The One Safe Place (46 page)

Marshall couldn't blame him. He himself was losing patience with his inability to sleep. Darren had nodded off once in his chair, and jerked awake glaring at Marshall and clenching his fists; then he'd grimaced and relaxed, emitting a grunt or a laugh. "What the fuck," he'd said about something that no longer mattered to him. "I'm off up. Do what you want."

"Can I watch television if I feel like it?"

Darren had performed his incredulous gape. "It's there, lad. That's what it's for, watching. There's the channel control. You don't want me to work it for you, do you? Want me to hold your dick for you while you watch a mucky video?"

"You're kidding."

Darren had stared at him as if he couldn't believe they were having this conversation. "Fuck off," he'd snarled, and stomped upstairs.

Marshall still couldn't blame him—not when Marshall had been acting like a little kid, demanding to be found things to do. He felt small and empty, hardly there at all, and dreading any further knowledge of himself. He would have read a book, except that there wasn't a book to be seen, and in any case what were books? All he did with them was stick his ostrich head in them. His skull was filling with sand, and he grabbed the channel control to keep the ants at bay.

A charred picture swam into the tank of the screen, and a face which he was sure he ought to recognise bobbed up. Why, it was Inspector Clouseau, who used to make Marshall and his father laugh together, although what was he doing in monochrome? A salesman's car was stolen and disguised at Clouseau's garage while Marshall waited for the laughs. Maybe he was missing the joke as Clouseau trapped a man's fingers in the lid of a record player, and beat up an old man and trod on his pet terrapin, and went to cut the face of the salesman's wife with some broken glass but punched her in the stomach instead. By now Marshall felt several kinds of betrayed by Clouseau, so that when the salesman caught up with him at last he heard himself yelling "Yay!" But the salesman was beaten up at length before he slammed a car door on Clouseau's hand and smashed his head with a wrench, and then the movie was over.

It wasn't nearly enough, nor was the WCW wrestling that followed. He seemed always to have known that wrestling was mostly stunts and superfitness, but now he saw that some of the wrestlers were life-size plastic figures that were being thrown about the ring. Maybe they all were; the closer he peered, the jerkier their movements grew. The ranting commentary must be intended to convince the viewer they were real. When a figure was flung over the ropes and lay writhing on the concrete, Marshall scoffed aloud and punched the arms of the chair in frustration. He needed something more, and his fists sprang him from the chair. His friend had told him there was something else he could watch.

At first he couldn't find any cassettes in the room. Surely his friend hadn't lied to him. He let out a cry of relief upon discovering a pile of cassettes behind the video recorder, lying flat in the dust. Cassettes should never be stored lying down, and he stood them on end before picking up one to squint at the handwritten label. The scrawled letters, which were of various sizes, wriggled back and forth on the rectangle of paper as he tried to find words in them. Eventually he was almost sure they said
A BITCH AND HER MATE
. He tugged the cassette out of its cardboard sheath and switched on the video recorder. Having fed the tape into its toothless black mouth he sat down, experiencing a mixture of eagerness and apprehension which made him feel slightly nauseous, to watch.

The image on the screen, an announcement that the next program would follow shortly, remained stubbornly unchanged. It took him a few moments to grasp that the set wasn't tuned to the video channel. He began to press the buttons on the remote control, and had to resist working his way through the digits of his phone number. Maggots of static swarmed hissing out of the television, and then he found a blank screen moaning to itself. Another button, and the screen flared and quivered with the contents of the cassette.

He heard a voice not unlike his mother's saying "Oh, there's a big boy. There's such a big boy" as if those were the only words she could bring to mind, and a dog barking. The sounds were so close that they seemed to be flattening themselves against the inside of the screen, down which a succession of white ropes of static was crawling. Then the ropes sank out of view, leaving a strip of noise lines bunched at the top of the screen, and he saw the woman and the dog.

