Soon I was booting up anew, grasping and holding and comprehending his world. My eyes saw what his hands did, and the hands contained an alien intelligence – I knew as soon as I picked up his tools. (Less facile – yet I couldn’t resist – was his pneumatic air hammer, a marvellous toy.) And yet in my new housing behind his eyes, MacCabe’s art simply didn’t interest me. How odd was his eye, how primitive his taste! I knew as sure as the smell of my old self that artworks should be finicked and finessed, not left so coarse and half-finished.
Two blocks of stone were mounted on worktops – one of granite, one I took to be alabaster, both mean lumps, dauntingly large and with an imperfect, fallen-off-a-lorry look to them. A mischievous urge gripped me: if Killian was so ‘respectful’ of his raw materials, then I would do violence to them. I dragged over the air hammer and cylinder, opened the taps, hefted the tool and attacked the granite lump. It was innocent fun as I stabbed about abstractly for a while. Soon I felt the edge crack through, smelt fresh-ground silica. Then something whizzed past my left eye, nicking the cheek near the jaw-line. I touched blood, stood myself down, chastened. Take care, always, with another man’s tools.
I rooted round, found and donned goggles, a dust mask, some distressed and fingerless leather gloves. I took up an angle grinder, fitted a diamond blade and began my assault anew. Within minutes I’d hunted out a long hooked pole, prised open the skylights so the clogging dust-clouds could escape. I broke away stone swiftly, intuitively, my head and hands harmoniously focused. A block of maybe seventy, eighty kilo-weight, this granite was surely meant to be a human figure, a trunk, a torso. Even in the roughest-hewn form there seemed a figurative logic, an assertion in the stone that drove me – even as I grew aware of a numbness in my fingers. But once I understood, belatedly, that the proportion wouldn’t permit me a head, I stood back, pondered, and quit. A body without a face did not interest me. I didn’t care for the direction in which my hands had tacked.
Wondering what would be my next trick, I turned to the alabaster, a two-hundred-pound hunk of delicate pale-white. I stroked its coolness, appreciatively, understanding how easily it could scratch and mark, was not to be assaulted – wanted delicacy, my stock-in-trade. Instantly I had a miniature in mind: I fancied I could make a face.
A mounted pin-board held a tacked-up Polaroid of Malena. I sat down at an old school desk with inkwell, found a large piece of paper, sketched her likeness swiftly in charcoal, concentrating on the elegant bones, fussing the lines here and there until I had a proper approximation of the flow of her glorious features. My schoolboy-ish absorption filled me with glee.
Then Malena was at my shoulder, silently returned from her morning’s messages. And the disdain on her face for my creation was … interesting. Not to say familiar.
* * *
Since I felt no special need to do anything other than enjoy her once again, it seemed a simple matter to tell her in earnest tones that I needed some ‘downtime’, didn’t wish to push myself in the short term, we were okay for money and I had vague plans that needed some days or weeks to percolate. A routine grew up whereby she came home and told me by her knit eyebrows that she knew I wasn’t working my usual days. (Quite – for I’d been out running, swimming, pumping iron, feeling tightness all over my body, propulsion in my legs, heavy-lifting strength in my arms.) I told her I was too busy thinking about her. It didn’t always wash. But in the evenings, without fail, we drank red wine, laughed, made love. In truth I found it hard not to want her in the middle of the day, if she was about. I was sweetness personified, a voracious little boy; she let me have my way and I don’t think regretted it. I slept soundly, though I had ceased to dream, a loss over which I felt mildly wistful. But there was no doubt in my mind I could live on like this; nothing about it seemed beyond my reach.
* * *
Then came that contentedly lonesome afternoon when I wandered out to the garden with the petrol-fuelled hedge-cutter I’d found in a cupboard … I yawned, scratched, lifted the tool aloft over my head – and felt pain, sharp and hot as a soldering iron, in my shoulder. Instantly I turned clinician, palpated my neck. But the examination flagged behind what my inherited memory was telling me. This was a torn rotator cuff, a rugby injury of several years’ vintage, imperfectly healed. I could nearly see in my head, a film of my life, a memory like a physical object – me as he, on a frostbitten pitch, falling hard with all my weight onto an outstretched hand. He should have seen to this properly years ago: cortisone and anti-inflammatory regimens, stepped physical therapy. Instead he’d sucked it up in silence. And in a flash his – my – apparent vigour seemed to me a sham, founded on sand, the structure fallible.
