~
The world outside has come alive by the time Daniel wakes. Everyone is busy, busy. Doors are slamming, car engines firing, people shouting, others laughing. Somewhere there’s a baby screaming. The thump, thump, thump of house music shakes the floor above. The clock shows 12:00. Either it has stopped working again or he’s overslept big time. He vaguely recalls being roused earlier by Alex rummaging about in the kitchen. More crutch athletics. But now his own flat is idle, merely a sponge for everyone else’s noise.
Yesterday now seems like a dream. The dreams themselves feel more vivid and real. But there’s no denying the contraption over his bed. The blankets rise from his shoulders into a pyramid above his waist – like some humungous erection. The bitter irony; heaven help him if he got one of those right now. There’s also no denying the pain: violently hot and already worsening. He has prescribed painkillers in the kitchen. 12:01. His clock is okay.
Bracing himself for imminent torture, Daniel slowly eases back the blankets and raises his upper body. The crease line across his stomach terrifies him the most. The dressing reaches up that far; it’s quite possible that the wound does too. He draws his body backwards to free himself from beneath the coffee table and tentatively swings both feet down onto the floor. Each movement brings its own unique stab of pain, as though some joker has filled the bandages with razorblades, but so far he’s not howling into the air like yesterday. It’s going to be fun getting dressed. He has no trousers big enough to accommodate this great strap-on cushion. Perhaps Gulnaz could steal him a maternity dress from the hospital. Oh, the guys down at the Millwrights would have a field day if they could see this.
For now though, he must improvise with a loosely tied dressing gown. Stiffly, he crosses the room. Walking isn’t easy, the burns spread across his groin and around the tops of his legs. The skin has become tight and unflexing; the dressing chafes like coarse sandpaper. Before he can face looking in on Alex he must find those pills and wash them down with a shot or two of a more familiar painkiller. He’s struck by the kitchen. Yesterday’s disaster zone. Ground Zero. The bulldozers have already been in, the forensics done their job and left. Gulnaz must have been busy during those hours he’d spent in A&E. She’s cleaned and tidied around the worktops. The joint of meat turns up in the fridge, perfectly roasted, sliced and covered with tin foil. The potatoes, last seen tumbling in a boiling cascade down his front and scattering across the floor, are now bagged up and safely despatched to the bin.
He feels kind of sorry for her. As if it wasn’t enough having a crowd of senile delinquents to deal with each day, now she has not just one, but two extra patients on her hands. It’s what he’s become to her now: a patient. And she to him little more than a home-help. But then, so much has changed in the past few days. Deep down, she’ll still be the same Gulnaz – somewhat bruised, but nothing that couldn’t be sorted in time with gentleness and affection. And him? The same Daniel who’d savoured Persian delicacies, who’d made love tenderly in the dark? The one who’d walked hand in hand across hillsides and grinned inanely at a camera? The Daniel who’d vowed to control his drinking and sat in confessional groups with strangers? No. It would take more than gentleness and affection to bring that Daniel back. The package she has before her now is quite altered; a frightened and crippled shadow of his former self, someone who has finally woken up to his past. Hasn’t she been fishing all along for someone with a sickness to be healed? Well, fine and dandy – that’s exactly the haul she’s gone and landed.
She said something about calling round in her lunch break. Maybe she’s already here, in with Alex. Standing at the doorway to the bedroom, Daniel looks back across the kitchen, the scene from Alex’s viewpoint – Daniel with his back to him at the cooker, but turning now towards the window with the saucepan in his right hand. Terrorist attack or tragic miscalculation? Why would Alex have cried out like that at such a dangerous moment? It did sound somewhat like a warning. Maybe Scoff was under Daniel’s feet, maybe the cupboard door beneath the sink was half open and about to trip him up. But it also sounded ominously like a ‘boo!’ And what did Alex do next – during those vital minutes that Daniel spent pulling off his clothes and splashing his burns with cold water? Plenty of time even for a cripple to cross the room and bring him the phone. But not Alex. When Daniel begged him for help he just stood there, frozen in the doorway, a most extraordinary expression on his face. Not shock – well yes, shock – but more than that. Hard to put into words; a kind of look of recognition. Like someone taken aback at seeing their sordid little scheme actually come to fruition.
The nurse’s words shape themselves on his lips, telling him just how serious the injuries might have been. He remembers turning off the potatoes, all set to drain the water but choosing at the last moment to take out the roasting tin first, a little time spent searching for the oven glove. For some reason the details need unpicking and retelling in order to keep them true. Because really that was the delay that had saved him. That, and the substance he’d knocked back the night before, generally slowing him down. Otherwise the results of drenching himself in a panful of truly boiling water would have been catastrophic. Full-depth burns, the nurse had said, needing skin grafts. The very thought of it forces him to run again through those crucial decisions.
