…but he didn’t eat very much either, and it’s a diet of microwave meals rejected by the factory, macaroni cheese mostly, so his childish frame was moulded with a layer of squishy white skin which could be pinched and shaped like putty, before sinking painlessly, bloodless, back down into bone.
His hair was thick and dark, his eyes were grey, he will never be handsome, but one day he might have a girlfriend who thinks he’s sorta cute and know that he’s grateful to be with her, and maybe for a little while they’ll be happy until he realises that he’s just playing this game and she’s neither his mother nor is he cute at all and in fact pretending to be cute is so fucking stupid it’s just…
Theo and Dani lay on the shingle, at the start of all things, and it is extraordinarily uncomfortable and probably deeply romantic. At their feet, the ocean reflected orange-black from a stained sky, and the wind carried in the smell of rotten eggs and cow dung. Behind them, the chimneys of Shawford by Budgetfood’s processing plant pumped smoke and steam into the sky, and the lorries growled and grumbled up the highway built by the company when they became community sponsor, though they’d had to knock down half the town to get it through. On the promenade before the pastel-painted houses, slanting grey roofs and tiny pink bullet-flowers in the garden, broad windows dive-bombed with seagull shit, four kids smoked pot and an old woman walked her dog between the shadows of the flickering street lights. Green algae had colonised long beards of colour beneath salt-scarred windows, a cross of St. George tangled itself around the pole outside a porch, and the seagulls hung in the air, tipped wings steady as they tried to fly forwards, were blown backwards, and remained going nowhere at all, resigned to their fate.
The sea rolled in, and Theo lay on the shingle, and Dani lay in his arms.
Dani Cumali, hair cut short because she hated the blue hairnet they had to wear in the factory, nails clipped down to an impossible white thread on translucent pink, skin pushed even closer to ivory white by the light spotting of dark, dark moles and ebony-black freckles that pop across her body, tiny as a needle beneath her eyes, round as a penny coin across her back.
They lie together, children again, and watch the starless sky in silence.
Dani doesn’t think she’s beautiful, and doesn’t think Theo is cute.
She thinks he’s low-pressure and she is going through certain experiences. It’s not so much the sex, which she’s already starting to suspect may be overrated. What she really wants, what she actually really needs is this thing which is sort of like that thing where…
She’s not sure if it’s like anything, really, maybe one day she’ll have the words for what it is, like some sort of love, but now it’s
friendship, perhaps
or just a needed quiet thing.
A quiet moment by the sea. That’s enough, for now.
Theo knows that Dani is beautiful, an opinion helped by the fact that she is a woman and he’s also going through a certain set of experiences, biological imperatives that haven’t been properly explained to him.
“We should go to the beach together. Like we used to when we were”
“Is 10 p.m. okay is that”
“You bring blankets, I’ll bring booze, like when we used to run away—just… you and me, tonight.”
Theo lay on the beach and at his back the theme tune of the town declared the hour, played through the speakers of Shawford. The speakers had been put in the day before the parade where the CEO of Budgetfood came to open the factory. His speech had been played to every corner of the town, from the little chapel with the large cemetery to the old ladies’ home by the leafless white trees, where they grumbled through their broken teeth about the disturbance. Since then the speakers hadn’t ever fallen silent, except once when a senior executive died, and once when someone had managed to find the main power inlet and set it on fire.
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Theo closed his eyes as the music drifted, slow and distorted, towards the sea, the sound deep, stretched as if slowed by opposition from the rumbling wind. The tune had been written by the executive mayor’s youngest son, who did it for GCSE Music coursework. The boy was very talented. This had been made clear, and the school wisely waived all tuition fees in recognition of his ability. The music was played on the synth, and a chorus was sung at noon, 5 p.m., 9 p.m. and midnight by a choir of children. For the longest time the boy who would be called Theo thought the words went:
Together we march, together we sing, happy in our community. The children play, there are igloos on the green, happy happy happy, the aliens make noodles.
As a child, he never questioned this interpretation. Why couldn’t there be igloos on the green? Why wouldn’t aliens make noodles? Noodles were great.
Later, the suspicion grew that he might have been wrong all along, but no matter how hard he listened, he couldn’t quite make out the actual words through the infantile chirruping of ageing speakers as they slithered down the hour to midnight. There were worse community sponsors than Budgetfood. At least you got cheap food on Fridays, and they still let the school do breakfast maths club on a Wednesday.
She said, “I didn’t think you’d be back.”
“Of course I would, I mean, it’s not like I”
“Off to your fancy university your fancy friends…”
“I heard you and Andy, I mean that”
“Piss off!”
“So it’s not a…”
“It’s over.”
“Really?”
“Really, are you kidding me, yes, it’s over, he’s a jerk, it’s all just been…”
Time comes a little unstuck, they sit on the blanket spread across the shingle and it’s…
“My bum is going to sleep.”
“Hold on, if you… is that any”
“Ow!”
“Sorry, I was just…”
And in his dreams
and in his memories
This is where it begins of course, but now he can’t remember if the moon was full or if they lay in starlight, and sometimes he remembers both, and both are true, and then he forgets for a little while, and it is almost certain that details, maybe more than details, were fantasy but still it’s all he’s got, all that’s left.
And Dani is in his arms, or possibly he is in hers, the difference at this point is academic, and somewhere, he hears himself say:
“There’s this thing at university, my mate, and I thought that maybe… but I was wrong and I did… I did this thing and…”
And she replies, or maybe she didn’t, maybe this was in town the morning before or perhaps the morning after, no—not the morning after, “They sacked me. It’s not called that. They didn’t extend my contract. No point. They’ve got other kids coming up through the programme now, give the job to some sixteen-year-old, not like they need much training, let them work until they’re twenty-one then give them the shove before they have to pay full wage and you just keep thinking, don’t you, you keep thinking…”
And in his dreams, or possibly his memories, Theo is crying. “I fucked it up. Dani? I fucked up. I fucked up everything. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
If he cried in reality too, she didn’t hear it, couldn’t see the tears on his face in the night, maybe tasted the salt with her tongue and thought it was spray blown in off the sea, the smear of seaweed on his skin, stone beneath his fingers, blood on his hands, and she whispered, “You’re never coming back, are you? You’re never coming back. I saw the look in your face, you hate this place now, you hate it just like I do. But I’ve got nowhere to go you’re never coming back so where’s the harm just once just tonight where’s the…”