Conrad Williams
Alex came out of sleep and his first thoughts were for his father, dead a year now. He felt he had yet to fully come to terms with his death, to properly grieve for him. It had been a strange death. Unexpected. Expected. In any case, still raw.
It was 4:00 a.m.; cold in the room, an hour too early for him to feel justified in rising. Alex knew from bitter experience that trying to burrow back into sleep would result in him moving further away from it. He switched on the light, and then switched it off. His next breath was difficult to take. He felt his heart lurch. The remnants of sleep, catching in his thoughts. A bruise in the air. A stray memory.
He sat up in bed and switched on the light again. It was still there, hanging in the room like a half-deflated helium balloon, angled in a way so that Alex could see the jawline’s familiar sweep. He stared at the face, or what was visible of the face. It was like something half-buried. It was like something emerging.
“Dad?” The name felt foreign to his lips, he had not uttered it for so long. The…what was it? – Visage? Mask? Dream projection? – showed no sign of recognition. His father looked much as he had in the days leading up to his death. Gaunt. Pale. Defeated. “Dad…what are you doing here?”
Alex swung his legs out of bed and placed his feet on the floor. Cold air swirled around them. I’m dreaming, he thought to himself. I’m having a nightmare. He stood up, keeping his eyes on his father. He looked as if he was trying to hatch himself out of the air. Was he trapped? Was he lost?
What am I thinking? He realised his entire body was tensed, and forced himself to relax. Something gave way in his head, a dull ache just above the back of his neck. He felt dizzy, and put out a hand as his balance shifted.
No, he thought. No.
He left his bed unmade, the lights on, and went downstairs. He dug through the laundry basket and put on some clothes, then he left the house.
Alex walked the streets until dawn edged the rooftops with colour. His stomach was churning at the knowledge that he would have to go back. He was worried his dad would still be there. He was worried his dad would be gone.
As soon as the coffee shop was open, he bought two flat whites and headed round to Sarah’s house. Sarah was his girlfriend, but he didn’t see much of her. She was always busy with work, or with fitness – when she wasn’t doing yoga, she was doing Pilates. And when she wasn’t doing Pilates, she was running. He wondered why they were even in a relationship, given the lack of time they spent together. Often, he wondered if he was the only person who thought he was in a relationship.
She answered the door in her yoga gear, hair damp from the shower.
“I’m not drinking that,” she said. “Just put it down there and I’ll heat it up later. Jesus, Alex, do you not know me by now?”
No, he wanted to say. I hardly know you at all.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realise you were starting so early.”
“It’s Tuesday. I have to start early otherwise I don’t get any exercise in before work. I have one coffee, after lunch. Are you okay?”
He wondered if she meant was he okay in the head for bringing her a crack-of-dawn coffee. But then he saw how she was looking at him, and how he might look to her after his shock that morning. He was never any good at concealing his feelings.
“I didn’t sleep too well,” he said.
“Don’t start that again,” she warned him. “We agreed, separate houses, separate beds. We need our own space.”
“I walked in on my mum and dad once, in their bedroom, when I was a teenager. And they were getting on in years. And they were sitting up in bed together, in their pyjamas, holding hands. Not talking or watching TV or anything. Just holding hands.”
“And your point is?”
“There is no point,” he said, hating how crushed he sounded.
“What’s going on?” she asked him.
He told her what had happened in his room. The face hanging in the air like some impossible exhibition in a gallery. To her credit, she didn’t accuse him of drinking too much, or eating cheese. She nodded sadly, and held his hand. “You never got over it,” she said. “You haven’t properly grieved for him yet.”
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel,” he said. He meant it. His father dying was the first major bereavement in his life.
“You still haven’t told me what happened,” she said.
He held his cold cup of coffee and looked around the room. The fruit bowl with its bounty of items destined for her blender. The homemade sourdough cooling on a wire rack (when the hell did she make that?). The three jars lined up by the kettle for her favourite tea infusions: peppermint, turmeric and fennel.
