Bed

by David Whitehouse

  ‘Come fishing. It’s been a long, long time since you came fishing,’ he’d said.

  I’d resolved to bring him further into my life, and for me to worm further into his. Fishing was the price I’d pay. I had stalled long enough, pretending on previous occasions that I was going to see Sally, who I’d not seen for almost a year. I’d stay at Red Ted’s house.

  Soon my wealth of excuses was diminished by my rising guilt and I found it in me to feign interest in the fishing rod Dad had apparently designed and built in the attic. It was, he said, his own combination of pulleys and cogs and wheels. It meant that he could lift bigger, heavier fish from the water with far less effort than was normally required, and lift them safely and quickly to the bank without any fear of them falling free. It was a feat, I was sure, though I’d secretly always wanted those fish to escape. I’d look into their horrible beady death eyes. I saw how they hated the air.

  We were sat on the bank, the two of us, listening to the plink-plink of the line tickling the surface of the water. And there was a peace. The rare kind of peace Dad spoke in.

  ‘I went back there, you know,’ he said.

  ‘Where?’ I asked, his interjection into the nothingness having taken me aback.

  And he began. And I listened. It seemed that even the fish slowed as they swam past.

  ‘TauTona. South Africa. To the mine. I went back there three years ago, just before Malcolm got into bed. I didn’t tell anyone. I lied. I said I was going up north to help build a new lift, do you remember? But I didn’t. I went back to TauTona. I went back to where the accident happened. I had to go.

  ‘It was the same heat, kneading your skin. The heat there, it grinds you down and makes you slow and weary. And it was the same dust in the back of your throat. It was that same feeling that was there when I left, of something that had happened that would never be forgotten, of something that we’d always carry. That weight, as heavy as the day that the chains snapped. As heavy as the day it happened.’

  I wondered if Mal would ever hear this. I wondered if he went to bed so that he’d never have to go fishing again.

  ‘Do you know, they never took anything out of the ground there? It was just too deep. Too dangerous. The sixteen men that died in that lift, they are still there now, impacted three and a half kilometres inside the earth. We could reach them but we could never take them home. And I went down again. I stood on the platform of the lift in the emergency shaft that I made, and I went down again. So deep that nothing can live there. Not insects. Not light. Just memories. So deep that there was nothing but the twisted metal and the stale smell and the dust and the dark and the pain in my heart. I went to see if I could take those men from the earth, if I could finally bring them home and lay them to rest. If I could give those women with their candles and their headscarves something real to grieve for. But I couldn’t. Nothing could. All was gone.

  ‘That night there was a remembrance service. I was invited. In a small grey church by a river. A corrugated tin roof and a cross made from cheap wood with chipped paint. And I went. I wore a suit with a yellow flower, just like they do to remember in Russia. I’d always liked that. Not black. Yellow.

  ‘And at the front, on the first two rows, were the sixteen widows of TauTona. Sixteen still-shattered faces. And I thought to myself, you know, I can’t be like them. I can’t carry this picture around inside my head for ever. This grief. I thought, one day, and I don’t know when or what, but I’ll have to do something, something great, something new and wonderful, if I’m to leave TauTona behind. If I don’t, there’ll always be seventeen men there underground.’

  We drove home together, the silence restored. We shared a grilled fish and had cake for dessert. Afterwards Dad climbed up into his attic to make some adjustments to his rod from the equations he’d formulated whilst testing it out that afternoon.

  54

  On Day One Thousand Four Hundred and Sixty-Five, according to the display on the wall, Mal received his first proper piece of fan mail. Mum picked it up from the doormat, scowled, and carried the envelope into the bedroom, where I was donning my work overalls and Mal was hastily devouring a second bowl of custard, the remnants of it collecting in arcs at the sides of his mouth and leaving him with a golden smile. The letter rested on top of a cushion, the way you’d think the Queen received her mail. Short of a silver letter-opener with which to carve a neat incision, he licked the crumbs from the knife he’d used to butter his pre-custard round of thick white toast and slotted it inside the envelope. With a quick jerk of his thickening wrist he stabbed it open, murdering it so that its papery innards plopped out onto his chest. Mum offered to read it to him, as though he couldn’t himself. He agreed, which pained me a little.

