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II
We got in with no trouble. The man who opened the door didn’t recognize us, but he didn’t live there and he didn’t give a fuck. I know this because he told me so. He told all three of us, one by one and then all together. He took my shoulder in his hand and told me from very close range.
I don’t know what he’d been drinking, but it wasn’t mouthwash.
I shrugged him onto Jack and went into the hall. Everyone was drunk and talking too loudly. A girl was crying on the stairs and another girl was comforting her by pointing out the pitfalls of all male humans. I seemed to be in a themed evening. Then, looking at the male humans in the immediate area, I saw that she had a point. Girls grow up and become women, boys become men but the growing up part gets left out. Some boys were dancing. Some were singing. Some were involved in competitions involving drinking. No one was winning.
‘They’re not worth it,’ said the girl on the stairs who wasn’t crying. The other one gathered herself and looked around. From where she was, halfway up the stairs, it must have seemed like Dandruff Central. I had thought that the long-haired look had died out with the end of grebo, that short-lived Midland sound that sounded exactly like the Midlands – industrial and stupid. I had been wrong. The hall was packed with leather jackets and straggling unwashed manes, ripped jeans and split boots. It was as though Marilyn Manson had been decanted into a kaleidoscope. From the horde came the smells of cider and patchouli. I didn’t see many tattoos. They weren’t well enough off to have tattoos.
Tattoos arrived, in the form of Jack.
‘Stone me,’ he said, ‘what’s this, fucking Donnington? What’s that fucking music?’
He went in search of it.
‘Are we going to have a drink?’ Judy asked me. I nodded. I had four cans of Supa Brew Ice Special and a bottle of the cheapest red wine. You have to take a bottle of the cheapest red wine to parties. Everyone does. It doesn’t matter whether it’s six hundred bikers in a clapped-out semi or a dinner party with minor royalty, it’s only polite.
I gave Judy a can of Supa and opened one myself. It tasted terrible. If it hadn’t had the alcoholic content of Dean Martin, it would have been undrinkable. It tasted so bad that you could forget what it was doing to your body. Supa comes in packs of four and costs less than either embrocation or lighter fluid, which come in packs of one. It isn’t advertised. It’s gained popularity through word of mouth. Which is strange, because once you’ve had a can or two, you can’t speak.
I’m not very good at drinking. I can drink as much as the next man, but I’ll fall over a long time before he does. I know my limits.
But I can’t stick to them. I recognize them as I see them receding into the distance far behind me. I’ve had one too many, I’ll think. Better have one or two more.
Then I start on the shorts.
We didn’t have any shorts with us, so once the cans were gone I unscrewed the wine bottle and swigged from that. Judy began to move in and out of my field of vision. So did everything else. The red wine stains became more widespread. I had them on my clothes. I had them on everyone else’s clothes. I found myself in the bathroom, with my forehead against the tiles above the bath. Someone had been sick in the bath. It wasn’t me. I had been sick in the sink. Remembering that, I was sick down the wall I was leaning against. I rested on the floor and listened to people knocking on the door. There was some very bad language. I was sick in the bath.
A chunk of the evening vanished.
I was on the stairs. There were more stairs than I remembered. I trod on a stair that wasn’t there and had a rest at the foot of the stairs for a while. A pair of men looking like the bastard offspring of a terrible union between Lemmy and himself helped me to my feet and spoke to me. I couldn’t understand anything they said. They sounded like warthogs. They looked like warthogs. The man who had once been in Pop Will Eat Itself walked past us. He looked like a better-known warthog.
Another chunk of the evening vanished.
I was outside, sitting on the drive. It was uncomfortable. Someone had been sick on it. It wasn’t me, I was sick on the lawn and on a cat that had been up to no good in the shrubbery. Legs were next to me. I looked up them. Standing over me were Eddie Finch, Jack, and Judy.
‘Eddie!’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you were here tonight.’
They exchanged looks.
‘He’s always like this,’ said Judy. ‘He’s too wussy for this sort of thing.’
