Never Ending

by Martyn Bedford

  The boat slowed, describing a long curve into a cove where a finger of land provided a natural shelter and the sea calmed to pond-like stillness. Nikos brought the vessel to a halt and shut off the engine while his father dropped anchor.

  “You’ve got your hair caught in the buckle.”

  Shiv stammered a thank you as Nikos cupped the back of her head with one hand while he gently freed the trapped strands of hair.

  To be standing so close to him in her bikini … Jesus.

  She’d meant to put on her one-piece bathing suit beneath her clothes for the boat trip but had worn it without thinking for the pre-breakfast dip in the pool and it was still damp when they’d set off. The two-piece was brief, meant for sunbathing more than swimming. Shiv was the last of the snorkellers to kit themselves out; the others were in the water already, or lining up to go in. But Shiv had managed to make a hash of the headgear.

  “There you go,” Nikos said, adjusting her mask and repositioning the snorkel for her. “So, you been snorkelling before?”

  “A couple of times, yeah.”

  “OK, enjoy.”

  She made a sad face, as far as that was possible in a mask. “Er, sorry, I can’t.”

  He looked puzzled. “How come?”

  Shiv pointed at the floor. “You’re standing on my flippers.”

  Nikos laughed and took a deliberate step back, arms spread in apology.

  That was their first conversation. The second took place after the snorkelling, as the boat headed for home.

  Panos was at the wheel again while Nikos gave his final spiel. He was talking about turtles’ egg-laying habits and had produced the dried-out remains of a hatchling which hadn’t made it from the nest to the sea. The tiny corpse, like something made out of leather, was handed from passenger to passenger with a mixture of revulsion and fascination. Shiv thought it was the saddest, most exquisite thing she’d ever seen.

  After the talk Nikos set to work, repositioning the rubber fenders along one side of the boat, ready for docking. Shiv watched him covertly.

  Too soon the trip would be over. The thought sunk a weight in her chest.

  She noticed the baby turtle, then, lying on a seat where one of the passengers had set it down. Shiv checked to see if she would be noticed. No. Mum and Dad were engrossed in conversation with the old English couple and Declan was leaning over the side rail, one arm outstretched to catch the spray from the vessel’s wash.

  “You forgot this,” Shiv said, the desiccated creature in the flat of her palm.

  Nikos stopped what he was doing and straightened up. Thanked her.

  As he took the baby turtle from her she felt the graze of his fingernail. She kept her voice steady. “I never knew something dead could be so beautiful.”

  He smiled but didn’t say anything.

  “There’s a museum in Oxford,” Shiv went on, “where they’ve got these tiny heads – I mean, actual human heads that have been shrunk to about the size of an apple and, I don’t know, preserved.” She was losing her way with this, waffling on. She shrugged. “Anyway, that baby turtle kind of reminds me of them.”

  “Some folk think it’s fake,” Nikos said, slipping it back into its plastic case.

  “It isn’t, though, is it?”

  “No.” He put the case in his shorts pocket. Then, “You enjoy the snorkelling?”

  Shiv nodded. Her throat was so tight she could barely talk. She had put her T-shirt back on and wore a beach towel as a sarong. Her top was translucent with damp and she was aware that her hair must be a mess, sticking up and claggy with sea water.

  She managed to say, “My name’s Shiv, by the way. Short for Siobhan.”

  “Irish?”

  “The name is, yeah. Not me. I’m English.” She scratched around for something else to say, to keep the conversation going.

  As it happened, he beat her to it. “So, are you staying this side of the island?”

  “Yeah, just a few K up the coast.” She pointed, naming the village.

  “Oh, I know that place. My grandmother lives near there.”

  Nikos had resumed work as they spoke, loosening one of the fender ropes and letting out some extra length before refastening it. He had a livid crescent-shaped scar at the base of his right thumb, she noticed. The black hairs on his wrist were curled tight by moisture, the skin sparkling with encrusted salt.

  Hardly able to believe what she was doing, Shiv told him the name of the villa.

