Hurt (10 page)

In the shower he discovers more cuts and bruises. The knuckles on his hands are cracked and bloodied; his elbows and knees are scraped raw. His right foot hurts like crazy, his toes are a violent shade of purple. There are crimson scratches on his arms, his back, his legs – as if he’d been attacked by a particularly vicious cat. His knees feel weak and he aches all over, as if he’d been punched repeatedly in the head, the chest, the stomach. The shower burns his lacerated skin and the pain dizzies him. He appears to be still bleeding – the water pink as it spirals into the drain. He must have got into some kind of brawl at the pub after the competition. There is simply no other logical explanation. But as for the mayhem in his room . . . Did he get into an argument in his own bedroom? No, that’s ridiculous. Yet his mind seems vaguely aware of some sort of fight – raised voices, clenched fists, the crunch of his knuckles meeting bone. And blood . . . No. He screws up his eyes until the flickering images fade. No. He cannot remember,
will not
remember.

Dressed in clean jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, he walks out into the bustling afternoon – and finds himself trying to memorize his surroundings, as if attempting to rediscover his place in the world. The identical rows of tall white houses, the colour of the sun as it illuminates the street, the stretches of grass coming in and out of view according to the curves of the road.

The high street is crowded with late afternoon shoppers: couples, teenagers, mums fetching kids from school and lingering outside on this warm, sunny day. People emerging from houses, shops, supermarkets, banks, restaurants, pubs. Chelsea girls sunning themselves outside swanky cafés, chatting on mobile phones, or walking arm in arm with their designer boyfriends, scouring the boutiques for makeup and shoes. Parking attendants in their crisp white shirts slap big yellow tickets on the windscreens of sports cars parked on double yellow lines. Bikers rev their engines outside the Harley Davidson club, while top-heavy, bright red buses crawl beside the kerb, weighed down with nannies and buggies, sounding their horns at frustrated drivers trying to perform U-turns in the middle of junctions. Roadworks hold up the traffic – workmen in fluorescent jackets drilling holes in the road, filling the air with an ungodly sound that shakes the pavement. Pedestrians crowd round traffic lights, a bicycle narrowly misses an opening car door, motorbikes navigate their way painfully slowly through the crawling traffic. At the entrance to the tube station a news-seller yells and waves his rolled-up paper at the stream of bodies washing past him. Somewhere in the distance, a siren wails. The dirt, the shouts, the hurried pedestrians crossing the congested roads; the fumes, the horns – it all surrounds him in a thick web of noise.

Everything looks so normal, Mathéo thinks, and yet everything seems somehow alien too. It is almost as if he is witnessing this kind of scene for the very first time. He feels as if he is on the other side of something all those other people cannot understand. As if he is the only one who is aware of the folly of humankind: forced enthusiasm, people rushing this way and that, trying to edge ahead of each other in their urgent need to get someplace – the where hardly seems to matter. What is imperative is the need to keep going, to keep moving, to keep constantly busy – all a desperate attempt to kid themselves that they are a part of this world, that they are somehow important, that the choices they make and the actions they take and the places they go actually mean something. Guys crowding into pubs, jostling round big-screen televisions and cheering on their football teams, women trying on the latest pair of designer boots, tourists picking out useless coloured glass ornaments from overpriced boutiques . . . It all suddenly seems so utterly absurd that he wants to stop right here in the middle of the street, watching the crazy snafus of human existence, and start to laugh, or cry, or scream. What was once so familiar that he barely noticed it has turned into madness. He feels like stopping a random passer-by and asking where they are going, what they are doing and why. But although the chatter around him is all in English, it could just as well be in a foreign tongue – one that he spoke a very long time ago but has now forgotten.

His ability to remain calm is impressive. Training his eyes on the pavement in front of him, keeping his mind fixed on the one thing he feels compelled to do. Walk. Where, he has no idea. It is as if beyond that one goal he cannot think; as if the safety valve in his brain is protecting him from his own visceral thoughts, forcing him to stay rooted in the here and now.

Exhausted, abruptly unable to go any further, he stops and sits down on a low wall flanking the park, overcome by the wave of heat and noise. His phone vibrates in his pocket, startling the hell out of him. Lola’s name flashes up on the screen and his first thought is to let it go to voicemail. He doesn’t want to see her right now; he
can’t
see her right now. But guilt forces him to answer the phone.