“He was mobile, in his old age,” he said. “He loved to get a bus into town and potter about the bookshop, buy a newspaper, read the headlines over coffee. He’d walk back. But then Mum went into the care home.”
Sarah knew as much, but she didn’t hurry him along. Alex appreciated that.
“She wasn’t aware, really, of what was happening. I don’t think she recognises me anymore when I go to visit. But anyway, when she was admitted, so was my dad. It was meant to be on a residential basis, of course. He didn’t want to go. He hated the place. But he went. And the first night he was there, he had a bad fall. He’d got out of bed to go to the loo, became disoriented, and tripped. Broke his hip and his shoulder. He needed an operation. I went to hospital to see him. But I couldn’t find him. There was just this tiny old figure in one of the beds. I wouldn’t accept it was him. He wasn’t my dad. But it was. Of course it was.
“I sat by him and he reached out his hand for mine and I held it and he said he loved me. Straight off the bat. I didn’t know that was in him. He was always very reserved. We sat like that for an hour and then I left. I saw him the next day and the next. And each time he was…I don’t know…withdrawing. He wouldn’t eat. I think he just…because he wasn’t able to walk anymore, because he didn’t want to go back to that place…he just…he just…”
“He gave up.”
“Yes. He basically starved himself to death. He knew he wasn’t going to be coming back from that. It took two months. From browsing the non-fiction bookshelves and doing the crossword over a latte…to oblivion.”
He felt a tug inside him then, as if something had become unanchored. Perhaps it was an understanding. An acceptance. But it felt like something forgotten, a tip-of-the-tongue frustration. He concentrated on the feeling, trying to unpick it, but it wouldn’t lay itself bare for him.
Sarah said: “I’ll cancel my class. I’ll come home with you.”
He didn’t protest. He knew her mind.
She changed out of her yoga gear and walked back to his house with him, holding his hand. He knew she meant to show him that the face in the air was an illusion, but he already knew that it was meant only for his eyes. His father would not reveal himself to anyone else.
In the bedroom she seemed more interested in the state of his sheets than the area he was fanning his hands at. “He was just here. His face, tilted, as if he was rising from bed. You know, getting up.”
She was making the bed for him. She had lost interest. “You need to establish a sleeping regime. Go to bed at a certain time. You need to factor in some winding down time, so your body knows that sleep is coming. Bath, herbal tea, ten minutes reading a book… A routine.”
He made all the placatory gestures and sounds. She kissed him. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll buy you breakfast.”
* * *
A bath. Some tea. A book.
He took off his glasses and folded them. He switched off the light.
There was a roughness building in his skin that he had not noticed until Sarah mentioned it over their breakfast (pancakes and bacon for him; fruit and yoghurt for her). He thought she was having a dig at him over his dietary choices, but now, in the dark, as he ran his fingers over his face, he saw she was right. He felt papery, dry. There were little edges and crevices that he could feel, as if his face was developing cracks. Panic rose in him like water, filling him up. He hurried to the bathroom and turned on the light. Staring back at him in the mirror was the face he knew so well, but which was suddenly that of a stranger. He looked grey and spent, like a bag intended for a cheap sandwich at a roadside café. He rubbed some moisturiser into the worst places. Sarah would have been to the GP by now. He always prevaricated. He could get a job as a prevaricator.
Dad was there when he returned to the room. There seemed to be no rhyme nor reason for his appearances. But maybe they occurred when Alex was active, or disturbed in his dreams. He liked the idea of his dad appearing when he was under stress. As he used to as a child in the night, afraid of the dark, or the thing slumped and hungry in his wardrobe, mustering the strength to push its doors open before devouring him in his bed.
Another teasing glimpse of a moment shared that wasn’t quite remembered. He imagined his father’s face as he sat on the edge of the mattress, looking down at him, the soft smile, the crinkles at the corner of his eyes. His father’s warm fingers smoothing his hair, and assuring him that everything was all right. He checked under his bed. He checked in the wardrobe. He said something. You said something.
