A strange way to meet

The child was crouched, her swimsuit a splash of red against the blue of the sky and the near-white of the sand in the harsh sunshine. Her head was uncovered, her hair in its basin cut bob was pulled back at one side. The ribbon was pink, pale against the gold of her hair.

She lay back in the deck chair and watched the child in her intensity. Her own dark bob was wrapped in a scarf, her swimsuit covered by the thin gauze of a wrap. Her indeterminate eyes, neither grey nor green nor blue, were protected by the sunglasses she wore. They lazily regarded the scene before her.

The child’s attention was fixed, all concentration poured into dragging whatever it was out of the water.

The young woman’s fingers remembered how it felt to have water pull like ribbons between them, trying to grasp the elusive prize that lay beneath the surface of river, rock pool, stream or ocean.

A sudden glare of sunlight on the water, against the sand, meant that she was temporarily blinded, and when she could see again, the child had disappeared. The rock pool was abandoned. There was no sign that anyone had ever been crouched there, fishing with fingers spread, hoping to capture whatever it was that had lain there, just beneath the surface.

She closed her eyes and thought of the hotel cat, lying on its side in the shade of the portico, cooling its skin against the marble flooring at the entrance to the hotel. She thought of how it slept, front paws crossed, back paws lined up neatly, all four legs pointing to the West.

She felt a shadow fall across her, its form darkening the redness behind her closed lids. She opened her eyes again to see her mother standing in front of her.

“Are you going to lie here all day?” her mother demanded to know.

The young woman languidly raised an arm to shield her eyes from the sun’s aura that ringed her mother’s darkened form. She looked over the top of her glasses. With the sun directly behind her, her mother’s features were shrouded in darkness, but the woman could tell from her posture that happiness didn’t mark that familiar face.

“Well?” her mother insisted.

She dropped her arm and sat back into the deckchair again. She didn’t speak. She gently turned her face to one side, so that her mother’s shadow no longer cast its shade upon her closed lids.

“Your father and I want to take your brother and sister into town.”

The young woman allowed her mother’s voice to run on in this way, yapping like a terrier. She no longer listened to the words. She drifted with her eyes closed, enjoying the stillness of the day, the quiet sounds of other families playing on the beach at a distance, the heat of the sun across her body.

Her mother’s tirade ended. The young woman turned her head again to face her. She dropped her sunglasses again, to the tip of her nose, and directed her gaze at her mother.

“I’d rather stay here,” she said.

“Your father won’t be happy about this,” her mother replied, her shadow still bearing down onto her daughter’s recumbent form.

In truth, her father was never happy unless he was left in peace with a newspaper and his pipe. Driving the family here and there at the whim of his wife was not his pastime of choice.

Eventually her mother left her in peace and the woman went back to resting her body in the warmth of the sun.

She heard a splash and, looking up, saw that the child was back at the rock pool. She had brought a net with her this time. Hunkered down onto her heels, she was swishing the net through the water.

The young woman got up and walked over to where the child was working.

“What is it?” she asked. “What have you found?”

“A hand,” the child replied. “I’ve found a hand.”

The young woman looked down into the pool, expecting to see a starfish or a dropped glove. She looked down and saw that the child was right. It was a hand. It was a hand that had been severed at the wrist; quite some time ago, judging by the pallid, fraying flesh at the end of the hand, the lack of blood or rawness.

The child was insistent in her efforts to retrieve the hand, but it seemed to be stuck.

“Would you like me to help you?” the young woman asked the child.

“No, I’m alright,” the child replied, her jaw twisted and two of her upper teeth biting down on a corner of her bottom lip. She pushed on with the net. The young woman had to resist the urge to take the net from the child’s rigid hands and do the fishing herself.

She crouched down beside the little girl.

“You’re in my light,” the child said.

She moved to another position and looked down, through the clear water of the rock pool, at the hand. It was a large hand, but delicately boned. The flesh was swollen by the water it must have absorbed.

She imagined an entire body, floating out at sea, perhaps washed up and trapped in one of the coves along the bay. She saw the closed eyes and open mouth of a drowned man flash before her eyes, and it made her gasp.

The child paused in her activity and looked at her.

“Are you alright?” she asked. “You’re not frightened, are you?”

“No, I’m not frightened,” the woman replied. “I was just imagining the rest of the body.”

The child regarded her solemnly. “Yes,” she said. “There will be one somewhere.”

The young woman crouched and watched the hand as the net swished about it, almost catching it, but never capturing it firmly enough to pull it from its resting place.

“I think I need something else,” the child said, relinquishing her hold on the pole of the net. “Watch my net for me,” she instructed. She waited for the young woman to nod her compliance before hurrying off along the beach, back to where her family were unconcerned at her absence.

