by James Hannah
Hzzzzzzzzz.
He walks past my doorway once more, glances in. I try to catch his eye to give a reassuring smile. I don’t know why. There’s nothing I can do to reassure him. Perhaps I mean: This is going to happen, and you’ll be all right.
He returns my smile with a nod. Good, that’s good.
He moves on.
I look out of the window once more, to the magnolia tree. There’s no robin so far today. But look at it. I could gaze at it forever, in late bloom as it is. I like them when they’re a little tighter, getting ready to reveal themselves. Better suited to a Japanese garden maybe, all clean lines. But beautiful, beautiful.
Hzzzzzzzzz.
“All the nurses here are very nice ladies.” I look up. Mr. Old Faithful has stopped on his way back past my doorway.
“Sorry?”
“All the nurses here are very nice ladies.” He ventures in.
“Yes, yes,” I say. “The best.”
“They have looked after my daughter and me very well. They have a good understanding of the stresses. They are very supportive.”
I nod and smile.
“Are you being looked after well?” he asks.
“Yes, yes. They are very good here. Can’t do enough for you. Whatever you ask for.”
“Yes,” he says. “Yes.”
Then his face collapses almost comically, his nostrils flare, and his mouth tightens.
I don’t know what to do.
“Sorry, sorry,” he says. He looks to leave, but he’s nowhere to go, so he stays where he is, forced to compose himself. “Sorry, sorry. It’s hard. I’m here, you know, with my daughter, and we’re just watching her mother slip away. I don’t know what I’m going to do. A father is a very poor substitute for a mother.”
“That’s really sad,” I say. “I’m really sorry.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he says. “You understand.”
“I do.”
“This cancer is a very awful disease,” he says. “It’s evil. It’s hard to believe that there’s no more they can do. We thought she was getting better. She had been given the all clear. So we allowed ourselves to hope. She started to regain weight. She started to look a bit more like she used to look. But the cancer came back. You can’t ever drop your guard. I worked too hard. We didn’t have enough time to enjoy ourselves. When we realized what was happening, she wasn’t well enough to enjoy herself. I worked too hard.”
I want to help this man, but I honestly don’t know what to say.
His daughter appears at the door with two mugs.
“Papa?” she murmurs in a barely audible undertone. She can see he has been crying and comes over to him. She proffers the mug and looks shyly over at me. I nod and purse my lips, indicating…something.
He accepts the mug and takes a couple of attempts to get the correct number of fingers through the unfamiliar handle. A teacup man. “Sorry, I was just—” He looks over at me. “This is my daughter, Amber.”
“Hello,” I say.
“Hiya,” she says.
She looks brilliant. Rich black hair with a deep blue streak. Eyeliner, in the same way that I remember you wearing it. The swash. I struggle to meet her with the right sort of look. Beautiful, clear, lively eyes. Part Japanese, part not. Striking.
What am I? Flirting?
It’s all I know how to do. A reflex action. She’s exactly like you were. Confident. Confident enough to say “hiya,” to look me in the eye.
She can’t be eighteen. Less than half my age.
“Are you both coping?” I ask. “As much as you can, at least?”
“Once you know what to expect each day, it’s better,” says Amber, throwing a look at her dad. “You get a routine.”
“Yeah. Routines are good. Uncertainty is almost the worst thing,” I say.
“It’s rubbish,” she says. “But the nurses here…I mean, they’ve been brilliant. We’re so lucky. She could have been in the hospital, and we didn’t want that. This is nicer than the hospital. We trust them with…with my mum.”
Even from the way she’s standing, I can see she’s the one in charge. Only a teenager, but she’s carrying her dad along with her. As she talks he looks disconsolately out of the window at the tree and the lawn beyond.
“Anyway, you shouldn’t be asking us how we are,” she says. “How are you feeling?”
“Oh, it’s much easier to worry about others,” I say. “Every time I see a doctor, my first question is always How are you? I worry that they’re too overworked to see me. I worry about Sheila. Have you met Sheila?”
“I love Sheila,” says Amber. “She’s amazing. Always there. Knows exactly the right thing to say. Things seem to be a bit more cheery after you’ve seen Sheila.”
For her age, Amber seems so mature. OK, so there’s the blue hair, and her eyes, her beautiful artfully painted eyes, and her clothes hung and slung about her. Statementy. Like any teenager. But a grown woman’s mind.
I want to say to her, Listen, you’re too young to be in a place like this. But I can’t, can I? You’re too young to lose your mum. Society will decide: You are too young. Society will tut into the silence of the drawing room and say, It’s a crying shame.
I want to comfort her.
But she won’t take that from me.
Let it go.
Let her go.
E
Eyes
“What are you doing?” says Dad.
“Nothing,” I say.
Even aged four I know not to admit I’m pretending to be car indicators with my eyes.
Embarrassing.
