All Sorts of Possible

by Rupert Wallis

  . . . And then Mason appeared in the doorway behind him, looming like a storm cloud in the mirror over his shoulder . . .

  . . . ‘Don’t try that again,’ he grunted, ‘or else I’ll break more than your nose.’

  34

  Daniel and Bennett sat on the low wall outside King’s College, eating chips for breakfast from yellow styrofoam trays, tourists glancing at them as they walked by.

  ‘What do you mean it was Lawson?’ asked Bennett.

  ‘In the mirror, it was his face looking back at me.’

  ‘But you just said it was like a memory. That you were him. How’s that possible?’ Bennett speared a chip and dipped it in ketchup. He moved his fork like a baton as if conducting his thoughts. ‘Unless it’s to do with the fit? That bits of Lawson got stuck inside you when things went wrong.’

  A passer-by looked down at them; Bennett smiled at her with ketchup teeth until she looked away. ‘Do you think you could remember anything else?’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to.’ Daniel cupped his hands round the styrofoam tray of chips, trying to warm them because even though the sun was out he felt cold.

  ‘But you might remember something that helps. If Lawson knew other people like him, maybe there’s somebody who could help you. You need to find someone to make this fit or who knows what Mason’ll do?’

  Daniel toe-poked a pebble as far as he could into the road. ‘Lawson’s dead, Bennett. It’s creepy, thinking bits of him are stuck inside me.’

  ‘Like starlight?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When we look up at a star, we’re seeing how it was in the past because of the time it takes light to travel across the universe. We’re only watching a memory from an age ago.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  Bennett patted him on the shoulder. ‘It’ll burn out eventually.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do.’ Bennett speared another chip and watched it steaming in the sun.

  He put the wooden fork down with the chip still attached when a woman with an American accent asked if she could take a picture of them sitting on the wall with the college behind them because it looked so cute. Bennett asked for a pound. ‘I’m saving up for university,’ he said. ‘Thirty thousand pictures should do it. Or else I’m going to be trapped in my socio-demographic fishbowl for the rest of my life, looking out at what could have been for me.’

  When three pound coins were placed in his outstretched palm, he lit up like a slot machine.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Daniel as they walked away after the picture was taken. ‘You can do anything you want whether you go to university or not.’

  Bennett beamed for a moment like he had won the lottery. ‘But I can’t find your fit for you though, can I?’ he said as they strolled among the tourists.

  ‘No you can’t.’

  ‘And Mason doesn’t sound like the kind of man to take kindly to bad news.’ Bennett slung an arm round Daniel’s shoulder and pulled him close. ‘Why not try to see what else of Lawson is left inside you? It might help. Do you really think you’re going to find someone just by walking round town? Mason only gave you three days and it’s day two now.’

  ‘Lawson was drawn to me when we met. Perhaps someone else will be too. The down-and-out on the train said the person I needed to make the fit will be wherever I am.’

  ‘And you believe him?’

  ‘There are people coming from all over the world to visit here,’ said Daniel as groups of tourists bustled round them.

  ‘Hello!’ shouted Bennett at the crowds, pointing to Daniel. ‘Anyone here interested? He’s someone you can make the fit with if you want?’ But while some people glanced up at them, most just looked embarrassed and walked on.

  Bennett raised his hands in surrender when Daniel scowled. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I can see it might be uncomfortable finding out what bits and pieces of a dead person are stuck inside you, so let’s walk a bit more and see what happens, until we meet someone or we up come with another idea. I can multitask anyway. Work off the chips at the same time.’ He belched and smiled at all the disapproving faces passing them by.

  They wandered among the crowds of shoppers and tourists like two pilgrims searching for a hidden, sacred place. But the only time anyone noticed Daniel was when a young kid gawped at him, pointing him out to his mum, as if he had just stepped off the front page of the newspaper.

  When a pack of girls from school recognized him too, they catcalled his name across the traffic, swigging from bottles of cider, their middle fingers raised, the sunlight flashing off their varnished nails.

