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‘I think it sounds nice,’ I say. ‘Something helping you out – what would it be, though, that made you find it?’
‘I dunno… Maybe God…’ He must see my face because he looks down again, ‘or maybe the devil. I told you, I dunno.’
I don’t know what to say. He doesn’t seem the type for God. He smells like he’s been drinking something heavy, and he looks tired and rough. I should leave, but I don’t want to. There’s something about him that makes me feel warm.
‘They say,’ he goes on, ‘that in Heaven there’s a stone for everyone. Underneath, it has a new name for you, so all this… doesn’t matter any more.’
His hands tremble in his lap. I can’t stop looking at them. He laughs and I know he’s embarrassed. ‘Take no notice,’ he says. ‘Tell me your name.’
My muscles tense with the scared feeling and I should just get up and walk away.
‘It’s Coo,’ I find myself saying, ‘short for Corinne.’
He puts out his hand and I have to shake it. ‘Banks,’ he says. ‘If you come again, bring us a cup of coffee would you?’
‘Sure,’ I say, and then my mouth goes on, ‘I’ll come in the evening if you like.’
He smiles, lets go of my hand and I get up. ‘You be careful,’ he says.
‘Careful of what?’
‘Just careful. There’s bad things out there.’
I don’t know what to say. Bad things again. Bad things everywhere.
I tell Joe about it on the way to school next morning and he gives me a sideways look. ‘Which one is it?’ he grins. ‘The one who was shouting at you? I told you he fancied you.’
I give him a jokey swipe around the head and he ducks like lightning. His expression changes like cloud shadow on the grass and he walks on without waiting for me.
‘Joe? You okay?’
‘Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘I dunno. You just…’
He sniffs and wipes his coat sleeve across his face, then in an instant he’s all right again. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Tell me about your alky – is he crazy too?’
‘Get out, don’t be mean. He reminds me of Sam.’
‘Sam?’
‘My brother,’ I remind him. ‘That was his name.’
‘Oh yes,’ says Joe. ‘But that’s not good is it, to remind you of your brother?’
‘I guess not, but Banks is different.’
‘He’s still a tramp, Coo. Not really the best of company.’
‘At least he’s there, and he listens to me.’
Joe says nothing, but the look on his face says it all. I remember my meeting with Banks and wonder if I’m losing it. Perhaps I shouldn’t go again, but I know that I will.
All the time we’re walking, I think about Sam. Lots of people lose brothers, but the usual noises of sympathy are no good to me. I lost mine a long time before he died, and I hated him and loved him like two sides of a sheet of paper. There are also the secrets. The secrets Sam told me when he was drunk and desperate, which I carry inside me like dark stones. Only someone like Banks could listen and not find them strange. He must spend all his time in dark and dirty places – my secrets would mean nothing to him.
It wasn’t always like that – hiding things and being scared. The change came slowly, like a dark stain in clear water. I was a late baby. There were eight years between me and Sam so I didn’t realise he had problems at school or that he was skipping it. Then, one day, there was a huge row between him and Dad, and after that, there was little else. He started hanging round with older people, and maybe he felt better with some booze inside him – more confident, more equal – but it didn’t stop there. You wouldn’t think a little thing like a drink could do so much, but it did. In just a few years it turned Sam into a monster. When he came home our house became a frightened place, and at night I lay in the darkness with a desk pushed across my bedroom door. How do you tell most people a thing like that?
7. (#uce819c4a-cfbe-5ded-a5ac-1e6fdc8bae2d)
Thought Diary: ‘Here we go gathering nuts in May!’ Nursery rhyme.
Now I’ve started talking to the Shrink Woman, I can’t seem to stop. I tell her on Tuesday evening that I’m planning to leave home. I don’t say ‘run away’ because that sounds stupid, like something little kids do then turn up at teatime. I tell her I’m packed and ready to go, which feels good because I know she can’t tell anyone because of patient confidentiality. I doubt she believes me anyway.
I also tell her I have two new friends, and this seems to cheer her up because she nods and makes a little note on her pad. She smiles when I talk about Joe. Her eyebrows wiggle about and she leans forward just a tiny bit, but she’s not so happy to hear that the other one is Banks. Her body language changes at once; even her feet want to tell me it’s all wrong, and the eyebrows stop wiggling and bunch together in the middle like two caterpillars.
