And who was out on the dinghy?
People from Phoenix Court. They were waving and shouting, their mouths open like goldfish wanting feeding. Liz and the tattooed man, Penny and Andy, all of them shouting at me.
But I can’t swim. My foot is like a weight tied to me. It would never flip like a proper foot. In school swimming lessons I could never propel myself. And I burned with shame throughout because everyone could see that foot in all its glory. When we jumped in the heavy, warm, chemical water, the crazy distortions made its ugliness leap up at me. Of course I couldn’t swim.
My mam said, “They’re going to drown, Craig.”
And I hate having dreams like this, where they put guilt on you. My mam turned away in disgust. She spat into the water. In real life she never spits. So I must think this is how she really thinks of me. She tossed off her cardy, the one I hate, with the pink embroidered cats, and leaped into the sea. She dove straight and looked so graceful. But the sea was green and cold and dark and somehow I knew it had just sucked her in and she wouldn’t be rescuing anyone.
The step machine lets out that heart-stopping bleep. Fifteen minutes. I’m relieved. I slow, slow, stop, automatically checking out how many staircases I would have climbed if this was real life. How many calories I’ve burned. Andy is already off his machine. He’s over by the rubber plants in the corner, talking with Penny, who’s come to meet me.
FOURTEEN
Craig thought he was going to die and that was why the future wasn’t worth thinking about. Once he startled Elsie by saying something along these lines. They were at the fairground; Craig was ten, an age when he stayed close by his mam. She said he needn’t grow up poor and uneducated like his mam and dad. Craig came right back with, “We’ll be dead by then anyway.” Elsie was shocked.
“What does that mean?”
“There’s no point in thinking about when I grow up,” he said with a shrug, gazing dispiritedly at the lights of the dodgems. “Can I go on them?”
Only if Elsie could come in the same car and keep an eye on him. She drove and let him place his hands on the steering wheel. The air smelled of rubber and crackled with the static that powered the cars. Someone rammed them and jolted Elsie’s neck. Her concentration was off because she was thinking over what her son had said. He came out with odd, gloomy things. She thought it was them funny comics he read. Once he’d told her he wouldn’t feel guilty shooting her in the heart if she was taken over body and soul by a Swamp Thing.
“Is it because of your bad foot?” she asked him, as sensitively as she could manage, swinging round in a dodgem car, grappling the slippery wheel. Maybe she should wait till after, but she was anxious to know what was going on in her son’s head.
“You what?” He looked at her, scowling. She knew he hated mention of his bad foot. “No, it’s nothing to do with that.”
Elsie thought, He might think that. He might think his foot will spread, that the crushed, diseased flesh will kill the rest of him. If I was a kid with a foot like that, I’d look at it, clutch and feel it at night and think that it was going to kill me. Especially if I read the weird kind of comics Craig reads. They’re always about monsters and things.
“Then why do you think you’re going to die?”
He sighed; she could almost hear it above the noise of the fair. Sometimes he looked so frustrated with her. “I never said just me. I said we’re all going to die.”
So that was it. “This isn’t about nuclear war again, is it? Because if it is, I’ve already explained to you about that.”
He tutted. “No, it isn’t about nuclear war.” Though he hadn’t really believed Elsie’s saying that it was all right if you hid under the stairs and ate tinned peaches. It was at this age that Craig started to feel he knew more about the world than his mam, and each thing she tried to tell him from then on only compounded that impression.
“We’re all going to die anyway, aren’t we?” he said with a bright smile. It was something he’d learned in comics. The superhero comics never flinched from deaths. Someone was always getting it. Look at Gwen Stacey, killed by the Green Goblin. Chucked in the river. Spiderman had been distraught. It had taken years for his alter ego, Peter Parker, to learn to love again. That was when he started knocking about with Mary Jane, who always called him Tiger. Craig had his first wank over Mary Jane. In his recurring daydream he’d been dressed as Spiderman and she felt him through his red and blue Lycra. “You’ve helped me love again,” Spiderman told Mary Jane in the comics, and she smiled, pleased. On the bathroom floor Craig stared at the widening pool of his white sperm and hardly dared touch his numb cock. His first sex was fraught with the idea of rescuing love from the jaws of death.
And the Green Goblin himself had been killed, the inadvertent victim of Spiderman, a bittersweet revenge. Found dead, he was unmasked and revealed to be the insane father of one of Spidey’s best college friends. The irony of life! Something else Craig had gleaned from comics, alongside the inevitability of death, was that your oddest, deadliest enemies are often just around the corner. Anyway, how could he explain this to Mam? She always wanted to bring all his worries and frowns and nightmares back to his broken foot or his absent father. I don’t care about either of those things, Mam, he wanted to say. But the wet way
