Майк Ланкастер: Human.4

I don’t really need to go into all the details. You . . . well, you know how it is. You spend a few break times together, you hold hands, you write their name in an exercise book or two, feel stupidly jealous if you see them talking to any other boy. You laugh at each other’s jokes, and find yourself thinking about them when you’re not together.

I even went back to her house once.

Just once.

That was kind of the trouble, really.

I was invited round for "tea" one evening.

Lilly’s family live in the old village store. From the road it’s pretty unremarkable: a flinted facade of the kind that’s common in Millgrove; a couple of bay windows that were probably display windows when the place was a shop; a nondescript front door.

I’d never given it a second look.

It looked like an ordinary house.

When I walked through the front door, trailing behind Lilly, I found myself in a room that was shop-sized. Literally. The whole ground floor of my house would have fitted in that one room.

It had a black-beamed ceiling and what looked like an acre of parquet flooring. There was a grand piano in there and it didn’t take up much of the available space. There were two vast but somehow elegant sofas that must have cost thousands of pounds; there were oil paintings of horses and hounds on the walls that were . . . well, real paintings, not prints.

I’d never seen anything like it. Not in real life. And I realized two things:

1. Lilly’s parents were far wealthier than she had ever let on, and

2. I could never invite her back to my house.

I pictured showing Lilly into the front room of my house: a tiny room with no art on the walls, no piano, a little old TV and a tatty three-piece suite.

I imagined how bad, how ashamed, that would make me feel.

And then I met her parents.

Lilly’s mother prepared the food on a huge, enameled Aga. We sat on wooden pews around an ancient table, and Lilly’s parents made conversation that was bright, witty and very, very clever. They talked about music, literature and art; they made instant jokes and witty asides, and they made me feel so uncultured and stupid that I squirmed in my seat every time they spoke to me.

I pictured taking Lilly back to meet my folks.

Discussions about rubbish television.

Chris and his endless chatter about football.

I felt ashamed at the very thought of it.

I started avoiding her soon after.

I invented phoney reasons and engineered even phonier arguments.

I stood her up. Twice.

Time passed, she got the message, and she broke up with me.

Then, while I was playing at being dad, I neglected Simon. I was too busy. Or thought I was. And in that time he and Lilly became friends.

Then more than friends.

And I hated my parents for not being like Lilly’s parents.

I hated my mum for not having an Aga.

I hated my dad for leaving us.

I hated them both for letting my best friend get the girl I had been too embarrassed to have for myself.

I never told Lilly why I acted the way I did. She must have thought I was the world’s biggest jerk.

At least she hadn’t seen the truth.

Now, next to her at Mrs O’Donnell’s house, I realized that sniping at me was partly her way of dealing with things. Just as mine was making jokes and Mr Peterson’s was to cut himself off from it all, to deny its existence.

If her comments also meant she was paying me back for being such an idiot to her, then I reckoned I deserved it.

"I’m only saying that the groupings of symbols could be words," I said calmly. "Maybe we just don’t understand the language they’re written in."

There was a moment of silence and, in the space between sounds, I thought I heard something. Something outside and probably distant, but as I listened harder it seemed to be getting closer.

It was a weird, disquieting sound, a bit like distant thunder, but somehow more electrical sounding.

Synthetic thunder?

What was I thinking?

"It makes no difference," Mrs O’Donnell said bleakly. If she had heard the sound, she didn’t show it. "The television can’t pick up a signal. The computer displays these weird symbols. The phones are down. So are the radios."

She turned the computer off in disgust and turned around to face us.

"We’re on our own for now," she said.

In the silence that followed I realized that the odd sound I had heard had stopped.

Had it just been a symptom of my already overstretched imagination?

Or was there really something out there?

Something that roared like counterfeit thunder?

That was moving towards us, silently now?

I shuddered and looked to Mrs O’Donnell for some kind of reassurance.

The fear in her eyes told me there was none there to be found.

I guess I have always believed that grown-ups have all the answers.

They behave as if they do.

Looking at Mrs O’Donnell’s face I suddenly realized something. It’s not true. Adults are just making things up as they go along. And when they’re scared, adults have no more answers than us kids.

Mrs O’Donnell was scared and she didn’t know what to do. Everything that she knew and thought had been—

NOTE

We have absolutely no way of knowing just how Side Two would have ended if the tape had not run out. Many papers and book chapters have set out to explore this interruption to the story, but they are all just guesses. They are not worth looking at here, because they cloud the issues rather than bringing them into focus. When Graysmark argues that "(T)he largest truth of the Straker account lies in the silent spaces between tapes" he allows himself to fall into what Nightingale calls "the fallacy of the gaps". The meaning of the gaps cannot be known, measured or estimated.

… my train of thought?

NOTE

Kyle never returns to his prior train of thought. Changing the tape seems to have completely wiped what he was going to say from his mind. It is difficult to judge the importance of this. Lahr and Pritchett, in their book Forgotten Words: the Untold Histories of the World, argue that Kyle Straker’s narrative is forever altered at the point where the second tape begins: "The story is reset, and the world revised. When Straker forgets his place in his own story, we lose something important, but it is something that we can never know . . . We try to complete this part of the story, and we can only do that by importing our own experiences, prejudices, ideas. Kyle’s story becomes our own, but it also stops being his. "

My throat is dry. Dry and scratchy. I think this is the most talking that I have ever done in my life. In one go, that is.

Funny thing is, I don’t even know if anyone will ever listen to these tapes. I’m not even sure why I thought it was such a good idea to make them. I just wanted to leave a record, for the four of us, for any more people like us that are left, so that we will not be forgotten.

I think that’s what we all want, in the end.

To know that we left footprints when we passed by, however briefly.

We want to be remembered.

So remember us.

Please.

Remember us.

Things never happen the way you think they are going to. Too many random factors between thought and action, I guess. My dad used to sum it up with this weird golfing saying: there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip.