Head Injuries (3 page)

    'All right there, sunshine? No vest for the wicked, hey David? Got a job yet?'

    I had in fact, but Terry didn't stick around long enough for me to tell him what it was. Maureen stumbled into the light shortly after, her face lined as though it had been used as a cats' scratching post. She was sucking on a cigarette like an asthma sufferer using an inhaler. On seeing me, she pulled the collars of her dressing gown around the speckled waste land of her chest and sat beneath a framed certificate which read:

    
Sales Person Of The Year (3rd Place): Juicy Fruit Greengrocers (Wolverhampton Branch) awarded to Maureen Wimbush.

    'Is ye room warm enough, Doivid chucky? Ownly, the 'eating's a bit shagged, yer know? Terry's adabashatit but no joy oim afroid. Plenty o blankits if yer cold, luv,' She began picking at the blackish roots of an otherwise strawberry blonde bob. I said the room was fine, after managing to decode her polyglot. Assembling my lunch, I declined her invitation to sit and chat. The last time I did that, she'd told me all about the weepy nature of the cyst in her armpit.

    I ate my eggs while watching the local colour scoot in and out of peeling doors or tap at engines with spanners. Girls who looked young enough to be sitting in the prams they pushed wandered by in twos while a stray pack of dogs had a meeting by the bins across the road.

    I thought about Helen. What was wrong? Was it simply that she missed us and wanted to breathe life into the volatile mix the three of us created? I doubted it. For the first time, I dwelt upon her words, the concern that she felt. Although she had yet to flesh out that anxiety, it was already pricking at me with possibilities. She might be pregnant. She might have contracted a life-threatening disease. Whatever it was, was it enough to warrant her summoning of Seamus and myself? I wondered if I would have answered her distress call had I been living further afield, in London, say, or abroad. Probably. If there was the sniff of her being interested in me again, I had to check it out. Oh me. David Munro, aka Sad Bastard.

    I managed to get out of the guest house unmolested, slightly peeved that I'd be returning to my cardboard hovel later on. The sky looked mightily pissed off, drawing its colour from the dead bowl of sea. I crashed through the well-oiled doors of The Battery just as the first flecks of rain found dry land and suffered the disapproving looks of the regulars as I shed my greatcoat and muscled into the passive scrum at the bar. Helen was there already, buying her second pint.

    We took our drinks over to a far corner where a fruit machine farted tunes at five-minute intervals. A dog curled on an armchair raised its eyebrows at us hopefully, but I hadn't bought any crisps. An old couple sipped halves of bitter and looked into space. But for their infrequent movements, they could have been fashioned from papier-mache, so grey and listless were they.

    Her tongue found the scar. She asked me how I was settling in. She asked me when I started work. And, pleasantries over, she dragged me back into the strange hinterland of ambiguity and evasion we had inhabited at breakfast.

    'I'm not altogether sure why I stayed here after we finished college. Apart from Pol living nearby,' She frowned. 'But I haven't been to see her while I've been here.'

    'Who's Pol?' I asked. My pint was disappearing fast-a sure sign that I was uncomfortable.

    'My grandmother. You do know about her. I have talked about her in the past.'

    I nodded and smiled as though the name had just found some significance.

    'Thing with Pol is,' she continued, 'I never really knew her. Still don't. I only ever saw her at Christmas and that was years ago, when I was still at school.'

    'Seems like a poor excuse to stay here.' I regretted the words but I was fed up of having to watch what I said. If I remembered correctly Helen liked me because I was honest, sometimes painfully so. I could see no point in stifling my nature just to make things easier for her.

    'You're right,' she laughed, surprising me. 'Maybe I wanted to come to the sea again. A place where there's lots of children.'

    'Helen. It's winter almost. The season's finished. Some alky TV has-been's turned out all the lights. This place is going to be dead for months now.'

    She placed her drink on the table, clinking it against the ashtray. 'I don't know why I'm here. I had to live somewhere.' She grew quiet, gazing into a place beyond the diamond patterns in the carpet. 'I can't seem to shake it off,' And then, quickly, she said: 'I'm being followed.'

