The Man Without

by Ray Robinson

  Mismanagement 101: kick them when they’re down.

  But at the end of the review she went,

  — Where would you like to be be be in say three years ti-time, Antony?

  Without hesitation, — Sitting where you’re sitting, but doing a good job.

  Trudy smiled appreciatively as she jotted it down.

  As he was leaving the Centre he got a text from Jade, asking when they were going to see each other again.

  He thumbed a reply but couldn’t press send.

  * * *

  He listened to the purr of the receiver, imagining Lizzie sitting in the darkening living room, TV switched off, staring at the ringing telephone as the evening closed around her like sleep.

  * * *

  The psych was always five or ten minutes late. He’d come into the waiting room and give Antony a solemn nod and then the two men would walk the narrow corridor in silence.

  What Antony hated most about the therapy room was its sparseness: there were no paintings on the walls and the beat furniture hadn’t been upgraded for at least twenty years and it was slightly too small for the lanky psych who was always fidgeting, twisting his creepy long limbs in an attempt to get comfy.

  He was in his late fifties, which Antony found both reassuring—he’d obviously heard, and seen, a lot of shit over the years—but at the same time worrying—perhaps he’d become jaded by it all? (The latter would explain why the psych was frequently stifling yawns.) He had a comb-over and wore thick glasses, behind which his tiny eyes punctured you.

  There were the customary few uneasy seconds while they both gawped at each other, willing the other to start. Between them sat a box of man-sized Kleenex on a small glass-top table.

  Antony decided to stop editing his thoughts.

  — This might sound glib and ridiculous, he said, but just because I considered throwing myself under a train, does that necessarily mean I’m depressed? I mean I’ve entertained ideas like that all my life. And these pills they prescribed me. I mean?

  The psych repositioned himself and said, — Tell me about the first time you met your father.

  Antony inhaled raggedly and turned his face to the window.

  He recalled that journey back from the prison, the road stretching away from a relationship that had taken its first breath. How in the distance he could see the massed, snowy horizon of home, and he’d looked at those hills and they made him wonder about the space between things. He remembered the parallel lines of electricity cables running along the side of the road, extending into the distance where everything appeared to meet, and it felt as if his life was going in reverse. As if his life was a constant process of retreat.

  * * *

  A few hours later, he found himself standing in his tiny kitchen, staring blindly into the cutlery drawer. The sessions with the psych—he wondered what was going to happen, and why he felt like he was describing someone else’s life. He knew there would be a time when he’d have to tell the psych about what he did in the wardrobe, about the woman who slid in and out of his life, about the girl crying in the room next door, except there was no room next door. And what happened, he wondered, if he unravelled himself so completely there was nothing left.

  He picked a large knife out of the drawer. His reflection along the blade: distorted, cambered. He ran his thumb lightly over the serrated edge, remembering how the tree had shivered nervously in the wind outside the therapy room window.

  He inhaled sharply, dropping the knife, sucking the ferric-tasting blood from his thumb, and moved over to the window. The city outside, cloaked in a drab grey fog that smothered the neon and streetlights.

  He squeezed his thumb. Smeared blood across the glass.

  * * *

  The welcome surprise of Lizzie’s voice.

  — I just wanted to know, she said. Would you come with me tomorrow?

  He moved his face back into the light above the mirror.

  — Where?

  — The unit. Where Kenneth. Where he’s going to be…

  Static clicked and clacked down the line as she paused.

  Antony tapped the brush on the lid, blending the powder above his left eye in a concentric motion towards the brow bone.

  — Lizzie?

  — Sorry.

  — Will Kenneth be coming with us?

  — No, he won’t.

  Antony turned his back on his reflection and listened to her breathe.

  — Are you OK?

  — No, she said. I’m not.

  — So when will Kenneth be moving to the unit?

  She swallowed audibly, then said quietly, — Next week.

  Quick work, Antony thought.

  — Give me the address, he said. I’ll meet you there.

  * * *

  He screwed the hook-eyes in and tied the keys, passing the cordage and chain over the clothes pole, hands moving in a fluid, intuitive performance.

  He could have been sleepwalking again.

  He rammed the lacy knickers into his mouth and pulled some low deniers over his head, fastening them with a studded leather choker.

  He smiled. He knew how hideous it made him look.

  Then he stood on the chair and padlocked, hooked, looped, and threaded. Then he hooked and looped again, and then snapped the heavy padlock shut beneath his hair. One more pass, one more turn, terminating at his wrists.

  He hesitated for second, but didn’t padlock it. Dead Man’s Release. With a thrust of his head, he yanked the closet door closed. Heard the final lock SNAP.

  In the darkness he saw the smudged colours, the green sparks ranging behind his eyes as his heart punched its liquid Morse.

  His toes began their excited waggle, anticipating the hangman’s dance.

  Smelt his own sweet sweat. Felt the silent lull.

  She was almost there.

