Same as it wasn’t yellow’s fault I was angry.
So they hatched a plan. A tennis ball.
Like I didn’t have enough problems. Yellow, everywhere, sneaking up on me, disguised as grey.
Morning, speech. Afternoon, the line. And now, all day, the ball.
Helen gives it to me.
I’m sitting on the bed. I’ve gained some strength back in my good side. I can push myself up. I can stand on one leg, like a drunken sailor. If I hold onto something, anyway. With help, I’m kind of getting into my chair.
I can go to the toilet on my own, now I’ve got the tube out of my cock. My left hand’s my stupid hand, though. I go through a lot of pyjamas.
My speech is a little better. That’s coming back quickly. It’s still slurry, and there are words I can’t find and words I get wrong, but I’m communicating. That’s good. I can tell people to fuck off and they understand. Sometimes, a small thing like that can make the difference between a good day and a bad day for me.
Helen’s spooning me mash and sausage. The sausage is cut up small. Chewing is a chore. I’m not exactly an adult when I eat, but nor am I a child.
Still, a fair amount of sausage rests on my chest.
‘I’ve got a present for you,’ she says.
‘What?’
She shows me a little package. It’s all wrapped and neat with a red ribbon tied around it, the big bow flopping over the sides of the box.
‘You want me to open it?’
‘Yes,’ I say. We’re still tender. I know why. The last few years. That’s why. But I’m still angry, and she’s here.
She unwraps the package. I see it’s a box for a watch. Inside is a grey ball. Lines round it, where the fuzz doesn’t grow.
‘It’s a tennis ball,’ I say.
She nods.
‘It’s for your hand.’
‘What am I supposed to do with it?’
‘Squeeze it. Throw it. Catch it. Hold it.’
‘And how the fuck am I supposed to do that?’
She closes her eyes for a moment.
‘Just start. That’s how. Seetha says it’s the same as walking the line.’
‘Seetha says?’
‘Yes.’
‘You and Seetha talk?’
‘Yes.’
‘About me?’
‘Of course.’
She stops talking. The spoon’s out there, midway. Hovering.
‘I don’t want the fucking ball.’
She’s crying. I’m shouting. A nurse peers round the corner. My room’s private. I just glare. The nurse backs off.
‘It’s not my fault,’ Helen says, quietly.
‘What?’ I say.
‘It’s not my fault. It’s not the ball’s fault.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘You know.’
‘That it’s my fault?’
She’s silent. I rage. I take the ball with my good hand. I throw it at her, but I’m weak and it’s my stupid hand. The ball just falls to the floor. It bounces. Then it rolls.
‘It’s my fault? Is that it? I’m a fucking cripple and it’s my fault?’
‘I told you. What did you think would happen? Coke! You promised! You promised. So many times. I love you, but you’re a…a…’
She wipes her eyes, but doesn’t stop talking. ‘Of course it’s your fault, you selfish, arrogant prick!’
She’s shaking, I’m shaking. I can feel the blood pounding in my head and I know that’s not good.
It could have gone either way, right there. There are plenty of moments in your life when you can succeed or fail in an instant.
She was right. It wasn’t yellow’s fault. It wasn’t the coke’s fault. It was mine.
Sure, a stroke’s a random thing, but being a twat isn’t. That’s a personal choice.
Sorry? She’s shaking. She won’t look at me. Tears are there, but I can see she’s holding back most of them, because she’s so fucking angry, and I realise she’s been this angry since she first found that wrap in my jacket pocket. Anger that had grown through a hundred nosebleeds, a hundred credit card bills through the roof.
Losing her husband to coke, then a stroke?
Sorry just doesn’t cut it. Not in the face of that kind of anger. I didn’t even know what kind of husband I’d been for the last three…four…fuck. Five years? Fuck.
Fuck.
Five years ago a choice led to this.
I had tears in my eyes now, too. I hadn’t even known, ‘til right then.
No, sorry didn’t even come close. This wasn’t a sorry.
‘Give me the fucking ball,’ I say.
