On top of the toilet cistern were two boxes of tampons, Tampax Regular (Yellow), and Tampax Super (Green). As Tom flushed, his eyes went down to the plastic bin with its lid not quite on, so you could see the wrappers, applicators and other stuff inside. You couldn't flush tampons down the toilet here, it would block it, he knew because Suzanne had asked him about the loo in his house the night she'd been there. Tom got this really strange urge to empty out the bin, to pour the contents onto the floor and play around. It was like the way that Nate and Suzanne would cough and then spit their phlegm in the gutter. It was like they wanted you to know all about it.
He went over to wash his hands. His eyes were bloodshot, the lids swollen like he'd been crying, and he was pale, he couldn't tell if it was just the light. He thrust out his chin and ran his fingers over the pimples on the skin of his neck. Tom would never get the things he wanted. How could he without beauty to smooth his passage through the world and ease the pain of its transactions? None of this could have happened if he were better-looking. The world did not want him, that made his eyes wet. But, just as the mirror had brought him to this point, so the sight of his lower lip trembling, his teenager's features, all out of proportion and on the verge of collapse, brought back self-possession. Tom would not panic. He ran the cold tap and rubbed his hands under it. He didn't want to touch the soap.
Today had started ok. He had woken late, as he always did during the summer holidays, and waited till the house was quiet before he got out of bed. He'd taken his bathrobe from the back of the door and shambled out of his room, with the hood up. At the top of the stairs he stepped on a sheet of paper. Looking down he saw that it was a list, left by his mother. There was always a list. He picked it up:
Dear Thomas,
I hope you have a productive day today - I will be seeing six patients this morning. Before you go out, please could you help your Mum by doing the following small tasks:
1. Feed PERESTROIKA, there are tins of food in the bottom of the cupboard.
2. Clean kitchen windows, have left money for WINDOLENE on table if necessary. + DRY CLEANING see below.
3. Collect dry cleaning from MAYFLOWER.
He didn't read any further, but stuffed the note into the pocket of his bathrobe and stamped down the stairs. His mother just didn't understand. He worked really hard at school, getting up early every day that it was on and going in even when it was cold. She did not understand how tired that made him and how he needed his holiday to relax, to have some time to himself. So she would be disappointed again, he was afraid, to find that none of the small tasks on her list had been completed.
It was bright and the moats in the sunlight on the stairs reminded him of when he would spend all day in the house, before he had gone to school even. He went along the landing and down the second flight to the kitchen. He could hear Perestroika mewing inside the door, reaching up with her paws to pat either side of the doorknob. He opened the door and the cat flowed round his feet, like she was trying very deliberately to trip him up. He hooked his foot under her soft belly and lifted her away. The cat surged back to rub her warm greasy head against Tom's ankles. Tom didn't know whether she was really that greasy or if he had just read somewhere that a cat's head was covered in glands, and when it rubbed the head against you like that, it was only spreading its hormones onto you, not showing love or affection as some people thought it might be and that was what made it feel greasy to him, in his mind. He gave the cat a light kick and then hissed it out of the room. It leapt through the cat-flap which flapped after it.
The kitchen was large and as clean as an operating theatre. The cleaner came everyday about half and hour after his Mum left in the morning, but since, apart from Tom's room, the house was always tidy, all that was left for her to do was wipe disinfectant onto the surfaces and arrange the post in size order on the floral plastic tablecloth. Tom didn't make much mess outside his room, which anyone could see was just untidy, not dirty.
He got out some milk, a bowl and poured himself some cereal, Weetos. On the table he noticed an envelope with "MAYFLOWER Cleaners ONLY," written on it. He ripped it open, took out the ?10 note that was inside and stuffed it into the pocket of his bathrobe. Then he went through to the television room where he took up his position in the corner of the sofa, his knees drawn up, stirring the Weetos which bobbed, half-submerged in the milk, like tiny life-rings. He reached behind him into the gap between the sofa's cushions and pulled out the TV remote, then reaching further back found the cable remote which was lodged in a snug corner along with a quantity of pine needles, pencil shavings and a large 5p piece. Without looking down he found the power button and flicked on the TV. Tom liked to watch the music channels, MTV and The Cable Jukebox. At the moment you mostly got grunge on MTV and The Cable Jukebox played rap and R'n'B, as requested by people across the country who you could see misdialling the request numbers which appeared onscreen in real time. Tom didn't own any R'n'B or even like it very much, but he identified R Kelly singing Vibe before the image on the screen had caught up with the sound. It was an easy one, R Kelly's nasal voice singing the word "Viibe" laid over itself to produce a sound like a choir of R Kellys singing in unison. He flipped to MTV which showed a white man with dreadlocks, doing his best to look depressed by pulling the sleeves of his jumper over his hands and so on, but just looking cold, singing in a reedy voice. The melody was insipid and they'd tried to turn the promo into an appeal for lost children. He flipped back to R Kelly who, he supposed, was about half-way through his song, and was now leaping up and down and shimmying grotesquely in a pair of leather dungarees.
Tom was wearing a pair of dirty white gym socks. He first scratched then rolled down the sock from his left ankle and began to examine the tattoo there. Suzanne had done it for him, sterilising a sewing needle by burning it with a lighter till it had turned grey. Then he'd lain on the sofa as she'd dipped the needle into the sticky blue biro ink, then into the flesh of his ankle, deeply, over and over in the shape of a star. He'd winced into a cushion but wouldn't make a sound. She'd already done a heart on her thigh and, when she'd shown it to him, Tom had seen the soft black hairs that framed gusset of her knickers.
"What are you showing your pubes to him for you slag? Look at him, he's gone all boss-eyed."
