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  It did not surprise Daniel that Ferris, an eight-year-old child, knew how to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre – he also knew how to defuse a thermo nuclear warhead and how to take off his pants without removing his trousers. What surprised him was that Ferris had chosen to save the life of Dorsal Grellman.

  *

  There are four hundred and ninety-three different Pokémon figurines and Ferris had every single one, in its original box. Each one was pristine, never played with and in that way, never understood. This was not a collection; it was something far, far worse. Daniel had never seen anything like Ferris’ bedroom but he had never seen anything like Ferris before so the bedroom was no real surprise.

  The removal of the father section from the structure once described as Ferris’ parents had left the remaining mother section cruelly exposed to the elements. Love, demonstrative affection, empathy, had all been his father’s department. His mother had supplied business integrity and financial acumen – not exactly essential parental attributes – and when his father died even these deserted her. She gave and she gave and yet Ferris received nothing and needed everything. She had become his almost-mother and the love she had once felt for her son had taken a one-way caravan holiday to Newquay.

  The sense of gratitude that she had felt towards Daniel – at last a child who would befriend the un-befriendable Ferris – was unbounded. Daniel was the torch-bearer in a home that had lost all sense of light, he was the four hundred and ninety-fourth Pokémon and she didn’t plan to let him leave anytime soon. If Daniel found the look of unabashed murderous hatred he saw every day in the eyes of his father, of his headmaster, of pretty much everyone he met, disconcerting, it was at least something he understood. The look of unfettered propriety in Ferris’ mother’s eyes was far more frightening.

  Daniel sat in the chair which Ferris and his mother had decorated for his first after-school visit. The legs and arms had been wrapped in silver foil and a red velvet curtain had been taken down from their lounge window and laid across the seat and chair back. To many it might have appeared to be a throne.

  Ferris was experiencing a level of karmic fulfilment hitherto attained only by Dalai Lamas. He had a friend in his bedroom perhaps not playing with, but certainly experiencing his toys and it had not, as yet, been necessary to physically restrain him in order to prevent him from leaving. He stared out of the window, his street had been daubed in vivid colours he had never witnessed before – the front door of the house opposite his, the white cat which lay sleeping on the car in his neighbour’s drive, the poplar tree, Dorsal Grellman, the daffodils growing in the window box of the…

  It occurred to Ferris that the view from his window now contained one Dorsal Grellman more than it had done hitherto and it was walking towards his front door.

  A few moments later, Ferris’ mother entered his bedroom ululating with emotion. Dorsal stood directly behind her. Daniel could not immediately see a weapon but that did not mean that there wasn’t one.

  ‘This is Dorsal,’ she rasped, ‘he says he’s your…’

  ‘Friend,’ said Dorsal, throwing her against the wall affectionately and entering the bedroom.

  ‘I’m their friend.’

  Chapter 21

  Ferris’ mother passed Daniel a plate piled high with giant home-made fairy cakes that had been dipped in hundreds and thousands. Daniel regarded them with abject horror before shaking his head. They were not intended to be inedible but since no one had ever eaten one, it was the same thing. It was Sunday teatime and Daniel had become a fixture in Ferris’ home. Provided he ate nothing, Daniel had found a place that was safe.

  ‘What was my father like?’ asked Ferris.

  Ferris’ mother regarded her son as if he was an alien who had spoken to her for the first time, in a language she had no hope of ever comprehending.

  ‘Your father was everything to you, he cooked every meal you ate, taught you to read and write, how to ride a bicycle, how to fly a kite. When you were ill, he was first with a diagnosis or solution, he tucked you into bed at night and took you to school in the morning. He was present during every one of your key developmental milestones, he held you when you cried, bathed you, dried you and taught you what he perceived to be the difference between wrong and not quite so wrong.’

  ‘And all of that was a good thing?’ asked Ferris.

