Bed

by David Whitehouse

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  ‘Are you serious?’ I squirmed, anxious not to sound too negative.

  ‘Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t I be?’

  Defensive. Uncomfortable.

  ‘No,’ I stammered and bit my lip and opinion. ‘No reason at all. I think it’s good. Great, I think it’s great.’

  For one of Santa’s elves. I thought of the relationship between fat men and large quantities of mail and wondered what made it so.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, the purity of her unabashed joy massaging my sore, brittle cynicism.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I said.

  Then she rallied.

  ‘And she wanted me to come and talk to you.’

  I felt like I’d been powered-down.

  She shuffled through a neat pile of paper on her lap in search of something and I drummed tense little fingers softly against my thigh, wallowing in my helplessness. I drew neat little triangles around my kneecap with my thumb. Then Lou discovered whatever it was she’d been searching for.

  ‘Look,’ she said, thrusting another torn-up envelope into my hand with a letter hanging out of it.

  The bright red-and-blue postmark was American, the neatly stamped words ‘AIR MAIL’ telling me it was better travelled than I was.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s from a lady in Ohio. She read about Malcolm in a newspaper. How weird is that?’

  I nodded and agreed but Dad’s stamp collection was led by an army of Lincolns. It was stewarded by a whole troop of Edisons and flanked on either side by Washington after Washington after Washington. His stamp collection was a parade of founding fathers. Mal received letters from America all the time.

  ‘Just read it,’ she said, and so I did.

  Day Three Thousand One Hundred and Eighty-Five, according to the display on the wall, I read only my second of Mal’s fan letters. Unless you counted the one Lou had passed to me at school when she was twelve, which these days I didn’t.

  Dear Mr and Mrs Ede,

  Unlike the others it wasn’t addressed to Mal, a unique approach to fan mail. Boded well.

  My name is Norma Bee, and yours is a situation to which I can wholeheartedly relate. I lived in a trailer in my own yard in Ohio, America, because my husband grew too big. I mean very, very big. My husband grew to 1,288 pounds. People who’d not seen him in years stood no chance at all of recognizing what he had become.

  I screwed up my face into a puckered sour ball.

  ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it?’ said Lou.

  ‘It’s horrible,’ I replied but I couldn’t take my eyes off Norma Bee’s frank, captivating scrawl. ‘Has Mum seen this?’

  ‘No.’

  I read on.

  This may sound strange to you. This may sound odd or perverse or even upsetting. Or, as I dearly hope, this may make some kind of sense. Regardless, I’ll continue. Just six weeks ago I entered my husband’s bedroom with a stack of blueberry pancakes, smothered in thick maple syrup and sugar, to find that he was dead. He had suffered an aneurysm and hadn’t even finished his breakfast of bacon, eggs and waffles. He could eat twelve eggs in a sitting. Our house is small, and as my husband grew large and needed more and more space, it no longer became possible for me to live there comfortably with him. And so I began entering competitions to win myself a trailer. I would enter all kinds of competitions. I’d enter cake-baking competitions, raffles and mostly painting competitions (I love to paint and my husband used to be my favourite subject – I’ve painted him over thirty times). Seven years ago, with a painting of my beloved Brian, I finally won one. It is a glorious Airstream trailer with a marvelous kitchen inside it and it’s where I have lived ever since, using it to make the meals for my husband in the house and to sleep whenever I got the opportunity. But now, of course, I have no need for it. Since my husband died, I like to sleep in his old bed. He was in that room for twenty years, and that is the closest I can get to him. It’s with this in mind that, having read about you both and your son Malcolm in the newspaper, that I thought of you. I’d love to offer you my little trailer. I’d love to have it shipped over to you, so that, if you need it, it can continue having the purpose for you that it once had for me.

  My contact details are on the back of this letter.