‘Always was,’ said Jack. ‘Used to throw up if he had Woodpecker, and that’s pop.’
‘How much has he had?’ Eddie asked.
‘Half a pint,’ said Judy.
‘As much as that?’ said Jack. ‘He’s getting to be one of the big lads.’
‘Wine,’ Judy added. ‘Two cans of Brew and half a pint of wine.’
‘Well most of the wine’s on the garden,’ said Eddie.
‘Two cans of Brew? Call a fucking ambulance,’ said Jack.
‘You’re an ambulance,’ I said. I knew I’d got the joke wrong, but they were all drunk and I thought I’d get away with it
‘There, he says he wants an ambulance. He knows he’s overdone it. Stick to the Vimto, mate.’
I noticed that Eddie had put his arm around Judy, and that Judy didn’t seem to mind. I told them both what I thought about that. I tried to tell them, anyway. The words came out overlapping and stretched.
‘Yeah mate,’ said Jack. ‘You’ve had a bit too much tonight. See Eddie? He’s going to take Judy home. Put her to bed, mate. What you’d be doing if you weren’t on the drive of this charming residence. I’ll take you to mine, you sleep on the floor. Throw up on the floor and I’ll murder you. Fair play? Fair play. Eddie’s got his car here. Haven’t you?’
Eddie nodded.
‘Shame you’re nobody special,’ said Eddie. ‘Good story if you’re famous, drunk in Stourbridge. Good story if you do criminal damage on the way home.’
‘Useless bloody story if it’s just Sam on the pop,’ said Jack. Judy leaned down to kiss me. She came in too quickly and I flinched. Jack and Eddie picked me up.
‘Now the walking thing,’ said Jack. ‘We need to do the walking thing.’
We were in the park, close to the lake. Another chunk of the evening had gone. It was like having your life edited by the British Board of Film Classification. All of the scenes ended in odd places and some things were missing altogether. A duck quacked a series of little quacks. It sounded like it was laughing. I was sick in the duck pond.
‘That’s the vomiting thing,’ said Jack. ‘We’ve done that. We’ve done a lot of that. We don’t need to do it again. It’s not helpful. You don’t like it, I don’t like it, and I’m fucking sure the ducks aren’t happy about it. The walking thing. This is Mary Stevens Park, and I don’t live here. I live at my house and we have to get there in time to go to bed. Now do a straight line. Not into the lake. Leave the cat alone, Sam.’
I was in Jack’s kitchen. There were noises from upstairs.
‘Lisa’s up,’ said Jack. ‘Because of what you did to the cat.’
I was sitting on a chair that seemed to slope in all directions at once. Jack was sitting opposite me. He slumped his elbows on the table then put his face close to mine. His nostrils twitched and he moved a little further away.
‘I never got to tell you, did I?’ he asked. ‘Eddie got in the way. Must have known there was a story coming. I was going to say, do you remember when we were twenty? When we killed those five people?’
I threw away a chunk of the evening.
I was in bed. It was a hard bed, and the room was doing acrobatics. It did flips and cartwheels and somersaults. I could smell vomit. Perhaps it was the cat from four or five memories ago. The smell surrounded me and I fell asleep in it, just like Jimi Hendrix. Except that I woke up the next day.
III
In the morning anything could have happened. I wouldn’t have known about it. I didn’t wake up until the afternoon. By that time the smell of vomit had become the smell of dried vomit.
Someone had been sick on me in the night.
Jack gave me a cup of coffee and some helpful advice about drinking, and then I went home. I remembered Judy leaving with Eddie. Eddie didn’t strike me as reliable. What was Jack thinking of, letting Judy go off with Eddie Finch? Eddie Finch would have sold his grandmother’s kidneys for an exclusive. Come to that, Eddie Finch would have sold his grandmother’s kidneys just for a laugh. I didn’t know what he might have done to Judy for a laugh. I’d be sure to count her kidneys the next time I saw her.
She was at my house, waiting for me. She made me a cup of tea and made me have a shower. After the shower she sniffed me and told me to take my clothes outside and burn them.