The young woman reached down into the water. She was close enough to the hand to touch it. She had to lean forward slightly, and almost lost her balance. She dipped her hand and then her wrist and then her arm until she was up to the elbow in the warm water of the pool. The water turned her flesh a ghostly colour. Her fingers touched the hand. They stroked its back and travelled down its fingers, to where two of them were lodged into a crevice in the rock.

Gently, she worked her own fingers into the crevice, trying to loosen the pale dead fingers of the hand. Beneath her fingers, the dead flesh felt soft and cool, despite the warmth of the pool’s water. It felt as though she were making love to the hand; as though this were the hand of her lover and she were cajoling him to take her hand in his.

She could not budge it, though. She pulled her hand from the water again and sat back slightly, rocking onto her heels. Looking up, she tried to see where the child had got to. She gazed down the beach in the direction that the girl had run, but she could see no sign of her.

She returned her vision to the hand in the pool. Her little brother would have been thrilled by this discovery, she was sure. He would have blundered in and taken over and ruined the small girl’s day, all so that he could claim the hand as his trophy.

The young woman thought that maybe she should tell someone about the hand; some figure of authority, perhaps, like a policeman. She looked down at it, lying so peacefully in its watery home, and decided that it was unfair to disturb it with authority and questions and investigations at the hands of scientists.

A slight breeze had picked up. She wished that she had the knack of telling the time by the position of the sun. She had a feeling that the day was drifting away from her. She looked behind her, down the beach again, and saw families picking up blankets and taking down windbreaks.

The girl was running up the beach towards her.

Breathless when she reached the pool again, she said, “I need my fishing net.”

The young woman pulled the net from the pool and handed it to the girl.

“I suppose the hand will be gone tomorrow,” she said, looking down at it, fishing net in hand.

“Was it here yesterday?” the young woman asked.

The girl shrugged. “Dunno,” she confessed. “Only got here today.”

She took one last look at the hand, drinking in its form, burning its impression onto her brain. Her body emanated regret, then she released all the tension, smiled brilliantly at the young woman and, with a cheerful goodbye, made her way back down the beach.

The young woman watched her go, then turned back to the hand. She couldn’t, in all honesty, leave it there. Now that she knew that it existed, she would think about it constantly; she would wonder if it had been washed away; she would look for it every time she came to the beach. It would become an obsession.

It already was an obsession.

She stared at it, trying to decide what to do. The breeze that was building up to become a wind pulled at her wrap, and she tied it more closely around her. She pulled the scarf from her head and let her hair blow free, enjoying the feel of the wind pulling it away from her head as she looked down into the pool.

The hand lay there, pale with a hint of green about the flesh. She thought about art class, and the way the teacher had informed them that skin tones always need a hint of green about them to make them seem more realistic. She looked at the hand and thought that the hint of green made it seem less real, not more so.

She regretted not wearing her watch. She placed her right hand around her left wrist, where the watch would have been. She looked at the hand and realised that it was a right hand. It was a right hand that had once belonged to somebody.

She recognised that the more detail she gave to the hand, the more squeamish she was becoming about touching it again. She stopped thinking about it so precisely and plunged her own right hand back down into the water, grabbing the severed hand around the knuckles and pulling. At first it didn’t move, and she almost stopped; the vision she had of ripping out two of the fingers and leaving them behind made her stomach turn.

Again, she moved her own fingers down into the crevice where the middle and forefinger were lodged. It was narrow, but she was able to manoeuvre her fingers a little, and then a little more, until she had loosened the dead man’s fingers enough.

Then she gripped the hand again and pulled.

The hand came up out of the water, and she almost fell backwards onto her behind. She put her left hand out to steady herself, jarring the wrist, and then stayed in that position, staring at the hand dripping water from its surface down her arm.

She was holding the hand aloft, as though it were an Olympic flame, or a trophy she wanted the world to see.

Slowly, she lowered her arm and brought the hand closer to her body. She held it palm up, her own palm snug against its back. She looked at the lines, the puckered skin, the strangely plastic appearance of the flesh.

Suddenly, she remembered where she was, and that anyone could walk by and see her sitting there holding a severed hand in her own.

She wrapped the hand in the scarf she had been wearing, then stood and walked briskly back to her deck chair. She placed the hand into her beach bag. At no point did she think to feel scared or disgusted or worried. She wasn’t even surprised at her actions. It was an occasion for which nobody could prepare; something where your reaction would only become clear when you had to face it.

