Free What Becomes by A. L Kennedy Page A

pals and saves them, too, or they save him, or even when he dies, he doesn’t quite leave them, he bounces right back looking like a different actor and everything goes on just as it was – running about and monsters and saving the day. It’s very exciting but slightly frightening as well and so it doesn’t often make me laugh.
    But I’m laughing today. I can’t stop.
    When I was younger my parents would wonder aloud if the show wasn’t overly worrying for me – things that were threatening walking up out of the sea, minds being taken over and running away, louping, breenjing, scared soldiers firing bullets that never worked, never prevented the bad things on the way. I wanted to watch, though. I wanted that small way of being terrified.
    I am watching now and unconcerned by what I see and from upstairs, coming in through the ceiling, there are noises – not completely familiar, but I understand them. I have heard things like them before. And I am still laughing, howling, hurting my throat, and then I stand and swallow and I say, ‘Excuse me,’ to my acquaintance and I walk from the room and then run, take the stairs two at a time and across the landing and there is the door to my parents’ bedroom and it is locked.
    I didn’t know that it could lock.
    This brings about a complicated adult feeling, because inside the room is my mother – I can hear her squealing sometimes, these cries – and my father is with her, hitting her again – this time he is hitting her so much that there are other sounds of impacts against the walls, or the floor, of furniture shifting, clatters – and I cannot get in to stop this, but I know that I couldn’t anyway – not even if the door were open, pulled wide, and the light running up into every corner.
    I don’t want to see what’s in there. I am glad that I’m locked out. This makes me a bad child, a bad daughter.
    I hammer on the door while knowing my acquaint-ance will hear this along with all the rest which my laughing couldn’t cover but at least I tried. And I don’t want to be let in. I am lying with the whole of myself, pretending I’ve come to save her, stop him, when inside I know that I can’t because I’m too frightened.
    But maybe my hammering will make things better, change them.
    But that’s another lie. I know the way my parents are – if I hammer but I can’t get in then they won’t notice and nothing will be different, only more of the same. I am embarrassed for being a bad child and ashamed for turning into this lie and for going downstairs again to see my acquaintance and say, ‘Sorry about that,’ in exactly the way my father and my mother tell their acquaint-ances, ‘Sorry about that,’ when something unimportant has gone wrong.
    I sit down and start laughing again.
    I look at the screen.
    And here’s the Doctor with the hat and the curly hair and the great big eyes. I’ve always liked him. The episode when he arrived to replace the preceding Doctor, I remember being nervous and little and troubled by change. I was trying to guess if he’d be nice and all right – keeping cautious the way that I might when I get a new teacher – and it took such a lovely short time to know he could be relied upon, was fine. The Doctor does what he ought to, sorts things out. He opens doors when they need to be opened and he locks them when they should be shut and he shouts at important people who don’t expect it and he makes them listen and be sensible. I’m no longer young enough to believe that he exists, but he’s a good idea, entirely good, and when I’m by myself I still like to concentrate hard on the pictures that start each episode, because they haze forward and forward, seem like a tunnel to something, I don’t know what, but I’m quite sure I wouldn’t mind it. I would go there. I’d be