Being Small (6 page)

Except that coming to the bedside, sitting on the upright chair provided – high to match the bed, so that my feet were just a fraction off the floor, which felt appropriate – even so little obedience was a commitment, of a sort. Here I sat; I could do no other. For now.

Closer, I could see how the skin around his eyes should have been creased and shadowed, how all his face should have held his age in its folds but had lost it, only the shallowest of pale lines left like parch marks in his tan. Sickness was working on him as botox does, drawing his skin tight and smoothing out all his wrinkles. Perhaps he should market it, blood in a bottle, a liquid facelift...

Except that this close, that wasn’t a tan, it was jaundice that coloured him so highly; and that drug-sheen lay on his eyes like an oil slick, so bright and so unhealthy; and no, no one could ever want to buy into this.

“My new neighbour, then. Mrs Alleyn may have got it right for once. Kit says you like dogs, and you play chess.”

“He does. Kit also says, drink this,” and was standing at my elbow with a steaming mug of coffee. Black, and presumably unsweetened, but he wasn’t offering me cream or sugar. I took it, stricken shy again, and he said, “Drink it quickly, it’s not that hot.”

Which seemed an odd thing to say, and unlikely to be true, freshly made and freshly poured. I took a wary sip, ready to pretend but not to burn my tongue – and almost choked on the simple surprise of it, warm and dense and sweet, barely coffee at all.

“What is it?”

“Café trèche,” he said; and then perhaps heard his own smugness and tried to correct it, because he went on, “Quin taught us.”

“I taught them all,” dryly, from the bed. “All they know, which is not much more than what you hold in your hands there, but at least that lesson stuck.”

“What’s in it?” I asked, taking another swallow, bolder now.

“Brandies,” Kit said. “Poire William and slivovitz, tonight. Next time it might be apricot and peach, anything fruity.”

“It’s wonderful, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He’d been busy while he spoke, setting up a chessboard on a bed-tray that he laid now across the patient’s knees. I wanted to say no, I wasn’t ready, I wasn’t even willing, I hadn’t been asked; but long and fragile fingers were reaching already, not to move yet, just to touch, and those tender fluttery gestures broke whatever will was in me to resist him.

“You can have white,” Quin said, and indeed the board stood that way round, Kit had just assumed it. “Do you need a handicap on top? I could spot you a knight or a rook, if it makes for a better game.”

“I don’t need a handicap,” I said quietly. “Do you?”

He quirked an eyebrow. “Well, then. Let’s find out.”

～

I thought that this would be a getting-to-know-you game, a social occasion, that we would talk as we played. That he would ask me questions. That was all my experience of an adult world, that grown-ups asked me questions. Sometimes, in self-defence, I’d refer them to my brother. “You’d better ask Small about that, I wouldn’t know,” or sometimes, “He’s the expert,” if it touched on something personal to us. I had other people, other interests in my life, where he had only me; of course he knew more about the way we worked, together or apart. Being bottled up must give you a great perspective. Ask a genie.

Perhaps I underestimate Small, how much he’s learned by watching me at play with other people. Perhaps he would have known better how this game would go, if I had thought to ask him. I didn’t do that, I was so determinedly living my own life now, even on our birthday; and so I was surprised by the silence, by the intensity in Quin as he moved those hands – hands like besoms, like bundles of loose-bound twigs – around the board. It was a good board, wooden and solid, but the pieces were cheap and hollow plastic, wholly incongruous in that setting or anywhere in that house. It took me a while, embarrassingly long to understand that they were wholly apt to his fingers, that they were light, easy to grip and easy to lift or slide. He could probably no longer handle the pieces proper to that board, with any comfort at all.

He could handle these pieces but not swiftly enough, or with sufficient purpose. I won in thirty-seven.

“Well,” he said, fixing me with a gaze I couldn’t read. “Kit, Michael might like another drink.”

Anyone could have read that, it meant he wanted another game. Kit had been reading in a corner; the last ten moves, he’d come to stand behind me and watch. He said, “Surely. Anything you fancy, Michael. Champagne if you want it, for beating Quin.”

“Actually,” I said, starting to reset the pieces, white for my host, “I’d like another of those coffees, if I could.”

“I knew you would. The mixture as before?”

“Please.”

