‘He’ll probably grow out of it,’ the doctor said to Luke’s mother.
‘I didn’t think people grew out of XP,’ said Luke’s mother.
‘It’s not necessarily XP,’ he said. ‘Remember, we talked about this.’
Luke was listening to the conversation with his eyes shut, pretending not to have come round yet. He didn’t want to open his eyes and lose the incredible image of the blue sky he half-saw.
‘Yes, but . . .’ Jean stammered.
‘We just have to wait and see. It could just be childhood allergies.’
Luke never saw that doctor again but for years he couldn’t shake the hope that the doctor was right and he’d be able to go out one day. The next doctor he saw, when he was about eleven or so, was a friend of his parents’ – Dr Mackay. He seemed excited to have a patient with XP and wrote a paper about Luke which none of the medical or scientific journals published even though he’d been sure they would.
Dr Mackay was still conducting allergen tests when the social worker, Mrs Murray, started visiting. Luke remembers her being a well-meaning lady with a sourness he later realised was just a lack of humour. She asked him questions about his friends, his home tutor, and his hobbies, and Luke said everything was fine because he’d got it into his head that he’d be sent to a home if he didn’t say the right thing. Eventually the doctor and the social worker both stopped coming, satisfied that Luke’s disease was incurable, that he was comfortable and, crucially for the social worker, that he wasn’t likely to commit suicide or go mad.
At sixteen, there was one more doctor’s visit, and after a brief examination of Luke’s medical records, the doctor signed some forms that meant that Luke started receiving some sort of sickness benefit which he never understood. His mother applied for it, and she still collects it and puts half in the bank for Luke, and takes the rest for rent and food and bills. Occasionally she asks Luke to sign forms that always seem to come in the same A5 brown envelopes.
Luke hasn’t seen his father for years. He’s not even entirely sure what happened between his parents; all he knows is that one Sunday evening his dad went to Yorkshire and it was a few months before everyone realised he was never coming home again.
And apart from XP, and a couple of colds, Luke has never been ill in his life.
Chapter 6
Mice.
There are eight glass tanks, two stacks of four, in the pet shop window. The pet shop is on the High Street, a couple of doors down from Xoom Clothing, which is where Julie’s due to meet David in five minutes. He’s persuaded her to come and look at a jacket he’s planning to buy. Because they left work early, it’s not like Julie could have made an excuse or said she planned something else, because right now she should be plonking Pepperoni Passions on tables and wiping sweaty blobs of salad dressing off plastic tablecloths. And what else is there to do? Luke’ll be asleep at this time of day and it’s not like Julie has any other friends.
All the mice are asleep, apart from one that’s moving around the glass cube with determination. It seems to be making a nest in the far right-hand corner; piling up bits of white stringy bedding probably made in a factory for exactly this purpose. Julie looks at the other tanks: the other mice all have nests in precisely the same corner, which is pretty weird, but then mice are a bit weird – like flies that only fly in geometric shapes.
Julie remembers once opening a cupboard in her old house in Bristol and seeing a biscuit packet with a perfect round hole cut into it. At first she thought it had been made by a machine. She was confused because who’d want to use a machine to make a perfect hole in a packet of Jammy Dodgers? Then she saw it. At the back of the cupboard, in the darkest spot, was a little ball of shredded paper – mainly bits of biscuit packet and most of a greengrocer’s paper bag. Julie poked it with her finger, and there was definitely something warm inside, but nothing happened and she was kind of scared. She didn’t poke it again. Later that night she saw a small brown creature run across the kitchen floor. The next day the nest was slightly larger, and the rest of the biscuits had disappeared.
