by Paul Sayer
I wandered aimlessly about the rest of the cottage, my head spinning with too many thoughts. I went into the kitchen and gorged myself with whatever I could lay my hands on, baked beans from the tin, a packet of cakes, bread, sweets, and more. Then I ran out of the cottage, through the garden and back to the cliff edge down which I scrambled to the beach. I began running again, the shale and coarse sand spraying from my feet, out to the edge of the tide, then back, under the dead gaze of the empty shops. There were a few people about, in pairs, with dogs, but nobody seemed to find anything unusual in a boy galloping to exhaustion along the cold wet beach, and no one sought to stop me as I gangled and stumbled, though eventually fatigue got the upper hand and I dropped to the ground, cuddling a piece of clay, my head filled with the red of weariness and misery. I felt the cold moisture of the clay against my cheek and the flames of tears in my eyes.
I rested for a while then began the long walk back to the cottage. Where else was there for me to go? My lungs were glowing inside me and I thought I recognized the first symptoms of a cold, though it was probably only the result of my unusual exertion.
The dark blue palms of night were growing and spreading from the inland horizon as I dragged myself back up the cliff and walked into the garden of the cottage. Something stirred near my foot, small, frightened, quickly gone, since, strain my eyes as I might I couldn’t spot it in the gloom. The toad, no doubt, on one of its nightly forays - though I had never seen it anywhere but under the stone.
I went inside and closed the door gently behind me. The cottage was in darkness and I stood there for a long time, completely unsure of myself. Eventually I fumbled for the kitchen light; it didn’t work so I made my way across to the hallway to switch on the light there. Then I was standing before the door of my father’s bedroom, transfixed by some external message that had not yet permeated into my conscious mind. Then I realized what it was: the smell. It overwhelmed me: the vomit, the stink of shit, and a quick throb in my temples sent me doubling over to throw up on the floor, buckets and buckets of the stuff.
I feel sure that my intention had been to find out how I could help him, but that may be a convenient trick of conscience, a rationalization to make me feel more comfortable and less responsible. But if I had intended to offer him my assistance, that resolve vanished in an instant and I made my way to my own bed to sink into a sleep deeper than I had ever remembered or would ever know again.
SEVENTEEN
How tough a body is. How hard it is to make it relent against its wishes. I can’t say how long I lay there, many days certainly, weeks maybe, listening, at first, to my father’s low groans and mumblings, forcing myself not to hear by concentrating on the sound of the sea or the falling rain - ancient, accommodating sounds. At some point I began to be beleaguered by dreary hallucinations: cumuli of colours before my eyes, armies of insects coming for me, that sort of thing. But they would pass and I would realize that this process, whatever it was, was far from complete. My tongue became cemented into the roof of my mouth with the crud and residue of my seldom breath. My eyelids began to grate like paper and there was no comfort in keeping them either open or closed. I felt odd stabs of pain in my limbs, my stomach and heart. Then there were other times when I would be listening to the wind at its height, absorbing it, feeling myself rise above the thin outline of my body, rolling away from it, sharing with delight the wind’s violence on our home and the earth, making an ally of it, a universal companion, trusting it the way I would trust a cancer, if I had one.
There would always be someone, though, it seemed, somebody trying to ‘save’ me. A man came saying, ‘Forgive me, I’m looking for someone. Perhaps he’s your father.’
He was standing in the doorway to my room, his feet crunching broken glass the origin of which I did not know. He was dressed in a dark overcoat, and he carried a small brown case. Resentful of the intrusion I slipped momentarily back into my trance, then I looked again, turning my head this time. But the method I had chosen to abstract myself from the world was not sufficient, and I knew it; just turning my head had given the game away. The man came closer, tightly clutching his case as if for safety. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m from the National Insurance, you see. I say, are you all right? No,’ he said, a twitter of fear in his voice. ‘I can see you clearly are not all right. I’ll get help.’
He backed off, then mistakenly entered my father’s room. A sledgehammer of stench rolled out through the door, the smell of bad meat, together with a black bubble of hissing flies. I heard the man’s little gasps of dismay then saw him as he re-emerged, a handkerchief cupped over his mouth and nose. He took a step into my room, his eyes looking at me over the hankie, pale, serious eyes; then he hurried off, clutching his case.
