Set Me Free

     Years later it’ll come back to me in another life. I’ll be sitting in a pub with a few guys and someone’s friends who’re visiting from somewhere and it’s a big multi-way conversation. Then one of them mentions the suburb I grew up in and a house he rented there once and how there was this huge writing on one of the walls. I’ll stare deep into my pint and put on a laddish grin and he’ll say the house was this big red brick in a pretty affluent area, and then this screaming thing in the bedroom, taking up a whole wall, sprayed black all over the magnolia and even over the curtains! And he’ll straighten up to say it, twisting his face in adolescent angst:

     O Set Me Free From This Excruciating Conformity!!!!

     We’ll all crack up laughing and cringing and asking how the hell it got left there and I’ll laugh too and show amazement and pretend to gag. And he’ll be only a little bit wrong. I never sprayed the curtains. And there’s no way I’d be able to spell a word like ‘excruciating’.

     So, I’m fifteen and my parents are Pushy and Grabby – I mean, those are their names. In fact they’re both totally pushy and totally grabby, but I reckon she’s got the edge at grabs and he’s really the push one. Push and Grab are kind of like cartoon characters, always yelling ‘More! More! More!’ Just stopping for a minute to stuff their faces, then shoving and shouting again. I conjured them once in red spray paint on a wall under a bridge, massive bodies and little single-cell-brain heads, and I have to say the likeness was striking. Not that they’re that different from any of our neighbours who are hell on wheels, or any of the relatives or friends – except for my cousin Bob who is cool.

     Grabby likes to buy things, throw them out and buy more. That’s kind of her life. There’s a lot of stress involved at each stage so she has to have spa treatments to help her cope. Her only real joy is clearing out wardrobes, which she does very often because they do fill up. She dumps everything on the bed and swears if she hasn’t worn it for six months it’s going. I once explained there weren’t enough days in six months to wear that much stuff. And I didn’t get how you could have twenty-seven handbags when you only have two hands. Oh, how she yelled! But when she finished she surveyed her work with the usual smug look.

     ‘There! That’s done!’ – like she’s just climbed K2. ‘There’s a great sense of space!’ she coos, like we don’t live in an enormous house. Her eyes are already gleaming with thoughts of what she’ll buy tomorrow. She knots the bulging sacks for the charity shops, flinging them down the stairs to a little rubbish tip at the bottom, then wrecks my head again. ‘I’m only doing this for a good cause.’

     I slam my door and play something really loud.

     Pushy has a better excuse – he has to be pushy because that’s his job, getting people to buy things. Only on his days off he can’t leave it, can’t even wait in a queue. Like, he gave me ten euros to go to the top of a line of people in a café and push in a grab him a sandwich. I was like soooo mortified, so he shouldered in to show me how – watch, son, and learn. On the road there can’t be a car a mile in front of him, oh no, this is Captain Fly-me Fantastic, cruising at thirty thousand feet – outa my way!

     They’re slightly less awful on their own; I’ve figured it’s together that they combine to form something toxic. Like, Grabby takes me shopping sometimes and I kick and scream but I endure because that’s just her pathetic way. Pushy will come fishing if I ask him seven times. Deep, deep down he likes doing manly things with his son, but fishing is slow and doesn’t always get a result. In science class Mr Clarke talks about melting ice disasters that could happen in our lifetime. (‘Or sooner!’ I sometimes gasp, but he’s so deeply furrowed by then he misses my wit.) But I can tell you, if sea levels rose up to the garden gate, Push and Grab would still be ordering lampshades online and trying to get them delivered by boat.

     My sister Fat Girl is a little apprentice Grabby – making great progress too. I call her Fat Girl cause she’s a stick insect, but it totally bothers her. (She calls me ASBO – like I care.) She’s got piles of pink things in her bedroom – clothes and walls and furry stuff, like someone threw up after jelly. She gets her room painted pink and that’s fine but having mine done in black is not – why, why? Because she’s a sweet little thing and licks up. And a little princess and... shit! I need a smoke when I start on that.

     I took up smoking right after it was made illegal within walls. That was such a great summer, everyone out on the streets. I was too young for pubs but I got to stand outside loads of other places with the rest of the cool people. Of course, Grabby was over the moon about the ban. She simply adored theatres now! And the restaurants! She could breathe! Like, what did she do before? Pushy just made a disgusted face, like smokers were filthy scum who should have been put out in the rain years ago. And I didn’t like the smokes at all at the start, but you have to stick to what you believe and after a while I could flick ash with the best. Anyway, my cousin Bob smokes and plays in a band and works in a phone shop, which is Three Point Cool.

     Sometimes Grabby sits me down and says ‘Damien...’ and I think ‘Uh-oh...’ She tells me – listen to this –that I’ve got problems, but she’s willing to work with me on them! Now thing is, that kind of talk sets off my gag reflex, so I roll the eyes a bit and she gets mad. And even madder when I try to tell her my real head trauma.

