Ellie

I think I spent pretty much the entire next day lying on the couch, watching golf and feeling sick. My head was in a right fucking state. Felt like someone had puked in my brain – and not good puke either. Thank God for the fucking golf – eight hours straight and a bottle of Lucozade. It was all I could keep down.

Still, there was something wonderful about this hangover: no thoughts. My brain was goo. Nothing was working. How refreshing from the normal state of affairs, all those ideas and imperatives to get up and do something. Almost worth the pain. Rendered incapable, I was in peace.

Except for mum, of course, coming in and tutting and trying to shame me off the sofa. Calling me a lazy bum. A sod. Shaking her head at me and saying she was blowed if she was gonna make me owt to eat.

God, that woman could tut. But even her barrage of clucks couldn’t reach me in my fog of wankered befuddlement. Everything floated on by. If only I didn’t feel so sick I’d’ve been in heaven.

“Mek us a cuppa tea mum,” I said, “I don’t feel well.” I smiled behind my tired eyes. I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell.

“And who’s fault is that?” she said. “You can mek it yerself if you want one.” And out she went, banging the door behind her.

I winced. I wanted to shout something but I didn’t have the strength. Didn’t want to hurt my head. Instead, I watched Greg Norman sink one from the edge of the green. Listened to the cheers. Got interested in Fuzzy Zoeller in the rough. The commentator’s voice so lush and smooth. Lulling me into a sleep…

…where I had the weirdest fuckin’ dream of my life. Me and Andrew Pickin gay lovers together. But then he broke it off, said he had to go to Australia. Everybody was going to Australia. Debbie. Lance Dixon. Nicola Brown. Everybody except me. But I was the only one who knew anything about the place! Hadn’t I been supporting the cricket team for like seven years? Knew Allan Border’s average and everything. And…Andy Pickin! Christ!

What did it mean? Do I want to bum him? Yikes.

I spent the whole next day in my room playing Head Over Heels and then Steve came over and we watched One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest on my Betamax and then went up Kirkby for a walk with Joanne Woodhouse and Kelly Thomas. We knew they normally only went for the sporty guys but we also knew we could make ‘em laugh better than they could and they sure liked a giggle. We got them so giddy Kelly ventured a joke of her own – which had to be the worst joke anyone’s ever told or ever will tell in the history of the world.

“Tommy’s mam med a pie,” she said, “an’ she left it on windersill t’cool darn. But when she kem back t’pie were gone. ‘Tommy,’ she sez, ‘weir’s tha’ pie worra med this mornin’?’ Tommy just winked. ‘Tha noz,’ he sed. ‘Tommy,’ she sed, ‘weir’s tha’ pie?’ But all he would se’ were, ‘tha noz.’ So Tommy’s mam fetched Tommy’s dad and ‘is dad sed, ‘Tommy, weir’s tha’ pie?’ an’ Tommy winked and said, ‘tha noz.’ Tommy’s dad gorriz slipparart an’ sed, ‘Tha’d bess start talkin’ Tommy lad: weir’s tha’ pie?’ ‘Tha’ noz,’ sed Tommy. ‘Grrrr,’ sed Tommy’s dad, an’ he went an’ fetched a bobby. ‘Ask ar Tommy weir tha’ pie’s gone,” sed Tommy’s dad, and the policeman asked and Tommy just kept sayin’ ‘tha noz.’ Anyway, finally they got some more policemen and some soldiers and the prime minister and then they all said, ‘Tommy, weir’s tha’ pie?’ and Tommy winked and sed, ‘tha’ noz. Tha’ noz av etten it!’” – and she laughed and laughed and laughed.

“Tha’ noz I’ve etten it!”

But, still, she were gorgeous – and she din’t tell no more jokes and she laughed loads at me and Steve’s. Kelly Thomas, t’prettiest girl in t’year…

The next day I thought I should go in to school. But then the alarm clock didn’t go off – I didn’t hear it, anyway – maybe didn’t set it – and as I was lying there thinking, well, I’m an hour late already, there’s probably no point, I realised I didn’t ever really want to go to school again. Lying there staring at the ceiling and seeing it all so clearly. Why? What for? All this being told what to do and writing boring stuff about things I didn’t care about, all to get into university to write more boring stuff and then after three years of that finally go free into the world and get a job and why not just do that now? So I played some more Head Over Heels – completed it again: 275 rooms explored, 99% done (God knows where that last 1% is) – and when my mum came home I told her the good news.

