By Nathan Midgley
Tanya and David are excited about seeing in the millennium, but to young Jamie it's the same as any other New Year. Until eavesdropping and centipedes get involve
Millennium started in ten hours’ time, the party in five. For four of those Jamie Marshall, his sister Tanya and her friend David Shears were to play outside while the house was prepared. Tans and David were almost exactly the same age – they’d been born in adjacent rooms, which was how their mums had become best friends. This meant Tans and David had to like each other. Jamie, who was younger, was not sure they did, but knew they had some kind of partnership that excluded him.
They were playing a game for sunny-but-cloudy days: they called it Faster Than Light. As clouds passed over, the two of them would race down the lawn with the receding sunshine. David said that if you ran fast enough to win it meant you’d be able to go back in time. It was impossible to win, though; when you reached the end of the lawn, where it gave way to an area of untamed shrubs and tall overhanging trees that his mum called The Wilderness, you had to leap in the air so the shadow passed under you.
The game was the same every time, but Tans and David still ran flat out, laughing at the effort and screaming when they were forced to leap into the approaching dark. Then they would walk slowly back up to the house and wait for the reverse to happen – for the cloud to move away, and for them to run, this time, from the approaching light.
He sat on the patio and watched. Through the double doors that led into the kitchen, he could hear his mum and Ellie Shears talking in quiet, serious voices.
“It isn’t getting any better, Jan,” Ellie was saying. She lowered her voice still further, and said, “I don’t think he wants to stay. And I’m almost certain I don’t want him to.”
“Well,” said Jamie’s mum, and hesitated for a moment. “Perhaps things will look better tomorrow. New start.”
“New numbers,” Ellie returned quickly, though she sounded more sad than angry. “One nine. Two zero. Same old same old same old. I should tell him to leave tonight.”
“Come on. If there’s one night in the last Christ knows how many to forget about personal things. Don’t spoil it for the children. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
Jamie could not believe what he was hearing. He got up and hurried down the lawn to meet Tans and David, who had just raced another cloud. They stared coolly at him as he approached, and he became more embarrassed the closer he came, so his run dwindled clumsily into a trot, a skip, a pretence of walking. He took a deep breath.
“Your mum wants you to go,” he said to David. “Leave home. She’s talking to my mum. She said she doesn’t want you to stay.”
David looked puzzled. Jamie glanced back at the house and could just discern the two women staring at them from the gloomy kitchen. His mum came out onto the patio.
“Jamie, will you come inside, poppet,” she called.
She looked at him severely as he stepped into the kitchen. Ellie gave him a thin, understanding smile that both began and ended their discourse.
“Are you playing nicely with Tanya and David?” asked his mum. “What were you three talking about?”
“I don’t want to play their game,” he said, though he did. “I was just reminding them not to tire themselves out because they’ll miss millenium.”
“Okay. Remember you need to start getting ready at six. And Jamie…”
He was halfway to the door, and turned.
“Play nicely. Be careful.”
This gave him proof. The others hadn’t believed him but he’d been right; the mums knew and were subtly warning him not to talk. Suddenly feeling that millennium had become a dark, oppressive thing, he went back to sitting on the patio and considered the David situation.
* * *
Four hours later, while the five of them were in the kitchen organising who would shower first, and which rooms they should use to dress, Jamie’s dad came in. He kissed his wife on the lips, and the children howled with revulsion. All three grown-ups laughed.
“Are you three excited?” he asked them. “Big night.”
Jamie shrugged. “No different to any other New Year.”
His mum rolled her eyes. Tans saw it, jumped on board with a tut and a sigh, and told him he just didn’t understand.
“I’m with you, Jame,” said Ellie. “We don’t care, do we? Although,” she paused and was clearly counting the six of them, “2000. Yes. Prefer even numbers. Four of you Marshalls; two of the Shearses. 1999 was an odd year.”
There was a pause.
“Can I make anyone a drink?” asked Jamie’s mum. His dad excused himself and went upstairs to change, telling the children to do the same.
“Did you hear her?” whispered Jamie to David as they were ascending the stairs. “Two Shearses. Her and your dad.”
“Shut up,” said David.
“You might end up living here,” Jamie suggested, hoping to lighten the conversation. “Then you and Tans could play all the time.”
David shrugged, and Jamie went to the bathroom in silence.
As he went to turn on the shower something stirred in the well beneath it. It was a bug; long, thin, with legs like little hairs, it scurried about in a panic that made him panic too, but revolted him at the same time.
He crouched down to get a closer look, and after several attempts found that its legs were too small and too numerous to count. The rhythm of counting would become so hypnotic that he stopped paying attention to the numbers; he’d be going through the thirties and realise he’d already done them, become so stuck to the same numerical root that thirty-nine thirty seemed more natural than thirty-nine forty.
