Underwater Breathing

by Parkin, Cassandra;

  “I passed my exams,” Jacob blurted out, and waved a brown envelope. “Every single bloody one of them.” As if this was the worst possible outcome, his legs folded beneath him and there he was, sitting at her feet as though he expected her to pick him up and comfort him. She gazed at the tight cluster of dandruff nested at the back of his head, and wondered why he thought she’d want to touch him.

  “Well,” she said, when she couldn’t stand the sobbing any longer. “Congratulations. I suppose. Why are you so upset?”

  “I went home,” he said. “To tell my dad.” The whiteness of his face made his spots blaze out like lights. “And he – he was in bed and he – I couldn’t – he won’t –”

  How was this sentence going to end? She could think of a number of possibilities. She waited, quite patiently she thought, but he was beyond speech.

  “Is he dead?” she asked at last. He shook his head. “Is he angry with you?” Another shake of the head. “Is he in there with someone else?” The sound that escaped Jacob was too high and frantic to be a laugh. “Right, that’s three guesses and I’ve still not worked it out, so I’m stopping now. You need to explain what’s going on.”

  Another silence. Mrs Armitage was good at waiting. The water looked very welcoming tonight. Perhaps she might go out later after all, once she was sure the beaches were empty of idiots who thought she might be rowing out to commit suicide.

  “I got home and he was upstairs in bed,” Jacob said at last, in a fierce hiccupy whisper. “I thought I’d go in to see him. I thought he’d be pleased because I’ve done really bloody well. I mean, I know he’s upset, but he doesn’t seem to remember that I’ve still got things going on, you know? I thought if I told him how well I’d done he might, you know, just be a little bit pleased, maybe enough to stop drinking for one bloody day and think about me for once, so I went in to see him, and he –”

  If he didn’t get it out this time, she thought to herself, she’d go back into her house and make herself a cup of tea and forget she ever had this conversation.

  “He won’t wake up,” Jacob finished, and took a deep, shuddering breath as if these words had freed him from an almost intolerable weight.

  “Well, he’s probably drunk,” said Mrs Armitage briskly. “Give him a few hours to sleep it off.”

  “That’s what I thought. He was drunk when I went out, he took a bottle to bed with him, he thinks I don’t notice but I bloody do. But it’s different, he’s not even drunk it, there’s this whole bottle lying on the floor next to him and he won’t wake up.”

  “So call an ambulance.”

  “Will they be able to help?”

  “How should I know? I’m not a paramedic.”

  “Will they take him to the hospital?”

  “If that’s where he needs to be.”

  “And then what happens to me? Will they leave me on my own?”

  “I don’t know, how should I know?” Her feet were getting tired with standing. She’d often noticed that standing still tired her out far more quickly than moving. “Do you want them to leave you on your own?”

  He looked at her blankly, and with a sinking feeling in her heart, she realised what he was really asking. Please come and help me. I need you. You’re my only choice.

  She wanted, very much indeed, to ignore this skinny grease-monkey of a boy and go back into her house and shut the door. If she waited for long enough, he would give up and wander off – perhaps back home, perhaps on into some unknown future that might end almost anywhere, while his father woke up or didn’t wake up, died or didn’t die, went on with his life or sank beneath the waves. That was what she wanted to do. The only problem was that if she did that, she would eventually have to go into her bedroom and turn off the light and know that in the darkness, the photograph of her husband would be watching her. She allowed herself this single superstition: that the dead watched over those they had loved in life, and passed judgement on their actions. Her husband would not condone her leaving Jacob alone.

  “All right,” she said, cross because the universe was once more demanding something of her that she didn’t want to give. “I’ll come and take a look at him. But I’m warning you, I don’t know much.”

  He was too much the awkward teenage boy to thank her, but she saw the relief in his eyes. They walked in silence, she a few paces ahead of him because like hell would she follow in his wake like a skivvy. The evening air was deliciously warm. So few days turned out as perfect as this one. What a shame she was having to waste it on looking after a near-stranger. If it had been Ella who had come to her –

  But it would never be Ella. Ella was gone. She had to accept that, just as she had to accept that she was now committed to helping Jacob. She would not mope. She’d simply do what she’d promised, and move on.