  ‘“Dear Malcolm Ede”,’ she began. ‘“I just wanted to write to you to let you know that I heard what you are doing and I think it is wonderful. I’d love it if we could become pen friends, and if I could keep you company while you do what you are doing. Lots of love, Amy Lam”.’

  ‘But you’re not doing anything,’ I said, adjusting my apron to straighten the twist in the strap that runs behind my neck and holds my shoulders.

  Mal shrugged.

  ‘That’s OK,’ he said.

  I felt my lips clamp. I was well practised in dealing with Mal’s idiocy but not the greater idiocy of anyone inclined to try and be his friend.

  ‘I’m going to work,’ I said.

  Red Ted left the shop early to go to the tattoo parlour. He said he’d always wanted a tattoo and had been held back because he couldn’t settle on a design. In the end he’d opted to keep it simple and was, he told me, going to have his name written across his back.

  ‘I suppose that could look quite good,’ I said. ‘It’s a cool name, Red Ted.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘just “Ted”. You are the only person who calls me Red Ted.’

  Alone and slow on customers, I thought about the fan mail, about Amy Lam. Mysteriously buoyed, I picked up the phone and dialled Lou. It seemed like legitimate news, something to say, which I’d vitally lacked. A man answered.

  ‘Hello?’ he said.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Is Lou there, please?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK. Can I leave a message?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His answers crashed in before my questions had finished, forcing them off of the road. He was old, his voice raspy, definitely a dad and not a boyfriend. He was forgiven. I couldn’t bring myself to say my name because I would only suffix it with ‘Malcolm’s brother’, and so I said ‘Tell her Malcolm has fan mail.’

  ‘OK,’ said her dad, ringing off.

  When I arrived home that evening the sky was pink and the smell in the air that distant bonfire stink of danger. Mal was watching two-part detective dramas and Mum was sat at the ornate rolltop desk Dad had been bequeathed by his own father, a black fountain pen in her hand. Her fingers were coloured white by the scars left by the burns from the cooker and the iron. She was writing a reply to Amy Lam, happiness on her face, a reason in her evening.

  I removed my shoes and blood-dampened clothes by the front door and jumped when someone knocked on it. I opened it to find Lou. Her smile was huge, impossible and lovely. We sat in her tent with a torch and played cards and I told her about the fan letter that had arrived. She laughed along with me at it and I masked my delight at what I considered a breakthrough.

  55

  Lou flopped a waxy two of hearts onto the floor. It directed the light from her lamp against her chin like a buttercup. She lay on her front, hitched up on her elbows. I loved her shoulders and her cleavage, the dive of her bones. I loved the ski-jump plunge of her back, from her neck to her buttocks. I loved the three moles, a constellation on her cheek.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ Lou asked.

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  Something about Mal, I presumed.

  ‘Why do you stay?’

  I crinkled my nose and licked the gl
ossy insides of my teeth. Mal had asked me this once, and I’d stumbled as the answer evaded me.

  ‘Is it because you’re in love with Lou?’ he’d said. I’d nodded and my heart had cracked.

  He’d closed his eyes.

  ‘You could leave,’ she said.

  ‘I know I could. Any time.’ We both sat there, trapped in the time and the conversation. Together. ‘So could you.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Not really.’

  The dinking of a fly trapped between the outer layers of the tent.

  ‘We both could,’ I said. ‘Something big needs to come along to knock us out of orbit.’

  ‘Like an asteroid?’ she said.

  I heard that same sadness in her as was in me. It seeped and was on both our skins. The will to escape without the power to enact it.

  ‘Yeah,’ I smiled. ‘Like an asteroid.’

