(In advance of the publication of “The Sign of the Rodent,” I present you with a FREE BONUS STORY.  This was supposed to be in the book, but now it’s on here instead.  If you enjoy it, please buy the book when it comes out.  Thanks.)

Tuesday, 6th April

Ramona was going to fly.

She stepped out into the street just as the sun was rising.   The light made everything seem newer, filled with potential.  If you squinted, the streets looked as if they were paved with gold.  As if she’d been transported into a different world overnight, a fantasy land, like Narnia or Oz, where you’d find something new and wonderful around every corner, and you’d never, ever have to go back home.

Ramona walked towards the sun.  It rose over the beach, which meant that it set over the city.  Ramona had always found this a little disappointing.  It seemed to her that if there was going to be a sunset, it ought to be over the sea, reflecting pink, purple and red across the water, as if the horizon had caught fire.  Behind the buildings, you could barely see it.  The sunset was wasted on a city like this.

She knew where she was going.  About a mile from here, there were cliffs- high, grassy and stony, jutting out across the water.  If you jumped from them and took flight, you’d soar over the sea and leave the city behind.  Everybody on the beach would see her, a pink dot disappearing into the sky.  They’d talk about it for days afterwards, wondering what it was and what had happened.  But only Ramona would know.

She hadn’t told any of her flatmates that she was leaving.  None of them were awake.  They didn’t like being awake much.  Every minute they were up, they’d grumble and look around with bleary eyes and bite other people’s heads off, wishing they were back in bed.  Ramona was just the opposite- she didn’t like being asleep.  She’d found ways of making it so she didn’t have to be.  She didn’t like the taste of coffee, so she drank Cherry Cola and turned the heating down in her room and left all the lights on.  But even those things only worked for so long.  Eventually, you’d lose consciousness, and then there was no way to stay safe.

Ramona walked on down the road, leaving her street behind.  She just needed to walk for twenty minutes, and she’d be at the cliffs.  She’d go down the next road and along the beach, and with any luck, she wouldn’t run into anyone else.  Nobody who’d want to stop her and talk about something stupid like sex or money or politics.  Ramona didn’t care about things like that right now.  On the morning when you knew you were going to fly, it was hard to care about anything else.

Ramona was going to take off from the cliffs, and then she was going to fly up into the air and look down at the city below her.  The people would look like ants, and the streets would look like patterns on a bit of material, and she’d look down, and she’d know…

Her phone was ringing.

Ramona stopped walking, took the phone out of her back, and answered it.  “Hello?”

“Ramona, hi!  It’s Danny.”

Ramona smiled.  She didn’t need Danny to tell her it was him.  She’d know his voice anywhere.  “Hi, Danny.”

“What are you up to?”

Ramona squinted at the horizon.  The sun was almost all the way up.  “Nothing important.”

“Listen, Chris wants to meet up.  He says he’s found some kind of golden opportunity for the three of us.  Something to do with the Air Show.”  Ramona listened as Danny said something about a band and an audition.  She liked the sound of Danny’s voice.  Just listening to it, you could tell that he wasn’t the kind of person who wished he was still in bed.   He was more like her.

“So do you think you can come along?” he asked, “Chris says he’ll be in the Bush and Castle at about ten.”

Ramona frowned.  She wanted to go, but wasn’t there something she was supposed to do today?  Something to do with the sun, and the cliffs…

“Ramona?  Are you there?”

She stared at the horizon.  There was a line of pure white between the sky and the sea, the kind of light that could blind you if you looked at it for too long.  Ramona was sure that if she just thought for a few seconds…

“Ramona?”

No.  It had gone.  “Sorry, Danny.  I was miles away.”

Danny laughed.  “No problem.  But do you think you can make it down to the Bush and Castle by ten?”

“Yeah.”  At this precise moment, there was nothing Ramona wanted more.  “I’ll be there.”

“Great.  See you there.”  And Danny hung up.

Ramona looked round the streets, newer and more fantastical in the morning than they ever were once the day had got started properly.  How anyone could sleep through an hour like this was a mystery to Ramona, but she couldn’t help it if people wanted to be stupid.  It was a beautiful morning, and Ramona was going to the Bush and Castle to meet Danny.  She couldn’t imagine a better way to spend the day.

