Head Injuries

by Conrad Williams

  ***

  I dreamed immediately.

  Eve was flying through a storm, her fragile wings struggling against the wind and the cargo she was hauling. I swung below her, knitted into a purse made from her spittle. We were travelling towards a coal of orange light. I was naked and vulnerable, but I felt protected because Eve was here. Behind me I could hear the awful, desperate noises of pursuit but couldn't twist in my net to see what was causing them. I looked up, following the spinning thread that connected me to Eve. Her wings were beating unsteadily, and every time a volley of rain drops impacted upon her soft body, a cloud of gold powder plumed out of her. I couldn't see her face to define the extent of her pain. I was as helpless as a babe but Eve radiated security and confidence with each stroke of her wings. She might have been ancient, such was her depth of wisdom, experience and control. She was my guiding light. Yet if she was trying to save me, she was likely to be my downfall too, because she was like a beacon, brilliant enough to attract others who weren't so benevolent.

  The thrashing at my shoulder grew more pronounced. The heady reek of petrol suggested that the storm was formed of something more complex than rain. The coal flared before us, Eve drawn inexorably on, fascinated by its colours, its persistent chimeric dance. Awash in fuel, anaesthetised by the ignorance of dreams, I only realised I was burning when my skin turned black and shiny and the smell of my flesh cooking consumed me.

  I walked most of the way back to Morecambe and managed to hail a taxi just as my feet were about to call it a day. My back was beginning to complain anyway, and, even though I could ill afford it, I felt I deserved spoiling in this way. The cabbie dropped me off on Regent Road just as a knackered yellow light staggered over the lip of the bay. Though I needed my bed, I decided to watch the sun come up. I felt compassion for our nearest star; one of those embarrassing, tender morning thoughts that would make me cringe later on. Reaching the barrier, I drew some of that semi-rotting sea air into my lungs and trawled the horizon for ships with eyes that weren't up to the task. The sea was pegged back, seemingly tucked under the leading edge of far-off land; the crenellated sand-where it wasn't bruised with oil-gave the impression it was shifting, dune-like, the longer I stared at it.

  The stone jetty made itself known through a grey sleeve of mist at the end of which the lighthouse pulsed with a light so weak I was unconvinced as to its worth. I walked back to the guest house and closed the door of my room; picked up various phone messages that had been slipped under by my landlord on my way to the bed.

  ***

  Helen called, 8 pm

  Helen called again, 8.30 pm

  And again! 9 pm, 10 pm

  Perhaps you should of left a mesage with us?

  ***

  I tossed the sheaf of notes away and watched as one of them landed on the material which shrouded a stack of frames leaning against the wall beneath my sink. It reminded me of what I had to do. Guardedly, I pulled back the corner of paint-stained cloth and riffled through the canvases, wincing now and again when I saw a painting that had not come off. By the time I'd searched the pile I felt a bit depressed; nothing I'd created boasted any verve, any nerve. All of it was too safe and parochial. From there, I went to the older stuff I had stored in my suitcase down in the landlord's garage. He'd shoved the bag into an alcove above a shelf crammed with boxes of after-dinner mints, instant chocolate custard mix and sachets of ketchup. I unzipped the case and a painting fell into my hand. I knew it was the one even before I'd turned it over to look at the picture. A moth. I'd been quite proud of it at the time-I'd painted it while at school-but now I could see how poorly I'd executed the strokes: the paint was applied too thickly, the moth's anatomy was a joke and I'd tried to treat the wings to a little yellow and brown once my gold supply had run out. Still, the history of the painting was irrelevant. What mattered was the likeness of the moth, in shape, posture and tone to the tattoo on Eve's left breast. This was that, magnified. It seemed to swell and deflate even as I watched it, as if it was being powered by its own heart or that of another, like Eve's had been.

  A sudden bark of static broke the quiet outside, followed by a voice foaming in its wake. The doorbell rang. I slipped downstairs and opened it on two police officers, their walkie-talkies chattering. I couldn't be sure if they were the same ones that had been trying to trace the car owner last night-this morning. They asked for Terry but I didn't need to fetch him; he appeared behind me, bleary-eyed, shambling. Maureen took up the rear, her arms folded around her chest. The policemen didn't say anything; they merely beckoned to Terry and Maureen and when I made to follow, they pointed at me and raised their eyebrows.

