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.
I put on some gloves (fourteen pairs remaining) and squirted the top of my bookcase using some antibacterial spray I’d stolen from under the sink in the bathroom.
“Look at the state of Mr. Charles’s yard. I bet he’s really angry,” I said to the Wallpaper Lion as I cleaned.
It had only taken a day for the little kids to trash it; the once tidy lawn was littered with a freak rainfall of toys. Buckets, spades, an assortment of different-sized balls, plastic cars, three jump ropes, and a blue tartan picnic blanket covered the thick green grass. I picked up my notebook.
1:15 p.m.—Mr. Charles’s grandson, Teddy, is playing in the backyard. There’s no sign of his sister, Casey.
Using a stick, Teddy was poking at something in the flower bed. I squinted to try and get a closer look, then flinched when I saw what it was. It was a dead baby bird—the bald kind, with bulging, just-hatched eyes. He picked up a plastic orange spade from the grass and, dropping to his knees, wiggled the spade underneath the bird to scoop it up. I put my cleaning things down to watch.
It took Teddy a bit of effort to stand without dropping the bird, but he managed and quickly toddled off toward the pond. Stopping a good meter from the edge, he tossed the bird up, and it somersaulted over and over and then splashed, disappearing beneath the surface. There were a couple flashes of orange as Mr. Charles’s fish darted to the bottom. Teddy stood and watched the water for a bit, perhaps to see if the dead chick was going to float to the top, and then he went back to the flower bed and began to dig with the spade. I took out a book and began to wipe it as I kept an eye on the yard.
Casey appeared carrying a plastic bag and the porcelain doll she’d had with her when she’d arrived. Teddy skipped over to her.
“Casey! Casey! Bird dead!”
Acting like he was invisible, she pulled the tartan picnic blanket toward some shade as Teddy danced around her.
“Bird, Casey! Dead!” He shouted the word as if that would make her understand him. I guessed he regretted throwing it into the pond now; he could have shown her first.
“Go away,” Casey said, placing the pale-faced doll in the center of the blanket, stretching its legs so that it wouldn’t topple over. She tipped the plastic bag upside down, and an assortment of ribbons, brushes, and hair clips rainbowed onto the blanket.
“Casey. It dead! It DEAD, Casey!”
Teddy ran to the pond. He pointed at the water as he jiggled around on the spot. Casey watched him for a moment before sorting through the hair accessories, lining up the various brushes and combs and winding the ribbons into curls. Teddy wandered back and sat next to his sister. He picked up a purple brush and attempted to run it through his blond hair, but he got the angle wrong and it scratched down the front of his face.