Rocks in the Belly (4 page)

Some mums and dads are just better than other mums and dads. My mum says she's especially good which is why she gets to take in kids whose mum and dad are not so good, or just struggling but good deep down.

Normally Mum doesn't tell me what's wrong with the mum and dad until after the kid has gone, unless there's something I need to know. Like we had a boy once who loved to start fires and Mum had to buy an electric thing for lighting the stove and throw away all the matches.

Plus I'm never allowed to get the door, or leave it unlocked, or say my name or address when I answer the phone because one day a bad parent might find out where we are and come try to take their kid back.

We never have any foster girls. Ever. Probably because girls
are treated better than boys, that's why. Or girls behave better. Or parents love girls more than boys. Or girls are only born to good parents.

I can hear Mum and Dad talking to Robert downstairs but I get into bed and play games with the moon. If I relax my eyes there are two moons and they're like a wolf is looking down at me.

I wonder if you get moon rainbows at night if it rains. I don't see why not but I've never seen one. I think moon rainbows would be made up of all the sad colours like black and midnight blue. Which means moon rainbows might exist but you just can't see them cos they're the same colour as night.

Only owls can see them.

This morning I wake up happy then remember Robert's here. Robert gives me the same feeling as a maths test or the dentist or Sunday night. That snaky tummy feeling. Plus I can hear them all downstairs together already like they never went to bed and had midnight feasts and played.

I check for overnight rain but there's just a tiny bit probably from dew so I don't mark it down. I do my hair nicely and dress up in my scratchiest clothes. I even clean my teeth. Then I'm scared to go down but scared to stay up and let them play happy families without me.

When I get downstairs Mum is dressed nice too and her hair is done. ‘What you doing all dressed up, silly!' she says and laughs at me. Robert's at the kitchen table watching and Dad is out digging in the garden but not in his digging clothes.

Everyone is dressing up for Robert but Robert's wearing the same clothes every day cos he had to leave his home in a hurry.

Today is his 11th ever breakfast in our house and I ask Mum how many more breakfasts she thinks he'll have with us but she gives me one of those nothing answers and her laser beam look. Robert fidgets.

I eat as much as him maybe more plus finish his leftover orange juice even though I feel like a boa constrictor that just ate a boa constrictor that just ate a goat. Dad says that after most dinners.

Robert is 12 which is a lot older than I am. I want to be 12 but when I'm 12 he'll be, well, by then Robert will be …

17.

I'll never catch up.

The day he came Mum asked me to show him round while she spoke to the social workers. There was lots of paperwork to sign.

‘Why don't you take Mic — I mean Robert on the grand tour?' she said. Then she got the serious beetroots. ‘Sorry, Robert.'

Sometimes she accidentally calls me Michael too.

The social worker with the big boobs watched her and I quickly took my Alonely poem off the fridge and hid it in my pocket but later on Mum made me put it up again. ‘You were most insistent about having that poem up, young man.'

After lunch she gives Robert and me a chocolate biscuit. Robert eats his bickie really quickly in the living room. He eats everything fast. I wait till he's finished and then go in and show him mine with only a little nibble out of it.

‘So what,' he says. ‘I enjoyed mine you haven't yet. Makes no diff.' He shrugs then looks round me at the TV. He's starting to get a bit brave.

I turn the TV off and run out the room and he calls me a little brat and gets up and turns it back on.

I put my biscuit on the oven where it's still warm, and wait until the chocolate is changing colour and getting melty. Then I go through to the freezer which is big and long like an enormous pirate's chest. I open it and go on tiptoe to put my biscuit inside on a box of chicken kievs.

‘WHAT are you doing playing in the FREEZER!' Mum can creep up on you better than any spy. ‘Are you stealing food, mister?'

‘I was just putting my biscuit in.'

‘Why?'

I shrug. Robert comes and stands behind her, wondering what the fuss is about.

‘No more playing with the freezer, thank you.'

‘Why!'

‘BECAUSE. Besides, if you fell in you wouldn't be able to get out.'

