What You Make It (22 page)

They came in half an hour later, surrounded by their friends. The blonde pool-playing girl was there, as were the two lads from the previous night. I fought down the urge to get straight up and go across. That wasn't the way to do it. There is a right way to do everything, and everything must be done in the right way. I hadn't eaten all day, and the beer was going straight to my head. It was very noisy and hot and smoky and there were people all around shouting happily at each other and I sat there with my cue case on my lap waiting for the right time, waiting for the sign.

Then suddenly a ray of quiet cut across the bar as the song on the juke box ended. After a moment of relative silence I heard a distinctive piano riff, and then smiled as a familiar guitar chord scythed through the smoke. It was ‘Secret’. That was it.

That was the sign.

I stood up and walked down towards the other end of the bar. The twins were standing in a gaggle round a pool table
there. I worked my way round the back of the group, feeling my heart swell. I would let her know that I understood. When I was behind her I tapped her on the shoulder. She turned and looked at me. For a second, I thought I read something in her eyes, and then all I saw was distaste.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Who the fuck are you?’

The others in the group were staring at me. I smiled at them and then turned back to her.

‘I got your message. I understand.’

‘What message? What the fuck are you talking about?’

I saw the others' faces again. Some of them were looking embarrassed. The blonde pool player was giggling behind her hand. The twin sister was looking at the girl, eyebrows raised, shaking her head. I began to feel very bad.

‘You know what I mean. The photos.’

She gave an angry and embarrassed laugh, and shook her head.

‘I don't know what you're talking about. Now piss off.’

‘Yeah. Piss off.’ This was from one of the lads. Maybe he fancied her. He reached out and shoved my chest. I wasn't ready for it, and fell backwards, banging into a table. The group turned its back on me and laughed. The blonde girl kept giggling, giggling.

I staggered upright, feeling the chorus of ‘secret’ reverberating through my bones. The barman looked at me sternly, but it was okay. I was going.

In the car park I smoked some cigarettes and waited for an hour. Just after ten the group came out, and the girl separated from the rest of them and headed down the Holloway Road. I followed her, pausing for a moment to pick something up from outside a house.

I understood. I had made a mistake. I had brought it into the open in front of her friends, in front of people who knew nothing about it, who didn't know that she was special, that she was capable of unusual things. When I saw which house she was
going into I went round the back and carefully climbed up the drainpipe to the balcony.

I understand things, you see. I learn very quickly. When I was four I dropped a bottle of milk on the kitchen floor. When my mother saw what I had done she got out my father's cue and calmly screwed the two halves together. Then she swung the cue with all her strength and smashed me round the face with it. That's how I got one of the scars round my eye. I told you I could remember. When I was six, I said something wrong and she grabbed my hair and banged my head into the corner of the kitchen table six times, once for each year. I had to go into hospital that time, with concussion. I didn't tell anyone what had happened. It was our secret.

I never dropped the milk again, and I never said anything wrong. I learn.

A light went on inside as the girl went into the kitchen. She opened the fridge and there was milk inside. She drank some and then put the bottle back. I eased the latch on the balcony door open and stepped soundlessly into the flat. As she came out of the kitchen I could see her face, and she was smiling a tight, hard smile. I remembered it now. It was the smile my mother had when she picked up the piece of broken glass from the milk bottle to run it across my stomach. It was the smile she had when she pulled my head up from banging it on the table and pushed her fingernail into the new gash by my right eye. It was the smile she had the first and last time she met my first girlfriend.

The girl walked into the living room and sat on the sofa without turning the light on. She was waiting for me. She knew I was coming.

The only girlfriend I had before Siobhan was called Sally. She went to the same school as me, and we went to the films a couple of times. Then I brought her home to meet Mum and Dad. Dad was in the garden so we went into the kitchen first to meet Mum. She was sitting at the kitchen table. There was a milk bottle on the table. When she saw us she gave that tight
hard smile and stood up. I introduced them to each other, but I don't think I did it very well. I was distracted. I thought I could see blood on the corner of the kitchen table.

‘So this is Sally,’ said Mother, leaning back against the table, arms folded.

‘Yes. Hello,’ said Sally, smiling sweetly.

Moving carefully, I edged closer to the living room. I could hear the girl humming, and the tune was ‘I'm on Fire’. She had sent her twin off with the others so she could be here alone.

Mother smiled at Sally for a moment, and then gestured me to come and stand next to her.