This time I did watch him make it. As he lifted one bottle into the light, I saw something bulbous stir in its depths, and had to bite back a cry; did it too slowly or not well enough, made noise enough to bring his head around.

“All right, Michael?”

“Yes, but – what is that?”

“Poire William. I said. Oh, you mean the pear? It’s a pear.”

It was. I could see it now that he’d named it: impossibly whole, bobbing in the liquor as Kit waggled the bottle from side to side. I wanted him to stop, and couldn’t say so. Instead I asked the obvious, the moronic question, “How do they do that...?”

“They grow it there, of course. They have to. Can’t cast a bottle around a pear, certainly can’t squeeze it down the neck. Go out to the orchards in summer – if they have orchards, do they call them orchards if it’s pears? – and you’d see all the pear-trees fruiting bottles. Feed the baby fruit into the neck while it’s still tiny, tie the bottle to the branch and leave it there. I guess the bottle must have a greenhouse effect too, keep the insects off and help it ripen sweetly. When this bottle’s empty, I’m going to break it open and have a taste, see what it’s like inside. You want to share?”

I felt my whole face twitch and shook my head rapidly to hide it. “No, no thanks. Um, I’m not a fan of preserved fruit,” which was a lie so direct, I thought so naked that I felt myself blushing as I said it, just to reinforce its
flagrancy.

I turned back to the board in my confusion, to find that white’s first move had been made already.

“I know you like to play the Ruy Lopez, which is unexpectedly old-fashioned of you. Let’s see how you like to play against it.”

Ordinarily not a problem, but my mind was full of bottles, broken bottles, and my mouth tasted formaldehyde though I wasn’t even drinking any more. I lost the game, and my lifelong undefeated status; and in twenty-nine moves, which was a capitulation.

“You’ll stay for the decider,” he said, not a question. “Play black again. We know you can beat me as white; I want you to do it the hard way. Concentrate, this time. No need to drink your coffee if you don’t want to, but don’t keep staring at it.”

“Uh, sorry. Something on my mind.”

“I know. One thing at a time. Bottle it up for now,” which was maybe the worst way he could have found to say what he meant, but he wasn’t to know that. Even chess isn’t truly telepathic, which was how come I’d kept my crown so long, because Small couldn’t really read my mind. Neither could Quin. Not yet, and not later. I was and am determined on that.

I took a sip from the disregarded mug and felt that same sweet, heavy, oily-bright bite, to work against what I wasn’t really tasting, fear and formaldehyde; and I closed my mind down like shutters slamming, and I narrowed my gaze till it took in the chessboard and nothing more.

I can concentrate for England, if I have to. So could he. That game ran to fifty-three moves, and for the last twenty there was precious little left on the board to play with. Neither one of us suggested a draw; that would have been too easy, where there were still opportunities for both. In the end I was too savage or he was too subtle, or else his energy failed him, betrayed him, ran to me. He made a mistake, and I tore him apart.

And looked up then, finally, to find a stranger standing over us and oozing disapproval.

“Quin, you’re doing too much and it exhausts you. Do I have to ration chess too?”

A big hand closed around a thin wrist, feeling for a pulse, but was shaken off abruptly.

“Don’t make like a medic, leave that to Dr John. You wouldn’t know what to do with a pulse if you could find it. And I have been rationed for months now, baby-chess, like a diet of Enid Blyton and tinned spaghetti. At last I find someone who understands, or at least plays better than I do. Him I can coach, and you’re not taking him away from me. Michael, this is Gerard: never Mike, I gather, and never ever Gerry.”

That same big hand reached for mine and folded itself around my fingers. I thought I could feel the effort he made, not to go for a bonecrusher grip.

“It’s Michael’s birthday,” Kit said from the window, where he was apparently back on drinks duty, filling glasses. “Sixteen today. Yesterday,” with a corrective glance at his watch.

“Is it indeed? Well, and how do you come to be here, Michael?”
Playing chess with my sick friend,
he meant,
exhausting him beyond the limits of his strength, when you should be off somewhere with your own friends and testing your own
limits.

“Uh, Kit found me out in the lane. I was going home but he brought me in, he knew I played chess and said Mr Quin would like a game,” and never mind what else he’d said. If he could forget about that I was the last person to remind him.

