Speaking With the Angel Read online

  The next morning I heard Mum say to Grandma, ‘Are you finding it hard to let go?’ and Grandma said, ‘Let go of what?’ I don’t know why they don’t just get O’Hare in to measure her up and then hit her over the head with a frying pan.

  That evening I fell asleep in Grandma’s room and I dreamt that I was doing the crossword again while she was asleep and I heard that funny voice from Grandma. Then I realized in the dream that it wasn’t Grandma at all but her dentures talking by themselves in the glass. They introduced themselves as ‘A fine set of molars, eight incisors, central and lateral, upper and lower, and four canines with a perfectly sound bite. How do you do.’ And they had this really strong Scottish accent.

  I asked them if they could finish Grandma’s story and they said yes, but not yet. I said why not, and they said ’cause we hadn’t got to the end. And I asked when they would tell me, and they said that would be up to me. Then I realized that this was more or less what Mum said about saying goodbye – and I got angry with the teeth and threatened to pour their water out.

  I said, ‘Are you saying she’s definitely going to die?’ and they said, ‘I don’t know, I’m a set of teeth, not the Oracle of Bloody Delphi!’

  I was about to leave, when they gave me this mysterious instruction. They said that if I wanted to hear the rest of the story I had to make sure that they weren’t buried with Grandma and if I kept them separate they’d finish the story – and that was a promise.

  Next day I was in a really crap mood and decided no way was I going to see Grandma any more because everyone was blatantly trying to trick me into making her die and it was like I was the only one who could do it. And anyway what was the point – I mean she couldn’t even talk any more except like the Mad Hatter.

  I got into such a crap mood that it made me really brave, ’cause I didn’t care, so I did an amazing thing: Roy Hattersley told me to piss off by the terrapin huts and so I told him to eff himself and he grabbed me and told me to apologize and before he could nut me I knocked him down. And no one did anything – not one thing!

  I felt like the most powerful person in the world, like Colossus, who can turn his flesh to steel, so when I got home I punched Max. But he punched me back, right in the eye.

  I’ve had all these speeches from Mum about how she can’t cope any more and if I’m not going to see Grandma then she has to go in a home. She’s the one who has to clean her and stuff – which means her bum.

  I said I’d see her, and I knew I should have, but I still didn’t.

  It was another thing without any explanation. I just knew when it happened. I was on the railway line going to school, and it was a windy day, and a bit rainy, and I suddenly got the smell of Grandma’s room in a gust of wind. I didn’t even think about it; I turned round and ran home. I remember now, I was shouting but can’t remember what. But I was thinking how, because it had only just happened, you could go back in time, like rewind – ’cause you wouldn’t have to go back that far.

  Mum must have just left ’cause the house was locked, so I went up the drainpipe into Grandma’s room. She was looking like the cover of Goosebumps. Her eyes and her mouth were open and her skin was all stretched and her head was kind of back on the pillow. I stopped looking at her and ran out and right out of the house down to Stoney Lane where the woods start. It was all slippery on the gravel from wet leaves and I kept falling over. It was only about nine o’clock, so I wasn’t going to bump into any naked bank managers or my dad in the woods. I got soaked going through the trees.

  I could see Mrs Bluck’s cottage and I thought it’s not fair that she’s still alive. I suddenly got a strange idea that Mrs Bluck didn’t have blood in her veins but just tea. Then I didn’t think for a long time. I tried to think, but instead I just kept seeing my classroom in my imagination – and I could hear a song by Westlife coming from somewhere – and then it was Teddy Bear’s Picnic and it made me laugh because I thought of Wing Commander Devonish and you really would get a big surprise. And then I cried. For ages.

  I went home in the afternoon and I was really hungry. My mum knew that I knew when she saw me. She hugged me and I cried again.

  She said, ‘She looked lovely – so peaceful. She had a beautiful calm smile.’

  I knew that was a lie for a start and it made me stop crying.

  I said, ‘Can I see her?’ and she said no ’cause she was gone and she didn’t think it was appropriate at my age to see a dead person. This started me going quite postal. ‘Gone where?’ I asked her.

  ‘She’s gone to O’Hare’s, Henry. We’re going to bury her on Tuesday.’

