Flick (20 page)

MY HEAD, MY HEAD.

It's a little later. I think I've been half-asleep, and I'm woken up by a huge pulse in my head. Kyle is still talking, unencumbered by my outburst.

“The problem is that everything we own costs money. And you have to have it just to keep up.”

I stand up slowly. The left side of the room is lower than the right.

“And then you have to buy property in a fucking good location, just to keep all this stuff safe.” Kyle is emphasizing every word and each one beats like a hammer on the inside of my skull.

“We don't need all this shit, man! We can be free! Free, like that dude in
Amores perros
!”

Oh god. My head. My head. My head.

I hear the front door open and close. Then, suddenly, Gav appears, blurred and haloed in my vision by an ethereal light—dreamlike—and scampers up to me with his grin, his huge grin, that I'm suddenly terrified by. It looks like he's going to fucking
eat
me.

“All right, our Flick?” His voice is sped up, high like he's sucked down helium. He seems to be moving really fast, jumping up and down, gesturing, shaking. Or perhaps it's the outline of his body. Perhaps it's moving so fast the particles are heating up and he's turning from a solid into a liquid.

“Gav,” I whisper, grabbing him, scared for him, trying to warn him. “You're melting.” I hear his voice calling me from a distance, echoing, the sound of his words retreating, as if space were being stretched out. “Don't move,” I say. “You'll be okay if you don't move.”

Gav leans down the tunnel between us. His twitchy eyes flick back and forth, looking into mine searchingly. One giant vibrating hand comes closer to me, the edge wiggling like those little lines that float across your pupils in the fluid in your eye. Maybe time is being stretched out too and I'm seeing how things really are before the eye processes them, like seeing the movements between the twenty-five frames of film per second in one of Kyle's foreign movies.

“Flick?” Gav, so far away, touches my arm. “Flick? Are you okay?”

RIDING IN CARS WITH BOYS PART 2

We're going through the center of town. I'm looking down, but I can tell where we are because the bridge makes my tummy jump up and land in a horrible slow roll and I taste sick at the back of my throat.

“Look at that little piece of pussy.”

“Fez, keep your eyes on the road!”

“What?” I say. It's like I am present but everyone else is very distant from me, down a long dark corridor. I am aware of Fez's hostile presence in the car and I am frightened. But it seems that Gav is also here. I can hear him talking in my ear. Gav, the voice of reason.

I grin. It's a desperate fucking situation when Gav is the voice of reason. Suddenly a pain flashes through my skull, my head falls forward like a dead weight and for a second I black out again.

“Whoa! Whoa, whoa, it's okay, man, it's nothing, you just concentrate on me, okay? It's gonna be okay, it's me, it's Gav, you'll be fine, man, you'll be fine.” Gav's eyes are wide and his bottom lip gets caught on his top one. “You'll be fine.”

I've never seen him like this. I look up to the windscreen and watch the car straight-line a corner. Headlights strike us full in the face and the oncoming car's horn wails in protest. Fez swerves round it without a movement of his stony psycho face. I see those twitchy blue eyes in the mirror fixed hard on the road. I hear the rev count go up as we hit the straight towards the hospital. He's completely coked up. And he's enjoying this. The bastard. My brain starts to feel like it's pressing on the inside of my skull. I let out a small noise from between my teeth, which are bit around my tongue. Something starts to hurt and I can't tell where, and suddenly all I can think about is: “Rainbow.”

WHITE ROOM

Gav must have walked me through the corridor and put my head gently on the desk while he spoke to the receptionist, because it's the kind of thing Gav would do in a crisis. Gav was soft in the head from all the pot, yes, but on the plus side it made him a puppy to all those he considered his friends. He must have done this, but I was twitching like a psychiatric case and to me it felt like I had been dragged through the waiting room by some beefy bodyguard whose hands pinched bruises into my arms and who kept taking quick digs into my spine with his knee. When we got to the counter my head smacked into it, my nose definitely broken, and I was sure blood was pouring out of me onto the white countertop, like Edward Norton when his head gets fucked up under the bar in
Fight Club
. I groan.

Somewhere in the distance, like an echo from down a long corridor, I hear Gav's voice. “What floor should I . . . ? I don't know amounts . . .”

“. . . more specific . . .”

“. . . Quite a lot? I dunno, I wasn't there . . .”

“. . . who was with . . .”

“. . . his mates . . . young . . . didn't know what to do . . .”

“. . . illegal substances . . . toxic?”

“. . . not sure what . . . not exactly ibuprofen . . .”

“. . . age . . . national insurance number card . . .”

“
What?
”

Some time must have passed, because although I'm not aware of having moved anywhere, I'm now sitting on a doctor's bed, encircled by blue curtains, flanked by Dildo and Gav, who is now answering different questions.

