Cold Fire

by Craig Saunders

  I want to tell her to come home. To get away. Get away from the house and me. But I can’t speak anymore. The dream is done with my words. My words can’t beat the dream.

  It’s not a bad dream, but now I know I have to beat it. I have to fight it. My girl...get her home. Home to us.

  The lights come on in the house. I notice that there’s a ‘Welcome Home’ banner, diagonally, across the front door. Shining words and pictures of party poppers and stars.

  Samantha turns her face away from me. A white fat slug sits proud on her bony shoulder. I reach my good hand up to brush it off, but she’s too far away. The stranger has more power here than me.

  He can put his filthy hands on my daughter but I can’t touch her and I can’t stop her walking toward the door and the man coming through the door. The door squeals and the banner burns under blistering paint. He ignores me. I try to scream, because he’s on fire and he’s coming for my daughter.

  ‘I’m lost,’ she says. She can’t see he’s burning. She can’t see the fire hiding his face. She hasn’t got any eyes.

  ‘Can you help me?’ she says, and I try to pull her away even though I can’t reach her. My hands grasp at air.

  ‘We don’t live here,’ says the burning man. His voice is full of crackles and sparks, knots in logs bursting.

  She moves closer to him as she floats away from me.

  I push against air and shout and thrash but it does no good. I can’t hold on. I only succeed in waking Helen with my scream.

  Helen’s there. Thank God Helen’s there.

  ‘What? What’s wrong?’ she says, her voice slurry, like mine in the dream.

  ‘Dream,’ I say. I’m shaking when I hold her tight, so she doesn’t float away.

  ‘Bad dream?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘It wasn’t a bad dream. Samantha was in it.’

  She cries, and I hold her.

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘She was happy. I just missed her. She was wearing a yellow dress.’

  She forgets about the scream that woke her, and she doesn’t press the lie. She wants to believe. She wants to believe there are no bad dreams.

  I do, too.

  But then the dark things don’t need dreams. They’re right there, when you’re wide awake.

  Some you see. Like a black cat with no tail, or little grey tennis balls.

  These things you can see in the light of day. Others, you can’t see no matter how hard you look, because they’re the strangers within us.

  I tell my wife to go back to sleep. I tell her it wasn’t a bad dream.

  But by then I’m not sure it’s me talking, because I remember the cat. He remembers, too…the one that tells my wife it’s fine, just like he used to when I was flat out fucked on drugs and had blood on my collar.

  She rolls over while the stranger lies beside her. He’s been there all along.

  It was the cat that let him in.

  *

  Part Three

  -

  The Black Cat and the Ball

  21.

  Time of death, 12.03.

  It’s a cold night in London town. I’m walking. It’s thirty minutes until I die, give or take.

  I’m pretty drunk and some way high. I just closed a big deal. I guess when you come down to it I’m a glorified salesman. I don’t do the cool work, though I get paid enough to keep me in drugs.

  It’s a hard time for everybody. There’s a recession on and some feel the pinch more than most, if you’re a plumber, maybe. I don’t know what plumbers earn. I guess it’s not as much as me. Companies are cutting budgets and cutting hours. Sometimes those self same businesses go under. People are losing their jobs. London isn’t immune to a recession. But I am. I’m golden.

  The deal’s worth 1.2 million. Some of that I spent in advance, on ten grams of coke. Some, less, on pills and pints. Thirteen pints, two pills. Beer and cocaine mix pretty well. Pills and beer not so much.

  It seems a lot, but when you’re six foot one and weigh over 19 stone, the drugs and the alcohol can get lost in the pipes.

  Maybe not totally, though, because my heart’s pounding and my head’s thumping.

  I’m on an anonymous street, making my way home to where my wife waits, and my car. The car’s on a finance deal I can soon afford to pay off. It’s parked outside my house, a three story townhouse with a basement, on which the mortgage will soon be history.

  Commission. It’s a beautiful thing.