  I said, ‘Were her teeth in?’ and Mum said ‘What?’

  This is where you’ll think I’m mental – I had this thing where I knew the dream was important. After I’d cried by the Stoney Lane I’d started to think, and I’d thought about the dream and how the teeth had said to rescue them from being buried with Grandma, how they said they’d tell me the end of the story. And I’d remembered too how Grandma had told me to put her voice under a walnut tree, and it all seemed like an important message that I’d buggered up. First I hadn’t said goodbye to Grandma and she’d had to go without me, and now I’d let the teeth already go with her to O’Hare’s. And there was only one way I could get them back now.

  I stood for ages, not quite in front of O’Hare’s but a bit to the side and I knew I couldn’t do it in a million years. What would I do, just go in there and say, ‘Oh hi, Mr O’Hare, can I have my Grandma’s teeth back?’ The only other way was the Darkling Window of Death, and I wasn’t exactly going to do that either.

  The drainpipe was quite wobbly but I reckoned, if I even thought about it, forget it. And anyway, she would be buried in two days and at least it was daylight and this way I wouldn’t have to talk to O’Hare.

  One of the panes was boarded up from the inside and it was quite easy to push open.

  I don’t remember much about going in ’cause I was so scared I could nearly have started laughing like the Riddler out of Batman. I remember thinking for a second that I was a total superhero. First I’d punched Roy Hattersley and now I’d climbed into the Darkling Window of Death … and then I felt number twos coming on. The room was empty and really spooksville. I must have gone out and down some stairs. I think I just followed myself. I don’t know how long it took me but I obviously found the right room.

  The coffin was open and I kept thinking of the music from Pet Rescue to stop myself from being scared but then that started to sound creepy and then I’d get so scared that I almost wasn’t scared, if you know what I mean. I was probably a bit mental to be honest. The room was quite darkish but I could see which end her face was. I just closed my eyes and put my hand right in her mouth.

  Her teeth wouldn’t come out. They were completely stuck. Then I opened my eyes and saw that it wasn’t Grandma but Mrs Wharburton who helps with Oxfam. I didn’t even know she was dead.

  I turned around and saw that, like a bell-end, I hadn’t noticed that there was another coffin in the room.

  This really was Grandma. And actually she really did look peaceful and almost smiling. So maybe Mum wasn’t lying. So why wasn’t it ‘appropriate’ to see her then? Anyway I got the teeth quite easily and that’s when the door opened and O’Hare came in.

  I don’t know who screamed louder. This was like blatant pant-load hair-fall-out time. I might not have been able to scream if he hadn’t have screamed. But he did … he screamed the place down. I’m surprised no one came. Actually someone did but only from upstairs.

  He was still shaking in his office when he gave me a cup of tea.

  I was sitting in this great big comfy leather armchair and he had made me put a blanket round me – I don’t know why – and he said (and I think it was Irish, I’m not sure), ‘I bet you had to stick your courage through a stick pin to come in there, did you?’ He was smiling.

  He tried to give me a gobstopper out of his jar but they were all stuck together. ‘I
hate how they get like that,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

  Another old man came in and said, ‘Will you be needing anything more?’

  O’Hare asked me if I wanted more tea, and I asked for some water, and the old man went out.

  ‘That’s Ned. He helps me out around here.’ I wondered if it was really the ghostly old Mr O’Hare.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, you gave me the fright of my bloody life,’ he said. ‘It’s not every day I hear knocking about back there. People don’t break into places like this, not since Burke and Hare. No relation.’

  He kept asking how I was feeling and I kept saying fine and he said I was made of sterner stuff than him, then.

  He asked me what it was all about – was it curiosity? And I said it was. He told me that where he comes from they wouldn’t let a little lad run around trying to figure out what’s being kept from him. Everyone gets to say goodbye and they have a kind of party and the dead person gets invited and you all get a last look, something to keep in here like a photo, and he tapped his head. ‘It’s not the same here,’ he said. ‘Everyone had to creep around like it’s a big dirty secret.’

  I told him about how Grandma told stories, and how she never got to the end of the last one. I told him loads of stuff in fact. I don’t know why, but it all just came out. I didn’t tell him about the teeth though, in case he thought I was mental.

