Veiled in Grey.

So. I know you probably have better things to do but… if you listen for a while, I mean, what, five minutes, I bet you won’t regret it. Okay, so, that’s a lie. You’ll probably feel like you’ve wasted a small chunk of your life but– wait! Wait, really, please! Just listen. Five minutes. If I’m not done and you don’t want to hear the end then you can just, you can just leave. But… come on. Five minutes?

So. When I was a kid I didn’t have any parents, so I used to grow up in an orphanage. I mean, not used to, I did grow up in an orphanage. It wasn’t a big orphanage, more like a crowded foster family. There were eight of us. There used to be nine but… these things happen, yeah? So there was the eight of us. There were the Twins – who weren’t actually twins, they weren’t even related, but they looked a lot alike and they had the same name and they were the best, most inseperable friends ever. Then there was Don, who was the oldest, but no one liked him, so no one would listen to him. After Don there was me, and even though I was two years younger I was still sort of in charge. Penny was a year younger than me, but she was gunning for top dog, don’t doubt it. Then there were the Twins, both of them called James, and Rod(ney) was the youngest. There were three others; Hannah, Thomas and Elizabeth, but they were all under three, so we didn’t spend much time with them except when we had to.

Yeah, yeah, I’m getting to the point. Sorry.

There was this perpetual construction site next to the orphanage where we lived. Some company had bought the land and they were building a shop or something there, except they kept having fights with the building companies, I guess, because it never got far in construction. I went back a few years ago and it’s just an empty plot of land now. Then again, so’s the orphanage. I think they’re gonna build flats there… these things happen, yeah?

We used to play at the construction site, when they had it closed down and there was no work being done. We weren’t supposed to, of course, except that the old lady in charge of the orphanage was really old and drank constantly and could never leave her house, which is I think why she opened up the building in the first place – ‘cause she was too old to get around and do things herself now. You can sort of tell, because the orphanage was actually just this small house and the eight of us all slept in the same room. We didn’t mind. We liked it this way. You always knew where someone was when you needed them.

So’s even though the construction site was forbidden we all used to go over there. Well, not all of us – Don didn’t, ‘cause like I said none of us liked him. He was really dull and never really spoke to us. He just read a lot and did schoolwork and stuff for fun. And the babes never came, of course, because we were smart enough to know that that stuff would be way too dangerous. So it was me, Penny, the Twins and Rod, all playing around on the construction site. It wasn’t really that interesting, there wasn’t much to do except climb on the scaffolding and dick around with the equipment, but it was made fun in the same way anything is – ‘cause we weren’t supposed to be there. Same reason the teenagers in the area used to hang around the construction site to smoke and drink. It wasn’t allowed.

Penny was… back then I hated her. She was loud and bossy and annoying, and even though in the end she’d usually listen to me, she wasn’t like the others. She’d make fun of me and stuff. I really hated her. But now-days I realise that she was probably even lonelier than Don. I’d seen her with the babes, taking care of them. She’d be really quiet and gentle. She was the only girl out of us – I guess she felt like she had to keep up with us or something. Maybe if I knew the stuff back then that I know now-days I would have told her that she didn’t have to. That we wouldn’t have thought less of her. Except that, yeah, I know it’s low, but we probably would have thought less of her. The only reason I let her hang around with us was because she did her best to act like us, like boys. Maybe if things had been different, if there had been nine instead of eight, or if we hadn’t been such blokes, things would have turned out different for her. The way she was with the babies, when she didn’t think I was watching – she would have made a great mum. She would have. Still though, these things happen, yeah?

Rod was sort of the same. He was the youngest, so he had to work to keep up with us. Penny was always really hard on him, really mean, but I guess she hoped it would stop us from realising she was a girl. I tried to go easier on him, but I guess not easy enough. It wasn’t just that he was young – he was always a bit of a wuss. Fragile, Don said once. Big blue eyes and pale skin that burnt too easy, skinny arms, shaking all the time… yeah, he was pretty fragile. But you don’t see these things when you’re a kid. You don’t notice them. You don’t see a kid who probably shouldn’t be running around in a pit of rocks and broken glass and sharp and heavy tools and unstable scaffolding. You see a little wuss who can’t keep up with the big boys. Look, it’s not like I’m trying to excuse myself or anything, I just… just trying to say things how I think them.

