Up on Cloud Nine Read online

  The sun came out. That always sends Stol quiet—and me too, since, back in nursery, he first taught me to water my eyes and flicker my lids till it's like being underwater in some delicious sunlit pool. Even the wriggly things that roll down your eyeball can look like idly floating weeds. You're in another world. And even if you blink the shimmering ripples away, you could still be on some delicious beach in Malaga, or pegged out under desert sun, if you weren't on a muddy sports field, half a mile from the gasworks.

  The world came back. Up shot a nearby window. Out came Mr. Bryson's voice. “I don't remember hearing any of the games staff authorize a little break for the congenitally idle behind that roller. On your feet, Stuart Oliver! Back on the run! And take that Man Friday of yours along with you, would you?”

  man friday

  This whole Man Friday thing began a couple of years ago, sometime in the summer, when I was put in charge of getting Stolly to exams.

  “Not just on time,” Mrs. Hetherington ordered me sternly. “Clutching the right gear. Spectacles. Ruler. Calculator. Wristwatch. Everything he needs.”

  I have my dignity. I did put up a fight. And out it poured quite well, since it's the speech that Mum's delivered to me once a week since I was four.

  “Stol has to take responsibility for himself. After all, he's got to learn sometime. He won't always have his best mate trailing after him, to remind him what day it is and keep him out of trouble.”

  Mrs. Hetherington said witheringly, “Ian, you can take all the fancy psychological lines you like, but I, who toil at the rock face of education, simply want him to pass his exams. So you do it.”

  And no big deal, since for some years now I've been ambling round behind Stol, pointing out books that need taking to lessons, or homework that ought to be finished by Friday. I tap my watch when it's time for his violin lesson. I make sure we drift round the back in time for the swimming bus. The only thing that's an effort is remembering, when I get home, that I have to knock off a bit or I get the lecture from Mum:

  “Ian, there are a host of theories about raising balanced children. But in none of them does one boy trailing round picking up after another rate as a fine plan.”

  “If you're so good at bringing up kids,” I challenged her once when she was ticking me off for putting Stol's socks in the laundry, “how come you never had any more?”

  “Next door's cat dug up the gooseberry bush.”

  “Seriously.”

  She stopped sorting the newspapers into piles for the garbage. “Well, for one thing, we never asked.”

  “Why not?”

  “If I'm honest, for a while I don't think it occurred to us. We were so thrilled to have you. I suppose we assumed we would think about it later.” After a moment's pause, she added, rather as if it settled matters, “Then, of course, Stol came along.”

  “What's Stol got to do with it?”

  She stared as if I'd asked what water had to do with drowning. “You do have to admit he's a bit of a handful.”

  I swear she said it as if Stol were ours. Nothing to do with either Esme or Franklin.

  “But suppose that the Olivers had moved house? Upped sticks and moved away? You'd have been left with just me and a few fond memories of a neighborhood nutter.”

  “Don't call Stol a nutter, please.”

  I wasn't to be deflected. “Answer the question. You mean, I really didn't get another brother or sister just because of Stol?”

  “See?” she crowed. “You said ‘another'! That proves you think the same way we do.”

  Off she went, grinning, as if she'd proved her argument. But I didn't let up. Before the two of them could cobble their stories together, I followed the faraway sound of banging from the attic. Scrambling up the ladder to the trapdoor, I poked my head into the filthy dark space where Dad was lying on his back under the water tank, attacking something rusty.

  “Explain to me! Here you are: two parents. There they are: whole orphanages bulging at the seams with sobbing kids longing for Happy Homes. So how come you only have me?”

  He starts with the jokes, of course. “One of you is enough for anyone, Ian.”

  “No, no. I'm serious. If I'm supposed to be such a success, how come you didn't adopt again?”

  He rolled over and put down his spanner. “You're a success. Never doubt that.”

  “Well, then? Why aren't there more of me?”

  He made a face. “Don't think no one's ever suggested it.”

  “So?” I persisted. “Why not?”