  The garden, unsupervised even by Maggie’s fitful atten-tions, had grown wild and menacing. Picking her way through, she trod on the end of a rake that leapt up and tried to smack her in the forehead. She caught it in time, and turned her gaze towards Jacob.

  “Sorry,” he muttered, as if this was the only way he’d imposed on her that evening. He took the rake from her grasp, but then ran out of impulsion, standing bewildered in the long grass and waiting to be told what to do.

  “Lean it against the wall,” she told him. “Not like that, it’ll fall over again. Don’t you have a garden shed?” He took hold of the rake once more. “No, not now, do it later when I’ve gone. I’m not standing around watching you tidy things up.”

  The kitchen was reasonably clean, not immaculate but certainly passable considering who had presumably been in charge of it for the last few weeks. Was she supposed to tell him this? She looked at Jacob and saw him standing dumbly in the centre of the room, far beyond hearing compliments or even insults, only able to process the simplest and most direct instructions.

  “Where’s your dad?” she asked. Jacob pointed vaguely towards the door that she presumed led to the hallway. “There’s no point trying to tell me. Take me upstairs and show me.”

  The staircase was scarred but magnificent, and in any other house but this would command a premium of thousands – even in its current condition, bare of carpet and with dust and fluff collected around the base of the spindles and the wood cracking for lack of care. When the ocean finally came, the staircase would make a beautiful shape in the water. Fronds of weeds would cluster along the spindles, and fish would dart between them as if they were taking an agility course. At the top of the stairs, Jacob turned right and opened a door.

  “Right,” Mrs Armitage said, and looked in.

  She looked cautiously at the man in the bed, wary in case he should suddenly wake. The last time they had met, they had not made friends. She could see again Richard’s resemblance to Jacob. They had the same look of fundamental ordinariness, although Jacob had acquired character through the grease of his hair and the grief in his face, an effect his father had achieved through the liberal application of alcohol. His face was puffy and greyish, uneven stubble turning to patches of beard in the spots he’d persistently missed with the razor. He was lying half-across the bed with his head and arms hanging over the side facing the door. She’d wondered on her way up the stairs if she was coming to examine a corpse, but he was clearly still alive in some primitive way; his chest rose and fell in a slow rhythm and his fingers gave an occasional twitch.

  “Well, at least he’s tried to get up,” she said.

  “No,” Jacob whispered. “I did that. When I – when I was trying to wake him up, I moved him.”

  His father was taller than he was, with all the weight of fat and muscle that came with late middle-age. When she looked more closely, she saw the red bloom of bruises on the pale shrivelly skin of Richard’s arms. Who knew a boy his age and size could be so powerfully cruel?

  “I didn’t mean to hurt him,” Jacob went on, not knowing he was contradicting himself with every word.

  They stood side by side and watched th
e slow rise and fall of his father’s chest. She thought about slapping the man’s face, trying her own brand of violence in case she might have more success at bringing him back from whatever place he was wandering in. He was disgusting to look at, filthy and gross and with a smell that permeated the whole room. There would be a distinct pleasure in slapping him. Perhaps Jacob had felt the same impulse. A proper adult would reprimand him for the way he’d left his father – it was harder to breathe with your head stretched back like that, he could easily have suffocated. Then again, a proper adult would probably not have let Jacob get into such a position in the first place.

  “Right,” she said, when it became clear Jacob had no more to offer than the numb guilty misery of silence. “Let’s get him back into bed properly. Then we’ll phone the ambulance.” Jacob reached listlessly for his father’s arm. “No, don’t do that, you’ll pull his arm out. Get underneath him, under his shoulder, and lift. Lift! And roll him. Keep going. That’s it. Now prop him with the pillows. Good.” She arranged the covers over the man’s chest, trying not to let her fingers touch his flesh. Now he looked human again, a person someone cared about rather than a lump of inanimate flesh. “Where’s your phone?” Jacob fumbled a flat black rectangle from his back pocket. “Call the ambulance.”

