Silent Voices

by Gary McMahon

  He laid a hand on the bulge and felt it shiver. It was like being pregnant, he supposed, and the thought was almost amusing.

  Almost.

  He recalled a newspaper report from a few years ago about a man who’d gone through breast implant surgery after a drunken bet. There was full-spread story in one of the red-top newspapers, with photos showing the man proudly displaying his new breasts in a low-cut shirt, the top buttons undone to show off his cleavage. At the time the images had repelled Marty; they had made him afraid in a way that he didn’t understand, and this had quickly turned to disgust. Right now, standing before the mirror and examining his own altered form, he realised that it was the notion of invasion, of something foreign being present inside a person’s body that had caused him such grief. That was why he’d never liked women with fake breasts; the thought of something underneath their skin, nestling there, had always made him feel slightly afraid.

  The shape slithered around inside him, coiling around his innards. It wasn’t painful. The sensation was even mildly pleasant. But the feelings it provoked were deeply disturbing, at levels he’d not even been aware of before. When he closed his eyes, he saw three boys bound by leaves and twigs in a secluded grove, and shadows moving, patrolling the boundaries like jailors.

  “What do you want?” he said, speaking to the mirror. His silent invader tightened its grip and his heart began to pound harder. He thought of Simon and Brendan out there in the car park; he saw once again Simon’s splayed fingers making a fist as he waved up at the window, mouthing words that Marty had been unable to lip-read.

  He knew what they wanted. They wanted his help. They wanted him to join forces and help fight something. Just like he’d been fighting his whole life, but alone, standing apart from the crowd. Now it was time to forget about being the lone wolf and reach out, take hold of someone else’s hand. Maybe he would feel another hand gripping his own, and whoever it belonged to would lead him out of the darkness in which he had always been lost.

  Marty put on his jacket and left the room, then the flat. It was time to get things done.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THEY WERE SITTING at a table in the window, looking down at the river, drinking slowly, not speaking much; just waiting. Hoping for something to happen, waiting for the momentum to kick in and move them.

  The bar – The Mill on the River – was new, with shiny tables and chairs and up-market clientele stopping off for a few drinks or a spot of lunch after viewing the paintings in the Baltic galleries. The bar (it was a bar, not a pub; to people like Simon and Brendan, there was a crucial difference) sat in the shadow of the old Art Deco style building, and benefited from its new status as one of the North’s top art venues.

  Brendan wasn’t comfortable in places like this. He felt more at home in dingy drinking dens on impoverished estates, sharing space with drunken old men, youngsters already on their way down the slippery slope of drink-dependency, and broken-down single mothers looking for a brief window out of the hole they’d made for themselves. People in nice suits bothered him. He felt uneasy around them, as if he were an interloper and they knew it.

  He sat opposite Simon sipping his pint – an expensive round; almost a tenner for two beers – and staring over his friend’s shoulder. The river was the same one he’d known all his life, but from this angle it looked different. The colour was lighter, the slight waves less threatening, the current moving at a slower pace that might not tug you under if you fell in. The river he knew and loved – and sometimes hated – would pull you down and kill you within seconds.

  “Just relax,” said Simon. His face looked somehow loose on his skull, as if the last few days had tired him beyond anything he’d ever expected. Brendan knew the feeling. It wasn’t just Harry’s episode, the trip to the hospital and the night without sleep; there was a lot more going on than that. Like the river, his life had developed a weird current, and he was being dragged along by forces he would not have dreamed of months before. Even his own body was rebelling, taking on a life of its own. The skin of his back was trying to tear away from his frame, seeking a freedom that during darker moments he suspected might benefit him.

  When he’d returned from the hospital in the early hours of the morning, he’d made sure his family were asleep and then gone into the bathroom. Stripping off his clothes, he’d been presented with a hideous sight: the flesh from the nape of his neck down to the base of his spine, just above his backside, was infected again. The skin had torn and split; viscous yellow fluid was slathered all over him. He was polluted; his body could no longer accept what was being done, the badness that he had held inside him for so long. His system was rejecting the filth; or was the filth simply coming out to play?

