Indelible Acts

by A. L. Kennedy

  He came home two stone lighter and with a soft haze of regrowth on his scalp, a dressing, tape. And he had a new skin: fierce and pale and naked, completely naked. I couldn’t see him without touching him. At first, only with my mouth, because that was gentle. He needed gentleness.

  I move my head to study the telephone; like the rest of the room, it is behaving normally. I could use it to call Tim. The time difference, though, the other differences—it would all end up being too difficult.

  While he lay on the hospital bed, I made him promises, more than I can remember, I put all that we might be into his silence, his sleep. Sometimes I think it’s made me seem an anticlimax to him since—I never have lived up to any of the dreams I gave him—he settled for second best by coming back to life.

  I roll on my side and set the walls and carpet swinging, my head is muzzled suddenly, held in something wet. I retch, stumble up for the bathroom and retch again.

  When I kneel, I don’t touch the toilet—no need to volunteer for other illnesses—I breathe between the rising cramps—Oh Jesus, oh Jesus Christ—and again I want my mother. Fuck. Another series of jolts. Oh, fuck it.

  And nothing happens, not a thing. In what must be half an hour, I bring up a single, scouring mouthful of bile. Whatever this is, I can’t be rid of it.

  Back on the bed, I crouch, defensive, suddenly burning, and reach for the phone. In a quite unlikely but persuasive way, it seems both more beautiful and more solid than it did before: a worryingly lovely, heavy telephone with a button to press for messages—I either haven’t got one, or it doesn’t work—and one for reception and one with a symbol I don’t recognise—God knows—and one with a miniature waiter holding a miniature tray—which means Room Service. Not “Service.” Room Service—that’s what I want.

  “Yes, Room Service? I need water. Please.” I have no water left. “Large-sized bottle; bottles. I want two large-sized bottles of water.” Without it, a person can die.

  The line out to wherever Room Service is prickles and whines.

  “The biggest size.”

  I have no idea if I am audible, or understood. “I have not been well.” As if they care. “Sorry … Can you?—Sorry. Water … Water?”

  There must be guests who can do this, who find it easy, who can just order things. “Sorry. Two bottles. Please.” Without making a single apology. Or saying please. “Two bottles … Hello? Good evening?”

  The connection oozes away, implacably uncommunicative, and finishes with a little click.

  If Room Service never arrives, there will be no water. I need water. If Room Service does arrive, there will be water. Which I need. But then I will have to get dressed and stand up and unlock the door and reach out and get the water, carry it.

  I don’t know if I can.

  Now, even when I close my eyes, something undulates—the blood light at the back of my eyelids, it’s treacherous. If Tim was here I would tell him about it, or would have told him, before the meningitis and the disappointment.

  It was that time, that evening, weekday evening, when I walked in on him and watched his face close, everything blurring to neutral, to a chill, just because I was there. I had surprised him being the way that he used to be, but it wasn’t for me any more, so he shut it away.

  We spend more time working, he takes evenings out, it surprises me now when we meet in the house; going into a quiet room and there he’ll be. I try to look irritated and leave before he does. We go on holiday separately.

  I flatten myself to the sheet, press and press my forehead against the small creak of the mattress as if this will alter a single mistake I’ve made. Because I didn’t shout, didn’t grab him by the arm and shout in his face, didn’t throw a clock I was fond of and hurt to see it smashed and to see him keep on going, leave the room without a sound—I didn’t do any of that until it was only stupid and too late. An infection in the brain, the doctors told me, might make him different and so I went against myself and drifted for months, let him be, let what I knew of him leave me.

  Except when that light comes back to his skin, that nakedness. Not to talk, not to see each other—it’s only to meet his mouth, lace my hands behind his new, cropped hair, know we can taste what hasn’t changed.

  “Room Service, good evening.”

  The door stammers with a series of knocks and I am caught in the cold recollection of lying beneath a husband I can’t speak to, both of us dead weights, breathing, recovering ourselves, our sadness, our embarrassment.

  “Room Service, good evening.”

