by David Wood
The coffee fumes weren't helping clear my head any. Already I had chain smoked my way through three cigarettes. I thought about lighting a fourth. I needed to be doing something with my hands.
Only I could deal with the memories of the past days. It wasn't fair to offload the weight on his fragile shoulders. I knew that. What I didn't know was if I could tell it; how anyone could be expected to believe the things that had happened to me since the tramp stepped out in front of the car.
The simple act of telling wouldn't make it seem any less delirious.
What was I supposed to say: You saw my eyesa tramp did that to me. A tramp with razors embedded in his fingers. Cut me open. Stole my eyes. Left me for dead in a gutter. . . No, these aren't mine. An old man who says he is the essence of this city gave me them, they were donated by stray dogs who think I'm some kind of saviour. . .
Talk like that would move the conversation from the front room to the padded cells of the madhouse and me with it. I couldn't very well ask him to pretend it was make believe like one of his blessed movies.
Still, in at the deep end:
'I'm in trouble,' and that was one hell of an understatement, but it was the kind of truth Ciaran could understand. Even if the rest of my life death was beyond him.
I had my doubts about what I was doing, but I opened up, laid myself bare. Not all of it, but most. I started with my tramp stepping out into the road, the old bag lady with her trolley, the street corner evangelist and the boy with my Hoodoo Man's voice that died in my arms, and there was no going back. My foot was on the black top of my own road to Damascus and the last few days were the out of control truth bearing down on me.
I was the victim of my own hit and run.
It was as if fissures had started to appear in my little slice of reality, these fissures opening up onto another similar but altogether different sky. In this other place it was not outrageous or insane for a man called Malachi to be the life and death bloods of a city called Newcastle, an alternative city to the Newcastle that was my every day. In this other place it was not at all surprising that a blind man, a dead blind man raised again like Lazarus, might see with new eyes that witnessed wonders and colours that were absent from his mundane reality, and that these eyes were transfused from the canine world was pure irony. Nothing more.
I told my story, in my own way teasing open the cracks of unreality that little bit further, offering Ciaran a brief sight of wonderland. He didn't want to see it. He listened, but his eyes, his nervous smile, his tight, uncomfortable movements spoke of concern, not for the danger I was in but for my state of mind. He had no head or heart for wonderland. He was hearing wild fantasy, and that I so obviously believed what I said was scaring him deeply.
'I'm not mad,' I assured him, but even as I said it all I could think was: Methinks that meladdo doth protest too much. A part of me desperately wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing. Maybe I was mad. Maybe during that dark glass hour in the hospital I had somehow traversed the Abyss Line into madness, my sanity shattered like a Christmas tree bauble between merciless fingers. Then again maybe I was still lying in the road choking on lungfuls of my own blood.
Inside my own head I knew I wasn't in any road.
I had had a glimpse at the backwards land behind the mirror, a snatch of a world our own couldn't hope to compete with. 'I need your help because this isn't just about me,' I said, rising to stand by the window. 'It's about everyone out there, sleeping on the streets tonight.'
The street was cold, rain transforming it into a domain lacking mercy. I watched as a darkened shadow shuffled by, stooped against the invasive touch of the downpour. I still had things to wrestle with in my own mind before I could phrase them, implications that threatened to undo my simple understanding of good and evil and my supposed place as protector. If what the priest said was in any way true, then a kind of inescapable backwards logic insisted Malachi was part of some secret society that had butchered innocents, culled the poor and the homeless to make way for their own twisted parody of a brave new world. The pendant owned the violence. The pendant was Matthew's, and Matthew was Malachi's.
Now it was coming round in a vicious full circle, Malachi demanding my protection from the beggar kingdom that threatened to undo his bloody paradise. The blood already spilled was not enough.
I was in a lethal ‘no win’ situation. If I didn't act as this white knight Malachi seemed to think I was, the old man and his splendours, Matthew and God alone knew how many others, were going to die. And what happened to the city? If Malachi died did that mean a literal undoing for the city itself, or was it a metaphoric one? The brave new world lost to the underbelly of beggars and thieves? I thought of the lost spirits of all of those children walled up in the underground. Did it really matter which way the devastation swung?
Through no choice of my own I was slap bang in the middle of a fight two hundred years old, and I could see no obvious way out of that apex. I was nailed hand and foot to the cross.
Let the bastards come pick at my corpse. . . I thought bitterly.
Frustration had me punch the wall beside the window, hard enough to leave my knuckles hot with the aftertaste of pain.
'Turn on the television,' I said bleakly, rubbing the moon of my thumb over the ridges of my smarting knuckles.
Ciaran didn't question my sudden desire for external interference. He turned on the television. We watched the screen in mute appreciation for several minutes, waiting for the news item that had to follow.
'This is where it gets us,' I said, seeing the smiling face of the vicar of St Thomas's surrounded by a clutch of young bodies at a nameless fund-raiser. If I hadn't walked into his life. . .
'Turn it up.'
