Transition (6 page)

He made no secret of the fact that he had no faith himself, except that “There must be something up there,” as he would say
sometimes when he was very drunk. He said it quite a lot.

My mum must have seen something in him. Perhaps, as I said, she also thought that she was escaping from the petty rules and
regulations and restrictions she’d had to accept living in her parents’ house, but of course dad had plenty of those of his
own, as we both discovered. My usual way of discovering a new rule was being slapped around the ear, or, if I’d been really
bad, dad taking his belt off, throwing me across his knee and leathering me. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, that’s
what it was for my mum. I started out in the fire.

Mum made me her treasured boy and gave me all the love that she wanted to give dad but which just bounced back off him. Don’t
think that she turned me into a gay or anything. I’m not. I’m quite normal. I just had this unbalanced upbringing in this
strange family where one parent worshipped me and thought I could do no wrong and the other one treated me like some pet that
my mum had bought without asking him first. If I’d thought about it I’d have assumed my family was typical. It wasn’t something
I did think about, though, and I’d never have thought of asking other children what their families were like. I didn’t mix
much with other children at school. They seemed very noisy and dangerously boisterous and they thought I was quiet, apparently.
Or cold. I was teased and picked on for being Christian.

I suppose people would say it was a troubled upbringing but it didn’t feel like that to me, not at the time and not really
since, not properly. Just one of those things. I worked hard in class and went for long walks in the country after school
and at the weekends. I always did my homework to the highest standard. I spent a lot of time in the school library and the
library in the nearest town, not always reading. On the bus to and from the town I used to sit looking at nothing.

We’d probably have rubbed along not too bad together, just the three of us, but then my sister came along. I don’t blame her,
not really, not any more, but it was hard not to at the time. I didn’t know any better. It wasn’t her fault, even though she
caused it.

We lived in the country in a line of prison-officer homes, within sight of the prison. I’d grown up listening to mum and dad
arguing over the years because the walls were thin in the house. Though you couldn’t hear mum, just dad. She always kept her
voice right down, whispering even, while he either shouted or just talked in his loud voice. I don’t think he ever whispered
in his whole life. When you listened to them it was like he was arguing with himself, or with somebody who wasn’t there. I
used to wrap my pillow round my head, covering both ears, or if it got really loud I’d stick my fingers in my ears and hum
to myself to shut out the sound.

One time I must have been humming really loudly because the light went on and I opened my eyes and dad was there over me wearing
just his underpants standing at the side of the bed and demanding what I thought I was doing making all this noise? He scowled
at me as I lay there blinking in the bright overhead light, wiping my eyes and cheeks. I was sure he was going to hit me but
he just made a grumbling sort of noise and left, slamming the door. He left the light on so I had to put it out myself.

I had already, over the course of the preceding few years, heard things I would not have chosen to hear, things about sex
and so on, but the night mum came back from the hospital a week or thereabouts after giving birth to my sister was the thing
that really made the difference, for me. Mum had had a bad time giving birth to me and she wasn’t really meant to have any
more children, but then she got pregnant and that was that. Dad would just have soon have got rid of what turned into my sister
but mum wasn’t having that because of her religion so she went through with it. But it was an unpleasant procedure and she
needed a lot of stitches down there. I suppose dad must have been drunk – especially drunk, as he always liked a drink.

I tried humming but I knew they were talking about sex that evening when she came back from the hospital and because of the
age I was a part of me was getting interested in sexual matters and so I partly wanted to listen, so I did. Thus I got to
hear my mother begging my father to let her take him in her mouth, or even sodomise her, rather than have normal sex, due
to the stitches and the fact that she was still very sore. I had heard dad in the past demanding these favours, or thought
I had, but from the little I knew neither had actually occurred. That night, though, he wasn’t to be fobbed off with such
distractions, especially not after months of being denied.

So, not to put too fine a point on it, he had his way with her, and I had to listen to the gasps and gulps and then the screams.
A lot of screams, even though despite it all you could somehow tell that she was trying to be quiet about it. I shoved my
fingers into my ears so hard that I thought I was going to puncture my eardrums, and I hummed as hard as I could, but I could
still hear her.

It took much longer than you might imagine. Perhaps it was the drink, or the screams. But eventually the screams stopped,
to be replaced by sobs and, shortly, snores.

I had, of course, imagined myself bursting in on them and hauling him off her and beating him up and so on, but I was only
eleven, and slight, like her, not big and burly like him. Therefore there was nothing I could have done.

Meanwhile my sister had been set off by all the screaming and she was crying the way that very small babies do, and had probably
been crying like that all the time but I hadn’t heard her over the screams from my mother and my own humming. I heard mum
getting up from her and dad’s bed and going over to the cot and trying to comfort her, though you could hear her own voice
breaking and her sobbing as she did this. Dad snored very loudly, and mum was sobbing and breaking down and my sister was
screaming in a high, unpleasant whine. It was only at this point that our next-door neighbours started hammering on the wall,
shouting, their voices like a sort of tired, distant commentary on events.

I am not ashamed to say that I cried quite a lot throughout the rest of that night, though I still dropped off to sleep eventually
and got up for school the next day, because it is amazing what you can put up with and get over. Almost anything, in fact.

Nevertheless, I think it was then that I decided I would never get married or have children.

Patient 8262

T
here is a certain purity to my existence. A simplicity. In a sense nothing much happens; I lie here, gazing into space or
at the view presented by the window, blinking, swallowing, turning over now and again, getting up occasionally – always while
they make the bed each morning – and staring open-mouthed at the nurses and orderlies. Now and again they’ll try to engage me
in conversation. I make a point of smiling at them when they do this. It helps that we do not speak the same language. I can
understand most of the one that they speak – sufficient to have an idea what my perceived medical status is and what treatments
the doctors might have in store for me – but I have to make an effort to do so and I would not be able to speak much sense in
it at all.

