Man or woman, they have all kept their T-shirts on, like white cotton nightgowns. I glimpse names and ages, and a word or two of history, incomprehensible without the remainder. Their other clothes are bundled up under their pillow – trousers, skirts, socks, even shoes, all to raise the level of the thin cushion in its envelope of stiff white cotton.
I reach the eleventh bunk and crawl in. Under cover of the sheet and blanket, I take off all my clothes except the T-shirt, and arrange them under my pillow like the other people here. I notice that my feet are quite black with dirt, that the flesh of the insides of my knees is scarred with a rash from sleeping too many nights in damp jeans, that my genitals are as small as a child’s.
The sheet is so old and often-mended that I’m afraid of tearing it as I try to make myself comfortable, but the blanket is thick and soft. I wrap it around me, tucked snug around my neck, and am just about to make a decision about whether I’ll pull it right over my head when the barracks falls into darkness.
Relieved to be invisible at last, I venture my head a little way out of my bunk, looking up at the ceiling. It is glass, as I’d thought: huge tessellated panes of tinted glass through which moonlight smoulders, indistinct and poorly defined. The dangling rafts of extinguished fluorescent tubes loom at black intervals in the air, suspended between me and the people on the other side. I stare into the gloom, waiting for my vision to adjust. But as soon as it does, and I begin to see pale shoulders and the feeble candlepower of wakeful eyes, I turn away. I don’t know what I expected to see or what I expected to feel, but these shadowy towers of scaffolding, these tiers of hidden bodies and glow-worm faces, fail to strike awe or pity into my heart. This indifference shames me, or I imagine it ought to, and I make a conscientious attempt to feel something. After some effort, I decide that I feel gratitude, or at least absence of anxiety, owing to us all being here for the night, assigned to our places. Often since going missing I’ve daydreamed of going to prison, but of course the gift of brute shelter is not easy to earn. Whatever crime you may commit, the world still wants you to keep playing the game. Even murderers are visited by their wives and children.
I lay my head back on the pillow, quite carefully, for fear of dislodging my shoes and sending them plummeting to the floor below. The nurse was right, though: I feel no fear of falling myself. The rectangle of steel and wire on which I lie feels as secure as the ground. I relax.
Above me, there sags another mattress held in a metal web, bulging down under the weight of a heavy body. I reach up and touch the mattress and the metal that holds it, very gently, just for something to do. I wouldn’t, for the world, wish to attract the attention of the sleeper above.
I close my eyes, and as my brain begins to shut down I realise that for the first time in months I don’t have to worry about being found.
In the morning, after a blissfully dreamless sleep, I wake to the sound of coughing. From various recesses in the honeycomb of bunks, gruesomely distinctive snorts, hacks and wheezes are flying out. In time, I will come to recognise each cough and associate it with a name and a history. On that first morning, I know nothing.
I lean over the side of my bed and look down. On the floor far below, lit up brilliantly by the sunlight shining down through the transparent ceiling, is a silvery pool of urine. The metal towers of sleeping berths are mirrored in it; I scan our reflections trying to find myself, but can’t tell the difference between all the tiny dishevelled faces. I raise one hand, to wave into the glowing pool, to clinch which one is me. Several hands – no, half a dozen – wave back at me.
I am no longer missing.
ANDY COMES BACK
His eyes fluttered open, and he was surprised to find himself alive.
If he’d thought about himself at all in the last five years, he’d considered himself dead. Occasionally he’d peek out at the world, and for his peekhole he would use the gibbering, shrieking idiot the nursing staff called Andy.
But today he’d dropped in to the idiot’s head to have a look, and there he was: alive as anything. It was a hell of a shock.
He sat up, immediately aware of the institutional pyjamas he was in.
‘Morning, Andy!’ said the old man in the next bed.
‘Morning,’ he responded vaguely, looking at his bedside cabinet, which had nothing on it but flowers and orange juice.
‘Ha! Good for you, Andy boy!’ said his neighbour, as if impressed.
Andy checked inside the cabinet. It was empty. He twisted around to look at the wall behind his bed. A flimsy plastic bas-relief of Father Christmas had pride of place there, connected by a barbed wire of tinsel to other identical Father Christmases behind other beds. Blu-tacked under Andy’s Santa were photographs of a woman and three children, in various combinations. A child’s painting, rather tattered and signed Robert, was almost hidden behind the bedhead.
A nurse strolled into the ward and said hello to everyone. She was wearing disposable gloves.
‘Andy said good morning just now,’ the old man informed her at once.
‘That’s nice,’ she said, obviously not believing it. She strode over to Andy’s bed and without warning pulled back the covers. Briskly uninhibited, she inspected his crotch, then slipped a hand under his bottom to check the white undersheet.
‘You been a good boy tonight, Andy?’ she cooed approvingly, addressing his lower half.
‘What?’
She carried on instinctively, before she’d had a chance to decode the sound he’d made.
‘Not poo’d the bed?’
‘I should hope not,’ he said. ‘What do you think I am?’
She stared at him openmouthed, stuck for an answer. Then she ran away.
