Head Injuries (10 page)

    The thought of Eve looking at my back, even in its raw state, was quite attractive but I shook my head, uncertain that this was the path I really wanted to go down. I was here for a reason, serious matters. It would be stupid to get mixed up with someone and possibly put them at risk.

    'It's not too bad,' I said. 'I just need to clean it. I'll be fine.'

    'And what about your friend? Is he okay?' She leaned on one arm and drew back from me; her long jumper snagged on the various soft peaks of her body. I really wanted to hold her.

    'He's okay. He was telling me about something that happened to him a while ago. A bad accident.'

    'Oh dear,' she said, pressing her fingers to her mouth. 'I've been too nosy, haven't I?'

    'No,' I said. Silence fell and time seemed to become sticky, gelling around us. Sunlight coated Eve's face in layers, at first polishing and then concealing her skin without blurring the edges of her face. Her eyes were blue suggestions through this. When I could blink and breathe again, I drew away. Her face stole back its form from the sunlight; she was smiling. Her fingers traced the imperfections on the back of my hand. I leaned over to blow out the candle but she stopped me.

    'There's a place we can go to, where I can take you, if you need to get away,' she whispered, watching as her fingers measured the mini-bevels of sinews, veins and bones. 'There's a way out.'

    I gritted my teeth against an unease that said:
She knows what's going on.
'I have to go,' I murmured.

    She shifted so I could rise. I idled over tying my bootlaces; I wanted time to study her face. Her eyes were closed, which always takes away some of the life in a set of features, but I could tell she was attractive. Not catwalk-attractive; her face was too flawed and interesting for that, unusual enough to keep my attention. The scant impact of the candle flame helped her face lose its structure. I thought, horribly, that it might start sliding off the bone.

    'We'll talk soon,' she murmured. 'You have my number.'

    I was about to deny this but then I remembered Frank putting something in my pocket. I patted it now and heard it crumple against my thigh. 'Yes. I'll call you.'

    'You'll call me.'

    'I'll just get rid of breakfast,' I said, picking up the dead bird and flinging it out of the window. She wore the same liquid near-smile I'd seen in the car. As I closed the door I caught her reflection in a mirror. She looked new and unspoiled among the dregs of party, like an overgrown newborn unaware of its limits and enjoying the flex of its body for the first time. Her skin was so pale it seemed transparent.

    I popped my head round the corner of the living room, quietly impressed by the volume of empty cans and bottles lying around the place, to say goodbye to anybody who was conscious. There was nobody around. I heard muttered voices in the kitchen. Two guys in vests and baggy track suit bottoms were hunched by the door. I heard the words 'Call the police' and saw one of them cover his face and say, 'Jesus.'

    'What's up?' I asked, startling them out of their confab.

    'Aw shit, mate,' said the taller of the two, 'you don't want to know.' But even as he was saying this, he was stepping back to allow me through. It felt as though he was handing me a baton in a relay race so that he could forget his part in it.

    'What's in there?'

    'Have a look. Tell us were imagining things.' This came from the other one, an Australian with blond dreadlocks.

    Wishing I'd left when I intended to, I pushed past them, affecting a sigh in the hope that it would conceal the tension I was feeling. There was a girl on the floor with strawberry jam smeared all over her face and breasts. She was naked from the waist up.

    'Is she all right?' I asked, concentrating on the steady rise and fall of her chest.

    'Is she all right?' the Australian asked, incredulous? 'Is she all
right?'

    'Fuck it, mate,' his partner spat. 'She's fucking
dead.
Look at her.'

    The rise and fall of her body had nothing to do with her lungs and everything to do with my own clattering heart. I steadied myself against the wall and edged closer. Her face had been torn from the boss of her skull; the flesh of her chest was macerated. One breast hung free, clinging to the torso by a thick flap of skin. She was looking up at me, sneering a curve of blood-smeared teeth. I stepped back and I think I said, 'Oh.' My foot mashed a piece of mince-a nipple-into the linoleum. After yesterday, with all the omens and demons we'd discussed, I felt partly responsible for her death, as if our words had somehow summoned forth an evil presence intent on making real our fears.

