The alarm sounds. Waves three, four, five times the height of the two brothers roll towards them from the deep end. Low hum of the machine that generates the waves from somewhere unseen. Shankill Leisure Centre. Their father has brought them here, sits in the viewing gallery in his Liverpool tracksuit while the boys jump into the waves from the shallow end. The younger brother has never seen him in swimming trunks, let alone in the water. He doesn’t want to believe it but he’s sure their father can’t swim.
He can’t jump as high as his brother, can’t quite get the timing right to get himself over the top of the waves. Chlorine water goes up his nose, in his ears. An old plaster finds its way into his mouth, makes him gag. He looks to the gallery. Their father smiles as the older brother floats serene over the crests.
The alarm sounds again. The older brother is far off in the deep end, his father’s eyes still on him. The waves begin to settle. The boy lies face down in the water. Shankill. Thou Shan’t Kill. But this is the worst place for killing. He feels his limbs go light and free of fear, a looseness in his cheeks. A leaf. Their father says the worst is when they don’t kill you. Muffled sounds of screams from under water. Eventually what might be whistles and shouts.
Then there are hands under his shoulders, pulling him up and out. He opens his eyes, hoping for his father but instead it is the lifeguard, a woman in yellow shorts, white T-shirt, and red rage in her eyes.
*
He is thirteen now, school has just finished and turned into summer. He has invited some friends round to their almost empty house but so many more have come than he was expecting. There are boys from the year above and boys from the year above that. Some have just finished exams which will twist the rest of their lives. Almost men, they walk through the house like they own the place, chugging from fat green bottles of cider. One has a face wrecked with acne and a chain wrapped around his knuckles.
The boy stands in the kitchen and the doorbell rings. More bodies fill the house. His brother is upstairs in his bedroom. He refuses to come out. It’s a big house, feels much bigger since their father left. From the living room comes the sound of pornography on the TV. Somebody cheers.
The older boys have found his father’s antique guns, the bayonets, the Zulu spear. His mother can’t work out how or who to sell it all to and now there are fifth formers having sword fights with bayonets. Blades clash heavily. Empty scabbards are kicked around the kitchen floor. He wants to laugh. He takes a bottle of cider, holds it in two hands, fills his mouth and nearly burns his insides out. He hears a banging from the bedroom above, his brother stamping on the floor.
He pushes his way through the bodies in the kitchen, the living room and runs up the stairs, taking them two at a time. As he reaches the top a boy jumps from his mother’s bedroom, the Zulu spear pointed right at him, but he’s travelling too fast to stop and the tip of the spear, the wide, flat, rusty blade, punctures his chest. He cries out for his brother.
*
He crouches by the payphone in the halls of residence. The Aberdeen afternoon is black outside the window. Winter in early autumn. Flyers for university societies are wedged around the plastic casing of the phone. Opera and Dining Club. Lesbigay Society. University Film Club presents Total Recall.
Here people laugh when he opens his mouth. He never knew he had an accent before. Say guard. Say down. Say how now brown cow. He worries about being overheard talking on the phone. What he wanted was to stay at home. The conversations they had at the dinner table. His brother doing all the talking. His mother nodding. Persuading him he wanted to study Computer Science and Data Management. Persuading him he wanted to leave.
He stands up when finally, his brother answers. He leans against the window. He asks would Mum mind if he just came home. This place is like home only worse, he says. He watches men smoke in the street far below as his brother talks hard and fast at him, then hangs up. The loneliness of the next four years is laid out clearly before him.
In the strip-lit galley kitchen someone has left a bowl of apples out with a luminous pink Post-it note stuck to one of the apples. Please help yourself! Come and say hi! Room N3. He takes an apple in his hand, runs his thumb over the skin, then presses it down hard against the countertop, feels the flesh give way and flatten. He puts the apple back in the bowl. He does this with each apple in turn until every one is unmistakably disfigured. Then he goes to his room and locks the door. He lies on the floor, puts his hand in his trousers and thinks of his brother’s girlfriend.
