Free Lolito by Ben Brooks Page A

‘It’s like. I don’t know. Hon, that was great. I love doing this with you.’
    ‘Me too. It’s good. I’ve got to go. Um. I’ve got to do something.’
    ‘Do you have to?’
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘Email me. Please.’
    ‘I will.’
    ‘Goodbye, hon.’
    ‘Bye.’
    I roll a cigarette, light it and sit on the living-room carpet hugging myself. Why did I go? Macy’s nice. She doesn’t make me feel small. She wants to hide too. The Alice Gulf. I push my eyes into my arm. They’re heavy. Amundsen wakes up, shakes himself and comes over to put his tongue in my ear. My arms fall and I turn to face him. He licks my bruises.

15
    I finish the bottle of wine in the bath, surrounded by Radox clouds, loudly singing ‘Drop The World’ to a rubber duck. I hold my breath underwater, pretending that I’m a giant squid at the bottom of the blackest ocean. The part so deep that it will never meet the sun, only hear about it in whispers from passing whales. No human will ever see me. I will die and my bulbous body will be picked apart by creatures that have not yet been discovered.
    There’s an orgy happening in my head.
    Alice sucking Aaron Mathews’ dick. Aaron Mathews fisting Alice. Alice sliding a finger into Aaron Mathews’ ass. Aaron Mathews enjoying it. Aaron Mathews cumming on Alice’s face. Alice enjoying it. AaronMathews being immediately ready to begin again. A third person entering the room. The third person being invited to participate.
    I wish I was the third person.
    No, I don’t.
    I’m drinking neat gin.
    Staring at the ceiling.
    I slip twice when I get out of the bath, cracking my head against the sink. Everything’s being dragged down. Everything’s being weighed down by the weight of Alice’s disappearance. She didn’t disappear. She made me make her disappear. She’s gone. I’m one human in the world. I don’t want to be one human in the world. I want to be Alice and Etgar in the world.
    I don’t dry myself. I climb straight into old clothes.
    I take thirty pounds from the box in my parents’ bedroom, drink more cider, and leave. Doing the key is hard so I leave the door unlocked. The rain outside has settled in small pools dotted along the pavement. It’s half-light. A single grey bird loiters by the roots of a tree. I scream and chase it into the sky. I follow the street down and to the right, onto Denton Lane, where there are three shops the colour of old fax machines. One’s a dry cleaner. One’s a hairdresser. One’s Shanghai Palace.
    The waitress who seats me is familiar from times I’ve collected takeaway. She is short and perfect-looking in the way that any young female who is not Alice is now perfect-looking. I want to ask if she’ll come home withme, to build a blanket castle and drink rum and watch Judd Apatow films. The thing that makes me do heavy weather most is when you see someone and you can tell they want to be not alone and you know you want to be not alone but you can’t be not-alone together because of things like how she’s forty-two and you’re fifteen, or how she’s got kids and your mum’s waiting for you at home. That’s what makes me do heavy weather the most. It’s fucking retarded.
    I don’t say anything.
    I let her direct me to a table next to the tank of clownfish.
    I do an Irish accent. I say ‘top of the morning to you’ in it. I immediately feel severely retarded and like I want to climb into bed and never climb out.
    ‘Are you okay?’ the waitress says.
    ‘Yes,’ I say. I’m still doing the accent.
    ‘Yes?’
    My body sags. Bodies aren’t supposed to be this heavy. ‘No,’ I say. ‘Alice lied about being raped with kisses by Aaron Mathews. He’s got tribal tattoos. He punched me and I don’t know what to do. I want to get drunk. I want to disappear.’ The fish in the tank drift past each other like blimps. They don’t fight and don’t lie and are never alone. ‘Yes,’ I say.
    ‘To drink?’ she says.
    ‘To drinking,’ I