Easy Peasy (19 page)

‘Your turn,' Hazel said to Dog-belly. He hesitated. ‘Go
on,'
she prodded the front of his jumper. I was afraid for a moment that somehow I had been wrong, seen or remembered wrongly, that his chest would be perfectly normal. I flinched imagining Hazel's scorn.

‘No,' Dog-belly said and folded his arms.

‘Help me,' Hazel demanded. She got hold of his wrists and wrenched them apart. I looked towards the house. From the little window I could see Huw sitting on his new tricycle by the back door. ‘Pull his jumper up …' I got hold of the edge of it, but he snatched his body away from us and the tree-house rocked. There was a moment of pause. I looked at Hazel. Hazel looked at Dog-belly.

‘Go on then,' she said. She folded her arms, waiting. Dog-belly raised his chin and looked her in the eye. It wasn't embarrassment I saw on his face, or fear, it was a sort of defiance. He pulled off his jumper and folded it neatly on the branch beside him. He loosened the knot of his tie, slipped it over his head and hung it over his jumper. Then he slowly unbuttoned his shirt, almost, it seemed, teasingly, fumbling over each button. He wasn't wearing a vest. He pulled the shirt open and there, on his bony chest, where the ivory ribs showed through the skin, were the six nipples, just as I'd described, the usual two, two rather flatter halfway down his rib-cage, two colourless puckered circles of skin just above the waistband of his shorts. Hazel touched them one by one with her index finger. Dog-belly sat absolutely still. I couldn't read the expression on his face. A little pulse was beating fast just above his collar-bone.

‘It's really interesting, isn't it?' Hazel said.

‘Yes.'

‘Touch.'

‘No.'

‘Let's tickle him then,' Hazel said. I didn't want to. I wanted to get out of the tree-house and go inside and watch television. I wanted to cuddle my fat little brother and blow a raspberry on his creamy neck. I didn't like the expression on my heart. I looked at Hazel and suddenly saw her as a bully. But I had to help her. We tickled him all over his neck and chest and he gave a sort of shrieking laugh. ‘Let's take his shirt right off,' she said.

‘No. Why?'

‘Dunno, just let's.' Together we wrestled him out of the sleeves of his shirt. Then the game felt over. He sat on the branch, scrawny and pathetic, his skinny shoulders hunched, his hands pressed between his thighs.

‘I know what would tickle him properly,' Hazel said, eyeing my formicary.

‘No!' I didn't want my ants let out and Dog-belly looked so defeated. Different impulses were welling up inside me, scrambling to win. I felt dizzy. Hazel had her determined look. I seem to be saying it was all Hazel, that Hazel made me do it. But that is not true. There was something in myself that wanted to be urged. If Hazel remembers this, I am sure she remembers quite differently.

‘Go on … it won't
hurt
him.' She met my eyes when she said the word
hurt
.

‘
I don't know
…' He sat there, uselessly, not looking at us to read our lips, not even trying to put his clothes back on. It was as if he would let us do anything to him, as if he almost wanted us to. I thought of the smug goldfish in the pond that he had chosen. I thought of all the times I'd watched him helping Daddy with the pond and how he'd been no help at all, not half the help I would have been. How
useless
.

‘It would be funny,' she urged.

‘We'd have to tie him up,' I said.

‘Go on then.'

The only thing to tie him with was his own tie.

‘It would only be a sort of joke,' I said. We lay him down on his back on the branch and I crawled underneath and tied his wrists together. He just fitted nicely, his chest splayed right out so that you could see all the ribs and the delicate spaces in between. I thought of a chicken carcass picked clean after lunch.

‘We could take his shorts off too,' Hazel said, touching the button at the waist.

‘No,' I said, ‘that would be too …'

She considered. ‘OK.'

Why did Dog-belly let us do what we wanted? He could have fought. There was nothing to stop him, really, before we tied him up, just shrugging us off, climbing down the ladder and going to find Mummy. If he'd cried or fought back we wouldn't have done it: but he did nothing. He just let us tie him up and lay there looking at us expectantly. My heart hardened. All right then. He wanted this and he should have it.

