by Jo Gatford
At three, Matthew was a little watery-eyed silent thing who liked to sit as close as humanly possible to Angela on the sofa - hip bones sticking into her thighs, his arm squashed up against her side, head a few bare inches away from resting on her shoulder. He never made it that far, though he seemed to long to do so.
Lydia would roll her eyes and pull us into rough hugs, kissing our ears, leaving bells ringing inside. Alex would climb up legs and onto laps and throttle us with love, his open-mouthed kisses full of teeth. I patted heads and nodded solemnly, the sort of expression to be adopted when confronted with something I don’t know how to react to. I can feel the frown clamping at my muscles now as the doctor leans around her doorway and asks us to come through. But her doorway has no magic, I can tell, and I don’t move until Angela prods me in the fat underneath my arm.
My doctor is younger than Angela, with deep brown skin and eyes whose irises are almost as dark as her pupils. I may be no good at physical contact but something about her manner makes me want to crawl into a ball on her lap. I’m fairly sure she would be too polite and professional to mind. Doctor Samyal consults her notes, smiling every so often, trying to divide her attention between me and my chaperone. It’s a careful balance, and one she negotiates well: don’t make the patient feel like a child, but ensure that any important information is retained by the one with a properly working brain. I watch her and nod without listening, trying to keep my expression as neutral as possible because after our last appointment Angela said I looked at the doctor like I wanted to kiss her.
My straight-faced response has always failed with Angela, ever since she discovered brown blood in her knickers and rushed to tell me because her mother was at work, and she didn’t seem to think it mattered that I didn’t share her body parts. The pain must have shown clearly on my face as I rummaged through the basket in the bathroom that contained Lydia’s products and creams for things I didn’t normally investigate.
Angela took Lydia’s stance on embarrassment: it’s something that only applies to other people. “We talked about it at school,” she told me. “They gave us free tampons but I don’t have any left because we threw them all at the boys.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to answer. I passed her a pad and a tampon of every colour I could find. “You know what to do?”
“Mmm hmm. They gave us a booklet too. Thanks, Peter.”
Nod. “And you know what it all means? Uh… It?”
“It means I can have babies now.”
“You’re twelve, you’re not having babies yet.”
“Yes, but it means that I can.” She laughed at me gently, elated – part of the great women’s club at last – blushing with the happy knowledge that tampons were no longer just surplus missiles to be launched at the sniggering boys in her class, to make them squirm with the same uncertainty and discomfort I felt fifty-odd years on.
It didn’t get easier. I reacted in much the same way when she did, in fact, have a baby ten years later. I was the first to know then, too. Lydia was dead and I was alone again, navigating the terrifyingly familiar territory of being responsible for children I wasn’t prepared for.
I studied the rays of sunshine on the ultrasound and gave an emphatic nod.
I took Clare in my arms the day she was born and pressed my face against her blanket to blot away the tears I pretended I wasn’t crying.
I walked her up and down the hall while she wailed out her colic.
I watched her cobalt-blue eyes roll ecstatically as she breastfed, the little dimples of her inverted knuckles pawing at her mother’s necklace, a lazy smile on her lips.
I remember this. I remember all of it, in blossoming, flaring Technicolour, and yet there are times when I don’t recognise Angela’s face.
I have a pencil in my hand, a blank notepad on the desk between me and the doctor and I cannot recall what has just been said.
She asks me to copy a picture of interlocking shapes, and I fail, just like last time. She asks me to remember three words: chair, blue and blackbird, which I am to repeat back to her at the end of the consultation and I am able to do so. I am told that there is a difference between two apparently identical pictures and asked to spot it but I can’t. I am not embarrassed. I am not upset. I am filled up with a vacancy that is not unpleasant, because it is not anything at all.
Angela is troubled. She’s spent too much time around people losing their minds, I know. She can anticipate how it’s going to go, how it’s going to end, except this time she’s the relative and not the nurse. Or she’s both, which is twice as awful. I cannot comfort her and I don’t want to try.
The doctor writes out an appointment card, explaining to Angela about a new set of exercises which will help to maintain as much memory function as possible, intermittently blinking kindly and regretfully at me. I jerk to my feet. By the time they react with echoing repetitions of “Peter? Peter?” I am already out the door and down the corridor, and even though Angela catches up with me at the foyer I don’t let her slow me down. I know exactly where I’m going. She follows me unobtrusively out of the clinic and all the way to the high street shoe shop that used to be a travel agency where Heather once worked. I sit on one of the chairs with my feet on a foot-measuring stool and ask the shop assistant if she knew, if she was even aware that this place used to be a travel agency. If she knew that Heather worked here. A bit of accounting, that’s what she did. And some secretarial duties. She hated it. She hated everything, by the end. The shop assistant didn’t know, and she shakes her head with a slow, patient, painfully tolerant expression. Angela sits down next to me and waits quietly until I allow her to persuade me to go back to the home.
