Another Faust

Victoria didn’t have time to play. She didn’t have time for friends or laughing or jumping or any other thing little kids do. Victoria was ten, but she didn’t like ten-year-olds. At all the London dinner parties, her job was to shut up and look well-behaved for the adults. She would sit in a big plush armchair, her feet barely touching the floor, and she would pick the petals off a bouquet of blue hydrangeas in a nearby vase. She would quietly brood as she watched the adults circle the room, drink tea or cocktails, and comment on the sculptures in the foyer.

Her little brother, Charlie, loved parties. He let old ladies pinch his cheeks and performed Mozart concertos on his toy piano, a Steinway baby grand. He was just five, but most of his babblings were in Spanish or Greek. Victoria was not amused by him. She wanted him gone. She watched her mother hold Charlie in her arms, while he laughed a happy, oblivious laugh. Charlie was the good-looking one. Victoria straightened her thick glasses in a mirror and turned away, disgusted. She hated those unhappy parties. She hated her graphing calculator and her schoolbooks, her tutors and instruments, her frizzy hair, her packed calendar, her father’s glasses, and her little brother’s genius IQ.

But that hatred was exactly what drove her to try to win — like a moth to a burning lamp. Because for Victoria, only one thing in life was valuable: winning — at any cost — and
that
she knew how to do. She spent her days in a blaze of activities, never fully enjoying any of them, just concentrating on her duty to win — bringing home prizes and certificates and good grades like a starved cat bringing a dead bird to its owner.

“In this life, you have winners and losers,” Victoria once announced to her startled algebra teacher. “The more you win, the higher you go. Professor at Oxford and a Nobel Prize —
that’s
winning in your field. Last I checked, private tutoring is not.”

Of course, she came back to the room a little later with her hands behind her back. She smiled for the nervous old lady and apologized. She had to. The hag would be grading Victoria’s exams whether she was a loser or not.

Victoria hated her schoolbooks and activities because they were her best friends, and like her mother, she had learned to choose friends she didn’t like. Riding, chess, piano, tennis, painting — she had tutors for each one, each unhappy like her.
You’re slouching on the horse. Your moves are clumsy. Your fingers are fat. Your fingers are fat. Your fingers are fat. . . .

Victoria’s fingers
were
fat. Another imperfection to add to her father’s long list. Luckily, the list wasn’t all that long when it came to debate, her favorite activity, the one that let her vent her anger. “I suppose our daughter isn’t all that bad,” her father said once, when Victoria brought home a national trophy. No, Victoria wasn’t that bad at all. During her debate rounds, Victoria could humiliate her opponents (she always did) and pretend that she was finally older, away from her parents, and powerful.

Considering they were never around much, Victoria’s parents managed an enormous volume of criticism. As for family time, Victoria got their e-mails. And their occasional update meetings at breakfast were enough. Her father leafed through calendar pages and ate toast and jam as though food didn’t have a taste. It could have been butter on cardboard. Her mother stirred her tea and read the
Times.

Her father: “Vic, it says in my calendar that you had some event. . . .”

“Yeah, I had a debate.”

Her mother: “Don’t say
yeah,
Victoria; it’s so common.”

Her father: “Did you win?”

“Almost. I came second to Liddy.”

Her mother: “Speaking of common . . .”

Her father: “And why would you let Liddy beat you?”

“She had a great rebuttal. I didn’t anticipate —”

Her father: “Didn’t anticipate? Then it stands to reason that you should lose.”

“Daddy, I’ve won the last four —”

Her mother: “You’re only as good as your last performance.”

It didn’t matter what they said. So what if Victoria stormed out when she lost at anything? So what if she obsessed over the paint on the ceiling, stood in front of the mirror, and tried to pluck every stray hair? So what? Victoria knew what was important. Her new debate tutor said as much; and Victoria believed. Because her new debate tutor was tall and regal, honey blond, and even prettier than Victoria’s mother.