  We’d both basked in the warmth when Mal turned it on us. But she was blocked, unable to see round Mal’s expanding waistline to what lurked in his shadow. Me. It was time, I thought, to show her that I could give her that same warmth too.

  ‘Lou,’ I said but unaware I was to speak she spoke too.

  ‘I guess I’m more like my dad than I knew,’ she said.

  Fear let itself into me, and the confidence that had come so briefly expired, died and rotted. Like her dad, she’d never given her love to anybody else and now she didn’t know how to. That was what joined us inexorably. Neither had I.

  ‘I love him,’ she said.

  To love someone is to watch them die.

  So we floated in stasis together, for days and weeks and months and years. Lou chained to Mal, widening like the flourish of bubbles on a wet bar of soap. Me to Lou, the metal of the chains thick and heavy. And we waited for Mal to take the lock in his hands, spin back the steel cover on the hole and produce the key. If he would unlock it, I could take her away. An arm underneath the crooks of her knees, the other a scaffold for her shoulders and back, and I could carry her. Without the shadow falling on my face, she’d see the love in me. She’d grip my hair in her fingers and know this time was wasted. But he didn’t. The asteroid would come from elsewhere. From America. And the time it would take to get here would mean the crack in my heart grew bigger still.

  56

  After that first letter arrived, like a finger widening the hole where a tooth was knocked out, more and more dropped through the door and onto the mat. It slowly became an occurrence of such regularity that it was added to the list of chores Mum was to complete upon rising.

  Get dressed.

  Make Mal’s breakfast.

  Collect the post.

  We were having calls from the Post Office, questioning the influx, as if to check we were suitably deserving. Letters came from as far away as Australia. I saw postmarks of all colours and patterns. The rainbow squiggles of Japan. The red-yellow sunburst of Alaska. The criss-cross mint-cool blue-green thatch of Peru. The world dropping through our front door in tiny jigsaw pieces. Dad would save the stamps. Nameless heads of state. Placeless landmarks. Inventors, engineers and thinkers whose existence was not even in our time.

  Some days I arrived home from work to find the corner of a room brimming with bulbous black bin bags, rustling and shifting. They bulged like the humongous eyes of giant flies. They spilled and rolled and moved. Their outline, like Mal’s, was becoming a lumpy, unnatural changeling. Sometimes I would find these big black sacks in the garden, breathing in the heat of summer, or caked in thin white frost come wintertime like a Scandinavian liquorice.

  Mal didn’t read the letters. His fingers had grown too fat and stiff to hold something with the fragility of paper. He’d once worn a silver ring on his right forefinger but it had long since been swallowed up, his skin and flesh having grown over it, incorporating it into his all-consuming mass. He was part jewellery. I looked at his chin. It blended almost seamlessly into his shoulder blades, and I imagined his body consuming itself, the edges smoothing out. There was no outward evidence that he even had bones in there any more. If he were to live for ever, perhaps he’d eventually become one huge, amorphous pink blob. A globe without oceans. I imagined that belly of his wriggling and moving until it spilt open to a yawning chasm webbed with bloody strings, like a toothless old man, his gummy grin full of toffee. I imagined it spilling a sea of pearly white eggs across the bedspread, full of larvae that became insects that became clones of me, Mum, Dad and Lou.

  My mind was wandering in this way when I heard, above Mal’s foul and coarse snore, Dad shouting from the attic.

  ‘What on earth!’

  I opened my eyes and listened to the tinny clank of him trundling down his ladder into the kitchen, where, since I’d been secretly awake, Mum had been putting the finishing touches to a cake festooned with rich cherries. Breakfast.

  ‘Yorrnomgooindulikeiss.’

  Dad’s voice, muffled and squeezed through the insulation of the walls. Eventually I understood: ‘You’re not going to like this.’ I pulled on Mal’s old jeans, my wardrobe long-since bolstered by his renouncement of clothing, and walked slowly to the window. I glanced to check he hadn’t stirred.