Grimly I knew, I had sleepless nights ahead, my prescribing rights burnt up along with my old identity. I lumbered through to the kitchen, upended a tray of ice into a plastic bag. As I cursed my luck, I was startled by a shadow fleeting across the pale walls. For the first time in what seemed a long while – I wondered where She had taken herself.
The list of what I hadn’t known was to lengthen in the following days. I wanted to romance Malena, do things for her, proposed we take a jaunt overseas. But she cautioned me with her list of commitments. I began my renewed courtship with dinner at ‘our place’, the St John. I wanted to drink, she was all prudish ‘Better not’. But by God she wanted to talk.
Shouldn’t I have better anticipated and respected the shared emotional history of which I was now part? Or did I think it such a trifle next to ‘ours’? At any rate, when Malena referred fondly to ‘how we met’ my blood seemed to chill. Taking my hand, she told me how she’d had to chivvy and prod herself to ‘make the first move’. How could my good mood survive that? You were so eager to be rid of me?
Had I my choice I would have spoken of that day she sallied in on assignment to record the light bouncing off the sleek new surfaces of the Forrest Clinic. How she dallied in my office, asked me charmingly accented, impressively specific questions, then seemed to stop listening to my answers. Had it been the same with MacCabe? More or less? No, I felt it as it flooded me – that had been swifter, irresistible, more physical, the man impressed her before his milieu. They met in a quiet room at a house party, both wanting a moment’s peace – he could have been anybody, in fact he was The One.
For the rest of that wretched dinner only strange and affectless lies fell from my lips, save for my account of the pain in my shoulder, and the need I felt for a bellyful of wine to relieve it. What else can it be but a vain quest for authenticity, when I laugh another man’s laugh and swear on another man’s mother and fuck with another man’s cock? My mood turned sullen, truculent, upset her. That night she slept with her back to me while I brooded. How deep had been my self-hatred, to go out and erase myself? How deep my delusion that I could accept her love in this counterfeit manner?
In the morning I felt a hangover of psychic proportions, the delayed reaction to this insane transmigration. My temper had a new strange edge to it. My head wasn’t right – headspace seemingly teeming with illegals, aliens, remnants of the host consciousness that had always resented my invasion and had now turned insurgent. My hands suddenly looked all wrong for my body. On the toilet, under the showerhead – I felt now that I was mourning my old odour. Because an acute, unpleasant sharpening had occurred, all of a sudden I could smell whole moods and auras in a room.
Before Malena returned home I’d taken the hair of the dog. I cajoled her into bed, only to find myself incapable. As she lifted herself from recumbent, sighing, there seemed to me a sheet of ice formed anew between us. ‘You need to get back to work, Kill,’ she muttered. ‘A project. For your own sake.’
It took me longer than it should have, no doubt the gut-sickness distracted me, but having sought refuge in the studio there was a moment when I contemplated the alabaster and knew what I would do, even as I denied it to myself. I made a new sketch swiftly, from memory.
Then I studied the block for its grain, its fault line
s, trusting myself entirely. I took up pitcher and hammer, knocked out what I knew to be a right-sized piece, a shallow square of thirty pounds or so, large and yet workable. I rinsed it, marked it. As I set it on a sandbag and retrieved my sketch, she wandered in, frowning quite implacably.
‘Don’t worry, it’s not you,’ I said with what I feared was a smirk. In fact her fleeting appearance seemed to foul my concentration, and in the inertia I developed a headache that seemed to wheedle its way needle-like through the corner of my eye. I drank most of a bottle of Nuits-Saints-Georges that failed to shift it. Malena returned, gave me the same grief, I snapped and told her I wasn’t having it, and she stood there like a suffering icon of a faith that was foreign and galling to me.
‘Why are you acting so strange? Making us so miserable?’