The young woman was glad that she was calm, that she hadn’t had hysterics, and she thought that the tone had been set by the child’s dispassionate interest in the hand. To the child, it had been a matter of fact that the hand was floating in the rock pool, and it made logical sense to try to retrieve it.

She picked up her bag and folded the deck chair, returning it to the booth and reclaiming her deposit. As she received the coins into her hand, warm from the deck chair attendant’s pocket, she liked the fact that she had a hand in her bag and the attendant didn’t know it.

She walked back to the hotel. She made small talk with the desk clerk as she collected her key, then she made her way up to her room. The lift attendant smiled politely at her and they ascended in silence.

Once in the room, she looked for a place to keep the hand. She didn’t yet know what she was going to do with it, just that she wanted to keep it. She placed it at the back of the drawer where she was storing her underwear.

She closed the drawer just as her family returned from their afternoon in the town.

“Oh, you’re back, then?” her mother said, on seeing the young woman come out of her room.

“Yes, it would seem that way,” she replied, quietly. Then, more loudly, she said, “I’m going to bathe and get ready for dinner.”

Her mother grunted some form of approval of her eldest daughter’s attention to hygiene and appearance and disappeared into her own room.

The young woman drew herself a bath in the bathroom down the corridor. She lay back in the warm water that was gritty from the bath salts and looked at her hands. She tried to picture on her own body where the hand had been severed. She thought just above the wrist bone was the most likely place. There would still have been bone to cut through; all those tiny bones that connect the hand and the arm.

The skin at the end of the hand had been ragged. She decided that this could have been the effect of being washed by the seawater, or by small creatures nibbling away at the flesh. Equally, though, it could have been whatever blade was used to do the severing.

She wondered if the other hand was floating somewhere out to sea. She wondered about the rest of the body, and had the same vision again of the bloated corpse with open mouth and closed eyes, arms outstretched, but with no hands there to catch hold of anything.

When she returned to her room to dress, her young brother was stretched out on her bed.

“What are you doing in here?” she asked, busying herself in the wardrobe, choosing a dress to wear to dinner. “Come on, I need to get dressed. Out you go.”

“I’m bored,” he said, not moving.

“Teddy, I’m serious. I need to get dressed and you’re too old to watch. Besides, you need to wash up for dinner too.”

Her brother was ten years younger than she. He was beginning to change from the sweetness of being very young to the brutishness of double figures.

“What did you do today?” he asked her, still not moving from the bed. His hands were behind his head and he had his feet up on the ruby red eiderdown.

She turned to look at him. “I stayed at the beach and I helped a small girl fish something out of a rock pool,” she told him.

“We went to see a ruin,” he said.

“Was that not fun?” She pulled stockings from the underwear drawer, catching a glimpse of the hand wrapped in her scarf and feeling an illicit thrill run across her and through her.

“You’ve just gone pink,” her brother said. “Are you thinking of him again?”

The young woman didn’t speak. Now that she had seen the hand again, all she wanted was for her brother to leave the room so that she could look at it.

She knew, though, that she would have to wait until she was alone and everyone else had gone to bed. She would have to get through dinner, and then cocktails in the lounge, listening to her parents and the friends they had made at the hotel talking about dull subjects, while some limp son of one of the families tried to make conversation with her.

Her pinkness and silence on the matter was the thing that finally forced Teddy to leave the room. Younger brothers have a natural abhorrence for the thought that their older sister is daydreaming about a man.

The door clicked shut behind him, and the young woman was finally able to peel back the scarf a little. The flesh peeped out, almost luminescent in its paleness, and she ran her fingers along the skin.

The smoothness of it out of the water surprised her. She stroked it gently and wondered how it would have felt when it was still attached to whoever had once owned it.

She wondered whether it would have been smooth and warm. As she stroked, she imagined its owner using that warm smooth hand to stroke her. Turning her head slightly, she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. She had gone pink again. The pleasure of thinking about such a warm, strong hand had lent her skin a rosy hue.

She pulled the scarf back around the hand and closed the drawer.

As she walked down with her family to the dining room, she couldn’t stop thinking about the hand. It was an attractive hand, and she found herself building a man that went with it. The fingers were long and slender; the bones in the hand were fine, lending it an elegance of composition.

Eating a piece of chicken, she frowned as it came to her that even a man of such apparent elegance must have done something in order that someone would cut off his hand.

“Are you alright, dear?” her mother asked from across the table.

The young woman looked up at her and remembered where she was.

“Yes. I’m quite alright, thank you,” she said, remembering to smile, and continuing with her meal.

After a little while of eating, she suddenly asked the question.

“What do you suppose someone would have to do in order to have their hand cut off?”

Everyone stopped eating and looked at her. Her family, people at other tables nearby, the serving staff. Everyone went still and looked at her with a mixture of horror and surprise on their faces.