*
27.
That night, after Helen goes home, I sit on my bed, holding the ball in my left hand. The lamp in the corner is dim, made even more so by the blindness in my right eye. There’s been a shadow there for a couple of days now. I’m hopeful. More hopeful than I have any right to be. But I don’t want to tell the doctors. I don’t want them to break my hope. It’s a fragile thing. It needs me to be gentle with it.
I turn the ball, spinning it around with my fingertips. I nearly drop it. My left hand is good for holding things down, but pretty useless for anything else.
I slow the rotation. Then I just hold it again. I try to remember the way it feels. I close my eyes. Fuzzy. But not like peach fuzz. Rougher. Not unpleasantly so, but you couldn’t mistake it for natural.
A bare line that I trace with my thumbnail. It’s not easy, without my other hand.
Light, but sturdy. It won’t break.
I squeeze it. I expect it to give, but it doesn’t. I squeeze harder. It’s tougher than it looks. I put my all into it, so the veins in my forearm are standing out, and it gives, just a tiny fraction. Probably not even a sixteenth of an inch.
I know what I’m doing. I’m concentrating on the ball because I don’t want to think about Helen. I don’t want to think about five years of marriage disappearing up my nose. That the whole thing is my fault. Maybe not all…but the stroke? Helen’s got no part to play in my stroke. I don’t want to think about my wife living with a dead man for the last five years. Walking and talking but dead, just the same.
I try not to think about her living with a cripple until one or the other of us dies. I try, but I don’t manage it. It’s a hard thought. It butts up against me. Insistent.
I do think about the kind of dedication that would take. The same kind of dedication that drives a woman to share her bed with a dead man for half a decade.
I don’t want to think, though. I really don’t. I’m tired, I’m heart-sore.
As it turns out, I’m good at not thinking about things. I think about the ball. The ball becomes everything. The ball, I can deal with.
Seetha’s second rule: one step at a time.
I put the ball on the sheet. I take my dead hand and turn it, palm up, on the bed. It feels like a ritual. Like I’m holding a wake for my hand. I don’t like the look of that hand. It looks alien. It doesn’t belong to me anymore.
I’ve got to win it back.
I take the ball in my left and place it in my right palm. I try to remember what it feels like. Shape, texture, weight. My sight is spoiling it. I feel like I’m cheating. So I close my eyes. Try again.
I can feel nothing. But I know it’s there. It’s light, but it has weight. I should be able to feel it.
I’m getting angry. I don’t want to be angry. Not now. I’ve been angry too long. I want to be calm. I want to feel the weight of that grey ball. I’m not worried about yellow. I’ll settle for grey, if I can just feel something.
Fuzz. Bristly. Light, but there.
I feel it. I do.
I open my eyes with a smile and look down and the fucking ball is on the bed. It rolled out of my hand.
That’s when I cried. Not like when I was in pain in the ambulance, feeling like I’d been kicked in the chest by a horse. Not like when I was frightened I was going to die. Not like that.
I’m crying because after five years, six months, eleven days, a dead hand made me realise that I could feel again. My heart had stopped then. Five years, six months, eleven days ago. It stopped for good at 7.45pm, while I was holding my wife’s hand, beside a bed just like this.
It didn’t start up again in the ambulance. It started again that night. That night, crying, looking through tears at the stupid ball.
As I stared at the ball on the sheet, I punched my arm and my leg and felt nothing and everything all at once. I remembered all the things I didn’t want to think about. That was O.K. This wasn’t thought. This was memory. I cried so much that night I burst a blood vessel in my eye. They took me down for a scan in the morning.
People talk about floods of tears. I should have drowned that night, but as the sobs receded, as I wiped my nose on my pyjama sleeve, I didn’t drown. I floated. Holding onto a little grey ball, like it could keep me from going under. When the tears stopped, really stopped, my chest was wet. My left sleeve was wet.
The ball just sat there. Me watching it. I was all cried out. The ball didn’t cry. It was just a ball.
