Head Injuries

by Conrad Williams

  Whether or not Seamus' letter infected me with its depression, my last hours of sleep in Warrington borrowed heavily from its content and tone. I dreamed of walking back from town, laden with shopping, looking forward to an evening in front of a television boasting some Cup Final or other: I had bought a six-pack of lager and a pillow-sized bag of tortilla chips to share with everyone else while the match was playing. Into this vapid scenario stepped a woman of my own invention. If she was a collage of everything I found attractive in a person, she wasn't so perfectly blended that I couldn't identify some of her constituent parts. Here were Helen's tidy bee-stung lips; Eve's filmy complexion; the caramel eyes of Stephanie, my first girlfriend. This woman's hair I couldn't attribute to anyone: it was a dirty blonde pile falling to her shoulders. Errant strands bracketed a wide face free of any cosmetic. A spray of freckles banded her nose, muscovado dark. Her name would have been something warm and clotted that caught in the throat: Claire, say; or something rude and rich, full of obstacles for the lips and tongue: Lydia, Rachel, Charlotte.

  She pulled her beaten leather jacket more comfortably around her shoulders and fell into step beside me. Her suede cowboy boots scraped and clicked. She had a comeliness about her that was not so profound that it made my mouth dry; rather, her rough appeal latched on to me like meshing Velcro surfaces and persuaded a more sedate exchange, as of people well known to each other. Or so my dreamscape suggested. As we reached my front gate she cupped my elbow with her hand and swung me into a kiss. Our mouths were so perfectly matched it was as if this was their natural disposition and we'd been cruelly separated at some former time.

  When I wakened I felt instantly bereaved; a yearning I had never felt before, even for the living. The pillow was her softly submitting body. As the day impinged itself more forcibly upon my groggy senses I was aware of her lingering scent and the fact that I could not remember the peculiar assemblage of features I knew so well in others.

  Mum stood on the doorstep, arms folded, entreating me to take care while her expression patently pleaded for me not to go. Dad was all bluster: 'Leave him to it Liz, if he wants to tear off like that. You can't talk to the lad. You can't.' At the last moment, as I closed the front gate, he pressed his lips together-which passed for a smile-and raised a finger. 'Be well,' he said. 'And don't lark about else you want your tripes spilled all over the shop. Give your body time to heal itself. Think on, David.'

  I promised I would, marvelling at the way he could make me feel like an infant.

  When I arrived back in Morecambe and smelled the sea-or the shit soup which passed for it these days-the fact that the journey had taken just two hours was something of a comfort; I felt close to my parents and, irrational though it was, enjoyed a sense of security in the zone they created for me-as if their protection could reach across the county border and envelop me here on the battered coast. It couldn't buoy me with regard to the mordant, irrepressible greyness of everything and the weight of expectation-a sense that work had to be done, or finished. I dropped my bag off at the guest house and chatted to my landlady about how things were bad for them in the closed season until I saw she was ferreting for rent. Outside, pale sunlight could do little against the grumbling clouds building up over the bay. I walked streets whitened by salt, strangling on bin sacks which slumped out of alleys like drunken threats. Much of the architecture of the 19th century had fallen foul of the sea's breath; corners of buildings were becoming rounded, sandstone crumbling in its ambition to return to the beach. Scaffolding clung to surfaces like arcane dental braces; orange plastic fencing and shivering green brick-nets abounded-the only nod to colour beyond the tawdry prostitution of Morecambe's front.

  Turning on to the promenade, I felt sure I was going to bump into Helen, or any of the acquaintances I'd made in the past few weeks. This I didn't want. I checked my watch; the meeting with Eve at Half Moon Bay was to take place in less than three hours; I didn't want to spend all that time locked up in my fusty room, work pending or no. I drifted towards The Battery, then beyond when I realised facing Eve drunk might not be appreciated. I passed a couple in the bus shelter huddled into each other as though trying to negate their individuality. The woman's eyes were hooded. They watched me as their invisible hands rummaged under thick clothing like burrowing animals. I caught a strong, momentary whiff of bladderwrack, its black saltiness reaming my nostrils as efficiently as a snort of ammonia.

