* * *
Daniel’s bath time plan had been to leave Alex to soak, in enough bubble-bath to grant him some privacy and let the cleaning take care of itself. But even as the water comes thundering into the rusty old tub it begins to look doubtful that any of this is achievable. The bubble-bath has turned everything slippery; there’s nothing to grab onto. Assuming Alex did somehow get into the water, there could be no way of ever getting him out. The whole plan seems ill-judged and unsafe. Alex is already out of his chair and perched half-naked on the toilet seat. Thinking fast, Daniel plunges a hand through the bubbles and yanks out the plug. He hurries to his room and tips out his wastepaper basket. He tears two bin bags from the roll under the kitchen sink, shakes them out and stuffs the basket inside one, teasing the other over the top and binding the overlap with Sellotape. The newly-improvised waterproof stool is then placed upside down in the emptying tub and Alex steered gingerly down onto it with the taps and shower fitting facing him.
Privacy is most definitely thrown out with the bathwater. No longer is it just a matter of lying back and soaking himself; Alex must sit it out while Daniel sprays, sponges, flannels and sprays again; all clearly embarrassing and awkward for them both to begin with. Until a stray water jet strikes where it shouldn’t and causes Alex to jump. He gives out a little squeal and covers his privates. Daniel can’t stop himself from smirking – the next spray-off is deliberately playful. Alex hits back with a hand movement that redirects the water over Daniel’s right arm. Daniel retaliates by targeting Alex’s chest, one quick burst against each cherry-red bull’s-eye. Now Daniel is laughing uncontrollably.
Their childhood bath-time all over again. Two infants, one tub of water and a whole lot of splashing about. Sponges thrown, soaps dunked, plastic boats scuppered. Standing side by side on a wet bathroom floor for the rubdown, never a second thought given to running naked across the landing to their bedroom for pyjamas and bedtime story.
When they’re finally done, he draws Alex to his feet, wraps him in a towel and helps him out onto the tiles. All in all – with dressing and teeth counted in – bathroom antics have taken an exhausting two hours. But it’s their best two hours together so far.
Breakfast follows in similar vein. Preparing food and getting it successfully from plate to mouth is as hit and miss as ever, but the barricades between them continue to come down. If the food finds its target, all well and good. If it doesn’t, they exchange mock accusing looks and simply try again. Talking too seems easier somehow. Though an ideal conversation would be one that flows both ways, an eagerness for information in Alex’s eyes encourages Daniel to stay with it. Before long, he’s busy unravelling the social circle of the Millwrights, painting little verbal portraits of his friends Threadbare (the ragged woollen threads teased out just a little further for effect), Bladder (who can now go well beyond the full gallon between one piss and the next) and of course Jerry – Jerry, at once the dullest man on earth and the boss sent down from heaven. And so talk wanders onto the subject of Greenalls, the hard times it has hit since the arrival in the retail park of big boys B&Q and Focus, with their cut-price garden departments, and how Daniel was able to negotiate time off work. He’s already talking about Uncle Martin’s letter before clocking the potential risks of mentioning family. Just in time perhaps, he sees the light fading from Alex’s eyes and cuts off mid sentence. To conceal the deflection he stands and peers up through the kitchen window. The bin bags are flapping against each other like crows, but the black plastic appears to be dry.
“I need to get some things. Fancy a trip out?”
By way of an answer, Alex swings a wayward arm towards his crutches.
Stepping out from the stifling heat of the flat into the bitter cold of a winter’s morning is something that Daniel has got used to, and he quite overlooks the need to rethink what Alex is wearing. All around the courtyard, fallen leaves are being whipped into frantic little cyclones, until the wind hurls them from the dance into the four corners. A low, aircraft-like rumbling joins the battering white-noise of treetops. They’re out onto Cooper’s Hill by the time Daniel makes sense of the wild shaking that rocks the chair.
The street is a mayhem of miserable souls pressing forward uphill, stooped, collars raised, forced to give ground to those being blown towards them at speed, hair obliterating their faces, litter scurrying along beside them. To save time, Daniel parks the chair in someone’s drive before dashing back to the flat to grab gloves, scarf and a blanket. Once he’s sure that Alex is properly protected from the elements, their intrepid outing once more gets underway. Everyone is too hell-bent on getting to where they’re going to stop and gawp, or to point, or to make fun of a young man breaking his back heaving a wheelchair into strong winds up a steep incline.
