Bed

by David Whitehouse

  ‘It’s a clock,’ said Mum, her hands excitedly clasped at her chin, overjoyed to have us all here.

  Even Dad was present, unable to work temporarily after twisting his ankle falling down from his ceiling hatch. He sat in the corner, his head rested on a flat palm and bent elbow, in wonder at how grossly happy she seemed. At how gripped by cheer she had been for a whole year.

  ‘A what?’ asked Mal.

  ‘A clock. We had it made for you. A friend of your dad’s, from South Africa, this is what he does now. He makes clocks. But not ordinary clocks. Special clocks. Like the ones that do the countdowns, the big ones, on New Year’s Eve, just before the fireworks go off . . . Doesn’t he, love?’

  Love. When she called Dad ‘love’, I knew fondness. Few things so endearing grew more so the sparser and more meaningless they became.

  ‘He does, yes,’ replied Dad, still unmoved in his chair, never a word wasted.

  The flecks of glitter chased each other around in the shafts of sunlight piercing the window.

  Mal turned the cumbersome black box over and around, investigating and probing it for a switch or a button, whichever gave it life, as Mum hurriedly unwound its cable and slotted the plug into the wall. With a click the two of them were suddenly illuminated in a comic-book green that bounded off every wall. By the time it reached Dad, gently swaying in the rocking chair by the television, it was a dull pea colour, highlighting his wrinkled brow and making him look the wicked pantomime witch.

  YEARS MONTHS DAYS HOURS MINUTES SECONDS

  Tick tock tick tock, Mal’s life in liquid crystal. Mum lifted the small black plastic flap on the back and poked a finger around the tiny buttons buried there until there was a beep a whirr and a click.

  ONE ZERO ZERO ZERO ZERO ZERO

  She twirled the smooth plastic dial.

  ZERO ZERO 365 ZERO ZERO ZERO

  Day Three Hundred and Sixty-Five, according to the display on the wall.

  Dad stood, smiled and left the room. I followed him. It struck me then, for the first time as I shadow his movement left leg right leg, that I was bigger than him. That I probably had been for some time. And that it seemed he was withering away, a stop-motion image of a flower turning from yellow to grey and into powder as the wind sucked it up into the air. I wanted to wrap my arms around his neck, push my heart into the back of his chest and share with him my life force. I wanted to lift him atop my shoulders, right there in the living room, revive him, give him back what he lost. What all sons secretly wanted to do to their fathers, to make him the champion. But he looked beaten, by time, by events. By whatever he lost one day and never got back. I followed him into the kitchen, where he rested a rough, haggard hand on the metal skin of the kettle to check its temperature and flicked the switch regardless.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Yes,’ he said.

  I wanted to tell him that I wished we talked more but had he asked me ‘What about?’ then maybe I wouldn’t have known. Every day I left him there when I went out in my apron to work, and every day he was there when I returned. What wage I earned would be spent hastily, out with Red Ted. Red Ted would drive us to satellite towns and we’d go to bars and clubs where the music was too loud, communicating with imperceptible gestures. It was cheap at home, I’d reasoned with myself. I’d no responsibilities, no matter how much I might have wanted them. There was the difference between me and Mal. And, I wanted Lou. Everything I did was designed to help me forget the fact as cheaply and as quickly as possible.

  ‘The clock,’ Dad whispered. ‘Your mum says she thinks it will make him realise how stupid this is. That it will make him get up. If you ask me, I think she might have set him a challenge.’

  A shrill yelp screeched out from Mum’s throat, raking the lining from the inside of her lungs. Dad, pouring from the kettle, scalded his hand on the spout.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he shouted, louder than I’d heard him since the day he tanned my hide at the hospital, and we ran through the living room to the bedroom, where, stood at the window, palms fastened to her cheeks, was Mum.

  The shock of what she’d seen had apparently tapped her for blood at the ankle, her face a mint white. Mal, naked, had the bed sheet pulled up and over his face. His fingers gripped it at the top for fear that someone might whip it away, a magician at a dinner table, leaving naked Mal, the plates and cups rocking gently but still on show.

