Chapter Text
‘Which team do you support?’
The young jackal folds his arms across his chest. He’s sneering, and the sneer seems to say, ‘I already know the answer, I just want to hear you say it.’
Because Kai doesn’t support a team, although he should, and he knows that he should, and so does the jackal, because they’re both boys in a rural middle school and the very idea of not supporting a team is inconceivable. But it’s impossible to say ‘I don’t,’ or ‘that’s not really my thing,’ even though it’s the truth, because equally it’s not acceptable to admit this out loud. So he has no choice but to pretend. He thinks about his brothers, and the posters on their walls of males holding bats and throwing punches with their names written in big letters, and phrases like ‘Season of ’89’ and ‘Grand Slam’ plastered across them.
He racks his brain and picks a team almost at random, hoping that he’s chosen the right sport, and tries to say it in an off-hand, confident sort of way to hide the fact that he feels sick to his stomach. The jackal looks a bit surprised, and somehow this draws Kai’s attention to a little nick on one of his ears, which is something he’s always noticed, like he was once in a fight. He also notices the gap in their heights - a whole head, almost - and he thinks that the gulf between them is much greater than just belonging to different species.
‘Good choice,’ says the jackal, and pouts as he nods left and right as if to an imaginary audience. Kai feels elated, because he’s passed the test; he’s managed to name a team and that proves he’s a boy as well. But it only lasts a second before the sneer is back, and now it’s sadistic.
‘Name one player, then.’
Kai shudders, and a wave of prickly sweat crawls up his neck. So he’s failed to deceive him, and he’s grimly aware of the blush spreading on his face. It’s the same way he felt on the school pitch a few weeks ago; someone passes him the ball and it’s a shock initially because they normally leave him alone on the wings, but they must be desperate and he thinks ‘here is my chance,’ and he runs with it and feels incredible because he’s running so fast and nobody can stop him, and they’re shouting so loud that he must be doing it right, but then he realises that he’s actually going the wrong way, because they changed sides at half time and he didn’t notice. They’re not shouting ‘you go, Kai,’ but rather ‘you moron. You utter moron.’
So even though the jackal already knew that Kai didn’t support a team, having it confirmed in his own words seems to bring him great joy. Because on top of that, and on top of being small, Kai is now also a liar.
And he just knows that the list of things he is but ought not to be will keep growing and growing.
The jackal’s torn ear twitches, and in the vortex of hatred and self-hatred Kai feels an urge to reach up and rip it off completely. But before anything more can happen, he’s saved by the bell - truly - and they’re separated by the stream of other students off on their way to their classrooms. On each stroke of that bell, Kai chants a vow under his breath to hide that list from sight forever.
And anyone that says that children are fundamentally happy is fundamentally wrong. The depth of anguish in moments like this is inequitable.
Here is the beginning of a story.
‘A young mother places her new-born child in an ark and conceals them in the bulrushes to escape an evil king.’
So far, so good. Then, by some tacit cultural agreement, we know more-or-less what will happen next.
‘The child is found by poor farmers, or traders, perhaps, and adopted. They grow up to become a great leader and defeat the evil king.’
The storyteller might say that throughout their youth the child had a sort of ‘far-away’ look in their eyes, as if in some corner of their mind they remembered it all, and can see the worried face of their mother, and the sneer of the evil king.
And because Kai is a mongoose who was abandoned at birth and raised by hyenas, he thinks it’s very important that his story matches up.
But real life is clumsy and inarticulate. Vulgar, even. So, when he tries out that look in the bathroom mirror, hoping it will make him appear mysterious and brooding, he instead just looks like he’s squinting. Similarly, his adopted mother looks a bit bemused when he asks if he was delivered in an ark, or if not that then a boat, at least? Or perhaps he was left outside on the front step of a convent on a cold winter night and woke the nuns with his crying.
But that’s not right either, because as it turns out there’s no evil king and there’s no ark. There’s barely even a mother, because both his parents were violent alcoholics, reportedly, who weren’t fit to take care of him. ‘Real bad sorts,’ his hyena mother says, in a way that makes Kai worry that he might be a ‘bad sort’ as well.
And Kai isn’t sure what all this means.
