Bed

by David Whitehouse

  ‘What shall we do?’ I asked Mal. I waved my hand in front of his face as though I were testing someone’s claim to being hypnotised.

  Mal stood. He walked to the bottom of Dad’s ladder and, putting one foot before the other, began to shimmy up it. We’d get in trouble for this. I followed him. He placed the flats of his palms against the underside of the hatch and eased it open slowly, pushing it upwards until it fell upright against something else and stayed there. The hole in the ceiling, like a lone telescope on a hill, begged us to look through it. So we did. I followed Mal up, my eye at the level of his tattered socks as we ascended, not knowing what we’d find. And then, as quickly as I’d started to follow him, I stopped. This was all that was forbidden. I couldn’t anger Dad.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Come on. Let’s go up there.’

  I shook my head and jumped down the few steps I’d taken to the floor.

  ‘Just come on,’ he said.

  ‘No, Mal. Let’s sit down,’ I countered, turning back towards the living room only to be stopped by him grabbing my arm, his fingers rigid and with the strength of a man determined to burst a basketball using only his hands. He launched me onto the floor with a stern push, about-turned and marched out of the room.

  I wanted him turned to powder. I grabbed my bike and pushed it through the front door onto the path outside without a thought for putting my shoes on and rode into the street.

  It was three hours and ten minutes later when Dad’s car trundled around the corner of our road. I’d been patrolling it, rolling slowly up and down its length, the way every house looked the same, watching the birds swoop down towards the big glass doors at the front of ours and pull suddenly into last-minute climbs.

  In the dark of the night the light from the headlights formed a veil around me that lurched a hard right into the driveway. The clicking of the seatbelts foreran the clunking of locks and the perchunk of the doors opening.

  ‘Where is Mal?’ asked Mum. Dad rolled his eyes. Not ‘Where are your shoes?’ or ‘What are you doing out here?’

  ‘Dunno,’ I said.

  With a twist on her heel, she gathered pace towards the house. I went to follow her but Dad stopped me at the door with one hand rested on my chest. His suit felt nice as it brushed the skin of my arm. I’d never known him to feel nice before; his clothes were normally heavy with a rough musk.

  ‘Don’t go in there,’ he said.

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  We went to the car and climbed inside. It still smelled sweet, like perfume and wine, as though the car was holding these scents in its lungs for as long as it could manage, worried it might never get to inhale them again. Through the glass doors I could see the shape of Mal under his quilt, his naked leg poking out from the side and the rise fall rise fall of his breathing underneath it.

  ‘You know I love you, don’t you?’ Dad said. And I said yes, I knew. ‘And Mal too,’ he said. And I said yes, I knew. ‘And your mum, I love your mum,’ he said.

  I sat and listened as he spoke. He spoke so rarely that, even if it was for a short time it was how treasure hunters must have felt when their gadgetry beeped.

  25

  Dad said, ‘When I met your mother, I loved her immediately. I needed her. Do you understand? There was nothing else.’

  I felt a bit embarrassed, like I was watching them kiss.

  ‘Out at TauTona, she was all I thought about. I wanted to be back. It was hot there, arid. You would wake up in your hammock in the morning and it would be so saturated with sweat that you could wring it out like a towel you’d just dried yourself on after a shower. And it would stink. Of heat. Hot smells. Of men in the morning, the large tents we set up fumigated by cigarette breath. I just wanted to get back to your mother.

  ‘When the accident happened, when I found out, all the while we were trying to save those men, I realised that it wasn’t for me. Life, I mean. Depression, I guess that’s what they’d call it these days, something bloody stupid like that. Bet they’d ram you full of sugar pills, send you on your way. Well, I don’t know about that. I felt like I wanted to be a child again, when everything is painless and easy and done for you. I wanted it all taking away. The badness, I wanted it stopped. I remember wondering why anyone would want the responsibility of other people’s lives on their conscience. Do you see? You will learn this. And Mal. My parents taught me that when I grew up, the world would be my oyster. I wouldn’t tell the same lie to you. TauTona taught me that.

