Please

by Peter Wild

  No one to hurry us

  To this dream we found.

  We’ll gaze at the sky and try to guess what it’s all about.

  I placed it in the shallow hole. Shallow. Newspaper reporters make a noise about holes being shallow, as if deeper holes made everything OK, and I think I know why that is. They think it’s permanent, they think it will last. But nothing lasts. Used to think everything would last. But why should it?

  This can’t last. This misery can’t last. I must remember that and try to control myself. Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long.

  It all started only a week ago. I had been paddling in the sea with Felicity and Jamie when I noticed it; a faint indentation, the thickness of a hair, running around my upper arm. I thought it was nothing, dismissed it, but the next day Jamie and I were building a sand palace for Felicity’s Barbie and I was putting the finishing touches to the low wall around the moat when Jamie said, ‘Dad, what’s that funny line on your arm?’

  What had been a line no thicker than a whisker was now a shallow groove running round the whole circumference of my arm, just below the shoulder. I squeezed my fingertips into the hollow. It was like a deep wrinkle. Maybe that’s what it was; a wrinkle. I stretched my arm to see whether the furrow would disappear. It didn’t.

  I continued to build the palace for Felicity’s doll. The Barbie came with a purple horse and this meant stables and an exercise field, as well as the ten-roomed building she had specified, so we had a lot of construction work to do. I decided to ignore the blemish on my arm. When you notice something odd about your body the idea becomes all-enveloping–like when I was a kid and obsessed that my ears were monstrous flaps, and slept with a heavy book on the side of my face.

  I splashed water on to the sand, scooped up a handful, and poured it on to the palace walls to make smooth concrete whirls. Jamie and I set about moulding the runny sand into shapely turrets and balustrades while Felicity marked out the horse’s field. Then Georgina came over with ice creams.

  ‘Mum, has your arm got a line on it like Dad’s?’ Jamie said.

  ‘I don’t know, darling. I don’t think so.’

  ‘See?’ Jamie poked my arm, showing the groove to Georgina.

  ‘That’s funny,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s how Daddy’s been sleeping. Have you been leaning on something?’

  I brushed sand from the wrinkle. ‘I don’t think so. It must have always been there.’

  She, like me, pressed her fingers into the wrinkle then followed it round my arm like a needle in the groove of a record. ‘Does it hurt?’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Has it been bleeding?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you fallen, or cut yourself or bumped into something?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s almost like there was something tied around your arm and then it’s been taken away and left a wound. But you say it doesn’t hurt?’

  ‘No. It’s not sore. But I think I’ll put my shirt back on-this sun is scorching.’

  On the way back we passed Hooch sitting outside her caravan scratching numbers into her ledger. Hooch was the odd-job woman and had the caravan next to ours. She looked after everything-changing gas bottles, fitting light bulbs, unblocking drains, and organising engineers for the more technical problems. She was a skinny, unclean woman with long straight black hair, a severe fringe and lipstick of a dark red colour which made her teeth glow margarine yellow. But you seldom saw them because she never, ever smiled. She had few callers and there wasn’t a man. The solitary nature of her job seemed to give her pleasure. In the evening she sat outside her caravan filling in a ledger. We knew what she was writing about because we heard her talking about it on her mobile phone: the flickering light in number 46, the leaky shower tray in number 49, the smell of gas in number 94.

  Hooch had slung a hammock between her caravan and an adjacent tree, and when she’d finished writing in her ledger she clambered into it to read her book. Always a biography, and always of a sporting figure. We used to sit outside our caravan a few yards away from her, drinking cheap wine and looking at the stars. She was a restful presence and some kind of companionable relationship between us developed which was hard to describe. When she wasn’t there we felt somehow incomplete.

  Hooch listened to one CD over and over again-an album of Noël Coward songs, louche, loungey tunes from another era, with desperate, yearning, lonely words. A soft piano tinkled over a ukulele rhythm:

  Speak low, Johnny,

  Tip toe, Johnny,

  Go slow, Johnny,

  Go slow.

