Everything You Need: Short Stories (16 page)

‘Another souvenir from the move,’ he guessed. It was after midnight and they were lying in bed, having just abandoned an attempt to make love. This wasn’t from any lack of enthusiasm — far from it — simply that the pain in Richard’s ribs was too bracing to ignore. He was fine so long as he kept his chest facing directly forwards. Any twisting and it felt as if someone was stoving in his rib cage with a well-aimed boot. ‘And no, I’m not going to the doctor about that either.’

Chris smiled, started to tickle him, and then realized she shouldn’t. Instead she sighed theatrically, and kissed him on the nose before turning to lie on her side.

‘You’d better get well soon,’ she said, ‘Or I’m going to have to buy a do-it-yourself book.’

‘You’ll go blind,’ he whispered, turning off the bedside light, and she giggled quietly in the dark. He rolled gingerly so that he was snuggled into her back, and lightly stroked her shoulder, waiting for sleep.

After a moment he noticed a wetness under his hand, and pulled his hand out from under the duvet.

In the threadbare moonlight he confirmed what he’d already suspected. Earlier in the evening he’d noticed that the little cuts on his hand seemed to be exuding tiny amounts of blood. It was happening again, or still. Constantly being reopened when he lugged boxes around, presumably.

‘S’nice,’ Chris murmured sleepily. ‘Don’t stop.’

Richard slid his hand back under the duvet and moved it gently against her shoulder again, using the back of his fingers, cupping his palm away from her.

T
he bathroom was tiny
, but very adequately equipped with mirrors. Richard couldn’t help noticing the change as soon as he took off his dressing gown the next morning.

There was still no sign of bruising over his ribs, which worried him. Something which hurt that much ought to have some external manifestation, he believed, unless it indicated internal damage. The pain was a little different this morning, less like a kicking, more as if two of the ribs were grating tightly against each other. A kind of cartilaginous twisting.

There were also a number of new scratches.

Mostly short, they were primarily congregated over his stomach and chest. It looked as though a cat with its claws out had run over him in the night. As they didn’t have a cat this seemed unlikely, and Richard frowned as he regarded himself in the mirror.

Also odd was the mark on his chest. Perhaps it was merely seeing it in proper light, but this morning it looked like more than just a scratch. By spreading his fingers out on either side, he found he could pull the edges of the cut slightly apart, and that it was a millimeter or so deep. When he allowed it to close again it did so with a faint liquidity, the sides tacky with lymph. It wasn’t healing properly. In fact — and Richard held up his left hand to confirm this — it was doing the same as the cuts on his palm. They too seemed as fresh as the day before — maybe even a little fresher.

Glad that Chris had left the house before he’d made it out of bed, Richard quickly showered, patting himself dry around the cuts, and covered them with clothes.

B
y lunchtime
the flat was finally in order, and Richard had to admit parts of it looked pretty good. The kitchen was the sole room which was bigger than he’d been used to in the previous flat, and in slanting light in the late morning, it was actually very attractive. The table was a little larger than would have been ideal, but at least you could get at the fridge without performing contortions.

The living room upstairs also looked pretty bijou, if you ignored the way half his books were crammed sideways into the bookcases. Chris had already established a nest on the larger of the two sofas; her book, ashtray and an empty coffee mug placed within easy reach. Richard perched on the other sofa for a while, eyes running vaguely over his books, and realizing he ought to make an effort to colonize a corner of the room for his own, too.

Human, All Too Human
.

The title brought Richard out of his reverie. A second-hand volume of Nietzsche, bought for him as a joke by Susan. It shouldn’t have been on the shelf, but in one of the storage boxes. Chris didn’t know it had been a present from Susan, but then it hadn’t been Chris who’d insisted he take the other stuff down. It had simply seemed to be the right thing to do, and Richard had methodically worked around the old flat hiding things the day before Chris moved in. Hiding them from whom, he hadn’t been sure. It had been six months by then since he and Susan had split up, and she wasn’t even seeing the man she’d left him for any more. To have the old mementos still out didn’t cause him any pain, and he’d thought he’d put them away purely out of consideration for Chris. As he looked over the bookcase, however, he realized how much the book of Nietzsche stood out in their new flat. It smelled of Susan. Some tiny part of her, a speck of skin or smear of oil, must surely still be on it somewhere.

