It wasn't nearly enough, nor was the WCW wrestling that followed. He seemed always to have known that wrestling was mostly stunts and superfitness, but now he saw that some of the wrestlers were life-size plastic figures that were being thrown about the ring. Maybe they all were; the closer he peered, the jerkier their movements grew. The ranting commentary must be intended to convince the viewer they were real. When a figure was flung over the ropes and lay writhing on the concrete, Marshall scoffed aloud and punched the arms of the chair in frustration. He needed something more, and his fists sprang him from the chair. His friend had told him there was something else he could watch.
At first he couldn't find any cassettes in the room. Surely his friend hadn't lied to him. He let out a cry of relief upon discovering a pile of cassettes behind the video recorder, lying flat in the dust. Cassettes should never be stored lying down, and he stood them on end before picking up one to squint at the handwritten label. The scrawled letters, which were of various sizes, wriggled back and forth on the rectangle of paper as he tried to find words in them. Eventually he was almost sure they said A BITCH AND HER MATE. He tugged the cassette out of its cardboard sheath and switched on the video recorder. Having fed the tape into its toothless black mouth he sat down, experiencing a mixture of eagerness and apprehension which made him feel slightly nauseous, to watch.
The image on the screen, an announcement that the next program would follow shortly, remained stubbornly unchanged. It took him a few moments to grasp that the set wasn't tuned to the video channel. He began to press the buttons on the remote control, and had to resist working his way through the digits of his phone number. Maggots of static swarmed hissing out of the television, and then he found a blank screen moaning to itself. Another button, and the screen flared and quivered with the contents of the cassette.
He heard a voice not unlike his mother's saying "Oh, there's a big boy. There's such a big boy" as if those were the only words she could bring to mind, and a dog barking. The sounds were so close that they seemed to be flattening themselves against the inside of the screen, down which a succession of white ropes of static was crawling. Then the ropes sank out of view, leaving a strip of noise lines bunched at the top of the screen, and he saw the woman and the dog.
Their outlines were melting with duplication; their colours leaked. The woman's flesh, of which there appeared to be a generous helping, was bright orange, while the Alsatian's panting head resembled a mask made out of an old rug, and Marshall could almost believe that the part of the animal which was receiving a good deal of attention was a length of dark red plastic pipe. As the woman nodded, mumbling her litany as best she could, her hair trailed back and forth over the dog's pelt, though since they were the same brown Marshall saw the hair reaching out of the animal to pull her head to it. That wasn't the worst, however. The more she tried to pronounce her speech, the more she sounded like his mother talking in her sleep.
He'd once heard his mother murmuring like that to his father, in that tone and maybe in some of those words, when they must have thought Marshall was asleep. Now that his father was gone, what would she do for sex? He'd never thought about that before, and wished he hadn't while the cassette was playing. Her voice was sticking to his ears—the voice of the woman with the dog, which couldn't really be his mother's voice. Nevertheless he was growing desperate to see her face properly, with nothing in its mouth.
Her head gasped up at last, trailing orange streaks. The band of interference hid her eyes like a blindfold. She lifted the dog on top of her and clasped her cartoon legs around it while Marshall stared about, failing to locate a control for the video recorder. He fell on his knees before the television and poked the rewind button of the player. When the stretched black mouth began to utter a sound suggestive of the chewing of tape, he busied himself with the tuning wheel instead. That only spread the band of interference, and so he retreated to his chair.
As though in sympathy with the sections of the participants on which the camera was concentrating, the area of him between his rib-cage and his thighs was growing variously uncomfortable. The action on the screen achieved its point at last, noisily and blurrily, and he very much wanted to look away instead of waiting for the woman's face to make itself clear to him. He couldn't watch once she began to use her tongue, though closing his eyes didn't keep out her moans of apparent pleasure. She looked exactly like his mother now. He didn't know which idea was more loathsome—that it was his mother in the movie or that he was capable of imagining it was. He dug open his eyes with his thumbs in an attempt to escape the self which was trapped in his head, and saw the image on the screen fading into a grayness shot with broken white lines. The movie was finished. He sprang at the machine, though he didn't know if he meant to eject the cassette or rewind it to persuade himself the woman was nobody he knew. Then his mother appeared in front of him.
