I took Dawn’s hand-mirror from her bag and reflected my face at itself. It felt like I was watching another boy watching himself. Another me, another Leander, with swollen eyes and plumped lips – lips nearly as plump as Francis’ now – gazed in dispassionate assessment at both me and the other me whom I was overseeing.
‘The mirror’s nearly convex to your intoxicated stare,’ I said without intonation. ‘In Ashbery’s “Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror,” he sees
“tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful
In its restraint that one cannot look for long.
The secret is too plain…
That the soul is not a soul
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly…”’
I smiled as I recited this, as if for an audience I wished to impress, half-imagining Francis back beside me – till I turned my head and saw that I was alone.
‘I only partly agree,’ I said. ‘My soul is not a soul – but it fits its hollow imperfectly – not perfectly. The hollow is ajar, and the gap beside it seems its own presence; like a second soul, uncomfortable, not plain but blank, and in its blank there is a snarl.’
I tilted my head. My eye was not yet a black eye, and was not as puffy as I had feared. Perhaps it suited me. Though my ability to appraise my own impairment was itself impaired – since it was with a faulty eye that I was trying to see a faulty eye. The black wings Eva had drawn on my lids had leaked into the crease below the lashes and the mascara had muddied the foundation.
I put the mirror back into the bag and took out a packet of make-up removal wipes – and in so doing, dislodged two glued-together cereal bars, and so took these out too. The wipes smelt of cucumber and seemed to cleanse my skin of their own cool accord, unattached to my hands, which were unattached to my arms. I got through both sides of four wipes before the white did not discolour and I was clean.
I regarded myself again in the mirror as I ate the first cereal bar. I grinned at my grin in a foolish way – like a chimpanzee, convinced it has got away with a theft, being viewed through the crosshair of a rifle.
The second cereal bar became harder to eat as oats and treacle accumulated on the roof of my mouth. I was chewing and swallowing simply for the sake of it – there was no flavour or pleasure beyond a mechanical satisfaction. Nonetheless, as I watched myself eat, my eyes seemed to trip themselves up – and somewhere in them I detected a kind of joy.
Was this the emotion that Dawn had said I deserved? Well, nobody deserves anything. But all suns eventually explode, don’t they, so perhaps there is no cosmological guilt – or, if there is, then it is too late to be concerned by it. So I can deserve whatever I gain without guilt.
I finished the cereal bar, and told the mirror, ‘Nihilism is for fragile heterosexuals. Meaninglessness isn’t meaningless. I can give meanings to whatever I want. Death lends a levity to life, sure, but so does chaos – and chaos can be shaped into meanings by will. So I can contrive arcs, reversals, and endings until I have revenged my own fatigue.’
I put back the mirror and took out Dawn’s phone. It was unlocked. Wincing at the bright screen, I logged into my email and found the message from Eva that I’d hoped for – ordering me to report to her film set tomorrow morning. I replied: ‘ok see you then – but be warned im a method actor.’
As I waited for the message to send, my gaze strayed to where Eva’s mink cape lay spattered with vomit. I reached to it and from its pocket took out the business card of Mr Nikolas And – the earnest journalist who’d been interviewing Iris yesterday. My eyes failed to focus on its details, but I understood the card more generally as an opportunity I needed to uncover, or a plot not yet devised – and so put it into Dawn’s handbag, promising it a future use.
Finally, to complete this toilette, I took out the tube of Savlon and squirted it onto my stab wound, stirring the ointment into the bloodied crust until the two became a paste. I applied some to my eye as well, and wondered as I did so whether I should have made Francis do this for me, so as to continue my trend of being disinfected by my victims.
But perhaps Francis was no longer my victim. And perhaps it was more appropriate to make a gesture towards self-reliance for now, since there was sure to be little of that to come. And even though there was no stable self upon which I could always rely, this current self – the one that had winked at me in the mirror – would do for now.