• • •
I’m holding the bull’s eye with the very tips of my latex-gloved fingers, but I can still feel the refrigerated coolness, the slippery deadness that might somehow come alive. I’m leaning as far away from it as I can, and I’m pressing at it with my scalpel, but it won’t go in, a scalpel, a fucking shitting crappy blunt school scalpel, and it won’t shitting fucking puncture the cold and slippery surface, and Kelvin says give it here, and he takes the scalpel off me and I shrink away as he stabs and it squeakily dodges, and he stabs and it bursts and flicks inky black juice at his face. He blinks and flinches and reaches for his eyes with his wrist, flashing the scalpel around near his other eye.
“Oh, my—fucking hell! That’s—fuck!”
But that’s… No, that’s wrong. That’s not my eyes, is it? That’s just eyes.
What should it be? Should it be things my eyes have seen, or ways in which my eyes have been seen?
“How’s my star patient doing today?”
Sheila’s head appears at the doorway, and I look up at her, give her a smile.
“Oh dear,” she says. “That smile didn’t quite reach your eyes, lovey.” And she’s in.
“Didn’t it?”
“No. You’re going to have to try harder than that to keep me happy, I’m afraid.”
I give her a big sarcastic smile, all the way up to the eyes and beyond. She laughs. She seems more relaxed now. More time for me. Perhaps Old Faithful’s condition has eased.
“Nice try. How are you keeping?”
“Fine.”
“You finished that A to Z yet?”
“Heh, no hope.”
“No hope? Well, that doesn’t sound too good. Tell me what you’re up to.”
“E. I was just thinking about eyes, actually.”
“Well, the eyes will tell you whether someone’s smile is genuine or not.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. They’re a dead giveaway,” she says, tapping her nose and winking.
“My mum used to stare straight into my eyes to see if I was lying.”
“Ha! Yeah! Look me in the eye and tell me honestly! I used to say that to my boys all the time.”
I feel a sudden surge of affection for this woman, now tucking my feet back among the sheets, who has tenderly and patiently and unquestioningly cared for me. She’s a natural mother. Maybe that’s what these care workers are. Natural mothers, all. And sort of innocent with it. Innocent, but having seen everything there is to see.
“And there are cultures where you’re not supposed to look people in the eye, aren’t there?” she adds. “Kings and queens—if you looked straight at them, they’d have your head chopped off.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe they didn’t want you to know if they were lying or not,” she says simply before disappearing out of the room for a moment. It’s a statement that chimes true in the silence.
She comes back cradling a steaming mug. “We used to have a rule,” she says, with relish. “A rule about flirting with your eyes when we were out in the clubs. I used to be ever so good at it. You’d look at a fella for four seconds, and then you’d look away for four seconds. And then you’d look back at him for four seconds, and if he was still looking, you knew he fancied you. I got ever so good at it!”
I shake my head and smile a smile that I’m sure this time reaches my eyes. There’s a sweet dimple that’s come out on her cheek, I notice. I can see her now, the mischievous young thing she must have been, still alive and well, just a little softer at the edges.
“I know,” she says. “I’m terrible, aren’t I?”
“Well, you’ve got to use what you’ve got.”
“That’s right! Use it while you’ve got it. Mind you, I haven’t had it for a long time.”
She squares a look at me before realizing how this sounds and raises her hand to cover her mouth before disappearing quickly through the doorway. Out in the corridor I hear her cluck: “I’m being inappropriate with the guests!”
• • •
Glance across to the stage, your vivid blue eyes are looking at me. I catch them for just long enough to see you switch them away.
Did I imagine that? Your eyes, lit sharp in the surrounding dark, looking over the top of the microphone as you sing, looking across the back room of the Queen’s Head at me.
You look up again now. I look away.
Embarrassing.
You might think I fancy you. I wasn’t looking looking.
Look again.
The swash, the calligraphy of the eyeliner. Eyeliner makes whites pure white. You draw good eyes.
You look away, look down, faint sense of shyness as your hair drops across your brow, and you check that your fingertips are pressing the right frets as you shift your hand along the neck of your electric guitar. You check too as your sneakered foot switches on the guitar pedal, and the chords now begin to throb around the room, written across us in sound shaped by those same fingertips that deftly flicked out your eyeliner.
I feel it. I can feel it like that.
I am an eyes man.
That’s it: that’s what I should have said when Becca was going on and on all those years ago about whether I was a bum man or a boobs man or whatever. I should have looked her squarely in the eye and said with all confidence and conviction: “I’m an eyes man.”
Was it love at first sight?
People used to ask us this, didn’t they?
You’d say, “Yyyeah… Sort of…”
I’d feel a bit put out when you said that.
Anyway, is it a worse love, if it’s not love at first sight?
I look behind me at Becca and Laura, being bumped and shouldered by an unusually enthusiastic crowd for a Thursday night at the Queen’s. Becca’s smiling and clapping and looking at me and nodding.
“Is that your new housemate?” I say.
Becca is dancing deep within herself and nods and smiles without taking her eyes from the stage. “She moved in after Christmas.”
“Is she a mature student?”
“Trainee nurse.”
I return my gaze to you, and you’re checking back behind you at your amp and glancing across to the semi-interested soundman to your right, before engaging again with the microphone and singing, eyes closed, settling into a rich harmony with your simple distorted chords. I can’t quite make out the words, but the effect is mesmerizing.