“Well, in a Muslim country, because they had stolen something,” her father said, after a pause.

“And in this country?”

She looked at him insistently. He coughed a little, choking on some morsel of food he still had in his mouth. He took a sip from his glass of water before answering.

“I really don’t know,” he said.

“You do ask the most preposterous things,” her mother said.

The young woman remained silent for the rest of the meal. She didn’t notice that a young man was watching her from across the dining room.

He pulled her out onto the terrace while everyone else was sipping sherry in the lounge after dinner.

“Why did you ask that question at dinner?” he said, holding her by the arms and staring into her face.

“Let go of me,” she said, not struggling, but not welcoming his closeness either.

He released her arms.

“Sorry,” he said. “But will you tell me why you asked it?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I was just curious, I think. It struck me as an interesting question to ask.”

“I saw a hand in one of the rock pools earlier today,” he said, lowering his voice and bending his head towards hers. He took hold of one of her hands. “You saw it too, didn’t you?”

She looked down at his hand holding onto hers then looked back up and nodded.

He let go of her hand and sprang back.

“I knew it!” he exclaimed.

Some of the people talking near to the French doors looked around.

“Shhh,” she whispered. “Don’t draw attention.”

“Sorry,” he said, sheepishly.

“What’s your name?”

“Bob,” he said.

The young woman looked at him steadily. He returned her gaze without discomfort.

“Bob,” she said. “I have it in my room.”

He looked puzzled. “You have what in your room?” he asked.

“The hand,” she said.

His eyes widened. “You have the hand in your room?”

She nodded.

“Do you think I’m mad?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. He paused, then, “Can I see it?” he added.

She nodded again. “I’m in room 204,” she told him. “I’ll go up now, say I’m tired. You follow me up in a few minutes.”

“You seem very expert at this,” he said as she began to walk away from him.

“Oh,” she said breezily, “I’ve read too many Agatha Christies is all.”

Her mother smiled at her as she crossed the room to her parents.

“I see you were talking to the Tatchell boy,” she said.

“Mmm,” her daughter replied. “Goodnight, mother, father. I’m feeling done in, so I’m going to go up.”

She gave each of her parents a kiss on the cheek and left the room.

She waited ten minutes for him to follow her. She was about to give up and go to bed when the tentative knock came.

“Is there anyone else around?” she asked through the door.

“No,” came the reply.

She opened the door to her room and let him in.

“Where is it?” he whispered.

She moved over to the chest of drawers and opened her underwear drawer.

“It’s in here,” she said.

“With your – bits?” he asked, blushing slightly.

“Nobody else but me is going to go in this drawer,” she said, pulling the scarf-wrapped hand from its hiding place.

She placed it onto the bed and opened out the scarf. They both stood and looked at it.

“What are you going to do with it?” he asked eventually.

“I hadn’t really thought,” she said. “I just knew that I couldn’t leave it there to be washed out to sea again.”

“You should take it to the police,” he said.

“I suppose I should,” she replied.

“What’s your name?” he asked her.

“Angela,” she said.

“Like an angel.”

She laughed.

He was holding her hand.

They stood and looked down at the other hand lying oddly on her bed.

“It’s a strange way to meet, isn’t it?” she said.

© J R Hargreaves February 2007

What Dad Wanted

I followed her into the house. The smell of hospital met my nose and I listened to the gasp and pump of the machinery that was keeping the old man alive in the room that was now his final resting place.

She was in the kitchen. The kettle was singing. It was one of those white plastic rapid-boil things, shaped like a jug, perched on a base that allowed it to swivel. Through the plastic window in the side, I could see the beginnings of bubbles forming on the element at the bottom.

I put my bags down on the floor.

She was putting teabags into mugs; one for me and one for her.

“I can do that,” I said.

“No,” she replied, “it’s fine.”

She moved past me to the fridge and as she opened the door I said, “Let me,” but she ignored me.

I stood waiting to feel welcome. I knew it wasn’t likely to happen, but all the same I waited.

The mugs were white and wide. The shape of them reminded me of the red and white plastic mugs in the picnic hamper that our parents had had since the early ‘60s. The mugs were made from cheap porcelain and the white was almost grey, the glaze poor. The kettle boiled and snapped itself off. She poured the boiling water into the mugs. I was still standing, my bags at my feet.

“So how long does he have?” I asked.

She stirred and lifted out the teabags, one by one, depositing them on a small dish kept specifically for that purpose.

“Not long. A week. A month at most.”

“And the doctor is happy with him being here?”

“Yes. It’s what dad wanted. The Macmillan nurse comes every day.”

