by Ray Robinson
But he needed some friends. He needed to get out there and find some, because they sure as hell weren’t beating down his door.
He put ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ on the stereo and spent ages trying different outfit combinations and then he wrestled with his hair. It was so eighties, so Metal, but it hid his sticky-out ears and looked so much better than any of his wigs. Then he showered and blew a kiss at the blurred figure in the steamed-up mirror.
— Wish me luck!
* * *
Jade was looking totally delish. She even had on a touch of make-up, subtle, not too O.T.T. He knew from experience not to comment. And there was no hiding it: he found her stunning.
After the curry they went to the party in Fallowfield. It was like any other full-on house party, apart from a) the music was so loud the decibels hurt your skull, and b) everyone was signing. The hearers had to sit outside, and even then they had to sit very close to each other and shout.
Antony managed some sketchy BSL with Jade’s brother, John. Jade looked suitably impressed.
She rolled a small joint and went, — Should we try to find some pills?
He produced the three he had left over from his visit to his dealer, scoring many Jade points. He gave her one and thought briefly whether or not he should be drinking and drugging on antidepressants, but then he thought fuck it, I’m not depressed, and boshed one.
So began a lot of sighing, jaw grinding, a lot of super-earnest chat. Human contact – he’d almost forgotten what it felt like. A wave of compassion and joyfulness spread from somewhere deep inside his brain and flowed down past his ears and across his shoulders and down his spine.
They talked about holidays and travel. About the summer’s riots and their favourite cities; (Antony’s: Warsaw; Jade’s: San Francisco). They discussed their favourite authors; (Jade: Murakami; Antony: Kafka). They discussed their dream jobs and dream lives. Jade was a veggie; Antony an omnivore. She asked him what star sign he was and he lied and told her he was a Libra and she said yes, she knew it. But then she asked about his ex. He said the word ‘Rebecca’ and laughed to himself. He told her he really needed to dance.
They both stuck their earplugs in and went inside.
At one point she hugged him tightly and mouthed something like,
— I’m so glad I met you.
He could feel his entire being pulsing and tingling with chemical love, but her shape, smaller and more petite than Rebecca, didn’t seem to fit. He was still haunted the ghost of Rebecca’s touch, as if she’d left an invisible imprint, a mould of herself against him. Jade’s small body, the smell of smoke and shampoo in her hair, the hard whorl of her ear glancing against his lips—it made his eyes sting. He knew he wanted her and didn’t want to let her go, but she held him at arm’s length and gave him a wounded look.
She could feel it inside.
Smiling dopily, he shrugged her off, unable to match her tone.
She had that teenage madness to her that was so infectious and insatiable but scary to be around, and she was very keen on them both getting a lift back to hers, to continue.
He told her it was nothing personal.
* * *
He walked the full length of Oxford Road, stopping outside the Palace Hotel, The Smiths’ ‘Reel Around the Fountain’ looping round his head. In the non-hour of twilight, the Victorian Waterhouse splendour of the city centre appeared eerie and soulless. Walking through the Northern Quarter, feet aching, the prospect of Cheetham Hill suddenly seemed like Everest.
Victoria was dotted with piss-heads dozing and E-heads swaying to internal beats. He sat in the PHOTO-ME booth to keep warm, and then wandered along the platform.
The sun started to come up, and as light dappled the new glass tower blocks in the city centre he remembered poaching with Eddie in the pre-dawn light. He remembered giant waxy leaves boomeranging back into his face and how Sonny kept nosing the back of his legs.
* * *
Eddie took the wicker box from his waist, sitting on it with a grizzled sigh. For a moment the sky paled in the moonlight and Antony saw how the valley ran in smooth waves, like a pair of cupped hands waiting for the moon to fall.
The Blue Hour. It was Eddie’s favourite time of day. The hour before dawn when everything seemed to be suspended, waiting for the frost to be made.
Suddenly the rifle was in Antony’s lap. The gravity of it shocked him. He could just make out the whites of Eddie’s eyes as he said something about ricochets, about carrying a loaded rifle, about the safety catch never being enough.
Antony’s hands began to shake.
Afterwards, Eddie assembled the quarry on the grass. An odour came from the corpses, thick and dark. Eddie hadn’t told him that rabbits screamed. He hooked most of them to his waist and let Antony carry the rest. They were still warm, and with each twitch of their legs Antony’s stomach hitched. He trailed Eddie, biting his bottom lip, watching the silhouette of Eddie moving into the morning light, framed by the pine trees.
He knew he’d never forget that image. That wild image.
* * *
A week of insomnia- and nightmare-free sleep, and the duvet that usually caused him so much torment felt electric against his ultra-sensitized skin. His heart raced madly and jaw ached dully as music continued to thump through his bones. He ran his hands over his tingling body, rolling around in the bed, feeling only half in this world. Tugging languorously beneath the bed sheets, surging in and out of a chemical stupor, he imagined he was being smothered by Jade’s all-consuming warmth, all-consuming softness, all-consuming womanliness.
The mirtazapine dragged him under.
