to hop from stone to stone and dodge the thistles that spring up in dense little crowns. There is such pleasure in being here, in this place that can feel like his and his alone. He stands and looks back out across the river, at the slow, measured run of it, the keeper of so much he is yet to find out.
IT’S THE END OF September. The sky is low and grey, and there’s already a chill in the air. Clouds scud above him as he walks with his eyes lowered and his hands thrust deep in his pockets. He doesn’t take the object out, but allows his fingers to turn it over, growing more and more familiar with it with each passing second.
His street. The name of it tacked high on the red bricks of the first house. Windows with their netted curtains. Some of the doors propped wide open. A cat, yellow-eyed and sharp-eared, stares out at him through a pane of dusted glass. He knows everyone’s name here, even the adults, but he’s never said a word to most of them. It’s the place he knows best in the world; he can conjure it in his mind in every detail, and yet still he feels the knot in his stomach tighten to be here, feels himself to be on the outside of something that’s not quite his.
There are other kids out playing, kicking balls or racing from one end of the street to the other, dodging the cars parked up on the kerb. Their cries echo cleanly, slapping against the brick. Most of the kids are younger than him. No one turns to stare at him. No one calls out or raises a hand in greeting.
He’s never lived anywhere else. He has no memory of either of his parents and knows almost nothing about them. He’s been told that they’re still alive, but that’s about the measure of it. Both went their separate ways when he was too small to remember them, but neither, apparently, had deemed him worthy of bringing with them.
He lives with his mam’s parents, his nan and grandad. They’ve made it clear that they don’t like to talk about their daughter. There are no pictures of her anywhere in plain sight, but he’s seen one, the time he’d quietly, guiltily searched the drawers of his nan’s prized mahogany chiffonier when they were out at a funeral a few years ago. He’d held it for a long time and he’d known it was his mam just by the look of her: they shared the same dark hair, the same wide-set green eyes.
He’s not felt the need to see it again since. His memory is like this: sometimes he has only to glance at something and he can capture it vividly in his mind, can revisit it months, even years down the line, and it won’t have dimmed.
As for his da, he’s seen nothing, not even a single picture. There’s been almost no mention of him, and he hasn’t yet felt the need to ask. To ask would be to set something in motion, something that he might not want. He’s very conscious of words and their power, and he fears them. He’s not sure where this fear comes from, why he’s so reluctant to speak. Better to stay quiet. Better yet, say nothing at all. Around his brain he imagines there to be a trench so deep and wide that no bridge can span it. It’s beyond this trench that he hides. No one can reach him; he is safe, secure. He’s all alone but he is in control, and it’s this that matters to him most.
All he really knows is that he loves his nan and grandad. They say they’ll tell him anything he needs to know in time, when he’s ready. They’ve always cared for him and looked after him. This is enough, at least for the time being.
THE DOOR OF HIS home, number 21, is unlocked. He slips inside, pulling down the handle as quietly as possible so as not to disturb anyone. His grandad is too absorbed by the TV to notice him, and his nan’s in the kitchen. The radio is on and she’s frying pork medallions, the butter hissing and spitting, the smell reaching his nostrils and making his mouth water a little. He takes off his trainers, arranges them neatly at the bottom of the stairs, then takes the treads two at a time up on to the tiny landing.
There’d once been only two rooms, but the room that had been his mam’s when she was a girl has been split into two so that there’s now a bathroom in the house rather than outside. Still, his room is big enough to fit his bed and a chest of drawers, and there’s a thin strip of faded grey carpet where he can sit and study his belongings. His walls are painted yellow and blue, and he likes how the roof slants down above his bed, so he can reach up and touch it when he’s lying awake at night.
He knows that he and his mam must have touched the same things in this room. Their feet must have padded across the same stretches of floor, or their knuckles grazed the same patch of wall. The thought can sometimes give him a sharp rush of feeling: a pulse or flare that burns brightly behind his eyes, and then disappears. It’s almost as if, for a split second, he can picture the place she is now, the life she’s living without him, possibly thousands of miles away. It’s a connection that sometimes unnerves him, but he is for the most part pleased when it happens. He wonders why feelings must always be like this: never one, definite entity, but forever branching and splintering into rivalrous factions, all of them forced to bunk with one another in the cluttered dark of his mind.
He likes small spaces and always has. Any room he enters that’s too big and he feels himself to be exposed; immediately he wants to fold in on himself and shy away. In the canteen at school, he chooses to sit with his back to the wall on the far side, so that there’s no one behind him. Sometimes, he finds that his seat has been taken, and he’s forced to sit in plain view of all the others, and he can barely swallow his food down for the worry of being stared at and – in some vitally intimate way he doesn’t have control of – noticed.