 

Monday, 12th April

Danny remembered being eight years old, and hearing his mum call him into the living room to watch something on TV.  This would have been around October, just after his third or fourth visit to the school psychiatrist.  Danny always felt a bit uncomfortable during these visits- Doctor Jenner was a nice enough bloke, alright, but every time Danny went into his office, he felt as if he was being given marks out of ten just for breathing.  But he had to go, no matter how weird he felt about it, because all the teachers were worried about him.  They wanted him to be able to make friends.  Danny didn’t see how Doctor Jenner’s questions about how he felt when his mum was late picking him up were going to help, but he was a trusting kind of boy, and he assumed that the teachers knew what they were doing.  Probably.

Anyway, this programme his parents wanted him to watch.  They’d taped it specially last night, his mum said.  It was to do with why he’d been seeing Doctor Jenner.  They wanted him to see it.  They felt it was important.

“It’s about children like you,” his mother said, and she sounded as if she was at a funeral.

Danny sat between his parents on the sofa, and watched the programme.  It was a documentary, with real children being filmed going about their daily business, and a narrator who kept cutting in to explain about the challenges that these children had to overcome, in the same kind of voice his mum had used.  As if someone had died.  As it went on, Danny found it harder and harder to pay attention.  It just seemed to repeat itself, over and over again.  You’d see the kids building things with blocks, or arguing with their brothers and sisters or something, and then they’d have a doctor explaining some scientific stuff that Danny didn’t really understand, and then they’d go back to the kids and have the announcer say something doom-filled.  Over and over.  Danny just didn’t get it.

And then they showed this boy who…

Well, the weird thing was, they said he was ten, but Danny wasn’t sure if he believed them.  He knew some boys in Year Five who were already ten (like Simon Russell, who’d got a prize in assembly for playing football), and this boy wasn’t anything like them.  They showed him rolling on the floor of a supermarket, throwing a tantrum because they didn’t have the type of cereal he wanted.  Actually rolling around on the floor, screaming his head off.  What was that about?  There was no way this boy was ten- Danny hadn’t done anything like that since he was three.

His dad saw him staring at the screen.  He leaned over to him, pointed at the screen, and whispered, “He’s got the same thing you’ve got.”

That day had been a long time ago, so Danny didn’t remember whether or not he said anything in reply.  He was pretty certain, though, that he hadn’t said what he was thinking, which was, What?  You said I was just going to see Doctor Jenner because I was too shy!  What’s that got to do with throwing tantrums about cereal?  It probably wouldn’t have made much difference, even if he had.  His parents would still have carried on staring at him with their sad, solemn eyes, as if they expected him to start rolling around and screaming at any moment.

From that day on, in his mum and dad’s minds, the boundaries were set.  That’s YOUR side, the one with the boy rolling on the floor.  And this is OUR side, the one with all the normal people.

In between that night and this, fifteen years had gone by.  Danny had a lot to be proud of.  He’d got a decent set of GCSEs, then some A-Levels, a degree, and finally, a Master’s in Web Design, which had got him his dream job.  He had his own flat, his own car, and, since he was no longer eight years old and scared of his own shadow, his own little group of friends.   He’d moved two hundred miles from his parents’ house to go to university, and then another fifty just for good measure.  And that whole long journey, full of milestones, setbacks and achievements, had ultimately led to this night, at this pub, where Ramona Allardice had introduced him and a few of their other friends to Mick Tully.

To be perfectly frank, Mick Tully was a scumbag.

Danny was prepared to admit that he probably wouldn’t have liked him anyway.  He’d been biased against him from the start.  But who wouldn’t have been?  The first thing Danny had learned about Mick was that he was forty years old and, oh yeah, married.  Disliking Ramona’s boyfriends on principle would have been shallow, fair enough, but Danny reserved the right to dislike the married ones.  They’d earned it.

Besides, none of the others liked him, either.  They might not have wanted to say anything about it to Ramona- it would have been like kicking a puppy- but you could tell.  Lloyd Daniels was giving Mick the kind of stare that you only saw in films, where the escaped lunatic is deciding whether or not it’s worth the effort to rip off somebody’s head with their bare hands.  And Lloyd was a medical student, so he’d probably know how.  That was a nice thought.

“So, I don’t suppose any of you boys caught the match last night?” asked Mick, his weaselly little eyes flicking from Danny to Lloyd to Reese, grinning that wide, humourless grin that told you that the subtext was, Of course you didn’t.  You’re a bunch of limp-wristed intellectual types who wouldn’t know football if it bit you on the arse.  I’m the alpha male here, and don’t you forget it.