  “I need to go to the bathroom.” He slid his pint glass across the table and staggered across the room, following the signs to the gents. As he pushed through the door he bumped into a man coming the other way, and snarled. The man – who was talking loudly into a mobile phone – stumbled aside, letting Brendan pass, and there was such a look of pity in his eyes that Brendan wanted to smash the guy’s face in.

  He walked along a narrow hallway, bouncing off the walls, and came to the toilets. He pushed open the door to the gents and leaned against it, breathing heavily. His back felt soft, yielding more than it should against the wooden door, but there was no pain.

  “Oh, fuck...” He looked around the small room. There was nobody else in there. He kicked open the four cubicle doors, but they were also empty. Then he grabbed a tall litter bin from the corner and pushed it over onto its side on the floor at the base of the door. Dirty paper towels spilled from the bin. It was a flimsy barricade, but at least it would warn him if someone was coming. He would have time to duck inside a cubicle and out of the way.

  Brendan approached the wall-length mirror set above the row of stainless steel sinks. The sinks were pristine. In fact, the entire room was spotless – no piss on the floor tiles, no shit stains on the back of the cubicle doors, no graffiti scrawled on the walls.

  He stared at himself in the mirror. His eyes were sunken, as if his skull was swallowing them, and his cheeks were dark, hollow. His hair had never looked so thin; he could see patches of pink scalp beneath the greasy filaments. He ran the cold tap and ducked his head to the sink, scooped cold water onto his brow. It did no good; he could not cool down. Something was boiling inside him, and it wasn’t anger or resentment, not any more. It was pollution. He was polluted by whatever had happened to the three of them, tainted by the influence of that weekend.

  He leaned forward, his hands gripping the sides of the sink, and stared into his own dead eyes. Red-rimmed, yellow at the edges, as shallow as glass. He looked wasted, defeated; the fight was already done, and they had lost.

  His back crawled.

  “Leave me alone...”

  He thought of goat eyes and hummingbird wings.

  As if in answer to his plea, a clicking sound started up behind him, inside one of the cubicles. It was soft at first, like someone snapping their fingers to low music, but as he turned to face the sound it intensified, growing stronger and faster.

  Brendan walked slowly across the room, his feet whispering on the floor tiles. When he reached the open cubicle door he halted, listening. The sound was emanating from the toilet bowl. He took another step forward, so that he was standing over the bowl, as if preparing to unzip his pants and take a leak. The clicking sound continued. Brendan went down on his knees, grasping the sides of the porcelain bowl, and stared down into the clean, still water. Only his reflection stared back up at him, but it looked thin, ghostly: the face of a man who was haunting himself.

  He pulled back from the image, a gag reflex causing his own throat to echo the sounds coming from the bowl. He fell backwards, onto his arse, and pushed with his feet against the bottom of the bowl. Sliding backwards across the tiles, he closed his eyes and wished that all of this would just stop, that everything would go away and leave him a
lone.

  The clicking sound ceased.

  Slowly, Brendan got to his feet and returned to his spot before the mirror. Scrawled across the glass in what looked like grease – perhaps oil and sweat wiped off human skin – was a word he’d never encountered before:

  Loculus.

  Brendan peered at the strange word, unsure of what it meant. Was it a name, a place, a person? What the fuck did it mean?

  The word faded, as if drawn in mist. He reached out and rubbed the mirror clean, and saw a fleeting, jerky movement behind him. He spun around, but of course there was nothing there. He was spooked, seeing things. He could no longer trust even his own senses. Sight, sound, smell, touch... liars, all of them. He doubted now that he had even seen the word written on the glass.

  He took off his jacket and laid it on the next sink along, draping the collar over the taps so that it wouldn’t fall onto the floor. Then, without looking down, he began to unbutton his shirt. He did it slowly, methodically, not wanting to rush. Still there was no pain; no feeling at all. His entire back was numb, as if the nerves had been stripped away, the meat cleaved off the bone.

  He placed his shirt on top of his jacket.