“You said something,” he whispered now, as his father’s face waxed and waned in the air. He wanted to touch him, but he was afraid that doing so would cause him to vanish, like a balloon under a pin. “Back then. You said something to me. What did you say?”
His father’s face creased, as if he was in thought. The edges of it moved against the borders in the air, and there was a strange glimmer there, like the rim of ice at the edge of a pond at the start of its freezing.
“Open your eyes, Dad,” Alex said. His father’s eyelids twitched. He looked like someone struggling out of a sleep that was too deep to be beneficial. “Dad, can you hear me?”
The glimmering seam which collared his father’s face sagged a little, allowing more of it to be revealed. There was the mole on his left cheek. The suggestion of five o’clock shadow. How much of that breach needed to be loosened before he would slither out of it, as if newly born? Could he do anything to hasten the process?
Alex watched for an hour as his father twitched and frowned, his eyelids fluttering under the weight of some fantastical dream. He remembered sitting by the hospital bed scrutinising him in the same way, as he sank towards death, his eyelids smarting. What do you see, Dad? Where do you go?
He glanced at his watch and there was a shiver around him; he knew when he looked back his father would be gone. So it was. There was time yet for Alex to catch up on his sleep. His was dreamless, or of dreams unrecalled. When he woke again, just before nine, there was a contour of blood on his pillow, where his jawline had been resting.
* * *
“It’s non-negotiable,” Sarah said. “You’re going.”
She was a confident driver, but tended to speed. Alex realised he was gripping the seat tightly only when she lightly slapped his hand. “I’m fine,” he said.
“Fine…right. Because bleeding from the face in your sleep is no cause for concern. We all do it, don’t we?”
“It’s just dry skin. Maybe I’ve got eczema. It’s just a stress thing.”
“I’m suffering from a stress thing too. The Latin name for it is Alexii Irritatum. I’d pay a lot of money to have that surgically removed.”
“Very funny.”
She parked near the GP’s surgery and shooed him out of the car. “I’ll wait for you,” she said. “Go.”
He hurried through a mist of rain to the entrance and stepped inside. The smell of lemon bleach. Tulips past their best in a vase on the windowsill by reception. He was just in time to hear the voice of Dr. Ferguson over the intercom calling for a Mrs. Watkin. He gave his name and his date of birth to a woman wearing a surgical face mask who couldn’t sit still on her office chair. She gestured with her eyes and he went to sit in the waiting room where he had once sat with his father, thirty years previously. Some tummy bug. Some cold. The clock on the wall ticked off the minutes. Ten. Fifteen. He watched Mrs. Watkin leave, her long fingers plucking at her flimsy green blouse, pulling it back into shape. A lump under the breast. A swollen gland.
“Alex Barlow.” A deep voice. Sonorous. Wet.
He traipsed through and Dr. Ferguson – Fergie, as Alex’s dad had called him – was standing by the window. All those years ago he’d had the cold stethoscope to his chest while Fergie asked Dad about his holidays. The same desk. Dr. Ferguson was old now, way past retirement age. He loved the job. His hair was white, but still styled the same way as it was when it had been deep chestnut. Long and wavy, swept back off the forehead.
“You look like something you’d find in the shitter on a gastro-enteritis ward,” he said. “I was sorry to hear about your father.”
Suddenly close to tears, Alex could only nod. He liked Fergie. He liked the lack of propriety. You didn’t find that in people anymore. Everyone was careful of what they said, lest it offend, as if offence was the most harmful thing there was now.
“What’s going on with your boat race?” Fergie asked. “I assume that’s why you’re here. Unless your knob has dropped off.”
Alex shrugged. “Dry skin? I don’t know.”
“Let’s have a look.”
He prodded the tender edges of Alex’s face with a tongue depressor. Through the thick lenses of his glasses (probably the same frames he wore in the 1970s), Alex saw a pale blue corona around the iris similar to those his father had developed.
“Bugger me,” Fergie said. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my puff.”
“Dry skin?”
