A Change of Clothes

By Derek Des Anges

Security at the Bellside Gym and Leisure Centre was, in the opinion of Ivan Kles, a joke. Just as an example, like, he’d been able to walk right into the changing rooms and lockers where everyone kept their stuff without having a gym pass and without anyone challenging him, even though at sixteen he was graced with the exact kind of face that usually featured on Crimewatch reconstructions about corner–shop robberies. Same outfit, too. 

It was a peaky day in mid-March and the smell of cheap bad coffee from the gym concession swept in through the door and mingled with the smell of stale sweat in the changing rooms and the cheap deodorant and chlorine from the showers. Ivan wandered into the changing room with his hands in his trackie bottoms, looking even by his own estimation guilty as hell.

He knew from previous experience he couldn’t get into the ones with the padlocks on, not without some kind of bolt cutters, and it wasn’t worth the aggro. But a lot of people, a surprising amount of people considering Bellside backed onto his kind of area, just didn’t bother to bring one. You could get a couple of bits and bobs out without any bother at all. Sometimes even just walk off with a whole bag. No one stopped you.

There was only the one today: Ivan pried it open, listening to the showers hiss and roar and the muffled sound of some shit ‘90s chart music from the gym floor coming in under the door.

Inside there was a massive blacky-brown fur coat, taking up almost the whole locker.

“Mint,” muttered Ivan. He’d heard they could go for a bomb on eBay.

He pulled it out and started searching around for the pockets. It might just be easier to nick off with the wallet, and it’d look a lot less suspicious. 

“Mmmmblahblbhalbh,” said a very serious-sounding voice right outside the door.

Ivan froze.

He was pretty sure that was the security guard. The big one with the England tattoo on the back of his neck who looked like he ate bricks for breakfast. The one whose left leg was bigger than Ivan’s whole entire waist.

Ivan stuffed the coat under his arm and considered making a break for the toilet cubicles. 

“Mmmblah bmlala blah blah,” said the probably-security guard outside the door, and the door hinge creaked. 

Ivan wondered if he should just stuff the coat back into the locker . . . then he could pretend he wasn’t doing anything very much, maybe take his shoe off and put it back on again, and when the guy was gone he could get the wallet or whatever out of the pocket . . .

The door opened. In walked a man who didn’t look a thing like the security guard: he was tall, thin, wearing a boring-looking suit and talking on his phone.

Ivan exhaled slowly.

The man caught his eye, said, “Nice coat,” and took off his suit jacket, still talking to whoever was on the other end of the phone in the most condescending voice Ivan had ever heard in his life.

Number 319 River Road was Ivan’s current address. That didn’t mean it was his house, because technically the owners didn’t know him and Darren were living there, but he’d been there for seven and a half months and they didn’t seem to have noticed on account of them having the place up for rent and living in a different country or something. Darren had read the post and had a better idea of it than Ivan; Darren was also the one who’d figured out the neighbours’ Wi-Fi password. Ivan was supposed to be thinking up ways to make it so they didn’t have to keep getting bottles of gas from the back of the garage for the camp stove, but he kept getting distracted.

Darren was out when Ivan got back that evening, and he’d taken his Switch with him. He texted Ivan specifically to say that, which Ivan considered to be piss-poor unneighbourly behaviour. 

He was still smarting about it and weighed down with a carrier bag of Pot Noodles and another one full of fur coat when he got to the front gate.

There was someone standing in the garden.

Normally Ivan went in through the front door bold as brass because, as Darren said, it made them look more legit and no one asked questions, but this immediate little knife of anxiety pricked him right in the gut and said, what if that’s someone from the letting agency or whatever?

So he doubled back, turned up the driveway to the passage between the back gardens, and hopped over the fence.

The padlock on the back door wasn’t even closed, which Ivan had this awful feeling was actually his fault, but no one else seemed to have come in.

He dropped the Pot Noodles and the fur coat on the kitchen table on top of Darren’s latest collection and snuck up to the front room. 

The curtains were still closed.

He sidled up to the curtains and put his face against the little slit in them that they used for checking who was trying to ring the doorbell.

The person was still standing in the garden, just staring at the house.