So, Kai is a mongoose who was abandoned at birth and raised by hyenas.
He lives with his adopted father and mother and two elder brothers, and though he doesn’t look like them or talk like them or laugh like them, there’s not one second when he doubts that they love him. His brothers are kind and protective. They carry him about on their shoulders and make him giggle when they bicker with each other. He has his own room, for which his mother built furniture and painted in just the colours he wanted, and he has a desk on which to write. His father buys him books - because Kai loves stories more than anything else - and pats him on the head and calls him a ‘proper smart lad,’ because his grades are miles better than his brothers’ ever were.
He loves them too, of course, no question about it. But sometimes they do things that make him a little anxious.
Tonight is a typical school night, like hundreds before and hundreds to come, and Kai’s sat on the sofa holding a cushion to his chest, as usual, because he’s a little embarrassed by the roundness of his belly. His eldest brother is sat next to him with an arm round his shoulders and his leg in a cast resting on the coffee table in front of them. He sustained a nasty injury in a county match a week or two ago, though it wouldn’t have been quite so nasty if he’d quit when he first rolled his ankle. But he was determined to win, so he’d played the last quarter with an ice pack strapped to his leg. When the bell rang for time he’d looked white as a sheet, and had to be wheeled out into an ambulance then straight off to hospital. But they did win, after all, and Kai had turned to his father to say ‘what an idiot,’ but his breath caught because his father looked ready to cry with pride. Now, his brother groans and makes a big show of the pain as he gets up with his crutches to fetch himself and his father a beer from the fridge. From his position in his own armchair, his father raises an empty glass as a lazy salute.
Kai adjusts his grip on the cushion and wonders what he’d have done in that situation.
A moment later the stairs rattle as his other brother rushes down into the kitchen to grab his car keys. He’s dressed in tight skinny jeans and reeks of cologne because he’s off on a date with his girlfriend. But he must be late, because once he’s got them he charges towards the door, only stopping because his eldest brother taps him with his crutch.
‘Is that a girl’s jacket?’ he asks with a dangerous grin, and cocks his head to one side.
‘Yeah, so what?’ he replies, looking down at himself. It’s very subtle, but Kai notices the denim jacket is slightly tapered at the waist.
‘What d’you mean, ‘so what’?’
‘They’re all the same. There’s no difference.’
‘Whatever. Why don’t you do us all a favour and come out already?’
‘Fuck off,’ he snarls.
‘Don’t mind him,’ his father calls. ‘You look pretty as a peach.’
They cackle with laughter while his other brother huffs and stalks out the front door, slamming it behind him. Normally Kai finds their laughter contagious and would be right there with them, but tonight, for some reason that he can’t explain, he not really feeling it.
He picks at his nails and fidgets in his seat.
To distract himself, he checks his phone. He flicks through a group chat he has with a few of his friends. They’ve given each other nicknames like ‘Wankstain,’ and ‘Dickhead,’ which Kai supposes are terms of endearment, though he doesn’t really see how. Dickhead is telling Wankstain about a girl in their class - who we’ll call ‘Violet’ - in that slightly revolting and lecherous way that teenage boys do. They do this a lot, and it’s the sort of thing that Kai tends not to join in on, because he actually quite likes Violet, and it feels a little degrading to talk about her like this. But he also knows that if they were face-to-face he’d laugh along with them, even though it makes him a bit uncomfortable, because what else could he say?
Then, his brother returns with the beers and slumps down next to him, handing one to Kai to pop open for him. It’s a little ritual they’ve always had - though Kai doesn’t drink any, obviously - and it makes him feel good, in a way, like what he imagines buying a round will feel like, and his brother nods and pats his head with his other hand.
The news presenter on TV has started talking about a protest in the city. Some sorts of tensions between carnivores and herbivores that escalated into violence. His father grunts as he sips at his beer then shakes his head and coughs into his hand. ‘They’ll be up in arms, that’s what’ll happen,’ he says, as if in one fell swoop he’s gauged all the complexities of the problem and come up with a solution. He says it with a look in his eyes that suggests if he were in charge, none of this would have happened. Like in another life he could have been a leader, or a general. But instead he’s sat in his shorts and his slippers, like no general that Kai’s has ever seen. Beside him his brother nods solemnly and hums in agreement, but Kai’s not sure anything has really been said.
