I wondered if the birthday card I sent sits in the mountain of black bin bags full of unopened mail Dad told me is stacked in and around Lou’s tent on the lawn.
For hours I rocked in her chair on the porch, plucking caught strands of her hair from the joins in the woodwork and winding it through my fingers. The dog was still too scared to come into my vicinity. Norma Bee tried to soothe me. Soon she realised she was making little headway and returned to silence, occasionally rubbing my shoulder as she passed, bringing me snacks and meals and drinks.
I went to bed.
75
In the middle of the nights I’d open my eyes. No more colour seeped in. I thought of her next to me but she was still not there. I thought I could hear the gentle whirr and click of the clock on the wall, and I dreamt I bathed in its bright green glow. As the sun rose I heard Norma Bee making my breakfast but I didn’t even bother to get dressed when she brought it to me on a wide plastic tray.
Every day Norma painted me. I stopped answering the phone. It was never Lou.
I was in bed.
Norma Bee told me I could stay.
I ate and slept and grew. The trinity of pleasure that cupped me, now missing a side, had fallen over. I had tumbled to the floor.
I ate fatty American delicacies. Meals a nation was created on sated my transatlantic palate. In the daytime, when it was hot, I’d lie underneath a single sheet. In the nighttime I’d build a pillowed wall and seal myself inside it. Where she’d been was now just nothing but a space I was gradually beginning to fill.
Time began to wobble along. Great racks of lamb. Chicken, rice and peas. Tortillas with salsa and hot summer-shaded dips. Fajitas soppy with sour cream, noodles with a brown vinegary sauce and finger-sized lumps of duck. Meatballs. Lots of meatballs. Norma Bee made great meatballs. Soggy spring rolls. Cannon-balls of ice cream. The days had slowed down. Now sunrise to sunset was just one long blink of nature’s eye, the changing of the shade of the day interminable.
There were seven paintings of me in bed on the wall facing where I slept when clarity found me. Norma bundled through the door, a cardboard bucket of deep-fried meat twizzled in breadcrumb armour underneath one of her wings.
‘Lunchtime,’ she sang.
She always sang meals. I thought about Mum. I knew deep within my being that it was time to return. But I had rested here now, settled, stagnated and tired.
My impetus arrived early one morning. I woke to the unpleasant nuzzle of heartburn. The light through the window showed me to the mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door that had, for the first time and accidentally, been left open by Norma Bee. I saw myself and recognised the reflection but not as mine. The clusters of pustules jostling in sweaty patches of my face. The pale stretchmarks slashing across the dirty, expanding skin. Taller and wider, not the man in the paintings but the brother I’d left behind. I’d turned forty in this room but the icing on the cake had been no signifier that the day was that different from any other. I had to go.
I took one portrait with me. Norma Bee missed Brian Bee with all of her colossal heart. She said I’d always be her son.
76
Day Seven Thousand Four Hundred and Eighty-Three, according to the display on the wall.
No one notices me pulling on my coat as the darkness arrives. I am exhausted by the day. Lou coming home. The interview. The fight. The people outside, some who remained. My legs ache, the metal pins still spearing my shins.
Mum is still applying cooling antiseptic lotion to the trails that ladder Mal’s skin. He is laughing about Ray Darling, about today, but the pressure of the weight his body lays on his lungs is five baby elephants and the noise doesn’t emerge at first. He is too preoccupied with it, as Mum is with his nursing, to watch me slip through the front door.
Dad is on the lawn, stood behind Lou’s old empty tent. He has finished the frantic banging he’d been making in the attic and is talking to the dozen or more people still here. With them arced around him, he looks like a preacher on the mount. He gestures towards the house, to the window where Mal is lying as though in state. He makes grandiose, upward-sweeping movements with his arms.
He doesn’t notice me hobble quietly down the path and onto the street. The moon is up. Its light shrouds the trailer and the cold sucks my fingertips. I walk briskly and, taking care not to slip on my crutches, retrace backwards the way Red Ted used to bring me home from work every day in his little car.
