Swallowing the Sun Page 5
‘For making my lunch.’
‘All part of the service. Do you want some tea?’
‘I got something on the way home,’ he lies, because he cannot bear the thought of her doing more for him; in her kindness his deceit is magnified and edged with guilt. He tries again to tell himself that he did it for her. That it wasn’t an entirely selfish act but if he can no longer convince himself then what hope has he of convincing anyone else?
‘How was your day?’ she asks and as he answers, he listens to his voice and thinks it sounds different – weightless, fluttering round the kitchen like a trapped moth. She’s tidying and cleaning the chopping board, scraping the crumbs of bread and cheese with the edge of her knife and each little scratch of the blade feels like a cut inside his head. Tell her now, tell her right now while it still feels like a confused mistake, raw and uncovered, before it has the chance to fester and harden into reality. He was lost, climbing those stairs – that was all – momentarily stumbling into the wrong place. And now more than anything, as much as he’s ever wanted anything, he wants to come back to his home. Go to her now, steady the busyness of her body by resting his hands on her shoulders. Only once in twenty years, only the once and never again, he can tell her and maybe that will mean just enough for her to forgive him. And if there’s punishment, and he thinks that there should be, then he will accept it gladly and openly.
‘Alison.’ He calls so gently, it’s almost a whisper. She doesn’t turn but presses the lids closed on the lunch boxes. ‘Ali.’ She turns and looks at him as she places the boxes in the fridge. ‘Do you think we can find the money for Rachel to go to Oxford?’ There is one punishment he can’t stop thinking of – the one thing that he knows he could not endure and the fear of losing all of them warps and silences the words he wanted to say.
‘She hasn’t got in yet, so let’s not count our chickens before they’re hatched,’ she says while she dries cutlery and lets it tumble noisily into the drawer. ‘There’s bound to be grants. And I’ve been thinking that maybe when the canteen is closed during school holidays I could find a part-time job. Safeways are looking for checkout people. Maybe there’s a late afternoon shift would suit.’
He feels a new shame that she should have to think of adding more work to what she does already, determines to take on more overtime, even, as much as he dislikes the idea, considers the possibility he has long resisted, of applying for the next promotion that comes up. He goes to tell her but thinks the words he must use will feel like a lie in his throat and so he asks her what the children are doing.
‘Same as always,’ she says, looking at him more carefully. ‘Rachel’s in her room working, Tom’s using his time slot on the computer.’ He nods and wonders if he looks different to her as he slips away.
He goes to Tom first in the front room, feels a sudden burst of affection for him that he hasn’t felt in a long time. It’s as if he’s come so close to losing everything that only now does he know the value of what he has. Tom doesn’t take his eyes from the computer or acknowledge his presence in any way. Only his hands are alive with movement, the short chubby fingers stabbing and fretting over the keyboard. There is dirt under his fingernails. He stands behind him and watches the running woman jump and somersault, make her way down stone corridors. ‘Are you winning?’ he asks, but the only response is a nod while a finger pushes his glasses back to the bridge of his nose. He pats him on the shoulders and leaves, tells himself that he’ll spend more time with him, maybe try to find some sport or physical activity that they could do together. He pauses at the door and looks back. Tom’s head is pecking like a bird at the screen, urging on the girl. Where did the weight come from? It seemed to creep up on him, and now it’s getting worse all the time with every diet they try to keep him on collapsing in a matter of days because he doesn’t seem to care, because he wants to eat the things he shouldn’t. He thinks of Tom’s lunch box in the fridge and goes back and wordlessly places a pound on the top of the computer and watches a hand silently pocket it.
