Alice and the Fly (8 page)

I’ve heard similar theories. A couple of years ago when my phobia was getting out of hand again Mum took me to see her doctor, Dr Filburn. Dr Filburn was different to the other doctors I saw because he was a doctor of the mind. He wasn’t like the others who just palmed me off with pills. Dr Filburn was going to cure me.

Dr Filburn said it was the concept of
Them
that scared me. He said I could happily coexist with
Them
if I could just overcome my irrational brain. Dr Filburn also used the term ‘Metaphorical Phantoms’, only he said I needed to face my Metaphorical Phantoms head-on. Dr Filburn was old. Not age-wise – he just looked like he belonged in the past. He had a moustache. Mum seemed to like him, though. He really helped her when she went through her sick stage. The whole time I lay in that comfy white chair Mum stood there, smiling back and forth between us. It was that same smile she dons while showing off a new item of furniture – the smile that forces you to smile right back.

Dr Filburn told me to close my eyes. With the click of a remote his office was engulfed in low, moaning whale music. After a few minutes he began to speak, softly. He told me to imagine a mountainside, shrouded in mist. He told me to pretend I was walking through the mist, searching for something, an animal. He told me to find the animal. I found an American bald eagle. It was perched on a rock overlooking a misty beach. Apparently this was my ‘Safety Animal’, and Dr Filburn told me to approach it, which I did. Then he told me to stroke it, which I also did and which, I have to admit, felt relaxing. Its wings were spread and I could feel the ribbed bones beneath. It made me feel light-headed.

Dr Filburn told me to open my eyes. He placed my right hand on his desk, which was empty apart from a pen, a pad and a picture of a blonde lady that could have been his wife or his daughter. Then he left the room, returning with a little plastic one of
Them
. He told me to maintain the peaceful state of mind I’d created stroking my Safety Animal. Mum was still smiling.

Dr Filburn placed the plastic one of
Them
on his desk. He asked if I was OK with the plastic one of
Them
on his desk and I nodded. He told me to close my eyes and imagine my animal. When he asked me to open them again the plastic one of
Them
had moved across the desk, a little closer to me. He asked if I was still OK. I nodded again. He told me to close my eyes again.

This continued until the little plastic one of
Them
was perched right in front of me. Then Dr Filburn lifted the plastic one of
Them
and placed it in the palm of my hand. He asked if I still felt scared. I wanted to explain that I’d never been scared of the little plastic one of
Them
because it was plastic and right at the start I could have just walked over and picked it up, Safety Animal or no Safety Animal. Instead I just shook my head. Dr Filburn nodded and left the room again.

He returned with a jar. Before the lid was even off I was clutching the leather and starting to fit. Everything went cold and dark. Mum was screaming. That was the day I bit the hole through my tongue. I never saw Dr Filburn again. I remember how angry he was when I bled all over his comfy white chair.

But anyway, they’re not real. I guess that’s the point. That’s what I have to remember.

They’re just Metaphorical Phantoms.

They’re not real.

It hurts because you are still there and I know you are there and I don’t know how to take you away. And it’s not your fault but you could have come to school. You could have to come to school anyway and just worn your glasses and nobody would have known and I would have walked you home and everything would be the same.

But nothing is the same.

And it was hard for me. I waited for you. At 08:18 I was pressed against the gate, holding my breath, watching your bus arrive. I was examining each Pitt kid as they stumbled from the steps. By the time the last kid had departed and the bus had pulled away I’d nearly forgotten how to breathe.

And I waited again, at lunch, in the library, staking out the hole in the hedge. But Angela Hargrove crawled out through it alone and returned, an hour later, still alone.

And all I could think about was you. The lack of you.

So at 15:30 when the final bell rang I waited one more time, in my usual waiting-place, with the ducks. I waited for the 17:32. I guess some part of me still expected to see you, shivering at the bus stop outside the Prancing Horse, but you hadn’t gone to work either.

