Bed

by David Whitehouse

  42

  For all the powers of recall our house had, Mal and Lou’s had none. When they left it, it was as though they were never there, the walls having never heard them speak, earless. This was the blight of the young modern couple. The table everyone else had. The chairs that came with it. Stock glossy pictures on the wall of couples they don’t know in places they’ve never been. Starter furniture. We sat at the starter table drinking cheap wine from starter glasses. Lou was out, at a training course to assist her in working as part of a team in the bank. I’d not invited Sal to Mal’s house. I’d see her later. She’d begun to talk about us getting our own place together. It was an impossibility, unless it could be paid for in minced beef. Besides, the desire was not there, the flame low. I’d toyed with the right way to let her down a final time. Perhaps that night.

  Despite the weight gain in his gut, Mal looked gaunt. His cheeks sunk into dark hammocks across his bones so that if it rained you’d be able to lie him down and pool water in them. Around him were piles of ironing. The fridge was all magnets and bills. A voting card hung amongst them for a date that had been and gone. The floor was strewn with fast-food cartons and shoes. It was Friday night, Mal’s twenty-fifth birthday. After work he’d untucked a creased, dirty shirt from his trousers and partially loosening the horrid checked tie around his neck.

  The calendar that hung from the shabby notice board in the kitchen featured twelve cute kittens. One played with a ball of wool. One peeked from above the rim of a wicker basket. One fell asleep next to a puppy. Each month was marked by Lou’s careful hand, an elaborate matrix of ticks and crosses.

  ‘Are you trying for a baby, Mal?’ I said, drawing him out.

  ‘We won’t call it “Baby Mal” if it’s a girl.’

  He seemed dour. We started to walk home, my home, to his birthday party, where Mum had spent the day blowing up balloons with all of the gust in her lungs and Dad had been dozing gently in his chair to the hiss and crackle of an old record player he’d found in a skip and repaired. One compilation of The Glenn Miller Band’s Greatest Hits played quietly, over and over again, on repeat.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  The night was cold, and though it was only just dark the walls and the fence posts shone with an early frost. My warm breath spelt out my words in frozen mist.

  ‘Did Dad ever tell you his story?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘About TauTona. About the mine and the accident.’

  I’d had no idea that Mal knew it too. We’d never discussed it, which seemed odd, but then we’d never discussed Dad either. He was discussion-proof.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. I faked manliness, not knowing why.

  ‘About the photographs. About the things you leave behind.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well . . .’

  He stopped. We stood there, both hands in pockets, holding identical poses. I didn’t feel the cold any more, just the needle-jab ache of the icy breeze in my ears.

  ‘What if you knew, now, that you wouldn’t leave anything behind. That you couldn’t leave anything behind. That no one will remember you, and no one will have anything to remember you by. That you are, in fact, just someone that was there, and that’s it.’

  ‘You’re being stupid,’ I said. ‘What does that mean?’

  He didn’t look up. Neither of us did. We stared at our feet by the yellow beat of a vandalised streetlight. A deep breath. Not a sigh but almost.

  ‘I kinda think . . .’ he said, and it was paced, more considered this time. ‘What is the point?’

  I was frozen. My tongue too stiff to make the vibrations and shapes that formed the sounds I needed to say. Please, Malcolm, shut up. The water streaming from our eyes in the wind was only just too heated by our skin to turn to ice on our faces. And so I raised my fingers, two of them, gun-shaped, to his lips to stop him from saying any more. We walked home under the umbrella of his arm around my shoulder, and it felt bigger than it ever had.

  Later, we were sitting on our front doorstep. His twenty-fifth birthday party. Mum was ferrying great silver trays of finger-food above our heads, perched on the bent tips of her long frail fingers like I’d seen the waiters do in posh hotels on television. Dad was sifting through a stack of vinyl he’d picked up in a secondhand shop, hoping that the people dancing in the living room don’t stop all at once. Red Ted, Sal, Chris, Mal’s boring work friends, the guys that Dad goes fishing with, weaving arms and kicking legs. Strangers talking the international language of drunk. But none more drunk than me and Mal.

