What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(12)
“I saw all this light coming out from under that door,” Lucy said. “That was new.” She peered over Montse’s shoulder. “Swap you a rose for a book,” she said.
“sorry” doesn’t sweeten her tea
/
To you who eat a lot of rice because you are lonely
To you who sleep a lot because you are bored
To you who cry a lot because you are sad
I write this down.
Chew on your feelings that are cornered
Like you would chew on rice.
Anyway life is something that you need to digest.
—CHUN YANG HEE
Be good to Boudicca and Boudicca will be good to you,” Chedorlaomer said. Boudicca and I eyed each other through the blue-tinted glass of Ched’s fish tank, and I said: “Tell me what she is again?”
To the naked eye Boudicca is a haze of noxious green that lurks among fronds of seaweed looking exactly like the aftermath of a chemical spill. But Ched’s got this certificate that states Boudicca’s species is Betta splendens, colloquially known as Siamese fighting fish because fish of this kind have a way of instigating all-out brawls with their tank mates. It’s almost admirable. Boudicca doesn’t care how big or pretty her fellow fish are; if they come to her manor she will obliterate them, whether that means waiting until the other fish is asleep before she launches her attack or, in the case of a fish that simply refused to engage with her, eating the eggs that the other fish had spawned and then dancing around in the water while the bereaved mother was slain by grief.
So now Boudicca lives alone, which is exactly what she wanted all along.
I get this vibe that Ched the eternal bachelor sees Boudicca as a fish version of himself, but he’s never said that out loud, at least not to me. We don’t have those kinds of talks. Even if Ched and Boudicca are on some level the same person, the fact remains that the man is able to feed himself and the fish needs someone to see to her nutrition a couple of times a week.
Ched called me over to tell me he was going away for two years and he expected me to take care of Boudicca. Twice a week for two years! Plus Ched’s house is spooky. The House of Locks, it’s called. That’s the actual address: House of Locks, Ipswich, Suffolk. He travels a lot and I have his spare set of keys for use while on best friend duty, watering his house plants when he used to have house plants, collecting post, etc., but when I’m in there I don’t linger. Nothing has actually happened to me in there. Not yet, anyway. But every time I go into that bloody house there’s the risk of coming out crazy. Because of the doors. They don’t stay closed unless they’re locked. Once you’ve done that you hear sounds behind them; sounds that convince you you’ve locked someone in. But when you leave these doors unlocked they swing halfway out of the doorframe so that you can’t see all the way into the next room and it’s just as if somebody’s standing behind the door and holding it like that on purpose. The windows behave similarly—they won’t fully open unless you push them up slowly, with more firm intent than actual pressure. Only Ched really has the knack of it. Apparently the house’s first owner took a particular pleasure in fastening and releasing locks—the feel and the sound of the key turning until it finds the point at which the lock must yield. So for her the house was a lifetime’s worth of erotic titillation.
—
IT’S A NICE HOUSE for Ched too, in that it’s big and he got it on the cheap, and anyway he’s not really comfortable in overly normal situations. As it is he hears voices. Nobody else hears these voices but they’re not just in Ched’s head, you know? In this world there are voices without form; they sing and sing, as they have from the beginning and will continue until the end. Ched borrows their melodies: That’s the music part of the songs he writes. For words Ched uses rhymes from our village, the kind that nobody pays attention to anymore because they advocate living by a code that will surely make you one of life’s losers. A lot of stuff about living honestly and trying your best. Even if you only have one tiny job to do, do it well, do it well, do it well . . .
These songs of Ched’s turned out to be a hit with a lot of people outside our country. Ched got Internet famous and then magazine famous and all the other kinds of famous after that. It was fun to see. His mother still says to me: “But don’t you think people overreact to our Chedorlaomer? These girls screaming and fainting just because he looked at them or whatever. He’s just some boy from Bezin.”
That’s the power of those true voices, man.
And now that you know that Ched and I are from a small village that might make you say Oh OK, so that’s why this guy believes in voices he’s never heard. But trust, living in a small village in a country that’s not even sure it’s really a country you see a lot of shit that’s stranger than a shaman (which is what Ched is, or was, before he started making money from the voices). Every day there was news that made you say “Oh really.” Some new tax that only people with no money had to pay. Or yet another member of the county police force was found to have been an undercover gangster. If not that then a gang member was found to have been an undercover police officer. An Ottoman-style restaurant opened in a town nearby; it served no food but had a mineral water menu tens of pages long, and fashion models came to drink their way through it while we played football with their bodyguards. Speaking even more locally there was this one boy at our school who had quite a common first name and decided to fight every other boy in our postal code area for the right to be the sole bearer of that name—can you imagine? I was one of the boys on his hit list, and I was already getting picked on because I didn’t have a father. But what a ridiculous place we were born into, that fatherlessness was a reason why people would flick a boy’s forehead and say insulting things to him, then pile on four against one when he took offense . . . it’s not our fault we’re ridiculous people, Ched and me. How could we be anything else?