  ‘You’ve got to love ’em,’ said Bennett, blowing them each a kiss.

  When Bennett spotted the down-and-out they had met on the train, he chased after him down the street, shouting that he wanted his hip flask back. But the man ducked down an alley, his mackintosh flapping. When Daniel followed them, he found Bennett at the end of the alleyway, panting, his hands on his head as he stood pondering which of the three separate passageways to take.

  ‘Vanished like a bloody cat,’ he said and cursed.

  Eventually, the two of them lay down in one of the parks on the sunburned grass. Bennett picked up a stick and turned it in his hands. ‘So much for meeting someone. All we’ve done is go round and round this bloody town. People’ll start talking, you know.’ Bennett tossed the stick as high as he could and watched it cartwheel round and snap like a bone when it landed on the dry brown grass. He stared at the two broken pieces and clicked his tongue. When he looked round, ready to say something, Daniel was staring at him.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll try it.’

  Bennett bought a notebook and pencil from a kiosk in the park and sat quietly beside Daniel, waiting to write anything down that might be useful.

  Daniel lay silently for a few moments, thinking about Lawson, focusing on everything he could remember about the man. What he had been like in the hospital. How the house he had lived in was set out. Everything he had mentioned to Daniel about the fit and what he hoped they could do together. Ever so gradually, Daniel began to sense they were having an effect as little flickers of the man’s memories – things he could not have possibly known about – revealed themselves to him, flitting like sparks through the black of him as he kept his eyes tight shut.

  They were mundane moments at first – Lawson brushing his teeth or eating a meal or driving a car. But they had a momentum of their own that carried Daniel into a deeper thinking and he started to remember other things in sequence from across the man’s lifetime. Most of them were short, coming too quickly for Daniel to appreciate, but there was the odd more detailed one he saw clearly enough through Lawson’s eyes to describe to Bennett:

  As a toddler, playing with a black Labrador, pulling its ears.

  Lawson on his first day at school, just a young boy in grey shorts with a satchel on his back.

  Lawson the teenager sitting in his bedroom, focused on an HB pencil striped red and black which suddenly rolled a couple of centimetres or so of its own accord, making him whoop in delight.

  In a cinema with a girl in the seat beside him, holding his hand in the dark.

  As a young reverend, leading a church service, the pews containing just a few people.

  Sobbing as he stood beside a new grave, the brown earth covered with wreaths of flowers, and swallows boomeranging round him.

  Ripping out the pages of a Bible and letting them flutter to the floor.

  As the older man Daniel had known him to be, standing in a dusty hallway of a stately home with a huge staircase winding upwards.

  Being shouted at by Mason as they sat in a car.

  Lawson, sitting in his living room, doodling a strange symbol on a piece of paper, practising it over and over on the page.

  Standing in the hospital shop, looking at the photograph of Daniel in the newspaper.

  Faster and faster the fresher, most recent memories started to come to Daniel .

&
nbsp; Speaking to Daniel in the hospital . . . cooking supper . . . hearing a doorbell . . . walking with Daniel into his living room . . . the light bulb moving as it tied a knot in the cord . . . resting and talking to Daniel as the light bulb swayed above themand­thenMasoncominginto­theroomandLawsonbeingsickandholding­thesilversignetringandtellingDanieltoopen­hisheartmoreandhishandexplodingfromhisarm­bloodspatteringacrossthewallsofthelivin­groomandfeelingsolittle­painitwasshockingandthen­fallingforwardandexpecting­tohitthefloorbutonlyplungingintoa­blackbottomlesshole—

  Daniel opened his eyes, panting in the heat like a dog, and wiped his brow with a shuddering hand.

  Bennett sat with him until he was calm, reassuring him gently that he was safe in the park.