Julie watches as the pet shop mouse tries to work out how to drink from the water bottle. She suddenly becomes aware that she is looking at a confined animal. How does she feel about that? Most people would look at an animal in a cage and instinctively feel that it should be set free. But this mouse seems pretty comfortable in the little tank, and seems to have everything it needs: food, water, a bed and some space to run around in. Julie wonders what choice the mouse would make if it was given one, if someone was able to communicate with it and say, ‘Hello, mouse, would you like to be set free? It’s a dangerous world out there, filled with predators, and you might starve or freeze to death or be eaten by a cat, but at least you’ll be free. Alternatively, you could choose to stay in your tank, where you’ll be kept safe, and cared for, and fed.’ Would that mouse choose freedom, which, in Julie’s opinion, is essentially a human concept (does the mouse know it’s not free in its cage?), or would it instead think, ‘No, my instincts lead me to safety and it’s safe in here.’ If there were no humans about and the cage was open, would the mouse even run away?
What would you prefer? A comfortable, safe, warm, cosy life in a cage; or an uncertain life of freedom? Julie would choose the cage, she suddenly realises, as long as her cage was safe; and fitted with a computer and modem, say, and satellite TV – and lots and lots of puzzles. She frowns, picturing herself in this comfortable cage. No matter how hard she tries, she can’t think of any reason why she wouldn’t want to live like that. In fact the vision of such a safe, comfortable life with everything provided for her suddenly makes Julie want to cry. It’s so beautiful.
‘All right?’ says David.
‘Oh, hi,’ Julie says, blinking and losing her perfect image. ‘I didn’t see you coming.’
He’s emerged from somewhere behind her. Now he’s standing next to her looking through the pet shop window, breathing steam all over the glass. It’s cold this afternoon, although they did forecast rain on the news this morning.
‘What are you looking at?’ he asks.
‘Mice. I’ve never really looked at mice before. They’re weird.’
David laughs. ‘Hey, maybe we could do a raid on the pet shop and set them free.’
‘Do you think they’d really want to be set free?’ she asks.
‘Yeah, of course,’ says David. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Nothing. Come on, it’s freezing out here.’
Xoom is one of those clothes shops that are kind of dark inside, with moody assistants and £200 price tags. Two local drug dealers own the shop and most of the clientele are already their customers and/or wannabe drug lords themselves; larging it in Stüssy and CP Company or whatever’s in fashion now. Julie hasn’t been in this shop for a few years but it hasn’t changed much.
The men’s stuff takes up most of the rail space: shiny shirts and slightly flared jeans and huge, fluffy, hooded tops. There is one rail of girls’ clothes, on which there are tiny T-shirts and dresses that you could almost imagine using to dress a doll rather than a person. Julie prefers Miss Selfridge and Top Shop for clothes. Her favourite style, at least to look at, is probably that recycled look with clothes from charity shops. It always looks great in magazines – suede jackets, frayed jeans, wool bags, second-hand jewellery and cowboy boots – but there’s no way she could wear something that belonged to a dead person, or, worse, something that someone could actually have died in. Whenever Julie goes into Oxfam, all she can think about is someone crying as they bundle clothes up – a mother usually, crying over her dead daughter’s things. The last time she went in, there were rails full of club-wear – rubber dresses, PVC trousers and little sequined tops. These clothes had obviously all belonged to the same person and Julie obsessed for about six months over what must have happened to her.
‘All right, mate,’ David says to one of the assistants.
‘Yo, bro,’ he says. He looks
at Julie. ‘All right?’ he says.
Julie looks at him. ‘Uh, hi,’ she says.
‘It’s Julie, isn’t it?’ he asks. ‘Haven’t seen you for a while.’
David looks confused. ‘You know each other?’ he asks.
‘School,’ says Will. ‘You used to go around with, um . . .’
‘No one,’ Julie reminds him. ‘I went around on my own.’
Will looks uncomfortable. ‘Oh, right,’ he says.
David looks weirded-out. Julie knows that as far as he’s concerned she’s always been a bit of a loner and strange in some way. Maybe he’s freaked out to imagine her at school – at the same school as Will, who’s one of those guys that other guys seems to adore in a bizarre way, waiting for him to acknowledge them in the street, to nod his head or call out a Yo! Bro, or know their name or who their friends are. Maybe David’s just shocked because Julie’s not trying to be cool with Will. But Julie doesn’t want to be cool. She doesn’t want to belong to a social group like some sort of ant or insect and text message people and call them m8 and pretend to do drugs or know the right word for dope (it was ‘draw’ last time she checked, but that was about three or four years ago). She just wants to be on her own, or with Luke. A glass tank would be pretty good right now but it would have to be the sort of glass you can’t see through.