* * *
Kenneth’s house was in complete darkness. He rang the bell and knocked on the door again, and then phoned the Centre to see if there had been any messages from Lizzie. Nothing. So he phoned the landline and listened to it ringing through the back door. He sat on their doorstep, waiting.
* * *
RETROGRADE AMNESIA: Loss of ability to retrieve previously stored memory. Kenneth’s cognitive functioning assessment shows that he has not learnt any new vocabulary since 1995, but he is of superior intelligence, with an IQ of 143 and an estimated vocabulary of 100,000 words. His frontal executive abilities, language and deductive reasoning skills are in the superior range…
* * *
Cheaper Sounds. One of the younger lads was on the till and there was a certain hesitancy in his eyes, which Antony read as ‘knowing something’. The lad was about to speak when the manager appeared and Antony was shooed out of the place like a shoplifter. When he got back to the Centre the manageress didn’t say anything about him being late, though she did have the most infuriating of smirks on her face. The world, he felt, was in cahoots.
* * *
All afternoon, he looked around him at the abstract humans, the afflicted, the mentally challenged; the less able-bodied, the disfigured, the partially destroyed. Those who are invisible, ignored, brushed to one side. Those who are drugged up 24/7, who have electrodes on their spine to block the pain. Those whose skulls, brains, arms, legs, minds, senses are absent. Those who have led a productive life and then something happens: an accident, M.S., a failed suicide attempt, or just some humdrum aggressive fucker of a disease. Those who curl themselves back into a helpless, useless, foetus. But they smile, they laugh, they take the piss out of each other. Ciphers of triumph, they get on with it. Because they’ve passed their test in life with flying colours.
He wasn’t in the mood for teaching art so he suggested they watched a video and received a few gurgled yeses in reply. They decided to watch Terminator. He pressed play and turned the lights off, listening to phlegm rattling in Lerch’s throat, to Derek’s heavy asthmatic wheeze, to the soporific click-click-click of Maureen’s MS leg tapping against her wheelchair.
Antony closed his eyes and saw two women pointing at his naked body, laughing. They tied his hands behind his back and began to punish him with the spikes of their six-inc
h heels. Walking on him, spitting on him, hitting him, kicking him. Then they gagged him.
He opened his eyes. Felt so at home.
* * *
Lunging from a nightmare, he inhaled sharply. She was standing at the foot of his bed, her back turned. Eyes wide and fingers grasping, he made a noise. ‘Please.’ But she twisted into the darkness and was gone. He stared into her absence, rubbing his wet face. Snotty, sleepy weepings. How long had it been? He climbed out of bed and stood in moonlight coming through the window, staring at his figure in a mirror, part shadow, part light. Behind him, a frowsy wig hung from a chair. He put his face to the mirror, nose flattened white, eyes the colour of fresh bruises.
— Please, he whispered. Please.
* * *
One of the carers said they were covering for him that afternoon.
— Why?
— You better check your pigeonhole.
A letter:
Emergency meeting today
Re: Kenneth Monahan
Occupational Therapist’s Office, 2 p.m.
The manageress wasn’t around and no one seemed to know anything and so he went into the toilet, hit the hand drier and let it all go in a wail of FUCKs.
Think, he told himself.
He opted to take the morning’s computer session and began searching the Net.
* * *
He got to the O.T.’s department just before 2:00 and found Kenneth sitting in the waiting room with a carer Antony hadn’t met before.
Kenneth looked at Antony, then at the carer, and lowered his head.
Antony knocked on the O.T.’s door and walked in. The room was thick with smiles missing eyes, self-conscious coughs and averted glances. Everyone was there: Kenneth’s social worker, psychologist, physiotherapist, a rep from the Primary Care Trust, the O.T., and Lizzie looking guilty as hell with a man Antony was introduced to as her counsellor.
The manageress began the meeting in her inimitable way.
— M-m-maybe we c-could start with you, Antony? Why don’t you t-tell the team how you’re g-g-g-getting on, and how well the aide-mémoirs are are are working?
She knew fine well the aide-mémoirs weren’t working because the rest of the care team weren’t using them. Yet she put him on the spot.
— I’ve been researching the latest compensatory technologies available, he said. There are a lot of new, cost-effective strategies I feel we could, and should, be trying. For example, I think we need to introduce more cognitive prostheses into Kenneth’s daily routine.
Without a hint of sarcasm, the O.T. asked, — Are you a neuropsychologist?
Antony focussed on his notes.
— I’m talking about simple, computer-mediated cueing aids. Kenneth’s main problem is with where, how, and when to perform particular tasks. An alarm clock doesn’t tell Kenneth why it’s ringing. People, especially carers, are unreliable. If Kenneth can’t see it, it’s forgotten. Notes don’t alert him to anything. He forgets to write in his diary and then he forgets to look. The calendar doesn’t speak, and he’s embarrassed by the labels all over the house. I feel he needs a PDA…
Someone sighed heavily.
— Or better still, there’s a pager made by NeuroPage that Kenneth could clip to his belt. It has a flashing diode and buzzes and makes a loud chirping sound that would alert Kenneth to a simple screen message such as: GET DRESSED or MAKE BREAKFAST. The messages can be customized… and… he’s learnt and retained basic computer skills… so… I know we can…
— But you have no formal training in this, do you?