She was weeping. For a moment in which he felt he was falling apart, he thought that was because she knew he'd recognised her in the movie; then he saw himself weeping beside her. They were at his father's bookshop. A newscaster ousted them from the screen and said "Police—" before giving way to an uneasily blank screen at which Marshall stared, struggling to understand.
The newscast wasn't connected with the movie on the tape—he mustn't let himself imagine it was. His friend must have recorded the newscast out of sympathy for him. Maybe he'd found the tape in the machine when he'd needed to record. Who could have left it there? Of course, the people he'd warned Marshall against. What were such people doing in a nurse's house, and were they likely to return? Marshall's nerves were yearning for at least those answers. He jabbed the control at the television until the screen went blank, and scrambled out of the room.
As he trod on the first stair his foot squashed an insect, gristle turning to pulp. It wasn't an insect, it was one of the cigarette butts which were crawling about the floor. Why would a nurse keep her house in such a state? Maybe because she was overworked, not least by him, or maybe the butts weren't really there, any more than the stairs narrowed as they ascended. He wasn't sure how much of what he had seen on the television was real. Maybe all of this simply proved the pills hadn't worked because he hadn't given them a chance. Since he and his friend were alone in the house, there ought to be a bed he could use. He gasped with relief as he gained the landing, then he recoiled against the banister. A voice had begun to croak at him.
Maybe it was a toy or a talking bird—it sounded repetitive enough. "Who is it? Who is it?" it squawked. He threw himself away from the unfit banister and stopped himself by clutching a doorknob that rattled in its socket. The sound sent the voice into a frenzy. "Who's that? I know you're out there. Come and finish me off if you're going to. Stop your game."
Marshall's hand was turning the doorknob, which he could only hope would come loose. He felt it catch the mechanism, and the yielding of the door rendered him helpless. The knob pulled at his hand, dragging him across the threshold.
For entirely too long he was unable to distinguish any of the contents of the room as its clutter heaped itself up in his skull. Surely the room was the source of all the mess in the house. He had a suffocating impression of countless broken objects piled on the floor and against the walls, blocking off part of the high meagre window. Amid all this was a bed in which lay a figure composed of dirty white rubber gone so rotten he could smell it. It was just one more abandoned object, even though it moved, its fleshless knobbly hands plucking at the pyjama jacket which hung on its long shrunken arms and mottled torso as its head jerked on the skein of neck and flapped its dangling cheeks. "I know you," it croaked. "Come ahead, don't be frit. You'll see to me, you're a good lad."
So it was a person, and certainly no worse than the other things Marshall had seen during the eternity he'd spent in this state. He wanted to look away from the old man's bulging eyes, in which red cracks were visibly multiplying, but they were brimming over with a plea which his muscles seemed unable to res
ist. "That's the ticket," the old man wheezed as Marshall took a step toward him. "Only shut us in so they won't hear."
Marshall faltered, his ankles scraping together. "Who?"
"Who do you think, lad. Don't let on you've forgotten. The enemy, that's who."
"The people Darren said I should keep away from, you mean?"
"Darren, aye. Phil's lad. Haven't seen Phil since they took him away."
"Who did?"
"Who are we talking about? Are you trying to confuse me or summat? Get in before they get you too. You'll be safe in here."
Did he mean the room or the bed? His legs appeared to be trying to lift the faded stained quilt, but they kept collapsing, driving out a smell which made Marshall clutch at his face. The boy pulled the door shut and stayed where he was. "What do they do?"
