Whispers Through a Megaphone by Rachel Elliott

it’s really boring.”
    Ralph smiled, which made Arthur want to pick him up and throw him across the kitchen.
     
    Upstairs, Sadie applied all the usual make-up, apart from foundation. She had no intention of covering up her husband’s mistakes, which were swelling on her cheek and around her eye. She set a Suzanne Vega album playing and turned up the volume. How had Suzanne Vega’s music eluded her until now? She had been listening to this acoustic collection of old songs on repeat over the past few weeks. It was poetic, funny, clever, romantic. It belonged to Kristin.
    Sadie Swoon @SadieLPeterson
Suzanne Vega: total goddess
    Jilly Perkins @JillyBPerks
@SadieLPeterson Lost my virginity at a Suzanne Vega concert (Marlene on the wall)
    Arthur stood beside his father, swigging Peroni from the bottle, appeasing his own toxicity. How did he know that he was toxic? His mother told him after his and Stanley’s sixth birthday party. “How did I end up with such a toxic son?” she said, her hands gripping his shoulders. “What’s wrong with you? You have everything a boy could ask for. Why areyou always sulky or angry? Why can’t you be more like your brother? Look at him, Arthur. I said look at him. He’s smiling, see? That’s what normal boys do. They smile every now and then.”
    TOXIC. The word had lit up inside his brain. He was hot-headed, headstrong. He was poisonous .
    Years later, Arthur read about a psychological experiment in which one group of children (group A) were told that they were especially clever and another (group B) that they were less clever. In the tests that followed, every child in group A achieved better results than they used to, while the little Bs got lower results and seemed unmotivated. Over time, motivation levels in group A also began to fluctuate (if you’ve been labelled “clever”, why bother to try and appear clever?). Arthur read about this experiment and shook his head. It reminded him of something—something uncomfortable—but he couldn’t quite reach it. All this thinking made his head hurt, so he finished his chicken sandwich and went into the back garden to throw a chair across the lawn.
    “Hormones,” the doctor said. “He’s brimming with hormones. And if you call him toxic, that’s what he’ll become. I should know. I’m toxic. I shoot pigeons for fun. Real ones. It’s not illegal. It’s pest control. But keep it to yourself. Is there anything else I can do for you, Mrs Swoon?”
    “What did it feel like?” said Arthur.
    “What?”
    “Hitting Mum.”
    Ralph stood up and slammed his bottle on the table. “I’m going to say this one last time, all right? I did not, I repeat not , hit your mother. I’ve never hit a woman in my life. Have you got that?”
    Arthur shrugged.
    “What kind of question is that anyway? What a fucked-up thing to ask.”
    “Now who’s swearing?”
    Stanley was standing in the garden with a pint of Ribena. He looked around at the multicoloured lanterns hanging from trees, the citronella candles waiting to be lit, the chairs positioned in a semicircle to the left of his mother’s gargantuan, top-of-the-range, six-burner gas barbecue. It arrived last summer after another of her trips to B&Q. She had called it a symbol of independence .
    “I will not be a suburban cliché,” she announced, releasing the shiny red beast from its cardboard cage while her family watched. “I’m not going to cook all week in the privacy of our home, then have my husband stand in the garden in front of our friends, tossing burgers like he’s king of the cooking, king of the barbecue, king of everything while I run in and out of the house, in and out all the time, carrying bowls of lettuce. I refuse to become one of those women who stands by while her husband takes the glory. If I cook in private, I cook in public.”
    “Fine by me,” said Ralph.
    It was fine and it was not fine. He hated the pressure of barbecues, having to stand there in a silly