*
In the disabled toilet at the office Christmas party he takes money from the work experience kid and shares a handful of pills. The muffled riff of ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ comes through the locked door. The work experience kid has a sour smell about him, seems nervous, so he shoves a couple of pills into his own mouth to show they’re safe. A red emergency cord hangs from the ceiling and he mimes as if to pull it. The work experience kid laughs, puts a pill on his tongue and swallows. As they come out of the toilet his manager catches his eye. He knows he needs to be careful.
Now the band is playing ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ and the dancefloor is full of men in Christmas jumpers. The few women who work in the East Belfast Child Benefit Office are huddled together by the bar. They have two tables in the pub, the rest taken by other parts of the civil service. The Christmas package covers two drinks; anything additional at your own expense. He’s already at the bottom of his second Strongbow and there is no sign of food. The work experience kid won’t take his eyes off him, leans against the bar near the women.
He’s coming up. He bounces the empty pint glass in his hand. It feels amazing, weightless. Two pills on top of the cider and he might be more up than he’s ever been before. The band is playing ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and he’s jumping. It’s just like in the video for the song. He has his arms around the shoulders of two men who work in audit. Someone hands him another pint. He downs it so he can keep dancing. He’s slipping pills to the audit fellas. Slipping pills to a couple of lads he’s never seen before. Someone shouting in his ear about food. He necks another three pills himself. Can barely stand. Is on his back on the dancefloor. The band has stopped playing and his manager is whispering something in his ear. His manager and one of the bouncers are trying to get him to his feet.
It’s no use, he’s absolutely flying. He looks around for the work experience kid.
*
He knows his brother is driving. The two of them are in their mother’s car and his brother is next to him. He rests his head against the passenger window and closes his eyes. There are bumps in the road. His head bangs against the window but there is no pain. He smiles to himself. The oxy wraps deep peace around him like a blanket, warms his bones. He opens his eyes to check is his brother really there. He forgets why his brother is here and where they are going.
Maybe he did sleep. He thinks maybe he dreamed of a circle of stars. His hands on a circle of stars. He laughs and curls into the passenger seat. He looks at his brother, concentrating too hard on the road ahead. The poor bastard needs to relax. He almost says this but can’t fully wake himself.
Then he remembers why they are here. The terror floods through him. Wants to reach and unbuckle the seatbelt, open the door and roll out. Like when he falls down the stairs and it doesn’t even hurt. He looks at his knees. He tries to circle his feet. He can’t find the energy for any of it.
They drive out onto a causeway, grey water on either side. They reach an island and stop in a car park. His brother nods in the direction he needs to go, up the steps to where the ruins of a monastery wait.
Eventually he gets out of the car. Now there is no question of not having the energy. He can walk but barely feels like he’s there at all.
He climbs the steps.
Two men are waiting for him. One tells him to lie on his back on the grass, the other kneels and pulls a hammer from a sports bag. He lies down and thinks only of his brother. When it’s over his brother will carry him home.
*
The coming of cold makes his legs ache round the knees. He picks his way slowly across the field. Inside the barn, with the door shut tight, the pain eases. This is the first day he’s trusted with his own key, the first day the farmer hasn’t come on the long walk down through the trees with him. He leans his crutches by the light controls. The mature plants are half his height again.
He slips the keys into his pocket and feels the soft squidge of a Spiderman toy. Stretchy Spidey bought for a fiver off eBay for his brother’s son. His brother who can’t cope with the child’s meltdowns without melting down himself. His brother who leaves the four-year-old with his half-crippled uncle for weekends while he gets his head straight, weekends he’s meant to have custody. He and the child spend hours together watching old Spiderman cartoons, ignoring the warnings about negative depictions of people and cultures. He tells him about Venom, the black-suited Spiderman who is really a parasite, who can shape-shift and take over a person’s whole being.
