by Mark Morris
twenty-five
I was back in Alex’s house, sprawled on the carpet, having been shoved into the coffee table. Alex was lying in front of me, a knife sticking out of his chest, his feet making little pedalling, kicking motions. Looming over both of us was the fiend who had done this to my brother, his eyes like the eyes of something dead. I kicked back from him, and rage rushed up inside me.
‘Look what you’ve done!’ I screamed at him. ‘Look what you’ve fucking done!’
Matt didn’t reach down and grab me this time. Instead, as though roused from a trance, his robotic composure fell away. He blinked at Alex and then at me, and his eyes were no longer blank but fearful. All at once he looked less like a monster and more like a stricken schoolboy who had overstepped the mark.
‘It wasn’t my fault!’ he protested. ‘He came at me. He attacked me.’
‘You burst into his house! You had a knife!’
‘But I wasn’t going to use it,’ he said, indignant, defensive.
‘But you did use it, didn’t you? And now it’s too late to take back what you’ve done.’
I scrambled to my feet and made for the phone on the shelf behind the TV.
‘What are you doing?’ he said.
‘I’m getting an ambulance for Alex.’
‘If you tell them what happened the police’ll come.’ He looked scared, trapped.
‘Probably,’ I said and picked up the receiver.
‘No you can’t!’ he shouted and flailed across the room towards me.
I turned to meet him, the receiver still in my hand. I was terrified, traumatized even, but my sense of self-preservation and concern for Alex gave me a poised, agile strength and a ruthlessness I had no idea I was capable of possessing. As Matt came within my range I swung the receiver at him with perfect timing and smashed it into the side of his head. His mouth opened and his eyes flickered and he staggered back. I couldn’t see a wound, but blood suddenly blossomed at the side of his head. He put his long, bony hands, his hateful hands, up to it. I stepped forward, the telephone cord still allowing me plenty of leeway, and hit him again. The sharp clunk of the receiver impacting with his skull was immensely satisfying. He gave a little cry of protest. I hit him again, and again, and again, until he had been forced down on to his knees. Blood ran out of his hair and soaked his shirt, and there were smears of it, sticky as glue, on the telephone receiver. I stepped away from him, turned and dialled 999, and slipped into a kind of funnel of calmness, where for the duration of the call my head was clear and I was as erudite and as concise as I had ever been.
It was only when I put the phone down that I realized how much my arm was aching. Not just aching, but really hurting; I’d put everything into those blows with the telephone receiver. The pain seemed to throb out of my arm into the rest of my body, to set up a chain reaction, and I sank to my knees, my shaking legs suddenly unable to support the weight of my body. After being so together on the phone, my mind now felt slow and soupy, able only to absorb details as sharp little increments of information. I looked at the telephone receiver and saw strands of hair sticking to the blood that was smeared across it. This made me realize that for the last couple of minutes I hadn’t even thought about what Matt might be doing. I turned my head, though seemed able only to do it slowly. Alex was lying on the carpet in a pool of blood, deathly still. Matt was nowhere to be seen.
I crawled across to my brother on spent limbs, my body still shaking. I crooned his name, stroked his hair, terrified of moving him in case it made things worse, snapped the delicate thread of life he might still be clinging to. His eyes were closed which I told myself was a good sign, told myself that it meant he was sleeping, not dead. I was getting his blood all over me, but I didn’t care. I lay down beside him, and that was how the ambulance men found us when they arrived.
I travelled with Alex in the ambulance, but I don’t remember much about it. What I do remember is that one of the ambulance men put a big, warm orange blanket around me and gave me some tea out of a thermos flask. I don’t usually take sugar in my tea, but this had quite a lot of sugar in it and it tasted fantastic. The journey itself passed in a bit of a blur. I think I kept asking whether Alex would be OK, and received vague assurances from the medics that they would do all they could for him.
