Dispossession

by Chaz Brenchley

  Only that it had happened to someone else, effectively. I didn’t recognise either the actions of this supposed, this apparent Jonty Marks or the motives that had driven him; he was as much a stranger to me as Sue was. Myself and my wife, and I didn’t know either one of them...

  Finding myself straying into abstraction again, drifting into muddled and misty tales that I couldn’t get a finger’s good hold on, I pulled myself sharply back to what was actual and solid and very much there, very much attached to me in a way that these stories were not: my body, as it lay in this bed.

  The torso told the tale, seat belt and steering column vividly marked out. For the rest of me, my arms and legs were where most of the patching-up had been done, as I guess you’d expect from a man strapped into a rolling car; it’s got to be flailing limbs that take most damage. I couldn’t see the damage, for all the dressings; nothing too horrendous, though, by the feel of things. It hurt to move them, but that was more wrenched joints than anything else, I thought, whiplash-equivalents for elbows and knees. Lucky again, when you thought of the fragility of bone within a failing steel cage...

  Fragile bone in manky skin, and I had hot water at my side. Reached for flannel and soap, and grunted sharply as something stabbed and twisted in my shoulder.

  Nothing, I told myself, it’s only muscles yanked about too hard, maybe a bit of ripped tissue, that’s all, barely more than a stiff neck from sleeping wonky...

  Maybe so, but it felt like flexible steel, it felt like a blade buried between bruised flesh and battered bone. I’d stretched and shifted about in bed hitherto, and thought I’d learned the extent of my discomfort; but now I was actually trying to do something, I found out just how wrong I’d been. My fingers had problems enough picking up the flannel; getting my other arm across to handle the soap was agonising.

  If I hurt this much now, I thought maybe I should be grateful for having spent three days unconscious, having slept through what must have been worse.

  Would have been grateful to have slept through this also, to have been cleaned up in the night. And though I didn’t, I wouldn’t ring the bell to ask, I was nothing but grateful when Simon put his head around the door after ten minutes or so and said, “How are you doing, then? Need any help?”

  I’d have waved the white flannel at him like a flag of surrender, only that I rather thought I’d drop it. Instead, “Bit of a problem bending,” I muttered, gazing all the length of me at the impossibility of feet.

  “Thought you might. You tell me how far you’ve got, and I’ll do the rest.”

  He washed my feet and legs for me as briskly and efficiently as an undertaker washing a corpse, except that undertakers don’t presumably keep up a constant stream of chatter with their clients as they lave; then he helped me roll over and did my back, brought me a clean robe and knotted me into it, settled me against a mound of pillows and shaved me neatly.

  “Anything else now, before I bring your breakfast?”

  “Yes,” I said, running a hand slowly over smoothness of skin between scabs and thinking how much I liked being shaved, how much I hated shaving, “are you available for hire?”

  “Bar mitzvahs, weddings and funerals,” he said cheerfully. “Bar mitzvah boys don’t shave, and you’re already married. You could hire me for your funeral, I suppose. Money in advance.”

  He waited, I suppose for a smile or a swear-word; but got neither, because he’d caught me in the gut unintentionally, sent me plummeting back into confusion. Married I was, I accepted that, but acceptance made none of it any easier to handle. Married to a stranger, I was still in love with Carol if with anyone. I hadn’t thought about it, I supposed, for years; not in those terms. But if knowledge and understanding, comfort and affection and concern added up to love—which I thought they did, pretty much, I felt that would be an adult definition of the word—then yes, I was in love with Carol.

  And she with me? I would have said so, by the same definition. Three months ago—the latest I could remember—I would definitely have said yes to that, and so I thought would she. But she hadn’t so much as sent me flowers, and Carol sent flowers to bare acquaintances who found themselves in hospital. Could be she didn’t know I was here, of course; but she’d also slammed the phone down on me without saying a word, without giving me the chance to tell her. Carol, I thought—knowing her, understanding her—was deeply, deeply angry.

