Head Injuries

by Conrad Williams

  Jared had turned up, early evening, drenched and shivering. She'd let him in and sat him by the fire. He hadn't said anything, he simply stared at her. Helen's voice was as flat as a newsreader's. We'd stood staring at the puddle in the centre of the room. Jared had disappeared when Helen went to call me. I say disappeared-he might well have just liquefied.

  'Water was trickling out of the corner of his mouth. It didn't stop, just kept coming, making a pool on the floor. I got hysterical, thinking he was drowning, that he was in some kind of catatonia, drowning in my shop. And he smiled at me then, and there was a… David, I don't believe this, what I'm telling you. His teeth were rusting bars, like those on a drain, and there was a tiny figure, a girl, her wrists tied to the bars, her face bloated so much it was like a pink balloon. I couldn't see her eyes but I knew her. And he just kept getting wetter, like someone who'd just stepped out of a swimming pool. Streaming, he was.'

  'It's over now,' I said, feeling as corny as the line. 'What are you feeling?'

  'I don't feel relieved, if that's what you're getting at. I feel unresolved. Lost. I feel guilty as hell.'

  'I know,' I said. 'Me too.'

  ***

  We overtook a police car cruising in the left-hand lane, south of Bamber Bridge. I hoped they wouldn't notice Seamus' crumpled form in the back, pull us over, ask us what was going on, ask us: 'Is this your car, sir?'. I would have told them everything. But we weren't stopped and I waited for the relief that didn't come.

  Helen swung the Mini off the M6 at Junction 22. The snow had stopped but I couldn't recall seeing the join. We sped past the traffic island at Winwick Hospital and joined the A49 towards Warrington town centre. We were minutes away now and I realised nobody had said a word since we picked Seamus up from Skerton.

  But now: 'Home again, home again, jiggety-jig'. Seamus' song hung like a black veil, partitioning the two halves of the car.

  On Lilford Avenue I sighed and the sound whined through my teeth. Nobody seemed to hear: we were all concentrating on the clump of black at the end of the road that heralded the woods. I saw a thin streak of light. A train, passing over the Arches?

  'What do we do, when we get there?' asked Helen. Her mouth sounded tight and dry.

  I didn't know and Seamus wasn't imparting any great wisdoms either. The question remained unanswered although I was certain our immediate future would be more a matter of what we'd find rather than what we would do. It was out of our hands.

  'Park the car,' I said, picking up the torch and checking the batteries. The beam blazed in my eyes: when I closed them I saw bloated red shapes. Helen did not look as though she was dealing with this very well, which was upsetting because we had always relied upon her in the past; she was the unflappable one who basked in the vicarious thrill that hearing other people's problems gave her.

  As I applied the handbrake, I took a sidelong glance at her. I was quite sure that since leaving Pol's house (with her pouring scorn upon us from the landing and promising us our lives would be sorry, barren affairs) I hadn't seen her blink. Seamus seemed much heavier but I couldn't decide if this was because we'd been stuffing him into and freeing him from the car all night or he'd chosen to make himself more difficult to manoeuvre due to the shock we'd suffered and his reluctance to take any further blows to his enfeebled constitution.

  'How the fuck are we going to wheel him up there?' Helen asked, nodding her head towards the fence surrounding the field and the sharp incline immediately beyond it.

  'I don't know, but we'll have to find a way.' I checked up and down the fence's reach and found a gap that would accommodate Seamus, if not his chair also at the same time.

  'I'll manage to walk, if you could stand my arm around your shoulder.'

  And so it was. We stumbled up the path, pausing to deal clumsily with the fence (I tore my jeans-and part of my thigh-open on a hook of metal). We bundled through and I half-carried, half-dragged him up the incline, our grunts competing with each other until we reached the top. The criss-cross structure of branches above looked like fractures in the sky. I had a feeling this was the last place the three of us had converged before we were blown apart like seeds from a dandelion clock.

  I had to leave Seamus on his own while I helped Helen with the awkward wheelchair. I unfolded it and wrestled him in, holding him steady by the shoulders and looking down at his wasted shape, huddled into his old greatcoat. 'Chins up, fatty,' I said, and he found a smile from somewhere. I was fit for nothing now and flopped down on the snow.