  Seeing them there, in the street, looking up at Duncan's window-Terry's face creasing with concern and Maureen quickly looking away-I thought fuck this, shut the door and legged it upstairs. The police soon found their voices and shouted, imaginatively: 'Oi!'

  'Duncan!' I shouted, slamming my palm flat against the door. I briefly thought about asking to see his socket spanners, that would get him moving, but there was no response. The door wasn't locked.

  I had a look in the room and the next thing I knew I was answering questions in an interview booth in a Lancaster police station. I was telling them what I'd seen and heard that night-including the coat behind the bathroom door, which I now realised wasn't a coat at all-while a small part of me had locked itself away and was combing through the detail of Duncan's bed asking itself again and again whether what it had seen was real. Whether it might be possible for him to still be able to breathe with his lungs externalised.

  By the time they let me go, it was getting on for lunchtime. I hadn't eaten and I was ravenous. I was wondering what I should have: a sandwich, maybe, or a bowl of soup, and I couldn't make up my mind. I started panicking, knowing that if I didn't eat something I would die. The inability to think, the seemingly total lack of substantial difference between life and death drained me and I sank to my knees, gasping with fear, now conscious only of my heart and the minuscule lurches of horror when it paused between each beat.

  ***

  I called Helen.

  'I know what you're going to say, and yes, I probably am one.'

  'You're a cunt too, while we're at it.' Her voice was hoarse, as though she'd been smoking too many cigarettes. 'Thank you. Did you have a productive meeting?'

  'Fuck off.'

  'Shall we have a productive conversation?' I oughtn't be so cocky but I couldn't help it. I was being pulled two ways over Eve and the other stuff; I didn't want Helen to lay claim to another part of me: I'd only just managed to jettison her.

  'Will you come round tonight?' Now she sounded soft-spoken, almost afraid.

  'To Seamus' house?'

  'Yes. I'm still there. We didn't do anything last night other than watch a video.' She sounded like she was trying to reassure me. 'You made it very hard. I couldn't relax, David. I'd geared myself up for our talk and I kept expecting you to arrive so I couldn't get it out of my system.'

  'So why didn't you talk to Seamus about it?'

  'But I can't till you're here. It's what we agreed. There's no point unless you're here. Jesus, David. Don't you get it?'

  'Okay. I'll be there tonight. What time?'

  'Eight.'

  'Fine. And how is Seamus?'

  'He's okay. Gets me to run around after him. You?'

  There was the suggestion of a hint of a trace of compassion in her voice. 'My back gets a bit painful if I walk too far. Otherwise, I'm comfortable.'

  'And sleep? Do you sleep?'

  I thought of myself arcing through the sky, chased by a wall of fire. I thought of Duncan, opened up like a strange, bloody flower. 'Like the dead.'

  'I feel I know what's following us, David. I feel this close to it being given a name. I smell it constantly. I keep expecting it to walk straight through the door.'

  Instead of agreeing with her, I said: 'What do you smell?'

  'Oh, all kinds. Blackcurrant. And toffee
. Children's things. Conkers. Do you smell anything?' Helen sounded dangerously close to tears.

  'Petrol and smoke. And I see figures I can't recognise.' I didn't want her to psychoanalyse what I'd just divulged so I told her what I had been intending to keep mum about. 'Listen, I hope you don't mind but, well, I went to see Pol yesterday.'

  She was quiet for a moment. 'You sneaky bastard. I haven't seen her for years. What right have you-'

  'She told me you'd been involved in a drowning.'

  'What?'

  'I mean, that you'd tried to save a girl who'd fallen into the Lune. But she drowned. You never said anything.'

  'You are talking shit, Munro. That is a bunch of shit.' Her voice was quaking, filled with knives.

  'No. Pol was adamant.'

  I heard her breathing as she tried to control her rage. 'Helen? What's wro-'

  'Where did you go after you'd seen Pol?' Her voice was seeking normality but there was too much distress. 'I went to meet Eve.'

