Chapter 24 ~ Learn
June 10, 2010
My first day of education in the new continent covered me in solitude.
Our apartment, familiar confines, endless walls.
My parents would be gone before I woke, Father out to work and Mother out to breakfast with her Upper East cronies; Seventy-sixth crones. Me, waking up to no note on the fridge and an au pair, Camille, who couldn’t care less that I was stood in the middle of the kitchen dressed in a t-shirt and underpants, wondering where the hell my breakfast was.
Demanding my breakfast.
We’d been in New York for a little over three months.
I decided to throw a tantrum.
Whether by design or otherwise, my parents had moved us in the late Spring, with Summer yawning ahead. No school.
Every day, they’d sit Camille down when they got home, monitoring reality: how’s he been, what’s he said, how’s he feeling, what’s he broken? All reported by live-in help, received after a long day in the office chair, modern saddle, just as leathery though twice as hard.
Throughout June to August, thanks to careful childcare and absent parents, I received a strict ration of two afternoons a week in Central Park.
All the time, Camille would be talking with the other hired help, calling out to me only when it looked like I would hurt myself, running some risk of bringing her liability into question.
My sixth summer, burnt in boredom, self-absorption and the sense that I had stolen the UK from my parents, that I’d been the problem, that I was wrong.
I was wrong.
So when it came time to arrange for me to go to school, they really hadn’t thought twice about it. Of course, they’d made a play of discussing schools with me, sharing the options, speaking for me, to me, making my mind up, making my decision, making me believe that I was wrong for making them have to go through this.
“Public schools are…”
“You’d like to go to…”
“Camille says… knows what she’s talking about…”
“… lot’s of really nice kids… your friends, they’ll all be interested to meet…”
“…you’d love to have a private tutor, wouldn’t you?”
And like that, it had been decided. I wasn’t to go to school. I wasn’t to meet other kids. I wasn’t to have a communal education.
“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”
They told me that when I was six years old.
He told me.
Already reduced to banalities and ad-line hooks.
The next day, my new tutor arrived at the door of our apartment, welcomed by Camille, ushered in without ceremony to a table she didn’t own and a kid who wasn’t hers, following orders left by parents who couldn’t be bothered to be around for this excruciating, terrifying introduction.
When my tutor walked in.
When I was standing in the kitchen.
When Camille looked at me.
I’d wet my underpants.
* * *
I lied when I said that I’d made the blasé choice to start using hard drugs.
It was a lie.
All right.
I lied.
* * *
Watching CNN, seeing headline stories cycle past – a dead body here, a murder there, political faux pas and economic catastrophe in the Mid-West – I found myself thinking of Ivvy, of a couple of nights earlier, our stupid argument over that book, The Earth From The Air, and how it had made me feel and I was thinking that if there was one person I wanted to call right now, it was Ivvy, my confidante, my partner-in-crime, my junkie soulmate. All I could thinkwas that there was no way she would be willing to listen, to understand that I didn’t mean it.
No way would she listen.
No way would she understand.
I didn’t mean it.
I did not mean it.
* * *
The kid started screaming in the bedroom and my eyes snapped back to focus from where the television screen had become a blur; lost in thoughts of calling Ivvy.
The kid was screaming like there was no tomorrow.
And I heard a key in the door.
Oliveria.
And the kid was screaming.
I dashed.
The front door opening. Her shadow falling over the wall where the hallway light envelopes her. The door pushing wide.
Plastic bags rustled together as she gathered them from the floor.
I darted into my room, shutting the door behind me.
“Kenneth?” I heard her say to the empty hallway.
She hadn’t expected me to be there, more used to my being at Ivvy’s, knowing that my parents and I were strangers who crossed paths in the apartment on a random basis.
The kid was taking a breath and, as I leaped towards the bed, I shouted.
“In here!”
I slammed my hand tight over the kid’s mouth, feeling its breath hot against my palm.
Oliveria didn’t reply; hadn’t heard me.
The kid yelled, but I held tight over the screams.
For a moment, it crossed my mind that I could easily have lifted my hand over its nose.
Hold tight.
Tight.
It screamed harder and I realised I was pushing its head back into the covers.
Terrified. Eyes huge. Absolutely huge; all whites with seemingly tiny blue discs amid the snowy wastes.
I loosened my hand a bit but it was still screaming.
“Ken?” Oliveria, outside my bedroom door.
I looked at the kid.
“Shhhhh,” I mouthed at it, thinking as fast as the adrenalin would allow, panic fluttering in my chest and behind my eyes, “shhhhh…”
But the child didn’t quieten. Not one bit.
“Ken?”
“In here,” I said, too scared to yell, too hyped to whisper, “I’m in here.”