  “Yes.” I am still naked. “Yes. Good evening.” And I don’t want to move. “Leave it outside the door.” I don’t want anyone near me.

  “You want—?” It isn’t the would-be room cleaner, I think I would recognise that voice.

  “I said, leave it outside the door.” And if I sound like a Colonial oppressor, I don’t care. “I CAN’T GET UP NOW. LEAVE IT.”

  “Good evening. Thank you.” This sounds slightly put out, but a muffled clunking gives me cause for hope.

  I will stand, I will wrap myself up in the sheet and do what I must to get my water.

  When my hand finds the child-skin at the small of his back, I always wait for that.

  My scalp tingles, as if there were someone behind me, or above, and the insects worry on and I lever up to sit, then stand. My balance swims, but lands again and I drag the sheet round to cover me, shuffle for the door.

  The lock foxes me for a moment, no more than that, I open it, lean out into the hot, empty passageway, swipe down for the two bottles, retrieve them and half stagger back. The effort of this bangs in my head. Still, I have my water—that’s fine.

  “Good evening. Good evening? Room Service?”

  The line is a little worse than before, as if it anticipated my call and is already disapproving.

  “Yes. I ordered water. Two bottles of water and you left them.” If anyone is listening, they make no sound. “Someone left them …” This is too complicated. “Someone left them and I have them, but the seals on the bottles are broken …” I wait for an intervention of some kind, but none is forthcoming: I will have to say this all on my own. “If the seals are broken … by mistake.” There’s no reason to accuse anybody—obviously that’s what I’m doing, but I don’t really mean it that way. “I can’t drink. I have been ill. All day ill. I need clean water.”

  “Our water is clean.”

  “I’ll …” Shit. “Look, I’ll pay for new bottles, but if the seals—”

  “I will send him again.” The distant receiver clanks down.

  So I’ll have to be ready when he arrives.

  Shit.

  I move to look at my jeans where they’re crumpled on the chair, moderately baffling, and then lift them, scattering meaningless small coins out of the pockets, a crush of dirty notes. Methodically, I balance, step, waver, then work my way in. The T-shirt is easier. After that, I stay on the chair, waiting, smoothing my breath, ducking every thought of Tim’s hands, the way they can be, confident with fastenings, the parting drift of cloth.

  More quickly than I expected, the knock comes.

  “You have a problem.” He is perhaps seventeen, lost in somebody’s oversized guess at an impressive uniform: cuffed black trousers, a purple jacket with gold piping, creased patent leather shoes. “There is something wrong.” He makes each statement critical and precise, a slight edge there to emphasise that he can understand my language while I would be lost in his.

  Well, I’ll apologise for being British later.

  “I, ah, yes. The seals …” This sounds so petty. “I’m sure this has nothing to do with you, maybe your supplier …” His sleeves are turned under to fit—and he sees that I’ve noticed.

  He sets down two new bottles of water on the table and lifts up the old, unwilling to admit defeat. “The seals …?”He delicately twists both caps, then waits, surveying primly, making it plain that he dislikes me, the tangled bed, the slovenly room, the indi
cations of deeper disorder.

  I try to sound brisk. “The seals are broken, as you can see.” I should have put on underwear—then I might have a sense of authority. “That will be all.”

  “Our supplier is at fault. I am so sorry.” This in an insincere drawl.

  I will have to sit down soon. “That’s fine, then.” The young man shows no sign of moving.

  Well, I’m not giving him a tip—not unless it makes him go away.

  His hands are shaking visibly. I suppose that he might be afraid, either furious or afraid, perhaps both.

  “Thank you. I’ll tell your manager you’ve helped me. Good evening.” I attempt a smile, but he ignores it and leaves with a pointed, “Good afternoon.”

  Maybe I’ve lost him his job.

  Or maybe everybody down in Room Service spends their days filling water bottles from the tap, from stagnant pools, from beggars’ wounds, how should I know. We’ve made them suffer, why not? I probably earn his year’s salary in a week.