  'Why?'

  'Why not?'

  'She's poisoning you.'

  There's a phrase involving a pot, a kettle and the colour black. Do you know it?'

  'God David, you've become a vicious swine.'

  'I've been taught by an expert.'

  'I don't want to fight with you,' she sighed. Of course not, not when it seemed I was winning for once. 'I'll see you tonight. Please come.'

  What about this drowning?' But she'd hung up. I put the phone down. Once the receiver was cradled, it rang.

  'Hello?' There was still a little gruffness about my manner so I hoped it was Helen calling back to rake over some more ashes.

  'David, it's Eve. I missed you this morning. When did you leave?'

  I felt instantly revitalised, more alive than I could understand. It was as instant and invigorating as ducking into a shower after the enervation of a sauna. Despite the fact that so many people expected of me and my fear that I was unequal to their demands, I was able to summon more cheer and optimism than I believed I owned. 'Eve, yes. I'm sorry but I left after making sure you were okay. I didn't feel too good myself. I didn't want to hang around and give you the breakfast-time spectacle of me with my head down the bog.'

  'Okay.' But in that word I noticed an entire spectrum of suspicion and regret. 'Perhaps we should call this off. I mean, every time I talk to you, I see Helen in your eyes.'

  A fat bubble of pain burst behind my eyes; my throat was sucked dry of moisture. Suddenly, everything looked dim and shaded, like the deep cross-hatchings in a cartoon by Robert Crumb. 'No,' I said. 'Not after last night. You made me happen last night. It was like cracking open a barrier and pulling out the real me…' I imagined myself saying this to Helen and almost barked laughter-Helen would have torn me apart. 'I need you. You… you're opening doors for me.'

  I probably couldn't have admitted it then, but I don't think I'd have been able to carry on without Eve being there. Although she was now my lover, I found it difficult to see her as something other than my guardian.

  NINE

  IN VINO VERITAS

  We arranged to meet at lunchtime. 'By the lighthouse, why not?' Eve had said. The wind was up, as it always seemed to be whenever I got near the sea. The coastline opposite was teased from cast iron; burnished cavities, like those in a steel drum, were pitted with house-scars. Like a brief pencil scoring, smoke from a chimney linked hill with heaven. I strained to see people but other than the odd glint of light on a car window, there were none of the usual signs.

  Fingers clasping the frigid railings at the pier end, I looked into the water. The sea worked like a muscle beneath my feet, clenching and squirting the water away in slow, massive spasms. I checked my watch. Eve was late and I was hungry. Leaning back against the railing, I watched the traffic hug the shopfronts. Funny how it remained constantly busy while the numbers of people shrank. Christmas was spreading across the awnings like slow fire but its promise seemed empty, all exterior, just like the shops its strange, tinsel ivy clung to. I took out a sketch book and opened it to the most recently used page, a quick drawing of Salcombe harbour choked with boats. I'd spent last summer there and though the weather had been sullen, seeing this representation was enough to fill me with a cloying, immediate nostalgia. It felt like a part of me so much more distant, like a holiday enjoyed as a child, shaped by the simplest of pleasures, like a scoot around an unremarkable funfair, an icecream on a freezing beach, flying a kite. I turned the page and pressed the stub of my pencil to the textured paper, waiting until their alien marriage felt less stifling. Quickly, I outlined the basic pattern of the street, growing bolder as my affinity with the graphite returned. The Midland Hotel looked suitably shoddy, as did the corrugated prow of the leisure centre. When I'd finished, I made a few notes about colour and turned my attention to the peeled boats gulping in the bay. I sketched them too, looking back down the pier to see if Eve was approaching. Sometimes the bay would be visited by scaups and bar-tailed god wits, plovers and whimbrels. But I'd never seen any. Perhaps because I didn't know what the hell they looked like. And Eve was forty minutes late. Well, fuck this for a game of soldiers. Moving alerted me to the force of the wind. It made my mouth misshapen and flapped my cheeks like astronauts pulling G. I looked down and felt my hair spread until the crown was bared. My suede boots were tanned with sand, blasted with craters of dried salt. Rain fell just as I walked on to the main road. I ran to the cafe and nestled into a chair, hanging my coat on its back and wiped my sketchbook free of water.