  He raised a hand against a fierce slant of light splitting the dark from a slate crack. “Your mum has always said she thinks you and Stol between you are more than enough.”

  “That's what she just told me.”

  “She would.” He gave me a long look. “But, personally, I've always suspected there's a bit more to it than that. I think—”

  “What?”

  “I think your mum just feels she doesn't want to push her luck.”

  “Push her luck?”

  He reached out a hand that was covered in rust. Taking me by the chin, he eyeballed me as if I were some hard-faced Alsatian he'd decided to stare down. “Listen,” he said. “How often are you going to find a diamond in a dustbin?”

  I shook his gritty fingers off. “I don't know, do I?”

  “I wanted more,” he confessed. “I wanted lots of you. But it was up to Sue. And though your mother claims to be so sensible and clearheaded and all that, I think about this she got really superstitious. I think, whenever we got close to it, she thought, How could we ever be so lucky again? and couldn't bring herself to risk it.”

  I've thought about it since. A lot. And what I've thought is, If I were Mum—and I knew Stol—I wouldn't risk it either.

  So that's that.

  cobwebs

  At half past three, Dad showed up. “Got off work early.” He took a look at Stol. “My lord, the boy's made a proper mess of himself this time. Which window did you say?”

  “The old nanny's sitting room.”

  “Is that the sticky-out bay above the back porch?”

  I put him right. “No. It's the one above Esme and Franklin's bathroom.”

  Dad whistled. “Straight drop, then?”

  “Except for the jasmine bush.”

  “He'll be grateful for those scratches when he comes to his senses.”

  “You know Stol. When he comes round, he's always in a foul mood. He won't be grateful for anything. And he hates being in plaster.”

  “Doubt if he'll notice the plaster for a while, what with the pain.” Dad passed me the plastic bag he was carrying. “Here, take this. Off you go.”

  I looked inside. He'd brought a towel, my swimsuit, and a couple of chocolate bars.

  “Swimming?”

  “Do you good. Clear away the cobwebs. To be cooped up all day in a hospital isn't healthy.”

  While I was gathering up my piles of writing, he started on Mum. “And you can push off home.”

  “No, no. I'm staying here.”

  “Oh, no, you're not. You're going home. Just keep by the phone, and if he needs you, you can be back in no time.”

  “But—”

  “I mean it, Sue. Go take a break.”

  Mum lifted her bag off Stol's cabinet. “You will stay close? You won't just wander off? You will make sure you're here if he wakes up?”

  Dad glanced round, clearly on the hunt for something to do. Hastily I snatched up my Stol biography and stuffed it away with the swim things. That left the package from Jeanine. Dad pounced on that. “What's this, then?”

  “Homework slips from school.”

  Dad slid them out and read a few of them. “Describe the equipment round Stol's bed, with diagrams? Study his drug packet labels? What sort of homework is that?”

  “They're just being nosy,” I told him.

  He shook his head in amazement. “They don't hang about.”

  “I reckon they thought them up in the
staff room at break time. And they're so used to sending messages to our house for Stolly, I expect they just guessed that the grapevine works both ways.”

  Dad was still shuffling through the bits of paper I'd been sent. “Make sketches of what's on all four sides? Have you done it?”

  “No. Not yet,” I admitted.

  He stuffed the homework slips back in the envelope and pointed at the magazines Mum had left lying about. “Have these got problem pages? If they have, I'll be all right for a while.”

  He ushered her toward the doors. “Go. Go. Drop Ian at the pool. And if you have to start weeping, then for heaven's sake stop driving.”

  all-encompassing dark moments

  I took the fast lane. Most of the time I swim in the unroped area, even if I'm alone. But this time I felt like grinding out the lengths. Swimming for swimming's sake. The counting started, the way it always picks up in your brain. First the mind-numbing little calculations: If I'm doing sixty lengths, then when I pull level with that set of steps, I'll have done two sevenths. Then, as you settle, the more fanciful thinking: If Stol's in plaster for—say—eight weeks, and one of those is half term, he'll miss seven school sessions and eight Sunday-morning swims. So that'll be fifteen whole hours of his life not spent in water.