If he could sense that, then surely Chris could too. He walked across the room, took the book from the shelf, and walked downstairs to put it in the box on top of his filing cabinet in the study.

On the way he diverted into the bathroom. As he absently opened his fly, he noticed an unexpected sensation at his fingertips. He brushed them around inside his trousers again, trying to work out what he’d felt. Then very slowly he removed them, and held his hand up.

His fingers were spotted with blood.

Richard stared coldly at them for a while, and then calmly undid the button of his trousers. he lowered them carefully and then pushed down his boxer shorts. More cuts.

A long red line ran from the middle of his right thigh around to within a couple of inches of his testicles. A similar one lay across the very bottom of his stomach. A much shorter but deeper slit lay across the base of his penis, and it was from this that the majority of the blood was flowing.

It wasn’t a bad cut. It hardly put one in mind of the
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
. But Richard would still have much preferred it not to be there.

Looking up at the mirror above the toilet, he undid the buttons on his shirt. The scratches on his stomach now looked more like cuts, and a small thin line of blood rolled down from the cut on his chest.

Like many people — men especially — Richard wasn’t fond of doctors. It wasn’t the sepulchral gloom of waiting rooms, or the grim pleasure their receptionists took in patronizing you. It was the boredom and the sense of potential catastrophe, combined with the knowledge that there probably wasn’t a great deal they could actually do. If you had something really bad then they sent you to a hospital. If it was trivial, it would go away of its own accord.

It was partly for these reasons that Richard did his shirt and trousers back up again, after patting at some of the cuts with pieces of toilet tissue. It was partly also because he was afraid. He didn’t know where the scratches were coming from, but the fact that instead of healing they seemed to be getting worse, was disquieting. With his vague semi-understanding of such things, he wondered if his blood had stopped clotting, and if so, what that meant in turn. He didn’t think you could suddenly develop haemophilia. It didn’t seem likely. But what then? Perhaps he was tired, run-down after the move. Would that make a difference?

In the end he resolved to go on ignoring it for a little longer, like that mole which keeps growing but which you don’t wish to believe might be malignant.

He spent the afternoon sitting carefully at his desk, trying to work and resisting the urge to peek at parts of his body. It was almost certainly his imagination, which made it feel as if a warm, plump drop of blood had sweated from the cut on his chest and rolled slowly down beneath his shirt; and the dampness he felt around his crotch must only be a result of his having turned the heating up very high.

Absolutely.

H
e took
care to shower well before Chris was due back. The cuts were still there, and had been joined by another on his upper arm. When he was dry he took some surgical dressing and micropore tape from the bathroom cabinet and covered the ones which were bleeding most. He then put on his darkest shirt and sat in the kitchen, waiting for Chris to come home. He would have gone upstairs, but didn’t really feel comfortable up there by himself yet. Although most of the objects in the room were his, Chris had arranged them, and the room seemed a little forlorn without her to fill in their structure.

That evening they went out to a pub in Soho, a birthday drink for one of Chris’s mates. Richard had discovered that Chris had several different groups of friends. He had also discovered that the ones she regarded as her closest were the ones he found hardest to like. It wasn’t because of anything intrinsically unpleasant, more an insufferable air of having known each other since before the dawn of time, like some heroic group, the Knights of the Pine Table. Unless you could remember the hilarious occasion when they all went down to the Dangling Cock in Mulchester and good old ‘Kipper’ Philips sang ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ straight through while lying on the bar with a pint on his head before going on to amusingly prang his father’s car on the steps of the village church, you were no more than one of life’s spear carriers — even after you’d been going out with one of them for nearly a year. In their terms God was a bit of a Johnny-come-lately, and the Devil, even had he turned up to dinner with a hostess gift and a bottle of very good wine, would have been treated with the cloying indulgence reserved for friends’ younger siblings.

