There's something you're not telling me Helen. I'm not just here to play comfort blanket to you both. I need to know.'
Already I felt unwelcome, even though it was Helen who had instigated my return to the town with her brief phone call. It had come one snowy evening towards the end of September and I recognised her voice immediately.
I'd first met Helen in nursery school. I had been in a race: up a slight incline to the tree at the end of the playground and back. I've seen that tree since, it's no more than twenty feet away from where the starting line had been but it felt like miles back then. On the return leg of the race, Helen had stood up in the sand pit and positioned her spade at my eye level. I was more concerned by the mouth full of grit I received than the cut above my eye. It was how she introduced herself. I had followed her ever since.
Until she rang, her face had developed a softness which blurred her features, as if I was looking at her through a foggy pane of glass. Her surname was as elusive as the last pea on the plate. Talking to her again swept all those cobwebs aside. How could I have forgotten: Soper; the scar; her love of Dime bars; phobias of insects and fungus (she'd once said the scariest thing she could imagine was a spider eating a mushroom).
I realise now how much of what she'd said had been injected with a false bonhomie-I'd been sucked into the affection in her words and hadn't been able to detect the desperation behind them. After all, I'd had a good four years in which to forget how she behaved. It's hard to remember what we talked about; the past, what we were doing with our lives-I can't recall specifics. Apart from her mention of a death in her family and the way that coming winter was disturbing her to the extent that it filled her sleep with terrible images.
'So far I've never remembered any of them, only this awful clenched presence that lingers round me when I wake up. It's only a matter of time. And I don't know what I'll do then.'
I don't know why I capitulated so readily when she asked me to spend some time in Morecambe. I'd like to think it was because Warrington was stale, a town I knew inside out and hadn't been able to shrug away from. More likely, it was because the barely concealed ache of loneliness that she exuded down the line tweaked at something similar in me. We'd shared some close moments in Warrington and later, in Morecambe; maybe its magic could work on us again.
I reluctantly agreed to go over to the pub for Seamus' arrival and left her at the corner so I could go back to my digs and unpack. I'd picked one of the guest houses in a side street off the Marine Road that was less garish and in-your-face than the others. Even so, this one looked like a flower stall in its attempt to brighten the town. The old duffer tooling about on the flags with his trowel and bag of Fisons nodded a hello and went back to his truffling with slow-motion enthusiasm. Through a window poked the profile of his better half, like an inhospitable face of the Eiger.
'Ooroit, Dievid?' she asked, through a mouthful of green teeth and prunes. 'Owzya room? Sorted?'
'Nearly,' I said, and pushed through the front door so I wouldn't get into another interminable pow-wow with her. Yesterday, it had been water content in bacon and shivering poodles, the state of her ribs and Pick 'n' Mix queues at Woolworth's.
These newly painted walls (white and peppermint) were blighted with framed pictures of cars made out of watch pieces. Maureen, the landlady (Eiger's daughter), had positioned a large plastic vase on the first landing. An invitation was taped to its rim:
For Your Umberellas
Through the fire door, I collided with Duncan. Six foot fuck off, Neanderthal forehead, prognathic jaw, bull-shouldered, cow-eyed. His ginger hair was brushed back from his brow like a nest of fuse wire.
'I'm just nipping to the shops. Do you need any milk, or bread? Or lint remover. I'm going for lint remover.'
'No thank you, Duncan,' Inside, I locked my door and stepped over the boxes I had yet to disgorge. There was hardly any room; enough to swing a cat if you didn't mind clouting it open against the walls. I heard Duncan lumber outside, ask Eiger if she wanted any lint remover and her non-sequitur about the discrepancies of Belisha beacons, how they never flashed in tandem. I closed the window and put on some music.
It seemed strange that, despite my not thinking of Seamus other than in the most rudimentary way, he should now dance glass-sharp into my thoughts where Helen had always been wraith-like, smudged by time and my questionable memory into an indistinct figure. Strange too that I should conjure him like this: scooping his beloved thick-cut marmalade into a split pitta, his bespectacled gaze soaking up the obituaries (The Bitch, we called him-'I'm coming… just let me finish the bitcheries will yer!'), spare hand squirming against the flesh that peeked through the holes in his towelling bathrobe.
