Nathan’s GI Joe is his friend, sort of. There’s a scar on his cheek he won’t talk about. Nathan touches the smooth plastic welt. Joe spits.
‘Women love it, son. Don’t let anyone tell you a man can’t be someone with a scar. Scars are what we are.’
Nathan nods. This is exactly the sort of thing Joe always says.
When the doll first spoke, the boy wasn’t shocked. He’d arranged Joe’s hands to grip onto the cliff of the window-ledge. Eagle eyes looked up, positioned with the lever on the back of Joe’s head. Blue sky rushed through the glass. Joe lost his grip and slipped.
‘Shit,’ he said.
The carpet was beige, dusty and stained. Nathan looked at the doll on the floor, bare feet like paddles pointing out of different sides of a boat. If Joe was a person, the bone would have broken. If he was a person who fell this way, ‘shit’ is exactly what he’d say.
‘Joe?’ Nathan said.
‘Private,’ Joe said. ‘What now, Sergeant? Sarge?’
Plastic eyes stared.
‘I’m Nathan,’ the boy said.
The doll lay down, poseable ankles twisted. His valiant salute to his beret had been lost as soon as he was taken out of the box.
‘Private Joe, reporting for duty, Sarge.’
‘I’m Nathan,’ Nathan said. ‘I’m not a sergeant, I don’t think.’
‘Yes sir!’
Nathan looked at Joe, awaiting orders. He’d never given orders before. No one ever called him ‘sir’. (Once, on a birthday card, his aunt wrote esquire on the envelope, but it wasn’t the same.) Giving orders might be kinda cool; Nathan left Joe to guard sheets of newspaper under his bed.
‘Let no one see them,’ he said. ‘That’s an order.’
It was still early. Nathan’s mother was in Helen’s room, trying to dress his sister between bounces on the bed. Thud. The newspaper dropped through the letterbox. Nathan snuck downstairs with a sheet of newspaper under his arm, just in case. He flicked through the paper. All clear. Today was ok. There were no pages he had to replace with stories about albino hedgehogs or a raccoon out of nowhere messing up someone’s lawn.
‘Nathaaaaaaaaaaan.’
On Saturday, Nathan’s mother calls upstairs. She makes his name so long he’s bored before he’s even there. He leaves Joe in the snowy pillow mountains and runs. It’s shopping day again.
‘Put your shoes on,’ Nathan’s mother says.
Helen is all ready in the hall, bundled into the lazy-mobile of her buggy, though she’s old enough to walk. Nathan buttons his coat.
‘Don’t forget your scarf,’ says his mother.
The scarf is itchy and striped yellow, red and blue. Nathan loops it around around his neck and thinks of Joe calling him Sarge.
The bus is rammed with old ladies with wheelie bags and women with buggies. Everyone gets on the bus to cough, cough, cough, cough. Everything is in the air. Nathan pulls his scarf over his mouth, remembering his mother spraying piney fresh all over the house.
‘Chemical warfare,’ Joe says. ‘Cover your mouth. Quick!’
Nathan’s mother rings the bell twice to get off at Quids In. Inside, she picks up a basket and hands another to Nathan. Stroking her chin, she considers tinned vegetables, crisps, packet rice and biscuits close to their best before.
‘Can I have this, Mum? Can I?’ Nathan asks.
He is clutching a piece of cardboard with a desert painted on. Brittle plastic is moulded over a plastic ammunition belt, boots, a helmet and cotton fatigues. Everything rests in perfectly shaped slots like shoes on sand.
‘Put it back,’ his mother says. She is looking in her purse, counting change, subtracting money for the bus into one compartment and figuring out how many tins of soup she can buy with the rest. There’s no chance of a helmet. Helen has grabbed a pair of plastic shoes and a tiara and is waving them around.
‘Nathan,’ his mother says.
She looks at him with too much in her hands: purse, bag, a box of cereal, the wire handle of the shopping basket hooped over her elbow. It’s up to him to wrestle the princess shoes off his sister. He tugs and she wails. He tugs, she wails like the plastic shoes in her hand are on a string connected to her mouth.
‘Sshh,’ Nathan says. ‘Are you going to be a man or a little girl?’
His sister looks at him with an open mouth. Everything about her is pink, from the flowers on her tights to the bow clipped to her hair. Everything screams ‘little girl’. Yet, she stares at Nathan and stops whining. Sometimes Joe is a good guy to know.