  'Oh come on, you fanny,' chided Helen. 'I know from personal experience that you have more stamina than that.'

  'That was a long time ago,' I said. 'I can only manage the odd five-minute shag these days.'

  'Instead of the marathon seven minuters when you were in your prime?' coughed Seamus.

  'Fuck your mother,' I said, good-humouredly, 'if you can find the rock she crawled under.'

  Helen said: 'Look.'

  At the field's far end, where it began to dip towards the canal, soft, ochre light danced. I tensed, waiting for the sound of MacCreadle's bike or the percussive effect of half a dozen cans of Bastard Brew being opened at the same time. It took us twenty minutes to cross the field, as Seamus' chair kept getting trapped in the snow or clashing against a frozen divot in the earth, threatening to spill him out.

  'You never said, Seamus,' I began, glad that I'd found something to talk about, something to fill the silence that wouldn't have sounded as twattish or desperate as a comment upon how brutal the weather had been recently. 'You never said what happened to your lady friend, Chicken Little, the one who thought the sky was falling in on her.'

  We'd reached the Arches; a pall of relief and affection swamped me, despite the blind panic fuelling our journey here. Someone had lit a candle for us, it seemed; it shivered, a pathetic thing, as much use as an umbrella made of salt.

  'A welcoming party?' asked Helen. It would have been a relief to see Juckes and Smoac swing down from the embankment, whooping abuse and threatening to kill and eat what they couldn't fuck. But all I could think of was MacCreadle, reclining in the dirt, being force-fed the souls of all the children he'd precluded from life. I half-expected to see his nemesis-that headless, mummified Siren-come tumbling out of the shadows, offering us titbits from the folds of her shroud-shawl.

  'She wasn't my lady friend,' murmured Seamus, jolting me. 'You've got it wrong. Dawn was anything but.'

  I knew what we were going to hear. Perhaps at that moment I understood exactly what was happening to us all; how we were linked, how we were so tightly knotted together in more than just friendship and nastiness. They were devilish knots and something foul lay at their heart. Eve, Jared and Dawn understood that and had been busy unpicking them. Maybe they understood that because they were the same person, or mirrors of the same person. Mirrors of us. The thought jolted me because we never saw them together and none of us ever met the other's 'friend'. I don't really know who they were, but I suspect they'd been a part of our make-up for many years. I also had a feeling that we would never see them again.

  Why else would I paint a golden moth if not in anticipation of the woman who wore it on her breast? Certainly not because of any bow to creativity; my paintings were second-hand, passed down, left behind. Streets, houses, punched-in cars, starving dogs pissing against dead trees. I remember the day I drew the moth. I'd spent a day with my dad in the garden. He'd been having one of his bonfires and I was standing well back; fires always gave me a headache. I'd had to sit in the grass because I felt so dizzy. Part of me was being totally attentive to what Dad was saying, some harmless old guff about scouts and fire and, What's the best way to get rid of stuff, David? Doesn't matter what it is. The best way? Burn it.'

  But I was also keeping an eye on the fire; that series of frozen orange leaps through the air, like watching a zoetrope spill its magic. I found myself attuned to its blurring speed and able to take visual snapshots as the flames distorted and dissol
ved in a wink. The moth was one of them, and it kept coming back. I dreamed of it for days after, only managing to kick it into my back brain by giving it some life on a canvas.

  'Dawn locked herself in the loft,' said Seamus. 'She wouldn't come down. I was sending up food for her to eat every morning; she'd pull it up in a bucket tied to a piece of string. At night, when I was trying to sleep, she whispered to me through the floorboards. Most of the words I couldn't hear but now and then I'd pick out a few such as "pressure" and "suffocation" and "crushed".'

  An aeroplane limped overhead, engines protesting against the black weather. Once it had disappeared, Seamus went on.

  'She infected my dreams but I panicked if I closed my eyes and couldn't hear her. It's like I needed her around to feel safe. I'd go to sleep and have these long, hot dreams of smothering. People without faces forcing food into my mouth until I could take no more. But it wasn't food. It became soil, packed into my lungs, my mouth splitting with the effort. Jesus.'

  'Where's Dawn now?' I asked, settling Seamus' chair by the embankment. I started picking up bits of litter, careful not to prick myself on one of the rusting syringes lying around. A fire would do us the world of good.