  God bless you,

  Norma Bee, Akron, Ohio, USA

  I used my fingers as pincers to scour the envelope and pull out whatever it was I could feel still left inside of it. Two Polaroids fell out into my lap. They were memories of an enormous Mr Bee. Rolls upon rolls of mottled black skin. His face segueing into hanging fat breasts and a monolithic tummy comprising separate slabs of hulking meat. On his face was a smile and in his hands two cream cakes, white and fluffy, as though he’d reached into the heavens for a scooping of cloud. And then there was another photograph, quartered and folded. Lou took it and opened it slowly, smoothing out its petals until she could lay it flat in front of me, a photo of an exquisite oil painting of a silver trailer nesting in bright green grass to the backing of a wide blue American sky.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Lou. ‘Wouldn’t be the first strange thing on your lawn.’

  58

  Mal was surprisingly awake on the day that the builders come to demolish the wall that separated our bedroom from Mum and Dad’s. He lay there and watched with the sheets lapping at his body, like a great lumbering walrus emerging from the ocean. The dust in the plaster woken by sledgehammer upon brickwork made him sneeze so hard that the sheets fell to the floor and the builder pretended badly that he hadn’t noticed.

  Mum wasn’t convinced when Lou gave her Norma Bee’s letter, vehemently refusing to have anything to do with Norma Bee’s very queer little life. She did not see her own reflection in the mirror of it. Besides, it distracted her from the job at hand, Mal. Dad, meanwhile, embraced it as his own special project. He had friends in shipping, having himself sent huge metal structures all over the world, and enlisted them to help him bring Norma Bee’s gift to us.

  Dad paid Red Ted to drive with him to the coast, where our great metallic pod was arriving on a huge blue liner. By the time Dad and Ted arrived home, a crane was on hand to lift the trailer into position, for which Dad was in its cabin with the driver, entranced by the systems of levers and combinations of pulleys and wheels. A crowd gathered. I watched with Lou as the trailer swung through the air like a glamorous silver wrecking ball, catching the sun as it slowly spun and turned, bouncing its harsh light into the eyes of everyone that had come to watch. Slower and slower still it was lowered towards the floor. A team of men in fluorescent jackets stood on the ground to guide it carefully into place. A camera crew gathered behind a cordon of plastic yellow crime-scene tape and they filmed the entire thing.

  Finally, when it was all over and the crowd began to disperse I found Dad, his hands on his hips, surveying the land like a conquering emperor a new domain. In his eyes was a mad inventor glint.

  ‘Did you see that?’ he asked, hopping from one foot to the other like a sand lizard. ‘That was amazing. Did you see the crane? How it lifted the whole weight of this caravan like that? It wasn’t even a big crane! See, you can’t do that with lifts because they’re stationary, but for a crane to be able to pick up and move something like that, with just ropes and wheels . . . Essentially, of course, that’s all it is. Well, for a crane to be able to do that, and do it that easily, it’s a fea –’

  ‘Feat of modern engineering,’ I said, faking a yawn that he didn’t notice to amuse Lou if not myself.

  ‘Yes, exactly that, a feat of modern engineering. How I would love to make something like that. Amazing. Could you imagine?’

  ‘No, Dad,’ I said, secretly glad to be warmed by the re-igniting of his imagination. Far too long had passed since his body had registered such a feverish chemical rush. I could almost see him glow. I could sense the beginning of the fading of TauTona on his face.

  ‘Seriously,’ he said, because he didn’t know that I was taking him serious
ly and I didn’t show it. ‘It’s all about weight and space but . . . ’

  He walked away, still talking, his words a slow jet behind him.

  Later that night, as Mum and Dad got ready to sleep in the trailer for the first time, me and Mal watched their silhouettes shuffle around inside it like in a Victorian children’s puppet show.

  59

  I’d been home from work for ten minutes when the doorbell rang. Lou stood there in a floor-length overcoat, collar up around her face, eyes perched on it, round and pointed at the ends, a cat’s mouth. The heat from inside the house climbed out over her.

  ‘She’s dead,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  Images of all the women I’d known flickered through my mind. Of Sal, whom I’d not seen or thought about in so long. Of Mum. Of Mrs Gee, who probably was. That was it, small roll-call.

  ‘My mother is dead. She died last night.’

