She faltered slightly as she nosed into the next line of foam, rose to it, and sailed smoothly on. She sailed like a dream over the pearly gray dawn sea, rising and falling steadily to the rhythm of the waves. He watched her out of sight and walked slowly back up the hill, telling himself that this was the last, most desperate thing he could try. It filled him with a terrible bitter ache of loss, but he'd had to do it. If it didn't work, then nothing else would.
He dragged himself home long before breakfast-time, but he couldn't face eating so he just dirtied a bowl with a bit of milk and cornflakes because Mum was bound to notice if he didn't. She noticed something all the same, and asked him if he was all right.
"I'm fine," he said. "Just I'm not properly awake yet." "No wonder. You're needing the sleep. Robert's taking you to the hospital after school, as usual?" "Yes, of course. It's Friday."
"I'll try and be over by five-thirty. I want to talk to Sister." Somehow he forced himself through school. He longed to go and hide in the library, like he had that first day after Grandad's stroke, but he knew that would only make it worse. Doing something—anything—helped him stop thinking about what he'd done. The utter, pointless loss, the stupidity,the certainty that soon Mum and Gran were going to notice, and ask, came flooding back into his mind, like vomit in the throat, and he had to gulp it down again. Luckily none of the teachers noticed, but some of the other kids did. He muttered furiously that he was okay and they left him alone. He ate only a couple of bites of his lunch sandwich and threw the rest in the bin.
When the bell rang he snatched up his stuff and shot out, barging through the scrum at the main door. Robert was waiting for him. After that he hardly noticed anything till he was pushing through the swing door into the stroke unit. At that point everything slowed down and became extraordinarily sharp and clear.
Janet was in the ward, with her back to the door, and didn't see him. Grandad's bed was back in its corner. No, it wasn't— it was a different bed with someone else in it.
They'd taken Grandad away….
No, not yet. They were going to, this evening, and … the real reason why Mum was coming over early was so that she could be here when Sister told Gavin.
So Grandad would still be in the single-bed ward where they'd put him for Gavin's birthday.
He slipped quietly out and along the passage. Nobody saw him. Yes, Grandad was there.
This was the time, the place, the last chance for something to happen, like he seemed to have known all along it was going to be.
With a sigh of relief Gavin put his satchel down and pushed the door a bit shut, far enough to hide one side of the bed from anyone passing by. He wasn't supposed to do this, of course. He just hoped it looked as if it had happened by accident.
He fetched his stool, sat down, leaned over the bed, and took Grandad's hand, wrapping the sleeping fingers round his own as best he could, to make it feel something like really holding hands.
"Hi, Grandad," he said. "I'll read you your e-mail in a minute—there isn't that much—but there's something I've got to tell you first…."
After the first few words his voice started to go funny and husky. He kept having to stop and get control of it. The hoarded pressure was building up inside him, trying to burst out. It all mattered so much, more than anything else in the world. This had to work. He had to believe in it to make it work. He did believe in it, almost….
Behind him the door moved.
Slowly, not knowing what to expect, he turned.
It was only Janet.
"Hello, Gavin. Didn't know you'd showed up. How's things?"
"They're taking him away, aren't they? There's a new patient in his corner."
"Well … um … I'll tell Sister you're here—she's busy just now…. Don't you worry, Gavin. He'll still be looked after. He'll be fine."
It wasn't her fault. It wasn't anyone's fault. Gavin managed a sort-of smile.
"I'm just going to read him his e-mail," he said.
"Great," she said. "See you soon."
He turned back to Grandad, reached for the limp hand, and hesitated. The mood of almost-belief had been broken, and he was back to knowing in his heart that it was all nonsense.
Try again later, he thought, and got the e-mails out. There were only two of them, both short. He read them, and suggested how he might answer them, always finishing with a question ("That okay with you, Grandad? Right." Or something like that). Still nothing seemed to be happening inside him, so he started on his homework as usual, telling Grandad about it as he went along.
