by Jo Gatford
Legend Press Ltd, The Old Fire Station,
140 Tabernacle Street, London, EC2A 4SD
[email protected] | www.legendpress.co.uk
Contents © Jo Gatford 2014
The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.
Print ISBN 978-1-9101620-4-0
Ebook ISBN 978-1-9101620-5-7
Set in Times. Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International.
Cover design by Simon Levy www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk
All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.
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Jo Gatford is a writer from Brighton. She was the winner of the 2013 Luke Bitmead Bursary and longlisted for the 2013 Tibor Jones Pageturner Prize.
She has, at one time or another, been: a till-monkey in a book shop, a circus performer, a childminder, a cleaner of expensive Hovian houses, a baby massage teacher, a graveyard-shift hotel waitress, an antenatal yoga teacher, and musician. Her flash fiction and short stories have been published in various UK and US literary magazines, including Litro, PANK, and SmokeLong Quarterly.
Visit Jo at
jogatford.com
or on Twitter
@jmgatford
For my boys.
Chapter One
There’s a head-shaped hole in the plasterboard of my living room wall. A cracked depression, clumsily slathered with Polyfilla. I’ve learned how to ignore it, to unfocus my vision when I pass. I’ve acclimatised to the discomfort of it, like a lump I can’t swallow. I thought it might be easier once I’d cleaned the blood away. There was only a smear from where he’d lurched up, after the impact. A smear and the echo of a little internal voice that said, “I’m never getting my deposit back now,” instead of, “Is he okay?”
Because, at the time, I couldn’t give a shit. That’s the sum of it. And they all know it. My fault. Blame me. Even though the autopsy report said it was inevitable, even though the police poked unenthusiastically at the crumbling dent in the wall and offered shrugged condolences instead of handcuffs. I know. I killed my brother.
“Half-brother,” I corrected the policeman as he wrote in his little notebook. Let’s get that right at least.
I don’t believe in ghosts but he’s haunting me all the same, like an absence of noise you hadn’t noticed was there - the unsettling feeling of pausing a song on the inhale. I sleep on the sofa, the muted TV for a campfire - to keep the wild things at bay. Except it doesn’t. The moment I slip away, the nightmares creep through the cracks in the plaster and my half-brother’s stupid head leers out at me. A reminder of my purgatory, every Sunday, bowing at the altar of my father’s armchair, mumbling the same answers to the same questions:
“When’s Alex coming?”
“Where’s Alex?”
“Why doesn’t he visit me?”
“Why doesn’t he come?”
And I have to take in a slow, dry breath, as though the air is full of sand, and it starts all over again: “Dad… Alex died.”
Today the news slips out with no preamble, no parachute to lessen the gut-wrenching drop. It’s been three weeks. Sometimes it’s better just to say it straight away. Sometimes, these days, he doesn’t even reply. Dad’s responses have cycled through distress, hatred, obliviousness, ambivalence and, most recently, a sneering disdain - like he doesn’t even believe me. Practice doesn’t make it any easier. In fact, I’m more bored than sick of the whole fucking thing. Maybe tragedy becomes dull when it’s inevitable.
My father sits there in his floral armchair, three feet away from me, pretending I don’t exist. He stares at the door, occasionally dropping his chin to his chest, clearing his throat of fifty years’ worth of tobacco-tinged phlegm, glancing nervously at the drawers beneath his bed.
“Dad? Did you hear me?”
He looks up, nods absently, and pats down the left arm of his chair in a vague attempt to find the remote control. It’s on his lap, next to the stump of his right arm, where his hand used to be. I don’t point it out to him, don’t want to show him how slow and stupid he has become.
His world has been reduced to a single room in the third-nicest dementia nursing home in the South East and his mind is downsizing along with it – making heavy-handed attempts at erasing itself, like trying to cover footprints with dynamite. I’m the last one he reliably recognises, and I’m probably the last person he wants to see.
I cast around for something to say, some reminder that might yank him back from fairyland for a minute or two. He sits like he’s in a waiting room, imposing on someone else’s home, sitting in someone else’s seat. He’ll spend the day that way, anxiously anticipating something he can’t remember, too proud or polite to ask where he is, or when he’s going home.
I can’t sit here anymore. The bed twangs and undulates as I stand. We watch it come to a lazy stop. A slice of afternoon sunlight, full of dead skin, highlights a single square on the silky quilted eiderdown. The type of bedding Nana Alice thought was classy and luxurious but would fuse to skin like molten plastic if ever it saw a naked flame. It’s not the same as hers; the wrong shade of dirty pink, the wrong pattern of roses. Not familiar enough, though it has that same musty scent of sandalwood and sweat. I used to lie belly-down on her bed and press the cool satin against my temple, a crackle of static in my ear. But these are my memories, not Dad’s. I carry around the same questions for him as I did when I was small, when Nana Alice’s house was home and he was just a visitor. Thirty-something years and I still can’t bring myself to ask him plainly. And now it’s too late. He’s too weak to interrogate. Instead, I worry about health and safety and wonder if I should tell the staff about the fire hazard combination of my chain-smoking dad and his highly flammable eiderdown.
