Chapter Thirty-Four
THIRTY-FOUR
What was it Louisa said on the train? That sometimes you don’t want to hear the end of a story because when you find out who survives, you know that all the other characters in it might die?
Throughout his life, Ted has been frightened of men. When he was young, his big brother, six years older, used to beat him up like it was a game. Even the fact that Ted used to curl up rather than fighting back would provoke him. “Fight back, you coward! FIGHT BACK!” his big brother would roar. When Ted still wouldn’t, he would hit him even harder. Once he threw Ted down the basement stairs so that he hit his head and lost consciousness. At the hospital their mother had to lie and say he had slipped, the doctor had looked suspiciously at the bruised younger brother, but Ted had lied so well that even he began to think it was true. From then on he took his socks off every time he went up and down the basement stairs, so he wouldn’t slip again.
Some children are born lucky, they’re the children who ask things like: “What’s the most dangerous animal in the world?” But Ted never did, he was a child who always knew the answer. Once when he was eight or nine, their mom had been at the hospital with their dad, so Ted’s brother had stolen their dad’s beer and sat in the kitchen drinking with some boys from school. When they got drunk, they shouted for Ted and forced him to come into the kitchen. At first they just pointed to things and asked him to say what they were called, so they could laugh and make fun of his accent. His big brother, who had the same accent, didn’t encourage them, but he didn’t stop them either. Ted had tried to escape to his room, but the drunkest guy in the kitchen, known as “the Ox” for all the obvious reasons, stopped him from leaving.
“Do you like girls?” the Ox asked with a grin, and Ted was smart enough to nod. “Really? You like pussy? Or are you a little fag?” the Ox snarled, his grin gone now.
“Shut up! My brother isn’t a fucking fag!” Ted’s big brother slurred from the other side of the table. It sounded nice, as if he were defending Ted, but he was really only defending himself. Being what they were accusing Ted of was such a serious crime where they grew up that it would threaten the honor of the whole family.
“Maybe you’re a fag too? The fag brothers?” the Ox grinned, standing up and stretching out his arms so that his body looked like if he got hit by a truck, it would mostly be the truck’s problem.
But Ted’s big brother replied stubbornly:
“You really do talk a hell of a lot about fags. Do you think about them when you’re jerking off too?”
The violence was an explosion. The Ox flew over the table in an instant to grab hold of Ted’s brother’s face, but didn’t have time, because by then something had flared up inside Ted’s head. He grabbed a full can of beer from the table and threw it as hard as he could.
“DON’T TOUCH MY brOTHER!”
The can hit the Ox in the eyebrow, and the huge fifteen-year-old yelled so loudly that it must have been heard across the whole block. Ted was shaking with stifled sobs even before the blow was struck. He could have run, but there wouldn’t have been any point, the Ox’s fist was like a sledgehammer when it hit his little chest. Ted lay on the floor, unable to breathe, the Ox stood over him raining blows on his back, as if Ted were a lump of meat. People who have never been beaten up don’t understand the recklessness demanded of the person doing the beating, what must be missing from someone like that, or what happens inside the person getting beaten.
Lucky children often ask what the most dangerous animal in the world is, but all other children already know. It isn’t the lion or the hippopotamus or the snake or the spider or the shark. The most dangerous creature on the planet is, and has always been, a young man. And the worst thing about a young man? That until very recently he was just a boy. No one gets any warning when he stops being one.
Ted doesn’t even remember how he got away from the Ox, or how he crawled to his room. He just lay there shaking beneath his bruises, as if he had a fever. Late that night, before their parents got home, his door opened and his big brother came in with grilled cheese sandwiches. Ted had eaten in silence and his big brother had asked anxiously: “You’re not going to tell, are you? That I took the beer?” He wasn’t at all worried that Ted would tell about the rest of it.
One day not long after that, Ted heard his mother talking to a friend. She had walked into his big brother’s room without knocking and caught him looking at porn. She sighed into the phone to her friend and said: “Well, I suppose it’s just natural? That’s what boys his age are SUPPOSED to do, isn’t it? Get into fights and look at porn, that’s what men do. Otherwise I suppose I’d worry that he was… you know…”
Ted has been frightened all his life.
He hears the kicks to his body now, on the pavement beside the car below the train station, but he no longer feels them. Perhaps his brain is protecting him by blocking the pain signals, like when the Ox beat him up in the kitchen, and when he got stabbed in the classroom many years later. Enough adrenaline becomes insulation, the world stops, like when you stop fighting against water and just let yourself drown.
But then he hears a cry, far beyond the ringing in his ears, at first he thinks it’s his own, but it sounds different. His body slumps when the kicking stops, he falls onto his back, blinking at the only streetlamp, a short distance away. Then he hears the cry again, it’s one of the men, like an animal caught in a trap. No, Ted suddenly realizes, it isn’t even a cry of pain. It’s a cry of shock, like an animal encountering a more dangerous animal.
Louisa may be alone when she comes rushing out of the darkness, but she’s like Joar, she fights like an entire gang. She’s holding a metal pipe in her hand, later she won’t even remember where she found it, only that she snatched it up out of pure instinct.
In the fullness of time she will hate herself for this, and how natural this violence is to her. What must be missing inside her. Most people never find out what they’re truly capable of, but she will never forget. She swings the metal pipe and hears it break the first man’s arm, then hits the second man as hard as she can across his calves, knocking him screaming to the ground. All Ted hears after that is the clatter of the metal pipe hitting the ground, and Louisa shouting:
“RUN!”
So they run. Ted staggers and she drags him. Up the steps, through the turnstile, out onto the platform. They get there just in time to see the lights at the back of the train as it thunders away along the tracks and disappears into the night.