Nathan’s mother pushes the buggy to the checkout. Behind her, he spots his chance. He thinks of Joe’s bare feet and rams the soldier clothes into his waistband under his coat. Walking to the counter, he’s rigid, the cardboard like a six-pack strapped over his belly and everything fluttering inside. They are halfway out the door. Yes! Home free. Nathan can feel his pulse racing like a car on a plastic track.
‘Excuse me…’
The shopkeeper holds a price gun in one hand, the other taps Nathan’s mother’s shoulder. He’s not smiling; he looks like he’s forgotten how. The boy’s mother turns, buggy jamming the doorway. People wait to get past.
‘What’s this?’ the shopkeeper says.
Nathan’s heart plummets to his stomach. The shopkeeper holds a silver coin in his mother’s face.
‘Foreign,’ the shopkeeper says. ‘You gave me this.’
‘Did I? Sorry.’
Blushing, she takes out her purse, gives him the right coins and leaves. Nathan turns in the street, half expecting to be chased.
Wind kicks the leaves in the gutters. Walking through the houses is less windy, Nathan’s mother says. She’s overspent. They must walk halfway home, then take the bus the rest of the way. Carrier bags dig trenches in Nathan’s palms. Now and then, his mother pauses and says, ‘That’s a nice front door, isn’t it?’ or ‘I love those windows.’ He doesn’t understand how anyone can love something like windows. She stops, pulls the hood over the buggy to protect Helen from the drizzle and looks at shiny white windows. Some have the front page of a newspaper taped to the glass. The newspaper is a flag with a photo of a grinning soldier in the centre. There are only three words on it: ‘Support Our Troops’. Nathan wonders if the people who put the paper in the window have dads in the service, brothers or sons. The wind blows in his ears; they ache. He sees Spiderman curtains in one window and wishes he could knock on the door and go in; his mother looks as if she is thinking the same and would love to make friends with someone for a while. Maybe there’s a kid in the Spiderman house just like him he could talk to, but he can’t. Joe wouldn’t like him talking to people for a start, his lips are a sealed plastic line.
‘Tell no one nothing,’ he says. ‘You admit your fears and stuff can start to bug you, seem real.’
And nothing is all Nathan tells everyone all day long.
Under raindrops on her clear plastic bubble, Helen is asleep as they arrive home. Nathan stares at the newspaper taped to their window as his mother rummages for keys. The soldier’s grin is almost white, bleached by the sun.
‘I could have sworn we still had some packets of pasta left,’ Nathan’s mother says. ‘Where does it all go?’
She unpacks the groceries, but he can’t help. Stiffly, Nathan walks upstairs, rips into the cardboard packaging under his coat and undresses Joe quickly, not looking at his smooth groin or touching the abs etched into his torso like scars. The jumpsuit is spattered in brown and green splodges that don’t camouflage with the carpet or the white flowers on the wallpaper. The helmet fits. Nathan stands the soldier on tiptoes like a ballerina to get his feet in the boots.
‘Bit of a squeeze, Sarge,’ Joe says.
His toes strain at soft plastic. Nathan squeezes the boot the way his mother decides if he needs new shoes. Tearing the cardboard packaging to bits, he hides it under his bed.
‘Made in Taiwan,’ Joe reads the scrap of card at his feet. ‘It figures.’
Nathan knew it would bug him. He doesn’t think there’s ever been a war with Taiwan, but it doesn’t matter to Joe. It’s another country.
‘Anywhere could be the enemy,’ says Joe, ‘anyone.’
Nathan looks at the doll handed down by his cousins. Sometimes Nathan wants to argue, but who knows where Joe’s been? How many wars he’s seen?
It’s Saturday again. Nathan’s mother runs through the hall in rabbit slippers, tripping over foam ears. She barges through Nathan’s door with an envelope in her hand. This time it’s not a letter from school. She isn’t asking him why he wouldn’t take off his scarf in class.
‘He’s coming home!’ she says. ‘Really, this time.’
‘Great,’ Nathan says.
He wants to believe her, smile with her, but he can’t feel his face. His mouth feels like a foot he’s been sitting on too long. The door gapes when she leaves.
‘We need shelter, Sarge,’ Joe says. ‘Somewhere to figure out manoeuvres.’
Nathan builds a fort with a blanket and chairs by the bed. Inside glows orange, the lamp lights up the old blanket, revealing thick and thin patches. It feels quieter in the tent than anywhere in the house, though the walls are just wool. Sometimes, in the tent, Nathan tries to talk.
‘What’s it like, Joe,’ he says, ‘where you’ve been?’
‘Sshh,’ Joe says. ‘Look out.’
