Surrender (11 page)

We were both fifteen years old that spring, although Finnigan seemed without age, the way a cat appears for much of its life, its face unchanged by time. He dressed in clothes thefted from clotheslines, from bags left outside the charity shop. He rarely spoke about anything except the future — never about where he’d come from, who or what he’d left behind. He was a beg borrow and stealer, the owner of nearly nothing. He’d loved Surrender from the moment he saw him, and the hound was likewise fonder of Finnigan than he was of anyone else. I knew that while I was at school, Finnigan and the dog accompanied each other on long patrols of the countryside; I knew, too, that they traveled at night, borrowing trucks left parked in laneways, borrowing bicycles from garden sheds, plucking fruit from laden trees, plucking pullets from the roost. I knew that while I slept or ran errands or sat alone at my books, Finnigan took Surrender to places he never intended to take me; I knew he told Surrender things he chose not to share with me. My feelings weren’t hurt, not really — I told myself that Surrender was my dog and wherever he was, so was I; what he heard, I heard too. Besides, at that time and at that age, I had other things on my mind.

“Sarah!” I call. “Sarah!”

My nose has started to bleed.

She comes to the room after a short delay, dressed in vulnerable cream. “Oh Gabriel!” she says. She bundles a towel against my face, tilts me forward and pinches my nose. These are such small things, but I can’t do them myself. Anyway, I wanted her here. In this room the view never changes except as Sarah comes and goes.

While the bleeding slows she rubs my back, her fingers rumbling on my ribs. I want to say
Don’t rub too hard
, for under the press of her hand I can feel my skeleton give. My bones are brittle, like those brought up from a desiccated tomb. Instead I shake myself free from the towel and say nothing of the sort. “Where were you?” I ask, accusingly.

“Working,” she answers, looking surprised. “There’s lots to do around here, you know.”

“. . . Has anyone come around, asking for me?”

“No, Gabe.”

“But if you were working, you might not have seen . . .”

She shakes her head slowly. “There’s been no one, Gabriel.”

I sink in my pillows, suck the blood from my lips.

“Who are you expecting?” She almost whispers it. I glance away. I won’t tell.

Instead I ask feebly, “Can you stay with me?”

And she does; she changes my nightshirt and massages my feet, she rubs lotion into my hands. She brushes my hair and dabs oil on my lips, refreshes the linen on my wounds. She does all this gladly, chatting away, yet I can see her thoughts slip through the walls, I can hear her wishing I’d go to sleep so she can get on with what occupies her. But I stay vividly awake, watching her. I’ll sleep when I’m dead.

The year I was fifteen was the year my mother took to muttering under her breath when she encountered any young lady who had even the vaguest potential to catch the eye of a young man. She would stand at the window, ironing clothes, curtained from sight, assessing passersby. Most of them she dismissed with a sharp click of the tongue. But if a girl of a certain age came along, Mother would mutter as if laying a hex. Meeting such specimens in town made her grimace, brisk her pace, shoo me onward, cast her curse. In the evening, washing dishes, she would tally the horrible total of faults she had encountered that day.
That Jessica Flyte’s got a face like a fish; someone should tell her she’s not all that she thinks
.
Deirdre Smythe will be fat, like her mother
.
Lillian Brink’s very la-di-da; I pity the man who marries her
. And she’d drive them all off with hisses and spits, the sound of an attacking reptile. I sensed from the start that this performance was for me, but for a time I couldn’t guess its reason. It was in a moment when my mind was blank that I eventually understood. My mother was making an island of me.

It’s strange: I remember the moment as one wouldn’t forget a fall into arctic seas. Since childhood I’d been building a wall meant to protect me from the worst of the harm. In that moment of understanding, however, the wall quaked and near-fatally cracked. My stomach flipped, my scalp crawled, my mind reeled sickeningly. I gripped my chair and sat still, though my instinct was to rampage or flee. My mother had breached the wall and I stood knee-deep in a brackeny fluid that was seeping through the cracks. I fought to control myself, halt the slide, expel her from my head. Already a corner of my brain had been made black and sodden by her.

I walked around in a stupor for days, tormented by the broken wall, the leaking fluid, the mush in my brain that felt like a bruise and smelled of pond scum, an odor that oozed through my skin. Only Finnigan noticed my distraction, and he watched me incuriously while I struggled to explain. We were on the hill that overlooked the cattle yards where the two of us had made our pact, years ago. Surrender was hunting through blackberry and weed, flushing out hysterical birds. The shadows cast by the pine trees waltzed on the compacted earth. When I’d wrung out my troubles and sagged, feeling gouged, Finnigan exploded with laughter. He laughed till he spluttered, till his hyena eyes streamed. He fell limply across the earth and pummeled it with his fists. He dragged himself out of the dust and whimpered, “Go on, tell it again.”

“It isn’t funny.”

“Yes it is. Tell me again.”

I glared at him, my heart beating fast. A desperate chasm was breaking open in me; even Finnigan, my friend, couldn’t understand. “Shut up,” I growled. “Why don’t you ever shut up?”

Finnigan was chortling. “Mush in your brain! You’ve got mush
for
a brain! Your mother’s as mad as a hatter: what do you care what she says?”

I looked away, my face burning, slivers of flesh sliced from me. Surrender’s snout was buried in undergrowth; Finnigan’s hands crouched like spiders on the ground. I said, “This is different — I can’t explain. She’s taking things from me that I don’t even have. Ordinary things — liking someone, being married, living a normal life. She doesn’t want me getting that. She’s ruining everything before it starts. She doesn’t want me
ever
to be happy.”

