by Various
“Chris! Chris, what the fuck? Where are you? Quit fooling around!” Nick’s heart started to beat a little too fast. He felt a crushing abandonment weigh down on his chest. “Chris!”
Nick ran back to the cottage door, where Chris’ grandma was still standing, frowning at him.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, Chris was right here, behind me.”
The petite, frail-looking lady shook her head. “That’s impossible,” she said, flatly.
“What are you talking about? Chris and I, we were on the train together. All the way from Toronto. How else would I know where you lived, who you were? You’re his grandmother, right? Your name is Rose?”
“Right. But everyone knows that around here.”
“I’m not from around here. I’m from Toronto, I just told you that, weren’t you listening to me?” Nick was aware that his voice was becoming strident. His stomach was doing back flips.
The old lady sighed, as though she was worn out. “I think you’d better come in.”
Nick followed Rose into her living room, where she sat down heavily in an old leather recliner. Nick perched gingerly on a hard wicker chair opposite her, but almost immediately jumped up again.
“There! That’s him, right there!” Nick ran over to the framed photograph on the mantel over the fireplace. Chris grinned at him from the photo. Younger, but the same glossy black hair streaked with bleach, the same dark brown eyes, happy and smiling in the sunshine; and on the slender wrist, a bracelet of painted wooden beads.
“My favourite grandchild,” said Rose, wearily.
Nick stared at the photograph. He took it down from the mantel and studied it closely. Suddenly, he remembered. “Here, I’ll prove it to you,” Nick said, excitedly. “Chris gave me …” He looked down at his wrist, but there was nothing there. “The bracelet, he gave me the beaded bracelet, it’s in the picture…”
Nick trailed off. He was at a loss. “I must have dropped it on the road. It must have fallen off, I’ll go and look for it right now. I’ll …” Aware that he was babbling like an idiot, He looked back at Rose, only to find that she was crying.
“Why are you doing this?” she sobbed.
“What do you mean? Why am I here? Because Chris told me to come and see you. Because he brought me here. Where is Chris? Why are you crying? What the hell is going on?” Nick heard his own voice as though it belonged to someone else.
“Please leave.” Rose snatched the photograph from Nick’s hands and clasped it to her heart.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean …” Nick stammered. “Duncan! I can phone Duncan, he saw us, just give me a minute …” Nick fumbled for his BlackBerry, and then remembered that it was gone.
“Get out. You’ve done more than enough damage as it is.” Rose’s voice was cold.
“But, I’m not …” Nick began to protest, but Rose opened the front door.
“Get out. Get out of my house, right now, and don’t come back.”
“Rose, please!” A note of desperation had crept into Nick’s voice.
“Get out!” Nick was unceremoniously shoved out onto the sidewalk. The door slammed shut behind him. Nick stared down the street, a cold swirl of panic rising in his gut. It was after eight o’clock, and night was closing in fast. He started to retrace his steps, looking for the bracelet among the clumps of dirty snow that lined the pavement. Chris, where are you? Don’t leave me here all alone, please, Chris, I need you, please…
Cochrane in April wears a somewhat bleak aspect. Nick walked on, back towards the train station. He rubbed his wrist where the beads used to be, and tried to ignore the strange hot prickling at the back of his eyes. When the station came into view, tears began to stream down his face. The sensation was so unfamiliar. He reached up to touch his face and found that his cheeks were wet. He hurt all over, with a nameless agony. For the first time since he was eight years old, Nick Sinclair was crying.
Nick wandered aimlessly across the tracks at the station. He had enough on his credit card to buy a ticket back. But why? For what?
“Hey, watch it there, fella.” The elderly station attendant’s words cut into Nick’s thoughts. “Stay off the tracks, the sign says. Youngster came a cropper there, about a year ago now.
Some kind of lovers’ tiff, you know how it goes. Only 22-yearsold – very sad.”
Nick stepped up onto the platform. “Chris?” he muttered, his voice sounding hollow.
“Yes, that was the name. Young lad, went to live with some asshole from the city, came home a wreck. Walked in front of the northbound train.”
