PJ

Here’s something you’ve been thinking about lately: when things come back, very often they come back different, like they come back weird or wrong.

The best example of course would be Pet Sematary, which you watched in the bowling alley one time with Zargham on Zargham’s brother’s phone, where this family’s cat gets run over and they bury it in this weird graveyard and then it magically comes back from the dead except now it’s evil and attacks everybody but for some reason they don’t 100 per cent get the message so then when their son dies they bury him there too and basically that goes even worse than it did with the cat. The moral of the film is that you can technically bring things back but it’s a lot of trouble and at the end of the day you will probably wish you hadn’t. Ghosts, similar situation, like it’s different because nobody actually asks ghosts to come back, they just come back, but the point is that they act so insane when they do it’s impossible to imagine that they were ever people. You could even sort of say it about oil, in fact that’s what got you thinking about it because you were doing it in Geography about how oil is formed from tiny sea creatures from 150 million years ago, like plankton that were swimming around during the Jurassic, so in a way it’s the total Pet Sematary thing of at first you pull it out of the ground and think Fantastic this solves all my problems but then after a while everyone realizes whoa, wait a sec, this miracle substance is actually annihilating the entire planet, which obviously the original plankton wouldn’t have tried to do anything like that before someone decided to resurrect them.

So the big question then is how far gone something has to be before bringing it back becomes a bad idea.

Some people might say that the key problem is with coming back from the dead specifically. Because obviously death is a pretty serious step with all kinds of long-term effects that you’re not going to just shake off. But lately you’ve noticed it with other things too, that even though they never actually died, when they came back from where they’d gone they were still completely changed. For example: when Cian Conlon lost his rabbit Oisin during the massive storm, and Fiach O’Connor found it a few days later, in his dad’s boat in his dad’s boatshed, and he knew straight away it was Oisin from Cian Conlon’s posters, still, though it looked exactly the same, maybe slightly thinner, it acted like a completely different rabbit. It huddled in a corner of its hutch, it stared at you in this quite freaky unsettling way, it had developed this menacing snakelike kind of hiss. Till the question became unavoidable as Cian Conlon asked on his YouTube channel, Is this actually the same rabbit?

Because while the rational answer is like Cian Conlon’s dad says, Yes, definitely, let’s hear no more debate over that bloody rabbit, and although when you mentioned Pet Sematary to him Cian Conlon said he was pretty confident the rabbit hadn’t died and come back to life, the fact is Cian Conlon’s brother is scared of it and won’t go into the kitchen after bedtime, because that’s where they keep Oisin’s hutch now, and he says it’s not the same.

And you wonder if that would be the case for e.g. a person too, like say if there was a person who had gone somewhere – or maybe they hadn’t even gone somewhere, say they were still nearby but something had happened to them so they were different – how different would they have to be for it to become a very bad idea to try to bring them back? Like, is it that things are just supposed to go their own way and you basically can’t do anything to stop them and if you do it’ll just make everything way worse? Or is it worth taking the risk? Sometimes? If you could still sort of see the person they were and you thought maybe there was still enough time, if you knew what to do or say?

One person whose take you’d be interested in getting on this would be Zargham. In the bowling alley when you watched it together you remember Zargham had some interesting ideas about Pet Sematary, e.g. how you could maybe use it deliberately to create an evil army of cats/other creatures? He’d be able to tell you straight away whether this plan you’re figuring out could work, and if not he’d help you come up with a new one.

But Zargham himself is different, has come back different. Since you returned to school after the summer break he doesn’t talk about the things he talked about before (Nerf guns, Roblox, how to make a mech suit) and if you try he gets this weird look in his eyes and storms off. He’s put fluorescent laces in his shoes and he’s been trying to get people to call him Tyler, which you don’t understand, Zargham is such a brilliant name, you personally would love a name that begins with a Z, and you’ve pointed out to him more than once how high its Scrabble score is, or would be if people’s names were allowed in Scrabble. But he doesn’t want to hear it, or not from you anyway. Instead he’s hanging around with Dave Okinwale and Pete Barron, who have also done the fluorescent laces thing, which you have to admit looks pretty cool.

So that’s why you’re sitting here on a bench in the yard on your own, watching a seagull stick its beak in an empty bag of Hunky Dorys, trying to figure out whether your plan is a good one or if it’s even a plan at all.

But not on your own, because when you glance up at the school clock to see how much break is left you find yourself looking instead at the pointed, smirking face of Julian Webb.

What’s going on with your dad? Julian Webb says.

Hmm? you say. Lately you’ve become very good at this. Hmm? As in, Dad? That name does ring a bell, let me just check my records …

He came into our shop, Julian Webb says. The stink off him! Jesus. His bony face screws up.

Oh yeah, you say. Well, see, he’s working on this project in the woods …

He’s lost the plot, Nev says, materializing ghoulishly at Julian’s side. He’s gone nutso.

You let this go, you know Nev’s still angry over the whole sister-fucking thing.

He had this dwarf with him, Julian Webb says with a gleam in his eye now, rolling his jaws together in enjoyment like a praying mantis.

Yeah, that’s our builder, you say, as if this is a normal conversation instead of you walking into a mantis trap. He’s not actually a dwarf, he just has bad posture.

Julian grins and says something you don’t catch but Nev hisses with laughter behind him and it’s the hiss that launches you off your bench.

You quickly realize that you’re no good at fighting. The moves you’ve seen in Avengers and practised so diligently in the back garden for some reason don’t seem to work in real life. Almost immediately you find yourself in a headlock getting punched. Then Mr Kennedy appears, exclaiming, Boys, boys! and pulls you apart. He makes the two of you shake hands. The bell goes for class. When the teacher’s out of earshot, Julian says to you, You’re going to wind up in the mental home, just like your nutjob dad.