Head Injuries (25 page)

    'Then you're ready,' she said, her voice losing its playfulness, her face now blanked into a serious sheet.

    'Ready for what?' Her hand felt like the scrape of dry bone against my skin as she took hold of me.

    'History lesson.'

    We returned to the path and I noticed my line of vision had changed. It seemed as though I was looking the wrong way down a pair of binoculars. The periphery had become charred with shadow. The huge hotel on the corner of Broadway was a hulking suggestion; the homogeneous flats that took over from the guest houses as Morecambe's focus diminished were a series of flat blocks, like umber strokes from a broad brush. My back to the sea, I could have been anywhere. I saw the suggestion of a body to my left, struggling along the floor as it pulled itself along by its stumps. It flailed a vestigial limb at us as we came abreast of it. Eve kicked it away before I could see. The stink of rot filled my nostrils.

    'What do you mean, history lesson?' I said, my tongue treacly with fatigue. I was sweating heavily. At one point it felt as though we were walking a field, the ground yielding beneath us. I could smell freshly cut grass and see goalposts. Ahead, a railway viaduct slunk across a brook like a series of giant stocks.

    'There's a dead part in you. You know it well. You walk there often. You know its population. You know its roads. Before long-' her voice susurrant, a skein of dry leaves on a pavement,'- you'll be there for good, unless you
excise
it.'

    Then the path swam back into view. We were at the tall, wrought-iron gates of the fun fair. Chains and locks looped around the struts like the preface to an escape act. The next moment, they were behind me but I couldn't remember climbing them. Whenever I glanced at Eve, I felt a bolt of fear and panic ride up between my balls, lacing my spine with dread. I'd stall but she'd gee me on, and I'd have to force myself to believe that the macerated, dribbling aspect to her face was due to my current fugue.

    'I feel awful,' I gasped.

    That's because we're here now,' she said. The badlands of your head. You've allowed it to slip through the walls you've built around it all these years.'

    A path led down the centre of the fun fair, bisecting a crude conglomeration of huts and turrets, stalls and tinsel pagodas. Eve's hand was a hot bundle eclipsing mine as we drew abreast of the first: a lifeless, splintered portacabin painted purple and done up to resemble a Romany grotto. The sign was gone, its ghost remained.
Fortunes told,
it might have said. I was beginning to feel a little better. My sight had returned and Eve no longer bore those hideous, unsettled scars.

    'Have you ever crossed anybody's palm with silver?' Eve said. 'Ever been told what the future holds for you?' The sky was curdling, late afternoon greys gravitating to a point above the horizon like a sheet being tucked down the side of a bed.

    'No, I've not,' I said, testily, still struggling with my tiredness and the threat of regression. 'I believe in making your own destiny. I don't think there's anything mapped out for me.'

    'Really?' Eve gentled, sounding as though she knew better, sounding as though her mouth had a wry smile all over it. We went deeper into the park, taking in the silent, facade-like aspect of the various rides and sideshows. A doughnut and candy floss caravan lurched almost in defiance of gravity's laws; a child's ride-giant tea-cups and tiny helicopters-creaked in its immobility, the massive central bolt around which the seats spun broken in two. The ghost train seemed untouched by the damage, but only because its original cosmetics acted as camouflage. Scorch marks streaked across machinery and mouldings; burned oil created tarry scars in the grass. The cages of a lethal-looking ride hung from their supporting arms, melted by high temperatures into smooth, grotesque knots. The fire-hungry prizes arranged on one of the stalls offering dart challenges
(Score under 50 to win! No trebls, no doubls, evry dart must score in seyerat beds. No argument)
had turned into a black cluster, like dirty, solidified detergent bubbles.

    'I feel like a character in a Ray Bradbury story,' I said. Eve still had a curl to her lips. I kissed it away and when I moved back, I smelled woodsmoke. At first I thought I was having some terrible flashback linked to the awfulness of that night.