Nathan positions Joe’s eagle eyes sideways. From his voice, he knows that’s what Joe wants. He places a plastic gun in his hand pointing at the door. The end of the gun is slightly chewed from when Nathan was bored. There are lots of chewed things in the room; Nathan chews everything he can get. He likes biting something firm, seeing the size of the dents his teeth can make in things. He looks at Joe’s left thumb now, chewed to the knuckle, the tip spread out like a spatula. He was sorry he chewed it once Joe started to talk.
‘I’m sorry about your thumb,’ he says again.
Joe’s on the look-out, not looking at his thumb.
‘Can’t feel it,’ he says.
Joe wakes Nathan up with a hiss: ‘Patrol,’ he says. Nathan can hear birds. He gets up, listening, and stands in the hallway guarding the letterbox, ready. The newspaper pushes through into his hand. On his knees, Nathan flicks through the paper. There’s a picture inside of a flag over a box and people with brass stars on their hats standing still. He scrunches it into a ball in his pocket.
‘Is that the paper?’ his mother says.
She walks towards him with a mug of tea in her hand. There isn’t time to replace the page with a story about fish with bellies that look like smiling faces. He watches her read over cornflakes. When she comes to the missing sheet she frowns.
‘There’s a page missing,’ she says. ‘Again. I think that paperboy’s stealing them for the comic strips or something.’ She looks out of the window, picturing a boy on a bike collecting crosswords or page threes, stashing them under his bed. Nathan’s heart pounds.
‘Maybe he just dropped them,’ he says.
She shrugs, flipping the page. Everything is ok, what’s missing is skimmed. The sort of page that makes her look at the letter again isn’t there. ‘I hope they actually let him come home this time.’
It’s almost bonfire night. Outside, fireworks whoop and whine. Nathan’s mother cleans out closets, tossing old shoes into a pile.
‘Lie low!’ Joe says.
Nathan slides on his belly in the tent. The streetlights are on outside, though it should still be day. Joe’s stomach grumbles on time.
‘Mess time,’ Joe says.
Nathan opens a packet of rice and holds grains to Joe’s lips. They won’t open. His plastic stomach is hollow, but every day it rumbles, regular as the chiming clock in Nathan’s grandmother’s lounge. Nathan holds the food close to Joe’s nose, hoping he can smell it and will go back on duty full, not realising he didn’t really eat.
‘How we doing for rations, Sarge?’ Joe asks.
Rations are low. There are packets of rice under the bed, but Joe won’t ‘eat’ from one that’s already open: ‘How do we know it’s not contaminated, Sarge?’
Nathan waits till his mother stops moving around. It takes time. Even when she does stop, she doesn’t really. In the middle of game shows, she says, ‘The skirting in the hall needs painting. I’ll do it tomorrow.’ Everything in the house stands on parade. Helen needs new sparkly tights. Nathan must have new laces in his shoes. Finally, she is still. Nathan listens to her in the lounge, a pretty woman is falling in love through the walls. He looks both ways and creeps into the kitchen with bare feet. He knows how far to open a door before it squeals. Stuffing packets of pasta in his jeans, he moves along. In the cupboard by the mugs is the stuff his mother stashes like a squirrel for special occasions. He takes a bottle of whisky, pours some into his Superman flask, tops up the bottle with water and puts it back.
Upstairs, boy and doll lie with their eyes open. Joe doesn’t sleep in the bed, he’s not that sort of doll. His close-cropped hair is like Velcro. Everything sticks, stray feathers and lint. Nathan hears him under the bed, sock pulled over his chest like a sleeping bag, murmuring in the dark.
The boy and soldier listen. They’ve been listening for weeks. Their days in the tent are numbered. They know it. Joe’s eyes are shiny, but then, they always are. The vacuum cleaner bashes skirting boards behind the walls. The bedroom door opens and the walls of their world tremble, the vacuum cleaner at the sides. Knelt in sniper mode at the entrance of the tent, Joe is knocked to the floor by the flex. He lies in deafening darkness, head sucked into the hose. Everything goes quiet with a click. Nathan’s mother peers into the tent.
‘You need to take this down, Nathan, so I can hoover,’ she says. Pulling the blockage of Joe’s head out of the tube, she tosses him down. ‘You’re old enough to tidy your own room.’
Nathan takes down the tent as Joe watches from the ground.
‘I’m not gonna make it, Sarge,’ he says.
Nathan hides their rations under his bed. The vacuum cleaner is getting close again, so he sits Joe on the shelf.
‘Sarge, you can’t leave me like this. I need help.’
‘Aren’t you supposed to say “Go on without me, save yourself” or summat?’ says Nathan.
