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“I’m sorry Officer, I don’t know what’s got into him.”
Nothing. Nothing’s got into him. Nothing’s got into him and nothing’s in him at all, not since he vomited cornflakes into the police station flowerbed.
“Don’t apologise, Mrs Sims,” the detective smiles tightly. “We’re well aware of the difficulties of using child witnesses. We’re used to teasing out metaphors and analogies. Small brains aren’t always equipped for big truths.”
Jon tenses and scowls at “small brains.” His grandmother barks a laugh and nudges him.
“If he were feeling more communicative, you’d be regretting ‘small brains.’ That’s the problem, really. Jon is a lot of things, but small brained, he is not. A liar he is certainly not. Nor is he one to analogise. I can’t fathom where this nonsense about spiders might have come from.”
He tightens his grip on the teddy bear he was given in the waiting room. A loose thread dangles from one of its paws, like a spider’s leg. It only has one eye, and it is dull and unseeing. Of course it is, it’s made of plastic. Plastic doesn’t live. Eyes only see if they’re connected to a brain, to a head, to a body, to a –
No
No
ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodoh –
***
She’s certain, she tells them, and the detective agrees. The doctors switch focus to the detective, in all her objectivity, while Mrs Sims stands vigil over the strange child she loves but cannot bring herself to like, who has become all at once stranger.
He’s silent now, after so many hours of screaming, after more sedatives than you’d expect to see pumped into a racehorse, let alone an eight-year-old. She takes him in, the bald patches from where he’d ripped chunks of hair out, begging it to stop, stop, stop. He was sorry, sorry, sorry. What had he done, done, done.
She’s certain. When he’d entered the police station that morning, he had not had any of the perplexing injuries that now littered his body and looked old as stone. Not the snaking burn on his hand, nor the smattering of round silvery scars, nor the slashes on his neck and shoulders. Definitely not the angry gash down the centre of his chest. She cannot be certain certain that he was born with the standard number of ribs, but was certain that the contrary had never come up.
Jon’s tiny body had been unmarred until he had given his statement, and collapsed writhing to the floor, screaming the bloody murders of a thousand collapsed universes.
What an awful fuss, Mrs Sims thinks absently as her grandson shifts in his induced sleep. What an awful, awful fuss.
***
An Uncomprehensive List of Things Said to Psychiatrists, by Jonathan Sims, Between The Ages of 9 and 15
- You won’t believe me.
- You won’t believe me.
- You won’t believe me.
- I don’t want to talk about it.
- You won’t believe me.
- worms clowns spiders wax burning hunting eyes eyes eyes spiders spiders spiders blood darkness not them not them the end extinction smoke ash hurt desolation me me me dust loss plastic hands all slimy and cold spiders eyes coffin buried alive buried alive deception knives ghosts bullets bones spiders eyes spiders eyes me
- me
- him
- me
- I told you you wouldn’t believe me.
- No I don’t want them.
- They make me sick and slow.
- I DON’T WANT THEM.
- Can I go home please.
- No not there.
- The place with the cows.
- Where is he.
- Where have you taken him.
- WHERE HAVE YOU -
- I feel sick.
- I feel sick.
- I’m going to be sick.
- I told you I was going to be sick.
- Please no more.
- I think you’re right.
- Yes, the brain is an extraordinary thing.
- Yes, I was very young.
- Yes, I was probably traumatised.
- Yes, I think so too.
- Thank you for your time.
- I wish you’d believed me.
- But thank you for your time.
***
There’s a new hire in Research. He’s small, and that is the word. He isn’t short, or squat – scrawny is closer to the mark but implies a sort of wiry lopsidedness that doesn’t fit right. He’s just small, like if you took an average sized person and scaled them down. He walks with a cane and keeps his head lowered. He wears some sort of brace or glove on his right hand. Silvery marks pepper his neck and jaw. He doesn’t seem to talk much.
“I’ve got a name,” Sasha reports, perching on the side of Tim’s desk. She’s just back from a coffee-machine gossip with Rachel, who had been ignored by the new hire in favour of staring at his shoes. “Jonathan.”
“Compensating for size with syllables, classic move.” Tim peers around her to mentally affix the name to the hunched figure curled into the corner desk. “Word of advice, avoid at all costs a one-night stand with an un-shortened ‘Bartholemew.’”
“He might be a Jon,” Sasha shrugs, engaging the selective hearing necessary for friendship with Tim, “Or a Jonny.”
“Nah, that’s a Jonathan. Look at that scowl. Imagine that scowl saying,” (Tim has decided that Jonathan has an RP accent), “‘My mother gave me a perfectly good name, now why would I want to mangle it?’”
“Can’t imagine it, actually,” she glances over her shoulder, she hopes a little more subtly than Tim. “He looks a bit too skittish to be haughty. If he was against shortening, it’d be because he’s scared of it biting him in revenge.”