  He moved forwards, feeling the edges of the chair with his toes,

  and slowly, slowly,

  let his feet

  slide

  o

  f

  f

  * * *

  She breathes for him. He travels so far the planet becomes a periwinkle iris in a black void, and every star is a woman hanging in the sky. She helps him leave, and when he slips into that moment between life and death it’s like drowning, like falling into the deepest of sleeps and he never wants to wake. But she helps him fight in his closet, kicking out wildly, blindly. She dances in the sparks, and the flower that blooms before his eyes are her hands unfurling as she holds him there, suspended, until he’s released. That invisible line that led him into the night got caught around his neck. Dancing in the colours that range behind his eyes, dancing in the sibilant sound that fills his skull, her body lit-up in spark-light as his life flickers off and on.

  She holds him there.

  She holds him.

  5.

  He drew the curtains and put U2’s ‘Beautiful Day’ on the stereo. After two months, he believed he could feel something in his brain being rewired, the mirtazapine simultaneously blocking his alpha2 receptors while provoking his 5HT2 and 5HT3 receptors. These facts, they gave him such a hard-on.

  He went and stood in front of the bathroom mirror and smiled at himself, reciting the list of words he and the psych had compiled together, scrawled across the bathroom mirror in the hottest vermillion lipstick. They were meant to help him triumph over the blueprint that had so far steered his life:

  A lack of confidence

  Eating too little

  Tasmanian Devil nutter moments

  Hopelessness

  Self-centredness

  Excessive drinking and drugging

  Having his head stuck up his own arse

  Not being able to enjoy life

  Being unable to share

  A total lack of concentration

  Inability to be anything resembling a friend

  His fucked-up circadian rhythms

  Wanking ten-times-a-day like a caged chimpanzee />
  And feeling, generally, quite manky inside.

  So his daily introduction to himself was now fortified with constructive, affirmative feelings—words, floating before his reflected face, which he recited at the top of his lungs while smiling beatifically. Yeah! But every word he’d written on the mirror was a word he’d use to describe the experience of hanging himself for kicks. He had yet to tell the psych this.

  * * *

  He thought they had everything sorted. Just platonic, you know. Besides, she knew getting tangled up with him would be emotional suicide. But when he hugged Jade goodbye at the station that day, she moved her head and fleetingly, clumsily, their lips glanced. It was hardly dry-humping, tonsil-tickling, nipple-tweaking action right there on the platform, but he pulled away and she looked, well: crestfallen. This constant to-and-froing between them—he knew there’d be a point when she’d get sick of it. Who’d blame her? She could have had anyone she wanted. He should’ve gone back to hers. Should’ve Gone-With-The-Moment.

  But he couldn’t and didn’t know why.

  * * *

  He was in the middle of showing Derek and Lerch how to make butterfly cakes when Derek beckoned him.

  — Antony?

  — What?

  — Come. Here. Closer.

  Antony thought that Derek was trying, for once, to be discreet about the sudden smell in the room, of Lerch filling his nappy.

  Antony put his ear next to Derek’s mouth and Derek whispered, — Wanker.

  Behind him came the sound of choking as Lerch set in motion his version of laughter. Then Derek started. Then Antony started. The three of them laughing as Derek began a long, staccato fart, like the sound-effect from a horror movie.

  At times like these Antony loved his job.

  Belly aching, he pushed Lerch out into the corridor.

  * * *

  His progress in the sessions over the first two months could be summarized thus: he circled, he span, he skirted, he sidestepped. There were hours of either non-stop shit-talk or staring into the Blank Place. Usually the psych just sat there, lanky limbs twined in the too-small chair and that expression on his face: opaque. Antony viewed their doctor-patient relationship thus: the taxpayer was paying the psych to allow Antony to lay steaming turds into his expansive, shit-container head.

  — Tell me what to do with all of this stuff inside of me.

  He blurted it all out and for what? To hear his own voice bouncing off the walls. Then, out of the blue, the psych said it,

  — There’ll be a time in the future when you’ll need to speak to her.

  He meant his mother.

  — To get closure.

  Antony told the psych to go fuck himself and stormed out.

  * * *

  THE WHITE COATS. Is this a FLASHBULB MEMORY? Is it REAL? Could this serve as a cue to retrieve further biographical information? Have I found a way in?

  * * *

  He got to the unit twenty minutes earlier than his allotted visiting time of noon. He wanted to meet Lizzie on her way out. To catch up.

  When he visited the unit with Lizzie that first time, he thought I wouldn’t be surprised if they had an electroshock room. The place was like a prison, total Cuckoo’s Nest. Lizzie said nothing but Antony could see it in her eyes: one hundred per cent guilt.

  Kenneth had been living there for two weeks by now. They said he was having trouble ‘getting settled’, hence this was Antony’s first proper visit to see him. He was hoping Kenneth hadn’t forgotten his name.

  As he walked towards the front gate, he saw Lizzie getting into a car. He shouted at her but she didn’t seem to hear. That’s when he saw the man behind the wheel. Lizzie put her head down as they drove on by. When Antony looked back towards the unit, he saw Kenneth at an upstairs window, staring down into the front garden, forehead pressed against the glass. He must’ve seen. He must. But he would have forgotten as soon as he saw it. An after-burn of anger he didn’t understand.