I stare back at Robert for a second, really hard. ‘I would. Easy.'

‘It's a heavy lid and it can get quite sticky. Put the lid down, good boy.'

‘I'd be able to get out. Men are strong, women are weak.'

‘Is that right.' She picks me up and puts me in the freezer on top of the food and then the lid is slammed shut. It's very black and cold. I push on the lid then wriggle into a better space to push again and I push and it's not opening and my heart is all squishy like when the water hose kinks.

I do that to the hose sometimes when Dad's watering the garden. Then I always run and hide and he huffs and walks over and unkinks it, looking around in case it's me. And I'll sneak back after a minute and kink it again. Eventually I end up getting a good spraying.

I can hear my breathing all around me in the freezer, really loud and fast as if there are a hundred boys panicking in here with me. I need the toilet.

Mum's voice is all muffled. ‘Come on, strong man! Are you trying to open it?' She's giggling a bit like Robert is tickling her.

I'm screaming and screaming and it finally goes all light and she picks me up and says ‘See what happens to little boys who get too big for their boots. We'll have no more playing with the freezer thankyouverymuch.'

I've got chocolate and crumbs stuck to my school shirt and Robert is walking away and trying not to laugh. I dry my eyes and
go upstairs and get into my lion's den. I feel heavy, like when I stay in the bath while it empties.

Eventually I get too hot and climb out my den, go over and look at my biceps in the mirror. I'm still growing.

A bit later Mum comes in and sits me down, stroking my hair away from my forehead. ‘I'm sorry I did that but you do ask for it sometimes. You know we have a foster placement here, and what does that mean?'

‘Best behaviour.'

‘Xactly. More jealous than your father aren't you, little man.' She messes up my hair. ‘Robert's very special and needs a lot of love at the moment. Don't make that face, it's not the end of the world. Other children have to share their mum and dad. They manage.'

She gives me a really tight hug and even lets me eat my lunch in my room but I hear them all talking and want to go down again. Sorry is supposed to be like abracadabra or hey presto but they are all just words. Real magic doesn't work like that.

I hide the green lunch bits under some paper in my bin then creep down to listen to them eating and talking.

They've lit a fire!

Mum and Dad are saying to Robert how I'm usually like this with new foster children and Robert shouldn't worry. She says I'm harmless and that I always settle down eventually.

I don't like them talking about me and nor does the snake in my tummy.

Plus Dad has lit a fire even though it isn't cold out, and I'm ALWAYS asking Dad to light a fire and he nearly always says not to be silly, that it's practically summer. Except he says this all year round and thinks he's funny but I just want us to be all snuggley together. The three of us.

Maybe Dad lit a fire to warm Robert's mood up.

The firelight makes the vase of walking sticks sparkly. I'm not
allowed to touch them cos they're Mum's pride and joy even though she didn't make them, Grandad did.

Robert and Mum leave the table and go outside. I race upstairs and stand on my bed with my shoes on and watch them. I can hear Dad doing the dishes in the sink.

I'm down low spying on them from the corner of my window, Robert pointing at boring things in the sky, Mum looking at Robert a lot when he isn't looking, then smiling at him when he is. Or she's looking at the house, probably at Dad in the kitchen window, and making these stupid happy faces to him behind Robert's back.

Robert lies down on the grass and the sun is out and Mum lies sort of next to him and they look all colourful and sunny like they're a washing powder advert. Then she reaches out and finds Robert's hand in the grass and takes hold of it. And he LETS her.

I don't know what happens then cos my face is in my pillow and I'm shouting and scrunching the bed sheets in my fists.

By the time I look again they're gone and I can see the different coloured green space on the lawn their bodies made together.

I get a whiff of smoke smell coming out the chimney. I check the thermometer and it says 22 degrees outside.

