Head Injuries

by Conrad Williams

  'Really?' Eve gentled, sounding as though she knew better, sounding as though her mouth had a wry smile all over it. We went deeper into the park, taking in the silent, facade-like aspect of the various rides and sideshows. A doughnut and candy floss caravan lurched almost in defiance of gravity's laws; a child's ride-giant tea-cups and tiny helicopters-creaked in its immobility, the massive central bolt around which the seats spun broken in two. The ghost train seemed untouched by the damage, but only because its original cosmetics acted as camouflage. Scorch marks streaked across machinery and mouldings; burned oil created tarry scars in the grass. The cages of a lethal-looking ride hung from their supporting arms, melted by high temperatures into smooth, grotesque knots. The fire-hungry prizes arranged on one of the stalls offering dart challenges (Score under 50 to win! No trebls, no doubls, evry dart must score in seyerat beds. No argument) had turned into a black cluster, like dirty, solidified detergent bubbles.

  'I feel like a character in a Ray Bradbury story,' I said. Eve still had a curl to her lips. I kissed it away and when I moved back, I smelled woodsmoke. At first I thought I was having some terrible flashback linked to the awfulness of that night.

  'Are you all right?' she asked. A plane of smoke drifted between us. It snagged against one of the scoops of her hair and twisted into her face, looping with it, once again making her seem insubstantial, of rather than in the smoke. Her eyes appeared in a pocket of calm but I couldn't see the flesh in which they must be cradled. I didn't want to lose her, or the grip on my fear, which was dwindling rapidly, so I clenched her hand even more tightly. 'Something is still burning here,' I said, relieved that there had to be something corporeal on fire, rather than the conviction of my eager imagination. I took a quick scan around, and my eye was caught by movement at the entrance. There was a figure standing there but it wouldn't remain constant in my line of vision. It kept dissolving and fading into the background colour, before morphing into some new shape. It was trying to make contact, I felt, but its vocal cords sounded blasted. A rasp lifted and lost itself to the wind. I was about to approach when I sensed movement behind me. Eve was gone. In my hand was a bunch of combusted sticks.

  'Your history,' came her voice. 'It's on fire.'

  Where are you?' I called, my lungs filling up with what tasted like smoke from a barbecue. 'Jesus, Eve.' I staggered forward, choking on the meaty, greasy fumes. My eyes were streaming. I didn't know what I was going to do first: choke to death on my imminent vomitus or suffocate. I dragged a handkerchief from my pocket and covered my nose and mouth. My hand touched wood and I felt my way around what felt like a rickety fence until I was standing amid a crowd of trees. The smoke was thinner here, unable to develop itself among the divisive branches. Wads of smoke clung to the heights like strange nests.

  Then there was movement, finally. Something drifting towards me through the blue mist. Stinking low and sinuous, a wind of muscle and fur. The cat sat a little distance away from me, observing me as I shivered and spluttered into my handkerchief. Catching my gaze, it hooked me and flung me twenty years into the past. I realised I hadn't thought of the cat on the school field in all that time, the way we'd lured it with little clicks and blown kisses. The way we'd scratched its head and listened for the purr. The way we twisted its head till the bone splintered and a red comma of blood flicked out from its mouth. Taking a Bic to its brilliant eyes.

  And God, that wasn't all I was remembering…

  ***

  Some time later I came up from a dream in which I was the perpetrator of every murder-real, screen or otherwise-that I had ever witnessed or read about. I dragged around the agony from every knifing, hail of bullets, garrote, drowning, explosion in a clear sac that was attached directly to my heart. It was a milky fluid that sloshed about. Different expressions of pain and suffering pressed against the membrane. 'Heaven marching,' they mouthed, before sinking back into the effluvia. Then I realised that it wasn't the physical pain that was my burden but the consequential torment that I visited on relatives and friends. I surfaced, sure I was suffocating, but the only thing that was stopping my breath was the scream that filled my throat.

  ***

  Helen answered on the first ring. 'It's Seven Arches,' I said. 'Don't I know it.' She sounded hollow and tired. 'What happened?'

  She told me. 'Fuck,' I said. 'What now?'