  Even facing forward, looking at himself in the mirror, he could see the red blotches as they crept around his sides beneath his arms, caressing his small love handles. He turned to the left, looking at his right side, and the first of the boils came into view. Whatever had entered him – possessed him? – that night, when the acorn had disgorged its occupant, had done this to him. It had crawled inside him, letting out the twenty-year-old pollution but also bringing its own toxins, mingling them, stirring them up.

  He turned the rest of the way around, craning his neck so that he could keep an eye on the damage in the mirror. Last night he had noticed the suggestion of something within the mass of ruptured tissue, something with eyes. Today that formation was clearer, the picture taking shape.

  A rudimentary face was forming out of the chaos across his back, the marks and striations, the ruined flesh. A face that was at once familiar: features that somehow resembled his own.

  The face sat between his shoulder blades, its eyelids level with the centre of his back. Its nose stuck out of the skin, the nostrils perfectly formed, and he could even make out the bone structure he’d stared at every morning in the mirror, the cheeks he’d spent years shaving every other day, the lips with which he had kissed his wife and his children countless times.

  Brendan tried not to think about his dead twin often, but right now he was unable to think of anything else.

  He’d heard the story many times as a child, and even researched the facts when he was older. He had not thought about it in any great depth since his own children were born, but now the memories surged forward from the darkness at the back of his brain.

  He recalled the doctor’s description by rote; it was like a fairy tale, an old story told to ensure his good behaviour. An old story about how, when he was in the womb, still an egg, more or less, he had been one of a set of twins. His egg had absorbed the other egg. The process was called Vanishing Twin Syndrome. It was a quaint term, and he supposed it was named that way to lessen the blow, but it added to the fairytale quality of the account, making it into a story rather than a statement of fact.

  Brendan, in his own pragmatic way, preferred to call it a case of in utero cannibalism.

  He recalled what he had read in books and online. During the first trimester of pregnancy, a foetus would spontaneously abort and the foetal tissue would be absorbed, by the other twin, the placenta, or the mother. It was more common than people might think. The latest figures estimated that Vanishing Twin Syndrome occurred in 21-30% of all multiple pregnancies.

  A common thing, then: one twin consuming the other.

  At least it had not happened to Jane. They had been blessed with their own twins, and because of no genetic history of multiple births in her family, they supposed that his genes were responsible for the happy result. He was a twin. And his twin’s face had now appeared on his back, like Jesus in a bowl of cornflakes or Elvis on a cheeseburger bun.

  No sweat.

  Nothing wrong with that.

  He stared at the face in the mirror. When it opened its goat-like eyes, he was not even shocked or surprised. It seemed so natural, so perfectly natural, that the face on his back would open its eyes and smile. There were no teeth in its mouth – not yet, anyway – so the smile was rather crude, unformed, but it was friendly enough in its way.

  The bathroom floor tilted sideways and Brendan set his feet apart to ride out the movement. Then, when the room settled down and stillness was restored, he said, “What do you want from me?”

  The eyes in his back closed; the face sunk into the pus-lathered spots and pustules. Brendan felt dampness on his cheeks. He reached up and brushed away the tears. How strange, he thought. How strange it is to mourn someone who has never really lived.

  The bathroom door opened an inch or two before hitting the bin. “Hey,” said a voice. “What’s going on? I need to use the bog.”

  “Just a minute,” said Brendan, rushing over to lean against the door, to prevent it from opening any further and allowing an outsider to intrude upon this family business. “There’s a bit of a mess in here... just cleaning it up. Could you use the ladies instead?”

  The man grunted, huffed and puffed, and then went away.

  Brendan went to the cubicle and wiped at his shoulders with paper tissues. Then he layered them over his back, like a second skin, before he put back on his shirt and his jacket and moved the bin away from the door.

  He took one last look in the mirror before leaving. The smile he presented looked odd, disjointed. It made him look as if he’d lost his mind.

  “Loculus,” he said to his retreating reflection, wondering again what it meant, and if he was even pronouncing it correctly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  BRENDAN LOOKED ILL when he sat back down at the table. His hands shook as he gripped his glass, and he slopped beer down the front of his shirt.

