Being Small (11 page)
Authors: Chaz Brenchley
Right now, the bread was treat enough. Inside the soft and flaking crust I found minced meat on one side, sweet coconut and raisins on the other, and I thought perhaps I’d misjudged Gerard just as he had wanted me to. Perhaps he didn’t dress to impress at all, perhaps he dressed to conceal. Perhaps we all did. Perhaps Kit was dressing me to conceal whatever it was that he thought I shouldn’t show around.
A new shirt, new hair and a gaudy pair of trousers couldn’t contain Small. You couldn’t hide him under a bushel, he’d still shine through. Actually, I’d wondered if all this evening’s dance was just cover, to make a situation where they could quiz me about Small; but they didn’t ask, they didn’t acknowledge his presence for a moment after that first quizzical pause at the door.
Instead, when they weren’t picking at each other, they talked about Quin. Quin the professor, the rising fiery light, the savage intelligence; Quin the clubman, the doubly clubbable, white tie in London society with Gerard or leading his pack of acolytes around the student night scene here, “like wolves to the slaughter,” Kit said, doing his best to look the innocent lamb. Quin the patient, the terribly impatient, bedridden and hagridden and howling to be free as he never would be again.
“He ought to be in hospital,” Kit said, because Gerard clearly couldn’t ever allow himself to say it, “only he made us promise not to do that, after the last time. He hates being sick, he’s terrified of dying and he says that hospitals are factories for the preparation of corpses, so he won’t go back. We had to promise to look after him, to help him die at home.”
It seemed to me that they were doing the opposite of that, they were helping him to keep alive, fighting that losing battle in the long home of lost causes. If it didn’t make them happy, perhaps it made them feel good. I played with my hair until Kit slapped my hand away, both of us quiet now while Gerard talked softly about one more Quin, Quin the lover, tender and painful and precise, and I thought that if there should have been a fourth sat at that table, it wouldn’t have been Small the empty place was set for.
～
Later, it seemed much later, we came back to number thirty-nine with a doggy-bag for Nigel and a fat, fizzing feeling in me at least. I couldn’t speak for the others, but I had too much food in my belly, residual spices on my tongue and an airy, beery frothiness in my head. I was just composing a careful goodnight, in hopes of not having to use it yet, when Gerard told me briskly to sit down, there in the offshoot, a high stool at the high counter.
I did what I was told. He went into the kitchen, and from there into the bathroom, and so back.
Whether Kit was expecting this, whether he’d budgeted for it, whether he’d worked for it I didn’t know, I couldn’t tell; but Gerard came back with a large orange, a bottle of distilled water and a packet of syringes.
“I should probably ask your mother,” he said, “but I’m not going to, you can do that yourself. If she says no, never mind. And I hope you never need to do this anyway, I don’t ever want you to find yourself alone in here; but if you’re going to be on the team – and Kit and Nigel have set this up between them, I can read a conspiracy when it licks me in the face – then you need to know how to give Quin an injection. Kit’ll show you how, you sit there and practice, then I’ll come back and check. I’ll test you again in the morning, see if you can do it sober, but I need to be sure that you can do it drunk. Try not to jam the needle through your own finger, that’s counterproductive.”
Kit unwrapped a syringe, pulled off the protective cap and held it horizontally in front of my eyes.
“Sharp end, blunt end. Fill it like so...”
I want to be on the team. I want my mother to say it’s okay. I want my brother to say it’s okay. I want to be a part of this. I want a reason to get up early, to stay up late. I want to eat with my fingers and drink beer from a glass, I want to sing for my supper, I don’t want to be a skeleton at the feast.
I don’t want to see a pear in a bottle, or blood in a syringe. I want blood in my oranges, a dead king on a chessboard, shah mat, no place else. I want to be a courtier, a parasite, a nurse. I want to drink Quin’s pain, I want to grow fat on it so that he need grow no thinner. I want to give as good as I get, but I don’t know how. I want to outreach myself, to be better than they expect, to be more. I want to be greater than the sum of my parts...