  Grandma was going to be first up on Tuesday – to be buried, I mean – ten o’clock. Which meant the same limo deposits our lot and has to be back at nine-thirty for Mrs Wharburton. The Wilcoxes are at twelve (‘And you thought this was a quiet town?’ he said). Mr Craddock he’s three o’clock (‘He wants a Mercedes Benz, bless him.’). Four shows on one day. That’s what he called them – shows. He said he was just a stage manager and the mourners were the actors – temperamental. He told me to come and see him again sometime and not wait to be brought in a box. He’d have fresh gobstoppers.

  It’s strange but when I came out I felt better than I’d felt for absolutely ages.

  I went straight home and filled up a glass of water and went to the bathroom and put the teeth in and waited. I waited for quite a long time.

  But they didn’t speak, and by now I knew they wouldn’t, and it had been a piss-take. The whole thing. A big racket. Doing what you’re supposed to do, being rewarded for being brave … It’s all bollocks to get you to do it. Like Mum’s wise voice … That’s why it’s in all the stories, to hypnotize you into thinking you’ll get something out of it – like there’s a bargain. But there isn’t a bargain. You pass tests, which in stories always end up with you becoming king or Lord Mayor or you rescue a princess or find a pot of gold – but in the Department of Nothing you do it all and nothing happens. Your Grandma dies and everything stays the same. And you never get to hear the end of the story. I knew we had a walnut tree, so I decided to bury them there. It’s not ’cause I thought anything would happen. It was just ’cause … what else was I going to do with them? Put them back?

  During the funeral I kept trying to think up an ending for the story. I still haven’t managed to. I’m sure Emma will have got out of that tower, but bugger if I know how. Maybe she gets the ring and Lucien Lothair turns out to be a really nice bloke and gives her a cup of tea – and then she goes off happily ever after with Blind Jack who’s not blind any more …’cause it’s a story. Actually, you know what? Jack could rescue her, ’cause with being blind it wouldn’t make any difference, the castle being invisible! That’s not bad is it? So maybe that’s the ending.

  I was thinking that if I told a story about my life, everyone would boo at the end.

  So it’s back to the Department of Nothing. The house is calmer now. Dad’s gone back to morris dancing instead of his movement and that calms Mum down a lot. Mrs Foster reported the movement for moral turpitude and they all got arrested. I go and see O’Hare quite a lot now. He tells jokes. They’re not that funny, but if you don’t laugh it hurts his feelings. Going in there makes Roy Hattersley more scared of me. O’Hare told me I had one or two tales to tell myself now, and maybe I should try them out. So that’s what I just did.

  And the session is now closed.

  I’m the Only One

  ZADIE SMITH

  She was my sister and she was sleeping late. She’s a lot older than me and at the time she was about to break into films, directing them, so everybody was indulging her. She was the only girl, too. If something didn’t work out in her life and she had to come home for a while, it was a big deal. It mattered more than if I fucked up in one way or another. When Kelly was at home you had to creep around the house and keep your voice down even if it was the middle of the afternoon. Our mother’s Canadian – I don’t know why I say that, except maybe it helps explain her opinion about Kel: Smarts Needs Special. It was this little crappy phrase she had made up and it meant that clever people, people with special talents, need special treatment. Like they have a disease. You have to meet the Canadian side of our family to understand how cute she thinks that phrase is. I remember thinking that it was bullshit when I was fourteen and it still smells bad now. But to my mother, Kelly was this asteroid that had landed in our lives and no one knew how she got there or what size hole she was going to leave. I’ve never been very good at school, and Pete, our older brother, is the same. Then along comes Kelly. So my mother had us all pussy-footing around like a family mime troupe, waving our hands, taking our shoes off.