Nick’s knees gave way. Bile reached up from his insides, making his head swim. All the breath had left his body and he stared down into the black void that was opening up before him. Chris…
“Yeah. Lucky really, if you can call it luck. Hasn’t moved or said a word for damn near a year now. The doctors say a coma like that can last for the rest of the patient’s life.”
“What?” Nick’s mind spun back from the edge of the murky dark. “Wait, what?”
“Kid’s in a coma. Like I said, very sad.”
“Where?” A direct shot of pure adrenaline hit Nick’s muscles and he sprang to his feet. “Where is he? Is it far? How can I get there?”
“Hold your horses, lad!” The old man rubbed his chin and looked Nick up and down, as though appraising his market value. “Lady Minto Hospital, ICU. But they won’t let you in unless you’re family.”
“I don’t care. Take me there. I’ll pay you any amount of money. Name your price, just get me there.”
“All right, all right. Give me a minute.” The elderly gentleman struggled to his feet and reached for the phone. As he lifted the receiver, he frowned at Nick. “You’re not him, are you?”
“What? Who?” Nick said, somewhat at a loss.
“The boyfriend.” The man’s finger hovered over the dial pad.
“No! No, well not that one, at any rate,” Nick replied. “Please. I have to see him.”
It seemed to take forever for the cab to arrive, but finally Nick was on his way. Cochrane seemed drab – a grey little town at the end of the line. By the time they got to the hospital, it was pitch dark, and visiting hours were over at the ICU.
“But I’ve come all the way from Toronto,” Nick found himself explaining to the pretty blonde nurse. “The train doesn’t get here until 7:45.”
“Family only in the ICU, sir, I’m sorry,” the nurse said, in a syrupy voice that was supposed to be comforting.
“But I have to see Chris. I have to, you don’t understand. I stopped by to pick up Rose, his grandmother, but she was upset, she told me to come by myself anyway,” Nick lied. At this point, he’d lie to the Dalai Lama.
The nurse checked a piece of paper under her computer keyboard. “Yes, Rose is listed as next of kin, she hasn’t been by for a while.” The nurse looked directly at Nick, searching his face. “She’s lost hope, I think.”
Nick nodded slowly. “Yes. Yes, I think you’re right.” He held his breath. He could feel the nurse sizing him up, making a mental note of the tear tracks on his face.
“All right, I suppose it can’t do any harm. Through these double doors, then the first door on the right.”
“Thank you, thank you.”
The nurse looked up to say ‘You’re welcome,’ but Nick was gone.
The first door on the right was ajar, and Nick knocked softly, even though he knew that no-one would answer. The room was dimly lit, and beige hospital blinds shut out the night. The regular beep of a monitor punctuated the silence.
“Chris?” Nick whispered. The figure in the bed lay still, propped up with pillows, wired to an I.V. Nick sat down on the visitor’s chair. Thinner, for sure, paler, but unmistakably Chris. The same shoulder-length black hair, fine features, long black eyelashes. And around a wrist so thin you could see the bones under the translucent skin, a bracelet made of painted wooden beads.
“Chris, it’s Nick. I’m here, I found you. Chris
, wake up. Please, I miss you, I need you, please.” But there was no answer.
Nick took the pale, slender hand in his own and cried. He cried for his own loss, and for Chris, and for Rose. He cried for a long, long time. When he was done crying, he talked to the unconscious figure in the bed, about his job and how he hated it, about his father’s preconceptions and his mother’s denial. He talked about how he could never say the words, not to anyone, that was why his girlfriend had left him, it was why everyone always left him, because he couldn’t say the words. And then he slept.
Morning came cold and clear, the watery spring sun filtering through the hospital blinds Nick pulled them up, flooding the room with light. He stared out at the sky; a sky so high and blue, it could drown any sorrow. He sighed, and ran his hands through his hair. There was a bustle of noise from the nurses’ station. Soon they would be coming in to check the I.V. and turf him out.
“Nick?” It was only a whisper on the wind. “Nick?” The voice was weak and hoarse. But it was there, and it was real. Nick found himself rooted to the spot. His heart was racing, but he couldn’t move. “Nicky?” There it was again. With a supreme effort of will, Nick forced his feet to turn. He ran to the bed and knelt down.
