Loss of Separation

by Conrad Williams

  I can't do this.

  The first time I saw my girlfriend.

  She emerged from the first class lounge at Heathrow holding a Selfridge's bag between her teeth. She was so beautiful that I laughed out loud.

  Chapter Two

  Bights, Ends and Falls

  The bookshop is on a road running parallel to the beach. It is hardly ever open. The only clue, when it is, is not in any door sign but in the presence of a chocolate-point Siamese cat lying on a blanket in the window. Go through the door and there's a long corridor of books, too narrow for more than one person at a time. An old school desk with a cash register, a plastic molded chair and a hand-sewn cushion. A notebook, a volume of non-fiction, a mug of something that will cool to tepid before being drunk.

  The shop is empty. I don't know where Ruth is. I've asked her why she doesn't lock the shop when she nips out to buy a snack from the delicatessen, or fruit from the greengrocer's in the square. But she just gives me this pitying look and pats my hand. It's the look people who have never lived in London give to Londoners. It's a look that says: yes, there really are places left on Earth where you can go out and leave the door unlocked. There's an honesty box on the windowsill, next to the slumbering Vulcan, but it's always empty.

  'Because people are stealing your stock,' I tell her.

  'Because it's winter. There are no visitors,' she counters.

  She opens the shop because she likes to sit there at her desk and read with the portable heater and a short-wave radio tuned to something far away, exotic, faded, unintelligible. She comes here too, to look after me, to keep me company.

  'You're very kind to me,' I say, again.

  'Shush.'

  At the end of the corridor is a room where Ruth keeps the children's books, the science fiction and fantasy novels. There is a door that says STAFF ONLY. Behind it is a staircase up to Ruth's living quarters. There is another door next to a small bookcase with a cardboard bat glued to it and a legend: MASTERS OF MMMWAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!! The bookcase is crammed with paperbacks by Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker, Peter Straub. There are warped and foxed copies of The Pan Book of Horror in a cardboard box. Fifty pence each. Five for two pounds. Skulls and candles and snakes and rats. I slide a key into the lock and turn the handle. I go inside. The horror room. The room where I exist.

  There is a CircOlectrio orthopaedic bed, a chair and a small table. An en-suite bathroom contains a sit-in-bath, a toilet with a raised seat, a red emergency cord and a saucer of pot pourri. This extension to the bookshop had been added to house Ruth's mother, who died a few days after moving in, having funded its construction. I've been here for the best part of three weeks. I've seen Ruth's certificates. She wanted to look after me. She felt as if she had been chosen for the task because she had saved my life after the hit-and-run.

  'I found you on that B road, just on the edge of Bailey's Hollow,' she told me. 'It was a miracle I was out at all that night. I shouldn't have been. My God, neither should you. Terrible storm. Winds gusting hard, fast. Trees down all over the county. A Range Rover, or something similar I think it must have been. One of those big 4x4s anyway, going too fast, drifting out over the middle of the road. It clipped you. You flew through the air. It was hard to believe you broke so many bones when you looked as if you didn't have any.'

  I'd asked her where my girlfriend was, apparently, before the pain grew so big I could no longer hold it inside me. I couldn't remember where I'd left her or where she'd gone. I asked her again when I came out of the coma, half a year later. It might have been seconds. Ruth's hair was long. Her belly was big.

  She took me home, even though I'd told her I would be all right. I said I was going to live at the B&B - Tam's Place, we were going to call it - but she insisted. She brought me back here and read to me. My life was measured out in chapters. I'd dread the moment the bookmark was slid into place and the book closed. I was worried I might die before we reached the end of the stories she was reading me. But it hasn't happened yet.

  Tamara was gone. I should be dead, but I survived. I was alone. How could she leave someone, her man, her love, so wrecked? Did she leave me when she saw how destroyed I appeared? Perhaps she thought I would be a vegetable for the rest of my life and could not live with the responsibility of that. Did she stay for long? Was there any kind of vigil? Did she light a candle? Did she cry? Did she kiss my cheek? Winners and losers. Heroes and villains. Who was wearing which mask? I couldn't even begin to take a guess.