The wait in the hospital after Alex was wheeled through for emergency surgery was just as dreamlike as the trip in the ambulance had been. I sat in a corridor on a plastic chair, still clutching the orange blanket around me. Nurses appeared every now and again to ask how I was; on a couple of occasions I was even brought a hot drink. A policewoman spoke to me too. She touched my arm and her tone was gentle. I can’t remember any of her questions or what I said in response to them.
There was a constant traffic of people shuffling up and down the corridor, but I registered them only as a lulling, ghost-like tide. I felt numb inside, anaesthetized. I had slipped into a state where I couldn’t quite believe that any of what was happening was real. I don’t think I slept, but I drifted; perhaps one of the medics had given me something in the ambulance to countermand the effects of shock – I honestly can’t remember.
I have no idea what time it was when I heard a deeper voice speak my name. I looked up and saw a portly man in his early fifties, whose iron-grey suit, complete with waistcoat, matched the hair swept theatrically back from his wrinkled brow. Indeed, his whole face was deeply lined, and there were heavy bags under his pale eyes.
‘Miss Gemmill?’ he said again.
‘Yes,’ I said, the word I spoke seeming to come from somewhere else.
‘Miss Gemmill, I’m Dr Lassiter. I’m the surgeon who operated on Alex.’
All at once I was scared. I hadn’t realized until now that I’d been dreading this moment. I wished I could slip back into my dreamlike state of waiting. ‘Yes,’ I said again.
‘Miss Gemmill, Alex fought bravely, and we did all in our power to save him, but I’m afraid his injuries were too severe. He died a little while ago on the operating table. For him the end was very peaceful. I assure you he didn’t feel a thing.’
He spoke with genuine compassion, but his words to me seemed as cold and sharp and lethal as Matt’s blade had been to Alex. I felt myself punctured, torn open. I felt as if a great howling pit were opening beneath my feet. I reached out and gripped the sleeves of the surgeon’s grey jacket. ‘No,’ I pleaded with him, ‘no, no, no.’
‘I’m sorry, Miss Gemmill,’ he said, and he looked sorry, he looked heartbroken, in fact. I felt it all overwhelming me, felt something black spin inside my head, and the next thing I knew I was on the floor, and although I wanted to be left alone, people were pulling at me and talking to me, trying to drag me back into their terrible world, into a place I no longer wanted to be a part of.
I went to be with Alex for a while, and I sobbed over him and whispered his name and stroked his hair and wished with all my heart, with every fibre of my being, that tonight had never happened and that Alex could be alive and restored to me. We never realize how much we take for granted, or how achingly we love someone, until they are taken from us. Each day we carry on as though we’re immortal and nothing is ever going to change. We go through our lives feeling bored or fed up, or at best blasé, little knowing what a wonderful and precious thing it is we’ve got until it is denied us.
‘How am I going to manage without you?’ I whispered and kissed him on his cool cheek. ‘Oh, Alex,’ I said, and then the tears came again and I could say no more.
The policewoman, younger than me by a good five years, drove me home. She came into my flat with me, switched on the lights, preceded me into every room. She was reluctant to leave me, but I insisted that I wanted to be on my own, and eventually she went. She told me that they’d pick Matt up pretty soon, and that I wasn’t to worry because a police car would be patrolling the area, passing in front of my house every five minutes, until they apprehended him.
When she had gone I sat in silence
for a while, hands pressed between my knees. At that moment the thought of Matt coming after me didn’t worry me in the slightest; he had already done the worst thing that he could possibly do. Eventually I got up and went to the window and looked out. After a couple of minutes I saw a police car cruise slowly past the house. I looked at my watch and saw that the time was 1:17 a.m. I waited for the police car to reappear, then consulted my watch again – 1:24. The next time it came around it was 1:30. As soon as it had disappeared round the corner at the top of the road, I grabbed my car keys from their hook above the sink in the kitchen and went downstairs. I’d gone round to Alex’s earlier that evening on the tube, so that I could have a drink, intending to get a cab back or stay over at his place. This meant that my car was still parked out the front. I got into it and drove away.
I drove on autopilot, my subconscious registering signs and signals and responding to them. I headed north, and by the time I got to Preston it was almost dawn. The dark skin of the sky was splitting open to reveal paler wounds. It was no longer the day that Alex had died. Already his death had passed into history.