Your eyes open again, and again you’re looking over at me, and as your chord diminishes, your solemn face gradually warms into a smile, and I’m thinking, you’re smiling at me. Jesus, you’re smiling at me.
You’re too good to be smiling at me.
But it only dawns on me now that, no. No, no: all this time you’ve been looking over at Becca, because you live with Becca. And it’s so obvious that this is what you were doing. You don’t know me.
Becca leans in to talk directly into my ear. “Isn’t her voice beautiful?”
I smile and nod. When I thought you were looking at me and you weren’t, it felt like the first bit of good, the first glimmer of something…I don’t know.
My phone buzzes, and I push my hand in my pocket and pluck it out. Mal. Again. Wanting to sort out a meet-up for later. I wonder about sending him to voice mail, but I don’t want him to know I’m deliberately saying no. I hold it and watch the name until it stops and the screen dips dark again.
I slot the phone back in the right pocket. Always the right.
In the left, I pat the fold of ten twenties. Two hundred to go out and get absolutely hammered tonight.
Mal will have the gear by now. The two hundred’s as good as spent.
But I just… I don’t really want to do it. I mean, I’ll do it, but I’m not into it.
Frowning to myself as your next song sets in, I’m thinking, I’ve given up on myself. Without having realized, I’d given up on the idea that anyone might find me remotely appealing.
What would I be able to say if you asked me about myself? Well, I could tell you I’m on a final warning at a job I’ve stalled in at the local garden center because of repeatedly coming in two hours late and being too wasted to get through the word “chrysanthemums” on a Sunday morning. I’ve got a sickie lined up for tomorrow. What? Yes, I live with my mum, technically, apart from the nights when I live at my sister’s to get fucked up with my mate.
This is not me. It’s not who I set out to be. How did I become this total moron I’m playing?
There aren’t many times when all things fall away and you start to see yourself for what you are, but that’s what I’m feeling now. The shimmering sound from your amp burns the deadwood in my brain, and I’m thinking: I can do this. If I can just…just break away from what Mal’s waiting for on the other end of the phone, I can have the confidence to say no to Mal. No, no. I know I said I’d go out and get smashed again, but I don’t want to go out tonight. I’m doing all this for no reason. Everything I’ve been doing for…for years, I’ve been doing for no reason.
I want to press reset in my head, and I don’t want to…I don’t want to do this anymore.
Is…is that all right?
I don’t know.
My spongy brain blooms in all directions at the possibilities. Whatever it is you’ve got to get you up there on that stage, that’s what I know I want.
You finish your final tune, lay your guitar carefully in its case, and pick your way over to us, thanking and smiling at people who offer congratulations.
“Oh, hiya!” you cry. “I’m so pleased you made it down!”
“I brought a few friends,” says Becca. “Everyone, this is Mia.”
You make your greetings and kind words, and I manage to chip in an insignificant “well done,” which you modestly acknowledge.
Becca invites you to come and sit with us, but I’ve clocked before anyone else that there aren’t going to be enough seats. Instinct makes me stand, and I weigh up the options. I think, if I just go—go to the bar maybe—then you’ll have somewhere to settle.
“I’m off to get a round in,” I say. “Here you go. Sit here, if you like.”
“No, no,” you say, with a soft northern accent I hadn’t quite imagined. “Let me… I’m sure I can get a stool or something from somewhere.” You look around for any vacancies.
I offer to fetch a spare chair on my way back from the bar. You smile up at me, and I don’t know where to look, so I look away. Look back, and you’ve looked away.
“What’s everyone having?”
I look at you directly with a look that means you’re included too.
“Um, I’ll have an orange juice, please? If I can buy you one back.”
“Orange juice? Nothing stronger? I have just been paid…”
Oh, your eyes. That killer feline cut. Are they blue, actually? I thought they were blue, but they might be green. They’re sort of a mixture. Really striking. I’m definitely an eyes man.
Becca wants a snakebite and black for old times’ sake, and Laura settles for a white wine because red wine stains whitened teeth.
I take myself away and jockey for position at the bar, creasing my twenty-pound note unnaturally lengthwise, the better to jab at the bartender.
What was it? OJ, snakebite, white wine, Beamish.
I chance a look back over at the table, but your eyes aren’t on me. I can see you watching Becca animatedly explain something, while Laura pouts and nods. Oh God, I bet Laura’s off on her relationship anxieties with Mal. She just has to go over it and over it, and it never changes.
My pocket buzzes again, and it’s Mal. It’s always Mal.
I could tell him. I could tell him now, I don’t want to go. I don’t want—
The two hundred—no, the remaining one eighty—burns a hole in my pocket. No choice.
OJ, snakebite, white wine, Beamish.
Hurry up, hurry up.
“Yes, mate?”
“Orange juice, a pint of Beamish, a snakebite and black, and a white wine, please, mate.”
Four drinks. It’s an awkward number to carry back from the bar. As the bartender lines them up in front of me, I hand over the cash and weigh up the differently shaped and sized glasses. Do a couple of test huddles to see whether I’m going to be able to manage them all at once. Nope. Not a hope.