‘She's a bit fat, isn't she?’ Mother said, putting her arm round my waist. ‘He normally prefers slimmer girls, don't you?’ She turned to me, smiling, and ran a finger along the biggest scar by my eye. ‘Tall and slim with long brown hair.’ Then she pulled my head towards hers. Sally backed out of the kitchen as my mother pushed her tongue into my mouth, sucking my lips and sliding her hand up under my shirt. She pushed herself up against me and laughed as Sally ran out of the house. I never spoke to Sally again. Then Mother bit my face and shoved me away from her. Off-balance, I fell and banged my face on the side of the fridge. That's how I got my final scar. I learnt. I understood. I couldn't have her, but I couldn't have anyone else either.

I walked into the living room. The girl pretended to be surprised to see me, even screamed a little, but I wasn't embarrassed any more. I knew how things worked, knew that this had to remain a secret between us. I pulled my cue out from behind me and belted her across the face with it. She went down onto the floor. She tried to speak but her nose was broken and blood was running into her mouth. I couldn't hear what she was saying, but it didn't matter, because I knew what the score was, and I was doing what I was supposed to. I didn't need instructions. I smashed the milk bottle I'd picked up on the Holloway Road across her forehead, and pushed the broken neck into her right eye. Now she had some scars, and I pushed my fingers deep into them, feeling the bone beneath, feeling what Mum had felt. I
pushed my tongue into her mouth, sucking her lips, and slid my hand up her shirt. She struggled as I pushed the bottle into her stomach, and screamed as best she could as the soft skin there punctured and my hand fell in. I knew there wasn't that much time so I pulled my hand back out and linked it with the other one round her throat. I put my face as close to hers as I could as I squeezed, watching the blood from her scars trickle into her eyes and down her cheek.

As she gasped I looked up for a moment, looked at the room, the chairs, the carpet. This was our place now, somewhere only she and I had been. Blood and saliva ran out of her nose and mouth as she choked and I put my cheek right next to her mouth, waiting to see if I could tell.

And I could. I knew which was the last breath, I could feel it on my face, and I sucked it up into my body. I held her for a while, rocking her close, and we shared a happiness that I cannot describe, that is impossible to explain. She'd needed to be the only one, to have me completely, and she did. As we sat there we were the only two people in the world, and I thanked God she'd had the ingenuity and the magic to give me a message I could understand. This place would never stop being ours, and its power would never fade. I felt her slimness against me, and pushed my hands through her long brown hair, looking at the scars we shared.

Jeans, is how it started.

About a year ago, I'm having problems buying a simple pair of blue jeans. For years I'd been a Gap man, then I discovered Calvin Klein, which frankly are a better cut. I'd been buying CKs for about three years when suddenly they stopped working for me. Didn't fit as well as they should.

I keep buying new pairs, hoping I'll find some that do, but I don't. Then one day I'm in a store, still searching for that elusive batch which have been cut the way they used to be, but they don't have my size. I'm looking for 30 waist, 30 leg, but all they have is 32 waist. So I think shit, I really need some new jeans, I'll try them on anyway. And guess what – they fit.

In other words, I'm now a 32 waist, is what the jeans are saying.

Now I don't mind this too much. Hell, I've been a 30 waist since I was twenty, and that's twelve years; figure sooner or later I'm going to go up a size. It's in the nature of things.

I go home with my new jeans, take the others back to the stores if I've still got the receipts, or throw them away if I haven't, and everything's cool again jean-wise.

Then nine months later, Calvin Klein start cutting the jeans weird again. Don't fit the way they should.

I muse on this for a while. Couple months, in fact.

Then one dread afternoon I go back to the store, stand in front of the 34 waist pile for a while. I grab a pair, put them back. This is a big step here, and I don't want to make it. But I pick ’em up again, buy ’em, take ’em home.

Guess what? Heart-in-elevator time. They fit.

Not perfectly: truth be told I'm probably more of a 33 and
a half than a 34. But the cut is back again, and I have to face facts. Basically, from here on in, if I want my jeans to fit I'm going to be walking up to that 34-inch pile.

Now this I'm not too happy about. Like I say, after ten years, you expect a change, especially if you like to eat and drink like I do. And fail to exercise, like I do. Exercise? Excuse me? Screw that. The thought of exercise makes me feel so tired I just flop right down on the couch and turn on the TV. So I can see there's going to be a trade-off. But another two inches in less than a year? This is not good. A 34 waist is a bad thing. It's in the Bible.

