Head Injuries (26 page)

    I sneaked a glance at Seamus-suddenly we were partners in crime, our reputations defamed; I felt like a tyke sent to the headmaster for pissing in the sandpit. He, like Helen, was gazing elsewhere.

    'You three. All of you shoddy and shabby. I'm grateful for the smell of the booze. God only knows-'

    'Shut up! Fucking well shut up will you, you crabby old bat!'

    '-what you reek of underneath.' But all the hostility was gone from Pol's voice. She stared at Helen in the way I imagined my mum would stare at me if I declared I wanted a sex-change.

    'Get out!' barked Pol, her body bristling as though covered with cockroaches. 'Get out of my house, you slut!' The words were painted with brittle blue streaks of sound; I never believed I'd hear such a screech.

    Helen stood up. Pol actually snarled; a cat whose territory had been encroached. She pointed her crippled finger vaguely in the direction of the window. 'I said get out.' A thread of spittle fell from her mouth, weighted by a tiny sparkling bauble. I stared at it, wondering crazily if it would harden.

    'I need something,' Helen's voice now conciliatory, its punch dissipated. I stood up, intending to leave them to it but she'd docked her lizard eyes with mine. Such a fury capered there though it was countered by a ponderousness that made her appear shocked, like a strung-out mental patient. Hadn't Helen mentioned something about Prozac in the past? If so, she'd stopped taking it.

    'You sit down you groin-hungry bastid!' I complied, biting down on my desire to ask her to make up her mind about whether or not she wanted us to leave.

    'What do you want?' Her hand was still flaying towards the window as if it were some freakish insect struggling to detach itself from her wrist. 'Obviously you don't need my help any more.'

    Helen bridled. 'When have you ever given me any help?'

    'The drowning.' Pol uttered the words with glutinous black relish: a linkman on TV introducing a horror film.

    Though the words caused her to wince, I admired Helen's tenacity; she tilted her chin as though inviting a blow. 'You didn't help me. You just used it to fascinate those sad farts you call your friends. You used it as currency.'

    'You'd have been nothing if it weren't for me. Ha! What am I saying? You've turned out rotten after all. You're a shite-hawk and a guttersnipe. You killed someone. You said so yourself!'

    I was gnawing my bottom lip so voraciously that I hardly noticed the slow explosion of blood into my mouth. A rumour of cold crept through me. What we needed to discover seemed so close I thought I could pluck it from the end of my tongue. Helen's face had slackened, become as formless as kneaded dough.

    'Photographs,' she said. 'I've come to collect some photographs.'

    Pol's eyes narrowed. She knew Helen didn't need an escort just to pick up a few measly pictures but dutifully she shambled off to the bathroom, at last remembering to snatch her hand down to her side.

    'Helen?' I tried to coax her out of her fugue. She looked hypnotised. Behind her face I could see Morecambe Bay's water-shy sand-flats stretched out and gleaming beneath the moon. I could make out hundreds of naked glistening bodies curled into the ground: all somnolent curves and hollows; any number of haunches and shoulders and shanks.

    'Just leave me alone,' she said, in a voice that was fraught with distress yet resigned, the way someone sounds when they've been forced to accept a set of circumstances they didn't want. I wandered out to the landing, as close as I dared get to the bathroom, where Pol was scrabbling loudly. She was murmuring to herself, but the words were too flat and atonal to carry to me. I edged closer, ignoring the masks and a spray of pottery birds clinging to the wall, frozen in flight or spread out in modes of predacity. The door was a quarter of the way open; I could see the sink (complete with tide-mark) and a medicine cabinet above, which was closed, the mirror reflecting a print on the opposite wall that was all red and black squiggles. I still couldn't make out Pol's litany of madness. The scrabbling stopped; I began to sink back towards the threshold but not before she'd opened the cabinet and stung me with her eyes again. Her face filled the mirror, like a savagely cropped passport photograph. She smiled, putting me off balance for a beat until I realised it was more a rictus to show me what squirmed in her mouth, other than her tongue. I hurried back to the living room. Pol followed me and sat in the corner, face slashed into a raw harlequin pattern of light and shade. She was watching

    Helen spread photographs around the floor while Seamus sagged impotently in his chair with all the submission of a dentist's patient. Pol looked at me with what could have been a knowing smile but I was unable to tell. I went back to the bathroom and splashed a little water on my face. The picture on the wall was of Half Moon Bay: a black and white photograph taken at dusk. I was trying to work out if the scratches were of the glass or of the photograph-figures walking the beach perhaps?-when I heard Helen call me.

