The Folded Man

 

 

 

 

Matt Hill
was born in 1984 and grew up in Tameside, Greater Manchester. After completing a journalism
degree at Cardiff
University, he trained as
a copywriter. Matt currently lives and works in London. You'll find him on Twitter @matthewhill.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE FOLDED MAN

 

 

 

Matt Hill

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First published in Great Britain by

Sandstone Press Ltd

PO Box 5725

One High Street

Dingwall

Ross-shire

IV15 9WJ

Scotland.

 

www.
sandstonepress.com

 

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored or transmitted in any form without the express

written permission of the publisher.

 

©
Matt Hill 2013

 

The moral right of Matt Hill to be recognised as the

author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.

 

The
Folded Man
was placed runner-up in the

2012 Dundee International Book Prize

 

The publisher acknowledges subsidy from Creative Scotland

towards publication of this volume.

 

 

  

ISBN: 978-1-908737-34-2

ISBNe: 978-1-908737-35-9

 

Cover design by Graham Thew, Dublin.

Ebook by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore.

 

 

 

 

For
Dom.

 

Acknowledgements

Love and thanks to family, near and far, here and not. ­Especially my grandparents, Julia and Alan, and my brother, Alex, for their stories; and my godmother Val, who told me to never apologise for being honest.

Thank you to those who read drafts and chatted through ideas: Gareth and Sarah Hulmes, Gareth Clarke, Edd Barber, Cat Gee, Mike Williams, Ed Vanstone, ­Chrissy Hoey, Gemma Kirkpatrick, Amy Hoyle, Chris White, Heather Taylor, Nick Moran, James Leadley, and Mark Griffiths – as well as Anna Day and everyone ­involved with the Dundee Prize. To Caroline and Gary Smailes, the kind of gratitude a rainforest's worth of greetings cards couldn't say.

Many thanks to my agent, Sam Copeland, for his belief and his graft – and to Eilidh Smith at Sandstone Press for all of hers.

And then to Suzanne. Without whom –

 

0.

Brian means to divide himself by two.

He wants a thick lamp post for starters. A long enough road for seconds. And in the boot, there's enough cable to string up an ox.

So when he finds the right post on the right road, he rigs it good. He ties it off with good strong knots. And when he's set, he leans out the car window and hooks the cable's other end with a stick. He pulls it into the car and runs a lasso round his waist. There, by his crotch, he makes the same knots again, strong despite himself, grazing sweaty palms on cold steel.

He winds the window up. He remembers some facts from a dirty yellow post-it:

I
am a special kind of bastard. Fat and grim and
dying. A challenging kind of bastard, too. Didn't know
it? Skin an apple and you might miss a worm
in the middle.

In the rear-view mirror, the Pennines. Through the sunroof, slate. Forward, a sign pointing into Manchester, half a mile ahead.

Course, you aren't meant to tell, he writes on a fresh sheet. You're meant to show.

Brian sets off hard. Chasing some kind of happy-ever-after.

On the pavement, the cable uncoils – a long, sharp snake in school-jumper grey.

1.

Thursdays, Diane comes round to spoil Brian's day.

Brian, he's fannying about in the lounge with a tin ­between his legs, watching his CCTV monitor, watching her walk up the drive, through rain, through the door. Into the hallway, watching her shake her brolly up the wallpaper.

Brian! she shouts, bright as buttons. You in?

Through here.

Diane clumps through the hall and wanders in. Looks around and wonders.

Brian sits in his chair – the wheelchair in the middle of his world. Today it's the tin, but she knows from here that all days are the same. All days, every hour – that he's trapped. A fat man entering a cold middle age with nothing left to burn. A fat child, a chubby little boy, ageing without grace. And all these things: smoking and eating and sleeping between these damp, bare walls. Sitting under bare bulbs, through the power cuts and water shortages; the riots and the radicals at his door. Always in this same chair at the arse-end of Manchester, capital of the north.

Their cold city, the blinking city. That's our Brian. This man without hope or humility.

Brian mixes goop in his old paint tin, turning circles with the back of a wooden spoon. No mistake: the room stinks – really stinks. Stinks of all sorts. A low-hung smell of washing-up liquid and something worse. It catches in her throat the way chilli powder does; a burnt smell, like dust over heater filaments.

Morning, she says. It's a smooth, even voice. For a ­moment she thinks she sees her breath.

