But coming to this place every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, spending half my life with NUTTERS like Patricia, and the Asian guy in the relaxation room, slyly pocketing pieces from the jigsaw puzzles and rocking backwards and forwards like he’s a pendulum, and the skinny BITCH who skips along the corridor singing God Will Save Us, God Will Save Us, when all I want to do is concentrate, but can’t because the stuff they inject makes me twitch and contort, and fills my mouth with so much saliva I’m actually drooling onto the fucking keyboard – I’m just saying this is harder than I thought.
‘The thing is Mum, it wasn’t the same for you, was it?’
‘In some ways—’
‘No. It wasn’t. It wasn’t the same because Nanny Noo didn’t stop you going to school in the first place, or make you sit by yourself for a whole year making pretend mistakes in your exercise books and wondering when—’
‘Matthew, no. I didn’t—’
‘Wondering when I would have to go to the doctor’s, if you’d drag me there past the whole school, staring and pointing—’
‘Matthew, please—’
‘Staring and pointing at me—’
‘It wasn’t like—’
‘It was! It was just like that. And you made it like that. So now I have to see them all again. I don’t care about the new people. I don’t care about the people who don’t know me. I don’t care about not having anyone to write on a stupid plaster cast. I don’t—’
‘Matthew, please listen to me.’
She tried to put her arms around me but I pulled away. ‘No. I don’t have to listen. I don’t have to listen any more. I’m never going to listen to you. I don’t care what you think.’
‘You need to get some sleep, Matt.’
She wobbled a bit as she got to her feet, and for a second looked down at me as though balanced on a cliff edge.
I had one more thing to say, but I didn’t want to shout it. I forced each word into a tightly bound whisper.
‘I hate you.’
Mum closed my door softly behind her.
handshakes
I didn’t describe the special handshake I do with Dad.
When we became amis we decided on a handshake. I think I’ve mentioned it already, but I didn’t say how it goes. It’s a special handshake, not a secret handshake. So I can tell you.
What we do is reach out with our left hands and link our fingers, then we touch the tips of our thumbs together. We must have done this thousands of times.
I haven’t counted.
Each special handshake takes a brief second, but if each one was placed end to end they would stretch for hours.
If somebody took a photograph every time, at the precise moment our thumbs touch, and viewed the photographs in a flip book, it would make a time-lapse film – like you get on wildlife programmes to see plants grow, or weeds creeping across a forest floor.
The film begins with a five-year-old boy, on holiday with his family in France. He’s been trying to delay bedtime by talking to his dad about the hermit crab they caught in the rock pool. The handshake was his dad’s idea. Their thumbs touch, and the camera clicks. In the background, on the hotel balcony, the boy’s Mum and older brother look on. They reveal a hint of pride, and jealousy.
Day and night flash in a strobe, seasons collide, clouds explode, candles melt onto icing sugar, a wreath rots way. The boy and his dad rush through time, thumbs pressed together.
The boy grows like a weed.
And in every moment is a world unseen – beyond balconies, outside of memory, far from the reach of understanding.
I can only describe reality as I know it. I’m doing my best, and promise to keep trying. Shake on it.
prodrome n. an early symptom that a disease is developing.
There is weather and there is climate.
If it rains outside, or if you stab a classmate’s shoulder with a compass needle, over and over, until his white cotton school shirt looks like blotting paper, that is the weather.
But if you live in a place where it is often likely to rain, or your perception falters and dislocates so that you retreat, suspicious and afraid of those closest to you, that is the climate.
These are the things we learnt at school.
I have an illness, a disease with the shape and sound of a snake. Whenever I learn something new, it learns it too.
If you have HIV or Cancer, or Athlete’s Foot, you can’t teach them anything. When Ashley Stone was dying of Meningitis, he might have known that he was dying, but his Meningitis didn’t know. Meningitis doesn’t know anything. But my illness knows everything that I know. This was a difficult thing to get my head around, but the moment I understood it, my illness understood it too.
These are the things we learnt.
We learnt about atoms.
This illness and me.
I was thirteen.
‘STOP THAT, STOP THAT AT ONCE!’
His face turned purple, and a thick vein started throbbing on the side of his neck. Mr Philips was the sort of teacher who wanted lessons to be fun. It took a lot to make him angry.
Jacob Greening could manage though. I can’t remember what he was doing, exactly. This was in science, so probably it had something to do with the gas taps. In the science block there were these gas taps on the tables for fuelling Bunsen burners. It might have been that Jacob put his mouth over one of them and was sucking at the gas to see what would happen – it might have been his face that was turning purple, his neck veins throbbing. Perhaps he was set to exhale it onto a lighter flame, to breathe fire.
Jacob wanted to make lessons fun too.
We’d met on the very first day.
It happened like this:
Dad had taught me to knot my tie, as promised. Jacob turned up to school without one. In registration he started whispering into my ear, as though we’d known each other for years. He was going on about needing to see the Head Teacher, how it was private, and really important. I didn’t listen properly. My mind kept taking me back to what I’d said to Mum, about hating her. She’d driven me to school in silence. I pressed my face against the cool glass, and she flicked through radio stations. I’d hurt her feelings, and was trying to decide if I cared. Jacob was still talking, only now I realized he was anxious. His words were tripping over each other. He had to see the Head Teacher, but he didn’t have a tie. That was the crux of it.
