Lullaby (9 page)

Get the fuck over there.

I moved, but not far enough to make anybody comfortable.

‘After dinner Georgia and Theo had an argument. I didn't hear the details, but I
can guess. Georgia was the one he could never get over, the only person I ever saw
him need. She would have helped convince Harriet to come along, as a favour to Theo,
and Georgia's favours came at a price. By the time the campfire was glowing, my mood
had infected the group. Even a session of post-dinner canisters couldn't bring us
back together. Georgia tried to get a game going, this thing with a pack of cards,
suck and blow, you have to…'

Maggie's look of determined tolerance killed any thought I had of explaining.

‘But the game hissed and fizzled like the flames. Theo still imagined he could rescue
the night. And why not? Two boys, two girls, two tents. It shouldn't have been that
difficult.

Well, I'm knackered, he yawned. Who's for bed?

Might just go for a wander up the river first, I said. I was moving before Harriet
could suggest she join me.

‘Theo came after me, caught me at the first
bend and pulled me round by the shoulder
like he was setting me up for a punch.

Okay, what the fuck?

Already said, I'm going for a walk.

We didn't come here to walk.

I've changed my mind, I told him. It was the truth, but not all of it.

Because? he asked.

She's not my type.

So what?

You wouldn't understand.

I understand you've got no balls.

Better than having no standards.'

I could see from Maggie's face that she didn't understand, and I didn't blame her.
It wasn't what we said, that night, standing on the riverbed with the water dark
behind us. It wasn't the words we chose, but the shape they fell into, the rut of
a thousand conversations past. A poem of anxiety, accusation and denial, and the
last line always there, but never uttered.

But that night, when he looked at me, I didn't look away. I stared back long enough
for there to be no doubt—too good for those girls, too good for you. And I turned
and walked away.

I didn't tell Maggie, because I didn't want her to know. I wanted to pretend it was
just the words and nothing more.

‘Then what happened?' Maggie asked.

‘I walked for an hour and a half. The moon was three-quarters full and the valley
was deep with shadows and, apart from the tireless chatter of river and rock, silent.
I jerked off in the blue light, but it didn't make me feel any better. When I returned
to the campsite I was surprised to see the fire still burning red. I had my apology
ready. I thought about suggesting another canister; I was thawing. Only the figure
sitting up at the fire, prodding it with a stick, wasn't Harriet. It was Georgia.
I took a seat on a log set at right angles to hers. The wind bounced and swirled
through the valley, breathing life into the embers, turning one face suddenly orange,
shrouding the other in smoke. We could hear the other two in Theo's tent, giggling.

Guess you're with me, I said. I was nervous and hoping to be funny.

Arsehole, she replied.

It's a family thing, I said.

‘Later Theo gave me his version. When he
come back from the river, Georgia had wanted
to know why I wasn't with him. He'd defended me, because that's how family works,
and she'd stormed off. Harriet had started crying, Theo had tried to comfort her…That's
how he told it.

‘I dragged my sleeping bag out to the fire. In the morning the bottom was soaked
and the top was shot through with little burn marks. We got a ride out that afternoon.
We travelled back in silence, each of us wanting to get home and wash the whole thing
off. I clung to the insane idea that it was all Theo's fault, that he'd stolen Harriet
from me. He blamed me for destroying his relationship with Georgia.

‘We got over it though. Theo was always good at sorry: gracious and generous, when
the time came. It was just a case of waiting. It took longer than usual, a week or
so, but we got there. I apologised back; there was plenty of stupid to go around.
Forgiven, but not forgotten. I think we both knew that.

‘There was the time before that weekend, and the time after, and the two halves never
quite fitted together.'

‘I don't see what you did wrong,' Maggie said.

I shrugged. ‘I broke something that didn't need to be broken.'

It was the only way I could think of explaining.

‘You didn't have to have sex with her, if you didn't want to.'

‘I did want to.'

She gave me that look, then. The look that people who've never been a teenage boy
give to those who are.

‘So what do you think you broke?'

I tried to find the right word. Fun, trust, hope, family…

‘Dunno.'

‘Okay.'

‘I still saw the others and said hello, but everybody understood we were drifting
apart. I made friends in my class. Not good friends, I knew they wouldn't outlast
the seating plan, but it was the end of pretending. Harriet went into a transition
project, and started training to cut hair. A year later I heard where she was working,
but I never called in. I think I knew that if I saw her standing over a stranger,
washing their hair, I'd fall out of love with her.'

I've always done that, slipped too easily into
nostalgia, one small step from bad
poetry. But if you can't be a bad poet at seventeen, with your brother dying just
down the corridor, what hope is there for poetry?

I wondered how much of the time Maggie charged for consisted of waiting in silence.

‘How am I doing?' I asked her.

‘You haven't answered the question,' she said.

‘What question?'

‘How does a top science student end up in drama school?'

One step left. One small step. My problem was I wanted Maggie to like me and I needed
her to hear the story. I couldn't have both.

‘After the group broke up, Theo started to come apart too. There was a thing with
a break in, and then a stolen car and a joy ride through the school. He came within
a governor's blink of being sent to an industrial training centre, but somehow he
came out of the interview with an eleventh second chance. I say somehow: it was the
smile, the handshake, his way of making people believe he was sincere, by believing
it himself. I shouldn't have been surprised when he came home one day and announced
he had the lead role
in the school drama production.