“He keeps going . . . a bit, a bit blurry, like he can't see, and shaking, and he was sick a lot and he keeps holding his head and saying ‘Rainbow.' ”

Rainbow.

“Like that.”

“Rainbow! She's a girl!”

The doctor looks up from his notepad. “Rainbow's a girl?”

“Yes, she's a girl,” I murmur into Dildo's jacket.

I can't make out his face but the doctor's head tilts to look at Gav. Gav shakes his head. A chasm opens in front of me—I'm on top of the steelworks and falling, my tummy, my spleen, my colon, my balls, my dick, my legs, my heart, my lungs drop into my head. My eyes roll up, I feel myself simultaneously retching and leaning backward, everything fades to black, and just before I lose consciousness I hear Gav say: “There ain't a girl called Rainbow.”

AN ARC OF COLORED LIGHT IN THE SKY CAUSED BY THE RAIN'S REFRACTION OF THE SUN'S RAYS

There are some things that are too painful to say in the first person. I see myself from the outside and the realization of where I've ended up is sick, stuck in my throat. I see myself clearly, objectively, as Rainbow might see me.

Of course, there is a girl called Rainbow. In my fucked-up state, I was gripped with fear that maybe I'd made her up and didn't think about the more logical explanation: that Gav had been doing community service all this time and had never met her. Four months had gone by since the night I met Rainbow , my entire life had changed, and to a friend in the same town there hadn't even been a ripple in the water.

She visits me in the hospital. Rainbow, I mean. I open my eyes from a sleep, and she's stood at the door. She's ethereal, a dream. She was a really beautiful dream, I think. And I start crying.

And she starts crying. The light from the window hits exactly where she stands in the doorway, making her fluff of hair look like a lion's mane, a frieze of fire circling her heart-shaped face. She wears a white slip of a dress with a dark leather band around her right upper arm, and dirty white trainers falling off her feet. Her eyes are electric and blue and open wide in worry. She'll never have to worry like that again. Maybe at another time it would have worked out. But everyone has to climb a rocky path before reaching that rainbow. And me, I was just learning how to climb, fucking up, making mistakes.

She was a rainbow. A sign of hope proved illusory. An arc of colored light in the sky caused by the rain's refraction of the sun's rays. I wasn't ready to be in her spotlight.

The thing about Rainbow was that she knew the truth in people. You met her eyes, you were illuminated in her light, and devastated, because you saw that she knew you, right through, every flaw. She branded you with her rays. I couldn't stay there. The pressure was intense. My complexion was wrecked. I couldn't keep it up.

So I lost someone that had meant the world to me. Only I guess I didn't realize it, just then.

A POEM

I read this book once, maybe it was for class, maybe at Rainbow's, I can't remember. It was a collection of poems by this guy Corey Elwood Dean. One read:

I make these choices

I don't know where they will lead

Before

But after

The devastation on your face

Disappointment

Again

The first time was the worst

Flashes of color desaturated

The ones later meant less.

I bet you anything he was talking about a girl.

LOOSE ENDS

You thought that was the end? It would probably have been way better if it was, all Hollywood and devastation and that. But life's not all bad! Although the following doesn't really lend any weight to that claim. Anyway. There's one more piece to the story.

Just before the summer ends I'm in the center of Sandford City of a late afternoon. It's a Saturday, a lot of people are out, walking up and down the high street and buying things in the summer sales. I'm shopping on my own, walking towards the station, about to catch the train back. In one of my assorted carrier bags there is a bracelet in red, yellow, green, blue, orange and pink chunky beads that I've bought for Ash, to make up with her. There is also a DVD, a book on Flash animation, a bib for Teagan's baby, and a white short-sleeved T-shirt. I turn a corner and finish texting (unfortunately not Rainbow—in fact, me mam), press send and look up to a shout.

“Fucking little cocksucker.” Fez.

Fez in full flow, shirt open and spitting in Kyle's face.

“You owe it me, Fez. You're a piece of shit,” Kyle is saying.

Danny stands behind Kyle, his big form proud, his fists clenched. Troy is behind Fez, more nervous. Around them stand about ten of my friends, scattered between the two forming groups. I look for Ash. She isn't there. I watch what unfolds as if from in front of a television screen, or behind a wall of glass.

