Everything You Need

by A. L. Kennedy

  Cairn had turned and was speaking.

  “We couldn’t do any of this, of course, without people choosing to give us themselves. At one point, paupers, unclaimed cadavers, would be used without permission, but now we only work with gifts. Quite often the donors have been ill for long periods and are quite old . . . they want to give themselves to medicine, in gratitude for the care it’s given them.”

  And some of them want to trap those who survive them. Some of them are control freaks in death as in life.

  Cairn seemed restless now, happily anxious to join in the currents of studious activity. Somewhere behind him, Nathan heard the sticky peel of what could only be skin, lifted quickly away from naked muscle.

  “You’ll want to move around and observe now. So I won’t interfere. Do feel free to come and ask me anything. Or you could even speak to the students, a few of them are exceptional this year. A potential prosector among them.”

  And what exactly would I say to them? That I’m looking for my friend?

  As Cairn started to leave him, Nathan let himself survey the tables properly. His eyes followed the fall and rise of inquisitive fingers, the turn and smile of living heads, and then dropped to examine the subjects of such focused enquiry: the bodies, of course the bodies, of course the suddenly slow-motioned puzzlement of the bodies, of the way they were. He couldn’t understand the way they were.

  “Professor?” Nathan watched his hand reach out and catch Cairn by the arm. The movement seemed to take minutes to complete. “Professor?” He wasn’t panicking, he knew that, he didn’t feel frightened at all. But if anyone had asked him what he was doing, he also knew he couldn’t have said.

  Cairn was facing him now, extremely animate, unmistakably competent and sturdy. “Yes?”

  It was clear to Nathan that the professor would be more than happy to answer almost anything he’d ask.

  Except the proper questions, the big ones.

  He began to form his mouth around the most appropriate words, while Cairn waited, jovial, encouraging him to speak. “There’s something I haven’t covered?”

  “Yes.” Nathan listened to his voice, its unlikely calm, its unlikely question. A cool blade seemed to open in his skull, slitting speech apart from thought.

  The real questions, you can’t answer—the ones like fucking walls, like standing stones in the head, something brainlessly hard and unavoidable, quiet but always there—somewhere in the head—the questions of my personal dying and the dying of those loves particular to me—all here in the head.

  Nathan became aware that he had finished speaking and that Cairn’s reply had already skipped a few phrases ahead, faded out by a little fugue of disorientation. It occurred to Nathan that he understood why someone might describe himself as staggered and mean exactly what he said—that something about him had lost its footing in the world.

  The professor rounded off his final sentence with a smile. “It’s the only thing that seems to worry them.”

  Nathan swallowed stupidly and stared, his gaze drawn for the eighth or ninth or God-knew-what-number time to a flat, transected surface, a raw core of bone. Too adrift to even know what further query he could make, he simply frowned, willing his expression to imply that he couldn’t quite understand worry in this context—or that he had, perhaps, a problem with them.

  Cairn took the hint. “They still have to work with them, of course, but in a separate series of sessions. So, as far as the students are concerned, the body is always presented without the head. And, naturally, the head without the body.”

  I won’t know him—which seemed far worse—how will I know him?— than having to face Jack—I won’t know him—having to recognise him here, in whatever disarray he might have reached.

  Cairn, by this time, had tucked himself into one small, white-backed crowd, grouped off to the right. So Nathan was finally left to himself and the promise his editor had made him part of.

  He began to walk, soft-shoeing between tables, trying to be a writer— always his very last line of defence—attempting to be peaceably filled with the details of it all. Observation was not involvement, was not guilt or strangeness, was only his vocation, his job.

  Stripped to the waist, to bared muscle, to the clear-cut line where the body fat’s left in an inches-deep rind the rich colour of something sweet . . . of, Jesus fuck it, marron glacé, just that and nothing else—and embalmed flesh, dark as a cooked meat, you realise—something of the after-dinner, after-carving mess here and the shame of hunger starting, in amongst the black plastic bags and the pale, naked, vulnerable feet and the skin that looks pressed already, buried already, prematurely underground.

