Shift

by Mia Gallagher

  So this was what had become of her.

  No, he thought. Go away. Get back to the past. You should not be grown.

  ‘Good to see you,’ she said at last. She smiled again. Bright, this time.

  Good to see you. Adam looked down at his shrivelled body under the snot green blankets, the plastic tube feeding life into his disappearing veins, and wondered what had made her, his gorgeous piratical George, so fucking stupid.

  They sit in the corner of the children’s room. The playroom, Adam’s mother calls it. There are brown tiles on the floor. Cork. Safer to play on than wood, his mother says, and far more practical. They play marbles. George’s idea. It’s an unusual game for a girl, but then, that’s George all over.

  Adam’s favourite marble is the one that looks like a miniature universe. It sparkles. Deep, deep blue, speckled with silver. Adam loves that deep, deep blue. But George says it’s a useless marble; it may look pretty but it’s cheap and won’t roll. Her favourites are catseyes, especially the greenish yellowy ones that really look like the eyes of cats.

  Adam thinks she’s way off. Who would settle for a cat’s eye when they could have a universe instead?

  As usual, they agree to disagree. They value each other too much to make a fuss. George is not just a cousin; she’s the big sister Adam never had. The big brother too, all rolled into one. At times, Adam thinks George is him. She owns so much of him that he can’t tell the difference.

  It’s early afternoon, visiting hour. She pauses at his bed, as she always does, as if she needs his permission to sit. Under the fluorescent lights, she looks even more wrong than usual. Her face is drawn, the skin stretched tight, her freckles vivid orange. She’s lost weight. Too many angles.

  She looks better with flesh on her, thinks Adam, surprising himself with the thought. No. With the flesh.

  ‘How are you?’

  He says nothing. Something flashes in her eyes – regret? – but she quickly smooths it over. ‘Phew,’ she says. ‘It’s hot outside.’

  She plumps down on the bed, carefully avoiding the place in the blanket where the tiny mounds of his knees poke up, mocking his lost mobility. Her movements are still clumsy, tomboyish. The springs of the bed recoil. Adam, slowed down by morphine, imagines the bedclothes lifting, floating, settling. Like feathers, like dust from a bomb blast.

  Stray bits of hair cling to her forehead. It’s unlike George to sweat. Despite her lion’s heart, she’s always been—

  What’s the word?

  Phlegmatic.

  Dust holds the amber room together. Dust. Separate but together, like ants. It turns the light in the room into great big honey-coloured slabs. It carves yellow slices out of George’s face, making Adam want to touch it. Adam is absorbed in the game, the chuckling of the marbles as they roll over the cork, but still he sees this. Her face, scarred golden.

  She takes out a cigarette. Long, slender and black. Adam can’t remember the name. It hovers at the edge of his memory but then something catches his eye, a dying fly on the windowsill, and the word disappears. Just like that.

  He stares at the cigarette. She glances down, shrugs.

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘Terrible habit. I’m trying to give them up. It’s easier to pretend.’

  Adam, yearning for nicotine, swells with dark hunger.

  He sees that her fingers are trembling. Quivering on the black stick of tar like the innards of a watch, the wings of a butterfly in a museum, an electroscope’s gold leaf.

  He watches the movement, fascinated. It seems like all the movement in the world to him. In the distance, he hears bells ring, wheels whirr, curtains rustle. Further away, children’s rhymes, the flap of a bat’s wings against the slate roof of a church. Further still, his heart, beating.

  She is seven and he is six. It is afternoon, early summer. Bright. No school. The quarry is ten minutes away. It’s always seemed like a great idea to go there but they’ve never had the opportunity. Then something happens, a mother’s migraine, warm wind blowing in through the open hall door. Possibly a visitor. The stage is set. The chance is upon them. They take it.

  They walk up the road and through the palm-studded grounds of the gloomy church, imagining the thunderous saints in their grey arches sneering at their disobedience. George sticks out her tongue. Adam waits till the coast is clear, then throws a handful of gravel at the granite wall, under a stained-glass image of a shrunken bleeding Jesus. A violent gesture. Sacrilege, indeed.