  His mother picked up a fairy cake, it was the size of her fist. She raised her hand and dropped it onto the dining room table where it landed with a corpse-like thud. ‘Once you were born you became his alpha and his omega. He gave up his scientific research, he gave up his friends, he ceased to be a husband or a man, he was defined solely by paternity. Your father left no space for anyone else in his relationship with you and so when he decided to die four years ago, we were cut adrift. I supported you both and yet, because of him, I was no more relevant to you than the postman.’

  ‘You allowed him to do this,’ said Ferris, ‘you allowed yourself to become a margin – a footnote.’

  ‘It is never as simple as that, Ferris. You do not always know you have been defeated at the time that it happens. It’s often only in retrospect that you realise that you have been in a battle with winners and losers – that you have, somehow, been defeated.’

  ‘So how is it I have only a handful of memories of him, all of them negative?’ asked Ferris. ‘I need more, I have a right to have more.’

  ‘These are the vagaries of the wiring of the human brain, Ferris. We have no choice in what is indelible and what is erased. Even when we win the race it may only be the cold black metal of the starter’s pistol that we recall. Your father left us, he is still leaving us every day. He casts a shadow on our home that all the light in the world cannot illuminate. So you want to know what your father was like. He was a loving, caring, devoted and generous parent but more than that, more than anything and in perpetuity, he was an infamously pathetic shite-magnet.’

  Neither boy was fazed by this, they had heard worse, experienced worse on a daily basis.

  ‘My father hates me, he has been present at every important moment in my life to ensure that no one made it any more enjoyable than it needed to be,’ said Daniel.

  ‘I have spoken with your father,’ replied Ferris’ mother calmly, ‘he doesn’t hate you, he wants you dead, it’s not the same thing at all.’

  ‘How, how could you…’ said Daniel.

  ‘It was at one of Mr Bynes’ open evenings for parents who have a somewhat problematic, err, relationship with their…’

  ‘It’s for parents who want to kill their children,’ said Ferris.

  It was his mother’s turn to be shocked.

  ‘Don’t worry, I know it isn’t personal,’ said Ferris. ‘You have no idea what to do with me and you have been looking at your options.’

  ‘I have never actually contemplated, wouldn’t really have…’ struggled his mother.

  ‘Can I show you something?’ asked Ferris. ‘It might not make you proud exactly but it may suggest to you a number of ways in which I could be commercially exploited.’

  At last his mother smiled at him. He was playing her song.

  Chapter 22

  The attic room in Ferris’ home – what had been his father’s laboratory – was a maelstrom of rubber pipes, bunsen burners, petri dishes, centrifuges and cages containing assorted rodents. All of the interconnected tubing led to a single small glass tank in the centre of the room, which was sitting on heated pads.

  ‘Haven’t you wondered what I have been up to all these months in dad’s old laboratory and what I was doing with the animals you supplied me with?’ asked Ferris.

  ‘I hoped you were torturing them, I am sure they deserved it,’ replied Ferris’ mother.

  Ferris flicked on a central switch and the ceiling lights in the room pulsed. He walked over to the glass tank, disconnected it and handed it to his mother.

  ‘I have been working on this project for the last two years. There were a few sc
ientific and moral hurdles to overcome but last week this happened,’ said Ferris.

  His mother held the tank up to her eyes.

  ‘A goldfish happened?’ she asked.

  ‘Take a closer look,’ said Ferris.

  She looked into the tank again. There was a small amphibian creature swimming around it in cloudy water. It was not a creature she was familiar with.

  She looked up at Ferris and back to the creature. ‘You ought to change this water, it’s a bit cloudy.’

  ‘It’s amniotic fluid,’ explained Ferris. ‘Oppenheimer speculated that man was his own creator, that there was an incestuous synchronicity in evolution. The key to life itself has remained elusive, its pursuit anachronistic, some might say, perverse. But examining my father’s research into exogenesis it occurred to me that a common origin of everything, from blades of grass to imploding dwarf stars might dwell inside us all. I took some of the raw cellular material from the reproductive organs of rats, mice, birds and fish and compared it on a sub-molecular level with the stamen of flowers. I exposed them to extremes of temperature, to vacuums and controlled micro nuclear explosions and whilst I found some community in the structural displacement of the DNA there was nothing that resembled a baseline, particularly when compared with what we know about the formation of stars.

