* * *
Generally, it’s best to stay naked. Best for the injuries. Little by little, day by day, the scabs are starting to flake and fall off – along with a little coaxing when the itching gets too great. Each scab is as thick and hard as chocolate – chunks of broken Easter egg. The skin beneath has become a shiny, vivid pink, the colour of Gulnaz’s lips. The colour, but not the feel. This skin is stiff and tight and dry to the touch, not soft, moist and giving. On Gulnaz’s lips, a million nerve endings. Immediately beneath his burns all sensation is gone, the nerves cauterised.
Scoff continues to fool with the edge of his vision, ready to morph at the speed of an eye into a shirt, a carrier bag or just an empty space. Daniel’s ears too have begun to play tricks – a snatch of a remark caught here or there in a room beyond. Another sound will always interrupt it, leaving it to fade into doubtful memory, and the words never quite reach him, but the inflection is perfectly clear. As clear as it was in those last seconds of consciousness before the gas overcame him.
Daniel knows he is slowly starving himself to death. But hunger evades him, and besides, there is no longer anything in the flat to eat. Of course he should venture out and buy some essentials. Everyone needs their five a day, he doesn’t need a girlfriend or a mother to tell him that. But the world out there is a sick and frightening place. In the world outside there are rapists and drug dealers, rabid dogs and fascist thugs, waiting for their chance to get him, waiting for a wrong move, a lowering of guard.
Noises outside. Each to be carefully weighed – for fear they may come a-knocking. Teenage girls on the stairs, rushing off towards narcotic oblivion, staggering tearfully home. Drunks singing on the pavement. In the morning, wives shouting at husbands, husbands slamming doors (slamming wives?). Engines igniting, cars roaring up the hill. The clang of bells of St. Bart’s, a squall of wind flapping the rubbish bags beyond his window. Silence for a few short hours only at dead of night. The loneliest hours. The inside noises take over then – the hum from the boiler room, the click-click of cooling water pipes, someone on the floor above creaking their bedsprings, an occasional door, the flushing of toilets. And flies, even at this time of year, spinning a death dance on his windowsill. One night he even hears nose-blowing from the flat next door, and loud snoring. For the first time in weeks.
It’s a shock to discover how much he misses them. For years he’d never missed anyone and now he grieves for them all, Scoff the most. But at least Scoff comes to him each night in dreams and might stay for an hour after he wakes. Alex he never sees, but sometimes there’s a clatter of crutches against furniture, or the squeal of tyres on the vinyl, at night his breathing or muffled moaning. Of Gulnaz he’s given nothing – except a sensation, the smell of her hair on his pillow, the taste of her skin on his lips. And maybe, just maybe, a streak of black as she hurries to be somewhere else, attending to the needs of everyone but him.
It’s other company he’s forced to keep now; the uninvited guests he’d allowed to cross over before passing out. His father’s voice has grown bolder, more obsessive. He should be freaked by it, but in many ways this voice has always been with him, in his head until now, but speaking nonetheless. Like the gods men create to subjugate themselves, this voice has been his lifelong arbiter of sin, his means of measuring his own failure. But Christ, how that voice does go on. His failure today is in not standing up for himself. He should be out there, bringing Alex home, winning back Gulnaz and settling the score with Morris. So much to be shamed by. It’s a voice that hovers nearer at hand now, somewhere over his left shoulder, but still refusing to show itself. The hungrier he is, the more he drinks, the louder the voice. Only Morris’s potion shuts up that mouth for a few blessed, blissful hours. But every time, the aftermath: the tremors, the terror and the character assassinations, multiplied tenfold.
As for his mother, her presence never alters. When she appears she is always in shadow, nebulous and intangible, always half hidden behind the back-posts of a chair or the bars of a window. And always silent until he tries to speak her name. Not a good idea to speak her name, not unless he wants another drowning in her devastating howls of misery.
The handrail by the toilet. The sliding board. The unused bubble-bath, the ruined wastebasket wrapped in torn bin bags. Their separate towels and flannels, soiled and screwed up.
Oh, Alex.
Will Gulnaz be showering him with the same care? Will she clean him as thoroughly after his toilet? Does she dress him and make his bed and cut up his food and launder his clothes and…?
Yes. Yes, of course she does. She will do all this willingly and lovingly. Because she is who she is, and because now they are together, Alex and Guli, just as they planned it.
What a fool he has been. A girl like that, one-in-a-million. And she was the one who said they belonged together. Kindred spirits. She didn’t like cats, but cats were no longer an obstacle. She was everything he could have wanted. She had opened him up like a flower. She could have taught him so much about passion, about sex, about people and how they work, how normal people deal with emotions. How to feel love. She could have made him happy.
Maybe that’s why he had to go and throw it all away.
‘When did it start, Guli? When did you first know?’
From the beginning perhaps: the moment she witnessed those bouts of jealousy and obsession.
‘And I thought I’d done well in hiding them from you.’
But he’d never hidden the drinking, or the outbursts of fury. ‘You told me your limits then, didn’t you?’
She had, yes, and given him an ultimatum, but still she’d bounced back with even greater forgiveness and affection.
‘Then, what? When did I screw it up?’
He waits for her answer. She won’t speak it of course; he never hears her voice. He must read the perfume trail of any words she chooses to give.
‘It started with Alex. When he woke up and came home. It all started to unravel at that moment, when you wheeled him out of the hospital, when I couldn’t be there with you.’
‘Because I was angry with you? Is that all? Can a simple apology put it right?’
‘No. It’s not that. It’s something in you. Your capacity to connect. One person at a time: it’s all you can handle. It had to be me or Alex; it could never be us both. Just as it once had to be your father or your mother.’
The scent of her is fading now, but those damning words leave such bitterness in his mouth. So there it is. If she’s right, then it’s hopeless. If forced to choose between Gulnaz and Alex, there could only ever be one outcome.
From the bathroom to the kitchen. No scotch left, enough vodka barely to wet his lips. A half can of Stella, three days old – anything to take this taste away. But is she right? It doesn’t feel right: like there’s something she’s overlooking.
How magical, the many forms a revelation may take. In that moment it’s to see an old jumper under the table and to mistake it instinctively for something else. It throws him a lifeline to go on fighting, to keep on living. An incentive to turn the tide. He grabs the garment with one hand and squeezes it tight.
‘Not true, Guli, not true! All the time we were together, I always took good care of Scoff.”
The jersey is Alex’s. Daniel had missed it when packing his clothes. “And then I had Alex to cope with as well, but that didn’t stop me looking after my cat.” He hurls it into the bedroom. “But now I don’t have a cat, do I? My poor old Scoff is dead and buried.”
Doesn’t she see? It can be Gulnaz and Alex. If he could devote himself to two at a time before, then he’s perfectly capable of devoting himself to two at a time now.
He spits out the beer, drains the can into the sink and kicks it into the air. Tomorrow will be the day he puts his life back together.
~~~~~