  That was one of the two certainties I could find in my life that morning, and neither one gave me much to hold on to. First, Carol was angry with me, and no blame to her for that; and second, by whatever definition you chose to measure it, I was certainly not in love with my wife.

  Oh, God...

  What I wanted that morning was metaphorical dressing-gown, teddy bear and cocoa, all the comforts of childhood against an adult world. I wanted to curl up in some fœtal space, to know that I was safe and someone else was out there coping for me, sorting all my problems.

  What I got instead was doctors and nurses, my sheets changed and my mind only a little reassured. The amnesia should pass, they said, but I would have to give it time. Meanwhile just rest, they said, watch telly or listen to the radio, don’t try to read if your head’s still aching.

  Then they left me alone again. And no, I didn’t watch telly or listen to the radio, neither did I read or rest. I only lay there fretting, wondering, too sore to move and too confused to sleep.

  It was almost a relief when Sue turned up.

  Almost? Nah. It was definitely, absolutely a relief. She got me out of there, if only on a limited licence.

  o0o

  Breezed in, she did, just after lunch, wearing black denim and a baseball cap, black again with a silver-blue logo, Q’s above the peak. She kissed me quick but unhurried, which is a neat trick if you can do it, which she could. I guess the quick was in case I showed signs of pulling back, the unhurried was purely for pleasure. Then she patted my shaved cheek approvingly, picked a little at one of my scabs and hissed apologetically when I winced, laughed when I pushed her away; and said she had permission to take me out.

  “Only for a bit, mind. And if you act weird I have to bring you straight back again, so mind you behave yourself.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked cautiously.

  “Just out. Out and about.”

  Out was good, out was great, a temporary release the closest I could hope to come today to dressing-gown and cocoa. Out with Sue was more problematic.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “Trust me,” she countered instantly. “We’ll go for a drive, here and there, and then I’ll bring you back. It won’t hurt, Jonty. Promise.” Then she grinned, and added, “I already had to promise them, twenty miles an hour and no sharp stops, and nothing you could bang your head on. We’re going on a tall person’s drive.”

  She said that, she said that and Trust me, and then she helped me dress. Clothes she’d brought with her, nothing I’d seen before: silk shirt and soft baggy cotton trousers, thin warm socks and moccasins. All in black, matching outfits; and all a perfect fit, all showing signs of having been worn and washed.

  Nor was that all. At her quiet insistence, by virtue of her clever fingers, the stud and the ring went back into my ears; she fastened the chain around my neck, and I tried not to see a symbol in that; she put the wedding-ring onto the third finger of my left hand and said, “With this ring I thee wed again, Jonathan Marks, and don’t you forget again...”

  A nurse fetched a wheelchair; Sue pushed me through the corridors to the exit, and out to her car; and I said, “A tall person’s drive, you told me.”

  “Okay. A tall person’s drive in a small person’s car. I’ll drive like a tall person, I promise. Well, not like you. I won’t drive like you, you crash things.”

  It was no big surprise, I guess, that Sue drove a Mini Cooper. It suited: a short, aggressive little car, gloss black and gleaming clean, all the windows tinted as dark as the law allowed. What was more surprising was when she
helped me up out of the wheelchair, and really was a help to me. She was small, but she was springy; I leaned on her more than I meant or wanted to, and she showed not a sign of buckling.

  “Duck,” she said, hand firm on the back of my neck to encourage me. “Duck and fold. Don’t you dare bang your head, or I’m taking you straight back.”

  I didn’t bang my head. What I did, though, I caught a glimpse of my face reflected in that darkened glass, as I ducked and folded.

  Caught a glimpse, and couldn’t believe it.

  Once I was in and she’d slammed the door on me, I pulled the sun-visor down to get at the vanity mirror, looked again; and was still staring as she got in the driver’s side and caught me at it, and I didn’t know what the hell to say.

  Not a problem. She did. She’d probably been practising, only waiting for the moment.

  “Bad hair day, huh? Never mind, we all have ’em,” touching the peak of her cap in a conspiratorial gesture, me too, why d’you think I’m wearing this?