So we had this game, coming back into the house. Her little house, the old lady’s I mean, it was on the second floor. There was this family living below us – mum and dad, five girls. The oldest girl was really wild. She and her mum used to have these screaming fits. This girl, she was a year younger than Don. I used to be pretty sweet on her. She would sometimes talk to Penny, which I think was good for her. Penny I mean. House full of boys… look, I’m not being sexist or anything, but the only real girl in a house full of boys would be lonely, right? But yeah, this girl, she was a bit of a nutter. Wild.

So. Yeah, well, we had this game. The stairs onto the second floor, where we lived, this little orphanage, they were really old. They used to creak, no matter how carefully you tried to climb them. I think maybe the old lady had them tuned or something, because they creaked really badly, really loud. That way she’d always know if someone was sneaking out – or back in. We figured out how to climb out one of the bedroom windows, but it was sort of a one-way thing. Except we figured out if we all formed this sort of ladder, Rod could get back through the window, and he’d go down and open the door, say he heard someone knocking. We’d see if we could all walk in time back up the stairs, making the creaks at the same time, try to fool the old lady. It was stupid, never worked. She always caught us and even though she was too old to ever leave the house much, she wasn’t too old to skin us with her dead husband’s belt. I used to get it really bad, because I was the second oldest, and I used to howl and cry and scream at her.

She’d whip Don too, because he was the oldest, so apparently he was supposed to control us. The rest of us would howl and stamp around for ages, really playing it out, but Don would just stand there while she tore the skin off his back, his calves, his forearms, where ever, and he wouldn’t say anything. His face wouldn’t even twitch. And then he’d apologise to her and say he’d keep a better eye on us and go back to whatever it was he did. She’d give him a boiled sweet afterwards, maybe because she sort of knew it wasn’t his fault and she felt guilty, but she’d say it was because he took the beating like a man, which just made the rest of us hate him more. Sometimes she gave one to Rod, because she could see like Don could that he wasn’t like us, and he wasn’t really putting on the show like we were. She’d sneak it to him and make him promise he wouldn’t tell the rest of us, and he’d promise.

Except he’d always come up to me afterwards and wordlessly slip the sweet into my hand and smile, with his eyes huge and pleading and desperate, and I’d always snatch it off him and I’d hit him over the head and that was that. Yeah, so, I guess I was a little bastard back then. Some things never change.

I just remember this one day we were playing the game, and it was… Jesus, it was perfect. Like God was looking down on us and saying, what the Hell, why not? Except then the girl below us, she and her mum were having this big row and she suddenly storms out of the house, still screaming, with her mum chucking things after her and screaming back, and then her mum just slams the door behind her. Usually this girl – I can’t even remember he name, to be honest – usually she’s pretty sweet to us. But I guess she was in a foul mood or something that day, because she takes one look at us through the open door, creeping up the creaking stairway, and she just screams at us, “Why don’t you just stay out of the fucking construction site?”

We all just stare after her as she storms off, and there’s this stamping above and the old woman appears at the top of the stairs and she’s pissed. We knew what was coming, so we all just turn and run back down the stairs, bolting out of the house. We run down the street and we run until Rod says he can’t anymore, so we start walking instead, but fast, until we reach a park, and Rod is crying and saying his chest hurts. I tell him to suck it up and to stop being a nancy, but he just cries harder, so we stop and rest.

The girl, the one that lives below us, she’s there. She’s smoking and she’s drinking a beer and she looks at us and gives this twisting smile. She’s sitting on a park bench, covered in pigeon shit, and she just motions to the empty space beside her. One of the James’s tells her to fuck off, and he and the other one go to play on the old swings. Rod goes with them, and he does look like shit so I sort of felt bad. But then it’s just me and Penny and this girl.

“You wanna smoke?” She had asked me, the cigarette she’s smoking shaking between her fingers. She’s got make up like a whore, smeared on all thick, with too much around the eyes that make it look like someone’s punched her up. But it suits her, makes her look real pretty. And I nod, because by then I was bumming smokes off the other teenagers in the neighbourhood and I was conning the younger kids out of their money to buy my own.

She hands me a cigarette and offers them to Penny, but Penny just shakes her head and we sit down next to this girl.

“No hard feelings about before, hey?” She says, and she takes a drag of her cigarette.

