Kit de Waal - My Name Is Leon

He has to say thank you to Timmy and let him play with his AT-AT, so by the time he gets to the allotment it isn’t exactly getting dark but it’s the time of the afternoon when everything looks exciting. He has his tools still in his bag and he pedals as fast as he can to the allotment and then wheels his bike to his plot.

Someone has taken all the weeds out of his raised bed. Someone has made all the paths nice and tidy and someone has put some wigwam canes up at the far end.

Leon puts his hand deep into the crumbly soil. It’s cool and black underneath and he can squeeze it into a ball. The whole raised bed is just waiting for him to plant something. He can see specks of insects burrowing away from the light and a tiny black spider marching across a stone. Underneath him is a whole world of insect lives that nobody ever thinks about. Leon lies down on the earth and feels them marching and burrowing and finding their dinner and making their nests and bumping into each other. Hello, spider. Hello, beetle. He looks up at the pale blue suede sky and closes his eyes. He feels the roots of all the trees and the flowers mingling in with one another, making a giant web that sucks all the goodness and the rain up into their leaves so they can make apples and roses and all the strange vegetables that grow in the Asian shops. Leon’s going to have the best plot on the whole allotment. He’s going to grow the plant with the yellow flowers and baby peas and mangetout and Scarlet Emperor. And he’s going to need more seeds.

Leon sits up and brushes the dirt out of his hair. Tufty isn’t around and his shed is always locked so Leon can’t go and have a look at his seeds, but Mr. Devlin’s halfway house has the door wide open so Leon walks over.

Mr. Devlin is slumped in his armchair. He has a small blue glass in his hand and his eyes are closed. Leon tiptoes inside. The room smells of beer and old clothes. Every time Mr. Devlin breathes out, a small bubble of spit forms at the corner of his mouth. It goes big and small, big and small, as Mr. Devlin snores and blows, snores and blows. Sometimes, Mr. Devlin has the same old-lady smell as Sylvia, and Leon notices that he wears the same clothes every day, whether it’s sunny or it’s raining. His hair is gray and long, just like his face, and sometimes Leon thinks that Mr. Devlin might actually be a tramp.

Leon walks quietly around the shed looking at more and more of Mr. Devlin’s special things. He sees there are bottles of drink in the corner by the door, whiskey and stuff that his dad used to like. Leon carefully picks one of the bottles up and unscrews the cap. The smell reminds him of his dad at Christmas and his black granny that he only met once, just before she died.

His granny’s house was full of furniture and ornaments. All along the mantelpiece there were little china dogs and birds and a pink lady with an umbrella. There were pictures on every wall and a big map of Antigua in a silver frame. Every room smelled of spicy meat and it was so hot inside that Leon felt sick. The old lady sat in an armchair with a blanket over her knees. Leon’s dad told him that she had had her feet cut off because she had diabetes and wouldn’t stop eating cakes and Leon kept thinking of the stumps under the blanket and what they looked like.

“This him, Byron?” said the old lady, looking at Leon.

“Yes, Mommy,” said Leon’s dad and pushed Leon forward.

The old lady held Leon’s wrist and brought him up close to her face. She had a dark, sunken face, sunken eyes with a dot of pure black at the center that darted from side to side. Tight plaits of cane row stuck out of her scalp like sharp white bones and Leon kept thinking where his feet were going in case he trod on her stumps.

“He look like your father,” she said, turning Leon from side to side.

She smiled at him.

“Leon? That’s your name?”

“Yes.”

“You look like your grandfather, Leon. He had your pretty face, same nose. You look like your father too. He just tell me now about you. Just last week. He knows I’m dying. I know I’m dying. So your father just tell me now he has a son. All these years I never knew about you. We could have been friends.”

She spoke slowly, pushing her face up close; her moist breath smelled of medicine. She asked him lots of questions about school and his favorite programs and what he wanted to be when he grew up, so Leon said a fireman because he couldn’t think of anything else. But she wasn’t really listening and she kept closing her eyes.

Then she started coughing and Leon’s dad had to get her some water. As soon as he left the room, Leon’s granny pulled him even closer.

“You be a good boy for your mother. I never met your mother, so I don’t know her, but I know what a good son is. I know how a good son can make your life wonderful and a bad son can bring you heartache. So you be good for your mother. You look after her. Take care of her. I wish I didn’t have to leave you, Leon. I hope you remember me.”

She let his wrist go and put a five-pound note in his hand. Leon walked backward away from her. His granny looked at his dad and shook her head.

“Oh, Byron.”

“Sorry, Mommy,” he said. Leon had never heard that voice before. He’d never heard his dad sound like a little boy.

Leon had to have some rice and meat and then his dad took him home. Leon never saw his granny again. One day afterward, his dad told him that she’d died. He was wearing a black suit with a white shirt and a black tie. He was drunk. He kept saying the same thing over and over.

“I got no one now. I got no one now. I got no one now.”

He pulled Leon toward him and started crying until Carol told him to stop.

“You’re scaring him, Byron,” she said. “Go and sleep it off.”

Leon knows that Mr. Devlin is sleeping it off as well. He can smell it in the air.

Leon listens carefully but there’s no one nearby. Mr. and Mrs. Atwal aren’t talking in their own language and the lady with the long skirt is nowhere around. Just Mr. Devlin breathing. Leon tiptoes up to where Mr. Devlin keeps all his knives. He can’t take the big knife, because Mr. Devlin uses it every day and he would notice if it was missing, but he could hold it and touch the very edge of the blade and see how it felt to swish it in the air. He has almost got his fingers on the handle when he feels Mr. Devlin’s hand on his neck.

“Leave it.”

Leon’s hand hovers in midair. He doesn’t move.

Mr. Devlin drags him back away from the bench and pushes him down on to the floor.

“Sit.”

Leon sits cross-legged like he does at school assembly. Mr. Devlin sits up straight in his chair. He pours some drink into his blue glass and drinks it down in one gulp. His eyes are small and red.

“Thought we were friends,” he says.

“I just wanted to feel it.”

“Sit still.”

Mr. Devlin puts his glass down and feels across the bench for a small knife. His hand moves like a spider and all the time he carries on looking at Leon. His hand finds the small knife and a block of wood. He picks them both up and starts peeling the block of wood with the little knife, looking from the wood to Leon and from Leon back to the wood.

“I used to be good at this,” he says. “You have yourself a wide forehead. I’ve been looking at you. I started this from memory, some weeks ago.”

Little pieces of wood are flying onto Mr. Devlin’s lap and on to the brown rug. Leon picks one up.

“Pine, I’m afraid. Just pine.” Mr. Devlin is squinting. “It’s too soft but then I’m old now. My whittling hands aren’t what they were. Can’t do what they once did.”

He holds the piece of wood away from him and looks at Leon again.