And as all these perfectly normal things happen around him, he checks them against the list. He files ‘broken ankles’ under good and ‘girl’s jackets’ under bad, though there’s no justification other than ‘that’s just how it is.’
And he gets to feeling like the list is longer and more complex than ever.
One day, Kai falls in love.
Of course, that’s not the word he ascribes to it, but that’s what it is nonetheless.
Kai falls in love with a character in a book. It’s strange, because Kai is an avid reader, and he’s read a lot of books with a lot of characters in them, but he’s never felt like this before. Never been so utterly obsessed. So he reads it time and again. He imagines the way they look, and talk. He sketches them, though he’s not a very good artist, and he pretends that they walk beside him on his way to school. He even dreams about them, sometimes.
The author is deliberately ambiguous about the exact species, and precisely what they look like, but one thing Kai knows for sure is that they have ‘spots on their cheek.’ So, because he wants to be this animal, and be with this animal, one day he decides to wait until his family are all out before sneaking into his hyena-mother’s room. There he deftly opens her dressing table and removes a tube of lipstick, being extra careful not to disturb anything else, and crudely paints several spots onto his cheeks. He sighs at the result, because it doesn’t look anything like he thought it would, and he’s about to put the cap back on the tube when he pauses. He stares at his face in the mirror for a long moment, mesmerised by the redness of those spots. Then his mouth goes dry, and he has a sudden urge to do something else. With shaking hands, because he knows he shouldn’t, he lifts the tube to his mouth and applies a thin coat of red paint to his quivering lips. The completely changed mongoose that gazes back at him makes him feel giddy with excitement.
After he’s put everything away he takes a long shower to clean it all off. His lips are red and raw with how hard he scrubs them, and his heart hammers in his throat all the way through dinner with his parents and long after he’s gone to bed.
The next day, he attends one of his brother’s sportsball games with the rest of his family. It’s overwhelmingly hot in the un-shaded bleachers and his brother is barely a speck in the distance. He’s also not completely sure of the rules, but he doesn’t want to ask because he reckons he ought to know them instinctively. But even then he’s quite sure he’s never heard anyone explain them in full, so he wonders how on earth anyone actually learns.
He makes the excuse of not being quite so well suited to the heat as the rest of them and ducks away to find a tree. Of course, what he really wants to do is read his book, which is now looking sad and dog-eared, and is filled up with his own pencil illustrations in the margins. Several college students walk past him and one points and exclaims ‘he’s reading a fuckin’ book,’ like it’s inconceivable, and a hilariously absurd thing to do at a sportsball game. But Kai doesn’t care because he can almost feel the hand of his spotted-cheeks story-book-love on his shoulder. It gives him the strength to ignore them.
Too bad it’s a boy.
And Kai doesn’t even have to consult the list to know what that’s filed under.
One day, Kai gets in a fight.
Except it’s not really a fight. It’s one of those awkward teenage encounters where both parties are exceedingly angry but neither are brave enough to do any actual fighting. Honestly Kai’s not even that involved. He just stands at the side while Wankstain and the jackal square up to each other. The jackal bares his teeth, pulling his reddish lips taut across his gums, and stands chest-to-chest with Wankstain as they glare and snarl.
But nothing comes of it. Kai’s literature teacher shouts at them to break it up, and they jolt apart, looking enraged and embarrassed. The jackal’s ear flicks again, drawing his attention, and in some corner of his mind Kai wonders what it would feel like to roll it between his fingers. As they back away from each other the jackal spits at Wankstain, just catching his trouser leg and Wankstain looks like he’s about to launch himself at the jackal, but he can’t because the teacher is still there.
Later on, when they’re alone, Wankstain rounds on Kai with fury in his eyes and demands to know, ‘why didn’t you do anything?’ The real reason is that it was a stupid thing that started it and he knew that it probably wouldn’t go anywhere. And he was right. But Wankstain keeps at it. ‘What are we friends for if you won’t defend me?’ he insists. But Kai’s, confused, because suddenly he’s the bad guy for not wanting to fight, which makes no sense, and he says as much.