  Nikos paused, half turning to look at her over his shoulder. “D’you mind me asking, Shiv, but how old are you?”

  “Seventeen,” she said, without the slightest hesitation.

  4

  The Make session goes ahead without Mikey. Or Webb, who escorted him back to Eden Hall after the assistants had stopped him from dashing his brains out. It took them a while to calm him down and persuade him that he needed medical attention. His forehead was caked in blood, dirt and bits of bark, one eyebrow split right open.

  Shiv couldn’t believe he hadn’t knocked himself unconscious.

  As Assistant Hensher led the rest of the group from the clearing and along a trail to the Make area, a shocked hush descended. It was as though Mikey had dazed them more than he’d dazed himself.

  And so, now, in silence, they emerge into what looks like a picnic site, laid out with wooden tables; they enter a camouflage-green Portakabin to collect cartridge-paper, pencils and drawing boards; they go back outside to take their places at one of the tables. In silence, they listen to the instructions.

  Their task is to draw the face of the person they lost.

  “It doesn’t matter if you can’t draw very well,” Hensher tells them. “It doesn’t matter how close a likeness it is. What matters is that you create an impression of that face in your mind and try your best to put it down on paper.”

  He stresses that, as in Walk, talking is not permitted during Make.

  “Any questions?”

  Lucy raises a hand. “Do we draw their living face? Or their dead face?”

  After the session, Lucy falls into step with Shiv and Caron as they all troop back through the woods. She apologizes for failing to turn up in the Rec Room last night. Tummy bug, she says. Caron doesn’t make an issue of it, although Shiv can tell she doesn’t believe the girl. There’s just room for the three of them to walk side by side, Shiv and Caron slowing to Lucy’s pace on an uphill section. Her panting provides a backing track to their conversation. Even though they’ve spent almost two hours absorbed in Make, the talk quickly turns to what happened before that.

  “D’you think Mikey’s all right?” Lucy asks. “He looked a mess.”

  “It’s the inside of his head that’s the problem,” Caron says.

  “Same here.” Shiv’s tone is sharper than she intended. “Same for all of us.”

  “You’d think I’d have more empathy, wouldn’t you?” Caron says. Not nastily, though. “Sorry if this sounds selfish, but I’m here to sort out my life. Not his.”

  “Psychiatric patients are shipwreck survivors but they do not share the same lifeboat,” Shiv says. “Each is in a lifeboat of their own, adrift on the same sea.”

  The other two girls widen their eyes at her.

  “Something I read on the Internet,” Shiv says with a shrug.

  “You google that stuff?” Caron says. “’Zuss, no wonder you’re screwed up.”

  They all burst out laughing, drawing curious looks from some of the others filing along the bark-chip trail in the direction of Eden Hall, and lunch. The path has begun its descent, the sun dropping coins of light all about them through the branches.

  They continue discussing Mikey, exorcizing the shock of what they witnessed, it seems to Shiv – or, at least, trying to make sense of it. No amount of talking it over can rid her of the image of his smashed-up face. It might be this, or a delayed reaction to the incident – or just that she’s tired and hungry – but Shiv has begun to feel nauseous, trembly, a little lig
ht-headed.

  “I thought he was trying to kill himself,” Lucy says.

  “No chance.” This is my territory, Caron’s tone suggests. Shiv recalls her admission, at Break, about having taken an overdose. “If you’re serious about suicide,” the oldest girl says, “you don’t head-butt a tree with two care assistants standing twenty metres away.”

  The trail narrows just here, forcing them into single file; Shiv lags behind, shutting out what the other two are saying about Mikey.

  Shutting out that face.

  It was there in Make, too: flashes of Mikey’s bloodied features superimposed themselves as she tried to draw Dec’s. She never saw her brother’s face at the end. So, even if she wanted to (why would you?) she couldn’t have drawn his dead face, as Lucy had put it. But she was unable to draw his living face either.

  Shiv wasn’t alone in finding Make tough. Caron, sitting opposite her at one of the tables – spare pencil between her lips as a surrogate cigarette – had little to show for the two hours: a few scrawls on the sheet she handed in to Assistant Hensher and several balls of crumpled paper littering the ground where they had sat. By the end, she looked as frustrated, as upset, as Shiv felt.