  Pol, Helen's grandma, lived around here-had done, according to Helen, all her life and had known the town before it became engulfed by the penny-pinchers who sniffed profit in the dubious marriage between sunbathing and one-armed bandits.

  I picked up my pace; Pol would be able to fill in the gap (I hoped) between leaving University and more recent events. I didn't know her exact address but I remembered Helen letting on that her grandmother lived alone above a florist's just off Hey sham Road. This was no guarantee of me finding it, of course, but it would pass the time. I checked along the first few streets that led off the arterial road but all I could see were banks of houses and tired cars. Clouds swarmed in windows like oil and water pressed between panes of glass. The gabled roof of The Battery pinned the glowering sky into place-my beacon-like some Gothic rampart from a Hammer film. I oughtn't rove too far from that if I didn't want to get lost.

  And then I realised I was being followed, if followed was the right word for what was happening. I noticed a figure walking the parallel street to this one at the same pace as me. I would lose sight of him as a block of houses came between us but at the next junction he would reappear, keeping step. At first I thought it was mere coincidence; the post-trauma jitters advising me of anything vaguely awry. But when I tried mixing up my pace-dawdling one moment, eating up the ground with great strides the next-he stepped into the connecting road at exactly the same time as I did. It was as if a vast mirror had been erected at the opposite end of the street, so minutely copied were the figure's movements. I didn't let it worry me. Go through it, I told myself, it will have to stop. Rather than stop, though, the figure turned sharply left and began sprinting towards me. Its head was a nimbus of frothing pink, like a face on a canvas of mine treated with too much water. Smears of it seemed to hang in the air as though snagged.

  I took off, my momentum threatening to send me into a poorly trimmed wall of shrubbery. I managed to stay upright and pelted to the next junction where I at last saw a florist's set back from the road. I swung into the street, casting a glance back: he still hadn't emerged. Feeling threatened, yet somehow calm, as though floating, I checked names next to the various bellpushes. Here was a P. MacFarlane-surely it was Pol? I rang it. Her voice came through the metal grille, coated in static. I knew then it was her; she sounded exactly like Helen-the tone was questioning but it was treated with an enamel which was all: what the fuck do you want?

  Sensing something awful gathering at my shoulders I said: 'I'm David. Helen's friend. Can I talk to you?'

  Expecting to be interrogated over the reasons for my visit, I chanced another look back over my shoulder. He was standing at the corner of the road watching me-I supposed-through the pink and red blur of his head. He looked like a Polaroid print that has been smeared by an errant thumb before the chemical fixers have had time to fasten the picture. His arms opened as if to embrace me. I took in his ragged shirt, the charred mess of his blazer, the scuffed comfort of his shoes before the buzzing of the door release rescued me and I tumbled into a hallway filled with masks.

  Nothing Helen had told me about Pol prepared me for what I was to encounter. She appeared at the top of the stairs, wreathed in the thin light coming from the back of the house.

  'Hello David,' she said, her voice both arch and welcoming. 'I thought we might have met before now, considering how long you've known Helen. But…' and she was sloping off, her shadow contracting like a water stain on a hot pavement. I bounded up to the landing, uncomfortably aware of the masks which glared at me, head height, as I ascended. At the
top of the stairs I detected a vegetable tang coming in pulses from the wallpaper as though it were a breathing skin. She was already ensconced in a large chair tucked in the corner of her living room between two windows that were heavily curtained. Motes swarmed in the chinks of light available; a sliver painted her eye livid blue-the rest of her seethed beneath shadow.

  Take a sip of something with me if you please,' she said. 'You'll find the makings of a cup of scaldy in the cupboard behind the kitchen door. There's some fancy Darjeeling I pick up now and again for visitors that never come but I'm for a normal. You help yourself.'

  I made a pot, feeling oddly detached from this scene, as if I was viewing it from elsewhere. I hadn't spoken a word yet and already I was acting the skivvy.

  'How do you like it?' I asked, appalled at the scratchiness of my voice. I peered through the window; he was still there, blots of red staining his hands like stigmata. Go away, I thought, wincing at the nubs of flesh that puckered along my spine. His face was like something Francis Bacon might have created. Go away, I thought, and then: What are you?

