At a cost of fifteen pounds a week this was going to make living in the new flat even more expensive than the old one — despite the fact it was in Kentish Town and you couldn’t buy a decent chicken liver and hazelnut paté locally for love or money.
On Friday night the two of them huddled baffled and exhausted together in the huge living room in Belsize Avenue, surrounded by mountains of cardboard. They drank cups of coffee and tried to watch television, but the flat had already taken its leave of them. When they went to bed it was if they were lying on a cold hillside in some country where their visa had expired.
The next morning two affable Australians arrived with a van the size of Denmark, and Richard watched, vicariously exhausted, as they trotted up and down the stairs, taking his life away. Chris bristled with cleaning know-how in the kitchen, periodically sweeping past him with a damp cloth in her hand, humming to herself. As the final pieces of furniture were dragged away Richard tried to say goodbye to the flat, but the walls stared back at him with vacant indifference, and offered nothing more than dust in corners which had previously been hidden. Dust, some particles of which were probably Susan’s skin — and his and Chris’s, of course. He left to the sound of a vacuum cleaner and followed the van to their new home.
Where, it transpired, his main bookcase could not be taken up the stairs. The two Australians, by now bedraggled and hot, struggled gamely in the dying light but eventually had to confess themselves beaten. Richard, rather depressed, allowed them to put the bookcase back in the van, to be taken off with the other storage items.
Much later he held out ten pounds to each of them, watched the van squeeze off down the narrow road, and then turned and walked into his new home.
Chris was still at Belsize Avenue, putting finishing touches to the cleaning and negotiating with the old twonk who owned the place. Richard moved a few boxes around while he waited for her to arrive, not wanting to do anything significant before she was there to share it with him, but too tired to just sit still. The lower hallway was almost completely impassable, and he resolved to carry a couple of boxes up to the living room.
It was while he was struggling up the stairs with one of them that he hurt himself.
He was about halfway up, panting under a box which seemed to weigh more than the house itself, when he slipped on a cushion lying on the stairs. Muscles which he hadn’t used since his athletic glory days at school kicked into action, and he managed to avoid falling, colliding heavily with the wall instead. The corner of the box he was carrying crunched solidly into his ribs.
For a moment the pain was truly startling, and a small voice in his head said ‘Well, that’s done it’.
He let the box slide to the floor, and stood panting for a while, fingers tentatively feeling for what he was sure must be at least one broken rib. He half-expected it to be protruding from his chest. He couldn’t find anything which yielded more than usual, however, and after a recuperative cigarette he carefully pushed the box the remainder of the journey up the stairs.
Half an hour later Chris arrived, cheerfully cross about their previous landlord’s attempts to whittle money off their deposit, and set to work on the kitchen.
They fell asleep together that night, three of their hands together; one of Richard’s unconsciously guarding his side.
The next morning his side hurt like hell, but as a fully-fledged male human, Richard knew exactly how to deal with the situation: he ignored it. After four days of looking at the cardboard boxes cheerfully emblazoned with the logo of the removal firm, he had begun to hate the sight of them, and concentrated first on unpacking everything so he could be rid of the boxes.
In the morning he worked in the living room, unpacking to the sound of Chris whistling in the kitchen and bathroom. He discovered that two of the boxes shouldn’t even have been there at all, but were supposed to have been taken with the others and put in storage. One was full of manuals for software he either never used or knew back to front; the other was a box of Susan Objects. As he opened it, Richard realized why it had hurt quite so much when making contact with his ribs. It contained, amongst other things, a heavy and angular bronze which she had made and presented to him. He was lucky it hadn’t impaled him to the wall.
It wasn’t worth calling the removal men out to collect the misplaced boxes and so they ended up in his microscopic study, squatting on top of the filing cabinet. More precious space taken up by stuff which shouldn’t be there; either in the flat or in his life.
The rest of the weekend disappeared in a blur of tidal movement and pizza. Objects migrated from room to room in smaller and slower circles before finally finding new resting places. Chris efficiently unpacked all their clothes and put them in the fitted wardrobes, cooing over the increase in hanging opportunities. Richard tried to organize his books into his decreased shelving space, eventually having to lay many on their side and pile them up vertically. He tried to tell himself this looked funky and less anal, but couldn’t get the idea to take. He set up his desk and computer.
By Monday most of it was done, and Richard spent the morning trying to make his study habitable by clearing the few remaining boxes. At eleven Chris called from work, cheerful and full of vim, and he was glad to sense that the move had made her happy. As they were chatting he realized that he must at some point during the morning he have scraped his left hand, because there were a series of shallow scratches, like paper cuts, over the palm and underside of the fingers.
They hardly seemed significant against the pain in his side, and aside from washing his hands when the conversation was over, he ignored them.
In the afternoon he took a break and walked down to the local corner store for cigarettes. It was only his second visit but he knew he’d already seen all it had to offer. The equivalent establishment in Belsize Village had stocked fresh-baked bread, the New York Times and three different types of hand-made pesto. Next door had stood the delicatessen with home-made duck’s liver and port paté. ‘Raj’s EZShop’ sold none of these things, having elected instead to focus single-mindedly on the pot noodle and cheap toilet paper end of the market.
