‘Do you see what I mean?’ the old man asks Misha, and he’s tapping parts of the diagram with a stubby finger. He lost the ends of each digit, up to the first knuckle, on his right hand. He tells people it was in an accident with a chainsaw, his own fault for letting his concentration drift. This story is exactly that: a tall tale. A lie. The truth is, as Misha knows, is very far from and much more dangerous than chainsaws. Granddad physically has to turn her head with his hand to get her looking in the correct place. ‘Please, Misha, focus. Here, at West Nine, everything is higgledy-piggledy. It creates an imbalance that’s hard to address, given current layout and numbers, but look closely here…’ The stub thumps an area halfway up the hill, not far from where she saw that Caleb earlier today. He’d be tiny seen from this angle, high above the large map, which spills over the table’s edges. Miniature Caleb stares at the miniature map-version of her. He doesn’t call her a name, doesn’t tell her to piss off, doesn’t demand anything of her. What he does is look puzzled. She feels an urge to push the mini-Misha closer to him. Mini might dig in her heels, but what chance would she have of resisting God-Misha’s will? An enormous hand will descend from the heavens and force her forwards, digging two thin ditches as she goes. Then she’ll be face-to-face with the funny little indie boy, and she’ll say…what? Should she tell him to stop snooping around? Should she ask what he’s looking for? Should she tell him to get on with it, do what everyone else does, call her Ghoul Girl or the Corpser or whatever else he needs to? Yes, call mini-Misha something horrible, give her a shove so that she falls and lands on someone’s flowers, then God-Misha can shake the land itself with her thunderous anger, and smoosh him under the heel of her palm.
‘Well?’ says Granddad. Misha’s gut squirms a little, because she can’t think of a fake answer. ‘You haven’t heard a word I said,’
‘That’s not true,’ she says, confident now that she doesn’t need to lie. ‘You said about layouts and numbers and the imbalance of it all.’
Granddad shakes his head, rubbing at the deep wrinkles over his brow. Worry lines, Misha calls them. The more furrows there are, and the more they scrunch together, the more worried he is. And before he hides it all away, before he smooths his lines as best he can, before he puts on a thin smile that can’t hope to fool the way it’s meant to, Misha wishes she could be less of a disappointment to him. He’d never say it, but she’s not what he wants, expects or deserves.
This knowledge is a long, slender needle of pain that eases a little further in every day, too slippery to pull back out.
‘I’m pushing too hard, I know. All these extra lessons…’
‘It’s a little bit like getting triple homework,’ she says, looking up at him through her swathe of lashes. It’s one of the looks she practices in the mirror. It works, filling out his smile.
‘No school, and I’m making you work harder than ever, eh? What a horrible old man I am.’
‘You are, Granddad. A real horror.’
He rolls up the map. The large sheet of paper needs nimble work from both hands. ‘I bang on a lot, I know. But it’s important, my girl. You have to learn this, all of this, and we have to do all the boring bits like layouts and arrays before we can bring it all together…’
‘I know,’ she says, and she really does know, and even talking about how boring this stuff is makes her feel bored. ‘It’s just…nothing more’s going in, it’s like my head’s all full up.’
‘No more tonight, then,’ says Granddad as he slips the map back into a cardboard tube and puts the tube back with the stack on the sideboard. ‘Let’s have supper. There’s still some stew left in the pan.’ He shuffles away in his tatty slippers, looking for all the world like just another doddery old chap with his head partly in the clouds and partly in his memories.
Misha trails off to flop onto her bed. She should be pleased. The torture is over for the evening. No more thinking about things that shouldn’t happen. But her eyes feel hot, and her lungs are clenching together. She saw it in Granddad’s face. She’s let him down again. All he wants is her attention, and she can’t even give him that. There is so much that is wrong with her. That’s why boys corner her by the bins. She is life’s mistake, and they sense it even if they don’t know it, and they know in their knuckles and toes that they must get rid of her. She’s so wrong that, even in her fantasy at the map, it was Caleb she smooshed before those boys. Caleb, who is yet to do her wrong.
When Granddad calls for her to come get stew, she doesn’t hear, and he forgets, and she spends the rest of the night on her bed in her big, dark, dusty room, and her thoughts turn into dreams and her dreams are bad.