  If Walk had stilled their minds, Make had stirred them up again.

  The trees are thinning, big blots of brightness forming up ahead – approaching them, it seems, as though rather than Shiv, Caron, Lucy and the rest walking out into the daylight, the gloom of the woodland is being slowly erased to release them. The other two let her catch up, Lucy in full flow now. Only half listening, Shiv gathers that the girl is well into a monologue about studying marine biology at university, when the time comes. If the time comes, she adds.

  Shiv knows she must rest or pass out altogether.

  “Hold on a sec,” she says, spotting a tree stump at the edge of the path. She sits down a little unsteadily. Holds her side. “Stitch,” she tells them, as they pause.

  Caron gives her a questioning look. Concerned. Not buying the “stitch” excuse.

  Lucy just picks up where she left off. “I’ve already been off school for seven months, yeah, and I really don’t know if I’ll be well enough to go back this side of Christmas. And what with my GCSEs next year…” She trails off. Puffs out her cheeks. “Sorry,” she says. “Dad calls me Mimi when I get like this – as in me, me, me. He goes, “Oh, Mimi’s here again.” I mean, he used to. Before.”

  Before what? Shiv wonders.

  The girl’s cheeks are pink but Shiv isn’t sure if that’s from walking or because she’s upset. Shiv dips her head. The wooziness has eased but the nausea is still there and her skin is cold and clammy. She wonders if she’s about to have one of her turns; she doesn’t think so, but it’s hard to tell when one is sneaking up on her.

  Caron rests a hand on Shiv’s shoulder. “All right, girl?”

  “Just a bit tired.”

  When she’s recovered, they set off again – the last of the group now. Lucy is talking about Marine Biology again. Shiv’s always imagined herself doing English when she goes to uni, or maybe History – nothing science-y anyway. Right now, she can’t imagine going to university at all. Or getting a job, or what that job might be. Or marriage or kids or where she’d be living. Anything. Even her own GCSEs – next summer, same as Lucy’s – seem pointless, fantastical. Since Declan died it’s like all of her own possible futures have closed down, become as unattainable for Shiv as her brother’s never-to-be-lived life is for him. Just to be thinking about what she might be doing a year from now, five years, or ten, or fifty, seems wrong. Grotesque. Offensive.

  How can she contemplate growing older when Dec never can?

  Then there are the times when she wishes she could wake up one morning and two or three years will have passed overnight and she won’t feel like shit any more. But that would mean not missing him, not wishing he was still alive, not remembering how he died.

  She can’t conceive of waking up to a morning like that even if she lives to be a hundred.

  When they reach the orchard behind Eden Hall, Assistant Hensher is still waiting for them: a sheepdog rounding up the last of the flock. Shiv tells Caron and Lucy to go on ahead – she’ll come and find them in the dining hall.

  “I’d like to see Mikey,” she says to Hensher, once the others are out of earshot.

  “Mikey?” Hensher can’t be much older than Nikos yet the contrast between them is about as stark as it gets. She shuts down the thought of Nikos. “I’ll have to check where he is,” the care assistant says, unclipping a radio from his belt.

  “I just want to make sure he’s OK,” Shiv says.

  Hensher manages to meet her gaze. “D’you mind me asking why?”

  “Because he’s my Buddy.”

  Mikey is in the medical room, resting, so Nurse Zena can keep an eye on him for signs of concussion. When Shiv goes in, the young nurse is sitting at a desk in an adjoining office area, writing notes on a white card. Hensher must’ve messaged her because she smiles, gestures Shiv to go on through.

  “How’s he doing?” Shiv whispers.

  Zena whispers back, “Worse than the tree, is my guess.”

  Mikey is on an adjustable bed, the back raised, his head propped up by pillows. For once, he doesn’t look agitated or keen to be anywhere except right where he is. Shiv changed out of her jumpsuit before coming here but the boy is still in his, the yellow fabric spattered in places with dried blood. His fringe is encrusted, too, like he’s tried to highlight his short, dark-blond hair with ketchup.

