I landed straight-legged, hands across my chest. A coffin. The impact of my bodyweight on my heels forced them up into my shins, which shattered immediately into shards of bone that concertinaed, bursting out in red explosions through the skin with sharp white fins. My kneecaps lurched to the insides of my legs, I buckled entirely, my right tibia smashing my right fibula to crumbs, my left tibia punching through the denim of my jeans.
My brain opened an emergency trapdoor of endorphins. None of this was mine. None of it was even happening. I lay quietly in a puddle, crippled and cracked.
I rocked my head back and rolled my eyes. Mal was there through the glass, he could see it all, but his screams couldn’t keep me awake.
80
Abed but not my own. For the first few days I lapsed in and out of consciousness, guided by a chemical hand. When pain arrived, it beckoned me towards a light and as I entered it, it tricked me back from whence I came. Slowly everything was not so white any more, and if I listened carefully I could hear the beeps of the equipment by my head singing to the rainbows of tubes and wires that ducked in and out of my body, giving me electric pulse and life. I wondered if I was Mal.
And then one morning I was in hospital, able for the first time to remain awake. Mum was by my side.
‘Get some rest,’ she said, and I heard her voice and I knew she had been here as long as I had, at my bedside. Telling me stories. Telling me that I was going to be OK.
My legs were the colour of damage, quarantined in metal cages that skewered the skin. My thighs had angles and my feet were packets of broken biscuits. They hung up high in stirrups either side, and they didn’t look or feel like mine but rather that I operated some enormous robot with the strength of ten men, that I could stand up right now and kick through the walls of this hospital until I was walking through the still of the countryside, destroying everything that blocked my path home.
‘It hurts,’ I said.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘get some rest.’
In my bed it became clearer and clearer over the days and weeks and months. There was a reminder every time my bolts got turned. I remembered nothing about the day I fell off the roof but for the hints left by my scars, which never forgot where I had been or what I had done. Mum fed me jelly and ice cream. The nurses acted extra-nice towards me when I was polite.
‘Who is looking after Mal?’ I asked her.
‘Your dad,’ she said.
She was stroking my arm and filling my drink. She brushed hair from my eyes and winced when the doctors lifted the titanium spikes that pepper my legs like the stanchions of a famous bridge.
‘Just relax,’ she said.
Her face said he’d gone to the attic, a tortoise back into its shell. His own recovery ruined by wet slate and my unsuitable footwear. Sabotaged by my lack of balance.
‘Anyway, I am here for you.’
And as I was going to speak I slept, muted.
They turned me tighter and tighter once a week. When they did it, I could hear my bones whinge. They felt like they might snap in protest. They taught me to walk. They massaged my muscles and stimulated my nerves, re-set my bones and broke them again. One day as they helped me to stand straight, I bit the tip of my own tongue off. I needed eight stitches and I spoke like my mouth was full of sawdust for the rest of the month.
With my legs locked up there was too much time to think.
I watched television and had reconstructive surgery. I did puzzles while they washed me and read books as they tweaked. I had wire tentacles.
It was as Dad, listless, wheeled me home that I accepted my fate at the third attempt, that I was meant to be with Mal in that room, to ride this out to the very, very end. I went to bed.
Day Six Thousand Eight Hundred and Eighty-Eight, according to the display on the wall.
81
‘Oi. Look. Here. Oi.’ I lifted my head. ‘Would you like one of these?’ asked Mal.
He had an open packet of six blueberry muffins resting on his naked chest. One toppled out and rolled down the landscape of his huge flat slab to his groin, where it jammed.
‘Mmmm, yes, please, I’ll have that one. What time is it?’
‘Four,’ he said. ‘And no need to be funny.’
His voice started so deep inside his chest that it sounded by the time it emerged as though there were a little version of Mal in there trapped inside a cave, hollering for help.
‘Four in the morning?’
‘Yes.’
‘You woke me up.’
‘To see if you wanted a muffin.’
In what was still the fledgling hours of my first morning out of hospital, I was a seething, emaciated wretch. Expert mediation of my painkillers had ended. My legs felt hot but, unable to regulate their own body temperature, they were covered in goose pimples, little hairs standing to attention around the bases of the metal tubing where it pierced me, like pilgrims praying at a sacred rock. I looked down at Mal’s enormous thighs, like pugilistic weaponry wrapped in burger meat, enough space to fit six of mine in, pins and all.
A small fly balanced on the end of his big toe, the nail of which was yellow as custard. The insect perched there on its hind legs, rubbing its front two together smugly. Mal couldn’t feel it moving for the thick layer of dead skin Mum would come to grate off in shards as long as the careful shavings of a pencil.
I sighed.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he said.
‘What do you think?’
Despite the blue light from the television and the green light from the display on the wall colouring me with cheap neon, in the dark I fell asleep again quickly, perversely aided by the rasped metronome of Mal’s continual struggle for breath.
I woke again three hours later when Mum brought a jittery tray full of china heavy with globules of ketchup and mustard. She opened the curtains and gave me the sunlight. It prevented me from one final doze, and I watched as she rubbed lotion into the brittle brown toughness of the scabs on Mal’s sides. She removed and replaced tubes, emptied and filled bags, wiped with cotton wool inside the many little folds.