  Dad and me walked to the window and pulled the curtain further aside. Out there on the grass, our grass, was a tent, pitched and lived-in.

  ‘What on earth is that?’ Dad asked.

  ‘A tent,’ I said.

  ‘A tent, yes. But what is it?’

  ‘It’s a portable piece of camping apparatus used for shelter,’ Malcolm laughed.

  ‘I know it’s a tent. Of course it’s a bloody tent,’ Dad said. He was pointing at it through the window as though I wouldn’t have noticed the landscape that had been mine for so long suddenly had a new addition. ‘What is it doing there?’

  ‘I dunno,’ I said.

  Mum sat back on Mal’s bed. It was as though she’d drawn the curtains to find a full chorus line of can-can girls pumping pom-poms. She was ashen.

  The tent was small and white, looking from a distance little more than a fly-wing-thin sheet tossed over a couple of twigs. To try and sleep in there in the heat of the midday summer sun would have been hellish. But then, for one reason or another, camping had never seemed to me like a good way to have fun. As the clouds moved across the sky, this tent, barely twenty feet away from where we were standing, was illuminated. And in it, when I stared hard enough, I could see the silhouette of a solitary figure, an outline I would recognise by clearest day or darkest night. But I didn’t even need to say it.

  ‘It’s Lou,’ muttered Mal from underneath his cover. ‘That’s Lou’s tent. I recognise it. That’s Lou, I guess, inside it.’

  Mum rocked back on the base of her spine. Dad brought his hand to his mouth. I saw he was surprised but more than that, mischievous perhaps, enjoying the presentation of a hurdle, anything to softly prod the cradle.

  And I felt elation. Sweet, powerful elation. Elation just to see her again.

  Mum rose fast and drew the curtains back across the glass, leaving the room lit only by the bitter green glow of Mal’s twenty-sixth birthday present. We stood there, in a row, basking in the ambient light, the fact that it was Day Three Hundred and Sixty-Five, according to the display on the wall written large across us all.

  51

  ‘You’re not going out there,’ ordered Mum.

  I was scrabbling through the pile to find my shoes as Mum, in pointless protestation, pulled the bolt across the front door.

  ‘What are you doing that for?’ I said, annoyed.

  ‘Because you’re not going out there,’ she said.

  Her teeth gnashed. I couldn’t figure out whether she was angry or afraid. Regardless, my decision was made.

  ‘I’m going to talk to Lou!’ I shouted to Mal in the bedroom but more for Mum’s benefit. He didn’t answer.

  ‘Well, I’m going to call the police,’ she snapped. ‘It’s trespassing, technically. It doesn’t matter who she is. That’s our front garden. She has no right just to turn up and pitch a tent there without our express permission. She has no right at all.’

  As she talked I listened less and less, until eventually she became background noise. I could see her pursed lips forming little shapes. I could see her slender eyebrows snaking. I could see the wild gesticulation of her hands cutting the air in an angry dance. But it meant nothing to me.

  ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘do whatever you like, if you think it will make life easier.’ I felt big, readied. A man. ‘But I’m going out there to speak to Lou. Let me find out what she wants.’

  Mum’s head bowed until her chin rested against the sharp bony plate of her chest and her force field, which until now I’d not been able to detect, slowly disappeared. Steadily, and without m
eeting my eye, Mum shuffled into the living room. Dad waited there with a hot cup of tea in his hand for her, his timing impeccable. Mal still hadn’t said a word. As I pulled on a thin summer jacket to combat the brisk morning chill, I peeked through the gap above the hinges of the bedroom door. The sheet was still above his head and only his swollen traffic-light green feet were on show, poking out from the edge of the bed like the upturned heads of two rakes in the grass. Begging to be stepped on.

  Removing the latch from the door a nervous sickness growled in my stomach, so I waited and swallowed and waited again until it eased to a gentle purr. And then, slowly opening it, I trod out into the cool babysteps of the day. Only when I heard the hairy crunch of the bristled doormat underneath my feet did I look down to find that I was accidentally wearing odd shoes. I was thinking about Mal as I crossed the small stretch of grass to the tent, where I heard her humming, a siren singing me to shipwreck.

