Grandma only stays a little while because we have another visitor, that’s our lawyer Morris. I didn’t know we had one, like the courtroom planet where people shout and the judge bangs the hammer. We meet him in a room in the not upstairs, there’s a table and a smell like sweet. His hair is extra curly. While he and Ma talk I practice blowing my nose.
“This paper that’s printed your fifth-grade photo, for instance,” he’s saying, “we’d have a strong case for breach of privacy there.” The
“You mean like suing? That’s the last thing on my mind,” she tells him. I show her my tissue with my blowing in it, she does a thumbs-up.
Morris nods a lot. “I’m just saying, you have to consider your future, yours and the boy’s.” That’s me, the boy. “Yeah, the Cumberland’s waiving its fees in the short term, and I’ve set up a fund for your fans, but I have to tell you, sooner or later there’s going to be bills like you wouldn’t believe. Rehab, fancy therapies, housing, educational costs for both of you. .”
Ma rubs her eyes.
“I don’t want to rush you.”
“You said — my fans?”
“Sure,” says Morris. “Donations are pouring in, about a sack a day.”
“A sack of what?”
“You name it. I grabbed some things at random—” He lifts up a big plastic bag from behind his chair and takes parcels out.
“You opened them,” says Ma, looking in the envelopes.
“Believe me, you need this stuff filtered. F-E-C-E-S, and that’s just for starters.”
“Why somebody sent us poo?” I ask Ma.
Morris is staring.
“He’s a good speller,” she tells him.
“Ah, you asked why, Jack? Because there’s a lot of crazies out there.”
I thought the crazies were in here in the Clinic getting helped.
“But most of what you’re receiving is from well-wishers,” he says. “Chocolates, toys, that kind of thing.”
Chocolates!
“I thought I’d bring you the flowers first as they’re giving my PA a migraine.” He’s lifting up lots of flowers in plastic invisible, that’s what the smell.
“What toys are the toys?” I whisper.
“Look, here’s one,” says Ma, pulling it out of an envelope. It’s a little wooden train. “Don’t snatch.”
“Sorry.” I choo-choo it all along the table down the leg and over the floor up the wall that’s blue in this room.
“Intense interest from a number of networks,” Morris is saying, “you might consider doing a book, down the road. .” Ma’s mouth isn’t friendly. “You think we should sell ourselves before somebody else does.”
“I wouldn’t put it like that. I’d imagine you’ve a lot to teach the world. The whole living-on-less thing, it couldn’t be more zeitgeisty.” Ma bursts out laughing.
Morris puts his hands up flat. “But it’s up to you, obviously. One day at a time.”
She’s reading some of the letters. “ ‘Little Jack, you wonderful boy, enjoy every moment because you deserve it because you have been quite literally to Hell and back!’ ”
“Who said that?” I ask.
She turns the page over. “We don’t know her.”
“Why she said I was wonderful?”
“She’s just heard about you on the TV.”
I’m looking in the envelopes that are fattest for more trains.
“Here, these look good,” says Ma, holding up a little box of chocolates.
“There’s more.” I’ve finded a really big box.
“Nah, that’s too many, they’d make us sick.”
I’m sick already with my cold so I wouldn’t mind.
“We’ll give those to someone,” says Ma.
“Who?”
“The nurses, maybe.”
“Toys and so forth, I can pass on to a kids hospital,” says Morris.
“Great idea. Choose some you want to keep,” Ma tells me.
“How many?”
“As many as you like.” She’s reading another letter. “ ‘God bless you and your sweet saint of a son, I pray you discover all the beautiful things this world has to offer all your dreams come true and your path in life is paved with happiness and gold.’ ” She puts it on the table. “How am I going to find the time to answer all these?”
Morris shakes his head. “That bast — the accused, shall we say, he robbed you of the seven best years of your life already. Personally, I wouldn’t waste a second more.” “How do you know they would have been the best years of my life?”
He shrugs. “I just mean — you were nineteen, right?”
There’s super cool stuff, a car with wheels that go
“Wow! That’s loud,” says Morris.
“Too loud,” says Ma.
I do it one more time.
“Jack—”
I put it down. I find a velvety crocodile as long as my leg, a rattle with a bell in it, a clown face when I press the nose it says
“Not that either, it gives me the creeps,” says Ma.
I whisper bye-bye to the clown and put it back in its envelope. There’s a square with a sort of pen tied to it that I can draw on but it’s hard plastic, not paper, and a box of monkeys with curly arms and tails to make into chains of monkeys. There’s a fire truck, and a teddy bear with a cap on that doesn’t come off even when I pull hard. On the label a picture of a baby face has a line through it and
“Oh, come on, Jack,” says Ma. “You don’t need that many.”
“How many do I need?”
“I don’t know—”
“If you could sign here, there, and there,” Morris tells her.
I’m chewing my finger in under my mask. Ma doesn’t tell me not to do that anymore. “How many do I need?”
She looks up from the papers she’s writing. “Choose, ah, choose five.”
I count, the car and the monkeys and the writing square and the wooden train and the rattle and the crocodile, that’s six not five, but Ma and Morris are talking and talking. I find a big empty envelope and I put all the six in.
“OK,” says Ma, throwing all the rest of the parcels back into the huge bag.
“Wait,” I say, “I can write on the bag, I can put
“Let Morris handle it.”
“But—”
Ma puffs her breath. “We’ve got a lot to do, and we have to let people do some of it for us or my head’s going to explode.” Why her head’s going to explode if I write on the bag?
I take out the train again, I put it up my shirt, it’s my baby and it pops out and I kiss it all over.
“January, maybe, October’s the very earliest it could come to trial,” Morris is saying.
There’s a trial of tarts, Bill the Lizard has to write with his finger, when Alice knocks over the jury box she puts him back head down by accident, ha ha.
“No but, how long will he be in jail?” asks Ma.