#
I don’t remember dinner, or getting into my pyjamas, or taking my medication, but when the resonance of Heather’s workplace finally leaves me I find myself sitting up in my bed, steeped in the catnip stink of my room, with the ocean-sounds radio set to some sort of waterfall. It is as if I have been dug up and replanted, like a sickly tree. Perhaps if you put it in the shade at the back by the fence it will survive, and if it dies you won’t notice, it won’t be missed.
I may be falling asleep or I may be falling through some sort of horizontal doorway, but all I can keep hold of is the image of a woman I thought I once knew. Perhaps I saw her in the shoe shop, or out of the window of the car, or in the conservatory back at The Farm House - a woman, a witch, a figment of an untethered imagination. She remains when I close my eyes, threading a voice through the hair inside my ears, telling a story that I’ve heard before, to the rhythm of a bleating heartbeat:
A prince. Waiting for his execution. And a bell, ringing a hole in his head as he sat in his stone cell and swore instead of prayed at the dirt under his feet.
A woman. Standing the wrong side of the locked door. Brown toothed, swarthy, and twisted like willow. A witch, almost certainly.
“Evening,” she said, with a voice like a broken back.
There were no windows in his cell but the chill of the sunset had reached him hours before. He raised a princely eyebrow at her but she said nothing more until he asked, “What is it you want from me?”
“Your fear,” she replied.
He did not understand. The incessant bell tolled reason and thought out of his brain with each sweet-toned peal.
“I’m not afraid,” he muttered, not even believing it himself.
“Don’t you want to know how they’ll do it?” she asked coquettishly.
The prince forced himself to sit up straight, to the fullest height he could manage while shackled to the wall. He had a proud chin - his portraits, now pulled down from the walls of the palace and replaced with his usurper, had always captured it well.
The woman had magic. In the earthen floor she drew visions of his end: the desperate silence of a hanging, the heated knife disembowelling and castrating, the bubble and pitch of burning alive. He kicked the images away like a drowning man jerking his last.
She watched his bloodless face, the battering pattern of his heart. “No fear?” she said.
The prince shook his head once each side.
“Well then,” she sniffed, “I’ll leave you to your death.”
As she turned away, he wondered how she would leave – how indeed she got inside – with no keys, with no sign that the guard outside his cell had any idea she was even there. “Wait,” he said. He didn’t feel strong enough to witness a woman walking through a solid door.
“Yes?”
“I am,” he said slowly. “Afraid. I’m terrified.”
She smiled.
“I can make it all disappear.”
And she did. And it did.
#
The beeping won’t stop. I am standing at the foot of Mother Whistler’s bed and though her lips aren’t moving I can hear her voice as clear as the bells of the prison tower.
“Is this what you wanted?” she asks.
I shake my head once each side. One, two. No. No.
She doesn’t smile. Her machines are furious. Red and green lights illuminate the pitted and sunken flesh of her cheeks in stuttering flashes. “You still have to pay,” she says, without saying anything out loud.
I can hear the nurses coming to turn off the noise, to return the technology to a placid hum, to tuck her up and chase me away. “How much?” I ask, just as silently.
“Two.”
“Two what?”
“Sons, Peter. Two of your finest boys.”
“But I don’t have any children.”
I can hear her laughter above the bleeping. For a second the corner of her mouth twitches upwards. “Oh Peter.”
“What if I say no?” I ask her. The darkness cloys at my skin, seeping between my pyjamas and my nakedness like a coating of cement, turning me to stone with every second her eyes fix on mine.
“You won’t,” she says.
Chapter Nine
The first time I told him I thought it would be the only time. Angie and Sabine came with me and we lined up like dominoes outside Dad’s bedroom, waiting for the catalyst, for a giant finger to flick us over. We stood in height order, tallest to smallest - a space missing for Alex who would have stood at the end of the line, ahead of me, his bony shoulder blades poking out like bird beaks, the three moles on the back of his neck forming a triangle, his hair protruding at odd angles around his double crown. But if he were still here then we wouldn’t have any reason to deliver any news.
We hadn’t rehearsed this ridiculous line-up. We’d simply come to a gentle, otherworldly, swaying stop at Dad’s door. We stood there for at least three minutes in silence while I picked at the inside seam of my jeans pocket and Angie cleared her throat of phlegm that wasn’t there and Sabine shrank into herself like a retreating snail. The woman in the room next to Dad’s hummed along to David Bowie on the radio, muttering crossword clues and shaking out her newspaper.
A nurse walked past and nodded to Angela. As if it was some sort of prearranged signal, Angela took a loud intake of breath and put a hand on my back. “Right,” she said. “Let’s… ” But she never finished the suggestion.
Sabine let out a sigh like a landslide. There was a lump in my throat that was not from tears or nausea but almost as if my body had decided it would rather not breathe than do what it was about to do. Angela had stalled. Her fingers contracted around the back of my jumper. It had to be me. I had to lead the way. I felt my entire weight fall into my shoes and pushed open the door to my father’s room.
Inside was the kind of quiet that made skin prickle, the kind that creates an inexplicable urge to cough. We filed in like naughty schoolchildren and stood in front of him, blocking his view of the television.
“Hi Dad,” I said.