  'She's gone. I was sitting in the living room, looking out of the window. I heard the trap door swing open and she came down. I didn't… I couldn't look round. I heard soil trickling to the floor as she moved towards the door. I wanted to beg her to stay and scream at her to fuck off. And this fucking soil kept falling. I didn't know what it was but I couldn't turn round. And then she said goodbye and her voice was full of grit. Just as she shut the door she said something else but I couldn't make out what it was.'

  Seamus looked around in his chair at me scrabbling on the floor. His eye was a swivelling bearing, catching the candlelight and spitting it around. 'I think she said: "Mercy". What the fuck was she on about?'

  Helen leaned across and rubbed his hands, murmured assurances, smiled. I took my collection of damp sticks, empty crisp packets and dead leaves to the candle and managed to get them ignited. Bitter smoke lifted, spreading when it met the underside of the arch. 'Get him near this,' I called to Helen, who began forcing the wheelchair over the unstable ground. She arched her eyebrows and pointed out the wooden chair, smashed and soiled, lurching in the nettles behind me. I clapped my hands and retrieved it, placing the lengths of wood in a pyramid over the heart of the fire.

  This should warm us up,' I said, too cheerily.

  'Who's got the fucking sandwiches and Vimto then?' Seamus sneered, shivering under his blanket.

  We settled ourselves around the flames, listening to the small explosions as the heat met pockets of air, or insects in the wood. Shadows sparred on the ceiling.

  We didn't say anything for about half an hour, simply watching the flames gorge on the fuel, reach their peak then begin to dwindle. Time became something ductile, pulled out of its usual linear state and knotted up into something confusing. It was as if, while the shadows cavorted and shuddered, we gradually powered down, until we were dormant. I felt so relaxed I might not have been there. Sensory impingement was at a minimum. No cold, no heat. I could no longer smell the smoke or hear the crackle as the chair was consumed. Seamus and Helen were indistinct shapes filling my periphery. And I was conscious of the shadows. I knew we were all conscious of the shadows. But now they no longer seemed to be originated by the fire; they were of the arch's ceiling, their energy spent. Meandering across the failing brickwork like molten tar, I watched my past unfolded before me, creating a montage in black as the sour core of me cracked open like a rotten gourd, defining me in a moment more acutely than any passage of experience I had absorbed since. One moment, one act that I had buried and was now exhumed to caper, brilliant and rank, in my thoughts for the rest of my life.

  We used to bully Tim Ashbery. At first it was all pretty harmless stuff, rugby-tackling him as he walked to school over the field; sticking worms in his pencil case. Like you have to be courteous, get to know them before you really lay into them. He had ginger hair, so he had no chance really.

  And smelled like some cat's latrine. At first he took it all in his stride-thought it was a big joke. Rough and tumble. All lads together. That kind of bollocks. But then it got serious. One winter day, we decided we were going to rip his trousers off. One of the boys suggested ramming an icicle up his shitter. We were going to go for it. Tim was standing by the all-weather basketball court, shuffling about in the snow with his white NASA cap. The pitiable fuck. We came at him, five of us I think, from the top of the rise, where the school canteens were. And then he did the weirdest thing. Took off his clothes. He started beating himself up, pulling his hair out. Screamed something awful. It was almost funny until he started to bleed. Soon as he turned the snow pink, we legged it. We left it a few weeks and then started up again. Because of what he'd done, we felt we had to teach him a lesson. How dare he bully himself?-that was the insane line we took. That was our justification. Up until the spring we were giving him grief. Around that time I was playing cricket nonstop, trying to make the county schools side. I was never without a cricket ball. My nickname was Corky.

  We were thinking of new ways to get to him and someone suggested killing the stupid cat that hung around on the field for him every day. I wasn't too keen. We had a cat called Hovis around that time-Loot's mother-and I was pretty keen on the things. But I was overruled.

  We killed the cat in the morning and left it for Tim to find when he walked across the field. The bastard set fire to his own head. I went to help, to put out the flames but it was too late. His skin was black and one of his eyes had cooked like a poached egg. He was mewling pathetically, writhing around in the grass. I looked behind me but the others had scarpered; the only other figures were two hundred yard away, kicking a tennis ball around the quad.

