Here was the chair with shoes beneath it, neat, and a more untidy slump of clothes: shirt, jeans, underpants, socks, the glimmer of a metal wristwatch also removed.
Here was the bed.
Here was the relenting bed.
‘I got tired.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
Here was the space around the bed, a little uncrossable and surprised.
‘Where were you?’
‘Where were you?’
Here was the bed where he was sitting up at the sound of her, sitting up like Sunday morning, sitting up like ages and ages ago when it made her smile. He had the covers tucked under his arms and he did not look as if he’d been sleeping, or resting since he arrived. He looked as if he’d decided the weight of talking to her would be eased if he was undressed, but now he was reconsidering.
Dorothy frowned and then stopped, because otherwise she would appear to be unhelpful. ‘I was in the town — village.’ She went to sit on the bed, but then didn’t. Since it was, to a degree, altered, she had no longer been there before and was nervous of it.
‘I did call when they told us the flight was. . I knew you’d have your phone off.’
‘I had my phone off.’
‘I know.’
They both understood that uncomfortable calls she has to answer make her turn off her phone pre-emptively. It was irritating. Neither of them would have denied that.
‘So I landed in this. . I’d forgotten how much I like it here. It was a good idea. Good idea. And thanks for letting me know. We can have some days. Really. Clever. I wouldn’t have thought. . but you did. .’ He lay down flat and blinked at the ceiling as if he were an invalid, an injured party, a boy overcome by his surroundings. ‘I had to catch a train. . They landed us in the wrong place. Then a train.’ He disappeared his arms under the quilt and tucked it neat to his chin from inside, from in the dark and hiding. ‘A train. .’ It was too hot to be so covered.
Dorothy turned, sat on the floor with the back of her head leaned against the mattress, against the modest shifts of motion that told her he was there. She told him, ‘I wish I hadn’t. . I wish I. .’
‘I didn’t want you to think that I wasn’t coming. I was going to. The pause wasn’t about that.’
She didn’t tell him anything.
‘You worry. You get anxious.’
She didn’t tell him anything.
‘And I get. .’
She didn’t tell him anything.
‘I worry, too. . You’ve seen and. . I’m. . I wanted you to know I was on my way.’
There was a small ruffle of bed sounds and he reached down and pressed her shoulder and the back of his hand was brushed untidily against her cheek and then he formed the touch again and moved through it again and concentrated and she could feel his purpose as tender, serious, frightened.
They had broken things, the pair of them. Unexpected damage had occurred, and they’d thought they would have managed better after their years of practice, but they hadn’t.
She leaned into his hand, kissed his fingers. ‘I got scared.’
‘I know.’ She heard him breathe out and pictured a column of something, some living trouble, pluming above his face. ‘And when you. . That was. . I don’t think. .’
This at the moment was peaceful. No breakages.
‘I wanted to hear your voice.’
‘I’m sorry.’
And there is a way of saying this which means we can’t continue and a way of saying it which means we can keep on and manage and we can be all right.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, too.’
Knocked
HIS EARLIEST ADULT experience — he wakes up in a hospital wearing stiff clothes, cold clothes. Also there is a some kind of mistake in his head. He is not alarmed, the boy, only puzzles in the cloth- and sour-tasting darkness of the ward until he knows it is a ward and that something has gone wrong and put him here.
‘Nurse?’
The boy does not say this. He would never have thought to call a nurse: his character is undemanding and, besides, he cannot imagine needing anything beyond perhaps an explanation for the maritime rush which is catching at his ears and this dizzy, laden weakness of his thinking.
‘Nurse?’
It is this word that woke him, he believes — its repetition. First word of his alternate life.
‘Nurse?’
Footfalls consent to be summoned and close on him, as fast as irritation — heel-thumps before toe-thumps and a squeak each time they argue with the floor.
The nurse’s shape halts three beds down from the boy and interrupts the glimmers of a window in a way that seems peculiarly shocking.
‘What do you want, then?’
She is nothing like the boy’s mother, has a voice which is entirely strange to him, and sharpened — it sews through the air, passes over him, then on. He hears it ting against the farthest wall.
‘Well?’
‘Can I have a glass of water?’ The melody of the question is indecisive, apologetic.
‘No.’
And the nurse-shape begins to leave again, even more quickly, while the boy wonders if the other child, the thirsty one — who sounds like a boy, too — will maybe die soon from a lack of water. Water does seem such a plain and reasonable requirement that only some fatal intention would allow it to be denied.
Lying still and heavier than he has ever been, the boy recoils very slightly within his unfamiliar pyjamas. He believes, almost at once, that these are part of the belongings of some previous small patient who has died while on the ward, odds and ends reused for the benefit of others and no further trace remaining. There are numerous, uncountably numerous, places where the boy’s skin is being touched by the dead-boy cloth. The jacket cuffs nuzzle clammily against his wrists. It is very likely his arse is where a dead-boy’s arse has been, and moreover his parts which are meant to be secret are comfortably settled in these trousers, perhaps because this is how the dead-boy’s used to rest. His mickey where another mickey was. A smoky rush seems to rummage across him as he considers this and his left hand sneaks beneath the covers to make sure of himself and feel that all is well.
The hand seems slower and more clever than it used to be.
‘Nurse?’ The boy tries his own mouth with the word and it emerges much as he’d expected.
‘Yes.’ She has paused because he has spoken and this makes him proud, but wary of coming responsibilities. ‘Yes, what do you want?’
‘Can I have a glass of water?’ He isn’t thirsty, only curious.
‘Yes.’
And the water is brought to him, shining with guilt, and set between his palms when he has raised himself through a wavering and thickened space. The boy holds his drink with monumental care — has to concentrate on gripping, as if he might soon forget how. He clings to the smoothness of the glass, to someone else’s want, sips and swallows loudly and with a kind of grin.
‘Why does my head hurt?’ Because it does — the left side of his skull and even his cheek are singing with a weird, dark awareness, something exhilarating.
‘A horse trod on you.’
This seems not unlikely.
He tucks the water inside himself, understands it is coiled now in a blue shape that perhaps half-fills him. ‘Thank you.’ He is polite. His father and mother would expect that of him. Then he slides back down to be flat, the water lapping and giggling as he moves.
A horse.
Yes.
There were horses.
There were lessons with horses to make the boy confident and able to sit up straight, a commanding presence in later life. A premeditated Christmas present which had started in January: ten o’clock on Saturday mornings, an hour with himself and various older, wilier boys in a wide, high barn — peaty and sawdusty stuff underfoot and everywhere alive with a humid and dangerous reek. Frost beyond the walls, but the boy hot, the boy feverish with horses.