I Still Dream - James Smythe

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I’ve got. ELO, The Beatles, Elton John. But my favourite is Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. Mum’s hair used to look just like hers on the cover; and I loved that the picture is all soft focus; like at first it’s just a woman with some dogs, and then you look at it more, closer and closer, and you can see stars in her hair, and this strange effect over the whole picture, as if there’s two of her, slightly blurred, slightly out of sync with each other.

      The tape is a bit warped now, because it’s old. It’s been listened to a lot. I play it quietly, usually, because I don’t know that I want Mum reminded of it – of him – if she hears it. But I’m alone in the house right now, so I turn the volume up, so loud that the stereo speakers start to shake on my shelves, and everything around them shakes as well. The dust.

      I sing along, every word, even though I don’t know what any of the songs are actually about. That’s partly why I like it. It makes sense, but it’s elusive. When she sings about Organon, I know it’s not my Organon, but still. I snap the matchhead against the grit-strip of the box, and hold it while I roll up the sleeve, just like always. The bits of the scab wilt under the heat, like candlewax. Wet underneath. I feel sad, overwhelmingly sad. Like clouds; like fog. I light the match, and the smell of the burning, and the light, in that moment.

      I take my pain, and I bury it; and I forget.

      Mum pokes the shepherd’s pie that Paul’s made with her fork, swirling the mash and mince and carroty gravy around until it’s one puddle of brown, lumpy mush in the middle of the plate. She hasn’t been eating much the past few days. Maybe she’s having a proper lunch, but I doubt it. There are lines on her face, around her mouth, where she’s thin; and the only other people I know with lines there are the girls from school who everybody always worries about. The telly’s on, some bit on Watchdog about holiday companies ripping people off. How to get your money back if you’ve been fleeced.

      ‘We should book a holiday,’ Paul says. He nudges his knife towards the TV. ‘I mean, terrible for them, it must be, to be done over like that. But we should book something, get it sorted for next summer.’ Neither Mum nor I reply. ‘They say that it’s good for you, to have another holiday sorted. Does something to the brainwaves.’

      ‘We’ve got enough to be dealing with,’ Mum says, but I don’t know what she means. There’s this quietness from her that I can’t work out. I reach over for the ketchup and bang my elbow against the side of the table. I forgot how bad I made it earlier. I swear, and they both look at me.

      ‘Sorry,’ I say, and we all go back to eating, until Mum stops, puts down her fork, and stares at me. I can feel the blood before I see it. A trickle of it down my arm, and the wetness of it soaking into my shirt.

      ‘What did you do?’ Mum asks. Alarm in her voice. She knows.

      ‘Scraped it in school. I’ll clean it up,’ I say, and I push back from the table and stand up, rush out of the kitchen, up the stairs, but she’s right behind me, right on my heels, and she reaches for me, to turn me around.

      ‘Let me see,’ she says.

      ‘No,’ I tell her, ‘it’s fine, I must have just—’

      She grabs my wrist, and she forces the sleeve of my shirt up. It’s hard to see it in the darkness of the hall, but she can feel, I’m sure, the blood that’s run down to my wrist, to her fingers. Her grip tightens, so tight that she’s hurting me; I can feel her fingernails digging into my skin.

      ‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’ she asks. She isn’t looking at me, but down at her hand. I wonder what she can see in the darkness here that I can’t; how much better her eyes are than mine. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

      ‘I’m not doing anything,’ I say. I yank my arm from her grip and rush into the bathroom. She doesn’t follow, but I still slam the door. I want the whole house to feel it. To shake.

      I look at my arm in the mirror. It’s worse than I thought. The elbow skin’s torn, more than where I burned it. A flap hanging off, and it’s really bloody, really red. I take my top off, and I hold my arm under the shower. Mum’ll hear it, but I don’t really care right now. The water hurts. The heat of it. It’s a different sort of pain when you’re in control of causing it. I can’t stand it hurting when I don’t want it to. When I’m not prepared.

      I keep the shower going until the water runs clear, and then I open the cupboard and find a plaster, a big square one that’ll fit around the whole thing. I know it won’t stay fixed, so I unwind some medical tape and wrap it across the top and bottom of the plaster. Wrap it all the way around my arm. My shirt is ruined. Mum might be able to bleach the blood out, but that’ll mean giving it to her, and then she’ll start asking me about it all over again. What are you doing? Why are you doing it?

      There’s a knocking on the door. ‘What?’ I say. Furious. That she could stand there, listening, waiting.

      ‘Are you all right?’ Paul, not Mum. ‘Your mother’s really upset, Laura. I said that I’d come and check on you, let you know. Maybe you want to come and talk to her.’

      ‘Not now,’ I say. He waits, for a second. I can hear him breathing, about to say something, but not quite managing it. Then he’s gone, his feet on the stairs, his hand on the bannister, skirting along.

      I hold the sink with both hands, and I look at my face. I didn’t even realise I was crying so much.

      When I hear them finally go to bed, I’ve got a bug report email waiting for me; or, rather, three of them. Mr Ryan’s turned it on and off three times since I was last online. Once this morning, before school, for only half an hour. Once this afternoon, from school, which I already know about. And then once in the evening. That final session lasted for five hours, which is insane. I can’t see what he’s doing. Just: he opened it, he typed. He used it.

      And there’s an email from Shawn. It’s short, abrupt. Asks me to tell him more. Asks me if I’m feeling okay. Doesn’t mention anything about my email, and the fact that I’m very clearly not okay. Like he wasn’t really paying attention when he read mine. Like there’s something wrong, and I think: Well I could email him and tell him that, but not now. I don’t want to have any more fights. I need him on my side. And I’ve got things to do that are, suddenly, much more important. He can wait for my reply now. See how he likes it.

      I go to one of the forums I found when I first started work on Organon. I started off by teaching myself to code from old books that used to be my dad’s, that he left. Really old things, with his own notes scrawled in the margins. Useful tips. It was reading those that first gave me the idea for Organon. He was creating something that could translate words, that spoke those translations back to the user. I wanted to create something that did more than just words. Did something deeper.

      I ask the coders who live on these boards if they can help me with a problem, give me a way to disable a piece of software remotely. I post that, and then I open up Organon. My version. The real one.

      I tell it everything. Just like every day, I tell it what’s happened to me. About Mr Ryan, about the version of itself he’s got at home with him, that he’s shown it to people, or that he planned to. Organon asks me all the right questions.

      > How would you fix this?

      I don’t have an answer.

       THURSDAY

      I’m outside the computer lab so early that the only other people in school are the cleaners. I sit in the hallway, on the old floor that’s got this strange zigzag of dark wood all along it, like paths leading you in every which direction. I wait there while other kids start to appear, walking past me, bags into lockers, talking about whatever. Ignoring me. The smell of sausage and bacon baps being sold in the dining hall drifts through the corridors. Then the bell rings, and I should be in maths, but I don’t move. Some kids come along, Year 8s, but there’s still no sign of Mr Ryan. Eventually, one of the

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