  In the end, his observations faltered, baffled, and retreated to the hands: their relatively harmless resting curl; the unscathed, upturned palms; the cyan blue or the milkiness of fingernails.

  And, when he’d already given up searching, this was how Nathan found him. He found Jack by recognising one of his hands. The right hand. It was his, it could only be his. The slightly large knuckles and nicotine staining were irreversibly eloquent, both part of the small identity of the perfect instrument for jabbing out faulty typing, miming gunfire, raising glasses, red-inking corrections, pointing out cretins, building joints, producing a signature of surprising elegance and drumming bar tops, turning pages, patting shoulders, shaking hands, shaking Nathan’s hand, shaking Nathan’s hand.

  Just fucking like you, leaving me here with all of this.

  Nathan let his fingers close hard around nothing.

  Just fucking like you, Jack.

  “Just fucking like you.”

  Mary was watching Nathan work. “What is?” Not watching him writing, watching him doing proper work.

  “ ‘What is?’ she says. ‘What is?’ ” He paused for a moment, breathless, hugging the tall roll of chicken wire he’d been waltzing and frogmarching over the increasingly muddied grass. “It is just like you to stand by while I rip my sodding arms open with this stuff.” He had, indeed, managed to score both his forearms with fine, bloody lines from the wire.

  Mary had been trying not to notice the marks—they made her squeamish. Anything involving pain in conjunction with Nathan always did. “You said you didn’t want me to help you. And I don’t know what you’re doing, in any case.” He blinked at that, she noticed, and twitched a mournful smile. She leaned over the border of what would soon be a finished fence and tapped at the back of his hand. “You could, of course, roll down your sleeves.”

  “And then I’d rip my shirt.”

  “Your arms are probably worth more than your shirt.” She kept trying to meet his eye, but today he was having none of it.

  “Shirts don’t heal. And I do.”

  He said this so completely unconvincingly that she wanted to give him a shake.

  Jesus, man, I know you’re upset about something. I know you’re usually upset about something. I know you’re an emotional fucking haemophiliac, but if you won’t say what’s the matter, I can’t help. I am sympathetic, but I can’t help. Subtext is all very well, but it isn’t the same as communication.

  Nathan folded his arms across the flat top of the roll and then rested his chin on them. “What are you thinking?” His stare was firmly set at the edge of the trees behind her. Ever since he’d come back from London he’d been gently avoiding contacts, anything that might lead to questions he didn’t want asked. “Hm? Mary?” Now he was evading examination again by quizzing her.

  She decided to abandon subtlety. “I was thinking that subtext was no replacement for conversation.”

  His mouth tightened. “Are you referring to a theory, or a fact?” The voice almost too quiet to be heard now—which, with Nathan, was not a good sign.

  “A fact.”

  “A fact relating to what?”

  He’d obviously decided to be angry, which was unreasonable of him, because she was doing nothing wrong and wouldn’t be bullied into feeling that she was. “A fact relating to this co
nversation.”

  He closed his eyes for a breath or two, then lifted his head, faced her and said nothing, only stared: one long, inarticulate look which she met and dumbly returned. She couldn’t understand what he was trying to tell her and had no idea of what her reply might appear to be.

  This is ridiculous.

  “Mary?”

  The sound of his voice broke the moment, let her discover that her pulse was jolting high. “Yes?”

  “There’s nothing wrong here.” He was focused on a point beyond her head again. “There’s nothing wrong with me.” This in his gentlest way of speaking, now: the one he used when they’d been working late at her manuscripts, the one he used with Eckless when he thought no one was listening. “There’s nothing wrong at all. I went away and attended to something for Jack Grace. I’d promised I would. It upset me, but now it’s done. I’ve said my goodbyes.