I glanced at him; his face was blank; perhaps it was simply impossible for him to appreciate. His own life would never be like anyone else’s — he had no use for normal or ordinary things. But I wasn’t that way: I hankered to be like everybody else. I felt mortally alone and defeated. I said, “I always thought that, one day, I’d get free. I’d walk away and be free. But now I don’t think I can. I’ll never get this bruise out of my brain.”

Finnigan looked up sharply. “Walk away where?” he asked. “Where would you go?”

“I don’t know: somewhere. I can’t stay here.”

“But what about me? We had a pact! You swore! And anyway, what makes you think somewhere else would be different? You’d still be kooksville, wherever you went.”

I bit my lip. He watched me as a crocodile watches an animal bending to drink. Finally I said, “Be quiet.”

“I’m just saying —”

“Yes: stop saying it. You’re missing the point.” I got to my feet, brushed the dust from my knees, walked away across the fawn earth. “You don’t understand. You never do.”

He answered instantly. “You’re wrong.”

I could not resist: I looked back at him. He wasn’t easy to find among the shadows, being dusky as something grown from the soil. His eyes were resting calmly on me. “You’re not alone, Gabriel. You have me. As long as you stay here, you’ll have me. There’ll be no damage in your head, no bruising, no mush. Nothing will hurt. I’ll keep it all out. I’ve done it before. It’s always been us — you and me. In the house, you and me, against
them
. Remember?”

I stared at him, straining to see — in the shifting shade of the trees he vanished and vanished again. My heart fluttered, my blood streamed, there was a strange weightlessness to my bones. “Yes,” I said, “I remember. I know.” I knew he was dangerous and that I was endangered, that he was, like my parents, making a prisoner of me — yet he was also salvation: I wasn’t alone. “I’ll see you later,” I said, and shambled down the hill, leaving Surrender to choose whether to follow or stay. I walked until the land flattened and the sale yards stood like a rib cage around me, deserted but for the crows. The wind had dropped; Surrender hadn’t followed; there was now some peace in my mind. I leaned on a railing and wiped grit from my eyes. I knew that the worst of my life was over, that things would never be so bad. Finnigan was unruly, perhaps he was mad — nonetheless a surge of affection went through me for him. I loved him for all the things he knew about me — for things like my brainstorming mother — and equally for all the things he didn’t know: for things like Evangeline.

McIllwraith has fallen asleep on the floor. His eyes shut like someone pulled a fuse in his head, and he slept. I left Surrender in the roof and came down closer. The Constable makes a small noise as he sleeps, as if some tiny creature who lives in his nose uses this time to rearrange its nest.

Outside, finally, it’s true night. No longer gray, but black. He looks innocent as a babe, lying there, as if he was sleeping the sleep of the just.

I have the wooden pike that I ripped from the ceiling beam. It is as long as my arm from elbow to wrist. When I put it down on the kitchen counter, it clunks. I poke around in the kitchen, looking for something to eat. In the refrigerator I find a bottle of beer kept cold for surprise guests. I’m a surprise guest, so I take the bottle and pick up the stake and sit cross-legged on the couch. I can smell the perfume of the notebook-lady, detect the odor of ink. The room is warm, which I like. I haven’t got penguin feathers or a wolf’s coat — winter’s long, for me. A stuffy room is luxury. I wish that I could stay.

I lay the spike across my lap and take a swig of beer.

McIllwraith breathes; I look down at him. If the sun was shining above us, my shadow would pool on him. His eyelashes touch my toes — that’s how close I am. Maybe, in his dream, he smells me, the mountains, the snowy sky.

I think of the bones they found in the forest. Finger bones, feet bones, backbones, skull. Underneath his skin, McIllwraith has bones the same.

Now Eli, I say, I want you to listen. I’m not very happy with you. . . . What’s that? Why? What have you done? Oh, I think you know. Remember how proud it made the angel, to have you as a friend. He didn’t have very many friends — in fact, he had none. But he thought that he had you.

McIllwraith is silent.

He trusted you. He ran big risks for you. Do you know what his father would have done to him, if he’d found out there was a traitor under his roof?

McIllwraith stays silent.

Nothing nice.

The beer bottle stings my hand, it’s so cold.

But he was flattered and eager and honored to help you. And what thanks did you give? McIllwraith, answer me.

There’s silence. Just the fire, a log falling.

You weren’t his friend. You used him, that’s all. And when you saw the chance to make a name for yourself, you used him again. You forgot all the things he’d done for you, all the risks he’d run. Now you’ve got perfumed ladies in your house; now your escape is at hand. And where is our angel? Shut up in a room.

McIllwraith shifts, nervously.

Now, I admire treachery as much as anyone. But I can’t let it go unpunished. The angel might forgive you — that’s his job. Not mine. So here I am: here we both are.

Put the stake away, Finnigan. Let’s talk reasonably about this
.

Don’t tell me what to do, Eli. You know I can’t bear that.

And before he can protest further, I put the stake away.

I think it was her name that drew my attention.
Evangeline
: the word itself is holy.

In the center of my palms spread two dark lakes. They are not wounds — flesh ices them over. But the blackness is blood, gathered swampishly. When I press a finger to the fluid, it radiates. When I clamp and unclamp my fists, it dissipates. Slowly it refills, a little deeper each time, a little blacker, a swelling swamp. Such unnecessary reminders of my approaching fate irritate me no end. I drag words up my rusty throat and say to my body, “Look alive.”