“I’m done,” I said, “I can’t be arsed. Can you ring them and tell them I’m not coming in anymore?”

Oh man, she went livid. I thought she was going to explode. Going on and on about how I was supposed to be the first in the entire family to go to university. How I had all these brains and how I was just wasting them. Hadn’t I won that scholarship to QEGS and then dropped out? I could’ve been going to Oxford or Cambridge. But she’d sorted that out for me and all she’d ever asked was that I got my A-Levels and could do whatever I wanted after that. But now only halfway through I was telling her I wanted to drop out of that too. And to do what? Couldn’t I just finish them off? Well she was blowed if she was going to support me in just lazing around the house playing computer games and watching TV. I was gonna start paying my way.

“You’re going out there to find a job,” she said, “and by the end of this month you’re going to be paying your share of the bills. If you don’t want to go to school – if you want to be an adult – you can start living like one. Starting now. I can’t afford to keep you.”

I just stood there thinking, yeah, whatever.

“And if you don’t want to pay your share, you can give me your key and go and find somewhere else to live. Your bloody dad can support you. I’ve had enough.”

“Is that all?” I said.

“Go on,” she said, “off you go. Get out of my sight.”

I went upstairs. I sat on my bed. I wondered what to do. Play Sonic? Or look for that missing one percent on Head Over Heels.

I looked at my school books and smiled. Maths, Physics, Phillip bloody Larkin were going bye bye. All those years of sitting behind desks were over. Hadn’t taught me anything anyway.

Out the window was the world, and the world was where it was at. That’s where I wanted to be.

The world. The…some faint remembrance of something, of having been here before. Déjà vu – I always got that. I told my mum once that I got it in a class and knew the answer to a question I didn’t know the answer to ‘cos I’d seen it in déjà vu or maybe in a dream. I told her that when I was real young – maybe when I was in my lying and making stuff up phase – and she’d repeated it back to me over the years, told it like it was a story she was witness to – but I know she wasn’t in the classroom with me. Now I didn’t know whether it happened or not. My lies coming back to me as facts. Unless it had happened. In any case, déjà vu hit me now, lying on my bed waiting for Head Over Heels to load up, and I started to get this weird feeling…like the whole ceiling was rippling and vibrating and I could see these little red dots on the peaks of the artex mountains and my breath was going real fast and I felt a bit sick. But it was like I’d lived it before. And there was something I needed to realise or remember or do…

What was déjà vu anyway? I wondered. And then I felt like my brain came up with an answer and it was saying, that’s the life you’ve lived before, and you’re living it again and you need to pay attention when you experience déjà vu ‘cos that’s the moment of choice.

What the fuck? This was weird. I wanted to get up except I couldn’t. My body felt heavy and pinned to the bed. Head Over Heels was not even halfway through its title screen. The ceiling shimmered and became veiled in a red fog. I blinked my eyes and it cleared but then came back immediately. I got scared and closed them instead. But it was like some light show going on inside my head, colours popping and flashing everywhere. I tried to open my eyes then but they felt stuck. I wanted to call out for mum – shout, “mum! come quick!” – but I couldn’t even open my mouth. Just stuck to the bed, comatosed, vegetabling, I was…

Dying! That’s what. And with superhuman strength I pulled myself up and shouted out and managed to roll onto the floor where I lay heaving my chest and pretty much back to normal.

