Daniel
They come for him early on Monday morning. They shower him, wash his hair, dress him in his freshly laundered clothes and serve him food with an unprecedented air of deference. At the stroke of a pen, on the whim of a doctor, everyone is suddenly treating him like royalty. Alex has been promoted from over-demanding inmate to honoured guest. Convicted criminals released on appeal could scarcely find the change in their fortunes more bizarre.
It’s the outcome he’s worked so tirelessly to achieve; the hospital is about to relinquish its hold. Alex has won. He knows he should be overjoyed. So, why this hard knot turning his insides, like a fist grinding against his stomach wall? Maybe it’s having to take the next steps without Abdelgadir – that inspiration of a man who’d given him the resolve to stick with such a gruelling work regime. Without Abdelgadir, he wouldn’t now be sat here ready for release; stronger, upright and poised for action.
Or is it facing a future without the gentle, dark haired nurse who’d comforted and reassured him during his bleakest moments? With almost no memory to police it, over the last few days his brain has been in meltdown; his imagination running riot, half the time not knowing what was real and what was not. Throughout it all, that nurse had done more than anyone to keep him sane.
By leaving here he’s choosing to turn his back on them both. Without their professional help it’s likely to be a long, rocky road to recovery. Over time, he’ll probably regain the ability to walk, given his progress so far. But what of his speech? And his mind? The wall clock tells him Daniel is due. Even at this eleventh hour he wonders if he should turn tail and throw himself back on their mercy – Prentice, smiley nurse, even matron, Dr Sarcasm and his crowd of toadies. Is anyone else remotely as qualified? Or as committed? Five minutes late now. How exactly does Daniel view this long road ahead? Alex watches his own hands rise from the armrests and form a white-knuckled grip around an imaginary steering wheel, the dual carriageway shooting beneath him as the hospital looms large. Then in his head he is reluctantly pulling to a halt, just before Daniel himself comes into view and draws up at the kerbside. Daniel’s rising dread as he darts from the car comes flooding into Alex’s brain in a kind of drowning madness. A meeting of minds. And then of eyes – as they face each other across reception. For a moment, Alex isn’t sure through whose eyes he is seeing.
They’re wheeling him out now into the daylight, his first lungful of fresh air since coming round. As conversation bats back and forth behind him, he stares at the great challenge up ahead – the unaided climb out of the chair into that car. A dozen times they’ve rehearsed this, but the madness still wells around inside him, dashing his confidence. At the moment of reckoning, every muscle fine-honed for the job chooses at once to rebel. Instead of raising himself slowly and taking hold of the roof, he sees himself tumbling clumsily forward, landing spread-eagled across the roadway, Daniel cowering backwards and swearing that he wants no more part in this. Next thing, Alex is still in the chair, Abdelgadir’s voice soft but firm in his ear, opening a channel through the panic attack, and finally allowing him to proceed.
The chair is being stowed. Doors are slamming. The nurse is waving and turning away. The car moves off. There is no going back. The rising unease, as the hospital road winds its way towards the exit, Alex realises suddenly is not only about leaving the hospital. It’s a form of agoraphobia; a fear of being returned to the outside world. No-one out there is going to stand by him, to protect him. Society has no time for the disabled. To them he won’t be a victim. He’ll just be a freak, an object of ridicule.
The hospital is shrinking from view, gradually being swallowed up by the suburbs and ring roads. And he begins to recognise some of the buildings and names on road signs. That familiar places should exist here is not so surprising; it does make sense for him to have been living somewhere nearby, for them to have taken him to the nearest hospital. But being able to remember these things, after weeks of having remembered next to nothing, is not something he’d dared expect.
With every turn, the veil seems to lift further from his eyes. There on the left is the Park and Ride that nobody ever used. And here comes the train station, with its fancy ironwork and gaudy green paint – memories of grey coffee in its platform café, train delays, diesel fumes and throbbing engines. Past the Drive-Thru McDonalds he would sometimes visit after work. His heart is racing. These are not isolated, disembodied memories from childhood; these at last are tangible, verifiable, from the here and now.
The further into town they drive, the more familiar it all becomes. Nobody could possibly mistake the overbearing new Tesco’s that had brought shopkeepers onto the streets with placards. And the central bus terminus. How many drunken nights had he ended up there after falling asleep and missing his stop?
With these memories comes an additional fear: that he’s heading straight for trouble; the murky question mark of a past he can’t yet unravel. This is the town that had spawned the horrific domestic violence he’d witnessed, that had harboured his vicious attacker, a monster who’d perhaps held him against his will in a room somewhere. And Daniel seems intent on driving him right into the heart of it.
But Daniel chatters on, oblivious. Apparently, as children they used to come here on holidays. A strange choice for a holiday. He also seems to know the area well, and is enjoying the challenge of matching those distant memories to the vastly altered scenes around them. “That’s where the cinema used to be,” he says, pointing at nothing in particular. “And that was the old Co-Op. Remember the sports centre? It’s a retail park now – where I work, actually.” He indicates off to the right, toward some featureless exit road and a cat’s cradle of flyovers. “Not too far to go now. I hope you’re going to be comfortable. You have a room all to yourself. Central heating and plenty of cupboard space. And you’ll be able to park the wheelchair right up against your bed.”