‘He sounds a lot older than you,’ she says. ‘Is he?’
‘I guess so. I think he’s about thirty, but it could be his skin.’
‘His skin?’
‘Yes. People who drink a lot have old looking skin. It changes the way they look. It puts ten years on them and makes them smell bad, like old cheese. If they keep on doing it, they can’t even stay living in a house with other people, and in the end it usually kills them.’
She nods. ‘I thought you didn’t like to be around people who drink.’
‘I don’t mind Banks,’ I say. ‘He doesn’t drink when I’m with him.’
‘Do you think you can stop him?
I look at her. It’s a stupid question. ‘I’m not his counsellor,’ I say, ‘he’s just someone I met.’
‘And what do you think the point is?’
‘The point?’
‘Well. Why? Why an alcoholic?’
I don’t know what to say. She’s talking like I picked him out of a dating site and checked a list of his hobbies or something. ‘There isn’t a why,’ I say, ‘that’s silly.’
She looks at me for a bit, her long, elegant fingers toying with a tortoiseshell pen. ‘There often is,’ she says. ‘There’s very often a hidden “Why”.’
Every comment leads to another question – we are two contestants in a ring, where only one comes out. It’s all about getting me to say what I think without slipping up herself, but like I said, I know her game.
We fall into silence, but just before it gets awkward she’s called out to the telephone. Nothing is meant to disturb our sessions, so it must be something serious – maybe someone forgot to pay her and she’s worried about buying her caviar for the weekend. I lie back in the big chair and think about Banks.
I was going to go home after school yesterday, but Mum rang me.
‘I’d rather you came straight home today,’ she’d said. ‘A girl’s been attacked down by the marina.’
‘I’m not going to the marina,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I can look after myself.’
I turned the phone off then. Too bad. I didn’t go home lots of times when they were running after Sam, and they barely even noticed, so it seems a bit late to start playing nanny. I didn’t go home. I went for a walk – right down towards the marina. Serve her right.
I didn’t get that far before I saw Banks. He was stumbling along as if he had to get somewhere fast, but there was only the beach, with the sea splashing at his feet all annoyed looking. A bit further along an old man with a white bathing cap was starting a swim. That’s what Banks was looking at. An old man with white, stalky legs, a slack-skinned stomach and a chest with saggy little breasts all covered with hair.
My feet clattered on the stones and Banks turned, losing his balance and tottering down the incline. He staggered right into the water and went down on one knee. His arm was soaked to the elbow when he got out, and the tatty little cigarette in his mouth was a grey rag. I hurried the last few steps and when I reached him, the old man had taken a quick plunge. Nothing could be seen of him now but his pale face looking back at the beach.
‘You look like a sailor who tried to catch a mermaid,’ I said as I reached him.
‘He’s no mermaid. I thought he was in trouble for a sec there.’
‘How could he be, silly? He wasn’t in the water yet.’
Banks shrugged and grinned. ‘All the trouble I’ve ever been in happened on land.’
He hiccuped and burped, and we stood for a bit longer looking for the old man and finding only unbroken sea.
‘He musta drowned,’ Banks decided. ‘Horrible way to go, or so they say.’
We began to walk up the beach, away from the town. Banks waved his arm around, trying to dry it, and sometimes he’d stop and pick up a pebble then throw it down again. None of them seemed special. They were just boring ordinary pebbles. They were just stones. Banks turned up the shingle and onto the road and I followed him without thinking. We cut behind the bushes to the grass, where he sat down and took out a little bottle. The ground was littered with cigarette butts and empty cans but it didn’t bother Banks. He tipped up the little bottle to drink, and turned to me.
‘Tell me about your brother then,’ he said. So I did.
‘Sam was all right as a boy. That’s why I hate how I feel now. He used to play with me even though I was much younger. Sometimes he laughed so much he couldn’t breathe, but he changed as he got older.’
Banks nodded, looking down. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘what made it happen?’
