Everything You Need

by A. L. Kennedy

  Oh ffff—And now I’ve got a wet bed, on top of everything else.

  Under everything else.

  Shit.

  He flopped himself back against his soggy sheet which was, at least, now cooler and counted his breaths, tried to feel himself hammocked beneath them, relaxing, swaying in his own breeze. He started to fix his concentration on the few topics he was safe to consider after nightfall.

  Ruth. She’ll be asleep now and dreaming of sharks, the weird hiss of the tiger shark, shutting its car-boot jaws around her . . . around her what? Which part would she actually favour? What would she like? The warm throat closing on one of her legs? Or both legs, with those cheeky, sharky teeth just hugging her tight at the waist? Or the whole of her body sucked sexily in with only her head snipped off like a troublesome button and freed to bob and stare, chiffoned with blood? She’d like that—a body without worries, without memories, without shame. I’d like that myself.

  Beyond Nathan’s cottage the muggy air swaggered faintly with sideshow music: insistent, mechanical and clashing through the jolly syncopations of melodic insanity.

  Mary heard it, too, filaments and rags of drunken nursery tunes and bad pop, working in between the trees around her. She listened to the dodgeming refrains, along with all the rest of the encoded night: the nervous leaves and twig snaps, the starting of rabbits, the visible silence of owls and the reckless crash and snuffle of her local hedge-hog rooting for a feed—the usual animal and vegetable hubbub, seasonally adjusted, and then amplified by the saturated dark. A fraction of moon spiked behind sails of hot cloud, while half echoes caught in the wood fell stickily against her as she tried to understand why they all seemed different tonight. When she walked, patterns of muted light and sound seemed to ebb away and then close again behind her, thickening towards sense.

  Nathan rubbed his face, coughed, rubbed again.

  Richard will be swabbing at Lynda with the antiseptic liquid of their choice. They’ll agree that he should use his full-size arm for this, because his other one is why she married him, his point of interest. Which, of course, he decided to tell me when I didn’t want to know. And I don’t actually want to remember now. His life is not something I wish to consider—his unhappy childhood, his unhappy schooldays, his fucking unhappy Shakespearean withered arm—but he always does manage to slip in and tell me about it all, in any case. Why me? What the fuck would suggest I’m the sympathetic type? One minute he’s business as usual—the Virtually Invisible Man—fucking fascinated by the middle distance—and then he’s tight beside me, concentration breaking out all over him like lice, and I know why he does it, I fucking know—because it makes my skin crawl. Because I ought to be sympathetic, but I can’t. He isn’t another poor bastard, buckled by grief, he isn’t my cunting soul-mate—he fucking enjoys it. He fucking loves the suffering.

  And I don’t.

  I’m sure I don’t.

  I am fucking sure I don’t.

  But there he’ll be tonight, in exquisite despair, dabbing and sponging at the heart of Lynda’s charms and doggedly keeping his shortcoming in the shade, because that and only that about him turns her on, and Lynda won’t want a turn-on when she’s in no state to fuck.

  Although maybe she’ll want to feel sexy, attractive, and maybe he’ll want to help. This could all be the kind of arrangement that they make: their own kind of sweetness. United in pain. Uncovering unaccustomed passions.

  Fuck.

  Imagining them shagging is the one thing I know that can douse my libido no matter what state I’m in. Those two, they don’t bear thinking about. Like right now—he could—in fact—be at her, could be taking his conjugal pleasures, exercising his husbandly rights, bouncing off her pubic bone until he opens up her wounds.

  Now there’s a little picture we shouldn’t paint.

  Mary had written for most of the evening—building paragraphs and then scrawling them flat again. She had made a kind of start, had produced one or two scraps that were almost saying something, but they still weren’t enough. Out of doors now, in an effort to stroll her head clear, she passed by the stone wall of the old rabbit warren, Richard and Lynda’s house not too far away.

  Mary’s literary situation appeared to be frighteningly plain. She was not one of the people who could do this. She did not come from the right kind of place, she had not been brought up appropriately, she had not lived in the proper way, she did not naturally use the acceptable range of words, she was not a womanly enough woman and certainly not a manly enough man and her stupidity was constantly, horrifically deafening—she didn’t, couldn’t ever, know enough. All the ideas she had ever been going to have had already occurred to her, there were no more. This was the time to give up, to let go.