  He wouldn't shut up. He would not shut up.

  I rammed the cricket ball into his mouth, stamping it down until I heard his jaw crack and the ball lodged deep in his throat. I ran when his body started arcing. The smell of lighter fuel stayed with me for days, throughout the enquiries and questioning, but I couldn't remember where it had come from. I didn't understand why I was being questioned. When school got back to normality, I couldn't work out why there was an empty seat next to Benny Lawson. And then I couldn't recall what I was bothered about: the layers of my forgetting had begun to settle.

  ***

  There were still shadows swelling against the ceiling, even though the fire had burned down to a rubble of ash and embers. I was aware of Seamus, out of his wheelchair, scrabbling through the snow to the embankment. I hoped the grinding noise I could hear were his boots on the gravel and not his fractured bones scraping against each other. I'd subsumed his secrets too, during the unfolding of my own. Helen's too. It was hard for me to apportion any kind of weight to them (Seamus trying to give Evan Foley a hand-job as he lay, trapped, dying underground before plunging an ice-pick through the back of his head) because they were my friends and I could understand their motives for doing what they did (Helen abandoning her mouth-to-mouth when all she could hear was water gurgling in the girl's lungs, braining her with a half-brick while her eyes bulged in suffocation).

  I wanted to ask Seamus where he was going but I was frozen, my limbs stiff and unresponsive. I slurred a few words of warning but I could barely speak. Helen was staring into the fire, paralysed by her own epiphany. The snow had started again, measured and heavy. I could hear every single impact.

  A train hooter sounded. The Liverpool/Manchester Sprinter. Maybe the last of the night although I didn't know what time it was.

  I heard Seamus whimpering as he scaled the embankment with its loosely packed gravel and ineffective barbed wire barriers. I couldn't move. Bonded by Seven Arches as we might have been, our collective dawning had produced a kind of fission. It was as though my heart had split into three, chilling me and grinding all the energy from my body. Seven Arches was feeling it too, the old mort
ar that kept it together, along with all the sordid hopes and sullied dreams that had fed its dank recesses over the years, weakened by the sudden suck of the present.

  The train sounded its horn again, closer now. I could hear the metallic whine of the rails signalling the train's imminent passing.

  'Seamus!' I called. I could no longer hear him, although occasional pebbles bouncing down the embankment marked his progress. He didn't answer me.

  Helen's eyeballs had rolled back into their sockets. Shock was painting her mouth blue. The only part of her that was moving was her foot, twitching spastically at the edge of the fire, scuffing up small clouds of ash.

  I struggled to my feet and lurched towards her. She reared up, holding her hands in front of her face as if warding off a blow.

  The train's clamour looped in and out of the arches; an enormous sound. Great nets of dust dropped from the ceiling. I heard a loud crack and then, just as the viaduct collapsed and I hurled myself out of the way of the plunging tonnage of brick, I heard a soft, percussive punch, followed by a wetness, similar to the sound of a flurry of snow hitting a tent.

  I just wanted to get away as the entire sky seemed to fall into the hole of my head, a symphony of rending metal and shattered glass. I felt as if I was at the centre of a black hole, dragging matter into the nagative vacuum of my heart.

  I was wrong about Eve and the others. They weren't mirrors of us. They were… God, I don't know. Glue. Some form of adhesive providing a bond between the living and the dead. Just as Eve had been my protector and nemesis, she had been guardian angel to Tim Ashbery. She, Jared and Dawn drew death to them. The bodies strewn across my path were botched jobs, enforced dress rehearsals. It was me who was meant to die. Because deep down I wanted to die-the only way I could atone for what had happened. There were no reprisals from beyond the grave. Ashbery's corpse wouldn't rest because I couldn't allow it to. It was festering deep inside me, fruiting with terrible profligacy, filling out every niche of my being with rot. Ditto Helen and Seamus. We were lost souls because the events that should have destroyed us had merely clouted us senseless. Any hint of those monstrous acts welling up inside were swiftly broad-sided by the subconscious, and the results of that were for us to become a little bit darker, a little bit more unstable. We were walking comas, safely ensconced in a fictional past of our own making; black pearls sealed inside dead oysters.