On the stairs he can hear the music from Rachel’s room. She always plays music when she works. Sometimes her mother asks her how she can concentrate with ‘that racket’, worries that she won’t be able to perform in the silence of the examination hall. Her door is half open but she doesn’t hear him because of the music and because as she sits at her desk her back is to him. Her head is bowed into the light from the reading lamp, she has nothing on her feet, books are sprawled in all directions to her page, with more dumped on the bed. He doesn’t go in or speak – he never goes in when she’s there or when she’s working. He stands and watches her work, absorbs the way she sometimes flicks the hair from her eyes, the angle at which she holds her pen, and the way when she’s thinking hard she holds it level with her cheek like a spear she’s going to throw. What would she think of him if she knew? Would she pierce his heart with her hatred? He can never tell them – he knows that now. Never, never tell and so he’ll bury it deeper and deeper with all the rest until some time far in the future; it might just rot away to the nothing that it was.
He goes to the bathroom and showers, slops great splashes of water against his face again and again, feels his face and searches his skin for traces but sees nothing. He has started to hate her, to blame her for making it so easy and although he doesn’t want to, he thinks again of his father huddling with them behind the locked front door. She tried to destroy what he has, to destroy his family and he has to hate her for that. But then as the water sluices against him he remembers the moving leaves on her body, the flutter and press of her hands on his skin, the tautening of her breasts and for a second he feels himself stirring until he stops the water and presses his body against the coldness of the tiles.
*
It’s not the shape of Lara’s body which he loves best. He leaves it to the other kids to talk and joke about her breasts. He never joins in because sooner or later someone will talk about his and then he’ll have to laugh and pretend it’s funny. What he loves best about the way she looks is her eyes. Almond-shaped tiger eyes, jet black in the pupils and they don’t blink or smile. Eyes that see in the dark. Eyes that are never scared. These are the eyes he would like for himself. Not his half-blind, watery blur of blue under puffy lids.
It is his favourite of all the games, nothing else comes close. It seems more real than anything in his life, it’s where he would stay and live if only he could. He has started to think that if he can master it, follow the right path, overcome all the obstacles, then he will find the answers that he needs. And in the playing, only in the playing, his body is subsumed by the movements of hers and so as he journeys deeper into the labyrinth, his whole being is alive and fluid, moving through the elements with consummate ease. Here he is light and unhindered by any constraint and so he can run without the shudder and shake of flesh, without the burning stitch and the shuffling protest of his breath. There is only the firm press of feet, the kick and effortless glide through water. He loves to watch her climb and jump – gets it wrong sometimes so he can make her do it again and again. Jump and jump, propelled into the air as if on wings. And with it the soft little moan, a simple bruise of the air.
Who can stop her progress? What sniggers, passed round the class like a parcel in a game that he never wins, what jokes and daily inventory of names – a list that’s always added to and replenished when it’s grown a little stale – what slap of hands can, even for a second, stop him hurtling forward to the very heart of the temple? Let the scorpions and snarling dogs leap from the shadows and be blown away by the unfettered fury of his anger, the banishing flash of light and bang of her guns from which there is no escape. For Ross, Chapman, Rollo, Leechy and all the others, there is pay-back time. The blowing-away. His dampening fingers stab the keys with all the weight of his body, eyes blinking with pleasure at the pulses of his desire. Let them try to tip his possessions into the toilet or out of the classroom window, let them try to take his money and sweets;
let all of them try. Because now he is as light as air, running, running, and none of them can touch him or resist the angry retribution of his fingertips. Running and climbing, bursting into the square of blue light above, before striking out in new directions. Running and running and no one can get close, not even the words they shout after him, and when he turns and stares, it is with tiger eyes, and now the only fear is theirs and it squirms and spirals in their throats, coiling tighter and tighter until it starts to choke the bastard life out of them and as they gasp for air he bends close to their faces and whispers ‘Suffer!’ And the one he bends closest to with his tiger eyes, and whispers to with most pleasure, is always Chapman. But suddenly it’s not his own voice he hears, but his mother calling to him, telling him that his time is up and he must shut down the computer. Then, as the screen darkens in front of him, he fingers the coin in his pocket and wonders if it will be enough.
