A to Z of You and Me (9 page)

“Mal! Fucksake.”

I flap at him.

He withdraws and snorts me a chastised smile.

I see it straightaway. Where his finger touched the blanket there's a grubby mark. I look quickly up at you, but you haven't seen it—you're busy battling back the bags and wrapping that are sliding off the seat beside you.

I'm not going to point it out. It's my birthday and my present, so I'm not going to take the rap for screwing it up. It'll probably scrub out anyway. I might have a try in a bit.

“Oh, look at that. It's gorgeous,” says Laura, reaching across and turning over the edge to look at the back. “You
made
this?”

“Yes,” you say, finally karate-chopping the discarded wrapping paper into cooperation.

“For him?”

You look at me and break into a warm smile. “Yes.”

“Do you know what?” I say. “I think it's the first time anyone's ever made anything for me.”

“That's why I wanted to make it,” you say. “It's made with love.”

I'm ashamed to realize I dart my eyes around to see if anyone's registering their amusement at the word “love.” Becca is whispering something in Mal's ear and laughing. He laughs too. A nice, private little joke.

“Ah, Ivo, you always get the best stuff!” says Laura. “How do you always manage to land on your feet? How many stitches are in this?”

“Ouu, I don't know,” you say. “About…fifty, sixty thousand?”

“You're mad,” says Laura. “Sixty thousand stitches? For him?”

“Is that mad?” you say, straightening the blanket, checking for imperfections, tutting when you find a loose end.

“I don't know where you find the time for everything you do. You're like a cottage industry or something, with all the guitar playing and songwriting and crochet as well as training to be a nurse.”

“Ah, you can find the time for the right person,” you say. “He's worth it.”

“Well, I'm glad you think so,” says Laura, pulling an incredulous face. “I don't think there's anyone on the planet I'd do this for. Or I haven't met him yet, anyway.”

I catch a brief cloud cross Mal's face as she says this.

“I've enjoyed it. I had all those bus trips to work, and I used to fill up any quiet moments on night shift: I could pick it up and work on it, and it made me feel like we were together.” You look up at me. “Think of it as an apology, if you like, for being away on nights all those weeks. This blanket is made up of all those hours when I was thinking of you, and when I wanted to be back with you.”

“Aww,” says Laura, turning to me. “That's lovely.”

“And whenever I got stuck with anything, there were a lot of the older patients who still had all their crochet skills—I learned hundreds of little techniques.”

“Do you love it?” Laura asks me.

Your eyes switch slightly shyly to me, and the pressure of expectation immediately swells.

“Yeah, it's really… I like it a lot.” I feel myself scratching around for the kinds of words I want to be using, now the whole pub seems to be watching. “It's really…really
heavy
.” I weigh it, impressed, in my hands.

“It's only a blanket. All you want to know is, is it warm?” says Mal. “Is it going to keep those frail little knees from knocking together or not?”

Maybe there's a twitch in my DNA, a switch flicked in my middle, but I look at Mal now, and I think what a child he seems. How puerile can he get? Surely he can do better than that.

I know I can.

“It's brilliant,” I say deliberately and decisively. “I love it.” And fuck you, Mal.

“Well,” you say, turning to me, “as far as I'm concerned it's just something someone thought enough about you to spend a lot of time making. And that's what I wanted to do for you,” you say. “Happy birthday.”

I'm touched. I'm genuinely touched.

“Well, here you go anyway, fella,” says Mal, reaching around inside a plastic bag he's got with him. “Happy birthday, yeah?” He lands a packet of twenty-four Kit Kats on the blanket and a packet of twenty Benson & Hedges on top of that.

I look up, and he's primed and ready for my laughter.

“Aw, what's not to love about that,” you say semiquietly. “Perfect for a diabetic.”

“Cheers anyway, fella,” says Mal, raising his glass and encouraging others to do the same.

Then, he says, “Sorry, Mia, I forgot you weren't drinking.”

“I'm not not drinking,” you say. “I just haven't got a drink.”

“Oh, right. I thought because of your dad and everything.”

“What about him?”

“Being an—sorry, was I not supposed to say?—an alcoholic?”

“Mal!” cries Laura.

“What?” says Mal, raising his hands in fake innocence.

You look at me, and I shake my head like I don't know how he found out.

“What's this?” you say.

Ah, shit, you've found Mal's fingermark.

You glare up at Mal straightaway.

“This took me eight months. Mind what you're prodding it with, OK?”

“I don't get it,” you say. Your computer table and all your books are juddering as you stomp up and down the carpet of your room. “I don't understand what kind of special code they want me to crack to gain entrance to their little clique.”

“Will you sit down?” I say. I'm lying widthwise on your bed, my head propped up on a big cushion. “You're making me tense.”

You sit on the edge of the bed, leaning forward.

“It's hard,” I say, “but we've all known each other for years. I think they get a bit… I don't know, a bit lazy when new people come along.”

“It's been nine months now we've been seeing each other. That's a bit more deliberate than lazy. I mean, what's the deal with Mal? He deliberately made that mark on the blanket.”

“No, it wasn't deliberate. I saw him do it. It was an accident.”

“Yeah, well, he wasn't too apologetic about it, was he? He was openly taking the piss. Why do you hang around with such a bunch of piss takers?”

“I don't know.”

“Seriously, they just leech off each other. Anything that doesn't fall in with their little world view gets stamped on immediately.”

“I'm not like that.”

You sigh and slump back on your bed. “No, I know you're not. I don't know how you managed to escape it.”

“They don't know anything about you. They don't know the real you at all. It'll just take time.”

“Becca's supposed to know me, but she's too busy being fawned over by everyone, all latching on to her.”

“Ah, no, Becca's all right.”

“Oh, she's lovely, but she'd never stand up for you. And what's the deal with her and Mal, whispering like schoolkids?”