    I waited. Saying something might only knock her out of her rhythm; cause her to snap at me. I wanted to know what was happening. More drinks. I glanced back at her twice while I waited at the bar. She was looking out of the window at the bank of telephones by the bus stop, her face tilted back, awash with weak sunlight. For a second, she didn't seem real; more a celluloid cut-out pasted on to a drab background. Her edges appeared to shimmer. Then normality swooned back into place as clouds stubbed out the fluke light, lending her, in shadow, a new austerity.

    'I don't know who it is but he wants me to suffer,' It was all she said before the door swung open and in walked Seamus. His face was hidden partly by a black knitted skullcap, partly by an eyepatch. He nodded in our direction before moving to the bar. Waiting for his drink he seemed desperate to avoid any further contact. Maybe he was psyching himself up for our confrontation or maybe he was rehearsing his first line. He took off the cap as the bartender handed over his change. Seamus had gone for the bald look: his head was divertingly attractive, shorn of its usual red chaos. The plates of his skull were softly angular; they caught and held the light, bled shadow across his face, which, for a moment, looked shockingly wasted, the eyepatch like a hole-something that was eating him away. He placed a copy of the
Guardian
next to his tonic water, curling one foot beneath his bottom as he sat down.

    'Ay up,' he said, 'it's Morrissey.'

    'Fuck off, Seamus,' I said. 'You've changed.'

    'Important to do so. I wanted to kill off all that I was at college, you know, renew myself, get in touch with parts of me that needed to be recognised, that needed release.' He rubbed his scalp. What do you think?'

    'Very fetching. The eyepatch too.' I thought I was doing pretty well; my voice was bright and friendly, not at all how I felt.

    The eyepatch isn't a fashion accessory. It's for real. I was in a fight in Bristol-you know a pub called The Sugar Loaves? and I was stabbed in the face with a broken bottle. Don't remember all that much about it,' He leered at me and fingered the edges of the fabric, which was biting into his livid flesh, empurpling it. Want to see?'

    I shook my head. Helen leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. Her eyes closed, tightening as her lips found him. I almost felt her need pass through them both. When she opened her eyes again they seemed bluer. All I could think was: she's shagged the bastard.

    'Good to see you both again,' said Seamus, raising his glass as if to toast us. 'I feel as though I've come home-despite the fact I've never lived here before. You can see why though. What a fucking dump. As my sister would say: "I wouldn't wipe my arse on it".'

    He laughed and Helen followed suit although it sounded painfully false.

    'So why
are
you here? Why are any of us here?'

    Seamus fell silent then and I noticed a tic begin under his good eye. His ear-ring glittered. He was shivering. 'Come on, Davey,' he said, forgetting, as I had done until then, how much I hate that name. 'Give a man chance to settle down. We can talk later.'

    All his spirit had flown, his voice bereft of its original edge. He lifted his glass, thought better of it and left the table. I saw him looking at his watch almost hungrily as he headed for the toilet.

    'Nice one, David.'

    'Oh give it a fucking rest, Helen. Have you heard the way he's speaking?
I want to renew myself.
What a bunch of hairy bollocks.'

    'He's here for me. I'm in trouble. We all might-'

    '
Then tell me what it is.'
My voice cracked half way through and although it was a relief to get rid of the tension inside I couldn't help but start laughing when I saw Helen's stricken face.

    'Oh come here, you,' she said, all smiley and sad at the same time. She hugged my neck with her arm. 'I've been pissing you about a bit. I'm sorry, David. Really. It's just something that needs a little thinking out. I don't want to drop something cold on you. But I know-and here she lifted my face so she could look through her fringe into my eyes-you're a part of this.'

    'How?' I asked. 'A part of what?'

    She closed her eyes and I saw them roll skyward beneath the delicate flesh of her lids. 'Well, I'm being hunted. I believe I'm being hunted. Sniffed out.'

    A spattering of snow on the window made me jump. The sky was low and sullen. Seamus had crept back to his stool and was watching me, his face wreathed in smoke from a cigarette that shivered between his lips. Helen continued, her eyes still closed, her fingers rubbing my neck.