  'Be?' asked the owner. His hair was lank with grease but then so was his cafe.

  'Coffee, please. And a toasted tea-cake.' This he laboriously chiselled into his order-book with a constipated expression.

  'Else?' he muttered, already turning away.

  'No thanks.' I reached over to the next table and slid the abandoned tabloid towards me. For a moment, I thought I'd misread the date as five years previously. I caught the word 'faceless' and read about a male corpse found buried not a hundred yards from where he'd once shared a house with his lover. His face had been battered so badly, the features had turned to pulp. I turned to the sports pages, unable to shake off the image or why it bothered me so. Before my coffee came I'd grown jittery and in need for fresh air. My tea-cake landed shortly after, butter hardened like wax, napkin extensively creased, as though someone had tried the origami approach and given up.

  'Joyamil,' said Mr Enthusiasm, though a tea-cake and coffee hardly comprised something that substantial. I wolfed the lot and hopped about at the till while he jabbed his finger into the old-style cash register, offering a grunt of satisfaction when it finally shot its tongue out and allowed him to agonise over the change.

  'Forget it,' I said. 'Stick it in the charity jar.' And out, and out. Jesus, I felt pumped up with the need to scream or run for ever. Once that option occurred to me I took off, sprinting as fast as I could, and then flying faster, the whistling rain (as the night often did) providing the illusion that I was running more quickly than was credible.

  Drenched, I ducked into a vacant phone booth and rang Eve. No answer. My breath, amplified to something alarmingly ragged, deflected back into my face, turning it cold.

  Back at the guest house I scrubbed myself dry with a towel and made a pot of tea while my landlord and landlady went on about annual rainfall, grouting and how they weren't racists, just culturalists.

  In my room, I set the easel up by the window and slotted a piece of paper beneath the clips. My paints looked dirty; the bright colours tainted. I soaked a stiff brush in hot water and worked out how I'd approach this from the sketch in my book but then I thought, no rules, just do it. Ten minutes later, I had a satisfying cobalt wash, steadily layered so that the upper most part of the canvas was thinnest, barely touched. This would do for the sky. I let it dry while I had lunch and came back to it feeling enthusiastic, despite the stolid urban nothingness it represented. In went the suggestion of buildings; I was pleased with the diminishing
perspective, something which usually failed me. The lights I managed to turn into fragmented stars, accentuating the presence of rain.

  I called Eve. No answer.

  Hills became ghosts in the background, so faint they might have been made of the paper itself, rather than any of the colour it had leached from my brush. I stopped when I felt I should start fiddling with what I had done.

  I switched on the radio in time to hear the closing bars of the first Christmas carol of the year. Rather than make me feel mawkish, it infused me with warmth; I felt newly charitable towards Helen and Seamus. I would take some beer round tonight and try to fluff up the solemnity a little. As long as we were together and able to pool our knowledge, we'd be safe from whatever wanted to cause us any harm. If harm was what it wanted to mete out. And could we be really sure that this wasn't all one huge, shared nightmare, afolie a trois that we had infected each other with? I kept thinking of that face-so much like a thick, pale cake mix having something like cochineal folded into it. And the events that went on around me, seemingly pre-ordained so that they would occur whether or not I was around to witness them yet significant to me because they appeared to take place specifically so I would notice them. The tree falling in its forest: would there be a noise if nobody were there to hear it?

  Mum was in when I called. I felt confident all this malarkey would be settled by Christmas and told her I'd be home to spend New Year with them. Inspiring to think that I'd be able to leave all this dross behind in a stale year that had promised little and delivered less. I told her my back felt fine when she asked, and after saying goodbye, went to check in the bathroom mirror. The skin looked very clean now that the scab had cleared; the scar was like a cut through a meat pudding: something black and encrusted welled in the gash, surrounded by pale and doughy flesh, still swollen. When I moved, the skin grew shiny and taut. Pain moved sluggishly inside, as though my nerves had forgotten how to work properly.