  ‘Hiya, Hooch,’ I called out. She lifted her head from Tennis Ace, The story of Chris Evett, and pointed her ferocious little eyes at me. Her hair looked greasy and held the tracks of her comb.

  ‘Hummph,’ said Hooch.

  ‘Hooch, our fridge door won’t close properly and I was wondering whether—’

  Hooch held up her hand to stop me, then reached under the table from where she produced a polythene bag with a plastic device inside. ‘Use this to click around the door,’ she said. ‘I knew about that problem.’

  ‘So you had that ready for us?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hooch.

  ‘In case we asked?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But what if we had just struggled on and didn’t ask?’

  ‘It’s up to you,’ she said. ‘I don’t interfere, I just help when I am asked.’

  I looked at her for a moment. There were times when she seemed half buried in some sediment of despair.

  ‘But you knew about—oh, never mind,’ I said. ‘Enjoy your book, Hooch.’

  From her stereo Noel Coward cooed that all he needed was

  a room with a view and you,

  and no one to give advice.

  When I woke up the next morning the first thing I did was feel my arm. I sat upright in shock. It was definitely worse than yesterday. My finger went in deep, up to the first knuckle. I lifted it to see whether there was any effect on my movements, but there didn’t seem to be.

  I made a cup of tea and sat on the step of the caravan. Six thirty. People were assembling for that day’s trip. A melon farm? Or was it a pearl factory? I lifted the arm above my head. No problem. I went over to the terrace table and tried to lift the parasol holder, which was anchored by a heavy container of water. I could just about shift it, the strength in my arm didn’t seem to be affected. While holding the parasol aloft I caught a glimpse of Hooch at her window, washing a glass at the sink. She was looking at me and frowning more than usual. If it weren’t for her thick fringe I imagined I would have seen deep furrows in her brow like dark canals.

  When Georgina appeared I told her I was worried. The situation with my arm, I called it, and she laughed.

  ‘The situation,’ she said back at me.

  I told her that I definitely hadn’t had it since I was a kid, that it was something new. Again she asked about pain, and infection, and cuts and accidents, and again I told her no.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I think it’s nothing to worry about but maybe you should go to the campsite health centre and see what they say.’

  I stopped at Hooch’s hammock. Her bare feet were hanging over the end. Hairs grew from her big toes.

  ‘Do you know anything about the campsite doctor, Hooch?’

  She looked up and swept her eyes from my heels to my scalp, instantly bored by the query.

  ‘What’s up, like? You got a cold or summat?’

  I smiled. ‘I need to see the local sawbones. You’re not in charge of our physical health as well as our gas bottles, are you, Hooch?’

  Her expression didn’t change. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Just repairs to the caravans, like.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  Her face under the stiff line of her fringe showed no flicker of emotion. ‘People think they’re funny, like,’ she said. ‘Dead funny. You know what? Nobody’s funny nowadays
, that’s the truth. You need a doctor, like? Uh?’

  ‘I could do with seeing one today.’

  From her stereo Noel Coward pleaded

  Please be kind.

  When you’re lonely-if you’re lonely

  Call me–call me–anyhow.

  If you want me–need me–love me

  Tell me,

  Tell me,

  Tell me now!

  ‘The doctor’s surgery is from nine till eleven, thereabouts,’ Hooch said. ‘He’ll see you and he’ll give it to you straight. But you have to have your green slip.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve got the green slip.’

  I thought I saw the flicker of a smile before her face resumed its default position of an aggrieved grimace.

  Now I was kneeling next to the hole. Now I was getting rid of it, I felt much, much better. It had felt for a time back then as if someone, somewhere, was disassembling me, disaggregating me, taking me apart, fleck by bitter fleck, as if they wanted to shatter me into a thousand and three spores, toss me out of the window, into the shrieking storm. It was as if they needed a cutting from me to stick in the ground, a whole new me to spurt out, to break me up, seed me all over, in every fold of earth, every pleat of skin, in Hooch’s greasy hair, in the angry heat of some dead dog yard. To put me in places where people don’t go, places they’ve forgotten, places they never knew they came from that they go back to in the end.