Sometimes I nod, or laugh, or make a sound that is halfway between a sort of throat-clearing noise and the moans that deaf
people make sometimes, and often I frown as though I’m trying to understand what they’re saying, or as though I feel frustrated
at not being able to make myself intelligible to them.

Doctors come and give me tests sometimes. There were quite a lot of doctors and quite a lot of tests, early on. There are
fewer now. They give me books to look at with photographs or drawings in them of everyday objects, or large letters, one to
a page. One doctor brought me a tray holding letters on wooden cubes, from some child’s game. I smiled at them and her and
mixed them up, sliding them around on the tray, making pretty patterns out of them and building little towers with them, trying
to make it look as though I was attempting to understand these letters and do whatever it was she wanted me to do, whatever
might make her happy. She was a pleasant-looking young woman with short brown hair and large brown eyes and she had a habit
of tapping the end of a pencil on her teeth. She was very patient with me and not brusque the way doctors can be sometimes.
I liked her a lot and would have liked to have done something to have made her happy. But I could – would – not.

Instead I made that motion babies and toddlers make sometimes, clapping with fingers fanned, knocking down the little towers
of letters I’d made. She smiled regretfully, tapped the pencil on her teeth, sighed and then made some notes on her clipboard.

I was relieved. I thought I might have overdone the kiddy-clappy thing.

I am allowed to go to the bathroom by myself, though I pretend to fall asleep in there sometimes. I always make mumbly apologetic
noises and come out when they knock on the door and call my name. They call me “Kel,” not knowing my real name. There was
a reason, something between a conceit and a joke, why I was christened so, but the doctor who named me thus left earlier this
year and the thinking behind this name is not mentioned in my notes and nobody can remember the reason. I am not allowed to
bathe alone, but being bathed is not so terrible; once you get over any residual shame it is very relaxing. One even feels
luxurious. I take care to masturbate in the toilet on the morning of a bath day, so as not to embarrass myself in front of
the nurses or orderlies.

One of the nurses is a big kindly woman with drawn-on eyebrows, another is quite small and pretty with bleached blonde hair,
and there are two orderlies or care workers, one a bearded man with a ponytail and the other a frail-looking but surprisingly
strong lady who looks older than me. I suppose if one of them – well, just the pretty blonde, if I am being frank with myself – ever
showed any sign of sexual interest in me I might reconsider my pre-emptive pre-bath self-pleasuring. So far this looks unlikely
and I am bathed with a sort of professional detachment by all of them.

There is a day room at the end of the corridor where other patients gather and watch television. I go there rarely and affect
not really to understand the programmes even when I do. Most of the other patients just sit there slack-jawed, and I emulate
them. Now and again one of them will try to engage me in conversation, but I just stare at them and smile and mumble and they
usually go away. One large fat bald chap with bad skin doesn’t go away, and regularly sits beside me, watching the television
while talking to me in a low, hypnotic voice, probably telling me about his ungrateful and dismissive family and his sexual
exploits as a younger and more attractive man, but for all I know regaling me with lurid local folk tales, or his detailed
design for a perpetual-motion machine, or professing his undying love for me and setting out the various things he would like
to do to me in private. Or perhaps his undying hatred for me and setting out the various things he would like to do to me
in private – I don’t know. I can hardly understand a word he says; I think he talks in the same language as the doctors and
nurses – most of whom I can understand well enough – but in a different dialect.

Anyway, I rarely bother with the television room or the other patients. I lie here or sit here and I think about all that
I’ve done and all that I intend to do once the immediate danger has passed and it is safe for me to re-emerge. I smile and
even chuckle to myself sometimes, thinking of these poor fools mouldering away until they die here while I’m back out in the
many worlds, living and loving; an operator, getting up to whatever mischief takes my fancy. How shocked they would be, patients
and staff both, if they only knew!

Adrian

Funny thing is, I always loved cocaine. I mean, obviously I loved it in the sense that I loved how rich it made me, how it
helped me to drag myself up from the pretty much nothing I started with, but what I mean is I loved it when I took it.

It’s a proper brilliant drug, coke. I loved everything about it, I loved the way it all seemed of a piece. The cleanness of
it, for a start. I mean, look at it: this beautiful snow-white powder. Little yellow sometimes, but only the way really brightly
lit clouds are yellow though they start out looking white, from the sun. Bit of a joke it looks like cleaning powder, but
even that seems right somehow. It feels like it’s cleaning out your skull, know what I mean? Even how you take it goes along
with all this, doesn’t it? Clean, sharp, definite things like razor blades and mirrors and tightly rolled banknotes, preferably
new, as big denomination as you like. I love the smell of new notes, with or without powderage.

And it energises you, gives you what feels like ambition and ability in one easily snorted package. Suddenly nothing’s impossible.
You can talk and think your way round any problem, batter down anybody’s resistance, see the clear, clever way to make any
challenge work for you. It’s a doing drug, an enabling drug.

Back where I came from they were all into dope, or H, or speed, which is the poor man’s coke, and they were starting to get
into E. Speed’s like laminate instead of real wood, or faux fur not pukka, or a hand job instead of proper sex. It’ll do if
you can’t afford the real thing. Ecstasy’s pretty good, but it’s not immediate. You have to commit to it. Not as much as kosher
old-fashioned acid, though, cos I’ve heard people old enough to be my dad talk of these trips that lasted eighteen hours or
more and just turned your whole world inside out, not always in a good way, and you needed to organise everything, too, like
where you were going to spend the time you were tripping, and even who with. Support staff, practically. Like, carers! How
the fuck did hippies ever get that fucking organised, eh?