  ‘Do you not see?’

  Mal’s breath was hot and cloudy in my ear, a great boozy fog. My eyes fogged and then cleared, rolling around my head, awry projections.

  ‘Do you not see?’

  ‘No, I can’t see.’

  ‘Well, I can,’ he said. ‘And that’s the point. If you can’t do what you’re meant to, why do anything at all?’

  He was inches from my ear, shouting into my skull. It rested and wobbled on my knee. Mrs Gee, next door, was banging a ‘keep it down’ rhythm through the thin plaster. No one could hear it. That her old bones could muster the strength to thump the wall was commendable. She would have been better off not doing it in time to the music. Mal was pointing but I couldn’t focus, my eyes had abandoned their posts. I’d a limp cigarette in my mouth but was lighting my chin. He was still talking, I was sure, but it was just noise and I tried to concentrate until slowly it sharpened and shifted and began to make sense. I didn’t even smoke.

  ‘NMMMMMMMmmmmmmndddddddd sswwwwoooork in . . .’

  ‘What?’

  Where had the cigarette gone?

  ‘What?’

  ‘Have you been listening?’

  ‘Yes’.

  And I wished I could understand.

  ‘I work in a chair. I fight on a computer game. When I vote, it changes nothing. What I earn can’t buy anything. Maybe my purpose is to give purpose to others.’

  It kind of always had been, I thought, but I couldn’t verbalise the notion.

  ‘What?’

  I fell back until my dizzy head rested in a pile of strangers’ shiny work shoes.

  Moved around. Glass of water. Sally kissing me on the forehead. Fleeting glimpses of landmarks I only half recognised on the long road back to sobriety.

  It was later. The house was empty. The music was gone. I was on the settee and it hugged me, still dressed, unsure whether the phone had just started ringing or whether it had been ringing for hours. I picked it up.

  ‘Hello.’

  My hand was numb from where I’d slept on it, drool had trickled around the ball of my thumb like ornate Indian decoration.

  ‘Hello . . . Malcolm? Malcolm?’

  Lou, her voice was a bullet with an urgency I wished was for me.

  ‘No. It’s me. Lou? Mal is in bed. I think he’s in bed. What time is it?’

  ‘Can you fetch him for me, please?’

  ‘He’s in bed. It’s his birthday,’ I said.

  The semi-clarity of sudden drunken awakenings.

  ‘I know. Can you get him for me? I need to talk to him. It’s urgent!’

  New sincerity that was there before I heard now for the first time but I was drunk and none of it mattered.

  ‘OK.’

  Standing slowly I gripped my belt and turned it around my waist ninety degrees, a heavy sundial, until my jeans no longer twisted the skin on my legs. I heard Dad snoring softly in the attic, tools in hand. With a gentle push I opened the door to our room to find Mal asleep on the bed, naked, the crisp linen sheets draped over him. He seemed heroic, albeit briefly. In the armchair next to the bed was Mum, her hand resting on his, her head tossed backwards in slumber, the conversation they had left to drift there in the chilled night air.

  The sight span, twirled and threw me drunkenly. I landed face-down on my own bed and fell asleep instantly, oblivious to my clothes, the open windows, the voice repeating the words �
�Hello? Hello? Hello?’ through the telephone receiver propped on the arm of the settee, but not to the knowledge that things were about to change.

  I dreamt about Lou again.

  43

  By late morning Mum had already woken Mal but he hadn’t yet emerged for breakfast. She reasoned that he must have a hangover, unlike me who, though twenty-three, was still bathing in the wondrous period of grace life gives you where the morning after the night before is little different to the morning after the night before that. But I’d seen hangovers on Red Ted. That slow agony. Those tired weary bones, frayed tempers, black hounds. I sympathised. Which is why I didn’t protest when Mum, as Lou called again that morning, explained that Mal was asleep and curtly took the phone off the hook. Still inebriated as I was, I thought nothing of it at all.