Their outlines were melting with duplication; their colours leaked. The woman's flesh, of which there appeared to be a generous helping, was bright orange, while the Alsatian's panting head resembled a mask made out of an old rug, and Marshall could almost believe that the part of the animal which was receiving a good deal of attention was a length of dark red plastic pipe. As the woman nodded, mumbling her litany as best she could, her hair trailed back and forth over the dog's pelt, though since they were the same brown Marshall saw the hair reaching out of the animal to pull her head to it. That wasn't the worst, however. The more she tried to pronounce her speech, the more she sounded like his mother talking in her sleep.

He'd once heard his mother murmuring like that to his father, in that tone and maybe in some of those words, when they must have thought Marshall was asleep. Now that his father was gone, what would she do for sex? He'd never thought about that before, and wished he hadn't while the cassette was playing. Her voice was sticking to his ears—the voice of the woman with the dog, which couldn't really be his mother's voice. Nevertheless he was growing desperate to see her face properly, with nothing in its mouth.

Her head gasped up at last, trailing orange streaks. The band of interference hid her eyes like a blindfold. She lifted the dog on top of her and clasped her cartoon legs around it while Marshall stared about, failing to locate a control for the video recorder. He fell on his knees before the television and poked the rewind button of the player. When the stretched black mouth began to utter a sound suggestive of the chewing of tape, he busied himself with the tuning wheel instead. That only spread the band of interference, and so he retreated to his chair.

As though in sympathy with the sections of the participants on which the camera was concentrating, the area of him between his rib-cage and his thighs was growing variously uncomfortable. The action on the screen achieved its point at last, noisily and blurrily, and he very much wanted to look away instead of waiting for the woman's face to make itself clear to him. He couldn't watch once she began to use her tongue, though closing his eyes didn't keep out her moans of apparent pleasure. She looked exactly like his mother now. He didn't know which idea was more loathsome—that it was his mother in the movie or that he was capable of imagining it was. He dug open his eyes with his thumbs in an attempt to escape the self which was trapped in his head, and saw the image on the screen fading into a grayness shot with broken white lines. The movie was finished. He sprang at the machine, though he didn't know if he meant to eject the cassette or rewind it to persuade himself the woman was nobody he knew. Then his mother appeared in front of him.

She was weeping. For a moment in which he felt he was falling apart, he thought that was because she knew he'd recognised her in the movie; then he saw himself weeping beside her. They were at his father's bookshop. A newscaster ousted them from the screen and said "Police—" before giving way to an uneasily blank screen at which Marshall stared, struggling to understand.

The newscast wasn't connected with the movie on the tape—he mustn't let himself imagine it was. His friend must have recorded the newscast out of sympathy for him. Maybe he'd found the tape in the machine when he'd needed to record. Who could have left it there? Of course, the people he'd warned Marshall against. What were such people doing in a nurse's house, and were they likely to return? Marshall's nerves were yearning for at least those answers. He jabbed the control at the television until the screen went blank, and scrambled out of the room.

As he trod on the first stair his foot squashed an insect, gristle turning to pulp. It wasn't an insect, it was one of the cigarette butts which were crawling about the floor. Why would a nurse keep her house in such a state? Maybe because she was overworked, not least by him, or maybe the butts weren't really there, any more than the stairs narrowed as they ascended. He wasn't sure how much of what he had seen on the television was real. Maybe all of this simply proved the pills hadn't worked because he hadn't given them a chance. Since he and his friend were alone in the house, there ought to be a bed he could use. He gasped with relief as he gained the landing, then he recoiled against the banister. A voice had begun to croak at him.

Maybe it was a toy or a talking bird—it sounded repetitive enough. "Who is it? Who is it?" it squawked. He threw himself away from the unfit banister and stopped himself by clutching a doorknob that rattled in its socket. The sound sent the voice into a frenzy. "Who's that? I know you're out there. Come and finish me off if you're going to. Stop your game."

Marshall's hand was turning the doorknob, which he could only hope would come loose. He felt it catch the mechanism, and the yielding of the door rendered him helpless. The knob pulled at his hand, dragging him across the threshold.

