Niven Govinden - Graffiti My Soul

‘Teenage stuff,’ I say. ‘Growing pains. Nothing I want to discuss with my mother.’

Jase on his mother — this came last Christmas when he stayed over one night. A stayover sandwiched between my first two times with Moon, so I was feeling manly and all-knowing. We’d played on X Box until we were virtually blind, but still unable to sleep. It was one of those three a.m. conversations that adults are so fond of having.

‘Her sticking her fingers down her throat is the only happiness she gets. It sounds fucked up, but that’s how it is.’

‘I get it. It’s like her high, right?’

‘You should see the look on her face before she locks herself in the bathroom. And then the look she has when she comes back downstairs. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to contentment. Since Sophie, anyway… Why would I want to take that away from her?’

‘Don’t say any more,’ I go, but not for the reasons he was thinking. More to do with me looking at him in his boxers on my floor and thinking things I shouldn’t.

Everyone pretends they don’t have a gay phase, but they’re all liars. This was mine.

The nights when we meet are when she practises sex with me. All socialising has gone out the window. I’m banned, thanks to the volleyball idiot and his Surrey fatwah.

She’ll turn up at eleven when Mum is doing a night shift and Pearson is safely tucked up in bed, saying things like, ‘I need to try it out with you laying on your back tonight,’ or ‘Let’s see if I can get you off in five minutes without taking my clothes off, and by neither using my hands or mouth.’

She says these things before she’s said hello.

Having Moon this way, in secret, is better than not having her at all, even though I know that the next time I see her, outside her house, or in the school corridor, she’ll be looking at me like I’m some deranged dependent muppet who can’t let go.

If I wasn’t so angry, I’d find the urgency in her voice, the hot hot heat of her breath, fucking sexy.

‘This is sick,’ I tell her, usually when she’s on top of me. ‘You’re just trying this stuff out like it’s a recipe you’re perfecting for a dinner party.’

‘That’s exactly what it is.’

‘Why don’t you just do this with Pearson in the first place? Forget the dry run. It’s not about making mistakes, sex. It’s about the moment, the connection, or something.’

‘Like you’re the big expert all of a sudden. I suppose we have Kelly Button to thank for that. I’m not interested in the unknown, Veerapen. I’d rather get the new stuff or the tricky stuff out the way with you, so that when I’m with him I’m in control.’

‘That doesn’t sound too healthy.’

‘Well, it’s either this arrangement or exercise control over food. Which would you prefer?’

Moon had a problem with food for a couple of years when she was about eleven. It’s kind of common round here. Everyone looking for perfection and not finding it, having to keep it all in their head and out of their bellies. Her parents had to get outside help to sort it. It’s why they always go crazy at the first sign of trouble because they never know if she’ll cave in and pull the inner trigger. Wheel out the crutch when things aren’t going her way. It’s also why they don’t like having the computer on in their house, after she tried to make her own proana webpage, sending a hyperlink to her dad instead of saving it.

It’s like living with a suicide bomber who’ll never take his coat off.

I hate her. Right now, I hate her, but there’s no way I want her going back to how things were before she got help; a skinny unsatisfied undernourished hell.

‘No, it’s fine,’ I say. ‘Keep fucking me ’til you think you’ve got it right.’

We carry on, silently, like Scientologists.

Stoicism is bollocks. I’m no good at letting go. Ask anyone. When Dad left, I’d creep downstairs after Mum had gone to bed, and sleep in the garage, pulling down his old sleeping bag that he’d used about three times on a fishing trip and then forgot about, and the cardboard boxes from the Christmas stuff that no one had got around to chucking away. (Mum was never very good at getting rid of clutter, maybe that’s why he went.)

I slept in the garage every night for two weeks, thinking that he was going to find me, or that I’d wake and find his car towering over me and realise that it was all a bad dream. Kids are so stupid. No wonder people lose patience with them. First sign of trouble, and they start doing rubbish like that. Like that’s going to solve anything, retreating back into your shell, regressing to toddlerhood.

Looking back now, I get it. It wasn’t so much that I wanted it to be a dream, I just wanted to be near him. The garage was his place, it had his stamp all over it. He wasn’t a practical person, the only things he knew about were books, food and screwing opticians, but he liked gear. He liked having the kind of stuff all dads have, even if he wasn’t ready to use it: tools, nails, tins of paint, ladders of varying sizes, lampshades, varnish, off-cuts from the old carpet, stacks of old magazines. Wonder why Mum never noticed.

She didn’t notice a lot of things. Too fucked up at the time to notice that her kid had stopped speaking. She was taking a few pills to get her through the day, pills that made her rabbit on. She talked to me, to herself. All the time, yak yak, trembling tone, everything’s rosy, what are we having for dinner, yak yak. Never a comment to register that no sounds were coming from my mouth, that I’d become Dad’s unwilling counterpart, the silent ghost. It took the same amount of time, a fortnight, before I started talking again, when I realised that Mum needed more help than I did.

Not sleeping in the garage, making myself not do it, was the biggest hurdle. I tried tying myself to the bed, but it didn’t work. I had to rely on willpower. It was like I was being operated on without any anaesthetic. Doctors ripping my guts out and me feeling every second of it. Knowing that I could stop feeling so empty in a minute, if only I’d get my ass downstairs and meld my body into the concrete floor, the site of multiple botched DIY attempts and car repairs. A place where it was just the two of us. But I didn’t. I gritted my teeth until I felt my incisors sinking into my gums, and I stayed in bed. You can’t always be a baby. You have to grow up eventually.

Mum’s moved the computer from the bottom of her wardrobe, where it’s been confiscated, to the dining room, and creates her own tech area. Whilst I’m at school, she clears out some of the crap and pushes the desk right into the far corner, next to the piano that nobody uses. It’s all for Mike, of course. She and him get online and swap instant messages on the nights when they’re not on dates.

I’ve got so much going on right now, I’ve forgotten about being a cyber-geek. It’s the real world I want, not the one that comes in a flat screen, but Mum’s taken the baton and is pegging it for all she’s worth. She’s hooked. You know it’s getting serious when you start eating in front of the thing. Mum says she’s got a strong mind, that it’s hard to pull the wool over her eyes. She isn’t. She’s putty. Three days in and all her snacking time is at the keyboard instead of during EastEnders .

‘What’s a grown man doing cruising the internet all night? Doesn’t this strike you as odd?’

‘He’s not surfing anything. I thought you were supposed to be one who knows everything about the internet.’