But I stayed on our bus. I rode it all the way out to the Pitt. I closed my eyes and pictured your sleeping face in the driver’s mirror. I told myself you were OK. You were fine. You were at home. You had not been hit by a bus. You had not been attacked by a gang in the Pitt. You were not at the hospital having contracted cancer from all that smoking and you were not going to die like Andrew Wilt, shaky and milky and bald. I got off at our usual stop, walked our usual route. I watched my feet. That way I could pretend you were up ahead of me. I could imagine the click of your heels on the pavement. I could even sniff for your cigarette – I swear at one point I could even smell it. But you seemed further ahead than usual. I couldn’t keep up with you. Every time I lifted my head you’d disappear again and I’d be alone again and in the end I started to run, up all the dark and empty streets, run with the cold air biting my face.

By the time I reached your house I was panting. I sat on the wall opposite. The air was cold and stung the hole in my tongue. I focused on your red and peeling door. Your curtains were drawn. Your father’s car sat outside, rusted browny-green, its backseats packed with Hampton’s cardboard boxes. I could hear a sound, a voice. Canned laughter.

Your house backs onto Crossgrove Park. I hurried across the field, counting the houses till I reached your back hedge. Your garden was overrun with weeds, foot-long grass, white plastic patio furniture. Any intentional plant life was dead – the hedge patchy, the few scattered plant tubs at the back housing only shrivelled brown remains. Your father was spread across the couch in the lounge, lit by the TV. Laughter murmured behind the glass. Your father wasn’t laughing, he was swigging from a bottle. His eyes were shut and he was swigging from a bottle.

There was a shed in the corner: shelter from the light of the house. I found a gap in the hedge just behind it. The shed itself was rotten. There were several crooked or missing planks. The roof was held up by four wooden beams, one in each corner, planted into the surrounding mud.

A strip of light shone from the first floor of the house. A bedroom. The curtains were thick and purple, giving nothing away but a thin square of light round the edges. Every few seconds a shadow passed over it, flickering, back and forth. Back and forth.

That’s when I heard a growl – deep, nearby. I was leaning on the shed and I assumed it was the boards creaking but as I turned the growling increased, snarling and guttural. I turned too sharply, slipped in the mud. The wet grass broke my fall. A sharp pain spread from my palm – the burn, the scab from your cigarette butt, I’d grazed it on the side of the shed and now it was bleeding. There was mud and blood on the arm of my coat. I tried to wipe it but my hands were muddy too, even muddier than my arm and all I could do was make things muddier and bloodier and worse.

That’s when the barking started. I could see it now, the dog, through a gap in the shed. Its head was long and snouted, just a foot or two from mine. Its breath was hot and smelt like boiled ham. The only thing holding it back was a length of chain, knotted round its neck. I don’t know one breed of dog from another but it was a pretty mean-looking dog. It had lots of teeth, most of them yellow with black bits in between. Its gums were the colour of chopped liver.

I was halfway to standing when the back door opened. Your father’s voice echoed out across the garden. I dropped to the ground, once again facing the roaring stinking dog. Your father shouted for a minute, stuff like ‘Shut up, Scraps’ and ‘I’ll give you something to bark about’ but the dog didn’t shut up, if anything it got louder. I closed my eyes. The barking stabbed into my ears. Everything was wet and tasted like soil.

And then there was you. All it took was your mumble across the garden and the dog stopped its barking and turned to face the house. It whined from deep inside itself. You told your father to go back indoors. Liquid clunked from his bottle. He coughed and swallowed and breathed.

He said, ‘If you don’t shut it up, I will.’ And the back door slammed shut.

I tried to catch a glimpse of you then, strained to see over the long grass. Your feet rustled past. They slowed to step over the patio furniture, slapped the concrete steps up to the shed. The dog scrambled over to greet you. I glanced at the house. Your father was across the couch again, head back, swigging at his bottle.

Your footsteps creaked into the shed. I saw you then, kneeling beside the dog, scratching its ears as it whined. You had your back to me, your hair tied in pigtails. You wore a pink dressing gown, a pair of black Wellington boots. You rubbed the dog’s head, pulling the skin back to show the red of its eyes.

You told it, ‘There-there.’

Then you stood and reached, high up into the shed, returning with a clear plastic bag of bone-shaped biscuits. You rattled a few into your palm. The dog chewed noisily. It drooled onto your dressing gown. When it’d finished it rested its head on your lap. You stroked its belly. Rubbed its ribs.