Without consulting a map, I drove unerringly to the old station where Matt had brought me on Day One. I jolted down the weed-choked dirt road, and came to a halt, with an almost empty tank of petrol, on the cracked, rubbly surface of the car park. The roofless, decaying building in front of me clung tenaciously to what remained of the darkness, like an old man attempting to conceal his sagging nakedness. I got out of the car and walked across to the main entrance, rubble crackling beneath my feet.
The smell of human waste greeted me as I stepped into the ticket office. Coldness fell from above; with the breaking of dawn the building seemed stripped of two roofs, one of timber and slate, the other of darkness. I stepped across the broken glass and traversed pools of discoloured water to reach the rusted turnstile. I gave it a little push, but it refused to move, so I climbed over.
The wind bowling along the platform was like a physical thing, flailing and howling at me. It was only when it whipped my hair about my face that I realized what sort of state I was in. My hair was dry and scratchy, like old twigs, which it took me a moment to realize was because it was covered in dried blood. I looked at my hands. They were covered in flakes of blood too, and my fingernails were packed with it. Feeling as though I was waking up, or coming out of a trance, I looked down at my clothes, and saw that they too were stiff and dark with Alex’s blood. This was his life here. This was the life that had seeped out of him. Suddenly I felt weak and sick and overwhelmed with the horror of what had happened. I stumbled to the edge of the platform, fell to my knees, and threw up on to the overgrown tracks below.
Being sick was like pulling a plug out of me. For the next fifteen or twenty minutes I screamed and wailed and cried and yanked at my hair. I felt close to the brink, felt as though I would be driven mad with grief. Eventually, though, even this subsided, leaving me drained and wretched and lethargic.
After another ten minutes or so I hauled myself to my feet and trudged over to the faded blue door of the waiting room. The door was ajar very slightly. I took a deep breath, then pushed it open.
Pale, cold light angled slyly into the room behind me. I heard a creak and a soft clunk at the same instant I saw Matt. He was in the centre of the room, hovering three feet above the floor, glaring at me. For a moment I thought he’d become the demon I’d latterly thought him to be, but then I saw the hole he’d made in the ceiling, the exposed rafter he’d attached the rope to, the noose around his neck.
epilogue
‘Ruth, there’s someone here to see you.’
I hadn’t heard her coming, but Dr Sykes’s voice was mellifluous enough not to startle me. It was her job to soothe and reassure. That was why I had selected her as an ally, I suppose, during what I now thought of as my battle. I turned and squinted. The noonday sun crowned her strawberry-blonde hair with a dazzling white coronet of slow-burning flame. It threw her face into soft shadow, but I could see that she was smiling.
‘Oh?’ I said.
I was aware of a figure hovering at her shoulder, sensed the uncertainty, the anxiety, of the individual simply by the way that he or she stood. Since re-emerging, as it were, I’d felt … mellow. And I didn’t think that was due wholly to the medication I was still obliged to take. My mind was sharp, clear, precise, uncluttered. I felt newly minted, untouched by the stultifying emotional detritus of the past. All around me people seemed to be rushing hither and thither, their lives fuelled by stress, by the fear of non-achievement. But I was content simply to sit and ponder and recuperate, to allow one day to slip into the next without worrying about the passage of time, about picking up the threads, about needing to get on.
‘Hello, Ruth,’ the figure said, stepping forward to block out the sun. The voice matched the stance: hesitant, uncertain. I was the supposed mental patient, and yet I felt it my duty to put people at their ease.
‘Hi, Kate,’ I said.
‘Kate’s been keeping tabs on your progress, Ruth,’ Dr Sykes said.
‘Or lack of it,’ I replied, and smiled to show I was joking. ‘I know. Keith told me you’ve been ringing up two or three times a week.’
‘I came to visit a few times too. But you weren’t … I mean, I couldn’t seem to get through to you.’