He looked up, not bothering to smile, then returned his attention to the TV where a celebrity chef was making hollandaise against a timer. I wonder if Dad guessed - if he mentally ticked off the various possibilities and worked out the reason why Alex wasn’t there.
“Hi Dad,” I said again.
“Hmm?” he said.
I stood between Sabine and Angela. They squeezed my hands simultaneously. I tongued my ulcers and tried to remember the series of sentences I had prepared for the occasion, stock stuff from soaps and films and dramas, like: “There’s been an accident,” or “Something terrible has happened.” Or maybe: “I know he was your favourite son but at least you still have me, Dad.”
“You alright?” he asked, leaning around to keep his eyes on the telly, reaching unconsciously for his tobacco packet and flicking out a Rizla.
Angela squeezed harder. My knuckles jarred against each other. “No,” I said, “no, we’re not alright.”
“Oh?” Dad said, mildly amused. “What have I done now? What are you all doing here?” He eyed Sabine, in particular, suspiciously.
“Peter,” Angela began, but I crushed her fingers in mine and she stopped, water pooling in her lower eyelids.
“Alex had something to tell you,” I said.
“Matt,” Sabine said under her breath, “don’t.”
“He came to see me last night.”
“Matthew… ” Angela this time.
Even I’m not that much of an arsehole. My dad calmly rolled himself a cigarette and pretended he wasn’t still watching the chef whisking manically. I couldn’t tell him that his prodigal son had not sprung from his loins. He’d have found a way to blame me. I shook my head sharply, like a bull about to charge, trying to throw off the rage.
“Well, where is he then?” Dad asked.
Words started coming out of me in a voice that was a few millimetres above a whisper. They should have been soft but they came out completely devoid of feeling:
“Alex had a brain aneurysm. Probably been there for years. It ruptured. He died last night on the street outside my flat.”
All three of them watched my straight face, waiting for more. I shrugged.
“And that’s it.”
It was an echo of the detached doctor who gave the news to me – more guilt than sorrow – although at least the doctor managed a kind of numb empathy. I missed by a mile. I was a human fucking telegram. No sobbing, no breaking down. I was not bereft, destroyed, hysterical. There was no keening or beating of my man boobs while I told a man his son was dead. It just wasn’t normal and I could tell they all found it utterly repugnant.
Dad looked across our expressions, moving along the line and back again, measuring something that I couldn’t gauge. Then he stood, hoisting his cigarette in my face. “’Scuse me. Going to have this outside,” he said, and shuffled past us into the corridor.
“Peter!” Angela’s voice squealed unpleasantly.
Sabine turned and punched me as hard as she could on the shoulder, though I didn’t really feel it. “Are you completely dead inside?”
“What the fuck did I do?” I yelled back at her.
Angela had fallen into a crouch and was pushing her palms into her eye sockets as if she could erase her own face by sheer force. She hardly ever cries, but when she does she sounds like a walrus in heat.
“What’s going on in there?” the woman next door hollered. “Some of us are trying to bloody read.”
#
They tried to give Angela compassionate leave but she wouldn’t take it. She was back at the home within a week, perhaps thinking no-one else would be able to look after Dad as well as she could. But he didn’t need looking after. He was still refusing to acknowledge the news of Alex’s death; he was completely unbothered by a situation he was blind to, albeit confused as to why Angie burst into tears whenever she tried to speak to him. She told me she couldn’t face telling him again. She said she felt like she was drowning whenever she looked at him.
“You’re going to make yourself ill,” I said. But really I was just jealous of how easily her emotions poured out of her. I hadn’t even told my boss. I was still thinking about practical things like picking up milk and butter on the way home, and whe
re Alex’s funeral should be, and forgetting to record the final episode of that documentary series on all the different ways global warming is going to fuck up the world, and whether I had to ring the utilities companies to stop the gas and water and electricity at Alex’s empty flat. It didn’t matter how many times I said it out loud – my brother is dead – it was just four little words in a line. Subject, verb. This thing is that. I pretended I was being strong for Angie but they knew. They knew.
Angela wouldn’t stop asking: “How did it happen? How did he fall?” Tell me again, how he hit the wall, at what angle, was he knocked unconscious, did he cry out, did he bleed? Never the ones she wanted to ask: “Did you push him? Did you hit him? Did you kill him?” I had to rely on the fact that she trusted what Sabine and Jamie had seen, trusted the police, trusted my witnesses.
“He tried to hit me and he fell. He fell and hit his head.” Sentences with the simplicity of a child learning to read. Lies are straightforward. The truth is complicated. The police were less concerned about the details than she was. Once the postmortem results came back they stopped asking anything.
A bubble. In his head. That’s all it took. Here one second, screaming in my face, gone the next, dying a hundred feet from where I knelt blotting up orange juice from my carpet. I didn’t even hear the ambulance. Jamie didn’t think to come back up to the flat to tell me, even then. No, a payphone call was all I deserved. He took those last moments, he took the time of death announcement, he took Alex’s last words. He was there. He stole my brother’s death away.