“No deal. They've just known each other a long time.”

“Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if there was something there, you know. I don't know why Laura puts up with him.”

“I don't know why you put up with me,” I say, offering you a Kit Kat.

• • •

Actually: green fingers. It was my mum who said that to me. She said, “You'll have green fingers.”

She was struggling to push the old hooded lawnmower up and down the lawn on a Saturday. Saturdays always made her sad. Sadderdays. It was something Dad should have been doing.

She said to me, “We'll have to set aside a little piece of the garden for you to call your own. You'll have green fingers like your dad.”

Slight twitch of a frown on my face. It presented a bad image of rotting green fingers deep underground.

Maybe she noticed—I don't know—but she quickly said, “That's what they say if you love gardening. You've got green fingers. Have you never heard that?”

I shook my head.

She set me aside a little patch I could tend and look after all by myself. I grew sunflowers that first year, and the patch was soon allowed to stretch to the size of a full bed, an odd hodgepodge of annuals and perennials, herbs and vegetables. Within a few years the whole lot was mine, and my mum could confine herself to enjoying it around her on warm summer evenings.

It was the least I could do.

Funny what small things it takes to set your life on a particular course.

• • •

God, look at my face.

I've got a triangle where the oxygen mask has pressed around my nose and mouth.

I steady myself with my hands on either side of the bathroom's sink and peer through the bad lighting into the mirror.

My face is
yellow
. Dark gray under the sunken eyes.

I slowly move my head around, checking out the angles, watch the pupils fixed stock-still, compensating for the rotating of my head.

I've always done this, since I was a kid. Always pondered the fact that you can only ever see your face from one place, from your own eyes. I will never see myself looking away.

Not without a camera.

Jesus, though. I look more and more like my dad.

There's a face that's imprinted on my memory. Dad. It's the
movement
of a face that stays with me. The
way
he smiled. The way he laughed.

From all those years ago, it's still as strong, that blueprint.

Face

“All right there, little man?”

There it is: the familiar face. Familiar old Dad smile.

“Something up?”

I look at him and twiddle the end of his bedcover. Comb my fingers through the tassels.

“C'mon,” he says. “Tell your old dad.”

I peer up at him. “I'm not allowed to bother you.”

He considers me a moment, and I can see his face breaking into a little laugh. Not completely his usual laugh.

“Who said that? Did Mum say that?”

I nod.

“Ah, well, she's very tired,” he says. “But what you should do is be a good boy for her, OK?”

Nod.

“But don't worry about me. You can play me up all you like.”

I look at him, curious.

“Are you going to die?”

He frowns, and again it's familiar, that deep groove straight down between his eyebrows. After a brief pause, he holds his hand out to me. I take it and roll myself up gratefully in his arm and end up looking away from him. Away from the frown. I feel him stroke the hair on the top of my head.

His voice comes to me now.

“It looks like it, little man. I'm really sorry.”

I say, “That's OK.” I have a strong sense that I don't want him to worry about me.

“Will you look after your mum for me?”

“Yeah.”

“And your sister.”

“Yeah.”

“And then I'll look after you, OK?”

“Yeah.”

“I'm sorry we haven't started work on that pond of yours yet.”

“That's all right. I don't mind.”

“Well, just keep it in mind. And you might be able to start it yourself when you're old enough. When your mum says it's OK. OK?”

“OK.”

“Just make sure you work slowly and carefully. It's not a race. If you go a bit wrong, all you have to do is keep calm and put it right, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“What you don't get right, you can always put right. Don't be afraid to change your mind.”

The words don't mean much to me, but I hear the click of his lips behind me as they stretch into his familiar old warm smile. He's happy he's told me this. That makes me happy.

What you don't get right, you can always put right.

But I couldn't, Dad.

I tried to put it right, but it just kept drifting wrong.

Every night I would say to myself,
I will not go out tonight. I will not get stoned tonight
.

But every night I would fail.

I wish I could have asked you what I should do then, Dad.

I wish I could have asked what I should do when every instinct in my body was urging me to do what I wasn't supposed to do.

And then I'll look after you, OK?

I'm imagining his smile.

The ghost.

Just thinking of that smile now, the calming, comforting movements of his face, it brings out actual physical reactions in my body. It makes my heart lighter. It makes my shoulders instinctively spread and settle.

The ghost exists: my body has seen it, and shaped it.

• • •

“Hiya.”

I look up suddenly, and the elastic on the oxygen mask plucks my stubble, makes me flinch and frown. Standing awkwardly in the doorway is Amber.

“Oh, hello…”

And ah, no, she's caught me here in my mask. Ah, shit. I didn't want that. Old man, old man.

“Sorry about that,” I say, hooking the mask back on the canister. “I'm trying out the laughing gas.”

“Can I come in?”

“Yeah, yeah, of course,” I say. “Have a seat—if you've got time.”

She heads for the visitors' seat and plants herself down, still in her coat. When you're a kid you don't think to take off your coat. You just put up with the uncomfortableness.

I realize quickly when she doesn't say anything that she hasn't come here for any particular purpose. She just wants to hang out. She looks tired, but she's clearly together enough to put on a public face. Matte scarlet lipstick to offset the shimmering blue streak in her hair, still troubled to put on the eyeliner.

“Oh, hey,” she says, reaching down and rooting around in her bag. “I've got something I wanted to show you.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I went into college this morning, to try to stay in touch and let them know what's going on—”

“Good thinking.”

“—and I was talking to my tutor, and I've managed to start up with this.”

She retrieves a small, curiously familiar little shape. A scrap of oatmeal-colored crochet, slung over a hook and attached to a small ball of wool. “I wanted to try to…try to get my stitches to be even slightly as good as you've got on your blanket there.”