‘From the very first rehearsal, he changed. Changed back, I mean. The joker again,
maker of plans, boy with a future. As if the awkward years had simply been deleted.
Mrs Struthers reverse-aged in front of our eyes. The wrinkles I'd thought were age
turned out to be ground-in worry, and her arthritis began responding to treatment.
I remember one afternoon walking in on her and Theo practising a dance from the show.
I watched them moving together around the room, and for a moment I could imagine
what she was like when she was young. It was possible to believe she had once laughed
and danced and felt beautiful. I wondered then what had happened to her, how she'd
ended up with us. I didn't ask.

‘Acting provided what athletics hadn't. It made Theo whole again, by making him better
than everybody else in the room. Somewhere in the past, Mum and Dad had managed to
convince us we were special. I suppose they were trying to establish our confidence.
They didn't guess they were feeding us a belief that would become our addiction.

‘The show was about a boy who'd created
an imaginary friend. That was Theo, co-starring
with a hologram of himself. That's probably how he got the part. Mr Watts was the
sort of drama teacher who had all the theory but no feel for the actual art of it.
He could produce quotes out of the air from plays no one else had heard of, but when
it came down to watching an actor on stage, and telling them what to change, he had
no flair. So the possibility of working with an actor with an identical twin (he
preferred to say doppelganger) was very attractive. Theo wouldn't need to be directed,
he could simply live out a version of his own experience on stage. Except that was
all bullshit. What Theo brought was charisma, and the ability to imagine a character
into existence. He'd been preparing for the role all his life.

‘It was Theo's idea to include me in the show. There was a problem with the ending.
It was a big musical number, designed to rise above all that had gone before and
bring the audience to its feet. In reality, it was just a lot of people singing and
dancing, for no apparent reason other than the time was up: an unearned moment, destined
to fall flat. I imagine Mr Watts saw that, he wasn't totally useless, but he didn't
know what to do
about it. He hoped a bit more volume from the band and finding a
way to drift the hologram out over the crowd would be enough to cover up the deficiencies.
By then Theo was effectively operating as an assistant director and he suggested
they write a new final scene, where the hologram came to life. A cheap trick too,
but he wrote a beautiful little dialogue between the two characters and Mr Watts
bought it. And that's how, three weeks from opening, I was welcomed into the ample
bosom of the Cook High Theatrical Company.

‘I'd never been involved with anything like that before. I'd been in debating club,
played chess for the school; there was athletics, and I was once co-organiser for
a charity drive, but drama's different. I don't know how to describe it, a sort
of mass delusion: a group of people holding hands and running full tilt to the edge
of a clifftop, convinced they can fly. Obviously, that's not quite it, because in
the cliff scenario everybody falls to the ground and dies a hideous death. On stage,
there's always the tantalising possibility of success.

There's a certain type of person who needs to perform, and there's a certain type
of energy they bring, a sort of desperate confidence. Between you
all, you construct
the illusion of significance. From the outside, I'm sure it's nauseating, but from
the inside, it's a room full of boys and girls and hugs and wishes. It's seductive.

‘I said Theo was the lead, but you don't get a school musical without a love interest:
in our case Emily Watts, the drama teacher's daughter. And it won't surprise you
to hear that by my third rehearsal I'd fallen in love with her. Theo hadn't. I asked
him, just to be sure. He doesn't lie about those things.'

I could feel myself doing it, slipping back into the present tense. The closer the
story got to the interview room, the easier it was to do. Or the harder it was not
to. The seven-year-old playmate—he's gone forever either way. But the guy I stood
on stage with, only thirteen months before—death, not time, was stealing him away.
And death, you deny.

‘Emily expected a certain level of attention. And the fact that Theo wasn't offering
it unsettled her. There was nothing dignified about what I did, offering myself
up as a substitute. But if you could see her on stage, the way she has of making
every last person in the auditorium believe she's
performing just for them—dignity
wasn't a big part of the equation. I fell in love with Harriet because she was there.
I fell in love with Emily because I knew, as long as I lived, I'd never find another
like her.

‘I checked again with Theo, before I made my move.

Are you sure there isn't anything between you and Emily?

There's nothing, he said, and if he'd been lying I would have known.

Why? Are you interested?

Maybe.

‘That was a first for me, admitting it so easily. Hearts do actually skip a beat,
by the way. I suppose you know that. I felt it, kicking back in with excitement.

‘Theo offered to help me, as if the camping trip had never happened. Reinvention
is an easy trick—all you need's an accomplice.

‘I loved those next three weeks, maybe more than any other time in my life. Theo
was happy again, motivated and invincible. The two of us were working side by side,
the way it was meant to be. And the whole time, slowly, carefully, I was
edging closer
to Emily. We were all of us caught inside the same bubble and the world couldn't
touch us. If you could have seen Theo, when he's like that, everything revolving
about his axis…

‘But bubbles burst.'

9

It was no good. Just when I was sure I'd managed to push it out of my mind, it came
back, shocking in its power. The earth still spun, the heavens still pulled, the
tide of him sloshed backwards and forwards.

Him, Theo. Dying. Or dead? Which word to use? There was pressure at the back of my
throat: a physical reminder of that thing I couldn't swallow. I tried to cough it
away, but produced only the gurgling of a drowning man. No, a drowning boy. The woman
watched, waited. Doing her job.

‘So what happened?' Maggie asked.

‘I did what you do. Found excuses to spend time with Emily. She made it easy for
me, told me she wanted someone to help her learn her lines, even though her lines
were fine. One time they
needed someone to pick up the food for a cast lunch, and
that was us, and then we both volunteered to help out when the crew doing the backdrop
got behind with their painting. It was obvious she was waiting for me to say something,
but it still took me another week to find the courage.'

‘What did Emily say?'

‘She said, not until the show is over. I took that as a yes. I floated through the
entire season. I've never been so high. And then he fucked her.'

‘Or she fucked him,' Maggie said. Cruel, and fair.