‘I’ll leave you two to it,’ Dr Sykes said and squeezed my shoulder briefly. ‘Don’t go getting sunstroke out here.’
‘She seems really nice,’ Kate said once Dr Sykes was out of earshot.
‘She’s the best,’ I said. ‘She was my greatest friend when I was … I tapped the side of my forehead with my index finger. ‘She helped me get through it.’
Kate was perched on the bench beside me, but she didn’t look particularly relaxed despite the idyllic surroundings. I gazed out on the rolling lawns and the meticulously tended flower beds, took delight in the ever-changing play of light on the leaves of the distant trees as their uppermost branches were ruffled by a gentle wind.
‘And are you through it?’ Kate said. ‘Properly, I mean?’
I nodded. ‘I couldn’t cope with Alex’s death, wouldn’t accept it. Severe post-traumatic stress. I just shut down so I wouldn’t have to face up to it.’
‘But if you shut down, how can you be through it?’ Kate said. ‘I mean, you’ve been catatonic for six months, Ruth. The times I came to see you, you just stared into space. They had to feed you through a drip.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Poor old Keith has had a lot to put up with.’
‘And then one day you just wake up and say you’re fine, you’re over it. But how can you be when you still haven’t faced up to anything?’
‘But I have faced up to it,’ I said. ‘The reason nothing was showing through on the surface was because it was all happening in here. I don’t know what you’d call it – a delusion, a dream, a mental landscape. All I know is that it was as real as this place. And even when it got strange and confusing, even when I didn’t know what was going on, it still felt real.’
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Kate asked.
‘Not really.’ I could see she was hurt by that. I reached out and took her hand. ‘No, I mean, I don’t feel a need to. I thought maybe you thought I did, that you were seeing it as your duty. I mean, I’ll talk to you about it if you really want to listen.’
‘I do,’ Kate said. ‘I’m interested.’
‘All right, then.’ I gave her a potted version of what had happened in Greenwell, of what had happened (the way I saw it) while I had been away. Though I knew the place did not exist on any map, it was as real to me as this world, the world I had re-emerged into. If I had made the wrong choices in Greenwell, if I had allowed the darkness to engulf me, I felt sure I would still be there now, that I might never have found my way back.
‘So part of you must have been conscious then,’ said Kate. ‘To take so many elements from the real world, I mean.’
I nodded. ‘I suppose so, a
lthough I wasn’t even slightly aware of it. Having said that, when I woke up I wasn’t surprised to see that Liz and Keith were real people. I just accepted that they were there. In a way, it was almost as if I’d been expecting it.’
‘So is Keith gay in real life?’ Kate asked a little too innocently.
I thought of Keith in his white nurse’s tunic and dark trousers, which in the real world was all I’d ever seen him wear, and then I thought of him in Greenwell in his linen suit and black polo-neck jumper, and I thought of him naked and kissing me, kissing me between my legs, and in spite of myself I blushed. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s not something we’ve talked about.’
‘He’s a bit of a hunk, though, isn’t he?’ said Kate with a twinkle in her eye.
I laughed. ‘I don’t believe this. I’ve only been back in the land of the living for two minutes and already you’re trying to matchmake.’
‘Am not!’ said Kate, none too convincingly.
I squeezed her hand. ‘I’m so lucky to have a friend like you, Kate. A lot of people would have given up on me.’
‘No one’s given up on you. We all knew you’d pull through. Graham’s been brilliant. On the few occasions that I did start to let myself think that you’d never come back to us, he pulled me out of it by saying that it was just a matter of time, that we just had to be patient.’
‘Good old Graham,’ I said. ‘How is he?’
‘Oh, he’s fine. Working too hard and drinking too much, as usual. He blamed himself for all this at first, you know, says he should have realized sooner there was something not right about Matt. He said sometimes, when they played football together, Matt used to really lose it.’ Then she checked herself. ‘Oh, sorry. Matt’s probably the last person you want to talk about just now.’
I shrugged. ‘He’s dead. He can’t cause me any more pain than he already has. It’s not that it upsets me to talk about him, I just think he’s not worth talking about.’