As I finally round the corner where the butcher’s shop sits, the nervous vice in me begins to twist its sturdy metal handle. I wait there. The chance to see and touch her is an angry needle. It wants to spike her for an apology, stab out an explanation. It tells me to turn around, to go home, to never speak to Lou again. I know that I can’t obey it.
Then I am cast in light, as though I were a criminal chased along the wall of a prison from which I have just escaped. It is from a car, just arrived and now parked opposite me, its beams blinding. I maneouvre myself carefully on my crutches and shamble slowly out of the glare. Putting one foot in front of the other, I make my way to the driver’s-side window, which winds down to greet me.
‘Hello,’ says Lou, older but her voice trapped in time.
‘Hello,’ I reply.
I am a textbook full of questions with stained, maddened pages.
‘What happened to your legs?’ she asks.
The car smells brand new.
77
The taxi driver who drove me from the airport to my home didn’t ask me about Mal. Time had erased me a little, rubbed me out. I had faded like a photograph buried under soil. I was tanned and older, weathered and experienced and fat. I was what we all become, a by-product of the torture of ourselves.
As I passed the trailer, I thought of Norma Bee on her own, about the food that must have been going to waste.
Lou’s tent was unloved on the lawn, torn and faded but secure where Dad had nailed it down. I opened my suitcase, took out the painting of the two of us and placed it inside. It didn’t smell of her any more. It smelled of dust and heat and the humid summers I had missed. I wondered if I should climb in, run the zip up behind me and lie in wait, a mousetrap primed and ready, a tasty chunk of cheese sat invitingly on the edge. Instead I left the portrait there, propped against the side, and headed into the house.
Home was always the same inside. Its exterior grew and shrank depending upon how long I’d been away but indoors it was a precise mould. There were turns I could make in the dark, that smell of food and perfume and linen and Mal. Creams and sweat. Creaks that the walls always made, the clanking of badly tuned pipes in the cavities. Home was always the same temperature. It always had the same map. It always welcomed me in the same way.
What greeted me when I pushed open the bedroom door scooped my foundations from underneath me and I collapsed, compacted floor by floor into the carpet. Mal. Huge. The folds in his skin were blistered red eclipses. The sores that peeked from his underside shimmered with clear secretions that glossed his sodden bed sheets. In the middle of the day he was asleep. Drowning in his own fluids, a chicken slowly turning on a spit. The walls were lined with newspaper cuttings and randomly apportioned piles of his post. There was box upon packet upon plate. There was Mum, who slept in a chair in the corner. She had more colour than I recalled, glowing cheeks and rosiness. There was the display on the wall.
Dizzied, I staggered backwards to where Dad’s ladder’s black rubber feet met the carpet. Stepping aboard the first rung, I gave the hatch a tap with a pointed knuckle. There was the clatter and movement I expected and remembered, and then it opened to Dad’s face, older yet more fatherly, surprised and pleased.
‘Ha!’ he shouted, jumping down and tossing his arms around my middle, pinning mine to my sides. ‘Look at you,’ he said, ‘you’re home!’ Then he moved away, saw that the look on my browned face didn’t match his. ‘She didn’t come back with you?’ he asked.
‘No.’
I’d not known how much I’d mi
ssed him. His hair was a wise grey and wild, his face full of movement and his eyes wider. They glinted like underwater coins. He looked how I’d imagined Einstein did in the flesh, crackling with energy. He was charged up, new.
We woke Mum. She hugged and she kissed me, and when I was close to her it didn’t feel frail as it once had but warm and soulful. A grand emotional renaissance had taken place. As separate as their lives were, happiness was upon them.
Mal opened an eye, set back on a thick cheek like a button buried in the wool of a winter jumper.
‘Hello,’ he said.
In the furrow that indented trenches in his chubby misshapen brow, I saw that he knew I was not here through choice.
I leant my suitcase against my bed – it was still there next to his – and with a sigh and the thick stink of malaise clouding any way out which might have existed, I resigned myself to the fact that perhaps, just perhaps, neither Mal nor I was ever supposed to leave this house.
‘Do you want to talk?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said.
‘All right,’ he said.