I run downstairs with the snake big and thick in my tummy and I'm pacing by the fire. I take one of Grandad's walking sticks and try to snap it but it's too strong for me, like the freezer lid. I beat the couch with it instead, throw it down and I'm pacing and pacing while Mum and Robert and Dad are in the kitchen together and I want to go in but I'm too dizzy about everything. Then Mum says something and Robert is LAUGHING. His first laugh in the house ever.

Dad told me once that people who are in big terrible life and death situations can do amazing things, which might be why I can keep my hand in the fire for the longest time.

I walk into the kitchen with it after and Mum is running with
me to the bath and I'm sort of miles away, my hand feeling super bright like it's the sun or something. She puts me in the tub in my clothes and Robert's white face is here and Dad sends him away but he doesn't move and my hand is all blistering and black like a monster's. The bath running with cold water and Mum making me put my hand under the surface, and shouting for Dad to get things from the freezer and I'm crying at what I've done.

Mum is crying too but in a sort of scared angry way and she's almost in the bath with me, my hand in the water and feeling so hot I think it might make the bath boiling.

Dad runs in with ice and bags of peas and chicken kievs, my favourite, and dumps them in the water, Mum screaming something at him and he really shouts back at her, tree roots showing up on his neck. But I can't really hear them. I can't hear the water thundering out the tap or the frozen peas coming out of the blurry bit where the plastic packet was pulled open, bright green dots bobbing up and down in the bath.

But Robert is crying. I'm pretty sure he's crying.

We're at the family table, me in the seat that was always mine, Mum in hers. Old habits. There's two empty chairs at the table with us, pushed right in out the way. And a certain type of silence.

Outside, the afternoon is slowly taking on an evening light, my jetlag making it seem out of the natural order, uneasy. We sit here though, neither of us knowing what to do with one another while we wait for the nurse. This being the hollow period then, like the ice age after the comet struck.

Day 4 of my paused life.

While sitting here my gaze is drawn reluctant but greedy to the operation scar on the side of her head, metal staples holding the flesh together. The hair she's lost. The family pictures taking over the walls — all that past. The dirty dishes sitting in the sink. The freezer door a little ajar again, a puddle of meltwater at its feet.

I put my elbows on the table, hands in my hair, stare down at the congealed out-of-date milk she put in my tea. And at all the familiar shapes and scratches on the surface of this old wooden table.

‘Is the nurse usually this late, Mum?'

She offers a smiling shrug and I don't know if she can't compute
the answer, or the question. I give her one of those polite, lipless smiles, both of us looking occasionally at the two empty chairs — even Mum seeming to feel a palpable sense of the way things used to be, before the comet. And yet she looks at me like I'm a stranger.

‘Work?' Mum manages to say, the pronunciation a little like she's deaf — that numb-tongued sound.

‘You already asked me that. Work's work. Can you remember what I do?'

She looks for the answer on my face and I have to look away, down at my lumpy tea, then back up at her but she's already fallen into staring.

Alfie II is curled up on the sunny windowsill — our female cat named after Alfie. When the first Alfie died Mum and Dad just went out and got another one and named it the same, even though he was a she. Now she's snoring loudly through the scab-like growth jutting out from her nose.

Even the cat has cancer.

‘I'll give you a clue,' I say, managing to keep some softness in my voice, like I'm the parent.

‘Prison!' she says.

‘Very good. But can you remember my name?' Which plunges her back into that gap in her mind, as if I really am the bit they took out of her.

‘Robert,' she says and smiles, then looks down at her hands like she doesn't recognise those either.

There's a knock at the door and we both jump. I wander away doing my hair.

I never used to be allowed to answer the door. Before the accident there were always visitors. Afterwards though it was mainly nurses, like this one. She does a double-take when she sees me.

The three of us are seated now, all offers of tea rejected. The nurse sitting in my dad's place at the table, a part of me wanting
to bring her a chair from the dining room instead. Mum fidgeting, a persistent smile papered over her inability to partake in the simplest etiquette of Hello, fine thanks, how are you? She can only nod and stammer truncated fragments of words, then shake her head and smile as if it's really all just a simple mix-up. Laughable being preferable to terminal.