It dawns on Alex now that his distress isn’t even just about this town. It’s about Daniel; the things he’d said on that second visit to the hospital: that he and Alex had been out of touch for years – that nobody had known if Alex was even alive. And yet, by all accounts it seems the two of them had been living only streets apart. Nothing in Daniel’s story stacks up. Alex takes a deep breath and turns from the window. He should stop worrying. An explanation of some kind exists. He just doesn’t have the full picture. He doesn’t really know anything.
But this has to be a coincidence too far. As the car takes a right at the lights he knows immediately this is his own street. The petrol station on the corner. The chip shop. The launderette. The mock-Tudor fronted pub over the road – it’s the pub’s name that really cuts him up. Drink, drugs, a mugging, whatever it was that happened to him, this ‘Millwrights’ was at the heart of it, no question. A really bad crowd. And some thug or thugs from that crowd had been out to get him. When word gets round that he’s back on the street, aren’t they going to want to ferret him out to finish the job?
Daniel shows no interest whatever in the Millwrights, his eyes stay fixed on the way ahead. Just so long as he keeps on driving. But halfway uphill the car swings into a cul-de-sac and Daniel parks up before a line of garages. He follows with the last thing Alex wants to hear:
“We’re home.”
Home?
Daniel’s home?
How can that be possible? Not streets away from each other then: quite literally on each other’s doorstep.
Or does he mean Alex’s home?
Of course, that must be it. They’ve just called in to pick up his things. They’re not stopping here. They’re still en route. He sees the whole thing now: when the hospital had established his identity (probably from his wallet) they’d managed to track down his family. Daniel had driven many miles to spend time with him, and because of the distance had booked himself somewhere to stay.
It explained how he’d had time to get to know the town again.
But Daniel said he worked at the retail park.
The theory
didn’t hold water.
They’re over the road now, into a concrete forecourt facing a block of flats. Is this his home? The place is so utterly without character or soul that he simply can’t say. Just one of ten thousand such flats that he might have passed on his travels.
“Welcome to my pad,” Daniel says, with a slight bristle of pride as he turns the key. “I’m afraid it’s not exactly five stars, but as you’ll see, I’ve done what I can to make it comfortable for you.”
So, there it is. Definitely Daniel’s home. Utterly crazy. They really had been neighbours the whole time.
The door opens onto a small lobby, a stairway over to the right. The space is too cluttered to allow the wheelchair through, but he can perfectly well make it on crutches. Only, Daniel has other ideas. The moment he sees the state of the place he totally loses it. Alex watches in growing alarm. Is this the brother on whom he’s going to have to rely for his safety and welfare? Is this how Daniel is going to behave every time his disability slows him down, every time he fails to live up to expectation? Is it any wonder that when the crutches are handed over they prove too much to handle?
But somehow they make it through to the kitchen, the drainer taking his weight as Daniel heads back for the wheelchair. Bent low, regaining his strength, at first Alex fails to take in his surroundings. It’s the closely packed vertical lines through the light that finally draw his eye. Barred windows. He pulls back, takes in the room as a whole, sees the bedroom through the open door to his right and hears himself cry out. The room from his nightmare. Worse still, it had all happened right here, the woman bursting from that room into this, bent double, face covered, protecting herself from a hail of flying objects. Quite where Alex had been at the time isn’t clear; he seems to be shooting the scene from multiple locations. But the attack had taken place on this very spot, without a shadow of a doubt. The kitchen is suddenly hot and spinning. Alex wants to be sick. This is where he’d been held prisoner. This is where he’d been beaten up. Daniel’s own flat! Was it Daniel then who’d done that to him? Three weeks of convalescence, only to be duped straight back into the very hell from which he’d escaped? His knees begin to buckle.
Someone far away is shouting something at him: how did he fall; where did he hide; was he abducted. The voice pulses in his ears. He no longer understands what is happening. Why is Daniel grilling him this way? It doesn’t square with the flashbacks. Nothing makes sense any more. Why can’t he walk or talk? Why is his brain in such a jumble? He doesn’t know! He doesn’t know!! Too many twists, everything drawing in, closing down. A growing barrage of noise.
It’s a while before he realises the interrogation has stopped, that he is safely back in the wheelchair, and that his hand is being squeezed.
“It’s alright, mate. I’m so sorry…”
Something new is seeding in his head. Something way beyond the words Daniel is speaking. That connection again. The electricity. The fusing of minds.
“You don’t have to say anything. No-one’s going to force you to explain…”
Not through these words, but again through their touch, through their oneness, through their DNA, Alex just knows that his panic has been absurd. Daniel could never have done anything like that to harm him. There’s no accounting for what he’s just witnessed, but all the same he becomes calm, consumed by a crushing tiredness. All he can think of suddenly is sleep. He begins to move towards the bedroom, but Daniel wheels him the other way, helping him out of the chair and onto a bed in the lounge. He sits there for a while, too bewildered to think, then lies back against the pillows, legs still dangling from the side, and lets the curtains of darkness fall.