James Smythe: I Still Dream

rat-a-tat-tat of the start of a song. I kick my shoes off, slide them under the radiator. I don’t want wet footprints through the house. One less thing for Mum to freak out about. As I get upstairs, I yank off my drenched tights, chuck them into the basket in the bathroom. Grab socks from the airing cupboard, still warm, and I go to my room, lie on the bed, pull them on with my feet stuck up in the air. The bill next to me on the bed. My bed, like the rest of my room, is a mess. That’s what Mum says, but I know that everything has its own place. Maybe it’s just not as ordered as her stuff is, but then I’ve never been one for that level of organisation.

Stub comes up, chunk of tail trying to swish and failing. He noses at me.

‘Not now,’ I say, which I reckon might be all I ever really say to the cat. But, really, not now. There’s a bit of time pressure here. Every month I intercept the bill as soon as it arrives. I panic, because I know how bad it’s going to be. I need them to not see it; and I have to read the number myself, to know how bad it’s going to be. I use this old letter opener that used to be my dad’s – my real dad’s, but maybe it was his dad’s first, I don’t actually know – and I slide it along the stuck-down flap. Every time, I try to prise the glue apart rather than cutting it. Every time, I tell myself that, if I manage to do this successfully, stealthily, I can put the letter back afterwards, and they’ll never know. But I always wreck the paper so much it’s not even a remote possibility. It’s a ritual now. Every month I read the whole bill. I recognise the calls I’ve made, the times that I made them. Every weeknight of my life I get home from school, and then, like, an hour later I’m on the phone to the people that I’ve just spent the entire day with, talking about the things we did – and did together! – earlier that day. I know it’s stupid, I know, but it’s what we do. Everybody does it. We take it in turns with who calls who, because otherwise you get an engaged tone for hours. And, God, if you get one of them when you know you’re meant to be speaking to somebody else, that’s the most tense hour or whatever of your life. Because, who are they talking to? And what does that mean?

Then, when I’ve read the bill, I get rid of it. Throw it in a bin on my way to school. I know that doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t stop the money going out of their account at the end of the month, and it doesn’t stop them asking where the bill is, raging at the amount, shouting at me. They know I’ve taken it, but I’m strong. I blame the postman. Paul keeps threatening to make me pay some of it back out of my Saturday wages or whatever, though I’m meant to be saving for university, so I don’t think he’s serious. I want to tell them: it’s not because I don’t want them to see it, I just have to know how bad it’s going to be. Every month they tell me that I’ve got to think about other people with the phone, that somebody might be trying to get through. And, as well as thinking about other people, I should think about myself . That’s my mum’s favourite one. Think about yourself, Laura, she says; because you have to work hard this year to make sure that everything else falls into place. Every month we have the conversation, and I’m like, I know, Mum. I swear, I know. Doesn’t mean I can’t speak to my friends.

And it doesn’t mean I don’t want to use the Internet, either. And it’s that 0845 AOL number that’s been the real cost these past few months.

This month? The total at the bottom of the bill is huge. Biggest it’s been. My hands shake. Shit.

I hear a bang from downstairs. The front door, the slamming shut of it.

‘Laura?’ my mother calls. Does she sound angry? I can’t tell. The sound of her feet on the landing, coming up the stairs. Walking so heavily that I’m sure it’s because she wants me to hear her. I open the second drawer down and throw the envelope in, all the different bits of it. Pages and pages of numbers, like some awful spreadsheet – and when has a spreadsheet ever not been bad news? – but the drawer jams, slightly, when I try to shut it, because it’s so crammed full, so I have to really work it to get it closed, creeping my hand in, forcing the pages along, pushing them down. ‘Are you home?’ she shouts, from right outside my bedroom.

‘Yeah, come in,’ I say. Hand shakes; voice shakes. Come on, Laura, keep it together. ‘You’re home early,’ I say, as she pushes the door open. Before she can speak.

‘You’re soaking wet,’ she says. I can see myself in the mirror, over her shoulder. My hair’s a state. She really hates that I don’t do more with my hair. ‘Didn’t you have your little brolly with you?’

‘It’s fine,’ I tell her. She looks past me: at what I see as order, but she sees as something entirely chaotic.

‘And you keep this room so cold,’ she says, looking at my open window; an open window that she basically forces me to have because of her insane addiction to constantly-on radiators. ‘You’ll catch your death,’ but that bit of caring is only a pretence; a prelude to what she really wants to say. ‘You have to sort this heap out, you know.’ She scans the whole room, looking at every single bit of it, somehow, in only a few seconds. Like her eyes are able to flick from mess to mess faster than any other human’s can. Somehow in human.

‘Fine,’ I reply. The desk is covered in electric leads and books and bits of schoolwork; and there are piles of clothes on the floor; and there’s all this stuff Blu-tacked to the walls, which they warned me against, because you’ll never get Blu-tack off, and it’s us who’ll end up having to scrape it off when you’ve gone to university, and on and on and on. They gave me the desk a couple of years back, after Paul salvaged it from his office. I got him to paint it black for me, because I was going through a phase, Mum says. I say I’m still going through it. There are bits where I’ve chipped the paint, and there’s the old cheap wood veneer poking through.

Mum glances at my drawers – the tape drawer is open, boxes crammed in, tapes threatening to unspool under the pressure – and I picture the drawer I crammed the bill into popping open, a jack-in-the-box, and the letter flying up into the air, the pages of the bill – many, many pages of itemised phone calls – showering down around us.

‘Are you all right?’ She asks this every day. I think she’s hoping that, one day, she’ll hit the jackpot, and she can say, See, I can always tell.

‘I’m fine.’ I don’t say: I really am not fine; I’ve got a phone bill in my drawer that incriminates me to the tune of nearly a hundred and fifty quid, and you’re going to go absolutely bloody mental when you find out.

‘School was all right?’

‘Same as always.’ Mum nods. She rolls her tongue around the front of her mouth, between her teeth and the inside of her lip. This is what she does when she’s thinking about something. Or, when she’s thinking of whether to say whatever it is she’s trying to stop herself from saying. Weighing up whether the potential argument’s worth it or not.

Today, it’s not. ‘Okay,’ she says instead, and she backs away. I wait for her to say something else, but she doesn’t. Not a word, just this weird hum of some song I only slightly recognise; and then the click of the television they have at the end of their bed coming on, the theme tune to Neighbours.

I time the slam of my door to the end of the song.

I can’t deal with the BT bill yet, in case she comes back. She’s got a habit of doing that. Knowing when something’s up, and surprising me a few seconds later, like she’s trying to catch me in the act. I take my clothes off, put them on the radiator. Pull joggers on, a Bluetones T-shirt I wouldn’t really wear out of the house any more. I turn on my computer, and I think about going online, dialling into AOL and getting on with more of my Organon project. But I can hear Mum muttering something, and I can hear Madge and Harold talking on the telly, and I know I wouldn’t get away with it, not right now. Fingers on the home keys, waiting for something. Not yet.

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