  On her second visit, he’d tried to speak. But before he’d got even one syllable out, the vicious crab in his chest crawled upwards and clawed at his words, forcing them back into his throat.

  He coughed. He coughed.

  ‘Jesus!’ she said. He could see pity and panic fight for space in her face. He wanted her to call the nurse but instead she lunged towards him, sliding her hand under his head.

  ‘It’s – it’s okay,’ she said. ‘It’s okay.’

  He spluttered and gasped, a dying fish, as she lifted his head, raised a glass of water to his lips. The water tasted tart. His blood, of course. Her hands were rough. Fuck off, he wanted to say. But all the words were gone, scared off for good, coughed out of him along with his rotting body, leaving nothing but a man-sized tissue stained all the reds in the world.

  The disused tram track lies predatory brown in the sunlight. Across it rises a bridge, curving over the ancient sleepers and smooth green lawn like a set of false teeth. Adam likes cycling over that bridge, even though there’s always the risk of going down it too fast, of smashing bike and head and bones into tiny pieces of red-spattered chalk, twisted metal, sending the grey sauce of brains everywhere.

  The air hums. Adam can tell it is alive and hears insects everywhere, crackling with the promise of summer.

  The cigarette makes things worse. George keeps fiddling with it, weaving it through the one-sided conversation like a conductor’s baton. She caresses the black coating, taps the white filter with the calloused pad of her thumb. At times he thinks she’s going to rip it apart, send the precious tobacco flying across the ward like gunshot.

  He can’t understand why she’s tormenting him. Light the fucking thing, George. Get it over with. His irritation surprises him. Funny he should care, even now.

  She doesn’t light it. Hospital rules. Besides, she’s giving them up, isn’t she?

  She talks. Christ, she talks. Coffee mornings. Tennis lessons. Weather. Headlice. Home helps. School fees. She avoids politics. As usual. Though what is she afraid of? That he’ll suddenly jolt into life, start ranting on about human rights or the shitty world we’re leaving the young, or worse, prod a latent reactionary nerve by disclosing an unwanted intimate detail from his cruising days? Some hope.

  He sneaks a glance at her watch. Fifteen minutes five seconds. Ten. Twenty. Thirty.

  She doesn’t notice him looking. He would. If it was the other way round, and he was sitting at her bedside, he would take note of her every sideways glance. And he’d wonder why. Why count any more, Adam, when all it does is take you down?

  But he’s always counted; he’s a scientist, comfortable with numbers. Besides, everybody does it, don’t they? Parcels out their life; if not with coffee spoons, then something else. Adam’s parcels used to be schooldays. How he longed for holidays – Easter, Christmas, and best of all, summer. Then, one September, he realised that he could long for the rest of his life until one day there wouldn’t be a life left to long for. Realising didn’t stop him.

  She talks. Oh, she talks.

  At the bottom of the quarry is a pool of black water. They look down at it from a height. Their reflections in the pool look funny, like bad photographs. Adam asks George what’s in the pool to make it so dark. She hesitates – then, with conviction, says, ‘The tar baby.’

  Adam shivers and prays they won’t fall in. He’s heard of the tar baby, the black sticky mess fairies leave in your bed if you don’t do what you’re told. It eats you up, says his uncle. I
t sucks out your blood and grinds your bones for porridge. Then it turns you into tar too. Adam couldn’t bear that, to have to squelch from bed to bed when the fairies tell him, just to teach some other poor boy a lesson.

  He doesn’t tell George he’s scared. She won’t understand. Besides, she’s the girl. She’s the one who’s supposed to be afraid.

  A silence. She swallows. Adam has glazed over, is staring at the middle distance, but the sudden movement in her throat drags his eyes to her face. She blushes and looks away. Idly, she taps the cigarette against the New Scientist she’s brought in as a present for him.

  ‘Do you remember?’ she says.

  Something twists the blackened seersucker surface of Adam’s right lung.

  Stupid question.

  Still, the noises around him stop.

  They lean over, staring at their alien, distant reflections.

  ‘Jump in,’ says George. ‘I dare you.’

  Huff, puff, bluster. She is seven, he is six, remember.

  ‘No way!’

  ‘Go on,’ says George. ‘I dare you.’ Her freckles are brown rain on her face.