“His name?”
“Yeah. Getting mad at having its tail chopped off,” Sasha makes an illustrative snarling noise as she rips into her croissant with her teeth.
Tim huffs a laugh.
“Are we inviting him to Friday drinks then?” She ignores Tim rising in his seat to take a bite of her croissant. She learnt long ago to stash secret croissants in her desk drawer.
“I think so. Best that happens, new friend. Worst, anecdote.” He waves his hand in the air, “Something, something, serial killer, something.”
“Something, something, serial killer, something,” Sasha replies solemnly. “I don’t think so, do you?”
“It’s the quiet ones,” Tim shrugs, then smiles.
“I’m going to strike while the iron’s hot,” Sasha declares, uncrossing her legs and brushing crumbs off her skirt. “You owe me tenner if he’s a Jon.”
“Deal.”
Jonathan is absorbed in something dense looking as she approaches, nose only inches from the thick tome on his desk. There’s a chewed pen to the right of it and he’s twisting a rubber band around the fingers and thumb of his left hand, the right clamped between his knees.
“Hi Jonathan,” Sasha says, bright with an edge of caution and just enough question peppered into the tone for him to correct her if Rachel had given her misinformation.
He startles a little, rubber band twanging off his thumb at the same time as his head snaps up. He tucks it away in his palm quickly. Then he smiles – small, coiled and a little unsure.
“Hello. Can I help you?”
Dammit, Tim was right. BBC One voice. Soft though.
“Just checking in, really. How are you finding the new job. Made any friends?”
He blinks, as though expecting a different answer. His gaze drifts to just left of her head, but settles somewhere around pleasantly surprised.
“It’s good, thank you. I’m… it suits me. I like to have something to get stuck into.”
She takes this in along with the chewed pen and the lack of eye contact, and nods, smiling.
“I concur. Getting paid to fixate, which I am perfectly capable of doing in my bedroom at 3am, with far fewer resources.” (There was a space in that sentence where the word “legal” would have sat rather comfortably.)
Jonathan makes a sound that might be a laugh’s socially awkward distant cousin. “Exactly.” Tentatively, the rubber band starts moving again, like he’s been given permission.
“And the friends thing?”
“Not really been much opportunity for that,” he says, returning his gaze to the words in front of him. The look is almost imploring - like they might offer him yearned-for companionship.
“Shame,” she says sympathetically. Then, she sticks her hand under his nose. “Sasha James. Opportunity.”
He stares at the hand in confusion for a moment, then raises his own, eyebrows rising in tandem. His grip when he shakes it is firmer than Sasha had expected, some strange shadow of authority lingering in the intention. She can see shiny discolouration on his skin, poking out from under the brace. She tells herself not to be nosy.
“Jon Sims,” he says. And then quieter, “Grateful.”
She laughs, perhaps more emphatically than she needs to – lightened by the money she’s just earned.
“Me and Tim,” she signals over her shoulder and Tim manages to wave appropriately without looking up from his computer, “Go for drinks on Friday nights. Well, me and Tim are the skeleton crew who go for drinks on Friday nights, anyway. Open invitation, but other people appear to have lives or something.”
“Open invitation, including…”
“The new kid, yes. We meet in the break room at 5:15 then get the tube. You are very, explicitly, unambiguously welcome to join us.”
“That’s very kind of you. I…” he takes a moment, and it almost looks like he’s squashing something down his throat. A little of whatever it was crawls back up, and tinges his words a regretful colour that doesn’t quite match the content. “I think I’d like that.”
“Great!” she makes a show of looking at her watch, “Right, suppose I best do some work, in my job, which I am paid for.”
“I think that tends to be the idea,” Jon smiles, then it falters. “Just…”
The rubber band has grown tighter around his fingers. Sasha frowns.
“Alright?” she asks tentatively.
He nods and keeps nodding, but it gets slower and slower.
“Sasha. You said your name was Sasha.”
“Yeah.”
He sucks in a breath through his teeth, then a tiny cough sounds at the back of his throat. He seems to shake himself off, then his face settles back into that small half-smile – marginally less coiled than before perhaps.
“Okay. Something just… yes, okay.”
“Okay.” She makes the executive decision to ignore whatever happened there. Temporarily at least. “Enjoy your great big boring book.”
“I will,” he says seriously.
Sasha turns and returns to Tim, rubbing her fingers with her thumb and singing “Money Money Money” by Abba.
***
It takes a pint-and-a-third for Jon Sims to stop looking like he’s vaguely scared that something is going to jump out at him. He uncoils and stops bouncing his leg, and reduces his anxious glances at the door from every thirty seconds, to every five minutes. Another third of the pint and Tim somehow manages to get him into an impassioned rant about Greek mythology, which has his soft consonants turning sharp and his skittish gaze narrowing into a laser. When he and his tipsy feet leave for the loo, Tim and Sasha share a high five, as well as the last chicken dipper.