Though frequently caustic, he could sometimes be capable of a disarming tenderness-a quality that seemed instinctive rather than pre-meditated; often he would look bewildered when soothing a distressed companion, ostensibly uncertain of his behaviour. He looked like a child that has suddenly discovered how to whistle. His warmth worked, but-because of his more forthright and nervy side-only at a superficial level; comfort rather than cure. I never experienced this softness, only his angles and edges. Habitually late for anything we'd arranged, it would invariably be me who was called upon to encourage his haste, but we didn't mesh too well and would find ourselves growing heated in places that should have been neutral zones. Sudden spats in beer gardens, sneered remarks on the bus home, exasperated plays of hostility in the cinema queue. Remarkably, an audience was essential to precipitate this kind of behaviour. Alone, we would get on fine, tolerating the quirks that irritated us so much.
Like me, Seamus had been mesmerised by Helen's lovely face and the way she made you feel as though you were the only person worth talking to in the world. She had a perspective on things that was totally unlike any other kid I knew. The way she talked had a lot to do with the way we fell absolutely under her spell. I think we probably loved Helen a bit all through our formative years. She was the factor that brought us together and the reason why we would never really get on.
The last time I saw Seamus was on the morning of my final exam. I'd been revising most of the night and felt hollow, ductile as hot wire. Seamus had been pacing about the house while I crammed, his exams completed some time before. Every argument or opinion I studied was corrupted by a creak or the soft click of a closing door. He was getting psyched up for a caving expedition to the Brecon Beacons; he'd decided that caves were the only uncharted territory left on the planet and that he wanted to discover a new pocket in the Earth's crust. He said it was the thrill of knowing his would be the first footstep to ever mark a piece of land that was millions of years old.
Over a bowl of cereal I tried to ignore the clunking of his belaying pins and karabiners, his checking and rechecking of lamps and ropes. I cracked when he finally relaxed, plonking himself down on the kitchen sideboard, virtually raping the newspaper in his desire to get to the bitcheries.
'Fuck me,' he said at last, 'Arlene Farraday's rolled a seven.'
I threw a teacup at him which bounced off his forehead and shattered on the floor. He didn't say a word, merely folded his newspaper and left. I had to strain to hear the front door snick shut. And that was that. No letters, no telephone calls. His sulk had lasted three years.
On the floor with my boxes I gradually succumbed to a light claustrophobia; I wasn't making inroads on the piles of stuff waiting to be put away, simply moving them around. Downstairs in the kitchen, I boiled some water and flicked through a catering magazine that Maureen had left on the table. Now that the summer season was over, the huge range and double oven seemed ridiculously extravagant, especially when I was only boiling an egg. At least I wanted for nothing: the drawers and cupboards were filled with every kind of kitchen paraphernalia, from blenders and electric knives to indulgences such as corn-on-the-cob holders and a carousel for cooking jacket potatoes. I selected a double egg-cup and one of the toast racks, turned the egg-timer over just as
the water began to bubble and Terry, the landlord, skimmed out of his adjoining living room decked in overalls and Dunlop tennis shoes. He had a mathematically precise side parting in his hair and a Berkeley hung from the expanse of his bottom lip (the top was non-existent). He was carrying a sander in his hands. And his ubiquitous cuppa, brewed to the colour of a jaundiced person's piss.
'All right there, sunshine? No vest for the wicked, hey David? Got a job yet?'
I had in fact, but Terry didn't stick around long enough for me to tell him what it was. Maureen stumbled into the light shortly after, her face lined as though it had been used as a cats' scratching post. She was sucking on a cigarette like an asthma sufferer using an inhaler. On seeing me, she pulled the collars of her dressing gown around the speckled waste land of her chest and sat beneath a framed certificate which read:
Sales Person Of The Year (3rd Place): Juicy Fruit Greengrocers (Wolverhampton Branch) awarded to Maureen Wimbush.