  “And now I’m building my little fence here, setting a part of the wood aside for some research I have to do. I’ll probably use what I find out in the novel—depending on how things go. I’ll see. Partly, I just feel like some strenuous exercise—an excuse to be active. If you have no objections, of course.”

  “You run every day, how much more active do you need to be?”

  “This much more. Please, Mary, this is nothing to concern you.”

  “You mean that it’s none of my business.”

  “I mean you have no need to be concerned.”

  “This is an island where people have accidents. I have noticed.”

  Nathan slipped her an enquiring look and it was her turn to glance away. He sighed. “I am not going to have an accident. Not as far as I know. As far as I’m concerned, I am going to take a very great deal of care. And, meanwhile, I have work to do. Everything in here has to be sealed off, so that it won’t be disturbed. Even Eckless won’t be coming in here once the fence is up. In fact, particularly Eckless. That’s why he’s at home just now. He’ll give me hell when I get back—what time of day do I call this and where have I been and why couldn’t he come and were there any other dogs there—you know what he’s like.” Nathan made a fair attempt at a grin.

  She tried her thumbnail against the post, it was good, hard wood, something to support a very serious fence. “So everything’s fine, then, is it, Nathan?”

  “That’s right.” He wiped his mouth with one hand, as if he didn’t like the taste of what he’d said.

  He’s such a terrible liar, he really shouldn’t even try.

  She waited, although she could guess that he’d rather she didn’t, that he’d hoped the conversation might be over with. “Nathan—” but she stopped herself from going on.

  He doesn’t even want me here. Whatever it is he means to do, it’s all decided, in any case, no matter what I say. That was the change in him when he came back—you could tell that he’d made a decision, that something had been fixed.

  Mary was about to go, “Well, I’ll see you arou—” when Nathan pushed the roll of wire forward, let it thump into the grass while he watched her face and stepped forward and took hold of her wrist.

  He lifted her hand in both of his and bent his head to meet it, set a kiss on her palm, and then folded her fingers over, as if she should keep what he’d given her: the brief press of soft heat. For a moment, he smiled at her—slightly apologetic, slightly surprised—and for the first time she really believed that he’d been a husband, had gone out courting, had quietly secured a wife.

  Nathan let her go, buried one hand quickly in his pocket and used the other to scrub at his neck. “There’s something I’ll have to tell you soon . . . that is, I’d like you to . . . know . . .” He frowned at the chicken wire, as if he couldn’t recall how it came to be lying at his feet. “When I’ve finished the book I’m writing, I’d like you to read it. I mean, I’d like it if you could read it first, before anyone else.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I wouldn’t ask, but it’s a real . . . you know. . . a serious . . . Jack would have called it a proper novel. I haven’t really written one of those in years . . .”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “All that slashing and premature burial stuff—not to mention the fast-seller/best-seller/genre-fiction amounts of money it tends to make—it all rather led me astray, so I don’t know if I’ve still got the knack of . . .”

  “I’d be glad to read it.” And without entirely intending to, she added, “I’d be proud,” which made him look simultaneously happy and alarmed.

  “Ah, well now, you shouldn’t say that—you haven’t read it yet.” Nathan tugging at one eyebrow and then the other for no obvious reason. “And I haven’t finished it yet.”

  “We could swap.”

  “Mm?”

  “When I’ve finished mine, you’ll see it. And then when you’ve finished yours . . .”

  “That would be . . . yes, that would be . . .” he stooped and wrestled the chicken wire back up into a manageable embrace, “fine. If everything works out. We’ll see. But you’ll be finished before me—you’re practically done now, aren’t you?” He halted and allowed himself a full smile. “Practically a novelist—our Mary Lamb.”

  “Hardly that.” She smiled back.

  “Exactly that. But bugger off now, will you? I’m busy.”

  Still smiling, “All right, all right. I know when I’m not wanted.”

  And as she walked away down the hill, she undoubtedly heard him shout, “Thanks for agreeing. Means a lot,” but when she stopped to look up at him, his back was turned and he seemed, to Mary, completely preoccupied with his hammer and his staples and his wire, doing proper work alone, with his secrets still secret, his decisions still made.