    Pol was still tucked into the fragmented angle of light, hands tirelessly rubbing at the hem of her dress. I thought of Miss Havisham and wondered if Pol had ever known any long-lasting love in her life, as I crossed the carpet to where Helen and Seamus were surrounded by photos. I leaned over, planting my hands on Helen's shoulders.

    'Do you recognise him?' Helen said.

    'I can't see,' Seamus complained, rubbing his eyes.

    It was a group photo, taken when we were in our fourth year. One of those fish-eye camera jobs that pans around while you stay stock still. You have to stay stock still in order for the photograph to be taken properly. Move and you blur. Helen was pointing at one boy about ten feet away from me, his face smeared in the air as though he'd been shot in the head. I couldn't tell who it was, but I knew that he was wrapped up in what was happening to me.

    'It's him,' I said, in a voice that was relieved and exhausted and scared to death.

    

    

    The motorway was quieter than we'd hoped. I felt alienated from the few neighbouring cars and lorries as they powered south although I wondered at their freight both physical and otherwise. Who else was journeying towards a page break in the novel of their lives? I gripped the seat, fiercely wishing that whatever happened in the next few hours might deliver me from the desperation that had haunted me for as long as I could remember. Seamus and Helen were breathing dressmakers' dummies, Helen driving hunched over the wheel, peering through the waving windscreen wipers as they crammed snow into thick crusts at the edge of the frames. Her hands clenched and relaxed like dying spiders as she steered. A daisy ring made from green resin rose and fell on her little finger in time with her tension. I was too wired to take the wheel. Seamus' breath was a gargle rising from the back seat. I switched on the radio to drown him out but the poppy music that swam out seemed inappropriate and no other station had a signal sufficiently strong enough to beat the waves of static. I snapped it off and leaned back, allowing myself to be drawn into the pale cones spilling from the Mini's headlamps, and the destiny they etched for me on the flecked Tarmac.

    I thought of what had happened at Helen's shop earlier that evening, when I'd rushed over to pick her up. Helen had been sitting in the centre of the floor, all of her water sculptures broken around her. A thin rash of sweat covered her face and her chest hitched as she took in breath. She'd trashed the lot. I picked up a flat, smooth disc of metal; one of several tears. Her initials were etched into its underside. I pocketed it, a souvenir: I wouldn't be back this way again.

    Jared had turned up, early evening, drenched and shivering. She'd let him in and sat him by the fire. He hadn't said anything, he simply stared at her. Helen's voice was as flat as a newsreader's. We'd stood staring at the puddle in the centre of the room. Jared had disappeared when Helen went to call me. I say disappeared-he might well have just liquefied.

    'Water was trickling out of the corner of his mouth. It didn't stop, just kept coming, making a pool on the floor. I got hysterical, thinking he was drowning, that he was in some kind of catatonia, drowning in my shop. And he smiled at me then, and there was a… David, I don't believe this, what I'm telling you. His teeth were rusting bars, like those on a drain, and there was a tiny figure, a girl, her wrists tied to the bars, her face bloated so much it was like a pink balloon. I couldn't see her eyes but I knew her. And he just kept getting wetter, like someone who'd just stepped out of a swimming pool. Streaming, he was.'

    'It's over now,' I said, feeling as corny as the line. 'What are you feeling?'

    'I don't feel relieved, if that's what you're getting at. I feel unresolved. Lost. I feel guilty as hell.'

    'I know,' I said. 'Me too.'

    

    

    We overtook a police car cruising in the left-hand lane, south of Bamber Bridge. I hoped they wouldn't notice Seamus' crumpled form in the back, pull us over, ask us what was going on, ask us: 'Is this your car, sir?'. I would have told them everything. But we weren't stopped and I waited for the relief that didn't come.