‘I am your lover who loves you,’ I told her in forbearance. ‘I’ve always loved you.’
She flounced out. It was evening by now. I wondered if she would be seeking comfort elsewhere for the night. But soon I fell asleep in my bone-hard rocking chair. The next day I was showered, changed and at the coalface before nine, albeit no more active than sat in the chair, nursing my mug of tea. But slowly I dragged myself in front of the stone, resuscitated what had been yesterday’s intention. With the point chisel I began to mark features, nose, lips, eyes – clearing stone from the low areas, leaving the highs of brow, nose, cheekbone, chin. Then the chisel mined into a small lump of quartz. Hateful imperfection! Furious, I abandoned it, lurched over and cut out another thirty-pound piece, resolved to begin anew.
At which point, enter Malena, shy-smiling, thrusting out the little blue-capped plastic wand – proof of life. The anxiety and hopefulness she’d felt – ‘I’ had felt – arose in me sickeningly, had been concealed from me, I knew, only because she had refused diligently to ‘talk up’ those hopes. But now she was radiant.
I looked at the test through clouded eyes. It wasn’t the clearest, but on the side of positive. ‘Faint,’ I said finally.
‘I’ve done two, the first was the same,’ she gushed. ‘Negative is sometimes positive, positive can’t be negative …’
‘And when d’you suppose … the magic worked?’
‘Ten days ago, I’m sure, that’s what I waited for. She was conceived on your birthday, Kill.’
No birthday of mine … Ten days ago my name was still Robert. A cold flush went through me, from scalp to crotch. I knew, suddenly, how long this had been planned, how dearly wished for – even while they were cuckolding me. His wish to be a family man, dovetailing into her yearning broodiness. Would I love this child? Never. What had I been dreaming of? The devastation of what I had done struck me anew, the desperate evil sham of it, to have thieved and padded out another man’s skin, ignorant of the fullness, the plenitude of the life I stole.
She was visibly stiffening as I looked back at her and saw only someone else’s little misfortune. ‘Well … I need to work here,’ I murmured. Tears were coming to her eyes now. She said many things to my back, among them: ‘How could I have misunderstood you so much?’ It seemed then to be her fate.
Early the next morning she packed up and headed off for two days’ work on some film set in Belfast. Stood at the end of the bed she told me we would have to talk. I agreed to whatever I had to. Once she was gone I hurdled the stairs up to the studio.
I carved one chip at a time, my arms wearied, found myself wiping dust off the stone onto myself, and yet liking it, my dirty, sweaty state. The rudiments done, I used a claw and my hand as a vice to clean up and carve the rudimentary shape of the face. Then with toothed chisels I smoothed the faceting left by the chisel, and made the curves pronounced: the streamlined cheekbones, the rounded tip of the nose, the bow and swell of the lips – those defining details. For sure there was a surgeon’s assurance in my process, I knew where to cut and how the stone would respond, what would yield to the edge and how.
Close to completion, content to rest, I felt an urge to treat myself. With night fallen I walked out to a local bar: a youngsters’ joint, big as a barn, thudding with music, beer pumps and a mountain of spirits glowing through the murk. Various girls had formed their own little circles to jiggle about, various blokes forming a wolfish perimeter. One girl with her midriff bared brushed by me, and I fought the urge to strike her. A girl with a cross tattooed on her shoulder asked my name.
‘Robert,’ I whispered in her ear under the din.
She whispered back that she thought me ‘a bit of a sort’. She knocked back a shot with me. I grabbed the back of her head, pulled her in for a kiss. Then some thunder-faced skinhead was shoving me and bawling me out for ‘fucking about’ with ‘his’ girl. I was happy to step outside, liking my odds in this scrap, and I settled it in one with a head-butt that caught the eejit entirely and remarkably by surprise.
Thereafter I drank several more shots, eventually led that girl out back near to where the bins were shuttered. As I pressed her against the wall, pain shot through me – irradiated me. The heart raced, the vital organs clenched in agony. I was bent double, could feel a loathsome inner quickening, as if I were being eaten, internally necrotised.