The report was painfully brief. The priest had been brutally murdered in the knave of his own church, the details were sketchy but the police were interested in talking to a man seen leaving the church some time before the body was discovered at three o'clock, ostensibly to rule him out of their enquiries. The report finished with a wild faced composite that bore little resemblance to my own, but enough for me to see myself in the artist's impression.
'Turn it off, please.' My eyes were red in the black-faced reflection of the little screen. I had seen too many reminders of mortality in the few days since I had left the hospital.
He didn't need asking a second time.
'I killed him,' I began, hoping to make Ciaran understand. Needing to make him understand. 'I walked into his church and demanded answers he couldn't give me. He tried to, but something stopped him. It ripped him apart, Ciaran.' My fingers strayed to the silver bird at my throat. 'It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't gone to him. And it was all because of this!' I broke the leather tie and threw Matthew's gift across the room at him, unable to bear its lifeless weight around my neck a moment longer than I already had. The release was dizzying, euphoric in a hideous kind of way.
Ciaran caught it and held it. There was no way for him to know the blood debt attached to that bird and the New Dawn it represented, but he instinctively handled it with the respect due something murderous.
When he looked at me there was something in his eyes, desperation, a need to know. 'Tell me you didn't kill him,' he pleaded. 'Tell me it wasn't you. None of it was you. Tell me and I will believe you.'
I couldn't.
I couldn't wash my hands of the man's death. If I hadn't walked into his church demanding answers he wouldn't have been dead. It was as simple and as painful as that for all of them.
My dead.
I had killed them as surely as if I had put a knife to their hearts myself. All I needed to do was touch their lives and they ended.
Who else had died for me?
Who else was misguided enough to believe I was their saviour?
We lapsed into silence again; a deeply uncomfortable silence. My lack of denial had violated some sort of unspoken trust between us. Ciaran didn't know what to say to me anymore, what he could sa
y to me. And all I could think to say was that if I hadn't touched that man's life he would have been holding communion instead of appearing on the news.
I drank my cold coffee without tasting it.
'What did he have to tell you that was worth dying for?' Ciaran asked, his voice an unwilling intruder in the silence that had fallen between us.
'He told me a story,' I answered softly. 'How much more than a story it was I don't know.'
Words. The very fabric of any delusion. Creative and misleading with what they don't say as often as with what they do.
'I'd like to hear it anyway,' Ciaran offered, that look of desperation clinging to life in his eyes in place of something infinitely darker. He needed me to tell him something sane, and I needed to tell him about secret histories and angry mobs.
'Well, it's no harder to believe than anything else.' I had been about to add: so what harm can it do. But I had already seen the kind of harm this story could inflict first hand. I bit my tongue. I couldn't help but scan the room for whickering candles. There were none. 'This place,' I said, expansively, meaning Newcastle, meaning England for all I knew, 'has an evil history.'
An evil history. . . I told Ciaran the priest's tale of that vile night of madness and the New Dawn.
'That bird in your hand was their emblem.'
'It can't be true,' Ciaran said, obviously finding it painful to relinquish his grip on pragmatism, but the horror of the priest's story was undiluted by a second telling. 'Tell me it's a joke,' he said, unwilling to give up on reassurance… on the world we had both grown up with.
'I wish to God I could,' I murmured, 'but what's worse, I think it is coming around again.'
Five
We didn't act like brothers.
Too much time spent in brooding quiet. Too much time mulling over the insanity of my blurted confession. Hearing it out loud was a new experience for me as well, remember. I think he believed me. Not all of him, and not all of it, but I think he believed in me. It was as much as I might have hoped for.
Maybe that bond hadn't been broken after all.
Six
The sing song chiming of the doorbell.
Aimee.
As selfish as it sounds, I had forgotten about her.
I lurked at the top of the stairs while Ciaran went down to let her in. I was terrified. More than anything, I wanted to clatter down and hug her so fiercely she burst at the seams, then I wanted to take that embrace until she melted into me, but I didn't dare. Too much had happened for me to suddenly appear like the ghost of Bob Marley, clanking my chains, so I waited anxiously for her to come to me.
I touched the scars around my eyes, glad I hadn't thought to cover them with dark glasses this time. Glad I was to meet her hiding nothing, none of my experiences, none of my nightmares. I would meet her as everything I was, saviour and damnation, flesh and blood and weakness all.
She looked rough. Like she hadn't seen the warm side of a duvet for the best part of a week. The neglect was painfully apparent in the way she carried herself. Lines were deeply etched into the waxy flesh around her eyes and mouth, none of them from laughter. The tears weren't far away. The black roots showed through the bleached crop. She looked raw, that was it, as if something inside her, the joie de vivre, had died under that bridge with me. I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was. I had expected her to look exactly the same as she had the last time I saw her. The unchanged woman.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
The guilt was both sudden and acute.
Instinctively, I moved to embrace her, to show her I was real, alive. To try and rekindle that spark, make her into the Aimee that I had loved so unreasoningly. That I still loved so unreasoningly.
