Bed Read online

  ‘So are you at Malcolm’s school?’

  I loved it when she called him Malcolm. It made his lip curl and his eyes squeeze.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lou.

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Mum.

  Lou absent-mindedly brushed the crumbs from the hammock her dress made between her thighs down onto the floor. Realising her error, she glanced up to see if the crime she’d committed had been witnessed. It hadn’t, except by me, but establishing eye contact felt like it would be a pressure I wasn’t yet equipped to cope with. Instead I quickly bored my vision into the carpet, lasering an imaginary hole through it.

  ‘Hello,’ she said to me.

  ‘Hello,’ I replied but by the time I’d made the noise it had petered out. It sounded stupid. Worse still, I had nothing to follow it up with. I flirted with the idea of mentioning my impending trumpet lessons but it seemed daft.

  I smiled toothlessly until it felt strange for both of us. It went silent for a while and all I could hear was my own breath, so I made an excuse and hid in the toilet until I probably couldn’t get away with it any more. When I got back they were eating bangers and mash on their laps except for Lou, who had the small trestle table, a Jewish pre-war one with customarily thick, sturdy legs. She was the guest after all. It’s the table Mal normally had.

  The quiet, freakish gaps that perforated the occasional sound of the cheap cutlery scraping against our best plates gave me a headache. And then Mal went to the bathroom.

  ‘So are you Malcolm’s girlfriend?’ wondered Mum aloud.

  More quiet. I scrabbled around my head for a conversational tourniquet but there wasn’t one. We were bleeding to death. I glanced at Dad, to see his feet disappearing up the ladder and through the ceiling, his dinner just a gravy birthmark on the plate at the foot of his big comfy chair.

  ‘Yes,’ Lou smiled. Mum didn’t stop.

  ‘What is Malcolm like at school?’

  It hurt more this time. I longed for the flush of the cistern. The backwards click-clack of the lock.

  Lou didn’t look nervous. She smiled and jiggled a strap of hair from out of her right eye. And when she answered it sounded like lyrics from a pop song learnt from the pages of a teen magazine.

  ‘He’s nice,’ she said. ‘Better than the other boys.’

  Mal finally emerged, still buttoning up the fly of his jeans, soon to be my jeans, as he walked into the room. We watched laugh-tracked family comedy together, and Mum offered to make a pot of tea every fifteen minutes until Lou’s dad came to pick her up. She offered to make one for him too but he’d left the car running and had to get back for his food. He was having mashed potato with sausages too, he said, and he and Mum cooed over their coincidental dinner plans. Lou did her shoes up and we all grew sad that she was leaving. Especially me, because I knew that now Lou was in our lives, every time I saw her leave from that day on I’d feel the same.

  I knew that wouldn’t work.

  17

  Our school loomed in the background the way a prison presides over its inmates during exercise break. We marched out in a rolling cloud of cold purple knees and icy blue hands tucked into the cheap elastic waistbands of our shiny nylon shorts. The sharp breeze tongued the little scar on my leg to an erect pink mound, my body keeping a record of where I had been and what I had done. That day was sports day, and I had to run but the wind had turned my skin to bone.

  My classmates and I craned our necks to the right, surveying the gathered crowd of mums and dads penned in like clucking camera-flashing chickens by reams of multi-coloured bunting. I couldn’t see mine but I knew that they were in there and so I waved anyway, for fear of standing out.

  The whiteboard had names upon it listed under different events whose very nature corrupted the definition of sport. Our school year had been split into four segments between which a false rivalry was promoted. I was in the red team. My occasional academic success garnered red points. On red assembly days, it was my teammates who performed in the big old hall. Today I wore a red bib and we huddled together to find out the discipline we’d be competing in. Slowly, amidst the rush and the talk and the togetherness of it, all reluctance to take part began to disappear. This was what all the others must have felt like. I wondered if I could move in wider circles still.

