Only the world is ugly and even if anything could happen, usually the same things keep happening. I wake up the next day and I'm still Amy’s monster.
The town warned you about me, Amy.
Now I’m warning myself away.
26
ME
MAX POINTS OUT the smell of cigarettes in the downstairs kitchen, while his mum attends her therapy session. He comes over to me, where I sit at the long kitchen table doing some paperwork, and asks me for five pounds.
I lean back and cross my arms. ‘What’d you want five pounds for?
‘We’ve run out of milk.’
‘Milk doesn’t cost five pounds, mate.’
‘Okay, two pounds then, mate.’
‘Alright, Max. Here’s two pounds.’
‘Stingy, Bro-Dad. I know you’re rich. I’ve seen your shiny car. And you’ve got a motorbike.’
‘There’s nothing stingy about me giving you two pounds to buy milk.’
His shoulders sag, and he sounds like a balloon when you let the air out. ‘Do you want the change?’
‘Yeah I want the change, kid.’
‘Okay, Bro-Dad. You’re not stingy at all . . . ’
‘You’re a gobby little one.’ I ruffle his hair. He totters off. ‘No, wait for me. I’ll come to the shop with you, bud.’
‘No, it’s okay. I’m not a baby. I’m nearly ten.’
The little shop is only a five-minute walk and the neighbourhood is safe enough. I let him go by himself.
While I wait for Max, I ring Amy. Leave a message. Then feel fucking stupid and try to rerecord the message. The bloody answering service cuts me off.
I’m staying away from her, but that doesn’t mean I’m leaving her behind again. It’s time to return the favour Amy offered all those years ago, when we were kids, when she hid with me in the broom cupboard, with open arms, wrapping me in the protection of her sympathy.
There was nothing I could offer until this moment that comes close to what Amy gave me back then. Nothing that had ever been offered to me in my whole pathetic fucking life and Amy offered it so easily.
But I fucked it up. Was just too damn hard to love, and Amy was — is more than I deserve. She’s more than I thought I could ever give her in return.
Now, in this moment, seeing Sad Amy, seeing her heart decay — it just about breaks my fucking soul.
The reason why I’m back in town has changed.
Fifteen minutes later, Max returns with a small carton of milk and a packet of Maltesers.
‘Don’t remember saying you could buy those, Max.’
‘You didn’t say I couldn’t.’
‘I said I wanted the change.’
‘Here.’ He slams seven pence into my palm. The coins are hot and sticky. ‘Do you want some Maltesers?’
‘Yeah. Alright.’
I push my paperwork to one side. We sit at the table drinking milk and dividing up the Maltesers. Max gets a kitchen knife and cuts his Maltesers into halves, and then into quarters. He sits dissolving them on his tongue, then sticks out his tongue to show me.
‘Shepherd?’
‘Max?’
‘Aren’t you going to eat your Maltesers?’
‘You have them.’
‘Okay. Bro-Dad?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Tarek said I live here because I belong in a looney bin.’
Tarek needs to learn to shut his damn mouth.
‘Why’d he say that?’
‘Because I saw a dead body.’
Shit. I’ve gotta handle this right.
‘What you saw was disturbing, wasn’t it?’
Max says nothing.
‘Max. You ever feel the need to talk about what you saw, doesn’t matter where or when, we can talk about it, yeah?’
‘Is it because of the boner?’
‘What’d you mean, Max?’
‘Tarek said that if you see a grown-up’s willy and it’s a boner then all the other grown-ups go spectrum, and you have to go to see a psycho.’
I sit, trying to find an answer to this. Tarek’s covered a lot of damn angles in one sentence. I’m caught off guard.
‘So, do I have to see a psycho?’
‘Psychologist, and I don’t know, mate . . . Yeah, maybe it’ll be a good idea.’
Max rolls his eyes in that way only nine-year-old’s do.
‘Listen up, kid. In the next few years you’re gonna be discovering a lot about your body. And about other people’s bodies. Your mum probably wants to make sure you don’t find that scary.’
Or go ‘spectrum’ in Tarek’s words.
His mum enters the kitchen, gives him a hug.
‘Thanks for the Maltesers,’ Max says. He takes his mother’s hand. He turns and looks up at me. ‘Can’t you help me? You’re one of those doctor lots, aren’t you?’
Max smiles at me like I’m a decent person and I want to tell him the truth. Real bad, like it’s burning in my throat, the words.
‘No, Max, not me.’
When night hits, I lie on my back in bed. My bedroom no longer smells of sex and sweat, but I sniff Amy’s white lace panties, the ones she’s forgotten, thinking that somehow, Amy is here with me, and we have something we can never fucking have.
US.
Fuck. It all seems fucked. We have no damn chance in my world.
There’s only one way I can end this.
Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.
Sorry, Amy.
27
ME
When the car lights strobe through my living room blinds, I check myself out in the mirror. I look like the Walking Dead. Dirty, two-day old torn jeans. Stained white tee.
In the bathroom, the shower hisses. It's almost time now. I sit down on the sofa and rub my eyes. I haven’t slept in months.
Amy’s made me take stock of life. Made me see through the shit in the trees. It’s a strange feeling, like I’ve been abducted to another planet with no getaway ship.
It’s become an obsession — hell, addiction. Crazy addiction. Like I’ve injected my brain with heroin.
My heroine.
After