‘You can have mine if you want.’
‘Can I?’
I gave him my tie and he wrapped it inside his collar, then looked at me helplessly. So I knotted it for him. I turned down his collar and tucked the end inside his shirt. I suppose it made us friends. He sat next to me in lessons but at breaks he’d be gone, bolting through the school gates with his rucksack held tight to one shoulder, and his anorak flapping in the wind. He had special permission to go home. This wasn’t something he talked about.
Mr Philips crashed a fist onto our table, ‘It’s not good enough Jacob! This constant childish, dangerous behaviour—’
‘Sorry sir.’ Even as he said it, a smile crept across his acned face. It is strange how fast we change – he wasn’t the sort to give a shit about school ties any more.
‘Get out! Get out of my classroom!’
He slowly moved to pack his stuff away.
‘Leave your bag. You can get it after the bell.’
‘But—’
‘Out! Now!’
The problem with sitting next to Jacob was that whenever he drew attention to himself, everyone looked at me too. I felt a surge of anger towards him then. Here is a question:
What do you have in common with Albert Einstein?
1) You are made out of similar kinds of atoms
2) You are made out of the same kind of atoms
3) You are partly made out of THE SAME atoms
Jacob Greening slammed shut the door behind him, and Mr Philips asked that we all settle down again and look at the whiteboard. It is a good question, I thin
k.
‘I’d like you all to decide which statement you think is true, and write down one, two or three in the back of your exercise books.’
‘Sir?’
‘Yes Sally.’
‘What if we don’t know, sir?’
‘I don’t expect you to know. We’re going to work it out together. Let me ask you another question. How much do you think I weigh?’
‘What?’ Sally shrugged, and I imagined how it might be to kiss her neck, or what her tits would feel like.
‘Have a guess.’
‘About twelve stone?’
‘Good guess.’
Sally smiled, then saw me staring. You’re weird, she mouthed silently. I turned away and picked up Jacob’s pencil case. He was the kind of boy who drew knobs on his own pencil case.
I never worked him out.
Mr Philips stood beside the whiteboard. ‘I weigh nearer to eleven and a half stone, or seventy-four kilograms, which means I have approximately, 7.4 x 1027 atoms in my body.’
That is a way of abbreviating really huge numbers. Here is the number written out in full:
7,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Jacob was kicking the wall in the corridor. Sally was copying out the zeros. Someone else was looking out of the window. Someone else was imagining their future. Someone else could feel the start of a headache. Someone else needed a piss. Someone else was trying to keep up. Someone else was bored and angry. Someone else was somewhere else, and Mr Philips was saying, ‘This is more than every single grain of sand on every single beach.’
These are the things we learnt.
My illness and I.
‘Billions of years ago exploding stars sent atoms hurtling through space and we’ve been recycling them on Earth ever since. Except for the occasional comet, meteor, some interstellar dust, we’ve used exactly the same atoms over and over since the Earth was formed. We eat them, we drink them, we breathe them, we are made of them. At this precise moment each of us is exchanging our atoms with everyone else, and not just with each other, but with other animals, trees, fungi, moulds—’
Mr Philips glanced at the clock, it was nearly break time, and already people had started to pack away their books and begin conversations.
‘Quiet please. We’re nearly done. So what do you have in common with Einstein? One. Are you made out of similar kinds of atoms? Yes, I suppose, and aside from the most minute variations all humans are made of the same basic ingredients, Oxygen (sixty-five per cent), Carbon (eighteen per cent), Hydrogen (ten per cent) etc. So number two is also correct, but what about number three? Is there any part of the world’s greatest ever physicist sitting amongst us now?’
He looked around the room, pausing for effect. ‘Sadly, not enough it seems. For those who are interested, the answer is yes, and not just one or two atoms, but probably many many many atoms that were once part of Einstein, are currently, for a while at least, part of you. Right now. And not just Einstein, but Julius Caesar, Hitler, the cavemen, dinosaurs—’
The bell rang, cutting his list short.
I added someone else though.
Jacob rushed into the classroom, grabbed his bag, and left, ignoring Mr Philips’ request for him to stay. I don’t know why it was this day I decided to follow him. Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps it was another day.
Maybe I waited in the rain, hidden beside the bike sheds – which aren’t really sheds, but more like a cage – and after he ran through the gates, gasping at air, I ran after him. It wasn’t so far; a few streets onto the estate with the small bungalows and little squares of perfectly kept green lawn.
It was just a thing to do, I suppose – to see where he lived. Probably I’d turn around and head back as soon as he went inside.
‘Jacob!’
Except I didn’t head back.
I called out.
More and more these days I only knew what I was going to do as I actually did it. He was inside the porch. ‘Jacob!’ My voice was lost in the wind. He closed the door, and I stood on the front grass for a while, catching my breath.
The rain fell harder. I pulled up my hood and moved around the side of the bungalow. It was small, like a Doll’s House. I don’t mean it wasn’t nice, that isn’t what I’m saying. Anyway, not everything has to mean something.
