A lid on the sky

 

 

“CAN I come shark hunting with you?” Micky asks, watching from my nest as I pull my trousers on.

As soon as I nod, he jumps up and eagerly throws his clothes on.

It’s dark and cold in my shell, and I know it’s going to be darker and colder outside. I eat some more of the bread with something tomato flavoured from one of my label-less cans—we ate all the ham earlier. I don’t even taste it, really.

Micky doesn’t want anything, but I put a few slices of bread in a bag in my pocket, in case he gets hungry. Even if he doesn’t want to listen to his body, I know he’s hungry. His stomach was rumbling while he slept.

 

 

AS SOON as we reach the end of the dark dead-end road, Micky shouts my name and takes off down the side of the common.

He’s so alive tonight.

I jog after him, clutching my bad arm to my chest to try to stop my shoulder hurting with every step.

He runs with the wind, his golden hair streaming out behind him, but after a minute he turns and jogs back to me.

I love that he’s wearing most of my clothes—as in he’s wearing all my jumpers, one on top of the other, apart from the one I’m wearing.

“I’m sorry, I forgot your shoulder would hurt running,” he says breathlessly, coming to walk beside me. “Sometimes I just want to run and run, as fast as I can.”

I smile. I know what he means. And yeah, if my shoulder wasn’t injured, I’d run with him.

 

 

WE MAKE our way slowly towards the city, walking close together, our hands tightly entwined in the pocket of my hooded top.

The ground is wet with melted snow, and it’s a little icy in places. Micky slips once or twice when he’s being nosy, staring into windows where people have neglected to shut their curtains. I catch him before he falls, enjoying the way he leans against me, heart beating fast in shock.

When we reach the river, I’m transfixed by all the lights glittering brightly in the dark water like stars. We stop and look down at them—at the dark I almost got lost in. Micky presses close, and I breathe in his warmth, his scent, and wonder what he’s thinking. I wonder about Dieter too. I wonder if he now hates me more or less than before. Not that it matters. There are always going to be people out there who hate you, no matter what you do. What’s the point in wasting energy worrying about them?

Near the embankment Micky sees a few people he knows working, but he doesn’t stop to talk. I keep my head down as stark images play through my mind—Micky huddled on the pavement with them as they wait in the cold for someone to touch them in ways they don’t want to be touched.

“Don’t go back out here,” I plead suddenly. I feel awful for putting my worries and wants onto him like this, but it takes my breath away, like repeated kicks to the stomach, when I think of him doing this.

Micky squeezes my hand hard. “I won’t. I promise. Don’t know what I’m going to do for cash, but I don’t ever want to be out here again.”

“I’ll look after you.”

Without warning he pulls me into a shop doorway and kisses me. We’re not even in the shadows—there’s a streetlight about four meters away, shining on us like a spotlight. I don’t think he cares. And for a moment, neither do I.

“We’ll look after each other. Okay?” he murmurs, his lips still touching mine. “We’ll come up with a plan. We’ll find jobs, maybe get a flat somewhere—somewhere with its own bathroom and running hot water, where you can take a bath whenever you want. Somewhere warm enough your eyelashes don’t freeze together when you’re sleeping and your boyfriend doesn’t have to suck on your fingers to warm them.”

My body goes rigid. I’m sure Micky feels it, but he doesn’t say anything, and when I take his hand and pull him gently away from the shop doorway and start walking again, he remains quiet.

How am I supposed to explain to him that there can be no plan? This is it—I can’t be more than I am. What I’m offering is on display: I will keep him safe in my shell, feed him when he’s hungry, love him like he’s the most precious boy on this planet. I can’t give him anything more. Why didn’t I think about this? I feel so stupid.

I don’t want to be angry at myself, and I don’t want these thoughts whirring around my head, ruining the seconds I spend with Micky, because every single second with him feels so important. Instead, as a sort of punishment, I make myself sad thinking about everything Dashiel will never see.

 

 

IT TURNS out Micky is good at spotting sharks. Like Dashiel, maybe it’s from experience. I struggle with that thought for a while as we wander around the park.

We don’t see Dollman, but I write down a few car registrations. Micky adds a little story-like description of why the guy was a predator and what the person who got in the car looked like. He draws little pictures of them too.

Around one o’clock we’re both exhausted. We hunker down next to a massive tree to keep out of the wind. The snow has turned into brown ice on top of the soil, all cold and dirty.

“There’s a night café near here. We could go and get a cup of tea?” Micky says.

He told me once that Americans don’t drink tea like people in England do, but he’s grown to like it.

“I don’t have any money,” I say, my eyes on the ground.

Micky takes a few deep breaths. I can tell he’s thinking—he breathes like that when something is bothering him. I’m not sure why it’s making me apprehensive.