Luckily that evening they were seeing a different and more recent group, some of whom were certified human beings. Richard stood at the bar affably enough, slowly downing a series of Kronenbourgs while Chris alternately went to talk to people or brought them to talk to him. One of the latter, a doctor whom Richard believed to be called Kate, peered hard at him as soon as she hove into view.

‘What’s that?’ she asked, bluntly.

Richard was about to tell her that what he was holding was called a “pint”, that it consisted of the liquid alcoholic byproducts of the soaking, boiling, and fermenting of certain natural vegetative species, and that he had every intention — regardless of any objections she or anyone else might have — of drinking it, when he realized she was looking at his left hand. Too late, he tried to slip it into his pocket, but she reached out and snatched it up.

‘Been in a fight, have you?’ she asked. Chris turned from the man she was talking to, and looked over Kate’s shoulder at Richard’s hand.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Just a bizarre flat relocation accident.’

‘Hmm,’ Kate said, her mouth pursed into a moue of consideration. ‘Looks like someone’s come at you with a knife, if you ask me.’

Chris looked at Richard, eyes wide, and he groaned inwardly.

‘Well, things between Chris and I haven’t been so good lately...’ he tried, and got a laugh from both of them. Kate wasn’t to be deflected, however.

‘I’m serious,’ she said, holding up her own hand to demonstrate. ‘Someone tries to attack you with a knife, what do you do? You hold your hands up. And so what happens is the blade will nick the defending hands a couple of times before the knife gets through. See it all the time in Casualty. Little cuts, just like those.’

Richard pretended to examine the cuts on his hand, and shrugged.

‘Maybe Kate could look at your ribs,’ Chris said.

‘I’m sure there’s nothing she’d like better,’ he said, quickly. ‘After a hard day at the coal face there’s probably nothing she’d like more than to look at another piece of fossilized wood.’

‘What’s wrong with your ribs?’ Kate asked, squinting at him closely.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just banged them.’

‘Does this hurt?’ she asked, and suddenly cuffed him around the back of the head.

‘No,’ he said, laughing.

‘Then you’re probably all right,’ she winked, and disappeared to get a drink. Chris frowned for a moment, caught between irritation at not having got the bottom of Richard’s rib problem and happiness at seeing him get on well with one of her friends. Just then a fresh influx of people arrived at the door, and Richard was saved from having to watch her choose which emotion to go with.

Mid-evening he went to the gents and shut himself into one of the cubicles. He changed the dressings on his penis and chest, and noted that some of the cuts on his stomach were now slick with blood. He didn’t have enough micropore to dress them. He would have to hope that they stayed manageable until he got home. The cuts on his hands didn’t seem to be getting any deeper.

Obviously they were just nicks. Almost, as Kate had said, as if someone had come at him with a knife.

T
hey got home well
after midnight. Chris was more drunk than Richard, but he didn’t mind. She was one of those rare people who got even cuter when she was plastered, instead of maudlin or argumentative.

She staggered straight into the bathroom to do whatever the hell it was she spent all that time in there doing. Richard made his way into the study to check the answer phone, gently banging into walls whose positions he still hadn’t internalized yet.

One message.

Richard pressed the play button. Without even noticing he was doing so, he turned down the volume so only he would hear what was on the tape. This was a habit born of the first weeks of his relationship with Chris, when Susan was still calling regularly. Her messages, though generally short and uncontroversial, had not been things he wanted Chris to hear. Again, a program of protection, now no longer needed.

Feeling self-righteous, and burping gently, Richard turned the volume back up.

He almost jumped out of his skin when he realized the message actually
was
from Susan, and quickly turned the volume back down.

She said hello, in the diffident way she had, and went on to observe that they hadn’t seen each other that year yet. There was no reproach, simply a statement of fact. She asked him to call her soon, to arrange a drink.