During the week he works at the farm. There is a fuck-you-all to the work that he likes. No need for anything he learned at university or school. He enjoys tending the plants in the barn. The secateurs the farmer gave him are well made and cut cleanly through the branches as he prunes. He modulates the UV lights following a pattern of his own design, going more by instinct than actual understanding. He imagines one day telling his father the story of his life, wherever he is. It took time, but finally he found his place.
*
His nephew is seven, just tall enough to work the cooker in the makeshift kitchen at the back of the barn. Not so much a kitchen: an old four-ring Electrolux the farmer wanted to dump in his yard and a tap that drains directly into a hole in the concrete floor, fenced off from the plants by an old table laid on its side. They’re meant to make one packet of Super Noodles per person. He watches his nephew stir the flavour sachet into the boiling water. He lets him self-correct when the bubbles foam over the top of the pan, no need to step in to help. But this is as far as he’ll let him get involved. He gives the boy his phone, loaded with superhero movies, tells him to stay in the barn and not make a sound.
He carries the noodles through the woods in a large plastic container meant for computer cables. Walking on his own he can just about manage without the crutches, nobody to keep up with, no need to rush, but his legs still pain him, a sharpness piercing all the way up into his lower back. He wants to reach for the peace but knows he mustn’t, not with the boy around. He’s always ready for a shock that will bring him to ground, ready one day for the teeth to come that will stop him walking at all.
Twenty-five minutes it takes for him to make his way down from the barn to where the shelters are hidden. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you’d barely notice there was anything there at all. He and the farmer have got better at disguising things. They’d had to. Drones flying over the place, the prying eyes of the village up above. Black tarpaulins under a canopy of branches. Camouflage tents from the army surplus store in town. The intense quiet perhaps the only giveaway that there are people hiding here.
For the first time, miraculously, there is a whole family. A mother and her two children, a boy and a girl. Usually, he leaves the food on the ground and heads back to the barn, leaves whoever is there in peace to eat but today he sits down. He has a story he wants to tell. He starts to talk. You’ve come to the right place, he says. A man wrote a book about a world on the other side of a wardrobe. This is that world. It’s a magical place, he says, but then loses his way. He thinks of his nephew back in the barn. He remains sitting cross-legged, rocking back and forth to ignore the pain, while they eat in silence. He sees himself at the head of a long table, his own family around him. You’re safe with me, he says, but they don’t look up. This family will be gone within the week, to where he does not know, and he knows not to ask.
*
His phone vibrates on the sofa again and the little banners with the photo of his brother and his nephew as a baby stack on top of each other. His brother trying text messages, iMessages, WhatsApp, phone calls, all the different angles to get his attention, sorted out enough now to want to spend time with his son, but it’s too late. The baby in the photo is now the teenage boy sat next to his uncle, hiding behind a plastic Hulk mask, PlayStation controller in his hand, happy to be ensconced again. The dregs of a spliff smoke faintly in the ashtray between them. The boy’s phone vibrates too but he doesn’t take his focus from the game.
Spiderman swings through Manhattan, a clear sky perfect above him. His Spidey-sense tingling, a robbery uptown he needs to get to. They’ve been locked in for more than five hours; the boy wants to complete the game. The man reaches for the Rizlas and resin and rolls another spliff. He needs the toilet but doesn’t want to interrupt the flow. There will be the agony when he stands. He takes the envelope from his pocket and fishes out a pill, rests it on his tongue. His phone vibrates again.
When the last bad guy is webbed, he touches his nephew’s knee. The boy raises the Hulk mask from his face like a visor, takes a long drag from the fresh spliff and holds it in his lungs the way he’s been taught. The man leans in to put an arm round his shoulder. The boy heaves him to his feet, helps him to the bathroom in the hallway and waits while he steadies himself on the plastic bars either side of the toilet. The man feels relief flood through him. He takes his time, enjoys the moment. Eventually, he manages to stand without help. On another day the effort would almost kill him. Today he smiles in triumph, straightens himself and shuffles forward. He offers the envelope to the boy.