    'Are you all right?' she asked. A plane of smoke drifted between us. It snagged against one of the scoops of her hair and twisted into her face, looping with it, once again making her seem insubstantial, of rather than in the smoke. Her eyes appeared in a pocket of calm but I couldn't see the flesh in which they must be cradled. I didn't want to lose her, or the grip on my fear, which was dwindling rapidly, so I clenched her hand even more tightly. 'Something is still burning here,' I said, relieved that there had to be something corporeal on fire, rather than the conviction of my eager imagination. I took a quick scan around, and my eye was caught by movement at the entrance. There was a figure standing there but it wouldn't remain constant in my line of vision. It kept dissolving and fading into the background colour, before morphing into some new shape. It was trying to make contact, I felt, but its vocal cords sounded blasted. A rasp lifted and lost itself to the wind. I was about to approach when I sensed movement behind me. Eve was gone. In my hand was a bunch of combusted sticks.

    'Your history,' came her voice. 'It's on fire.'

    Where are you?' I called, my lungs filling up with what tasted like smoke from a barbecue. 'Jesus, Eve.' I staggered forward, choking on the meaty, greasy fumes. My eyes were streaming. I didn't know what I was going to do first: choke to death on my imminent vomitus or suffocate. I dragged a handkerchief from my pocket and covered my nose and mouth. My hand touched wood and I felt my way around what felt like a rickety fence until I was standing amid a crowd of trees. The smoke was thinner here, unable to develop itself among the divisive branches. Wads of smoke clung to the heights like strange nests.

    Then there was movement, finally. Something drifting towards me through the blue mist. Stinking low and sinuous, a wind of muscle and fur. The cat sat a little distance away from me, observing me as I shivered and spluttered into my handkerchief. Catching my gaze, it hooked me and flung me twenty years into the past. I realised I hadn't thought of the cat on the school field in all that time, the way we'd lured it with little clicks and blown kisses. The way we'd scratched its head and listened for the purr. The way we twisted its head till the bone splintered and a red comma of blood flicked out from its mouth. Taking a Bic to its brilliant eyes.

    And God, that wasn't all I was remembering…

    

    

    Some time later I came up from a dream in which I was the perpetrator of every murder-real, screen or otherwise-that I had ever witnessed or read about. I dragged around the agony from every knifing, hail of bullets, garrote, drowning, explosion in a clear sac that was attached directly to my heart. It was a milky fluid that sloshed about. Different expressions of pain and suffering pressed against the membrane. 'Heaven marching,' they mouthed, before sinking back into the effluvia. Then I realised that it wasn't the physical pain that was my burden but the consequential torment that I visited on relatives and friends. I surfaced, sure I was suffocating, but the only thing that was stopping my breath was the scream that filled my throat.

    

    

    Helen answered on the first ring. 'It's Seven Arches,' I said. 'Don't I know it.' She sounded hollow and tired. 'What happened?'

    She told me. 'Fuck,' I said. 'What now?'

    'Have you tried Shay?'

    'No,' I replied. 'Do you want me to?'

    'Forget it,' she said, her voice suddenly alert. 'I tried and there was no answer. Better we should just go round to see him. Can you borrow a car?'

    'No problem,' I said, doubting that Terry would allow me the use of his Toyota.

    'Pick me up. I'll be waiting outside the shop.'

    I put the payphone receiver down and the ding from the bell echoed comfortably in the small alcoves of the ground floor. I sat back on the PVC pouffe and rubbed my eyes. Terry's footfalls made soft impacts above my head as he crossed the landing. 'Here's a bulb for you,' he said. 'Hundved watt, is that all vight?'

    I heard Eiger's reply-'Buggered if I know'-and a door snick shut.

    The kitchen was empty but a pall of cigarette smoke hung above the dining table. The sound of a car starting up. I went to the window in time to see Maureen take off in her Peugeot. I returned to the door to their living quarters and tried it. It opened on a room struggling to be identified under a weight of clashing decor. Paisley wallpaper, striped corduroy sofa covers, a carpet like a map of the cosmos. There was a fish tank burbling away like a container of simmering soup. On top of the lid I hit gold. I snatched Terry's keys and slipped out the back, vaulting the gate and legging it along the alley to the car. I was in Heysham seven minutes later.

