Head Injuries

by Conrad Williams

  'At last,' she says, and hugs me.

  'There was nothing to stop you from kissing me.'

  'I know. But I've been there. It was important you made the move, David. First-timer.' She smiles and I blush. I want to ask her if I was good; if the kiss turned her on. She ducks her head and kisses me this time and she's controlling what happens. Her tongue dabs against mine, her hands crawl up my back and nestle in my hair. When she pulls away, purple spots are swimming behind my eyes.

  'It's not against the law to breathe.'

  It gets better. Soon, I'm able to think of other things while my mouth works on auto-pilot. I'm thinking of how I should touch her breasts when the shouting starts.

  'Why do you hang round with Seamus and Dando? They're a bit rough. Not like you,' We're walking towards the bushes. They slope down to the canal, where the noises are coming from. I can't make out who it is, or what's being said.

  'They're okay. Lot of hot air. And it's not like I'm spoilt for choice is it? Our year is full of geeks.' I want to ask her if I kiss better than Seamus. Now I've finally done it, I resent her for letting him get away with what he did.

  A couple of feet into the bushes there's a fence. Kerry climbs over first and I follow, realising that my heart is troubled with more than this business of kissing. The shouts, still vague, possess an urgency. Kerry's nails dig into my palm-she senses it too.

  'Careful,' I say. 'The bank gets steep here.'

  We meet the leading edge of bushes beyond which lies a narrow path forged by fishermen and kids playing truant. Something's going on under the footbridge; four or five figures painted white by the lights are a blur of movement. I'm having to squint to make a sense of it all: it seems like a human knot constantly re-configuring itself.

  'Kerry?'

  'Oh God,' she says, and lets go of my hand. I run after her.

  'What's happening?' I can hear Seamus shouting in that reedy voice of his. And Helen sobbing. Dando I can just see, holding something out in his hands before the knot finds another loop and everything's lost again.

  'Stop it.' And I'm rattled by the sheer urgency of Kerry's voice. She comes to a sudden halt and I try to look past her. I manage to squeeze by on the path by clinging on to some of the thin branches which overhang. From here I see everything.

  I see Seamus circling Dando. I see Kerry with her hands to her face, crouching by the canal. I see Dando. Dando's holding a dog by its hind legs and plunging it into the soft mud on the bank. He's keeping its head submerged until it begins to convulse before pulling it back out again. There's a wet sucking noise as it comes free. The dog is shivering and making odd, weak yelps. Its head is misshapen with mud. Back it goes. Seamus is cheering. Dando's face is half-hidden by shade. The other half blazes. He's got his dick out; a jutting, moonstruck twig.

  'Stop it!' Kerry screams.

  As if only now becoming aware of the people around him, Dando grins and kicks the dog in the stomach. Any noise it might have made is muffled.

  'The fucker bit me. No dog gets away with that.' He covers his dick with his hand, giving it a little tweak as he pushes it back into his jeans.

  I'm striding over, even though Dando's bigger than me and-if it weren't for Jimmy Price-would be the cock of our year. I aim a punch at his face but he leans away and my fist finds his throat. He loses his footing and falls over, letting go of the dog. Kerry pulls it free of the mud and it runs, blind, straight into the canal. I watch it swim away, its head twitching left and right. At the opposite bank it sprints towards the housing estate. I'm wondering if it will die of shock when Dando wades over and grabs me by the neck.

  'I ought to kick your bastard teeth in for that.'

  And then… then…

  ***

  And then what? I sat up in the bath and stared at my hands, which were beginning to prune. My mind wouldn't allow me to drift with the true course of events: how I fell back against a rotten plank and felt the slow heat of a nail sink into my thigh. How I'd gone to casualty where a nurse who smelled of lavender swabbed my wound clean and gave me a tetanus injection. How we went for popcorn and a Coke at the cinema but couldn't get in to see The Empire Strikes Back after I'd gone back to the park to rejoin everyone, Dando teasing me that I'd had a prick up my arse. I could think all this, but I couldn't see it. Instead, I saw Dando grab me by my jumper. While he held me, Seamus bound my hands behind my back with a length of twine. Then they upended me and forced me into a hole just wide enough to accommodate my shoulders. My head touched the bottom and the weight of my body above me forced me on to my cheek. The mud, folding around me…

  I swallowed thickly. Hands shaking, I pulled out the plug and stood under the shower for a few minutes until the panic was washed clear. But those things hadn't happened. It was like a game in which secrets are passed on and distorted. Dando hadn't tried to kill me.