  “Hey,” Shiv says.

  He doesn’t reply, just looks at her through half-shuttered eyes. A dressing covers most of his forehead, his right eyebrow is zippered with soluble stitches and the skin around his eyes is several shades of purple. The rest of his face is deathly pale.

  Shiv pulls up a chair and sits beside the bed. “Most people walk round a tree,” she says, putting on a cheery grin. “Not straight through it.”

  Mikey points at her T-shirt. “What’s that mean?”

  She doesn’t look down at the slogan; she doesn’t need to. “It means if you make friends with someone it’s going to hurt when you stop being friends with each other. Or if they go away.”

  He looks unimpressed. Actually, it’s difficult to know what he’s thinking.

  “It’s from a book,” Shiv says. “The Catcher in the Rye.”

  “Yeah?” It’s not a curious “yeah?”, more of a so-what “yeah?”.

  “It was my brother’s.” Shiv plucks at the front of the T-shirt. “My dad thinks it’s a bit morbid, me wearing his stuff.”

  Mikey just sniffs. Touches the gauze patch on his forehead, as though to check whether any blood has seeped through. It has. He wipes his fingers on the bed-sheet.

  “Your head must hurt,” Shiv says.

  “She gave me something so it wouldn’t.” A glance towards the open doorway to the nurse’s office. “I told her I didn’t want nothing but she jabbed me anyway.”

  She wonders why he asked not to have pain relief. Why he bashed his head against a tree in the first place. She doesn’t ask. Whenever she kicks off, she hates people asking why. Why? Why? Why? She suspects Mikey’s the same.

  “Got yourself out of Make anyway,” Shiv says. She starts to tell him about the session but the boy cuts across her.

  “Why are you here?” he asks.

  Shiv hesitates. “I don’t know, I guess I just—”

  “Feel sorry for me.”

  “No, I … it upset me. Seeing you do that to yourself.”

  “You seen the freak show, now you’ve come to see the freak.”

  Shiv can’t help laughing. “Are you always this obnoxious?”

  He goes sulky on her, trying to stare her down. The boy who doesn’t want a Buddy. “No one asked you to come,” he says.

  She keeps her voice soft. “How old was your sister, Mikey?”

  He looks at her, fiery-eyed. Says nothing.

  “Younger than y
ou?” Shiv says.

  His eyes are an amazing colour – hazel, but flecked with yellow. He breaks eye contact. Takes a bite out of one of his thumbnails. “Nine,” he says, aiming his words somewhere over the far side of the room. “Feebs was nine.”

  “Feebs?”

  “Phoebe. I always called her Feebs. Or Feeble, sometimes – to wind her up.”

  “Phoebe? Seriously?”

  “Yeah, why?” He sounds cross.

  “Nothing. It’s just—” she touches the front of her T-shirt. The slogan. “That was the name of Holden Caulfield’s sister.”

  From Mikey’s expression, he has no idea what she’s talking about.

  Shiv changes tack. “Were you friends, you and Feebs?” He doesn’t answer. “’Cos I was, with my brother. Declan. Dec. He was twelve but he…” She won’t cry. She absolutely won’t cry. “He was my best mate.”

  “He was on the TV,” Mikey says. “You both was.”

  Shiv nods. “Yeah. Yeah, we were.”

  The others have been more subtle about it – Shiv’s “celebrity” status – but it’s been buzzing beneath the surface in the way some of them look at her, or the sudden halt in conversation when she enters a room. She can’t tell if it’s resentment (Why did your story make the headlines when ours didn’t?) or curiosity – the thrill of meeting someone, for real, whose face you’ve seen on the news. Like she’s a singer or actress.

  A hush envelops them. Just the ticking of a clock and the scritch-scritch of Nurse Zena’s pen in the adjoining room. Food smells drift in from elsewhere in the building and Shiv realizes how hungry she is.

  “Two more minutes,” the nurse calls out. “I need to do a couple of tests.”