The boy and soldier listen. They’ve been listening for weeks. Their days in the tent are numbered. They know it. Joe’s eyes are shiny, but then, they always are. The vacuum cleaner bashes skirting boards behind the walls. The bedroom door opens and the walls of their world tremble, the vacuum cleaner at the sides. Knelt in sniper mode at the entrance of the tent, Joe is knocked to the floor by the flex. He lies in deafening darkness, head sucked into the hose. Everything goes quiet with a click. Nathan’s mother peers into the tent.
‘You need to take this down, Nathan, so I can hoover,’ she says. Pulling the blockage of Joe’s head out of the tube, she tosses him down. ‘You’re old enough to tidy your own room.’
Nathan takes down the tent as Joe watches from the ground.
‘I’m not gonna make it, Sarge,’ he says.
Nathan hides their rations under his bed. The vacuum cleaner is getting close again, so he sits Joe on the shelf.
‘Sarge, you can’t leave me like this. I need help.’
‘Aren’t you supposed to say “Go on without me, save yourself” or summat?’ says Nathan.
‘Fuck that,’ says Joe.
Nathan looks at Joe, the same as always, lint on his head. He sounds shaken, like something from an old movie — a cowboy with one red strand trickling from his lips. Nathan gets the whisky, one eye on the door. He pours some onto Joe’s face and rips toilet-roll bandages.
‘It hurts, Sarge.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know.’
Nathan licks a drop of whisky off Joe’s chin, tasting fire.
It’s not easy, leaving Joe for school, but Nathan does. Sharpening his pencil, he thinks ‘Where does it hurt?’ and still doesn’t know. The class are reading out papers about their families. A girl with skin the colour of perfect toast offers around little pastry sweets.
‘Just like Jaddati makes,’ she says.
She smiles at Nathan. He looks down, fingers sticky from the sweet in his hand. When it’s his turn to read, he stutters and skims. He cannot tell the smiling girl they might be enemies. She is wearing pink tights like his sister’s, but her grandmother lives in another country. Whose side is she on? He isn’t sure.
After school, Nathan’s mother scrub-scrubs everything clean one last time. In his bedroom, Nathan can hear knives scraping burnt pans. Joe’s voice shivers, his belly is hard. Nathan listens to a stool being dragged across the lino in the kitchen downstairs.
‘Someone’s been here. Something’s not right,’ says Joe.
Nathan follows Joe’s gaze to the door, his little sister’s writing beside it on the wall. Helen. Helen. Hel. The writing slopes down then gets bored with itself. Nathan sighs. His sister writes her name everywhere all day long. Sometimes, he thinks he’ll go to sleep and wake to find himself covered: Helen Helen Hel all over his face. Next to the scrawled wall, one of her dolls is abandoned on the floor. The doll is called Skipper; it looks like a child with a too grown-up face. It lies face-up, staring at glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to a white ceiling. The stars aren’t glowing now. Joe can’t look away.
‘Close my eyes,’ Joe says.
Nathan tries the switch at the back of Joe’s skull. Blue eyes move side to side. There’s nothing to make them close.
‘I can’t close them,’ Nathan says.
‘Why?’
Joe’s voice is a splinter. He can’t stop staring at Skipper lying on the ground.
‘Who did that?’ he says. ‘I didn’t do it. Walking through the village, I saw two local children and gave them chocolate. Walking back, they were lying down, the wrapper still in their hands. I saw the “thank you” still in the girl’s throat. Cut. Open like a red flower.’
Nathan looks at the doll on the floor, still just a doll, light dabbed to its eye. He holds Joe in his hands. Joe can’t stop seeing, even facing the window, the yellow weeds on next door’s wall waving in the wind.
‘What’s that stain on the wall?’ Joe says.
‘Chipped paint,’ says Nathan, ‘that’s all. That’s all.’
He hums a song about bottles on the wall until Joe is quiet, sleeping with open eyes, a drop of whisky drying on his chin. When he wakes, life seems better. Joe wants to talk about other things again. He wants to tell Nathan about the biscuit game, how to make liquor with a tin of pineapple chunks and sun, the tattoos his friends have on body parts that make him laugh till he cries. ‘Sometimes bad shit is what makes guys buddies,’ he says. ‘Bad shit that boys get into together.’
This is the Joe Nathan likes, the one that says the sort of things he thinks he should write down.
‘Sometimes, I worry… I’m scared…’ Nathan says, then he stops.
‘Nathaaaan. Nathan? Come down. I need a hand.’
His mother calls him downstairs.
‘Tell her nothing if you love her,’ Joe says. ‘Sometimes silence is the best gift you can give.’
Nathan nods, leaving Joe guarding the ledge, the light fading. Tell nothing, that’s just the sort of thing Joe always says. Nathan thinks of this going into the kitchen, where his mother drops pins on the lino. She stretches up on the noses of her bunny feet to tack a Welcome Home banner to the wall.
‘Pass me the pins, Nathan,’ she says.
He passes the pins. Helen sits on the floor, scribbling her name on the cupboard door. The card Mum helped her make lies on the counter, a wax rainbow and stars on the front, night and day all at once.
Nathan holds out his hand to help his mother down from the stool.
‘You haven’t signed Helen’s card,’ his mother says. ‘Write something lovely.’
She hands him a pen as if knowing he is too big for crayons. Nathan stands at the kitchen counter with the pen. He knows he should write something like hero somewhere inside the card and he starts writing it. The he starts out fine, then he sees he started too close to the edge. It’s trickier to squeeze what comes next into the space that is left on the page.
Author’s Acknowledgements
This book was made possible by Imogen Pelham, thanks to her belief in short stories, by the Costa Short Story Award, and by Stefan Tobler.
I would like to acknowledge the editors and judges who first published some of my stories. I am grateful to Ashley Stokes, The Pygmy Giant, Sophie Payle and the Short Story Competition for accepting stories when I started. And to readers and writers who have shared my stories online and supported me over the years. There are too many to name, you know who you are. You kept me writing, particularly Anne Louise Kershaw and her relentless belief, my friend Kate Fox, who brought me a flying pig when I wanted to quit, and the Bristol Prize, with their dedication to the short story.
This book would not exist without my husband, who has never doubted.
It is dedicated to anyone who has felt like giving up, but did not.
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