  'Have you tried Shay?'

  'No,' I replied. 'Do you want me to?'

  'Forget it,' she said, her voice suddenly alert. 'I tried and there was no answer. Better we should just go round to see him. Can you borrow a car?'

  'No problem,' I said, doubting that Terry would allow me the use of his Toyota.

  'Pick me up. I'll be waiting outside the shop.'

  I put the payphone receiver down and the ding from the bell echoed comfortably in the small alcoves of the ground floor. I sat back on the PVC pouffe and rubbed my eyes. Terry's footfalls made soft impacts above my head as he crossed the landing. 'Here's a bulb for you,' he said. 'Hundved watt, is that all vight?'

  I heard Eiger's reply-'Buggered if I know'-and a door snick shut.

  The kitchen was empty but a pall of cigarette smoke hung above the dining table. The sound of a car starting up. I went to the window in time to see Maureen take off in her Peugeot. I returned to the door to their living quarters and tried it. It opened on a room struggling to be identified under a weight of clashing decor. Paisley wallpaper, striped corduroy sofa covers, a carpet like a map of the cosmos. There was a fish tank burbling away like a container of simmering soup. On top of the lid I hit gold. I snatched Terry's keys and slipped out the back, vaulting the gate and legging it along the alley to the car. I was in Heysham seven minutes later.

  TEN

  SEVEN ARCHES

  We said not a word on the journey back: a nightmare ride. Seamus' breath was a wet burbling in his chest which sounded inches from my ear. Helen drifted into the oncoming traffic on a few occasions and was rewarded with horns and flashed headlights. Luckily, the Marine Road was pretty quiet, though we had a panic when the snout of a police Rover quested into the road ahead of us. Helen seemed to get a grip of herself and guide the Mini more sedately past the dormant guest houses, in the windows of which sat mannequin-still people topped off with grey hair, perhaps sleeping, perhaps watching the sea as it filled the bay. A group of students nestled in the shade beneath the awning of the Gingham Cafe. And the lighthouse fastened all of this to the past, its beacon describing a line which bisected my eyes, filling my immediate world with light and snow. God, I was hammered. Seamus had been passing round a large hip flask of neat vodka-well, we had been passing it back and forth between ourselves; Helen was too busy building a hill of cigarette butts to join in.

  Helen parked the car by the florist's off Heysham Road and we listened to the ticking of the engine as it cooled. I thought I could hear our own cogs and springs loosen a little, but it was just Seamus' leather jacket squeaking as he wormed his way to the side of the seat. The wind bound sweat to my face like a mask. I had to screw up my eyes to save them from a stinging. Through the barrier of lashes I looked up to Pol's window and saw a thin shadow slide across the ceiling away from me. Then the light went out.

  'She's not going to answer,' I said to Helen as we slotted Seamus into his throne. She rang the doorbell regardless and we waited, watching each other's cheeks grow papery with the cold. I looked into the frosted, wire-grilled oblong of glass at the door's heart; it took a while to discern Pol's eye there, framed by the gaunt grey smudge of her face. She was looking directly at me, though she surely couldn't see anything.

  'What do you want?' she spat and I saw her lower jaw squirm as it worked the words around in her mouth.

  'Pol. Gran, it's me-Hel. Let us in. It's freez-'

  The door slouched open and the hot breath from within was laced with almonds and oranges and age. She was something picked from the darkness behind: her skin grainy and softly cut off from the rest of her like something u
ndeveloped on film. Of the masks I saw only an infrequent glint, as if their hollow eyes were shedding tears.

  'Inside. Boneheads the lot of you. You're all thick with booze.' Her hand clung to the door's edge; the hook that was her blackened nail tapping frenetically against the wood. Its tip was encrusted with blood.

  Helen and I dragged Seamus to the landing, preceded by Pol, who gusted ahead in a blowsy dress mottled with cigarette burns and stains. In one horrifying moment, as she was framed by the doorway, I saw her outline in the dress, etched as it was by the snow's luminance. It was like beholding an X-ray.

  'Make a hot drink-I'm for a Bovril myself. Strong, mind, and don't go filching no stuff from me shelves. I'll have yer hands off.'