  ‘There you are,’ said a boy next to me, Ben, fast, sporty and seemingly unaware of inter-social tier kindness etiquette. He pointed at the whiteboard and I did my best to follow the sniper’s sight of his finger but his arm was knocked to and fro by heads bobbing like a crate of apples spilled into the sea. I scanned through ‘Egg and Spoon’, ‘Sack Race’ and ‘Three-Legged Race’ but couldn’t find myself. I wasn’t in ‘Long Jump’ or ‘High Jump’. There was no me under ‘Discus’ or ‘Javelin’. I didn’t even know our school had javelins.

  ‘There!’ yelped Ben again. The crowd had thinned this time and I could look to where he was pointing. There: ‘4x100-Metre Relay’. Three names and then mine. The three sportiest boys in the whole school, and then me. Panic racked me, stretched me out as the Tannoy gargled instructions through the commotion. It was meant to be summer but my breath still condensed against the wind. My legs were speckled purple tinned meats and my stomach nervous bubbles of air in and out and in and out of me. A tapping hand on the summit of my spine sucked me out of a coma.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  We’d not spoken before but I knew who he was. Chris. His friends too. They were bigger than me, stronger. When they extended hands I shook them and smiled, and in the back of my head I pretended that they were my bodyguards.

  ‘Can you run fast, Phil?’ he said.

  My name wasn’t Phil, he’d got it wrong, and though it took an ice-cream-scoop-sized gulp from my throat I decided in a split second not to correct him. There is no greater test of human character than the riding-out of the subsequent seconds after someone gets your name wrong.

  ‘Not really,’ I replied.

  ‘That’s OK. You can go last.’

  This was good, I thought.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘By the time we’ve all done our legs, we’ll have a lead. You just have to run as fast as you can and not lose it.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘It will . . .’ he said, as the others turned and walked towards the row of stackable plastic chairs where we were to sit and watch the other events take place, ‘. . . be fine.’

  He had a hand on my shoulder; a palpable camaraderie embraced me. It left a brief warmth of friendship in my heart and the prop pride gives wedged tightly underneath my chin. A head rush.

  The four of us sat together in a disjointed circle. They joked and I smiled and reciprocated with acute timing. I thought they invited me out with them, maybe on our bikes. In fact I’m sure they did. I felt giddy with the novelty of it all.

  ‘I run like a duck with chewing gum on its feet,’ I said. They all laughed. They didn’t ask me about Mal. I wasn’t cold any more.

  18

  ‘It’s going to be fine.’

  ‘I don’t want to lose it for you.’

  ‘You won’t.’

  ‘I might.’

  ‘You won’t.’

  But I might. The trophy, a life where Mal plays a bit part. My life.

  I looked to the crowd as I copied the warm-up exercises my new friends were undertaking. I pretended they hurt a little even though they didn’t because I didn’t really know how to do them properly. What was more important was that, should anyone glance over, I wasn’t the only one not standing on one leg, the other tucked into my hand behind my back. We looked like the biggest and clumsiest of the flamingos. I looked the smallest and clumsiest of the big flamingos. But at least I was a flamingo.

  Finally, there was my mum. And dad. He was the only dad there that had brought some binoculars. He felt, I imagined, like an assassin. And Mal lapped at a huge ice cream, the strawberry syrup fringe on it having split into two rival factions. The drip-drip armies raced each other down the br
ittle cone and through the gaps between his fingers. Mum looked nervous for me. She’d done her hair especially, her make-up too, and she was wearing a billowy summer dress dashed with the colours of burning hot suns. She looked hand-made, a pretty craft-fair doll. I smiled back to reassure her that I was fine but I was not.

  The burst of compressed air sounded as Mr Thirkell, the wheezing PE teacher, squeezed it through the claxon. He exercised vicariously through us but it didn’t show. And that meant it was time to begin. We sauntered towards the starting line. I both wanted and didn’t want it.

  ‘Just don’t fall over,’ whispered Chris.

  ‘But if I do, it won’t be my fault,’ I said.

  ‘It won’t be anyone else’s fault either,’ he said.

  And he grinned. I wanted to ask him if I was still allowed to come on that bike ride should I fall over, or lose the race, or just burst into tears right there.