I remember a doctor standing over me, testing the reflexes in my elbows and ankles. He listened to my slow heartbeat, wiped milky muck from my lips with a sweet-smelling damp cloth, then said I would live. Behind him, in my father’s room, I heard the curses and quiet disagreements of the paper-masked men who had come to move my father’s corpse. For some reason they couldn’t agree on a particular way of doing something, some task, I didn’t know what. I heard the rustle of sheets of plastic. The doctor pushed my bedroom door to. He tried opening a window but was unsuccessful. He made a great show of looking at his watch. He said nothing.
Eventually, I too was moved, somewhere, I will never know where, since the exertion I had felt during even the slight action of having my body picked up made me fall asleep before they’d taken me from the cottage.
I was nursed back to consciousness, encouraged to drink, and eventually to eat again, by a kindly, ringlet-haired young man with a small face and sharp, pointed features. I was in a room of my own which was decorated with red rabbits and cartoon bears. Indeed they had me in some kind of cot where I would lie most of the day, listening to the sounds of other children, probably much younger than myself, playing nearby, outside somewhere. The young man, he wore no kind of uniform, would come and praise me if I’d eaten well. He would get me to sit out in a chair and by way of reward he would read stories to me from a book of one thousand and one such stories. What a freshness these stories imparted to me, a lightness, a release such as I had never known before. They radiated and lifted me from my preoccupations with myself. Sometimes he would show me pictures to please me, the sort of thing my mother, that dark stranger in my soul, might have done. I saw only one other person, a white-coated woman who dropped in on me on odd mornings, smiling, asking how I felt. I, of course said nothing. I should have known enough to be wary of this woman, not to have trusted her, but my wilfulness would lead me where it would.
I was taken from this place to some kind of home, a big house set back from a road, hidden behind tall trees, which looked out towards a straight blue horizon that was the sea, that awful, sucking expanse.
I was put in a dormitory with other boys. It was a crowded place. Many of the boys were very rough and when they could they would stand around me screwing their fingers in their temples, calling me weird and loony. And, as was the way of things, I was beaten up once or twice, though I felt they got little pleasure from this since I was never inclined to retaliate. The pain of these beatings was negligible: I seemed to be rising above pain in a curious sort of way. I was put in a classroom during the day, at a desk at the back of the class, though I never wrote anything or understood what the teacher was talking about. The teacher feigned patience with me, though I sensed his exasperation. The summer heat was intense and I fainted once or twice, since I was far from strong despite everyone’s efforts. One day, without a thought in my head, I set off walking down the drive and out of the grounds. I walked straight across fields of deep green corn which rippled in the wind, waved and tressed like fantastic hair. I came to a road that looked familiar, though how I would have known it I couldn’t imagine. I followed it down a rift in the hot landscape till I found the lure that had drawn me: the sea, the beckoning giant in my
imagination and my nightmares. I walked on to the beach. There must have been something odd about my appearance because children stopped their playing and fell quiet as I passed. I just kept going, no reason, on and on for I don’t know how long, under the shadow of the cliff. Then I came to a familiar place.
All the cottages had gone, and the shops, though they hadn’t been claimed by the sea. The whole site was flat like a desert, the horizon broken only by a bulldozer and some kind of hut or mobile home. I climbed the cliff, careless of the loose clay beneath my feet, sometimes tumbling back down but then simply retracing my steps till I reached the top. I wandered about, inexplicably seeking the foundations of the cottage that we’d lived in, but there wasn’t much to be seen save a few sharp, salt-edged weeds pushing up through a mazy piece of concrete. The heat began to draw my blood and I fell to the ground, the low sun burning on the top of my head. From the dazzle a small girl appeared. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked. I raised my head a little. She kicked at the fine sand round her feet. ‘Have you seen what I’ve got?’ she asked. And she lifted a stick up in the air from which a big old toad was suspended, its head and legs bound with a thin, cutting wire. It was alive, though very still: any movement would surely have been an agony for it, or perhaps have brought its death. It didn’t even blink. I dragged myself to my feet and made a weak gesture of pushing the girl away. She moved back a pace looking as if she was about to cry. Then she ran away, the toad flopping around on the end of the stick. I slithered back down to the beach, catching my head many times. The screams of the seagulls rose in my head, their wings beating in my chest. I lost my sight for a while, blackness encapsulated in terrific heat. And I hoped I would die and be taken by the tide.
But it was not to be.