That anyone would wish such harm upon their own twin beggared belief. Daniel’s fury yesterday, which had him shrieking down the phone and hurling abuse around the room, was purely instinctive; not a reaction to the deeper implications of what had happened. But for the first time now he senses real fear – something truly nightmarish about being targeted by someone on the face of it so benign. He sees that he’s cornered. No-one is going to believe that Alex set out to hurt him like this. To think of the hate that must be raging inside that twisted mind – a kind of insanity. Daniel could rationalise all he liked about the two of them sharing responsibility for Alex’s fall, for having disobeyed their mother, for all her suffering. But such intense hatred surely heeded no argument. So, what is he saying, that Alex has become a monster? Daniel stands rigid at his door, outstretched fingers playing over the handle. He sees a child driven crazy by the trauma of his fall, turned mute and psychotic by the cruel baiting of the sea, rescued secretly and locked away in an institution, the family never told. A child prone to fits and cataleptic episodes, now escaped to wreak revenge on the man upon whom he’s focused the blame for a lifetime of suffering. Is that what waits through that door, a brother out to destroy him? And fresh from his first assault, does Daniel now just walk in as though nothing has changed? Does he play this psycho’s game?
He turns the handle. What other choice does he have?
In the bedroom the curtains are still drawn. The bedclothes are pulled back. Alex sits by the pillow with the flats of his hands on his knees, gazing at the floor. When Daniel walks in he looks up slowly. A monster with blazing eyes, horns and three-pronged tail? No, just his brother, slight, hunched, voiceless and frail. And that look on his face; neither one of atonement nor one of vengeance. Alex simply looks ill. On his pyjamas and on the sheets around him Daniel can see streaks of yellow-brown liquid, a pool of it further down the bed. The telltale stench catches his nose at the same moment. He takes a step backwards.
“Oh Jesus, Alex, have you puked up, or something?”
Alex shifts delicately, but the smell suggests he may have parted with more than the contents of his stomach. Revolted though he is, Daniel is buoyed up by the sudden restoration of power and his chance to get even. Alex will have to sit with his mess until someone is ready to clean him up. And Daniel gets to choose when and whether it’ll happen.
“Love to help, but can’t bend, see. Just think of the pain.” He draws aside the folds of the dressing gown. Alex’s reaction pleases him. “Unless of course you beg me. No, not like that; let me hear you say it. Go on, I bet you can. The doctor said there was nothing wrong with you. All in your mind. Oh, didn’t you know that? Stand up and say it: ??
?Daniel, please clean me up’. Say it, damn you!”
Alex’s eyes rise again limply, like those of a beaten dog, then fall to the ground. Punishing him much further suddenly loses its appeal. Like it had done in the cemetery after dragging him off the gravestone. Maybe just leave him to stew in his own filth for an hour or so. To remind him who’s boss.
Some fifteen minutes later, the hallway rattles to the sound of key searching for lock and mating with barrel. Gulnaz’s calling-card feet-wiping follows, and then her voice. Always, ‘It’s me,’ she calls. Her protocol for not intruding at an awkward moment gives Daniel time enough to pull open the drawer and dig out the spare bedding. He can intersect her in the kitchen before she has a chance to reach Alex.
“Hey, look at you, up and about,” she cries, with a smile Daniel hasn’t seen in days. “How are you; did you manage to sleep?”
“Yeah, I coped. The burns are torture though.”
She opens her arms and hugs him very carefully, leaning forward to leave an archway between their lower halves. In parting, she clocks the significance of the bundle he’s carrying.
“Oh, here, let me. You can’t go doing that.”
“It’s Alex. He’s had a mishap. He’s been sick on his bed. And crapped himself, I think. I just found him. Of course I immediately…”
She’s in role at once.
“Okay, don’t worry. It’s probably just eating too much after having starved himself for so long. Or maybe because of yesterday. He was terribly upset after seeing you get hurt like that. Last night it took me ages to console him. Leave him to me. Just sit tight, and I’ll be with you in a minute.”
So, Alex needed consoling. Interesting. Perhaps the injuries weren’t serious enough for him. Or a genuine accident after all? Alone again at the crime scene, if that’s what it is, Daniel lowers himself tenderly onto the stool and notices Scoff, all curled up in his basket.
“How the hell you can just sleep there with all this going on.”
Yes, a cat’s life was easy alright. Give them food, shelter and a warm knee, lots of fuss, and their life is complete; no questions, no remorse, no pity, just blameless instinct. Next time around he’ll insist on being a cat. Preferably a deaf one like Scoff.
Gulnaz is leading Alex through to the bathroom. The bedroom smells of air freshener. She’s unbelievable – they don’t even have any air freshener. She’s changed the sheets and made the bed in under a minute. She’ll have Alex cleaned up and in fresh pyjamas faster than Daniel could tie his brother’s shoelaces. She’s a natural. He is not.