    The police came and the ambulance men took her away. We all made statements and gave names of the other party guests. I didn't get away until late but all the while I was there, I didn't see Eve, despite the fact that the police checked all the rooms. She must have slipped out while I was in the kitchen.

    On the bus back to Morecambe I tried to remember the colour of Eve's eyes. Though it was a fruitless task, it took my mind off how jaded I felt and the nightmare of that poor girl's face. Her name was Jemima. She was the girlfriend of one of the other guys who had come to the party but who had gone home early because he felt sick. I remembered (but only because I recognised her blue linen skirt) squeezing past her on the hall to get to the toilet.

    I closed my eyes tightly, trying to force out the bloody image of her. I tried to think of Helen instead and how claustrophobic I was already feeling. Though I'd only been around my old friends for a short while I was already needful of my own space. The talk we'd had in the pub yesterday seemed distant and unreal; the subject even more so. I wondered if I should just leave, go back to Warrington, anywhere, so that I could claim myself back. Too many weird things were happening here. It was as though this grim, etiolated coastal town was stripping me bare, making me vulnerable to attack from the people it had already defiled with its slow poison. My mind was perceiving a solid world yet it consistently peeked at what was rotten underneath, pulling reality out of true so that I couldn't discern the healthy from the diseased.

    The links with my friends didn't appear reduced in any way. If anything, they were stronger than the last time I'd seen them, though I couldn't be sure if this was anything to do with the fact that we'd outgrown our petty phase, or the focus of our conviction had shifted to this new crisis.

    A watery sun was doing its best to warm me through the window. I shifted slightly, trying to ignore my back's protest but the pain was too intense. I grunted and felt woozy again, close to fainting. The bus driver's eyes filled his rear-view mirror, black with intent. I felt guilty, like a schoolboy caught defacing the seats.

    Somehow I got back to the guest house though I had to stop every few yards and wait for my dizziness to pass. Once inside, I took off my clothes-apart from my T-shirt, which had stuck to my back-and stood under a hot shower until I was able to peel the material away from my skin. My back felt bloated with pain. I washed it gingerly, then rinsed the smoke and beer out of my hair and skin. Uncomfortable as I was, it was heartening to feel cleansed of last night's excesses.

    I crumbled some crackers into a mug of instant soup. Duncan walked into the kitchen and showed me his set of socket spanners. 'Got 'em for twenty quid off a bloke round the corner who was about to chuck 'em.' His eyes went waxy. 'I will do great things with these. Let me know if there's anything of yours I can, em, spanner for you. Bike. Or a go-kart. Anything.'

    'I will, thanks.'

    I sipped my soup lying on my front in bed. Music seemed attractive until I switched on the radio and found a squelchy mass of static. I made do with silence. Towards sleep, I felt her head press gently against me. Her lungs gurgled as she sucked air through the ruin of her chest. Boys bent down to pick crabs from her hair for cricket practice. But I didn't want to see her face. No, not that.

    

    

    Cricket filled my life when I was small. My father played every Saturday which meant my summer weekends were given to fields by polluted rivers, petrochemical stations, breweries. My immediate horizons were broken by rooftops and chimneys and pylons and pavilions peopled by heavy men dressed in white.

    Dad's cricket bag was made from brown canvas and long enough to accommodate his bat. During the closed season, it would reside in the cubby-hole beneath the stairs and I would sometimes crawl under there to open it and smell the summer ghosts it had trapped. There was always a scuffed cricket ball or two, a pair of gloves with their meaty finger shields, a couple of old bails. There was also a box, which was meant to provide protection but felt deeply uncomfortable whenever I tried it on.

    As well as the musty smells of canvas and leather, there hung around the bag's pale innards a detergent whiff, of Vosene and astringent soaps, sticking plaster. Although I was too big, I wanted to crawl inside the bag and lie next to the perished rubber grip of the bat and imagine my dad's strong, tanned arms flexing as he used it. I bowled at him once he'd padded up, happy that I could help him practise.