VIII
BEING SMALL
S
ometimes, often
, I wonder how it is that Small sees the world. He uses my eyes, sure, as his own can only see through glass, and that darkly. But does he, can he, would he want to see what I see? I think not, he’d find it jarring.
Eyes are just the optics, that give good measure of what patterns of light come their way. It’s the mind that sorts and shuffles, adds meaning, understands. In every way that matters, then, it’s the mind that does the seeing. Small’s mind is a closed book to me, like last year’s diary closed and locked away, all the writing in it long since done. Unchanging, unchangeable: stroppy little mannikin, what does he truly make of all these data I supply, what world has he built in his little head to contain them?
It’s easy to turn him into metaphor, easy and false. He can be a pupa caught forever short in his metamorphosis, the imago that never was, cocooned
in vitro
and perpetually baffled by this adult insect world: all bright colours and sharp edges and rough raw sounds, how is he ever to understand it who never had the chance to live in it? Like an alien I can see him squatting in his spaceship bottle, on his universal shelf, watching and not sharing whatever goes on beyond his cupboard cosmos. If he took notes, it would only be a way of recording his own bewilderment. He can’t learn from us, from me, from what I do; he doesn’t have the capacity.
On another day he can be the puppet-master, the spider squatting in the centre of his web with a leg on every string and all the strings attach to me, so that he twitches and I jump, how high he has determined. All my choices are his own, I dance for him who cannot dance at all. And speak for him, and eat for him, and all my body is just him, out there distance-learning in the world. I am his periscope and his torpedo both, his prosthesis. Wonderful what they can do these days for the disabled.
Or he can be my cold and unreachable heart, the figure in my carpet, the ghost in my machine; or he can be my saviour, my criterion,
deus ex machina
, the point of my perspective. Or the sign and symbol of my mother’s hand in mine, the control she keeps over me, how she displaces any focus else: so long as Small is the mote in my inward eye, then how can I turn my gaze elsewhere, outside the family, away from her?
Analysis breeds paranoia. What’s the point? He is not a metaphor, for my use or anyone’s else. He is my brother, my twin, my mother’s other son. He is himself, in his jar and in my head, in my heart, in my life. If I have to live a second life on his behalf, if I have to divide my time between us, I won’t complain at that.
But I would like to know the way he sees things. The way he sees me, I suppose, and what I do. We don’t talk any more, the way we used to. It’s like living in a silent movie: we sleep together and eat together, we share books and walks and party invitations when they come, but we can’t have conversations. The most we can do is mouth at each other like fish in deep water, gesticulate wildly and hope that someone walks on with a caption to spell out what we mean.
It’s bad, when you need someone else to interpret between your brother and yourself; worse, when your brother can’t or won’t talk to anyone but you. Never mind my mother’s claims to understand, she knows nothing. I am the world’s living and only expert on Small, and I don’t pretend to follow the convolutions of his mind. All I know is this, that he and I are poles apart, but opposite poles attract. We cling like magnets and redraw all the world around us like patterns in iron filings, dance and twist in filigree, in tandem, he in his small bottle and I in mine.
IX
CHEMOTHERAPY
…I
wan
t to lose a game of chess
.
I want to lose a friend.
I want him to go gentle into that good night, no more raging. I want the night to be good to both of us. I want to say good night, God speed, and mean it; I want him to wish me well. I want to wish him well, but I can’t do that.
I want to be stronger than I am, but I don’t want to grow into my strength. I don’t want to grow at all, I don’t want to be big. I want to be small. I want to be Small. Shock horror, but I do. Not Small-in-a-jar, a shrill acid gnome in vinegar, never that; I want to be Small-as-he-is, in my head and heart, in my belly, bedded down, the one with the easy ride. I want to be the eunuch in the harem. I want to be carried around, I want to watch, I want to criticise, I never want to do anything. I never want to have anything to do. I never want to have to lift a finger.
