Never Ending

by Martyn Bedford

  Declan, doing a backflip off the springboard.

  The clinic has chosen ones that show her brother at his most energetic, most vital. Look how alive he is! How happy! She didn’t mind the night-time picture shows in her bedroom but these moving images of the life she snuffed out are unbearable, especially right after the days of death shots.

  With them comes sound. Dec talking, shouting. Laughing.

  Hearing his voice shocks Shiv into the revelation she will never hear him speak again. Never hear his silly jokes, his clever riffs, his witty sarcasm, his funny accents, his stupid yodel-singing. Never hear his voice break from boy’s to man’s. Never hear him at the end of a phone, pretending to be the answering machine. Never hear him shout at her to hurry up in the bathroom. Never hear him say her name.

  Of course, she hasn’t heard his voice in all the months since the night he died, except in her dreams and her imagination. But it has taken till now – taken this, Declan yelling, “Watch and weep, Shivoloppoulos!” as he backflips into the pool – to lay it bare for her.

  She has condemned her brother to eternal silence.

  13

  Dec looks well. Tanned and smiley, spinning a volleyball on the tip of his middle finger. For a second, it looks as though he’s mastered it, then the ball reels off and thumps on to the sand.

  “You were such a pain that day,” Shiv says. “D’you remember?”

  Over and again, he tries to perfect the trick, Mum recording every attempt. You can hear her in the background, alternating between words of encouragement and bursts of laughter. They’re meant to be starting a game, two-a-side, but her brother insists on keeping them waiting while he shows off his ball-spinning skill.

  “It made you so cross that you couldn’t do it.”

  There he is, being cross. “I could do it before,” he says, on the footage.

  Like it’s their fault – Shiv’s for watching, Mum’s for filming, even though he’d nagged her to. The clip ends with a freeze-frame: Dec’s face half obscured by the volleyball, the ball and his hand blurred, the forearm encrusted with sand as though afflicted by some strange skin condition.

  “Then Dad took the ball off you and did a perfect spin. D’you remember?” She laughs; on the wall, he does too. “That really pissed you off.”

  Shiv gets up, crosses the room. Touches the image. Tries to brush the sand off his arm. As she does so, the picture dissolves beneath her fingertips, mutating into a photo of her brother’s lumpy, tarpaulin-covered corpse.

  Like the wall’s electrified, Shiv jerks her hand away. Almost immediately, the freeze-frame of Dec with the volleyball reappears.

  “Dr Pollard reckons I have a demon inside me,” she says, after a moment, trying to steady her breathing. “Reckons I have to be exorcised.” Declan passes no comment. Shiv smiles to herself. Then, serious again, “They never blamed me.”

  Who?, he doesn’t ask.

  “Mum and Dad. The police. Anyone, really.” She realizes she is about to touch the wall again and stops herself before the image changes. “It’s your fault. If it wasn’t for you, he’d still be alive – they all think it, but no one has ever said it to my face.”

  Dec is quiet still.

  “Do you think it? Do you blame me?”

  Silence.

  “You do. Why wouldn’t you?”

  A partially obscured smile. A ball. A blurry hand. A sand-encrusted arm. A flare of irritation ignites inside her; she snuffs it out. He’s only twelve years old, after all. Dec should be angry with her, not the other way round.

  “When I came here, I told Dr Pollard I had to find some way to live with what I did to you.” Her voice is breaking up. “But how can I? How can I live with it?”

  Declan has nothing to say to her.

  The next day, in PTU, there are no images at all. Just a soundtrack.

  Barking dogs. For ten minutes at a time, every half an hour for four hours.

  Not just any barking but a ferocious din so loud, so savage, the beasts might burst into the room at any moment and tear her to pieces. Shiv can’t see them, but she’s sure they’re the ones from the tree dream, waiting for her to fall from her branch.