  “What do I say?”

  “Tell them your father won’t wake up and you need help. I can’t do it for you, I don’t like mobile phones.” The pleading in his gaze was hard to bear. “If you dial the number I’ll talk to them, but this is the absolute last thing, do you hear? I’ll stay until they’re here, but no longer. I’m busy.”

  From the relief on his face as he handed the phone over to her, he hadn’t heard a word beyond I’ll talk to them. A single ring and she was speaking to the dispatcher, explaining the situation as well as she could. No, he wasn’t responding at all. Yes, he’d been like that for quite some time. No, she couldn’t say how long. Yes, he was still breathing. No, she couldn’t tell them any more, she didn’t live with them and his son wasn’t up to talking right now. Yes, she would stay until the ambulance arrived.

  A kinder person than she would find a way to comfort Jacob. They would put their arm around his shoulders, perhaps, and take him away from this terrible room and downstairs to safety. Sit him down in a chair and make him a drink of some sort, then sit down beside him and say words intended to make him feel better. It’s not your fault. You weren’t to know. You’ve done your best. The ambulance will be here soon. They’ll soon have him on his feet again. I’ll look after you.

  Instead, she stood beside him and watched the slow movement of his father’s breathing, up and down, up and down, as if someone was pumping a bellows in his chest, and waited for the crunch of gravel that would tell them the ambulance had arrived.

  She’d expected an instant diagnosis of stroke, but the para-medics seemed to have other ideas. In between the brisk bright reassurances as they tried and failed to wake him, then loaded him into a contraption that got him down the stairs and into the ambulance, she heard fragments of more puzzled discussions, and a muttered conversation over the radio.

  “So, about Jacob,” said the man in the green jumpsuit, whose name she hadn’t bothered to remember, knowing her part was nearly over and she wouldn’t be speaking to him again. “He’s welcome to come along with his dad if he wants to, but since his dad’s not actually conscious and there might be quite a lot of hanging around, he might be better stopping here with you and calling the hospital later. Is he always this quiet? He’s not saying very much.”

  “I think he’s a bit shaken up,” said Mrs Armitage cautiously.

  “I can imagine. Well, like I say, he’s welcome to come but he’s probably better off here, unless he feels very strongly about it. You’ll be keeping an eye on him?” She hesitated. “Are you a relative?”

  “I know the family,” she said cautiously.

  “I was going to ask about that. Is Dad a drinker, would you say? That bottle in the bedroom?”

  “Yes. Yes, he’s definitely a drinker.”

  “Right, that’s good to know. Any idea of quantities? Just a rough estimate?”

  Against her will, she thought of Ella, and then of Maggie. Enough to damage everyone in the family, she thought.

  “More than is good for him, I imagine,” said Mrs Armitage in her best prissy voice.

  “And is Mum on the scene at all? Anyone else who needs to know?”

  This was the moment when she could keep the secret, or betray it. She ought to tell this man the truth – that Jacob had been essentially on his own for weeks now, doing his inadequate best to cope with the useless slab of flesh they had loaded into the ambulance. That Jacob had a stepmother, who must surely be out there somewhere, and who could possibly be induced to return now that her husband seemed so definitively cancelled from existence.

  “No,” she said, impressed by how natural she sounded. “It’s just Jacob and his dad. His mother hasn’t been around for a long time.” Once she began lying, it became suddenly very easy, the words opening up in front of her like a broad highway. “I’ll stay tonight. Do you want to give me the details so we can call later?” We, she thought to herself; that was a good word to include.

  “Perfect. And he’s how old? Fifteen? Sixteen?”

  “Sixteen, I think.”

  “Right.” The ambulance man nodded to himself. “So we might need to involve Social Services at some point, then, if his dad’s going to be ill for a while.”