“Didn’t catch it, I’m afraid,” said Reese, sounding as cheerful as he could have, under the circumstances.  The circumstances being, of course, that Reese had thought it might be fun to invite a few friends to the pub on a rare night when none of them were doing anything, and Ramona’s forty-year-old married boyfriend had invited himself along.  To make sure she wasn’t secretly meeting another man, apparently.  Oh, if only.

Mick snorted.  “Yeah.  I expect you boys had to watch a documentary about Einstein instead.”  That grin again, the one that said, I’m only joking, except for the fact that I’m not.  It was the same grin he’d had when he’d followed Paula and Shanice up to the bar, and greeted Paula by pressing up against her back and squashing her against the wall.  Or when he’d asked Danny and Lloyd what they thought about “their lot” starting a race riot in some city in America.  The man was a charmer, alright.

“Oh, leave them alone, Mick,” said Ramona in what was almost a yawn, “Not everyone’s interested in the same things as you.”  Ramona herself had been watching everything that had gone before with what was, for her, a deeply unimpressed expression.  She looked separate.  Not just from Mick the prick, but from the whole rest of the room.  She was so much more vivid, both brighter and darker by turns, as if she was a part of the picture that had been overexposed.  Mick had had his arm clamped around her shoulders for the whole time he’d been sat down, but she didn’t look as if she was attached to him.  She looked above it all, as if she was a higher life form and could float away at any moment.

The angel and the ape, thought Danny.

“This is football, darling,” said the ape, “It’s supposed to be the one thing that you can definitely talk about with other men.”  He swept his hand through the air, indicating Danny, Reese and Lloyd.  “This lot, they just don’t understand.”

He let out a plaintive sigh, and settled back into his seat.  That seemed to be the end of it.

Shanice, who’d been complaining to Reese about some woman from their work before she was so rudely interrupted, turned back to him.  “Oh, I meant to ask, Reese.  Did you see…”

“I mean,” said Mick, gaining second wind, and looking at Danny and Reese in particular, “All this stuff you two do with your spare time- staring at a computer screen all day- it’s not exactly normal, is it?”  That grin could crack mirrors.  “It’s not exactly the sort of thing that young men are supposed to be doing.”

It was the word “normal” that had done it.  If it hadn’t been for “normal,” Danny might have let Mick yammer on all night.  Danny liked a quiet life as much as anyone else.  But some things just got to you.  It was like being… punched in the soul, Danny thought.  “So, Mick,” he asked, “Does your wife watch the football with you?”

That wiped the grin off his face.  For a few seconds, Mick stared in disbelief at Danny, as if he was trying to comprehend the fact that one of those puny little worms on the other side of the table had dared to say something cheeky to him.  Then he slammed his pint down on the table, with the force of a sledgehammer.

It might have been wishful thinking, but, out of the corner of his eye, Danny thought he saw Ramona smirk.

“How is that any of your fucking business?” roared Mick.  A few of the other bar patrons turned around to stare at him, which embarrassed Danny a bit (although, going by what he’d seen at this pub in the past, Mick would have to get a lot louder and more scatological before anyone told him to keep it down.)

Ramona put a hand on his arm, steadying him.  “Mick…”

Mick shook her off.  “No, really, how is that any of your fucking business?”  He jabbed a finger in Danny’s face.  “How is my life of any concern to you?”

Because Ramona’s caught up in it, you stupid fuck, thought Danny.  Out loud, he said as innocently as possible, “It was just a question.”

“Sort your own fucking life out, mate, don’t worry about mine.  I have my own life.  I don’t need some little…”  He cut himself off, presumably before he could say something he’d regret.  Or, since men like Mick rarely had any shame, before he could say something that could be used against him later.  He stood up, pulling Ramona, who’d been leaning on his shoulder, up with him.  “Come on, Mona, we’re leaving.”

Ramona frowned.  “I want to…”

“I said, we’re leaving.”  He put his arm around her waist and shepherded her out of the pub.  The five left at the table watched them go in silence.

After a while, Shanice drew in her breath and whistled like a bomb dropping. “Fucking hell.  Do you think one of us should go after them?  Check they’re alright?”

“It’ll be OK,” said Lloyd, sounding a bit uncertain, “He wasn’t angry with her.  She’ll be alright.”

