This Story Is a Lie

Mum finds me in the larder. I crouch in the corner, flinching from the sudden light in the doorway. My mouth is full of blood and shards of porcelain.
      I want to spit, but that’ll show her the mess the splinters of the saltshaker have made of my gums. Jags of it are still digging in under my tongue and stabbing into my soft palate, but I can’t swallow in case they stick in my throat. The salt rages in the cuts on my tongue. I try to smile at Mum while moving as few of the muscles in my face as possible. A drop of spit seeps through my lips and streaks red down my chin.
      Mum exhales once, gathering herself, then bustles in through the doorway. She slaps a handful of paper towels over my mouth.
      “Spit,” she orders. I do. We look at the wadding in her palm. It’s like a tiny battlefield, blood and bits of china bone—as if I’ve choked up the remnants of the fight that just took place in my head.
      She pokes at the stuff with a finger. “What happened to counting?” she asks. I shrug. She tuts and sighs.
      “Open,” she tells me. I hesitate, then tilt my head back and gape.
      “Aaaah. Oo I eed illings?”
      She laughs, and I relax a little at the sound. Her hands, warm and confident, move my jaw to catch the light. Her laughter fades. “Oh, Petey,” she murmurs. “Look what you did to yourself.”
      “Zit baa?”
      “I’ve seen worse. You won’t be heading to hospital, but still . . .”
      She reaches into the pocket of her dressing gown for a pair of flimsy surgical gloves and pulls them on. Surgical gloves, I think queasily, in her dressing gown. At four in the morning. Wow, am I predictable.
       She reaches into my mouth.
      “Ready?”
       I give her hand a squeeze.
      “Three, two, one, and here we go.” With a series of wince-inducing tugs, she pulls the remaining bits of china from my gums and drops them tinkling onto the larder floor. The base of the saltshaker is still gripped in my right hand. Its broken top rises in white crenelated jags above my fingers, a mirror to the teeth that crushed it.
      I can still feel it giving way. The panic like a ratchet in my jaw, making it clench tighter and tighter around the porcelain, until the instant where I knew I’d pushed it too far and shrapnel exploded in my mouth.
      When she’s done, Mum pulls the gloves off, balls them, and sticks them on one of the empty shelves. She pulls a small pen and a black notebook from her other dressing gown pocket. I eye the thing resentfully, even though I know it’s only her way—she’s a scientist.
      “Okay,” she says. “Tell me.”
      “Tell you what?”
      She gives me Look No. 4. If you have parents, then you’ll know No. 4, the one that says, At present, Sunshine, the shit you’re in is only at ankle level, but push me any further, and you’re going to need scuba gear.
      “This stuff may be inside your head, Peter William Blankman, but I’m going to have it out in the open,” she says, palming the pen and picking up a tin opener from a shelf. “Even if I have to come and get it with this.”
      I snort and the shadow of the attack recedes a little further.
      “I had an attack,” I admit.
      “I gathered. We talked about counting as a way to get you through it.”
      “I tried that.”
      “And?”
      I look at the mess in my hand. “I was unsuccessful.”
     Another Look, longer and sterner, edging into No. 5, Ve have vays of making you talk, Herr Blankman, but all she says is, “Unsuccessful how?”
      I probe the raw places under my lips with my tongue and wince.
      “I ran out of numbers,” I say.
      Look No. 5 is replaced by outright disbelief.
      “You ran out of numbers.”
      “I did.”
      “Peter, you’re one of the best mathematicians your age in London, maybe the country.”
      “I don’t know about the country.” I do know about the country. If you don’t think I check the rankings, you’re out of your mind. “But—”
      “You of all people ought to know that you can’t run out of numbers. Just keep adding one, and presto! Another number appears. Like magic.”
      “I know, but—”
      “Only, it’s not magic,” she says acidly. “Only maths.”
      She folds her arms. “If you managed to exhaust the limitless resource of positive integers, Peter, just think what you’re doing to my patience.”
      Silence. I glance at the larder door and consider making a run for it.
      “Petey,” Mum says, and all the humour’s gone from her voice. The shadows under her eyes are deep, and all of a sudden, I’m sharply aware of how big a deal today’s going to be for her, and how every second we do this gnaws away a little more of her sleep.
      “Why are you eating crockery? Talk to me.”
      I blow out my cheeks. “Okay . . .”
 
 
It was a tactical error, really, a screwup. I saw the attack coming a mile off; I should have been more prepared.
      It was 3:29 in the morning and I was still awake. My eyes felt like pebbles in my skull, and the ceiling seemed to flex and warp before them like a cream-painted ocean.
      Big day coming up, I thought. A big day that was due to start in three hours and thirty-one minutes, so it would’ve been a spectacular idea to close my eyes and get some sleep. Except, I couldn’t, because I knew I had to get up in three hours and thirty-one minutes, and that fact was freaking me out.
      Big day coming up, Petey. Huge, massive day, and so very, very public. One false move will ruin it, not just for you, but for the whole family, so you really, really ought to get some shut-eye.
      I stared at the ceiling. I stared at the clock. Three hours and twenty-nine minutes. Conditions were perfect.
      Peter, this is mission control. We are at DEFCON One. All green lights. You are go, repeat go, to have a screaming shit-fit.
      It started the way it always does: the hollow ache in my stomach that I used to mistake for hunger, but that no food would ever satisfy.
      Three hours and fifteen minutes. Three hours and fourteen minutes and fifty-three seconds, fifty-two seconds, fifty-one . . . That was eleven thousand six hundred and ninety seconds. I wouldn’t be ready. Feel that? You feel sick. You can feel that nausea stretching in your stomach, and if you close your eyes, it will only get worse. You’ll be a zombie tomorrow, and you need to be at your best. Because if you’re a millimetre off your game, you’ll have an attack there. Not here at home, where Mum and Bel can cover for you, but out there, in the world, where people can see, people with phones, filming it. And then it’ll be on YouTube, your blood in the digital water. It’ll drift and disseminate everywhere, the stain of it. And everyone will see and judge and know.
 