*
She is working on her essay. This is her room. About eleven feet by nine. Not very big. A single bed with a white quilted headboard – she doesn’t like the headboard, thinks it looks tacky. She’s seen a gothic-style wrought iron one in a magazine that she’d like. Wants a new duvet cover as well. This green one with its yellow flowers is too childish now. She’s seen a white one in the Argos catalogue that has black Japanese writing on it. She wonders what the writing says, jokes to herself that it’s probably a trick on foreign devils and says something like ‘A whore sleeps in this bed’. More and more things in the room have started to irritate her recently with their slightly embarrassing echoes of childhood, or earlier phases of her taste. She wonders how she ever thought some of the stuff was cool – stuff like the yellow, floral wallpaper with the matching curtains from Dunne’s. The prissy little tie-backs, the colour coordinated border. Even the light shade. How terribly fashionable she had thought everything was, how sophisticated that everything matched. Getting the wallpaper up right had nearly broken her father’s heart but he had kept at it until he’d done a good job. There was only one place where it didn’t join properly and you wouldn’t really notice it, unless someone told you. Now there’s not much to be seen of it anyway. Where it isn’t hidden by the pretend-pine MFI wardrobe and dressing table it is mostly covered with her pictures and posters. There’s a big poster of Kurt Cobain, one of Liam Gallagher with a cigarette drooping from his lips and his hand raised in a two-fingered salute to the camera. There’s a poster of Ash, a black and white magazine photograph of Marilyn Monroe, and a film poster of Billy Elliot that the girl in X-tra Vision kept for her. Above her bed there’s a postcard of Mount Fuji, one of Mount Etna erupting, and one of Everest. She likes mountains. In school, Lisa says it’s an unconscious wish fulfilment thing for bigger breasts. But what she likes about them is not the fact that they tower above everything else, not the way they dwarf everything, but how they have a sense of aloofness, of detachment. Like they don’t care about anything else, what anyone else thinks. And they’re cool, snow-capped, not driven by mood swings and crazy, stupid passions that burn out quicker than new fashions.
There is more snow beside her bed on the desk at which she works. It’s a little glass dome and when she shakes it, snow falls on an alpine village. Lorna gave it to her at Christmas – it’s the type of cute / naff little present that everyone exchanges with each other and is given with extravagant hugs and pretend kisses. But the reason it’s beside her bed is that she really likes it, not pretend like, but really likes. She shakes it every night before she goes to sleep and watches the snow swirl and settle on the sleeping village. It reminds her of her favourite poem, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by Robert Frost. She likes things that make her feel cold. ‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep.’ She repeats it to herself like a mantra. At the start of every exam. When she’s scared. ‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep.’ It helps her to think that just maybe the things that are meant to scare you are the very things that will take you in their arms, hold you tighter than anyone ever can.
Beside the snow-shaker and in front of the book-rack are her other favourite objects, her talismans. A pink pebble picked off the beach whose smoothness calms and pleases her hand; a little piece of grey stone pressed with the outline of a fish that she bought in a fossil shop; a ball of plasticine that she never uses except to roll and mould in her hand; a carved and spangled wooden box that in its sweet-smelling inside contains a tiny alabaster elephant, some rings and earrings; her personal stereo; her mobile phone; a hand-held black lacquered mirror; a picture of herself as a child on the beach in a frame decorated with shells. Only her favourite books are kept in the rack, all the others are piled on top of each other in the space between the wardrobe and the dressing table, so it holds Alex Garland’s The Beach, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, A Room with a View, Sophie’s World, Generation X, A Dictionary of Mythology, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Heidi, The Collected Poems of Robert Frost, The Great Gatsby, The Old Man and the Sea, The Woman who Walked into Doors, My First Atlas, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, Snow Falling on Cedars, and The Silence of the Lambs. Between pages forty-six and forty-seven of Heidi there is a condom, given to her by the girls in school. For the first time. She wonders when she should use it but doesn’t know the answer. Worries that she’ll use it for the wrong guy. Give it away to the wrong person.