After he left — empty handed but for the cigarettes, which had never happened in Belsize Park — Richard went and peered dispiritedly at the grubby menu hanging in the window of the restaurant opposite. Eritrean food, whatever the hell that was. One of the dishes was described as ‘three pieces of cooked meat’, which seemed both strangely specific and discomfortingly vague.
He turned and walked for home, huddling into his jacket against the cold and feeling — he imagined —like a deposed Russian aristocrat, allowed against all odds to remain alive after the revolution, but condemned to lack everything which he had once held dear. The sight of a small white dog scuttling by only seemed to underline his isolation.
When Chris returned at six she couldn’t understand his quietness, and he didn’t have the heart to try to explain it to her.
‘What’s that?’
The answer, Richard saw, appeared to be “a scratch.” About four inches long, it ran across his chest, directly over his heart. He hadn’t noticed it before, but it seemed to have healed and so must have been there for a day or two.
‘Another souvenir from the move,’ he guessed. It was after midnight and they were lying in bed, having just abandoned an attempt to make love. This wasn’t from any lack of enthusiasm — far from it — simply that the pain in Richard’s ribs was too bracing to ignore. He was fine so long as he kept his chest facing directly forwards. Any twisting and it felt as if someone was stoving in his rib cage with a well-aimed boot. ‘And no, I’m not going to the doctor about that either.’
Chris smiled, started to tickle him, and then realized she shouldn’t. Instead she sighed theatrically, and kissed him on the nose before turning to lie on her side.
‘You’d better get well soon,’ she said, ‘Or I’m going to have to buy a do-it-yourself book.’
‘You’ll go blind,’ he whispered, tur
ning off the bedside light, and she giggled quietly in the dark. He rolled gingerly so that he was snuggled into her back, and lightly stroked her shoulder, waiting for sleep.
After a moment he noticed a wetness under his hand, and pulled his hand out from under the duvet.
In the threadbare moonlight he confirmed what he’d already suspected. Earlier in the evening he’d noticed that the little cuts on his hand seemed to be exuding tiny amounts of blood. It was happening again, or still. Constantly being reopened when he lugged boxes around, presumably.
‘S’nice,’ Chris murmured sleepily. ‘Don’t stop.’
Richard slid his hand back under the duvet and moved it gently against her shoulder again, using the back of his fingers, cupping his palm away from her.
The bathroom was tiny, but very adequately equipped with mirrors. Richard couldn’t help noticing the change as soon as he took off his dressing gown the next morning.
There was still no sign of bruising over his ribs, which worried him. Something which hurt that much ought to have some external manifestation, he believed, unless it indicated internal damage. The pain was a little different this morning, less like a kicking, more as if two of the ribs were grating tightly against each other. A kind of cartilaginous twisting.
There were also a number of new scratches.
Mostly short, they were primarily congregated over his stomach and chest. It looked as though a cat with its claws out had run over him in the night. As they didn’t have a cat this seemed unlikely, and Richard frowned as he regarded himself in the mirror.
Also odd was the mark on his chest. Perhaps it was merely seeing it in proper light, but this morning it looked like more than just a scratch. By spreading his fingers out on either side, he found he could pull the edges of the cut slightly apart, and that it was a millimeter or so deep. When he allowed it to close again it did so with a faint liquidity, the sides tacky with lymph. It wasn’t healing properly. In fact — and Richard held up his left hand to confirm this — it was doing the same as the cuts on his palm. They too seemed as fresh as the day before — maybe even a little fresher.
Glad that Chris had left the house before he’d made it out of bed, Richard quickly showered, patting himself dry around the cuts, and covered them with clothes.
By lunchtime the flat was finally in order, and Richard had to admit parts of it looked pretty good. The kitchen was the sole room which was bigger than he’d been used to in the previous flat, and in slanting light in the late morning, it was actually very attractive. The table was a little larger than would have been ideal, but at least you could get at the fridge without performing contortions.
The living room upstairs also looked pretty bijou, if you ignored the way half his books were crammed sideways into the bookcases. Chris had already established a nest on the larger of the two sofas; her book, ashtray and an empty coffee mug placed within easy reach. Richard perched on the other sofa for a while, eyes running vaguely over his books, and realizing he ought to make an effort to colonize a corner of the room for his own, too.
Human, All Too Human.
The title brought Richard out of his reverie. A second-hand volume of Nietzsche, bought for him as a joke by Susan. It shouldn’t have been on the shelf, but in one of the storage boxes. Chris didn’t know it had been a present from Susan, but then it hadn’t been Chris who’d insisted he take the other stuff down. It had simply seemed to be the right thing to do, and Richard had methodically worked around the old flat hiding things the day before Chris moved in. Hiding them from whom, he hadn’t been sure. It had been six months by then since he and Susan had split up, and she wasn’t even seeing the man she’d left him for any more. To have the old mementos still out didn’t cause him any pain, and he’d thought he’d put them away purely out of consideration for Chris. As he looked over the bookcase, however, he realized how much the book of Nietzsche stood out in their new flat. It smelled of Susan. Some tiny part of her, a speck of skin or smear of oil, must surely still be on it somewhere.
