Head Injuries (2 page)

    Maybe she realised how brusque she was sounding. She rubbed the heel of my hand with a finger. Its tip was purple and ragged from chewing. She dipped it into the torn packet of sugar and I watched its journey back to her mouth. She sucked long after the sugar had dissolved on her tongue.

    Through the soapy window (soup, pies, chips, balms) I watched a couple bent into the wind trying to light cigarettes. Like a vampire the woman lifted up a flap of her trench coat while her partner ducked into its shade. An eddy of smoke. She walked on and he fell into a crippled gait behind her, his twisted limbs moving in grotesque yet oddly delicate parabolas. I watched them until they disappeared behind the clock tower. I had seen them before. Morecambe was like the dim, sunken corridors behind a theatre where character actors mope from week to week waiting for two or three lines in a play that has been running for years.

    Ernest reappeared with a tray. He had done up the offending button and smoothed his CrispNDry head into something more befitting the Conservative front bench. He still smelled but it had been tamed by the recent application of Hai Karate. The tea was greasy but strong and I disguised its taste with sugar.

    'No kipper for you today, uh?'

    'No thanks,' I replied, willing him, with every shred of my body to bugger away off.

    With another glance at Helen's breasts, he left us, bowing slightly and offering Helen anything she wanted. 'Do you kipper,' he said, hopefully. 'A little bit of sausage? Hot.'

    'Oh for Christ's sake, David. Why did we come here?'

    'I used to come here when I was at college.' It wasn't a reason but I shrugged when I said it.

    I've loved cafe toast for ever: even Mum was unable to equal it. It always comes hot and crunchy and golden, the butter already melted. It's one of those things, like freshly cut grass or milky drinks or
Match of the Day,
that you find yourself using as a metaphor for life. For good things. I explained all this to Helen once. She said: 'How very Hovis. You stupid twat.' I tend not to wax lyrical in front of her any more.

    'Have some,' I said. She just stared at it. 'People who don't eat die, you know. I read that in the newspaper.' It was a weak attempt but it worked. She broke off a corner of toast and chewed, a comma of grease at her lip. My throat grew painful then and I found it hard to swallow my food. Why couldn't it be like it was at college? She looked so vulnerable sitting there with butter on her mouth that I wanted to hug her and nuzzle her hair.

    The waitress took my plate away before I'd swallowed the last bite. I wanted to ask if her haste was due to an imminent coachload of tourists, flocking to this gastronomic heaven, but it would have only alienated me further from Helen. She wasn't one for faffing about. I left a small hill of coppers on the table.

    A bitter wind, reeking of dead fish, mugged us as we stepped outside.

    'We could go back to mine,' I said feebly, knowing she'd refuse. She turned away but not before I saw a look of disgust crease her face. I wish I could let my anger out now and again but I always feel foolish when I shout and I can't keep it up. Helen was wonderfully eloquent when in a rage. It would appear to be part of her natural constitution. She always seems sickly and pathetic when pleasant.

    'I haven't walked enough yet,' she said. 'And I need to be at the pub in time for Shay. He'll be here soon.'

    My attempts at feigning nonchalance were pitiful; I could feel my features sloping. Shay-Seamus Cope-had been a friend of mine back in our Warrington childhood; the kind you can't wait to leave behind and never get in touch with again. The three of us would tool about the town centre or throw stones at birds by the railway line behind our school. He wormed his way into my life because a teacher had asked me to look out for him. Said he was shy. Like most people one feels a hostility towards, I couldn't pinpoint exact reasons; rather, it was a steady disaffection like the build-up of plaque upon teeth.

    'Why?'

    'He called me over the summer. He was in a real mess-he
is
in a real mess. I think that whatever I'm suffering… he is too.'

    'Look, Helen. What is going on? Have you two got some kind of disease? And why call me about it? Ever since I got here I've felt like someone for you to piss on, someone to make you feel better. Well, it's just-' and here my anger expired. I could feel my mouth stiffening. I felt sad; I wanted to bury my face in a cardigan.