“Is it really you? Are you real?” The soft voice could only manage a whisper. Dark brown eyes gazed up at Nick, the long black lashes fluttering.
“Yes, it’s me, it’s Nick, I’m here, Chris I’m here.”
“You came. You found me,” Chris murmured.
“You led me here. I was scared, so scared I’d lost you forever.” Nick gathered him into his arms.
“I dreamed of you. We were on the train.”
“How much do you remember?”
“Everything.”
“Is it really you?” Nick echoed Chris’ question.
“Don’t believe the evidence of your own eyes? Some lawyer.”
“It’s you.”
They kissed, like it was the first time.
“You’ve been crying. I thought you didn’t cry.”
“I’m doing a lot of things lately that I haven’t done in a long, long time.”
“Why were you crying? Was it because of me?”
“You don’t really need to ask me that, do you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“God! You haven’t changed.”
“Not a chance.”
“Chris, you know how I feel about you.”
“Tell me anyway.”
As Nick gathered Chris into his arms, closing his eyes and breathing in his warmth, his scent, his life, he realized that he could never go back. Just as Chris had dreamed of him, Nick would dream a future for them. So Nick said the words that he had never said in his life before, and became more than the sum of his parts, more than his father’s expectations. In the space of a single day, on a train to nowhere, Nick Sinclair became a human being.
What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in your hand
Ah, what then?
˜ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
10
Curious Case
of Jenni Wen
A. J. Kirby
Author
A.J. Kirby has published two novels and a large number of short stories in a variety of media, including print anthologies, magazines and journals, on-line and as pod casts. He was awarded third prize in the Luke Bitmead Writer’s Bursary competition 2008 judged by a panel including best-selling authors Deborah Wright and Zoë Jenny, and has also been runner-up in the Huddersfield Literature Festival and short-listed for the Mere Literary Festival prizes. Andy’s writing was also featured in Legend Press’ 2009 short story collection 8 Rooms. He lives in Leeds with his girlfriend Heidi and lucky black cat Eric.
Curled into a foetal comma in my wet dress, I whispered prayers that it was a comma – simply an intermission – and not the full stop of my life.
Next to me the long, malnourished body of a man became an exclamation mark; it was topped by a bulging head that seemed weirdly separated from his body. Someone had ripped open his checked shirt, exposing his sunken chest and a stomach, which seemed to have gone mouldy; damp patches were everywhere. Under his beige combat shorts I could see knees which knocked together. No musculature. No movement. He was either dead or close to it.
I didn’t dare take a similar inventory of my own body. Didn’t want to know. I was alive, I knew I was alive and that was all that mattered. I could feel my heart clattering away in my chest; I was scared.
I was scared because I still had some idea at least of who I was and I wanted to protect that tiny piece of myself. And because the three snarling men who stood over us, waving their massive meaty paws around, seemed to be paying little or no attention to the dead man, but were certainly interested in me.
The three men were dressed almost identically: huge clodhopping boots – shit-kicker boots, my brother Lanh would have called them – and these luminous yellow vests which speared my eyes as though I’d not seen anything bright for a long, long time.
One of the men, the largest of the group, shouted something into my face. I had no idea what he was trying to communicate. Maybe, I thought, the man just liked shouting. Maybe he was like the mad dog that was parked-up in the yard out back of Romi’s Bar in the village. Lanh and I used to laugh at that big, flop-eared dog. We were amused by the way he raged at the very night as though bitterly unhappy about his lot in life. As though he thought he should have been built for something better
But this Dog-Man was no laughing matter, despite his stupid fuzzy moustache, which was now so close that it was tickling my neck.
Dog-Man spat almost continuously. Whether he was clearing his throat before speaking, or mid-sentence, or after he’d finished as though getting rid of a horrible taste in his mouth. He spat so much that it left a snail-trail of saliva across his moustache.