“It’s not dry skin. It looks…it looks as if your skin is aging rapidly. It’s coming away from the younger flesh surrounding it.” He said this in such a matter-of-fact way that the shock of it was delayed. Alex’s heart lurched.
“It’s cancer?”
“I don’t know. I’d refer you to a specialist but they’d tell you they’ve never seen anything like it either, I’d bet a pony on it. How long has this been going on?”
Since my father appeared out of thin air.
“Three…four days?”
“You’re kidding me.” Fergie took off his glasses and sucked one of the ear rests, tapped his teeth with it. “Right. I’ll take a swab and I’ll send it to the lab with a rocket under its arse. I’ll prescribe you something topical to ease the discomfort and hopefully soften the skin, make it want to seal itself back up again. You never know. And some bastard-strength antibiotics. Let’s nuke the sod and see what happens.”
* * *
The following day Sarah visited him first thing. She gestured at the large yellow pills he’d picked up from the chemist. “Are you going to take those?”
He shrugged. He nodded.
She came to his bedroom but would neither look at him nor at the area where his father was struggling to be…
To be what? Birthed was the word he kept circling around.
“I don’t want to know,” she said. Her gaze flitted from one place to another, but couldn’t settle, as if everything she saw triggered a memory too painful to consider.
“I think he might speak soon,” Alex said. “He looks ready to talk. He looks as if he’s trying to say something. Trying to tell me something.”
Now her gaze crystallised. What was she looking at? It seemed suddenly very important. The staircase? The picture on the wall of a child playing cricket on a beach?
“I’m sorry…what did you say?”
She closed her eyes. Breathed deeply. He knew that look. Her exasperated look. He realised with bitter clarity that it didn’t matter what she was trying to tell him.
“You are falling apart, Alex,” she said. “You have…there’s this smell on you…coming off you. It’s sweet. Rotten. You need to go to the doctor.”
“I went,” he said, seizing on the one thing he could understand. “You took me!”
“You need to go back,” she said. “It could be fatal, this thing you’ve got. Like a flesh-eating bug or something. I’m not going to watch you die.”
“I feel…fantastic,” he said.
Her lips disappeared to a flat line. It was a look he knew better than he would have liked. It meant she was close to tears. She was struggling to say something; she kept opening her mouth to speak and then either thinking better of it, or hitting a wall. It scared him. She was always so effortlessly articulate.
“What?” he said, and he said it with such vehemence her head snapped up. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Reluctant. He felt something give in his jaw, and a wet release across his throat. He put his fingers there and they came away wet with a thin wash of blood and lymph.
“Jesus fuck. Jesus, Alex. What will it take? Your entire face sliding off your skull?”
“That’s not what you were going to say. That was easy. That was too easy. Tell me what you meant to say.”
“Stop trying to divert me. The issue here is your health. You will not acknow—”
“Tell me.”
She held up her hands. A gesture of surrender; a barrier against his aggression. He couldn’t tell. But then she said: “Your father.”
Those initial words uttered, her voice grew tremulous and high-pitched. She rushed the rest of it, as if she needed to get it out of her before she could stop herself.
“Your father is dead, Alex. End of. Whatever’s going on, you have to leave it. Let go. It’s eating you up. Whatever this is. Grief? Let go. Let him go. Christ. Christ.” She was walking away now. He didn’t know what to say. He felt whatever control he had over the situation slipping away. He thought she’d have been thrilled to know his dad was coming back. That he was trying to speak. But she was treating him like someone suffering a kind of breakdown. He could see it in her eyes. That mix of pity and concern and fear.
At the door, she seemed to dither, and then she forced herself over the threshold and into the street. “This is what happens,” she said, “when you deny yourself the process. Bereavement. You blocked it out. You refused it. It’s not healthy. And now look at you… What did the doctor say?”
“Well, he gave me some antibiotics. Told me to eat an apple and call him in the morning.”
She was crying, but she wouldn’t allow him to hold her. She walked to her car. “You know what to do,” she said. “Christ, Alex. Find balance.”
