Читать книгу A Fucked Up Life in Books - Литагент HarperCollins USD, J. F. C. Harrison, Professor J. D. Scoffbowl - Страница 8

I grew up mostly in the garden. We lived in the countryside, fucking miles away from anything. My best friend was my brother and my second best friend was the cat. On the right hand side we had an elderly neighbour, and on the left a newly engaged couple. My brother and I were the only children and so spent our days playing together.

It wasn’t bad growing up in the garden, because it was a shit-hot garden: a big lawn and loads of trees and flowers and bushes. A vegetable patch at the back, a patio at the front. Plenty of space for running around and hiding from each other and finding new things to discover.

My parents had bought us a Wendy house each. I say Wendy house, but mine was some plastic sticks assembled into a house-like shape with a canvas slung over the top that was decorated like a house, with windows and a roof and all of that kind of shit. My brother’s was a tipi, a bunch of plastic sticks that met at the top with a similar canvas sheet thrown over the top with decoration on.

When you’re playing in the same garden every single day you have to get creative with your games. On this day, I’d decided (I made almost all of the decisions) that my brother and I were going to play ‘decorate the houses and then move in and be neighbours’. First things first: decorate the houses.

I had this wonderful picture in my head of daisies growing around the bottom of my house. As daisies don’t just grow where you want them to, this meant picking daisies and placing them around the edges. I decided that instead of daisies that my brother should decorate around his tipi with tufts of grass, because daisies were a bit girly and also because I didn’t need the little shit taking any of my precious daisies.

Now, being a clever and scheming child, I knew that picking enough daisies would take a fucking age. I also knew that picking grass was a piece of piss. So, I lied to my brother. I told him that he could decorate with daisies and I’d decorate with grass, so he’d better pick all the daisies from the lawn and put them in a basket, and I’d do the same but instead fill a basket with grass. We got to work.

After ten minutes my basket was overflowing with grass, but my brother, having to painstakingly pick each daisy one by one, was not doing so well. His basket didn’t even have the bottom covered in daisies.

I told him to hurry up and that I was moving in now. I went inside and picked up my things. Into my lovely house went Mr Meddle’s Muddles, a swan Keyper (do you remember those toys, Keypers?), a notepad and pen, and the cat. The cat did not stay in the house for long.

Even after I’d moved in my brother was still picking daisies. He was so slow and shit. I went into my house and looked at the pictures in Mr Meddle and waited for him to finish. After what felt like hours, he came to show me how much he’d got.

It wasn’t great, to be honest, but he’d probably been at it two hours and I really needed to decorate my house. So I took the basket from him and told him that there had been a change of plan and that he was decorating with grass and I’d have all these daisies. He was not happy.

He screamed at me that they were his. I told him that no, the grass was his, he didn’t want flowers to decorate a tipi anyway.

Unfortunately, being my only friend, he knew my weakness: the flowers that hung up on the side of the wall of the house to dry. That old woman that lived on the right was teaching me about drying and pressing flowers and all of the other shit that old ladies do because they are bored to tears. He told me he was going to pull the flowers down, and began to stride purposefully towards the house.

Little cunt.

He was angrier and quicker than me, but he was also shorter. He got to the wall of the house, reached up his hand to destroy my hard work and I came up behind him, snatched my flowers away, and smashed his head against the brick wall of the house.

I don’t know why at the age of four my first instinct was to smash his head against the wall rather than just take the flowers and run. I wonder now why my brain had managed to make my first instinct so violent.

He screamed. He screamed so fucking loud that it scared me. I ran to the bottom of the garden and climbed up a tree. I couldn’t see him any more, but I could hear my Mum shriek as she found him. I waited in the tree for what felt like forever until my Dad came and found me and told me to come inside, my brother had gone to accident and emergency with mum and that we were having pizza for dinner.

When I got to the patio before going through the back door I noticed some splashes of blood on the tiles. No one had told me off though. If anyone asked then I’d just say he tripped.

Mum came home with my brother. He was not talking to me. He’d had to have stitches in his forehead. We all ate pizza for dinner and I didn’t get told off. I don’t think at the time that he had told anyone what happened. As I got older I felt guilty that no one knew what I’d done.

Almost a year ago to the day my brother visited my flat in London and stayed over because he was working nearby the next day. He pulled out of his bag a package wrapped in dinosaur wrapping paper and told me that it was my birthday present. I could open it now or later. It didn’t matter.

My birthday wasn’t for another six weeks, so I chose later. That evening I sat in my flat with my brother and we drank some wine and watched some TV, just what we do any time he visits. And when I left for work in the morning I said bye without saying thanks for my birthday present, which sat at the foot of my bookshelves waiting to be opened.

Six weeks after he visited it was my birthday. I sat in my flat with my boyfriend opening my presents. I’d left the one from my brother until last.

I tore off the dinosaur wrapping paper, and the masses of bubble wrap underneath and found this:

It’s a poem that he wrote for me, in a clip frame. A poem about that day when I smashed his head against the wall, and about our childhood together and about some of the shit that has happened between then and now. And it’s fucking wonderful, and as much as I’d like to write it all down for you to show you I won’t, because it’s mine. But I’ll give you the last two lines.

‘… Of each other’s part we played alongside the games those childhood ways the times we’d play, Hide away all night and day from our important lives.’

Now, have a closer look.