"Nowt if you steer clear of them. They're only ordinary fellers like us and you Yanks. Took the Japs to bring you into it, though, didn't it? They're the worst. If them lot catch you—Here, I'll show you what they do, and worse."
He was kicking the quilt and tugging feebly at it, movements which cancelled each other out. "Give us a hand," he whined. "That's how they left me. Can't get it off by meself."
Marshall would have felt cruel if he hadn't approached the bed. He stopped within an arm's length of the side of it, reluctant to see what might have been done to the old man. "Shouldn't I get the nurse?"
"You'll do, lad."
She wasn't in the house. Marshall felt guilty for having offered the old man false hope. "I'm in pain here. You'll be like me one day," the old man complained, and a confusion of emotions—pity, apprehension, panic at the way his mind couldn't be trusted even to remember that the nurse had gone out—took Marshall a step closer. The old eyes swivelled toward him, a gleam appearing through their webs of blood. "That's it, lad, just throw it off."
Marshall breathed through his mouth, which tasted of the stench of the room, and grabbing the quilt by the nearest corner, flung it back. He managed not to recoil, but clapped a hand over the lower half of his face. The old man's pyjama jacket was mostly unbuttoned, displaying a mass of purple bruises turning yellow, and his pyjama trousers were wide open. Above the sticks of legs, which looked raw with some kind of torture, he was sticking up like the dog in the video. Marshall knew that could happen in bed—he'd wakened more than once to find himself like that—but the sight dismayed him, brought images of the dog and the woman with his mother's voice crowding into his head. He stood swaying, afraid that if he moved he would sprawl across the bed, until the old man sniggered. "You're all right, there's no gas. You don't need a mask."
Marshall drew a deep breath muffled by his fingers and took his hand away from his face. "Shall I cover you up now?"
"No panic. Seen everything you want?"
Marshall felt ashamed of wanting to turn away from the sores and bruises when he'd asked to see them, but they weren't all he yearned to look away from. "Yes," he mumbled. "Sorry. Thanks."
"Maybe you can give us a bit more of a hand."
"How?"
"For a start, help us up a bit."
The request seemed not to tally with the old man's gestures, his hands waving on either side of his groin, unless he wanted Marshall to lift him with one hand behind his back and the other beneath his legs. Marshall was incapable of that, not least because of the concentration of the stench in that area of the mattress. He moved alongside the flaccid grubby pillow and took hold of the old man's shoulders, and hands which felt exactly like bone closed around his wrists. As Marshall lifted him against the sagging headboard, the movement dragged the old man's trousers down his legs. He began to roll his eyes and rub his lips together and poke his mouldy tongue between them. "Ooh God, I need—"
"Let go." Marshall tried to pull his wrists free, but the bony grip was tightening spasmodically. "Let go or I won't be able to help."
The old man relinquished one of his wrists so as to grasp the other with both hands. "What are you going to do for me, lad?"
"Can you make it to the bathroom? I mean, can you walk?"
"Do I look as if I can, the way they've treated me?"
"Then where's the bedpan the nurse brings you? Do you know where it is?"
"Not the foggiest."
"I'll look for it. It can't be far. Try and hold on. Not to me. I'll find it if you just let go."
Maybe the old man didn't realise he was digging his long cracked nails into Marshall's wrist. He stared into Marshall's eyes and gave vent to a breath not unrelated to the smell of the bed. "Swear you'll come back?"
"Sure, if you want me to. I swear. I'm your friend."
"Let's see how much you are," the old man declared, digging in his nails so hard that Marshall almost cried out. That was apparently his way of ensuring that Marshall returned, because then he let go. Marshall rubbed his wrist and went down on his knees by the bed, a move which provoked the old man to emit a squeal of what sounded like anticipation. The boy ducked to peer into the clutter of objects blurred by dust under the bed. Directly in front of him was a tin pot, full almost to the brim.