Danny looked down at the table.  He wasn’t any surer than Lloyd was, but he knew that following Ramona and Mick wouldn’t do any good.  In fact, it would probably make things worse, especially if it was one of the boys.  After tonight, Mick would probably make a new rule that said Ramona wasn’t allowed to have any male friends.

Shanice shook her head.  “What I want to know is, where does she find these men?  You’d think she’d find at least one good one, after all the ones she’s been out with.”

Danny looked up.  “Oh, don’t you know?” he said, trying to sound light, “She finds them wherever the normal people meet up.”  He picked up his pint glass, and raised it for a toast.  “May we never go there.”

 

Tuesday, 13th April

Ramona didn’t know how it had got this far with Mick.  To be honest, Ramona rarely knew how anything ended up in the way it did.  You’d start from something little, something you did on a whim, and then it would build and build until you were caught in a cosmic disaster with everyone yelling at you.  People always talked about actions and intentions, but as far as Ramona could see, things just happened, no matter what you did or what you were thinking when you did it.

She’d kissed Mick once, at a nightclub, because “Don’t Leave Me This Way” was playing and he’d asked her to.  She hadn’t thought much about it- it was almost instinct, kissing a handsome man when you were drunk and a romantic song was playing.  It was one of those things you just did.  But then he’d started buying her drinks, and you didn’t tell someone to stop doing nice things for you, and then he’d ended up at her place because, well, it had seemed like a good idea at the time, and then later that week he’d bought her a drink again and he’d ended up at her place again, for the same reason, and now it was two months after he’d first kissed her and he was round hers about three times a week and they had to come up with elaborate plans so his wife wouldn’t find out and he followed her just about everywhere she went in case she was secretly cheating on him.  Ramona hadn’t known that any of that would happen when she’d kissed him.  It would have been just as likely for them to dance with each other for a bit, and then leave the nightclub and never see each other again.  But that hadn’t happened- she’d got the cosmic disaster instead.  And now Ramona was standing in Mick’s kitchen, drinking that bottle of wine she’d found in the fridge, scratching his dog under the chin, and wondering what to do next.

(Sometimes you did see a pattern in events, but it was never the kind of pattern that could help you or that you wanted to see.  Whenever Ramona glimpsed a pattern like that, it gave her a cold feeling, as if everything you loved could crumble to nothing in a second and there was nothing you could do to stop it.  You were better off without patterns like that.)

She’d been looking forward to last night.  It had been ages since everyone had been together, but last night Reese had got them all to come to the pub (even Danny and Shanice, who were really busy with their jobs these days), and they’d all thought they were going to have a great time.  Ramona sometimes didn’t know what to do on her own- how to be funny, how to be interesting, how to have fun- but with all these guys around, it was like she remembered.  They all bounced off each other, telling jokes and stories, making each other better people than they ever were separately.  Together, they lit up the night.  But Mick had wanted to come, and he hadn’t cared.  He’d blundered in with his hobnailed boots, and he’d insulted her friends and then dragged her away from them.  They’d sat in his car for an hour, him screaming at her, and at the end of it he’d forbidden her to see any of them again.  Especially Danny.

She’d been looking forward to last night, and he’d ruined it.

She’d nearly finished the bottle now.  Mick wasn’t in.  No-one was.  She’d let herself in with the key that they’d left under the big stone on the patio.  She’d seen Mick pick it up the one time they’d come back to his instead of hers, and she’d always wondered how he remembered which stone it was.  There were about ten, scattered all around.  But she’d remembered it too, today.  Maybe it was just something you didn’t know you could do until you really needed to.

The clock on the wall said ten o’clock.  She was OK for a bit.  Mick and his wife (who didn’t have a name apparently) were both at work, and their children were at school.  Or maybe college or university- Ramona didn’t know how old they were.  Anyway, even if it was university, their lectures wouldn’t have ended yet.  Nobody had a lecture that early.  So Ramona was perfectly safe to sit on the grubby wooden table drinking wine.  The dog was happy to have her here- he hadn’t even barked when she’d let herself in.  If any neighbours saw her through the window, she’d probably wave.  That would really confuse them.

