We were heading for the toilets. I could feel the Jägerbomb inside my cheeks. In the toilets, the light was nauseatingly bright. There was a tint of sputum to it. Adam locked us inside a cubicle. He gestured for me to peer into the bowl. He had an outraged look on his face, amplified by how much he’d had to drink. The word was je-la-ti-nous. ‘We need to get it out,’ he said. We used Adam’s jacket as a sling. It was one of his nice jackets, from Next. He came into school with it sometimes. There was a fair amount of sploshing before we had any purchase. ‘Count of three, we lift.’ His face was large. His sweat was the viscosity of milk. We removed the thing from the cubicle, then the three of us weaved our way out of Popworld.
I sobered up in the Uber. The jacket was between us, in the middle seat. Adam peeked underneath to see what the thing was doing. He toyed with the seatbelt, as if he wanted to lock it in, safe and sound. There was no radio on in the Uber. I listened out for the click-click of the indicators. Maybe they didn’t make that sound for new cars. That was a shame. I put my forehead on the window, not that I could see anything once we were out of Blackpool.
We used to get taxis a lot when we were kids. Karen would take money from Gavandra’s purse. Sometimes we wouldn’t get out of the cab. Karen liked to be driven around the West End. She would whisper the names of all the theatres as we drove by. Or, ater, when she was at Italia Conti, she read scripts in the backs of taxis.
I took my forehead off the window and looked down at Adam’s jacket. There were the faintest vapour trails coming off the lump between us. Adam noticed this too and looked at me with worried eyes.
‘Anywhere here is fine,’ Adam said, and the Uber pulled up. I was handed the jacket as Adam tried to find his keys. He lived in a flat at the top of the house. When we were inside, I asked what I should do with the jacket. He turned on the big light, then he said we should unwrap it at least, give it some air. A cat appeared. It sidled up to my shins. This was Judy. The kitchen was barely big enough for one person. There were two Christmas cards pinned to a corkboard. Adam placed his jacket on the hob. The thing had shrunk, like a raisin. ‘It needs water,’ Adam said. He filled the sink. I saw the plug on the sideboard and handed it to him.
‘Put some warm water in there,’ I said calmly.
We carried the raisin over and then lowered it into the sink. Immediately, its colour returned. He was like a planet bobbing in space.
‘I can see its eyes.’
Adam was quiet. His tongue was pushing up against his lips. He was going to be sick. I knew that he wasn’t a big drinker anyway, and it had been a surprise when he’d continued into town after La Bottega. I guided him to his own bathroom. He waved a hand. ‘I’m not drunk. Everything’s just so fast.’ I put a hand on his back. We’ve all been there.
‘Tell me something. Anything.’ He was slurring, eyes shut. ‘Something about you.’
‘Like what?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘I was thinking about all the taxis I used to get in London, with my sister.’
‘I didn’t know you had a sister.’
The kitchen sink wailed. It was piercingly loud. I got up right away.
*
I realised I liked Adam when I saw he had the Wikipedia app on his phone. We were on PPA time. He was working on his iPad, pasting lyrics into a PowerPoint. We bought taught Year 2. Adam was only the only male teacher in KS1. He was handed the responsibility of Music Lead at the start of last year. He complained about the Kidz Bobification of the culture in general.
‘What do you look up on the Wikipedia app?’ I asked.
Adam put his iPad down. He picked up his phone and showed me a list of favourited articles.
‘Phonics?’
‘I was curious.’
‘And what did it say?’
‘Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing to beginners.’ He sighed and reached for his cup of coffee. ‘I love shit like that,’ he said.
*
We worked in shifts. Neither of us slept. I don’t remember it being said outright that I was living in Adam’s flat, but it wasn’t like I was going to abandon Norman. I suggested the name on Christmas Eve. Norman was Karen’s white terrier on wheels. He had black eyebrows and Styrofoam legs. Our Norman could not stand but after a while he moved.
Adam erected a tent in the living room next to the Christmas tree. He didn’t want to lose the deposit on the flat by permanently damaging the carpet, and Norman did secrete. He last used the tent at Leeds Festival. The headliner in 2015 was Metallica. Inside the tent, it was written in permanent marker: Music Forever. This seemed like a very dweeby thing to write when everyone else, presumably, was getting off with each other outside the tent. I smiled.
Experimentally, one evening, Adam fed Norman a Calipo. Norman took it between what you could call his lips and ate it. The Calipo was with him all morning.
We took turns going to the One Stop, the only shop that had Calipos. My life was the flat and the walk to One Stop. While everything around us slowed down for Christmas, the shop stayed the same. Norman’s favourite flavour was cola. It left a brown residue around his face, which I wiped away with the spit on my thumb. He would roll and roll, all over the tent.