  I should call her back.

  Nathan unrolled some of the chicken wire, started anchoring it to a post. His shoulders were aching in a way that made his arms seem twice their normal weight.

  I should just call her back, it would be no bother and would make us both glad.

  This was a fiddly business—fencing—it called for concentration and a weirdly precise kind of strength, both of which he lacked.

  She would hear me, if I yelled.

  Sneaking a look round, he could still see her, the dissatisfied tilt of her shoulders, the signs of concern. He bent to his work again.

  I’m making her worried. I should call her back and tell all, tell some, tell a fraction, just—

  Fuck.

  He watched as the hammer calmly recoiled after battering on to his hand.

  Fuck. You stupid, stupid wank.

  He sucked his breath in hard while he waited for the first ugly slap of pain.

  This is, of course, what will happen if you do not concentrate—the rattling of the hand bones with the fucking hammer. Working out here is supposed to completely fill the mind with the sunny preoccupations of the artisan. It is supposed to make you focus, but not think. So, naturally, you do the reverse, you fuck.

  Oh, shite, that hurts. No wonder I type for a living. I have the craft skills of a rubber plant.

  Still, he was relieved to see, he hadn’t actually broken the skin: only kicked off a line of increasingly angry bruising across his knuckles. It hurt to work on, but he did so anyway.

  Still, when I’ve done this, I’ll be ready to really make a start. I can do the digging somewhere over past the beech and I’ll think about the rest of the arrangements nearer the time. No need to be under pressure. There’s enough young hazel for supple wood, enough load-bearing branches for everything else. I can set up whatever I like.

  And I didn’t lie to Mary—this is research. If all goes well, it’ll help me to finish my fucking book. And when the book’s finished, I can tell Mary everything, do what I should have done years ago, and—coincidentally—work through my sodding promises to Jack. Christ, you’d think he would have had the decency to leave me the fuck alone once he was dead. But then, decency never was his speciality.

  Which didn’t mean that Nathan didn’t miss
him, didn’t mean he wouldn’t have been glad to pick up the phone and call London, talk through all the things he planned to do, talk for the sake of talking, for the sake and the satisfaction of making words. They’d both liked words: Jack and Nathan, Nathan and Jack.

  A thin rain came and went and Nathan sank, as he’d hoped, into the smooth and unreflecting rhythms of activity. He was fixing in the last of the hinges and tramping down the earth at the base of the wire as the day began to turn grainy and monochrome. Then he opened—for the first, most satisfying time—his newly hung gate and then chained it and pad-locked it shut as if there were something behind it which might be precious, or at least worth hiding. This was not yet the case, of course, but might be, whenever he thought the time was right.

  He came within sight of his cottage before the night was fully in, enjoying the drag of tiredness in his thinking, the mumble of worthy muscular discomforts as he walked. Nathan even liked the look of the lamp-light, cast across the grass from his windows and drawing him on towards home. Then he remembered that he’d left on none of his lights and realised there was someone inside waiting for him. One of the better things that ever happened in this world.

  Might be Mary.

  Which would be nice—she’d see he was knackered and possibly make him a cup of tea, not push any more questions, just be friendly and domestic in a way she hadn’t been in a while—Jonno and all that, intervening.

  Naturally, he’s got first call on her, of course.

  Still, the fucker needn’t begrudge me the odd cup of tea. Mary is still in training, she does still have to concentrate on developing her craft.

  And making me tea would aid her development as a novelist, no end.

  He shook his head at himself and stamped the mud off his boots before he opened the door. “Hello. Anyone there?” Eckless trotted up dolefully, doing his best impression of a dog worn down with worry over its erring and incomprehensible master. Nathan set about breaking the animal’s will with vigorous ear scratching until Eckless couldn’t help but grunt and wag his tail, all sins forgiven.