She never wanted to see Mick again.  He was the kind of person who stamped up and down on beautiful things, and if you spent too much time around him, he’d end up stamping up and down on you.  That was sort of why she’d started drinking the wine- to prove it to herself.  If she just wrote him a note and left, then she might chicken out halfway to the door and go back and rip it up, and then she’d have Mick hanging round her neck for years.  But as soon as she’d opened that expensive bottle of wine that Mick and Mrs. Mick had probably been saving for a special occasion, there was no going back.  When Mick saw that she’d drunk it all, he’d be angry.  In fact, if he came home early and caught her drinking it, he’d probably dump her himself and save her the trouble of writing the note.  That would suit Ramona fine.  Less work for her.

No such luck.  Ramona finished the bottle and put it down on the table.  For a second, she’d thought about putting it in the recycling, but then she’d decided it had to be right there, where he’d see it.  So he’d know exactly how things were.

1. Now the note. She’d seen a load of little pink bits of paper by the phone when she came in, so she’d picked one of them up.  It was one of those ones with a little logo and a quote in the corner (something about friends being angels, but without wings), but there was plenty of room for her to write what she needed to write.  She fished a ballpoint pen from out of her bag, leaned on the table, and struggled to write as neatly as she could, in spite of the wine.  She didn’t want him reading it, going, “What the hell is this?” and then her having to come back and explain it.  She had other stuff to do.

Dear Mick,

You don’t get to speak to my friends like you did last night.  I never want to see you again.  And don’t try phoning me, either- I’ve blocked your number.  Life’s too short to have to deal with losers like you.

Die in a fire.

Ramona

It wasn’t until she was halfway to the door that Ramona remembered- Mrs. Mick only worked part-time.  So she’d probably be home before Mick, who taught a Year Five class full-time.  Ramona thought about going back and putting the note somewhere only Mick would see it, but then she decided not to bother.  If it was going to turn into a cosmic disaster, then it would no matter what she did.

 

 

Wednesday, 14th April

“‘But in the corner, at the cold hour of dawn, sat the poor girl, with rosy cheeks and with a smiling mouth, leaning against the wall- frozen to death on the last evening of the old year,'” Ramona read out, sitting up in Danny’s bed, “‘Stiff and stark sat the child there with her matches, of which one bundle had been burnt. ‘She wanted to warm herself,’ people said. No one had the slightest suspicion of what beautiful things she had seen; no one even dreamed of the splendour in which, with her grandmother, she had entered on the joys of a new year.'”

From the other side of the room, Danny looked up from the pile of bills he’d been sorting through, and smiled.  “Where’s that from?”

“‘The Little Match Girl,'” said Ramona, lifting up the book she’d been reading and showing him the title.  Complete Andersen’s Fairy Tales, with a picture on the front of a wistful-looking blonde girl in a white pinafore.

“She looks a bit like you,” said Danny, pointing to the picture, “Only with better dress sense.”

Ramona wrinkled her nose.  “Shut up, you.”  She put her hand to her mouth to stifle a yawn.  “I think I’m going to do a painting.”

Danny hoped that she wasn’t going to do it in his bed, especially since those were his pyjamas she was wearing, but he decided not to say so.  There was no need to bring her down right now- he was still on cloud nine because of the Mick thing.  Really, she could have splattered his whole bedroom with paint and then sold it to the Tate Modern as a new art installation, and he’d still be pleased about the Mick thing.  “Of the little match girl?”

“Yeah.  Like, one side with the lit-up matches and the grandma, and one side with the people finding her in the morning, with the burnt-out matches all around her.  Hot and cold, see?”  She put her hands into L-shapes to indicate which side was which.  Then, all of a sudden, she thought of something, and frowned.  “You know Mischa, my flatmate? She doesn’t like “The Little Match Girl” at all.”

“Well, it is a bit bleak,” said Danny, picking up the next bill, “I mean, she freezes to death in the end…”

“Yeah, and then she goes to Heaven and sees her grandma again!” said Ramona irritably, “It’s a happy ending!”

Danny knew when not to push it.  “OK, OK.”   The bill was from the water company.  That was strange.  He’d put that onto Direct Debit earlier this month.  “Which one’s Mischa?  Is she the one who complained about your music that time?”

“No, that was Andrea and Nikki.”  Ramona hugged her knees.  “Mischa’s the nice one.”

