so much foulness passing through my mouth today, I could do with a good floss.
Gwen’s a brisk brusher – oh how Dad would disapprove – and she gives her face only the most cursory scrub with the washcloth and one pump’s worth of hand soap from a sink-side container. I’m hoping she’ll beat a quick retreat after that but she doesn’t, not even when it’s my turn for the toilet.
Our bedroom, which I’m marched into next, is not technically a bedroom because there’s no bed. There are two mattresses and a neat stack of sheets and comforters against one wall, but no other furniture to speak of. It’s a room as empty as the day you move in. Gwen doesn’t even call it a bedroom.
‘Inspecting the phaser room!’ she bellows as she hands me and my belt loop over to her dad. Then she drops to her knees and rakes through the bare carpet with her fingers. She crawls from one corner of the room to the other tearing into the synthetic weave, poking down the sides by the skirting boards, getting eye level with the windowsills. She checks the door to what I assume is the closet and seems satisfied to find it locked. Turning her attention to the mattresses, she peeks to see what’s sandwiched between them (nothing) then lets them plop down on to the floor and leaps on them, one springing step each, like a trampoline. One of the mattresses, the one with the deepest sag in its belly, is kicked into the corner farthest from the door. Next Gwen shakes out each sheet, each frilly comforter, each sad pillow, and tosses them in equal measure on to the separated mattresses. As she makes her way back towards me, her eyes remain on the floor, scanning each step, each inch.
‘All clear!’ she reports. Her father rolls his eyes and backs away without a good night.
The mattress in the corner is my bed for the evening. Rammed in the corner like that, it makes me feet like a dunce, like I should forget how to spell and sit on my own till teacher calls time, like I should wear a big pointy white cap.
Gwen undresses, twisting off her Velcro-strap sneakers as she yanks down the bottoms of her sweat suit. I avert my eyes from her rolls of blubber, trying not to think how unpopular she must be with the boys, even if it does give me some pleasure. Still, I can’t help but notice her nipples which are the size of Franklin Mint special edition silver dollars and wonder how you get nipples like that.
‘Get ready for bed,’ she orders, stepping into a pair of oversized men’s boxer shorts.
‘What should I wear?’
‘What have you got?’
‘Nothing. You know I haven’t.’
‘Watch it, dirtball, don’t you get sassy with me.’
‘I—’
She groans then pelts me with a wadded up T-shirt with UNICEF stamped on the front where a pocket would have been. ‘Don’t get anything on it.’
The T-shirt is too small – I think it must belong to Trish – and the stitching on the label causes the back of my neck to itch, but I squeeze myself into it. Gwen snaps the lights off before I’ve finished folding up my clothes and the room is darker than I expect it to be. I grope my way towards my dunce’s mattress.
‘And don’t even think about crying,’ Gwen hisses from her mattress. ‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s fucking cry babies keeping me up all night.’
I pull the covers up to my chin and try to imagine that I’m in our rollaway, which is similar in its proximity to the floor.
After you left, I found myself sleeping in the rollaway more and more, just like when we were little. I didn’t plan to. Grandma came so I gave her my room and Mom made up the couch in the TV lounge for me. That was the official sleeping arrangement. But I kept tossing and turning out there on the couch, my butt wedging itself into the space between the cushions. About midnight one night, I got up to walk around and passed your door, slightly ajar, the glow from your old Mickey Mouse night-light you never bothered to throw out silhouetting the frame. I kneed the door open, maybe hoping to find you, and there was your room, just as you left it. Except for the rollaway. It was wheeled out from its hiding place beneath your proper bed and jacketed with a sheet now coated in dust. I didn’t mind, didn’t stop to think twice. I yanked the pillow and bedspread off your bed, crawled into the dust and fell asleep at once.
Mom found me like that in the morning and started bawling all over again. She said I oughtn’t be sleeping in your room. Grandma Shirland massaged the small of Mom’s back, little circular motions interspersed with pat-pats, calmed her down, changed her mind, bless Grandma. She said if it helped me, what was the harm. ‘Trust me,’ Grandma Shirland told Mom. ‘It’s OK.’
But I can’t make Gwen’s dunce mattress feel the same. The sheets are icy cold, they feel faintly wet and smell of chlorine. I scissor my legs to warm up. It doesn’t have much effect and I wish I had some socks. I wish that eternity ago that was this morning I’d taken the time to run upstairs and root out my thickest, warmest pair of black woollen tights. Not that they’d probably still be with me even if I had taken the time. Without my tights or a good pair of ski socks, I’m sure my feet will become frozen little approximations of appendages by morning, like the marbled and immovable chips of Greek statues they display in museums.
My dunce pillow has lumps in funny places and no matter how I plump it, my head feels like an eggshell, fragile and lopsided. I plunge my nose into the pillow’s innards hoping to come up with that smell of you that’s lulled me to sleep in the past. I love to sink into that smell. Sorta musky, still fresh nearly and…something. Not a bottled thing, not just a combination of sweat and salt and anti-dandruff shampoo and deodorant. You asked me once, ‘How do I smell?’ and I leant in and ran my nose across you like a dog would and I thought about it, really tried to capture it but all I could say was, ‘Wonderful, you smell wonderful, Josh.’
You pressed me, ‘Yes, but what’s it like? Describe it.’
I answered, ‘You smell like you.’
But the dunce pillow doesn’t. It smells of piss, mildew and other people’s dead skin cells. There’s no way I can drift off to never-never land with my nostrils full of this. There’s no way I can sleep at all. I listen as Gwen tosses once, twice, three times. She smoothes her bedspread then punches it away from her. She grumbles and lashes out at someone. ‘I know that,’ she retorts to the empty room and then her breathing grows heavy, punctuated by an occasional piggy-like snuffle.
I should have peed more. I couldn’t let go, not fully, when we were in the bathroom earlier, not with her standing over me like that, toothbrush in hand. But out of nowhere, the need hits me. My bladder’s about to burst.
I can hold it, no problem.
I try not to think about it, I count sheep, think of drifting off, think of you floating on a raft in the pool on a summer’s day with the sun beating down and the radio playing our favourite Duran Duran songs from the table on the patio.
I listen to Gwen sleep. I don’t know how long I listen to her but it feels like a very long time indeed as I tauten my privates, grit my teeth and envisage miles of sandy desert and no swimming pools at all: what a silly idea, no water, no waves, none of that. I count her snuffles – one, three, five, seven. I figure they’re at least two to three minutes apart. She hasn’t moved in, what, fifteen minutes.
I decide to take a chance.
I creep towards the door, thinking myself weightless while simultaneously trying to gird my bladder. It’s working. I always was the best at hide and seek because I could be so quiet. I knew the places you’d gravitate to, sure – under the sink with the Audrey Hepburn rubber gloves, behind the garbage cans in the garage, under the bed in Mom and Dad’s room, beneath the tattered tarpaulin shrouding the barbecue out back or under the cushions for the poolside chairs – but that wasn’t my real advantage. Though you were the one hiding, I was always the one who had the element of surprise on my side. I’d sneak up behind you, soft like a whisper, and tap you on the shoulder as calm as you please, as if all I hankered for was the time of day, and you’d jump out of your skin, startled and scared and packing your