He keeps the box of everything he finds in the river under his bed, pushed up against the wall and wrapped in a dark plastic bag. He knows the chances of either his nan or grandad getting down on their knees to have a look under here are very slim, but he has to be cautious. He doesn’t think they’d want to take anything away from him, but they’d ask him questions that he wouldn’t have the answers for, and he knows already that his quietness troubles them. The last thing he wants is to trouble them any more than he already does.
He lies flat on his stomach and reaches under the bed. He pulls out the box, then stays very still, listening to make sure that no one is coming up the stairs. He can only hear the TV. The racing his grandad watches is on, the commentator barking out names and positions, the voice becoming more and more enthused as the seconds go by.
When he’s sure that he’s in no danger of being discovered, he removes the dark plastic bag. His name – Finn – is scrawled on the lid in faded red ink. He doesn’t remember where the box came from. It’s too small to be a shoebox and too large to have held anything as delicate as jewellery. He opens it up and looks down at his treasures. If the box were any bigger, then the collection might look less impressive; but in here, they have to jostle for space, and when he reaches his hand in and sifts through them all, he gets the same feeling every time: not elation, not pride, but a form of peace, a glorious distillation of his thoughts into one single beat of pleasure.
He reaches into his pocket and takes out what he found today. He holds it up to the light that comes in through the small window set into the slanting roof. It’s not like anything he’s found before, and though it doesn’t matter to him what it is, he thinks it’s starting to resemble a tooth. He places it amongst his other finds. Like all of them, it’ll give him its own particular kind of satisfaction when he holds it. No thing, he knows, is ever the same.
Drifting under his door, he can smell the waft of the butter and pork. This is what his nan does every Saturday morning. His grandad sits himself by the TV in the living room and she cooks him up his breakfast. He likes to have it late because he’ll soon be going to the pub, and he doesn’t like to leave the house with the feeling of an empty stomach. He’ll have a glass of milk to wash it down, and then he’ll be away, pulling the peak of his hat low over his eyes and whistling his own meandering tune.
Finn moves down the stairs, quietly. He looks at the clock that hangs from the patterned wallpaper in the hallway beside the mirror. It ticks away, never stopping. It’s later than he thought. He knows that Ronan’s da is picking him up at eleven. He only has a few minutes to get himself ready, though when he thinks about it, he doesn’t really know how he’s meant to be preparing himself.
He’s been invited to a party that he doesn’t want to go to. The boy who’s invited him, Ronan, isn’t really a friend. There’d been a time, when Finn was much younger, that he’d had friends at school, and he’d fitted in far better amongst the other children. But that was before he – and they – had sensed that there was something different about him, something he’d have to protect. He’d had a small group who he could talk to and share his thoughts with without fear of being ridiculed. Some of them had liked the same things he did: digging around in the muck and bringing up anything that was buried down there. Like him, they kept little bits and bobs in their pockets: stones, dead insects, leaves, sticks that they could sharpen into arrows or spears.
But around four or five years ago, they’d all seemed to grow out of those habits. He’d watched as slowly they began to drift away from him to talk about things that he didn’t understand, or didn’t interest him. Eventually, he stopped talking to them altogether. So now, at breaktimes, he walks around the perimeter of the playground on his own. His hands reach out from the cuffs of his coat like pale little leaves, and he thrusts them down into the dirt to lift up anything he can find: old bottle caps, ring pulls, coins, wrappers, scraps of metal that he takes home to rinse under the tap and inspect.
He knows the only reason that he’s been invited today is because Ronan’s mam sometimes works with his nan in the bakery in town. They do the occasional shift together, and she knows that his nan worries about him. She worries that he doesn’t have any friends, that he spends so much time on his own, that he so rarely talks. He knows all this because he likes to sit on the stairs when he can’t sleep, his face pressed between the same two spindles of the banister, and he listens to his nan fretting endlessly about him to his grandad.
Last week he’d heard them again.
What’s wrong with him? his nan asked.
Nothing’s bloody wrong with him, said his grandad. He’s a boy. He’s growing up.
But he’s so quiet, she said. He’d not say a word if he had it his way. He’d be up in his room or out doing God knows what.
The news started, and Finn could hear the familiar theme tune building to a crescendo. There’d be more stories that would have his grandad in a foul mood the next morning, muttering to himself over his breakfast of tea and eggs.
Leave him be, said his grandad. He doesn’t need you breathing down his neck.
Maybe he doesn’t need me breathing down his neck, but he could do with his mother. Don’t you think? Don’t you think we could—
That’s enough, his grandad said. That’s enough.
Finn had heard his nan getting up from the sofa then, so he’d stood without making the stairs creak and returned to his bed. But he’d not been able to sleep. He’d stayed up long enough to hear his nan and grandad’s footsteps on the stairs, and then the snoring coming from across the hall. When he’d finally drifted off, he’d dreamt of his mam in the photograph, and when he woke in the morning with the light sluicing down through the window, he could still see, somehow feel, the green of her eyes on him.