    

    

    

    We said not a word on the journey back: a nightmare ride. Seamus' breath was a wet burbling in his chest which sounded inches from my ear. Helen drifted into the oncoming traffic on a few occasions and was rewarded with horns and flashed headlights. Luckily, the Marine Road was pretty quiet, though we had a panic when the snout of a police Rover quested into the road ahead of us. Helen seemed to get a grip of herself and guide the Mini more sedately past the dormant guest houses, in the windows of which sat mannequin-still people topped off with grey hair, perhaps sleeping, perhaps watching the sea as it filled the bay. A group of students nestled in the shade beneath the awning of the Gingham Cafe. And the lighthouse fastened all of this to the past, its beacon describing a line which bisected my eyes, filling my immediate world with light and snow. God, I was hammered. Seamus had been passing round a large hip flask of neat vodka-well, we had been passing it back and forth between ourselves; Helen was too busy building a hill of cigarette butts to join in.

    Helen parked the car by the florist's off Heysham Road and we listened to the ticking of the engine as it cooled. I thought I could hear our own cogs and springs loosen a little, but it was just Seamus' leather jacket squeaking as he wormed his way to the side of the seat. The wind bound sweat to my face like a mask. I had to screw up my eyes to save them from a stinging. Through the barrier of lashes I looked up to Pol's window and saw a thin shadow slide across the ceiling away from me. Then the light went out.

    'She's not going to answer,' I said to Helen as we slotted Seamus into his throne. She rang the doorbell regardless and we waited, watching each other's cheeks grow papery with the cold. I looked into the frosted, wire-grilled oblong of glass at the door's heart; it took a while to discern Pol's eye there, framed by the gaunt grey smudge of her face. She was looking directly at me, though she surely couldn't see anything.

    'What do you want?' she spat and I saw her lower jaw squirm as it worked the words around in her mouth.

    'Pol. Gran, it's me-Hel. Let us in. It's freez-'

    The door slouched open and the hot breath from within was laced with almonds and oranges and age. She was something picked from the darkness behind: her skin grainy and softly cut off from the rest of her like something undeveloped on film. Of the masks I saw only an infrequent glint, as if their hollow eyes were shedding tears.

    'Inside. Boneheads the lot of you. You're all thick with booze.' Her hand clung to the door's edge; the hook that was her blackened nail tapping frenetically against the wood. Its tip was encrusted with blood.

    Helen and I dragged Seamus to the landing, preceded by Pol, who gusted ahead in a blowsy dress mottled with cigarette burns and stains. In one horrifying moment, as she was framed by the doorway, I saw her outline in the dress, etched as it was by the snow's luminance. It was like beholding an X-ray.

    'Make a hot drink-I'm for a Bovril myself. Strong, mind, and don't go filching no stuff from me shelves. I'll have yer hands off.'

    Seamus looked ready to protest but Helen pressed a finger to her lips.

    Because I didn't want to be subject to any of her insidious little assaults, I went to the kitchen to make her drink, my hands unconsciously reaching for the kettle and the mugs. Instinctively, perhaps because I thought I'd catch another glimpse of him, I shot a glance out of the window, which was full of the bare lightbulb and my whey-faced reflection. It took a while to realise it wasn't mine at all, but something flyblown and sagging, devoid of any features. After a stretch of determined staring, it faded, like frost on a heated windscreen. Like a moth flitting from the flame.

    Back in the living room, I handed Pol her drink while diligently avoiding her eyes. We were sitting in the soft clash of candles at the centre of the room. I looked at the painting above the fire (off-I could hear the wind thrashing about behind it like a trapped animal), at the picture of the woman and her grinning dog, and wondered why I thought there should be a bird in the picture too. Helen's hand rubbed up and down my spine. I realised how stiff I must feel and tried to relax.

    'So,' said Pol, smugly, her voice deadened by the mug which hid her lower jaw. Steam turned her eyes into black olives. 'So. Why? Tell me that, Helen.
Why?'

    Helen kept her eyes on the fluid pattern of the hearth rug; its overlapping, busy strands of green and orange and blue. 'Why what?'

    'Don't give me none of that smart chat, slammakin that you are. Christ, you come snuffling out of the shitey weather, dragging your touchy-feely fiddlers with you-'