  She was still smiling, though I couldn’t see her mouth. My stomach rolled.

  ‘Oh.’ I offered a hand, automatically, conciliatory. She took it in hers, folded her hand around mine like an oyster. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be.’

  ‘How did you find out?’ I wondered.

  She still held my hand and ran the ball of her tiny thumb across the scarred, cold brim of my butchered knuckles.

  ‘I went to visit my father this morning,’ she said and dropped her head for the first time at his mention. ‘First time since I moved into my new place. I couldn’t open the door for the pile of post behind it. The carpet was covered in packets of food and rubbish, bottles and ash. It stank. And he was in the corner, in the same chair in the same clothes. I knew she’d died. I knew it. But you know what? I’m happy she’s dead. Now she’s gone, he’s cut loose.’

  ‘How?’ I said, as though I only ever knew one word.

  ‘Cancer.’ And I could see it in the back of Lou’s gladdened, pretty eyes.

  A bobble became a bump became a lump became an aggressive tumour in her hot breast. It had eaten through her with its mighty jaws in no time at all until her skin remained just hangers for her bones and all the fight left inside her was with her own regrets. A karmic tumour. It unfurled in my imagination like a flag to some memorial. On her death bed she had asked to see her daughter but the message of her illness arrived too late, unable to make its way through the chicanery of the relationships she had busted to reach Lou in time for her to make it to the hospice. Not that she’d have gone. Just as Lou’s mum hadn’t been there when Lou most needed her, Lou was absent when her face was all that her mother needed to see.

  I could picture it. In those last moments she had worn the overbearing guilt of abdicating her maternal responsibility around her neck, an anchor that weighed her to the bottom of an ocean of dark thoughts. And I could see that this made Lou pleased. I could see it in her as she smiled at me and let go of my hand.

  ‘I can’t end up like my dad,’ she said. ‘I can’t let Mal take me with him. Perhaps it’s time for me to leave.’

  Then I realised she had let go of my hand, that mine was still cuffed to Mal and hers moved freely away. My cellmate’s pardon granted, I slunk into the darkness of the corner as the bars slammed behind her. I wanted to run out behind her, roll like a commando through the gap in the door. But I was weary. It was there, as always in my head, the invisible barrier between the opportunity and the grab I wanted to make for it. Tired.

  Mal had been in bed for ten years. I climbed in beside him.

  60

  It had been a year since the death, the carcass mulch. The tent remained idle, a collapsed lung on the yellowed grass. When the low breeze blew southwesterly, sweeping the walls at the side of our bungalow, the tent would breath. Over Mal I watched it as the display on the wall went click.

  Lou would call to see me at the butcher’s. She still asked after Mal but less and less so. ‘He’s OK,’ I’d say, hollowed by the effort. She told me about how things were going at the bank, about her friends, about her flat. She mentioned men’s names sometimes, men I didn’t know.

  She asked about my life. Whether I’d met anyone. I told her the truth and she smiled. I’d ask after her dad, which I liked to do because when she answered I learned more about her. Her words distilled feeling in me, whittling it to raw and pure of heart, how you’d feel when, at a televised awards ceremony, a young girl with burns, skin as thin as a tambourine’s, is rewarded for re-entering the house to wake her sleeping mother. A medal for bravery and selflessness hung around her sore, charred neck. The audience applaud, distraught and suddenly small.

  In trying to leave Mal behind, Lou had focused her love. It had gone to her dad. And in doing it, it was as though she’d given up the pursuit of convention, the hopes that she had once believed were all that could make her happy. She now understood what Mal had said that night on the beach. Why, she thought, devote herself to finding love, success, solvency – to the life she was expected to create around herself – if it could only explode so spectacularly? She needed no better an example of how a life lived a way perceived to be correct could still come to nothing more than that of her own father.

  The first month, Lou said, she’d spent cleaning around him. Scrubbing the smoke from the curtains, lifting the ash from the carpet fibres. Shampooing the arms of the chair where he sat, his grubby fingerprints ingrained.

  The second month, circling the names of clubs, societies, groups, meetings, centres and courses in the local paper, no hiding of her desperation to enthuse him.