  One more look, one more touch, before the dirt. This is the time. My time. The drive. The dreams inside. I had to hide it. Cover it. Cover it with dirt. We call it dirt, but is it dirty? What is on dirt that is dirty? Can dirt be cleaned? Can something be taken away from dirt to make it clean again and, if so, what would be left? Am I what is left when dirt is taken from dirt?

  I wondered about leaving the lid off. But it looked so fragile, so needful, yearning for its blanket of dust. Happy under soil. Safe and warm and tired. I wished I could join it. Maybe that’s what it wanted.

  as happy and contented as birds upon a tree.

  High above the mountains and the sea.

  I touched it again. One last time. Like placing my hand on the skin of some mummified saint. It felt warm, which was impossible, and soft too. Was that a pulse? A trembling, a tingle? Was there a tiny blush of pink in the fingertips? It still seemed part of me. It was me.

  I began to scrape the dirt over the top.

  There’ll come a time in the future when I shan’t mind about this any more.

  Later that night we had gone to the campsite bar. It was kids karaoke and Jamie wanted to do Eminem and we’d said he could as long as he did the radio edit with the gaps for the swearing.

  Earlier in the shower I had a really good look at my arm. There was a groove all the way round, a definite groove. It seemed even deeper than before at the beach. I could insert the tip of my thumb right inside and trail it round the whole circumference.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Jamie Crowther.’

  Little Jamie, hair gelled up, hollered the words to ‘Stan’ while the Dido track warbled away, and we watched, utterly rapt. Georgina gripped my knee. ‘Look at him. I can’t believe he’s ours.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, and squeezed her hand, grinning like an idiot.

  The doctor was a young Spanish man with excellent English who listened carefully and nodded seriously as I described the opening that had appeared from nowhere on my arm.

  ‘Have you been OK otherwise?’

  ‘Fit as a fiddle,’ I said.

  ‘OK, let’s have a look.’ He moved me over to the examination couch. I sat on the edge and removed my shirt and the doctor looked at the strange aperture, inserting his fingers just as I had and checking to see how far round it went. ‘Just move your arm a little for me,’ he murmured, and I worked my shoulder up and down. The split opened and closed like the sucking lips of a horrible shellfish.

  ‘You can put your shirt back on,’ he said. ‘And sit back down over there.’ I did as he asked and he looked at me and tapped his pen on his pad of paper. ‘You say it appeared yesterday?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, it looks to me like it’s always been there. It looks like it’s healed perfectly, but that at one time it was some kind of wound. Maybe from tying something tightly around it. Have you had anything tied tightly around it? Some sort of ligature?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you use your arm? Can you lift and stretch?’

  ‘It feels fine.’

  ‘Do you use any drugs. Anything like that?’

  ‘Not really.’ The fact was I smoked spliffs most weeks–most days if I was honest–but I didn’t see how that was relevant. ‘The odd glass of wine.’ Bottle more like.

  He looked to the side for a beat. ‘Any mental health problems–depression, anxiety?’

  ‘No more than anyone else. We all get down from time to time.’

  ‘That’s true. Well,’ he said, putting down his pen. ‘If you can use the arm and you’re in no pain and there’s no sign of infection I don’t think there’s much we can do. Just keep an eye on it and come back if it gets any worse.’

  Georgina and Jamie and Felicity were waiting for me when I got back. I had promised that we would drive into the local town where there was a market and fairground rides.

  ‘Everything OK?’ said Georgina, flapping her arm like a chicken.

  ‘He said to keep an eye on it.’

  ‘Let’s do that, then.’

  As we packed up the car I saw Hooch looking at us out of her caravan window as she watered a plant. She raised her eyebrows in a peculiar way.