‘Didn’t you used to be blonde?’ asks Will.
‘No,’ Julie says.
There’s silence for a couple of seconds.
‘So anyway, what can I do you for, mate?’ Will asks David.
Fifteen minutes later, David has a new jacket. It’s grey and sort of shiny.
‘Do you want to get a drink or something?’ he asks Julie.
She looks at her watch. ‘I’m not sure . . .’
‘Come on, don’t be boring.’
Julie looks down at the pavement. ‘I like being boring.’
‘Yeah, I can see that. Go on. Just a quick one?’
‘Oh, all right. Rising Sun?’
David makes a face – it’s too grungy to be his kind of place – but they start walking in the direction of The Rising Sun anyway.
Chapter 7
When Luke wakes up it’s getting dark. His room has a deep-blue glow, and occasionally, when a car passes outside, there is a yellow streak across his ceiling, a muffled engine sound or the squeal of a fucked clutch. Then nothing. The cul-de-sac is usually quiet – it’s one of the reasons for the high house prices around here. But at about four every weekday afternoon, the shift workers at the local industrial estate use it to turn in because you can get on the A12 better going the other way. These cars are like Luke’s alarm clock and the approaching darkness is his dawn.
His curtains, which he can open only when it’s fully dark, are heavy enough to keep out all the light and most of the shadows. Since about January, though, Luke’s been experimenting; leaving a tiny gap in the curtains so that there are more shapes and shadows in the room. He read somewhere that his condition – if it is in fact XP, which no one ever really found out for sure – is dangerous only in direct sunlight and that it would be perfectly acceptable to have his curtains open in the day with special filters on the glass. But Luke’s mother told him that was rubbish and made him vow to keep the curtains completely shut. He did, for years, but now something’s making him slightly rebellious. Probably this 2001 deadline, this kill-or-cure feeling he’s got.
Another day; still alive. Luke’s been waking up with headaches lately, that’s the only thing. Of course, that could be down to the cable they’re installing in the road outside. It’s pretty hard to sleep when a load of guys are drilling just beneath your bedroom window.
The air in the room is heavy and stale despite the various air filters and ionisers. After getting out of bed, Luke switches on his fan and starts his exercises, which he hates but still does every day. He doesn’t hate the effort, just the empty feeling afterwards, the adrenaline rush that never has anywhere to go. The feeling goes with the territory, he knows that. He knows he’s ill, and it could be a lot worse than this – if he was bedridden or contagious or didn’t have a TV or computer, that really would be hell. This isn’t so bad, he knows that.
After Luke ran out of the house for the first time on that bright, cold spring morning, his mother installed window locks and turned the house into a prison, with everything that was lockable firmly locked. If she was going out she usually shut Luke in his room, a practice she reluctantly gave up a year or so later when a neighbour pointed out that it was a fire hazard. After that she went out less often and gave up her nursing job to keep a proper eye on Luke. When Luke threatened to open his curtains and kill himself that way she got his father to paint the outsides of the windows with silver paint, which came off after about a month. Keeping up with Luke’s new and sometimes ingenious ways of threatening to kill himself took its toll on Jean, until she had an ingenious idea of her own.
‘I think I might kill myself,’ she said thoughtfully one night. Luke was about nine. They’d just watched Dallas, and everything was normal until she said that.
Luke’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Mum!’ he wailed. ‘You can’t say that.’
‘It’s how I feel,’ she continued, in a faraway voice, like a radio drama.
Luke started crying. ‘Why are you saying this?’ he sobbed.
‘I think I might gas myself. Or maybe I’ll cut my wrists. What do you think?’
‘Stop it! Please.’