But it was as though she hadn't seen me, or recognised me. As if I were someone else. An impostor claiming to be her dead lover. She recoiled, eyes wide and shockingly wild, fearful of my venomous touch.
Her fear was like the keen edge of a knifeblade.
After hearing the abruptness of Matthew's summary death sentence on my old life, I hadn't thought I'd ever see her again, but what must she have thought? To see me beaten like that, stabbed and left for dead. . .
It was no beautiful thing to be shared between lovers, and as much as it hurt, I understood her uneasiness all too easily.
Sensing the awkwardness, Ciaran left us alone, but even alone neither one of us could talk.
More of that damned silence.
It was the first time I truly felt like a ghost revisiting the haunts of my old life.
I was unwanted here, not because of who I was or what I was, but because my presence reopened the wounds… because of the vulnerability it demanded. To accept that it was me standing before her meant that Aimee had to come to terms with losing me again, going through the trauma, the grief, the loss again. Suddenly she was facing the uncertainty of a future with me instead of the certainty of a future without me.
Not for the first time, I realised I should have stayed well away from someone else's life.
This wasn't fair on either one of us.
I couldn't stand this being with her and not being with her at the same time.
I lit that fourth cigarette and inhaled deeply, exhaling the used smoke through the 'O' made by holding the cigarette between thumb and forefinger. I looked for faces in the smoke. It was an old game. We used to play it together. I suppose I hoped we would both find the same one and that joint discovery would make something happen between us.
It didn't.
Three uncomfortable hours passed like that, neither one of us able to build even the shakiest of bridges to span the gulf that had opened between us.
I sat on the windowsill, looking through at the darkness outside, a pale reflection of the darkness within.
A ghost.
Seven
I set the taps to running, closed the bathroom door and peeled off my second skin of begrimed and bloodied clothes. It felt good to be free of them, nakedness luxuriant in the pleasant warmth of the small room as the steam billowed forth from the old brass mixers.
I hunkered down to sluice the water around the tub with the hair jug, evening out the distribution of hot and cold. The top-scale of the thermostat on Ciaran's hot water boiler was broken, so hot frequently meant boiling, and a long wallow in a hot bath was an indulgence I had been craving for the last hour of my windowsill vigil.
My arms, my legs, my whole body ached. I could feel the tenseness in every square inch of flesh and nerve. The ephemeral touch of the steam was no replacement for the skill of Aimee's gentling fingers.
I left the bath to fill itself just over the three quarters mark, making allowances for Archimedes and Ciaran's carpet.
I had smuggled his old boom-box in with some clean clothes, bringing Nina Simone along to keep me company while I submerged beneath the eddies. I left the volume low, deliberately letting the restrained sensuality of Nina's vocal mingle with the thickening steam. It was music to fall in love to, and it was music to be lonely with. To be empty with. To despair with.
I stopped the taps and sank into the deep heat of the water, sliding down until it covered everything but the flare of my nostrils. I stayed that way, listening to a very different Nina through the weight of the water and the rhythmic accompaniment of my heart, until my trapped breath exploded out of my lungs in a waterspout of bubbles and I had no choice but to surface.
There was a disorientating half-second when the sounds of the room couldn't make it past the build up of water in my ears. I shook my head and wiped my eyes with wet fingers.
The water felt good and it was washing away the dirt and the dried blood. I lay back and let my fingers explore the scar tissue where the bedstead had forced doors through my stomach walls. It was tender, aggravated to a pinkish hue by the heat of the water, but it was visibly healing. And my head. The plates of my skull felt slightly depressed, the skin ridged with tender scar tissue again, but there was no cavity into me.
As long as I kept my fingers in contact with those healing wounds it was easy to think someone was feeding me a line. Playing me like a string puppet; quick jig this way, skip step that way and none the wiser in between.
I wiped the layer of condensation off Ciaran's shaving mirror and took a long hard look at what I saw.
A face; an amorphous pink blob, really.
It was me.
That reflection always had been me, and it always would be me.
My eyes looked sore, a little puffy, a little strange, but they didn't look wrong. They didn't single me out as a freak. Forgivable if I had come out on the wrong end of a hiding, I thought, touching the soft flesh beneath them, testing the firmness of my cheekbones. Fine.
I rescued an orange razor from the soapdish, lathered my face and carefully shaved off a quarter inch of irritatingly scratchy stubble, still managing to draw a copious amount of blood from my neck for all my care.
Feeling cleaner for that little exorcism, I couldn't resist taking a huge swallow of air and submerging again.
I always remember hearing that Harry Houdini could hold his breath underwater for seven minutes or something ridiculous like that. I counted the duration of my own sinking with considerably fewer seconds, coming up for air after a slow count of ninety-three.
Aimee had slipped in while I was under.
She looked more sure of herself, a tentative smile on her lips as she eased the bolt into place.
I held my breath again, wishing silently as she knelt down beside the bath. I looked into her eyes, this time knowing what she saw when she looked into mine. I tried to find a smile of my own, started to say: 'I love you,' but she placed two fingers on my lips to stop me.