‘I don’t know, really. He couldn’t get on with people; he felt like he didn’t belong. I think getting drunk helped that. He said it made him feel better … ’
‘Ahh,’ Banks said. ‘I remember that. Better. Right.’
‘Later,’ I went on, ‘I think he took other stuff too. He started to see things – normal things, but to him they were something else. He thought people were plotting against him too. He was drunk all the time – and then he started seeing the shapes. He’d phone the house at three in the morning, screaming that devils were chasing him, and Dad would go out with a jacket over his pyjamas to find him. First I wished the shapes would get him, then I worried they’d follow him home.’
Banks dragged on his ciggie and burped. ‘He was a proper boozer by then.’
‘And the rest.’
‘Violent?’
‘And the rest; he hit our mum.’
‘You?’
‘He hit everyone. Even himself.’
I try to remember that once Sam was just my brother. I try to remember when we were very young and not what came after. Sometimes I wonder if there was ever a time when someone could have stepped in and stopped it. Useless thoughts, those.
‘He wasn’t bad looking,’ I tell him. ‘He had curly hair and freckles, but later he got pale and blotchy, with bags under his eyes like he was about sixty.’
‘What’d he drink?’
‘What didn’t he? Beer first. Then cider, then later on, spirits – vodka and that.’
Banks nodded. ‘Sends you funny, spirits – best stick to cider.’
‘He used to invent games,’ I whispered. ‘Games we had to play when our parents were out.’
Banks looked at me and spat onto the grainy floor. ‘Yeah?’
‘Yes. He liked to make me do things I shouldn’t do, like steal stuff or say things to people in the street. He liked to see me get into trouble.’
‘Doesn’t sound so bad,’ Banks said.
‘When I didn’t want to play them, he got angry.’
‘It was the drink,’ Banks said
‘No it wasn’t! Stop making excuses.’
Banks looked down.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Not your fault.’
‘That’s okay,’ Banks said. ‘I did ask.’
He sighed and started rolling another of his ciggies – one handed which was pretty impressive. His fingers were yellow-brown right up to the first knuckle and the nails looked like he’d spent the last year living in a coal cellar. When the rollie was finished he lit it – right in the face of the wind blowing across the promenade – by lifting his coat sideways and hiding inside it. Banks knows how to do all sorts of difficult things that would seem useless to most people.
‘He’s dead now, right?’ he said to me.
‘Meant to be,’ I said. ‘But it’s not that simple.’
The psychologist woman told me, on one of my first visits, that when something is so big you don’t know where to start, you can take just a little bit. One sip from the whisky bottle, one slice from the loaf, or just the melody line of the song and manage with that. So I’d have to tell her about Sam in little bits that don’t join together. How he stole my life in tiny little bites. First my parents, then my home and finally even me. Everything turned around Sam like some dark sun, and whether he was drunk or not we turned in our orbits. Sometimes I wonder what sort of person I’d be if he’d never been born. Thing is, it’s just too much effort; there’s too much to tell.
The door cracks open and the Shrink Woman is back, apologising all over the place and promising to make up the time. Who cares? An extra ten minutes staring at each other for about twenty-five quid? That would buy Banks a whole heap of sausage rolls.
8. (#uce819c4a-cfbe-5ded-a5ac-1e6fdc8bae2d)
Thought Diary: Today: Words about the sea: ‘A swatch is an incoming wave, backwash is an outgoing wave, and fetch is the distance travelled by a wave. The longer the fetch, the bigger the wave.’
‘I think of my life now in terms of the sea. Sam was the swatch, the curling wave that swamped us, and the backwash is still going out, dragging us with it, over and over in the stones until one day it will spit us all out again on a distant shore. Right now we are still travelling, on the crest of the biggest wave I ever saw. Rolling on – a long, long way.’
I’ve started to write in the Thought Diary, and that’s what came out today.
‘You learn about those words in school?’ Banks says when I tell him, and I nod.
‘I coulda told you,’ he says. ‘I know.’
We’re sitting together. Me in my school uniform with my bag tucked under one arm and Banks in his heavy black coat. We are on one side of a square of wooden benches; it’s cold and the wood beneath us is wet.