  Louis . . . You can never be sure with Louis—I’m not even convinced that he sleeps. Although he could, of course, be tucked up now with a head full of saints and martyrs, dormitory feasts, the ghostly tickle of Llangattock’s eyelashes, sideburns, tongue.

  I saw his pyjamas once—old Louis’s—proper Chinese silk with piping, the sly dog.

  Nathan’s heart tried to skip aside on him, to summon up Maura and coax him hard awake, but he ignored it. He pinched the skin on both his forearms as a distraction and continued his internal Foal Island tour.

  Collating us, our deaths and near-deaths—that’s a job I’d leave until after dark, perhaps Louis does, too. Yes, I feel that he may be archiving us while we’re asleep and can’t feel him fumbling at our lives, at our attempts to end them.

  Mary began to work back towards the hut, trying to fix out a form of words that would let her say goodbye to Joe without her crying. What she would say to Nathan, she didn’t want to consider yet. She noticed, when she walked, that her tiredness had finally deepened into a kind of intoxication—she was amiably unco-ordinated, disconnected from her thoughts and oddly easy with the prospect of abandoning her total sum of hopes. Even the surprise her indifference lifted in her was distant and irresistibly ridiculous.

  And I never can imagine Joe, not in any way. I could almost be persuaded that he won’t let me. Somewhere, I suppose, he’s shining away to himself, praying at us all until we’re better than we are. No wonder I don’t sleep.

  When she reached the rise, Mary sat. From here she could see four different lights, ticking out their particular hazard warnings: one on a count of seven, two on two different counts of four and one scything up from below the horizon, a brief wag of illumination for one second in every five. They measured against each other, skipped their different beats and then, somehow, locked.

  Mary felt the instant fasten round her, fit her, inside and out: finally, massively, shockingly articulate. This one shrug of blood, valved in her heart; this one taste of breath, its fractions of sea rock, grasses, earth, a note of honeysuckle, a note of pine; this one black and dove sky, flesh hot; this one lighthouse twitch; this one blink of absolute comfort when she started to stretch, to swallow and then know this one exponential scream of unconfined generosity, possibility, life. It changed her mind.

  Then the ordinary flow of time tipped over her again and, for a few moments, reality leapt from a standstill to a rush and then centred itself while she attended to the sensual creep of an almost sexual understanding. Her skin shuddered against the static rub of it while she raced with information: this was hers, this part of this second, and then this and the next; everything was hers, things of which she had no comprehension were still hers, would still come to her and speak. The possible scope of her inspirations was so thoroughly beyond her that she felt completely unafraid: there were no details here to alarm her, only the first real hook of hunger, growing in and setting up a charge in her that meant she wouldn’t sleep until the sun was almost risen and she was home and sitting at her desk and tired beyond herself, but not beyond imagination, not beyond the finished pages she’d been driven to produce.

  And by that time even Nathan was dreaming: splinters of conversations he’d never quite ha
d, of near-completed meetings and the clear idea that he ought to be touching somebody.

  And, over in Ancw, the fair was quiet now, closed away.

  And, about half a mile beyond it, resting in the gorse that grew by the sea-front path, were a pair of children’s trainers and a purple T-shirt. A tourist would notice them there in the morning at around nine o’clock, think nothing of it and walk on.

  And at nine, or a little after, in Bethesda Street, in Ancw, Darren Price’s mother, tired of shouting upstairs to wake him, would climb to his room and discover he wasn’t there. She would hunt through the house, imagining that he was hiding, calling his name. Then she would search the street, her nearest shops. Later, she would regard this as time that she had wasted—as a betrayal of her son and all later attempts to find him and bring him safe home.

  And at ten, or a little after, Mary would already have surprised herself by being entirely awake and walking in on the end of Nathan’s breakfast to set a slim handful of papers on his kitchen table and walk out. He would choke on his toast and only be able to nod his head in acknowledgement before she slipped away. This would be the last he was able eat for some hours, his digestion baffled by the onset of pride and pleasure and critical unease.

