Being Small by Chaz Brenchley

that’s so sweet. How’s your head going to feel in the morning?”
    “I’ll be fine.”
    “Fit for school?”
    “Of course.”
    “Good boy. While we unpack, then. Go to bed now. Clean your teeth first, and drink a glass of water. And if you are suffering tomorrow, don’t be too sixteen to say so. I’ve got plenty of nux vom.”

VI
BEING SMALL
    S mall is not big into nux vom , or indeed anything else that I have to swallow. Nothing in, nothing out is his own chosen position, nil by mouth. He does understand how that wouldn’t work for me, and he tolerates my eating – which is big of him, I think, I’ve always thought – but he still hates it when I medicate. I guess he’s floating in the stuff himself, he reckons that’s enough for both of us. Besides, I’m all the access he has to the world; he likes me clean and clear, a window, not a distorting lens disturbed by drugs or potions.
    Self-medication, the same thing. He hates that too, when I’m drunk or doped up.
    And I was right, he really really wasn’t happy with the piercings. I lay sprawled on my bed while the room spun all around me and I felt adrift, afloat, a bubble of air in the swirl of the world, and his thin narky snarky voice went on and on in all the dizzy hollows of my skull.
    He’s short on resources, is Small, there’s not much that lies within his ambit; but what he lacks in reach he makes up for entirely in vitriol. Sometimes I think he’s bathed in pure acid. Or else that he spits it, with a narrow focus and a lethal aim.
    God knows, he’s had the practice. One target, all my life. That thing that happens to you, where one line of a song gets stuck in your head and just repeats and repeats itself all day? Be glad of it, be grateful you’re not me. I’ve read, I’ve been told how all kids thrill with horror at the legend of a worm that digs into your ear and chews its way right through to your living brain – but not me. I was born with him already in situ, and all my life he’s been trying to chew his way out to open air.
    No blame to him for that. Be fair; no one likes to be bottled up and kept in the dark. We’d all try to change that if we could. And I’m the lucky one, whichever way you want to count it. I owe him; I’m not denying that.
    Just, I’m not sure that I owe him my life, the way he wants to claim it. My body’s not his temple, any more than it is still his vehicle. I carried him around in my belly for long enough; I’ve carried him around in my head ever since; I think maybe that’s enough. I don’t have to be his mirror image, limited to what he makes of me, what he can match up to.
    I wanted to put rings in my ears, and rings in Adam’s too. I wanted THC in my system, TLC in my life. I wanted to come home drunk and topple into the roomspin and not have Small sit sour in my ear, all green and gooseberry.
    I wanted time off for bad behaviour.

VII
CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION
    S chool was for Mum, not for me. I was the instructor.
    It was how she tested what I’d learned, that I could teach her clearly and accurately, to have her understand. I didn’t get to prepare the lessons; she said she knew all about my short-term memory already, there was little point in testing that. Spontaneity was the key, to find out how much I actually knew. She might ask for a lecture on particle physics, or else on metaphysics. Once she took me to the Ashmole and stood me in front of a Van Dyck deposition they have there, and had me talk to her about it. It was a Saturday morning; after twenty minutes I had a dozen random people listening in and the security people were getting restless, they thought it was some kind of student prank. I guess that was half the point of the lesson, to be sure that I was comfortable with an unexpected audience and the interventions of petty authority. These are the ways my mother thinks, inside and outside and all around the box.
    Schooldays were necessarily weekends or bank holidays, to suit