Occasionally, Adam would spend some time on housework, and I would be left to look after Norman. The more time I had alone with Norman, the more I felt I could tell Adam what to do. ‘I don’t want you vaping in front of him,’ I said, after one of my walks to the shop.
It was the end of December. Adam had by this time found time for thinking about school. He created what he called his Genre Chart, and he was going to email it to KS1 staff. I had, in truth, barely thought about school. It was as far from my reality as Alaska. When I thought about doing some work, it was in a dreamy sort of way.
On 31st December, I walked into town. I went to Card Factory and bought party hats. At home, Adam held Norman steady while I fixed the string around his bottom. I got upset because I thought the string might be cutting into his skin. But Adam said it was fine. He said this in a way which meant that Norman was difficult, that he was always being needy. We took our places for the Hootenanny. There was something about Jools Holland that reminded me of Norman. He was ebullient and odd, but you could see he was genuine. I started to cry. I put my head on the arm of the settee. In the early hours of the year, I found the leather jacket I’d worn to the Christmas party. I’d left it in a clump on the futon in Adam’s spare room. Fortuitously, I had taken half a blister pack of Lustral to Popworld.
*
Adam went back to school and in the evenings I would hear about the girl who had transferred from another school to his class. She was a new challenge. He was thinking about referring her to a speech and language specialist. In the past, I might have challenged him on this, intimated that it was too soon for a referral, but I didn’t have an opinion. Around this time, I thought that Norman would start to multiply. The idea became fixed in my head, during those long hours in the flat. He was blotchy around his middle and I thought that this would mean other Normans would be popping out of him soon. I would have to manage that.
This was his first real illness. The heat radiating off him was intense.
Norman always made noises when rolling about, because he was so holey and succulent, but now he was deathly quiet. He’d dried out, and I was reminded of the night we had first brought him home and put him in the sink.
He just looked at me, helpless.
Thinking that fresh air would be good, I took Norman for a walk. I reached the bus stop before I had to turn around.
It was only when this period of illness was over that I understood how useless Adam had been. Slyly, during an argument, I said, ‘You were the one who wanted so desperately to save him.’ What I said hurt me more than it hurt Adam.
Every conversation was in some way about Norman and how he had changed our lives. Adam complained about how tired he was. SLT were doing his head in. He wanted sympathy; that was what was so gross about it.
‘Are they asking where I am at school?’ I said.
‘You’re sick,’ he said, and I wasn’t sure if he was answering my question or making a statement of fact.
*
There was a man who walked down our street sometimes, and I would watch him from our window. Shouting, ‘No one on this street cares, I’m going to step out into traffic and kill myself.’ In his Ghostbusters jacket and Spider-Man satchel. Sickly green Crocs.
I no longer thought of myself as a teacher, but I kept one hand in the world of phonics. I made up stories. Norman was older now. He needed an imagination. I developed Reithian values. The more stories I made up, the more I tried to get in words with more complex phonemes, or I’d throw him an alien word with made up phonemes to see if there was any jolt of recognition from him.
I also introduced him to music. Songs that were popular when I was a kid. I found ‘Wonderwall’ by Oasis so profoundly moving, I had to turn it off before the end. They were a stupid band; it was a stupid song. I felt myself getting shaky even thinking about it.
It was hard to know if Norman enjoyed any of the songs I played for him, and in those moments, I wondered if we were connected at all, which made me feel that I had wasted my time. I put A Hard Day’s Night on Adam’s big flatscreen TV. It was on BBCiPlayer. I drew the curtains. The black and white shone onto Norman, and he absorbed it, and I felt better about his education. I was always running into walls, but this was a good day. It was a nice moment. When Paul McCartney said again how very clean his grandfather was, Norman rolled into his tent and said, ‘Klin, veri klin.’
Karen was on the news. The photo they used on the BBC News site was from the premier of All the Dolls, the year before. Or it might have been the BAFTAs. She had been driving with a friend – unnamed – through Italy. There was a collision, and she’d been killed immediately. It hadn’t come up as a news alert on my phone, so I came across it at a random time during the day. Norman was now able to sit nicely in a chair, and that was where he was when I started reading this, about my sister. I looked over briefly and saw that he was spewing gently onto his chin. The dress Karen wore was silver. She absolutely shone. I got Norman from his chair and started to tell him about his aunt. ‘London,’ I said, trying to sound it out for him, slowly, because it felt like an important word. I was squeezing the city into the gaps between the phonemes.
‘That’s where things happen – apart from you, you happened here,’ and I touched my chest, but as I moved my arm, Norman fell, and he splattered onto the laminate floor in the kitchen. Judy came to lick up the mess. I didn’t feel stupid at all.
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