He stood there long after the sound of the engine had dissipated. He might have stayed there till dark if it wasn’t for the voice he heard coming from his room.
“What, Dad? What is it? Can you hear me?”
His dad was slowly turning in the air, and Alex was put in mind of something cocooned, rotating on a thread. He thought his dad was somehow distraught, that he had in some way overheard his conversation with Sarah, or was able to feel in him his disquiet. He leaned in close to him. Could he detect those Dad smells? The Old Spice. The tang of copper from the loose change he collected in a large whisky bottle.
“Dad?”
There was a movement of air. A twitch in the throat. Then sound shifting there, deep in his chest. Alex wanted to get hold of…whatever it was – the rent, the fracture – and tear it wide, but he worried his father might slip away into whatever existed beyond. And in any case, he wasn’t ready to see what was beyond.
But he felt he should do something to try to induce his dad’s reappearance. Cook the food he liked? What was that, anyway? He closed his eyes to think. Dense, meaty stews. Chinese takeaways. Fried breakfasts. He liked instant coffee made with hot milk. Tinned fruit in syrup with evaporated milk.
He played the music he had grown up listening to. The album titles as known to him as the street names around the house of his childhood. Catch Bull at Four. Blood on the Tracks. Diamonds and Rust. He watched his father while he did this. He seemed more animated. Alex remembered him encouraging him to sing along to the lyrics printed on the album sleeve. Sitting in their living room, the record spinning on a turntable, reflecting light in strange, waxing patterns across the ceiling.
When the record ended, his dad would look at his watch and say: “Apples and pears.”
Alex would go up to his room and change into his pyjamas. Brush his teeth. When he turned the light off in his bedroom, the glow-in-the-dark King Kong on his desk was the colour of lemon, so bright initially that he could have used it to read by.
Now, going to sleep was hard. It felt as if he was mining for it, perhaps in a way similar to his father’s travails. Everything hurt. He thought he could feel his bones, spongy and damp within their aching parcels of meat. If he opened his mouth to yawn, his face shifted alarmingly, and he felt pain lancing like sutures along its circumference. Shifting on the pillow alerted him to damp areas where his skin had leaked onto the cotton. He was aware of the smell of himself, decayed and cloying. He could taste it, perhaps via some kind of osmosis through the tissue of his jaw. It hung, claggy and bitter at the back of his throat, like the aftershock of a dismal meal. What have I become? The languor of pre-sleep moved through him, and he settled despite his disquiet. His eyes fluttered, and he saw, through his narrowing lids, his father appear in the air, nested in eternity’s socket, the edges of the aperture encrusted with ice. Frost blued the hollows of his father’s cheeks. He seemed agitated. His face lifted and fell. Alex was convinced something other than his own need was causing it.
“Dad? It’s okay. Don’t force it. You’ll be here soon. And we’ll do all the things we should have done when…when, well, you know. All those times when you were too busy, or I was doing something else. When I said: later, maybe. When you said: not right now. The time we thought we had. We had no time at all.”
His dad’s eyes opened and Alex fell into deep sleep. But the image of him remained. The skin on his father’s neck red raw where the ice collar was irritating him. The eyes distant and confused, questioning. For the first time he wondered if his dad was in pain. It was a birth of some kind, after all. A rebirth. A deliverance from death. How traumatic must it be? It occurred to him too that his dad might not want to be there. That he had earned his rest, that he had died, after all, tired of life, of the constant pain and the exhaustion. He felt a lurch of panic as he considered this, and in the dream his father twitched and shuddered. The collar loosened somewhat; he heard the crackle of ice as the aperture shifted. Alex imagined his dad trapped at the neck, suspended above countless miles of screaming nothingness. What had he done to get to where he now was? How hard would it have been to try to reverse what ought to be irreversible?
Fingers poked up through a slender gap between his father’s throat and the aperture’s edge.
Dad?