They were a bit taller than Ivan, although a lot of people were so that wasn’t surprising, and they were a bit darker but not like actually Black or Asian or something, more like . . . tanned, probably . . . and had black-brown hair and were wearing red gym shorts and a vest and nothing else, which was a bit mental in this weather. 

Ivan couldn’t really tell if they were a bloke or a woman. They were fat enough that they basically had little tits and muscular enough that they looked blokey but not quite. He couldn’t tell through the little slit in the curtains how hairy they might or might not be, and he didn’t really care, and they didn’t have a beard or anything.

He stepped back from the curtains. 

“Fucking nutter,” Ivan muttered, and he went back into the kitchen to make himself a Pot Noodle.

Ivan went out two more times before giving up on getting any more goods, and both times the nutter in the front garden was still standing there. The second time it was well past eleven at night and getting cold, and Ivan was starting to get freaked out.

He pulled the bolt on the kitchen door shut behind him and texted Darren.

There’s a fucking mental case standing in the garden and they’ve been there all day

I’m at Aishas sort it out yourself, Darren replied, half an hour later, while Ivan was looking through the pile of cans in the corner of the kitchen to see if they were all actually empty. 

They were all actually empty.

Darren was at Aisha’s, which was good news because it meant when he came back he’d have more gear, but bad news because he’d probably be there for three days like he was last time. Aisha, after all, lived with her mum and had a house with actual electricity that she was meant to be in, and her mum sometimes cooked. If Ivan had some chance of hanging out at Aisha’s he’d probably spend three days in a row there too. 

Ivan walked through to the living room. The slit in the curtain shone orange street light on the opposite wall. The dark telly sat there as silent as ever in front of the empty couches. It was well cold. 

He peered through the slit in the curtains. 

The nutter went right on staring at the house. The streetlight shadows on their face made them look weird, and Ivan started to get even more freaked out. What if they were a murderer? Fuck Darren for going off and leaving him here on his own with a murderer, that was worse than his mum. 

Ivan picked up the bag with the fur coat, a packet of Doritos, a can of Coke, and one of the phones he’d lifted. It still had sixty percent battery. 

He went into the master bedroom, the one that Darren technically took for himself, wrapped himself in the fur coat and got into the massive bed under two duvets. 

“Smells of fucking fish,” he grumbled to no one, and opened the Doritos.

He fell asleep watching Let’s Plays on YouTube, and by the time he woke up in some unspecified hour of the night, needing a piss but too cosy to get up, the battery had died.

Ivan went back to sleep.

When he woke up there was someone in the kitchen. He could hear them. There was the unmistakable sound of bottles clinking, of someone moving around. Darren had clearly come back in the night, or more likely just now, since he hadn’t come and kicked Ivan out of the bed. 

Great, Ivan thought, he’ll know what to do about the nutter in the garden.

Or maybe the nutter had gone.

This cheerful thought motivated him to wriggle out of bed, which appeared to take a lot longer than it normally did even when he was reluctant to get out into the cold. 

“Fucking blankets,” said Ivan. His voice sounded strange to him. He wondered if he’d managed to get a cold. He’d felt fine when he went to sleep.

He rolled over to the edge of the bed, intending to use his momentum to get himself onto his feet the way he usually did, by swinging them out of the bed at the last minute. 

His legs didn’t swing out of the bed.

Ivan rolled off the edge of the bed and hit the floor with a loud, decisive slap that shook the floorboards beneath the carpet. 

There was no answering yell of complaint. The carpet had probably muffled the sound. It was probably the carpet that had stopped him from hurting himself as well, because he felt completely fine.

Ivan peered at the carpet for a minute. He was pretty sure it had been rose pink once, but it must’ve got really dusty, because it was now a pathetic, unassuming gray.

He tried to get up.

Instead of getting to his feet, Ivan flollopped like a pissed-off caterpillar and came down exactly where he’d started out.

“Oh shit,” said Ivan, horrified. “I’m fucking paralysed!”

He still sounded weird, but he had other things to worry about right now. Like just how paralysed he actually was.

He put his hands down on the carpet. He couldn’t seem to get them any further in front of him than his chest, and he couldn’t curl his fingers at all, but at least he could push with them. 

He gave another ridiculous hump of his torso, and tried to grab at the carpet.