  I drew a bath; it didn't take long. It was the only bath that would fit this space, Ruth told me, and anyway, her mother would never have been able to use a conventional tub.

  After Ruth was raped, she used this bath all the time. It made it easier to hide the bruises. This style is popular with the Japanese, apparently. It looks like a ceramic well. There are steps up the side.

  I poured in some bath foam. I don't like it; it irritates my skin, but, like Ruth, I don't want to see anything of me beneath the waterline. Somehow, I managed to undress. My clothes smelled of smoke. I couldn't bend down to clear them from the floor. Somehow, I got in. There are occasional, panicky moments when I feel I've not healed, that there are cracks and splits in me that will leak into the bathwater, turning it red. I feel like a thin bag filled with knuckles of bone. I feel like something continually on the brink of failure.

  In coma, in that place, inhabiting that blind country, I suffered four heart attacks. As with the nightfishing, when I was young I saw this differently: I imagined the heart being set upon by marauders, gremlins sent by death through the veins and arteries to wage war. When you died from a heart attack, they opened you up and found the heart slashed and stabbed and burning. I can imagine it in my chest, scarred and exhausted, reduced. I wonder how many beats it has left now.

  There's a window next to my head. It's frosted, low: the building sits next to a rising road. When I bathe I have it open - just a crack - and can see the occasional pair of legs, the swing of an arm, as people walk by. No matter how much cold I pour in, the bath is always too hot. Either that or my skin is still too tender to deal with any temperature above lukewarm.

  I closed my eyes and waited. Presently, I heard movement from within the shop. The door opened and I heard her sigh. I heard the click of her knees as she bent to recover my clothes. A change in air pressure, a deepening of the shadow behind my eyelids. I thought of Tamara as the sponge glided over my shoulders and back. I thought about how long we'd been apart. Six months since the crash; three weeks since I emerged from coma. Before she went missing, we had spent every night together. We had been talking about who would make the breakfasts and who would change the bedding. We had been talking about chocolates on the pillow, or not? What to put in a full English. Herbal teas, or was that just too London?

  She saw me, dried blood on the linen, intubated, catheterised, and thought, what future is in this shell? I can't spend my days sponging him clean while everything draws inward, his hands, his feet, his life. I won't watch him waste away.

  Was that how it was?

  'What was that?'

  'Nothing,' I said. 'Daydreaming.'

  She helped me from the bath, endlessly patient. She dried me with a towel, wrapped me in a bathrobe. Now I could open my eyes.

  Ruth is the kind of woman who appears different every time you see her. Her hair is dense, Japanese black; she wears it always in a slightly new style, or her makeup is brighter, or darker. One day her freckles are prominent, another her skin seems unblemished. She doesn't have a general way of dressing. You wouldn't call her a jumper-and-jeans kind of girl, although she will wear them. She'll wear a dress with a pair of jeans underneath, if the mood takes her. I know she likes wearing expensive underwear and wooden jewellery.

  Now she had her hair up, big plastic crocodile clips keeping it off her face. She was wearing Agnès B glasses with black oblong frames. A sleeveless, caramel-coloured summer dress. Her swollen belly was as tight as a drum. I could see
the shape of her navel, proud against the fabric. The ebony bangles on her wrist clacked together as she dried her hands on the towel.

  'How do you feel?' we both asked each other at the same time.

  I wonder about the pain. I wonder if I'll ever recover enough to be able to not feel it any more. And will my body look like it used to? How could it? How could it remember the way it was? It's hard for me to remember. Did my chest always feel so lumpy? Or is it the scar tissue wound around my fingers suggesting the illusion? I say I'm fine. She's says she's fine. We both know that we're not.

  The car punched me into the air. I put out a hand and it was buried in glass up to the elbow. My skin came off like the unravelling of a silk glove. I lost two pints of blood before the ambulance arrived. Ruth had been out walking in the storm, wondering whether to keep the baby. When she found me, the decision was made for her.

  'How many more chances might I have?' she asked me, one night shortly after my revival. 'I'm forty-two. I'd need to meet the right man in the next few years. It might not happen. I might have an accident, like you. The odds are stacked.'