  ‘I was searching for Pandora’s box in a submicroscopic valley of the kings but the truth wasn’t hidden within the lungs of a Sphinx but inside a grain of sand. What lies within the phial that will unlock both a gas giant and a razorback clam? I challenged myself to find the least likely solution and by the purest chance, three months ago, it found me. There is a jewel chiselled from a single shard of antimatter. A piece of that jewel lies within everything. It was inside the car park that Daniel’s father made him descend, it is inside the lions that swim within your veins and it was inside this creature in this bowl when I made it.’

  Ferris’ mother replaced the tank carefully, put her arm around her son and squeezed him to her.

  ‘So, what you are trying to tell me, is that, at the age of eight, you have created life in our attic,’ she said, ‘and this is it?’

  She smiled broadly and kissed the moss patch of brown hair on top of his head. ‘No one is going to believe you.’

  ‘My father was a nuclear physicist, my mother is a research biochemist, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that…’

  ‘Oh, I think it is sunshine, there’s no fucking way that anyone is going to accept that you came up with the most important discovery in the history of the human race. You, a snot infested Star Wars-obsessed child who can barely reach the toilet flush.’

  Ferris was beginning to shake, tears were lipping over the floodgates of his eyes. ‘But Daniel knows – he knows…’

  ‘Daniel, is that it? It’s hardly corroboration by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg is it? I think the massed ranks of the world’s press and the Nobel Prize panel are going to need something a bit more substantial than the word of your rather pathetic friend here, as grateful as I am to him. No, I think it is fair to say that mummy is very clever and you are a very proud little man. Now sod off to your bedroom,’ she ushered Daniel and Ferris from the laboratory, ‘go play with Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo while I work out what to wear for my interview with the International Herald Tribune.’

  *

  An hour later, when the tears had finally subsided, Daniel sidled up to Ferris on his bed and offered him half of a Kit Kat.

  ‘We need to leave, you and I, leave here,’ said Ferris ‘we need to find somewhere that is ours. We aren’t needed here and we aren’t safe.’

  ‘I always thought you enjoyed adversity,’ said Daniel.

  ‘I enjoy attention,’ said Ferris ‘it’s just that it’s always associated with pain and disassociated with love.’

  ‘We can’t leave,’ said Daniel ‘not until this is over. If I am to become my parents as they became my grandparents, then I need to understand why.’

  Chapter 23

  The incident that led to M’s less than symbiotic relationship with food occurred on the day of his wedding to the woman who was to become Daniel’s mother.

  The logistics of arranging for the transportation of M’s mother-in-law in her bubble were complex enough, but the security required for his psychotically deviant American sperm donor father-in-law did rob the occasion of some of its romantic sparkle. Then there was the issue of Bernice, M’s mother. M was certain that the lack of any guests who were major characters from the world of science fiction would ensure that she did not feel compelled to off anyone before the best man’s speech, but she was still about as safe around the general public as a hand grenade without its pin.

  M had few other relatives to invite – there were of course apologies for the absence of his father – not surprising given that M believed he had executed him, Mafia-style, on the day of his twelfth birthday. M’s brother Clive and sister Bathsheba – or ‘uncle drunk’ and ‘auntie mad’ as they came to be known – were more than enough family for anyone.

  Since M and his fiancée had no room for friends or social graces within the imploding dwarf stars which masqueraded as their lives, it fell to Clive and Bathsheba to organise the wedding. They embarked on the project with great vigour, never previously having been entrusted with anything more demanding than wiping their own arses and within a week they had identified a venue.

  ‘It looks like the South Mimms service station at the intersection of the M25 and the M1 just north of Watford,’ said M, nervously thumbing through the photographs he had been supplied with.

  ‘It isn’t,’ replied Clive.

  ‘That’s good,’ replied M.

  ‘It’s the triangle of wasteland formed by the intersection of the two motorways, across the hard shoulder and crash barrier behind the service station,’ Clive explained.