  Standing outside, I cleared my throat. It sounded horrible. Apprehension wriggled and popped in my legs.

  ‘Hello?’ she said.

  ‘Hello,’ I replied.

  My fingers fidgeted at my side, jerking the way a quick-draw cowboy’s would at his holster when there are fractions of seconds before he or his foe fire the first and fatal shot at high noon. The zip began to unfasten from the inside. I watched it crawl down the tent, and then there she was, sitting in the porch of it.

  ‘Hello,’ she smiled. ‘It’s good to see you.’ She remained amazing. ‘You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here.’

  My voice box filled with thick impossible foam, and so I just nodded like the stupid greedy dogs that waited for Red Ted to sling malformed sausages from the doorway of the butchery.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said, moving aside, ‘you had better come in.’

  I dropped to all fours.

  The tent was little bigger than a coffin and had that stifling smell of hot vinyl. In the pockets of the lining were a few supplies. Food, flasks, water bottles. A mirror. Clean underwear. Magazines. A picture of her dad that had fallen from her purse. He looked sad and thin. A pillow. A sleeping bag. Wet wipes and cosmetics she didn’t really need. I sat facing her as she tied her hair back, quickly and professionally so that not a single strand of it still hung down over her face when she’d finished. I’d rehearsed this and rehearsed it again but only ever in my head. Now I’d arrived at the show, in costume, only to find I’d had my lines cut without my prior knowledge.

  ‘How’s Mal?’

  ‘Fine,’ I lied.

  Truth is, I didn’t really know.

  ‘Do you think I can see him?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I mean, well . . . It’s not just you, Lou. He’s not had any visitors. None at all.’

  ‘I see,’ she sighed.

  ‘So,’ I wondered, ‘where have you been? What have you been doing?’

  ‘I moved back in with my dad.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He just sits there and thinks about Mum. Like he’s waiting for her to come through the door, and if she did he’d just stand up and put the kettle on like nothing had happened. I think he thinks bad things like that don’t happen to people his age. He’s wrong. It can happen any time, I suppose.’

  I wanted to tell her she was doing the same.

  ‘I guess that’s love for you,’ she said.

  I wanted to tell her, it wasn’t, but what did I know?

  ‘I’ve tried to forget him.’ I could see it in the contours of her frown. In the pressure in the S-bend of her tongue, coiled up like a viper in her mouth. ‘This isn’t what was supposed to happen.’

  ‘You won’t be able to forget here. Camped out on our garden,’ I said.

  The cogs and pulleys and chains of my body geared up to perform the simple pattern of movements required for me to land a caring, conciliatory hand on her knee but the engine didn’t fire and I remained rigid in my place. She stayed quiet. Sat there, rocking her heels to and fro, clacking them together like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, which I’d seen on television once. A childhood trait of hers kicking through into womanhood.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I said. ‘I mean, the tent and all. We were all a bit surprised.’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry. What did your mum think?’

  ‘She was going to call the police.’

  ‘Will she?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Do you think I can speak to her? I’d like to.’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said, unable to find inside me the correct way of saying no. It was not in me to explain just how things had changed, just how normal Mal being in bed had already become. ‘So, why?’ I asked again.

  ‘Why am I here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I still love him, I always will. And so a little piece of me will always be here. This tent will be here to remind him, for as long as it needs to be.’

  I pushed my two upper front teeth downwards into my smooth bottom lip. Then came the beep beep and third impatient beep of a car on the road outside. I poked my head out and saw Red Ted, ghouls of smoke pumping from his exhaust pipe. He was chomping contentedly on a snack-sized pork pie with the circular jaw motion of a giddy camel and listening to some meaningless foreign sporting encounter on the radio.

  ‘I have to go to work,’ I said.

