* * *
The second day. No mention is made of last night’s episode. But maybe it’s been a turning point. The next hurdle, bath time, which has the potential to be every bit as awkward, proves to be a light-hearted and bonding experience. Only one moment threatens to spoil it. As the shower sprays over his upper body, working playfully down towards his groin, Alex is met with a vision. Down among the soap bubbles at his feet he sees pieces of his own skin circling the plughole. Instinctively he gathers in his knees and elbows. This has nothing to do with modesty. It is to protect the area around his genitals from the needle-sharp water jets. Daniel is sweet about it. He says nothing and judiciously redirects the water to a less sensitive area. He’s careful too over drying him, though Alex feels no pain down there and his skin is perfectly intact. Just his brain up to its old tricks again.
For the rest of the day there is nothing to do but eat, sleep, trundle the short distances between bedroom, kitchen and bathroom, and have his mind go round and round in circles. No visiting hours to bring distraction – no people-watching, no eavesdropping on everyone’s private dramas. None of the light entertainment of having new patients piloted in on beds or wheelchairs, escorted in on crutches, or tottering in slippers and loosely tied gowns with faces like zombies. No sorry souls being whisked off for examination, for surgery, for home, or for the morgue. And no Mr Abdelgadir to set him free in the gym for his two hours of backbreaking exertion. He’s not had a proper workout in over thirty-six hours. Today he must find a way of getting Daniel to fix him up with the crutches and give him enough space to work through his moves.
So when the offer to go out finally comes Alex leaps at it for all he is worth, despite the howling gales outside. There’s no way that Daniel, even in his present good mood, is going to allow him to make the whole trip on foot, but with luck there’ll be a park, a playground, a supermarket forecourt, somewhere for a half-hour burst of frenetic activity away from the confines of the chair.
He isn’t prepared for the image of a church that comes crashing into his brain the moment they turn onto the hill. The nightmare, the shower incident, and now this. Gulnaz’s diagnosis that these are no more than mental aberrations has done nothing to put paid to such things. Clear as day he can make out the course stonework, the grimy windows decked in rusty iron gauze, the dank porch-way and battered oak door. He can gaze up at the clock tower and along the ridge of the roof, sagging at its centre and missing too many tiles. He can smell the wet grass, mowed short between the graves, left long around the headstones. Stones of all shapes and sizes, a path doing its best to steer a course between and around them towards the lichgate. And he can step away, take a second path downhill, something deep in the shadows drawing him like a magnet.
As they approach the hilltop, true enough, right on cue, the tip of a church spire begins to protrude over the hedge. Even this glimpse is enough to tell him it wasn’t any old church in any old churchyard that he’d seen in his head; but this church, this churchyard. Before he can get nearer, they’re off down a side road, stuck for the next half hour in some greasy spoon internet café. But once Daniel has tired of computers and coffee, and brought him back around the corner to the grocery shop, Alex finds himself again pointing straight at the steeple. His mind takes its cue to springboard from the chair, high-jump the hedgerow and touch down among the grass. The church now stands slightly off to his right, someway back. The path winds around and behind it, but also slopes away to his left. Older graves; everywhere overgrown, untended, unloved, a scent of mildew. A deep gloom and a sudden dip in temperature, a pressing silence, a warning or an omen not to approach, but a compulsion all the same to do so.
Daniel is wheeling him from the shop now and setting off for home. Tracking the churchyard boundary, Alex is convinced they’re about to encounter a second entrance, a gate that would have meant nothing to him on the way up. No proud archway with name board and service times, just an unassuming opening in the hawthorn. And there it is. Closed, maybe locked, perhaps too narrow for him to get through, but all the same he begins waving wildly towards it.
“In there?” Daniel looks mortified. “You sure about that?”
He seems to deliberate over his next words. “You er… do know… it’s where we found you, don’t you?”
Whoa.
No, Alex certainly didn’t know that.
Found.
Here in the cemetery. Beaten up. Unconscious.
His head striking a glancing blow against a gravestone.
Yes, actually he did know. They are through the gate now, bumping along the rough cobbles. Wait a moment, of course. This was where their mother was buried. Even as Daniel is talking him through the story Alex’s memory keeps him one step ahead.
He already knows about her cancer and the long years of depression. He even knows about the funeral. But how the hell can he know such things, with everyone telling him over and over that he’d been off the radar, lost to his mother, lost to his brother? More tricks of a diseased mind? But whatever the truth of it, Daniel himself has just confirmed that he’d been here. He stares intensely at her simple memorial. Had he seen it before? Yes he had. For sure. He’s convinced he’d even touched it.
The narrative is now reaching back to their childhood in Devon. And for the first time Alex realises that he even knows about their day together on the cliffs. This is the closest he’s come yet to catching the moment he was alleged to have fallen. Yes, he sees the approaching gorse, and yes, the dizzy drop to the rocks below. A boat? Yes, there, upturned at the water’s edge, flaking black paint. Someone with it? Perhaps – he can’t be sure. And their mother, where was she? Alex has no answer to that. He’s reluctant to turn and look. He’s compelled to stay with the view down into the waters. The time has come to confront the moment they all say he’s blotted out. He tries to relive it, to push himself through the gap in the bushes and stumble on loose rock or foolishly attempt a descent. But his feet refuse to budge from the spot. Why – if it’s his own mind that has chosen to censor the memory, why can’t he now choose to release it? It was too long ago to harm him any longer; there is nothing to fear. Whatever had happened, he’d survived it. He is ready to take ownership of his stupidity and all the terrible suffering it has caused. And still nothing. Suddenly he hears Daniel talking of a trip back to Devon to the scene of the accident.
Yes, if Devon is the only place where he can break through this maddening stalemate, this impenetrable wall of denial, then it’s definitely where they must go.