I try to find a mental workaround. Maybe, I think, this is just my body settling into its next phase. Maybe I'm going to be 34 for the next ten years. 34 at forty? That's not too shabby.

It nearly works. But there's a nagging voice in the back of my head. Maybe this is just the start of it, it says – and at this rate of progress, it's not going to be long before you're going to be moving along
another
pile.

That made me really stop and think a moment. I've
never
bought jeans – or any other type of trouser, for that matter – at a waist size with a 6 in it. Last time there was a 6 in the number was when I was a 26, and back then the sizes came in small, medium and large and my mother was doing the buying. I've never bought no 6-suffixed trouser, and I wasn't going to start now.

I turned the TV off, stood up, and got to it.

I started doing a little running. I went to the gym. I dropped my beer consumption back down to the level of a normal human being, and then cut it out altogether. I ate healthy food, and not so damned much of it.

Sorta.

The thing is, I did all this apart from a beer here and a beer there, and apart from skipping the run every now and then. Most days, in fact. I mean, running is dumb. Animals only do it when they're frightened, right? And why do you think that is? Because it's no fun at all. I didn't really join a gym either: they're
real expensive and full of body Nazis. And shit – what's the point of being alive if you can't have a halfpounder with cheese when you feel like it, and a couple beers to wash it down? I mean, really? And do I have to spend the rest of my
life
dieting the whole time? Is this a reasonable way to live?

No. I don't think so.

It's my body's fault, I decide. It's reached a certain age, and it's tired of being trim. Probably even if I kept doing the good stuff it's just going to do its own thing.

So I come at the problem a different way. What I want, I realize, is the body I used to have back when I could eat what the hell I liked, and do no exercise, and my body would just happily metabolize all that shit away without me having to do anything about it. I don't want this diet and exercise crap: I just want the body I had before.

Then I get an idea. If I want that body, I just got to go back and get it.

So I build a time machine.

It wasn't so hard. Just muse on magnetism and tachyons a while and you'll be on the right lines. I cracked the basic principles on paper, then went down to Radio Shack and Toys R Us and Moss Bros, bought what I needed, and hacked the thing together in a couple evenings.

When I finished I got a copy of that day's paper, put it on the temporal diffusion plate. I set the dials, and pressed the button. The paper disappeared.

Then I remembered that six years ago, walking into that very room, I had found a paper with a date from the future on it. I was kind of drunk at the time, and don't remember what I did with it. Probably threw it away. It freaked me a little.

So I know the machine functions. Now I have to work out how to use it. I don't want to actually go back in time, you see: the early nineties weren't that special a period for me. Or the late eighties, come to that. Plus I've got an okay job these days and I'm halfway through a rerun of the last series of
Friends
and I want to see what happens.

So I realize that what I actually want, once I sit down and define my goals properly, is that my body's
nature
should go back in time say, five years, while both it and my mind stay right where they is. Be free, in fact, to travel forward in time the old-fashioned way, at a rate of one day every 24 hours.

So I check this idea out. I do an experiment first, because I'm a cautious man. I get one of the houseplants which is looking a little sorry for itself and like it could do with a new lease of life, and I send its nature back three months – to just after I bought it.

After I press the button the plant shimmers for a moment, and then suddenly it's looking bright and perky, like it used to.

I'm jubilant, obviously.

Then it occurs to me it was a crap experiment. Sure, the plant's body has gone back to an earlier state, while remaining rooted in the present – which has got to be enough to win me an award somewhere all by itself. But because it's a plant, and thus not much of a conversationalist, I've got no way of telling what happened to its mind. Did
it
stay in the present, or has the plant reverted to speaking plant baby talk and thinking the colour pink is cool?

I may be a tad chubby, but I'm definitely cautious. I needed another experiment. I drink beer for a while, which always makes me think better, and then it comes to me. I've got a dog, called Max. He's a great dog, but he's old. He doesn't hear as well as he used to, and his back legs are getting vague. If anyone could do with a body resurrection, he's got to be first in the queue. Ahead of me even, because my back legs work just fine.

So I stir the hound from where he's asleep in front of the fire, and I get his dog treats down from the shelf. Even at his advanced age this is news worth taking notice of, and he wakes right up and follows me around. I hide the box of treats under the cushion on the chair, making sure he sees me doing it, then I grab him, lift him over to my time machine, and put him down on the plate.

Set the dial for five years back. Press the button.

Shimmer.

