Head Injuries (22 page)

    I shrugged, trying not to appear browbeaten by Deep Pan's swaggering. 'I'm easy.' Eve forced a look upon me. 'But I suppose I'm a little tired. It's been a long day'

    'So be it,' said Tonka. We'll catch up with the both of you soon.'

    I led Eve back to the car park. She was very drunk. Once I'd strapped her into the passenger seat I stood a while, watching my breath mist and the curve of traffic as it sought the town centre or moved away towards Skerton Bridge. In a house somewhere near there, Seamus would be sitting with Helen, wondering why I hadn't come to visit them. Or maybe they'd be fucking each other senseless on the living room carpet. It wasn't a scenario that distressed me, perhaps because I was with Eve, perhaps because Seamus wouldn't be physically up to it.

    I thought of the girl I'd dreamed-all of it; this clotted feeling that I was being pursued and the persistent threat of violence moving about beneath the surface of everything I felt or looked at. Increasingly, I believed something was trying to defeat my memory and remain hidden while my brain fought for it to be recognised. I was projecting all my suffering on to innocent objects-the nuts and bolts of it basically. It was doing my head in.

    'Wake up Eve. You'll have to direct me.'

    'Sorry,' she mumbled. Her eyes were all over the shop. 'I like you.'

    'And I like you. Let's get you to bed, hey?'

    We managed to get back to Eve's without too much trouble. 'Sweet,' she said, turning inside the circle I'd created with my arms and stepping closer. When she kissed me it was with an urgency that was almost frightening. I opened my eyes and saw hers screwed tightly shut, as if she were passing on something painful via our intimacy. 'You're so sweet,' she said, moving away.

    We quested precariously through the caravan in the dark, guided by the thin light bleeding from the jamb of a door at the end.

    Her room was lit by a pyramid candle resting in a tall, spiral bronze holder. A poster of a prison interior hung next to a circular mirror framed with chipped plaster, its glass misty and scarred. The ceiling, threaded with cracks and cobwebs, jerked away from us as the shadows messed with my perspective. I left her to slump on the bed and went in search of coffee. Waiting for the water to boil, I watched, through the cataract of grease and mist on the plastic window, night shift across the rooftops. In every new configuration of cloud I glimpsed a face but at the moment of recognition, they folded into something different. I poured water into two mugs of instant and carried them back to the bedroom. Eve was twisted into her duvet, in a posture only the intoxicated could find comfortable. Her legs were tucked underneath her so it seemed the knee marked her body's lower extremity. Her arms were pushed together into a Y-shape, wrists trapped between her thighs, forearms bared. Her head was pushed back into the pillow so that her throat made a rippled bridge between chest and chin. I sat on thin cushions beneath her window and looked out at the rooftops, dingy and matt in the moonless night. Drinking her coffee as well as mine, my backside growing ever more uncomfortable as it was chilled by the floor through the flimsy material, I let my focus blur and tried to tease out the last memories I could of school. There was a hazy area there, though I couldn't determine its origin-memory's capriciousness or drunken blackspot-whichever, I was stumped. I tried another avenue in: people with whom I had shared classes in the last year.

    Lisa Strasser. A year or so younger than me. Her sibilants were juicy as I recall; I used to love hearing her introduce herself, as if she were salivating over the name.

    Janine Gosden. Left a month before her exams because her boyfriend asked her to go to Alaska with him. She had a scar on her cheek in the shape of a key. Lovely beige skin.

    And there's someone I know I'll not be able to remember, even as I tick off each of these names. Male-I know that much, but I can't conjure a face or a name. He sits in the corner of our sunlit seminar room, the yellow walls host to his shadow, so motionless it might have been painted there. Liz Bohanon. Mmmm. She wore halter tops after school. How did Seamus describe her bum now? Like two cocks fighting under a blanket? Something like that anyway. She was really nice. Boyfriend was previous year's Head Boy. Her dad was something big in toothpaste.

    Iain Copestake. BO like a pan of boiled onions. His favourite word was eclectic-he certainly used it often enough. He liked to wear bandannas around his head. And sometimes circular-framed spectacles without lenses. The twat.

