The Man Without

by Ray Robinson

  The Man Without

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  Thanks

  Copyright

  The Man Without

  Ray Robinson

  For Peter Wright

  1.

  He closed the staff office door behind him, took the letter from his pocket and sat down to read, scooping cold mouthfuls of beans and sausage from his ‘All Day Breakfast in a Can’.

  Dear Antony,

  Following our assessment interview last Wednesday, I am writing briefly to give you my understanding of the outcome. You had previously been assessed by Dr Flagstaff in the Community Mental Health Team…

  Then he studied the questionnaire.

  Please read each statement and think how often you felt that way over the last week:

  I have felt terribly alone and isolated.

  I have felt tense, nervous or anxious.

  I have felt I have someone to turn to for support when needed.

  He skipped to the end…

  I have hurt myself physically or taken dangerous risks with my health.

  He was meant to tick one of the following boxes:

  Not at all (he noticed this usually scored zero points);

  Only occasionally (usually one point);

  Sometimes (always two points);

  Often (usually three points);

  Most or all of the time (usually a four).

  Thank you for your time in completing this questionnaire.

  — You’re welcome.

  It had been nearly three months since that day on the train platform. His GP told him to wait at home for the Crisis Team and within the hour two women appeared at his door. They sat in his living room clearing their throats, scratching paper with pens. And now he had a date for his first appointment: a week today. And a box of happy pills, unopened: Mirtazapine. 30 mg.

  There was a loud knocking at the staff room door.

  It was Derek. He stuck his overly large, bulbous head in, panting hard. You could never be sure where Derek was looking because his boss-eyes pointed east and west and always in opposite directions.

  — Can. You. Spray. Cheese?

  — Je ne say what?

  — Say. Please?

  — I’m on my break, Derek. Where are the other carers?

  I have been irritable when with other people.

  Four points.

  Derek got a palsied leg through the door, clanging his calliper against the jamb. A fist of wet, twisted fingers shook at Antony.

  — Say [a huff and a puff] pleeeeease.

  Derek staggered forwards. He’d made Antony a cup of tea and Antony was delighted to see Derek had spilt most of it down his trouser legs.

  I have felt warmth or affection for someone.

  Then he heard Lerch out in the corridor, making abstract sounds, the motor of his electric chair clicking and whirring as he span in tight, rapid circles.

  Antony took the tea from Derek. A peace offering.

  — Thank you, Derek. That’s so nice of you.

  — You’re. Welcome. Ant. Fanny.

  Derek turned his face, clocking Antony with one beady, glassy eye, and Antony knew what he was thinking, because he was thinking it too: fucking wanker. But since Derek phoned Child Helpline the previous weekend the staff were no longer allowed to converse with him like adults.

  The manageress told Antony,

  — You’re on r-r-report. First v-verbal warning.

  I made plans to end my life.

  As if.

  She told the carers at yesterday’s team meeting,

  — No more banter with the the the c-clients.

  She named no names but stared right at Antony.

  I have felt humiliated or shamed by other people.

  F-f-four points.

  Antony was pretty sure that’s why she got the job: pity. Because she was a stutterer, and obese to boot. She wasn’t employed on the basis of her managerial skill, that’s for sure. And so now, because of Antony, they were all meant to treat Derek, this forty-year-old toss-bag, with kid gloves. Because he was so sensitive.

  I have threatened or intimidated another person.

  Antony looked at Derek’s fat, puffy neck bulging over his shirt collar, and thought ligature, thought airway obstruction. Thought cerebral hypoxia and compression of the carotid artery.

  Derek wiped the stringy saliva from his chin, sucked air through his lips, farted wearily, and staggered out.

  The Day Centre offered a full range of development, training and leisure activities, from cookery to music to housekeeping and massage therapy, catering for the full range of physical disabilities: cerebral palsy, arthritis, spina-bifida, multiple sclerosis, stroke, cystic fibrosis, amputees, deaf-blind, Hodgkin’s Disease, you name it. But Antony always got lumped with the more acutely disabled, and felt as if he’d been doing nothing but wipe arses for the past three years.

  He eyed the clock: ten minutes before he returned to spoon feeding, being puked on, chair pushing, hoist lifting, catheter inserting, sticking useless shrivelled cock-ends into plastic receptacles. He took the bottle out of his locker: another sneaky-pete swig of Night Nurse to get him through the afternoon.

  He closed his eyes, inhaling slowly, thinking about the evening ahead. He pulled the top of his turtle neck down and stroked his throat, swallowing.

  His skin thrilled. A smile tightened his face.

  I have hurt myself physically or taken dangerous risks with my health.

  Better make that another four.

  * * *

  His colleagues suggested an end-of-week drink in the Irish pub next to work. Antony made his excuses and got the bus home, which took forever and he just missed the end of Neighbours. Fuck!

  He phoned his Auntie Val. The receiver purred and purred but no one picked up.