I don’t want to be responsible. I don’t want to be the butterfly, living with the knowledge of the storm.
I don’t know what I want, but it isn’t this:
where I sit in the dark and feel as though I’m breathing for the house, for the whole house and everyone who’s in it, which amounts to me and Quin. Not Small. I don’t bring him here any more, or else he doesn’t come.
Unless he lurks, of course, unless he just squats in the shadows and listens in and never lets me know that he’s around. That’s always possible. Maybe he’s graduated, poltergeist to stalker. Maybe they’re two facets of the same thing, the jewel in the head of the toad. There must be something about him that shines; maybe I should be grateful, to be so thoroughly watched over.
If I am. It only feels like that sometimes, and I try not to go down there. I’ve got another life, other lives to live now, and I don’t need Small scratching at my shoulder, dribbling down my neck. I don’t need to feel supervised, accompanied, shared.
I don’t know what I do need; it isn’t that.
～
Quin has good days, good nights, and this is one of them. He’s been sipping water on and off all through my shift, so I haven’t needed the port in his arm, where we can put him on a saline drip. He doesn’t eat any more, there’s another tube we feed him through, straight into his stomach; he took that too, and kept it down, which is big on the good-news front. It’s dreadful when he pukes, messy and slimy and difficult to deal with, it goes all over the tubes and the medical kit where everything’s supposed to be sterile. And it hurts him, and then he’s difficult to deal with, and I hate to call for help, like I can’t cope with someone being sick. I’m always tense at dinner time, and for an hour after.
Sometimes he pukes blood, great gouts of it, thick and black, direct from his liver to the light. Then it’s okay, it’s compulsory to yell. Some things nobody has to handle on their own. Needs one to hold Quin up, one to hold the bucket; that’s a minimum. And still two of us afterwards to get him clean and quiet and settled again, drifting on a diamorphine drip. We’re not really supposed to have diamorphine, but Quin has friends all over, and more than one of them has a prescribing pad. I’m not allowed to touch the stuff, we keep all the hard drugs in a locked strongbox and they won’t give me a key, but that’s cool. I guess that’s cool. It’s the price I pay for being young, not big enough, punching above my weight. I don’t belong here, I don’t deserve this; I’m still grateful that they let me through the door.
So’s Quin, or so he says. He still says so, when he’s up for talking. Not that often now, but this has been a good day. We even had him raised up a little earlier, his eyes open for a while. I don’t think he can see that much now, but he likes to look, and he likes to look alert. So we bathe his eyes with glycerine, that helps; and he’s very good, he doesn’t complain when they hurt him. He just lets them close and keeps on talking so that we know he hasn’t drifted far, not too far, not out of touch.
He can’t manage the board any more, even with me moving the pieces, he doesn’t have that much focus; so we play chess in his head. Gambits, mostly. All the classic openings we play, he says to make sure that I know them. We don’t often get to the endgame. Too much history, too many choices: he can’t hold it all together, he loses grip and it all frays away from him and then he’s gone again, somewhere unreachable. Or else he’s hiding. Sometimes there are tears on his cheeks, and I bring out the glycerine to cover for him.
He hates this. He never says so, but I know. We all know. Stubborn but weak, it’s the worst, and he overdoes both. It’s the back end of charisma, the shadow-state, a kind of proud and desperate helplessness. He tries to cling, and his own personality is all he has to cling to, and even that’s not really there anymore. It’s paper-thin, the shell of memory when the core has gone, and his own shaking hands rip and tear at it like a clumsy child breaking what he most wants and the acid sweat in his fingers, that does damage too, and his bedclothes and his breath just reek of bitterness and rot. The bedclothes we can change, we do that once or twice a day, but the breath is harder to approach. He won’t lie still to have his teeth cleaned, and some days he can’t manage a spit in any case, but I’m not sure that hygiene is the issue. I think what we smell is what he breathes, what he sees, where he finds himself; and I don’t know who he is out there but the place is rank and swampy, built on loss.