She is talking very fast. She sounds excited about something. She is going on about the competition, his winning dive, watching it on TV yesterday morning with Hugo and Isabel. She is just leaving school and wants him to meet her in Greystone Park. He tells her he can’t right now; he is busy. But when she asks what he’s doing, he can only think of saying that he’s shopping in the high street. She asks him where, gabbles something about Hugo and Isabel, and then hangs up. He finds himself staring down at the phone in his hand in dull confusion, feeling trapped. He can’t possibly see her right now – she sounded so alive, so animated. He doesn’t recognize his own girlfriend. He doesn’t even recognize himself.

Against the violent brightness of the sun, three figures clamber out of a cab and leap into the oncoming traffic, forcing a double-decker bus to a sudden, tyre-screeching halt. Dodging vehicles and laughing, they tumble across the road towards him. He gets up, steps back and tries to arrange his face into a normal expression as they come charging, Lola’s arms circling his neck, her hair suddenly in his face, suffocating. She is warm and soft and sweet-smelling, yet he finds himself fighting the urge to push her away. She and Isabel are both squealing about something, their shouts and whoops shattering the air. Hugo grabs him by the shoulders and gives him a violent shake, and Mathéo quickly steps back, making a concerted effort to smile and breathe. Smile and breathe. That’s all he has to do for now. They are congratulating him on the diving competition. Overwhelmed and disoriented, he catches something about a gold medal, the Olympics, some stuff on the Internet, his picture in the morning paper.

‘I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t sleep!’ Lola is yelling in his ear, her face glowing, eyes wide with elation. ‘I thought I was going to go crazy, just lying in bed and staring at the clock and counting down the minutes and—’

‘Me too, me too!’ Isabel thumps his arm. ‘My whole family got together to watch you on TV—’

‘And she kept texting me every five minutes!’ Hugo puts in with an exaggerated sigh. ‘And everyone from school was tweeting about it at the same time—’

‘We tried and tried to call you after the interviews!’ Isabel adds in outrage. ‘And then most of last night! But your phone just kept going to voicemail!’

‘We – we went out to celebrate,’ Mathéo manages quickly with a dismissive laugh. ‘The pub was deafening!’

‘When did you get back?’

‘You said you were going to come home last night!’

‘We were waiting with leftover booze from the Leavers’ Ball to congratulate you!’

‘How come you weren’t at school today?’

Their voices merge and blur into one histrionic wave, and they all appear completely high on adrenalin, drunk with excitement, their chatter leaping in all directions as they talk over one another rapid-fire, full of so much energy he almost expects them to combust.

‘What happened to your face?’ Lola startles him for a moment, her hand on his cheek. ‘You’ve got the beginning of a massive bruise on your forehead. And is that blood on your lip?’

‘Oh yeah.’ He pushes her hand away dismissively. ‘Got pretty hammered last night with the rest of the squad. Tripped on my way back to the station.’

Hugo laughs. ‘Looks more like you competed in a boxing tournament!’

‘Ouch – your hands too?’ Lola takes them in hers to inspect his raw and bloody knuckles, the skin grated back from the wounds, jagged white rectangles surrounding each wet, crimson laceration.

But fortunately the attention is short-lived, as Hugo and Isabel have decided that high tea is in order, and Mathéo follows them as they gather noisily around a table beneath a large parasol outside one of the French cafés, scraping the metal feet of the chairs against the paving slabs.

‘Oh my God, it’s all in Frog!’ exclaims Isabel in horror, examining the menu.

Lola and Hugo laugh. ‘Oh, no!’ Hugo mocks, shaking his head. ‘
Croissants
,
pains au chocolat
,
café
. . . What on earth can these strange words mean?’

‘Ha ha!’ Isabel retorts. ‘Just because I dropped out of French doesn’t mean I’m stupid.’

‘No, no, not stupid!’ Hugo exclaims. ‘Just . . .’ He clicks his fingers and shakes his head. ‘What’s the expression?’ He looks round at the others. ‘Linguistically challenged?’

