‘You’d better get well soon,’ she said, ‘Or I’m going to have to buy a do-it-yourself book.’
‘You’ll go blind,’ he said, turning off the bedside light, and she giggled quietly in the dark. He rolled gingerly so that he was snuggled into her back, and lightly stroked her shoulder, waiting for sleep. After a moment he noticed a wetness under his hand, and stopped, pulling his hand out from under the duvet. In the threadbare moonlight he confirmed what he’d already suspected. Earlier in the evening he’d noticed that the little cuts seemed to be exuding tiny amounts of blood. It was still happening. Constantly being reopened when he lugged boxes around, presumably.
‘S’nice,’ Chris murmured sleepily. ‘Don’t stop.’
Richard slid his hand back under the duvet and moved it gently against her shoulder again, using the back of his fingers and cupping his palm away from her.
The bathroom, though tiny, was very adequately equipped with mirrors, and Richard couldn’t help noticing the change as soon as he took off his dressing gown the next morning.
There was still no sign of bruising over his ribs, which worried him. Something which hurt as much as that ought to have an external manifestation, he thought, unless it indicated internal damage. The pain was a little different this morning, less like a kicking, more as if two of the ribs were moving tightly against each other, a kind of cartilaginous twisting.
There were, however, a number of new scratches. Mostly short, they were primarily congregated over his stomach and chest. It looked as though a cat with its claws out had run over him in the night. As they didn’t have a cat that seemed unlikely, and Richard frowned as he regarded himself in the mirror.
Also odd was the mark on his chest. Perhaps it was just seeing it in proper light, but this morning it looked rather more than just a scratch. By spreading his fingers out on either side Richard found he could pull the cut slightly apart, and that it was a millimetre or so deep. When he allowed it to close again it did so with a faint liquidity, the sides tacky with lymph. It wasn’t healing properly. In fact — and Richard held up his left hand to confirm this — it was doing the same as the cuts on his palm. They too seemed as fresh as the day before — if not a little fresher.
Glad that Chris had left the house before he’d made it out of bed, Richard quickly showered, patting himself dry around the cuts, and covered them with clothes.
By lunchtime the flat was finally in order, and Richard had to admit that parts of it looked pretty good. The kitchen was the one room which was bigger than he’d been used to, and with the late morning light slanting into it, was very attractive. The table was a little larger than would have been ideal, but at least you could get at the fridge without performing contortions. The living-room upstairs also looked pretty bijou, if you ignored the way in which his books were crammed into the bookcases. Chris had already established a nest on the larger of the two sofas; her book, ashtray and an empty coffee mug placed within easy reach. Richard perched on the other sofa for a while, eyes vaguely running over his books and realizing he ought to make an effort to colonize a corner of the room for his own.
Human, All Too Human.
The title brought Richard out of his reverie. A secondhand volume of Nietzsche, bought for him as a joke by Susan. It shouldn’t have been on the shelf, but in one of the storage boxes. Chris didn’t know it had been a present, but then it hadn’t been Chris who’d insisted he take the other stuff down. It had simply seemed to be the right thing to do, and Richard had methodically worked around the old flat hiding things the day before Chris moved in. Hiding them from whom, he hadn’t been sure. It had been six months since he and Susan had split up, and she wasn’t even seeing the man she’d left him for any more. To have the old mementoes still out didn’t cause him any pain, and he’d thought he’d put them away purely out of consideration for Chris.
But as he looked over the bookcase he realized how much the book of Nietzsche stood out in their new flat. It smelled of Susan. Some tiny part of her, some speck of skin or smear of oil, must surely still be on it somewhere. If he could sense that, then surely Chris could as well. He walked across the room, took the book from the shelf, and walked downstairs to put it in the box on top of his filing cabinet in the study.
On the way he diverted into the bathroom. As he absently opened his fly, he noticed an unexpected sensation at his fingertips. He brushed them around inside his trousers again, trying to work out what he’d felt. Then he slowly removed them, and held his hand up.
His fingers were spotted with blood.
Richard stared coldly at them for a while, and then calmly undid the button of his trousers. Carefully he lowered them, and then pushed down his boxer shorts.
More cuts.
A long red line ran from the middle of his right thigh around to within a couple of inches of his testicles. A similar one lay across the very bottom of his stomach. A much shorter but slightly deeper slit lay across the base of his penis, and it was from this that the majority of the blood was flowing. It wasn’t a bad cut, and hardly put one in mind of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but Richard would have much preferred it not to have been there.
Looking up at the mirror above the toilet, he reached up and undid the buttons on his shirt. The scratches on his stomach now looked more like cuts, and a small thin line of blood rolled down from the cut on his chest.
Like many people, Richard wasn’t fond of doctors. It wasn’t so much the sepulchral gloom of waiting rooms he minded, or the grim pleasure their receptionists took in patronizing you. It was mainly the boredom and the sense of potential catastrophe, combined with a knowledge that there wasn’t a great deal they could do. If you had something really bad, they sent you to a hospital. If it was trivial, chances were it would go away of its own accord. It was partly for these reasons that Richard simply did his shirt and trousers back up again, after patting at some of the cuts with pieces of toilet paper. It was partly also because he was afraid. He didn’t know where the scratches were coming from, but the fact that, far from healing, they seemed to be getting worse, was worrying. With his vague semi-understanding of such things he wondered if it meant his blood had stopped clotting, and if so, what that meant. He didn’t think you could suddenly develop haemophilia. It didn’t seem very likely. But what then? Perhaps he was tired, run-down after the move, and that was making a difference.
In the end he resolved to just go on ignoring it a little longer, like a mole which keeps growing but which you don’t wish to believe might be malignant. He spent the afternoon sitting carefully at his desk, trying to work and resisting the urge to peek at parts of his body. It was almost certainly his imagination, he believed, which made it feel as if a warm, plump drop of blood had sweated from the cut on his chest and rolled slowly down beneath his shirt; and the dampness he felt around his crotch was the result of his having turned the heating up high.
Absolutely.
He took care to shower well before Chris was due home. The cuts were still there, and had been joined by another on his upper arm. When he was dry he took some surgical dressing and micropore tape from the bathroom cabinet and covered the ones which were bleeding most. He then chose his darkest shirt from the wardrobe and sat in the kitchen, waiting for Chris to come home. He would have gone upstairs, but didn’t really feel comfortable up there by himself yet. Although most of the objects in the room were his, Chris had arranged them, and the room seemed a little forlorn without her to provide their underlying structure.