It appears that between a pint-and-a-third and a pint-and-two-thirds is the sweet spot of interaction for Jon. By the time he’s drained his glass, he’s gone quiet again. Tim and Sasha have more than enough gossip to fill the silence – Sonia’s threatening divorce again, Olivia’s rich daddy has been caught embezzling, the tea bags in the office have quietly been changed from PG Tips to Co-Op’s own – and they amicably allow Jon to sink back into the background buzz of the pub.
Just as Sasha is about to suggest calling it a night, she notices that Jon is looking at her, with a very strange expression on his face. He’s looking at her like she’s giving him a headache. Not in a rude way, not like he’s irritated by her. More like he’s cross-legged on the floor, twisting the dial on an ancient television set and trying to get it to focus. Like he’s peering at her through buzzing static.
There’s a rational explanation of course. Perhaps they’d met before once, fleetingly, and Jon was trying to remember where and when. Perhaps she reminded him of someone. Perhaps it was just another of his quirks, laid bare by alcohol.
So why did it feel like he was squinting at her through a gauze only he could see?
***
In his second year of university, Jon had been hit by a car. Mid-December, the driver had skidded on a patch of ice in the dark, swung out to the right, and left him a sprawled bag of bones on the pavement. This wasn’t what had done his leg in, it had been weak since… yes, but it was what had progressed lumbering gait to cane user.
He shouldn’t have been out in the dark.
It was easier to do the grocery shopping in the dark, with fewer people out to stick their elbows into him and make their incessant buzzing noises, but still, he should know better.
In fact, the real problem was that he should have been able to suck it up in the first place – hardly an apocalyptic hellscape, Tesco at 11am.
And because he couldn’t manage that, now Georgie was having to bring him food and count his meds and drag him to the loo and help him wash on top of all the normal putting up with him she had to do and –
“Jon, just stop it, stop this.” Georgie screwed up her face and buried her hands in her hair. Her voice came out sandpapered. “You’ve got to stop this, Jon. You can’t keep reframing everything bad that happens to you as penance for the ways you don’t think you fit right in the world. If you keep telling people with this much conviction that you deserve everything that comes to you, they’re going to start believing it. And not everyone’s stupid enough like me, to love you enough to stay anyway.”
She both understood and didn’t.
She understood that real world traumas - with shape and substance and sound and screeching tires and screams - were comforting to Jon, who had spent his life stumbling through the fog of something erased by drugs and denial, that he never got the full shape of in the first place.
What she didn’t understand was that the real-world traumas were not something for him to hang his guilt from. That would require him to be separate from it.
He was the thing that hung.
And if he let go, he would fall.
His head swims as he remembers and lives these truths, trying to reason why it feels as though if he can reach through the hailstorm around Sasha and catch hold of her, he might find some kind of answer.
To a question he doesn’t have the shape of, to a something that was cut out of him, to a nothing in the bones of him.
***
Jon joins the Friday drinks skeleton crew. In between, a friendship begins to rear its head.
Jon is revealed to be a man of consistency. On much, he is unyielding, stubborn and abrasive. He fixates and commits and competes and does things properly. Case in point – a breakroom game of Dobble on one of the rare occasions when Jon unfolds himself from his corner desk over lunch.
“No no no no no NO.”
“Oh for god’s sake, what have I –“
“We have been OVER this, that is NOT a stop sign, it is a NO ENTRY sign, you have misarticulated and should NOT receive the card.”
“Oh come on, you both know what I meant!” Tim throws his hands up and huffs.
“Frankly, I think your driving license ought to also be revoked,” Jon says primly, crossing his arms and sniffing.
“I’m with Jon,” Sasha pipes up, “At the very least you should redo the theory.”
Tim lets his head drop onto the table.
Sometimes though, the solemnity and stubbornness which seems to weave through his every fibre manifests in a different way.
One Wednesday afternoon, on his way to return a book to the library, he catches Sasha’s leg with his cane. She yelps in surprise and snaps her leg back, then leans down to check for a mark.
“God Jon, trying to incapacitate me so I can’t run from your monologues about emulsifiers?”
Still examining her leg – there’s nothing to see – she frowns at the silence. When she straightens up, she’s met with Jon’s face, painted in sorrow and horror. He looks as though he’s retreating inside himself, feeling around in darkness for a memory.
“Sasha, I am so sorry,” he says gravely, and never has the word been more apt. He says it like he’s just crawled out from somewhere dark and punishing, and feels biblical remorse for his freedom. He even looks uncannily corpse-like, grey and haunted, strange scars glistening under the fluorescents.