  And suddenly I was thinking about myself. If I'd swum once a week since I was four, then, even allowing for sickness and holidays, I must have come here getting on for five hundred times, which is three weeks in water I'd have missed if I'd never been born—or not been found, which Mum claims is impossible, since, contrary to what Stol claims, I wasn't in the dustbin, but propped safely on top of it. She says it's obvious that I'd been put there precisely so I'd be rescued. (It was dustbin-day morning.) And far from being some poor, neglected reject, I'd clearly just been fed a nice warm bottle of milk (I definitely wasn't hungry), was chubby as a bun, and the blanket I was wrapped in had been pinned to my jacket so however much I wriggled, I couldn't fall out of it.

  “So, if she cared so much … ?”

  “Ian, we'll never know.”

  We have our theories, though. We have decided that she couldn't have been a schoolgirl because I was at least three weeks old and she couldn't have hidden me that long. She couldn't have been stupid with alcohol or high on drugs because the whole thing was too organized and I was too clean. She can't even have made some daft decision she regretted straightaway, because my photo was splashed all over the papers for ages afterward with headlines like COME BACK. YOUR DARLING BABY NEEDS YOU! and whole paragraphs making it clear that they don't send new mothers to jail for losing their nerve for a day or so. They help them.

  No. Can't have been that.

  Mum thinks she's dead. She thinks she watched till I was found—

  “Watched?”

  “I'm sure she did, Ian. After all, wouldn't you?” —and then went off in some strange, awful, dark mood. And by the time my bonny, beautiful face got in the papers to bring her back to her senses, she'd probably already drowned or hanged herself in one of those strange, all-encompassing dark moments some people get when they can't see things in the round.

  People like Stol.

  I've chummed him through some bad times, I can tell you. I'm not prepared to write about them here. They're far too private. All I will say is that I've come to recognize a sort of mood that Stolly falls into, a kind of cosmic exasperation, and when it happens I take very good care to make sure we move off the viaduct or play away from the train line. I don't know how his mind works. (Not like mine.) All I know is that Stol never seems to have quite so much pinning him to Earth as I have.

  And he is half in love with death.

  We've always quite enjoyed a funeral. Ever since we were small, Mrs. Potter has let us in her shrubbery, to watch them. When we grew older, we worked a serviceable hole into her back hedge to wriggle through into the cemetery and climb one of the yews to see better. Now that we're pretty well grown, we're a good deal more sensible. We check out the times and go over the railings.

  Stol looks up from the paper. “Hey, Ian! Dig 'n' Drop at two o'clock.”

  “Don't call them that,” Mum scolds. “It's deeply disrespectful.”

  “That's what they do.”

  “Oh, no, it isn't. They don't ‘drop' anything. They gently lower. On ropes.”

  Who does she think needs telling? Stol and I have watched a bunch. I quite enjoy the mechanics of the thing. The way the coffin sways, and how everyone shifts their weight hastily whenever anyone stumbles. The way they anchor the ropes so the coffin never splats down. How they have pegged tarpaulins over the dug-out mound to hide the fact that it's a pile of dank earth that'll weigh on that body forever and ever.

  Stol takes more interest in the social side. Who's elbowed to the front. Who's legged it to the most important car. He points out the ones who are peeking at their watches, resentful of even the time spent burying a relation who they're probably still hoping has left them some money.

  His speciality is eye-dabbers. “She's real,” he'll tell me, pointing. “But Black Feather Hat over there is faking. So is that thin bloke on the end.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I don't know. I just can. I'll tell you who's really upset here.” He'll nod at some drab figure I've not even noticed but who, now that Stolly points it out, looks on the verge of heartbreak.

  After, he'll plan his own memorial service. “Hymn practice first.”

  “We all know all the hymns.”