A pair of black shoes came into the shadows of my recovering vision. ‘We’ve been looking for you, sonny,’ said a voice. ‘Come on now, stand up. Gently does it.’ But his helping hands had to take all my weight. I could not move, had no strength, no desire to. Nothing was left in me at all. He laid me back on the warm sand and I reflected on the first wave of a comforting stillness breaking over me, a quiet madness of my own making. In a funny sort of way it was how I imagined a homecoming might be. ‘Easy now, boy,’ said the man. ‘You rest and I’ll be back shortly.’
I watched him scurry away, my sight having returned fully by this time, and allowed myself one last act, one last indulgence before the years that followed: I smiled.
EIGHTEEN
The Major thudded the spade into the hard ground, lifting a heavy clod that rolled off before he could turn it and dig it back in. He threw the spade down and picked it up again. He cursed quietly under his breath then scythed the blade through the tough carpet of weeds, drawing up a thin oblong of turf. We were alone. All the other residents were supposed to have joined us in this task of converting an area of open woodland into some sort of vegetable patch, but the sudden and unexpected late frost, together with the rule that they weren’t obliged to take part in any ostensibly therapeutic work unwillingly, meant that everyone else had opted to stay at the house where they would suffer the discomfort of John and Anna’s disapproving, indulgent looks in exchange for keeping agreeably warm. Neither the Director of One World nor his assistant could really have expected any of them to turn out in this cold, and it must have been a surprise when the Major openly challenged the house on their behalf, saying after breakfast, ‘If none of you will come with me then I’ll start the job alone. And for company I’ll take my friend Peter, since I know that if he could speak then he would wish to come.’ And for this outburst John and Anna were obliged to offer some vague support.
Though the Major had made a big show of dressing me carefully in overcoat, scarf, gloves and oversized hat, placing a blanket over my knees for extra warmth, it was not enough to keep out that grasping chill, that static coldness where ribbons of mist, like spectral mirages of the land beneath, twisted and thickened as the morning passed.
I was no longer quite myself, not up there in my head nor in that bony thin house they insisted was my body, the residing place of whatever they believed I really was, a haunted soul, a vampire, a trickster perhaps. I had not been quite myself since those hours, that day, however long it was, when I had been subjected to the acrimonious details of my past, my history, whatever it may be called. Perhaps I had really seen nothing, an embellishment of nothing, and found it simply appropriate to explain myself with these excuses, these images, these baubles cast against the sky. I don’t know what was true, have no idea of the nature of ‘truth’. Those things in my mind - I couldn’t trust them, not things like that so neatly arranged, two-dimensional, obvious to the point of being only declarable as null and void. That past I saw, if it was really mine, was not a past in which I could place any trust - it would only let me down, I know it would. To forget, if at all possible, that would be best.
John and Anna had come for me, points of light visible through the weave of the hood. Their feet, his shuffling, hers clicking, tripped about the cellar floor. One of them turned the creaky apparatus and I flipped over, my back coming to rest in an atrocity of pain. My limbs were freed but would not resume their customary positions unless manipulated. This seemed to bring sighs from them both. I might have hoped to be left for a while but they were eager to have me away up the wooden steps. My main joints grated, felt hammered as they lifted me up, up to the electric light in the hall of the One World Rehabilitation Centre. They did not pause to rest, carrying on up the stairs to my room where I was put on the bed. Anna tugged at the ties of the hood still in position on my head. To my surprise I was quickly able to focus in the dull light. John bent over me, his breath damp and attractive. He probed at my chest with his stethoscope, moving it about impatiently, shaking his head. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just the same. I find it hard to believe. He’s in there somewhere, the bugger, I know he is.’ He waved a finger, which Anna took as the signal to wrap a blanket roughly around me. He shrugged and they left, whereupon I fell immediately into a troubled sleep in which I dreamt they’d made a deal with me whereby I would be allowed to remain passive while they amputated parts of my body and resurrected them independent of the main mass, promising to return them to my keeping at some later time.
When I eventually woke it was to find John alone in the room, sitting with one leg drawn up over the other. He looked rumpled and gloomy. He stood and went over to the sink to fetch a damp cloth which he wiped gently over my mouth. He picked a bit of loose skin from my lip with his thumbnail. ‘Now, my boy,’ he said. ‘How are you today?’
Under the darkness of his expression I saw an abiding flicker of excitement.
‘I want you to tell me, Peter,’ he said, ‘how are you today?’