  It’s then she pushes him; a little push, but it feels like more. Years later, at times of stress, he feels her fingers at that point on his arm, embedded into his skin.

  ‘You’re not afraid, are you?’ she says.

  ‘Course not.’

  What else can he say? He looks down at the tar baby’s pool.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘But you go after.’

  ‘Okay.’

  A crude pathway leads from the crest of the quarry to a broken, sheared-off drop halfway down. He’ll have to jump from there. The height isn’t the worry. Adam’s good at diving. It’s the tar baby he’s thinking about.

  He curls his lower lip in under the gummy ridge where his baby teeth used to be. George looks at him, green eyes candid. Adam lifts a foot and climbs over the rusting rail they’ve put up to stop people going down the path.

  The rail wobbles, but he’s over.

  Adam looks down as he runs and sees the yellow ground flash past, flaking stone from under his feet in their navy runners. The two white stripes on the sides of the runners blur, making him dizzy. He skids on the loose stones. George wouldn’t skid. Her runners are much better than his. But then, everything that George has is much better.

  He comes to the edge, pulls himself to a stop. Strangely enough, the pool looks much farther away now that he’s closer. His reflection doesn’t stand out as much. He has merged into the cliff behind him. The city hums in the distance.

  ‘And then—’ she says, and stops, suddenly confused. ‘Christ, Adam. Do you know, I can’t remember what happened next…’

  Her face concertinas; a mixture of disbelief, amusement. Sadness?

  Adam lets the moment hold, treasuring the silence. He is an ivory hull in a sea of snot green but he can still treasure silence. Just before it passes and she starts off again on another, safer, subject, he speaks.

  ‘George?’ he says. It’s the first time he’s called her name in thirty years. It’s an effort. He’s forgotten how ugly he sounds.

  She flinches. He can smell her tension. Fight or flight. I dare you.

  ‘Yes?’ she says. Adam lifts his hand. It’s an effort.

  Puzzled, she glances where he’s pointing. When she looks up, there’s a glint of something familiar, tigerish and yellow, in her green irises.

  She looks around. Then she gets up, making the springs creak, and pulls the curtain along its casters so it encloses the bed. In the cool green cell it’s strange to hear the noises from the rest of the ward continue to filter through, unchanged. She sits down, close to him, and puts the black cigarette into her mouth. Against the black, her lipstick is a garish salmon pink. Some of it has flaked onto her teeth.

  She takes out a golden lighter, flicks it. The small blue flame eats at the black tip. She inhales. As soon as the smoke is in her mouth, she stubs the cigarette out on a folded tissue.

  She leans over. He smells her perfume. Citrus. Sweat. Under the neat preppy collar of her blouse he catches a glimpse of her cleavage. Her breasts are brown, freckled. Fleshy. She places her mouth on his. Her lips are dry.

  She opens her mouth.

  He looks into her eyes. Green, speckled with gold. A catseye. A universe.

  Adam stares at the pool. He tries not to think of it but pictures of the tar baby crowd his mind. He sees himself falling, sinking, but never rising again to the surface, sucked down by the bottomless dark into the arms of the white-eyed thing with gnashing teeth.

  What if he doesn’t jump? George would understand. She knows him inside out, after all. And—

  No. Even if George doesn’t mind, the tar baby will. Oh yes, it will come for him, if not tonight, then soon, snuggle up to him in bed and taunt him for his cowardice. It will put its sticky black hands over Adam’s eyes and in the darkness tell him, You are mine. I own you.

  He glances up. She’s waiting.

  You are mine.

  He parts his lips. He is aware of her tongue lurking there, somewhere in the background, as much as he is aware of his own. She lets go, closing her eyes, and he inhales. The smoke creeps past his teeth, into his ruined throat, down to wash the mottled surface of his dying lung where the cancer waits, counting down.

  Adam runs, falls. He thinks No! as his cheap navy runners leave the path but it’s too late to go back. He drops, a half-baked Icarus, flying past the orange cliff.

  The world tilts, the black rises to meet him. Adam lands with a boneshattering thud on his knees. The pool is three inches deep, full of damp leaves and muck.