  Seeing me lying, dying, had banished any relevance the rape might have had, she said. But I have my doubts. Her chameleon looks mask a lack of any bloom. Her skin is grey and tired, beneath that make-up. It is as if the pregnancy was separate, something that is going on apart from her. As much as she is trying to convince herself that she is doing the right thing, she has the look of someone who has made a mistake, with no time left in which to make amends.

  She has large, very watery blue eyes. She seems for ever on the verge of crying, or in the grip of a cold. Her beauty is something scared, scary. Sometimes I think that if I were to touch her face, it would fall apart like something a child had made from sand on the beach.

  I felt better after the bath. Restored. We ate breakfast together and I pushed away from the table, thoughtful, decided.

  She saw some of this in me. 'What?' she asked. Her left hand stroked the bump of her belly. I thought I saw movement. Maybe a kick.

  'You know,' I said. 'I think I'm going to go out for another walk.'

  Humour and concern in her face. Before she could try to warn me off, I rose. Slowly. 'You don't have to mother me, you know,' I told her. 'You don't have to feel responsible for me.'

  'If I'd been a bit quicker,' she said, 'I might have been there before it happened. It might not have happened at all. The driver might have seen me and slowed down.'

  'Or hit you instead,' I said. 'Anyway, what does it matter? I might as well be dead. If I was dead, I'd probably be in a better state.

  'Don't talk like that,' she said, jabbing a finger into the bridge of her spectacles, something I noticed she did a lot when she was agitated. I was struck by how strong her feelings for me were. I had to keep reminding myself that she had known me far longer than I had known her. She had saved my life. I was still getting used to the village, the people, my unreal role. Hot emotions were something I was unused to. Everything in my life was slow since I came out of the coma. My recovery, my new timetable. Even the shock of Tamara's abandonment nibbled agonisingly into me like the tide at the uppermost reaches of the shoreline.

  I spread my hands; I had nothing to say.

  I opened the door and the seagull with the broken back was before me, pinned cruciform to the lilac sky, blood fizzing from its opened beak and cloaca, trying to flap its wings and succeeding only in jerking its wrenched body from side to side. I blinked it into mist and moved up the lane to The Fluke. My mind was throwing up all kinds of visual treats since the hit-and-run - memories, nightmares, fantasies all spliced together and given the full widescreen, 3D treatment - but that didn't mean it was getting any easier to deal with.

  Movement behind the frosted glass. Cleaners getting the pub ready for opening time.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a length of yellow string. My fingers were gnarly and stiff. The doctors had suggested I do finger exercises; and try to use my hands as much as possible. Make bread, they suggested. Take up pottery. But Charlie had put me on to knots. The intricacy of it, as opposed to the vagueness of dough or clay, was difficult to overcome and my fingers grew tired very quickly, but I felt the benefit in them. They were always painful, but slowly I was reclaiming the dexterity I'd lost. Thankfully, the right hand, which had plunged through the windscreen, had suffered very little in terms of nerve loss. The lacerations, and how they'd healed into thick worming scars, were the problem. It felt, all the time, as if I was trying to thread a needle while wearing a thick mitten.

  Charlie had given me the string, and a photocopied leaflet containing five basic knots to learn. 'Get thems mastered and you'll make fishman yet,' he told me, fins of silver hair flapping around his head like something he'd caught and ditched in a bucket. 'I'll have y'out on morning tide pullin' in y'dinner with us afore y'knows it.'

  I hobbled on to the sand. I knew the reef knot from school, but I worked it now, liking its simplicity, the symmetry in the construction of it, the finished appearance. Left over right, then under. Right over left, then under.

  The figure of eight. A stopper knot. Sometimes doubled to add weight to an end for throwing. I tied that one a little harder than I meant to and struggled for five minutes trying to get it loose. The tips of my fingers were already beating. They no longer seemed like my fingers. One of the nails had a warp in it that would not correct itself. Trapped blood formed black half moons under others. It bothered me that the nurses had not thought to extract it, as if they predicted I would not be concerned with looking my best again once I was up and about. How much time could a shattered man have for vanity?