“What did you do before—” He hesitates and bites his lip. “—the shark-hunting thing?”

“Fixed stuff. Spent time with Dashiel,” I say emptily. What else is there?

“Danny, what I said before about wanting to be with you and make a home with you, I meant it,” he says out of nowhere. “If it’s too fast and it’s freaking you out, please tell me. Being out here like this, things become sort of live-or-die desperate, don’t they? I’m frightened, and you make me feel like everything’s okay, that I’m safe, but that’s not why I want to do this. I want this for keeps.”

He gives me that look, the one where his heart is laid out in his eyes and with one false move, I could break it. Vulnerable, that’s what the word is. He makes himself vulnerable to me.

I shake my head. Fast or not, I want him to be with me. I can’t bear thinking about things being any other way.

“I can’t even remember my life without you in it. You make me feel like anything is possible,” he whispers.

His words fill me with a prickly sensation I’m not sure is good or bad. How am I making him feel like anything is possible? Because the way I see it, there’s a definite limit, like a lid on the sky—some stars are unreachable, however hard you wish. The trick is in seeing what’s possible, isn’t it? What’s the point in striving for something you know is always going to be out of reach?

More importantly, I have a home. If Micky gets chucked out of his bedsit, I want him to know he has a home with me too. I’m scared to ask him. It seems like such a big thing to ask.

“You could live with me in my shell,” I say tentatively.

“Thank you,” he whispers, reaching for my hand. “What about somewhere more permanent, though?”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

“Somewhere no one is going to come along and move you on.”

“I’ve lived there for a year now, and no one official has noticed.”

“But what if they did?” he presses, and I wish he hadn’t.

“I’d find somewhere else.” I shrug. I know I got lucky with the swimming pool, and I don’t want to be moved on, but there are thousands of abandoned buildings in London—there must be others with running water and working toilets.

“Danny….” Micky touches my arm. I really don’t mean to, but I flinch away.

I know what he’s asking. I may be stupid, but I’m not that stupid. But I don’t want to talk about it. I’m not enough for him; I know I’m not enough. And it hurts.

Maybe I should be ashamed I don’t have a more ordered life, that I can’t be anything more.

“I don’t do money or jobs or any of it!” I blurt out, my voice as loud as it ever gets. I can’t do those things.

My heart trips over itself, a scarred, cracked thing so sure it had found its echoing beat.

“I’m sorry,” he says softly.

I’m scared he sounds a bit resigned. I’m scared he’s realising something that he didn’t realise before about me—like if you found a computer when you most needed one, and it looks as though it does all the things you want it to, but when you start to use it, you discover all the useful bits are missing. “You do saving the world and surviving, I get it.”

When I look up, there is a whole galaxy of gentleness in his eyes, so I know he’s not making fun of me.

But it doesn’t stop me feeling awful that there is something, and it’s a massive something, that I can’t give him.

“Danny, listen to me. We’ve got stuff to figure out, but all I want is to be with you. That’s it. Everything else comes after. Everything else I can compromise on. Remember that. And if we have to live like foxes, then we’ll live like foxes. I only want to be with you.”

I run my hands across the ice and let the cold bite into me. Deep down, I still don’t really get it. I don’t get why he would want to give up so much. I know that what he’s saying means that he is prepared to give stuff up. And for what? For me? He’s right, I’m strong enough to survive, but that’s all I’ve got. I’m not good to look at… or… or… anything.

Glancing up, I think maybe Micky is doing that mind-reading thing again, as there are tears in his eyes, and they weren’t there a few seconds ago.

The last thing I want is for him to cry. I shift closer so I can put my arms around him, even though my shoulder protests mightily. It must be the cold.

He drags his sleeve across his eyes and gives me a sad smile.

“I didn’t mean to make you feel bad about where you live or what you do. It’s just I didn’t have a plan when I got on that plane and everything went wrong. Like really fucking wrong. And now… I feel like I need some sort of plan, even if it’s only a little one. Security, I guess.”

“I want to be your security.”

“I know. I know. You are.”

Shakily he gets to his feet. It must be about half one now, and because we haven’t been moving, we’re both freezing. Micky’s fingers are as cold as the icy ground, and he’s shaking badly, even with all my jumpers on. After all that walking around, he can’t have any energy left to keep himself warm.

I pull the bag of bread out of my pocket, but he doesn’t want to eat it.

“I want to buy you a cup of tea and sit in a café for a while,” he says. “That’ll warm me up.”

I nod. It probably is a good idea.

The café isn’t far. It’s completely empty. A grey-haired woman sits behind the counter, reading a dog-eared magazine. Micky asks her for two cups of tea, while I sit down near the blank expanse of window and get my pad out.