    Helen swung the Mini off the M6 at Junction 22. The snow had stopped but I couldn't recall seeing the join. We sped past the traffic island at Winwick Hospital and joined the A49 towards Warrington town centre. We were minutes away now and I realised nobody had said a word since we picked Seamus up from Skerton.

    But now: 'Home again, home again, jiggety-jig'. Seamus' song hung like a black veil, partitioning the two halves of the car.

    On Lilford Avenue I sighed and the sound whined through my teeth. Nobody seemed to hear: we were all concentrating on the clump of black at the end of the road that heralded the woods. I saw a thin streak of light. A train, passing over the Arches?

    'What do we do, when we get there?' asked Helen. Her mouth sounded tight and dry.

    I didn't know and Seamus wasn't imparting any great wisdoms either. The question remained unanswered although I was certain our immediate future would be more a matter of what we'd find rather than what we would do. It was out of our hands.

    'Park the car,' I said, picking up the torch and checking the batteries. The beam blazed in my eyes: when I closed them I saw bloated red shapes. Helen did not look as though she was dealing with this very well, which was upsetting because we had always relied upon her in the past; she was the unflappable one who basked in the vicarious thrill that hearing other people's problems gave her.

    As I applied the handbrake, I took a sidelong glance at her. I was quite sure that since leaving Pol's house (with her pouring scorn upon us from the landing and promising us our lives would be sorry, barren affairs) I hadn't seen her blink. Seamus seemed much heavier but I couldn't decide if this was because we'd been stuffing him into and freeing him from the car all night or he'd chosen to make himself more difficult to manoeuvre due to the shock we'd suffered and his reluctance to take any further blows to his enfeebled constitution.

    'How the fuck are we going to wheel him up there?' Helen asked, nodding her head towards the fence surrounding the field and the sharp incline immediately beyond it.

    'I don't know, but we'll have to find a way.' I checked up and down the fence's reach and found a gap that would accommodate Seamus, if not his chair also at the same time.

    'I'll manage to walk, if you could stand my arm around your shoulder.'

    And so it was. We stumbled up the path, pausing to deal clumsily with the fence (I tore my jeans-and part of my thigh-open on a hook of metal). We bundled through and I half-carried, half-dragged him up the incline, our grunts competing with each other until we reached the top. The criss-cross structure of branches above looked like fractures in the sky. I had a feeling this was the last place the three of us had converged before we were blown apart like seeds from a dandelion clock.

    I had to leave Seamus on his own while I helped Helen with the awkward wheelchair. I unfolded it and wrestled him in, holding him steady by the shoulders and looking down at his wasted shape, huddled into his old greatcoat. 'Chins up, fatty,' I said, and he found a smile from somewhere. I was fit for nothing now and flopped down on the snow.

    'Oh come on, you fanny,' chided Helen. 'I know from personal experience that you have more stamina than that.'

    'That was a long time ago,' I said. 'I can only manage the odd five-minute shag these days.'

    'Instead of the marathon seven minuters when you were in your prime?' coughed Seamus.

    'Fuck your mother,' I said, good-humouredly, 'if you can find the rock she crawled under.'

    Helen said: 'Look.'

    At the field's far end, where it began to dip towards the canal, soft, ochre light danced. I tensed, waiting for the sound of MacCreadle's bike or the percussive effect of half a dozen cans of Bastard Brew being opened at the same time. It took us twenty minutes to cross the field, as Seamus' chair kept getting trapped in the snow or clashing against a frozen divot in the earth, threatening to spill him out.

    'You never said, Seamus,' I began, glad that I'd found something to talk about, something to fill the silence that wouldn't have sounded as twattish or desperate as a comment upon how brutal the weather had been recently. 'You never said what happened to your lady friend, Chicken Little, the one who thought the sky was falling in on her.'

    We'd reached the Arches; a pall of relief and affection swamped me, despite the blind panic fuelling our journey here. Someone had lit a candle for us, it seemed; it shivered, a pathetic thing, as much use as an umbrella made of salt.