His few remaining possessions are laid out on top of the chest of drawers like a shrine: a stack of books, photos in heavy silver frames, a radio, his prosthetic hand. It looks obscenely false sitting there, like a prop in a comedy sketch. I pick up each photo, hardly seeing them, replacing them as softly as I can. Even movement is slow in this thick air. Angela with a red-eyed baby Clare, Alex and me in an apple tree, my stepmum Lydia’s teasing smile. None of me before Alex was born. None of my mother. I took the last remaining one of her with me when we cleared out his flat. The one that used to sit on his mantelpiece. He never asked for it back. A charity Christmas card sits next to the radio - a robin in snow, a generic Merry Christmas from all the staff at The Farm House and an extra kiss from Angela, his step-daughter, my step-sister, destined to watch him fall to pieces in her workplace. Poor fuckers, the lot of them.
He watches me out of his peripheral vision while I pick through his belongings, reluctantly searching for a conversation starter. Something not to do with Alex.
He used to ask where he was, why he was here, what we had done with his glasses. Before that, the questions were more innocuous but it was his questions that brought him here.
“Where do I keep the beans?” he’d asked, when I brought his shopping up to the flat. And according to Angela and the doctor and the nursing home, knowing which cupboard you store your baked beans in – unchanged for
fifteen years – is the hinge upon which independent living hangs.
He didn’t ask any more questions when I explained how Angela could get him a place at The Farm House at a subsidised rate, and that by selling his flat he could afford to pay the rent at the nursing home until… And then I didn’t know how to phrase “until you die”.
I took his silence for reluctant agreement.
No, I didn’t.
I took his silence for miserable defeat, but I pretended it was reluctant agreement while we packed up his things and sold off his furniture, putting the rest of his stuff in storage until… “In case you want them sometime, Dad.”
I swallow, reaching limply for small talk, turning the cheap Christmas card in my hands. “Angie said she wanted to take you to The Boatman for Christmas lunch, maybe.”
No response. I force words out of myself like splinters, trying to trigger a memory. “Remember when Nana Alice picked a fight with the chef there? About the scampi?” I say. Nana Alice is a safe choice. The memory of his mother-in-law might revive him if only to bitch about her. “She said it tasted like gristle wrapped in bits of cardboard.”
Deep, glutinous memories. A squat, thatched bungalow perched on an island of green, bypass all around, the rumbling white noise of traffic topped with Sounds of the Sixties on repeat. Walking the perimeter of the dining area, tapping on wood-panelled walls, hoping to discover hidden secret passages to smuggler caves. Reaching skinny arms into snooker table pockets, trying to guess the colour of each ball before it emerged, the thud against soft green felt, the sluggish trajectory, the mesmeric roll. Once you let go there is no way of influencing the journey. Studded leather benches in muffled little booths, all three kids to a side, Dad and Lydia on the other, Nana Alice on the corner, next to me. Every public holiday: a phone call from my mother’s mother that made Dad squeeze his eyes into a wince, or provoked a catty, overenthusiastic, “Wonderful!” from Lydia. The Boatman, for lunch. Something with chips and peas. Orange and lemonade. Steamed pudding with a custard moat. Bellyache, holding seatbelts away from anguished stomachs and full bladders on the ride home.
Dad lifts his eyes from the floor but his expression doesn’t change.
“You were mortified, I think,” I say. “She demanded to look round the kitchen to see if they were really deep-frying cardboard back there. They ended up giving us all free ice cream sundaes and - ” And all memories come circling back to the same resolution. I toss the card back onto the chest of drawers. “And Alex knocked mine over and I cried.”
Dad looks back at his knees, notices the remote control, tries out a few buttons, receiving the reward of a high-pitched squeal as the ancient set buzzes to life and the screen fills with electronic snow.
I raise my voice to match the weather report coming through the static. “He said we should feed it to the fish in the pond, and you and Lydia laughed.”
“ - brisk easterly wind with persistent snow for parts of East Anglia - ”
“And I couldn’t stop crying, and you slapped me on the leg to make me shut up, and then you all ate your fucking ice cream while I watched, until Angie gave me half of hers. Remember that, Dad?”
He’s looking at me now, eyes moist and jerky with uncertainty.
“ - remaining dull and cold, with light sleet across the South for most of the morning - ”
“You remember who I am?” I ask.
A dip of the head, “Matthew.”
“And Angela?”
Another nod.
“And Alex?”
“When is he coming to see me?”
Fuck. I can’t say it again. “I don’t know.”
Dad knows, I know he does, he just won’t let himself remember. The agony is there in his eyes, in the twitching of his Adam’s apple, in the unconscious clench of his arthritic fist. We’re similar for the first time - all the physical symptoms of grief with none of the emotion. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s not that it doesn’t hurt, but I just haven’t worked out how to mourn for someone I hated.
I wasn’t with my brother when he died, but I can see it happen every time I try to sleep. And if I sleep, when I sleep, he’s there, cursing my name. Of course he fucking is. Screaming ancient, nameless, binding curses as he stumbles down the concrete steps from my flat to the frost-dusted street outside, cursing me right up until the moment something inside his head implodes.