“What are you writing? More shark-hunter stuff?” he asks, placing two large steaming mugs on the table and sitting down.

“A letter to you.” I put my pen down and empty a few sachets of sugar into my mug.

It’s hard getting used to not being able to hide behind my hair.

“Really? What sort of letter?” He frowns a bit as he takes a sip of hot tea, but he keeps looking at me.

I shrug.

I want to explain some stuff, and this is easier than trying to say it all. I hope he understands why I’ve written it once he’s read it. It’s more a “no place left to hide, walking naked into the sun” sort of letter, so I’m a little apprehensive about it. Most of the time I tell myself it’s as though he’s in my head anyway, so why would him reading this make any difference?

I read it back, realising it’s getting longer and longer. Micky has finished his tea, and mine is probably cold by now.

I push the pad across the table to him.

He glances at me as if for confirmation that I want him to read, and I nod. This shuddery fear starts to build inside me, so I lean over the table and read the words with him to try and dispel it.

Micky, I want to tell you some stuff, but I can’t say it so I’m going to write it down. I feel really bad I can’t do things you want to do like live in a flat and get a job. I want to explain, and it’ll probably all come out in a jumbled mess even when I write it down, but if I try and sort out the words and get them exactly as I want them, it will take me ages, so I’ll just write it all down as it comes out and you can read it. Okay? You read my notes before, so I think you’ll be okay reading this.

I get obsessed with things. It’s like my brain has to have something to focus on. I’m aware of it, it’s not like I don’t know I’m doing it, and I mostly know when it’s okay and when it’s not. When we first met, I thought about you all the time and wanted to follow you around really badly, but I knew that was wrong, so I stopped myself. But like with Dollman—it’s not always wrong. At the schools I went to, they said that’s why I was so good at figuring out electronics stuff because I was so focused on it. Really though, I like fixing stuff because I discovered I could bring something broken back to life.

I don’t talk because I don’t always know the right thing to say, so I try to only say stuff I’m sure about or if it’s important. And I’m shy and feel uncomfortable with people, not because of how I look so much as other people’s reactions to me—and they’re sometimes bad. Dashiel used to have a lot to say about me hiding behind my hair, but you don’t, and now you’ve cut it off so I can’t anyway, but I like that you never told me to stop hiding all the time.

Sometimes I want to hide and I want that to be okay. I talk out loud more to you than I ever have to anyone, even Dashiel, because I don’t feel like I’m ever saying the wrong thing with you, or if I do, you won’t mind. Writing down is easier because you can see the words.

I can’t plan stuff. I can only do now. In Zen they have this concept called “living in the moment.” That’s what I do. I live here. And I’ve learned things like knowing I have to eat tomorrow and all the rest of the week, so it’s a good idea to have enough food in my shell so that I don’t have to go out and find some every day. It’s not because I don’t know what it means to plan, I do. And I like the feeling of forever. But most of the time, it’s just too much. The thought of using money or having a job overwhelms me. The only way I can describe it is that it feels too heavy. There is too much information. It’s like shops have too many things in them and I don’t know the right thing to choose. I buy tins of food off a guy in the underpass, and he can get me other stuff if I ask him to, like gas for my stove.

I know what’s wrong with me, but it’s not a thing that can be fixed.

It was difficult to know when to stop and I’d almost ended it there but I knew I wasn’t giving Micky the complete picture, so I’d added:

When I was fourteen I had a social worker who told me that when I grew up I probably wouldn’t be able to cope with things like the others did. She said when I reached sixteen, they’d move me to a halfway house with other people who needed a bit more help too, and they could teach me how to do basic stuff to help prepare me to cope with being independent. But when I was sixteen, there was no halfway house to go to. The council didn’t have the money to run them anymore. I got put in a room in a hostel with lots of other boys my age. My social worker had to hand me over to another social worker as the hostel was out of her area, but there was no other social worker, or not one that I ever saw.

The other kids targeted me because of how I look and they thought I was stupid because I found some stuff hard to do. They didn’t understand that I got overwhelmed. That was why I couldn’t fill out the forms I was supposed to or deal with the money I was supposed to live on. That place was hell. I didn’t want to be there, but there was nowhere else, so I ended up on the street. And I know lots of people think living like I do is bad, but it’s simple and I can deal with it. It’s better this way.

Minutes pass. I watch his eyes still tracing the words on the page, and think he must be reading the whole thing three or four times at least, because he’s definitely reading, not just staring in shock.

My heart thumps so hard I can feel it everywhere, even in my fingers and toes. I keep repeating silently that I’m not really telling him anything surprising. He’s probably worked out my brain is wired a little differently.