  Lou didn’t say goodbye. Instead she laid her hands out on the floor in front of her, rocked her weight onto her arms, lifted her bottom into the air and leaned forward to kiss me on the cheek. It remained there, that feeling, long after the contact was broken. I copied her grin, magnified it and sent it back in her direction. Then I backed slowly out of the tent so as not to knock it to the ground in my clumsy odd shoes and zipped it up behind me with the caring hand of a newly qualified surgeon. If I could have told her that I loved her, perhaps that would have lasted a lifetime too. The trouble was that there wasn’t room in her for any more. Mal’s love had taken it all, and now it was squatting inside.

  I climbed into the car and dropped my head to Red Ted. He didn’t mention the fact that I had just emerged from a tent on my own front lawn, that my shoes were two completely different colours or that a beautiful lipstick butterfly had landed on the side of my face. It stayed there all day, basking in the sunlight that fell into the shop.

  52

  The tent stayed. I thought of Lou every time I left the house. But I didn’t leave. There was nothing and nowhere to go to as grand as what I had imagined. My friends from school had mortgages and children. Maybe Ms Kay had been a shepherd, her advice a path to fuller pastures, advice they’d taken while I hadn’t. I knew regret a little but something magnetic had moored me, its anchor in my thinking. I had friends, though. At least I wasn’t Mal.

  Mal’s body had begun to morph. I noticed how the fat had started to gather first around his hips, swallowing up the lines where the tops of his legs book-ended the trunk of his stomach and plunged into the trousers he never wore. Soon I could trace with my eyes where Mal’s body had become misshapen, the workings of his metabolism shot through with sloth.

  I would see passers-by point and nod in the direction of the house as they strolled past, pointing at the tent, glaring from the pavement through the window to where Mal lay. Mum would be tending him like an emperor penguin plodding through the snow, careful not to let any camouflaged predators pounce upon its egg.

  Day Nine Hundred and Fourteen, according to the display on the wall. People in the town knew Malcolm Ede by name and name alone. He’d become gossip, a myth, an eccentric or a crank. Some that discovered I was his brother would come by the butcher’s shop to ask about him.

  ‘A fiver’s worth of braising steak. Are you Malcolm Ede’s brother?’

  Yes. But you knew that already.

  ‘A chicken. A big one. For roasting. For Sunday. So how is Malcolm these days, anyway?’

  Fine, just fine, I’ve customers to serve.

  ‘A pound of Malc . . . minced beef,
please.’

  As it grew more and more frequent, Red Ted agreed to man the front of the shop while I remained out back, preparing meat, cleaning up and placing orders for stock. I’d listen through the wall to the people asking about someone they didn’t know who isn’t actually doing anything. This was what fame was.

  ‘Are you Malcolm Ede’s brother?’

  ‘No. My name is Ted. I have no brothers.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who is Malcolm Ede’s brother then?’

  ‘Who is Malcolm Ede?’

  ‘You know who Malcolm Ede is.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘You do. The guy that’s stopped getting out of bed for no reason. His girlfriend has a tent on his lawn.’

  ‘Could be anyone.’

  ‘Not really . . . He’s been in bed for ages and his girlfriend lives in a tent on the lawn.’

  ‘Yeah, precisely.’

  ‘So you’re definitely not his brother?’

  ‘I don’t have any brothers.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Here you go, eight pork-and-leek sausages, a pound of lamb mince and a pound of stewing steak. I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t know anyone called Martin.’

  ‘Malcolm.’

  ‘No, my name is Ted.’

  I loved Red Ted.

  And Mal grew bigger and wider and rounder and heavier. Like a colony of ants, we worked and lived and fed around him, pretending that everything was normal, which in the strangest of ways it was.

  53

  In Dad’s car it smelled of tobacco and pungent breath mints designed to disguise the smell of tobacco. I liked neither but the two combined were an olfactory delight. They brought to mind times I wasn’t even born to enjoy. The smell of Dad’s youth decades ago, before the firstborn. The seats were brown and the air was still. The ashtray’s stinking guts spilled out their sterile grey carpeting all over the floor.