Sam: Child welfare

There’s something about that little boy that makes me want to feed him up, to take care of him. I don’t know if it’s that funny grown up way he talks, or those big wide eyes. But there’s something a bit hollow about the way he’d reacted to that bloodstain. I wondered what he did up there all day, him and his horrible old granddad. I also wanted to ask him why he wasn’t at school, but I didn’t want to scare him away by coming over all responsible adult.

“Having an inset day?” I asked casually.

“No,” he shrugged. “Haven’t had any insects at all – just some Rice Krispies this morning and a bit of dirt on the stairwell.”

Some kind of weird joke obviously. I tried again. “Do you go to the Crown Estate primary, or St Joseph’s?”

“Oh,” he said, the penny dropping. “School. I don’t need to go.” He pushed the subject aside, and started on a new tack. “Have you seen Simon yet?”

The name hits me like a punch again. It takes a millisecond to realise he’s talking about the rabbit, but during that tiny slice of time the hole’s opened up in my chest again, and I feel despair. He’s gone and here I am, in a block of flats where a mangled bloodstain doesn’t shock anyone. Where Alex was beaten up on his first day here, and where the only friendly face is nine years old going on seven hundred and twelve. The feeling crushes me but I push back hard and defiant. I won’t let him beat me this time.

I try to put my tea mug gently down on the coffee table but it clatters alarmingly. The kid notices but does not say anything. Instead, he promises to hunt Simon down for me. “If you don’t catch him soon the speeders will strip him bare,” he said. 

“The who? What are they some local gang?”

But he was staring towards the corner of the room, eyes narrowed. “Something like that,” he said.

Tea for two

I’ve never understood what people eat in this world. They ignore the raw goodness of a slab of bloody meat and the pleasure of stripping it from the bone with your teeth, instead they must always be mincing and mashing, sprinkling of spices, blending together. I am not saying it tastes bad – I enjoy Ixbal’s culinary experiments far more than I would ever tell him. But I’m saying, where’s the sense in it? How did they go from raw animal meat to this? Like tea – who sat down and thought: “I know what, I’ll take the leaf of this plant, dry it in the sun, grind it up, stick it in a little paper bag, then pour hot water on it, add the milk of a cow, whip the bag out and throw it away. Not sweet enough? Crush a plant that grows half way across the globe, dry up the juice, grind it all together and do unspeakable things to it until it becomes a kind of crystal. Then, if your tea’s not too cold by now, stick two spoonfuls in and give it a nice stir.”

Still, when the hooded non-virgin says. “I need a cuppa,” I know what she means. I notice her hand had closed around mine as we made our way up the stairs, away from the bloodstain that was Nguyen. Her fingers felt warm and soft and they seemed to anchor me to her, pulling me away from what we’ve just seen, making it feel different because we saw it together. I felt a flash of anger, and meant to snatch my hand away, but I didn’t. I just climbed beside her in silence.

“We’ve got the worst flat in the block,” she said. “Alex and I cleaned it from top to bottom, but it’s weird, it just feels wrong in this building somehow. How can you stand to live in this place”

I looked at her wonderingly. Could she tell that this world was wrong for me? I didn’t answer in case I gave anything else away. As we climbed higher she fell silent as well, her breathing getting harder. Until, at the floor below mine, she stopped. Three battered blue doors surrounded us, to the left, right and ahead, and I tensed. I found myself praying she’d turn to the right, or push her key into the lock of the door straight in front of her. Foolish. If she’s meant to die, she’s meant to die. Like Nguyen, like so many others. With agonising slowness, she turned left, and let herself in. She was in the apartment below ours. The death-place.

Inside, it had changed. A smell of fresh paint hit me in a wave, and something else too, vanilla candles. The mould had been scraped off the walls, hastily washed over with buckets of paint the colour of cream. The only thing that had not changed, that could not change, was the buckled curve of the ceiling where Herlut slept – she had fitted a smart blue light-shade in the centre of the room and it swung slightly as the monster shifted his position above. How could she not see what was wrong? Was it the same spell or curse which kept me looking like a boy, and kept Ixbal looking like a gentle old dodderer? Or was it something simpler, the pure human need I’ve seen many times, the instinct to ignore what you cannot change and to make the best of a bad situation? The waves of malice pushing down from Herlut’s underbelly were being fended off by a soap bubble of pure optimism.

The woman’s hand slipped from mine, and she strode towards the kitchen and snapped on the kettle. “Sugar?” she asked.

Unexpectedly I used a phrase I had heard on television once: “I’m sweet enough already.”