Author's Note:
And the rest...
“This is your therapist’s?” he asked. He felt like he was dropping her off to see a back-streets abortionist. Bridge got up, folding her blankets over her arm.
“I was lying,” she said. Her breath seemed to be back. “I live here. There’s a studio flat, right up there. You can come in, if you want.”
Morey ground his teeth, unsure how he was meant to reply.
“What, with my dog?”
“Sure.”
“Wait, who was that on the buzzer? What just happened?”
“My boyfriend,” she uttered.
Morey silently averted his gaze to the stains rising up the building’s walls, where some drunk person had inevitably relieved themselves. He didn’t understand this ridiculous breed of people who seemed to have forgotten their Ps and Qs, and how the stories of their lives were meant to play out. Bridge should have agreed to an ambulance - actually, she should have passed out, to shut her up - and Morey could have sat with her, heroic and delightful, holding her hand, and... at least have got thanks for this. Profuse thanks. Love or money.
Everyone is so embarrassed to be part of anything
epic, he thought. They’re too proud to be rescued and too self-conscious to be the rescuer. Morey remembers the days of revelling in illness! He was a perfect victim when he was sick, bathing in quilts and drowning in hot chocolate. And his father would always lug their television up the stairs to sate him with daytime educational programmes.
His father, now there was a hero. All this and more. Countless boyhood disputes resolved, pets discreetly buried and the way he just, oh, Morey didn’t know; the way he was. His aura. His soul was that of a hero.
But then, even he had resigned himself to normality. And failure.
“Why didn’t your boyfriend come and carry you all the bloody way here?” Morey finally demanded.
Bridge sighed and leant against the door. “He put me there.”
“Oh. So. Your boyfriend knocks you out, puts you on a bench, you fake some sort of diabetic freak-out, and Stranger In Trench Coat has to rescue you.” He paused. “Is this a kind of lure? Is
he, in fact, the Cambridgeshire Strangler? Or is this some weird sex thing?”
Did people do that? Maybe they did. They did all sorts on the Internet.
“Oh, please. You can stop trying to involve yourself. I was only inviting you up to be polite after you forced your rescue attempt on me. And
please. You think I’d fake a panic attack? What a scummy thought.”
“Wait, so... that was a panic attack.”
“Yes.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Perfectly fine.” She went to close the door.
“Are you an agoraphobe?”
“Probably. Who knows. Don’t say it like that, though,
agoraphobe. Like you also use words like ‘spic’.”
“I don’t,” he said. “I’d never - so wait, why did your boyfriend leave you on a bench? Does he know you’re agoraphobic? But why would he anyway?”
“Will you stop squealing out here? Our windows aren’t insulated,” she hissed. “Come in here for a second. You’re making me nervous.”
Morey obeyed, and Bridge slammed the door behind him.
“He does it because he’s trying to help. Plus he’s a moron. But trust me, he thinks if I ‘face my fear’ then I’ll overcome it. Like when, um, you’re teaching a kid to ride a bicycle, you know, and you keep pushing them till they don’t need to be pushed? Listen to me, I sound like I believe it myself, but... don’t go jumping to any conclusions. He’s well-intentioned. I love him. His name’s Andrew. And he didn’t knock me out, I was napping. I nap sometimes.”
“Okay.”
“Come and have some tea or something. I need to lie down.” Bridge then nipped back to the intercom, whispering, “Andrew, make sure you have clothes on, I’m bringing a guest up.”
As they climbed the stairs, something felt wrong. Morey put one hand into his coat and over his abdomen. He felt vaguely like his insides were being chewed. And like a nightmare was coming back to him, foggily, through the thick soup of his subconscious.
Every movement he was making seemed familiar - the way he had to veer to the right to avoid a shelf which protruded from the wall, how he had to lean forward to counter the steepness of the stairs. The more he considered this, the more he was overtaken with a viscous nausea.
He tried to focus on the back of Bridge’s head, the way the blonde tapered into a point on the nape of her neck, where a tattoo of a - a bow and arrow, he thought, sat as delicate as haiku. But no, no, he still felt terrible.
The stairs suddenly ended. He was on the top floor, and there was a shell lampshade that hung from the ceiling with an ill-fitting bulb. There were boxes, too, to either side of Bridge’s flat - plastic boxes filled with bottles, cardboard boxes filled with cans. The number 3 hung in brass from the door.
He looked carefully at that 3.
Bridge pushed the door open with her hip and went into the room. Morey stayed in the hall, unable to follow her.
You’d have thought the black eyes of the white house were just an illusion, and when you actually entered the room you’d see all that light flooding in. But the room before him was just dark, and grey, like the mouth of a beast.
“Morey, come in,” Bridge half-ordered, hanging from the door.
Looking past her, he saw the room was L-shaped, a sofa shunted to one wall, a TV backed up against another. A kitchen retreated into the furthest corner, the ghosts of fried things crawling up the tiles.
“I can’t come in,” he said.
“Why?”
“He’s not coming in?” yelled a man’s voice from somewhere unseen. “Well, don’t make him come in if he doesn’t want to.”
Something like déjà vu’s evil twin was there, in Morey’s body, with the sickness. Who had said that before? He ignored Bridget and leant against the wall opposite, cradling his head. He blocked out her voice.
Let’s play this game, like we did as children, he thought. Daniel, his brother, would spout a lyric, or a quotation from a movie or a TV series, and Morey would try and identify it. This was the same. Just play those words over and over again in your mind until they attach themselves to a voice, and that voice attaches itself to a face. With Daniel it was usually from Doctor Who. But this didn’t seem like it. Play it over again.
Don’t make him come in if he doesn’t want to. Don’t make him come in if he doesn’t want to.
