Alice and the Fly (7 page)

I had to fix my hair back to its scruffy bowl before school, so nobody would notice it’d been cut. I tried to rearrange it as I waited with the ducks but the canal isn’t very reflective so I couldn’t be sure whether I looked like a rock star or not. I always keep my hood up and head down on the bus, so nobody usually sees my hair, but tonight I’d planned a lean-back-with-my-fringe-over-my-face pose. I’d planned to give you a bit of a smoky-eyed glance, too, but it’s hard to do anything when you step on board, my head fills with static. Did you notice? You looked over but only in that glance-around way that people assess their situation. Those vinyl-black glasses don’t give much away. I think you gave the Pitt kids at the back quite a stare. Does the fact that your dad has long hair make it more or less likely for you to like it? I wish I knew psychology.

You kept your head down the rest of the journey. The Pitt kids kept playing that thud-thud music (although it was more like a tap-tap through their phone speakers). They kept staring at me, I could feel it. I wanted to turn around and tell them to shut up. You were trying to sleep.

Today the church sign said:

JESUS

LUVS

U

(EVEN WEN NO 1 ELSE WILL)

You pressed the STOP bell and we pulled up round the back of the Rat and Dog. You rubbed your eyes and stepped off without even a glance back at me and my hair. You just left me here with these Pitt kids and nothing to do but write and writing on the bus is making me sick.

I wish I could have gone with you.

Today was one of my bad days. One of my neck-rubbing collar-brushing goose-pimpling web-tickling shaking kind of days. One of those days when every time I close my eyes – every time I even blink – I see
Them
, hundreds of
Them
, massing in my head. At lunch I couldn’t sit still. I kept jumping up every time my hair brushed my neck and the scraping of my chair kept waking Miss Eleanor and she kept shushing me with that big librarian finger of hers. In the end I had to go down to the toilets and sit in a cubicle in my balled-up position and stare at the wall. I had to picture your face. I knew that, if I saw you, everything would be OK.

And it was. For the whole bus ride I sat and stared at your red curls and didn’t think about
Them
. I didn’t even think about the fact that I wasn’t thinking about
Them
. But then you got up to leave and it ached me to see you, clutching the rail, rocking from side to side as we slowed outside the Rat and Dog, knowing that any second you would step off the bus and disappear into the darkness and I would have to wait all weekend to see you again. I found myself sliding to the edge of my seat, I found myself clutching my bag to my chest, and as Man With Ear Hair and Woman Who Sneezes both stood and blocked you and I could only see a tiny patch of your hair in the driver’s mirror, I found myself standing and joining the queue. It felt like the first time I’d ever used my legs.

We shuffled along the aisle of the bus, past the fat and frowning face of the driver (a face that said, ‘This is not Green Avenue, this is not your usual stop’) and down the steps to the pavement. For a second we stood, watching the bus pull away. You lit a cigarette, cupping your lighter to protect the flame, a yellow flash that soon flickered and faded in the darkness. I wondered how you could see with your sunglasses on.

The crowd dispersed. Man With Ear Hair and Woman Who Sneezes disappeared up the side of the Rat and Dog. My breath was steaming and my feet were numb but I still felt that warmth inside to know you were there, to hear the click of your heels as you hurried up the street. I waited till you were a black and red figure, too far away to hear my footsteps, before I began to follow.

Once my father had a bump in his company Audi and he had to drive Mum’s BMW over to the garage to collect it and I remember Mum muttering the whole journey about a ‘two-second stopping distance’ between vehicles. The two of them sharing polite gritted-toothed words about what a ‘two-second stopping distance’ actually was – the disagreement, we found out eventually, caused by my father’s use of ‘and’ to separate seconds differing from Mum’s ‘Mississippi’. I tried to use a similar distance-method for our walk, maintaining a twenty-second stopping distance (using Mississippis), which I think is an appropriate translation from car to foot.

It was hard maintaining the twenty-second stopping distance, though, because you kept turning corners and disappearing from view and I kept having to hurry to the corner and wait, lingering in the scent of your cigarette, watching you gain enough distance before I could start walking again. A couple of times you stopped and I stopped too, begging you not to turn around, because if you turned you would see me and I might scare you. I pleaded with you to keep on walking, to just let me follow, let me watch the swaying curls of your hair. Both times you did.

