Under my bed I had a secret box.
I would have liked to say it was a mysterious old wooden box that I’d found buried in the garden, smuggled upstairs, and hid behind the folds of my duvet. It would sit there patiently, keeping its treasures locked inside. Once I knew I could trust you, I’d let you kneel beside me as I carefully opened the crumbling lid. Clumps of mud would fall onto my carpet, but for once I wouldn’t care. Your mouth would drop open, your eyes getting wider and wider as you gazed at the riches inside.
I wished my secret box was like that.
But it wasn’t.
My box was clinical. It was made of white and gray cardboard and was the size and shape of a small shoebox with an oval hole in the top. The manufacturer’s name was printed around the sides, and in the bottom corner at each end it read, in bold, black type:
CONTENTS: 100
I’d say there were probably around thirty-two left.
When I say probably I mean exactly. There were exactly thirty-two left.
Mum knew all about my secret box, but Dad didn’t. He’d be upset if he knew. Not so much at me, but more at Mum for “encouraging” me.
“It’s not right, Sheila. What’re you doing giving him stuff like that for, eh? You’re just making him worse.”
That was how Dad would react.
He wouldn’t understand that at the moment life without that box was impossible for me.
I lived, with my secret box under the bed, at number nine, Chestnut Close. It was a very ordinary duplex house with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen/diner, and an oblong backyard (mostly grass) with a shed and a conservatory. Until recently the conservatory had housed a wicker sofa and matching armchairs, but they’d been replaced with a new pool table. I had watched from my bedroom as the delivery men struggled to fit it through the front door a couple of weeks before, and every day since, my dad asked if I was up for a quick game.
Which I never was.
If I looked down from my bedroom window, and if the blinds on the conservatory roof were in an upright position, I could see Dad playing pool, all by himself. The day before, he had glanced up and caught me. I’d ducked behind the curtains, but within about fifty seconds he was banging on my bedroom door:
“Why don’t you come down, son? Give your old man a game?”
“Not today, thanks, Dad.”
He went away after that. I knew what he was trying to do, but honestly—pool? Where did he come up with that one? And I was determined I would never, ever, ever go into the conservatory again. Our cat, Nigel, had vomited up endless bird and mouse guts onto those cold, white floor tiles; can you imagine what would be crawling around in there? In the summer heat the whole room had to be boiling with disease. And as if to crush any tiny urge I might have had to join Dad in potting a few balls, Nigel had decided to adopt the pool table as his favorite place to nap. Every day he stretched across the green cloth as if he were being sacrificed to the Gods of Pool. The only way to clean that table now would be to smother it in disinfectant, and I wasn’t stupid enough to try. That table must have cost Dad hundreds.
My bedroom was the best part of the house. It was safe. It was free from germs. Out there, things were dangerous. What people didn’t seem to understand was that dirt meant germs and germs meant illness and illness meant death. It was quite obvious when you thought about it. I needed things to be right, and in my room I had complete control. All I had to do was keep on top of it.
Spending so much time in my room meant that I’d gotten to know the place well. For example:
1) The front right-hand leg of my bedside cabinet was loose and at a slight angle.
2) The paint on the underside of my windowsill was flaking—definitely made worse by my cleaning.
3) High in a corner above my bed there was a piece of wallpaper that, when you considered it from a certain angle, looked like a lion.
It wasn’t a fierce “king of the jungle” lion, but a funny-looking, gummy lion. It had a scruffy mane, a long, flat nose, and a drooping eye—ten-year-old textured wallpaper with umpteen coats of emulsion could do that to you, I guess. Sometimes, I would talk to him. I know the whole talking-to-an-object thing is a bit “out there,” but I’m sure there’s a textbook somewhere saying that what I was going through was completely normal:
On around day ten it is inevitable that the unfortunate person who has chosen to spend the majority of his or her life inside will become so bored that they’ll begin to talk to items around them. This is a normal occurrence and should not cause undue concern.
In my case it was day eight. I’d stayed home from school again and was having a bad afternoon, and I could feel the Wallpaper Lion’s eyes staring at me from the corner of my room. I knew who it was straight away. I’d been watching him on and off for a while, wanting to say something but not letting myself. I finally got to a bursting point and couldn’t hold it in any longer.
“I know what you’re thinking! You’re thinking: Aw, poor Matthew, stuck indoors all day, isn’t it tragic? Why doesn’t he go to school? Why doesn’t he go out there and actually do something? Well, it’s NOT going to happen, so DON’T bother worrying about me, okay?”
Once I’d said what I wanted to say I felt calmer. I felt like I’d won an argument with him. Now he was just something I talked to now and then, like Mum talked to the cat. It was nothing weird. What would have been weird was if he’d answered me. But that had never happened.
No one knew I talked to him, of course. That was another little secret I had. In fact, the whole cleaning thing was a secret too, until quite recently. My friend Tom was the first one to notice something was up. I’d gone to the bathroom during science class, and when I got back to our desk he was staring at me, his head resting on his fist.
“Matt, what’s going on?”
I looked at him.
“What do you mean?”
Tom leaned in to whisper.
“The toilet thing? You’ve been during every lesson today and at break. Are you okay?”
I’d been washing my hands. That’s what I’d been doing. They were never clean enough, so I had to keep going back to try and get the germs off. I opened my mouth to tell him but I didn’t know how to say it, so I just shrugged and turned back to my work. I pretty much stopped going to school after that.
Now that I was at home I was much more in control and could clean pretty much whenever I liked. The bathroom caused me the most stress, because every time I went in there it felt infested with germs. A couple of weeks before, I’d gotten really carried away while Mum was at work, and before I knew it the afternoon had passed and Mum was home, standing at the door staring openmouthed as I wiped the insides of the taps with cotton wool buds dipped in bleach.
“What on earth are you doing, Matthew?”
She looked around at the sparkling white tiles. You’d have thought I’d been scrawling graffiti everywhere, the face she was pulling.
“This isn’t right … Stop it now, enough is enough.”
She took a step forward. I moved away and felt the sink press into my back.
“Matthew, you need to talk to me about this. What’s wrong? And look at your poor hands …”
She reached out to me, but I shook my head at her.
“Stay there, Mum. Don’t come any closer.”
“But Matty, I just want to have a look at your skin. Is it bleeding? It looks like it’s bleeding …”
I tucked my hands under my armpits.
“Are they burnt, Matthew? Have you burnt your hands? You can’t get bleach on your skin, darling.”
“It’s fine, just leave me alone.”
I quickly scooted past her and went into my room, kicking the door shut behind me. I lay on my bed, my hands throbbing as I tucked them under my arms. Mum stood outside the door. She knew better than to come in.
“Darling, is there anything I can do for you? Tell me, please. Please, Matthew? Your Dad and I can’t go on like this. The school rang again today. I can’t keep telling them that … that you’ve got a virus …”
She made a little choking sound like she’d suddenly forgotten to breathe. I shut my eyes and called one word back at her.
“Gloves.”
Silence.
“I’m sorry?”
“Latex gloves. Disposable ones. That’s all I need, Mum. Okay? Now, can you leave me alone? Please!”
“Okay. I’ll … I’ll see what I can do …”
And that was it.
That was my secret box that I keep under the bed. Not a dusty old box of treasure but a box of one hundred disposable latex gloves, which now held just thirty-two. A secret agreement between me and my mum: She’d supply me with gloves, and I would stop burning my skin with bleach.
We didn’t need to tell Dad—he wouldn’t understand.