    She was smiling, but in a kind of resigned way. It was the most compassionate she'd appeared yet. 'Believe me. You're involved. Do you think I'd have contacted you if you weren't?' She was talking softly but I still felt the blow of that last sentence, deep in my belly. It's an ache we know well.

    'David. Shay needs to be here. He needs friends around him.'

    I balked. She held up her hand. 'I know he drives you mad but he was fond of you. And he always had time for me. He's nobody else to turn to.'

    I wanted her to tell me that the reason she called me was that she wanted us to get closer; she really wanted us to work.

    The longer she talked without such an allusion only served to thicken the doubt surrounding my being in Morecambe.

    There's something you're not telling me Helen. I'm not just here to play comfort blanket to you both. I need to know.'

    Already I felt unwelcome, even though it was Helen who had instigated my return to the town with her brief phone call. It had come one snowy evening towards the end of September and I recognised her voice immediately.

    I'd first met Helen in nursery school. I had been in a race: up a slight incline to the tree at the end of the playground and back. I've seen that tree since, it's no more than twenty feet away from where the starting line had been but it felt like miles back then. On the return leg of the race, Helen had stood up in the sand pit and positioned her spade at my eye level. I was more concerned by the mouth full of grit I received than the cut above my eye. It was how she introduced herself. I had followed her ever since.

    Until she rang, her face had developed a softness which blurred her features, as if I was looking at her through a foggy pane of glass. Her surname was as elusive as the last pea on the plate. Talking to her again swept all those cobwebs aside. How could I have forgotten: Soper; the scar; her love of Dime bars; phobias of insects and fungus (she'd once said the scariest thing she could imagine was a spider eating a mushroom).

    I realise now how much of what she'd said had been injected with a false bonhomie-I'd been sucked into the affection in her words and hadn't been able to detect the desperation behind them. After all, I'd had a good four years in which to forget how she behaved. It's hard to remember what we talked about; the past, what we were doing with our lives-I can't recall specifics. Apart from her mention of a death in her family and the way that coming winter was disturbing her to the extent that it filled her sleep with terrible images.

    'So far I've never remembered any of them, only this awful clenched presence that lingers round me when I wake up. It's only a matter of time. And I don't know what I'll do then.'

    I don't know why I capitulated so readily when she asked me to spend some time in Morecambe. I'd like to think it was because Warrington was stale, a town I knew inside out and hadn't been able to shrug away from. More likely, it was because the barely concealed ache of loneliness that she exuded down the line tweaked at something similar in me. We'd shared some close moments in Warrington and later, in Morecambe; maybe its magic could work on us again.

    I reluctantly agreed to go over to the pub for Seamus' arrival and left her at the corner so I could go back to my digs and unpack. I'd picked one of the guest houses in a side street off the Marine Road that was less garish and in-your-face than the others. Even so, this one looked like a flower stall in its attempt to brighten the town. The old duffer tooling about on the flags with his trowel and bag of Fisons nodded a hello and went back to his truffling with slow-motion enthusiasm. Through a window poked the profile of his better half, like an inhospitable face of the Eiger.

    'Ooroit, Dievid?' she asked, through a mouthful of green teeth and prunes. 'Owzya room? Sorted?'

    'Nearly,' I said, and pushed through the front door so I wouldn't get into another interminable pow-wow with her. Yesterday, it had been water content in bacon and shivering poodles, the state of her ribs and Pick 'n' Mix queues at Woolworth's.

    These newly painted walls (white and peppermint) were blighted with framed pictures of cars made out of watch pieces. Maureen, the landlady (Eiger's daughter), had positioned a large plastic vase on the first landing. An invitation was taped to its rim:

    
For Your Umberellas

    Through the fire door, I collided with Duncan. Six foot fuck off, Neanderthal forehead, prognathic jaw, bull-shouldered, cow-eyed. His ginger hair was brushed back from his brow like a nest of fuse wire.

    'I'm just nipping to the shops. Do you need any milk, or bread? Or lint remover. I'm going for lint remover.'