Washing's by the stairs, Brian says. Didn't get round to it.

Diane smiles. Diane looks at all the sand on the floor. She tells him not to fuss. Diane says, You're a funny ­onion.

Brian goes on stirring tight circles in the goop. His eyes hardly move, dry and red at the edges.

Still waters run deep, Diane thinks. Another northern loner on the list in her pocket.

What's that you're making there then? Diane asks. She unbuttons her bright red coat and slips it off. She pats down her dress.

Exfoliant.

She nods again. Smiles that weapons-grade smile.

And you've done your exercises this week?

Few dips, aye.

You'll never get out the bath one day, she says.

He looks right through her. I'll buy a crane.

Still wearing that hat inside, too, Diane says. Do your skin no good, will it?

Well, he doesn't like her dress either. Too bright, isn't it. Something for the bees.

No ironing, love? Brought your week's food as well. Autocooker of yours still on the blink I'll bet, but I've chucked a few meat cartridges in there anyway.

Brian's wheelchair creaks.

Dial ham you get tuna, he says.
Dial tuna you get steam. Dial lamb you get scolded.
So yes. And my cigarette ­papers?

All in the bag. Oh, and no eggs available anywhere close this week – or that's what they're saying – but the milk'll last you.

He looks at the CCTV monitor again. White fuzz and fizz, passing cars, bushes growing every which way but straight. An old, purple Transit across the road – that sometime symbol of hard work. A workhorse turned weapon in riot-time. Pigs, they called them round this way. Ironic or wit or whatever.

Back to Diane, back to her red file.

Them kids been back? Diane says.

He looks at the monitors as if to double-check.

Not this week, Brian says. Bastards need sending the Wilbers' way.

Can't wish that on anyone, love. You must call the ­police first.

Brian smiles into the tin.

Got a pen then, treacle?

He points at the sideboard. A pot next to the Bibles and Torahs, the books and post-its; the empty crisp packets and the tacky porcelain. Next to relics of the olden days. His older ways.

Diane stands to fetch it.

Sign here then love, she says, tapping a dotted line on the paper. She's bending over him and holding the paper close. Brian can see her bra, the crease of her breast. Everything's red.

Just so's they know I've been, she says.

Brian writes his name while Diane takes the washing through. The washing plus the shopping bags. He's written Brian with his surname while she drops all the bags on the cold lino. He hears her rumbling about in the cupboards. Looking for detergent he basically doesn't have. For storage space he doesn't need. He hears her put the shopping away. The washing machine door shutting. The click. The pump and the water –

Next Thursday then, Diane says, back
now and putting her coat on. Diane who never flinches,
never blushes. And you best take care.

Brian puts the tin down and stops mixing. Pulls out the creamy wooden spoon and puts it flat on the plastic bag that's spilling sand by his side. He lights the black end of half a joint and rolls the tip round the glass ashtray.

I'm dying, Diane, he says, as she opens the door to leave.

Diane stops and turns.

You big wally, she says. All of us always are. But listen, son. You must stop cooking your hair.

 

Two men load Brian onto the community care bus. It'd be a kind of comedy in another setting, this man being folded up and tinned by the able. His weight makes him awkward to shift up the access ramp, and the wheels of his chair keep jamming alternately, swinging what pass for his feet from left to right.

Your transport
company
, it says up the side.

The bus, it shows its age now: an armoured half-track carrier the council converted to run supplies, and long since sold off to the city's health trust. Inside it's oil and pop rivets, old sandwich wrappers under seats, old stains and burns on the fabric – like nothing about public transport changes, or nothing ever will. Only this thing has six-inch portholes where the old buses had plate glass. And it's a slow cooker. An iron lung, pushing stale air through hollow men.

The men shepherd Brian straight up the bus, rolling him backwards. He clings to his blanket and looks down while death-grey eyes scan him from all sides. The men don't speak as they strap his chair to the subframe. From here, there's only rain ahead. The smell of diesel. The heads lolling around on slack necks and sloping shoulders.

To his right, in a single corner seat, a boy is masturbating under his coat.

Brian asks him to stop – a quiet word if anything. ­Really, you wouldn't hear it over the cries and the gibbering. Wouldn't notice for all these recitals and prayers.

The boy stops all right. The boy's face splits into laughter. He makes the effort to lean over and spit a fat greenie in Brian's lap.

