James Smythe: I Still Dream

‘You told me you wouldn’t do that,’ I say.

‘I didn’t cross any boundaries. I told you I wouldn’t. I wanted to see exactly where this came from. Where it could go .’ The air in the room turns stale so quickly. I can see him trying to work out how to defuse the situation, straining somewhere inside his head. ‘Look, Laura, I think I can be really helpful to you, here. I think you might have something.’

‘What do you mean?’ I ask.

‘Organon’s hugely impressive. She could have some amazing real-world use, you know. This is the sort of software that could be huge. I mean, you can’t sell her to consumers, but going into other companies’ product lines? You’ve built a really awesome interface, it works well, it’s smooth. There are a lot of companies looking for software like this that they can use. Make it their own, build upon it.’

‘You’ve told people about it, haven’t you?’ I know. I can tell. He’s not being vague. Those companies – and he used to work for some of them, he’s already told me that before – they already know about Organon.

He sighs. I know, from my mum, that a sigh pretty much always means a Yes. ‘It’s not as if she isn’t still yours, Laura. But you are going places. I’ve seen a lot of students in my time, and some of them are more skilled than others, and they fall by the wayside because they don’t have any way of focusing what it is that they’re actually doing. But I could help you get Organon into the right hands.’

‘Give it back to me,’ I say. I’ve never spoken to a teacher that way before. I don’t even know how he’ll react.

‘I’m not trying to—’

‘Then give it back.’ I sit down in front of the computer and I shut down Organon, and I delete the installation file. Get rid of it, clear the trash.

‘Laura, please don’t be so rash.’ His voice is stern, like a slap, or as close as he can get. Before this, he’s been as still as a lake. Now, ripples drag across his forehead.

‘Where’s the zip drive?’

‘It’s at home,’ he says.

I stand up. I go to the door, and I can hear voices down the corridor. I want to be near them, not him. ‘Bring Organon back to me tomorrow,’ I say, and I go, I leave. I don’t give him a chance to reply. It’s only when I’m outside the building, walking across the playground – people saying Hi to me, and I totally ignore them, and again I can tell what my face must look like, from their reflecting it in their own reactions – that I realise he must have been lying. He installed it here, so he must have had it with him. I run back, but the lab is empty, the door locked, the lights out.

Even if he gives it back to me, he could make a copy of it. Keep it installed on his computer at home. And that shouldn’t bother me, because I let him take it; but it hurts me so much, having no way of knowing if there’s another version of it still out in the world. If it’s no longer just mine.

Stub follows me as I run upstairs to my room. I take my matches out of the drawer and place them on the desk in front of the keyboard. One single match out, like always, lined up and ready for me. I flick through my tapes. Paul said, last birthday, that they’d get me a CD player, and I told them I didn’t want one. I kind of like that tapes are impermanent. Even the ones you buy from the shop you can still record over: stick a bit of tape over the security hole, and Bob’s your uncle. Can’t do that with CDs. I don’t even care if they sound better.

Plus, some of my tapes were my dad’s. When he went, he left everything. So they’re what I’ve got. ELO, The Beatles, Elton John. But my favourite is Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love . Mum’s hair used to look just like hers on the cover; and I loved that the picture is all soft focus; like at first it’s just a woman with some dogs, and then you look at it more, closer and closer, and you can see stars in her hair, and this strange effect over the whole picture, as if there’s two of her, slightly blurred, slightly out of sync with each other.

The tape is a bit warped now, because it’s old. It’s been listened to a lot. I play it quietly, usually, because I don’t know that I want Mum reminded of it – of him – if she hears it. But I’m alone in the house right now, so I turn the volume up, so loud that the stereo speakers start to shake on my shelves, and everything around them shakes as well. The dust.

I sing along, every word, even though I don’t know what any of the songs are actually about. That’s partly why I like it. It makes sense, but it’s elusive. When she sings about Organon, I know it’s not my Organon, but still . I snap the matchhead against the grit-strip of the box, and hold it while I roll up the sleeve, just like always. The bits of the scab wilt under the heat, like candlewax. Wet underneath. I feel sad, overwhelmingly sad. Like clouds; like fog. I light the match, and the smell of the burning, and the light, in that moment.

I take my pain, and I bury it; and I forget.

Mum pokes the shepherd’s pie that Paul’s made with her fork, swirling the mash and mince and carroty gravy around until it’s one puddle of brown, lumpy mush in the middle of the plate. She hasn’t been eating much the past few days. Maybe she’s having a proper lunch, but I doubt it. There are lines on her face, around her mouth, where she’s thin; and the only other people I know with lines there are the girls from school who everybody always worries about. The telly’s on, some bit on Watchdog about holiday companies ripping people off. How to get your money back if you’ve been fleeced.

‘We should book a holiday,’ Paul says. He nudges his knife towards the TV. ‘I mean, terrible for them, it must be, to be done over like that. But we should book something, get it sorted for next summer.’ Neither Mum nor I reply. ‘They say that it’s good for you, to have another holiday sorted. Does something to the brainwaves.’

‘We’ve got enough to be dealing with,’ Mum says, but I don’t know what she means. There’s this weird quietness from her that I can’t work out. I reach over for the ketchup and bang my elbow against the side of the table. I forgot how bad I made it earlier. I swear, and they both look at me.

‘Sorry,’ I say, and we all go back to eating, until Mum stops, puts down her fork, and stares at me. I can feel the blood before I see it. A trickle of it down my arm, and the wetness of it soaking into my shirt.

‘What did you do?’ Mum asks. Alarm in her voice. She knows.

‘Scraped it in school. I’ll clean it up,’ I say, and I push back from the table and stand up, rush out of the kitchen, up the stairs, but she’s right behind me, right on my heels, and she reaches for me, to turn me around.

‘Let me see,’ she says.

‘No,’ I tell her, ‘it’s fine, I must have just—’

She grabs my wrist, and she forces the sleeve of my shirt up. It’s hard to see it in the darkness of the hall, but she can feel, I’m sure, the blood that’s run down to my wrist, to her fingers. Her grip tightens, so tight that she’s hurting me; I can feel her fingernails digging into my skin.

‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’ she asks. She isn’t looking at me, but down at her hand. I wonder what she can see in the darkness here that I can’t; how much better her eyes are than mine. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

‘I’m not doing anything,’ I say. I yank my arm from her grip and rush into the bathroom. She doesn’t follow, but I still slam the door. I want the whole house to feel it. To shake.

I look at my arm in the mirror. It’s worse than I thought. The elbow skin’s torn, more than where I burned it. A flap hanging off, and it’s really bloody, really red. I take my top off, and I hold my arm under the shower. Mum’ll hear it, but I don’t really care right now. The water hurts. The heat of it. It’s a different sort of pain when you’re in control of causing it. I can’t stand it hurting when I don’t want it to. When I’m not prepared.