“Nah.” I say, even though I’m still sort of bitter, because like I said I was sort of sweet on her. She smiles at me, all bitter and crude, like she knows I’m lying and she knows why I’m lying. But she just lit my cigarette and the three of us just sat there.

“What’s your mum pissed about?” I finally asked, because I always hated silences, and the girl gives me that twisting smile and she pokes out her tongue. And she’d gotten it pierced, you know, which was why her mum was so pissed at her this time.

Penny just asks her, “Won’t it get infected if you smoke?”

And I got all angry and embarrassed and told her to just fuck off. The girl just laughs though, and she took a swig of her beer and she tells Penny to fuck off too. So then it was just me and this girl and she’s starts telling me she knows that I like her, and then, I dunno, we just sort of started kissing. She tasted foul and bitter, cigarette ash and beer, and it was probably one of the worst experiences of my life. Except it was also my first kiss and I liked this girl enough that I managed to convince myself at the time that it was brilliant.

So. I remember we spent the afternoon there, me and that girl sucking face while Penny watched Rod and the Twins. When we finally got back the old woman was tired and looked pretty scared. Apparently she spent an hour alone because Don had gone out in the morning and wasn’t back, and she had gotten paranoid that she would fall over and break her leg.

Don… yeah, I remember now. He’d been going off some secret place a lot lately, and we all used to speculate what. Penny said he’d found a girl, and even though he was easily old enough it still seemed unlikely – he was so damn dull, so damn quiet. The thought of him with a girl made me angry, to be honest. As in, why him? Except that afternoon I didn’t care so much. Not after what I’d been doing.

So the old woman, she whipped us all worse than she’d ever whipped us before, and Rod was so sore over it he didn’t leave the house again for a week. We all used to call him names, hit him, badger him, but I felt pretty bad. Because the thing was, we had just left the old lady alone, and what if something had happened? She wasn’t so bad. Always fed us, kept our clothing stitched up, and when we sometimes hurt ourselves out at the construction site she’d just stitch us up and let us off with just a smack. Sometimes, if it was really bad, she’d give us a boiled sweet. Yeah, she wasn’t so bad. So what if something had happened to her?

But after that afternoon we didn’t see the girl downstairs anymore. A week afterwards her mum threw her out, told her to never come back. She never did. Last I heard, she had a kid. But that was years ago now. Years ago. You hear things though. That girl, she was the oldest of five, yeah? The other four, we didn’t see them too much. But whenever we did they were real quiet. Real young too, the oldest younger than the Twins. Actually, I don’t think I ever heard them. I thought they were weird, but not surprising considering their sister was a nutter, right? Turns out, though, right, turns out their dad was this violent sex offender, right? He used to rape their mum and beat the crap out of the oldest girl, which was what was with all the make up. I don’t know what he used to do to those four others, but I feel bad about it now. I used to say some mean things to them, whenever I saw them. Give them shit about being so quiet. These things happen though, right?

But after that there was no more girl downstairs, and it was always real quiet. Didn’t feel right. Things kept changing after that too. I didn’t want it to, didn’t like it. Like Don; he was almost old enough to leave. We all knew he was going to too. He said so, once. As soon as he was old enough he was going to leave and never look back.

And there was Rod. He didn’t ever get over that bad whipping from the old lady. He was even more timid, more scared. So we all gave him more shit, of course, which probably was a mistake. Everyone could feel things changing, and we didn’t know that we liked it.

The worst thing – or maybe just the strangest thing – that happened was when I found out what Don was getting up to. It was an accident and it was probably the only thing in my childhood, apart from what happened later, that I ever felt really guilty about. I walked in on him, see, and there was this other guy… but you didn’t do that sort of thing, back then. Stuff like that could really ruin your life, if it got out. It didn’t matter thought. I was old, but I guess not old enough to get what I’d seen. Don got pissed, and real scared, and it was one the most powerful displays of emotion I’d ever seen in him. He just screamed, and the other boy, he bolted, and Don picked up this rock, because they were doing it in the park, hidden away. But Don picked up this huge rock and he just threw it at me, and I ran for it but it hit me in the back and I fell.

