Read Online What Becomes by A. L Kennedy - Free Book Online Page A

party last week.
    Why not? I can let that happen.
    He was scared of me at the start – I was, after all, an unknown visitor – but then we chatted and made faces and then he wasn’t worried any more, was forgetting himself, giggling. He brought his hamster down to show me – Benny, Benji, Billy, doesn’t matter.
    He wants to go up your shirt.
    Precocious idea. I mean, not sexual, but experimental. And I wasn’t going to fight the child off – because that’s how the hamster gets murdered and then there’s hell to pay – and the rest of the room was both crushingly middle-aged and viciously tedious so I’d no prospects of anything better to do and under the shirt goes the hamster.
    The boy’s seven, six, has purely innocent motivations, a generous impulse, and he sets the thing down on my stomach, gives me a sensation that he has already relished – the tiny paws and whiskers, scampers of fur across skin.
    Lovely.
    Weird and lovely.
    That frantic ticking of breath – I’d known it before, years ago, and here it was back again: repeating, rattling along above its echo – because of course, I had a hamster when I was his age and of course I’d fed it into my own sleeves, my jumpers. It was something like sliding a panic inside my clothes: that scrabbling and vulnerability. I couldn’t have said if I was reading its fear, or it was reading mine. The whole procedure was an adult kind of pleasure, complicated: anxiety and fun and loss of control and maybe the chance that I’d hurt it without meaning, or that it would hurt me.
    I remember watching the boy’s face and thinking that I ought to forget more, clean things out.
    And then I picked up his hamster, held it firmly in my hand – that whole body reckless with life, the wild and tiny heart, everything about it too fragile.
    The boy’s eyes were happy and then less so.
    I could feel his will between me and shutting my fist, the way he might be brave.
    He looked, a loud look, and he was right to. He was a small, good-hearted man.
    And then I gave the hamster back.
    No harm done.
    Not anywhere.
    And none intended, not a breath.
    But, let’s be frank, a lousy choice of pet. Hamsters are almost impossible to love. They have the brains of a wind-up toy, or possibly a potato. They are bonsai rats and smell much worse than all that should imply. They’re unconscious when you want to play with them, then berserk through every night, and they live for about a week. Flush the body down the toilet and buy another, I presume – it’s not as if they cost a lot.
    The kid’s father was the sort who’d find that appealing. I was stuck in a corner with him for some truly geological slab of time while he maundered on about this probably mythical trip he made to Italy when he was younger and single and he took great pains to pronounce each Italian word as if he were a waiter in a sitcom and he leaned in tight and kept constructing these laborious smiles which I think were designed to imply that he was a dandy youngster and blade about town and could be that way again with no more than a cheap motel room and a free afternoon to spur him on.
    He’d be the cheap motel breed of adulterer. Not for interesting and perverse reasons – just to save cash.
    Fair enough, his wife is a dead-eyed, organic hummus-producing marionette with a whispery, creepy laugh – but he’ll have made her that way. And she’ll have made him a sticky-handed fraud reliant on alcohol, golf and non-threatening porn. They are every excuse they could ever need to abscond and yet they’ll stay and, having ruined themselves and each other, they will grind on and on and their son will be worn down and hollowed at seventeen – a self-harmer, criminal, crackhead.
    Hope not.
    I’d like to think he’ll muddle through.
    Honest.
    I wish him well.
    And I was nice to him that evening.
    Thank you