  And as I was thinking, the pistol burst. The four competing colours tore off in pursuit of its echo. A black wave of noise rose from the crowd but in my head it didn’t drown out the dull thump thump on grass of their feet, graced with such speed, one I couldn’t match with anything but my quickening breath.

  Into the second leg. Chris stormed away, catapulted. We had a lead already, the red team were winning, but I grew roots deep into the ground. Perhaps I could just sit it out. He could call me Phil for ever, perhaps I’d get used to it eventually, like the niggling twinge of a cracked rib, perhaps one day it would be there but not there too and that would be absolutely fine.

  The third leg. Thud thud thud. My joints seized, a rusted tin man. A scream unheard pumped my lungs to double their size. My ears whistled and the sound of the crowd disappeared. All colour leaked from my vision. This wasn’t me, I decided. This was someone else being me. I held out my hand and he was there immediately with a slap that bounced through the air like a gunshot.

  And I was running. I was running slowly but I was running as fast as I could. I was running away from Mum and Dad and Mal behind me. I chanced a glimpse over my shoulder and saw blue, green and yellow blocks catching me up with violent pace. I was ahead but less and less so, the timing of my short legs windmilling through the air lapsing in and out of the natural beat my juts of breath made. I was moving. I was going forward. Breaking new ground. I was out on my own. And they were catching me but there wasn’t time to overtake me. And they were screaming, and they were screaming because I had won.

  Red bibs piled on top of me but my elation lifted their weight and I was dipped in this stream I’d not belonged in and it was carrying me forward. Perhaps I could take this road. Perhaps I was invited. Perhaps this was for me.

  Chris cheered and shouted up close to my ear; the flecks of his spittle cooled my heated skin and tickled my neck. I couldn’t unclench my hands, they were tight like bunches in girls’ hair, and I felt, for a second, like the shaking centre of something great. My eyes cried hot tears but before anyone saw I dabbed them into the grass stains on my forearm until my skin was the green of an old bottle.

  ‘Happy?!’ asked Chris. It sounded like Well done. I nodded. I was happy.

  In the crowd I saw Dad, his hand in the air, and Mum, she was clapping to be the last to clap. And Lou, who waved double-handed theatrical air-kissing, the way a famous opera singer would as she embarked from a plane to greet a legion of adoring fans. But they were aimed at me.

  This was life I was feeling. I decided to lie there for a while, enjoying its exciting hand on my back.

  19

  Day Seven Thousand Four Hundred and Eighty-Three, according to the display on the wall.

  It is early morning, a busy one. The medics arrive before breakfast.

  There are two ways to get a hundred-stone man out of a house. The way to do it whilst they’re alive is to remove the front of the building. Literally to take it off, all of it, the bricks, the windows, everything. Then you have him bound in hundreds of feet of industrial-strength material, slide specially created inflatable hoists underneath him and gently lift him inch by inch from the bed and out, using a crane adapted for such a thing. Many television companies, private investors and even the occasional celebrity have offered to pay for the procedure in the past. It was, after all, a very expensive exercise. Aside from the building work, you need health-and-safety specialists and medical staff (in case Mal were to have a heart attack, which is highly probable given that he will be moving the furthest he has moved in the last twenty years). You need surveyors and a large police presence to marshal the inevitable throng of spectators. You need to hire portable toilets to cope with demand, extra seats, lighting for when it gets dark, and all manner of people and things you wouldn’t even begin to contemplate contemplating if you didn’t have a man the size of Mal in your house. We’d been told no long ago. Under no circumstances, no. No we would not be lifting Mal out of the house. We wouldn’t even be taking the front of the house off. If Mal were to leave this house, it would have to be ‘the other way’. They meant dead when they said that. Not only dead but in little bits in big bags, I guess. Or big bits in bigger bags. The reasons were thus, according to the report that arrived once all of the consultants had been consulted and all of their findings made plain:

  The structure of the house would not withstand the removal of the front outer wall.