  I wandered around the market, making a conscious effort not to check my arm. My hand wandered up there once or twice, but I corrected it. The problem would seem worse if I kept checking all the time. I vowed to leave it alone for a whole day then check in the morning.

  The market was crawling with tourists in combat shorts and lumpy off-road sandals. I could never see the attraction of markets. We have markets at home and they are colourful and exciting too, but we never go to them. The stalls were stocked with oddly shaped cheeses, glossy vegetables, olives, and big ugly dried fish. Jamie and Felicity liked a stall that sold dogs, rats and live chickens and we spent a long time hanging about there. After a few hours I had completely forgotten about the situation with my arm. Jamie bought a miniature kite and Felicity a wooden parrot which flapped its wings when you pulled a lever.

  When we got back to the car she gave me it and I yanked on the lever. ‘Squawk squawk, hello Felicity, where’s Jamie?’ I said. But operating the toy parrot made me aware that the arm felt quite a bit different now to how it had the day before. It felt much longer than the other arm, like it was heavier. I returned the parrot to Felicity and went behind the car, where I pretended to check something in the boot. I lifted up my shirtsleeve. When I saw what had happened I said, ’Oh,’ as if I had been struck. I trembled. I felt faint. The opening had grown much larger, to such an extent that it wasn’t a wrinkle or an opening any more. It was as if a huge chunk of flesh had been gouged out of my upper arm, as though it had been turned on a lathe the way you make the indents in table legs. The space was now the width of three fingers and the piece connecting my arm to my shoulder the thickness of a broom handle.

  ‘Georgina, come here a minute.’ She got out of the passenger seat and came over to where I was sitting on the lip of the car boot. ‘Look at it now.’ I gazed up at her imploringly. I must have looked like a sick puppy.

  She looked at the arm and I saw panic flash across her face. But then she calmed herself. ‘Is it hurting?’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you can still use it?

  ‘Yes. Look.’ I lifted the arm and touched her hair. I sensed her flinch a little as if she were afraid, as if my arm were some kind of monster.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I smiled at her. ‘I don’t think you can catch it.’ For the first time Georgina looked worried, and for some reason, this made me feel a
little better, as if I had passed some of my fear on to her.

  ‘Maybe you should, sort of, have it up in a sling? Maybe you should rest it and then the flesh will, I don’t know, grow back?’ She looked at me for a long time. ‘Oh, Roger,’ she said finally. ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘Doing?’ I said. ‘What could I have been doing that would cause this?’

  ‘Mum,’ said Felicity from the back seat. ‘Can we go back now? It’s Little Mr and Mrs Universe tonight and me and Jamie have entered. Come on.’

  ‘Will you be able to drive?’ Georgina asked me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It feels fine. Just the idea is a bit weird, that’s all.’

  Everything bad safely hidden away under the earth. I patted the dirt down, stamped it flat with my boots, then looked about me for some kind of marker-stones, or a stick for a cross. But why? A lump of meat. We talk of minds, of souls, but it’s just a ball of nerves. Fingers remembering movements, like a pattern of piano keys, or a lover’s curves, or changing gear in a car, or throwing a cricket ball. Recalling electronic pulses. I could hear the breeze strumming the telegraph wires, a low hum, making the wires sing. But do we bury these wires? Do we dress in dark suits and shiny shoes to accompany them to the scrapyard, do we sing when they are dismantled, do we cry when the poles are burned or shudder when the connectors are melted for tin? No. We do things, we stop doing them. End of. Nothing has ever really happened if you don’t tell anyone about it and no one writes it down. Life tends to come and go. And that’s OK, as long as you know.

  I found a rusted Coke can and tore it open. Its shiny, inner skin. Twisted it into an antic shape, distressed and hopeful at the same time, twin aluminium arms curling up towards the starless sky. I placed it on the spot. Despite the marker, I knew no one would find it. I’ll know where it is, I’ll know that it’s mine, and in some strange way it will always be with me.