Bitter Eden: A Novel (18 page)

Does he mean by this that, when naked, my nakedness arouses him as his arouses me? Is he, perhaps, thinking way back to the night in the paddock when I took his genitals into my hand?
Does
his nakedness wake me in a forbidden way? Involuntarily, I now, too, think back to the night in the paddock, recall his body-hairs’ bristling against my obversely smooth skin, bolt in a blind panic that I am powerless to control. But just how far can I run? Relentlessly, I am forced to face up to the nature of the relationship between us since the play. Never closer, we are yet no longer
interchangeably
one. He takes a certain pride in having me as his mate, flaunts me a little as though I am a particularly snazzy shirt or cunning knife, treats me with a subtle considerateness, almost gentleness, that draws me nearer even as it sets me apart, is, in fact, seemingly forever hooking me
back
into that dress. That final image goads me into wild denial, as does my reaction to the following question as to whether or not I feel
good
at being treated with a macho possessiveness that started off with Danny’s fisting Douglas in the mouth. But, as I said, just how far can a man run?

Douglas? Must that, too, be faced? After the shock of watching Danny knock him flat, how had I felt? Well, how was I
supposed
to have felt? How am I supposed to feel
now
? Jesus, I was not
married
to the guy! Did I not make that plain enough when we broke up? Certainly, seeing how he had changed was not the
prettiest
sight of my life. Still is not. But if it is that I am supposed to feel
guilty
about what he has
done to himself
, then no deal! If he had it in him to become a pansy at the drop of a hat – and a black-painted cardboard hat at that – then he would have become it all the sooner had the yukky lover-boy been first on the list.

So I convince myself that I am convinced that my hands are clean, but it is easier to forget the good, the often deeply moving moments that had lit my now dead friendship for Douglas with a gracious light, than to banish the nagging thought that somewhere in the Bible it says that a man brings upon himself that which he fears, and the one thing that I fear most these days is to be involved with Douglas again. Disturbingly, there seems to be some substance to this warning because although I had only seen Douglas once in the period between the break-up and Danny hitting him after the show, I now see him nearly every day as he darts about the camp in an increasingly manic way, his face seemingly
powdered
clown-white and his eyes brilliantly restless under the brim of that ludicrous hat.

I am far from straining at the leash, therefore, when I get a message from Tony that he wants to see me straight away, my first thought being that I could be setting myself up for another awkward meeting with you know who. ‘You want me to come with?’ Danny asks, instantly sensing how I feel, and I laugh, barely holding back from ruffling his hair. ‘No. You
start
trouble more than you stop it. And, anyway, Tony will see to it that he stays out of my way,’ and I content myself with laying my hand on his shoulder as I leave. ‘You watch it, hey?’ he warns, leaning into my hand without seeming to. ‘That slob’s one heavyweight nut, if you are asking me,’ and I am sure his eyes are watching me go.

At the theatre, Tony does not lead me over the stage and through the storeroom to his ‘space’, but takes me the long way round through the other half of the barracks where his ‘staff’ – Douglas surely amongst them – are lolling around like a petty elite. They stiffen, though, when we enter, then watch us pass with a tenseness to them for which I can find no cause, and I glance covertly about, checking to see if
he
really
is
there, but I do not see him and Tony, more than ever his lugubrious self, makes no reassuring asides.

Behind the cardboard wall, he seats me, makes tea, and we huddle over the ritual of the brew, and his eyes flick to me, then away, then again so, and I realize with no small surprise that Tony is
afraid
, that his fingers are straining against a trembling as they grip his mug. The silence drags and there is a silence beyond the wall that is keeping pace, and at last I ask him what is wrong, my own now uneasy hand setting my mug down with a thump that sets the tea to sloshing around.

‘Yes,’ he then says, his eyes now steadying on mine with the openness to which I am used. ‘There
is
something wrong – so wrong that I hardly know how to deal with it and I am still asking myself if I have the
right
to share such a shittiness with you?’