  Daniel looked through the notebook at everything Bennett had written down. He stopped when he saw a strange doodle, a figure of eight lying on its side. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘You said Lawson was drawing a symbol, practising it again and again. It’s the best I could come up with the way you described it. It sounded like the sign for infinity.’

  Daniel studied it. Shook his head. ‘No, it was more like . . .’ Pausing, he tried to remember it and then he drew the crude shape of a cartoon bomb. Bennett looked at it and shrugged.

  ‘It’s not how you described it.’

  Gradually, in the heat of the sun, Daniel fell asleep.

  When he woke with a start, Bennett offered him a can of Coke, and Daniel could smell the whisky fumes drifting off it.

  ‘You were having a bad dream,’ said Bennett, waggling the can in front of Daniel’s nose, making the Coke fizz inside the can. Daniel took a sip and handed it back. ‘Do you get them a lot?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘About what? Being underground again?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m back there, in the dark, with my phone, the rock shining back, the corners jutting out and catching the light so they look like teeth. Like the rock’s about to eat me. And sometimes it does.’ Daniel sat up and let the sunshine melt across his face. ‘It’s not just dreams. Sometimes a pothole widens when I’m crossing a road and I have to stop until it’s shrunk back down. Or every so often a car goes by and I watch it, studying the road, hoping nothing happens. Even the water running through the pipes at home can set my heart pumping.’

  Bennett offered him the can again. ‘Maybe you should speak to someone.’

  Daniel shrugged. ‘It’s not all the time.’

  Bennett nodded. ‘You can tell me anything whenever you need to.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I have another idea I’ve been waiting to spring on you. Maybe we should go to Lawson’s house. Perhaps we can find something there that might help.’

  Daniel tapped his fingers on the grass. ‘Mason said not to go back.’

  ‘He won’t know as long as we’re careful. We could just look around.’

  Daniel drained the Coke can and squeezed it in the middle and tossed it into the bin beside them, the whisky buzzing in his head. ‘OK,’ he said.

  They sped down the quiet lane towards Lawson’s house, their bikes spinning grit on to the verge. But, as soon as they saw Mason’s blue BMW pulled over on the grass, they had to brake hard, drawing black marker lines on the asphalt.

  A mountain of rubbish had been built up in the front garden. There were suits still on their hangers. Stacks of newspapers tied with string. Carpets rolled into grey tubes.

  Frank emerged with an armful of black curtains and threw them as high as he could on to the pile, like a thunderhead falling from the sky, until they landed and became an entrance into the mountain instead.

  ‘Guess they’ve moved in,’ whispered Bennett.

  And all Daniel could think was how sad Lawson would have been to see everything going up in flames. But, as they cycled away, he wondered if it really had been him thinking that or whether it was the part of Lawson left inside him that felt that way.

  35

  The two of them went to the hospital and sat with Daniel’s dad, listening to the machines keeping him alive. Daniel stroked his father’s hand and then he washed his forearms gently and carefully as if they were made of fine china. He spoke to Bennett as he did so, explaining his father was still in an induced coma to give his brain time to heal which was why the ventilator was breathing for him and he was being fed through a tube into his stomach. Daniel stopped speaking when his voice started to crack and break apart, and the only sounds were the machines beeping and sucking and whooshing.

  Daniel slumped into his chair after he had finished washing and drying his father’s forearms. ‘It’s the not knowing that’s the worst,’ he said. ‘Because none of the doctors or nurses can tell me if I’m never going to speak to him again or whether I’ll be helping to nurse him back to health after he comes out of the coma. So that’s why I need to make the fit, to try and help him. I don’t want to leave it up to the world to decide what’s going to happen. I want to make him better if I can. It’s up to me. But what if I can’t find anyone? What if I wasn’t saved to help him at all? That all along I’ve just been hoping I was.’

  Bennett sat in silence for a moment and then he stood up and went round to the other side of the bed and held Daniel until his friend had stopped crying.

  36

  His aunt had cooked supper by the time Daniel got home, but he wasn’t hungry, despite not eating since his breakfast of chips.

