Читать книгу All the Other Days - Jack Hartley - Страница 5

Judd

Day 6295

I sit in my bedroom, unable to block out the sounds. The yelling, the screaming at each other. Smash! I hear plates being broken downstairs. For just one day, I wish I heard them laughing, or singing, or anything. I wait until I hear the front door slam before I go downstairs to see how my mother is. I walk down the old stairs into the freezing cold lounge. Through the breakfast bar, I see my mother sitting on the faded vinyl, her head resting in her hands, her body hunched over her legs and blood trickling down the side of her fingers. She hears me walking into the room and looks up at me, brushes the tears from her cheeks and smiles.

‘Mom, are you okay?’

‘We just had a little disagreement. You know how he is,’ she replies, trying to hide her sadness as usual.

I grab the paper towels off the bench and dip them into some water from the tap. I wipe away the blood from her face and hold her.

‘You know this isn’t okay, right?’ I say, trying to sound like the adult around here.

‘Trust me, if I had the money, me and you would be far, far away from here,’ she says, looking deeply into my eyes.

We both sit there on the kitchen floor. I try to make her laugh by putting on my best Northern English accent.

‘It’s a bloody mess in here, like. Let’s clean ‘er up.’

She cracks half a smile and then laughs at my poor attempt to cheer her up. We start cleaning the dishes, and Mom turns on the stereo. Together, we sing along to one of my Mom’s favourites, Here Comes the Sun.

My mother sings into the soup ladle; I do the back-up singing into a cup.

‘Here comes the sun, and I say it’s all right.’

We break down into the drum beat and slap the kitchen counter. She’s smiling, and that’s all I want for her. I don’t know how she does it, day in, day out. My Dad can be a dick, I mean a real dick, to her. We’ve never really got along that well, and I guess that’s because I’ve always sided with my mom. But he’s done little for me to take his side throughout the years. She’s always the one left to pick up the broken pieces and clean up the mess after he has one of his fits and leaves her like this.

We finish cleaning up the dishes and gathering the broken plate pieces on the ground, and I go to bed.

‘Night, Mom. I love you,’ I say as I look at the broken expression on her face.

‘Sleep well, Judd. I love you more than you’ll ever know.’ She kisses me on the cheek, and I walk off up the stairs.

I sit on my bed, leaning against the wall, with my sketch pad and a pencil. I start to draw the outline of a hand on a face and blood trickling down the finger tips.

I draw a lot. I try to document what happens in my life. I put the happy drawings on one side of my room and the rest on the other side. So far, there’s a lot more sad ones, but it helps me to organise the moments so I can remember them when I need to. When I draw, everything is blocked out and I relive those moments. I don’t mind reliving the sad ones, because I know you can’t escape them in life.

On nights like these, I often have these weird dreams that stick in my head. I’ve always had weird dreams and I get fixated on them. How my brain creates another world of people I have never seen before, it’s like I have another life in there. I dream of all the things I wish happened, the people I want in my life, and I wake up smiling after them. For a moment, in my sleepy dazed state, I think it’s real. But then, as the sleep is brushed away from my eyes, the coldness of my room swoops over my face, and I’m brought back to the reality of what my life is really like. When they have a big fight like this, my dreams are really horrible and sad, and I wake up in a pool of sweat like my brain is tormenting me even when I’m sleeping.

I wake up to my alarm blaring in my ear and my face against my sketch pad. I must have fallen asleep drawing last night. I get up out of bed and walk to the bathroom. The pencil lead has stuck to the side of my face, and there’s a big black smudge on the side of my cheek. I scrub the lead off and get ready for school.

I run down the stairs trying to make up the lost time and to have breakfast before school. My Mom is sitting at the breakfast bar drinking a cup of coffee and having some toast. It’s always us two in the morning because my father has already left for work before we are up. I kind of like that though and I think Mom does too.

‘Good morning, sweetie. How’d you sleep?’ she asks. She’s called me this for as long as I can remember.

‘I slept well, thanks. No weird dreams last night.’