  Seamus looked ready to protest but Helen pressed a finger to her lips.

  Because I didn't want to be subject to any of her insidious little assaults, I went to the kitchen to make her drink, my hands unconsciously reaching for the kettle and the mugs. Instinctively, perhaps because I thought I'd catch another glimpse of him, I shot a glance out of the window, which was full of the bare lightbulb and my whey-faced reflection. It took a while to realise it wasn't mine at all, but something flyblown and sagging, devoid of any features. After a stretch of determined staring, it faded, like frost on a heated windscreen. Like a moth flitting from the flame.

  Back in the living room, I handed Pol her drink while diligently avoiding her eyes. We were sitting in the soft clash of candles at the centre of the room. I looked at the painting above the fire (off-I could hear the wind thrashing about behind it like a trapped animal), at the picture of the woman and her grinning dog, and wondered why I thought there should be a bird in the picture too. Helen's hand rubbed up and down my spine. I realised how stiff I must feel and tried to relax.

  'So,' said Pol, smugly, her voice deadened by the mug which hid her lower jaw. Steam turned her eyes into black olives. 'So. Why? Tell me that, Helen. Why?'

  Helen kept her eyes on the fluid pattern of the hearth rug; its overlapping, busy strands of green and orange and blue. 'Why what?'

  'Don't give me none of that smart chat, slammakin that you are. Christ, you come snuffling out of the shitey weather, dragging your touchy-feely fiddlers with you-'

  I sneaked a glance at Seamus-suddenly we were partners in crime, our reputations defamed; I felt like a tyke sent to the headmaster for pissing in the sandpit. He, like Helen, was gazing elsewhere.

  'You three. All of you shoddy and shabby. I'm grateful for the smell of the booze. God only knows-'

  'Shut up! Fucking well shut up will you, you crabby old bat!'

  '-what you reek of underneath.' But all the hostility was gone from Pol's voice. She stared at Helen in the way I imagined my mum would stare at me if I declared I wanted a sex-change.

  'Get out!' barked Pol, her body bristling as though covered with cockroaches. 'Get out of my house, you slut!' The words were painted with brittle blue streaks of sound; I never believed I'd hear such a screech.

  Helen stood up. Pol actually snarled; a cat whose territory had been encroached. She pointed her crippled finger vaguely in the direction of the window. 'I said get out.' A thread of spittle fell from her mouth, weighted by a tiny sparkling bauble. I stared at it, wondering crazily if it would harden.

  'I need something,' Helen's voice now conciliatory, its punch dissipated. I stood up, intending to leave them to it but she'd docked her lizard eyes with mine. Such a fury capered there though it was countered by a ponderousness that made her appear shocked, like a strung-out mental patient. Hadn't Helen mentioned something about Prozac in the past? If so, she'd stopped taking it.

  'You sit down you groin-hungry bastid!' I complied, biting down on my desire to ask her to make up her mind about whether or not she wanted us to leave.

  'What do you want?' Her hand was still flaying towards the window as if it were some freakish insect struggling to detach itself from her wrist. 'Obviously you don't need my help any more.'

  Helen bridled. 'When have you ever given me any help?'

  'The drowning.' Pol uttered the words with glutinous black relish: a linkman on TV introducing a horror film.

  Though the words caused her to wince, I admired Helen's tenacity; she tilted her chin as though inviting a blow. 'You didn't help me. You just used it to fascinate those sad farts you call your friends. You used it as currency.'

  'You'd have been nothing if it weren't for me. Ha! What am I saying? You've turned out rotten after all. You're a shite-hawk and a guttersnipe. You killed someone. You said so yourself!'

  I was gnawing my bottom lip so voraciously that I hardly noticed the slow explosion of blood into my mouth. A rumour of cold crept through me. What we needed to discover seemed so close I thought I could pluck it from the end of my tongue. Helen's face had slackened, become as formless as kneaded dough.

  'Photographs,' she said. 'I've come to collect some photographs.'

  Pol's eyes narrowed. She knew Helen didn't need an escort just to pick up a few measly pictures but dutifully she shambled off to the bathroom, at last remembering to snatch her hand down to her side.