  He looked over at his bed. Recently, he’d taken to sleeping in it again. For months it had seemed like a snowy field, a bordered absence, uninviting, barren. Some nights he stared out of the window, glass in hand, thinking of ways to win Rebecca back. He imagined her figure lit by street lamps as she made her way towards the flat, but then he remembered watching her run along that very same street three months before, and found himself cursing her.

  He eyed the pencil and charcoal portraits of her tacked to the walls. He couldn’t bring himself to take them down.

  He poured himself a vodka and lemonade and put some music on the stereo and stood before the window, watching Manchester growing dark outside.

  It was a Friday night. He had only one thing to look forward to. He’d run himself a bubble bath and begin.

  2.

  Saturday morning. Wrapped in a silk kimono and twisting helix of smoke, he flicked through the new copy of Harpers until he found one: a model with a similar pair.

  Same colour. Same misty, narrow look.

  He took the scissors, cut carefully, and went over to the wall where the new face was beginning to emerge. He dabbed the back of the eyes with Pritt-Stick and positioned them above the nose from Grazia, the mouth from Vogue.

  He tilted his head and squinted, exhaling sexy curlicues of bluish smoke.

  * * *

  Midday, he bought a cheese and onion pasty from Greggs and ate it in the park. Dog-walkers and children on bicycles, deafening bhangra coming from a lone sound stage. He remembered the previous summer, sunbathing with Rebecca over by the large chestnut tr
ee near the bandstand, priming their tans before their holiday in Greece.

  He dropped the half-eaten pasty in a bin and wandered back into town. He strolled into Cheaper Sounds and went up to the cash desk and asked the manager,

  — Do you happen to have Rebecca’s new contact details? I’ve got some things of hers I know she’d really like back.

  The manager looked at him wearily, sighed, and disappeared into the back room.

  So he headed over the road to the Drapers Arms and ordered a pint. He knew it was where the Cheaper Sounds staff usually went for a drink after work, but it got to seven o’clock and no sign.

  He wended his way down by the canal, to his dealer’s squat.

  * * *

  It was late by the time he got home. He rolled a spliff, poured some leftover wine, and booted up. The lime green lights of the modem flickered. Already a stirring inside of him he knew couldn’t be staved. A few left-clicks took him to his Hotmail account. As per, his last message to Rebecca had returned:

  This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

  Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

  He clicked the ‘Rebecca’ file and chose one from the top of the list.

  The early days.

  FROM: rebecca22@yahoo.com

  SUBJECT: Re: Friday!

  You’re welcome darling – it’s my pleasure. I’m so excited about seeing you too! Every time we are apart I miss you even more, and feel even more excited at the prospect of seeing you again. You’re right, this really does get better and better all the time. I’m bursting with love for you and excitement about our future together.

  love you xxxx

  -----Original Message-----

  FROM: antony dobson

  Thank you so much for doing this, and the whole Wales thing – I think you are so wonderful, I hope you know that. I am so excited about seeing you on Friday! And meeting me at the station – fantastic. This just gets better and better,

  Speak soon,

  Love you

  A x x x

  He stared hard at the drawings of her body on the wall. DNA at its finest. Drawings on A1 newsprint, that’s all he had left of her now. Charcoal, white chalk, finger smudge. But he wanted to see her again; wanted to smudge the real her. To know that she was happy; to make her happy. But he had no contact number. He couldn’t ring her to give her a mouthful when he was drunk.

  He walked over to the wall and pressed his face into the mirror. Through the shifting fog of his breath, he saw two circular glints of iris slowly overlap like a Venn diagram, and then converge into one. Saw a molten drip hanging in a Latin blue sky. And then his reflection disappeared completely.

  An abrupt, searing spasm bent him double. Behind his eyelids he could still see that bright, molten sun, and then a song began whistling through his ears. Everything But The Girl doing ‘I Want Your Love’.

  He got to his feet and saw the ghost of Rebecca sprawled across his unmade bed, the shapes of men moving across her body like shadows. He heard their animal grunts; heard bodies slapping in a hot room.

  Then a noise began to fill his ears.

  He grabbed a lacy chemise off the floor and rammed it into his mouth. With his fingertip, he closed the jugular. With a bit more pressure, he reduced the blood flow through his carotid. Maelstrom clouds, thick as migraines, began moving at high speed through his head.

  He controlled life, controlled death.

  Beat.

  The carotid, forked like lizard’s tongue. Above the arterial fork is the carotid sinus, cells sensitive to pressure and chemicals and once pressure is applied they can slow the heart right down…

  To a beat.

  He pressed, inhaled. Golden flowers bloomed behind his eyelids. Beat. He heard his panicked gasping. Beat. Saw high-speed clouds moving faster, faster. Beat. And then everything turned very cold.

  No beat.

  An icy turning.

  No beat.

  An iceberg rolling.

  No beat.

  No beat.

  No beat.

  And the woman in the mirror, exhaled.

  3.

  — Hello?

  His throat felt torn.

  — Now then, son.

  — Oh.

  Jack. His father.