Oh yeah, now he remembered.  Andrea and Nikki, who’d been so friendly at first, now bolted into their rooms and locked the door whenever they saw Ramona coming.  Ramona, who was understandably quite hurt by this, insisted that all she’d done was forget what time it was before putting her music on.  “I turned it off as soon as they said to.  It was only DJ Boonie.  Nobody died.”  Unfortunately, it had also been 3am, and Andrea and Nikki had both had lectures in the morning.  Communal life could be stressful, no doubt about it.

Danny went back to the bills, and Ramona went back to the book.  He liked that about her, how she got engrossed in things, even if they were things that other people said she shouldn’t.  Danny couldn’t imagine how his mum and dad would have reacted if they’d caught him reading fairy tales past the age of seven.  His mum had gone berserk once just because he’d brought three Stephen King books home from the library.  It hadn’t been that she’d had anything against Stephen King, per se- it had been the fact that he’d brought home three books by the same author.  Clearly it was an obsession, and why couldn’t he try new things, and did he want to upset her?  She’d carried on like that for about half an hour, then gone up to her room and slammed the door.  Now he couldn’t even look at a Stephen King book without feeling guilty.

“Do you know what I saw in Forbidden Planet the other day?” asked Ramona, looking up from her book, “There was a comic book version of The Happy Prince.  You know, the Oscar Wilde story?”

Danny thought back.  “The one with the statue and the nightingale?”

“It’s a swallow.  But yeah.  I forgot how much I liked it.  With the prince letting the swallow pick off bits of him and give them to the poor…”

“Well, now I know what to get you for your birthday,” said Danny, and, with that, he put down the bills and went over to join her.  Yeah, bills were important, but Ramona didn’t come over every day.  He might as well make the most of it.

 

 

Friday, 16th April

Danny finished work early on Fridays, and Reese and Shanice were free, too, so they went to see a film.  The film itself wasn’t that great- one of those by-the-numbers action flicks- but they were in the right mood for it, so they’d enjoyed themselves.  After they left the cinema, they went onto a Chinese place nearby, where they talked a lot about what their friends were up to, what had been in the news lately, how Chris and Danny’s band were doing, and so on.  It was all pretty fun.

But then the conversation turned to the last time they’d all been together.

“I thought we were never going to see her again,” said Shanice, “Really I did.”  She brushed her hair back, and stared at the table-cloth, looking pained.

“Well, she’s chucked him now,” said Danny, in the most cheerful voice he could manage.

“Yeah, but what if he comes sniffing round, asking for her back?”

“It’s OK,” said Danny, picking at the remains of his noodles, “She’s been at mine for most of the last week.”

There was an awkward silence.  It was weird- Danny didn’t actually know if anybody knew about his and Ramona’s “arrangement.”  He’d certainly never told anyone- not because he wanted to keep it a secret, but because it was hard to explain.  It felt wrong to even call it an arrangement, because that implied that he and Ramona had talked about it.  They hadn’t.  It was just something that seemed to happen whenever they were both single.  It seemed to happen on its own.

“See,” said Reese, breaking the subject, “With me, it’s not really about her taste in men.”  He glanced at Shanice.  “She’s hardly the only…”

“Watch what you say, short-arse,” said Shanice, pointing her chopstick like a deadly weapon.  Danny and Reese laughed.

“I didn’t mean…”  Reese clicked his fingers, trying to put what he had to say into words.  “My point is, I’m not worried about her taste in men as much as I am about what she gets up to on her own.”

Danny felt his muscles tense.  “What do you mean?  She isn’t into drugs or anything…”

“I don’t think she needs drugs.” said Reese, “She acts weird all by herself.”

Danny had had just about enough of this.  Reese and Shanice were supposed to be Ramona’s friends, and this was how they talked about her behind her back?  “Look, I know she’s not exactly normal…”

“Right, and that would be OK,” said Shanice, moving her hand in a placatory gesture, “But she gets scary sometimes.  Really self-destructive.”

Reese nodded.  “I think she needs to see somebody.”

“Oh my God, you two…”  Danny put his head in his hands.  “Look, she’s fine, OK?  She just needed to get rid of Mick.  She’s done that now.  She’s fine.”

Reese and Shanice gave him a strange look.

“Well…  OK,” said Shanice, with the same hand gesture as before.

Reese shrugged.  “Sure.”

There was an awkward silence for a while.  Then they changed the subject, and went on with their evening.