“Can I borrow your pen?” Micky asks, his gaze quickly flicking up to my face.

I pass it to him and he writes I understand with a big flowery flourish. A smile plays on his lips and he adds I really do.

He looks up again, and I hold his gaze for a few seconds, but I get the sense he’s looking beyond me, that he’s thinking. When he starts writing again, I lean farther over the table so I don’t miss any of the words.

Never say you’re stupid because you find some things hard. I never want you to use that word. Everyone finds some things hard. You’re clever in so many ways other people aren’t—in ways that matter the most. Your heart is so fucking big.

 

He pushes the pad across the table but tightens his grip on the pen. I glance at his face and see that he’s biting his lip as if he’s steeling himself to do something.

Suddenly he stands up, and I only just have time to wonder what he’s doing before his hand fastens firmly on the back of my skull and he leans down and kisses me, all openmouthed and everything. I get a hard-on almost instantly, desire rushing through me, making me want to grab Micky and pull him onto my lap.

The woman behind the counter puts down her magazine—I hear it crash down on the counter. I know she’s watching us, but I don’t care. She’s probably going to chuck us out, but all I can think of is how great we must look to anyone walking through the dark, our kissing figures framed by the bright café window.

We rest our foreheads together for a moment, breathing one another’s air, before Micky lets go of my head and sits back down.

A gentle clap from the vicinity of the counter makes us turn and look. The old woman smiles at us.

“Not every day I see that sort of thing. Glad to see not everyone is scared into hiding. Here.” She hobbles over to us with a steel teapot and refills our cups.

“Thank you,” I say, keeping my eyes mostly on the checkered tablecloth. Micky is grinning giddily at me.

“I’ve never done that in public, I mean with anyone watching,” he whispers when she’s gone. His eyes are still wild and wide open, the way he looks when he’s really turned on. It makes me wish we were back in my shell, getting lost in each other. 

I reach for his hand. “I want to kiss you again.”

“My place is nearby. We could go there,” he says. I watch his throat as he swallows, wondering what my lips would feel if they pressed there. “But I want to… there’s some other stuff I want to write down first.”

This makes me curious because it’s not as if Micky needs to write anything down.

I want to tell you something I’m not good at saying out loud either, he writes.

He looks up and holds my gaze for a few seconds as though he’s building himself up to do something and I’m somehow giving him the courage.

I’m anorexic.

He writes the words in neat block letters, and even though they’re upside down, “anorexic” stands out so clearly I don’t have to wait for my brain to turn the letters around to read it.

Do you know what that means?

I nod. I know it’s more than just not wanting to eat. I know it’s bigger than that. I know it’s complicated and scary and that people die from it.

Micky goes back to writing.

I don’t want to be like this. I want to stop, and I’m trying, but it’s like this thing that consumes me. Which is really ironic when you think about it. So I understand about being obsessed with something. Except this probably controls me a bit more than your obsessions control you. Being with you helps because I think more about you than about food, and I think about food a lot.

Danny, I want to read your letter again and again. Thank you for telling me all that.

I love the way he writes my name. It makes me feel like I’m made of soft jelly and I want to melt all over him. I smile, thinking about the way Micky seems to like my weirdness and wondering what he’d make of that one.

But my smile slides away for a moment as I take the pad and the pen. I’m worried for him, and I can’t stop replaying what Diana said to me in the restaurant—how did she know?

If you don’t eat, you’ll die, I write in really small letters.

“I know. I promise I’m going to try, okay.” He grips my hand so hard that I think the pen still caught between my fingers is going to snap. “I’m going to eat. When I’m with you, it’s the only thing I wish was different. When I’m with you, I don’t want to disappear.”

His voice has gone all husky, and I know he’s getting upset.

You’re beautiful, I write, while he’s still holding on to my hand. The words come out all spidery and crooked. You glitter like no one else. Like stars are inside you.

I want him to believe it. I want him to know what I see when I look at him. With my hand tight in his, I tug him outside, barely hearing the old lady calling after us, saying good-bye.

We lie outside the café on the icy pavement away from the road. I know he likes looking up at the sky like this. We make a T shape—Micky lying with his head resting on my chest, over my heart. I put my arm around him, holding him close, in case he should somehow float away from me.

We’re taking up the entire pavement, but there’s no one around. Only stars above. All the stars. All the bright and dying lights burning through the dark. There is no lid on the sky tonight. It’s endless. Forever.

I know space is supposed to make me feel small and insignificant, but somehow it doesn’t. What it makes me feel is special: I’m here, despite a million odds, in this moment, in this single point in time, with a boy I’m so completely in love with. Maybe Micky’s right and there is no limit. Maybe this feeling is what he means.

“I’m so happy,” he whispers, and I hold him close.