Then she tended to me, dabbing at the wounds where the steel met the skin with antiseptic that stung the inside of my nose. She lifted me and I leaned on her. She placed my heavy legs inside the two slings Dad had designed, made especially and hung from the ceiling, and she handed me a cup of tea so hot the mug ringed the wood on the bedside table.
She was hands out and ropes attached. I imagined her pretending to be a master puppeteer in a small French theatre, making her two most popular characters dance in perfect unison with the careful and practised manipulation of the strings that moved our arms and legs. She cared for us. I’d always known it was for this that Mum was made.
Sometimes I turned my head to find he’d fallen asleep, a dewdrop of drool linking his mouth to his pillow. Morning. Snoring. Ceiling. Breakfast. Cleaning. The monotony tapped at my head, threatening to cave it in like a woodpecker’s first burst though the stiff outer cloak of a tree. If I’d had the energy, I would have exploded through the walls.
I didn’t know how many days had passed. It was more than steps I had taken. A solitary bead of sweat helter-skeltered around the thick girth of Mal’s naked arm until it dropped from his chubby red finger and landed on the grubby plate beside him.
I burned angry bile in my chest like fossil fuels. Using all the power I could muster in my thighs, I swung my legs in their slings until they clacked hard together, smacked teeth on the road. The three feet between us was a canyon, the little gap a lifetime. I wanted to get to him. To scratch, bite and kick him. I thrashed in the air and my fists pounded the bed, a fish from its bowl to the shallow puddle on the kitchen floor. I flailed with my remaining drive, pulling the slings from the ceiling in a hail of plaster and fell, exhausted, into the space between our beds, face-down, my metal leg scaffolds tearing the cheap material that my bed was made from and jamming me in.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked.
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I waited for Mum to come and help me back to my bed, and I thought about the end.
82
Day Seven Thousand Four Hundred and Eighty-Three, according to the display on the wall.
Easing my legs into Lou’s car is simple because it is big and American, imported, the front and back seats two long, continuous surfaces like benches with slippery leather coats. They have the smooth hides of sharks to the touch. I lower my bottom in and then rotate myself around, my legs unable to bend more or straighten accordingly. I am awkward.
It is hushed in the car park by Red Ted’s Quality Meats. The steady fall of the rain makes the windscreen of the car move and wriggle like bacteria under a microscope. The light shifts as it drops from the lampposts.
‘You didn’t come back,’ I say.
The ecstasy of seeing her versus the agony of losing her, a million births and a million deaths.
‘You left me,’ I say, and I shake so that the crutches rattle.
‘I know what I did,’ she replies.
I can’t ignore that her face is still such a pleasure to behold but I summon resolve and give her my shrift.
‘I think you should talk,’ I say.
I think she is crying. I briefly see tears illuminated in passing headlights on the road but so briefly that I could have pretended they were there because the tears on my own cheeks catch the glow in tiny prisms of water.
Lou drives.
‘I’ve spent my life watching your brother give up, waiting to die. I couldn’t watch my dad do the same.’
‘What about me?’
‘I knew you’d never give up.’
Her eyes are washing her face away, her vision is as blurred as the glass it bores through. When I finally speak my voice fluctuates rabidly, like the needle drawing on the paper measuring the shifting of the plates that hold the planet together. She looks into her lap, meshes her fingers into a cradle by the steering wheel and wrings the skin on them together until they squeak.
‘I heard about the interview. I thought today might be the day he ends it all.’
‘Us?’ I say.
She nods.
‘I thought he might have read the letter I wrote to him.’
‘It would have got lost, you know how much he gets. They barely opened any of it after we left.’
‘Shame.’
‘What did it say?’
‘I asked him to end it. For you.’
‘Why for me? If you’d have cared about me, you’d never have left Akron.’
‘I knew I’d be back for you.’
‘What, now?’
‘Now.’
‘And your dad?’ I ask.
‘I’ve saved my dad,’ she says.
‘How?’
‘I got him another love. One that will always love him back. I got him a grandson.’ I put my hands on my lap and I squeeze. ‘Well, technically, you kind of got him one too.’
We pull into my street. There is shouting and arms reaching for the freshness of the air. They point at the roof of the bungalow, where Dad systematically removes the slates and hands them down to the small, soaked crowd.
I take Lou’s hand, still damp with her eyes dried on the back of it, lift the metal bumpers protruding from my legs and step out of the car. When people see who I am, and when people see who I am with, they move.
83
By the time me and Lou have reached the front door, I am sick and dizzy and elated, flustered by the surrounds and the busy factory of my thoughts. A child, I think. Faceless, unreal. I float for a time.
One by one Dad is pulling the slates from the roof and handing them down a chain of people to the concrete that spurned my soft bones. Lou’s tent is underfoot, forced into the freshly churned mud. There are people pressed tight against the glass of the window to the bedroom, so firmly that it looks as though it will crack and implode, showering Mal in glass swords and invisible splinters. Every time Dad takes another slate away, or pulls free a piece of roof, there is a cheer, raised hands and fists. There are cries of ‘Mal Mal Mal’. A fire engine arrives on Day Seven Thousand Four Hundred and Eighty-Three, according to the display on the wall.