If he doesn’t want to! The explanation mark appeared of its own will. The line was being shouted in his head. It started to gel in his mind; the mouth saying this was covered in red lipstick.
“What’s wrong with you?” Bridge said, faintly.
“Are you really going to tell me what to do with my child?” yelled Morey’s mother, to the red mouth. They were both sobbing. “Let him see it!” She was pushing a very young Morey into an L-shaped room, where he had to squint to see.
“Don’t do that to him,” said the red mouth, from a face covered in make-up. It wasn’t that different to his mother’s, slightly younger, but still succumbing to age. “Please, June. Let him wait outside.”
His mother had him by the shoulders and pointed him at the sofa. Morey saw a shape.
“Look at that, Morey,” his mother said, in a unsettling voice. “There’s your father out of town, visiting his uncle.”
His father? His great-uncle? He saw a man, slumped over into the arm of the sofa, wearing just a vest and jeans. He couldn’t see his face, but he could see the pooling saliva under the man’s hands, where his mouth must have been. But then also there was the salt-and-peppered fringe that rested on the man’s forehead. And the huge hands, all pale and covered in hair, like those that swept Morey up to play horse on his father’s knee.
His father’s hands.
Then he was turned another way, to see this unknown woman, curled on the bed with her mascara smothering her eyes.
“And there’s your great-uncle,” said his mother.
What?
“What’s wrong with him?” the woman was crying. “Is he dead?”
“He’s probably had a seizure,” his mother said, flatly. “From the diabetes. The bastard doesn’t take his medicine. He doesn’t believe in doctors. He thinks he can handle it with
willpower.”
“But is he dead?”
“Well, look at him, he’s breathing, isn’t he?” Morey’s mother shouted. “Look at him. In fact, look after him. He’s your mess to clean up.”
Morey gazed behind him at the pile of flesh on the sofa, apparently his father. It couldn’t be. Then it moved slightly in its sleep, and its hand dropped. Morey saw his father’s face, all half-dead and shamed, pushed against the cream-coloured leather.
Morey’s mother began to drag him away, hollering something he couldn’t hear. She shut the door with the woman wailing on one side, ambulance sirens wailing on the other. The little gold 3 rattled in its place.
“Is he dead?” said a man. Bridge’s boyfriend. Andrew, was it?
Morey had slid to the floor, face and hands to the wall. He didn’t want to turn around and see those strangers’ faces, drinking in his insanity. Hoff broke in under Morey’s elbow and began to lick his face.
He stroked the dog’s back and pushed himself to his feet. He heard an anxious sigh and the click of bottles being opened.
“I’m sorry,” Morey said to the wall. “I can’t go into your flat.”
Bridge burst into laughter, and Morey felt a fleck of liquid touch his neck. “That’s rich!” she said. “I can’t go out and you can’t come in?”
“Ha, yeah, you’re right, babe,” Andrew said.
“Mm.” Morey began to descend the stairs. He swallowed. He probably shouldn’t speak any more. Memory and sadness and sickness all waited at the back of his throat, like a threat.
“Well that’s fine, mate,” Andrew called out. Morey saw Andrew’s shadow toasting him on the wall. “I, er - I can’t eat mushrooms, eh! We all have our Kryptonite, our, er, Achilles’s heel. Heh.”
Bridge giggled, and her shadow embraced Andrew’s. They fell back into the apartment with a final click of the door, and Morey kept walking down, past 2 and 1 and the doorstep, out into Greathope Street.
Hoff burst out in front of him and started bucking up and down the road. It was cast in twilight’s cobalt blue and all the puddles were glowing. Morey walked slowly, regaining his composure. He watched Hoff - the dog was using his mad, shamanic eyes, where all the whites were showing as he galloped in circles. Morey let out a laugh. They walked back home through the park and through an entirely different web of road names. He let himself into his Man’s house.
He refilled the dog’s water.
He wiped the toast crumbs off of the counter.
He watched TV, he checked his e-mail, he stared at the wall.
He turned off the lights one by one and crept into his Man’s bed in his room. All furnished in expensive neutral colours. The first place he’d ever slept where the walls had no cartoons or naked women taped up all over them.
The dog jumped onto the bed and instantly lay down on Morey’s bladder. Morey swore at him. He grabbed Hoff’s paws.
“Afraid of the dark?” he whispered. “Or afraid of the
big world outside this room?”
Hoff said nothing. Which wasn’t unusual.
“Agoraphobe!” Morey said accusingly. He crossed Hoff’s paws. “Now are you insulted by that? I don’t see how it’s insulting.” He put on a whiny voice. “‘Don’t call me that! Don’t try and help me! Oh no!’”
He felt crazy talking to Hoff for that long, so he tried to get to sleep. After some minutes, he realised something was tapping against the window.
The blurry silhouette of a moth was throwing itself at the glass, with big dreams of the porch-light beyond. Groaning, Morey grabbed the empty glass next to his bed and carefully placed it around the panicking moth. He clapped his hand over the other end then manoeuvred the window open with his elbows.
He set the moth free. It flew out over the shrubbery and disappeared.
Morey adopted the squeaky voice again: “‘Thank you so much for giving me my freedom, Unremarkable-Boy!’”
Then a deep one: “Why, you’re welcome, noble insect citizen...”
His voice faltered. He saw his open hands in the moonlight. They had always been such huge, heavy things. He was diminutive and prettily-featured in most other respects, like his mother, but his hands were from his dad. Hands that worked, hands that carried. Hands that could cover his whole face in shame.
Sometimes they were strong and sometimes they were weak. But his dad had never ceased trying to repent his moments of weakness. He had been a good man once. He was a good man again.
Morey made a fist.
“... But hey,” he said quietly, somewhat to the absent moth, mostly to the night. “It’s Unremarkable-
Man.”