  Shiv talks about the dogs in Talk, writes about them in Write. Explains to the group about her nightmare and how the dogs fit into the events of Dec’s last night. His very last moments. It doesn’t help; if anything, she’s more traumatized by them than when she was in that room. From what the others say, and read out, the morning sessions are pushing all the residents into what Dr Pollard calls the “endgame” – forcing them to relive the last hours and minutes of their lost ones’ lives. In Kyritos, the dogs were an odd but irrelevant detail; nothing to do with Dec’s death really. Or so it had felt at the time. Now, it’s like they go to the very core of what happened. Like the dogs are outraged by Shiv, driven demented by witnessing what she did to her brother. Like they’re judging her.

  Of course, she knows the soundtrack isn’t the actual dogs, that night. But it might as well be.

  Looking around the circle of haunted faces in S-10 as Sumner calls Write to a close, Shiv sees she’s not alone in being taken to the darkest, deepest reaches of herself. If this stage is meant to drive out her demons, to exorcise her guilt, it’s having the opposite effect. At no time since Declan died has Shiv hated herself as much as she does right now.

  Back in her bedroom, she aims to take a long shower with the water full-blast, in the hope it washes away the dogs’ stink and drowns out their relentless barking. She twists the dial to let the water run hot while she strips off. But the glimpse of the Salinger T-shirt as she unzips her top stalls her in the middle of the bathroom.

  Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

  “Why did you even wear this shirt, Dec?” she says out loud. “You were always talking to people, making friends. Telling them stuff.”

  A memory comes back to her. She’s about four years old, maybe three and a half, and she’s in the back lounge, with its scratchy red carpet, dressing her dolls for a tea party. Declan toddles over with his shape-sorter, wanting her to play. She’s playing with her dolls, she tells him. He starts to cry. And that’s it – the dolls are set aside and Shiv sits on the floor with her brother, taking turns to slot coloured wooden blocks into the round-, the square-, the triangular-, the diamond-shaped holes, then tipping them all out and starting over again.

  Shiv continues standing there for a moment. Then she finishes undressing and steps into the shower cubicle and stands under the water for the longest time.

  And then this: Declan on board Poseidon IV.

  Even though he’s sitting on one of the benches, he sways exaggeratedly with the motion of the boat, as though it was being tossed about in a typhoon. He’s in his red swimming shorts, his skin the colour of honey. Mum, filming, tells him to “stop jigging about”, her voice fractured by buffeting wind and the swish-swoosh of the sea. Just then, one of the other passengers – the old English lady – passes Dec something and an uncertain smile flickers across his lips.

  “Hold it out,” Shiv can hear her mother say.

  Her brother extends his hand towards the camera, palm upwards. The picture jerks a bit, fuzzing in and out of focus as Mum zooms in for a close-up.

  The dried-out corpse of a baby turtle.

  Shiv puts a hand to her mouth. How have they managed to mend it, to make it whole again after she— But, of course, that happened later. When they were back home, just the three of them, and she finally got round to unpacking her suitcase. She’d forgotten the creature was there, buried among her clothes, in its pink tissue-paper wrapping. The moment she came across it, Shiv carried it out to the bathroom, snapped the turtle into little pieces and flushed them down the toilet. Three flushes it took, to get rid of them all.

  Even as she tells herself the footage on the boat was shot before she did that – and that it’s perfectly rational for the turtle to be intact in this film – a part
of Shiv’s brain can’t make any sense of these images at all.

  On the wall, Mum zooms in closer still.

  So close, so super-enlarged, Shiv can make out individual scales of blackened, desiccated skin and partially formed shell, the tiny pits where its eyes would have been. And the backdrop, filling most of the space between floor and ceiling: Declan’s hand, the creases in his palm and the joints of his fingers encrusted with grains of sand, or maybe salt, which wink like diamonds in the sun’s sharp glare … the whorls and swirls of his fingerprints … and, where the base of his thumb meets his wrist, a bluish-white artery pulses beneath the skin with the beat-beat-beat of his blood.

  All morning, the film is replayed. Over and over. Its images, she knows, will worm their way into her dreams tonight (if she sleeps).

  For the rest of the day, Shiv can’t erase them from her mind – like when you look directly at the sun, and spots of light and colour swim in your vision even after you look away. Except, these images stay with her for hours on end, as though the dazzling Greek sunshine in that footage has burned the pictures onto her retina.