This moved him about maybe like, fifteen centimetres forward, but he was closer to the bedroom door.

Ivan took a deep breath, and humped his body again.

By the time Ivan made it to the kitchen door he felt like he’d been jumped by six dickheads at once. The only part that had been even slightly fun was sliding down the stairs, and even that hadn’t been fun after he’d thought why did I ever stop doing this and remembered that it was because his mum had kicked his arse six ways to the fucking moon for making too much noise on a Sunday morning. 

Big bright morning light came in through the kitchen window and filled up the whole room. For a minute Ivan couldn’t see anything at all.

When he could, he realised his mistake.

The person currently sitting at the kitchen table wearing a smug expression and eating dry Pot Noodle out of the pot with their fingers was not Darren, because Darren wouldn’t do anything quite that mental. 

Over the unsettling sound of crunching, Ivan made three attempts to get up into the other chair, and when he’d accepted that this wasn’t remotely possible, he rolled over to just out of kicking reach of the stranger’s trainers and glared up at them.

It was, of bloody course, the nutter from the garden.

“Get out, this isn’t your house,” he told the nutter, ignoring for the time being that it wasn’t his house either.

“If you tense your abdominal muscles,” said the nutter, crunching loudly, “you should be able to sit up on your hips. Dunno why you’d want to, though, it’s very uncomfortable. Also, this stuff is disgusting. Is this really what you people eat?”

“You’re supposed to put water in it, you mentalist,” said Ivan, trying to tense his abdominal muscles under the full knowledge that, as far as he was aware, he didn’t actually have any. Certainly he’d never been able to achieve even a two-pack, never mind a six. “Who the fuck are you and why are you in my kitchen?”

“You’ve got my coat,” said the nutter. 

Ivan gave up trying to sit up and stared the nutter right in their bland and confusingly sexless face. He did what he always did when he’d been accused of nicking something: he lied. “No I haven’t, what the fuck do you mean?”

The nutter raised their eyebrows and crunched another load of broken–up dry noodles. “Bold choice to say that when you’re literally wearing it right now.”

Ivan squinted down at himself.

For the first time, he realised there was something directly between his eyes which he hadn’t noticed before: a long, blurry, grey-black thing with loads of long hairs coming out of it.

“What the fuck,” said Ivan.

“Hang on,” said the nutter, reaching into the pile of cans and stuff on the floor. “Got an idea.”

They picked up a piece of the broken mirror from the bathroom what Darren had smashed when he came back high and got freaked out by the way his face was moving. The nutter turned the mirror around in their hand so Ivan could look at himself.

“Nah,” said Ivan, staring into the mirror. “Nah, mate. You’re playing some kind of trick on me.”

The seal in the mirror looked back at him, and barked. 

By the time the stranger, who still hadn’t introduced themselves, had finished eating two entirely dry Pot Noodles and also picked up all the crumbs with their fingers and eaten them as well, Ivan had mostly accepted that for whatever reason, he’d gone to sleep wearing a coat he’d nicked, and woken up a small brown-grey seal. 

No matter how many ways he tried to phrase this in his head, it didn’t sound any less stupid.

“If you hate it so much,” said the stranger, who’d got up to go through the cupboards with more curiosity than urgency, “why don’t you just take the coat off?”

“How do I do that?” Ivan complained, sprawling on the floor. “I don’t have hands.”

The stranger shrugged and pulled out a tin of baked beans. “I dunno. You just take it off. What’re these?”

“Beans,” said Ivan. “I can’t just take it off. Where does it fasten? How do I get these weird flipper things under it? Does it just peel off me?”

“Dunno, never thought about it,” the stranger said, apparently not thinking about it now, either. They weighed the tin of beans in their hand. “What do you do with ‘beans’?”

“Eat them,” Ivan said, trying for the umpteenth time to sit up, and failing. “How do you take the coat off?”

“I just . . . take it off,” the stranger said, squinting at the can. “This colour is incredible, I could look at it all day. The colours up here are brilliant.”

“Look,” Ivan snapped, slapping his new tail fins angrily on the kitchen floor. “Don’t you want your bloody coat back?”