It turned out he’d been a drooling imbecile for five years. He’d contracted a rare disease, survived it, but lost his mind. When first admitted to an acute ward, he’d presented an exciting challenge to medical science. All sorts of experts had tried to pursue his consciousness wherever it had gone, and bring it back. Then the weeks had passed, and life went on, and the hospital needed his bed. He’d been shifted to a nursing home, and that’s where he’d lived ever since.
He gathered he’d been very difficult to care for, twitching convulsively and flinging his limbs about whenever the nurses tried to shave or wash him, sending cereal bowls and cutlery flying across the room with one slam of his fist, waking the other patients up at night with dog-like howls. His howls, in fact, could be heard even beyond the nursing home environs. Despite stiff competition from all the other mournful cries these walls had ever contained, his howls had achieved legendary status.
Calm and soft-spoken now, he asked for a mirror and a razor.
A nurse fetched him the electric shaver that had been shoved across his squirming face every day for five years. He asked for a blade and some soapy water. Their eyes met. Only a couple of days ago, she and a burly porter had had to restrain him when a Christmas singalong provoked him to a frenzy. The memory of his feral strength was fresh in her mind.
‘Thank you,’ he said, when she brought him the razor.
He was disturbed by what had happened to his face. It was very much older in one way, with hard, rubbery folds and wrinkles, and whitish-grey hairs amongst his usual black stubble. But it was obscenely young as well, like the face of a chimpanzee infant. Shaving the stubble off it didn’t seem to make much difference.
The nurse watched him as he struggled to carve out something familiar.
‘Your wife … ’ she began.
‘What?’
‘Your wife is coming today. It’s her visiting day.’
He thought this over for a second; suddenly remembered his wife very well.
‘I suppose you’ve rung and told her the news?’ he said.
‘I’m afraid not,’ replied the nurse. ‘We tried to, but there was no answer. She’s got a surprise coming, hasn’t she?’ She snorted, then blushed and left abruptly.
Andy’s wife arrived after lunch, whe
n the nursing home was at its busiest. She was at his bedside before any of the staff noticed her.
‘Hello Andy-boy,’ she said as she sat down on the end of his bed. Yanking her shoulderbag onto her lap, she rummaged in it. ‘Brought you some donuts. And a can of soft drink.’ She reached past him and put the treats on the bedside cabinet. She ruffled his hair, squinting and pouting.
‘How’ve you been behaving, eh Andy? Not causing the nurses too much bother? Not being a naughty boy at breakfast? Mustn’t be a naughty boy at breakfast, Andy.’
She seemed quite content, steaming ahead without really noticing him, like a primary school inspector breezing through a class of cheerfully preoccupied children. It seemed a shame to tell her the truth, but as a nurse was running towards them he thought he’d better get in first.
‘I’m all right now, Brom,’ he said quietly.
‘Uh … yes,’ panted the nurse, squeaking to a stop on the polished linoleum.
Andy’s wife didn’t speak, only looked from the nurse to Andy and back to the nurse.
‘I mean,’ said the nurse, ‘we’ve called in the specialist, and the test results aren’t in yet, but …’ She flashed a goofy grin and gestured towards Andy, as if to say see for yourself.
Andy’s wife smiled too, a grin of infinite foolishness and shock, as if she were the victim of a surprise birthday party on the wrong day.
‘Really?’ she said.
It was her husband, rather than the nurse, who answered now.
‘Really,’ he said.
‘How wonderful, darling,’ said Andy’s wife. She reached across the bed and embraced him awkwardly, like a member of the Royal Family embracing a deformed child.
There followed an excruciating silence.
‘Well,’ said the nurse, feeling herself being sucked into its vortex, ‘I expect this will take a bit of getting used to. On both sides.’ Counselling over, she walked off to do a bit of nursing, which was what she was paid for, after all.
The embrace broke. Andy and his wife settled back into their previous positions like pool players after a shot. Bromwyn stared straight ahead of her, at the narrow corridor at the far end of the ward.
‘I’m sorry if I don’t seem delighted, Andy,’ she began.
‘Have you been calling me Andy these past few years, Brom?’ asked Andrew, who didn’t like to be called Andy.
‘Sorry. Yes. Sorry,’ said Bromwyn, who didn’t mind being called Brom.
He stayed in the nursing home for another two days, reading Reader’s Digests, chatting to astounded medical experts. Every capability he’d ever had seemed to have come back to him. When the time came for him to go home, however, he was advised, for no explicit reason, not to do the driving.
After some embarrassing farewells and best wishes for the new year from the nursing staff, Bromwyn took Andy home. A staunch non-driver all the years that he’d encouraged her to learn, she’d bitten the bullet and got her licence barely six months after his mind had gone. He would never know if mastering the controls had come easily to her. She drove mechanically and without undue concern for the other traffic, like all experienced drivers. He found this oddly unbecoming.
The old neighbourhood had scarcely changed. This seemed to him an indictment of the sort of neighbourhood it was. He had moved here, reluctantly, for the sake of his job, which of course no longer existed.
His wife had found work, though. It was all she talked about on the way home, understandably.