If he could sense that, then surely Chris could too. He walked across the room, took the book from the shelf, and walked downstairs to put it in the box on top of his filing cabinet in the study.
On the way he diverted into the bathroom. As he absently opened his fly, he noticed an unexpected sensation at his fingertips. He brushed them around inside his trousers again, trying to work out what he’d felt. Then very slowly he removed them, and held his hand up.
His fingers were spotted with blood.
Richard stared coldly at them for a while, and then calmly undid the button of his trousers. he lowered them carefully and then pushed down his boxer shorts. More cuts.
A long red line ran from the middle of his right thigh around to within a couple of inches of his testicles. A similar one lay across the very bottom of his stomach. A much shorter but deeper slit lay across the base of his penis, and it was from this that the majority of the blood was flowing.
It wasn’t a bad cut. It hardly put one in mind of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But Richard would still have much preferred it not to be there.
Looking up at the mirror above the toilet, he undid the buttons on his shirt. The scratches on his stomach now looked more like cuts, and a small thin line of blood rolled down from the cut on his chest.
Like many people — men especially — Richard wasn’t fond of doctors. It wasn’t the sepulchral gloom of waiting rooms, or the grim pleasure their receptionists took in patronizing you. It was the boredom and the sense of potential catastrophe, combined with the knowledge that there probably wasn’t a great deal they could actually do. If you had something really bad then they sent you to a hospital. If it was trivial, it would go away of its own accord.
It was partly for these reasons that Richard did his shirt and trousers back up again, after patting at some of the cuts with pieces of toilet tissue. It was partly also because he was afraid. He didn’t know where the scratches were coming from, but the fact that instead of healing they seemed to be getting worse, was disquieting. With his vague semi-understanding of such things, he wondered if his blood had stopped clotting, and if so, what that meant in turn. He didn’t think you could suddenly develop haemophilia. It didn’t seem likely. But what then? Perhaps he was tired, run-down after the move. Would that make a difference?
In the end he resolved to go on ignoring it for a little longer, like that mole which keeps growing but which you don’t wish to believe might be malignant.
He spent the afternoon sitting carefully at his desk, trying to work and resisting the urge to peek at parts of his body. It was almost certainly his imagination, which made it feel as if a warm, plump drop of blood had sweated from the cut on his chest and rolled slowly down beneath his shirt; and the dampness he felt around his crotch must only be a result of his having turned the heating up very high.
Absolutely.
He took care to shower well before Chris was due back. The cuts were still there, and had been joined by another on his upper arm. When he was dry he took some surgical dressing and micropore tape from the bathroom cabinet and covered the ones which were bleeding most. He then put on his darkest shirt and sat in the kitchen, waiting for Chris to come home. He would have gone upstairs, but didn’t really feel comfortable up there by himself yet. Although most of the objects in the room were his, Chris had arranged them, and the room seemed a little forlorn without her to fill in their structure.
That evening they went out to a pub in Soho, a birthday drink for one of Chris’s mates. Richard had discovered that Chris had several different groups of friends. He had also discovered that the ones she regarded as her closest were the ones he found hardest to like. It wasn’t because of anything intrinsically unpleasant, more an insufferable air of having known each other since before the dawn of time, like some heroic group, the Knights of the Pine Table. Unless you could remember the hilarious occasion when they all went down to the Dangling Cock in Mulchester and good old ‘Kipper
’ Philips sang ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ straight through while lying on the bar with a pint on his head before going on to amusingly prang his father’s car on the steps of the village church, you were no more than one of life’s spear carriers — even after you’d been going out with one of them for nearly a year. In their terms God was a bit of a Johnny-come-lately, and the Devil, even had he turned up to dinner with a hostess gift and a bottle of very good wine, would have been treated with the cloying indulgence reserved for friends’ younger siblings.
Luckily that evening they were seeing a different and more recent group, some of whom were certified human beings. Richard stood at the bar affably enough, slowly downing a series of Kronenbourgs while Chris alternately went to talk to people or brought them to talk to him. One of the latter, a doctor whom Richard believed to be called Kate, peered hard at him as soon as she hove into view.
‘What’s that?’ she asked, bluntly.
Richard was about to tell her that what he was holding was called a “pint”, that it consisted of the liquid alcoholic byproducts of the soaking, boiling, and fermenting of certain natural vegetative species, and that he had every intention — regardless of any objections she or anyone else might have — of drinking it, when he realized she was looking at his left hand. Too late, he tried to slip it into his pocket, but she reached out and snatched it up.
‘Been in a fight, have you?’ she asked. Chris turned from the man she was talking to, and looked over Kate’s shoulder at Richard’s hand.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Just a bizarre flat relocation accident.’
‘Hmm,’ Kate said, her mouth pursed into a moue of consideration. ‘Looks like someone’s come at you with a knife, if you ask me.’
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