Also on the desk is a tray with computer discs, CDs and videos. Playing now, as she works, is Radiohead. On the top of the dressing table are combs and cosmetics, saucers with cheap jewellery and knick-knacks and on top of the wardrobe a tennis racquet, some box files full of school stuff, rolled-up discarded posters, unused bags and two empty shoe boxes that she thinks will come in useful for something. In the bottom of the wardrobe is a swimming float, a hockey stick and shin pads, and a small case that contains a pair of shoes from each significant stage of her life, starting with the very first pair and moving through the years. It was her father who started the collection and when she discovered it, she kept it going. Everyone collects something but she has never told anyone she collects her own shoes.
She sits at her desk and works on her essay, which she wants to get done even though it’s not due for another week. It’s about Polonius and his relationship with Ophelia and Laertes. She finds it hard not to show how much she hates this family and her only uncertainty is which of the three she hates the most. Perhaps her conclusion should be that they deserve each other, deserve the misery life brings them. What is it with Polonius? What makes this pompous, bumbling old man always want to snoop and spy? His whole fawning, ingratiating life is about gathering information, about being useful to those above him but even when he sees things with his own eyes he sees them wrongly, his understanding inevitably flawed and distorted. She thinks he is a voyeur, that there must be some sexual thrill for him in all this hiding and watching. She hates, too, the way he speaks to Ophelia, the way he calls her ‘a green girl’, tells her to think herself ‘a baby’, the way he treats everything she says with undisguised scorn and disgust. Ophelia should stand up for herself, tell him where to go but all she says is ‘I shall obey, my lord’ and if it isn’t enough getting all that interference from her father, she has to listen to it from her brother as well. On and on they both rattle, never listening or thinking even for a second about what she might want.
Laertes is the guy she never wants to give it to. Not if he’s the last guy in the world, not if the condom’s hurtling past its sell-by date because he’s like most of the guys she meets every day, where everything is on the surface and they’re loud and shouting about what they’ve done or what they’re going to do. About their honour in one shape or another. Always needing someone on their shoulder to restrain them, to hold them back from desperate deeds. The stupid way they drive their cars, the stupid way they drink, their phoney pretence of camaraderie. Of being in a gang. She hates gangs, in-crowds, so why then is it so important for her to be on the inside like everyone else? Sometimes, in the past, she’s pretended to be les
s smart than she is, because too smart is bad – a swot, freaky, different from the rest. A bit sad, a loner. ‘Get a life’ – that’s what they probably say. Get a life. After the stars, there isn’t any point pretending so she has to compensate in other ways to show she’s just like everyone else. Be a little sloppy and rebellious in the way she knots her tie, listen to the right music, be a little wacky sometimes. No one says much to her face, no one calls her Einstein or Brainbox: the most anyone says as they wait for results or hand in their projects is, ‘It’s all right for you.’ It’s not much, but she hates it as much as the worst insult she can imagine. Do they really think it’s all right for her? If they do, they’ve no idea about the worry, the unrelenting sense of failure that lurks just below the surface, the way that everything she does never feels good enough. That at any moment her world could come collapsing round her.
Why can’t she be like a mountain? For a second she closes her file and looks at the postcard she’s stuck on its front. It’s Fuji above the Lightning by Hokusai where the white-tipped peak holds itself above the forks, as if disdaining even to look at the stir of the storm below. Some of the girls have used their condom, bragged about it; soon someone will ask her if she’s used hers.
She goes back to her work and reads Polonius’s advice to Laertes before he goes off to France. She’s reluctant to admit it but is forced to concede that much of it is good. But how can someone who is so stupid give good advice? And the more she reads it, the more it’s obvious that every precept with which he lumbers his son is the very opposite of what he practises in his own life. ‘To thine own self be true,’ would perhaps mean more if it didn’t come from the mouth of a man who will contort himself into any shape that advancement requires. And what good would it be if your own self was inadequate or unformed? What good then to be true to something that was less than what you wanted to be? Even to know what your self really is, when sometimes it feels vague and fleeting like a ghost glimpsed in a mirror.