It was strange, walking through the Pitt again. It seems different now. Most of it’s unchanged, really – St Peter’s still looks the same (except for those tall green fences around it) and Crossgrove Park still has the swings and that rusted old climbing frame. Maybe it seems different because it’s winter and it’s dark or because it’s even scruffier and even more overgrown with even more misspelt graffiti, or maybe it’s because I know that Nan’s not there any more, not really, not the Nan I knew. We walked all the way down Brook Road and through the park to the estates. I didn’t see or hear a single other person, just you and your heels, echoing up each empty street. It was as if we were the only two people in the whole Pitt.

And then you disappeared. This time where I couldn’t follow: up your driveway. I crossed the road and quickened my pace but by the time I reached your house your peeling red door had slammed shut. I remembered where I was, out in the furthest reaches of the bus route. I remembered the gangs of Pitt kids I’d seen from the window, pitching stones at the cars on the carriageway. I could hear laughter, somewhere, a couple of streets away. I didn’t even know if I’d remember the way back.

But then I noticed something: a thin thread of smoke, rising from the end of your path. Your cigarette butt, lying there, smouldering. It gave me the same feeling of dread I get when I see a snail in the middle of the road. A cigarette that had been sitting in a packet in your pocket all day, that had travelled the bus with us, that had been to your lips and felt your suck and burnt down for you – it was just lying there, dying on the cold pavement. I glanced around but the street was deserted. I picked it up, held it in my pocket.

I ran back to the bus stop. I didn’t try to remember the way, I just remembered, instinctively. It was only seven minutes till the next bus so I sat and listened to my breathing, the butt burning into the palm of my hand. I didn’t dare remove it from my pocket, didn’t dare examine it in case, in the yellow light of the bus stop, I realised it was just a cigarette butt, and threw it away.

Later, when my sister was thudding away in her room and Mum had taken up her nap-position in the lounge, I crept out into the garden and sat on the edge of one of Mum’s plant pots and took the butt from my pocket. It was smaller than I remembered, smaller than it felt. The tip of the filter was crumpled pink from your lipstick. I smelt it, thinking it would smell of something other than cigarettes.

I held it in my lips. I clicked the trigger of Mum’s crème brûlée blowtorch (the only light I’d been able to find). Its flame was blue and extremely hot and it was hard to light the butt without singeing my nostrils. I breathed deep, sucking the heat into my chest. I don’t know what I was expecting – something smooth, maybe. Cigarette smoke always looks so silky but it felt more like gravel clawing down my throat. I coughed and dropped the butt into the flower bed.

It was hard to find in the darkness. Mum’s blowtorch doesn’t give much light. It was only as I crouched there, searching, that I noticed the burn on the palm of my hand, the weeping pink hole the cigarette had left when I grasped it.

I found the butt, eventually. It was lodged under one of the plant tubs, speckled with soil. I slipped it back into my pocket and came inside.

By the way, I wouldn’t let your dad find out you smoke. Whenever Phil smokes, your dad gets very upset. He says, ‘You’re sucking the dick of death, man.’ Phil sometimes offers him a cigarette as a little joke but your dad never laughs. He just gives Phil that stony-faced look.

This morning Phil was helping your dad carry some dead pigs to the freezer. Your dad lifted them no problem, hoisting them over his shoulder like a fireman, but Phil’s small and skinny and by the end he was panting his way past the kitchen like a wounded solider carrying a comrade.

Afterwards Phil was exhausted. He wanted a smoke. He looked everywhere for his tobacco pouch but it was gone. He got pretty angry, in a breathless sort of way, and kept asking your dad where it was, but your dad just gave one of his heh-heh-heh laughs and said he didn’t know and that smoking was the reason Phil was out of breath in the first place. He said, ‘You’re sucking the dick of death, man. Do you want your kid to grow up without a daddy?’

They didn’t speak for a while after that. Phil just hacked away at the meat. The Top 40 Chart Show was playing on the radio, that song my sister’s always dancing to. ‘Ooo you got me screamin’ boy …’ Eventually your dad took the tobacco pouch from his pocket and slapped it on the block and Phil snatched it and hurried out the back of the shop. I just kept my head down, mopped out the fridge. This week the Top 40 Chart Show was sponsored by Burke’s Clinic: ‘THE place for your boob job’.