He turned his face aside and breathed hard before taking hold of the icy handle to inch the pot to him. Was the surface of its contents coated with dust? He raised one creaking knee and carefully stood up, cupping his free hand under the tin bottom. As he lifted the pot higher than the bed, the old man's penis started to droop.
It looked like a large worm crawling back into a tuft of dead grass. Marshall saw it wriggling at the edge of his vision as he paced toward the door, where he had to lower the pot to the carpet in order to let himself out of the room. The old man kept repeating a sound between a snarl and a groan while Marshall raised the pot as quickly as he dared and walked with small quick steps to the bathroom. The carpet tiles which presumably had once been arranged so as to cover the floor of the room seemed intent on tripping him up, but he succeeded in reaching the toilet without spilling his burden. He used his foot to align the broken plastic seat with the pan, almost dislodging the lone screw, and as he tipped up the pot he felt as relieved as though he was using the toilet himself. He shook the pot over the bowl and hurried back to the old man, whose penis was draped across one peeling thigh. Marshall placed the pot close to it on the bed and turned away. "Quick, give us a hand, lad," the old man wailed. "Can't do it by meself."
He was attempting to lever himself above the pot with one hand clamped on the edge of the mattress. Marshall leaned awkwardly across the pillow and grabbed his shoulders to swing him toward the receptacle, only just in time. While the stream resounded on the enamel the old man accompanied it with a series of groans and sighs and growls through his teeth. As soon as he'd finished he slumped against the headboard, nearly trapping Marshall's hands. Marshall saved the pot from toppling off the bed and returned to the bathroom to empty it, averting his gaze from the face of the walking doll he had glimpsed in the mirror. A question was trying to drag his mind out of shape. How long had the old man been confined to his room to grow as white as that? If he never left his room—Marshall darted into it, the pot dangling from his fist, and faltered at the sight of the old man wagging his penis with both hands. He still had to ask the question. He dropped the pot with a clang that made the old man clutch at his ears and show his gums and half a dozen teeth the color and texture of wet sand. "Where did you know me from?" Marshall said.
The old man pulled one ear forward by its lobe while his other hand strayed down his body. "Eh?"
"Where did you recognise me from?"
"You're Phil's lad's pal, aren't you? Listen, are you listening? You stick with him. He needs someone like you to help him get away from all the muck he's living in."
The answer was confusing Marshall more than the question had, wiping out the very little sense of himself he had left, and he began to shiver. "Aye, it's parky," the old man said. "Don't hang about till we both catch pneumonia. Climb in and cover us both up."
"I won't, thanks. Thanks, though."
The old man pressed his shoulders against the headboard, which let fly an explosive creak, and jerked his thighs off the mattress, a movement which brandished his penis at Marshall. His hands flew toward it and past it to yank his trousers up. He covered most of his crotch with the discoloured flaps, then began to fumble in search of the button and its hole. "I'm lonely, lad. I've had nobody to warm me up in bed since Phil's mam died."
Marshall thought of his own mother lying alone in bed. At least once he'd heard her trying not to let him hear her weeping. He was overcome by a rush of grief which included the old man. He stooped to untie his laces and pull off his trainers before he got into the bed.
Why had he tied the knots so tightly? There seemed not to be a single weak point where he could insert a fingernail. "Just getting these off," he explained as the old man commenced emitting short harsh urgent breaths. If he couldn't unravel the knots, he would just have to wrench the shoes off. He sat on the edge of the bed to do so, and as a bony hand settled on his shoulder and dug its fingers in, a wave of the stench which his sitting had driven out of the mattress reached him.
He hadn't enough pity in him to be able to cope with that. He ducked his shoulder, disengaging himself as gently as he could, and stood up to pull the quilt over the old man. Wasn't there more he could do to stop him looking so disappointed and abandoned? Stepping back, he caught sight of a tray on the floor beyond the bed, biscuit wrappers on a dirty plate beside an overturned chipped mug. "Can I bring you anything to eat?" he suggested.
The One Safe Place Page 36