  We waited until early afternoon. Mal’s present, wrapped resplendently in crisp gold paper and shiny red ribbon the width of a horse’s mane, lay idle in the middle of the living room floor. I could barely resist the urge to unwrap it myself as the sun ricocheted off it but I managed to leave it be. And then Mal’s gift, and the fact it was wrapped, became a smaller issue altogether.

  ‘He said he’s not getting up,’ Dad said.

  ‘Until when?’ I said.

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Never?’

  Mum took our words with her as she walked to Mal’s room, where she remained for more than twenty minutes before, at Dad’s behest, I eventually followed her in. I carried Mal’s present under my arm but my mind was no longer on whatever sat inside it. She kneeled at the side of the bed, cupping his hands in hers like she had been the night before, when I found them. Malcolm stared up at me. He was naked still, the quilt kicked off and twisted like a white doughy plait at his feet. It was as if he had suddenly jettisoned all things with the swift wrench of a lever.

  ‘Get up,’ I said. ‘You have to get up.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked, reserved, calm. Infuriating.

  ‘Lou’s back today.’

  ‘There is nothing,’ Mal said, ‘that I can do about that now.’

  44

  Day Four.

  Mal never asked for anything, confident as he was that it would just come. Instead he lay quietly, watching television, waiting for something and nothing.

  In the kitchen the night before, Mum and Dad had had the biggest argument I’d ever overheard. Dad, his loft, his work, his fishing. Mum, the cleaning, the cooking and Mal. All history born of conflict.

  ‘Stop cooking for him, waiting hand and foot on him, and he’ll have to get out of bed. Don’t you see?’ Dad had said. Not for a second did he consider that this might actually happen.

  ‘He can’t starve,’ Mum said, her voice shaped powerfully.

  ‘He won’t starve!’

  ‘He’s my son and I’ll look after him if he needs looking after.’

  ‘You’re a fucking martyr, you are!’

  ‘Go up in your loft. Don’t you worry about anyone else.’

  The next morning I asked Mal to stop. To get out of bed and carry on. I reminded him about his flat. About his job. About Lou. I begged him. But it had begun. It had most definitely begun. I just hoped that his interest would wither and die like a seed planted in alien terrain.

  ‘Get up.’

  ‘No.’

  Goaded, I grabbed him by the ankle and in one almighty pull heaved his muscular naked frame from the bed and onto the floor at my feet. My hands open, I slapped and scratched at his face, head and neck as he wound foetal around my legs. I jabbed at his chest with my heels, pinching his stubborn flesh between my shoes and the floor. Exasperated, I slapped at the red handprints around his ribs, at the cut above his eye. In that instant I felt like beating him to half his size. I pounded harder and harder into his chest, thud thud thud, then dropped to my knees, vacant and breathless.

  Dad rushed in and all but tore the door from its hinges. He put both of his enormous hands upon my shoulders and lifted me out of Mal’s reach. Mal clambered slowly back into bed and pulled the quilt up over his cut, swollen face.

  Pushing me into the kitchen, Dad ran my bruised fingers underneath the cold tap. He didn’t need to speak.

  Hours passed before I poked my head tentatively around the bedroom door.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, something of a surprise, the will of a brother to forgive another.

  The flesh that framed the socket of his right eye had swollen and blackened, his naked chest was pocked with deep red grazes and tiny star-shaped formations where dried blood had collected after I’d cut into him with the heel of my shoe. He seemed completely nonplussed by the fight or by the arguments but what frustrated me most was that he’d ignored all attempts at communication from Lou. She had called at the door upwards of three times a day so far, alerting us each time with that same rat-a-tat-tat. Dad would always be in his attic, which would clang with dropped tools, the mesmeric rolling sound of loose screws spiralling about the frail wooden floorboards.