After lunch Phil came into my kitchen, smelling like a whole lot of smoke. He gave me a handful of coins and a slip of paper and told me to go to the bookies for him. I said I was too young to go the bookies and he said not to worry, I looked old enough, and if there was any trouble to just say his name. He said not to tell anyone (meaning your dad) where I was going. I went out the back door. It was busy in the bookies so I had to queue. I handed the slip of paper and the coins to the guy with the beard behind the counter and he gave me a different slip of paper without even looking up and I went back and gave Phil the new slip of paper and he tucked it into his pocket. Nobody asked where I’d been.

In the afternoon the Top 40 Chart Show finished and there was football instead. Phil stood by the radio, scratching at his neck with mince-covered fingers. The commentators were angry with the players, shouting and calling them a disgrace. It got me thinking about Lucy Marlowe again. I remembered those times she’d sit on the steps to the Lipton Building, trying to eat her lunch in peace, whilst the boys took it in turns to kick their football at her. How they’d snigger and ask her to throw it back. How she’d still always throw it back. I remember once they hit her
Star Trek
lunchbox and it clattered down the stairs and smashed open and her ham and ketchup sandwich landed in the gutter and she ran inside crying and nobody even picked up her sandwich and it lay there all day soaking up rainwater until the bread had melted, ketchup veining out across the playground. The boys used to say Lucy Marlowe was a nerd because she was passionate about
Star Trek
and wore this baggy Mr Spock T-shirt on own-clothes day that would probably still fit her now. I didn’t understand because they all wore matching football shirts on own-clothes day and I think football’s much nerdier than
Star Trek
. It’s not like
Star Trek
host radio shows every weekend with phone-ins and episode-by-episode analysis. It’s not like
Star Trek
fans stand by the radio scratching their necks and chewing their lips, looking like the entire world depends on what the commentator says next.

Someone scored and Phil jumped and punched the air. He kept grinning till the match was over. Then he winked at me and went back out to his block. I didn’t wink back but I couldn’t help smiling when he started singing. He danced around your dad. He gave him a big kiss on the side of his stony face.

Your dad just laughed.

‘Heh-heh-heh.’

Miss Hayes has a new theory. She thinks I’m not really scared of
Them
. She thinks they’re just something to blame my anxiety on. She thinks I hide my real fears behind Metaphorical Phantoms. Miss Hayes said when she was little her dad gave her a ventriloquist’s doll, a clown, called Mr Fungal. Mr Fungal was her favourite toy in the world. Her and Mr Fungal used to joint-host shows for her mum and she’d swear she couldn’t see her lips move. She said that when she was a little older her and her dad had a falling-out. Well, she said it was like a falling-out, only secret. She couldn’t tell anyone. She said she fell out with Mr Fungal, too. She’d wake up in the night crying and Mr Fungal would be there, grinning away from her bedside table. She hated him. She couldn’t even stand to be in the same room as him. She wanted to throw Mr Fungal out but then her mum would want to know why she didn’t like him any more. Mr Fungal belonged to her dad and by this point her dad had gone and her mum liked to keep the few things he’d left behind.

Miss Hayes said that she stuffed Mr Fungal right down at the bottom of her wardrobe, under her boxes of books and cuddly toys and shoes. She ignored him for a while but in the back of her mind she always knew he was still there, grinning. By then she was becoming a teenager and going through a rebellious time, so she took Mr Fungal out to the woods. She walked for hours without even thinking. She came to a clearing and sat Mr Fungal right in the middle, on the dry grass, and poured a bottle of methylated spirit over his head and set fire to him. She said he gave off a lot of smoke, a big column of it pointing into the sky. She said he crackled. She couldn’t leave till she was sure he was all burnt away, till she was sure he wouldn’t end up back on her shelf the next day, grinning with his lips all blistered and popped.

By this point in the story Miss Hayes’ voice was breaking. She clutched her skirt. Her hands were red but for a thin border of white round her engagement ring. There was silence – and not a nice silence. Miss Hayes wiped the side of her face. She said that sometimes our Metaphorical Phantoms can seem like the root of all evil but they’re not, they’re just a barrier between us and our real problems. She said that even if there was some natural phenomenon and all of
Them
were wiped out forever, I still wouldn’t be happy. She said they’re just a symbol.