A few hundred kilometers away, in a less-educated part of the island, a boy named Christian was running down an alley with a bag of hamburger buns and a package of hot dogs flapping behind him. He stopped by a moldy brick wall to catch his breath. The grocer hadn’t kept up, but he was hopping mad. Tomorrow the police would be looking all over Glasgow for Christian. He’d broken two of the shop’s windows. He looked down at his loot. He’d grabbed the wrong buns. He took a bite of one of them. Stale as the bricks behind him. Christian didn’t notice. He had eaten almost nothing for the last three days. That morning, he’d felt so faint, he got caught trying to steal a man’s wallet. Christian took another bite. The day had ended better than it started. “Happy birthday to me,” he said, and began to walk home.

Home was a shanty made of three sheets of corrugated metal and a mud floor. Spare tires and car parts lay discarded all around the shanty, which was settled in the hollow near a bridge. Sometimes volunteers dropped food or old coats from the overpass onto their roof; sometimes drivers tossed burnt cigarettes and dead batteries. Once someone gave a butane space heater. That was a good day. No one in the nearby town spoke to Christian, but they knew what had happened to his mom, the way his father had shut down and stopped working. They gave food, but they didn’t talk to him. It made them feel good, he thought, like they really took care of their own.

His last birthday had been different. They had had a house then, and Christian had had a mother. Everything had been better. Christian’s dad was a burly, red-bearded man, with a laugh as thick as the bogs. That was before his “bonnie girl” died, before his eyes went dark and he checked out of this world altogether.

Christian bent back the metal sheet and stooped down and into the hut. His dad was still asleep, wrapped in discarded coats, his beard gray and matted — a home for parasites. Christian’s last birthday had fallen on the day of the Ceres Highland Games. Back then, his uncles had been around. On any given night, as recently as a year ago, the town could hear his uncles and his dad at the local tavern, singing songs, telling stories of loch dragons, or just causing a ruckus arm wrestling one another to the ground. His last birthday, Christian had won the Junior Kilted Mile and the Junior Sheaf Toss events. Like his uncles, Christian was a strong athlete. But lately, he had given up the Scottish games, preferring to listen to football games on a handheld radio he had found outside the hut. He listened with hunger, dreaming of comforts that the players might have. He wondered if he could have that someday. When he played outside with the neighborhood boys, he imagined himself signing the next big football contract, the one that would get him out of this life.

Christian gently shook his dad. “Dad, Dad, I got some food.”

Christian’s dad groaned and tried to open his eyes. It was still tough for him; the nights were hardest. Christian could remember the nights not long after his last birthday: the lights would be off in the one room where they both slept. Christian would lie awake and listen to the faint sound of his father, the giant, whimpering to his dreams. Christian had had to take care of things from then on. He’d been caught stealing a few times. The landlord had finally kicked them out in the middle of an evening when the rain just wouldn’t stop. Christian thought to grab a few things, a picture of his mum, some coins from a coffee can, and his only prized possession, his journal — the one his mother had given him two birthdays ago, when he had asked for a series of adventure books and his mother had said, “Write your own, lad. Why rely on other people’s imagination?” The truth was, they couldn’t afford novels just then. On the night of the eviction, it had taken them only ten minutes to pack their belongings. His father didn’t have anything he wanted to remember or keep. As a parting shot, Christian had stolen the landlord’s pen.

The camping stove in their hut had run out of butane, so Christian couldn’t cook the hot dogs. He cut them up and arranged them on the hamburger buns. Christian hated hot dogs. He didn’t just hate them. They made him angry. They made him want to scream. For weeks, he had eaten practically nothing else. Hot dogs for breakfast. Hot dogs for lunch. Hot dogs for supper. Always in a different bun, whatever he could grab first. Of course, he hadn’t told his dad how much he hated it all. He never told anyone anything — except that pretty blond lady in the park, the one with the stylish hat and long black coat, who had sat down next to him and asked all the right questions. He had told her a lot of things. Even the disturbing things, like the fact that the smell of hot dogs now made him want to hurt someone and the fact that, if he had one wish, he would no longer use it to bring his mother back.