Hard to Explain: 3

The third in a series of chapters I've been posting from my young adult novel, Hard to Explain. The first and second chapters are also up. 

This probably gets past PG-13 at points, so consider yourselves warned... 

3

 

The plane touched down at two thirty. Jared’s mother would have run her finger along every surface in the airport and shuddered.

His aunt Meg was waiting for him in arrivals. As soon as he got into her car, he wanted to shut his eyes and bite down very hard on his fists because this was all just like what happened last time and he didn’t want to be here then and he didn’t want to be here now. Meg was talking. The radio was on. Jared switched on his iPod and turned the volume up uncomfortably loud. He imagined that he was like a piece of knitting that had snagged on something in New York and there was a line of wool stretched tight over the Atlantic ocean, pointing back to everything he missed. He felt kind of car-sick. He listened to Fleet Foxes and watched a factory swallowed up by the yellow hills.

The journey took an hour and a half.

He remembered Meg’s house only slightly differently. It was a white two-storey house with a front lawn, next to lots of other two-storey houses with front lawns. A damp pink tricycle lay on its side, streamers trailing in the grass.

Meg opened the door, let him in and showed him to his room upstairs. It had a small cold bed and an old television and dusty purple curtains. She told him they had ordered the school uniform as soon as they heard but it wasn’t in yet and she fixed it up with the principal so he could go in his own clothes just for a few days. She told him that the girls had already started back at school and she’d be going to pick them up in half an hour and then they’d all have lunch. Eventually she left and he sat on his new bed and looked at the window. 

His head throbbed with visions of Manhattan. That night in Treble when MGMT were playing. The tables ringed with beer stains – his right hand with that little red stamp on it – shitty stage lights pulsing the primary colours – the girls in a colourful flock at the bar, talking to someone from a band, all collarbones and bangles – Matthew peeling the label off his beer and talking about Sandra – then the crush of people around the stage, the perfume and sweat – some girl’s wrist in the air in front of him with a little wooden bracelet on – later he sees her in the corridor outside the bathroom and she’s Spanish-looking and she smiles when she walks past –

There were other nights. He remembered the Spanish girl probably because he didn’t look at her for long enough to notice her make-up was kind of smudged or to start wondering if he really did like her or whether he wanted to go over and try to talk to her and whether he would totally regret it and feel sick afterwards if she had a boyfriend or if she liked him back. The Spanish girl made him feel cool, like a person you could just walk past in corridors and smile at. There were nights in Treble that ended with kissing and phone numbers, but it was always awkward and he could never hear what the girls were saying and they never really got his jokes and afterwards he felt stupid and more frustrated than before.

Matthew once asked if he was gay. The actual fact of knowing Matthew made Jared want to smile. When he asked if Jared was gay, he asked it with absolutely zero offhandedness, like as if it was both the most important and serious question ever, but also the least important because Matthew just totally would not mind what the answer was. At the time, Jared was lying on Matthew’s bed wearing oversized sunglasses and Matthew was sitting on the computer chair kind of swivelling from side to side.

“Depends who’s asking,” Jared had replied.

“If I was asking.”

“You’re pretty cute, Matt, but I don’t know about –”

Matthew laughed. “Go fuck yourself.”

“What, with you watching? Please.”

There was a pause.

“Are you, like, bisexual, then?”

“Seriously, man, does it matter?”

“I guess not. I’d just like to know. I’m supposed to be your wingman.”

Jared sat up and removed the sunglasses. “Matthew. If I ever, ever, like ever use the word ‘wingman’ in your presence – just promise you will shoot me. Preferably in the face.”

Matthew swivelled back to face the computer. “Done and done.”

Jared didn’t know what he was. At the time, Matthew asking him made him feel better about the whole thing, like he could brush it off and nothing bad would happen. The more he thought about it, the more nervous it made him. He’d kind of gotten used to being an entity, like a whole thing, like an entire Jared all in one. All the usual parts of his identity were self-contained: eye colour (brown), favourite shoes (black All Stars), drink of choice (vodka and lemonade). He struggled to include his tenuous, undefined relationships with other people as a part of his actual self. It felt like standing in a room and stretching his arms out until they almost brushed the other people in the room but didn’t actually, and then trying to make that mean something.

Sometimes he liked girls and sometimes not. It wasn’t that he never thought about being gay: it was more that Jared didn’t really get desire. He didn’t have big epic feelings about anything. Okay, he did – when First Impressions of Earth came out; when he first saw Vampire Weekend live – but nothing sexy. Frustration, on the other hand, Jared got that. A lot. It was sort of everywhere, all immediate and dislocated, with that detached random fury that made him think about people in alarming ways. Even Matthew. Okay, alright, probably especially Matthew.

Jared didn’t know what to do with sexual frustration. Once, and once only, he had watched porn. It was a video of a couple having sex in the back of a Nissan Sentra. He didn’t identify the car make from the interior: it said it on the page title. Anyway, the gimmick was apparently the fact that the car was moving. At one point, the camera swung completely away from the action to film the passing cars out the window. It was on one of those freeways with a million lanes, bright and hot, somewhere in LA maybe. Anyway. He didn’t really want to think about that.

Suddenly the door opened and his cousins came in. Jared had only seen Christmas cards of them since they were babies: in real-life they looked much stickier and more intrusive. He could’ve been doing anything in there on his own. They were six and eight. The eight-year-old had curly brown hair and freckles. The six-year-old had blonde hair and a big plastic sword for some reason. He couldn’t remember their names, but he knew he didn’t like them.

“Who are you?” the six-year-old said.

“He’s your cousin!” the older sister giggled. “You know that! Mum told us!”

“I thought our cousin was a girl.”

They whispered something together, then turned to face him again with mournful eyes. This lasted only a few seconds.

“What’s your name?” the six-year-old said lispingly.

“Jared,” he said.

They both laughed and looked at each other and looked back at him and laughed again, stuffing their faces into their hands.

“What kind of trousers are you wearing, Jared?” the six-year-old said. The eight-year-old elbowed her.

“Aoife! Shut up!”

Aoife. That was it. And the other one must have been Sinead. The kids weren’t even Irish: Meg wasn’t Irish. She moved there to get in touch with her roots, even though the family’s last connection to Ireland was back in like the 1600s when they owned a part of it.

The trousers thing, Jared didn’t get.

“Look at his trousers!” Aoife squealed again.

“She thinks your trousers are funny,” Sinead said, red-faced with laughter.

“What’s funny about them?”

“Look!” Aoife cried, poking him in the shins. “They’re like what a girl would wear!”

Apparently, and unbeknownst to Jared, his cousins had grown up as the male college staff at his father’s office. Next thing they would be asking him how the boyfriend was and sniggering.

“Mum says to come down for lunch,” the older one said, grasping Aoife’s hand and tugging her out of the reach of his jeans. “We’re having fish fingers.”

They left, snorting and giggling. He got up and followed them down, thinking angry racist thoughts about Ireland and the Irish and most especially those who pretended to be Irish even when they still pronounced the word “coffee” like “cawffee” and called themselves a “mom”.

The kitchen was low-ceilinged, with lino on the floor and a shiny tablecloth with a pattern of pineapples on it. His mother used to sit at the table when it had a different tablecloth and pinch at her bony fingers as if there was something hidden in her skin. Every window had curtains, even the sink window. And none of the doors closed properly into their frames.

Fish fingers turned out to be rectangles of fish cooked in breadcrumbs. Jared didn’t like them.

That night, he lay in bed and listened to his cousins coughing and mumbling in the next room and the smell of rain and dust and then it was silent. He had not heard silence in so long. It reminded him of things.

He didn’t like it.