  ‘I see,’ said M. He was shaking in the way that lions do before a kill – that ecstatic inner waltz in anticipation of an act of violence that is so pure, it is almost exotic. He knew that allowing his brother and sister (people he often hurt but would never harm) to assume the pivotal role in what would be an event of unparalleled importance in his life was essential if he was to avoid an overly punitive response to disappointment. M was like a blind man, but it was empathy rather than vision which he lacked. His brain had compensated for this deficit by developing an indiscriminate loathing for all of the human race

  ‘Why? asked M, his hands opening and closing as if he were a marionette in a livid puppet show.

  ‘I love cars,’ replied Bathsheba, earnestly. ‘Have you ever really looked at a spinning car tyre – they all resonate at different speeds, sending sparks into the air that are the colour of passion and treachery. They will lead a rainbow of sprites on a path over your heads as you give your vows and they will tie a web of golden jeopardy around your wrists which cannot be broken by the harlots of time.’

  ‘Although parking might be a bit of a problem,’ added Clive.

  M breathed through his nose. He wondered if his brother and sister’s heads would fit inside a vacuum cleaner.

  ‘As wonderful as this sounds,’ said M, ‘I was looking for something a little more…conventional.’

  ‘What if we chose a different stretch of motorway?’ asked Bathsheba, crestfallen.

  ‘No motorways, no cars, I want an ordinary building accessible by road with a nice garden, a decent bar and toilet facilities,’ said M.

  ‘Does such a place even exist?’ whispered Bathsheba as Clive led her away by her bejewelled arm. ‘I suppose it must,’ replied Clive in disbelief.

  *

  M’s bride to be sat on her bed, staring at her reflection in a mirror that had witnessed her face grow from tortured youth to bereft adulthood. It was her face that offered the context for change – the mirror remained the same – grey, opaque, kissed by the light from the window that was always just out of frame – as did her expression – loss, lost.


  She ran her fingers along the spine of her journal, hard, green, replete with years of awkward ruminations. She opened it at the latest entry, titled The 10 things I hate most about M.

  I believe he is planning to kill the President of the United States of America with an axe – a sharpened golf club would also do the job. This would have to be at close range. I have no evidence to corroborate this but he looks like the type who might.

  I have woken late at night to find him standing by the window in the nude. He has a diagonal scar from one side of his chest to the other – he runs his finger along its length as if it is a musical instrument. He will not tell me how it happened, only that the person who did it is dead and he killed him.

  I love him.

  He took me to Raynham Hall for my twenty-second birthday and he watched the staircase intently for nine hours in case we saw ‘a misty form.’ He did not go to the toilet. He did not buy a sandwich despite being offered one on three occasions by the woman from the British Legion. When he was asked to leave he demanded his money back and when the guide refused, M dragged him into the toilet and stuck his head down it until the man apologised for not providing a ghostly apparition. He did not wish me happy birthday. There was no cake. There were no balloons.

  Everything must be in fives. Five is very important to me. It is the number that stops the shouting when it is at its worst. M deliberately sorted everything in our bathroom into groups of four. In response to this I smashed him in the face repeatedly with a flowering cactus (Cumulopuntia Boliviana). This was not good for the cactus.

  He has told me that I am more of a prisoner than my mother who lives in a bubble. This is true but he has the key to my cell and he will never let me out.

  His favourite film is It’s a Wonderful Life. He has watched this film over 3000 times and he has made me watch it over 100 times. Each time he watches it he cries continuously and does not stop crying until he falls asleep snoring. He will not tell me why this is. Last night, we watched It’s a Wonderful Life twice and during the second viewing I recited the entire script along with the characters, assuming their voices. My Donna Reed and my Lionel Barrymore could do with some work, but I believe my impersonation of James Stewart is uncanny. M told me to stop and when I refused, he waited until the end of the film, kicked in the television and was sick down himself before falling asleep on the sofa. This is not the way I envisaged I would be spending the night before my wedding although it was fairly close to it.