Then Wankstain spits on him.
In that moment, Kai experiences what he can only describe as a surge of rage. For a second he really thinks he’s going to hit him. But it passes, and he sighs as he wipes the spittle off his shirt with the sleeve of his blazer. Wankstain calms down too, realising what he’s done, and looks away as he gives a mumbled apology. Afterwards, Kai thinks that what his friend - if that’s what they still are - was really trying to say is, ‘why won’t you share in my anger?’
Kai has trouble writing this one into the list, because we all know that ‘violence is never the answer,’ but in this case Kai thinks that maybe they’re wrong. After all, turning the other cheek was only noble if you had already proven you could fight.
Otherwise you were just a coward.
One day Kai’s skinny-jeans-brother prods him in the gut.
Kai knows he doesn’t mean anything by it, because his brother laughs kindly while Kai flushes with embarrassment.
But that doesn’t stop him from crying into his pillow later that night.
So he starts doing push-ups and crunches in his room after school. He counts calories. He goes for long runs on an empty stomach. He grasps at his arms and his chest and his belly in the bathroom mirror hard enough to leave red, stinging welts.
He doesn’t know who he’s doing it for.
One day Kai writes a story.
So does everyone else in his class. It’s Kai’s favourite sort of assignment, because Kai loves stories, and he’s very excited, but he has to make sure not to appear too excited, because that’s the sort of thing that people laugh at you for. It’s happened before, and sometimes he’s even resorted to deliberately flunking tests so that no one calls him a swot, because he wants to look like he doesn’t care.
He writes his story over the course of a sleepless night and doesn’t bother to proofread it before turning it in. He thinks it probably turned out a little garbled so he doesn’t expect a good mark, but his teacher actually seems to like it. ‘See me after class,’ she says, and the boys in Kai’s class jeer at him because he’s a boy and she’s a woman, and staying behind after class can only mean one thing, in their eyes. Kai sees what they’re saying and even though he doesn’t feel anything for her - not like that, anyway - he nods along and grins in a way that he hopes communicates, ‘yes, I am a boy and I know precisely what you mean, but we couldn’t say it aloud or we’d get in trouble, so instead we have to leave it unsaid.’ He’s not quite clear why he has to communicate this, when it’s blatantly obvious that all she wants to do is talk about his story.
‘You’re very talented,’ she says when they’re alone, and it surprises him, and makes him feel good. Nice, even. But then he remembers that she’s a city type, and his brothers say that city types like her feel like they have a duty to raise up poor rural types like him. For what a life they would be condemned to, they sneer, if it weren’t for charitable people like her who’ve bent their necks down to his level, and it fills her with a gladness of spirit to say these things. She tells him that she sent a copy to her old literature professor at her old school in the city. Kai’s heard of the place, vaguely - an enormous private school sat on a cliff overlooking the sea. She tells him that her professor agreed, it was a very good story, and he ought to consider a scholarship.
And Kai’s not really sure what to do, because the list says that all things posh are bad, but then ambition is good, and winning things is also good, but more in terms of sport than scholarships. His family are divided about it. His eldest brother says yes, and so does his mother, but his other brother and his father scoff like Kai’s trying to punch above his station.
So as he’s walking through the corridors of Cherryton, he looks left and right at the students filing past him and thinks that he ought to have some pride, about his origins. Cherryton is full of rich types, and they dress well, and they have nice watches, and they don’t need scholarships to be there like him. He knows that they look down on him - tall specimens like Louis and Bill - and he feels like he ought to fall back on some core of certainty that, ‘they’re posh, and that’s fine for them, but I’m a mongoose who was abandoned at birth and raised by hyenas, and I grew up in the country, and that means something that they’ll never understand.’ But he’s not sure what it really means, other than it should mean something. That’s what his brothers tell him, because they love where they’ve come from. They love county sports and wear jerseys with ‘alumnus’ of their school written on the back. They also love to slag off city types in their rural slang, and they beam at the way it makes them bristle. But then he thinks about the jackal, and the sportsball games, and his not-friend-Wankstain, and his bad-sorts parents, and he gets to thinking that he doesn’t feel particularly ‘country’ either.
So whether he can write a good story or not seems a bit irrelevant.