‘Fuck that,’ says Joe.
Nathan looks at Joe, the same as always, lint on his head. He sounds shaken, like something from an old movie – a cowboy with one red strand trickling from his lips. Nathan gets the whisky, one eye on the door. He pours some onto Joe’s face and rips toilet-roll bandages.
‘It hurts, Sarge.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know.’
Nathan licks a drop of whisky off Joe’s chin, tasting fire.
It’s not easy, leaving Joe for school, but Nathan does. Sharpening his pencil, he thinks ‘Where does it hurt?’ and still doesn’t know. The class are reading out papers about their families. A girl with skin the colour of perfect toast offers around little pastry sweets.
‘Just like Jaddati makes,’ she says.
She smiles at Nathan. He looks down, fingers sticky from the sweet in his hand. When it’s his turn to read, he stutters and skims. He cannot tell the smiling girl they might be enemies. She is wearing pink tights like his sister’s, but her grandmother lives in another country. Whose side is she on? He isn’t sure.
After school, Nathan’s mother scrub-scrubs everything clean one last time. In his bedroom, Nathan can hear knives scraping burnt pans. Joe’s voice shivers, his belly is hard. Nathan listens to a stool being dragged across the lino in the kitchen downstairs.
‘Someone’s been here. Something’s not right,’ says Joe.
Nathan follows Joe’s gaze to the door, his little sister’s writing beside it on the wall. Helen. Helen. Hel. The writing slopes down then gets bored with itself. Nathan sighs. His sister writes her name everywhere all day long. Sometimes, he thinks he’ll go to sleep and wake to find himself covered: Helen Helen Hel all over his face. Next to the scrawled wall, one of her dolls is abandoned on the floor. The doll is called Skipper; it looks like a child with a too grown-up face. It lies face-up, staring at glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to a white ceiling. The stars aren’t glowing now. Joe can’t look away.
‘Close my eyes,’ Joe says.
Nathan tries the switch at the back of Joe’s skull. Blue eyes move side to side. There’s nothing to make them close.
‘I can’t close them,’ Nathan says.
‘Why?’
Joe’s voice is a splinter. He can’t stop staring at Skipper lying on the ground.
‘Who did that?’ he says. ‘I didn’t do it. Walking through the village, I saw two local children and gave them chocolate. Walking back, they were lying down, the wrapper still in their hands. I saw the “thank you” still in the girl’s throat. Cut. Open like a red flower.’
Nathan looks at the doll on the floor, still just a doll, light dabbed to its eye. He holds Joe in his hands. Joe can’t stop seeing, even facing the window, the yellow weeds on next door’s wall waving in the wind.
‘What’s that stain on the wall?’ Joe says.
‘Chipped paint,’ says Nathan, ‘that’s all. That’s all.’
He hums a song about bottles on the wall until Joe is quiet, sleeping with open eyes, a drop of whisky drying on his chin. When he wakes, life seems better. Joe wants to talk about other things again. He wants to tell Nathan about the biscuit game, how to make liquor with a tin of pineapple chunks and sun, the tattoos his friends have on body parts that make him laugh till he cries. ‘Sometimes bad shit is what makes guys buddies,’ he says. ‘Bad shit that boys get into together.’
This is the Joe Nathan likes, the one that says the sort of things he thinks he should write down.
‘Sometimes, I worry… I’m scared…’ Nathan says, then he stops.
‘Nathaaaan. Nathan? Come down. I need a hand.’
His mother calls him downstairs.
‘Tell her nothing if you love her,’ Joe says. ‘Sometimes silence is the best gift you can give.’
Nathan nods, leaving Joe guarding the ledge, the light fading. Tell nothing, that’s just the sort of thing Joe always says. Nathan thinks of this going into the kitchen, where his mother drops pins on the lino. She stretches up on the noses of her bunny feet to tack a Welcome Home banner to the wall.
‘Pass me the pins, Nathan,’ she says.
He passes the pins. Helen sits on the floor, scribbling her name on the cupboard door. The card Mum helped her make lies on the counter, a wax rainbow and stars on the front, night and day all at once.
Nathan holds out his hand to help his mother down from the stool.
‘You haven’t signed Helen’s card,’ his mother says. ‘Write something lovely.’
She hands him a pen as if knowing he is too big for crayons. Nathan stands at the kitchen counter with the pen. He knows he should write something like hero somewhere inside the card and he starts writing it. The he starts out fine, then he sees he started too close to the edge. It’s trickier to squeeze what comes next into the space that is left on the page.