If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. Jon McGregor

I can speak clearly or loudly enough when I say them to myself.

      One of the leaflets mentioned telling people, who to tell, how long to wait.

      I thought about why I haven’t told anyone yet, and what this means.

      Perhaps not telling people makes it less real, perhaps it’s not even definite yet, really.

      Perhaps I need time to get used to the idea of it, before people’s good intentions start hammering down upon me like rain.

      Another of the leaflets had a section on physical effects.

      You may find you become tired it said, you may find yourself experiencing dizziness, insomnia, a change in appetite.

      There was a list of these things, half a dozen pages of alphabetical discomforts and pains.

      I spent a long time thinking about them all, wondering which ones I’d get, wondering how well I would cope.

      I thought about backache, nausea, indigestion, faintness and cramps and piles.

      I thought about waking in the night with a screaming pain, clutching at the covers with clawed hands.

      I thought about banging my fists against my head to distract myself from it.

      I thought about religious people who train themselves to walk over burning coals and I wondered if I could control my body in the same way.

      I didn’t think I could, and I got scared and gathered all the leaflets up, stacked them away in a kitchen drawer with the scissors and sellotape and elastic bands.

      By the middle of the afternoon it had rained so much that the drains were overflowing, clogged up with leaves and newspapers.

      The water built up until it was sliding across the road in great sheets, rippled by the wind and parted like a football crowd by passing cars.

      I was shocked by the sheer volume of water that came pouring out of the darkness of the sky.

      Watching the weight of it crashing into the ground made me feel like a very young child, unable to understand what was really happening.

      Like trying to understand radio waves, or imagining computers communicating along glass cables.

      I leant my face against the window as the rain piled upon it, streaming down in waves, blurring my vision, making the shops opposite waver and disappear.

      There was a time when I might have found this exhilarating, even miraculous, but not that day.

      That day it made me nervous and tense, unable to concentrate on anything while the noise of it clattered against the windows and the roof.

      I kept opening the door to look for clear skies, and slamming it shut again.

      And then around teatime, from nowhere, I smashed all the dirty plates and mugs into the washing-up bowl.

      Something swept through me, swept out of and over me, something unstoppable, like water surging from a broken tap and flooding across the kitchen floor.

      I don’t quite understand why I felt that way, why I reacted like that.

      I wanted to be saying it’s just something that happens.

      But I was there, that day, slamming the kitchen door over and over again until the handle came loose.

      Smacking my hand against the worktop, kicking the cupboard doors, throwing the plates into the sink.

      Going fuckfuckfuck through my clenched teeth.

      I wanted someone to see me, I wanted someone to come rushing in, to take hold of me and say hey hey what are you doing, hey come on, what’s wrong.

      But there was no one there, and no one came.

      I stopped eventually, when I noticed my hands were bleeding.

      I must have cut them with the smashed pieces of crockery, picking pieces out of the sink to throw them back in.

      I stood still for a few moments, breathing heavily, watching blood drip from my hands onto the broken plates, wanting to sit down but unable to move.

      I watched the blood pooling across the palms of my hands.

      I looked at the broken plates and mugs.

      I wondered where such a fierce rage had come from, and I was scared by the scale of it, by the lack of control I’d had for those few minutes.

      I don’t remember ever feeling like that before, and it worried me to think that I might be changing in ways I could do nothing about.

      I washed my hands clean, letting the blood and water pour over the broken crockery, counting about a dozen cuts, each as thin as paper.

      The water began to sting, so I wrapped my hands in kitchen towel and held them up into the air, leaning back against the worktop, watching the blood soak through.

      Later, when the bleeding had stopped and I’d covered my hands in a patchwork of plasters I found in the bathroom, I tried to get myself some food.

      I thought it would make me feel better.

      I’d been planning to go out and buy something, but I couldn’t face it so I stayed in and ate what I could find.

      Peanut butter, sardines, cream crackers, marshmallows.

      It gave me a belly-ache, which seemed an appropriate end to a bad day, a wasted and damaged day.

      And it kept on raining, rattling endlessly into the ground, piling up in the streets, wedged into the gutters and the drains.

      It made the street look squalid and greasy.

      People were scurrying along the pavement, their coats tugged tightly around themselves, their heads bowed as though they had something to hide.

      And I was locking the door and closing the curtains, and I did have something to hide.

Chapter 8

      At number eighteen, the boy with the sore eyes is crouching on the floor among his arrangement of things, he is still thinking about the girl at number twenty-two, the girl with the short blonde hair and the little square glasses, the girl with the nicest sweetest smile he thinks.

      He’s thinking about the time he met her properly, besides seeing her in the street and sometimes saying hello, the time at a party round the corner when she’d stood and talked with him for a long part of the evening, and hadn’t seemed to notice his blinking and hand scratching, perhaps because it was dark or perhaps because she didn’t make him feel nervous by acting as though he was, the way most people do. They talked a lot, and laughed, and poured each other drinks and he’d felt comfortable and good and real with her, and she’d touched his arm once or twice, and looked him in the eye without saying anything, and although they hadn’t kissed he thinks probably they could have done. It was there is what he thinks. And she’d asked him to walk her home because she felt tired and a bit uncomfortable and so he did and she held onto his arm for support, held on quite tightly because she said the pavement was moving like on a boat and she said sorry I’m not normally this drunk honestly and laughed. She laughed a lot, that night. And just before she went inside he said, very quickly, do you want to go out sometime, for a drink or something or? And she’d grinned a big squint-eyed grin and said yes yes, Wednesday night, I’ll come round Wednesday night and we’ll go somewhere and then she’d gone in and closed the door and he’d gone home and barely slept until dawn.

      Next door, in the back bedroom of number sixteen, a young girl is playing by herself. She has a picture book with removable sticky figures, she is removing them and replacing them, standing them on their heads on the tops of houses, making them swim in duckponds, dropping them from a height and seeing where they land. She is waiting for her father to wake, so she can have breakfast and get dressed.

      He rubs at his bloodshot eyes,