  “How was your session?” Shiv asks.

  Mikey shrugs. “Same.”

  Sometimes he tells her about the pictures and footage he sees during PTU but, mostly, he doesn’t. He shoves his fingers roughly through his hair. They’re in his room (no longer a “cell” but a bedroom again), sitting at opposite ends of the bed, Mikey in his yellow jumpsuit – the one throwback to his convict period.

  “How about yours?” he says.

  Shiv describes the film of Declan on Poseidon IV. Mikey knows all about the boat trip from the stuff she’s said in Talk and read out in Write.

  “I should’ve guessed they’d show that sooner or later,” she says.

  Declan’s death began there, on that beautiful, perfect day. Everything that followed over the days and weeks and months to come started with her snorkel kit snagging in her hair; with Nikos fixing it; with where that led. Where Shiv led it. If they hadn’t gone on that boat trip, Declan would still be alive and Shiv wouldn’t be sitting here in the Korsakoff Clinic, talking to Mikey.

  But they did.

  “D’you ever think of the thousands of ways it might’ve happened differently?” Shiv asks. “With Phoebe, I mean.”

  Mikey looks at her. “All the time.”

  “My old counsellor used to go on about that. Like Dec dying was just a fluke – as random as being struck by lightning. Like I wasn’t responsible – I was just unlucky. I swear, she actually expected me to believe that.”

  “It’s why they show us all this stuff in PTU,” Mikey says. “From back before it happened, you know?”

  “What, to torture us with all the moments when we could’ve stopped it?” Shiv shakes her head. “I don’t need their help to do that.”

  He taps his skull. “She likes to mess with our heads.”

  She. Dr Pollard. When it’s just the two of them, he often lets slip his true feelings about this place. Publicly, though, Mikey is a good boy since the switch to Phase 2. No resistance, no kicking off, no trying to hurt himself. The clinic is giving this new Mikey the benefit of the doubt – putting him back on the same daily routine as everyone else, lifting the restrictions he was under, scaling down the supervision.

  Shiv suspects that he hopes to lull the staff into lowering their guard. Part of his master plan, whatever that might be. If she asks what he’s up to, he acts like he has no idea what she’s on about.

  “I still talk to Declan,” she says. Despite Phase 1, she doesn’t need to add.

  Mikey just waits for her to say something else. He has always denied talking to his sister, or “seeing” her, but Shiv isn’t sure she believes him.

  “That’s messing with our heads, isn’t it?” she goes on. “They spend the whole of Phase 1 making us see how delusional we are, then they lock us in a room for four hours a day with wall-to-wall movies of the people we’re supposed to let go of.”

  “What would you do differently?” Mikey asks.

  “What?”

  “On that boat. If you could go back in time, like.”

  “Oh.” The sudden switch back to their earlier topic throws her for a moment. The question itself throws her. “I, um, I guess…” She’s about to say she wouldn’t go on the boat in the first place, or that she’d make sure not to come on to Nikos, but she knows neither answer would be true. The thought of erasing the time she spent with Nikos – the turtle trip, the windsurfing, heading up the mountain to see the vulture, playing football on the beach, dancing in the street, drinking beer and kissing on the rocks… They were the best, the happiest, days of her life.

  “The last evening,” she says, trying to keep her voice steady. “That’s what I’d do differently. I’d stay in, playing cards.” She nods, wipes her face, takes a deep breath. “That’s what I’d do. I’d play cards with my brother.”

  Most people look away when you cry in front of them; Mikey goes on gazing at her face. No telling from his expression whether he’s sympathetic or what he’s thinking. Shiv likes his matter-of-factness. If she has to cry, he lets her get on with it.

  “How about you?” she says, at last. “What would you do differently?”

  “I’d keep hold of Feebs’ hand.”

  “Even if it meant you got swept away too? Even if you both drowned?”

  He nods. “Even if.”

  That silences them for a while. Mikey sits at his end of the bed, gnawing a thumbnail. Avoiding eye contact, self-conscious all of a sudden. Hunched up like a skinny Buddha or some homeless kid begging in a shop doorway. The big brother with no little sister to be big brother to.