He wanted to believe they were his father’s own. But they were long and slender, tipped with horribly curved, ragged purple nails. How could they be his father’s? Especially as they were now lightly scoring the white flesh of Dad’s neck, causing him to wince.
Leave him alone. Dad? Dad?
The fingers withdrew, but not before they’d made shapes in the air, as if essaying a wave, or a beckoning.
Alex jerked out of sleep to find his pillow wet with blood. His neck was criss-crossed with deep scratches. His fingers came away slick when he touched them. Oh God. Oh Jesus.
His face in the bathroom mirror looked ready to cantilever away from the fascia of his skull. He felt all it needed was a little tug at the break of his chin and it would lift up like the faceplate on a welder’s mask. Some of the scratches on his neck were welling with blood, deeper than he’d reckoned. What had he done to himself? Had he tried to kill himself in his sleep?
His mind turned to the fingers he’d seen slipping out of the aperture. He hurried back to his bedroom, but his father was not there. Only a rumour of cold where he had been hanging.
* * *
He tried calling Sarah throughout the day but she was either busy, or ignoring his calls. As darkness sifted through the streets once more, he found himself dreading his father’s return. He tried Sarah one last time. She answered.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m sorry too,” she said.
“I don’t know what to do. What did you mean when you said ‘find balance’?”
“You know what I mean. You’re hot or cold. Either, or. You can’t compartmentalise. You can’t shelve things for a later date. You wallow. You can’t…you don’t know how to forget.”
“I don’t…I’ve never had to deal with anything like this before.”
“It’s a club and we’re all members, Alex. Like it or not. No option. Everyone deals with it, or they don’t.”
“I’ll change,” he said. “Give me time. I’m trying to learn. I’ll change. I promise.”
“I’m here,” she said. “But I won’t shoulder your burden.”
She was saying something else but he had gone cold, turned deaf.
I promise.
He put his phone down and went upstairs to find his dad lying on his bed. He looked no different to the reduced figure who had died in hospital. He was staring at Alex. “I’m scared,” his father said.
“I’m scared too,” Alex said. He could feel something spreading inside him. A monumental coldness too big for him to contain. He thought it might be death, and that this was what balance meant. A man who had escaped from death left a vacuum that could not be sustained. Someone needed to fill it. “I miss you, Dad.”
“I miss you too. But I’m tired. I just want to go to sleep.”
“The fingers, Dad. The hands.”
“They carry me down. They lull me to sleep. Don’t worry. Don’t worry about me. Live your life. Just like how I taught you, right?”
“Right, Dad. I’m tired too.”
“Then let’s have a nap. You and me. In the morning you can go and visit your mum. Tell her I love her.”
Okay. Okay. Night, Dad.
Night, Alex. Sweet dreams.
* * *
The boy woke up in the semi-darkness and he was instantly afraid. The landing light was on; his parents always left it on for him. He was minded to get out of bed to turn it off, to show that he was a big boy, but it was cold and the darkness surrounding his bed was close and seemed full of movement; he was certain that if he moved it would touch him. Smother him. He felt his heart leap to meet the thickening of his fear, gelid there in his chest, like a cold chunk of something difficult to digest. He tried to call out around the lump of fear lodged in his throat. He could barely muster the breath to do so.
When he was able to call out, his voice was filled with misery. He wished he could be a little more like his dad. To be grown up and unafraid of anything. It must be such a relief to be a big boy, to not let anything bother you.
He heard his father’s footsteps on the stairs, the reassuring squeak of the sixth and eighth risers. His shadow in the doorway.
“All right, Alex?” The whisper. His dad’s weight on the mattress, tipping Alex towards him. His smell. His thereness. “What is it? What’s wrong? Can’t you sleep?”
“No,” Alex said, and his voice and his eyes were heavy with tears.
“Why not?”
And the reason was there in him, a fear he had never really considered before, let alone given voice to.
“You’re going to die one day.”
His father held him while he sobbed.
He said: “One day. Yes. But not for a long time. You mustn’t worry. I won’t leave you. I’ll never leave you. I promise.”