A Crescent-shaped Scar
I’m standing in front of a broken mirror with a sharp, dagger of glass held firm in my hand and I am as happy, right now, as I can ever remember being in my life.
***
A few days ago, I had an accident in my garden and ended up cutting myself quite badly on the cheek just under my right eye. It was, as it turned out, a perfectly appropriate way to round off what had already been a frustrating and exasperating week, a week sent to test my patience and push at the edges of my resilience, a week which, standing in the middle of my garden with my hands quickly covered in the sticky warmth of my own blood, I had cause to curse with even more vehemence than usual.
It was a week that began with a brick tossed purposefully and maliciously through my drawing room window early one evening. I was, by some good fortune, not at home when it happened but the effects were all there for me to see when I returned later that day. Small shards of sharp glass lay scattered all across the floor, there was a gaping gash in the window frame through which the rain had blown in and the carpets and furniture had a sodden, dishevelled look to them, the curtains sucking outwards and billowing roughly in the open air. Inside, landed neatly right in the middle of the floor was a red house brick with a scribbled note wrapped untidily around it.
“Why aren’t you dead yet?”
Sometimes they have notes, sometimes they don’t. I’ve had more than my share of bricks thrown through this window over the years and I’ve seen all possible variations on the theme. This one was a note carrier. “Why aren’t you dead yet?” in red marker pen written on A4 lined note paper. I flattened it out on the kitchen table for the Police to take away with them. This time they were quick to respond, polite and professional in their actions in a way I’ve grown to appreciate over the years, rather than expect as a matter of course. They took their pictures and they made their calls but they didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know and they didn’t make any promises they won’t be able to keep.
Outside when they were leaving, while the joiner they’d called was busy putting up boards over my broken window, a group of the neighbours gathered together across the road. They didn’t call over, didn’t say or gesture anything to me, they only stood and watched and talked amongst themselves, a grim assembly of sullen whispers and nasty smiles. They are like crows perched on a clifftop these people who live around me. They spend their days forever staring twitchily in my direction, watching and waiting on the off-chance they might one day have a corpse to pick over. There were no words exchanged at all, but if I were paranoid – and of course I’m paranoid, it would be crazy for me to be anything else – I could swear that one of them, the fat, bald headed man from two doors down, swapped a nod and a smile (of recognition? Of understanding?) with the younger of the two policemen getting into his car. I saw this, but I didn’t say anything. I know what goes on and I try not to let it bother me.
That was the way the week began and by the morning of my accident in the garden, my window was still boarded up, the tradesmen who’d agreed to replace the frame still not having arrived to do the job. Four times they’d arranged a time to come to me now. Four times they’d failed to show, the most recent occasion being the previous day and I spent that morning on the phone to them, trying to get hold of the manager, trying to arrange a new time for them to come and complete their job. Whenever I call them I have to struggle hard to remain civil, have to fight down those urges toward combat that rise up in the face of their boorish behaviour. I know what they’re doing. I know that they test me. I know the only way to get through it is to not let them think that it upsets me. I have to block it all out. I have to pretend that nothing unusual is happening. I have to wait for them to get bored first. If I had some choice in the matter, I know, I could try to take my money elsewhere, were it not for the fact that every other company in town has already refused to take my business. There is a poison attached to my name and address in this town. It is unmistakable and impossible to avoid. “We’re too busy,” they say, voices tight and spiteful, when I say who I am. “I’m afraid we just don’t have anyone available.” I know these are excuses. I know the real reason they won’t help me, just as I know why the neighbours stare and why the bricks get thrown and why the policemen do nothing about any of it. I know what they all want. I just refuse to give it to them. I will not do it.
***
It’s never the tidiest of places at the best of times, my garden, but on morning of the accident it was in more of a mess than even I could put up with any longer. It has been a stormy autumn here with winds as bad as anything as I can remember in any of the twenty odd years I’ve been living in this house. There have been trees blowing over in the parks, slates and chimneys brought down from rooftops and the sand from the shore has been picked up and whipped across every inch of the town so that just walking out has been like taking a bath in salty grit, like having the skin blasted and burnt off you with every gust. That morning things seemed to have calmed a little, the wind dropping and the sky clearing and I took my morning coffee outside to inspect the damage left by the latest storm. There were no tiles down, thank goodness, and all the neighbour’s trees seemed to have survived more or less intact, and yet the place was still an appalling mess. The cul-de-sac in which my house is situated acts, at times like this, as a long tunnel for the wind to blow down and that morning it looked as though my poor little garden had become like a sieve for all the rubbish of the town, a last resting place for every newspaper, every plastic bag, every leaf from every tree in the whole town to get blown through and caught up in. I stood in the midst of this clutter and set my mind to putting it to rights before the day was out.