  'I have it any way you choose so long as if s hot and wet.' Music filtered from the room, its vinyl-warm crackle helping to work the stress from me. I turned my back on the window and poured tea into two white mugs. There'll be a bourbon cream or three I've no doubt. A brandy snap even, if you're lucky.'

  'I'm not hungry.'

  'Right you are.' She dipped into the light to take her mug. Her lips were astonishingly like Helen's; I was tempted to call her bluff, persuaded that it really was Helen playing a trick on me. Instead I sipped my tea and read the sleeve notes of the Jeri Southern album Pol had slipped on to the turntable.

  'Summer music,' she commented, looking at me. I nodded and smiled. 'It's nice.'

  'What do you want?'

  'Oh, nothing really,' I lied, trying to sound casual and instead achieving the nervy status of a schoolboy accused of shoplifting. 'Just thought I'd call round and say hello. Heard so much about you that-'

  'Crap,' she croaked. 'What have you heard about me?' Her hands snaked into the blade of light like lizards sunning themselves: still and leathery but with a latent capacity for blinding speed. One of her nails had grown inexplicably long; it was beginning to curl under her finger. The flesh beneath the cuticle was blackened.

  'Okay, nothing. Apart from you living here and being Helen's grandma.'

  She seemed pleased with this; perhaps because she felt she'd ground the truth from me. 'So what's the rumpus?'

  'I just wanted to come and talk to you. About Helen.'

  'Ahh, now there's a tone I recognise. Lovesick dog, aren't you?'

  I bristled at this. Not least because I knew it to be untrue. What I felt for Helen these days was frustration; anger even. And sometimes a yearning that had nothing to do with love. Not love. Surely not love.

  'I'm worried about her. I've not seen her for so long, I thought maybe you could tell me what she's been like since she graduated.' I thought about what I said for a while and added: 'She seems different. Folded into herself.'

  Pol dappled the surface of her tea with those tapered twig-fingers of hers.

  'Folded into herself? What is it you're suspicious of?'

  'Have you seen her lately?' I couldn't keep the edge from my voice.

  Pol must have caught the concern; suddenly, her playfulness receded.

  'No,' she said. 'Is she in trouble?'

  'Not really. Not yet. But I've a feeling she has the capacity to harm herself. Without even realising it.'

  Pol's face collapsed into a sneer. 'Perhaps we can jettison the riddles, hey David? What is going on?'

  'I don't know. I think maybe Helen's upset about something that happened in the past. It's really starting to get under her skin.'

  'What something?' Her top lip quested over the rim of her tea cup, tapir-like.

  'I couldn't tell you. I don't remember.' I sipped my tea. It tasted faintly of washing-up liquid. For a time the quiet in the room was punctuated by Pol's inhalation of tea and the listless tick of a clock I couldn't locate. I wanted badly to look into the street for my pursuer but I was worried that Pol would interpret my covert ways as being directly related to Helen and, specifically, the trouble she now saw her to be in. Pol was wadded into her armchair like a trapped cushion. Scimitars of hair curved from beneath her beret, tangling with her eyelashes so that whenever she blinked, her fringe twitched. She wore a CND pin in the knot of a silk scarf at her throat. On the wall above the three glaring orange bars of the fire hung a photograph of a woman by a pond. The woman was crouched alongside a dog that seemed to be grinning. A pigeon in the background was just taking off, wings blurred to such an extent they resembled a loop of smoke.

  Pol replaced her cup in its saucer and steadied its rattling with a finger, the rest of her hand splayed out like a badly drawn asterisk. 'Don't presume to tell me the state of my family. I know what's what. Even if I haven't seen Helen for years-' (it was something of a shock hearing her name after so long, as though we'd been discussing someone else)'-I know what that girl has buzzing around in her mind. She was in no state for anyone after that girl drowned. She spent days in her room staring out of the window in the direction of the sea. I was worried sick that she'd just go walking off one night to the bay and keep walking till the water took her.'

  'Drowned? What girl? I don't understand.' I might have felt some emotion at this revelation if it hadn't all been driven out of me over the past weeks.

  Pol's hand had drifted to her chest where it lightly massaged. Her face had lost much of its aggression but the features sported the lines and shadows that, when joined, hinted at the fury that could take flight there.