I don’t think he knows who he is out there. I think he just barely manages to keep a handle on who he used to be, and that’s the worst of it, those times that he remembers.
Sometimes he tries, though, he does try, and sometimes he has a good day, even now.
Like this:
“’S dark.”
“You could try opening your eyes, it’s not so dark out here,” though I only had the one light burning, just enough to read by: Robert Graves,
The Anger of Achilles
. The book was his. I was working my way through his shelves, his tastes, his life in stories. In translation, I suppose. “Do you want to do that, give it a try?”
“No... No, let be. Michael?”
“Yes, it’s Michael.”
“You do too much of this.”
Which was just what my mother said, and Adam, and Small. All my significant others for once united, making common cause. But, “I like it here,” I said, which was true.
“You mean it’s convenient.” His voice was a whisper now, but it could still be sharp.
“That too.”
“For whom?”
“Everybody.”
Dry and thin as they were, his snorts were yet expressive. I listened to this one, and flinched.
“No, truly. Listen, Quin. Everyone works, except for me. They need to sleep, if they’re not actually working a night shift. Me, no school, no job,”
you are my job
, they told me that, “it makes sense for me to do this. And I’m a teenager, I’m naturally nocturnal –”
“– And you’re here in the daytime too, as often as not.”
“Well. I said, I like it. As a library, this house is better than the Bodleian. The books aren’t all lined up on parade, in proper order. They can talk to each other, you have shelves that are a conversation in themselves. That’s good for me; it’s all about connectivity, and that’s what I do.”
“What you do... What do you do, Michael?”
“I study, I suppose.”
“Yes, but what? And why? What will you do with it all, when you’ve learned it all?”
He was asking impossible questions, which he knew. I could have thrown them straight back:
What did you do, Quin, and why? And where did it all go, because there’s next to nothing left here, just a voice that breaks and a mind that slips its gears and can’t get up the hill...?
But I don’t do cruelty, I never did, and I’m not so good at dodging questions. Even the impossible ones. I said, “I won’t ever learn it all. You know that, you’re teasing me. It’s about understanding, how people work and what we’re doing here. Where we’ve come from, what we’ve built and how to look at that, how to read it, how to understand what people think.”
“Is that important?”
“Yes.” And then, in the silence after, because I really wasn’t sure, I temporised. “To me, it is.”
“Why? Why to you?”
“Because of what I am, who we are, the two of us. Because I have to think for two, for Small and me.”
“Small is dead, Michael.”
“Yes, I know. That’s the point. He used not to be. He used to be alive, inside me; and then they cut him out and he died, and I need to know what that means, and what I can do with it. I can’t just blunder around shitting and fucking like some Neanderthal before the obelisk arrives, counting on Prometheus to steal fire for me. I owe it to both of us, Small and me, I have to do better than
that.”
“Oh, Christ. You’re looking for enlightenment.”
Of course I was, I thought that was inherent; but, “Isn’t everybody?”
“Actually not. A lot of people out there are content with the shitting and fucking aspects. Aren’t you a little young to see the world that sharply?”
“So they tell me. Too much reading, I guess,” which was purely a lie, too well practised to evade. I didn’t guess, I knew, and the truth lay entirely the other way, which was why I tried never to tell it. We’re born sharp, and time is blunting; the world takes our edge away. Adult company grinds us down, but they really don’t like to hear that. When you’re a child, every adult that you talk to is trying to teach you something, and in the process rubbing away at what you’ve got. That’s why I was in such a hurry, to have things sorted in my mind before the people who loved me best could make an idiot of me.