  11.39. I’m starting to feel something. Something not good. I walk past a pub. There’s a gang of young lads outside, laughing at the fat bloke. Look at the funny fat man. He’s staggering, bumping into cars and lampposts, pale and bloated by the city lights and coke and pills and bitter. I imagine my eyes are firing, pupils getting big and small like a cartoon fat guy. Feels like that, too, like I can’t see. The sounds on the pills...kind of pounding, floating, with an echo, like someone’s got reverb on a speaker. The light swirls, too, contrails on the street lights as I stagger.

  My blood’s struggling to make the circuit round my huge frame.

  Then the fat man, me, is looking at them from the kerb.

  I hit my head on the way down. It’s pretty funny. I can see the funny side. Until a horse, a fucking 40-hand stallion, kicks me in the chest. I’d scream, but I haven’t got any breath. My breath is stuck. It’s hitched. Maybe it’s hitched to the fucking horse. I try to thump it loose. It steals in, sudden, like the pain. There’s an aftershock that follows it up, like a little guy putting the boot in after the heavyweight’s done the hard work.

  It could have ended right there. Me, shit in my work trousers, drowning in puke. I can’t turn to spit it up. It’s just sitting there, down the back of my throat. Pints, bile, maybe the curry I’d had at the start of the night.

  But it doesn’t end there. One of the lads is on the phone. He’s talking to me while he’s talking on the phone. I want to tell him that it’s rude, talking on the phone while you’re talking to a real person. I can’t speak though. My mouth is full of sick.

  He turns my head. Out it comes.

  I mumble. Try to move. My leg’s gone spastic. My arm, too. Both on my right side.

  I’m blind. Just out of one eye. Same side. Maybe the ground’s cold. Doesn’t explain the eye. I decide not to think about it.

  It’s at times like this that the drugs and the IPA don’t help. Still, it’s not like I got all the coke. At the time, I was pissed. Everyone loves you when the coke’s free. Now it seems like a good thing. Because even flat out fucked on beer and drugs, I still know I’m dying.

  I don’t want to. I don’t want to die.

  I try to tell this to the guy on the phone but it’s no use. I can’t speak.

  The ambulance comes quickly. I’m in the back when my heart finally stops.

  12.03.

  No drama. No flashbacks. No tunnel.

  There’s just pain, shortly followed by death and then, the cessation of pain.

  12.07, at 70mph, they bring me back to life in the fast lane. Four minutes of sweet peace before agony comes crashing back in and then I’m aware, vaguely, like you’re aware of your wife in bed next to you even when you’re asleep, of someone saying technical shit that even I know means ‘heart attack’ and ‘stroke’.

  Drugs, beer, fat. Blood clot heaven, right there in me.

  I cried in the back of the ambulance. It was the pain, but also sadness. For all the missed chances. For letting Helen down. This time, there’s no way to make up for it. Have I ever made up for it?

  Pain like that, it’s frightening. Add in blind, crippled and smelling of shit, and you’ll have some idea.

  Somehow, the shit was the worst of it.

  Next thing I know, I’m in hospital.

  *

  22.

  The next time I’m awake after my stroke, my heart attack, since being in the ambulance, Helen’s looking at me. She’s got mascara on. The first thing I think is, why’s she wearin
g mascara? This time of night she should be ready for bed. The lights are on, therefore it’s night. She never wears mascara to bed. It’s reliable. She’s reliable. It’s like a clock, like my Omega. Never fails. Before bed, she takes off her make-up. She brushes her teeth. I’m in bed. Why is she wearing mascara?

  I worry at this. I go round in circles in my head. Tiny circles, ever decreasing, until the thought is no longer a circle, just a dot.

  The lights are dimming.

  She’s dolled up. She looks her best. No matter what I’ve put her through I’ve always thought she was a fine looking woman. Always better than I deserved. But that simple full stop thought won’t give in. Won’t give me the time to make it up to her, because suddenly I’m sure I’m dead, which explains why I’ve been calling ‘Helen Helen Helen’ out over and over and she doesn’t even look my way, doesn’t turn those sad black eyes toward me, doesn’t even bother to say my name, prefixed with ‘oh’, like it always is.