But could I call this happiness? I had an identity, here, perhaps, and a companion, and food, and shelter. But did I really want those things? Perhaps I just wanted flight.
And flight is a difficult ambition to realise – though it can at least be achieved in a biochemical sense. And so I picked back up the burnt foil, the pipe, and the lighter – and heated the heroin tar, and breathed it in – until my eyes complained of the afternoon sky and the memory of myalgia was a mystery.
The ultramarine pain in me paled until it was the shade of a shadow of glass on water. My thoughts became silt. I slumped into Francis’ pillow, smiling into the smell of the coconut oil he wore in his hair, and the warm idea of the colour of wheat.
‘We’ve got to go,’ Francis said, his hands under my arms.
I nodded in useless assent, accepting his reappearance without considering what he’d been doing.
‘You got to get dressed,’ he said. ‘Put these on.’
I wobbled in reply. He sat me up on his side of the bed.
‘Fuck,’ he said.
He was seeing my injuries properly for the first time. He stroked the stab wound in my side and then turned my back towards him and stroked my whip wounds.
‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘There’s belt buckles in your skin. They’re all over you. How did – who did this? Fuck.’
He pulled grey sweatpants over my legs, white socks and white overlarge trainers onto each foot, a grey sweatshirt over my head, and a puffy blue coat over my arms. He was styling me into a uniform identical to his own. I stood up, balancing on him, my arm around his waist, and kissed him. We staggered out of the room, downstairs.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked.
‘We’re going to hospital.’
‘Ok.’
The front door was already open. To my diminished senses, it seemed the sky had constricted into a grip. The wind was a parliament of jackdaws, the rain had thickened into bullets. Francis supported me out of the house, down the steps, towards a woman whose black clothes I couldn’t interpret.
‘Are you alright, my duckling?’ she asked. ‘We’re going to keep you safe, now, I guarantee it.’
She took my other arm and guided me along the street – to a car whose patterns caused a pang of hatred I couldn’t interpret either. They helped me into the back seat. Francis slid wetly in next to me. He put on my seatbelt and let me rest against his chest. I fell asleep inside the slow revelation that this was a police car, and I had been tricked.
2.
I was shaken awake by Francis and drawn from the police car into a storm. The remnants of a dream impressed themselves into the wind – of flying buttresses freeing themselves from a cathedral to stack into an infinite stairway. He was taking me towards a roof of many titles, though the only one I could read was ‘MORTUARY’.
‘It’s from his blood loss,’ he said to someone I couldn’t see.
I wondered whether I was dead already and being led to my autopsy. The rain tasted of an unripe pear – but it vanished before I could finish it.
‘Name?’ asked a face behind a desk I couldn’t focus on.
‘Leander.’
‘Surname?’
‘I don’t have one.’
‘Your GP?’
‘I don’t have one.’
‘Carry him through there.’ The face pointed towards two doors of melting slate.
My other escort led me forwards and Francis followed, gripping the back of my neck. Steel tables bore dead and living bodies alike, their wheels sliding into each other in tremors I
couldn’t feel. As I watched, a bucket of sand began to swell – and grew a silver birch tree, its flank rippling, until it cracked the ceiling. The corridor rotated.
I fell through a curtain, into a green seat. Two hands tested the heat of my tongue, capped my finger with a plastic clip, and inflated a band around my arm until my heart beat with a slam.
‘Why are you here?’ the hands asked.
‘He’s been stabbed,’ Francis said. ‘He’s breathing slow.’
‘Go through there.’
I was lifted up by Francis and my other escort – whom I now understood as the woman from the police car, and who must therefore be a police officer – but her clothes still didn’t make sense to me.
‘Duckling, try to tell me anything you can remember,’ she said.
The walls were flapping like plastic sheets in an abattoir, grey and grey-blue and glaucous, with a draught warmed by disease. Aqueous cylinders arose and withdrew before my feet. On a shelf above me, a foetus decomposed, forgotten, its umbilical cord dangling towards my nose.