“So you have help, then.”

She had put milk into each of the mugs and now handed one to me. She didn’t have to reply, I knew it was the wrong thing to say as I said it. Her expression was blankly hostile.

She sat on one of the wooden chairs. She didn’t invite me to sit, so I remained where I was, standing in the kitchen like a child summoned to see the head teacher.

She sat with her legs crossed away from me, her shoulders curving her round so that her back was beginning to show. She stared through the kitchen window at the snow that lay on the garden.

“Is it alright if I sit?” I asked.

“Suit yourself,” her shoulder said to me.

I pulled out the chair closest to me. The legs scraped on the tiled floor with a sound that was the big brother of fingernails scraping down a blackboard. I sat.

I watched steam rise from the surface of my tea. There was an oily film floating on top, as though the mug hadn’t been washed properly, or washed in dirty water. She was taking the hospital-at-home theme too literally. I blew against the liquid, causing a mini tsunami to rise up and then subside repeatedly with each exhalation through my pursed lips.

I took a sip and scalded the roof of my mouth.

The room where Dad now lay was just down the hallway from where we were sitting. I imagined him propped up on pillows, linked up to machines by tubes and wires. She had probably set the room up so that he was facing the window; so that he could look out on the street.

I remembered him sitting in his chair, one hand clamped around the remote, newspaper dangling from the other, sleeping as the news droned on. That same room, with the green draylon suite and the coffee table inlaid with tiles. Back when it used to be a living room.

“His stomach looks like a beach ball,” she said, still not looking at me. “The tumour is so big that it looks just like someone stuck a beach ball under his skin.”

“Can’t they cut it out?” I asked.

She looked at me then. “No,” she said. “They can’t.”

I looked down at the mug of tea sitting on the table in front of me. She got up abruptly and opened one of the drawers. She pulled out a coaster and slapped it onto the table, catching the side of the mug and making the copper brown liquid slosh from side to side.

“Don’t put your mug on the table,” she told me, “it’ll leave a ring.”

I lifted the mug and slid the coaster under it.

I thought about asking if I should go in to see him. It felt like I ought to go in there. The thought of it made me feel sick. I wanted sleep. It had taken four hours to get there, driving non-stop along the motorways in the snow and the dark. Fat flakes had drifted into the beam of my headlights like cartoon ghosts wearing startled expressions.

I knew I should go in to see him, even though he would be sleeping, or drugged, or comatose. It was my filial duty to stand by his bedside and let him know I was there. Just in case he decided enough was enough in the night, and died thinking I hadn’t cared.

I looked at the mug sitting on its coaster. When I looked up, she was staring at it too. She looked small and deflated. Crumpled, even. The instinct that told me to go into the death room also wanted me to get up and go to her, give her a hug, tell her lies like “It will be alright,” but I resisted it.

I remembered when we were younger, playing in the back yard; some adventure that had gone wrong, because she had fallen and grazed her knee. She had cried without wanting to and I had let her. With her hair tied back, she looked like that same child. Her face in its sleepless grief was falling backwards in time and she seemed to be that same child trying to be brave but crying all the same.

“I’ll go and unpack,” I said.

I stood up and picked up my bags, taking them upstairs, refusing to look at the closed door that separated the living from the good-as dead.

I took my bags into the spare room. The covers were turned down on one of the beds and clean towels were laid out on the other one.

I put my bags beside the towels and left them there. It was too soon to unpack. He might go in the night and then there would have been no point in unpacking. I wanted to deny my presence in this house for as long as I could manage it.

My sister sat silently downstairs. I lay on the bed still in my overcoat and shoes, on top of the turned down covers. I wondered if she slept at the kitchen table. If she did, it would be sitting upright. No laying your head on your arms leaning over the table for our Karen.

My eyes closed and I could feel sleep threatening to overwhelm me.

I forced my eyes open wide, like I used to as a child. The lightbulb was an energy saver and I could hear its faint electrical crackle as I lay under its weary light. I kept my eyes open as wide as I could until they began to hurt. I blinked, feeling the dryness of my over-exposed eyeballs drag against the inside of my eyelids.

I didn’t want to go downstairs, but I knew that I had to. It was two in the morning. The house was silent but for the hiss and click of the respirator and the crackle of the lightbulb.

She was still sitting where I’d left her, but the cups had been rinsed out and left to dry on the draining board. I rested my hands on the back of the wooden chair and looked at her. She seemed a long way below me as I stood there wondering how to speak to this woman; this stranger. My sister sat and stared at the coaster where my mug used to be.

It was wooden and round with a cork inlay. The lip, I remembered, made your drink spill if you put it down the wrong way.