“Not especially,” said the stranger, to Ivan’s surprise. They sat down and rolled the can back and forth along the table. “It’s shite being a seal, if I’m honest with you. Dull. Cold. You’re either lying around or chasing after a fish or whatever. This place is much more interesting.”

“No it isn’t,” Ivan grumbled. “It’s boring and difficult and you never have enough money and everyone fuckin’ shouts at you whenever you get something wrong. Is this thing magic?”

“Probably,” said the stranger. “Like I said, I never really thought about it. What’s money, how do I get more of that?”

“If I knew,” Ivan snapped, rolling onto his back, “I wouldn’t be living in a fucking squat.”

By lunchtime the stranger had gone back out with a carrier bag full of empty cans. Ivan wasn’t sure what they planned to do with them and he didn’t care: the main thing was that they’d left the door ajar, and he thought perhaps it was on purpose. 

If the stranger wasn’t going to help — and it was pretty clear they didn’t give the slightest shit about doing that — he was just going to have to get out there and find someone who could. It was a long, long way to Aisha’s house, there were like, two buses he needed to get, but Ivan was pretty sure that seals didn’t have to pay bus fares anyway or even look like they did. Dogs didn’t pay for the bus.

Ivan braced his abs and did his best to flop and hump his way into the back garden.

He realised his mistake almost immediately: to get into the back garden from the passage between the houses he’d climbed over the fence. To get back out of the back garden into the passage between the houses, he would have to climb over the fence, which in his current condition was about as likely as passing his GCSE French. 

He flailed a flipper ineffectually, hitting the door.

The door he’d just heaved himself through swung open a little further and then, slowly and inevitably as a car coming directly towards him, it swung shut. 

“Fuck,” said Ivan, quite loudly.

He rolled over onto his back and made a mournful noise of complaint. 

“Mum!” hissed a voice from the next garden. “Mum! Mum, those weirdos next door have got a seal!”

Normally Ivan would have been wound up about being called a weirdo, but right now he had more pressing things on his mind. He rolled onto his front again and yelled, “Help! Help! I’ve been turned into a seal by a magic coat! Help me!”

“It’s really loud,” the voice said. “Mum! Come and look at this seal!”

“Hey . . .” Ivan flopped around angrily on the patio tiles. “Hey! Hey! Help me! Call the hospital or something!”

“You’d better not be making things up . . .” said an adult voice from next door’s garden.

A face peered over the fence. 

The adult voice said, “I’m calling the police. They’ve nicked a seal. This is ridiculous. I told you they were up to no good.”

“Can I go and pet it?” the child’s voice asked.

“No! It’s a wild animal! I’m surprised it hasn’t bitten anyone!”

“No! Don’t call the police! I’m not a wild animal!” Ivan yelped, to no effect. They weren’t listening. 

He watched in dismay as the woman next door got out her phone and started to dial. Ivan had spent his whole life trying to avoid the police: his mum had never had anything to do with them if she could help it, and it hadn’t occurred to him that someone would, completely voluntarily and for no reason at all, just call the police on him from being in the garden.

He could, however, imagine Darren saying: That’s ‘cos you’re white, Ivan.

The woman next door said, “Police, please.”

The next hour and a half was not the finest of Ivan’s life: the police showed up and immediately berated the woman next door for calling them, then for keeping a wild animal that she had no right to, then, without apologising to her for any of it, they called up a wildlife rescue centre, who said they didn’t do pick-ups. They then called up the local zoo, who said they didn’t do pick-ups but would, if the police could hang on a minute, send someone around to show them how to handle a seal without getting bitten.

Ivan, who had been slowly trying to escape down the end of the garden while two police officers and a very enthusiastic and very scary dog stood two metres away and respectively shouted and barked at him, had not considered the possibility that he could bite a policeman and get away with it in his current form.

He was quite disappointed in himself.

By the time the zoo person arrived the dog had been tied up at the far end of the garden and next door’s kid had draped herself over the fence with her phone on record and was refusing to be budged.

“I am going to be so famous,” she insisted. 

Ivan hunched up against the back fence. He couldn’t hear any more sirens. He wasn’t even sure if zoo people had sirens on their cars. He’d never really thought about it before. 

“You can’t arrest me!” he barked. They still didn’t seem to understand him. “I ain’t done anything!”