  I was the fearful shake of red hands awaiting a caning at the thought that Lou might be gone. I took the cord of the curtains and I opened them steadily, as though I were master of the crushed red velvet drapes, twenty feet tall, of a stage in a town where the theatre was the oldest building. As though my drawstring were a thick golden plaited rope I needed both hands and all my might to unfurl from its great wound wheel in the ceiling. As though whatever lay outside for me were the opening night of a show and me and sleeping Mal the audience brimming with anticipation hot and sickly like an illness.

  Behind the glass, behind Lou’s tent on the grass, was another. Big this time, in the professional camping shades of blue and grey, its ropes taut and poised on the ground like the legs of a preying mantis, its silver pegs sharp and shiny like claws. A green-toothed man sat outside it with his girlfriend. They were cooking sausages on a small gas stove, the blue flames fingering the bottom of a rusty pan.

  I nudged Mal’s chubby knee with an outstretched toe that peeked from the hole in a sock he used to own.

  ‘What?’ he muttered, an angry shaven bear.

  ‘Look,’ I said, and gestured with the same toe like it was a stiffened finger. He followed the line of its nail to the view.

  The way settlements become hamlets become villages become towns. Landing at the biggest river. Staying where there is action and food and reason. Mal. Dust and rocks and comets caught in the path of a comet hurtling nowhere.

  ‘And what do you think about that?’ I asked.

  The light from the window hit his face in golden rafters and made his pupils expand and retract in perfect circles.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ he said.

  ‘It’s everything to do with you, Mal. That’s why they’re here. Because of you.’

  ‘And they can leave if they want to.’

  He turned, his white naked back, blotched with inkdrop red blurs and the blackened heads of deep buried filth, facing the window.

  ‘So can you,’ he said.

  By the time I arrived home from work, dried crusty lamb’s blood worn like a shawl around my shoulders, the second tent was gone, their fun had. And with the trap being open would come the opportunity to limp away.

  57

  Day Three Thousand One Hundred and Eighty-Five, according to the display on the wall, started as usual. Mal, bigger even than yesterday. Food. Work. Red Ted. Talking continuously about those two beacons of masculinity, football and meat. I never thought I’d be a butcher at thirty-one but I was good, really good. I thought about getting my own shop one day. I battled the inertia that prevented me and didn’t win. Then home.

  Red Ted pulled neatly alongside the pavement outside our house. Lou’s tent was illuminated by the security light Dad has installed on the roof. I eased myself out of Ted’s sha
ttered old car and walked down the path towards it.

  When I got there I saw spread all around it the tatty remains of shiny black plastic and envelopes torn hastily in two, the way presents are supposed to be opened – with the excited talons of a child. Inside were four more sacks, their contents all over the floor of the tent like a soft paper mattress. And amongst it sat Lou on a throne of neat handwriting and goodwill.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said, though my face asked it first. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Hello!’ she beamed. I’d meant to say hello. I’d not seen her this happy in just over three thousand one hundred and eighty-five days. She looked great when she was happy. ‘Guess what.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your mum came into the bank today.’

  ‘She doesn’t even bank there,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What did she want? Please say it’s not a loan. If she wants a loan, she can have one of mine. I have lots.’

  ‘Two things. She said now that so many letters keep on arriving, well, there’s no point in fighting it any more.’ I waited for her to say she’d been inside to see Mal but she didn’t and I was relieved. ‘She wanted to know if I wanted to help.’

  ‘Why today? She’s never wanted help before,’ I said, sitting just inside the front of the tent, crossing my legs as though I were a child being read to in a classroom and leaning into a plumped bag of post.

  ‘I guess it’s all getting too big.’

  ‘Mal?’

  ‘Everything. She said there just isn’t the room or the time any more. So I’m going to help her answer some of these letters.’

  ‘You’re mental,’ I said.

  I felt like she’d escaped a riptide only to be torn away in the grip of a fierce undercurrent.