Junk - Melvin Burgess [49]
Sometimes I feel like I’m some kind of organ plucked out of a living beast. Every little twitch shows up; it’s like having to confess all the time. I can make my face go ever so still if I want to but then I forget and it starts twitching away and everyone knows exactly what I’m feeling every second.
I just wanted to bury myself about a hundred million miles under the ground.
They dashed in and out and talked about it, watching me and nodding to each other. They started on about Lily and Rob.
‘Scum,’ said Jerry. That shocked me. They looked scummy but they weren’t really like that.
‘I wouldn’t like to find one of them in my shoe in the morning,’ said Vonny, which made me laugh.
I looked at Richard, because he’s the one I trust the most. He looked terribly upset but he didn’t say anything. They grouped around me and hugged me and tried to cheer me up but none of them made me feel as good as Lily had when she was calling me the Titanium Man.
‘I liked them,’ I said.
‘Oh dear,’ said Richard.
Vonny was furious with Gemma. She thought she was being really irresponsible. Jerry kept going on about me getting over her and maybe it was all for the best. Funny thing, all the time at the back of my mind I could see this tiny picture of my mum raging at me and my dad was standing behind her as big as a mountain with his face getting darker and darker and darker.
‘She just wants to fly,’ I said.
‘She has to walk before she can run, let alone fly,’ said Vonny.
But I want to fly, too.
*
Rob came round the next day or the day after. I was in a state. I’d more or less decided to stay away from Gemma. I was hoping that if I gave her a break, she might miss me and want me back, although let’s be honest, there wasn’t much chance of that with Lily and Rob about.
‘She wants to be friends still, it isn’t that she doesn’t want to see you,’ he said.
‘I just want to leave it for a bit,’ I told him.
‘What about me and Lils?’ he said. ‘We want to see you –’
We went out for a walk. I didn’t tell him what the others had said about him. We did a couple of skips, wandered around the art shops and the bookshops, but… I was too messed up. I was glad when it was over. I told him to say to Gemma, you know, that I’d not be seeing her for a bit.
Rob said, ‘She’ll be disappointed.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. He didn’t reply. It was the truth. She was leaving me behind.
It was about a week before I saw them again.
‘Someone here to see you,’ called Vonny. I knew who it was at once, because of the way she said it, like the toilet had just overflowed or something. I looked down the stairs and there was Lily, weaving about at the bottom of the stairs, dancing with her head and grinning up the stairs like a cat or snake or… like Lily.
It was odd, seeing her there. It was always like that with Lily. Whenever you saw her out of her house she looked out of place. Like you looked out of your window and you saw a python sliding away under the privet bushes. Like she was having an incredible, dangerous adventure just walking down the road. I suppose she was.
‘Come with me,’ she said. I’d been planning on staying away a few days longer but…
I got my coat on and followed her out of the house.
It was a damp day. I’d only seen her at night or in the house, half naked. Now she was dressed in this long skirt that dragged in the puddles.
She walked along by me smiling all the time like she does, like she has a secret.
‘How’s Gemma?’ I asked.
‘Oh, she’s great, she’s fantastic, you know our Gems,’ said Lily, and then she laughed at me. I must have looked disappointed because she wasn’t sad like me. ‘Don’t get all hung up on that romantic love stuff,’ she told me. And she started clutching at her heart and her throat and moaning, ‘My life is at an end, I cannot go on without her, oh, woe, oh woe…’ and she ended up leaning backwards over a wall with her hand at her throat and her tongue hanging out.
I guess it was bit like that, wasn’t it? I was hung up on Gemma. I suppose I wanted