That was not strictly true, but the important part was, as far as Ivan was concerned, that they didn’t know that.

It started to rain. The police looked pissed off about it: the kid put up a pink umbrella and went right on filming. He found he didn’t really care whether it was raining or not. 

“Sorry, sorry,” said a skinny white man, coming through the back gate. He was wearing a sweater with a logo on it that looked like some sort of fucked–up monkey thing with a striped tail, and he had a bunch of equipment with him, so Ivan felt pretty safe in assuming this was the zoo man. “Traffic was a nightmare. Do you have facilities at the station for looking after —”

He stopped, stared, and looked angrily at the two police officers. 

“Why the hell did you bring a dog?” the zoo man asked.

“Dangerous wild animal,” said the male one into the collar of his stab vest. “Standard procedure.”

“It’s an underfed juvenile,” the zoo man said sharply, which Ivan thought was a bit rude. “There is absolutely no need. I know you have guides on this because I helped write them.”

The police ignored this. The zoo man tutted, and unrolled a kind of stretcher or sling thing on the lawn.

Ivan backed up against the fence until he couldn’t back up any further. “I don’t wanna go to the police station!” he wailed. “I ain’t done nothin’! And I’m hungry!”

The zoo man picked up a towel, strode over to Ivan, and wrapped him in it without stopping to take a breath. “There you go,” he added, as Ivan yelled indignantly and made a futile effort to squirm out of his grasp. “It’s going to be okay.”

He carried Ivan over to the sling thing and put him on it, hoisting it up by the handles before Ivan could even think about humping his way back off it.

“They’ve been really underfeeding this pup,” the zoo man said, as Ivan resigned himself to life in animal prison, lying defeated on a comfy towel while a small child filmed him over the fence. “You might want to refer whoever owns this place to the RSPCA. They shouldn’t have a wild animal out in their garden at all.”

“Don’t tell us how to do our job,” said one of the police officers. The other one just petted the police dog slowly. “I thought you didn’t do pick-ups?”

“I don’t trust you not to screw this up and kill the poor thing,” the zoo man said tetchily. “You clearly don’t read any of the material you’re given.”

“Watch it, sunshine,” grumbled one of the officers.

“Well would you mind opening the gate?” the zoo man said somewhat sarcastically. “My hands are full.”

To Ivan’s surprise, he didn’t get loaded into the meat wagon, but into the back of a perfectly normal Vauxhall Astra instead. Once he’d figured out that this meant he wasn’t going to the nick after all, he calmed down a bit, and let the zoo man secure him in place.

“That’s better,” the zoo man said. “I don’t know what those people thought they were doing but you should be twice the size you are. Unforgivable, in my opinion.”

He turned the radio on.

Ivan put up with the zoo man’s horrible taste in music all the way to a place which, going on the sign outside, was a wildlife park rather than a zoo. He had no idea what the difference was supposed to be, and only just caught a bit about customs and rescued before the car went through the gate. 

The zoo man finally turned down Smooth Hits FM and drove them up to a boring-looking single-storey building with small windows.

Once he’d been carried inside, Ivan got a better look around. There were a couple more people in sweatshirts — two girls and a bloke, who was wearing gloves — and some scary-looking medical stuff, and what looked like one of them scales for weighing vegetables and that at the supermarket, only massive, like.

“He’s been very good all the way here,” the zoo man said, as he passed the sling over to one of the girls. Ivan bonked his head on her tits. She didn’t even tell him off. “I hope this doesn’t mean he’s past it. The little guy’s horribly underweight.”

“Well, let’s get an idea of how badly, and see if he eats,” said the bloke, who had a stethoscope so was probably a vet of some kind.

Ivan didn’t much appreciate being called a little guy, but he also had a faceful of tits and none of the massive needles were coming in his direction, so he figured it was all right. Anyway, maybe they’d give him K or something, for free, like. That wouldn’t be so bad.

The next two weeks were like nothing else Ivan had ever experienced. He was constantly being given things to eat: first some kind of weird milk drink, which didn’t taste as bad as he was expecting it to, and then a never-ending line-up of fish, which was so good that he was starting to think that all them sushi nuts on the high street had the right idea after all.