  And at 15:28 Darren’s shoes and T-shirt would be found in the gorse, followed at 16:10 by the discovery of his tracksuit bottoms, stuffed in a waste bin outside the public lavatory. It would become much harder to picture him still alive.

  And at 18:07 that evening, Mrs. Price, supported by her husband, would appear for the first time in a televised appeal for information, for Darren’s return, for a power that could stop her knowing he was gone.

  And later on Foal Island, without the intrusion of televisions, newspapers or recreational radios, Nathan would spend the same evening reading and then re-reading the work that his daughter had given him. There was no mistaking—it wasn’t good. He would read the pages over and over, trying to like them, until it was dark.

  And when the night was drawn full in, Mr. and Mrs. Price would occupy it in uncovering one of God’s hidden gifts to them—unlimited resilience. In utterly separate ways they met pain, surpassing pain, surpassing pain, surpassing description and still they didn’t die.

  And through the next day they continued to live, even when a police-woman solemnly told them the story of their boy—their adventurous, outgoing, very often smiling boy—of his slipping down out of his window to visit the fair, of his being seen by neighbours, cousins, friends—who were, all of them, at that time, somehow less than capable, rushed, called aside at vital moments, temporarily rendered unable to ask why he was out so late, out all alone, and then out with a man they had never seen before— a man Mrs. Price can now smell under her fingernails, taste in her cigarette’s smoke.

  And at lunchtime that same day, Nathan would smile at Mary, at her newly confident face, and lie to her, saying that he had not read her stories yet. This would seem important to him, this small keeping of his child from harm.

  And at 17:05 a policeman and his dog would find Darren Price in woods twenty miles from Ancw, apparently asleep and snuggled up in leaves. Curled on his side, his shoulder naked, Darren—from a distance— was only wonderfully pale. For a few, remarkable seconds, he seemed flawlessly strange, not dead.

  And later, a little later, Mrs. Price would not remember when she screamed. She would be given sedatives.

  And quietly, tenderly uneasy, Nathan would walk to his daughter’s home and see her through the window for one beating instant, sitting in consideration of a page. He would look at her face: clear and solemnly open, as if it were tilting into the moment before a kiss: and he would know they were made of the same thing, he would know they were both— quite willingly—at the mercy of their minds. He would know how much she was his daughter. He would watch all the sense of his life, turning with the paper beneath her hands.

  And officers undertaking to reveal Darren’s body entirely would be the first to see his wounds. They would be careful to think of him with respect, but also as a body, not a little boy. They would find this strategy relatively unsuccessful. Within months, one would ask for counselling and another would leave the force.

  And Mary would listen to Nathan while he ceased to stammer, fumble, cough, while he told the truth. They would sit elbow to elbow and be together in the imperfection of her words, in the gentle drum and murmur of his voice, and she would be angry and then ashamed and then both disappointed and overjoyed—what she had done was good enough to be wrong, it existed enough to be fought with, to deserve someone else’s critical assaults. Mary would be pleased, in a bruised way: she would, for the first time, think that in writing she need not always be alone.

  And all around them, minds of every cast and inclination would continue to mark out fantasies, futures, hopes. In thoughts as free as children, bright as knives, acts would be rehearsed and then created irrevocably.

  And no one would be caught for killing Darren and no blame would be lifted and no mercy would come with time.

  And Mrs. Price took her pills and slept and wished never to wake.

  Two days after a murder he knew nothing of, Nathan used Joe’s telephone, and—still fretting over Mary’s manuscript—called Jack for advice. As is perfectly human and natural, he had a great capacity for entertaining worries that were focused on very personal, but really rather minor points.

  “Her material, it’s not . . . it’s not finished. It’s really remarkably . . . bad. Compared to what she wrote before she came here . . . I mean, I think I’ve managed to make her worse. Jack?”

  “Mm.” J.D. breathed too close to the receiver. “Well, she’ll sor . . . sort it out. If she’s writing, then she’ll learn. And it’s much better to make mistakes than to get it right. More educational.” He tried for a laugh, didn’t make it. “Anyway, you’ve got more on your plate than that . . . Do you know?”