  This meant that the house would collapse with Mal inside it, the weight of it rolling him outwards like an enormous bruised pancake. It made me think about those cartoons where they crush each other with grand pianos and anvils and refrigerators dropped from cliff tops. Except it’d be loads of bricks, and whatever Dad had in the attic. I’d never been in the attic. The second reason was this:

  Physicians found that Malcolm’s skin on his back and underside had grown and developed in such a fashion that it had begun some time ago to incorporate the material of the bedding. The surgery necessary to remove Malcolm from the bed at this stage would almost certainly result in his death from heart failure were it to be performed with him at his current weight.

  This was the bit that made me think. Mal hadn’t moved for so long that his skin had begun to merge with the linen on the bed. Parts of his back were cloth. All that weight over all those years had welded the two together and made something new. Pressure plus time, just as the earth makes coal.

  I watch the expert prepare to slide his hand between Mal and the mattress. His assistants hitch up the overspill of Mal’s thick edges, skirting the bed like a vulgar petticoat, and he begins lubricating a latex glove in glossed dollops of greasy clear jelly. He is young and fresh, perhaps mid-twenties, and I smile as I imagine the delight his friends take in recounting the more gruesome details of his perkless occupation whenever their social circle is graced by a stranger. He snaps an elastic band around his wrist to secure the glove in transit and wisely removes his watch, handing it to a pretty young trainee, who smiles because she is thinking the exact same thing as me. He calmly applies his stoic face. Gently he edges in, under heavy, sweeping folds of flab for a short distance until he can go no further. And then I imagine them all as one peeling Mal away from the bed and his skin ripping and stretching like burnt celluloid, an overcooked egg being scraped from the pan. Once the hand has gone as far as it can, and jarred in the flesh bedclothes, the expert beckons his colleague, who drops to her knees and begins sliding a long, thin plastic rod with a cotton-wool tip into the small gap created by the intrepid arm of her cohort. Slowly, slowly, further it goes, swabbing his unbearably pallid skin. Simultaneously they grimace as a long trapped pocket of air is granted reprieve to greet their nostrils with a sweaty funk. The muscle of it is such that the lady holding the swab rocks backwards on her knees with a wince, and the silence is broken by the muffled snap of the plastic tool breaking off somewhere inside him. The indignity of the whole affair weighs heavy on Mal’s eyelids, and he sleeps for the forty minutes it takes for five people in coats to fish out the offending article from where it nestles in a crevass
e on my brother’s underside. Success is achieved via a crudely twisted coat hanger adorned with bent hair clips belonging to the trainee. She sighs, rifling through a list of other possible vocations in her head.

  20

  We are used to medics in the house by now. It isn’t a big house, ours, a tiny bungalow. But like Mal it had grown.

  It had belonged to Mum’s mum. Everything retained the essence of her elderly fug, how hands smell of coins long after you’ve paid.

  The room that Mal and I shared had slowly become larger as he did. The kitchen and living room had been knocked through in order to make more space for beds, and Mum and Dad lived in an enormous chrome trailer we’d had shipped over from a woman named Norma Bee in Akron, Ohio. Her husband Brian, like Mal, had taken over her house, forcing her from it the way all air is expelled from a vacuum-packed bag. When he became too big to be around, she moved into the trailer in the yard and from there she made his meals. Full chickens. Egg whites. Curries, Indian and Thai. Bread, cakes and ice cream in triple portions. From there she fed him. From there she kept him alive. For a time.

  A friend she had in Scotland had sent her a small article about Malcolm she’d chanced upon in a newspaper, seeing the similarities between our situation and hers. After Brian’s death Norma Bee donated that trailer to us, a hulking monolith of glistening Americana. Parked out there, a beautiful silver blister on the face of the neighbourhood, I used to pretend it was the tour bus of a rock band that was here to perform for me.

  When not in there, Dad would usually be found in the attic space of the bungalow. We’d never disturb him, even as children. We’d leave him up there with his paperwork, his books, his maths, his inventions, his tools, his tuts, his sighs and his thoughts. You could hear his anger tremor through the plaster in the walls, the vibrations amplifying it until the house became a giant moan. None of this ever woke Mal.