    Daniel Hoth. Ginger hair. Hard bastard. Bit of a bully, but then, weren't we all? And a cunt when it comes to night clubs.

    Me. Helen. Seamus. And… this other. Another mouthful of coffee. Cold. God I was tired. Quite why my hand should curl to a fist so readily is beyond me. And my breath thick, as though I'd just entered a sauna. I looked over to where Eve lay, contorted still, her chest now swollen, now flat. I remembered something.

    The tattoo's tip, little more than a wisp of gold, writhed at the edge of her cleavage. I pulled back the hem of wool; the sweep of her breast was not enough to distract me.

    I stared at the tattoo for a long time. Eve's eyes flicked open, no longer muddied with drink. She caught me by the wrist and eased me alongside her, reaching down with her other hand to unzip me. Her mouth locked on to mine and she sank the broad edge of her tongue between my teeth. Her free hand found another task and once her T-shirt was off, her bra unhooked, she moved away and swung over me, the shadows in their frenzy making unstable the geometry of her face. She dipped in to kiss me again, her breath fast and thrilling. I felt her cunt bounce against my balls and shift clear. She was still wet. I reached down to touch her and her thighs tightened and shook. She took me into her mouth and things started to go wrong. I couldn't look down at her because as she slowly moved up and down on me, her eyes were pinned on mine and I was suddenly certain that they weren't Eve's. She sidled around and I saw her heavy breasts trip across my stomach, her nipples snagging on my skin. The sight of the moth relaxed me a little as shadows descended.

    I tried to enjoy myself and worked her energetically, hoping that exertion would get rid of my doubts. She perceived my athleticism as desperation and stopped sucking me.

    'Not yet,' she said, and turned once more. Light flashed off her sweating back, giving the illusion of iridescent wings folded into their housing, delicate raphs spinning the light in cords of silver and green. A strange, chitinous rasp fled from her mouth as she descended on me with the precision of an insect craving nectar. Engulfed, I raised my hands to caress her breasts, trapped in the glare of those massive, compound eyes, fractured by the light. My hands mashed against her and she burst, covered me with billions of chirring spores. I was peaking, the nerves in the pit of my gut on fire. When I came, I realised that everything I'd seen had been a fiction, conjured from the splintered light ricocheting around the room. I was crying.

    'Follow me towards the light,' Eve murmured, collapsing beside me and blowing out the candle. But not before I'd fallen for another trick: I appeared to be covered with gold dust from her body.

    

    

    I dreamed immediately.

    Eve was flying through a storm, her fragile wings struggling against the wind and the cargo she was hauling. I swung below her, knitted into a purse made from her spittle. We were travelling towards a coal of orange light. I was naked and vulnerable, but I felt protected because Eve was here. Behind me I could hear the awful, desperate noises of pursuit but couldn't twist in my net to see what was causing them. I looked up, following the spinning thread that connected me to Eve. Her wings were beating unsteadily, and every time a volley of rain drops impacted upon her soft body, a cloud of gold powder plumed out of her. I couldn't see her face to define the extent of her pain. I was as helpless as a babe but Eve radiated security and confidence with each stroke of her wings. She might have been ancient, such was her depth of wisdom, experience and control. She was my guiding light. Yet if she was trying to save me, she was likely to be my downfall too, because she was like a beacon, brilliant enough to attract others who weren't so benevolent.

    The thrashing at my shoulder grew more pronounced. The heady reek of petrol suggested that the storm was formed of something more complex than rain. The coal flared before us, Eve drawn inexorably on, fascinated by its colours, its persistent chimeric dance. Awash in fuel, anaesthetised by the ignorance of dreams, I only realised I was burning when my skin turned black and shiny and the smell of my flesh cooking consumed me.