I vomited. The girl straightened her string underwear, rehoused her left breast, sashayed away, left me behind. I had to wait some minutes before I had strength in my limbs to get off the ground, but the pain remained. I had filled another man’s skin, now it felt as though I were leaking out of it again, draining away. Paying the toll.
* * *
Alone still, I returned to ‘my work’ with a new, frantic urgency, trying to ignore my discomfort, a headache that was a stony throb in my temples and back teeth. I used a rasp file to perfect the face’s complexion, remove all marks. With a riffler I made the back of the thing a concave hollow, and then, impulsively, decided to remove the carved eyes, leaving blank sockets. Then I sanded, working my way delicately down to the finest grades, cleansing away the scratches, clouding the air with talcum – my lady in make-up. Once it was dry I took a soft cloth, waxed it to a sheen, made a bed for it on the black velvet of an old jewel case. My work filled me with a strange, grim pride. Having admired it in three dimensions, I fell into the rocking chair and there slept.
I awoke to darkness all around save for a rectangle of bluish white marked on the floor by the moon through the skylight. From ten feet the mask stared sightlessly at me. At first I thought its voice was in my head. Then the lips of the mask moved. There was life behind the void of those sockets.
‘Doctor. Why do you summon me?’
‘I’d begun to think I was … abandoned. Left to my devices.’
‘No. In our business with man no account is ever closed.’
‘I’m sick – if you didn’t know. Nothing’s right any more … It’s come over me, the wrongness of what I am, has taken hold, is what I feel.’
‘The flesh is unstable. Yes. I believe, then … your hold on this form is not tenable.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘The body itself rejects you, is allergic to you somehow. Your tenancy is being revoked. A chronic rejection.’
‘No, I don’t understand that.’
‘Of course you do, doctor. As your immune system rejects alien cells that are ill-matched. This was the risk. Our bargain could never have been thought free of it.’
‘No risk you ever warned me of.’
‘We were concerned only with your need. And it was great. Come, if I could offer you now – the push of a button? Could you bear to be Robert Forrest again?’
‘Oh Christ yes, so gladly …’
The voice cut through. ‘That was not our bargain. But, time I have sold you, time you will have. It is time, I think, for you to move on. Gone from here.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You know this already, doctor. There is no immunosuppressant for what ails you. But another donor may make you the match you require. You must take flight again, take possession of another vessel.’
&n
bsp; ‘You mean kill again, die again, go through it all again …’
‘Yes. And waste no time about it either. Understand, if you die in this body, doctor, then you are lost. Your debt is realised. I will collect.’
The taunting, the treachery was so foul I needed a hand on my belly to quell my gut. In the other I nursed my head, groaned. ‘No, no, I can’t stand it.’
‘You have no choice. Only one means to minister to yourself. Take another life. And choose with care. Perhaps this time the choice will be apt.’
‘Who am I supposed to prey on now?’
She laughed. ‘Must I do everything for you? Think, doctor. Whom else do you despise? What else do you covet? Or might it be a kinder form of murder if you stole the life of someone you loved? Think on it, think hard. But fast. The hourglass is upended and set.’
I heard noises below stairs. My love, returned at last, to save me from doom?
‘I would add only this. Set your sights on an individual you can … overpower, conquer? With ease. Perhaps also one who has few ties to the world, one whose withdrawal from life would not be much lamented. I do believe you may find such people anywhere. They litter the streets. Little waifs and strays …’
Her voice faded. The mask was once more inert. I got to my feet, felt impotent rage throbbing through me. I snatched up the heavy hammer, attacked the hateful face, annihilated it with a flurry of pounding blows. Some filthy Irish whiskey had been skulking on a shelf, now I opened it and drank, felt its heat to be good, encouraging of my instinct to smash up this prison of mine. At some stage Malena snuck in, fearful, realised at once she should not have. But I was done with the rage and the whiskey, drained of strength and frightened as a child, when the door creaked open once more and, to my horror, Grey stepped warily inside. I remember nothing of what got said between us – only that his concerned face, his dependable shoulder, were anguish to me, reminded me anew of everything I’d lost.
The Possessions of Doctor Forrest Page 28