‘Don’t bother getting out of them either, you drunken bastard,’ she said.
I had a feeling she was upset about something.
‘I’m sorry I was drunk,’ I said.
‘Drunk? I can cope with drunk boyfriends. They’re easier than sober ones. At least they’re honest. But there’s drunk and there’s paralytic. How did you get home?’
I didn’t know. That had fallen out of my head.
‘I knew it,’ she said, scrunching her face. A scrunchy face on the girlfriend means, Sam’s in trouble.
‘We went to the park,’ I remembered. ‘There were ducks.’
‘Lovely. You and Jack went for a stroll in the park. I was driven home by Eddie Finch, who has always wanted to be a rally driver. How do I know this? Because he drove me home at seventy miles an hour, going sideways for a lot of the time. He has fog lamps and bumper stickers and roll bars. There’s you, puking all over the wonders of nature, and there’s me, being driven home so fast I got there before I went out. Of course, I had to sleep with him. He’d driven me home, it was the least I could do.’
‘You’re joking?’
‘I may be. We’ll have to see.’
‘How many kidneys do you have?’
‘What?’ Judy went to the living room and came back with a cigarette. She had started smoking after going out with me for a few weeks. I’d tried to give up but it hadn’t worked. She hadn’t tried to give up. She claimed she didn’t smoke much. If she didn’t, either my cigarettes were evaporating or we had some woodlice in the wainscoting that were going to have chest problems when they got older.
I didn’t know what wainscoting was. I thought it was something low in the house, around the level of skirting boards. Or was it on the roof? I wasn’t sure. I did know that I shared the house with woodlice. I presumed they were busy eating the floorboards from under me. If you went into a dark room and switched on the light, there would be one or two woodlice in the middle of the room, heading for nowhere in particular.
Woodlice have an interesting life cycle. As I understand it, based on personal observation, there are four stages in the life of a woodlouse. Firstly there is the not-existing stage. You don’t see baby woodlice, perhaps because they’re the size of molecules. You do see them when they get to the second stage, which is pretty small woodlice. Then they become pretty big woodlice, and then they become unmoving woodlice that turn out, on closer inspection, to be empty shells. If you turn them over, all of the workings have gone. They’re empty. No legs, no feelers, just shell. How do they get to the middle of the floor when they’re empty? Why do they go to the middle of my living room floor to die? Where do their insides go?
All of these questions. Woodlice made less sense than women. Silverfish were also peculiar. Every now and then one would turn up in the kitchen sink, zipping about and looking at the leftovers in the plughole. You can’t catch silverfish. I’ve tried. They’re too fast, and if you do catch one, you open your hand and there’s no silverfish. There’s a little patch of silver powder. Woodlice turn into empty shells when they die, but silverfish go one better. They turn into glitter dust. I’ve been plagued by strange insects ever since I moved into the house. Perhaps I was cruel to them in a former life.
‘Are you listening to me?’ Judy asked.
I knew this question. It didn’t have a right answer. If I told the truth – that I had no idea what she’d been talking about because I’d been thinking about woodlice and silverfish – I’d be in trouble. If I lied, she’d ask me what she’d been talking about and I’d be in trouble when I didn’t know. There are a couple of wildcards for this – decorating the kitchen, say, or buying some new curtains for one of the rooms upstairs – but you can’t rely on them.
‘I think I’m going deaf,’ I said, trying a new approach.
‘Going bloody mad, more like,’ said Judy. ‘Why don’t you listen to me?’
‘I have a headache.’
I did an expression of pain and contrition. Judy did an expression of grim disbelief.
‘What, and it’s got your ears? I have headaches and they don’t affect my ears. Is it something peculiar to you? Or a new plague that I’ll be reading about in New Scientist?’
‘I need an aspirin.’ I went to the kitchen cupboard where I store my painkillers. I hadn’t got any. ‘I haven’t got any.’ I sat down again.
‘You haven’t got any because you didn’t get any, and you didn’t get any because you didn’t pay any attention to me when I told you you’d run out.’