I sat up. Looked around. Stared at my room. The black painted walls. The old bookcase. Alan Dean Foster’s ‘The Thing’ and ‘Alien’ and the entire series of ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ novels. My Zoids. My Jimi Hendrix records. Tapes and tapes and my hi-fi and speakers and guitar. Everything seemed like it was staring back at me, from as close as the hand that I held up to my face. And my hand was huge. And all those little tiny lines, the points of intersection, the hairs and the feel of the skin as I touched my hands together, turning them over in front of me. The lines in my palms, formed when I was a foetus, this one apparently saying that I would live to seventy and have three children. This one saying I was creative. But mainly the pattern of stretched diamonds just above the meat of my thumb, dots connected by lines, and the dots glowing red, and how’d those lines get there anyway, so perfect and delicate and beautiful…

I don’t know how long I was staring at my hand. I was snapped out of it by a knock at the door.

“What?” I said.

“It’s me.” It was Ellie, my girlfriend. I tried to pull my eyes away from my hand. Tried to look around the room again and pull myself up off the floor.

“Can I come in?” she said.

“Huh?”

The door creaked open.

She looked down at me and stared.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Come here,” I said, “look at my hand.”

She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me, then looked at my hand.

“Don’t spook me,” she said, “what’ve you got on your hand?”

“Nothin’,” I said, “just look here. Look at the tiny little dots and the lines between them. Have you ever noticed them? Have you got them? Oh. You have. But just look.”

“Are you on drugs?” she said.

“No,” I said, “course not. Just look.” I looked at my hand again. Held it out for her to see. Looked at the dots on the meat of her own thumb.

“Your mum says you’ve dropped out of school. You haven’t, have you?”

I sighed. I put my hand away. Got up on the bed and stretched out and looked at the ceiling.

“Come here,” I said, “come lie with me on your back and look up. Tell me what you see.”

She kicked off her shoes and lay next to me, put her head on my arm.

“What can you see?”

“Nothing,” she said, “what can you see?”

For some stupid reason I wanted to say, ‘it’s the entire universe’ but I didn’t even know what that meant. Instead I told her I could see red dots on all the little artex peaks, that the whole thing looked like it was a foot away, not all the way up there. Everything was big. And then I told her about not being able to move and the lights in my eyes and the voices.

“You were hearing voices?”

“Yeah,” I said, “it was…I got real scared. I felt like the top of my head came off. And I was there in the corner of my room and I was looking back and seeing myself lying on the bed. I didn’t know what to do. Is it safe? Is the top of my head still on? I could see myself, I swear, there were two of me. I’m so glad you’re here.”

“I don’t know what you’re – ”

“Sh,” I said, “just tell me it’s safe. Is it safe? Is it safe? Is the top of my head still on?”

“It’s on,” she said, and patted my head as if to prove the point. I knew I was acting but I was getting into it so much it started to feel real. I was good at pretending to be scared, to be mad, and I could see she was buying into it. The more she bought it, the more I wanted to do it. And the more scared I acted, the more concerned she got.

“Is it safe?” I said, “that’s all I want to know. I could see myself – there were two of me – and I didn’t know which one I was. I ran away and then I realised I was the other one and that the other one was actually running away from me. Who am I? Who am I? I feel like when I was eleven and I lay right here in my old bed with a little mirror staring at my eyes and a Meccano screwdriver pressed against my chest and I didn’t know what I was. I thought if I just pushed it into me – right into my heart – what would I be then? Where would I go? That’s not normal thoughts for an eleven-year-old is it? Did you think things like that? What’s wrong with me? Is it safe? Don’t leave me.”

Poor confused girl. She didn’t have a clue. Her boyfriend was talking like a maniac. She just wanted someone to watch telly with.

I pulled her close. I kissed her cheek.

“Everything’s fine,” I said, “it was just a passing thing.”

I jumped up from the bed and put a tape cassette in. Hendrix at Woodstock, the entire set. I flicked off the computer and we got right down to it. Got naked on the bed. Fucked there. Fucked in my chair. Fucked on the floor. Three whole sides of the C90 going in and out of her. Delicious sex. My personal best.

When it was over I said, “all that stuff from earlier, I was just messing about. For the most part.”

I put the telly on and we watched some Fast Show. The night we lost our virginity it was so fuckin’ boring I turned my head halfway through and started watching Russ Abbott – and I hated Russ Abbott, that was how bad it was. But things had got much better since then. We’d loosened up a bit. Three sides! That’s – like – more than two hours. Fuck me!