  Worms writhe around his screaming kneecaps. Adam sees the twist of their pale pink bodies in nightmares for years afterwards.

  Her eyes blur, overlap in parallax, too close for him now to make out the individual glints and specks. He sucks the smoke in, greedily.

  It starts raining. Adam picks himself up, muck and blood streaming down his arms and legs in dirty streaks, and turns to face the cliff.

  She is gone.

  Footsteps squeak on the linoleum. George pulls her mouth off his, sucking his breath away, and scrambles back to her usual spot on the bed. She pats her hair, fixes her clothes, doesn’t meet his eyes, looking for all the world like a guilty lover.

  The thought makes Adam smile.

  She looks up, smiles back.

  They kneel on the playroom floor. The marbles roll. Crash, bang. Stars collide.

  At the door of the ward, she pauses and looks back. Her hair is amber in the evening light. She blows him a kiss. Then she vanishes. Adam’s bad lung screams. He knows he and George aren’t the same person, has known this ever since the day she pushed him, but it still hurts when she goes.

  From the corner of his eye he sees the small gold watch on the nurse’s wrist. Thirty-two minutes and twenty seconds. A minute for every year he has known her. More or less.

  He closes his eyes and drops, towards the waiting blackness.

  Lure

  It’s those little bitches start it, sniffing her out at the Black Horse. The rain helps. It’s pissing again, hard, third week in a row, and the waters under the city are high, squirming for release. But were there no bitches, or no sniffing, or sniffing at a different stop, the chain of confluence may never have led to me. They get on at Fatima and go tracking up the tram, baying and hooting as they sway past the commuters, on the prowl for prey. It’s that feral intent first disturbs my sleep, down in the gravelly bed of small, sweet Camac. Though it takes a while to rouse me – they’re distracted too, sad little cunts. Chatting in capslock and exclamation points, middle fingers Snaptweeting Facetagram, stroking and flicking clever as a loverboy’s.

  Nine of them, groomed to the last inch. Hair glossy and smooth, nails dripping charms and studded with sparklers. Eyes decked with thick black liner, Kardashian-style, and lashes – the best ones, seventy squids a side, bought, not robbed, a point of pride, with first disco mone
y begged from their nans. Dressed in silks that sort of match: hot-pink puffa jacket over grey schooltrousers. The same trousery type-things their quarry’s wearing now, though – hah, such wilfulness! – she hates them.

  Better that you blend in, Margaret, they’ve told her at the House. We don’t want a repeat of what happened last time. We can’t afford for you to be so

  vulnerable

  Soft nursey pat on the arm, but between the lines she can read the beancounter eurosigns.

  Shame. She loves the glamour, this Margaret, no, this—

  Magpie.

  Had a bright blue coat once, like a kingfisher’s plumage. Velvet, with a fur collar. These days it’s granny clothes, granny colours – sedge-grey, sludge-green, to match the oldlady cough and swelled ankles. The only swank she has left is her hair, and under all the nicey-nicey no pressure, in your own time, Margaret she can tell the House is itching for her to chop that off too. Blend? Don’t make me laugh. Cunts is cunts. They’ll never see a blending, no matter how sludgy she makes herself.

  The tram hisses up the canal. The bitches’ voices grow nearer. She shifts her weight towards the window, hunching small as she can behind her mountain of bags. Proud Magpie: stubborn lady of the hoarders and gee-gaws, Magpie who used to light up the dance-floor. On her other side, a bulky Afrohair is arguing with a phone. No, No, No, she says, each No a nail. Opposite, an easterneuro with razory cheekbones watches, grommets of plaster itching under his fingernails now the booming is back in business.

  ‘Fucksake.’ The bitches are only three seats away now. ‘This is boring. Can we not just leave it?’

  ‘Wait.’ Their leader, a lanky ginger, sniffs. ‘D’yous get that?’

  Oh, eau de Magpie, distinct as the whorls of her most unusual brain. Under the silt and gravel and river-weeds, my sleeping nostrils open, caught by her scent, that coaxing mix of meds-sweat, coffee, rose attar and fagbreath.

  Up goes her elbow. The action is sluggish, sticky as honey. The pack lurch forward, all nose.