For entirely too long he was unable to distinguish any of the contents of the room as its clutter heaped itself up in his skull. Surely the room was the source of all the mess in the house. He had a suffocating impression of countless broken objects piled on the floor and against the walls, blocking off part of the high meagre window. Amid all this was a bed in which lay a figure composed of dirty white rubber gone so rotten he could smell it. It was just one more abandoned object, even though it moved, its fleshless knobbly hands plucking at the pyjama jacket which hung on its long shrunken arms and mottled torso as its head jerked on the skein of neck and flapped its dangling cheeks. "I know you," it croaked. "Come ahead, don't be frit. You'll see to me, you're a good lad."

So it was a person, and certainly no worse than the other things Marshall had seen during the eternity he'd spent in this state. He wanted to look away from the old man's bulging eyes, in which red cracks were visibly multiplying, but they were brimming over with a plea which his muscles seemed unable to resist. "That's the ticket," the old man wheezed as Marshall took a step toward him. "Only shut us in so they won't hear."

Marshall faltered, his ankles scraping together. "Who?"

"Who do you think, lad. Don't let on you've forgotten. The enemy, that's who."

"The people Darren said I should keep away from, you mean?"

"Darren, aye. Phil's lad. Haven't seen Phil since they took him away."

"Who did?"

"Who are we talking about? Are you trying to confuse me or summat? Get in before they get you too. You'll be safe in here."

Did he mean the room or the bed? His legs appeared to be trying to lift the faded stained quilt, but they kept collapsing, driving out a smell which made Marshall clutch at his face. The boy pulled the door shut and stayed where he was. "What do they do?"

"Nowt if you steer clear of them. They're only ordinary fellers like us and you Yanks. Took the Japs to bring you into it, though, didn't it? They're the worst. If them lot catch you—Here, I'll show you what they do, and worse."

He was kicking the quilt and tugging feebly at it, movements which cancelled each other out. "Give us a hand," he whined. "That's how they left me. Can't get it off by meself."

Marshall would have felt cruel if he hadn't approached the bed. He stopped within an arm's length of the side of it, reluctant to see what might have been done to the old man. "Shouldn't I get the nurse?"

"You'll do, lad."

She wasn't in the house. Marshall felt guilty for having offered the old man false hope. "I'm in pain here. You'll be like me one day," the old man complained, and a confusion of emotions—pity, apprehension, panic at the way his mind couldn't be trusted even to remember that the nurse had gone out—took Marshall a step closer. The old eyes swivelled toward him, a gleam appearing through their webs of blood. "That's it, lad, just throw it off."

Marshall breathed through his mouth, which tasted of the stench of the room, and grabbing the quilt by the nearest corner, flung it back. He managed not to recoil, but clapped a hand over the lower half of his face. The old man's pyjama jacket was mostly unbuttoned, displaying a mass of purple bruises turning yellow, and his pyjama trousers were wide open. Above the sticks of legs, which looked raw with some kind of torture, he was sticking up like the dog in the video. Marshall knew that could happen in bed—he'd wakened more than once to find himself like that—but the sight dismayed him, brought images of the dog and the woman with his mother's voice crowding into his head. He stood swaying, afraid that if he moved he would sprawl across the bed, until the old man sniggered. "You're all right, there's no gas. You don't need a mask."

Marshall drew a deep breath muffled by his fingers and took his hand away from his face. "Shall I cover you up now?"

"No panic. Seen everything you want?"

Marshall felt ashamed of wanting to turn away from the sores and bruises when he'd asked to see them, but they weren't all he yearned to look away from. "Yes," he mumbled. "Sorry. Thanks."

"Maybe you can give us a bit more of a hand."

"How?"

"For a start, help us up a bit."

The request seemed not to tally with the old man's gestures, his hands waving on either side of his groin, unless he wanted Marshall to lift him with one hand behind his back and the other beneath his legs. Marshall was incapable of that, not least because of the concentration of the stench in that area of the mattress. He moved alongside the flaccid grubby pillow and took hold of the old man's shoulders, and hands which felt exactly like bone closed around his wrists. As Marshall lifted him against the sagging headboard, the movement dragged the old man's trousers down his legs. He began to roll his eyes and rub his lips together and poke his mouldy tongue between them. "Ooh God, I need—"