 

It had been nearly four years since Danny had spoken to his parents.  Four years of student loans, job interviews and tenancy agreements; four years of nights out with friends and days out with Ramona; and, above all, four years of not having to listen to anybody who told him that he needed to face up to how much of a freak he was.  The last time had been the summer after his first year of uni.  He’d handed his coursework in at the start of June, given in the keys to his room two weeks later, and gone back to his parents’ house, fully prepared to spend the summer there.  And, for the first three or four weeks, it had actually been OK.  He’d met up with some of his old high school friends that he hadn’t seen in a while, and they’d spent most of their time in and out of each other’s houses, watching DVDs and playing video games.  It had been great.

Danny had been worried that he’d find it hard to re-adjust to being under his parents’ roof again, but actually, they were fine.  Dad seemed really interested in the kind of things they had to read for their course, and the kind of things they all got up to on drunken nights out.  As for Mum, she’d bought an actual bottle of champagne for Danny’s return home.  Every other word out of her mouth was about how proud she was, how she couldn’t believe that the little boy who used to dress up as a Ninja Turtle on weekends was now a university student.  For the first few weeks, the atmosphere in the house had been wonderful.  He’d started to wonder why he’d ever complained about it.

But they could only keep up the act for so long.  Sooner or later, the old resentments showed through.

It was the finger thing that had done it.  At some point, Danny had developed a habit, when under stress, of touching each of his fingertips to the equivalent fingertip on the other hand, in sequence.  He didn’t know why he did it, any more than he knew why he’d used to chew his nails when he’d been younger.  It was just something he did without thinking.  And it drove his mum and dad nuts.

“Why do you do it?” Mum had demanded one afternoon when they were driving up to Tesco.  They’d been having a cheerful conversation about the film they’d seen on telly last night, but Mum had forgotten all about that when she’d seen Danny’s hands move.  It was the oldest rule in their house:  You act weird, you give up the right to affection.  “You know it upsets us.  Why don’t you just stop?”

“I don’t know,” mumbled Danny.  That wasn’t completely true, but the actual reason would have sounded completely mental if he’d said it out loud.  Warding off trouble.  Reminding himself not to let his mind wander and lose track of what he was doing, in case he made a terrible mistake.  It was completely illogical and he knew it, but doing the finger thing comforted him.

Mum turned to him, her eyes wide with hurt.  “Don’t you care about our feelings at all?”

“Yeah…” said Danny, looking down at his shoes.

“Then stop doing it!”  Mum slapped the steering wheel, making Danny jump.  “It’s as simple as that!”

Mum stared at him for a while, as if she was expecting an answer, but Danny didn’t have one to give.  He could promise to stop doing the finger thing, but that would be a complete lie.  He could tell Mum that, as a matter of fact, he didn’t care how she and Dad felt about what he did, but that would also be a complete lie.  He kept quiet.  That seemed like the safest option.

Mum finally worked out that he wasn’t going to say anything.  “It’s always been something with you,” she continued, “There’s always been something I needed to deal with.  Do you know how hard it’s been to…”  She broke off and took in a shuddery breath, as if she was holding back a sob.  “Look at Suzie.  She’s never given us a moment’s worry.  But I worry about you all the time.  Do you think that’s fair?”

“Well, stop doing it, then,” said Danny, before he could stop himself, “It’s as simple as that.”

Danny prepared himself to be shrieked at, or for Mum to break down in tears and make him feel awful, but neither of these things happened.  Mum gave him a look of pure disgust, and whispered, “You are the rudest person I know.”

They drove on for a while.  Wanting to avoid Mum’s gaze, Danny looked out of the window.  They were just driving under the big footbridge, the one that had fascinated him when he was about six.  He’d wondered how they’d designed it so that it would stay up, and whether you could bungee jump off it, as long as you designed the bungee chord to pull you back up before you hit the traffic.  He’d thought about how weird it would be, to hear the cars roaring under you and know that there was only a thin bit of metal to…

“There’s always been something,” said Mum.  She was staring straight ahead, as if she couldn’t stand to look at him.  “You fiddle about with your hands, you spend all day locked in your room, you never try new things…”  She let out what sounded like a growl.  “…You give me a list of presents you want for your birthday, and they’re all the same thing…”

The birthday in question had been a few months ago.  Danny had given his parents a list of Neil Gaiman books they could buy, because he’d just started to get into his stuff.  “All Suzie asked for for her last birthday was a car, Mum!”

“That’s not the point!” she said, hissing the words between clenched teeth, “The point is, it’s not normal!  Don’t you see that?”