  Antony was shown to Kenneth’s room.

  Kenneth looked grizzled, unkempt, drawn. Salt and pepper speckled stubble, clothes stale, stinking. He gave Antony a look of recognition but refused to meet his eye.

  Antony noticed there were no labels on the doors or cupboards. No wall chart. No informational hub.

  Antony stepped towards him and said, — What’s my name?

  Kenneth replied flatly, — Leave me alone.

  * * *

  He asked to see Kenneth’s key worker. She took him into her office.

  — Why isn’t Kenneth shaved?

  — He’s taking longer to adjust than we expected. Nothing to worry about.

  She coughed falsely. Her breath was a wave of fish.

  — We’re used to aggressive clients, but Kenneth’s language?

  — Fuck Kenneth’s language, it’s his well being I care about. What about his aide-mémoirs? His Care Plan?

  — We’ve started using the file you’ve put together. Believe me, we have highly trained staff here. We’ll do everything we can to assist Kenneth.

  — How many times has Lizzie been to see him? Is this, like, respite forever?

  — She comes every Saturday morning without fail.

  — And Sarah?

  The woman looked over his shoulder.

  — Sarah refuses to come.

  * * *

  He found Kenneth watching a huge television with a group of about twenty residents in the Leisure Room. The television was deafeningly loud and no one spoke or looked at each other and no one seemed to register Antony was there.

  Antony spotted the upright piano against a wall. He crouched beside Kenneth.

  — Have you had a go on the piano yet? Fancy knocking off a tune?

  Kenneth looked at him slowly and mouthed silently, — Fuck. Off.

  * * *

  On the bus home, Antony watched the streets rolling by, thinking about Kenneth in that place at night, alone with his slippery ruminations, wondering where Lizzie is and why he was in that shit-hole in the first place.

  Kenneth didn’t know that man had walked on the moon or that the Vietnam War was over or that the Berlin Wall had been torn down. He didn’t know about Live Aid, Bloody Sunday, the poll tax riots, the Guildford Four, the Hyde Park bombings, the Lockerbie disaster, the Euro or Blair’s landslide victory. He didn’t even know that Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and John Lennon and Elvis Presley were dead, or that scientists had cracked DNA and cloned one ugly fucking sheep. But Antony was certain Kenneth was aware that he was not at home, that he did not wake up to Lizzie every morning, and that his memory loss was to blame.

  He pictured Kenneth walking figure of eights.

  * * *

  The bus left Todmorden train station and snaked its way up onto ‘the tops’, driving through amber moorland that sparkled beneath the bright emptiness of the evening sky. Jade’s village was the final stop, an ancient clutter of black stone cottages and slippery cobbled streets. He found the graveyard where Jade said Sylvia Plath was buried and headed towards a long row of terraced houses. He stopped to check the map she’d drawn and heard a tapping noise coming from a window.

  She opened the front door.

  — Now then, he said.

  She squinted at him.

  — Now then what?

  They hugged tightly. She recoiled, frowning.

  — You stink of perfume.

  — It’s close contact work.

  He said it too quickly and it surprised him.

  — I either smell of perfume or shit, he added. Which would you prefer?

  He followed her inside, the Morse of his heart beating liar, liar, liar.

  The house had been newly refurbished: treated wooden beams and exposed stonework and a fancy modern kitchen of brushed-stainless steel and pricey walnut floors. But every room was filled with the pervasive after-stench of veggie cooking and joss sticks.

  — My flatmate’s just gone to the offie. She’s looking forward to meeting y
ou.

  Antony wondered what Jade had told her.

  They entered a large, attic bedroom, and Antony scanned Jade’s open wardrobe, the array of cosmetics on her dressing table. He felt a judder of excitement.

  She opened the Velux window and they looked out over the barren moors.

  — It’s amazing, he said, what you get on benefits nowadays.

  She elbowed him.

  — The lowest form of wit.

  They stood beside each other, looking out beyond the graveyard towards a mill on a distant hillside. He listened to her breathing beside him; soft sounds, soft lips. It was such a pure moment and he felt an overwhelming urge to embrace her, but he made a stupid joke and they went back downstairs.

  Jade’s flatmate had returned with a few skanky, weirdy-beardy friends. Three had guitars and one a pair of bongos. Antony groaned inwardly.

  They clocked him straight away for being a bit older, a lot ‘straighter’, certainly better dressed and definitely in gainful employment, but as soon as he pulled out the bag of goodies he’d procured from his dealer, well, quell surprise, they suddenly wanted to talk to him.

  — Hey man, so where you from?

  — Hey dude, got any skins?

  He did a sneaky-pete double-drop and watched the night break.

  * * *

  Half-sentences and splintered dialogue, tales unfinished amid earnest drivel, cigarettes hanging off lips, people on pause, over-the-top laughter and paranoid whats? A few huddled deranged in the kitchen, high on Absinthe. The world looks like a Van Gogh painting, one of them said. Jade sat cross-legged in front of her flatmate, their foreheads touching as they talked.