First stop is the internet café on Town Street. Thirty minutes of peering into a screen and sipping coffee and Daniel is armed with a bunch of B&B phone numbers and a printout of directions to Thurlestone. Next stop, back down Cooper’s Hill to the convenience store opposite St. Bart’s, parking Alex in a quiet corner by the window, hopefully out of everyone’s way. Never comfortable in shops at the best of times, he makes a hasty beeline for the usual aisles: bread, milk, cereals, tea, coffee, eggs, meat, potatoes, alcohol; enough to fill three carrier bags, and then they’re out of there, heading safely home, shopping stowed around the wheelchair. All seems well – until Alex makes a sudden wild gesture across the road with his right arm, nearly knocking the bags from his knees onto the pavement.
A knot tightens in Daniel’s stomach. They’ve stopped directly opposite the north gate of the church. The whole subject of how and why Alex came to be there has not yet been broached. Daniel simply hadn’t dared. “In there?” he checks nervously. A single utterance confirms it. It would be easy to pretend the gate was locked. But it could be that Alex has come to terms with something, that his mind has started to unblock. “Okay, just a quick look then.” No pressure. Alex has control. This is Alex’s initiative, not Daniel’s.
He makes the turn and decides to risk it. “You do know it’s where we found you, don’t you? Lying unconscious against Mum’s…” The keen wind is left to sweep the remaining words away as they brave the road. With some deft steering the chair makes it through the iron gate. The cobbles are not kind either to chair or to passenger. But it’s only a minute’s shake out to the graveside.
“I don’t know how you knew where to find her, but I guess you must be wondering how she died.” Daniel mumbles the words almost to himself. “It was cancer. April ’95.”
Gingerly at first, then with growing candour, he fleshes out the story, intuition telling him to work backwards – her illness, her depression, her nervous breakdown, their move to the Midlands and their time before that in Devon, finally arriving at that life-changing Christmas Day in 1982. The dank churchyard, the failing light and the baying wind through the hedging all lend the narrative their added edge. Though he addresses Alex in the second person and their mother in the third, Daniel’s eyes never leave the gravestone, as though she were his true audience.
Not that he has any intention as yet of interrogating Alex again over the fall or its aftermath. The risk is too great. So he focuses instead on their last movements up on the cliffs.
“The three of us were out walking together that afternoon.” Again the remark might equally be directed at the headstone. “What I constantly struggle with is where Mum fits into the picture. How could she have let us run off like that when we saw the boat? What kind of a mother lets her children do that?” He’s drawn again to the wind in the trees, its rise and fall now uncannily like exploding waves. He pushes down on the handles to clear the front wheels of the cobbles and turns the chair around.
“Last night I had this idea – we go back there. It’s what I was doing on the computer – getting directions and addresses. Wouldn’t you like to get away from all this, spend a couple of days back beside the sea?”
Alex’s grunts and
gestures say nothing about his take on the idea, and everything about the cobbled pathway.
They reach Sedgefield Court just as the light is fading. The last half hour has convinced Daniel of it now: the time has come. This isn’t the place to be convalescing, this depressing little town, this squalid flat, this miserable hill with its creepy cemetery full of sadness. A trip to Devon will do them both a power of good. Such an experience would be more than a change of scene; it would be a release back into those wonderful carefree days of childhood; of sand, sea air and summers. Whatever had happened to Alex that Christmas Day, however terrible, it could surely never obliterate the magic of those times.
“Just going to make some phone calls,” he shouts, and pulls shut the bedroom door.
But, one by one, the numbers on his list let him down. Where he gets a reply at all, it’s the same old story. No bedrooms on the ground floor, no facilities to cope with the disabled. Again and again one name crops up: the Thurlestone Hotel. Thurlestone Hotel? Since when did pokey little Thurlestone have its own hotel? And it sounded scarily expensive. Only one person takes the trouble to find him the number. With every B&B on his list finally crossed through, Daniel bites his lip and makes the call. Yes, he’s in luck: they’ve just reopened for the season and no, no problem whatsoever, sir, regarding a wheelchair user – the rooms are not on the ground floor, but there are no changes of level to and from the lifts. How many nights do they require?
Just the one should be enough. If it isn’t, they can search out somewhere cheaper once there. They need to be back in two days anyway – a vital pool match on Friday night. Of course he’s also due on Friday at the drop-in centre, but he’s already had misgivings about ever going back. Joan has lost faith in him, the story he’d written about the boy and the rabbit now seems crass, and the stuff about his father unconvincing. Those sessions are surely irrelevant now; just something that had served a purpose for a period. And he’s neglected logging his drink intake. He just knows it’s already way, way over.
Certainly, sir. A twin room for one night it is then.
The cost leaves him winded, but all the same it is booked. They are going for it.