  — I haven’t woken you?

  — No, Antony said.

  — So how’s tricks? Still seeing what’s-her-face?

  Antony walked over to the window and pulled the curtains. Light slapped him in the mush. Ahead, the red minaret of Strangeways’ ventilation tower. Beyond that, the faceless grey slabs of City and Portland Towers.

  — Hello?

  — Yeah, Antony said. Hunky dory.

  — Good, good. Just don’t be making me a grandfather yet.

  Antony searched for his tobacco as Jack jabbered on. He could hear his half-brother shouting something in Catalan in the background. He found a docked rollie in the ashtray and lit the end. But he missed the sudden shift in his father’s voice.

  — I’ll be flying into Teesside tonight, Jack said.

  — What?

  — Back to England.

  — What for?

  Jack sighed. — Someone left a copy of the Northern Echo in the bar yesterday. I saw the obituary and rang home. To check like.

  — Who?

  — Val, Jack said. Your Auntie Val.

  Antony fell inside.

  — Do you want me to call you back?

  — Val?

  — Haven’t you?

  — No.

  — Funeral’s tomorrow afternoon, Jack said. Thought I’d show my respect. Besides, I’ve a bit of unfinished business. You’re coming, right?

  Antony hung up and went over to his sideboard and took the two photographs out of their frames, cracked and dog-eared from years of travelling around in his back pocket. No matter how he’d felt, how angry or disappointed he’d been, they’d always been with him, his 2D chaperones.

  Jack, sat at the end of a table with Val on her eighteenth birthday night. His laugh-a-lot grin and bushy, crow-black hair. And the photograph of his mother showed a young woman twisting her body and bending a knee. Dark roots in her bleached hair that seemed so incongruous, so unlikely.

  Antony tried crossing his eyes to see the blur of him.

  But he couldn’t.

  He asked Jack once, — How come you two got together in the first place?

  But Jack just fed him the same bulllshit she did, and Antony just couldn’t figure it out.

  Jack in Spain with his new family. Mother at home with Lou.

  He was ten-years-old when Val gave him the photograph. He went round to hers and found Eddie there, drinking. Eddie was no relation, just an old bloke from the village, but over the years he’d become something of a surrogate father to Antony. The two adults shared looks and Eddie went, — Show him.

  Antony brought the photograph close to his face. He made out Val straight away—her beehive looked bigger than ever. She was sitting with a group of people around a long table.

  — It were taken at the Social on me eighteenth, she said. Fancied the arse off the singer. Did the Stones to a tee.

  She raised her eyebrows at Eddie.

  — Should’ve married him instead of that useless Irish cunt. Here, that’s him.

  A long red fingernail next to a young bloke: dark hair, large sideburns.

  — Your singer? Antony said.

  Her crooked smile.

  — Your dad, Antony. Your frigging dad.

  His father’s absence.

  — Jack, Val said quietly. His name’s Jack Ellis. A cockney. Up here to do some building work and stayed on.

  Eddie’s pale, apple-green eyes.

  — You want to meet him.

  It wasn’t a question.

  Antony looked down at his shoes, shrugged.

  — Thought as much.

  And hearing Jack’s voice on the phone that morning, Antony felt tha
t childish anticipation, that longing to hear his father say it,

  — I’m sorry, son. For leaving you with them.

  * * *

  All day he avoided reminiscing, filling his mind with empty tasks. But as he undressed and climbed into bed and lay poised on the edge between wakefulness and sleep, he saw the cartoonish blur of Val’s face and her deep platform shoes—her ‘Magic Joe Cocker Boots’, she called them. He saw the Regal King Size hanging from the side of her heavily lipsticked gob, and the whole affair was surmounted, as usual, by her huge silvery beehive.

  He necked the mirtazapine and within five minutes he was already starting to feel twatted. He did a quick Net search on the drug, to get the low down, but it appeared it was safe. No history of mass lemming-style suicides.

  Mirtazapine. Side effects occurring commonly:

  increased appetite

  weight gain

  drowsiness

  dizziness

  headaches

  general or local swelling.

  Surfing left him with e-nausea and he had to lie down, and when he closed his eyes his inner world was pixelated—he found it strangely reassuring.

  But then it hit him. Shit: tomorrow. His Monday outreach session with Kenneth.

  He staggered over to the phone, the sedative-effect of the M dragging him under. He pressed the number for the Centre and let it purr.

  There’s no one here to take your call at the moment, but if…

  He cleared his throat.

  — Hi Antony, it’s Trudy. I’m afraid I won’t be in today. There’s been a death in the family and, well, it’s important I go to the funeral, you know. Anyway, I’ve sorted Kenneth’s cover, so don’t…

  He hung up.

  Antony, it’s Trudy.

  — Fuck!

  He collapsed onto the bed, burying his face into Rebecca’s old T-shirt.

  * * *

  He hadn’t slept so well in years—a powerful, Snow-White sleep.

  Home.

  Today was the day, and it was bigger than anything he’d ever known before.