“These used to have a special stand,” I said, picking it up. “It had three rods poking up from the base to hold them in place.”

I was looking at the coaster as if it was a miracle of modern science.

Karen said nothing. Just kept staring at the table.

I sat down.

“So,” I said. “I suppose we’d better talk.”

She sort of laughed through her nose; a single derisive snort.

“Do you need any more money?” I asked.

“Does he have everything he needs?” I asked.

“I’ve got money,” I said. “I can help out.”

She sat silently staring at the surface of the table. She was smiling cynically, her lips twisted slightly at the corners. Only the balance of her top lip stopped it becoming a sneer.

“He doesn’t need to suffer,” I said. “We can make sure he’s comfortable right up until the end.”

I felt like I was talking about a pet, some dumb animal, not my father.

“Honestly, Kaz,” I told her. “If there’s anything he needs, anything I can get, just say.”

She looked at me and her eyes were black and hollow like distant storms brewing on the horizon.

“Is that how you sleep?” she said. “You buy yourself peace of mind?”

I didn’t need to answer. There was nothing I could say. I knew what she meant. I’ve always had this knack of coming in right at the last minute, just as the final scene is being played out, and mopping up the credit for things not my due. And I do sleep easy.

All of my deals turn on a well-timed injection of cash.

“Better get some sleep,” she said. “The nurse gets here at eight.”

“I think I’m too tired to sleep,” I replied. “I’d rather sit up and talk.”

“Not you,” she said. “Me.”

“Oh. Of course. Yes.” I paused. “We can talk in the morning.”

She left the room without another word.

I carried on sitting at the table, playing with the coaster. I listened to her footsteps on the way up the stairs and the creaks of floorboards as she moved around her room. Our parents’ old room.

After a while her movements ceased and all I was left with was the hiss and click of the respirator again. I found myself wanting a drink, but not knowing what drink I wanted. I thought about tea, and then thought about fruit juice. The smallest drop of water fell from the lip of the tap into the sink, and the noise made me wonder if it was water that I wanted to drink.

I didn’t want to think about what was behind the door of the living room. I had stopped thinking about my dad as a who. He was already a what to me by that point. A shell of a man being eaten from the inside out by tumours. For all I knew, underneath that thin covering of skin, there might have been nothing left of the man who had raised me. His body might have been taken over by an alien life form using his body as a host, waiting to conquer the world.

Somewhere far away was a whole other existence in which he was still him. Still that tall man with the big hands who relied on the youthful me to hand him a spanner at just the right point, telling me that I could read his mind.

I spun the coaster on its edge, hoping to make it twirl like a coin, but the edge was too thick and it just clattered down back onto the surface of the table.

Soon, I thought, I would be an orphan.

Years ago, I remembered, I had made an orphan of myself.

The house was different in almost unnoticeable ways. When I drove through the streets towards it, I expected to feel the same as I always did the first moment I stepped back through the door. But it wasn’t the same house.

It wasn’t just the addition of the hospital smells and the whirring machinery. It was in the colours of the walls, the lightness of the carpet, the new cabinets in the kitchen.

My sister had emasculated the place. The house that I remembered in shades of green and brown had become a paean to blond wood and vanilla tones. The reek of quick sale hung about the place.

And why wouldn’t she want to sell up as soon as he was gone? Who would want to carry on living in a place with memories such as were contained here? Even without the shadow of death clothing it in sadness, this was not a happy home.

I let the coaster fall to the table one more time, then stood up and began opening cupboard doors. I knew what I was after when I saw the bottle of rum. I pulled it down and poured a measure into a glass. In the fridge I found cola that made the sugar in the rum froth up and leave a scum on the surface of the drink.

I took a large gulp still standing at the fridge, then turned and sat back down at the table, taking both bottles with me.

Yes. This house was not a happy home. Her choice to stay was something my brain refused to comprehend. I had fled these walls as soon as I was able. I took my fortunes elsewhere and wrestled them into a life that, if it didn’t bring me total joy, at least didn’t wrack me with pain. The echoes of childhood were stored in a tin box at the back of my memory.

The man who lay dying in the room down the hall once roared through this kitchen, wearing my sister’s cardboard witch’s hat. It had been Christmas, the time of year we all loved to hate, or hated to love, or something that wasn’t enjoyment. He had downed almost a pint of whiskey; the bottle bought surreptitiously from the off-licence up the road; he had left the house to buy cigarettes. He had downed half the bottle on his walk back home.

His hat, he thought, was a set of horns. He imagined he was a bull. He charged at the wall and the cardboard point crumpled on impact. He bellowed and my mother wept silently, seated at the table where Karen had been sitting before. My sister, ten years old, had stood in her nightgown in the doorway. She had come downstairs to see what the noise was.