  ‘Everything you imagine about the future when you’re young makes everything that happens afterwards a cruel disappointment. I watched those women crying on the surface. I watched their colleagues crying underground. I watched hopelessly as our futile attempt to reach those men got nowhere at all for hours on end, and we knew they were dead. No one signed up for that.’

  From the car I looked out through the big glass doors and I watched Mum, perched on the end of Mal’s bed, rubbing his feet. She smiled at him. Her tears ran strings through her make-up. Dad sighed. It meant ‘look at her’. So we both sat there and did. It seemed inappropriate that the lamppost outside our house had a broken bulb and that she wasn’t bathed in light, like you’d see in oil paintings of angels. She cared for him and in return he was all hers. She saved him from an outside world he wasn’t ready for.

  26

  Day Seven Thousand Four Hundred and Eighty-Three, according to the display on the wall. I rarely look at it any more.

  Mum arrives with breakfast once the medics have shipped out. My legs still rigid and painful from my time asleep.

  Food is Mal’s clock. Mum is in and out of the kitchen. The turning-on of taps, the scratching-at of pans with scouring pads, the metronomic clicking of the ignition on the hob teasing the storm-blue gas into a happy marriage of heat and light. All these sounds have a Pavlovian chime.

  Mal burned such little energy that his sleeping patterns were in disarray. He drifted off, illuminated in the glow from the television, which would blast out old movies until four or five in the morning.

  He’d wake again at about eight to be met with a huge cooked breakfast, all the colours of an artist’s pallet as he sits at an easel to paint autumn.

  A brief doze afterwards meant he’d rise again for lunch, often finishing mine. This would set him up nicely for a steady flow of chocolate snacks, ice cream and cakes. It was less a third course, more of an obstacle course.

  At dinnertime came the truly gargantuan portions that would serve to impress even the most experienced historian of royal medieval banquets. Any lingering tastes were soon destroyed by perhaps another full tub of ice cream. (This was known as pudding in the evening, unlike when he’d quickly consume the very same of a morning. Then it was simply ice cream.)

  Further snacking ensued, crisps, a pork pie or two, yet more chocolate, until suppertime, when typically Mal would revisit the leftovers of his dinner. Before retiring herself, Mum would litter his bedside table with enough food to carry him through the night.

  A visiting doctor told me once that Mal’s horizontality meant he wasn’t only prone to growing outwards faster than was normal but also that he was becoming taller as a result. We all grow at night, by fractions of fractions of millimetres but come the morning, when we finally stand, the growth is compacted again by our own weight. That, he said, is why astronauts often return to earth from space half an inch or so taller than they were when they left, which must be odd, he joked, when they come to kissing their wives hello.

  I watch Mal inhale his breakfast. He follows this by quickly wading into the enormous chocolate cake Mum has made, scooping it with clawed hand and shovelling the crumbling thick brown sponge mixture into his mouth with the jerky precision of an industrial digger. His mouth opens so wide that I can see the point where his tongue emerges from his lining. He’s just a couple of degrees away from owning a flip-top head. That he doesn’t must be attributed to evolutionary oversight. The survival of the least fit. The caramel adhesive th
at holds the cake together drips from his fingers, dangles in strings from his lips and clogs the wiry clumps of hair on his chin, but undeterred he spoons in more and more, even before he has finished with the previous mouthful. His arm repeats that same motion with clockwork regularity.

  I am taken aback as I am every morning by the deterioration in the health of Mal’s skin. Where once was florid boyishness is now a ruddy, mean-spirited mess. The lack of fresh air has turned his face into a miserly wallet for dirt and sweat and grease. The resultant clusters of immature acne glisten at the sides of his nose, growing like a coral reef across his chin and down his neck, blinking in the sunlight as they slowly marinate in their own juices. Acne at forty-five makes me feel better about living with my parents, living at home with my brother, at forty-three. Marginally. My broken legs ache but also mend.

  It was her love that was killing him. Mum.

  27

  The visual stimulus of watching Mal be bathed wrenches my stomach up into my oesophagus. He looks like an enormous sea monster caught and displayed in a Victorian museum of the grotesque.