As I walk up to the breakfast bar to sit down, I see the other side of my Mom’s face. I can see the bruises starting to form on her cheekbone, the yellow tinge in her skin and her puffy eyes from crying. I put my arm around her and she nestles her head into my shoulder. This is the other side of my father I hate. How he does this and then is never here to see her after what he has done. She tries to cover up the bruises with makeup, and she does a pretty good job. No one knows this happens. Well at least, I hope they don’t.

I finish my breakfast and put my lunch into my schoolbag. My Mom hugs me goodbye and I walk to the bus stop. The sun is starting to rise from behind the clouds and it leaves an orange tinge throughout the sky. I see the bus up the road, and the distance between me and the stop is further away than the bus, so I run. I run along the sidewalk with my arm waving the bus down, and the bus driver pulls up beside me and opens the doors.

‘Good morning, Mr Peele,’ I say, trying to catch my breath.

‘Good morning, Mr Judd,’ he replies, giggling at me for running.

I walk down the bus and find my usual seat next to the window halfway down on the left-hand side. The bus is like a zoo before school. Everyone is so excited, screaming, yelling and shouting. I don’t know why they’re all so excited to go to school. I’d rather be anywhere else. I get my phone and earphones out and turn my music onto shuffle. I sit with my head leaned against the window looking at the road. All the cars in their neat rows driving to work. All the people walking along the sidewalk. The shop doors opening for the day. With my head against the window looking out at the streets listening to my music, I feel like I’m in a film. I’m that kid who’s not quite like everyone else. I don’t think I’m special or anything. I just don’t quite fit in with everyone here. Everyone who lives here seems to stay here for life, do the same jobs as their parents and relive their lives for them. But I don’t want that. I don’t want to be my father and I don’t want to live here any longer than I have to. Until I finish school and can leave, I’m stuck here, running around in circles never feeling like I truly belong in this place. The bus pulls up outside school and I get off.

I’m in my senior year of high school, so I blend into the crowd more than I did when I first started here. I used to be short but then I grew and disappeared into the rest of everyone here. As I walk through the hallway, I become a part of the chaotic sea of bodies rushing to class. I make it through the first three periods of the day until lunch when I can finally breathe. I walk to the field to sit down out in the open, away from everyone playing around, where there’s less noise. Some days, I’m here on my own and sometimes Arthur sits with me. We’ve been friends our whole lives. Some might say this is the most unlikely friendship because he’s African American, wears the oddest clothes and is quite extroverted while I’m this plain white kid who seems to blend into the background most of the time. But that doesn’t seem to matter, and he knows me well, so I don’t have to pretend to be someone I’m not. He hasn’t turned up to the field today to sit with me, and I’m guessing that’s because he’s got another meeting with the student body or something. He likes to get involved with the school, and I think it’s pretty cool. If I wasn’t so quiet, I’d like to do that too, but I am.

I get my sketch pad out and finish off the drawing from the night before. The sweat from my face has smeared the pencil lead, but I like the distorted look it gives the drawing. It looks as though there really have been tears falling from the eyes. The perfect blend between reality and fiction.

I get off the school bus and start walking home. The sky behind me is getting darker as the clouds take over the sun, but I still feel the warmth against my face from the fading daylight. I walk through the front door and I can smell the dinner my mother is cooking. She’s a really good cook. I smell the chicken cooking in cream, mustard, onion and garlic, so I know she’s making her famous Dixie Chicken.

‘Hey, sweetie. How was your day?’ she asks.

‘It was good, Mom. School wasn’t too bad, which is a bonus too. How was yours?’

‘Oh, things aren’t too great at the moment. Mr Emerson had to let another person off. Everyone seems to only buy crap off the internet from China so it’s starting to affect us now too.’

‘Does that mean anything for you?’ I ask.

‘I’m not sure sweetie, it’s just a waiting game. The workers seem to be dropping like flies right now. All I can do is turn up and hope for the best.’

I give her a big hug to try and distract her from her day. It can’t be nice going to work like that, and I feel selfish because she goes there to make my life better so they can afford to put a roof over my head.

Once the grip of our hug loosens and she changes the subject I run upstairs to get changed. I hear her yelling to not be long because dinner will be ready soon.

I come downstairs to the table set out with our dinners.

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘It’s a Tuesday. He’ll be at the bar. Anyway, what are you doing at school at the moment, darling?”

