What I Did by Christopher Wakling Page A

small, and lead her through the hall. The door swings shut behind us. I pick up the circular saw from the mat where she dropped it, but she doesn’t care about it now, which is good for me, because the way it whirs when you press the trigger is in fact quite interesting. There’s the fish tank. The one at school had a bubbly filter, too, but someone turned it off by mistake. Fatal, Son. Lizzie has already lost the tail of silvery ribbon so no cat’s cradle for us but it doesn’t matter because I will spend the time doing something better anyway, teaching her to get ready to speak by explaining animals to her using the alphabet. A is for adder. B for bison. C, crayfish. D, E, F, and G. She pretends she’s not listening but I know better. Off she goes, inside her tent thing. Goldfish have a very short attention spam, too.
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    At school it is often quite boring. They teach me things I know already and to prove it I will give you some examples for instance.
    For instance one day Miss Hart got out a box of vegetables and held them up and asked us what they were. The first thing she held up was a carrot. Ta-da! A carrot. Then she held up . . . a cabbage. And then she held up a tomato which is not a vegetable because it is a fruit. I put my hand up and down very quickly because I could see her mouth getting all ready to tell some unsuspecting prey that fact and I didn’t want to say the thing that might spoil her thunder. I sat on the mat with my hands under me but on the mat and listened to Alice say, — Tomato, and Miss Hart say, — Yes, and did you also know it’s actually a fruit? I shut my eyes and opened them again as a test. Yes, absolutely everything that I could see at that moment of time was quite boring.
    Dad says that it’s my job to keep things interesting. I mustn’t blame the boring feeling on anybody other than myself is what he says. I shut my eyes on the mat again and here is what I thought.
    Radish.
    Celeriac.
    Palm heart.
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    Later I am at home in my own bedroom which is better than Lizzie’s. Hello house opposite, any lizard winking? No. Lizzie: lizard. Neither says anything; they’re both on mute. Did you know that Galápagos iguanas have black skin to absorb heat stored in rocks, but I only have a radiator? If I fetch my colored pencils from the drawer next to my bed and put a piece of paper on the Hungry Caterpillar book because it is biggest and the most firmly flat, and if I sit with my back against the radiator like this, brilliant, I can do a warm drawing on my lap. I have lots of paper. Galápagos iguanas are hard to draw but I person veer. If you press a normal gray pencil hard enough you can almost make it go black.
    Dad’s voice is gray-black at Mum downstairs. — Follow-up medical? She said what? Beyond a joke.
    I press my pencil down harder and keep shading in the rocks until little gritty puffs of lead start coming off the end. It looks like the tip is burrowing into iguana world.
    Mum’s voice is colorless: whatever she says doesn’t make it all the way up the stairs.
    â€” Of course I’ll take him, won’t I, Dad shouts. — It’s not like we have a fucking choice!
    Something inside me decides to stop shading in the rocks and put my drawing down instead. Butterfly had a jeans-pad but I’ve only got plain paper and a caterpillar book to rest it on and I’m trying to create something spectacular, not write horrible notes. And that’s what they’re talking about down there, her, her and me, her and me and Dad and what I did. I feel the hollowness rush inside me as I realize this because it is evidence of lies, more lies and yet more lies. He said it was over but he is still cross and he hasn’t stopped talking about it at all because he was lying .
    I close my bedroom door. Shutting hard is not the same as slamming.
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    Mum gives me my bath before she sets off for her night