  I don’t care, though. Not one of them is my direct responsibility.

  The new seals are OK, the first one giving with a reassuring snap and letting me, finally, drink. It tastes faintly chalky and lukewarm. I run a few drops into the hollow of my palm and wipe my face.

  Next year I’m taking my break in Europe, in Britain: at least then I’ll be poisoned close to home. Tim never goes far: a long weekend in Antrim, the Lake District, a few days in Argyll, the Orkney Isles. He always comes back happy.

  Because he’s been away from me.

  But if he’s happy, that’s when he’ll do a wrong thing.

  I keep drinking, probably too much.

  Lips against lips while I stroke his hair, feel when he breathes, swallow when he swallows. Clever mouth, it always deepens the parting, opens it, smoothes the smooth. And then he looks up, lifts his head: Tim, sheepish and excited, at the edge of smiling. It used to be the little glance that made sure I was happy and he was allowed. Now it lets me know that this is wicked and nice because we are two strangers.

  When the telephone rings, I rush a mouthful, cough.

  No one but Tim knows I’m here.

  “Hello?”

  “Good evening. This is a single occupancy room?” It is a hotel voice, a stranger. “It is a single occupancy?”

  “It’s what?” I am conscious of the liquid weight I’ve loaded in.

  “It is a single occupancy, what you have paid for.”

  “Yes. Single. Yes.”

  I don’t want to deal with this now—whatever this is.

  “You don’t let our personnel clean your room. You have been there for the complete day, not leaving. Now you have two bottles of water. But this is a single occupancy room.”

  “Look, what are you … ? I’ve been ill. Ill.”

  Room Service—they’re paying me back.

  “I need a lot of water.” There is a sceptical pause. “You can come and search if you like.” And another. “Two bottles does not imply two people. I mean, if I was in the same bed with someone, we could surely share the same bloody bottle.”

  This is obviously a deeply improper suggestion. “I have to ask if you are alone, this is all. This is my job.”

  “Great, you’ve done your job. Good evening.”

  I hang up, before they can say anything else.

  And fuck you. Single occupancy. What else.

  Then a twist of nausea shakes me, doubles me forward. Arms, legs, everything is slippy, jerking with each lunge, and I don’t think I can walk and I am right, but I tumble and stagger into the bathroom, the cooler air, the business of being freed from this.

  It takes a while.

  And then something has altered. The stillness is more definitive. My lips seem tender, I am light-headed, but I know I won’t have to be sick again.

  Found the trigger, didn’t I.

  Some thoughts are best left quiet and I shut myself against them every day. It isn’t often that they have a use.

  But today they were what I needed.

  So I unlocked the morning when I smelt it on his hands and chose to ignore it, believed I was wrong, until it was there again one night, there on his face, his mouth, his lips: the scent of a stranger, of some other woman, some cunt. Tim, he noticed when I flinched, and took care to kiss me again, as if he wanted me to be quite sure that he’d done a wrong thing.

  And I was sure enough to picture it, the way he would look up, happily caught in the act, before he tongued back in.

  And I knew that he wouldn’t leave me and that I couldn’t leave him.

  I still know it, the way that I know my name: Christian, Middle, Married. Now that we’re strangers, we need each other’s company. This won’t change. And, more than any infidelity, it sickens me. It sickens me.

  I wash my face with bottled water and I stand. The room is itself and I am me. Nothing has changed.

  A Little like Light

  You should tell everyone nothing: especially nothing about love.

  Otherwise, over and over, there always will be someone who always has to ask about you, about love, about your love, and you’ll end up like me—always having to answer.