You said, ‘Good boy, Scraps. Good boy.’

You lay its head beside me. Facing me. It breathed, soft and warm. The boiled ham smell was stronger than ever, probably because of the biscuits.

It closed its eyes, let its tongue loll onto the shed floor. Its ribs rose and fell in time with my own.

I closed my eyes.

You locked the shed. You crunched across the lawn, back to the house. I waited till I heard the kitchen door, then climbed to my feet.

You had stopped in the doorway. You were staring over at the shed, right at me. I hunched down. You mustn’t have seen me because a second later you turned and disappeared inside, locking the door behind you.

I can still see you now, that image of you I glimpsed for just a second. Your red hair parted, your eye all swollen and black.

This morning I watched your father through the blinds of the back fridge. He hacked at the hunks of meat on his block. He sipped tea and read the paper. He joked with Phil, holding his hat in the air with that big hand of his, too high for Phil to reach. Always with that laugh: ‘Heh-heh-heh.’

I only realised how long I’d been standing there when Phil stepped in and asked me to go the bookies. I was shivering but he thought I was nodding so he just placed the money in my hand and gave me a thumbs up.

It was 09:55. I had to sit on the step and wait till 10:00 for the bookies to open. The square was empty. There were two pigeons hopping around the car park. One of them was missing a leg. The other was missing an eye. They picked at a carton of chips. When the man from the bookies opened the door they scrambled into flight, landing the other side of the square. Pigeons never fly very far.

When I got back to Hampton’s your father was in the kitchen. He was enormous in my tiny kitchen, his head right up near the ceiling, where the steam gathers. He smiled down at me. I smiled back. I was numb and empty and smiling back seemed almost natural. He asked me to make him and Phil a tea. Phil shouted back that he wanted a coffee. Your father said cheers and called me ‘mate’.

In Hampton’s we use T-Rex Bleach. It’s ‘The wild way to clean’. The bottle has T - R E X written across it in jungle-style font, a teeth-marked chunk missing from the T as if an actual T-rex has taken a bite. Bleach is something I’ve got used to, working as a cleaner. It stings my nostrils and makes my fingers peel and sometimes at night I can still taste it, burning the back of my throat, but it’s the only way to shift real grime – the kind of grime that’s hard and black and no longer resembles what it used to be.

I put half a teaspoon of T-Rex Bleach in your father’s tea. Mum uses bleach to keep her mugs white and I know from experience that it’s only after a few sips the burning taste is noticeable and you realise you should have washed the cup more. I’m guessing T-Rex Bleach is stronger than the spray Mum uses. It says I N D U S T R I A L across it. The lid is childproof, with a black and yellow X on it. I can’t help but wonder why, if they didn’t want children to play with it, they put a T-rex on the front of the bottle.

Your father was over at the mincer, one hand shovelling hunks of steak down the funnel, the other covering the plate where the mince worms out. It’s important to cover the mince as it worms out or else it can pop and splatter the walls. I placed his tea on the block. I waited for him to notice me, so I could point to the mug. Eventually he did and I pointed and he nodded and pushed the big red STOP button and lifted the mug with his enormous mince-covered hand and slurped in the newfound silence. He coughed. He slurped again. Then he sat the mug back on the block and the whirr of the mincer started up again. He didn’t look up so I went back to my kitchen.

In
An Inspector Calls
there’s a character called Eva Smith who kills herself by drinking bleach. I think you’d have to drink a lot of bleach to kill yourself. If you brewed a tea bag in bleach and added milk and sugar and heated it in the microwave till it was steaming and gulped it down, that might kill you. I doubt half a teaspoon of T-Rex Bleach could kill anyone. Especially not someone as big as your father.

It was only after I’d delivered the tea that I remembered my first day at Hampton’s – your father showing me the racks at the back where the cleaning stuff’s kept, pointing to a white plastic dish containing green, plastic-looking pellets on the floor right at the back and telling me never to touch it, telling me it was rat poison. How many teaspoons of rat poison would it take to kill someone? How many to just make them really sick?