‘He needs to be medically cleared before he can talk to any police,’ a younger woman said. ‘Please wait outside.’
A freckled forearm with a turquoise sleeve eased me onto a bed.
‘I’m staying with him,’ Francis said, stepping inside our cubicle and closing the curtain across the policewoman.
‘Are you a family member?’
‘I’m his boyfriend.’
I had never been called that by him before, so I tried to arch my eyebrow in ironic surprise – but probably my face remained impassive.
‘Ok, can you take off his top?’
The freckled forearm and scrubs assembled into a young woman. Chestnut hair and heavy bust, a dimpled grin and eyes of comic empathy. Francis tugged off my coat and sweatshirt. A voice in a neighbouring cubicle shouted, ‘The reason I’m so happy is I’m gonna die slowly in front of you and there’s nothing you can do about it.’
The doctor laughed and hitched a bag of fluid to a hook on a pole.
‘Do you hear that line a lot?’ I asked her.
‘Oh my god yeah, about once a week at least. But the wordy ones aren’t the ones to worry about.’
She lowered the bag’s hose towards my right hip and placed a cool hand above it. I dreamed I was searching for a lost parcel, containing medicine I’d been prescribed – and I was being sent back and forth between two post offices, both claiming that the other had my parcel – and I queued and spoke to a dozen deliverymen at once, telling them the same story – that the medicine will fix me, drain the ultramarine pain and make me focused and active and I need it and I want to be fixed and why can’t I be fixed – and, indifferent, they directed me to the opposite office, to another queue and another dozen indifferent deliverymen. But perhaps, I dreamed, the parcel would turn up one day, at one of the offices, for no reason – it would simply be there, after weeks of waiting – and I would collect it and hold it and open it – and it would be useless – the medicine in the parcel didn’t work – or it worked, but not in the right way – and I wasn’t fixed, I couldn’t be fixed – the parcel was never going to save me and I wasn’t saved.
I blinked myself back into the room – and tried to remember what the doctor had just said.
‘Who are the ones to worry about?’ I asked.
She’d turned the bag’s tap on and a stream of saline water was rinsing the dirt from my wound.
‘Yesterday a man made me do repeated rectal examinations until I realised he was doing it for fun and was literally in perfect physical health. Blatantly not in perfect mental health. So I kicked him out. And today he brought me a thank-you letter written in glitter.’
‘I’ve come across that in my line of work as well.’
‘Have you? Well you’re lucky that when you came across a knife in your line of work it only penetrated muscle. As you can see now it’s clean, look, it’s actually ok. You got stabbed in the perfect place.’
‘That don’t look perfect,’ Francis said.
‘Could have been an organ. Did you try to treat it yourself?’
‘I used Savlon.’
‘Good try, but that won’t have been particularly helpful. Nurse!’ she called. ‘We’re going to give you a tetanus shot and antibiotics, ok?’
‘Don’t I get any painkillers?’ I asked.
‘Have you taken any forms of medication already today? And I ask this, knowing that you blatantly have.’
‘No, I wish I had. I feel like there’s a coral reef inside my stomach.’
‘Ok, I’ve never had someone say that to me before. You’ve earned some Oramorph.’
In an acceleration, the nurse walked in and out, the curtain twitched, and the doctor began lacing a needle across my wound as though it were a shoe. Its steel pricked through the heroin’s defence, and I smiled at its particular pain – a pain the blinking colour of pink – my sight clarifying with each incision.
When its stitches had been tied into the cut, she injected the nearby tissue with a syringe prepared by the nurse. And then the nurse handed me a second, purple, syringe, with no needle, and lifted my hand to my mouth.
‘Squirt it in past your tongue,’ she said.
I did so and tasted the dissolved back of duct tape, retreating, sticky, towards my stomach. The nurse exchanged this Oramorph syringe for a paper cone of water. I drank it and asked for another. Francis was sitting behind me on the bed, his head against my shoulders, a hand on the outside of my thigh.