  “Not Uncle Lionel. And Maeve and Tilly are the sort who open their mouths but are only pretending.” He'll be speaking in such a forlorn tone, you'd think the occasion had been arranged for the next day. “And Aunty Dolly only sings the notes that aren't too high or low.”

  “Better than being one of those ghastly ladies who cranks up to warble over everyone, even though no one else is even managing the main tune.”

  He shook his head. “It'll be dismal. I know it will.”

  “You can't make people come to a hymn practice first.”

  “I can. I'll write it in my will. ‘Doors locked at two P.M. Hymn Practice two to two-thirty. Service begins at two-thirty. No late admittance.' ” He broke off a bit of yew and started to peel it.

  “Don't chew that. It's poisonous.”

  “Whoops!” He inspected it. “Weird to think one day we won't be here, isn't it? Sometimes when we're waiting to cross in front of fast traffic, or up on the viaduct, I think, I could decide to die, and in less than twenty seconds I needn't be here. We could just—not exist. Just like we didn't before we were born.”

  Good thing we're only ten feet up a tree. I don't have to think up some reason to move us.

  He's brooding now. “No more thoughts. No more feelings.”

  “I quite like the ones I have.”

  “That's because you're who you are. But suppose you were weedy and ugly and disfigured with acne and everyone you knew made your life misery and each day at school was murder?”

  “Well, I'm not. And they don't. And it isn't.”

  “But what if?”

  “I'd grit my teeth and see it as a sort of prison sentence. Or a long test, like getting to be a knight, or a saint. And as soon as I was old enough, I'd clear off to Tasmania and work on some huge farm where no one came near enough to bother me.”

  “Not tempted by oblivion?”

  “No.”

  “No more worries? No more black nights?”

  “I don't have black nights, Stol.”

  He sees a different world, he really does.

  not in the mood for chatting

  When I got back to the hospital, Dad and Mr. Oliver were sitting by Stolly's bed, arguing over my homework.

  “Franklin, that isn't right. If you look carefully, you'll see that drip arm is retractable, and I think it's important to show the hinge.”

  “I admit I was much more at home with the French.”

  “I hope you put in a couple of mistakes, so Ian gets away
with it.”

  “Mistakes?” Franklin looked up, and, noticing me standing there, asked me directly, “Do you make mistakes?” the same way I'd say to someone from the moon, “Do you eat rocks?”

  I picked up some of the sheets they'd finished and pushed aside. “What about the handwriting?”

  Franklin peered at me over his gold-rimmed reading glasses. “We've worked that out. Jeanine can type it up and say you borrowed the laptop.” He turned back to Dad. “I'm gathering up now. Are you done with the physics?”

  Dad handed it over. Franklin wasn't satisfied. “Where are the diagrams? It definitely says on this slip that diagrams will be welcome.”

  Dad rooted among the papers on the bed tray and came up with the diagrams.

  I said to Mr. Oliver, “I thought you'd still be in court.”

  He looked up, grinning. “Case over.”

  Game, set, and match to him, too, you could tell. I didn't dare make any comment, but Dad spoke up. “You take note, Ian. Here is the man I want defending me when I murder your mother. His son lies barely conscious in a hospital, and still he wins.”

  I knew at once Stol must have woken up and spoken. Properly.

  I just burst out with it. “So he's OK? Really? All right in the head and all that?”

  “Tickety boo.”

  “If a bit grumpy.”

  I nearly did a Mum and burst into floods. Instead, I asked, “Was he awake long?”

  “Seemed like ages,” Dad said sourly. “But then again, listening to people grouse about their health is always tiresome.” He levered himself up and reached for his jacket. “You hold the fort, Ian. Franklin and I are nipping round the corner for a quick celebratory pint before your mother gets back again.”

  Franklin looked horrified. “Oh! I was rather more in the mind for that very pleasant wine bar on Fettler Street.” Off they went, arguing about whether wine in pubs was worse than beer in wine bars. I dropped on Franklin's still-warm seat and stared at the pale still face on the pillow.

  “Oh, Stol,” I said, still thinking of all the good times. “Oh, Stolly.”