Max is five years younger. He comes bounding off the plate, looking very pleased with himself. And then, and this is the cool part, he heads straight for the chair, sticks his nose under the cushion and turns it over. Finds the treats, chews them open.

I let him have half the box.

By this time it's late, and I've had maybe three six-packs of beer. I go to bed, knowing that tomorrow I'm going to have the body I always wanted. Well, maybe not always wanted, because I don't recall being that psyched with it at the time, but that's because I didn't realize what I had. It was good enough then, and that's good enough for me now.

I wake up early the next morning, because there's a weird yipping sound next to my ear. I open my eyes and see a puppy sitting on the blanket right in front of me, trying to lick my nose. At first my muddled brain wonders how the hell it got in the house, and then I recognize Max and leap out of bed like someone cattle-prodded my nuts. I run downstairs, the puppy Max still yapping away and trying to bite my heels in play, like he used to about ten years ago.

Downstairs on the table the plant has almost gone. But not quite. There's a seed lying there. I know shit about horticulture, so I couldn't swear to it, but it looked like the kind of seed which might have grown into the plant I'd owned the day before.

I played with Max for a while, but after a while his little eyes closed, and then he became a curly foetus. Got smaller still, and smaller, till I couldn't even see him any more. I guess the last thing was an egg and one lucky sperm, and then he was gone.

I was glad I'd decided to leave my trip overnight.

I went back to the drawing board, in theory and practice. I tweaked the machine a little and then tried again with next door's cat, but the little thing got younger even faster than Max had done. I tried blipping it
forward
in time at the last minute, see if that made a difference: but all that happened was the cat disappeared for an hour, then reappeared, having gotten even younger in the meantime. I futzed around a little more, then
tried again, with the Great Dane from across the road. Same outcome. Except it took longer. And it bit me.

Once the body's nature had been sent back in time, it kept just slipping further back.

Now at this point the whole thing is fucked up and costing me a fortune in replacement pets, plus all the stress is making me drink more beer and eat like a hog, and the cut on those 34-inch waists seems to be going a little haywire.

Luckily, I'm standing in front of the mirror one night, thinking, ‘36. 36. Fucking 36 …’ when I realize that's the answer.

I'm not just dealing with time here. There's a matter of
space.

The ‘one constraint’ approach wasn't working. Max knew where the box of treats was until he was the size of my thumb, but that wasn't a lot of help to him. Or to me. You can't go walking into a good men's store and buy jeans when you look two years old and are getting smaller in front of the assistant's eyes. Trust me, no reputable department store will stand for that kind of thing.

But what if I locked down two constants? What if I kept the mind latched in place, and threw a physical limitation in too, like maintaining the length of my body? If I made it so my body couldn't get any shorter, then it had to stop going back in time when I reached my current exalted height of 5 feet 10 inches, say when I was in my late teens. My mind stays where it is, my body goes as far back in nature as possible while keeping the same length, but remains locked here in time.

Cool.

I hit the sums again, and by this time the math
is
kind of hairy. I'm way past tachyons and am getting upside charmed quarks and shit. I didn't want my face to get younger, or people might think something weird was going on. So I had to factor in getting my head to stay where it was in time, while getting the rest of my body to go back, but remaining the same length. This is math with big fucking wheels on, I'm telling you.

But I cracked it. I cracked that equation wide open. It's truly
astounding what a man will do to avoid going jogging or giving up his Miller time.

By this time I've run out of neighbourhood pets, and anyway I'm getting desperate and wearing my 34s with the button and half the fly undone. So I sit myself on the plate, turn the dial. In the second I pressed the button I realized I was going to have to throw away all my new jeans and go out and buy 30 inchers, which was going to cost well over 200 bucks, but the thought just made me smile.

I felt weird for a second, and I guess I must have shimmered.

Then suddenly there's enough room in my pants for two people, and even my shirt feels loose. I got off the plate, went and looked in the mirror. It worked. I'm slim again. Took me two months of leisure time, and cost nearly four hundred bucks in parts and another eighty in replacement pets, but it worked.

Except in one niggling regard.

About a week afterwards, I noticed that my back was looking a little hairy. I figure what the hey, maybe some hormonal thing.

Then it started getting harder to hold things. My thumb seemed to be going a little weird, not as opposable as it used to be.

There were a couple of days when it looked like there was some kind of tail deal developing. That passed off, and the hair went away. My skin started getting a little scaly instead.

I'm still the same height.

But now I've got these, like, fins.