But it witnessed something. That night, crying my heart out in a hospital bed, it saw me for what I had become.
When I lost my girl, she wasn’t the only one who died. I died, too, and the story that was me, and Helen, and our daughter. But that was then.
This is a new story. Me, Helen, and my little grey ball, and how we float.
I picked up the ball, left handed. I didn’t want to drop it, not ever, because I fucking loved that ball.
*
28.
I woke up. Turned my head. I smelled her first. Saw her sitting there second. Smiling. I looked down. The ball was there.
It was stupid, but I thought if I could hold onto the ball, I could hold onto Helen.
She wasn’t watching me. She was reading a book. Just sitting there, smile on her face, reading. I watched her for a minute. Each small part of her was perfect. Her dark hair, her black eyes. Her shining skin. Even the lilac scar that runs down her jaw-line just added to the sum of her.
I was tongue-tied. I didn’t have the first idea what to say to her. I wasn’t the man she’d given her virginity to. I wasn’t the man who’d sworn before God to honour her. In many ways, I was a stranger. A stranger who’d been raping her. Raping our marriage. People think force is necessary for rape. A lie is just as damning.
But I loved her. That hadn’t changed. Not ever.
She wasn’t smiling because of the book. Sometimes a book can make her smile, laugh, cry. But this was the smile I’d married. The one I hadn’t seen for so long. This was the one I made.
‘What are you reading?’ I say.
She shows me. The smile’s still there. I want to keep it there.
It’s a John Wyndham book. Looks like she got it in a charity shop. The spine’s broken. There’s a coffee stain on it. I don’t know the book.
‘Any good?’
She shrugs. ‘Clunky.’
That makes me smile. Clunky. She’s the world’s greatest critic when it comes to books. She’s one of the world’s greatest readers, too. I think she’s entitled to her opinion.
I can’t remember the last time I read a book. Too busy filling my nose with shit and being dead. The thought could make me sad, but not this morning. It doesn’t make a dent, because I’ve got the ball. Helen’s here. For the first time in years, I am, too. That feels good. Unbelievably good.
‘What’s it about?’
‘Cuckoos.’
‘Really?’
‘No, don’t be daft.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s good. You should read it.’
She goes quiet. She knows I won’t. But I appreciate it. I don’t want to break the spell, so I search for something to say. It’s not normally this difficult to talk to my wife, but then I haven’t thought about what I say to her for years. Now my words come out funny from time to time, and I’m thinking maybe this is what it should be like. Like having to think before I speak. Measuring the words. Making them count.
‘The ball’s good. Better than your book. You should feel it.’
‘It’s just a ball.’
‘No. It’s not just a ball. There’s a story in this ball. One day, maybe, it’ll tell you.’
‘What kind of story is it?’ she asks. She’s smiling.
‘Dunno. You’ll have to ask the ball.’
She laughs. Once I used to be silly. Once I used to be fearless. Arrogant, confident. Then I died. I don’t know what I am now.
I don’t want to make her cry, but I’m going to now. No matter what I say next, she’s going to cry, but maybe that’s good.
‘Can we start over?’ I say.
There’s so much more to say. But I don’t start in with it then. It’s not the time, because: one step at a time.
She’s crying, and she’s shaking, and she’s coming over to the bed. I notice she doesn’t mark her book. She never does. She remembers the page number. Once, I remember, that used to impress me. It does again. A small thing. The kind of thing you notice in a marriage, but only when you’re awake. Then she’s hugging me. I can’t feel half of her, but that’s O.K. The parts I can feel are just fine.
She takes my dead arm and puts it around her back, like she’s done so many times before.
This is what it’s like to be resurrected. The world’s suddenly brighter. Colours are fresher, even grey. Smells are sharper. She’s hugging me, then she laughs and kisses me and tuts.
‘What?’ I say.
She moves. I see I’ve got an erection.
We’re both blushing like mad when Seetha comes in. Helen shifts to hide me. I raise my left knee to make a bigger tent over my bed sheet tepee.