  I’m dead, and this is what happens. People look right through you. Their eyes just slide right off. You’re still there, but they can’t see you. They can’t hear you. You’re like a shadow in the dark.

  Someone comes in, talks to my wife. It’s a woman. She’s maybe thirty, maybe forty. She’s wearing a trouser suit and a name badge, but I can’t fucking read. Maybe the letters are small, but why are they dancing?

  The woman looks at me, then goes round to my right side, where I can’t see. My wife’s to my left. I can see her. Not that it matters. She can’t see me wherever she sits and I want her to see me. Right then I want her to say my name. Shout at me. Call me names, if she wants. She could punch me in the face if she wanted. I wouldn’t care. If she’d just see me.

  I hear something. It’s muffled, just an annoying little niggle, tickling my ears while I’m busy being dead. I realise it’s me. Talking. Helen looks at me. I think I smile but the look she gives me doesn’t gel with a smile. There’s sadness there, same as always. Shock, too. And is that happiness? For a moment, I’m unsure. I hope it is, but what right have I got to expect it? It’s a long time since I did anything to make her happy.

  I’m trying desperately to smile but I can feel my teeth grinding together instead.

  She holds my hand and leans in. I can see her bra, just over the top of her blouse. I squeeze her hand and she cries. I think I do, too. Because I’m happy, not because I’m crippled. But that’s in there, too. But I’m crying because I’m happy, because I’m sorry, because she’s here even though I don’t deserve it.

  I’m crying because I’m not a shadow in the dark.

  When you have a stroke, the most important thing, more than anything else, is speed. You slow down, but if they get to you in time it can mean the difference between a limp and a wheelchair. Or dead. Let’s not forget dead.

  It turns out there was nothing wrong with my hearing. I heard a lot about prospects from a lot of doctors. Seems they were good.

  ‘Don’t seem so fucking good to me,’ I say, as my wife talks to the doctor.

  She ignores me.

  Their definition of good amounted to the fact that I was still alive.

  The chances of having a heart attack and a stroke at the same time? Tiny. So tiny they’d never had any experience of it.

  The chances of survival?

  Infinitesimal.

  I get it. I’m supposed to be happy about it.

  Well, I’m fucking not.

  I listen to them. I try to talk. I’m an aside, though. Even though I’m sitting there, propped up in bed.

  My words won’t come out properly. That makes me angry. So I lash out and knock a glass off the bedside cabinet. The rage I’m in, the glass should fly across the room and shatter, but I catch it wrong. The glass kind of sidles off the MDF cabinet beside the bed. A little water splashes on the top, the glass hits the floor, but it’s a dull sound as it hits, nothing tinkling, nothing satisfying.

  The glass is plastic, anyway.

  Helen strokes my hand and holds me. That makes me angrier still. I try to hit her but I’m as weak as a kitten. She just catches my hand and holds it in both of hers.

  Some people think having a stroke makes you stupid. It can, in certain ways. Sometimes bits and pieces that you take for granted, like knowing the right word, or picking up your socks, or even knowing how to put them on, bits and pieces like that can get lost. But you know you’re the same person. You know that stuff’s there, but in a cupboard up high and you’re suddenly short and can’t find a chair.

  That’s what’s frustrating. Even now.

  Back then, early days? I was fucking livid. I wanted to crush the doctor’s throat. I wanted the plastic cup to be glass, because I wanted to take those shards and shove them into my wife’s black eyes, again, again, until there was nothing but pulp. Until she was blind like me and there was no more pity in those deep pools that I’d once felt lost in for a different reason to the one I felt now.

  If the glass had been glass...if I’d had the strength…

  Would she have stayed? Maybe. But I think not. I think not.

  I think it’s far more likely that I would have wasted away somewhere where old people went to die. Somewhere people forgot you because you were hard to look at. In the space of a second my life changed from being one to being two and standing a chance.

  Helen saved me with a tennis ball, but Seetha saved me, too.

