Yvonne stood with arms folded and legs astride, like her own easel. ‘What do you think?’
‘It’s one of my favourites,’ he said. ‘You knew that, didn’t you?’
That evening he hung the moon painting in his narrow room and then he lay down on his bed. He saw Aunt Yvonne driving back up the coast in her old beat-up station wagon and sent his love with her on the passenger seat. She’d told him Dad needed help, though he’d known that already. Dad seemed to be moving through air that was different to everybody else’s, it was thick and sticky, built out of cobwebs. When Dad smiled, it looked wrong; it was as if someone had made a joke and he hadn’t got it, but he was pretending that he had. He could see that Dad was in some kind of terrible danger, and he wanted to rescue him, but he didn’t know how. Instead, he did everything he was asked to do, and did it without complaining. He hid his own fears and wishes, and only took them out in private, under the eye of the moon. He was a good boy.
He tried to keep his promise to Yvonne, he tried not to be too serious, but it was hard because those jets kept coming over. The scream of silver, the ghostly stalks of dust, the hands separating like two parts of a rocket ship. He’d wake up and lie still, waiting for Dad to die. His mother had been strong, that was what he’d always been told, and now she’d gone to the bottom of the ocean, seaweed necklaces and fish swimming through the spaces in her head. She’d been strong and she’d died, so what chance did Dad have?
He lay on his back in the narrow room and listened for his sister’s breathing through the half-open door, listened for his father’s slightly faster breathing through the thin wall to the right. He lay like a toppled toy soldier, hands pressed tight against his thighs, every muscle rigid. He couldn’t move his eyes. Because the jets flew beyond his dream, they were in the room with him, silent and lethal, swooping like birds in the grey air. It could happen any moment.
He listened to his father breathing and waited for it to stop. He listened to his sister breathing and made plans for their loneliness.
Those daybreaks.
He was eleven then.
Moscow, Brussels, Helsinki
Jed’s mother said she didn’t want him hanging round the beauty parlour after school, it was bad for business, what with him looking the way he did and all, so he’d walk home and climb out through the bathroom window and on to the roof. They lived in Sweetwater, right out near the airport. It was always funny the first time someone came to the house. A plane would go over and they’d duck or flinch. It was that loud. Once someone even threw themselves face down on the kitchen floor like someone in a war movie. Out on the roof, though, that was best. He’d lie on his back and watch the planes fly over. So close they almost grazed the tip of his nose. He liked the way his ears crackled, he liked to feel the house shake. And sometimes there was the sense that his legs were rising into the air, that the roof was sliding out from under him.
If he’d been Tommy, of course, it would’ve been a different story. Tommy was his brother, but he was twelve years older, more like an uncle, really. He worked as a foreman at a construction site in Rialto. She wouldn’t’ve minded Tommy hanging round the beauty parlour. He had thick shiny hair and he walked with his legs slightly bent so you could imagine a horse between them. Once he did a hundred press-ups with a girl in a bikini standing on his back (Jed saw the photo). He wasn’t bad for business. He wasn’t bad at all.
That twelve-year gap between him and Tommy, he knew what it meant. It meant he was a mistake. And not only that, but he was ugly too, just so nobody forgot. Only something so unintended could’ve turned out so wrong. Born in a bottle of vodka one night, his mother had told him once. Poured out of her seven months later like some sickly cocktail. They had to put him in a kind of see-through tent so he could breathe. ‘Oh Muriel,’ she was fond of saying, ‘I don’t know what you did to deserve it.’ She’d be sitting at her dresssing-table mirror, and he’d be standing beside her, watching her put her make-up on. Eye-shadow, mascara, rouge. Made her look just like plastic. And then she’d roll her eyes and sigh. ‘Must be someone’s idea of a joke.’ Someone was God, and she was always flirting with him, same as she did with any man.
These were the good days, when her disgust could seem like a kind of affection. But there were times when it didn’t seem like anything apart from what it was.
The year he turned nine he discovered junk stores. He felt at home there. The people who ran them didn’t care if he was ugly; most of them were ugly too, and some of them, maybe they were mistakes as well. Old Mr Garbett, he was ugly all right. He ran Jed’s favourite store. It was on Airdrome Boulevard. The Empire of Junk, it was called. Old Mr Garbett had a moon face and eyes that seeped. He sat on a leather armchair just inside the door with a brown bottle of beer standing beside his right foot. He wore the same mustard cardigan every day, and smoked cigarettes with wrinkles in them like the legs of elephants. The strangest thing about him was, his lips were the same colour as his face. It was here that Jed found the radios.
That first afternoon he was so excited that he ran all the way home. Along the boulevard, down Mackerel Street, through the front gate, straight into his mother’s bedroom. She was sitting at her dressing-table as usual. Instead of turning round, she used the mirror to look at him. ‘Do you have to bring those in here, Jed?’
‘They’re only radios.’
‘Yes, but look at them. They’re filthy.’
There was something wrong with what she was saying. But she’d thrown him off balance and he couldn’t think.
‘And what do you want radios for, anyway?’ It was sweet, that voice of hers, it was always sweet, somehow, but like all sweet things too much of it could make you ill. ‘We’ve already got a radio in the kitchen.’
‘That’s different.’
‘What’s different about it?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. These ones have names. It’s the names that I like.’
A plane went over, and all her tiny bottles jostled and clinked.
‘Names?’ She frowned. ‘What names?’
‘You know, the names of the stations. Moscow, Brussels, Helsinki. Those names.’
If only Pop was still around, he thought. Pop would have understood. Trouble was, Pop had moved out about a year before. Jed knew it was final when he saw Pop carrying his gun magazines out to the car. Pop had the same passion for collecting as Jed did, only Pop collected guns. He had nineteen of them. Six were special, and hung on the wall in the den. The rest, he actually used. Sometimes, on weekends, he used to take Jed out to the abandoned graveyard on Normandy Hill and they’d shoot at the wooden crosses. The bull’s-eye was the place where the parts of the cross joined, but Jed liked to shoot at the arms and watch the bits fly off. Pop loved guns so much, he’d even named his sons after them: Thomas Colt Morgan, Jed Gattling Morgan (if he’d had a girl he would’ve called her Baretta). He wanted to change his own name to Winchester, but Muriel wouldn’t hear of it. Winchester Morgan! He always thought that would’ve sounded grand. As it was, he had to be satisfied with Pop. Not even Bang. Just Pop.
About every month or two Pop would come back, late at night, a few drinks under his belt. The door would shake, then the windows, then the door again, it didn’t seem so strange, it was just like another plane going over, and then his voice would force its way through the mailbox. ‘Muriel? Let me in, will you? Muriel? Goddammit, Muriel, let me in.’ And Muriel would call Tommy. Or if Tommy wasn’t home she’d call the police. ‘He’s drunk,’ she’d say. ‘I think he’s got a gun.’ She didn’t like calling the police, though, because the cars’d scream into the street, the lights’d flash and then everybody’d know. She was a beautician, and she had her reputation to think of.