There was jam on the plate from the sandwiches. ‘Let's put jam on him,' I said, ‘then the ants can eat it.' Was that really my suggestion or was it Hazel's? I was worried about my ants in this game, worried that they might get hurt or killed.

‘Brainwave,' Hazel said. She opened up one of the remaining sandwiches and smeared jam on each of his nipples. His eyes were open very wide. They were light green flecked with brown. He looked at me with a sort of trust.

‘Go on then,' Hazel urged. I lifted the top off the tank. I thought just a few ants wouldn't do him any harm. He would hardly feel them.

‘You have to help me catch them afterwards,' I said. ‘Promise.'

‘Course.'

There were several ants on the ramp between the sugar bottle and the nest. I picked the ramp up, wiggling it free from the nest and collapsing a portion of the careful structure. ‘Oh blow,' I said. I held the ramp up, there were maybe ten ants on it.

‘Go on then.'

I held the ramp over Dog-belly's front and flicked the ants off with my nail. They looked bigger against his pale skin, brown-red, shiny. I knelt down close to watch a couple pausing on the soft-beating skin of the diaphragm. I felt sorry for them, snatched from one world without reason to another. One of them ran right round his waist, underneath him and disappeared, then several found the jam on one of his nipples, gathered round it like a cluster of hair.

‘More,' Hazel said, ‘that's not enough.'

Dog-belly was breathing hard but he did not say a word, he did not cry out. There was nothing to stop him crying out and then we would have stopped the game.

‘Go on,' Hazel urged. I thought just a few more wouldn't make any difference. Hazel would not touch the ants herself, she made me do it. I put my jammy fingers into the formicary and ants crawled on to them, making tiny tickling paths up my wrist. I didn't want them up my arms, inside my sleeves. I shook and flicked them on to Dog-belly, more and more until he was swarming. His skin had puckered into goose-pimples. Kneeling close beside him, I could faintly smell Wanda's perfume and a sweaty boy smell like pencil shavings and mouse droppings. Yes, he
should
have cried out and then we would have stopped.

Ants were crawling up over his collar-bone on to his neck, stopping, waving their feelers, stopping as if to converse. So strange for them, my ants, in this new, pale, jammy country.

‘His mouth,' Hazel said. ‘Look he's got jam round his mouth. She picked up a sandwich and smeared more jam around his lips and then, when he screwed up his eyes, she smeared jam over them too so that the lids and lashes were clotted.

Dog-belly's heart was beating so hard that I could see it behind his ribs like a fist beating to be freed. Each beat of my own heart was distinct and painful, like a high and tedious bell. Was it that he was stupid, or was it that he was brave?

The ants seemed to prefer his face. They swarmed up his neck and the mountain of his chin to find his mouth, leaving only a few stragglers on his chest; they gathered about his lips which were clamped shut and then about his eyes. And then he started to scream, a frightening sound like tearing tin. The ants were all on his eyelashes, feeding at his tear ducts where wet was starting to come out. He simply couldn't stand it. When he opened his mouth to scream they trickled in, so he shut it again, clamped his lips together, squashing my ants between them, spitting, spitting out bits of dead ant, screaming again, jerking and jerking his body about.

‘Stop!' I shouted, but he just screamed and screamed, his body thumping against the branch as if he would break his back.

‘Get them off him,' Hazel said, ‘quick, shut him up.'

‘I can't. You …' I tried to get the ants off him but the touch of my fingers on his face made it worse, the screaming was too loud, not like the screaming of a small boy, and the ants were falling into his open mouth.

‘Stop!' I shouted loud as I could right into his face.

‘Slap him,' Hazel cried. ‘Do something!'

‘You.'

‘What the …' the voice, sudden, loud, shocking as a rifle shot in our playhouse. Daddy's head through the door. Dog-belly's screams and convulsions. The lenses of Daddy's glasses glinting like white metal, his wiry hair on end.

Disgrace.

An atmosphere in the house like lead.

Arguments behind closed doors.

The word torture.

Even Mummy too angry to speak directly to us.

We were forbidden to go out for a month. We were forbidden to go into the tree-house. Mummy would not look at us when we were in the room but a door, a wall, away from us we heard her voice defending.
Only a game. Children get up to all sorts. Games get out of hand. They didn't mean it
.