What with the business with the tradesmen and the window, it was early afternoon before I managed to get started and it soon became apparent that what I thought would be a relatively short task ended up being a much more serious undertaking than I had imagined. By the time the accident intervened to put a stop to my progress, I’d been working away for a few hours already. Behind me on the square lawn lay the fruits of my labour, four tightly packed black refuse bags full of leaves and litter and another two piles of rubbish beside them, waiting to be similarly bagged up. All this work, all that litter and I still hadn’t managed quite to make my way more than half way around the perimeter of my small garden. It was a cold afternoon, the sky a bright frozen blue, but I was sweating heavily and beginning to tire from all the awkward exertion I was putting myself through. My body felt sore and heavy, every movement becoming somehow so much more uncomfortable and difficult than it had been a few hours earlier. My back ached from bending over for so long, my arms hurt from all the stretching and lifting I was doing and every inch of my skin was covered in a thin sheen of wet sweaty dirt that clung to me and soaked through my clothes. I had dirt on my face, dirt in my hair, in my ears, in my eyes, dirt under my fingernails even, on more than one occasion, dirt in my mouth, grinding moist and gritty between my back teeth. I could feel myself sinking, steadily into the wet earth as I worked, the cold, rotten stillness of autumn filling my lungs, piles of mulch and leaves growing around me, swallowing me up amongst them.
If I were a more sensible man I would have taken a rest at this point, stopped for the day, even, because by this point the sun was beginning to dip and the light to fade and at the rate I was going it was looking extremely unlikely that the job would be finished before darkness flooded over me. I would not allow myself to entertain such any such thoughts. I don’t know what it says about the state of my mind that day – dogged and obstinate, you might say. Delusional, perhaps – but I was determined to finish the job I’d started, even if it meant carrying on to work in the dark, even if it meant a week of recuperation and hot baths to recover from it. It’s a kind of mood that comes over me every now and then. I can put a job off for months at a time, but when I do settle down to do it, it becomes important to me th
at I finish it as quickly as possible, not leave things undone and untidy. I know myself too well, perhaps. Well enough to know, at least, that a job left half done will probably never be completed.
So it was that I carried on working, my mind wandering, letting my body get on with the task in hand. I cannot say what it was I was thinking about when the accident happened. Perhaps I was lost in the recollection of some old conversation, perhaps I was running over again some event of the previous day, I do not know. All I know is that whatever day-dream I was lost in at the time, I was sharply tugged out of it by a sudden prod in my shoulder, just like a long sharp finger tapping impatiently at me to attract my attention, and just at that precise moment I was filled with the odd, cold sensation that there was someone standing right behind me.
I turned quickly and carelessly and as I did so caught my cheek on the sharp thorns of the rose bush under which I was half crouched. I felt the thorn catch on me and tear across my face, fast and sharp like crack of a whip or the swipe of a cat’s claw. As I twisted, the branch twisted with me, the thorn breaking away from the bush, one last fragment of spiky barb left hanging from my cheek as I scrambled backwards, away from the bushes, backwards towards the middle of the lawn.
What had caused me to be so startled, again, I cannot say, because when I turned to look around me, there was nobody there. I was as alone in the garden as I had been all afternoon. The sky was clear, the air was still and there was nothing moving in the garden at all, not even a bird. When I think back now, it does seem peculiar how certain I had been of a figure standing behind me, of a finger prodding into me. Even though I had not seen anyone nor heard anyone speak a word the sensation was very strong. If I thought hard enough about it, I could almost picture the figure, put a face to it even, so powerful was the image formed in my mind at that moment, and yet the fact of the matter was when I turned to look there was nobody there.
All of this seems peculiar and difficult to explain now, but at the time, truth is I had other matters to concern myself with. The thorn had ripped a long gash through the fleshy part of my face and there was already a surprising amount of blood spilling from it. I tore off my gardening gloves, all muddy and wet, and, still in the process of stumbling backwards from the bushes, brought my hands up to my face. When I brought them away again they were slick with blood, my whole face stinging wet and warm. Delicately, my hands trembling slightly, my head tilted forward, I ran my fingers along the length of the wound, feeling out its beginning and its end, from which found and, wincing at the pain of it, tugged out the last remaining barb of rose thorn. There was blood everywhere by this point. My fingers, hands were slick with it. I could feel it drip constantly from the edges of the wound, a thick rivulet running its way heavily down my face and my neck. My sweater was covered too by now, large smears where I’d rubbed my hands clean lying alongside deeper, thicker spots where the blood had fallen directly from my face. I tore it off me and pressed it to my face to stop the flow, climbed to my feet and stumbled towards the safety of the house.
