Being Small (13 page)

Or you could wait a while longer, sometimes it really is a long wait now, until he comes entirely back into himself, and the eyes are his and the voice is his and what they say between them. And this is the worst of it, for him and for us too. Because he smiles at us and he speaks to us and he tries terribly hard to be Quin, even if it’s only Quin-the-patient and much reduced from anyone he used to be; but Quin never was alone, he never lived or slept alone, he never went alone to work or party. And now he’s there in his big high hospital bed and that’s a statement in itself, a strong metallic tubular bell of a statement, long and bright and sonorous,
this was bought for you and no one else to share, where you can lie alone
, because there are two worlds in that one room and he inhabits one and we the other, and there is no sharper way to say that he’s on his own now. His friends are here about him and his partner too, and we all of us only serve to stress how very much alone he is and going solo.

Sometimes I feel most guilty, being most young and probably furthest from him, but in truth it’s himself that makes this hard for him. When he’s most himself, he’s most aware of what’s happening, where he’s been and where he’s going, how he has to get there. He knows when he’s been raving, he knows when he’s been lost entirely, he may perhaps have some ghost memory of each. And he knows there will be more of each to come, and less of this. Ultimately he knows there will be nothing, and that for him is worse than either. He can lie there and savour his own dying, feel the slow determined tread of it, chart every separate step he’s yet to take. This terrifies him, but not so much as what follows, that logical final step, the being
dead.

If he were further gone, if he were raving altogether or else lost altogether, then all this might be easier. I might forget how scared he is of extinction, where to me it seems so much the better choice if I could make it for him. Without his craquelure eyes and creaking voice to remind me, I might persuade myself that there’s a mercy yet in simple death, where I have no hope at all of ever persuading him.

～

My mother on her morning shifts, she always left before the post arrived. Not me. Late home last night or early in, whatever today might promise or threaten or withhold, I could still be sure to be around to greet the postman, to open to his knock if what he carried needed signing for or simply wouldn’t fit through our letterbox.

It was a handy habit to acquire. My mother knew what cash I had, it was what she gave me; she didn’t always see where it went. Sometimes she asked, “What do you do with it all, for God’s sake? Tell me you’re not stashing it against a rainy day, tell me you haven’t got a savings account. You’re not seventeen yet. I know you can’t get rid of things, but surely money’s different...?”

Money was different, and I could assure her so. For once I couldn’t blame Small, I couldn’t say “I give it all to Small, I don’t know what he spends it on,” even she wouldn’t buy into that; but I could mumble and turn my head away, I could let her find the odd brown-paper wrapping and perhaps a foreign stamp, and that was good enough. I was sixteen, after all. Of course I’d buy porn on the net, what red-blooded boy would not? And of course I wouldn’t let my mother find it.

～

Running with Kit on a Sunday afternoon, this is serious work; we’ll do seven or eight miles around the city’s rivers, he says he’s training me up for a half-marathon. We don’t take Nigel. Nigel is not serious.

Kit is not always serious, but he can be. So can I.

So we run, and this is not jogging; it’s a steady lope, a wolf-pace that we can keep up easy as it eats the distance that we do, that makes us both confident of more. Which is the thing about Kit altogether, that wherever he takes me, whatever we do, he always makes me confident that we can go further and do more. If you’d asked me when we met, that day in the woods, of the two I’d have picked Peter as my likely friend: older and more comfortable, less edgy. Even despite Adam I’d still thought I would gravitate upwards, towards my mother’s generation, always wanting to be bigger than I was.

So Kit is a surprise to me, as Adam was before; and he’s a challenge and a temptation, a snare but never a delusion. No one is more real than Kit, or ever could be.

So we run his course, towpaths and bridges, like a thread that stitches all the city together despite its dividing waters; and then we head home and just before we get there we duck into the park for a lap of hard running, a race around the fence and first to touch the old oak wins an acorn. This particular challenge, sometimes, I can win it. Never in the gym, we only pretend to compete there; twenty-four can lift more than sixteen, that’s just biology. Running gives me a chance, even if it’s only a chance to cheat.

