James Hannah - The A to Z of You and Me

Kelvin and the new kid look at what I’ve written, and Kelvin laughs a silent and heartening laugh. The new kid doesn’t laugh. His face smiles without his mouth smiling — maybe it’s in the brow — and he watches on with a cool detachment.

Balls ( hairy ), I add, and then underline the A and B, before quickly coming up with C, D and E, all from the same source. Cock, dong, erection. We both tense up with silent laughter.

Fanny , counters Kelvin, arcing a line out to the female. Gonads .

Horn.

Incest.

I frown at him. ‘Incest isn’t a part of the body,’ I mutter.

‘No, but when it happens, it makes a dysfunctional human. It’s genetic.’ He connects it to a line to the male’s midriff, and then the female’s for good measure. ‘They’re brother and sister.’

I look at the new kid, and the new kid arches an eyebrow at me. We’re not convinced. Still: Jugs .

Knob.

‘Doesn’t that begin with “n”?’

‘Mine doesn’t.’

Lips.

Mammaries, nipples.

Orifice.

We’re silent-laughing in that way that makes me kind of queasy. The mash-it-all-up childishness you can only get in a hot afternoon of triple science.

Prick.

Queer. A connecting line to the wrist.

Rim.

Slit.

Tit.

Urethra.

Vadge, wang.

Kelvin chews his pen while he mulls the crowded diagram for what to put for ‘X’ .

In the meantime I add yum-yums, zingers , and draw lines to the boobs with a grand flourish.

Suddenly and with detached confidence, the new kid picks up his own pen, plucks off the lid, and writes X chromosome. He draws a line to the midriff. I look up at him, and he looks at me, and I don’t get it. But he smiles, and I smile back, and I look at Kelvin. Kelvin doesn’t get it either.

‘I’ll take that, thank you.’ The paper is whipped from beneath my pen, and Mr Miller stalks off to the front of the lab. He leans on the new kid’s desk: ‘Malachy, I see it was a mistake to put you with these two. I’ll see all three of you afterwards.’

‘I still don’t know how Jef poaches those eggs so well,’ says Sheila. ‘I try to do them at home, and they go all mangled.’

‘Mangled eggs,’ I say with a weak smile. I don’t mean it as a joke. Just reporting what my brain is feeding back to me. But it’s quite funny, I suppose.

‘Ha! Mangled eggs. That could be my signature dish, couldn’t it?’

Ah, I don’t know, I can’t eat. I’m made of stone inside. Honestly, I don’t want to be difficult.

Sheila perches on the edge of the visitors’ chair, and slots her hands between her knees.

‘I think it would be a good idea if you could manage just a little bit of it. You don’t want to make yourself feel worse by not eating. I know the last thing you want to do is eat, I really do. But believe you me, I’ve walked up and down this corridor for eight years, and I tell you, it always helps. It always helps when you eat it. Sets you right for the day.’

I should. I know I should. ‘Do you want me to get him to do you some fried? Honestly, it’ll be no bother. And if he says no, I’ll do them myself.’

Bless her, she does try to make me laugh.

What passes for a laugh these days. Wheeze and cough.

‘Or I could come over there and do choo choo trains with you, if you’d rather try that,’ she says, unclasping her hands and absently checking the positioning of the little upside-down watch clipped to her breast.

I can feel myself being persuaded along, like a boat at rising tide, my hull lifting with the wash, scraping along the wet sand and stopping, scraping along and stopping.

It’s you I need now.

If I imagine it right, I can — I can sense you, enthusiastic you, telling me, Yeah, you can do it.

I can do it.

Of course you can.

Of course I can. If I just — if I just remember you right — I can sense your face — the way it used to move when you’d decided on something.

This is going to happen.

Here it is, I love it. I love this blueprint of you, here in me.

This is going to happen.

It feels to me like you’re here. I can hear the comforting tones of your voice. I can actually hear the sounds. Or the memory of the sounds. They remain in my brain. I can be persuaded.

What is that, when you can hear someone’s voice without really hearing it through your ears? I’m not hearing you, but I’m hereing you. I’m H-E-R-E-ing you. You ignite my grey brain. Light me up. Spark me into being.

If you eat now, you’ll thank yourself later.

I lift my heavy hand and reach out for the fork.

I know, I know. I need to try to eat.

Chew chew. Chew chew and think of you.

Ankle

Does it count in the A to Z game if it’s someone else’s ankle and not mine?

I can’t beat the best ankle story of all time, which absolutely belongs to Laura. She went down in the history of our family with her ankle. I cannot believe how perfect the whole thing was, and I cannot believe how out of order I was.

What would I have been, about twelve? So she’d have been seventeen. I think I said to her — did I? — yes, I told her that her boyfriend at the time — what was his name? I told her her boyfriend at the time had told me that he thought she had a fat arse.

He never did. He never said anything like it. Why did I ever even think to say something so cruel? I didn’t feel the cruelty at the time. It was only a joke.

Her boyfriend must have delivered a persuasive explanation of not knowing anything about it, because she came storming back to me later in the day, absolutely spitting venom, and calling me a little shit.

Mum took my side, again. She told Laura I would never do something like that on purpose, and that it must have been some sort of misunderstanding. And she said — poor Laura — Mum said: ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if anyone did say you had a fat backside, the kind of skimpy shorts you waltz around in.’

Of course Laura rushed upstairs in floods of tears. And the irony, the beautiful irony of it was that Laura must have dumped herself down on her bed with such a leaden sulk that she fractured her ankle between the bedframe and her arse.

There’s not a year goes by that I don’t think what utter humiliation she must have felt, shuffling on her backside down the narrow staircase of that ex-council terrace to tell us, wailing, that she needed to go to A&E.

It’s no wonder she ended up going the way she did.

‘Let me get that.’ Sheila lifts my abandoned plate away. I’ve managed a few bites. ‘All right, you’ve done well there, haven’t you? How are you doing now? Have you been able to lie back at all?’

I shake my head.

‘Starts you coughing, does it? Did you sit up all night too?’

Minimal nod.

Shaking your head means no. Nodding it means yes. Why would that be? I’ll save that for ‘H’ in my A to Z.

‘It’s a problem, that, isn’t it? You try to get a moment’s respite because you’re cold, and then your lungs start filling up because you’re lying down. It hardly seems fair, does it?’

She stands with her weight on one hip, as if she’s never encountered anyone with such a problem before.

‘I’m all right,’ I say.

Sheila rearranges the knife and fork less precariously on the plate and considers me for a while. ‘Shout me, anyway, if you want any blankets or anything. Or a nice cup of something warm. Although we’ve run out of mugs again.’ She lowers her voice — ‘I don’t know why people can’t read the sign and bring their mugs back to the coffee machine. It says it right there. It’s not too much to ask, is it?’