Time went by. The nurses changed shifts. Janet and Duli looked in to say good-bye, which they didn't normally bother with. It didn't matter. He still felt perfectly ordinary, apart from being hungry and wishing he hadn't binned his lunch. When he'd done his homework he read a few bits out of the new Model Boats. Nothing changed, only time seemed to be going faster than it had done all day, and he knew he'd just been putting off trying again. Gran wasn't coming today, but Mum would be here in half an hour. With a reluctant sigh he put everything back in his satchel and took Grandad's hand.
He started at the beginning, as if he'd just come into the room.
"Hi, Grandad …"
But it wasn't the same. The words came steadily, in his normal voice, almost as if he'd been talking about some other kid he'd watched wade into the sea and launch his model fishing-smack out on the morning breeze. He couldn't even make it interesting. He was just talking to himself because he knew Grandad couldn't hear him.
He stopped before he'd got to the end. It wasn't worth the misery of pretending.
And now it hit him. It was like a wave surging against a cliff. There was a particular cleft below the cliff path on the far side of Dunnottar Castle where sometimes just before high tide, even on an almost calm day, a slow, deep swell, something you could hardly see was a wave at all, would lurch against the cliff face, forcing itself into the cleft, and the sheer weight of the raised sea behind it would send a column of water roaring unstoppably up the cleft and shooting a glittering pillar of foam out into the sunlight above.
Like that. Inside him. The awfulness of what he'd done, the lovely boat gone, the boat Grandad had given him, made for him, spent the last months of his life on, lost, lost, thrown away …
He was really weeping now, gasping for breath between his sobs….
"Oh, selkie, help me," he croaked as the tears streamed down his cheeks, down his nose. He licked them from his lips. They were salt, like the sea….
"You wantin' something, young laddie?"
He looked up, but couldn't see, blinded by his own tears. He wiped his sleeve across his eyes, trying to clear them, but everything was still a blur, as if the room was filled with fog.
A shape loomed in the fog—somebody—who … ?
He wiped again and saw it must be one of the hospital tea ladies, judging by her apron and cap, though he couldn't see her trolley—everything was still a blur, apart from her head and shoulders. She had a pale, round face, round dark eyes, and two or three hairy warts on her top lip.
"I want my Grandad," he sobbed, like a small lost boy in a crowded market. "I want to talk to him."
She just stared at him as if he were the strangest thing she'd ever seen. He was crying again, the tears filling his eyes, blurring her out, but he heard her laugh, a sharp, yapping noise. There was a roaring in his ears, drowning the swish of the door and the rattle of her trolley, but he knew she'd gone.
He should have asked her for something to eat. He felt very peculiar, empty inside, hollow, like that time just before he'd fainted. He felt himself falling off the stool and tried to stand up, lost his balance, and staggered against the bed. Everything had gone muzzy, everything except Grandad's hand in his own hand. Desperately he clung to it as he tumbled across the bed.
The bed didn't stop his fall. It melted round him, melted into a sort of red mist. Or was it him melting, vanishing into the mist? He opened his mouth to cry out, and the
tears dribbled into it, salt, like the sea, but there seemed to be no throat behind the mouth, nothing to cry out through, no lungs, nothing except the sea-taste, salt on his tongue, and the feel of Grandad's hand in his own.
And then even those were gone and there was nothing. Only a sort of bodiless Gavin-bubble, lost, helpless, floating in the roaring red mist.
hud. Thud. Thud. Soft, booming thuds, endless, unchanging, going on and on through the roaring.
He'd been holding Grandad's hand….
Where was Grandad's hand? He wanted to grope for it, but he couldn't, because his own hand wasn't there. It wasn't anywhere.
What had happened to his hand? To his other hand? Him?
The mist seemed to pulse with the thuds, and the Gavin-bubble pulsed too because it was part of the mist, getting thicker and thinner as the mist pulsed, because the mist and the roaring were inside him as well as outside, a ghastly feeling. That was all there was of Gavin, a sort of feeling, floating lost in the mist. The feeling didn't have eyes to see the mist with, ears to hear the roaring with. It wasn't like that. The Gavin-feeling was the mist, it was the roaring, and they were all that Gavin was, all he would ever be, all he would ever know….