Then I play dog-boy and fetch Nigel, and we do a lap of jogging, stretching, doggie-wrestling and throwing sticks. Maybe we talk now. Talking’s often good, when you’re hot and sweaty and cooling down.

Then back to the house and into the bathroom, under the shower together and he washes my back if I’ll wash his, and then one day it’s like this:

Water like a scalding flow of glass, enfolding me like a bottle, like time gone liquid, the flow and the drag of it over my skin and how it can beat me down, so hot, so hard it can numb me altogether and batter me out of my body almost, out of any sense of myself; and how it hammers on the back of my neck and the heavy run of the water downwards is counterweighted somehow by a shivering rise in my spine, a tingling that is neither warm nor chill but fierce and focused, that climbs in pulses like fists to the base of my skull and then dissipates like bruises, and it’s all about possession, personality,
this is me
and
this is mine...

～

“Are you done, then?”

“Yeah, I’m done.”

So he shuts the shower off, and I just stand there for a second or two, running my hands across my scalp, as if I were squeezing the water out of my hair except that there’s no hair there now, Adam’s sister is shaving our heads this month so that we’re bald and beautiful together, cheap on shampoo; and when I blink my eyes open again Kit’s looking at me through the steam, and I say, “What?” and it’s a real fight to keep it light, to sound amused and nothing more, not sullen or embarrassed or flirty when I could somehow be feeling all three of those at once.

“Oh, nothing. Just you. God, if I could bottle you...”

“Well, you can’t,” sudden and harsh and inappropriate.

He quirks an eyebrow at me and says, “Well, no. But if I could, I’d make a fortune. Essence of Boy, the pure thing, unadulterated.”

“Essence of Scar, more like,” I say, glancing down in a major misdirection.

“Oh, the scar’s all part of the charm. Every boy should carry a scar or two. You just take it over the top, as usual. What, you wouldn’t want rid of it, would you?”

“No. No, I wouldn’t,” and not such a misdirection after all.

“That’s good. Be a shame to waste a feature on someone who wasn’t grateful for it. Michael, you will let me know when you’re ready to hit the clubs, won’t you? We’ll rustle you up some ID, get you through the door, and then it’s downhill all the way. Everyone is so going to love you.”

“Thanks, but I’m loved enough already.”

“You say that now. Give it another year, for the other shoe to drop. And then just let me be there when it happens, yes? I want to watch. Now play towel-boy for us, there’s a sweetie; then you go and sit with Quin a while, and I’ll see what’s cooking in the kitchen.”

And double it
, he means, or put a pan of rice or pasta on the boil to go with, just for us. No one in that house ever ate enough, or thought we really needed more. We burned carbohydrates like coke in a furnace Sundays, gym days, pretty much every day. Sometimes it was easier just to take him home with me, my mother understood about starving age but feeding adolescence; except that then I’d have to put up with questions, teasing, who knew what. That could go on for days, and it never felt the easier choice at all, in retrospect. Best days were when we did the cooking ourselves, or else went out for fish and chips.

～

Dressed and damp, fresh and weary and alert, sipping water and fizzing with endorphins, I sit and watch Quin’s breathing, timed against the steady drip of saline through his port. I do this often at times like these, when I’m too hyped to read. It brings me down gently, it tunes me in with Quin’s day and where he stands within it. Slow and shallow, he’s asleep, if sleep is the proper word these days, I’m never sure. Sharper, faster but still steady, he’s dreaming, or what we’ve chosen to interpret that way, like Nigel when his paws twitch and he’s snoring and we say he’s chasing rabbits.

When there’s a break in the rhythm, a sudden silence or a sudden gasp, that’s when I know that Quin’s awake. When he’s suddenly tentative, unsure about his breathing or his body, what’s going to hurt and how much.

“Hey,” I say softly, just to test the water.

His lips move just a fraction, just enough. I reach over to touch them with the mouth of my bottle, test the water another way, see if he wants a drink – and catch myself just in time, I’ve been so shouted at for doing that, so threatened,
we won’t leave you alone with him if you can’t be trusted.