  “It’s not my hair,” I said wearily, stupidly. She knew that. Neither one of us could see my hair.

  She smiled, with I thought a little effort, and tried again. “Is this the face that lunched on a thousand chips? I kept telling you they’re bad for the complexion. You wouldn’t listen, and look at you now.”

  “No, thanks,” I said, shoving the visor up again, hiding from myself.

  I looked monstrous. The bandage around my head I knew about already, but I had two appalling black eyes to go with it, and all the flesh of my face was dark and swollen and a nest of worms, thread-like scabs clinging to mark where the windscreen glass had scarified me.

  “Shaving didn’t help much, did it?” I said, actually wondering how the hell Simon had navigated the razor around and between all those cuts, without slicing the scabs off and setting the blood to run again.

  “Vain pig. Did it hurt?”

  “Everything hurts,” I said grumpily. She patted my knee and I could have bitten her, except that my teeth also hurt. “But no, getting shaved was okay. Simon did it.”

  “Did he? That’s nice. That’s service, I guess. But don’t worry about your face, the doctors said there’s nothing permanent. You’ll play the violin again. On my heartstrings,” grinning at me sideways, pleased with herself.

  I was already off on another track, impatient with banter. “Sue, who’s paying for the room I’m in? Who sent me private?”

  “Vernon Deverill. Soon as he heard about the accident, he had you transferred. I guess he’s picking up all the bills, unless you’ve got some arrangement...?”

  I shook my head slowly. “I don’t know Vernon Deverill. Not like this.” Again I was thinking scam, thinking set-up, thinking how easy it would be to black a solicitor’s name with gifts when he was unconscious. And wondering why the hell he’d want to, why pick on me?

  “You’ve been pretty thick with him, the last two months,” she said. “For a man who doesn’t know a man, I mean.”

  I don’t know you either, and I married you. But that was evidence for the prosecution, not the defence. I felt very ill-defended: caught in possession, with nothing to offer but feeble denials—not my life, not my wife—and even my own mind turned accusatory, no longer believing myself. This would be the fast track to schizophrenia, I thought, if I allowed it.

  “Where are we going, Sue?” Second time of asking, and I don’t think I expected an answer this time either. Nor did I get one.

  “Okay,” she said. “You don’t want to talk about Vernon Deverill, that’s fine. I don’t like him. Where do you want to go?”

  “Away from here is fine. I’m not ambitious, just curious. You’re taking me somewhere, and I don’t like surprises.”

  She snorted at that, and I was aware of the irony myself, a moment too late. Right now, all my life was a surprise to me. It was true, though, I wasn’t enjoying any of it.

  “I thought I’d show you some of the sights,” she said, “try if that jolts your memory at all. That’s what I told the doctors, anyway, it was the only way I could get you an exeat. Might work, you never can tell.”

  “Uh-huh. So what’s the real reason?”

  A flicker of her eyes, and then she was totally inscrutable of face and voice both as she said, “I just want to spend an hour or two with my husband, all right? Just the two of us, no nurses banging in and out, no visitors, no nobody.”

  “Sue, listen... Okay, you’ve got some photos, and I guess they’re proof of something. But whatever happened, that still doesn’t make me the man you married. None of what you’re saying fits me, or anything I know about myself. It’s not just that I don’t remember doing this stuff, it doesn’t make sense to me that I ever would have done it. I’m sorry, but the man inside here,” and I lifted a hand to tap my head, only just remembered in time not to do that, “is not your husband. Whatever I look like, inside I’m just not the same person.”

  “Actually,” she said, “you don’t look the part either, right now. My Jonty’s pretty, wouldn’t have married him else. That makes it easier, a bit. So all right, let’s just play the doctors’ game for them. You be what the hell you want to be; I’m the tour guide. I’m supposed to be driving you around to see what you recognise, so don’t ask where we’re going. I want you to tell me, soon as you figure it out.”

  o0o

  It wouldn’t, it couldn’t work, and so I told her. I knew the streets of the city too well; they’d been my playground as a student here and my workplace since, they held many memories from many years and I could summon up all of those with no effort at all, and of course none of them was a memory of her.