‘Well, you can hardly
not
tell me, now that I am here. So what is it?’ and I lean to him, both wanting and not wanting to hear, moved more by curiosity than any willingness to, as he puts it,
share.

He sighs, that very exhalation not Tony at all. ‘All right. In a nutshell,’ and somehow I sense the shape of it even as it looms, ‘Douglas is in there,’ and he jerks his head at the nearer door of the storeroom whose further door opens onto the stage. ‘Both doors are locked and we have tied Douglas’ hands behind his back so that he can’t harm himself or anyone else.’

‘You mean,’ and I have no difficulty in keeping my voice calm, partly because I am not surprised and partly because I am quite callously relieved that Douglas is, after all, not prowling around, ‘that he is mad?’

He nods. ‘Yes. Quite mad. Does that mean nothing to you?’

‘Frankly, no. Which does not mean that his
madness
leaves me cold. Madness in
any
man is not something that would leave me cold. But I am leaning –
hard
– on the “
any
man” because today – and you will have to accept this, Tony – Douglas is to me just another man.’

‘I do accept that,’ and his tone is emotionless as mine and I am thinking – with no small measure of craziness in myself – that we could just as well be discussing whether or not we should put more sugar in our tea. ‘And I even
understand
that. But not everybody, particularly those in there,’ and now he nods at the cardboard wall, ‘is going to react in the same way.’

‘I don’t understand. What the fuck has it got to do with them?’

‘A lot, my friend. One
hell
of a fucking lot! Let me explain. Last night, late, that little thread that can be strong as a silk or brittle as a hair, and that had been stretching thinner and thinner since that night when Danny knocked Douglas down, could take no more and all the bits and pieces that, when fitted together, answered to the name of “Douglas” and came when you called it and did all the little tricks that you either hated or loved, flew out like the springs and cogs of a clock you have smashed against a wall. But there was still enough sense left in the beast,’ and for a moment he closes his eyes, ‘to do a hatchet job on Tom Smith that – whether true or false – leaves you as splattered all over the walls as Douglas’ mind. In short, you are stinking like a polecat out there right now, but I have agreed to keep the Krauts out of this till you have had a chance to, at least,
talk
to that poor sod,’ and again he indicates the storeroom door, ‘and maybe – just maybe – get him back on an even keel. So that is what I am asking you to do, but I can’t
force
you and if you refuse – well, then, don’t blame me if nobody wants to talk to you much from now on.’

I stare at him, incredulous and enraged. ‘Christ! I have never heard of anything so ridiculous in all my life! Who is it that’s mad – Douglas or you and your tribe of pervs?’

I regret the insult even as I launch it, but he merely says, ‘Don’t think in caricatures. There are as many straights as not on my staff,’ then adds with a quite genuine pity, ‘And of course it’s ridiculous. But so was Douglas’ performance last night. You were the loser right from the start.’

It is then that I think of the lover-boy with the face that I would like to crush between my nails. ‘What about the guy that he latched onto when I dropped him back there? Dropped him after
one whole year
, Tony, when I should have dropped him that very first day he came smarming all over me like a slug. Doesn’t
that
guy also feature in this somewhere?’

‘Uh-uh. That was the other way around. Douglas dropped
him
when’ – and for a moment he looks vaguely uncomfortable as though he’s seeing something that he had not seen before – ‘when it first came out that you were going to play Lady Macbeth.’

But I miss the opening, frustration confusing me, and the silence the other side of the stacks of cardboard pressing in on me like an invisible hand, and at last I hear myself whine and am hating myself for that, ‘Would
you
have liked Douglas for a mate?’

Again Tony looks at me with a pity that is real. ‘As you said just now – frankly, no. But that does not change the equation between you and him.’ Then he breaks me as the leaning silence cannot. ‘The only equation that
is
changing, Tom, is the one between you and
me.
I never thought to see the day when you would be running around like a rat because of such a very simple thing as walking through that door.’