Isabel bounds out of her chair and goes round the table to throttle Hugo. Then she slides onto his lap. ‘I could eat you – I’m that hungry!’ She laughs and twines her arm over his neck and gives him a long kiss. Looking away, their intimacy suddenly embarrassing him, Mathéo meets Lola’s gaze. With a jolt he is momentarily aware of her eyes scrutinizing his face, and it’s a monumental effort to keep hold of the laid-back, cheerful expression. Why is she staring? Can she tell something is wrong? Elbow propped up against the table, he turns away from her, chewing his thumbnail in an attempt to calm his nerves.

They all appear to be starving. As soon as the food arrives it disappears at an alarming rate, everyone helping themselves from each other’s plates: croissants, éclairs, muffins, coffees. Mathéo chews slowly so that it looks as if he is consistently eating, but only makes it through half a bun. With all the food-sharing and banter he hoped it would go unnoticed, but Lola glances at his plate while Isabel and Hugo are squabbling over the last muffin and raises her eyebrows.

‘Aren’t you hungry?’

‘Not really,’ he answers quickly. ‘Had a big lunch.’

‘But you told me on the phone you hadn’t eaten.’

‘I meant since then,’ he says, meeting her concerned gaze just long enough to give her a soothing smile.

A brief moment of hesitation, and then she turns back to the others, their rambunctious enthusiasm showing little sign of waning as they tease, joke and chatter animatedly amongst themselves. They move in electric currents: their raised voices, wild gestures and constant bantering igniting the table between them, making it thrum with energy. Mathéo feels the currents curl around him, envelop his body, encircle his head, but they cannot permeate his skin to fill the icy cavern inside with heat and strength and vitality; they cannot thaw the frost, anaesthetize his thoughts or extinguish the morning’s horrors. For a moment the contrast is overwhelming and he fears it will be impossible for him ever again to transmute back to his original state.

Mathéo is beginning to feel he can no longer keep up the façade, that his true feelings are about to show through. Panic washes over him; he just wishes he knew what was wrong. Maybe something to do with how pointless everything is. Why does everyone put up with the hypocrisy, the need to put on a happy face, the compulsion to keep going? He doesn’t know the answer, he only knows he can’t do it any more. He doesn’t understand what is going on. There was a time, not so long ago, when he was delighted to be part of this group – the most popular set. But something vital seems to have changed. It is hard to identify, but somewhere inside, a part of him is desperate to get up and walk away, screaming to be set free . . . although from what exactly he cannot say. He just wants to withdraw back to his bedroom, to hide and sleep as if he were dead – as dead as he feels inside.

For a few moments he tunes them all out and finds himself sinking like a stone, turning slowly through the water towards the bottom, where he rests, staring at the surface a long way above. He is filled with a sense of being nowhere – he can forget who he is, forget everything that’s happened, forget the terrible person he has become . . . Taking a deep breath, he attempts to absorb the mood around him. He knows he urgently needs to break out of this strange funk, stop analysing everything, forget the horror of this morning’s trashed room as if it had never happened. He needs to be popular, fun-loving Mathéo again. Because that’s who he is. That’s all he is.

The girls want to go shopping; Hugo is still talking to him about the competition. It takes all the effort Mathéo can muster to engage, respond, join in with the general chatter. But he feels he is about to crack, and knows he needs to get away from the others before he does. Day yawns open like a cavern in his chest and the sun is pulsing; he can feel it burn his skin. As they pass through the market, the summer stalls are loud and bright. Suddenly the air turns thick with the overwhelming smell of fish. With bulging eyes and gaping mouths they lie there, silver and bronze scales glistening in the late afternoon sun. Tourists, as if at a show, have gathered to watch the fish being carved up, fresh on the slab. The fish-monger works his way through his produce at lightning speed: tail grabbed, razor-sharp knife slicing the soft silver bellies. Occasionally the tail continues to twitch even after a fish is split in two and tossed on the pile, the nerve-endings still reacting spontaneously for a few seconds after death. Or perhaps it’s that after the brutal slice the brain remains active for just a moment longer – long enough to feel the pain, long enough to realize the struggle is over. There are other sea creatures too, of course. Seething tubs of crabs trying frantically to climb over one another, waving long, spastic tentacles in a fruitless struggle to regain their freedom. They will die far more slowly, often not until taken home and plunged into a cauldron of water, where they will continue their hopeless fight for survival, legs groping at the air in slow motion, until they eventually boil to death.