Once in the bathroom, I pulled the sweater away from my face and stared wide eyed into the mirror over the sink to examine the damage. My face looked a car wreck, barely like my own face at all, the combination of blood and dirt and sweat covering me like a mask from a horror movie. Again, it was the sheer quantity of blood that shocked me most. Even in just a few minutes since the accident, a tiny thing by itself, just one small swipe from rose thorn, I had somehow contrived, it seemed to smear this red, viscous liquid all over myself. My cheeks and my forehead were red streaked; there was blood in my hair, more blood smeared in thick, finger-painted streaks all over my neck and my ears. And still it kept coming, beading out of the wound in a steady flow, constant and insistent so that no matter how I pressed my fingers, my palm against the wound, it made no obvious difference to the flow and only helped further to spread the redness around my face, my hands and, by extension everything I touched or brushed against in the room. It dripped onto the floor at my feet, into the sink, around the taps so that already the room had the look of a butchers’ counter or an operating room about it.
There is a quality, I have always felt, about the red colour of blood that makes it almost entirely unlike any substance I can think of. Even in small quantities - a tiny drop, a small smear - it is obvious and unmistakeable. It stands out from whichever surrounding it is found in, sharp and vicious. Something in that colour contains a depth of reality that is shocking and uncomfortable to look at. In truth, the amount of liquid that poured out of me that day was probably not all that great in itself, it was after all only a small cut, and yet smeared , oily and slick, around my hands and the room I stood in, it seemed like a shocking amount to my eyes, achieving a surreal, dreamlike effect which was only heightened by my shortness of breath and the racing of my heart.
I have never, you might have guessed by now, much liked the sight of blood, least of all my own. As a boy I avoided butchers’ shops, I ran screaming at the slightest scrape of my knee or nick of a finger. Even now I shave with an electric razor, I have a distrust of blades that verges on mania. It took, therefore, considerable effort for me to pull myself together and take hold of the situation that afternoon. Pull myself together I did, though. I took towels and wet them through with cold water to press against my face. My cheeks so numbed with cold that my eyes ached and my teeth throbbed, I took more cloths and, so far as I was able to with only one free hand, began the task of wiping up the bloody red mess I’d spread all over the room. This business of cleaning helped to focus my mind somewhat, I felt, and by the time I was finished, or as finished as I possibly could be, I had regained a little composure and was ready to pull the towel away from my face again, peeling it away slowly and carefully to inspect the damage underneath.
The whole right side of my face was pink and numb from the cold icy water I’d pressed against it. The left side, as though compensating in some way, was pale like a sheet of blank paper so that my whole head had the peculiar appearance of having been split in two, or dipped sideways in a vat of die. Underneath my eye the scar stood out starkly, still, though with less enthusiasm than before, beading out droplets of blood along its length. The thorn had ripped into my skin just under my right eye, missing the eyelid by no more than a centimetre or two. Starting beside my nose, the cut ran rightwards, rising in a slow arc across my cheek some two inches or slightly more in length. It had a crescent shaped appearance to it, like the thin shaving of a new moon turned on its back or a cat’s grin gaping peculiarly from the side of my face.
I wet a clean towel again and dabbed gently away at the wound, cleaning away the droplets of blood which emerged from it every few seconds. For an age I carried on doing this, the towel growing progressively redder and redder, the time it took for the droplets to seep out from the edge of the wound growing steadily longer and longer – first only a second or so, then ten seconds, then thirty, then eventually, slowly a minute perhaps. I don’t know how long I stood there, mechanically dabbing way at the wound in my face. The room grew darker as the time went by and at some point I turned to switch a light on, but other than that short shift, I do not think I moved my feet once in all the time I stood there. My eyes stayed fixed on the image of my face in the mirror and my mind wandered, aimlessly, thoughtlessly. At one point I think I heard a phone ring, but I didn’t move to answer it. Outside, next doors’ dog started barking as its owner came home from work. Inside my house it was quiet. There was nobody here but me and the strange, multicoloured face which stared blankly back at me.
All that evening, even after the flow of blood had stopped, I found myself going back to inspect my face in the mirror, running my fingers delicately along the edge of the thin, pink scar that was forming on my cheek. The more I looked at it, the more I felt there something troubling about the shape of the scar, some strange sense of déjà vu that ran though me every time I looked at it. This had not
occurred to me earlier in the afternoon, but now, with the blood dried along it and my brain recovered from the initial shock of the incident, the strange familiarity of the shape impressed itself on me each time I stood in front of the mirror. It was not a pleasant sensation, a kind of maddening half memory that teased away the back of my mind, just out of reach no matter how hard I searched for it. I tried to brush it off, to ignore the feeling and settle down to the rest of my evening, but still the urge to look again at the scar came back so strongly that I dropped, over and again, whatever I was doing to go back to the mirror again, stare at the wound again and run my fingers delicately along its bright pink surface.
Even as I slept, this feeling would not leave me. I spent an unsettled night drifting between odd, disturbing dreams that clung urgently to me in unconsciousness but then slipped way imperceptibly upon waking. Only one image remained with me from this long night of odd thoughts and surreal exchanges, that of a long finger pointing at me, just in front of my eyes, so close that it was impossible to focus on anything else, impossible even to see who the finger belonged to. One image and one thought – that the scar now on my face had always been there, deep below the surface of me all my life, and that if only I’d known how to look I would have seen it all along.