  Mum pushes the bedroom door open with her foot, carefully carrying a bowl of warm soapy water which splish-sploshes about it from side to side, occasionally making brave leaps in huge teardrops of freedom. It is spiked with a special antiseptic lotion and smells of clean. She sets it down and begins work methodically. I look on from the armchair in the corner of the room.

  She starts with his face, stroking the wet flannel across his brow and down his cheeks. He wheezes like dust-caked bellows, in and out, in and out, all of his effort consumed. She slides a hand under his left breast that hangs flag-like and slowly lifts it as though it is a rock in the garden and spiders might dash out. It wouldn’t surprise me if they did. Underneath that fold the skin is as white as an institution, racked with scabs and scratches, deprived of all sunlight and free of all life. Tenderly Mum dabs the area with a soaked sponge. Her eyes are cold and spent.

  The other colossal breast. Done. Armpits. Done.

  Next the folds in his arm, which she sweeps for gathered fluff and finds enough to make a scarf for a doll. She puts down her tools and forces an arm underneath the fleshy ring of fat that divides the four different segments of his belly before dousing the newly exposed flaps in more warm lather. And then down further still. Mal closes his eyes. Mum approaches his gusset. She pushes her open hand into the massive mottled mid-section, kneading it into position as it closes around her wrist like the soft gummy jaws of a manatee, and takes a towel to Mal’s privates, the infected blisters he’s never actually seen.

  Then, as best she can, his back and underside, the chafed bottom of his legs, the edges of his buttocks that jut out like blocks of porky shelving and leave the sheets sodden with the sweat of a great weight not allowing the heat inside him to escape. As she moves a wet wipe once more around his chins in preparation for his shave, it expels a bubble of trapped air with a shrill whooping sound. It is a noise that never loses its novelty. Smothering the lower half of his face in thick slabs of foam, she carefully runs a razor around his outline. His skin has stretched and is thin and feeble, so he cuts easily. Occasionally I’d see the blade jar, a deep red trickle of blood blending with the foam like a death in the snow.

  I refuse to watch as she trims his toenails. Likewise as she empties his bag.

  28

  Tick tock tick tock. Mum finishes cleaning Mal just as the psychiatrists arrive. I let them in. She tells them they have until the TV crew get here. There are two of them, a man and a woman, and they both accept a slice of cake out of politeness. Rather than look like she isn’t eating it, the woman wraps it in a piece of tissue she finds in her handbag and pretends to save it for later, sliding it into the pocket of her jacket. Mum, out of equally painful politeness, pretends not to have noticed and then absent-mindedly offers her another portion.

  I hear Dad move across the floor of the attic that moans and groans when he doesn’t sit still. He hasn’t been down all day. I wonder what he’s building. I go to sit with Mal and watch a worm of saliva maze its way out of his stretched, wet lips. It makes me retch dry nothings up my throat.

  The door opens and the psychiatrists enter. I love this part, the look on their face when they first see him. Mal is naked. They see his feet first, disappearing under the hanging sleeve of the fat on his legs the way a snake eats a sheep whole. The growths and deformities caused by poor circulation chart a route up him to his knees, huge, flattened spheres of flab the size of satellite dishes, the bony caps long since buried.

  The woman raises her hand to her face, aghast. The smell hits her. Not uncleanliness, not Godliness either. An impassable waft, sweat and odour, a clotted, hideous force. She might faint, she might not.

  Up past his thighs is where he really begins to spread but they’re covered by the changing blubber of his many bellies. The occasional purple vein careering through them near the surface is worked to bursting point. The stretch marks, the thickness of tyres, worn like sashes around his huge, flappy tits. The crumbs in his chest hair, his eyelids half-cocked.