The ticking of the clock in the hall. He stands, watching his nan in the kitchen, the handle of the pan in one hand, a spatula in the other. Finely glinting hairs on the carpet tiles of the kitchen floor. Beyond her, he can see the brightly coloured pegs on the washing line bouncing in the wind outside. Her glasses are perched on the end of her nose, her lips gently puckering. She turns and sees him standing there, and immediately she shouts over the spit of the butter and the noise of the TV.
Where’ve you been?
But she doesn’t wait for an answer. She shifts the pan off the heat and comes bustling toward him, her apron tied around her thick waist, her worn slippers whispering on the green carpet.
She doesn’t look like some people’s nans do. Her hair isn’t grey but dyed a dark, almost ruddy brown, and though her face is slightly wrinkled around the nose and mouth, she still has a youthful quality to her, a brightness that lives in the pale blue of her eyes.
She goes upstairs with her apron still on. She seems to do most things with it on. Even when she sits down at night to watch TV, she still sometimes wears it. He used to wonder when he was younger if she wore it to sleep in, because she’d have it on in the morning when he woke up, stirring his porridge over the blue flame of the gas ring.
She comes back down a couple of minutes later with a heap of T-shirts and jumpers and a cagoule that he hasn’t seen in many years but knows is hers.
You’ll need these, she says.
She thrusts them at him and he sifts through them.
Do I need all of them? he asks. He speaks quietly, not much above a whisper.
You do, she says. Now put them on.
By the time he’s put everything on, he feels about a stone heavier. He’s yet to have his growth spurt, so his nan’s cagoule reaches down to his knees. It’s purple and green, and there are two toggles that swing pendulously and clack together whenever he turns his head. Even his smallest movements make the fabric rustle and crackle unpleasantly. He has sense enough to know he looks stupid. He wants to tell her that he doesn’t want to wear it, that he’ll be fine without; but he simply zips it up and stands there, his hands lost in the long, dangling sleeves.
His grandad has put some money down on a horse, so he’s leaning forward in his favourite chair, his fists clenched and resting on his knees. The faded tattoos on his forearms shift slightly as the muscles cinch and slacken beneath the skin. There’s a half-full ashtray resting on the arm of his chair, a thin spiral of smoke lifting from it. Sometimes, if the horse he’s put money on wins, he jumps up and knocks the ashtray over, so his nan has to come and suck up all the ash with the little hand-held hoover she keeps in the kitchen to get rid of crumbs.
A horn sounds from outside.
That’ll be them, says his nan.
He feels a flutter of nerves in his stomach and he can’t keep from wincing. His nan sees his face, places the papery skin of her palm on his dark head of hair. He can smell the sweetness of the perfume that she dabs on her wrists.
You’ll be fine, she says.
She opens the door and pulls him with her out on to the street. He wants to say goodbye to his grandad, but he’s already outside, his cagoule rustling like a steeple of kindling catching alight.
There’s a blue car parked over the road, two wheels up on the kerb. His nan marches him toward it. He knows that she’ll want to talk with Ronan’s da. The window rolls down as they near. A large face with a dark beard and very light blue eyes appears, hair greying at the temples. Ronan is sitting beside his da in the front, and there are two other boys in the back. Finn can see that their faces are turned toward him, can make out the paleness of their cheeks and chins; but the sun is just out from behind a cloud and smears itself across the glass so that their eyes are obscured; and he can’t put a name to either of them.
I want you to take good care of this boy, he hears his nan say.
She’s standing behind him, her hands clamped on his shoulders. Her fingers rustle the cagoule, and he sees Ronan’s da’s eyes drift down to look at the length of it, the way it hangs by his knees.
He’s in good hands, he says.
Will they be wearing a life jacket? she asks.
Every last one of them, he says. I’ll have him back to you. Now hop in the car, lad. We need to be on our way.
INSIDE THE CAR, THE air is close and briny. Finn is pressed against a boy he knows is new at school. His name is Evan and Finn feels a clammy heat rise up his neck and into his cheeks to be so close to another body, to be able to feel each miniscule shift of this other boy’s leg and shoulder against his own whenever the car changes direction slightly.
No one’s spoken yet. Ronan is yet to turn around. He’s slumped in his seat, his arms folded over his chest. He looks displeased, irritated – he’s been forced to do something he doesn’t want to do. Finn knows that Ronan has a temper on him, a surliness that always seems to be on the brink of boiling over into something more menacing. Even the back of his neck, smooth and stiff and pale beneath the arrowed finish of his light hair, gives off an air of distaste for what’s behind him in the backseat.