Don jumped on me, and he rolled me over onto my back and he just started hitting me, calling me these things. And then he said not to tell anyone or else. He said not to tell anyone or he’d kill me. And I think maybe I had been crying, not because I was hurt or scared, but because I was so confused, and sort of angry that he’d think I would. And I told him not to be such a fucking moron, and that of course I wouldn’t tell anyone, that we were family. Yeah, I called him family, and it must have been the first time I’d ever really done that. And he sort of just… just stared at me, like he didn’t really know what to do. So he just sort of said, yeah, right, okay, and he got up and walked off. We never spoke about that afternoon again.

It sort of made me think though. What I’d said to Don about us being family. Because we were family, really. The nine of us – us kids and the old woman. No one came to the orphanage to adopt, even though it was all legit and legal, so it was always going to be us. We were the last, because she was getting too old to take any more kids. But it was weird to know that, consciously, that we really were family.

But Don was the oldest, so we all thought he’d be the first to leave. We all thought, but it was Rod that left first. But not like he was supposed to. After that it was Penny, and then the whole family was falling apart. Just when I realised they were my family, they came apart at the edges, and I didn’t have one anymore.

Rod was always weak. Fragile, Don had called him at the service. I was two years younger than Don, but I was still the leader, still in charge. They all listened to me – even Penny, though it took her a while. Even Don did, a little, after that afternoon. I was the leader, and I should have been watching Rod, except I wasn’t, I was watching out for myself. Because we were playing the game, the creaky stair game, and Rod was sneaking down to unlock the door, but he slipped and fell and he broke his neck. Just like that. Quick and sudden and quiet. People shouldn’t die like that, I think. They should go kicking and screaming, real loud, so everyone sees them. So everyone knows. Not as a kid, just old enough to play in the construction site with the others. Not still growing. A quiet tumble, a silent thump, and then you don’t exist anymore.

She didn’t hit the others. She whipped me raw, all down my back, and I didn’t stop bleeding. It was worse than every other time, even when we ran off to the park. But it was the only whipping I’d ever taken silently. I didn’t cry, I didn’t howl, I didn’t stomp and whinge. I stood there and took it, and my face didn’t flinch, and when she stopped I couldn’t feel the pain in my back because the pain in my chest hurt even worse. That was the worst moment of my life. Not the service, or when I realised Rod was dead, or when the old lady died. The moment she stopped that whipping after Don had to let us in. The moment when all that pain in my back was tiny and incomparable to the hurt I was feeling because what happened to Rod was my fault. And it’s really awful to know something like that.

The old woman had a drinking problem, and one morning I woke up, walked out and found her dead with a glass of whiskey in one hand. I just looked at her, still sort of numb, and thought, fuck. And that was it. That was the real moment my family fell apart. Because without Rod, his big blue eyes and pale skin that burnt too easy, and without the old lady, who took us in only ‘cause she was too old to leave the house, and always gave us whippings and used to sneak Rod boiled sweets, without them the family was always gonna fall apart. I got Don, because even though I was the leader, he was still two years older and since that afternoon I didn’t mind him so much. He wasn’t so boring anymore. He just looked at the old woman and he sat down and cried. I didn’t really know what to do. I hadn’t cried – not even at Rod’s service. I had hoped Don would tell me what to do. So instead I got Penny, and she started to cry too, so I got a sheet and I put it over the old lady and Don said that was right.

Rod got buried, with a tombstone and everything, because the old lady had said he was worth it. We didn’t have enough money to bury her, though, so we cremated her at the construction site next door and we got as much of her ashes as we could and we put them in a casserole dish because we couldn’t find anything better. Don said he’d take care of us, but his voice was sort of desperate and hollow, and no one believed him. Not really.

Then Penny left, and the Twins, who had gotten real quiet and only spoke to each other, left with her. It was probably better that way anyway. So it was just me, Don and the babies. Don got a job and so did I, but we knew it wouldn’t work so in the end we left the babies at the door of a real orphanage, and I felt sad because they probably wouldn’t remember their family. They’d think their birth parents would have left them there, the three of them, but they wouldn’t think that maybe they’d have had a different family.

So then it was just me and Don. The house had always been real small, and a lot of us had had to share beds, but we’d never minded. Now the house was real big and empty, and the old woman smell we’d never really noticed before was really heavy now, making it hard to breathe. Me and Don had pushed all the beds together into the centre of the room, and we had our things packed, and we knew we would probably never see each other again. So we lay together in that huge bed we made, and even though I’d seen what he’d been doing with that other boy in the park, I didn’t really feel scared or awkward to lie next to him that night. He was family after all.