  Bed and depression are inexorably linked, the experts are explaining as they sit in the two plastic chairs Mum has placed at Mal’s side. His head rocks over to look at them as though it’s toppled under the weight, and I think about how weird it is that his features have not grown in keeping with the expanding face they sit on. It is, she says, ‘A vicious circle, really. Staying in bed, the constant malaise of it, the deregulation of the body clock, the lack of movement, it makes you depressed, an imbalance of hormones.’ She tries to look Mal in the eyes, and in the eyes only, but she fails and pans down and up him. Her voice is sweet. She could be describing the feathers on baby ducks, rather than the fragile mental state of a man who hasn’t got out of bed in twenty years.

  ‘And then, when you’re depressed . . .’ she continues, speaking in unison with the metronomic nod of her colleague, who can barely bring himself to look up, ‘. . . the natural instinct is to hide away, to find solace in lonely comfort. To go to bed. It’s a vicious circle. But you already knew all this.’

  She goes to hand Mal a leaflet but her dainty wrist accidentally brushes the saddle-bag bank of fat that hangs precariously on the side of the bed as she leans in and she drops it. It lands in the centre of Mal’s chest and lies there, open on a picture of an obese man. It’s like that feeling of being flanked by mirrors on either side, so that you can see yourself duplicated into infinity. Mal brings up his arms to reach it but he can’t with either, and he’s powerless. It occurs to me then that he can’t even clasp his hands together in prayer, should he want to. Eventually I stand up, even though it hurts my legs to do it, and remove the leaflet myself.

  ‘Sorry,’ says our guest.

  ‘That’s OK,’ says Mal. His breath is a heavy wheeze. I fold the leaflet into the back pocket of my jeans.

  ‘So we’d like to ask you some questions,’ the man says. He has a clipboard perched on his lap. Attached to it are questions written by someone else. The man might as well be a computer. Or a pen. ‘They’ll help us to understand where you are at mentally.’

  I look into Mal’s eyes every day. There is nothing wrong with him. He isn’t mad. He wasn’t mad when he was a child, he isn’t mad now as a great big deflated hot-air balloon of skin. This isn’t what we need to discover. You can’t get the right answers unless you ask the right questions. And there is one. Why?

  I stand up slowly, the pins in my legs grating, and edge past Mal’s disgusting feet. I step over cables and trolleys, creams and serums, and open the door.

  ‘Will you ask Mum to come in?’ says Mal in a breathy whisper of exhaust fumes. He likes an audience. He always liked an audience.

  ‘OK,’ I say.

  Mum is in the trailer, where she always is, facing the wall above the oven like she always does. It is always hot in here, the glass in the pictures she’s hung to make it slightly less plain permanently steamed. A picture of Mal
clings to the wafer-thin wall above the fridge. In it he is five and naked. Dancing at a birthday party, knees bent, elbows out. Adults form a circle around him and clap as he performs.

  ‘Mal wants you to go into the bedroom,’ I say.

  I massage my forehead with my fingers roughly.

  ‘Did they finish their cake?’ she asks.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘What do you mean who? The doctors.’

  ‘They’re not really doctors, Mum.’

  ‘Of course they are.’

  She has both her hands on her hips, the way you imagine the housekeeper always does in Tom and Jerry cartoons but you only ever see her ankles.

  ‘They’re not, Mum,’ I assure her. ‘They’re just reading out questions from a piece of paper. They can’t help.’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody silly. Should I take them some more cake?’ she says. She has already prepared a tray full. She arranges it in a semi-circle around a freshly brewed pot of tea. It looks beautiful. It could be an advert for tea and cake.

  ‘Yes. Yes. If you like,’ I say.

  She gathers up some napkins. She’s always on crumb duty. God, she looks old.

  ‘Mum,’ I say.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Let me take this tray through. You know what he’s like if I’m not there. How are your legs today?’

  ‘Fine, I suppose.’

  ‘You’ll be right as rain in no time, love. You’ll be skipping. And they’ll give you some work at the shop again, part-time maybe, I bet.’

  She edges out of the trailer, pushing the door open gently with her back. As soon as she’s gone, it snaps back into place. I can’t remember a time I was in here alone. The thick wooden furniture makes me think of America. Everything seems more substantial in America, their furniture objects of sturdiness, reliability, things your leaning can depend upon. It makes me think of Norma Bee, whose trailer it once was.