    'No thank you, Duncan,' Inside, I locked my door and stepped over the boxes I had yet to disgorge. There was hardly any room; enough to swing a cat if you didn't mind clouting it open against the walls. I heard Duncan lumber outside, ask Eiger if she wanted any lint remover and her non-sequitur about the discrepancies of Belisha beacons, how they never flashed in tandem. I closed the window and put on some music.

    It seemed strange that, despite my not thinking of Seamus other than in the most rudimentary way, he should now dance glass-sharp into my thoughts where Helen had always been wraith-like, smudged by time and my questionable memory into an indistinct figure. Strange too that I should conjure him like this: scooping his beloved thick-cut marmalade into a split pitta, his bespectacled gaze soaking up the obituaries (The Bitch, we called him-'I'm coming… just let me finish the bitcheries will yer!'), spare hand squirming against the flesh that peeked through the holes in his towelling bathrobe.

    Though frequently caustic, he could sometimes be capable of a disarming tenderness-a quality that seemed instinctive rather than pre-meditated; often he would look bewildered when soothing a distressed companion, ostensibly uncertain of his behaviour. He looked like a child that has suddenly discovered how to whistle. His warmth worked, but-because of his more forthright and nervy side-only at a superficial level; comfort rather than cure. I never experienced this softness, only his angles and edges. Habitually late for anything we'd arranged, it would invariably be me who was called upon to encourage his haste, but we didn't mesh too well and would find ourselves growing heated in places that should have been neutral zones. Sudden spats in beer gardens, sneered remarks on the bus home, exasperated plays of hostility in the cinema queue. Remarkably, an audience was essential to precipitate this kind of behaviour. Alone, we would get on fine, tolerating the quirks that irritated us so much.

    Like me, Seamus had been mesmerised by Helen's lovely face and the way she made you feel as though you were the only person worth talking to in the world. She had a perspective on things that was totally unlike any other kid I knew. The way she talked had a lot to do with the way we fell absolutely under her spell. I think we probably loved Helen a bit all through our formative years. She was the factor that brought us together and the reason why we would never really get on.

    The last time I saw Seamus was on the morning of my final exam. I'd been revising most of the night and felt hollow, ductile as hot wire. Seamus had been pacing about the house while I crammed, his exams completed some time before. Every argument or opinion I studied was corrupted by a creak or the soft click of a closing door. He was getting psyched up for a caving expedition to the Brecon Beacons; he'd decided that caves were the only uncharted territory left on the planet and that he wanted to discover a new pocket in the Earth's crust. He said it was the thrill of knowing his would be the first footstep to ever mark a piece of land that was millions of years old.

    Over a bowl of cereal I tried to ignore the clunking of his belaying pins and karabiners, his checking and rechecking of lamps and ropes. I cracked when he finally relaxed, plonking himself down on the kitchen sideboard, virtually raping the newspaper in his desire to get to the bitcheries.

    'Fuck me,' he said at last, 'Arlene Farraday's rolled a seven.'

    I threw a teacup at him which bounced off his forehead and shattered on the floor. He didn't say a word, merely folded his newspaper and left. I had to strain to hear the front door snick shut. And that was that. No letters, no telephone calls. His sulk had lasted three years.

    On the floor with my boxes I gradually succumbed to a light claustrophobia; I wasn't making inroads on the piles of stuff waiting to be put away, simply moving them around. Downstairs in the kitchen, I boiled some water and flicked through a catering magazine that Maureen had left on the table. Now that the summer season was over, the huge range and double oven seemed ridiculously extravagant, especially when I was only boiling an egg. At least I wanted for nothing: the drawers and cupboards were filled with every kind of kitchen paraphernalia, from blenders and electric knives to indulgences such as corn-on-the-cob holders and a carousel for cooking jacket potatoes. I selected a double egg-cup and one of the toast racks, turned the egg-timer over just as the water began to bubble and Terry, the landlord, skimmed out of his adjoining living room decked in overalls and Dunlop tennis shoes. He had a mathematically precise side parting in his hair and a Berkeley hung from the expanse of his bottom lip (the top was non-existent). He was carrying a sander in his hands. And his ubiquitous cuppa, brewed to the colour of a jaundiced person's piss.