“Hey, Nick.” I remember him whispering to me in the dark.

“Hey, Don.” I whispered back. And he kissed my forehead and I could see enough in the dark now to know that he was smiling. And then he told me not to be so bloody cheeky. I never really liked Don, but right there I felt closer to him than I had any human being before or since. It was the first time I remember crying, because I was finally realising that I was losing the my family, my whole family, and it wasn’t really fair, because I’d already lost one family and you shouldn’t be allowed to lose two. Not like this, anyway. Piece by piece, so out of your control, all slow like.

“Don’t be such a wuss.” He whispered to me in the dark, even though he had cried when the old woman had died. But I could see he was crying then, in the dark. So I crawled off the beds and I snuck into the old lady’s room, Don behind me. I’d never been in her room before – no one was ever allowed. No one had been in since she’d died. But I tore it apart, opening the wardrobe and the drawers of her dresser and everywhere, and Don looked confused but he just stood in the doorway, afraid to enter her room, afraid to stop me.

And I found it on top of her wardrobe. The jar of boiled sweets. And I grabbed Don’s hand and I grabbed the old lady’s ashes in the casserole dish and I ran out of the house, down the creaky stairway where Rod had died. Don didn’t know what I was doing but he wasn’t stopping me, because maybe he had an idea. And then he realised where I was running and he started running faster next to me, and faster still until I was running after him, and we were screaming, even though it was the middle of the night, running barefoot in our sleeping clothes down the street. It was the first time I had felt anything other than hollow fear since the old lady had died, this moment of just me and Don running down the street, screaming our voices away, until we reached the cemetery where Rod had been buried. Don climbed the fence and I passed the jar and the old lady through to him and then climbed over to join him. It was easy to find Rod’s grave, even in the dark, because we’d gone this way so many times before. Me and Penny and the Twins and Rod had snuck into the cemetery at night loads of times before. And there was Rod’s grave, next to my baby sister, who’d died a week after we had first arrived. The old lady had had the kid for a week and she still got her a grave and a tombstone, and this tiny little coffin, because she’d said she’d deserved it. Just like Rod had.

“Children don’t deserve to die. But if they do, they deserve to at least leave something behind.”

That was real good of her to say, when she had died. It was real good of her to give my sister a stone, even though she was so young and she didn’t know her. She was always real good, even though she didn’t have to be. It was thoughts like these that ended up with me and Don standing at Rod’s grave, next to my sister, and we were both talking at the same time so it didn’t really matter what we were saying, but we both finished at the same time. And together we tipped her ashes out of the casserole dish and over the grave, and I promised her that I’d get enough money so that she’d have a proper grave too, even if we didn’t have anything to put it in anymore. And then I grabbed a handful of the boiled sweets and gave them to Don, and I poured the rest of them over Rod’s grave. I still remember the shy smile he used to give me whenever he gave me his boiled sweets. I wish I’d gotten a chance to tell him that he was family. I wish I’d gotten a chance to tell him to enjoy his sweet, that it was his. But then, these things happen, yeah?

The next morning Don was gone, and I never saw him again.

I never saw any of them again, none of my family. But things weren’t so bad. I made sure I always went to the cemetery, in the middle of the night, and I would always bring boiled sweets. I was never really big on bringing the flowers and gifts and talking to the headstones, not really that sentimental. But the boiled sweets were sort of for me, and maybe hoping that maybe some kid would find them, visiting his own dead friends, and he might share them with his older brother. I just hope his brother doesn’t take them and hit the kid. I hope the kid gives a shy smile and his brother smiles back and they share them. But probably not.

Except I haven’t visited the cemetery, or that town in fact, in years. Last time I did there were three graves, instead of two. It was one of the James’s. It was the last time I went there… but these things happen, yeah? There are probably more now. Four or six or eight. Maybe they’re all there now, all my family, except me. Doesn’t matter. I’m not going back. Not til the old lady has her stone. And maybe not after that either.

Well, that’s it. Sorry to keep you waiting around, wasting your life like that. You stuck around, even though it took longer than five minutes, thanks for that. It ain’t much, but you can have this. Buy yourself a boiled sweet, yeah? Or use it to buy a cigarette off a teenager, maybe. Who cares, really?

You can go now.