No. Now something … What … ? Where … ?
Nowhere.
A yellow bucket in that nowhere, half full of filthy water. The water slopping about, starting to rise, slopping out over the edges, sluicing over the floor, rising, rising, a stupid little bit of green cloth to wipe it up with … horrible, horrible … he didn't know why …
Gone.
Red mist and roaring and thuds …
Voices … People talking close by. What are they saying? Can't hear through the thuds and the roaring. Call to them, shout for help!
Can't. No voice, nothing to shout with …
Gone.
Oh, please come back! Please!
Red mist and roaring and thuds…
Now something … somewhere … happening to someone …
Someone leaning on a bulwark at the side of a ship, looking out over an intensely dark blue sea. Heavy, slow waves under a clear pale sky. Between sky and sea, all along the horizon, a line of dazzling whiteness, brighter, whiter than the foam that rimmed the waves. Gavin knew, because the someone knew, what was being looked at. The whiteness was the floes and glaciers of the Antarctic, on the far side of the world.
Now the someone looked downward, and saw the greasy black side of the ship, with a great shape close against it, a shape heaving to the heave of the waves, pale on its near side, blue-black on its far side, and streaked across with scarlet as the blood pumped from three wounds, each made by a stocky harpoon that was stuck deep in the flesh of the dying whale. There was an open boat alongside the whale, men working cables round the immense body.
The someone was shaking his head. Gavin could feel two separate lots of feelings, the Gavin-thing-in-the-bubble's own shock and anguish at what was being done to the whale, and the someone's, which were grimmer and more complicated, revulsion and sorrow mixed in with anger and guilt.
Still looking at the whale, the someone spoke to the man beside him. The man laughed contemptuously….
But before Gavin could grasp the moment, fix it, understand where it belonged and how he belonged with it, the mist came surging back, pulsing to the steady unending thuds, and once again they were all there was, all that Gavin Robinson was— the eyeless, earless, bodiless almost-nothing he had somehow become….
It happened again and again and again. The mist dissolved, the roaring and the thuds ended, and there was a moment, a glimpse, an empty can, a broken gate, a dead bird in the gutter, meaningless things but somehow awful with loss or awful with disgust, loss and disgust that stayed like a taste in the mouth long after the red mist had swallowed the stupid things and swept them away.
And then, sometimes, something else, something that seemed to promise the beginnings of sense and meaning in the middle of the meaningless mess, but before he could grasp and use it to find out what was happening to him, it slipped away and there wasn't anything left to make sense of.
It wasn't always the dying whale, though that kept coming back, but so did the woman in the green dress walking on the shore at Stonehaven and talking over her shoulder to a kid behind her; only the kid wasn't listening because he'd stopped to try and drag a bit of old rope out of a pile of seaweed. Someone was watching her. The woman was Gran, but she wasn't, the way people are and aren't themselves in dreams sometimes, and Gavin wanted to call to her for help, but he hadn't got anything to call with. The someone wanted to call to her too, because he was fond of her and thought it was funny and typical that she should be talking away when there wasn't anyone to listen to her—Gavin could feel that on top of his own feelings—but before either of them could do anything the mist and the roaring and the thuds took over again.