“I’m joking Jon, I’m not that fragile,” she tries to laugh but it comes out a bit dazed. “You alright? You look… well, ill.”
He looms over her, still and intense. She sees his throat bulge as he swallows, hard.
“You know I’d never hurt you on purpose, don’t you? Never, ever would I hurt anyone on purpose.”
“Why are you apologising like you’ve broken the world in two?” she whispers.
“Maybe I… have,” he whispers back. And then he’s gone before she can think on it further.
She tries to shake the interaction from her mind, but she’s still thinking about it at the end of the day. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches Jon pack up his desk. Then, she watches him go.
He sidesteps the shadows cast by the desks, as though unwilling to hurt even them.
***
Sasha tells Tim about the apology incident. He waves it off with an easy smile.
“He is, with all the love in the world, a very weird guy. You know he blows stuff out of proportion.”
“This felt different though, like it wasn’t a thing to do with how he processes the world, more to do with… how I exist in it.” She chews on her thumb nail, feeling it weaken beneath the press of her teeth.
“It’s funny most of the time, but this is just an example of when it wasn’t,” he bulldozes on. “I really wouldn’t worry Sash, just be glad he didn’t clobber you Flintstones style on purpose.”
It is not long, however, before Tim finds himself re-evaluating this conversation.
Jon comes into work one morning, folded in on himself even more than usual, and picks up speed as he crosses Tim’s desk, chin almost to his chest. Tim frowns, but shrugs, and in a rather uncharacteristic move continues with his work.
He’s forgotten about it until he commences his daily ritual of attempting to manhandle Jon into the break room at lunchtime, with which he has an approximate 30/70 strike rate. Jon is entranced by something on his computer screen, nose so scrunched up that its close to concave, and a fond smirk places itself across Tim’s mouth. He claps in front of Jon’s face.
Jon snaps backwards like he’s been shot, birdlike neck crunching audibly and hands grasping for the arms of his chair. He sucks in a strangled breath, eyes flashing with someone else’s fear. The fear of a soldier, a casualty –
A dead man.
Tim, wide eyed, takes a few steps back with his hands raised in surrender, and laughs nervously.
“Whoa, steady on bud. Only me.”
“I know,” Jon gasps, relinquishing his grasp on the chair to clutch at his chest. “That’s the –“ he freezes, and clamps his mouth shut.
Tim lets the silence take hold for a moment, as he circles through possible ways to finish that sentence. The one he lands on makes him feel cold.
“That’s the… problem?” he asks quietly, closing back in again to create a bubble around this intense little situation.
Jon looks at the floor instead of replying, which is an affirmative.
“Jon, why did you think that I, specifically, would have hurt you?”
He tilts his chin up, and there are tears pooling in his eyes.
“You were very, very angry with me.”
Tim furrows his brow.
“When?”
“I don’t know,” Jon whispers.
“You don’t –“
“Things… filter through occasionally, the drugs they… they cut a lot of it out but they can’t have got it all. Some of it must have stuck to the sides and over time its… its grown and the… the leaves, they float away and manage to… I don’t know when –“
“Okay, Jon.” Tim crouches beside him. “Jon. We’re going to find somewhere quiet, and you’re going to calm down, and you’re going to explain it to me. I can’t have you thinking I’m going to hurt you.”
Jon nods, small and shuddering.
“Bring Sasha too.”
***
He tells them everything. He tells them about Mr Spider and the police station and waking up in hospital with a newly broken body.
He tells them about the treatments and the disbelief and the drugs that cut bits out of him. He tells them about the guilt that became him, and the him that became guilt, and how he doesn’t remember Sasha in a different way to how he doesn’t remember the rest.
And they believe him.
They believe every sodden, dripping, heavy word, and they squeeze his hands like they can help to keep him inside his skin.
So he tells them the other thing too.
How he has spent his life watching someone. Someone beautiful. Someone brave. Someone resilient, and kind, and biting, and righteous, and his. Someone for whom he keeps his teeth always slightly parted, ready to expel their name in a reverent whisper of prayer.
Someone who isn’t, and has never been, there.
“We’ll find them,” Tim promises, because he has realised that Jon is everything and nothing like his dead little brother and his hurt makes him want to put his fist through a wall. “We’ll find them.”
***
“Tim?”
“Hmm?”
“You doing anything terribly important?” Penny asks, peering out from behind a stack of files.
“Oh so rarely.”
“Splendid. I’m up to my eyeballs and Rosie needs someone to show a new guy round the library.”
Tim smiles and claps.
“OUGH, I am so good at pointing at things.” He does a full spin in his wheely chair. “Tell me where to go, Pennio.”
“Reception.”
He clicks his teeth and does finger guns.
“Got a name?”
“Uh… Martin. Martin Blackwood.”
***
Together.
One way or another.
Together.