    When he was in the field, Helen, Seamus and me would walk the perimeter boundary until we were close enough for him to hand us sticks of Juicy Fruit. We'd sit a little distance away and watch rabbits scampering or swallows skimming the pitch.

    Dad was the captain, an excellent bowler, very fast and accurate. He raced up to the popping crease, shirt open to his navel, a blur of purpose. We'd cheer when he got a wicket. When the players came in for tea, we'd run up to him and he'd slip us jam and marge sandwiches from the table.

    The sideboard at home became cluttered with trophies. His performances became like a history of code to me: 9 for 32,5 for 2,5 for 36.1 would look through his scoring books, often when the cricket season had finished, and decipher their strange markings, the dots and dashes that represented an entire game. I'd look forward to June when we'd troop out to our Fiat 127 and he'd take me somewhere I'd never been before where I could watch him from the branch of a tree or a bench on the boundary. End of an over-a maiden or a wicket-he might wave to me and I'd give him the thumbs-up. Pop (with a pulpy paper straw) and crisps in the bar afterwards.

    And then he stopped playing. The canvas bag disappeared and he cleared away his trophies. Summers were never so carefree and innocent again. The first year of his retirement from the game, I got pissed with Shay at Seven Arches and met a gang that sat around in the dank shadows necking beer and talking as candles turned the curve around them into an uncertain ceiling, a different kind of night. We were in our early teens and we'd sit a respectful distance from the ringleaders, watching them hungrily when the girls arrived offering kisses that were hot and wet and yielding as freshly laid bitumen. Every woman had a curve and for every curve there was a male hand to cup it.

    I once saw a girl, Patti, crouched on the floor in front of a big guy, MacCreadle, sucking at him slowly and deeply while he looked into the mist rising on the canal as if seeing something form there. Her flexed fingers clawed at his thighs with every upstroke, her muffled grunt of pleasure or pain punctuated the limit of her journey down. I dreamed about her for weeks.

    Delia bore thick ropes of crimson scar tissue on her throat like an extravagant necklace; her father had tried to strangle her with a length of barbed wire when she was a baby. Rifle knew a boy called Pook who had been battered and left to drown in the pond of a nearby pleasure park; the two of them haunted the rides at night. Pepper had driven the sharp end of a claw hammer into his maths teacher's cheek. Pris got drunk and danced topless around the candles.

    We watched them and, when MacCreadle was sent to prison for a crime that nobody dared talk about, we spoke to them, especially the quieter, more approachable ones. The low orders. Delicate Freddy, Hangfire, Juckes and Smoac. We wished we knew stories about the dark harlequin figures that capered in the town's underbelly. Instead, we recounted their tales in the playground, gaining the kind of brainless respect that passes for currency at school. Even the nutcases gave us a wide berth. One memorable day, Helen, Shay and me walked into the canteen and the queue dissolved for us. We knew MacCreadle, every child's wardrobe nemesis at bedtime. We were on speaking terms with Sawdust, who had torched a judge's car outside Crown Court.

    As summer turned rusty and the weather deteriorated, we started fires under the arch and talked less, concentrating on keeping out the cold. The starts of those evenings were almost magical, despite the deracinated look on everyone's faces, the scarified appearance of the wasteland around us. MacCreadle's bike would suddenly tear a hole in the night somewhere behind the ranks of lock-up garages on the other side of the railway. Its cry would descend from all sides, as if he were flying the machine.

    We'd curry favour with them by bringing takeouts. Once, shortly before MacCreadle was put away, he winked at me when I handed him a carton of Chinese. Sometimes, if we stayed out all night wrapped up in sleeping bags, we'd wake up to find everyone gone and a few twists of tin foil, spent syringes at the ash surround of the fire. We didn't know what they got up to when they weren't at Seven Arches, but gradually, over the years, they drifted away, leaving me with the same emptiness I'd felt when Dad's cricketing summers finished. It was as if the focus of my life was constantly being redefined and lost at a crucial point, when the cementing of who I was seemed about to happen. I didn't realise it then, but it wasn't the cricket or the nights under Seven Arches that ratified my character. Helen and Shay were the nucleus of my development, the constants, the positive and negative centres to my universe.