Mong, the boy says. Bloody paedo. Fuck off with you.

Brian falters. The bus takes off, grunting forwards. ­Brian turns away, wipes the slime off himself. He closes his eyes. Shuts them so tight; buttons them shut against the world.

Brian, he worries the bus might roll on a corner. Wishes it weren't a single driver responsible for all these people. He imagines himself crushed, split, burnt. His chair on fire. He's scared of fallibility is why: the one bad habit they always excuse.

Only it's 2018. Trust is a currency now.

The wheels on the bus go round and round. And Brian's bones are jumbled all the way into Manchester.

 

In Argos, the city-centre branch, Brian blocks the queue. He knows it, too, but pretends he doesn't. Pretends like he hasn't noticed everyone. It's an aloofness the wheelchair affords; an arrogance that goes unchallenged.

He's looking at watches – classic watches with faux leather straps, edged in gold, the kind that really say something about a man. They're four pounds each, every one. A clearance sale. A closing-down sale. That's how come they're by the exit. Right next to the shattered windows. End of days for another dead chain.

Brian pores and ponders and pushes fingerprints over glass. Shakes and listens to each watch in turn.

Brian likes that every watch measures time differently. A second out, others an hour slow. A better way to look at things.

In the face of every watch, the queue threads past behind him.

 

Brian retches bile in the disabled toilet at Burger King.

Brian holds the hand rail tight. He's got half a Chicken Royale down his beard and front, and mayonnaise on his hat. He starts to wipe himself with a handful of low-grade tissue, pulling thick bunches off the reel to wipe Fanta and sticky chip salt from the back of his neck, thinking this is what wheelchairs get a man.

He pulls his hat off and pushes it into the low sink for disabled people. He watches a faint trickle of hot water running over it, beading in places on loose strands of wool.

Bastards, he's saying. Dirty little bastards.

So Brian cleans his beard in the water; splashes his face for good measure. The tissue tears and smears and sticks in his whiskers. His eyes are watering he's so wound up.

Under the striplights in the Burger King disabled toilet, Brian's head looks like a buttered chessboard. That's because he keeps his hair the way farmers do their fields. Like crop rotation, he tells Diane on Thursdays, or anyone else who'll listen. How a man gets more one side when the other's shorn close. As rapeseed, as wheat, as hair.

To manage it, he's measured his head into quadrants and divided each of these by length. Shorn. Short. Long. Longer. With a comb, he's divided each of these quarters into many little squares of hair, and greased every bit with Vaseline for freshness. Every piece, every point, is sectioned off with an old rubber band. It makes for slick, wet squares, right the way across. The hat keeps it neat; a crown to fasten it close.

Every morning, he cuts out a tail of hair and cooks it with breakfast.

 

Oftentimes, the community bus is late back.

Gone eleven, Brian runs the bath downstairs. He takes the paint tin of exfoliant, a box of salt and an ashtray into the damp bathroom with him. He left the skimmer in there last time. Good. He runs the tap, a trickle first, turning heavy as the boiler shrieks.

He shakes the salt and pours it. He makes the sea.

When the water's on the right side of hot, Brian undresses. He does it slowly, awkwardly, mindful of old scabs. He peels himself. The aches of a long day out are racking his spine.

From his chair, Brian clambers into the bath lift harness – pausing for breath, shuffling for comfort – before lowering himself into the tepid water. Into the stinging water. Settling, easing, ready, he lights another three-skin joint and pulls hard, holding smoke down till his lungs burn. As he exhales, he takes a handful of exfoliant and begins to scrub away at the scales. He works coarse skin from his waist to his feet, drawing blood in semi-circles.

There's a rush, always a rush, that comes with this routine. Running sharpened hands over fused shins and fused calves and fused knees – the release and relief of finding the smooth beneath. It's the guilt and the hate, the pleasure and the shame. Sharp hands running over a single ankle, across the conjoined, flattened feet. It's the gritty sand he feels between his backside and the canvas of the bath lift. The salted water biting. The salt burning hot, ruthless.

On these powdered rocks, the mermaid throne. A throne in his six-foot sea.

He reaches for the skimmer, begins to fish bits of himself from the surface.

For Brian, in the bath downstairs and bleeding, the pink water holds a charge – an alternating current he's found for free.