     ‘Mother, your mouth is moving but all I can hear is “Conform! Conform!”’

     Once when she was ranting on, I told her – with a real straight face too – told her she had anger issues. Boy, did she go ballistic then! See that’s what happens when I talk the kind of crap I have to listen to all the time.

‘     Damien, Damien...! Why can’t you be like your sister?’

     Well I guess I just can’t be a little pissy princess, like the twenty-five other princesses Fat Girl has in her class, all togged out in the same pink gear, pink things in the hair and the brain. If you listen you can hear them sing it in their girly voices, Co-co… conform! Conform!

     How I stay sane? I do not know. There’s a lake I go to sometimes on my bike or I might go over to Bob’s. What I like most about Bob is he doesn’t talk too much. We just play music or watch a movie. Grabby doesn’t approve of him and I also like that. Push thinks he’s a complete waster cause he only works a few days a week. But he has to rehearse with his band! And he never asks me anything about stuff, but I know Bob is the one person in the world who understands me.

     So, we’re all hanging around after dinner looking out the window when Grabby says, ‘That garden’s got to go.’ Even Pushy is surprised.

     ‘The garden?’

     ‘It’s out of date! It’s horrible. Hydrangeas, for God’s sake!’

     ‘Mother planted those,’ Pushy says, but even that doesn’t help. She has that brisk look on her face that I’ve come to know and hate. She has a designer in mind who could do a complete re-vamp. It’s such a great space.

     ‘It’s a feckin garden, not space!’ I yell.

     ‘He’d have to work around the apple trees,’ says Pushy.

     ‘Oh, we’ll get rid of those,’ she says back, ‘they’re low yield. We’ll get new trees!’

     And so the last little snowflake fell, and the avalanche started and I said some things and threw a few pots and plates and ran out and zoomed around the apple trees doing this loud humming. Yes, and a kind of dance. They yelled and screamed a lot so after a while I darted past them up the stairs and into my room for a bit of peace and quiet. And I tried to concentrate on the lake and how still it was and the smooth black water. The spray paint was sticking out from under the bed since my bit of graffiti art. I kept looking at the red and black cans and the creamy wall/blank canvas while the threats mounted up outside the door. Then I stood on my desk and moved it around so I could spell it all out evenly from ceiling to floor. I didn’t think much about the words. It just came out.

     Crucifying Conformity!! I sprayed. Set Me Free!!!!

     Oh look, it made sense at the time. The best thing about it was that it was so big. And then I felt better and got out the window and slid down the pipe and it really did feel good running as fast as I could down that street. I was thinking about the lake and that peaceful thing, the quiet, even with all the lap lapping. I could still hear Grabby shrieking but that was in my head, and I thought how nice it would be down in the soft mud at the bottom of the lake where everything would be muffled and all the misery sinking deep into the silt. That putrefying lakebed would be a comfort cushion for my spinning head.

     But the lake was five miles and it was nearly dark, so I ended up at Bob’s. Can’t say he looked happy to see me. He got kind of odd when I told him what happened and said he was going out and what was I planning to do. Stay with you I said, and he didn’t seem to like the sound of that. Which isn’t fair because I know his flat is small, but I’d said I’d sleep on the floor no problem. You’d better call them, he said, they’ll be out looking for you. I wondered then did he understand me at all. I started yelling and he did too and I wished I’d gone to the lake instead and then this kind of sobbing started and I couldn’t stop.

     He didn’t freak out. He opened his only can of beer and poured me half. We sat down and said nothing for a good while and that was cool because my head was bursting. He put on a CD and gave me a cigarette and we chilled. Then he got the phone out. I wanted to jump up and stop him, but I felt woozy and tired.

     ‘He’s staying here,’ Bob was saying, ‘we’ll sort it out later.’

     I could hear screeching on the line.

     In the morning he wouldn’t let Grabby in. He just argued with her through the door and somehow made her go away – that’s awesome Bob! A fair bit of negotiating went on over the next few days. I spent a lot of time on my own in the flat, which really was very small. Bob asked me what it was I wanted and I tried to tell him.

     One of the conditions of my coming back was that the writing would stay on the wall. That mattered to me. For the sake of that and the apple trees I agreed to a whole list of crap, including psychiatric assessment. (Yeah, me. Not them.) I went back to live with Push and Grab and we all tried not to talk about it. It was only a few weeks later that my sister Natalie, formerly Fat Girl, got knocked off her bike by a dickhead opening a car door. She was unconscious for ages, four full days, and we spent all our time in the hospital with her, me and Push and Grab, sharing all that waiting between us. And you know, they were way more bearable people when things weren’t going well.

     Natalie was still in wheelchair when my dad got a new job and we had to move house, and the old place was rented out for its nice revenue stream. With all that stuff going on we forgot the graffiti was still there in my old room, which was all locked up with the good furniture stashed in it. Tenants came, and got in, and were amused. My rage passed down into pub talk.

     But I still have the bit that I kept.

This story was first published in Crannóg Magazine.