‘How did I run out? There was a full box in there.’
‘I had a couple.’
‘You did? Why?’
‘I had a headache. Now, I told Lynn I’d go into work this afternoon. So I’m going into work this afternoon, unless that’s going to put you out. I told you all about it yesterday.’
‘Oh yes,’ I lied, nodding. I didn’t remember that. Perhaps I didn’t pay as much attention to her as I should.
It’s not my fault, of course. Men will bear me out on this. Women don’t tell you anything all night long. Then on comes a programme you want to watch and off they go, rattling away, asking you about frocks and wallpaper and other things you can’t make sense of. It’s almost as though they’re interested in it all. I don’t know how their minds work at all. Sometimes I hug Judy and half expect her to vanish, leaving a big powdery stain on my clothes.
She went to work and I went to the shops to get painkillers. When I got back I offered the woodlice some, but they didn’t pay any attention.
‘I know how she feels,’ I told them, and they trundled across the draining board in search of bigger crumbs. I remembered what Jack had said. He’d said we’d murdered five people. He was obviously wrong. He’d got his wires crossed, which was bound to happen given that he was run through with them. I hadn’t murdered anyone. I didn’t have what it took. I got nervous just pushing woodlice off the draining board.
PART TWO (#ulink_b987b03e-b6b6-568f-ba7b-2cb24a4b4136)
Sam, aged twenty (#ulink_b987b03e-b6b6-568f-ba7b-2cb24a4b4136)
Chapter Five (#ulink_62616bed-41e0-5141-bd91-b25365015fb4)
I
I’m Sam. I’m twenty. I’ve been twenty for more than eight months now, and it’s been a short eight months. Time seems to be speeding up the older I get. I worry about that. I worry about a lot of things. Time used to run a lot slower. A year used to be a year and now it’s six months. Time’s devaluing. It’s being hit by inflation.
‘Take the time to think about it,’ my mother used to say. Not about anything in particular. She just used to say it. She still does. She’s got a stack of things she says that mean nothing to anyone else. I don’t think they mean anything to her, either.
‘In a bottle on the roof.’
‘Because Y isn’t Z.’
‘You’ve got more books than Jack Robinson.’
‘Take the time to think about it.’
So I took her advice. She says I never listen to her, but I do. I did about this. I took the time to think about time. It’s going faster and it’s leading us the wrong way. I read a lot. This is why my mother told me I had more books than Jack Robinson. I don’t know who Jack Robinson is but if he’s got fewer books than I have then he’s in a bad way. I have a friend named Jack who has a small number of books – ones with bright covers, mainly, thrillers about soldiers outnumbered in the jungle, war stories for boys – but he’s not called Jack Robinson. He’s called Jack Ives.
According to my mother, Jack Robinson hasn’t got much of anything. I have more shoes than Jack Robinson. I have more sleep, nights out, nights in, cheek and bad manners than Jack Robinson.
If I ever meet the poor bastard I’ll give him some of my leftovers.
Trouble is, these sayings came from somewhere. They meant something at one time. Language has got all fucked up. Not in the same way as time, which is going too quickly, or the weather, which passes too slowly, but it’s still in a tangle. We don’t know what it means. We know what we mean by it, but we don’t know where the words came from. Words can do a lot, properly applied. Words can do everything.
Everything is words. Everything is defined by language.
With training you can make words do different things. Point to different objects. Make those objects different.
I think that I can cheat death, to tell you the truth. I’m cutting through some things here. There’s more to it than I’m letting on. This is fair enough. I had to work to know what I know. I’m not going to hand out any details for free.
I came to magic gradually. I used to read fiction. A lot of science fiction, when I was younger, along with the usual dragons and wizards nonsense. I grew out of it years ago.
In all fantasy novels there’s a wizard and his name has one X and one Z and one C in it because all wizards favour the letters on the lower left-hand side of the keyboard. He has an apprentice from the town nearby. The apprentice is an adolescent boy as imagined by a nun; full of the desire to become better and go further and he’s never masturbated.