  This time Simon did not ask if he was okay; he was beginning to feel like a mother hen, clucking around the favourite chick. He felt bad for thinking it, but Brendan was still putting up walls, keeping him out, and if that was the way he wanted to operate, there was little to be done about it for now. He could only push so hard before breaking something, and that had never been his aim.

  Simon finished his beer and began to stand. “Same again?” he said, pushing the chair back from the table.

  “I’ll get them.” The voice came from slightly behind him and off to his right.

  Across the table, Brendan’s eyes widened.

  Simon turned slowly. He knew exactly who would be standing there, but still it came as a shock to see Marty Rivers scowling at him, his broad shoulders blocking out a substantial amount of daylight from the window.

  “Jesus,” said Simon, brushing against the table and making the glasses wobble. The moment stretched, becoming elastic.

  “No. It’s just me. Marty. I believe you two characters have been looking for me.”

  “You were there, weren’t you? Inside the flat when we came round.”

  Marty nodded.

  “Why didn’t you come out?”

  Marty shrugged. His shoulders were huge. His entire frame was massive: wide chest, squared-off waist, thick arms. He looked exactly like what he was: a fighter. “I like to come to people on my terms. Even old friends. Now... what can I get you?”

  Simon told him the round and as the enormous man walked across to the bar, he glanced at Brendan. “You’re fucking quiet,” he said.

  Brendan nodded. “Aye, sorry. I’m distracted. Just let me get my breath back – yeah?”

  Marty returned with the drinks, setting them down on the table. He pulled up a chair and sat alongside Simon, so that the two of them were facing Brendan across the table. Somebody chose that moment to turn on a CD player behind the bar. Low mus
ic stalked them through the tables and chairs – a female vocalist singing a bluesy tune.

  “Well, well, well. This is nice.” Marty had a pint of lager and a whisky chaser. He sipped the lager, his eyes unmoving, seemingly unblinking. His face was unreadable. “All of us here like this, having a friendly drink.”

  “It’s good to see you,” said Brendan. It was a feeble opening gambit, but it was better than saying nothing. “I mean, after all this time... I was never quite sure if you were dead or alive, or if you were even still based in the northeast.”

  Marty swallowed. “Yeah, this is a regular fucking reunion, isn’t it? Just like in the movies. Like The Big Chill, only with added psychological damage.”

  Simon smiled. He couldn’t help it. Marty’s comment wasn’t exactly funny, not really, but in that instant it seemed it. “So you’re a film buff, then?”

  Marty winked over the rim of his pint glass. “I love films, me. I’m a regular cinephile. Odds are, if I haven’t seen the film I’ll have at least read the book.”

  Simon was taken aback by the distance between the three of them. There were years separating the three men, yes, and lifestyle choices too, but there was also some uncommon kind of magic that had kept them apart – and right now, as they sat and drank in a riverside bar, that magic was weakening. He was aware of walls coming down, of barriers tumbling, and for the first time in longer than he could calculate, he felt at home in his own skin.

  “So you got my messages?”

  Marty smiled. “Yes, I did. I suppose we can dispense with the social niceties and get right to it.”

  Simon nodded. “So you know why I’m here, and why we need you?”

  “I can make an educated guess.” Marty took a long pull from his beer and then a small sip of whisky.

  “Go on, then,” said Simon. “Be my guest.”

  “So much for the tearful reunion... Okay.” Marty put down his glass. “You’ve got it into your head that you can change the way you feel, the way you’ve always felt, if we all get together and talk about the past. If we can come to some kind of conclusion regarding what went on back then, you hope that it’ll free you and allow you to have a better future.” He paused, licked his lips. “I’m guessing there’s a woman involved. Maybe someone you think you should love but you can’t... and you blame the past for this. You think that if you can sever all ties with what may or may not have happened to the three of us, it’ll let you feel about this woman the way you believe you should.” He stopped, leaned back in his chair, rubbing at his stomach. “So, am I right or am I right?”