  I’m thinking of a particular morning. I was creeping around trying to make a silent breakfast, opening cupboards quietly, acting like I didn’t exist. I’d been doing it for a couple of weeks since Kelly got back. It felt like I’d been doing it my whole life. The situation came about because earlier in the year Kelly had moved in with this guy called Aidan. They bought furniture, the whole works. Then she cheated on him and he left her. Apart from Kelly being back in our house, it was also a shame because Aidan was the only man she ever went out with, before or since, whom I’ve had any time for whatsoever. Aidan was a top man, a good guy. The thing I liked about him was that he was smart, but he didn’t need so much of this special treatment. He was Irish, from Dublin, and he could be funny, he could talk football and he liked to see other people’s mouths open and close besides his own. It was good knowing someone like him. I needed it; what with Dad not being around, Pete married and gone; and me in a house full of women. That was the year I was praying for a few more inches on my height and shaving the bare space under my nose hoping that something might turn up. So it was good to know Aidan, six foot three and hairy as a bear. He was hairy back and front and Kelly would tease him about it, and he would laugh her off or tell her she could do with losing a few pounds which, between you and me, was nothing but the truth. She was a fat little thing back then. And he went and told her, straight-up; didn’t care that she was almost, sort of, famous. He told it how it was. That was the way he loved her. She never appreciated it, though, and then she had this fling with some pretty boy in the film industry. But you could see she realized what she’d lost when he left her because she slunk back home and holed herself up in Pete’s old room that I’d been using for weights. She took it over and lay in there all day in the dark curled up in a stinking duvet watching old black-and-white films. I remember asking her, ‘Why can’t you use your own bedroom?’ She had a small bedroom upstairs that used to be covered wall to wall in her school friends’ graffiti until she went off to university and Mum whitewashed the whole thing. I asked her again, ‘Why can’t you use your own bedroom, that’s what it’s there for.’ She said, ‘I can’t sleep and work in the same room. I need a study.’ She said it as if a study is one of those things you can’t do without, like clean water. I said, ‘But I need to exercise.’ She said, ‘You’re fourteen. Your body isn’t even developed. The only thing you need to do is stop beating the bishop before you go blind.’ This was classic Kelly. She always knew how to make you feel four inches long in every direction.

  So she came
back, and I had to move out all my weights and spread them around the house wherever there was space. I put the bench press in my room along with the free weights. I put the Abdominizer in the lounge. I stuck the chin-up bar at the top of the stairs which lead down to the front door. And even though I was pissed off with Kelly for taking the spare room, having the weights all over the place did make it more like circuit training and doing circuits made me feel I was Rocky. It’s what they do in the middle of Rocky movies; a two-minute sequence to show that over a number of months he got fit and pumped up. You pray for that kind of speedy, magic-time when you’re working out, the same way you wish your adolescence would pass like it does in a TV serial: a school scene, a sex scene and a graduation. It’s slower and faster than that. And some events become still and solid, and turn into a thing in your life, an object like a lampshade or an ironing board. They hang around; you could reach out and touch them. This day I’m trying to tell you about is like that.

  So: my exercise. I’d start in my room, and do about four sets of twenty. Then I’d run downstairs and start on the Abdominizer. If you’ve never seen one, they’re like half of something fun, half a bike or half a swing. You lie down in them and you do sit-ups. You spend good money trying to make sit-ups something else. In the end, a sit-up is a sit-up. But I’m as big a mug as anyone and I’d try and do two hundred sit-ups on that thing in sets of fifty. The pain was very bad. So I’d think of something that pissed me off, usually Kelly, and the anger would help me push out the last fifty. I wanted to show her that I could develop if I wanted to. Because there was always this thing between her and me that we were both kind of overweight, and always telling the other one that they were obsessed with it. So if Kelly didn’t eat lunch, I’d be like ‘For fuckssake, you’re not dieting are you? You’re not even fat.’ Trying to make her feel pathetic. And if she caught me with the Abdominizer (it was hers, she never used it), she’d say something like, ‘Jono, you’re not even developed yet. It’s just puppy fat, for fuckssake, give it a chance.’ We used to swear like troopers. And we liked to make each other feel bad about things. Around that time she was also giving me a lot of shit about girls. All about how she didn’t want me to sleep with girls because I was too young and under-developed. She was more a mother in that way. And the fact that I started exercising, working-out – that really irritated her. She’d find me with a weight in my hand and start shouting. She’d say I was a boy trying to be a man too soon. I know I’m meant to be the stupid one, but I could work out for myself that it was all about Aidan, not me. Most days, I just did my best to avoid her.