  Fucking bitch. If I hadn’t already been married, I would have asked her to marry me. She might have said yes.

  Like, yes, after you’ve shown me you can walk the line. Always, walk the line.

  *

  23.

  ‘Walk the line,’ she says.

  I’m sitting in a wheelchair, so I’m looking up at her, but only just. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall.

  Seetha. She swallows up the room. Five-foot nothing and she’s filling the room.

  It takes me a while to tear my eyes from her, but it’s about winning small battles. I just shrug, ignore her. I look around.

  Helen tells me I’ve got a facility for emotion, for drama, but not for description. She says for the language to come back, I’ve got to use it.

  Every day. Got to stretch.

  People know what a hospital ward looks like. Why waste time? That’s the way I see it. But not everyone gets to see a rehab room, where the torture goes on. They save your life. Couldn’t they just leave it there? Is there any need to humiliate you, while you can’t even shuffle, let alone walk the fucking line?

  The line’s right there. Middle of the room. It dominates the room. The floor is covered with mats, wall to wall. The line looks grey, but I can’t see yellow anymore, so I know it’s yellow, because the line wouldn’t be grey. I know this because the doctors tell me there will be grey areas, but Seetha says there are no grey areas, and Seetha is the Queen of my world in the first few weeks. That first day? She’s regal, alright. She knows it.

  The walls here have wooden bars. Either side of the line are parallel bars, like at the Olympics, but not as high. Makes me laugh, the first time I see it, but then I don’t have the words to tell Seetha what’s funny. She smiles like she knows.

  Bright inflatable balls. Elastic bands. Walkers. Benches. There’s no need for Iron Maidens, thumbscrews, brands, racks. Not if you’re in the right place, in the right frame of mind. I’m blind in one eye, my right side’s fucked, even down to my eyelid and lip. They droop. I’m in the right place alright.

  With all that going on with my body, with my frame of mind? That grey line was just as effective as torture.

  ‘Walk the line,’ she says.

  Fuck her. This is my new regime, but I’m not playing. I want my bed and they won’t even let me rest.

  I had speech therapy already this morning. My speech is slurred, like I’ve been on an all day bender.

  The speech therapy must have worked, because Seetha seems to understand when I tell her to fuck off.

  I look away. Sullen
. Petulant. A bit lopsided, maybe, but I manage it.

  She just laughs.

  ‘Good,’ she says. ‘I like you already. You know, when I get a hard-arse, they always cry first.’

  Five feet tall. Must weigh less than half of me. I could have thrown her through the wall left handed, but how could I do that?

  She knows. She’s taking the piss.

  Fuck her, I think. She’s trying to get a rise. Well, fuck her.

  ‘Come on. I’m right here. You don’t like it? Big guy like you? You could do something about it? Right?’

  ‘I’m a fucking cripple!’ I say, but I shout it, too.

  She’s been working with stroke victims for 15 years. She’s heard it all before.

  ‘You’re a pansy, is what you are. What are you? 17, 18 stone? You going to let me wind you up? A little girl? You just going to sit there? Take it? Bend over? Come on. Big girl’s blouse. Sissy. Poof.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  She’s got nice teeth. I want to smash them. I want to punch through those teeth and drive my fist straight on through and use her head like a finger puppet, make her say she’s sorry.

  Before I know what I’m doing I’ve pushed myself up. I think I’m going to get her, but I’m not. I’m not even close. I’m falling. She’s there, quicker than gravity, lowering me into my chair.

  She steps back, out of range again. Now she’s smiling, like I’m a child that’s just discovered B follows A.

  ‘First lesson: Anger is useful. Use it. Don’t waste it.’

  She rubs my arm. Friendly.

  ‘That’s enough for today. Get some rest. You’ll be tired. Tomorrow, we’ll walk the line.’

  She was right. I was tired.

  *

  24.

  A porter wheels me back to my room. It’s around five o’clock. They took my watch from me. It’s in the cabinet by the side of the bed.

  Getting into bed isn’t easy, but there’s no pain. Just embarrassment.