  ‘But I don’t like chess,’ he’d mumbled.

  ‘It’s not about liking chess, Dad,’ she’d say.

  ‘Joining a chess club isn’t about liking chess?’

  ‘No. It’s about meeting people, like-minded people.’

  ‘I can’t imagine I’ll meet many people who, like me, don’t like chess, at a chess club.’

  There it is, she thought, a joke, a glimmer. He’s in there, buried but alive. Dig.

  ‘It’s not just chess, you can do pretty much anything.’ The options held above her head like a spade, each slamming of it downwards an inch closer to the target. ‘Archery . . . ’

  ‘Archery?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Archery?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Wine-making? Or you can learn a language. French? Spanish?’

  Lou cocked an ear, how she does when she hopes you’ll be pleased.

  ‘Spanish?’ her dad said. He’d not taken his eyes from the television set. ‘I don’t like Spain. Too hot, weird portions.’

  ‘You’ve never been to Spain, Dad. Anyway, there are more. Model railways? No? Salsa danc –’

  The volume on the television crept upwards, trembling a tinny rattle in the speakers. She’d try again another time. The survivor had been located, contact made. She’d return with an industrial digger. The excavation of her dad would commence forthwith.

  This, I thought, was the best type of love. The bravest type, given with no thought for oneself. It deserved medals too. She could kneel and I’d slide one over her head, noose-like, and down her smooth, elegant neck. Services to her father.

  She’d update me in instalments over the butchery counter. Red Ted stood behind me and listened. He never asked about her once she’d gone but he too daydreamed of her return.

  The third month, the fourth and the fifth, the reintegration of her dad into society began. Lou planned routes to town for them that skirted the tree-lined streets where signs erected outside properties bore the face of the man who’d ruined his life. The estate agent, his rictus cardboard grin ever-present.

  The fourth and fifth month, better and better.

  The sixth month, Lou’s dad went to the supermarket on his own. She cried when she told me. He bought a granary loaf and two tins of baked beans.

  The seventh month. Lou took the dirty plate from the tray in his lap and carried it through to the kitchen, resting it atop
the counter to be washed later on. He’d begun watching TV shows she wanted to watch, reaching out, an exploratory root pioneering a caress across dry soil in the search for water. She picked the newspaper off the table, sodden and clouded by the blue ink of her dad’s doodling, florid and incessant, and opened it to the community pages.

  ‘Boxing? No, no, not boxing. I don’t want you taking up boxing.’

  ‘I’d lose my beautiful features,’ he laughed.

  ‘Precisely,’ she said. ‘Floristry?’

  ‘Flower arranging? I might as well take up midwifery.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘midwifery?’

  ‘No.’

  And then a bloodied, embattled hand pumped through the wreckage and debris. It clasped her at the wrist, desperate to be saved.

  ‘Life drawing?’ she asked.

  He thought for a moment, twizzled the pen in his fingers, an enthused majorette.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘why not?’

  She looked around her, the heavy rubble finally gone, and hugged her father. He’d survived.

  The first time, the eighth month, they went together. In the church, under the lava-lamp gels pushed through the stained-glass window by the sun, a woman disrobed. Her feet were tiny and square, the balls of her cheeks fresh and pink, her hair brown, bobbed, tousled, good. She reminded Lou’s dad of the wooden woman who angrily emerged from his Swiss clock twenty-four times a day, infuriated, he liked to pretend, by having never had more than an hour’s sleep. The model said her name was Rebecca Mar, then lay down on the sofa provided by the vicar, naked and gentle. Lou’s dad picked up his pencil and sketched, realising quickly that he could close his eyes and still continue. He’d committed her form to memory immediately.

  The ninth month, he went alone, a new and expensive packet of graphite in his pocket. He looked at Rebecca Mar’s compact body, the muscle and flesh wound and pressed together beautifully as though it were a statuette. He traced her to the page. She curled the dressing gown around her midriff. He lingered as he packed his things. The vicar gone, they kissed by the cold stone altar.