Читать книгу Boy Underwater - Adam Baron, Adam Baron - Страница 11

Lance once asked me a question. We were in the hall doing PE, something I’d been looking forward to all week, but which turned out to be terrible. We were starting Year 3 then with Mr Ashe, who I happen to know is a boss footballer. He coaches the Year 6 team and we sometimes interrupt our Year 4 Saturday-morning training to watch their matches. Before every game he does kick-ups and catches the ball on the back of his neck while the Year 6 kids all groan. So I thought PE would be a chance to improve and perhaps even overtake Danny Jones. But it wasn’t. That term, Mr Ashe explained, as we lined up near the wall bars, we would not be doing football. Or rugby. Not even netball, which would at least have involved a ball. Instead we were going to be doing gymnastics, and if you don’t think that’s terrible it means you are probably a girl (though if you’re not, BIG SORRY AND RESPECT). The girls all squealed with delight, and soon I could see why.

Now I have to admit something. I like girls as much as the next boy, and maybe a little bit more, but I’d always thought that when it came to sport girls just weren’t quite as good. That day I found out that I was wrong. Hardly had the words left Mr Ashe’s lips than I was staring in mouth-wide amazement as girl after girl did the most incredible things. Laura Pinter did a cartwheel that was just like a real wheel going round, especially when she kept going and did three in a row. Rachel Jones then did another one but sort of twisted round halfway in the air so that she ended up on two feet, facing the way she’d come, her arms pointing up to the ceiling.

Wow! It looked so easy but when I tried I just got tangled up. The other boys were the same, looking like rejects from a toy factory, the ones that didn’t work right. The girls were smug too, standing up straighter than they normally did and raising their chins as they walked back to start again. In contrast, our own rubbish-ness was sort of humiliating, though there was one moment I did enjoy. Vi Delap did this thing that I simply COULD NOT believe. She stood straight and bent over backwards, reaching up and behind her. In less than a second she’d put her hands on the floor into a bridge, and then flicked her feet over so that she was standing up again. Billy Lee saw her and tried himself. The very loud echo, when his head connected with the wooden floor, is still one of my Top Five Sounds Of All Time.

‘Cymbeline,’ Lance said, sitting down beside me and rubbing his elbow. And his knee. And then his bum. He looked miserable, though I didn’t think it came from the gymnastics. ‘Where did you get your name from?’

‘My name?’

‘Yeah. I mean, I always thought it was normal because it’s what you’re called, isn’t it?’

‘So why don’t you think it’s normal now?’

‘Well, my dad –’

‘Wait, Lance. Is this your dad-dad you mean, or your new-dad?’

‘My new-dad. I told him you were my best friend and he thought you were a girl. When I told him you weren’t, he laughed a bit and told me he’d never heard that name before and it must be because I went to ‘that kind of school’. He didn’t tell me what ‘that kind of school’ was because my mum came in. So where did you get it from?’

‘I could ask you the same thing.’

‘I suppose,’ Lance said. ‘Though my name’s not as weird as yours. I’ve never met another Cymbeline but there’s another Lance in this school. And another kid called Lance in me and my dad’s cycling club.’

‘Your dad-dad?’

‘My dad-dad.’

‘But still, if you ask me, I can ask you. Why are you called Lance?’

‘I’m not allowed to tell you.’

‘What?’

‘It’s my dad,’ Lance explained.

‘Your dad-dad?’

‘Yeah, my dad-dad. He says I shouldn’t say. Or, if I do say, I have to say that it’s just a random name. I’m definitely not named after Lance Armstrong.’

‘Lance who?’

‘Never mind. But why are you called Cymbeline?’

‘Because of my dad,’ I said.

‘Your dead-dad?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Was he called Cymbeline?’

‘No, his own parents did not inflict that on him. His name was David.’

‘So …?’

‘Mum says he was an actor and that when she met him he was in this play by Shakespeare. Cymbeline. So they called me it.’

‘What’s the play about?’

‘No idea.’

‘You never asked your mum?’

‘Yes, and she told me. She even took me to see it.’

‘Well then.’

‘Have you seen Shakespeare? I’ve still no idea. It was impossible to understand and anyway we didn’t stay to the end.’

‘Why not?’

‘There’s this line in it. “Fear no more the heat of the sun.” It comes when there are people on the ground who are dead but you can still see them breathing. When this king dude said the line my mum just grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the theatre and took me home.’

I didn’t tell Lance that, once again, she’d cried when she’d done that. She cried all the way back. She put me to bed and the tears rolled into my hair as she clung on to me.

‘I hate my name,’ Lance said, as Marcus Breen did a forward roll into the piano.

‘Why?’

‘It’s Lance … who I can’t mention. He was a cycling hero but now he’s this super giant cheater, and I’ve got to wear his name forever.’

‘I know how you feel,’ I’d said, though now, waking up, it wasn’t my name that bothered me. That was a burden I’d always had to carry. Now there was something bigger, heavier, and I couldn’t get away from it. My dad. You’d think being dead would be the best way to leave someone alone, wouldn’t you? But my dad being dead was something even more real than if he’d been alive. It never used to feel like that, but now it did. And my mum felt it too. I could see that. My dad being dead was so big for her, a huge thing. It was so heavy that she couldn’t put it down. And so heavy that she didn’t have the strength to carry me any more, as well as it.

Uncle Bill was sitting on my bed when I woke up the next morning. He was smiling, but only with his mouth. The rest of him wasn’t smiling at all.