He collapses as though he is folding into three pieces – at the knees and waist – landing sideways onto gravel and glass and fag ends and rain. His head bounces off the tarmac. His brain is bleeding and his body doesn’t know what to do with itself. Pulses of steaming blood silence him, deafen him with soft pink swollen tissue. I see him from above, lying there. I hear him whispering, even after the scene ends and I know he’s dead. He never passed up a chance to cause me pain when he was alive. Why shouldn’t he do it from the grave, too?
The nurse comes early today and sing-songs the little magic spell that rouses us from our mutual silence and allows me to leave.
“Lunch time, Peter!” As if Dad’s been waiting for this bland, overcooked meal his whole life. She apologises, tells me I’ll have to get going, and I feign reluctance with a sad smile - for her sake, not his. Or maybe for my sake, so I don’t seem like a total bastard. No, please, let me stay and atrophy with these walking corpses while they drool gravy down their hairy chins.
I pat him on the shoulder as I pass. He’s not quite one of them yet. He looks up at me, showing his teeth in a tentative smile, as if he can’t remember if I’m here to fix a tap or rob him. He could be a poster boy for gum disease with that mouth. I resolve to floss twice daily, hit genetics where it hurts.
“Time to go, Dad. I’ll see you next week.”
He scratches his right nostril and turns to the window, back into the foggy depths of his head. The nurse is all rosy-cheeked sympathy but she stinks of cigarettes and bleach.
I’m almost at reception when Angela appears out of nowhere and grabs me, perpetuating my fear that one day I will look behind me as I walk through the nursing home’s gaudily wallpapered corridors to see a horde of growling, crawling zombies, eager for flesh. A cold flush of sweat ripples down my back.
“Jumpy,” she says.
“Zombie,” I mutter.
“How’s your dad?”
“The same.”
“He’s having a good day today,” she claims, though I can see she doesn’t believe it either. She lances me with a significant look. “Did you tell him about Alex?”
“I tried. He didn’t cry today. And I told him about your little Christmas day trip, which you know he’s not going to give a shit about. He’s getting worse, Angie.”
She deflects the negativity with a tight smile, slipping her arm through mine as we walk. “Familiar places are good for his memory.” She lowers her tone a few notches when we pass her supervisor and the receptionist, “He needs to get out of this place now and then. Otherwise he’s just going to get more and more confused.”
“He’s already confused.” The same question, over and over again. Where’s Alex? Where’s Alex? Where the fuck is Alex? Even the inflection is the same. Telling him his favourite son is dead was hard enough the first time; by the fiftieth the words don’t even make sense. I shake my head. “He doesn’t know who you are any more, does he?”
She jerks her arm like I’ve burned her. “Sometimes he does,” she says, “Sometimes he thinks I’m Alma.”
“Who’s Alma?”
“His Greek dentist.”
“He never had a Greek dentist.”
“In his head he did.”
“Have you seen his teeth? He never went to the fucking dentist.”
“Language, Matthew,” Angela stage whispers.
An old lady with toothpaste stains down the front of her cardigan glares at me and purses thin lips into a wrinkled cat’s arse. I smile back charmingly and she spits something yellow into a tissue. Bile rushes up my throat.
A
ngela pushes me towards the door with a long sigh, brushing down her uniform and turning back to face the legions of withering, floundering patients who snarl and snap and dribble and shit themselves and call her a bitch and a prostitute and try to pinch her arse and weep silently as they clutch at her hands, because they have no idea where they are any more. Angela is beyond human, beyond the zombies. And in amongst the daily miracles she performs, she still manages to smile and love the man who raised her like a daughter but for some reason now thinks she’s here to give him a root canal.
She pauses at the door and attempts a nonchalant expression, “Is Clare okay?”
My middle name should be ‘uncomfortable mediator’. No-one’s talking to Angela, not Dad, not even her own daughter. Clare, my niece, has been sleeping at my flat since Alex died. “I don’t know,” I say, “I mean, yeah, she’s fine.” I press my fingertips into the hollows under my eyes. Tiredness beyond talking. Too many faces that can’t seem to smile any more. And they’re all looking to me. “I’ve been trying to get her to call you, I promise.”
A slow, stoic nod from Angie and she turns away, waving once over her shoulder as the double doors swing shut behind her.
Across the car park I see Dad’s empty armchair through his bedroom window on the ground floor. One more week until the next weighing of my heart. The same chair, the same sagged face, uneven with stubble. Since his last stroke, one jowl hangs a few millimetres lower than the other, one eye sits deeper inside its discoloured hood. Another week closer to losing the answers he’s always refused to give me. Because I’m not just here for Angela, for whatever I owe Alex. I’m here because I don’t want him to die without telling me the truth: what really happened to my mother.
Chapter Two
My mind does not simply play tricks on me, it tucks me into bed, sneaks out on tiptoes and runs naked through the streets while I sleep soundly, unaware of the damage it causes and the horrors it commits and the humiliations it leaves laid out neatly for me when I awake.