‘Well, we’ve started to read Romeo and Juliet in English now.’

‘Oh, your father used to read all kinds of stories like that. I remember when I was in high school with him, he’d read that to me because our parents didn’t like us being together, so he thought he and I were Romeo and Juliet.’ She smiles.

‘Dad? He liked that sort of stuff?’

‘Oh yeah. He was a big romantic back then. Used to ask me out every day for over a year until I finally said yes!’ She laughs.

‘Why’d it take you so long to say yes?’

‘See, the thing with your father, he was the biggest charmer, could have any girl he wanted. But he only wanted me, and I liked that. But I knew as soon I said yes to him, I’d never be able to walk away from him, and that scared me a little.’

I never really thought of Dad being like that, mainly because I’ve never seen that side of him, the loving type. He’s always been this tough guy to me, the one who would yell at me when I did something wrong or just say good job when I actually did something he should be proud of. I feel kind of cheated that he isn’t like that anymore and I know Mom does too.

My Dad staggers in through the front door slightly drunk in his work gear, his face covered in grease. I don’t know exactly what he does. I just know that he works in a factory with machinery and he always comes home late stinking of cigarettes and has something to complain about.

‘Why have you started without me? I said I’d be home for dinner!’ Dad yells, and the vein on his forehead bulges with anger.

‘Honey, I knew you’d be at the bar, so I’ve put yours in the oven.’

He walks over to the oven and I can hear him calling Mom a useless bitch under his breath. I don’t get what his problem is, how quickly his fuse can blow over nothing. This is how their fights start: something little and stupid, where Mom has done nothing. Then his temper takes over him like a raging bull, and that’s when I leave to go my room. He grabs his dinner and sits at the sofa watching TV. I want to leave the awkwardness, but I stay for Mom’s sake and finish my dinner with her. As soon as I can get away, I go upstairs to escape my father.

Most nights, I just sit in my room by myself. I escape from it all into music, films and my drawing. The good thing about my father is his ridiculously large music collection. Between him and Mom, they have everything. I guess that’s another reason I’m stuck in the past because all I ever listened to growing up was their music. I always have to have some sort of sound playing, or my finger on a pencil, because the silence is the most deafening sound of all. I go through my usual evening routine of picking out an album and sitting on my bed and drawing. Tonight, I’ve decided to go for Bob Dylan’s Masterpieces album and put disc 1 into the CD player. I change the track to Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door. I can’t stand what Guns N’ Roses did to that song, and especially how people think it’s theirs. I lie on my back facing the paint-chipped ceiling and stare at the wall paper peeling off the walls. I start to think, and then my mind becomes a river as ideas flow through my head. I can never just relax. There’s always something ticking away in my head. I don’t have ADHD, but I can imagine what it’s like for those who do — the constant inability to be still. While my body doesn’t move, my thoughts do. I hear my parents yelling downstairs through the thin walls. I wish they were sound-proof, then maybe my mind would be quiet. I hear my father call her a bitch again. I hate this. If I could just run down there and smack him dead in the face. Watch him fall to the ground. And then we could escape. I’d let out all the anger inside of me and make him feel that through my fist. He’d feel the pain that I feel for once, being at the mercy of my anger instead of me being at his. But I can’t. I’m scared of him, and I know my mother couldn’t survive without his financial support.

Money. That’s another thing that plays in my head. I hate how it controls everything. It starts most of their fights. I can only imagine how different things would be for Mom and I if we didn’t have to worry about it. She would actually smile for once, not feel like a prisoner in her own home. We could walk about the house not worrying about how his day at work went. Things would be just different.

I can still hear them yelling downstairs and then I hear smashing. I don’t know if he’s hit her, or a wall, or what, but I start crying. I hate it. I can’t control the tears that fall down my cheeks. I don’t wipe them away because I know the dry spaces will soon be covered again. So I just sit and wait and hope he goes to bed soon so the river stops flowing. I put on my favourite film, The Wild One. I imagine I’m Johnny Strabler and the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club are my gang. I’d drive far away like he does. Never knowing where he is going. Just always away somewhere different. I lie in bed thinking about how my life would be if I was Marlon Brando. When I look at the clock, it’s 2:34 am. I turn off my lamp and try to fall asleep.