And the same with everything else: nighttime, angry men yelling at each other, the gaudy bright lights of a bar behind them, the loom of a crane above them, black against huge bright stars; himself, Gavin, but only about six years old, pushing out through a gang of kids at the primary school door; a rough, dark sea crowded with ships all steaming in the same direction, the sense of tension and danger …
Each time Gavin knew what he was looking at, because the someone knew. The quarreling men had just come out of a bar in Singapore; Gavin had been coming out after his first day in a new school; the ships were a wartime convoy; and so on. And each time the moment of clarity brought with it a sudden flood of relief and hope, hope that now things would sort themselves out and that the someone could get back where he belonged, and Gavin could too. But then the roaring mist and the thuds surged back and wiped out even the memory of the moment, so that each time the same thing came again it seemed new, and brought the same relief and hope and understanding. When it was about small-Gavin coming out of school he knew that the someone was Grandad, no problem. But at the same time he knew that he, Gavin-now, was in desperate trouble but he couldn't remember what the trouble was, and for a moment he became small-Gavin and tried to lift up his arms and call out to Grandad to help him, but Gavin-now hadn't got any arms and small-Gavin just ran forward laughing. And then the roaring mist came back and he couldn't hang on to the knowledge, and so couldn't work out that yes, the woman in the green dress was Gran, and so the boy had to be Dad when he was about twelve. He didn't even remember about the someone there in the red mist with him until another moment came.
Only one thing didn't get forgotten. Each time the mist surged up it brought with it the understanding that all this had happened before, again and again and again, and it was going to go on like that forever. And with that knowledge came an awful wave of anger and despair and utter, utter boredom. That stayed. It was worse than the way the horror and loss lingered on after the stupid stuff that had brought them was gone. Much, much worse. It was like when you bite into an apple that's had a bug in it, and there's this foul bitter, corky taste, so you spit your mouthful out, but you can't get rid of the taste, however much you rinse your mouth out.
That was the worst thing, the despair, the utter boredom, the useless, frustrated rage at what was happening to him, and was going to go on happening, no end, no one to help him, no one ever….
"Grandad," he groaned.
He had nothing to groan with. It was a groan in his mind.
It was answered in his mind.
"Boy! Gavin?"
"I'm here. Oh, Grandad!"
"Where … ? How … ? What's up, boy?"
"You … you …"
Bits of Gavin seemed to gather back into him, scraps of self flocking together, fitting themselves into place, the smell of hospital, a taste of salt like the sea, a round pale face floating in mist, huge round eyes—no human could really have eyes like that, or those whiskers….
"You had a stroke, Grandad. It was really bad. You can't move, or talk, or anything. You're in hospital. I wanted to talk to you. You couldn't hear me. I as
ked the selkie to help, and she did it. I … I think I'm inside you. I'm really, really scared. I want to get out."
"Ah."
Grandad didn't say anything, but now that Gavin knew he was there, he could feel him pulling the bits of himself together too. More understandings came. The thuds were the sound of Grandad's heart, and the roaring was his blood moving round his body. And now he found he could remember the moments of sense and hold on to the knowledge that the someone had been Grandad all along, they'd been snatches of Grandad's own memories all muddled up with the bad-dream stuff….
"You still there, boy? When … ?"
"It was twenty-seven days ago. We were up in your room…."
Still in the same voiceless whisper Gavin started to tell him the story. He took it slowly. He could feel Grandad's tiredness, the effort of just listening, paying attention, of battling to hold on to himself as the roaring mist tried to rise….
Now it surged up, unstoppable, like the tide in Stonehaven bay, flooding over the foreshore, covering rock and shingle and seaweed in the same shapeless sloshing mess of water,sweeping Grandad away from him. But now that Gavin knew what was happening he found he could just about swim on that tide, just about keep his head above water, hold himself together while he called and called out in his mind, "Grandad! Grandad! I'm still here. Where are you?"
"Gavin? That you, boy? What's happened to me? What's going on, eh?"
"You've had a stroke, Grandad. You're in hospital…."
Again he started the story, taking it slowly, giving Grandad time to rest, but again the mist returned and swept them apart. And again. And again, until Gavin learned to recognize the signs and stop telling the story and simply stay with Grandad in his mind, clinging to him in the roaring, thudding nowhere and whispering, "Hold on, Grandad. I'm here. It's going to be all right. Hold on."
Slowly, slowly, he thought he could feel Grandad getting stronger, keeping himself together more and more, beginning to answer Gavin's whispers. "In this together, eh? Good lad. We'll do…."
It seemed to take forever, and now Gavin began to worry about what was happening outside, in the little ward where Grandad was lying on his bed and Gavin …
Inside Grandad Page 8