I looked at him in bed and was lulled temporarily by the unspoken logic of it all. He might be right, I wondered. What life is this, giving you the wonder of a heart that beats and then smashing it to a million tiny pieces? When everything you’re taught to expect comes to nothing? If this is life, then why get out of bed?
Like an old pet dog, my mattress remembered my scent and my shape and it welcomed me with indiscriminate affection. I slept for days, my great escape aborted.
78
The lime-green liquid crystal morphed and manoeuvred to different shapes and times, up and up and up, but the light never pierced the thick black around me. My eyes numbed once more to the sight of Mal’s body as it enveloped him and he disappeared inside himself like a rolled-up sock.
I watched the sun come, then the leaves the rain and the snow. I watched the interest mount. I watched Lou’s tent and Mum’s arrival, with heaped fresh plates full of food. They were the only constant, the storming-on of time all that differentiated one day from the next.
Mal and I were watching a film we’d seen before. It was old, so black and white that it glowed blue in parts, and John Wayne espoused the relative benefits of laying down your life for the good of others and the rewards it ultimately brings. Neither of us was really listening.
It was Day Six Thousand Six Hundred and Forty, according to the display on the wall, a long time since my thoughts weren’t soured. Mum had finished tending Mal for the evening and so just the two of us lay there, side by side, big and small Russian dolls.
‘This has to stop,’ he said, the pelican undercarriage of his chin jiggling.
‘Turn it over then,’ I said. ‘I’m not watching it. The remote control is probably under one of your bellies.’
‘Not the film,’ he said, ‘This. You. You have to stop.’
I pulled myself up to a sitting position.
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you.’
‘What are you talking about? You are fully aware that none of us would even be here right now if it weren’t for you.’
And suddenly release, the pressure punching past. My face reddened, the hue rising up it like the mercury in a thermometer.
‘But you’re sat there feeling sorry for yourself,’ he said. ‘I’m not.’
He was right, I knew he was.
‘You ain’t got your photograph yet,’ he said. ‘I’ve got mine.’
I got dressed in a hurry and called Dad down from the attic.
‘Can I help you?’ I asked.
He dusted himself off like he’d been waiting to for a very long time.
‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘we shall go to the roof and you can see what I’ve been making.’
79
On the roof we were causing a stir. Dad was wearing an orange boiler suit salvaged from his lift-building days, topped with a scratched plastic yellow hard hat. Underneath his steel toe-capped boots the burnt red slate crumbled and gave. I struggled to balance. Swinging my arms in continuous circles, I walked a constant trapeze, occasionally finding brief respite in stillness.
The day was bitter.
‘Here,’ said Dad.
Kneeling, he lifted off one of the larger slates that sat over the two sides of the roof the way a tea towel is draped across the arm of a waiter, and placed it carefully to one side. We were both looking down into a hole the size of a dinner plate that led directly to the attic, a fantastic grotto when seen from above. There were shiny rods and metal cogs, materials, hooks and joints, all disparate parts to my eye, a freshly opened jigsaw. Dad grinned, a treasure hunter celebrating the accuracy of his instinct.
‘Who made this hole?’ I asked.
‘Me,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Because nothing moves anywhere without a hole. Now wait here, I’ll be back in a moment.’
He scrambled down the ladder and I stayed squat, my skin pimpled by the freezing morning air, wondering why I wasn’t wearing anything more substantial than an old pair of running pumps. I surveyed the surroundings of the house. The tent, Mrs Gee’s garden, the huge mound of post that had arrived for Mal, arranged into a pile.
I heard Dad climb the smaller ladder inside the house. The hatch opened and he appeared in the loft. I saw the pate of his head bobbing around below me, his baldness a pink egg in a wiry silver nest.
‘Are you still up there?’ he said.
‘Of course I am.’
‘Right. Grab a hold of this.’