I saw a vein flicker in the corner of his jaw, a tiny manifestation of his barely suppressed anger. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘get up.’ He reached for me, his thick hands gripping my upper arms with an unusual strength. ‘Out of it, come on!’ Some ghastly fluid lurched in my chest as he heaved me up, hugging me to him. He walked me around the room. ‘This is what we do, isn’t it, Peter? We walk. Yes? And we talk to our fellow man. No one can exist like you; it just isn’t humanly possible. There are no known cases. Come on, you bastard. Do it.’
He squeezed me till I thought I would be sick. Round and round the small floor he dragged me, faster and faster, breaking into some sort of singing with the momentum: ‘Baby don’t sleep, Baby don’t cry, Spread your wings, Time to fly.’
He threw me back on the bed and sank into the chair breathing very heavily, his head and shoulders rocking with the rhythm of his exhalations. He looked up at me as I lay across the bed, my arms spread wide. And he began to laugh. ‘You old bugger. You crafty sod. Why, the minute I get out of here you’ll be jumping up from that bed, dancing, singing. Ah God, I don’t know, I really don’t. I take my hat off to you, Peter. They just don’t come like you these days.’
He composed himself, then came over to me a
nd carefully lifted me on to the bed, properly, so that I was comfortable. ‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘Acting just like the others. Into bed, Peter? Want the wheelchair, Peter? I’ll fetch you some lunch, Peter, your favourite today. Poor Peter. How sad.’
He shook his head, covered me with the blanket, and left the room.
My leg no longer flapped though I did still slobber when food was put before me. But this action was less marked and I felt that, given time, it too would no longer be a feature of my condition. Tom resumed the exercises with me one morning, not sure if he was doing the right thing or not. But he’d barely started rowing away with the machine when John came in, waved a finger and shook his head. Tom let me down from the apparatus and took me to the kitchen with him where he spent a happy, leisurely hour preparing lunch for the rest of the house.
The soft air of a false spring came to One World, whispering in the tree-tops and undergrowth around the house. Bits of green began to appear in the dark of the hedges round the small garden beyond the front drive. For much of the time I was left in peace in some corner of the house, though one afternoon the triplets became excited by some idea they’d had, and they asked Tom if they could take me for a walk. He replied that he didn’t see why not. They took me out along the track that led to the house, then, when they were well out of sight of the place, quickly veered off through a gap in a thicket, pulling the chair over crackling ferns to a kind of den they seemed to have made for themselves some time before. The most exotic of the trio posed before a piece of broken mirror wedged into the crook of a low branch, pencilling make-up on her face, thick, heavy lines that made her features look grotesque. She poked a finger at her hair which was like that of the other two that day: held up by a yellow headband, wild and reaching like upturned roots. The other two were giggling, their arms locked together as they whispered. ‘I daren’t,’ one of them said. ‘Go on, he won’t do anything. An’ he won’t tell anyone. He can’t.’ One of them freed herself from her sister and came over to me. The exotic one paid no attention as her sister fumbled with the buttons on my trousers, getting bolder as each second passed, till she had peeled back the material and unfolded the top of my incontinence pad. She screwed her lips up and was joined by the other interested party. ‘Touch it,’ she said. ‘Go on. Get hold of it.’ The girl puzzled for a moment, then reached for my prick, sliding her cold fingers underneath till it rested in her palm. ‘Hah,’ said the watching sister, as if on the verge of some important discovery. ‘Now you have to rub it,’ she said, ‘and make it stiff.’ The girl scratched vaguely and tentatively. ‘Not like that,’ said the watcher, ‘harder. Like this.’ But before she could get hold of me I pissed, the thick gold liquid I’d been holding onto for a while, for some reason, shooting onto both sisters’ hands and arms. The girl wrenched her hand away. ‘Uuugh, the dirty bastard,’ she said, shaking her hand, wiping it on the grass. The other sister flicked my trousers over my prick. The exotic one, who had begun to take an interest in her sisters’ activity, sniffed and said, ‘Well if that’s the only way you two can think of getting a man, I feel sorry for you. This face is my fortune.’ Then they began arguing and ran off into the woods chasing each other, their raucous voices trailing some distance away, further, till I could no longer hear them. Much later, when the light was failing, the exotic one came back for me, did up my fly quickly, then pulled me from the thicket and hurriedly pushed me back to the house without a word.