  I sat down in the sand and with the yellow string tied a sheet bend into my shoelace. A stiff wind swept the surface of the beach into skirls and skrims. Moments of foam out to sea. Gulls hovered or stood on the exposed groynes, staring west. Their beaks were open, black spike tongues. It was as if they were tasting the weather. I glanced west too. Invariably I walked up the beach; it was easier with the prevailing wind at my back.

  Now I decided it was time to walk down it, against the weather. It would be harder, but that was good, necessary. There was a pub at the end of this stretch, and it would be open by the time I reached it.

  One more knot first. I found a piece of driftwood and secured the string against it with a clove hitch. These five basic knots I felt I knew now. I could do them without thinking, the bowline without its mantra: the rabbit comes out of the hole...

  I put the string in my pocket and struck along the beach, eyes beaded against the stinging hiss. The wind blew the creases out of my clothes. I felt the urge to lean into it, like the gulls, and allow myself to be propped up by its muscle. I wasn't feeling it quite so much; moving against the wind was distracting me from the basic pain that lifting and planting my legs produced. It felt good, even though I knew my bones would be aching by the end of the day. I could bathe again. And I could finally take up Ruth on one of the massages she kept offering me.

  Shadows had shortened by the time I reached the harbour wall and I was feeling hungry. I decided to walk up to the abandoned mill and take a rest before trundling to the pub for lunch. I had reached the end of the harbour track, bypassing the gift shop and the boat repair centre, the land falling away to scrubby paths, razor wire and open fields, when I heard a call behind me. Charlie stepped out from one of the shacks and waved.

  'How's thems knots coming along then, kidder?' he asked, when he had caught up.

  I smiled at him. I liked Charlie. He had done as much for me, in his way, as Ruth had done with her intensive care.

  'Not too shabby,' I said. I tied him a bowline with my eyes shut. 'What's next?'

  'We'll get y'on to some decorative knots, maybe. Tricky stuff. Keep y'fingers busy. Tire 'em out. Where're y'off to?'

  'Just walking.'

  'Pushing too hard, chief,' he said. His sunblasted face was a fascinating map of seams and slots and wrinkles. 'Y'going to end
up going backwards. Int there something about rest in this programme the doctors got y'on?'

  'I rest enough,' I said. 'I was on my back for six months.'

  He nodded, looked as though he might add something, and then hooked his thumb back in the direction of the harbour. 'I'm taking her out later,' he said. His boat, the Gratitude, was a stubby, bobbing mass of dull colour and portholes in the water. 'Goin fer sea bass. Come with? Get y'sea legs sorted.'

  I shook my head. It would be good to get out on the ocean, pull some of that air into my lungs, but I wasn't ready. I felt as though my life was being measured in terms of a bed, a bath and a fire under the pier. My roads didn't stretch beyond these things. Not yet.

  'I will, soon, thanks,' I said. 'But I don't know how much help I'll be.'

  He shook his head. His soft hair echoed the movement. 'Don't worry bout it. I've been doing this alone so long I forgot what the help is sposed to do anyway. Need some hooks baiting, though, if y'up to it.'

  We walked back towards Charlie's shack.

  'You saved me from getting muddy, at least,' I said, taking a last look back over my shoulder at the dun fields and the crippled mill. Charlie nodded and laughed and walked at my pace. He told me about sea bass. And he told me about Gordon, his son.

  Ruth made dinner. I sat at her kitchen table, sipping a Bloody Mary with way too much Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco, just the way I liked it. I smacked my lips and blew my cheeks out. Ruth made good Bloody Marys. She used celery salt and dry sherry and grated horseradish. It didn't matter how crummy the vodka was after that.

  I watched her waddle around the kitchen. She had jointed a chicken and was browning it off in a big pan of smoking oil. A heap of chopped vegetables sat on a board, waiting to be added to the cooking pot. I was hungry. For half a year of my life I had been nourished by injected fluids. I had vowed never to leave anything on my plate again. I nibbled on breadsticks and listened to the noises my body made.