  By now, I know how to, of course, that isn’t the problem. I shrug, I wag my hands—sometimes the one hand only—I shake my head, or I offer that little manoeuvre involving an upward jerk of my chin combined with very mildly rolling eyes. That one gets a laugh, during which I will probably smile, indulgent, and I will not ever say

  I’m a sick man—-you shouldn’t be laughing. I am very seriously ill. I think I have diabetes—I must have diabetes. My current doctor, like all of the others, disagrees with me, but I know—I can assure you that I do have undoubted diabetes, and also leukaemia, and this thing which is removing the bone mass from my legs—perhaps elsewhere, too—it is daily reaming out a new fragility in my pelvis, an increasing insecurity when I walk, and a fear that I’ll crumble something if I roll over while I’m asleep. I don’t care what anyone tells me, I am deeply unwell, I couldn’t ever feel this way if I were fit. And you are there and laughing and I am here and scared that I will nocturnally fragment and, set beside all this, my impotence should seem a really, wholly minor matter, but in fact it doesn’t. In fact it does not. And every part of this is no one else’s business, only my own, just like my love.

  I married young: twenty-four: and I have stayed that way ever since. Now I am forty-three. Ten years in, and with the necessary parts still working, I fathered my son. He is called Malcolm John and I am called John Edward and, in this way, the names of our respective fathers have slipped back a notch to settle in subsidiary roles for, most likely, the duration of two other lives.

  Actually, I did once think of dropping my John and enjoying the fresh sensation of being Ted. My father was steadfastly an Edward, so there would have been no confusion. I don’t know why I didn’t do it: a kind of stage fright, I suppose, an unwillingness to fail all over again in another role.

  Malcolm, my boy Mal, I would imagine harbours no such fantasies—he thinks that I don’t like him. Which is true, I don’t. He is, I’m afraid, rather difficult to like. Temperamentally, he’s pleasant enough: not that bright, but not so stupid, equipped with acquaintances: there is simply something about him which I find physically disturbing. He isn’t exactly clumsy, he just looks as if he will be, he isn’t exactly dirty, he just appears unwashed, his clothes aren’t exactly rumpled, he just has a dishevelled stance. He is a mess, fundamentally. When he was still a baby with the usual murmurs of down on a warm, endearing skin, beguilingly taut with life and little veins, he was also, somehow, cloying to the touch, consistently tacky. Some children are born athletes, or predisposed to be good at maths. Malcolm was made to be slightly unfortunate.

  Because of this, we spend a great deal of time together. We bicycle round the playing fields at weekends, we visit the cinema, I have taught him to catch, to whistle and, after a fashion, to swim. But then he will look at me, halt me with a glance fr
om among the trees next to the long jump, or breathlessly red-eyed and glistening in the pool, and I will stop pretending and we will both remember: we aren’t having fun. Any treat in each other’s company is no treat at all: we are not enough. We are the only real friends that we have and, as a pair, we are a continual, mutual disappointment, frequently prey to these sad, small pauses for thought. After which we hug and hold hands for a while, because we truly are sorry for each other, but sharing sympathy is not the same as love. Then we begin again with what we have to: being a father and a son.

  I think, aside from anything else, that Mal didn’t get enough daylight, early on. Our house, the only one he’s ever known, is snibbed between the highest part of the wall around the school and the tallest, easterly edge of what our current Head likes to call its façade. Direct light will sneak a way down through a handful of our windows for maybe three hours on a clear summer’s day, which is enough to keep my window boxes going, but must fall short of what’s needed for a boy. We have no garden and most of his early outdoor playing had to be done in the evenings when the classes were over and their children gone. He still looks his best in late slants of shadow, the silently incendiary glow that closes down the day.

  And the buildings are set in gravel, that’s another drawback—generations of youngsters have left this place with tiny granite fragments irretrievably embedded in their palms and knees. My son is just the same, little patches of him shimmering with iodine painted across fresh scabs. Now that I’m worried the necks of my femurs may snap with no warning and send me tumbling, we spend as much time as we’re able out at the sports fields. We feel calmer when we can anticipate soft landings against grass.

  My health also troubles me less when I’m working, although work involves a good deal of striding about. But, on duty, I have the uniform: the shiny shoes, the bunches of keys, the peaked cap and piercing expression: the usual, invulnerable ensemble for the security guard, the prison warder—or for the janitor. I can’t imagine ever having an accident while I’m dressed like this, it would offend against natural justice.