Our father had flung the hat at her.

“It’s crumpled,” he had slurred. “Sorry.”

My mother had gone to my sister and taken her upstairs, one arm wrapped around her to protect her. When I asked her, later, as adults, if she remembered that night, she had said no.

The hat had been left on the floor where it fell and I, fifteen and at the beginning of my adult strength, had been left to face my father. He had staggered towards the hat, but his balance was poor and he stumbled forward. I jerked forward to catch him and he had raised his arm, beginning to swing his fist as though to hit me. His reactions were too slow, and pinning his arms within mine had been easy. Dragging him to the living room and putting him onto the couch had been harder.

In the morning, he hadn’t remembered a thing.

That same man was lying a short walk away from me. I could hear the artificial breathing of the machine that was keeping him alive.

I finished the first drink and poured myself another.

In a lot of ways, there was little difference between us. I had no wife or children to bully, but I had the same sense of a life unfulfilled. I had the same taste for liquor that switched on and then off again as frustration rose. I had the same need to withdraw from the world by whatever means possible.

Sitting at the table, I thought about my own kitchen four hours away. The empty house and the privacy of my life on pause until my return. I swirled the booze in the glass and drank some more. God knew when I would be back in my own place, at the centre of my own life again.

From what Karen had said on the phone, it wouldn’t be that long; but I knew what a stubborn bastard the old man could be, and I didn’t count on being out of there much before a week was up.

It was cold. I was still in my overcoat, but the warmth from the central heating was fading. I stood and went over to the boiler, searching for the control. It was on the wall beside it, and I pushed the button that would bring the heating system to life again.

I stood in front of the boiler, listening to the rush of the gas and the sound of the burner, my posture that of a man standing before a log fire warming his hands. The noise of the gas burning covered over the sound of my dying father’s mechanised lungs.

I listened as the radiator in the kitchen began to tick, the fluid inside it heating up, the metal expanding slightly, unnoticeably, radiating heat into the room.

The ticking of the radiator speeded up, and it seemed to me as though it were ticking my life away. I shuddered. I had the feeling that I had grown so cold that I would never be warm again.

I remembered my sister at fifteen lying on her bed sobbing because our father had rubbed the make-up she was wearing from her face with a face cloth soaked in scalding hot water. I had been home for the vacation, still teenage enough to feel disaffected by sudden proximity to my family again, but adult enough to know that I didn’t have to choose this as my life. I was wrapped in pseud’s clothing and too disdainful of suburban family life to offer any sort of comfort to my sister.

I was beginning the process of becoming an orphan.

Mum dying a year later helped me on my way. Karen passed all her O-levels, trying to make her dead mother and her absent father proud; proving to herself that I was not the only genius in the family.

I wasn’t anyway. Our family doesn’t possess any geniuses. I think, though, that in not choosing the same career as Dad, I was supposed to be something better than what I am.

Standing in the kitchen, waiting to become warm again, I listened to the sounds of fake living in the room down the hall, and I wondered whether, even in death, he still felt disappointment.

I wondered if he even knew that I was there.

My sister slept on upstairs while I drank my way through her rum. The man I had never wanted to be and yet seemed incapable of avoiding lay dying only a few metres away from me.

If there was one thing that I knew I could do, it was beat him at his own game.

It took my whole life to walk those few metres from the kitchen down the hall, past the room that contained the swollen body of the man I had already killed years ago.

I stood in front of the fuse box, high up on the wall by the front door. I was tall enough to reach up and pull the clear plastic cover down on its hinges. I flicked the switches methodically, breaking each circuit in turn until I found the one that silenced the machinery up the hall.

It took only a few seconds to end it.

I left the switch flicked down.

I left my bags on the bed in the spare room.

I left five hundred pounds in cash on the kitchen table.

I left my sister with a life she was free to live as she wished.

I left the house a legitimate orphan.

It’s what Dad would have wanted.

© J R Hargreaves January 2007

She would have laughed

The skin on her torso was soft beneath my fingers.

We had bought takeaway from the local Balti house. The saffron had stained the skin on her fingers and placed a ring around the washing up bowl.

The saffron painted an aura of yellow around the edges of her thumbnails that fascinated her. She had laughed to see it there and spent a lot of the evening wondering why she couldn’t wash it away.

And later, the skin on her torso and on her back was soft and firm; pliable beneath my fingers.

The dishes soaked in the yellow washing up bowl that was filled with suds and hot water, leaving the saffron ring at the top of the water, staining the plastic of the bowl that needed replacing anyway.