Books too, books are blunting, all that mass of knowledge. Every sentence is a thread that wraps around the sweet blade of the mind. Every fact is a limiting factor, the death of possibilities. I knew it, I could feel it, I was trying to outrace the rising sun by running easterly, defiantly into the dazzle. I still had my hidden advantage, though, my secret strength. I still had Small. Small who’d never learned to read, Small who dwelt in death and talked to me and me alone, unencumbered by any adult conversation. Sharp as a hypodermic needle, Small. Hollow and sharp as he should be, as he was made to be. Even as I lost my own edge, I could still depend on Small’s.
Even Quin wasn’t fit to hear that. Especially Quin, perhaps, who had given his life to teaching and thought me the last of his many pupils, thought that I would always speak of him as mentor. Perhaps I would, if he was the man who closed me down, who cut away my choices till there was only the one path I could follow, broad and clear and well-intentioned all the way.
“Read to me,” he said. “What are you reading?”
“The Iliad, I guess.”
“In the original?”
“No. I’ve never looked at Greek.”
“You should. Have someone show it to you, don’t learn it from a book. But if you’re not reading the original, you’re not reading Homer.”
“No. Graves.
The Anger of Achilles
. It’s one of yours.”
“Of course it is. Read to me.”
We did this often when he grew tired of talking, when perhaps he felt himself a little start to slip. We used to keep a book beside his bed with the place marked, where we’d got to. Not any longer. He couldn’t manage a whole book any more, any more than a whole game of chess. The others might read him a newspaper feature, an article, perhaps a short story; I always thought that was a mistake, to offer him anything that ended. To me he seemed happier just to share a part of someone else’s journey, wherever I happened to be in whatever I was reading, to feel the run of words like a string pulling through his fingers until he lost it, until he let it fall.
“I’m just at ‘The Catalogue of Ships’,” I said, simply to see him smile. It wasn’t true, I’d been there an hour ago, but I could turn back quietly. He’d grown to like lists, details, a world expressed by its taxonomy. The looser his own grip, the more he liked to think of things tied down, measured, recorded and defined. One time I’d been reading the King James, and nothing could have made him happier than the first book of Chronicles, the lineage of a nation spelled out in all its generations, all those long chapters of begats.
～
“And that’s what you call a good day, is it?”
Adam, hot and stroppy, neglected for days and not pacified by this promised Saturday, his temper neither burned out on a long hard ride up the Evenlode to Charlbury nor soothed by my being mounted on Kit’s spare racer, a better bike than his.
“Yes. Yes, it is.” We lay scorched and sticky on spiky grass, in spiky sunlight above the river, the bikes and us all sprawled out where we’d dropped. We had one bottle of water between us, literally in the grass between us like a peace offering, except that neither one of us was offering either to pass or to use it. I stared up into the summer’s glare and wondered if you could have a white kind of darkness, if that was where Quin was headed, where his eyes were taking him.
“What, sitting in the dark reading out troopship manifests from an ancient war that certainly never happened that way if it ever happened at all?”
If I’d been sitting in the dark I couldn’t have read anything, but this would have been a dangerous time to say so. I took the other track, as usual, straight into the tidal rush. “That’s right. You just don’t get it, do you?”
“No, I don’t. That’s what I’m saying, I just don’t get it. So explain it to me, why don’t you? I’m all ears.”
All ears and a closed mind, slammed shut against temptation; but, “Actually you’re not,” I said, “you’re all skin and sensitivity. It’s Quin who’s all ears, pretty much, there’s precious little else left to him now. We can even take his pain away, but then his focus goes too, so he can’t really think any more. He’s breaking down, he’s fragmenting. If he manages a lucid hour, it’s getting to be unusual; if we can keep him conscious for half a day, then that’s a good day.”
“Good for you, or for him?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure about either. It’s a victory, that’s all, a day won back. I don’t know if anyone enjoys it. When he’s lucid, he knows what’s happening to him, and he hates it. That’s all the passion he’s got left. And he’s terrified of what comes next, the real disintegration. That’s why he likes to listen to lists of things in order. It’s just something to set against the chaos.”