 
I hesitate. Mum’s pen hovers over her notebook.
      “Usual physical symptoms?” she enquires.
      “Tight chest,” I confirm, ticking them off on my fingers. “Racing pulse. Dizziness.”
      “Hands?”
      “Damp as Lance Armstrong’s jockstrap.”
      Look No. 4 returns. “I can do without the colourful similes, Peter.”
      “Sorry.” I close my eyes, remembering it. “So, I tried the three lines of defence, just like we talked about . . .”
 
 
One: get moving.
      I scrambled out of bed and fled for the stairs. Motion is good; blood in the veins, blood in the muscles. It forces breath when breath is hard to come by.
      Two: get talking.
      I was a pressure cooker and my mouth was a release valve. Through gritted teeth I let the frantic stream of gibberish whirling around my head out into the world. Sometimes hearing the bullshit I’m thinking is enough to convince me it isn’t true.
      “You’re going to have the biggest, most epic public meltdown in history. It’ll go viral. Fuck viral, it’ll go pandemic. They’ll film kids reacting to kids reacting to watching you, and get hundreds of millions of hits. You’ll change the lexicon. Meltdown will vanish from the dictionary and be replaced by “Petey,” as in “doing a Petey.” The next time a cheaply constructed uranium power station gets swept up in a tidal wave and the zirconium rods crack and gamma radiation floods out to blight the surrounding city with cancerous death, the nuclear Petey will be on every front page of every news site on the Internet!”
      Okay, that sounded a little ridiculous. I started to feel a bit calmer.
      “You will—literally—shit yourself in public.”
      I stumbled on the bottom step. That, on the other hand, sounded horribly plausible.
      I ran into the kitchen and pushed myself up on the corner of the countertop like the world’s clumsiest ballet dancer and cast frantically around the room for something I could use to get a grip. But all I saw were open shelves crammed with cereal and pasta boxes, pine-faced cupboards, the big silver fridge, and my hazy, monstrous reflection. The oven clock’s green digits burned: 3:59 a.m.
      Ten thousand, eight hundred, and sixty seconds.
      Three: Get counting.
      Distract yourself. Break the attack up into countable pieces, little chunks of temporal driftwood. Concentrate on keeping your head above water until you make it to the next one.
      “One,” I said. “Two.” But my real, out-loud voice sounded weak and tinny next to the countdown inside my head.
      Ten thousand, eight hundred, and forty seconds . . .
      “Three . . . four . . .” I managed, but it wasn’t working. A separate part of my brain had taken up the count while my panic continued, unimpeded and undistracted. I needed something else, some trickier puzzle to drag my attention off the hot, churning sensation in my lower abdomen.
 
 
“And that,” I tell Mum, “is where I really screwed up.”
      “Oh?”
      “I switched from counting whole numbers to their square roots.”
      She stares at me. “How many decimals?” she asks eventually.
      “Six.”
      She winces.
 
 
“2.828427, 3, 3.162278, 3.316 . . .” I stumbled, syllables like marbles in my mouth, sweat clammy in my hands and between my shoulders. I tried again. “3.316 . . .”
      But it was no good; I’d run out of numbers.
      I looked around me in desperation, for something, anything else to fill the roaring whirlpool inside me. My eyes prickled and my heart lurched drunkenly behind my ribs. In the dim wash of streetlight, the kitchen seemed to be shrinking, the walls falling in towards one another. For a second I thought I could hear the beams creaking.
      Sometimes when it gets really bad, I see and hear things that aren’t really happening. Shit. How had this gotten so far away from me? I swallowed hard and reached for my last-gasp, incase- of-emergency-break-glass, sanity-preservation technique.
      Four: get eating.
      I threw myself at the fridge and yanked out a Tupperware of last night’s curry. The sticky brown mess was freezing to the touch as I dug my fingers in and started shovelling. I chewed frantically: a hopeless rear-guard action, knowing that I couldn’t feed the hole inside me fast enough, hoping that the sheer weight of the food would push the panic rising out of my stomach back down again.
 
 
“. . . and it just sort of escalated from there.”
      Mum frowns and scribbles. She’s taken only the occasional note, flagging any details she thinks might be significant for later consideration.
      “Okay,” she says. “You ran out of numbers and you ate. Not ideal, but in the moment you do what you have to. Still”—she nods at the half saltshaker I’m still holding in my fist—“that doesn’t seem to be the prime candidate for comfort eating.”
      Keeping her eyes on mine, she eases it out of my grip and replaces it with her hand. Her fingers squeeze mine. She pushes the larder door open and leads me from my hiding place.
      The kitchen looks like a football crowd rioted in it. Cupboards hang open, drawers wrenched from their fittings and overturned on the floor. Cartons and pickle-smeared jars, bags and rinds, and fragments of dried pasta lie everywhere. Flour is scattered like a half-hearted English snowfall.
      “I ran out of numbers,” I murmur, shell-shocked. I don’t even remember doing this. “And then . . .” And the shame, which has been licking its way up through me like a flame at paper, finally takes hold. “I ran out of food.”
      Mum clicks her tongue against the inside of her teeth. She closes her notebook, pockets it, crouches among the debris, and begins to put her house back in order.
      “Mum,” I say quietly, “let me.”
      “Go back to bed, Peter.”
      “Mum.”
      “You need to go back to bed.”
      “And you don’t?” I practically wrestle a drawer from her hands. “You’re the one collecting an award in seven hours. You have to give a speech.” I can’t think of anything more terrifying...