At the front door of their house she could not, for a moment, find her key. This flustered her immoderately. Key found, she insisted on going in ahead of him when she’d opened the door. The house, from what he could glimpse as he followed her through, was cluttered and untidy: young boys’ mess.
‘I’m sorry the place is in such a state,’ said Bromwyn, although she sounded irritated, not sorry. He knew damn well he was unwelcome, that he had come back to life at much too short a notice for her. He didn’t care.
The house was a single mother’s place now. Everything of his had been removed. He found this interesting, but didn’t mind much. Nothing he had ever possessed had been quite what he wanted anyway. He guessed correctly that his den had been given to the eldest of his sons, and he approved of that: Robert would be nine now, an age at which a boy deserved a room of his own.
Andy wasn’t looking forward to meeting his children, though.
His wife seemed hell-bent on taking him through a guided confessional tour of what had changed, and why. Extra space had been required for X, which meant that Y had to be shifted to Z, where it got in the way of … He told her he could wait until later for all that, and suggested she make them both a cup of tea.
The kitchen bench was littered with the mess made by children who’d been too young to serve themselves last time he’d seen them. He cleared a spot to lean his elbow on as his wife stiltedly made the tea.
‘Now,’ she said, her back to him, ‘Is it two sugars or one?’
‘Two,’ he said absently. They seemed mutually agreed to let this exchange pass as if unnoticed. Instead, they sat at the breakfast bench and drank their tea in silence. This, as far as he could remember, was not unusual for them, although of course it felt that way in the circumstances.
‘I have to clean up,’ said Bromwyn at last.
‘I’m not stopping you,’ he said.
She stared pointedly at his elbow leaning in the midst of the plates. He understood he was in the way, got up and walked into the living room.
He sat down in the old armchair and picked up a newspaper to see what sorts of things the world was up to these days.
Meeting his sons was not as much of an ordeal as he’d thought it would be. The eldest was in fact ten (a miscalculation on his part) and seemed uninterested in him or, for that matter, in Bromwyn.
‘See you later, Dad,’ he said, and went up to his room.
The younger boys were curious, shy, and friendly, as if he were an interesting visitor. They asked him how he got well.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Nobody knows. It’s a mystery of science.’
They seemed to like that.
They asked him, too, what it was like to be mad. The seven-year-old asked,
‘Can you still make that noise you made when you were mad? You know, like woo-woo-woooo?’
‘Sure,’ he said, oblivious of his wife going rigid with mortification behind him. Craning his head back and opening his mouth as wide as possible, he did an impression of his old howl.
‘What do you think?’ he asked his son.
‘Mm,’ said the seven-year-old dubiously. ‘It was better before.’
‘Sorry,’ he said, amused.
‘That’s quite enough,’ said his wife, sounding very careworn, which he supposed she was.
He could no longer see in her the young woman he’d married, the young woman with the black hair and the big dreamy eyes and the inviting satiny neck. If he had lived with her these past five years he’d probably still be able to see her the way she used to be, but he couldn’t. She was from an older generation.
That evening, the family watched television, the way they’d always done, even when the boys were babies. Later in the night, when the children had gone to bed, Andrew and Bromwyn watched television as a couple. They changed channels a couple of times, caught the second half of a murder mystery. Having both missed the start, they were on equal footing and were able to talk a little, conjecturing who the murderer might be. He felt marginally closer to her, but knew it wouldn’t last.
In bed she lay beside him like a folded-up deck chair. He stared at the wrinkles on her neck.
‘Do you want to make love to me?’ she asked. He could tell that if he touched her she would recoil.
‘Not tonight,’ he said. It was true. His erection, hidden away in his oversized pyjamas, was not for her. It was for women in general.
Eventually his wife turned over.
‘I’m falling asleep,’ she announc
ed thickly. ‘Good night, Andy.’
‘Good night.’
At about 2:45 by the strange new alarm clock on his side of the bed, Andrew got out and put on his dressing-gown and slippers. Carefully making his way through the black corridor in case he tripped on foreign junk, he finished up in the living room, trying to look out through the gauzy curtains. It grew in him how good it would feel to be outside.
He stepped out onto the veranda, leaving the door unlocked. There was nothing in the house he would mind a burglar stealing.
The night was indigo and sultry, with a full moon. Static trickled up and down his neck. The world was as still as a forest that had been cut down. He felt like a small bird, hopping uncomprehendingly from stump to stump in the darkness.
Pushing off from his letterbox as if for good luck, Andrew set off down the street. In the dark the neighbourhood was not as familiar as he’d first thought. He didn’t know if he’d be able to find his way back.
THE EYES OF THE SOUL
The view from Jeanette’s front window was, frankly, shite.
Outside lay Rusborough South. There was no Rusborough North, West or East, as far as Jeanette knew. Maybe they’d existed once, but if so, they must have been demolished long ago, wiped off the map, and replaced with something better.
Jeanette’s house was right opposite the local shop, which had its good and bad side. Not the shop itself: that had four bad sides, all of them grey concrete with graffiti on. But having your house right near the shop: there was a good side to that. Jeanette could send Tim out for a carton of milk or a sack of frozen chips and watch him through the window in case he got attacked. The bad side was that the shop was a magnet for the estate’s worst violence.