‘You two look guilty,’ says Seetha. She pauses, looks from me, to Helen, and back again. She doesn’t blush, because Seetha doesn’t blush. I can’t imagine her caught out. In another life she’d have been a great teacher. She could make you feel so naughty.
‘Time to go.’
She takes my chair from beside the wall.
‘I thought I had Simon this morning.’
‘We switched. I’m off this afternoon.’
I’m touched. She won’t say it, but she switched so she can see me. I just know it. But that doesn’t help me out of my predicament.
‘Ah…’ I say. But Helen doesn’t help. She’s laughing behind Seetha’s back, hiding it well behind a cough and a hand.
I’m trying to slide out sideways, but Seetha’s having none of it.
Suddenly I feel vindictive, and I think, fuck it. Forty-two’s too old to be embarrassed, so I stand and just give it up.
Seetha sees my erection. Nods.
‘Good,’ she says.
I don’t know if she’s referring to the size, or the quality. Suddenly it’s me that’s embarrassed. She wins. Again.
She winks at Helen as she wheels me out.
Helen’s cracking up.
I can hear her all the way to the lift.
That was when I knew I loved my wife again, when I got the ball. That ball saved my life, as did she. The black cat? I’m not so sure.
Back then, I came to life. My marriage was reborn, but me and the stranger both died at 12.03 in the back of an ambulance. I came back to life when my wife gave me that ball.
The stranger came back to life with the cat. Came back to life, but in the dead parts of me, where I can’t see him.
But I feel him, and he’s ever watchful.
*
Part Four
-
Black Cat. Lost Girl
29.
We’re in the car, driving through a light spring rain. I’m in the passenger seat, Frank’s in the back. There’s a fine mist on the windscreen. Frank’s got his window down and he’s staring out to the north, waiting for the rare glimpses of the sea that pop up along the coast road.
I’m not so sure it counts as an honest to goodness
coast road. It strays too far, so you can’t always see the sea.
Still, Frank knows it’s there. So do I. Helen doesn’t have the same feel for it. She keeps asking if we’re heading in the right direction. The road runs east to west. You can’t go wrong.
‘Yes, Honey,’ I say.
We make it to Morston. It’s up from Blakeney, but we thought we’d try it. It’s not hard to find the ticket office. They send us off to the port, or whatever the hell you’d call it. There’s some muddy estuaries, and a few wooden platforms going out to nowhere. There are no boats.
Frank looks pale even though there’s no water, no boat. I touch his arm and smile.
It’s a strange thing for me to do, but with Frank it feels OK. I wouldn’t do something like that with anyone but Helen and Frank. He’s seventy. He’s never been on the river, the broads, let along the sea. He must be nervous, but he’s a seventy year old man. Seventy year old men don’t admit to being nervous.
‘I’m OK,’ he says, brusque, but he smiles to soften it. He’s grouchy, in part because he’s scared. But he’s excited, too.
‘The boat’s going out in half hour. You want a bench, you’d do as well to get in the queue now,’ says the woman we’re told to meet at the back of a van in the car park.
There are only two other couples by the dock, quay, whatever. I don’t say anything. Whatever, I think. It’s not like there’s much else to do.
The lady at the back of the van’s got a mole. I kill some time looking at that.
We queue up with the other two couples. The wooden quay runs a little way into an estuary with hardly any water in it.
Then there’s water. There’s a lot of water. It comes rushing in, filling up the mud so it’s not mud any more. It doesn’t take that long to fill. I suppose the sea’s coming in. The sea’s big enough that when it wants to come it, you know about it.
I can smell the sea. I can’t really see it. The way the land lies, it’s like it’s just over a hill or something. I know it’s there. It’s right there, just over the hill. But we’ve got to get on the boat to go see it.
I’m impatient. I get the sense Frank could wait all day. Neither of us have a choice. We wait for the tide.
RAIN/Damned to Cold Fire (Two Supernatural Horror Novels): A RED LINE Horror Double: Supernatural Page 31