  Scrubbing myself dry, thoughts turned back to Kerry. We'd finished a month or two after that incident. The last time I saw her was a year or two after we'd left school. She was living in Taunton with an Alastair and practising midwifery. I remember thinking-what did I ever see in this girl? Her face was painfully thin, putting me in mind of a teddy bear I once owned whose head was crushed by a prolonged spell down the gap between my bed and the wall. We never talked about that night by the canal. I wonder if that was because of some teenage ability to reject the horrific, or because we consciously stopped it from surfacing? I know I'd blocked it, until tonight. And what of Dando? I gazed into the mirror, the towel around my shoulders; the scratch was a raised whitish worm. We'd spent so much time together it seemed criminal we should lose contact so quickly. How many friends could I boast of now, that meant as much to me as the ones with whom I used to play football until way past a time when the ball was visible in the dark? I found myself mourning Dando-I now realised he meant more to me than most people I'd met since. He'd been a brutal bastard, but he was genuine and honest-with me at least-and immune from any pretentiousness. I hadn't laughed as forcefully in the seven or eight years since our friendship dissolved.

  What did I have now? I still held on to Helen and Seamus but only then by the skin of my teeth. How easy it could have been to consign them to the back of my head, dusting them off now and then to massage my need for nostalgia. It would be better for them too, as I'd see them both in a honeyed light; that charitable bent the mind always seems to adopt in moments of reflection. How could I pretend, now they were back in my life? I didn't know the real Seamus any more though he must exist somewhere under all those layers of artifice. And Helen seemed almost self-satisfied with her lot, as if what were happening to her separated her from everyone else, marked her out for a special destiny, no matter how black it proved to be. I felt a prickle of anger when I realised she was exploiting a need for her that I thought (and hoped) I'd beaten over the years. She was probably gloating even now, that she could hold sway over my life after just a few months of tenderness that occurred years ago. But I was probably being unfair to them both. It would have been nice for them to contact me under different circumstances, but at least they'd done it. I hadn't lifted a finger. I should be turning some of this bile on myself, seeing what I was made of for a change, but it was either something I wasn't ready for or something of which I was incapable.

  It was just after seven. I was in no mood to continue with the parries and deflections of our first conversation and was in half a mind to contact Helen and call off the evening. There was too much to think about already; I didn't want another bout of ghost stories to keep me awake all night, waiting for something portentous to reveal itself. I wanted to see the girl again. I didn't for a moment believe that I would never see her again. It just wouldn't be up to me; she would reveal herself. She seemed that type of person.

  The afternoon's beer had made me sluggish. It would be nice to curl up in bed with something brainless playing on the TV. Instead, I drank a pint and a half of water before deciding to dress against the mood's grain which had d
eveloped throughout the day. On went a Daffy Duck T-shirt, improving my temperament enormously. How could the others speak of shadows and danger while I was acting the fool? Hopefully we would talk of lighter things this evening.

  True to form, Seamus turned up at the guest house with quarter of an hour to spare. Even his punctuality unnerved me. I felt awkward, tying up my boots while he hovered, flicking through my paperbacks and tapping on the window as he looked into the street. If he asked about my paintings, I'd tell him I'd burned the lot.

  'Anyone interesting die today?' I asked him.

  He gave me a name but I didn't recognise it. 'She was an economist and a translator. Italian ambassador to Washington too. Leukaemia. Seventy-four.'