It had scabbed over, but the scab was blue or black instead of rusty or green as scabs normally were. It was almost straight. He'd started putting the gym socks on before he went to bed in case he had to get up while his mother was still around. They had not spoken for nearly a fortnight after he had let Nate pierce his ear. Nate had seven piercings and she had done them all herself. But when he had heard the click of the stud puncturing the gristle of his ear, he had felt his skin grow cold and clammy and the world had shrunk to a tiny point of light containing just the tiny faces of Nate and Suzanne. And they were laughing.
The Weetos had gone soft and could be sucked apart if pressed to the roof of the mouth with the tongue. He heard his phone ringing upstairs and decided to ignore it. He chased down the last of the Weetos with his spoon and drank off rest of the milk.
Searching in his pocket he brought out a small plastic bag and held it up to the light. Inside was a grey-green twig with a small green bud. This was about half of the bag that Nate had sold him for ?10. He shook it and spread out the stuff with his finger and thumb. It still looked a bit small. He would have a smoke then get dressed. He thought about the night his father had come home and refused to speak to his mother. Just not said anything at all, sat staring blankly at the opposite wall. His mother had made an odd joke, she'd said, "What's wrong with you? Have you been smoking drugs?" He had laughed at the time, because Tom knew his father could not be smoking drugs. They owned their house, often went on holiday to Italy or France and Tom's school was one of those that you had to pay for. Still, it was an odd thing to say. Further investigation of his pocket produced a packet of red Rizla with the cardboard nearly ripped off. He laid out a Rizla on his knee and started to empty the contents of the cigarette out onto it, rolling it back and forth between his finger and thumb to force out the tobacco as he had seen Nate do.
* * *
It shouldn't have been so hard to dress. He always wore more or less the same thing: a t-shirt, baggy jeans, a hoody, only today, they looked all wrong. Tom did not look real and looking real was the most important thing. His jeans were the problem. They were almost double the width of normal jeans and Tom was wearing them with the crotch low. Since they were as long proportionately as they were wide he had turned up the bottoms in a thick, tight cuff. Looking at them now they brought to mind the trousers that Nazis wore in films, which ballooned out over the boot. Tom could not go out in these jeans. He went over to the cupboard and rummaged around for his other pair, the blue ones. These were short at least, so didn't need turning up, but their waist band was wider, they were made for an altogether fatter person than he was, so required a belt. Tom undid the pair he was wearing and let them fall into a pool around his feet. He pulled on the others and pulled the belt tight, threading the pin of the buckle through the extra hole he had had to make with scissors. He checked himself in the mirror again, pleased at first, but a frown forming as he came to realise that these jeans were no good either. The tight belt meant that the material, bunched and gathered at the waist formed a broad stately pair of hips. How had he not seen this before? He tried to count all the times when Nate and Suzanne had looked at his odd silhouette and shared a joke with one another.
"Tom Dove-Clare, you look like a clown Tom Dove-Clare."
Nate had made the three syllable of his name into an insult. Turning away from the mirror in despair he caught sight of his phone, nestling in its charger, its display blinking. He picked it up. Charging had made it hot, although not heavier he knew. He had a special battery which lasted up to seven hours, which was thicker than the normal battery and gave the phone a hump-backed appearance. His father had bought two mobile phones, one for him, one for his mother, the latest kind. Tom's had a flexible aerial you could pull out with your teeth and a flap that covered the keypad when you put it in your pocket. It had a phonebook actually in the phone where you could store several of your friend's numbers so that you didn't have to remember them any more. But what he liked most of all was that it was free to use in the evening. Quite often he would listen to Suzanne talking until the phone caused his ear to grow red and hot and he would have to change ears. Suzanne, who did not go to school, would talk about how she was feeling and how she looked, her allergies and her psoriasis. He would listen, enraptured. At the moment she had thrush, which she was treating with live yogurt.
He pressed the button on the phone and waited to retrieve the messages. There was just one from Nate:
"Tom Dove-Clare, how are you Tom Dove-Clare? Me and Suze are going to get a draw, but we need you to go halves with us. OK? It's Dylan so it's twenty. Anyway, call me when you get this."
He put the phone in the pocket of his jeans, got the money from his dressing gown and threw on the rest of his clothes. Then he left the room, avoiding his mirror, and went downstairs to his mother's study. The room was orderly with steel filing cabinets and metal shelves from DOITALL set on a thick-pile carpet. On a large pinboard above the desk there were several pictures of Tom, Tom in a bowtie, red-eyed, his face half-veiled in the shadow of the garden wall, Tom and his mother eating a picnic on a hillside both with their cheeks bulging, his profile an echo of hers. There were also several printed invitations for conference with slips to cut off and return:
The 18th Annual Conference of Child Psychiatry 1994
Child and Mind `94.
He lapsed into the office chair, its casters stirring in their soft divots, reached under the table and slid open a drawer. Inside there was s tack of loosely stuffed envelopes labelled, in his mother's handwriting, with a currency symbol and a figure. There were French Francs, Lira, Yen, Dollars and Deutschmarks - there were two lots of Francs which was lucky. He held them, one in each palm. One of the envelopes contained at least two coins, he could feel their weight and recognised their dull clink when he shook it. Which was it to be then? The envelope without the coins had to be all notes. Tom put his thumb under the flap and levered it open. Two 20 Franc notes, a five and two ones. Forty-seven Francs in blue and green, shrunken like monopoly money, with their strange unfamiliar pictures. This along with the ?10 in his pocket would buy a block of rich chocolate brown hash the size of his little finger. Tom closed the draw, put the money in his front pocket and the envelope, carefully folded, into the back pocket of his jeans. He made his way lightly down the stairs, locked each of the interior doors with a deadlock spike and tapped the code into the alarm, making it beep. Then he opened the door and went out.
First Love, part 2