  She just nodded, shrugged, told me not to worry about it.

  And took me somewhere I’d never been in my life.

  It wasn’t that mysterious really, only a suburb that was too dull for students and too posh for any of my clients, too far from the centre and too insulated for me or anyone ever to have passed through it on the way from somewhere to somewhere else. It existed sui generis, encircled by roads and its own smug contentment, a bourgeois province that needed no more than its own reputation to keep it so.

  Semis to the right of us, semis to the left of us, no access to the motorway ahead; and if this wasn’t the valley of the dead that we drove along, it was a pretty fair imitation. Me, I liked the quiet life, but this...

  This was the main shopping street, for all those souls who preferred not to take the Metro to M & S and Bainbridge’s in town. There were local equivalents, clothes shops catering for no one but the middle-class, middle-brow, middle-income Middle England; I even saw one emporium that still carried its title in gilded letters on the window, Draper and Haberdasher. Every shopfront bore an individual trader’s name; there were no chains here, no video stores or supermarkets, nothing so common.

  And we parked right there, on this Street that Time Forgot, and her ladyship looked at me expectantly, teasing and hopeful both. Something here, then, something I was meant to see or react to. It had to be the shops, surely; there was nothing else. I looked more carefully. An ironmonger—and yes, again, it still called itself an ironmonger, and I wondered if they still sold screws loose by weight, from little wooden drawers—and a bakery where surely they still baked their own bread on the premises. And a delicatessen with small ill-lit windows and a display of tins so drab it didn’t even tempt me out of the car, and a Chinese takeaway, and...

  Ah.

  Beside me, Sue had wound the window down on her side, and was resting her elbow on the rim.

  “Take your time,” she said, taking a pack of Gauloises from her jacket pocket and tapping a cigarette out, finding a brass Zippo in another pocket, lighting up.

  A smoker. I’d married a smoker.

  “It’s the takeaway,” I said. “Right?”

  “Bingo.”

  Made sense. She was a Chinese girl, after all. That was the only conceivable relationship, between this girl and this street. I supposed that I could live
here, or make some shift at living; a creature of habit I, and already too many of the habits of age. But not she; she’d be as much an alien here as she was to me. Even her car didn’t belong in this traffic.

  The Sunniside Chinese Takeaway, it was called, no clues there. But I felt confident enough to chance my arm.

  “Your parents?”

  “Yes! Brilliant, did you...?”

  But the enthusiasm that made scrutable all her feelings on her face died quickly, as she read my own on mine.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “that wasn’t fair. I didn’t remember, I was guessing.”

  “Unh. Well, good guess, then.”

  “It wasn’t hard. Why are we here, Sue?” Not just so that she could show me her parents’ place of business, I’d guessed that also. It had to have some greater significance.

  “This was where we met,” she said.

  “Oh. Right. Uh, how, then?”

  “Over a No 37, with fried rice and a Coke,” she said, straight-faced.

  “I never ordered anything by number.” And this time I really was certain, or wanted to be. I might have married a smoking stranger, three impossibilities in a single incredible act; but surely not that, not so ignorant and patronising. Please...?

  “No, all right,” she said, grinning now, only winding you up, Jonty. And maybe making a point also, that she knew me well enough to do it. “It was a Special Chop Suey, actually. Which is No 37, but no, you didn’t ask for it by number.”

  I nodded, sat back, gazed blankly at the takeaway’s frontage for a minute while she ostentatiously blew smoke out of the car, and either I was being hypersensitive here or this was also a message, or the same one again, see how well I know you, Jonty? Husband mine? You hate the smell of cigarettes, but you married me anyway...

  Then, “What the hell was I doing here?” Never been here in my life, guv, can’t think of a reason why I would.

  “I don’t know. You didn’t say.”

  “So what did I say?”

  “‘No 37, fried rice and a Coke. Please.’” But she glanced at me, shrugged a quick apology and said, “Seriously?”