  'Helen?' I tried to coax her out of her fugue. She looked hypnotised. Behind her face I could see Morecambe Bay's water-shy sand-flats stretched out and gleaming beneath the moon. I could make out hundreds of naked glistening bodies curled into the ground: all somnolent curves and hollows; any number of haunches and shoulders and shanks.

  'Just leave me alone,' she said, in a voice that was fraught with distress yet resigned, the way someone sounds when they've been forced to accept a set of circumstances they didn't want. I wandered out to the landing, as close as I dared get to the bathroom, where Pol was scrabbling loudly. She was murmuring to herself, but the words were too flat and atonal to carry to me. I edged closer, ignoring the masks and a spray of pottery birds clinging to the wall, frozen in flight or spread out in modes of predacity. The door was a quarter of the way open; I could see the sink (complete with tide-mark) and a medicine cabinet above, which was closed, the mirror reflecting a print on the opposite wall that was all red and black squiggles. I still couldn't make out Pol's litany of madness. The scrabbling stopped; I began to sink back towards the threshold but not before she'd opened the cabinet and stung me with her eyes again. Her face filled the mirror, like a savagely cropped passport photograph. She smiled, putting me off balance for a beat until I realised it was more a rictus to show me what squirmed in her mouth, other than her tongue. I hurried back to the living room. Pol followed me and sat in the corner, face slashed into a raw harlequin pattern of light and shade. She was watching

  Helen spread photographs around the floor while Seamus sagged impotently in his chair with all the submission of a dentist's patient. Pol looked at me with what could have been a knowing smile but I was unable to tell. I went back to the bathroom and splashed a little water on my face. The picture on the wall was of Half Moon Bay: a black and white photograph taken at dusk. I was trying to work out if the scratches were of the glass or of the photograph-figures walking the beach perhaps?-when I heard Helen call me.

  Pol was still tucked into the fragmented angle of light, hands tirelessly rubbing at the hem of her dress. I thought of Miss Havisham and wondered if Pol had ever known any long-lasting love in her life, as I crossed the carpet to where Helen and Seamus were surrounded by photos. I leaned over, planting my hands on Helen's shoulders.

  'Do you recognise him?' Helen said.

  'I can't see,' Seamus complained, rubbing his eyes.

  It was a group photo, taken when we were in our fourth year. One of those fish-eye camera jobs that pans around while you stay stock still. You have to stay stock still in order for the photograph to be taken properly. Move and you blur. Helen was pointing at one boy about ten feet away from me, his face smeared in the air as though he'd been shot in the head. I couldn't tell who it was, but I knew that he was wrapped up in what was happening to me.

  'It's him,' I said, in a voice that
was relieved and exhausted and scared to death.

  ***

  The motorway was quieter than we'd hoped. I felt alienated from the few neighbouring cars and lorries as they powered south although I wondered at their freight both physical and otherwise. Who else was journeying towards a page break in the novel of their lives? I gripped the seat, fiercely wishing that whatever happened in the next few hours might deliver me from the desperation that had haunted me for as long as I could remember. Seamus and Helen were breathing dressmakers' dummies, Helen driving hunched over the wheel, peering through the waving windscreen wipers as they crammed snow into thick crusts at the edge of the frames. Her hands clenched and relaxed like dying spiders as she steered. A daisy ring made from green resin rose and fell on her little finger in time with her tension. I was too wired to take the wheel. Seamus' breath was a gargle rising from the back seat. I switched on the radio to drown him out but the poppy music that swam out seemed inappropriate and no other station had a signal sufficiently strong enough to beat the waves of static. I snapped it off and leaned back, allowing myself to be drawn into the pale cones spilling from the Mini's headlamps, and the destiny they etched for me on the flecked Tarmac.

  I thought of what had happened at Helen's shop earlier that evening, when I'd rushed over to pick her up. Helen had been sitting in the centre of the floor, all of her water sculptures broken around her. A thin rash of sweat covered her face and her chest hitched as she took in breath. She'd trashed the lot. I picked up a flat, smooth disc of metal; one of several tears. Her initials were etched into its underside. I pocketed it, a souvenir: I wouldn't be back this way again.