There was movement and metallic sound and suddenly a thick silver steel pole began to emerge from the hole, almost knocking me backwards and to my doom. It too had the circumference of a saucer, and it continued to rise until, with a clunk, a new pole began to emerge from inside it, and another and another telescopically until it injected the frozen sky above me. I listened to the wheel Dad was winding from inside begin to slow down and I held on to the tower that had just appeared from the top of the house like a lightning rod. It swayed a little as the wind caught it. Soon he reappeared, carrying large bags full of rods and chains and wheels, and they were cumbersome but still he managed to move around the rooftop with some unorthodox grace.
‘I’ve been planning this for a long, long time,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘This. Ever since I built that fishing rod. And then, when I saw them bring that trailer in too, I thought to myself “I can do that”. It’s the same as lifts, you see. Weights, space and distance. It’s all ratios. Technically, if you get your mathematics right, you can build something to do just about anything with the minimum of energy. It’s about knowing how to amplify your exertion.’
As I gripped both sides of the roof with my tired legs, he was standing, sometimes on one foot and on the tips of his toes, running ropes and chains through holes and loops, around cogs and across hooks.
‘It’s about doing nothing but doing something incredible at the same time,’ he said.
I nodded.
‘Look,’ he pointed. ‘See down there.’
I leant out as far as I could. By the window between Mal and Lou’s tent he had stacked a pyramid of sacks full of Mal’s unopened post. It shimmered as the winter breeze blew its skin. Around it he had wrapped strips of thick material, four of them, which unfurled from each corner framing the heap of bags. They were joined tidily and securely at the top as a Christmas present is bedecked with pretty ribbon. Attached to that was a hook.
‘What a great way to test it,’ he said.
Those bins full of misfiring equations. Those aborted attempts and flawed prototypes and scale models.
I stood precariously to help him, each new rush of wind bullying me towards a fall, and it started to rain thick droplets. Dad shimmied up the great metal mast and I grabbed the seams of the trousers of his overalls. I steadied him as he took the assembled pieces of equipment and slipped them into a slot he’d prepared at the summit of the rod.
Bringing it round into position, it looked like a futuristic gallows. It was a rudimentary crane. The morning clouds seemed to gather in the distance, and I thought more about how smooth to the touch a bolt of lightning would find us.
Next, Dad threaded a rope and chain through a link at the far end of the rod that extended out from the mast above the sacks of mail in the garden. He had an admirable abandon in the way he moved, the kind you’d need to dangle above a shaft that hurtled towards the darkness at the centre of the earth. And then, just as easily as he had climbed up, he came back down to where I stood on the roof. My legs were bowed, the effort demanded of me to stand safely draining me like bark tapped for sapling.
‘Here,’ he said, handing me a thick silver hook attached to a sash of pea-green material so sturdy as to be impossible to rip. ‘Take this and hook it to the hook on the top of the pile of postbags. I am going to put this little wheel together, wind it through the pully to the rope. If I’m right, the distance between the centre, here, and the bags means that I’ll be able to lift their entire weight just by turning this tiny wheel. Just how you’d flip a fish out of the water.’
I loved him, seeing his enthusiasm and ecstatic that he had it.
As the rain waxed a damp slippery gloss on my skin and clothes he said, ‘See, much better than staying in bed, isn’t it?’
And then I was not concentrating any more. An error. I snatched the hook from his hand and stooped, bending my knees and preparing to take chicken steps on my way down from the roof.
The tile beneath my left foot crumbled in the pressure and the moisture, and the sound of lost footing cracked through the air like a scratched record. My dad shouted my name in drawn-out baritone. My back hit the surface of the roof with astonishing force and my bones moved around inside the bag of me as a supersonic slap clattered through it. My ribs tinkled like dropped chopsticks and my lungs inflated, airbags in a car against a tree. I opened my eyes and the sky moved upwards past me. Sliding down the roof, I clawed at the wet slate for a hold but none came. My angle was set. I tombstoned off the roof. Mid-air I felt the blood trickle down my back where the skin was scraped from it like the peel of an orange. The pinkish holes it left welled with more blood. My hand dripped it. I saw I had missed the pile of soft postage bags that would have caught me in their cushioned black mass, and I closed my eyes unsure of which way up I might be as I hit the cement of the pathway in front of the glass.
Bed Page 18