I tried to speak to him. I tried to open my mouth to ask him what was going on – nothing like this had been mentioned in Orientation 101 – but all that came out was a muffled wheeze. Nothing the man would hear. Come on, it’s easy, I told myself. And in my head I screamed the words WHERE AM I? In my head I demanded to know what was happening to me, how I’d come to be here and what they were intending to do with me. But no words spirited out of my mouth. All I felt was the cracking of my lips, which I now realised were so dry, so parched, that they’d become almost welded closed. Compared to the Dog-Man and his lake of saliva, I was a desert.
And a cold desert at that; I couldn’t stop myself from shivering. The second man seemed to find this funny. Or at least he did when he stopped pacing around me. He reminded me of an angry cockerel, the way his head bobbed up and down as he circled. Unable to keep still, he kept reaching down to his belt, twitching for a truncheon with which to batter me. I got the feeling that if the larger, moustachioed man were not here, Cockerel would have quite happily exclamation-marked me (and maybe had already done so to the poor guy by my side).
The third man held my attention for longer. Although he was dressed the same, he didn’t have the same violence bubbling just below the surface. Instead, he had a strange calmness about him, which seemed out of place. He was more like a buffalo, I supposed. Or perhaps he was simply drunk. I’d seen the same mindless staring eyes in certain men in our village. Nevertheless, my eyes appealed to his; I begged him to explain what was happening. But it seemed I had stared at his face for rather too long; after a moment, Cockerel gleefully slapped me.
The slap was good. It allowed my head to clear a little. I began to take in a little more of my surroundings.
It was dark and it was bitterly cold. We were outside but the air contained nothing like the humidity I was used t
o. Neither could I see a single star in the sky. It was as though they’d finally blinked off for good; stopped watching.
But the more I took in, the more I realised was wrong with the scene. Artificial light washed past us every few seconds before leaving us shrouded in darkness again. And every time this light passed it showed that we were in the shadow of a huge articulated lorry; a great dinosaur of a creature, which seemed to creak and moan as if it were alive when the wind hit it. Along one side of the lorry was a jagged tear, as if the three men had attacked it, wounded it. It had spilled its guts onto the floor; crates and crates containing electrical goods which had been hacked open; and me. Evidently I had been spilled out of the lorry’s guts too.
I screwed up my eyes. I didn’t really understand. Neither, it appeared, did the three men. Underneath all of their whispered, spitting rage at me, they were mystified. They just wanted an explanation.
Even before I re-opened my eyes I felt one of them leaning in closer, his hot breath spraying out all over my face. It had to be Dog-Man. He was repeating the same thing over and over, but I had no idea what it was. As my eyes were fixed on Dog-Man,
Cockerel was able to catch me by surprise. Without warning, he grabbed me under the arms and started to drag me to my feet. His rough hands touched far more of me than they needed to.
Finally, words came out of my mouth, “Let go of me!”
Cockerel simply smirked, he was now marching me round and round the lorry as though we were learning the steps for a dance. Every few moments he would stop and Dog-Man would gesture wildly in my face as though trying to make me understand something. Judging by their frustration, it was a very easy concept they were trying to get through to me, but I just couldn’t make out anything resembling a language in their barks, wheezes and grunts.
The only sound I did understand was my bare feet slapping on the concrete floor and echoing back off other concrete things, taller concrete things, which loomed above us, almost invisible. Indeed, the more I looked, the more I saw that everywhere was elephant-grey concrete. Even the three men seemed as though they were made from the stuff. They were like great slabs of dumb no-feeling concrete that hadn’t quite set yet. When they moved around the lorry, they moved heavily as though weighed down. Eventually, we stopped marching. A CB radio on Dog-Man’s hip had buzzed into life and I could hear a tinny voice seemingly asking questions. Dog-Man moved away from us in order to speak, which I thought was funny, in a sad sort of way. I’d not been able to understand a single word he’d said thus far; what made him think I would understand now? Was it that he simply did not trust me or my kind? I suspected it was. For Cockerel clearly felt the same way. He still gripped me hard, but now his superior had moved away, he took the opportunity to bait me. He sneered and pecked his beak close to my face. I could tell that it took all of his self-restraint to stop from smashing me in the mouth.