So I draw my bottle back, one more thing that Quin is not allowed to share, and find his own bottle on the side table, and hold that for him to suck at. Which he does; and then he moves his mouth and forms his breath into shapes, into spiky whispered words; and I lean close to hear him and he says,

“Rook to King’s Bishop six.”

He always used to call them castles, but since talking grew harder he’s converted. We both use the old notation, by dint of childhood training in his case and learning from classic texts in my own, so no problem there. The only problem is that he’s offering me a mid-game move and he and I are not in the middle of a game, we haven’t played for weeks and then it was desultory and soon abandoned. I’m damn sure he’s not been holding that game in his head all this time, and if he had been this move would still make no sense within it.

“Quin? Where did that one come from?”

He only says it again, “Rook to King’s Bishop six, your move,” and it must be important, it must matter, to be worth the effort of air that it costs him and all the slipping focus of his mind. But it can’t be real in any space outside his head, and I can’t join in under these conditions because telepathy is a closed book to me. So I say, “I’m sorry, I don’t think I was here for the start of this one, d’you want to tell me how the pieces lie?”

We’ve still got his old set in the sideboard here, I could set the game up to his dictation, easier to get a grip that way; but I never imagined that he would be able to describe it and I’m right, he says “Never mind” and nothing more. A couple of dozen pieces and their places on the board, all the dynamics of the mid-game, opportunity and sacrifice and threat, all of that is way too much for Quin to keep a hold on nowadays. He’s building a dream in there, a fantasy, a little focal point he can believe in, with whatever capacity for faith he has remaining; and he’s trying to involve me, to give it depth and meaning.

And I’m frightened, suddenly and thoroughly. Of all the ways I’d thought an end could come, I’d never seen it here, not like this, where Quin tries to bind me to a game I can’t be playing in a world that isn’t mine. I can’t take that. I won’t let him possess me as an avatar: hollow or inhabited, either is as bad. And of course there should be nothing I can do, I can’t burrow into his brain to find myself and save myself, let myself out of there in whatever strange or sick distorted form he’s held me.

But neither can I shrug and smile and let it go, let myself go, down and down with Quin on this long slow spiral. If he’s got me – inside his smile somewhere, behind his bleeding blinding eyes, wherever – he won’t be letting me go. It’s a lesson well learned from him, from his friends, from everyone who ever loved him:
Quin hates to be alone.
If he’s found a way not to let that happen, to take someone with him when he goes, he’ll be relentless.

And all I can do is match him in his unrelenting, stop him swift and sudden and irrevocable. Before he’s got a better grip on me, while he still has only that little part of what I am that plays a little chess. Quin’s mind runs wide and deep, or at least it used to. I don’t know what resources he has in there that he can still tap into. Even unconsciously, maybe even when he’s unconscious because I don’t believe he sleeps as other people sleep, as we do, not any more. I think he could make me, keep me, take me away. And I do not want to go. I’ve been bottled up long enough already.

～

I don’t have to think. I am not thinking. Someone else can do my thinking for me.

～

I don’t even have to watch. I am not watching. Someone else can do my watching for me.

～

Watch. You watch. Watch this:

where all I can feel is the tremble in my fingers and the pallor in my skin, I can, I can feel that in the dizziness and the pounding blood in my ears as I try to hold myself together unless I’m trying to pull myself apart, and vibration white finger is a joke but I’m not laughing and nor is he as we pull open the sideboard and rummage among the drugs, scattering bottles, scattering capsules and pills and blister-packs and boxes.

All Quin’s major medicine, all his heavy stuff is kept under lock and key and I do not have a copy of the key. But that still leaves a bevy, a raft, a pharmacopoeia of lesser drugs and draughts and potions, plenty of prescriptions and all the over-the-counter buys of a long sickness and a team of eager amateurs with money, all the homoeopathic and herbal medicines, all the vitamin supplements and dietary aids and of course the bags of saline and the needles, the drips and feeds and plastic gloves, the sharps box in its yellow, all the paraphernalia of nursing care...

～

Where’s best to hide a tree, a book, a purloined letter? Among their own kind, famously.

Our mother could look for porn, and never find it. Michael didn’t need it; nor did Small, for very different reasons, though Small might have liked it better if Michael did.