Antony shrugged. They all looked at each other as if to say told you so.
— In the last three three three years Kenneth’s p-progress has been neg-neg-negligible.
— That’s not true, Antony said. Kenneth’s learning new strategies. This is a major…
The looks confirmed his suspicions.
— With the c-c-current staff situation at the Day Centre, and n-n-no discernable prog-progress being made with Kenneth, I’m afraid Antony’s outreach work will have to to to cease.
The counsellor put a hand on Lizzie’s shoulder and went, — And with Kenneth’s behaviour last Friday [everyone glared at Antony] and his continuing aggression towards Lizzie and Sarah.
— Listen, Antony said. Kenneth has started remembering things. Last Friday…
— Last F-F-Friday you took him to the pub!
— He told me he’d remembered something.
Antony stared at Lizzie.
— He must have said something? About the white coats?
Lizzie examined her hands and Antony remembered the bruises on her arms and realised he was being railroaded into agreeing that Kenneth would be better off in full-time care, and that his current funding would be better spent on more worthy causes.
Antony stormed out and approached Kenneth in the waiting room.
— Kenneth, what’s my name?
The carer stood up. Antony was shaking.
— Kenneth, what’s my name?
* * *
He wept on the bus, admitting to himself that he was acting like someone who was seriously depressed. When he got home he phoned Jade. He needed someone to listen to all of this, but it diverted straight to answer phone. Then he wanted to phone Lizzie, to plead with her to wait. It’ll put him back years if he goes into care. It’ll ruin his recovery for good. But he couldn’t.
* * *
One message keeps coming through loud and clear:
STRUCTURE REDUCES ANXIETY.
* * *
He couldn’t help feeling he was to blame.
* * *
He stood before the montage of women’s faces, searching for a glimmer of her. He knew it wasn’t a dream; that brief snapshot of a female form twisting, retwisting into darkness. He’d worn the fantasy of her like a disguise for years, the daydream him in mascara and lippy smudge. He’d tried finding her in magazines, in women on the street, remembering how they used to dance on the moors in the Blue Hour, how as a child he imagined she took the beatings for him, and yet he’d tried so hard to get rid of her. Drink, drugs, asphyxiation, his three lost years in black-and-white. But she was always there, lippy in hand, in the between places. Inside every dry urge hidden under bed sheets. She smelled of him, tasted of him, she walked through his skin and danced in his shadow. Her hands were golden flowers blooming, fingers unfurling behind his eyelids as he slipped into that moment between life and death. She helped him fight, keeping him suspended until he was released, till he silenced the sibilant sound, gasping like a newborn, fingers scratching.
He used to imagine her as a young girl in a blue-and-white gingham dress, hula hooping and skipping, playing counting games in a street where it was always playtime. Her braided hair full of sunshine and the air about her filled with laughter. His mother would call her in, brushing her braids out before bedtime.
Hanging in his closet, dancing in the sparks as life flickers off and on, her gingham dress would go up in flames and her laughter fade, leaving him gasping. For it all to make sense.
For some kind of reconciliation with himself.
Whoever that was.
* * *
He was convinced the manageress was hiding from him. He found a new rota in his pigeon hole: Centre based, no outreach, no Kenneth, just three extra sessions a week with Derek and an impromptu meeting for his biannual review, set for that afternoon.
Great, he thought. Fuck-wit Derek.
The main reason Antony hated Derek, was this: Antony had only been working at the Centre for a couple of weeks, and as per they were hugely understaffed and so he got lumped with the new-to-him Derek for a one-to-one cookery lesson. Risk assessment nightmare. After a few minutes of Derek’s boorish interrogations and a flat refusal to do anything Antony asked of him, Derek told him he needed a number two. So they hobbled arm-in-arm along the corridor to the accessible loo and Antony helped him undo his trousers and pull his enormous brown underpants down.
— No. I. Need. You. Here.
So he made Antony stand and watch him do his noisy twos while he huffed and puffed, his googly Marty Feldman eyes on him.
— Finished.
The stench was unbearable. Antony could taste it. He could chew it. The air was filled with an enormous shit sandwich.
— Don’t forget to wipe now, Derek.
Derek stared at him.
— I. Can’t.
— Sorry?
— My. Arms. Are. Too. Short.
So Antony helped him to his feet, trying not to retch while attempting some small talk. Derek shuffled himself a hundred-and-eighty-degrees until Antony had his hairy, unceremonious arse in his face. He slipped on some latex gloves and pulled a good handful of toilet paper off the wall.
Derek looked at him over his shoulder and said,
— Do. A. Good. Job.
None of this was a problem—unpleasant, yes, but this was just part of working with the shitty end of the lollipop—it’s just that later that day, in the team meeting, to everyone’s amusement, ha-fucking-ha, Antony found out that Derek was fully capable of wiping his own arse.
Antony had fallen for the shit-covered handshake.
* * *
The secretary, Trudy, was taking the minutes. It was the same old rigmarole with the manageress flexing her hierarchical clout. This, of course, had nothing to do with the meeting on Tuesday or the fact that she knew Antony was close to Kenneth and upset-to-fuck.