  'I lost sleep. She took to wandering around the flat, so dazed that I thought she was sleepwalking but able to speak clearly so that I wasn't sure. I kept talking to her. She began to use a word frequently. "Atonement," she'd say. "There is a need for atonement.'"

  The dim ticking was subsumed by a tortuous meshing of tired cogs and springs: three chimes sounded. That I had an hour left before meeting Eve (my blood quickened upon recalling her-the tattoo! And what colour eyes?) relaxed me, until I remembered that I didn't know where Half Moon Bay was to be found. My panic rose like sea water to the plimsoll line of my throat.

  'I was convinced she was going to kill herself, that her atonement for the drowning of that girl would come with Helen opening a vein in her arm or swallowing pills but she eventually came out of it and it was like she was normal again. But hard with it.'

  'Miss MacFarlane,' I said. 'Pol-'

  'She was so confused when she was in that state. I remember her voice, so reedy. "There must be atonement. I killed the girl. I killed her." I don't want to be a part of anything like that again.'

  I edged forward in my seat. 'I don't know about this drowning. Helen never told me about a dead girl. What happened?'

  'I don't know for sure, lad. I wasn't there. But Helen liked to walk along the towpath on the Lune. She liked the barges; sometimes she'd feed the mallards and moorhens. I'd walked with her now and again but it was clear she preferred to make the journey alone so I stopped. She'd happened upon a girl who had fallen into the water. Without a thought

  Helen entered the water and fished the girl out. Helen had remembered her First Aid well but the girl did not revive.

  'Helen was counselled by therapists at college and on visits home but it was her stubborn view that she was to blame. She took to wondering about the girl-how she spoke or laughed, how she chewed or held her pen. Ridiculous details that she grieved over as though the girl had been her own daughter. I'd catch her writing the name Samantha on file paper or staring at blonde girls in catalogues. Helen was excused from having to take first-year exams and returned after summer looking healthy, determined and happier than in previous months. I remember thinking she looked, not so much older, as hardened. She never walked the towpath again. And I haven't seen her since. End of story.'

&n
bsp; Pol looked blank, her eyes yolky with age and the effort of recalling Helen's tragedy. She rubbed at her jowls and an insectile rasp-like the pattern of a cricket's call-filled the room. I half-expected a swarm of chittering shells to pour in from the ventilation duct on the wall.

  'Does she see much of that dandiprat Seamus? Is he still on the scene?'

  'He hasn't been for a while, like me, but he's around now.'

  'Course he is. You all diddled each other. There's your magic triangle. You've all smelled and tasted each other. Ball and socket. Key and lock. Fucking brings out the worst in us, David. And it also releases demons.'

  'Really?' I said, trying not to appear shocked by her tirade. It was hard to believe that six hours earlier I'd been tickling Loot's chin, eating Rice Krispies and listening to Dad hum along to Neil Young on the radio. 'I must go. Thanks for the tea.' I was trying not to laugh at the phrases that had crept into her invective. Diddling for God's sake. Ball and socketl And she looked so serious.

  I descended the stairwell and her shadow engulfed me as she stepped on to the landing at my back. The masks-papier-mache, plaster, wood-gurned at me, blackness churning in the holes where the eyes ought to be.

  'You're worried about her, you say? Worry for yourself. You're all sick bastards. She's the only one with any spunk. Why don't you fuck away and leave her alone?'

  On the threshold I stopped as I realised what might still be waiting for me outside. My upper body jerked back as my feet tried bovinely to carry me onward. It was 50/50 as to which of the horrors I'd rather face. In the moment of my remembering him, though, the air shimmered at the street corner where he'd previously stood. I closed the door on Pol's rantings and sensed her face at the window as I reached the main road. I didn't give her the satisfaction of meeting her gaze. Like heat vapour in the coming of dusk, the ripple in the air diminished and I felt safe to continue. I crossed the main road and cut through between buildings to the promenade where the dirty flat seabed stretched away into a distance cut short by a thin line of light like a cross section of glass: the tide's fresh limit. Because the hills beyond were packed in a cladding of mist, this liquid skyline seemed the outermost reaches of geography; beyond I could believe there was little more than a sheer drop.