Something in her manner has changed today. Compared with those awful phone messages, and her mood when they’d met on Saturday, she’s being upbeat, jovial and high-spirited. Even yesterday, she’d been slick and efficient, but hardly what he would describe as warm. In short, she’s being nice. Too nice. The kind of nice intended to soften someone up. There’s something she’s about to hit him with, he can tell. And all these pleasantries are just a preparation. It might be wise to prepare himself too.
“I’m putting the kettle on,” he calls to her. “Tea for you, yeah?”
“Please. Black. Won’t be long.”
He reaches for the bowl to prospect for mugs, only to find the pool emptied and dredged. No crockery anywhere to be seen.
“Where d’you put the mugs?”
She’s following Alex back to his room. She points to the wall unit.
“There, in the cupboard over the kettle.”
Gulnaz has been even busier than he’d realised. But what she’s done makes complete sense. Coffee, tea, sugar, biscuits, mugs overhead – kettle beneath, over the fridge – pedal bin moved into the corner. Maximum efficiency. Someone could be superglued to the spot and still prepare themselves an entire breakfast. Only, on this occasion his drink requires a finishing touch, even if it does mean taking three steps to the left. Thirty percent vodka and seventy percent coffee should be enough to soften whatever blow she’s about to deliver. As one hand stretches upwards for the drinks cupboard the other settles on the handle of the drawer below. He has a word or two to say to Jerry about the side effects, but Christ, the buzz when it first kicks in. Most of Saturday had been spent in a state of heightened awareness; sounds, smells, colours, textures all bursting with meaning. And a euphoria that for a few blissful hours at a stretch could blow away all of life’s little headaches. For him to have seen the poetry in the felling of his greengage tree, the symbolism of its fall from grace so powerful that he’d been reduced to tears. For him to have heard his mother’s voice at night, soft and forgiving, and for his father’s voice for once to be gagged. Any substance that could achieve all that was worth the consequences.
Gulnaz must have crossed behind again while he was retrieving the pipette. Lucky, given her fondness for reorganising his things, that he’d taken the precaution of decanting Jerry’s elixir into the cough linctus bottle. Hopefully she didn’t notice him spiking his coffee. The look of sunshine on her face as he carries their drinks through to the lounge suggests she hadn’t, but the sweetness and smiles are a worry in themselves.
“He seems fine now. He’s happy to rest for a while. I don’t think he can have slept much. And, guess what, he… spoke to me.”
“He did what!?” Before she can elaborate, Daniel has thrust her drink into her hands and is making for the door. “I bloody told him…”
“Hey, steady on. It was just one word. I almost missed it.”
“Well, what did he say? Did it give any clue to…”
“My name. He said my name. Just softly under his breath.”
Her name. After all Daniel has done for him. Given all that Daniel is to him. He says her name before anything else.
Gulnaz sips her tea. “Listen, I can’t stay long. I’m late already. But I have some news. Do you mind closing the door?”
Ah. This is it. This is where she tells him they’re through, that she and Prentice have shacked up together, or that she’s pregnant, or that the police have been round. But she mustn’t. Not yet. There hasn’t been enough time for anything to knock out his system.
“You’ve done a great job here, you know. I’m sorry about being cross with you over the trip you took. What you did was probably the best thing you could have done for him. He’s got so much better over the last few days. The thing this morning, his upset stomach, I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Surely this isn’t where she finishes. No, it can’t be – she said she had news.
“And you’ve done all this to the flat, sacrificed so much. But now that Alex is on the mend, I’m wondering how you’ll cope with all the extra demands. The flat is so tiny. So many hazards. I mean, what happened yesterday – you could have been horribly disfigured.”
So that was it. A very longwinded way of telling him he’s incompetent.
“I coped. It was a chance in a million. It’s not going to happen again.”
“I just thought – now with you being in need of looking after yourself – it’s going to be a lot harder for you over the next week or so.”
“And?”
Gulnaz lowers her voice. “The nursing home I’ve been working in, Dr. Prentice has explained the situation to them and they’re happy to have Alex – just for a few days, until you’re better. They won’t charge a lot. And I’d be there to see that everything is fine.”
It’s kicking in now, at last. He can feel the first surge of power from the caffeine and the vodka dismantling his defences. Nothing yet from Jerry’s magic potion.
“But I suggest we don’t tell Alex just yet. We don’t want to unsettle him any more than we have to. And maybe I should be…”
“Prentice did what?”
She purses her lips. “Calm down, Daniel, please.”
“Who the hell does he think he is?”
“That’s not fair.”
The sudden escalation in his own aggression unnerves him. He’s not sure he can keep a lid on it. “Did you put him up to this? I told you I
can manage. You had no bloody right…” He’s like a pilot flying into enemy fire, losing control. He wants to eject. She’s losing it too.