    'I can't describe him; I've never seen his face. But he smells of cinnamon and old things and sweetness. And I often see him when I am at my most vulnerable. When I'm ill. Shitting. Fucking,' A couple on the next table looked at Helen and then at each other. Helen didn't bat an eye. 'Sometimes I glimpse him and I feel a pull, very strong, at a part of me that can almost understand what it is, what drives his fascination with me. Sometimes I think I must know him from years ago and that I'm going to have some Eureka moment when I unravel all the knots in a dream. Mostly though, I feel he's coming at me from my future, that fate has supplied me, us, with a convergence.'

    She opened her eyes. Her voice had been level and strong, almost as if the words she'd spoken were rehearsed. Perhaps they were: whatever she was suffering had churned within her for a while; she'd had enough time to try to construct some kind of rationale around it.

    'A convergence,' I said.

    'Yes.' This was from Seamus. 'It's not just us who have been drawn to Morecambe.'

    'You've had this too?'

    He dragged deeply on his cigarette and stubbed it out. His words came in erratic blue gusts. 'Not the same kind of thing, but a pressure from inside, like butterflies, only more subtle. I think it might be related to Helen's experiences because I tend to believe I know what's at the foot of it but I can't quite see what it is. It's a who though, as opposed to a what. When we discussed it we found a number of common factors, like the frequency of its appearance. I called Helen the first time it happened to me. This was what, late July? I hadn't spoken to her since college. I don't know why I called Helen, but it felt right to, it just felt right.'

    Seamus picked at the sliver of lemon in his drink. Snow came in vicious, wet flurries. The clouds across the bay were underlit with orange from the villages. Around me, people drank and smoked and talked. A soft clack of billiard balls. The hubbub was peripheral, yet thickening with every beat; the pubs walls closing around us. I became sensitised to the slightest nuance of sound and motion: Seamus' heartbeat bussing the curve of his T-shirt; the hiss of air through Helen's lips; a thin whine in the dog's throat as it yawned from across the room. Sweat sprang on to my forehead in a line, like beads of blood following the route of a knife on flesh.

    Seamus' eyebrows arched. I nodded because I didn't know what else to do. 'I'm glad I called Helen,' he said. 'It meant I didn't have time to feel alone. I don't know what I'd have done if I was on my own. I don't know what I'd have done to get away, to get it away from me.'

    I sat quietly, taking this in, trying to relax. It was good to get accustomed to the way we worked together again, which hadn't really changed bar a kind of restraining courtesy, something I was sure would dissolve as time went on. All the things I'd fallen in love with Helen for were still there; mannerisms that I'd forgotten about over the years but which now hastened the air in my lungs and filled me with yearning. The way she dabbed her lips with a Body Shop lip balm; took businesslike drags of a cigarette; tied her hair back from her face with a band she wore on her wrist. Such an incredible face, a stunning face. I'd been attracted to her the first time we met, before we'd exchanged words. Her jawbone was strong and square; the cheekbones high yet softened, not so pronounced as to make her look starved or severe. Her mouth protruded due to a slight overbite which I found uncommonly sexy. She had large, soft, friendly brown eyes which sometimes appeared sad but mostly were filled with humour and a deep interest for the person she was focusing them on: Seamus, at the moment.

    'Where are you staying?' she asked.

    'I've a place in Skerton. Sharing with a couple of people who advertised a room at college. Pretty reasonable.'

    'You should have tried to find a place in Morecambe. What if we need to contact you? What if you need us?'

    Seamus gestured outside. 'I've got a car. Nowhere's far away if you've got wheels. I can be here in five minutes.'

    They turned to me. Seamus looked as though he was going to ask the same question. 'I'm staying at a guest house round the corner,' I said. 'Nice and comfy. Cheap.'

    'Doesn't sound very long term,' he said, pulling out a pen and a battered old Filofax with a still of Jane Fonda from
Barbarella
taped to its cover.

    'Why should it be?'

    He ignored the question and wrote down my address and telephone number. 'You looking for work?'

    'I've got some bar work, at The Whistling Clam up the road. Three or four nights a week, some lunchtimes. It's pretty flexible. Not started yet, though. There's some savings if I need to fall back on them.'