Right at that moment it didn’t matter what anyone else might have said. I’d clearly said something that was acting like acid on an ulcer, the room was so full of sudden twitches and sharp breathy sounds.

“If you’re Michael,” Kit said, “and Gerard is Gerard, then Quin is very definitely and always only Quin. If you mister him – well, actually, I don’t know what would happen if you mistered him deliberately, I’ve never known anyone stupid enough to do it. One time brings the awful warning; after that, you’re on your own. Cast into the outer darkness, probably, expunged from the family bible, I don’t know. I just wouldn’t go there, is all. See what I’m saying?”

I did see. I didn’t understand, either Quin or Kit himself – why be a monosyllable where you can go the other way, why chop back when you can stretch out, accumulate, titles and honorifics and all the names in the book? – but adolescence is good cover sometimes for bewilderment. Unsure whether to apologise or to whom, whether to gloss over it or be casual, assume that same equality that Kit was proposing – “Quin, right you are, Quin it is,” as easy as a grown-up – I came over all sixteen and said nothing at all.

And was rescued unexpectedly by Gerard’s murmuring, “It’s not that hard. Come on, practise; say ‘Goodnight, Quin,’ and get out of here. You too, Kit. Take your drinks with you. He’s had enough for now.”

Something in me expected Quin to protest like a child at bedtime, “one more game, I’m not tired yet,” like that. In fact he only made a gesture, a little sweeping wave of his long hand that seemed to mean
he’s right, take this board away and leave us be.
It was a beat later, still not too late that he smiled at me thinly and said, “Come back, Michael. Try me any time.”

I nodded, and promised that I would. Kit said, “Later, Quin,” moved the board off the bed and led me back to the kitchen.

“You get used to that,” he told me, and it sounded like an invitation or a prophecy,
you will get used to that.
“He’s sharp as a needle, and then suddenly he crashes. Gerard’s the one who spots it, often as not, if he’s around. You’d expect that, I suppose. I’m learning, but I still can’t chase people out the way the big man does. He’s the only one Quin listens to, anyway. You try saying ‘Right, that’s your lot,’ when Quin’s saying, ‘Sit, stay, I’m not done with you yet.’ It’s not possible. I’ve all but given up trying.”

I could imagine. I had been imagining, indeed, exactly that; it was only Gerard that I hadn’t accounted for.

“You need more coffee?”

“No. Thanks, but I’ve not finished this,” and thought I was not now expected to, thought I was on my way home.

“Not to worry, it’s just as good cold on a warm night. Come through and sit for a while,” out in the dog-room, the offshoot, where there were high wooden stools against a worktop. Kit perched; I subsided rather, down onto the floor next to the basket where Nigel’s tail was thumping idly into his blankets. If I sat close enough I could put my arm round his neck and bury my fingers in the loose fur of his throat, while he could stretch over the basket’s fraying rim to rest his chin on my thigh. We did that, then, and were both happy.

Kit gazed down on us with all the indulgent superiority he could contrive from his advantages of height and age, and said, “Smoke?”

“No. No, I don’t, thanks.” Well, I did, but not cigarettes, and not with almost-strangers.

“You should,” he said, lighting up; and, “You will, if you spend much time round here. It’s not strictly compulsory, but it’s the mood of the moment, the spirit of the age. This has always been a smoker’s house, and Quin’s not allowed any longer, so it falls to the rest of us to keep up the average.”

He seemed happy to carry his share of that burden. I watched the deep inhalation and the slow release, I watched his fingers roll the tip of the cigarette around an ashtray; eventually I said, “Kit?”

“Mmm?”

“How bad is Quin?”

“He’s dying.” And then, as though he was immediately conscious of the melodramatic weight of that, he tried to skip back from it: “I’m sorry, of course he’s dying, you can see that. He’s been dying for a long time, on and off. Only when he got sick this time, and it looks like being the last time, he just announces that he doesn’t want to go into hospital again. Which leaves us, his loyal crew, to look after him. Somebody like Quin says something like that, you don’t get a lot of choice. A few people slid off into the undergrowth as soon as they saw we were serious, but enough of us stayed around. It’s not odorous. Actually I take that back, sometimes it is odorous; I meant it’s not onerous, he doesn’t own us,” which was clearly a line he’d used before, it came out way too slickly to be fresh.