  I ushered him out of my room. I might have laughed had I tried to say something. Would he think I was ridiculing him if I asked whether or not he kept files on dead public figures? At college it just seemed like a bit of a lark, an idiosyncrasy by which we recognised Seamus or referred to him. He would enter a room, crestfallen, to announce the death of an Australian chef or a joke writer or a stalwart of the Japanese film industry; all unknown to me-and to him, which was where the humour, or his perception of it, lay. It was funny at first, so it was probably my fault for laughing because it encouraged him to repeat his performance every morning. By the time we'd forgotten to laugh, or ignored him, he was into the business of tributes in a big way. He would watch TV specials about a celebrity's life and then, if they were cinema stars, he would make sure he caught every one of a season of their films. Biographies began to crop up on his bookcases. Because of his nature, I couldn't help but think he was simply cultivating this image to try to make himself more mysterious and attractive.

  He drove well, guiding his black Mini confidently through the night. Lancaster looks almost appealing when you approach it by road. The Ashton Memorial's copper dome looks like the cerulean wash from a Mediterranean watercolour. Impossibly beautiful. In contrast, Lancaster Castle-cum-prison is imposing and dung-black, mottled like the imperfect plumage of grubby pigeons, suitable abode for those languishing in its cells. Though I haven't seen it, I know they have what's called the Drop Room, where condemned criminals waited for the noose. Seamus reached across me and stuck a cassette into the player hanging beneath the glove compartment. Something spare and quirky trickled from the speakers, beefed up after a few seconds by a chunky bass line.

  'Qu'est-ce que c'est?'

  'PJ Harvey,' he said. 'I love female singers, especially this one. She's got a raunch, a swagger.'

  'Really. Where's Helen?' I wiped away condensation on the window in time to see a white neon crucifix hanging in the sky.

  'Meeting us there. She's been in town, mooching around for treasure. You know what she's like. Looking for stuff that she can work on for her craft shop.'

  'What did you do after I left?'

  'Went back to hers for a coffee then I drove her into Lancaster.' Maybe he could sense I was digging for something else. 'She's worried about you, Davey.'

  'Come on, Seamus. Like we've been in each other's back pockets for the last four years? The last time I talked to you was on our graduation day. All this concern, it's crap.'

  'It's not crap. It's crap that you think it's crap.'

  He didn't say anything else for a while. The Ashton Memorial was a bald giant shrugging its shoulders on the skyline. Scarves of mist flapped about the fence separating the road from the river. Every car or bus window that swept by was fogged; filled with smears of shadow which shrank and grew beneath the streetlamps.

  What have you been doing with yourself then, Seamus, these past few years?'

  His face clenched in the half-light, as though this was a question he knew was coming but which he dreaded. He steered the car over Skerton Bridge, the new sweep of road casting blue and orange shapes across the famished oval of his head.

  'I've been underground for much of it,' he sighed. I readied myself for some tale of clandestine political agitation. 'You might have seen some of my caving gear in the back seat when you got in.'

  I glanced round and saw a nylon rope, a carbide lamp and a pair of knee pads.

  'So your pot-holing venture took off?' The image of Seamus squeezing himself into dark crevices seemed inexplicably apt.

  'Caving, please. Pot-holing is different. To me at least.' He swung the Mini into the car park across from Salisbury's, cut the engine and sat there, sniffing. The eye-patch gave his face a punched-in look. 'Up until September I was caving most of the time. There are some good wild caves in Britain. I've done them all: Giant's Hole, Lancaster-Easegill, Ogof Craig-a-Ffynnon.'

  He kind of trailed off here and I could see something was wrong. I didn't want to push him but then he changed the subject anyway.

  'I met someone this afternoon, shortly after dropping Helen off,' he said, carefully. He didn't seem all that certain of what he was telling me. It was as if, in the saying of it, he would somehow firm up what had happened in his own mind. 'On the way back to Lancaster. I was driving along the one-way system in town and I saw this girl. She was in distress.'

  I gritted my teeth and shivered; closed the window. So did I, I was going to tell him, when I got the chance. Hey, so did I.

  'She was hurrying along with her hand up, as if warding something off. I thought she was a nutter, but she was cleanly dressed.'

  I snorted at this and nodded, aghast at the way Seamus' head worked and about as surprised as a man who has had his surprise gland removed.