I carefully stepped over a few empty plant pots and a garden gnome holding a fishing rod. This wasn’t sneaking. You couldn’t say I was sneaking, because I had tried to get his attention.
I had called out his name.
I think.
Around the back I arrived at the single large window, with its slatted blinds. I crouched down low, gripping the wet ledge with my fingers.
The electric wheelchair was the first thing I saw, but she wasn’t in it. She was in bed, and now Jacob was beside her, leaning over her, attaching clips to a kind of metal crane. He stood back, holding a remote control. Slowly, she started to lift away from her mattress, hoisted in a huge sling. Jacob’s movements were precise, efficient. Holding the top of the crane with both hands he swivelled her away from the bed, pulled away dirty sheets, put fresh ones in their place. I stopped watching him, because I couldn’t take my eyes off her. The way he’d turned her, she was suspended facing the window, facing me, with her bloated arms flopped to her sides, her dull eyes fixed straight ahead.
It’s dark, night-time, the air tastes of salt, and Simon is bleating, begging me not to dig it up, telling me he’s frightened. I lift the doll, she is dirty, sodden. Her arms flop at her sides. I hold her in the air. The rain falls, and Simon is backing away, clutching his chest. She wants to play with you, Simon. She wants to play chase.
I ran, skidding around the side of the bungalow, tumbling over a stone pot, back on my feet, over the lawn – afraid to look back – across the road, through the gates, into school, with trillions of atoms colliding inside me, only atoms, trillions of atoms, and many, many, many of Simon’s atoms. Somewhere in the playground I crumpled. And threw up.
Perhaps we had Geography that same day. Or maybe we didn’t. Maybe it was another day.
The teacher put on a video, about the weather and the climate. Do you remember the difference? The lights were off to help us see the screen better, so I don’t think Jacob noticed me reach into his pencil case and take out the set of compasses. I’ve already said what happened next. Sorry, Jacob.
the watching stair
‘My God, listen to yourself. You sound like your father. So that’s the answer, is it? You’re going to what, Richard? Knock some sense into him?’
‘You think I won’t?’
‘What will that teach him exactly?’
‘That he can’t bloody—’
‘Go on.’
‘Christ, Susan. We can’t do nothing.’
‘I’m not suggesting that.’
They were sitting in the glow of the standing lamp, holding hands, still holding hands even as they fought over what to do about a son like me. Mum’s head resting on Dad’s shoulder, a second bottle of wine nearly drunk.
‘Then what exactly?’
‘He knows what he did was wrong—’
‘That doesn’t cut it.’
‘We’re going to the school—’
‘Yes, because we’ve been summoned.’
‘No, because we offered. He’s a teenage boy. They go through phases. Didn’t you?’
‘Not that phase. Not the phase of assaulting people.’
‘It wasn’t—’
‘Now you listen to yourself. This isn’t normal, it isn’t part of growing up. And do you know what hurts the most?’
‘You’re disappointed, I know. So am I—’
‘No, that isn’t it. I was disappointed when he swore at your mother. I was disappointed when his school marks dropped and he didn’t seem to care. I was disappointed when we caught him smoking, and again when we caught him smoking pot. I’d be hard pushed to recall a day this last year when I haven’t been disappointed in the boy for som
ething. But this?’
‘Let’s not do this now.’
‘I’m ashamed.’
Simon used to stay up half an hour later than me, because he was the eldest. I’d brush my teeth and be tucked into bed, but when I was certain Mum had gone downstairs, I would follow.
On the fourth stair from the top, with your forehead pressed against the banisters, you can spy through a glass panel over the living-room door and see most of the sofa, half the coffee table, and a corner of the fireplace. I would watch until the darkness of the hall closed around the glow from the living room, and the softness of their voices blended with the sound of my own breathing, so that sometimes I wouldn’t even feel myself being lifted, or hear Mum calling me her little rascal. I’d simply wake up the next morning, in the warm comfort of my own bed.
One night Simon was practising his reading. It wasn’t so long before that this had been a shared ritual, the two of us taking turns to read aloud from the same book.
‘It’s my page, Matthew. Not yours.’
‘I’m only trying to help.’
‘I can do it by myself.’
He couldn’t. Not so well. So he practised with Mum after I went to bed, and I’d watch her patiently teach him the same words night after night; she couldn’t have loved him more. Dad would be relegated to the far end of the sofa where I couldn’t see him properly, only his legs stretched out in front, and a socked foot resting on the coffee table.
That’s how it was as Simon read his picture book of The Lion King. Nanny Noo bought it for him from a charity shop and it became his favourite because when it gets to the part where Pumbaa and Timon start talking about Hakuna Matata, Dad would try to sing it. It was so funny because he didn’t know the words properly, and he’d always get partway through, then find himself doing that King of the Swingers song – which isn’t even from The Lion King. I guess you had to be there, but it was really funny.
Except this night, as I sat on the watching stair, they didn’t get that far, because when Simba’s dad died in the buffalo stampede, Simon went quiet.
‘What’s the matter, sweetheart?’