It was late spring now. The sun shone heartlessly. The tadpoles grew legs. We had got our wish. Vassily didn't come round again. Daddy and Mummy weren't speaking except to fight. No one was speaking to anyone except Hazel and me but even we … we couldn't meet each other's eyes.

It was an evil thing that we had done. That's what Mummy said. Daddy said nothing, not a word to either of us, not a word for weeks.

After the month was up, I went out to the tree-house with my comic. I still felt bruised inside as if something bad had happened to
me
. It was all right at school but home was painful. There was no need for them to hate us so much. We had done a bad thing. But we were sorry.

I saw Vassily at school sometimes but he kept his distance. Once he walked just ahead of me all the way home. I listened to the slap, slap of his feet and watched the way his hair grew a bit too long down the thin back of his neck. I was thinking of saying that I was sorry. I was thinking of telling him a joke. But then we were nearly home and it was too late.

When I went into the tree-house I found that my ants were dead. Beside the formicary was a carton of ant poison. The tank was knocked over and the floor of the tree-house was covered in white grains and the shrivelled flecks that were the bodies of the ants.

I never went in the tree-house again.

Two months later we moved.

LICK

1

Sitting by the fire in Wanda's house. An electric-bar burns above a mound of flickering plastic coals. The room is small but a mirror opposite the window doubles it. If the curtains were open and it was daylight, it would reflect the moving limbs of the lime tree on the path in front. But in the February night it frames only the darkly flowered curtains.

I can hear juggernauts on the main road, roaring towards the docks. Inside the room there is just the sound of the mock coals creaking as they warm. No television, no radio voice, no music. Upstairs, very faint, so faint it might only be the sounds in my own ears, I can hear Wanda's relaxation tape – waves breaking on a shore, gulls maybe, against a regular pulse of blood.

Wanda's husband is away, driving his lorry to Marseille. And I am in Felixstowe visiting Wanda who is very sick. Soon I will go upstairs and offer her herbal tea and, if she likes, my company.

When she told me that she lived in Felixstowe now, I thought of the sea, of course, the buffs and greys of shingle, the queue of ferries and container-ships that stretch, sometimes, out further than the eye can see. And if you walk from here for half-an-hour, that is what you get. This house though seems far from all that. A tiny semi in an awkward elbowing position dominated by the roar of the dual carriage-way. Sometimes the windows rattle in their panes and the darkness outside is rusted.

On the mantelpiece, among the candles, ornamental frogs and bottles of pills, is a wedding photograph in a heart-shaped frame: Wanda in white satin, heartbreakingly radiant with confetti caught in her candy-floss hair, and Stan – whom I have never met – low-browed and muscular in an ill-fitting suit. His smile is abashed but also curiously sweet. And another photograph: Vassily, little Vassily holding a white fluffy cat. It is almost funny like a cartoon from MAD: a cruel haircut, great hearing-aids clamped to the sides of his head, a snaggle toothed grin. Looking closer though, looking as an adult at a child, I catch my breath at the vulnerability of him, the frailness of his neck, the open expression in his eyes.

There is a photo of Vassily grown too, a graduation picture. You would never guess, never in a million years, that they could be the same person. In this second photo, Vassily in mortar-board and gown against a bold blue studio background, you can see only too blatantly how handsome he became.

I wonder what Foxy is doing.

Last night I walked out. I am not here visiting Wanda purely out of the goodness of my heart. I have been planning to visit – some time. That plan might have stayed unrealised if Foxy and I hadn't fought last night. If I hadn't been casting about for where I could go, where I could run to that wasn't home, that wasn't anywhere she could find me, wasn't anywhere where I would have to sit and listen for the telephone and know it wasn't ringing.

‘I don't want to be faithful to you any more.'

‘So it's finished?'

‘Up to you.'

‘What do you mean, you don't want to be faithful?'

‘I mean … just that.'

‘I know about Kris.'

‘Oh.'

‘So?'

‘That was just … stupid.' She smiles at me – a little sheepish. Does she expect
me
to smile?

‘Why?'