  'It wasn't raining, but she was clutching her coat closed and she had her hand up in the air, you know how people do when it's pissing down. So I stopped. She came straight over to the car and got in. Said her name was Dawn and could I take her home. When I asked her what was wrong, she said she was having a nightmare.'

  'But she was awake?'

  'Yeah,' Seamus glanced at me, to see how I was taking it. I must have been wearing a pretty unusual expression because he came back for a second look. 'What do you think of that?' he said.

  Was she sleepwalking?'

  'No. She was aware of who she was and where she was and what she was doing. She couldn't stop herself.'

  'Was she daydreaming?' I suggested and then thought about it. 'Like, um, daynightmare… dreaming?'

  'I don't know. Thing about daydreaming is that you don't know you're doing it until some maths teacher hurls a board rubber at you.'

  'You're right there,' I said. 'Maybe she was rehearsing. Maybe she's an actress and she was getting into her part.'

  'I don't think so,' said Seamus, hardening his face a little.

  Well, what was she dreaming about?' And I thought about it a little more. 'Seamus, lad. She was taking the piss. Must have been.'

  Seamus shook his head. 'I don't think so. She looked pretty flustered. And she was grateful to get in the car. She calmed down instantly.'

  'Her nightmare? Did she tell you?'

  'Yeah. She said her roof was falling in.'

  'What roof?'

  Seamus smiled grimly, his lips pressed together. He looked at me again. 'Her head,' he said, searching my face for signs of understanding. I knew then that he'd fallen for her story.

  'Her head? Is this woman still at large?'

  'No, she's back at my place.'

  'Bloody hell, Seamus. So what's the story? She suffers from migraines or something?'

  He shrugged, staring at the blasted rubble around us. We sat listening to the engine cool down. 'I don't know what she's suffering from. I haven't had a chance to talk to her properly yet. I just gave her the key and told her to make herself at home. She didn't look happy about being left alone, but she was a damn sight happier than when I found her.'

  I opened the door and waited till he'd got out before turning to look at him over the roof. I slammed the door shut and told him about Eve. He seemed shocked and he seemed unhappy too, as though I'd trumped him in some way.

  'She as weird as mine?' he asked. I liked that possessive-ness. />
  'She was sitting in a knackered car eating an apple. Pretty fucking nuts if you ask me.'

  It was a little milder now we'd left the coast behind us. We walked back along Parliament Street to the Indian restaurant, Seamus silent with whatever was uncoiling in his thoughts. I left him to it and watched the bloated river surge by narrow houses on the opposite bank that seemed lifeless and shrunken.

  'I would like to talk to you, a little later. About something that happened to me in the summer. Hello Helen!' He waved and strode ahead of me, leaving me to gawp like a fish. Helen was a dim shape against the wall; I suddenly noticed how fragile she appeared, although it could have merely been a trick of the light, and the heavy clothes she wore. Her cheeks were daubed with shade; she looked like a figure from a painting by Munch.

  She kissed Seamus lightly on the mouth, the glitter of her eyes never straying from my own. When I was close enough to feel the heat of her breath, she said: 'I met someone today.'

  THREE

  LECHUGUILLA

  It was a good meal. I was surprised and pleased to find a curry house so far north which served a decent Balti; a dish I usually had to wait for until I visited friends in Birmingham. We shared a bottle of red wine which Helen had brought with her (the restaurant was unlicensed) and, despite my alarm at her earlier words, the evening was thankfully free of anything enigmatic or threatening, as though we'd reached some unspoken agreement for a moratorium on the stuff we'd discussed in the pub. There'd been a subtle change in the way we tip-toed around each other; maybe Helen and Seamus had arranged this deliberately that afternoon, that their persuasions would be made separately in an attempt to eke something out of me that might not be so forthcoming otherwise. I was eager to find out what Seamus wanted to tell me but loath to share my own intrigues with Helen. If this was unfair, then I didn't feel too bad about it: I didn't like the way that they seemed to be cosy-ing up together and leaving me out in the cold, flying auto. Although there was probably something in it, I was reluctant to listen to them appropriate my memories, and the times we shared at Seven Arches and my strange adaptations of them, into something they could use as proof that I was being sucked into their tilted little world.