The roof is coming off. The urgency of a coup, Dad at the helm.
‘Dad!’ I shout but he can’t hear me. ‘Dad!’
I rummage in my pocket for the keys to the front door, find them quickly and push Lou inside, following her, closing it behind me, breathing so deeply the clockwork of my heart shifts through a multitude of cogs.
Mum is at the foot of Dad’s ladder, her head rested on her hands. But she isn’t crying as I expect. Inside the noise from outside sounds like thunder underfoot. She looks up at me, at us, sees Lou and smiles.
‘It’s ending, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Malcolm told us when you left, he told us this was the end.’
Without a prompting, Lou walks over, drops to her knees and places a thin, slender arm around Mum’s shoulders. In turn Mum buries her nose in the nape of Lou’s neck. She looks so old. Thin as a scroll and a cobweb, tiny like a model made of matchsticks.
‘Stay here,’ I say, and I turn slowly, painfully, my bones’ architecture complaining.
And I open the door to the bedroom, and I wobble and I flounder, but I slowly move inside. I can’t hear my headache for the shouting at the glass. This fire of grand denouement, this burning of momentum.
I can’t believe what I see when I enter the room. All of that noise disappears to a muffle. All I hear is him. Mal.
‘Hello,’ he says.
‘Hello.’
We sound the same.
Great sashes of thick, sturdy material emerge from underneath each corner of his mattress, meeting at a huge metal hook at the ceiling to form a pyramid around his body that flows and spills from the sides, his fat hanging off him like the lumps on a badly iced cake. He looks up, and where my eyes meet his line of vision I see that the hook is attached to a chain that disappears through a freshly punched hole in the ceiling, into the attic. But the attic now has no top, and we see the sky and Dad, his hands frantically moving, clearing the roof of tiles and pulling apart the floor underneath his feet. We can see metal tubing wrapped around the internal workings of the house, threaded through the floorboards like a skeleton. A life’s work. All that noise he made. We watch from underneath as he wrenches up one board after another, and the flecks of plaster and wood fall slowly downwards, landing and settling on Mal’s massive plateau of dry, purple skin like dirty snow.
I slump to the floor. The house shakes around us as the ceiling slowly disappears and the volume grows to an eruption. I take Mal’s hand in mine and he does all he can to bend his fat fingers around my wrist but there is no give in them, just an arthritic murmur. The thickness that sleeves his arms brushes mine. The four great swathes of material tighten and slacken as the hook toys with their strength. I can almost hear the dum dum dum of his heart quicken. His breath chug chug chugs like an old coal engine, a machine long since exhausted.
I notice that he is crying. I lay my head on the sweeping bed of his chest. He shakes and it ripples through a hundred stone of fat like a child trapped inside a monster.
We hear the tearing of plaster until all that separates us from the sky is a structure made from metal and chains and pulleys and pipes and rods and cogs and hooks and Dad, peeling away his attic from around him. A feat of modern engineering. The crowd outside make electricity with their voices. They bring the house down.
He grips me as hard as he can. The green light from the display on the wall bouncing off the great metal spider above allows me to see his petrified face.
‘Why?’ I whisper in his ear.
He does all he can to hold me tighter. A tear drops from my face to his, turning to steam, and I lean in so close I rest my cold ear on his hot, panting mouth until I feel his wet lips lap at it.
‘You had Lou,’ I say.
‘Who you loved.’
I squeeze his hand harder. The putty of his fles
h forms sausages between my fingers. His skin boils, his eyes round and running away.
‘Don’t pretend you did this for me,’ I whisper, and lower my ear still closer to his sticky mouth.
The sobbing is the only noise above the commotion, the hole in the roof, the shouting of our dad and the buzz of the crowd. All I can hear is Malcolm Ede. He speaks to me. I smell the hot acid of his panicked breath.
‘I couldn’t sit back and be content with a life of ings. Saving. Paying. Breeding. Working. But never living.’
I hear his deathly rattle.
‘This isn’t living,’ I say. ‘For any of us. You’ve made Mum a slave. You’ve made Dad a recluse. Lou is all I’ve ever wanted, and I couldn’t have her because of you.’
The tightening of his grip.
The mattress, a sodden red and brown, jolts as the hooks and chains tug at it. Dad takes the handle and turns the wheel above us. The howls and the cheers and the screaming.
I put my mouth to his ear.
‘You destroyed this family,’ I say.
‘No,’ he says, ‘I saved it.’
I rest my forehead on his.
He says, ‘When emperor penguins huddle together for warmth in the freezing winter storms, they adopt the same positions as Roman legionnaires. They take it in turns to change position. The penguins on the outside move back inside to shelter from the cold and the warmed penguins on the inside take their place, like bikers temporarily taking the lead of a convoy. They do it because it’s best for their family.’
Bed Page 19