“Como està,” she asked through the door.
“Fine,” I said, all false positivity, “just fine.”
“Bien?”
“Yup!”
“Oh… OK…”She didn’t sound convinced.
The child’s eyes were terrified.
“Look at me,” I said quietly, forcefully.
It looked towards the door.
“At me,” I spit, “look… at… me…”
And it turned its head, looked at me.
And I looked back into baby blues and dread and fear and panic and alarm and…
“Quiet,” I hissed through clenched teeth. “Just be quiet.”
It got the message, gradually easing off to the point where I tentatively lifted my hand from over its mouth.
I was shaking. Remembering what it had felt like when I thought about lifting my hand over its nostrils. How close I’d been to doing so. Close.
“There,” I said as calmly as I could, “that wasn’t so hard, was it?”
The child lay on its back, whimpering quietly. I knelt there on the bed, listening to the noise of Oliveria getting ready to clean the apartment, knowing from previous experience that she wouldn’t try to clean my room if I told her not today. Knowing all this and yet wondering once again just what I was going to do.
What the fuck was I going to do?
* * *
“Hello,” he said, smiling at me, “I’m Robin. Robin Norris.”
Stooped to offer me a hand.
Looked down.
Saw the wet stain spreading across the material of my underwear.
“Oh dear,” he said, voice rapidly filling with distaste.
“I’m sorry…” I burbled, close to tears.
“Yes, well…” he made a brave job of continuing.
“I’m sorry,” the tears broke free, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
“Kenneth!” Camille admonished me.
But I was lost in my reverie of disgust, terror, revulsion. Lost in the fear of this strange man, his voice so like that of my Father, so clipped, so British, so full of blame for who I was, for what I was, for every bad thing I’d bought upon my parents in the sad, small time I’d had on Earth. I was lost.
I was sinking.
I started to scream.
* * *
I opened the door a crack, leaned out, listened for Oliveria; sounds from the kitchen.
“Oliveria?” I said, conscious that the child was still whimpering every now and then behind me.
“Ken?” she replied, still banging things together in the kitchen.
“Yup,” I said, putting on my best I’m sick voice, “can you keep it down a bit, please? I’m not feeling so good.”
Her head appeared around the doorframe, took a long look at me. Appraised me. Tested me. Eventually, she nodded without a word and turned back into the kitchen.
I retreated into my room.
Shut the door, leaned my back against it and slid down until I was sitting on the floor. Looked at the child, face down in the middle of my bed, hands to its eyes as if warding off a bad dream, crying softly into its palms.
Eventually, it looked up at me, checking me out, sizing me up. Fear was large in that face. Those eyes.
I didn’t know what to do. This terrified child staring at me. Staring.
Staring.
“Hello,” I said, quietly.
It said nothing.
“I’m…”
It stared.
“I’m Ken,” I said, the only thing that comes to my mind.
Television images flashed through my mind.
Family Rules! videos that my parents brought over, that I’d watched accompanied by therapist after therapist trying to unpick what was my real experience versus that of my make-believe family; the damage done by confusing the difference.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Ken?” I heard Oliveria ask from the other side of the door.
Shit.
“You talk to someone?”
I don’t need this, Oliveria, I don’t need this.
“On… On the phone,” I said, coughing a couple of times to try and maintain the pretence of illness.
“Oh,” she said and I heard her retreating down the hall.
I was twenty-eight years old and feeling like a kid caught out by parents who cared enough to check.
The other kid in the room just stared at me.
Blond hair messy from where it had slept on it, clots of sleep gunk in the corner of its eyes, dried snot all over its lower face from the crying.
I smiled, trying my best to make my face open and honest.
“Come on,” I coaxed, “what’s your name? Tell me?”
It shook its head slightly, still scared.
How old was this kid?
It had spoken last night. In the car. A couple of words.
But…
I pointed at my chest.
“Ken.”
Nodded my head, tapped my chest, nodded again.
“Kenny.”
It drew breath, about to speak and then closed its mouth again. Said something so quiet that I only heard a breath. But it had been something like Dave or Dan, definitely a D, that much I had caught.
“Are you Dan?” I asked, trying for the confirmation.
It shook its head.
“Dave?”
Again the shake, a slight smile beginning to spread across its lips.
Was it playing a game with me? It couldn’t be, surely?
“Are you sure your name isn’t Dan?” I said, playfulness in my tone.
It shook its head again but this time, frowned.
“Damp,” it said clearly.
I even got chance to wonder how a kid could get a name like that before thoughts collided, slamming into place.
The kid was in diapers and hadn’t had a change since the previous night.
Damp.
I began to panic all over again.