“FUCK you.” Fez grabs Kyle's shirt. “If you think—”

But Kyle has seen this coming. He pulls Fez towards him and swings him around to his right side. The unexpected momentum has Fez on the floor. Kyle kicks his face and Fez pulls him down by the leg and pushes himself up off of Kyle's body. He takes three steps back and returns, like a wave on the shore, with force. Gav isn't there, but Troy, Limbo and another lad I don't know join Fez, quick-stepping forward, leaning on their back feet and jabbing fists into their opponents' faces, like synchronized dancers. Kyle and Danny take the punches and add more of their own. Dildo, stood at the back of the crowd, hesitant, awkward, my gentle giant, sees the inequality in the size of the groups and heads forward reluctantly to rectify the situation. He pushes Fez off Kyle. Fez stumbles backwards and I watch Kyle's hand pull something out of his pocket and shake it downwards. He steps forward again and a girl in a black dress and pink shoes screams. Danny's Girl.

This doesn't make me proud. I don't know what I should have done. I don't have an answer. I turned, pushed my way through some future witnesses. Maybe I should have been there for my mates. They are, were, as good as me. I'm no more worth saving than any of them. A month ago I would've joined in. Now it happens in a blur, and I walk away, unrecognized, anonymous in the crowd.

Kyle got five years for concealed carry plus GBH, meaning “grievous bodily harm,” and a large scar across his lip where his own knife was used against him. Poor Dildo got ten months and his first Anti-Social Behavior Order, or ASBO. Danny and Limbo did community service. Troy and the other lad, a guy called Ryan, because they were adult at the time of the offense, got eighteen months each for inciting riots and possession of cannabis, respectively. Fez was stabbed in the stomach by Kyle, and in the chest by a guy I know vaguely as Cappo, and succumbed to his wounds four hours later in the care of Sandford General Hospital, watched over by his mother, Mary Ann Freeman. That was how the paper put it.

I don't think about Rainbow much that September. We spend all our time on the beach, me and Ash, Mike and Jamie, and a new mate called Squidy, enjoying the freedom of no longer being in education. Only Mike gets high enough grades to go to college, and he starts to flunk as soon as he gets there, dragged down by us, no doubt, calling him out to play. I dig out my old wetsuit and learn to surf properly. I pass my test, buy a car and work as a driver for a kebab house. I crack jokes, life stays busy, I get by. Then when the seasons start to change and winter comes, I think about her. How she tasted of strawberry lip balm and hot chocolate in the cold nights of early summer on the coast. How the way she looked at me when she was disappointed and expected more had almost a cruelty about it, a look of pain and self-control and knowledge hardened into stone that hinted at things she had been through, things she had had to leave behind. I suppose it took those few months of living, of not thinking of her, for the shock to wear off. For me to understand something I still can't articulate about loss. After that winter I tried to put her out of my mind, but I think of her again the next April, around the time we met, and the next, and then all the summers since till I'm a lot older and maybe not at all wiser. I guess some girls just stand out more than the others.

And you. Yes, you. You thought this was just some book—a fairy tale about a mildly hard-up kid from England with a twist at the end. Well this isn't. It fucking isn't. It's my life and I have to live it. And it doesn't just stop because this book is over.

There's no underlying reason for why I am who I am, why my life has happened how it has. I am not gay and frustrated. I was not abused at twelve by an evil PE teacher. I am not neglected or unloved. Equally, at the end of this story, I do not die of an overdose, Rainbow is not revealed to be my long-lost twin, neither of us kill ourselves. I am just a boy, a man, a man/boy, a teenager . . . I'm a human being, in any case. Perhaps I had a crap education, perhaps I fell in with the wrong crowd, perhaps I am ever so slightly emotionally malnourished. Maybe, but there will be no equal, opposing force to balance this out and deliver a happy ending. These flaws and mistakes and missed chances will not be redeemed. Rainbow does not come running back at the last moment, eyes bright, breasts heaving, and Flick confess his deepest feelings. No. Our lovers lose each other in the dense, chaotic and impossible matter of living. Two arrows flying through the dark and missing each other, maybe by a fraction of an inch.

Think of that person you knew when you were a kid, who you always thought you could have loved completely and forever. Well, you could have. It's the truth, and it's the saddest and simplest thing. There isn't just one person for each of us in the world. There aren't many, but there are always a few people we could have made it with, who maybe we still want to make it with, who press themselves so close to our hearts they leave scars, and then slip through our fingers and disappear from our lives. And it doesn't make a difference if you're thirteen or ninety-eight because some things you feel are real, no matter when. Yes. I could have loved Rainbow forever. Yes. I could have had a better life. Yes. I could have been lifted from poverty and hopelessness and total, mind-rotting boredom.

But I will not be. I may never be. Because this is not the story of a faceless teenage down-and-out. It is my life. And unlike the pages of a flick book—a series of fast and frenetic images, delivered in double time, a bit of humor, a dash of tragedy, fairly black and white in its lack of variety, each page a story, each flick a life failing—it will not end when the pages run out. Only this book will.

So. Life goes on and I don't really expect much from it. Try not to think about it/her/him, enjoy what you can, and turn the page. FLICK.