    I walked most of the way back to Morecambe and managed to hail a taxi just as my feet were about to call it a day. My back was beginning to complain anyway, and, even though I could ill afford it, I felt I deserved spoiling in this way. The cabbie dropped me off on Regent Road just as a knackered yellow light staggered over the lip of the bay. Though I needed my bed, I decided to watch the sun come up. I felt compassion for our nearest star; one of those embarrassing, tender morning thoughts that would make me cringe later on. Reaching the barrier, I drew some of that semi-rotting sea air into my lungs and trawled the horizon for ships with eyes that weren't up to the task. The sea was pegged back, seemingly tucked under the leading edge of far-off land; the crenellated sand-where it wasn't bruised with oil-gave the impression it was shifting, dune-like, the longer I stared at it.

    The stone jetty made itself known through a grey sleeve of mist at the end of which the lighthouse pulsed with a light so weak I was unconvinced as to its worth. I walked back to the guest house and closed the door of my room; picked up various phone messages that had been slipped under by my landlord on my way to the bed.

    

    

    
Helen called, 8 pm

    
Helen called again, 8.30 pm

    
And again! 9 pm, 10 pm

    
Perhaps you should of left a mesage with us?

    

    

    I tossed the sheaf of notes away and watched as one of them landed on the material which shrouded a stack of frames leaning against the wall beneath my sink. It reminded me of what I had to do. Guardedly, I pulled back the corner of paint-stained cloth and riffled through the canvases, wincing now and again when I saw a painting that had not come off. By the time I'd searched the pile I felt a bit depressed; nothing I'd created boasted any verve, any nerve. All of it was too safe and parochial. From there, I went to the older stuff I had stored in my suitcase down in the landlord's garage. He'd shoved the bag into an alcove above a shelf crammed with boxes of after-dinner mints, instant chocolate custard mix and sachets of ketchup. I unzipped the case and a painting fell into my hand. I knew it was the one even before I'd turned it over to look at the picture. A moth. I'd been quite proud of it at the time-I'd painted it while at school-but now I could see how poorly I'd executed the strokes: the paint was applied too thickly, the moth's anatomy was a joke and I'd tried to treat the wings to a little yellow and brown once my gold supply had run out. Still, the history of the painting was irrelevant. What mattered was the likeness of the moth, in shape, posture and tone to the tattoo on Eve's left breast. This was that, magnified. It seemed to swell and deflate even as I watched it, as if it was being powered by its own heart or that of another, like Eve's had been.

    A sudden bark of static broke the quiet outside, followed by a voice foaming in its wake. The doorbell rang. I slipped downstairs and opened it on two police officers, their walkie-talkies chattering. I couldn't be sure if they were the same ones that had been trying to trace the car owner last night-this morning. They asked for Terry but I didn't need to fetch him; he appeared behind me, bleary-eyed, shambling. Maureen took up the rear, her arms folded around her chest. The policemen didn't say anything; they merely beckoned to Terry and Maureen and when I made to follow, they pointed at me and raised their eyebrows.

    Seeing them there, in the street, looking up at Duncan's window-Terry's face creasing with concern and Maureen quickly looking away-I thought
fuck this,
shut the door and legged it upstairs. The police soon found their voices and shouted, imaginatively: 'Oi!'

    'Duncan!' I shouted, slamming my palm flat against the door. I briefly thought about asking to see his socket spanners, that would get him moving, but there was no response. The door wasn't locked.

    I had a look in the room and the next thing I knew I was answering questions in an interview booth in a Lancaster police station. I was telling them what I'd seen and heard that night-including the coat behind the bathroom door, which I now realised wasn't a coat at all-while a small part of me had locked itself away and was combing through the detail of Duncan's bed asking itself again and again whether what it had seen was real. Whether it might be possible for him to still be able to breathe with his lungs externalised.

    By the time they let me go, it was getting on for lunchtime. I hadn't eaten and I was ravenous. I was wondering what I should have: a sandwich, maybe, or a bowl of soup, and I couldn't make up my mind. I started panicking, knowing that if I didn't eat something I would die. The inability to think, the seemingly total lack of substantial difference between life and death drained me and I sank to my knees, gasping with fear, now conscious only of my heart and the minuscule lurches of horror when it paused between each beat.

    

    

    I called Helen.

    'I know what you're going to say, and yes, I probably am one.'