He got poked and prodded a bit, but they kept apologising to him while they were doing it, and three different sweatshirt-wearing girls called him “so cute” and told him how well he was doing, and he was never too cold, and no one wanted him to do anything except swim around, eat, and sometimes play with plastic buckets and stuff. Which would have been really embarrassing, like, but everyone acted as if it was totally normal and kept saying “enrichment” a lot. 

At the end of the two weeks they put him back on the scales, told him how well he was doing, and took him to a new, bigger pool with an outdoor bit that was so new that he could smell the concrete in the mixers on the other side of the fence. There was a glass window in one side of it, so’s he could look down at stuff. 

All day, kids kept coming up to the window and pointing at him and shouting about how he was cute and funny and interesting, and sometimes girls would point him out to their boyfriends, and talk about how cute he was, and three times they stood around and watched him show off while he was getting given more and more and more fish.

When Ivan rolled onto his back in the sun that evening, he was full, content, and didn’t miss Darren’s Nintendo Switch even a little bit. He couldn’t remember any time in his life before when people had been pleased to see him, and told him he was good at stuff, or to be honest even said that he was cute, not even when he was a little kid.

Life, he thought, was pretty good. 

By the time he saw a face he recognised among the visitors to the Wildlife Park And Rescue Centre, Ivan had got well used to people not understanding a word he was saying. Sometimes he used this to catcall girls; sometimes he used this to explain to this one bloke who looked a bit like he imagined a psychiatrist to look, with a big moustache and all a suit on on a Sunday, what his mum had been like and how foster care hadn’t been no better; sometimes he just shouted about their taste in trainers, like what was that kid even thinking, those things were bare ugly. 

He’d just yelled, “Give me your ice-cream!” at a kid who’d been staring at him for half of an hour, like, when this face that looked familiar came over the top of the railing at the side of the enclosure.

They’d tied up their long hair in a ponytail and they weren’t wearing gym clothes any more but he was pretty sure it was the nutter from the garden with the magic coat, and when he said: 

“Oh, not you,” and slapped a big plastic ball at them, and they replied:

“Me again,” with a big grin, he knew he was right. No one else had understood him since he got here.

He climbed out on the rock by where the nutter was standing and said, “Whaddayou want?”

The nutter, who was wearing just normal tracksuit and all that, said, “Not figured out how to take it off, then?”

Ivan gave the best approximation of a shrug that a seal could. “Nah,” he said.

“Dunwanna anyway.”

“That makes sense,” the stranger said, lifting up a bag of M&Ms so they could eat one. “I don’t think it comes off unless you want to take it off, you know?”

“Don’t you want it back, though?” Ivan asked, preparing himself for a fight. He didn’t want to go back to the freezing cold squat, and while the M&Ms probably tasted all right, he’d started enjoying the fish and the not having to do nothing and no one yelling at him and constantly being told he was cute and getting to just shout shit at people without anyone being in the least bit bothered. And all right it was a bit weird having people just . . . there . . . when he went for a shit, but there was a spot behind a rock where he didn’t get seen doing it.

“No,” the stranger said, with a snort. “No, rather you than me. I’m having a ball. The fun kind, not the plastic kind you’ve got in here. That’s a metaphor, I think. I’m still getting the hang of those. The point is, I’ve got a job. People talk to each other. There’s free doughnuts on Fridays. I’m learning about banking. It’s very exciting. You can keep your fish.”

Ivan gave a derisive laugh. “A bank? Oh, mate. Suit yourself. I’m going to stay here where I don’t have to do nothing and everyone thinks I’m the absolute shit.”

He rolled over onto his back and slapped his chest with his flippers. Several people standing around the opposite side of the enclosure pointed excitedly. 

“See?”

“I see,” the stranger said, finishing their M&Ms. “Looks like it worked out pretty well.”

“Are you talking to the seal?” asked a middle-aged Black woman with one of those big fancy head scarves they liked to wear. Ivan had always thought they were really colourful, but now that he was a seal it all looked washed-out. “You know they can’t understand you, right?”

“Oh, I know,” the stranger told her, with a big charming smile, “but he almost looks like he could.”

And he walked away, leaving Ivan to roll around in the sun and do absolutely nothing at all.