However much he begged her, she wouldn’t stop.
‘Maybe I’ll chuck myself off the roof. Oh, I know. I could hang myself.’
‘Please don’t, Mum. I love you.’
‘Well . . .’ She pretended to think.
‘I’ll do anything.’
Tipping her head to one side, she pretended to think some more.
‘I’ll be good,’ Luke promised. ‘I know I’ve been difficult . . .’
‘Maybe if you give up all this talk of going out . . .’
‘I will. I swear.’
‘Good. Then I might be able to carry on living. But Luke?’
He looked up at her with big eyes, hoping this was all over. ‘Yes, Mum?’
‘One more word about going out, and . . .’ She paused. Luke’s heart squeezed in on itself. ‘You know what I’ll do, don’t you? I won’t warn you, I’ll just do it. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, Mum. I promise I won’t say anything ever again . . . I promise. I promise. I promise . . .’ His tears prevented him from saying any more. His mother held him as he sobbed, and then she put him to bed with a low-fat chocolate drink and a hug.
It’s eggs for breakfast today. After breakfast Luke goes into his en-suite bathroom to wash and shave while his mother airs the room. He hears her moving things about and then the clunk of the window lock and the click as the small window opens. He imagines the cold, clean air entering his room and the bad, hot air leaving. His mother lets the air circulate for five minutes or so before Luke hears the sound of the window closing and the lock being fastened. He has asked his mother to stop locking the window, to trust him to do it or even not lock it at all but she always says that it needs locking and she might as well do it when she airs the room.
After the window lock is fastened, Jean sprays antibacterial air-freshener around the room to kill anything that may have come in with the air. Then she goes downstairs to watch TV. Luke waits until he hears the annoying Countdown music before he comes out of the bathroom. He tries not to see his mother more than necessary because, lately, he doesn’t know what to say to her, and whenever he does say something it’s wrong, or she accidentally says something wrong and they end up arguing. Without even thinking about what he’s doing he connects to the Internet, just as he does every single day. Maybe if he could talk to his mother in a chat room things wouldn’t be so hard. In chat rooms you can use emotions to show that you’re only joking, or that you mean something in a nice way, or simply to prevent people from misunderstanding an
d, ultimately, flaming you. If Luke could pepper his conversations with his mother with happy smiley faces, or cute, regretful unhappy ones, things might be easier. And if he used text rather than speech, his mother could never complain about his ‘tone’.
Luke half expects something to have come from Wei, but there’s nothing. He scans his Outlook Express inbox. He can see that there are three unread messages in his ‘Crap’ folder, ten in his ‘Mailing List’ folder and two in his ‘Personal’ folder. He clicks on this folder first. One of them is from Leanne and the other is from Charlotte. For a minute, Luke has to think. Charlotte? Then he remembers. It must be Charlotte Moss. No one has seen or heard from her for ages. He clicks on her e-mail first.
Hey,
Have you heard about number 14? Some trailer-trash cousin of Leanne’s has won the Lottery and bought it. Fucking hell. That house is cursed. That whole fucking street is so Jerry Springer – even now I’ve left. :-) Anyway, I expect you know all about the rich cousin and everything since you’re getting jiggy with Leanne. Yuck! (Yes, she told me everything.) What has got into you? I’m coming to this party, by the way. I’ll pop in and see you too if that’s OK. Sorry I haven’t been in touch for ages. Oh – I told a friend about you and he said he’d be in touch. Hope that’s OK. Say hi to Jules. Charlotte XXX
Then Leanne’s:
Dear Luke
I have tried to phone you but I can’t get any reply. How are you? My cousin Chantel is coming to live at number 14 and no one is allowed to tell her about what happened there. If Charlotte gets in touch with you before I see you can you tell her that too? I did go and see her but she was a bit out of it and I don’t think she really understood how important this is.
I really want to see you, Luke. I’ll drop by later today (Friday) after work. I finish at 6.00 p.m. Lots and lots of love
S. W. A. L. K. Leanne