  She told him, right after it happened, what Caron had called him that time. Your little brother. And what Dr Pollard suggested down at the lake, about Shiv and Mikey being drawn to each other as surrogate brother and sister.

  “Is that how you see us?” Shiv asked him.

  “No,” he replied, once she’d explained what “surrogate” meant.

  “Good. Me neither.”

  Even so, they were awkward with each other for a couple of days after that. Looking at him now, Shiv finds herself mentally ticking off all the ways in which Mikey is nothing like her brother, or any kind of brother to her. But if Declan was here, in this place with her (how could that ever happen?), she knows they would be sitting at opposite ends of his bed, or hers, talking like this.

  “I wanted to be sent to prison.” She gestures at Mikey’s jumpsuit. “Wanted to make a confession so they’d have to charge me with something, the Greek police.” Mikey is studying her intently. “But the lawyer Dad hired – he wouldn’t let me.”

  “It’s not up to him,” he says. “Not up to any of them.”

  Any of them. Lawyers, police, social workers, magistrates. Psychotherapists. Counsellors. Parents. This clinic. Who were they to absolve, to forgive, to choose for her – to choose treatment over punishment?

  Kyritos

  It was too hot to spend another moment on the lounger. Shiv sat up, sweat trickling down her back. She squinted at the pool’s dazzling surface; the thought of plunging into the water sent a cold thrill through her veins.

  Mum called over to her from the shade of the pergola, where she and Dad were playing quoits. “Sure you won’t join us?”

  Shiv shook her head.

  Dad, collecting the hoops for his turn, didn’t look up. He’d hardly spoken to Shiv since the furious quarrel that followed his return from confronting Nikos.

  Jesus, the thought of him at the jetty, waiting for the boat to come in.

  A couple of hours later, he’d come back. Through her open bedroom window she’d heard her parents talking down below, on the patio.

  “You didn’t hit him, did you?” Mum had said.

  “No, of course not. But I thought his father was going to.”

  There was a pause. Then, Mum again, “So, what did Nikos say?”

  “He says it didn’t go an
y further than kissing.”

  When Mum asked if he believed him, Dad said he did – the lad had looked genuinely shocked and remorseful.

  Shiv went downstairs then – ran down, banging the patio doors open and yelling, tripping over her words. “You didn’t believe me, did you?”

  “Siobhan—”

  “You believed Declan and now you believe Nikos, but when I—”

  “He said you lied about your age.” She had never seen Dad so angry. “Said he wouldn’t have come anywhere near you if he’d known you were a child.”

  “A child? He never said that!”

  “Those were his exact words. And, like it or not, that’s what you are – a child, a fifteen-year-old girl. And fifteen-year-olds on holiday with their family do not sneak off at night with nineteen-year-old men. Christ, Shiv, anything could’ve happened.”

  “You know what, I really wish it had.”

  Dad thumped one of the dining chairs. “He could have raped you!”

  Declan was standing there. Shiv hadn’t even heard him come outside. “Happy now?” she said, rounding on him.

  Her brother shrugged. “I wasn’t the one who went off with Nikos.”

  “Why should it bother you so much what I get up to with him anyway?”

  “It doesn’t.” But she saw his fear over where she was going with this.

  She went there anyway. “Unless you’re jealous, of course.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Yeah? Is that it? Do you wish—”

  “Siobhan,” Mum said, “that’s enough.”

  Declan had tears in his eyes. “Just … shut up!”

  Shiv stood up, her skin unpeeling from the plastic surface of the lounger, and stepped gingerly across the hot flagstones to the poolside. She dived right in.

  The shock of the cold was exhilarating, just the best feeling.

  She could gladly have stayed there. Down in the depths, among the bubbles and eddies, with the thrumming in her ears, and the shafts of sunlight glimmering on the pale blue sides of the pool. She surfaced with a gasp.

  “Don’t burn up there, will you?” This was Mum, stepping out from under the pergola to call up to Declan, one hand raised to shield her eyes. “Dec, love?”