  Mum would be being similarly noisy in the kitchen, smashing pots and pans together, blaming them for a burnt cake or over-salted bread sauce. I imagined that when she wasn’t there they all sprang to life, their handles and joins forming smooth-edged eyes, noses and mouths like in a Disney film. I imagined they all congregated around the wise old talking oven and moaned about how hard they were worked.

  It would instead be left to me to answer the door to Lou. I didn’t mind. She’d cry, I’d hold her. She’d ask to see Mal. I’d inform her that he didn’t want any guests and apologise and apologise again. Mum would lock the bedroom door with the small bolt she’d asked Dad to affix. I’d get the words Let’s run away together stuck in the taste buds on the back of my tongue.

  One week in, he’d still not changed his mind.

  We were playing chess. Mal lay nude under a white cotton sheet, draped over him so neatly that from a distance he looked like a fallen pillar crumbling in an ancient lost ampitheatre. I’d pulled a chair to his bed and turned it around so that my legs straddled the back of it on either side. Mal’s failure to appreciate the rules of a game established for many hundreds of years meant that the levels of concentration required when playing chess against him were of lunar-module-landing levels of intensity.

  ‘Your move,’ said Mal.

  ‘OK,’ I said, glancing down at the board and then back up at him. I posed no threat whatsoever.

  ‘And if she comes, I can’t see her.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me what you are doing?’ I asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  Lou arrived again eventually. Her eyes were tropical spiders, red rings with faint black legs.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  I said I didn’t know.

  ‘I love him,’ she said, and then she wept.

  Every last ounce of what was inside me squeezed up inside a tight rubber ball and bounced around my body.

  I watched Lou leave, back to her father. So did Mum, through a slit in the curtains.

  45

  Within a year our lives had changed immeasurably. In this short time Mal had become our sun, our lives in his orbit. The rings we were forced to travel around him were getting smaller and smaller, pulled further and further in.

  It was early evening and I was trying to watch television, scuppered by the clacking of scissors from the bedroom. Mum was cutting Mal’s hair. He’d expressed no desire for any particular style, or even to have it cut at all, so Mum stuck with the textured, messy short look that was customary and achieved mostly by accident. I got up to ask them to be a little quieter. As I walked through the door, from the corner of my eye I saw her dig a smaller pair of scissors from her bag and start on his toenails. His toes, pendulous troll dollops.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Mum, do you have to do that now?’ I said.

  ‘If you don’t like it, go elsewhere,’ she said.

  Elsewhere. This was my bedroom too. I didn’t
need to say it. Mal stifled a giggle. I playfully slapped the remote control against his knee and hoped it hurt him.

  By then I only noticed his nudity intermittently. He was always naked, and he was always there, but even Dad seemed comfortable with it, in a way. Those pale gangly legs dangling from the sides of the mattress had become as much a part of the bedroom as the wallpaper. I understood how the children of nudist parents you’d see on daytime talkshows would almost appear to be feigning their embarrassment. It was just a body, sticks of meat.

  There was a knock at the door to a rhythm we didn’t recognise. Each of us froze, gawping at one another as though someone amongst us might be psychically linked to whoever was visiting. No one said a word.

  Another knock. I switched the television off and stepped over Mum as she knelt at Mal’s feet. Mal didn’t flinch one iota. I peered out from behind the curtains in the hall.

  Another knock, needlessly harder and more urgent this time, so I swung the door open to catch them unawares and took some delight in that first embarrassed grunt that emerged as the stranger at the door slammed his knuckles into nothingness. His movement carried him forward, the feeling you get when you step onto a broken escalator your legs expect to propel you. The visitor’s hand ceased just inches from my face. Normal door-answering etiquette had been temporarily reversed. It was now him that needed to say something before this entire situation even began to retain a jot of normality.