The doctor hooked a new bag to the pole beside me and slid a drip’s needle into my forearm. Its fuchsia-pink pain zigzagged into the brown of a ferret pelt, and in my mind these contradicting colours somehow whispered ‘angel, angel, angel, angel.’
As I stared, the needle seemed to widen into a probe that wished to penetrate bone. I drank another cup of water, trying to look away. The morphine would combine soon with my blood’s other opiate and space would resume its uncertainty. But still, I was transfixed by the needle, convinced it was about to stretch along my tendons like spider legs and branch into every vein until it claimed my whole arm.
‘How long will this take, my ducklings?’ the policewoman asked, peering around the curtain. ‘It’s only because, there’s other things we have to do today, you know how it can be, and the time is troubling us.’
‘I recommend that Leander stay the night,’ the doctor said.
‘I don’t want to do that,’ I said, watching the needle.
‘It would be better if he didn’t have to go through that,’ the policewoman agreed, with a new firmness to her maternal tone.
‘I can’t clear him yet – he might be infected. And he’s presenting numerous other injuries.’
‘I don’t want to stay here,’ I said. ‘Let’s go. I’m ready to go.’
Francis wordlessly stroked the whip wounds of my back.
‘I can’t discharge you, Leander,’ the doctor said.
‘But you can’t hold me here. I can discharge myself, can’t I?’
‘If you leave, you could die. I strongly recommend that you remain in hospital for at least twenty-four hours.’
‘I want to be discharged.’
‘Why you want to leave so quickly?’ Francis asked.
I wanted to say – because I’ve been betrayed by doctors for a decade! Because I’ve lost years of my life to being probed and screened and scanned and drained – in the search for the source of my constant pain – and because every failure in that search has tightened the noose of my depression.
But I couldn’t tell Francis this, still – because temporary wounds are glamorous, but chronic illness is boring – boring for the sufferer, boring for the sympathiser – and his boredom would soon turn to repulsion. So I would play the waster, or the villain, but not the victim.
‘I’m not staying here all night. I’ve wasted enough of my life in hospitals. Let’s go.’ I tried to remove the needle from my wrist, but the doctor interceded.
&nb
sp; ‘This is not your best decision,’ she said.
‘I’m not interested in the best decision,’ I said. ‘I’m interested in the most interesting decision.’
She sighed and tugged out my cannula. A parabola of blood spurted to the curtain, leaving a fang prick behind.
‘Come back when you’re bored of being interesting.’
Francis helped me back into my sweatshirt and coat.
‘Ducklings, we need to hurry along. I’m sorry, doctor, but the chief is never happy when he’s waiting.’
‘Stay away from knives, and forks,’ the doctor said, smiling, and waved me away.
The policewoman led us out of the cubicle into a whiteness that bit at me even after my eyes were closed. Behind a curtain, a mother howled ‘Sophia! Sophia!’ as she miscarried. Francis pulled me down some steps and then down a slope into colder air.
An obese corpse rotted on a trolley against a wall. It looked like it had just been dug out of a grave. We turned a corner into a stainless-steel ballroom, crowded by white-coated dancers. A quadrille of students had surrounded a table to celebrate a cadaver’s dissection. As we passed, an older doctor cracked open its skull with a stake and peeled off its face. Another group sawed at a child’s stomach, splattering intestinal fluids over their frocks. Butlers with trays of razors for canapés hurried in and out of servants’ doors.
We were guided towards a third table, where a narrow man in police uniform stood with his hands behind his back.
‘Thank you, constable,’ he said, with a nod, gesturing for the policewoman to release me and stand to the side.
I swayed against Francis’ arm, letting my ears confuse the clatter of the students with the chatter of their tools.
‘Good afternoon boys,’ the man said. ‘I am Detective Chief Inspector Sanam, and this is Detective Constable Floris, and I need to know more about you. First, which of you is the son of Dawn Cole?’
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