She lay face down on the bed and I ran my hands over the skin on her back, feeling its pliability beneath my fingers. I wanted to massage the life back into her tired bones.

We had eaten the takeaway sitting on the orange sofa in her orange living room. We drank wine and watched the tv. She made conversation about nothing, laughing at the tv show we were watching, filling the room with her voice.

There was nothing I could add; nothing I could say. I ate my curry and drank my wine and the sound of the tv and her voice washed over me. I didn’t want silence, but I had no way of breaking it, so I was grateful for her efforts.

There were things on my mind. I affected a certain air that let her know there were things on my mind and that led her to fill the awkward silence that threatened to grow between us.

The truth was that I was bored. I wanted a way to end this.

She cleared away the dishes and filled the yellow washing up bowl with water and bubbles. She wiped the kitchen work surfaces clean of the stains left by the saffron. She put the dishes to soak and poured more wine. I asked for water and she brought it; a tall glass filled with clear liquid and fizz; the bubbles stung the back of my nose and cleansed my jaded palate.

She sat back down beside me on the sofa. She sat with her back against the arm, her legs crossed like a genie, the better for her to look at me. I kept my profile towards her. I felt her eyes on me; I knew the way her face would look; I didn’t have to see it, so I didn’t turn my head.

When she spoke, her hands moving rapidly to emphasise her point, drawing symbols in the air that said more than the words coming from her mouth, it was her hands that I watched. I didn’t need to see her face.

She talked about nothing; her recent trip to New York; the tumult and stagnation of days she had spent at work; the frustrations of her life. She filled the air and left it empty. There was something on my mind, but I couldn’t speak it.

The bottle of wine was on the coffee table in front of me. I poured more into our glasses. I wanted to forget, but I couldn’t let this go.

A siren sounded in the distance. Police or ambulance; who knew? Who cared?

I looked at her and she was crying.

“Just let me have this,” she said.

I couldn’t move. There was nothing I could offer her. She wept, a silent shaking weeping, head bowed and hands folded in her lap. There was nothing I could do. The usual clichés had no meaning.

She stood and told me that she was going to bed.

I sat and drank more wine.

I listened to the sounds from upstairs. The way she moved from room to room. Running water and brushing teeth. Dropping the cotton wool pads stained with her redundant makeup into the metal bin in the bathroom. Her face being splashed with water, its coldness an attempt to calm the puffiness brought on by the tears. I heard the silence that I knew accompanied the removal of clothes. The click of light switches being flicked. The silence that meant she was regarding herself in the mirror.

I drank to try to forget, but I couldn’t let this go.

Her skin was soft and pliable beneath my fingers as I pushed my hands against her back and tried to massage the life back into her tired bones.

Face down on the bed she lay, still and quiet, allowing my hands to roam her back. I sat across the backs of her legs. I pushed the t-shirt she slept in up towards her neck and bared the skin of her back. She was not naked.

When the silence had stretched on, I left the wine on the table in the living room. I went up the stairs to where she lay face down on the bed. She had not even climbed under the covers. She lay in t-shirt and pyjama bottoms on top of the duvet, on top of the bed.

Her face was turned away from me, towards the window. Her arms were bent at the elbows, raised slightly at shoulder level. Her legs stretched out behind her, the toes pointed downwards.

I sat across the back of her legs and pushed her t-shirt up. I placed my hands against the small of her back, fingers out towards the waist. I pushed my thumb up the channel of her spine, counting the notches the closer I came to the neck. I pulled my fingers down across the skin from her shoulder blades to her waist. Her skin was soft.

Her breathing changed. I felt her body relax. I unstraddled her and pulled her body over. She opened her eyes and looked at me. All the tiredness in the world was in her eyes. I pushed her t-shirt up and ran my hands along the smooth skin of her torso. I pushed her t-shirt up over her head so that she lay there, topless on the bed before me.

She looked at me the whole time, the tiredness of death in her eyes. The stillness of death on her face.

I placed my hands around her neck and pressed my thumb against her windpipe until her lips went blue and her eyes slightly bulged and the pressure of my fingers against the softness of her skin left a necklace of rose petal bruises.

She struggled only once. She raised her hands to grip my upper arms. I thought of actors who fake strangulation by the one who strangles pulling away while the one strangled tries to pull them tighter. She did not seem to be pulling away, and I wondered if we had the trick of it wrong.

The skin on her torso was soft beneath my fingers. I lay beside her for a while, wanting to apologise, stroking the softness of her skin.

I wanted to let this go and eventually I left.

The dishes were still soaking in the washing up bowl; the saffron placing a yellow ring around the plastic.

She would have laughed to see it.

© J R Hargreaves January 2007