Almost I
hear
myself break, but still I try. ‘What do you mean – a simple thing? From what you’ve told me, he’s more likely to jump me than listen to anything I have to say. Which is not saying that I could
find
anything to say.’

‘At the moment he is just sitting on a chair, staring at the wall. You would think he was OK if his hands weren’t tied and his eyes would move,’ and Tony looks at me with eyes as unsettling as those he describes.

Now I
do
think I see an opening that is not to be missed. ‘So? How can he be bonkers the one moment and OK the next? He’s bullshitting you, man! Playing to the gallery for sympathy and kicks. Stop listening to his crap – slap him around a while if that will help – and he’ll be just fine!’

‘It is
you
that is bullshitting
you
,’ and now Tony’s voice has an edge to it that warns that his walking this road with me is drawing to an end. ‘Douglas had already slashed his left wrist with a pair of my scissors before we got to him and stopped him from finishing the job.
That
is bullshitting, Tom?’ and he waits for the frightened fowl in me to shove its head through another hole in the mesh, but the reality – the implacability – of consequence has caught up with me, has clamped its arm about my throat, and I sit, stunned and trapped as a second Douglas on the stool, and Tony gets up and unlocks the door, and I walk through it as to a statutory death, and the door closes behind me, and the lock clicks with the loudness of a tongue against teeth.

The light in the storeroom is not burning, so I do not at first see him, but then my eyes adjust and suddenly he is there, rigidly upright as an extension of the chair, his eyes acknowledging only the wall. For that I am prepared, but not for the
totality
of the changes in him, a completeness that so removes him from me that any speaking to him seems an ever more meaningless charade. Fascination heavily in me as an opiate, I stare at him as at a crippled mute or torpid snake – it does not matter which – seeing yet not accepting the sharply-curving-over nose and jutting chin as they merge into an almost saurian snout, blood-loss’s blue-white pallor overlaid with smudging mascara and other goo – for Chrissakes why don’t they clean him up or are they saving this as evidence that he is nuts? – and, most unbelievably of all, the once fussed-with, always washed brown hair become this sudden winter running wild. Only the gritted teeth seem incorruptibly the same, white and square and grinding fine some intangible abomination void of name.

What, I despairingly ask of myself, do I say to this travesty of the known, this vacated shell which I still tenaciously deny is any design of mine? Why the fuck did I allow myself to be bludgeoned into this most desperate dead end? But a residual practicality comes to my aid and I ask the first and most basic question that I must – ‘Douglas, can you hear me?’ – and, with an un-likeliness that makes me jump, his head bobs, though it does not even fractionally swerve. ‘Christ!’ I think. ‘The lines are
not
down!’ and am both exultant and dismayed – dismayed because I don’t
want
any renewal of contact with Douglas, but also exultant in the way of a faith healer when the blind or the deaf respond to a laying on of hands.

So divided, keeping my voice emotionless and low as though I am being so directed in a play, I try again, ‘That is not you sitting there. We are not friends any more and, when we broke up, I told you
why.
We were both upset and we said things we should have left unsaid.’ – I simply
cannot
bring myself to say ‘did not mean’ – ‘From my side, I am sorry about that and I’m asking you to feel the same so that, together, we can stash our spooks where they belong and, even if we can’t be the friends we were, at least
remember
that we were once good friends who had our good
times
along with the bad. OK?’ and I wait, sweating a little from a spiritual exertion that is harder for me than a long go with a spade. But, this time, there is no bobbing of the head and I edge a step nearer, willing my words to win through: ‘Come
on
, Douglas! This is not the you that I knew! The Douglas I knew was as gutsy as he had
class
and, like a rock that doesn’t cat around, was always
there.
So what is this shitbag I see in that chair?’ – and now anger is rousing in me and I’m wanting to be gone – ‘You
proud
of the way you are now? You wanting me to
remember
you the way you are now? For Chrissakes, man, here’s my hand. Take it and stop being a goddam tragedy queen!’ And then I remember – a genuine shame shrivelling me small – that his hands are tied behind his back and I let my own hand swing down to where it belongs.