Danny had to keep his breathing under control.  He had to stay calm.  Even if he felt as if he’d just swallowed a couple of razor blades, he couldn’t show it.  “Mum, I think that the two of us have very different definitions of the word ‘normal.’”

“You don’t have any definition of the word ‘normal’!”  She was definitely on the verge of tears now.  Danny felt his head start pounding.  “Do you know how worried I’ve been this last year?  Wondering how on Earth you’d be able to cope on your own?  You didn’t even know how to open the front door until you were eleven!”

“Well, it’s been a year since I left home, and I haven’t starved to death yet, OK?”

“It’s not about starving to death, it’s about how you act around other people.  I can’t count the number of times when I’ve had to apologize to people who don’t understand why you are how you are…”

Danny had heard this before.  “Name one.  Seriously.  Name.  One.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Danny!  Don’t just willfully ignore what you can see right in front of your face!”

“I’m just…”

“Danny.  Are you telling me that if you saw your ten-year-old son lie down in the middle of the supermarket just because they didn’t have the right kind of cereal for him, you wouldn’t think there was something wrong?”

Danny stayed quiet for a few seconds.  It was as if the air had changed.

“Are you even listening to me?”

“Mum…  That never happened.”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“That was just a documentary we saw.  It never happened.”  Danny finally met his mother’s eyes, and what he saw scared him.  There was a wild anger there, the kind of anger that would rage out of control, destroying everything in its path, until it had finally run its course.  There was no chance whatsoever of getting his mother to listen to reason.  If, in this wild, furious moment, she was convinced that Danny had once thrown a tantrum over cereal, then it was a fact.  Nothing he could say or do would convince her otherwise.

He should have been angry, but he wasn’t.  He felt as though a weight had lifted off his shoulders.

Danny undid his seatbelt, opened the passenger door, and got out of the car.  As he made his way down the street, he heard his mum behind him, calling out for him to come back.  He began to feel guilty, but he ignored it.  He was under no obligation to spend time in a car being lied to.

None of their comments meant anything.  They told him he wasn’t normal, that he was breaking their hearts, but how did he know that any of that was true?  They made things up to keep him under their thumbs.  They made things up, and trusted that he’d be too young to remember the truth.

Danny walked to the nearest railway station and bought a ticket back to university.  Back to his friends.  He had nothing but his wallet and his phone in his pockets, but that was all he needed.  He got a job, he got a bigger loan, and he found some friends who needed an extra flatmate.  His parents called and texted him about five times an hour, but he ignored them.  University started, and the calls and texts tapered off.  He got by.

And, over the next six months, the finger-touching habit went away on its own.

Funny, that.

 

 

 

Monday, 19th April

“The thing about this film,” said Ramona, as the DVD menu appeared onscreen, “is that it’s not, you know, like a Disney movie.  It’s got more to it.”

“You sound like Chris,” said Danny, pressing “play.”

Ramona laughed, a high-pitched shriek that changed into a giggle about halfway through.  “I do not!”

“Don’t you?” asked Danny, “‘The thing about this film, you know, is that it’s not, you know, like a Disney movie.  It’s got a lot more, you know, arty stuff to it, so only, you know, deep people like me can appreciate…‘”

“Stop it!” laughed Ramona, trying to smother him with a sofa cushion.

Tonight was going to be a good night.  Ramona had turned up as soon as Danny had come in from work, bringing with her a DVD of The Last Unicorn and about seven bags of sweets from the newsagent’s down the road.  “I didn’t know which ones you liked,” she’d explained.  Danny had liked the flying saucers.

“Come on,” said Danny, wriggling out from under the sofa cushions, “Film’s starting.  No attempted murder until after the film.”

Ramona considered this.  “OK,” she said reluctantly, and settled down to watch the film (still clutching the cushion, in case Danny tried anything funny).

Danny smiled as the movie started.  There was a line drawn in the sand, and the other side of it was where all the normal people lived.  But Danny bet that not one of those normal people had ever had an evening like this, an evening of stuffing your face with flying saucers while watching an arty animated film, and after that, who knew what?  But it was probably something the normal people would disapprove of.  Something they’d call childish, or disturbing, or just plain wrong.  Something they’d certainly never lower themselves to enjoy.

Danny put his arm around Ramona, and kissed her on the top of the head.  Their loss, he thought.

The End