'Is ye room warm enough, Doivid chucky? Ownly, the 'eating's a bit shagged, yer know? Terry's adabashatit but no joy oim afroid. Plenty o blankits if yer cold, luv,' She began picking at the blackish roots of an otherwise strawberry blonde bob. I said the room was fine, after managing to decode her polyglot. Assembling my lunch, I declined her invitation to sit and chat. The last time I did that, she'd told me all about the weepy nature of the cyst in her armpit.
I ate my eggs while watching the local colour scoot in and out of peeling doors or tap at engines with spanners. Girls who looked young enough to be sitting in the prams they pushed wandered by in twos while a stray pack of dogs had a meeting by the bins across the road.
I thought about Helen. What was wrong? Was it simply that she missed us and wanted to breathe life into the volatile mix the three of us created? I doubted it. For the first time, I dwelt upon her words, the concern that she felt. Although she had yet to flesh out that anxiety, it was already pricking at me with possibilities. She might be pregnant. She might have contracted a life-threatening disease. Whatever it was, was it enough to warrant her summoning of Seamus and myself? I wondered if I would have answered her distress call had I been living further afield, in London, say, or abroad. Probably. If there was the sniff of her being interested in me again, I had to check it out. Oh me. David Munro, aka Sad Bastard.
I managed to get out of the guest house unmolested, slightly peeved that I'd be returning to my cardboard hovel later on. The sky looked mightily pissed off, drawing its colour from the dead bowl of sea. I crashed through the well-oiled doors of The Battery just as the first flecks of rain found dry land and suffered the disapproving looks of the regulars as I shed my greatcoat and muscled into the passive scrum at the bar. Helen was there already, buying her second pint.
We took our drinks over to a far corner where a fruit machine farted tunes at five-minute intervals. A dog curled on an armchair raised its eyebrows at us hopefully, but I hadn't bought any crisps. An old couple sipped halves of bitter and looked into space. But for their infrequent movements, they could have been fashioned from papier-mache, so grey and listless were they.
Her tongue found the scar. She asked me how I was settling in. She asked me when I started work. And, pleasantries over, she dragged me back into the strange hinterland of ambiguity and evasion we had inhabited at breakfast.
'I'm not altogether sure why I stayed here after we finished college. Apart from Pol living nearby,' She frowned. 'But I haven't been to see her while I've been here.'
'Who's Pol?' I asked. My pint was disappearing fast-a sure sign that I was uncomfortable.
'My grandmother. You do know about her. I have talked about her in the past.'
I nodded and smiled as though the name had just found some significance.
'Thing with Pol is,' she continued, 'I never really knew her. Still don't. I only ever saw her at Christmas and that was years ago, when I was still at school.'
'Seems like a poor excuse to stay here.' I regretted the words but I was fed up of having to watch what I said. If I remembered correctly Helen liked me because I was honest, sometimes painfully so. I could see no point in stifling my nature just to make things easier for her.
'You're right,' she laughed, surprising me. 'Maybe I wanted to come to the sea again. A place where there's lots of children.'
'Helen. It's winter almost. The season's finished. Some alky TV has-been's turned out all the lights. This place is going to be dead for months now.'
She placed her drink on the table, clinking it against the ashtray. 'I don't know why I'm here. I had to live somewhere.' She grew quiet, gazing into a place beyond the diamond patterns in the carpet. 'I can't seem to shake it off,' And then, quickly, she said: 'I'm being followed.'
I waited. Saying something might only knock her out of her rhythm; cause her to snap at me. I wanted to know what was happening. More drinks. I glanced back at her twice while I waited at the bar. She was looking out of the window at the bank of telephones by the bus stop, her face tilted back, awash with weak sunlight. For a second, she didn't seem real; more a celluloid cut-out pasted on to a drab background. Her edges appeared to shimmer. Then normality swooned back into place as clouds stubbed out the fluke light, lending her, in shadow, a new austerity.