  “You’re drunk.” Nathan tamped away the usual disappointment, tried to judge if the conversation was worth continuing.

  “I said, did you know you’d got more on your pla—” Jack’s flow stalled, re-adjusted. “Yes, I’m drunk. I left her. Lovely girl.”

  “You left her?”

  “You know . . . left her . . . pre-emptively buggered off—things on the cards—not good. Don’t make me think about it, Sport. This Mary stuff— you talked to her about it? Did you? Her work? Hm? Nate?”

  “Well, I . . . she was . . . I was so fucking scared—not to blow it, you know. And then,” Nathan decided to take the confessional tack; there was a kind of pleasure in confessing to a drunk, knowing the recording angel was firmly out to lunch, “at first . . . at first, I know she didn’t like it—what I was saying, but then, then I altered my . . . Christ, Jack, it’s all so fresh with her—she likes doing it so much—it’s all so . . . young.” He paused to allow himself the total foolishness of a grin, the quick peppering of memories from last night: the first time she’d argued back, the first time she’d giggled and he’d known it would be all right, the easiness falling on him when they really kicked in to work and then when they’d finally called a halt, stretched, had a coffee and a good, tired hug. “I couldn’t bear— I mean, when I had to go, because it was late, because we’d finished, because . . . I had to go. I didn’t want to. I almost told her, I almost said, about . . . who I am.” Nathan heard the quiet muffle of a hand across the receiver, blurry noise. “Jack. Jack? Are you all right? Did you really leave her?”

  Jack’s voice grappled closer as, not far from his receiver, came the sound of something hollow falling. “Do leave it be. And . . . and . . . Let me tell you the news, your news. It’s shit . . . it’s all shit—all of my news is shit, you should know that by now, so should I—but this, this stuff is different shit, far worse. Fucking country we live in, Nate, how does anyone live in it sober? Mm? How?”

  Nathan concentrated, stared at the brass of Joe’s table lamp while J.D. stumbled through an explanation of Darren Price’s small
chain of events. At first Nathan thought he was listening to some kind of drinking nightmare, recited. Then he believed, recalled the left-handed boy who’d liked to look after the Foal Island boat when it moored at the quay. And then, of course, he couldn’t believe. Violent death did not happen to old-fashioned little boys who liked feeding gulls and coiling ropes up neatly.

  “Nate? You there, Nate? All right? Don’t be quiet.” Jack sniffed, might even have been crying, it was always hard to tell. “I’ve had enough of people being quiet. Nate?”

  “I’m here.”

  “It’s all fucked, you know? There’s only us who isn’t—aren’t. It’s fucked.”

  “Yeah.”

  “In the office—quick bastards, they are. Clever, clever fucks. Bright at things—some things, anyway. All day I could hear them, sniffing at the secretaries, same as ever: pushing the comments, the stories, seeing how much it took to make them squeal. Today’s best line? Did I tell you? Latest joke? ‘I hear the fair’s dirt cheap in Ancw, this year—Prices slashed.’ And I laughed, too, Nathan. I’m one of them. I laughed.”

  “Go to bed, Jack, get some rest.”

  “No. Fuck it, I didn’t laugh, I’m lying again. I always lie. I didn’t laugh—I said it. I fucking said it. I’m such a cunt.”

  “Go to bed.”

  “Can’t—when no one else is there, it scares me.”

  “Did it ever occur to you, Jack, that I know that?”

  “Well, fuck. Don’t be like that. Please. Not now. Nate? Nate? I would, if I could, apologise. Nate?”

  “I know. Goodnight, Jack.”

  “No. Not like—”

  “Goodnight.”

  1992

  Nathan had cut the top off one of his fingers. Not in fun: just by accident. He’d been dicing potatoes and had let his knife and attention slip. So the soup for the Sunday Lunch had gained a gout or two of inadvertent thickening. He’d chosen not to mention the addition—Foal Island soups were an ugly enough proposition at the best of times: normally Lynda’s speciality, allowing her, as they did, extensive contact with cylindrical vegetables.