  “I’ll see to all of that.” She gave him the small nod and half-smile she knew he’d want to see, telling him he could hand off any responsibility for Jacob and get back to his patient. “To be perfectly honest, I’ve thought for a while now they might need some help.”

  “You’re a proper good neighbour,” the ambulance man said.

  She resisted the urge to slap his face for being so patro-nising, and instead summoned a modest smile.

  “Not at all,” she murmured, through gritted teeth.

  “Okay, we’re ready to move, so we’ll be off. If you call the hospital in about two hours, we should have some news.”

  “Two hours. I’ll make sure we do that.”

  She could tell by the way he hesitated, by the irresolute movement of his arms and feet, that he wasn’t completely convinced by her dependable-neighbour act. She gave him another smile, hiding her teeth behind her lips, and held his gaze, willing the thought from her head to his: you can trust me. I’ll look after the boy. Nobody’s missing; there’s nothing to see. Everything in this house is entirely normal.

  “Steve!” It was the other paramedic, calling to her partner from the ambulance. “Ready when you are, mate.”

  “We’ll get off, then,” said the man called Steve, and patted her arm. “Thanks for looking after the young lad.”

  “It’s a pleasure,” she lied, and took her place next to Jacob in the driveway as the ambulance turned towards the road. In a moment of inspiration, she put an arm around Jacob’s shoulders.

  “Keep still,” she ordered Jacob when she felt him jump. “Do you want them to leave you alone or don’t you?” He kept obediently still. “Right, they’ve gone. Now, let’s go inside and talk about what happens next.” He stood passively on the driveway, like a small child woken from sleep, so she gave him a little push. “That’s it. In we go.”

  Inside, he stumbled into the living-room and took his place on the sofa. Like the kitchen, it was grubby and untidy, but could have been worse. Nevertheless, she was physically unable to ignore the litter of plates, cups and glasses strewn around like confetti. Despising herself, she collected them into a precarious stack and took them into the kitchen. I will not wash these, she swore to herself, but found herself running a sinkful of hot water anyway, leaving it deliberately too hot for her hands as a punishment for being so weak.

  As the water cooled, she grew cooler with it, wondering why she’d committed herself, however vaguely, to any part in the care of Jacob and h
is father. The task went on and on, glasses followed by plates followed by endless knives and forks lurking in the thick bath of suds. It had been years since she’d had so much to wash at one time. She gritted her teeth and told herself this was the first and last time.

  When she returned to the living-room, Jacob was, pre-dictably, asleep on the sofa. Some people found such sights quite charming, claiming that sleep returned the sleeper to a younger and more innocent state. She crashed around the living-room for a while, straightening cushions and swatting angrily at the dust on the mantelpiece, but Jacob did not stir.

  He was safe. He was sleeping. He had water and food. He wasn’t stranded in his own filth or wailing with hunger. She could wait for the prescribed two hours and call the hospital, write a note explaining what had been said, then creep out of the house and return to her own clean quiet home, where there were fresh sheets on the bed and everything was tidy. If it was Ella sleeping on the sofa, there was no way she would consider it. But Jacob was older and less appealing; leaving him would be far easier. If she thought about it for too long, she could become quite disheartened at how much of what human beings call conscience was dictated by the curve of a cheek or the pitch of a voice or the softness of freshly washed hair.

  “All right then,” she said crossly, and went upstairs to see which of the bedrooms would be the least unpleasant place to spend the night.

  It was noon the next day when Jacob woke up. In the in-tervening hours, she’d watched him sleep, been all over the house and visited every one of its rooms, then telephoned the hospital and taken careful and extensive notes. She’d scrubbed the bathroom nearest the bedroom where they had found his father, changed the beds, cleaned and re-cleaned the kitchen, gone through the refrigerator for out-of-date food (surprisingly, there was none – either a very good sign, or a rather bad one). After considering each bed in turn, she rejected them all in favour of a night beneath the apple tree, cocooned in rugs and duvets that grew steadily colder and damper as the night deepened, then turned to morning.