“Jamie,” said his mum from the hall. “Come on. I can’t hear the shower.”
He realised he didn’t know how long he had been there and stood quickly, feeling as if he’d been interrupted inspecting some private part of himself.
“Mum,” he called, “what’s this? Come and look at this.”
She came in with her face set, and looked down at the bright thread of bug by his feet. “It’s a centipede,” she said. “Get me a glass and some paper.”
He fetched both. His mum placed the glass over the centipede, and slid the sheet of paper beneath it. The creature wound itself in ridiculous circles, and Jamie was suddenly repelled by its stupidity. It was like a clockwork toy, running the same terrified course again, again, again, and he imagined it growing slower and slower until it stopped dead.
“I’ll let it go in the garden,” said his mum. “Shower. Come on.”
Jamie imagined holding the paper against the glass, while the thing crawled around on it just millimetres from his skin. It was a giddy feeling, like being at the highest point of a Pirate Ship ride, when the huge pendulum hangs there and readies itself for the swing back.
* * *
The party went quickly. At fifteen minutes before midnight Jamie’s mum dispatched him to find Tans and David, who she said must be playing upstairs.
“Be quick, poppet,” she said. “Or you’ll miss it and get stuck in the wrong millennium. And I’m sure Ellie doesn’t want David left in 1999.”
“Mum, does she want David to leave?” Jamie whispered, looking at the floor. “I don’t want him to live here.”
She smiled, but it was a downwards smile; she knelt and held him to her.
“No, darling,” she said. “I knew you’d heard us. Ask me about it tomorrow. Go on and find your sister.”
He ran upstairs and checked the bedrooms, but there was no sign of either his sister or David. When he crept outside to check the garden he still couldn’t find them, but he noticed that his mum hadn’t let the centipede go – the upturned glass was right there by the back door. Braver now, he picked it up and found he couldn’t feel the creature’s movements through the paper. He decided to carry it to The Wilderness and release it there.
He was halfway down the lawn when he heard Tans’s voice from the bushes.
“We’d be brother and sister,” she was saying. “Pretty much.”
They had been paying attention after all. He wanted to feed his sense of triumph by eavesdropping, but he knew he had to get everyone into the house in time for Auld Lang Syne; in any case, he had drunk too much lemonade – it was cold outside, and he needed to use the toilet. He was about to call out to the two of them when David said, “No way. Brothers and sisters see each other naked.”
Jamie had to stifle a giggle; it was true. He and Tans had bathed together when they were younger.
“Well we can’t be, then,” said Tans.
There was a clink, and a rustle, and two white, vertical, corn-on-the-cob shaped objects appeared, hovering above the ground. Someone – again, it sounded like Tans – gasped.
“Can be if you do the same,” said David, confirming that the white things were his legs. Jamie knew all about boys and girls being naked, but this seemed very unusual. He was curious in a way that made him feel dry-mouthed and sickly.
There was more rustling, and other patches of white appeared through the bushes. The shapes didn’t approach each other but quivered, morphing and fading like the lights you saw when you shut your eyes too tightly. Without thinking about it, he squeezed the place behind his zipper. It felt good there, and made needing to pee easier.
It didn’t feel like he’d been outside for long, but suddenly the patio lights were on and raised voices were coming down the lawn. The fleshy phantoms he’d been watching had become Tans and David again. They were wide-eyed, lit up so vividly they appeared cartoons, caught between dressing and undressing.
David had his trousers down. She had her top gathered up and clamped into her underarms, and had just let her skirt fall; it had caught on a branch and hung awkwardly, one side pegged out like the entrance to a tent.
Jamie could now hear muted cheers from the house, and a series of explosions began that turned the horrible scene red, green then purple. He realised that he too was lit up, stood there with one hand on the middle of his trousers and one balancing a trapped bug. He needed to pee. Oh holy, holy Christ he had to pee. He began to dance on the spot to hold it in, and pretended he was dancing to Auld Lang Syne – but he’d forgotten the words, and was just wailing Auld Lang Syne, Auld Lang Syne, Auld Lang Syne in time with his frantic movements.
Something pulled him in a violent half-circle, and he felt a hot, pinched feeling in his right arm. He was face to face with his dad, but there was no glass left in his hand; as soon as he realised it was gone, he felt the centipede was all over him. He screamed and pawed desperately at himself, imagining a hundred, a thousand tiny legs stroking his skin. Fear loosened the coil between his hips; pee, so much pee he couldn’t believe it, spilled warmly into his trousers and pooled on the grass.
The shame and relief of it brought him to tears, and as he sobbed beneath the fireworks, and heard Ellie shouting that David would never grow up and was his father’s fucking son alright he remembered being in bed that morning, before any of this had happened. He broke away from his dad’s grip and ran as hard as he could, imagining lines of light and shade behind him and time beginning to spool backwards.
