39
Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated.
– Alphonse De Lamartine
Fuck you, you hoe, I don’t want you back
–‘Fuck It’,
Eamon
We’re fifteen and drinking warm cider under the cathedral grounds’ pine trees. It’s seven-thirty. There’s a dim orange moon and everything smells of just-cut grass. Alice takes out a tube of AcneGel, pushes it into my hand, and lies down, eyes closed. Sam and Aslam are talking about dogs, terrorism, and which rapper is the richest rapper.
‘Nothing above the eyebrows,’ she says. ‘Last time you did it above the eyebrows and it rained and my eyes swelled up.’
‘But his headphones empire,’ Aslam says. ‘The headphones.’
‘Okay,’ I say.
‘But some behind my ears.’
‘Isn’t he dead?’ Sam says.
‘You don’t have spots behind your ears.’
‘He’s definitely alive.’
‘Spots might grow behind my ears.’
Alice is my girlfriend. She has a sharp nose, size four feet, and Raynaud’s Syndrome. In the morning her mouth tastes of stale milk. I imagine her recent search history goes: how to make a Ouija board, does anal hurt, Haruki Murakami.
I massage white paste onto her cheeks in small circles. She kicks off her shoes. Her feet are the shape of kites. ‘I’m going away for Easter,’ she says. ‘Dad just told me. We’re going on holiday. To Antigua.’
‘Oh,’ I say. I don’t want her to go on holiday to Antigua. I don’t know what Antigua is. For the past two years, we’ve spent every school break motionless in her bed, watching CSI: New York and eating cubes ofblackcurrant jelly.
‘What’s Antigua?’ Aslam says.
‘It’s like. Um.’ She scrunches her nose. ‘No. I don’t know.’
‘Hawaii?’
‘What?’
‘It’s not that,’ I say. ‘It’s not Hawaii.’
Alice opens one eye. ‘You don’t know what it is. You don’t know about countries.’ I smear white down her neck and rub it into disappearance. The skin above her collarbones is thick and rough from daily benzoyl peroxide.
‘I don’t think it’s that.’
‘Well, it might be.’ She does an I don’t want you to talk face, pushes my hand away and sits up. She swigs cider and diamonds appear in her cheeks and I think again how I don’t want her to go wherever Antigua is. ‘It definitely might be Hawaii.’
‘Hawaii’s a country and Antigua’s a different country.’
‘Hawaii’s a state.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh,’ Sam says. ‘We’re going to my aunt’s in Crewe.’
‘You’re going too?’
‘Mm.’
‘This is retarded. What are we supposed to do?’
‘I don’t know.’
I know what I want to do. I want to remain in bed, watching documentaries about exotic marine life and sporadically masturbating over shopping channel presenters. I want to call Alice three times a day for reassurance that she isn’t putting her mouth against the mouths of people who aren’t me.
‘Etgar?’
‘What?’
‘What are you doing?’
‘My parents are away. I’m not doing anything.’
‘Let’s do something.’
A wide man walks under a streetlight. He looks vaguely familiar, like I’ve seen him in a dream or through a car windscreen. My body tenses. I imagine him holding chloroform to our faces, carrying us away and solemnly dismembering our bodies on the floor of a urine-smelling warehouse. I press my hand against Alice’s hand. ‘Maybe,’ I say.
‘We could do bukkake on my dog and film it.’
‘I don’t want to do that.’
‘Fine.’
I watch the man shrink, disappear, then momentarily reappear under a bowl of orange light. We finish the cider and say goodbye and leave. Me and Alice go to her house. Her dad’s smoking in the conservatory, so we go upstairs, turn on Radio 4, and fall asleep to unintelligible chanting.
PART 1
Titanic
1
It’s the first day of the Easter holidays. Alice has gone to Antigua with her dad and my parents have gone to Russia, to watch Uncle Michael marry a woman he found on the Internet.
I’m lying in bed.
I’m never going to move again.
I’m going to grow until I am the size of a car and the weight of a lion and my arms look like antennae. Firemen will have to cut me out of the house and a documentary crew will film it. Mum’s friends will watch the documentary together, pressing their hands to their knees and mewing. My Two Ton Son. When I go into sudden cardiac arrest and die, they will call her to apologise and promise imminent lasagne.
Amundsen jumps onto the bed. He lies down, buries his head in my belly and exhales. The only thing I have to do over the next four days is walk him and feed him. Mum said that if he