“Oh for God’s sake, Daniel, stop. Just look at yourself. You finished off a whole bottle of whisky in that bath. That’s not coping. Anything might have happened.”
She’s spitting tracer bullets at the windshield. There’s black smoke filling the cockpit, the alarms ring out in the darkness. His guts tell him they’re plummeting to earth.
“Did I tell you? Or perhaps he told you during your cosy chat. He did it deliberately, you know. Crept up behind me and gave me the fucking fright of my life just when I had the pan in my hand.”
“Oh don’t be ridiculous!”
Flames on all sides, the ocean rising fast through the parting clouds. She’s getting to her feet. She’s going to leave him to his own private conflagration.
“Yeah, get the hell out, why don’t you? Whenever things get too hot.”
Pursuing her now, back to the kitchen.
“You’ve been drinking again. I know you have. Or you wouldn’t talk to me like that. And I can smell it. You promised me. It’s pathetic.”
She’s in the hall grabbing her coat. Waves, rocks, the hull of a warship, terrified sailors gazing upwards, crowds scattering, screaming, a great shadow spreading across the deck. Gulnaz has gone. Gulnaz the traitor. Conniving, devious, conspiring Gulnaz. They’ve planned this together, the two of them. She wants Alex for herself. The deafening fireball as Daniel’s half-empty coffee mug shatters against the kitchen wall. He’s running through the burning wreckage, fighting his way towards his brother.
“Talk to me! Fuck you, talk to me! You talked to her. You’re in this together. I’ve got to know. It’s driving me fucking mad. You’re out to hurt me, why? What is it you think I’ve done, huh? HUH? What’s going on in that fucked up little brain of yours?” He has Alex by the collar now, the pyjamas rucked up tight around his armpits. “You went over the cliff. Then what? What!? Someone found you. Where did they take you? Why are you back here? What do you want from me? What? WHAT!?”
A terrified Alex cowers in his hands, dribbling, shaking, more than likely soiling himself again. It comes that close. The beating. But something stops Daniel short. You don’t ever hit a dumb animal. He lets go, buckles, feels the tearing across his belly, turns on his heels, knees giving way, falling forward and sinking to all fours, crawling across the bedroom carpet onto the hard kitchen floor towards the toilet. There are fragments of broken mug impaling themselves into his hands and knees. Ahead of him, above his left shoulder, the impact site, the brown spray pattern already weeping downwards from the tips. And beneath, the three largest pieces – the handle, the base and a section of the rim. The opening line of a filthy joke. They lie strewn over a wicker basket, half buried among the folded blankets. So unlikely an image, Scoff lying there, blissfully unmoved by events, unwoken by a rain of debris.
The dawning horror of realisation. There is no rise and fall to the fur around the ribs, no gentle whistling of air through those parted black lips. The half-opened eye has no milky screen to shutter it. White-tipped paws and crooked whiskers do not twitch in time with the nimble leaping of dreams. No stretching of limbs, no splaying of claws, no chomp-chomp to wet a dried palate. Beneath Daniel’s unwilling fingertips there is no warmth, no pounding little heart.
Evidently, Scoff has been dead for hours.
The shock again numbs all physical pain as no drug, no wizardry of medicine, no nurse’s touch ever could. Daniel is squatting on his heels now, and cradling the lifeless ball to his chest. He should have known it was odd. Like any cat, Scoff would sooner settle himself down onto a heap of junk mail, a cluttered tabletop, a creased shirt, a vacant patch of window ledge, than snuggle into the warm blankets of his official bedding. Scoff had gone there for one purpose only. And that was to die.
The din of the past few minutes has died too. The whole world seems to be holding its breath. Just an engine somewhere revving. Then with it a single note. Then another. And a third. As he lowers the creature back into its blanket, Daniel gives way to a cry that would melt a heart of ice. Scoff wasn’t just his cat. Scoff was the feelings for his mother that he could not express. Scoff was the companionship with his brother denied by fate. Scoff returned the affections never shown by his father, and the trust never earned of his friends. Scoff never criticised, judged, deceived, betrayed. Scoff made demands that were fair, demands that gave Daniel’s life fulfilment and purpose. Scoff made it worth his while getting up in the morning and going through the motions of another day. Scoff made life bearable.
And now Scoff was dead.
Through a distortion of tears he sees above him a figure framed with light. An unearthly, four-legged figure with curved back, broad hind legs, the forelegs thin and narrowing. A creature wearing his own face, rocking gently from side to side. Daniel watches his lips move and sees the look of pity – the same look he’d seen up on the cliffs.
“Ssss-o-rrrr-y.”
Alex said that. He really said it. Bearing down, hunched over his crutches and gazing into the face of his brother, he actually said he was sorry.