  When he picked up his plate, still heavy with most of the food, she rolled her eyes. ‘You should eat more than that. You’re a growing boy.’

  Daniel ignored her and put the plate on the worktop beside the sink. He heard a little sigh as if she might be deflating. But when he turned round she was still there.

  ‘What have you been doing with yourself today?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing. Went to see Dad with Bennett.’

  ‘I saw you walking around town with your friend earlier; it looked like you’d been drinking,’ she said, scraping her fork round her plate, and the sound caught in Daniel’s chest.

  ‘No we weren’t.’

  She took a deep breath as if she was sniffing the air for clues. ‘You were chasing some poor man down the street.’

  ‘You don’t have to be here if you don’t want to be. If it’s all too much.’

  ‘Daniel, you’re fifteen.’

  ‘Like I said.’

  She smiled as if he had told her a joke. ‘And how do you know I don’t want to be looking after you?’

  ‘It’s not like you’ve been interested in me before.’

  ‘Maybe you should ask your father about that.’

  ‘Well, that’s a bit hard right now,’ Daniel said and she bowed her head. ‘Anyway, kids aren’t your thing.’

  ‘How would you know that?’

  ‘It’s obvious.’ His aunt stared right back and something welled inside him and made him say it. ‘Because you don’t have any.’

  She looked at her plate and then put down her knife and fork.

  ‘Actually, I did have a son. He was called Michael. He died very young, before you were born. He would have been just a year older than you.’ She wiped her mouth with her napkin. ‘I never had the chance to have another child. Sometimes you realize that life gives you a blessing only after it’s happened. That’s what real heartbreak is. But I think you know that now more than most people.’

  Daniel gripped the edge of the worktop because his legs seemed not to be there.

  ‘I know what it’s like to lose someone I loved very much, the same way it was with your mother, and that makes me the perfect person to be here helping you, don’t you think?’

  ‘Dad hasn’t gone.’

  ‘But he might, Daniel, because of how ill he is. And I’m sure you think about that from time to time. It’s something you need to talk about and I’m here whenever you want to. I worry you’re only telling your friend what you’re feeling.’

  She picked up her fork and started eating again.

  Daniel walked b
ack to the table with his plate and set it down in front of him and sat down. He began to eat too.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said after finishing a mouthful and swallowing. ‘I’m sorry about Michael too.’

  ‘Thank you. It was a long time ago.’ His aunt smiled. Nodded. ‘What do you tell him that you can’t tell me?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your friend.’

  ‘Nothing.’ But she gave him a look that told him she didn’t believe him. ‘We don’t talk about anything important. That’s the point.’

  They finished the rest of the meal in silence, her eyes flicking up at him as if expecting him to tell her something private and balancing the world between them. But he couldn’t tell her anything about Mason or Lawson. So instead he ate every grain of rice on his plate and tried to come up with something else.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said finally. ‘I have been drinking today. Just the odd sip with Bennett. Sorry.’

  When his aunt smiled as he put down his knife and fork on his empty plate, he knew that was enough for her for now. She laid her hands flat on the table and took a breath.

  ‘The consultant in charge of your father wants to speak to us tomorrow.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About what’s happening next. They’re going to start reducing his sedation in the morning because the swelling in his brain has gone down. They want to see if your father will wake up. If he starts to breathe on his own.’

  ‘Do they think he will?’

  ‘They don’t know.’

  ‘They don’t know much at all, do they?’

  His aunt’s mouth fell open. But the words didn’t come and all she did was close it and shake her head.

  37

  When Daniel woke with a start, it was still night and it seemed his bedroom was fast asleep around him, with no sign of anything that could have disturbed him. As he sat up, he tried to remember what he had been dreaming about, but there were only sad feelings left inside him, a black vapour trapped and swirling in his chest.

  And then the silhouette of a large man suddenly moved, as if emerging out of the wall, making Daniel cower back, too scared to cry out.