'I don't know who it is but he wants me to suffer,' It was all she said before the door swung open and in walked Seamus. His face was hidden partly by a black knitted skullcap, partly by an eyepatch. He nodded in our direction before moving to the bar. Waiting for his drink he seemed desperate to avoid any further contact. Maybe he was psyching himself up for our confrontation or maybe he was rehearsing his first line. He took off the cap as the bartender handed over his change. Seamus had gone for the bald look: his head was divertingly attractive, shorn of its usual red chaos. The plates of his skull were softly angular; they caught and held the light, bled shadow across his face, which, for a moment, looked shockingly wasted, the eyepatch like a hole-something that was eating him away. He placed a copy of the Guardian next to his tonic water, curling one foot beneath his bottom as he sat down.
'Ay up,' he said, 'it's Morrissey.'
'Fuck off, Seamus,' I said. 'You've changed.'
'Important to do so. I wanted to kill off all that I was at college, you know, renew myself, get in touch with parts of me that needed to be recognised, that needed release.' He rubbed his scalp. What do you think?'
'Very fetching. The eyepatch too.' I thought I was doing pretty well; my voice was bright and friendly, not at all how I felt.
The eyepatch isn't a fashion accessory. It's for real. I was in a fight in Bristol-you know a pub called The Sugar Loaves? and I was stabbed in the face with a broken bottle. Don't remember all that much about it,' He leered at me and fingered the edges of the fabric, which was biting into his livid flesh, empurpling it. Want to see?'
I shook my head. Helen leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. Her eyes closed, tightening as her lips found him. I almost felt her need pass through them both. When she opened her eyes again they seemed bluer. All I could think was: she's shagged the bastard.
'Good to see you both again,' said Seamus, raising his glass as if to toast us. 'I feel as though I've come home-despite the fact I've never lived here before. You can see why though. What a fucking dump. As my sister would say: "I wouldn't wipe my arse on it".'
He laughed and Helen followed suit although it sounded painfully false.
'So why are you here? Why are any of us here?'
Seamus fell silent then and I noticed a tic begin under his good eye. His ear-ring glittered. He was shivering. 'Come on, Davey,' he said, forgetting, as I had done until then, how much I hate that name. 'Give a man chance to settle down. We can talk later.'
All his spirit had flown, his voice bereft of its original edge. He lifted his glass, thought better of it and left the table. I saw him looking at his watch almost hungrily as he headed for the toilet.
'Nice one, David.'
'Oh give it a fucking rest, Helen. Have yo
u heard the way he's speaking? I want to renew myself. What a bunch of hairy bollocks.'
'He's here for me. I'm in trouble. We all might-'
'Then tell me what it is.' My voice cracked half way through and although it was a relief to get rid of the tension inside I couldn't help but start laughing when I saw Helen's stricken face.
'Oh come here, you,' she said, all smiley and sad at the same time. She hugged my neck with her arm. 'I've been pissing you about a bit. I'm sorry, David. Really. It's just something that needs a little thinking out. I don't want to drop something cold on you. But I know-and here she lifted my face so she could look through her fringe into my eyes-you're a part of this.'
'How?' I asked. 'A part of what?'
She closed her eyes and I saw them roll skyward beneath the delicate flesh of her lids. 'Well, I'm being hunted. I believe I'm being hunted. Sniffed out.'
A spattering of snow on the window made me jump. The sky was low and sullen. Seamus had crept back to his stool and was watching me, his face wreathed in smoke from a cigarette that shivered between his lips. Helen continued, her eyes still closed, her fingers rubbing my neck.
'I can't describe him; I've never seen his face. But he smells of cinnamon and old things and sweetness. And I often see him when I am at my most vulnerable. When I'm ill. Shitting. Fucking,' A couple on the next table looked at Helen and then at each other. Helen didn't bat an eye. 'Sometimes I glimpse him and I feel a pull, very strong, at a part of me that can almost understand what it is, what drives his fascination with me. Sometimes I think I must know him from years ago and that I'm going to have some Eureka moment when I unravel all the knots in a dream. Mostly though, I feel he's coming at me from my future, that fate has supplied me, us, with a convergence.'
She opened her eyes. Her voice had been level and strong, almost as if the words she'd spoken were rehearsed. Perhaps they were: whatever she was suffering had churned within her for a while; she'd had enough time to try to construct some kind of rationale around it.
Head Injuries Page 2
