44

Day Four.

Mal never asked for anything, confident as he was that it would just come. Instead he lay quietly, watching television, waiting for something and nothing.

In the kitchen the night before, Mum and Dad had had the biggest argument I’d ever overheard. Dad, his loft, his work, his fishing. Mum, the cleaning, the cooking and Mal. All history born of conflict.

‘Stop cooking for him, waiting hand and foot on him, and he’ll have to get out of bed. Don’t you see?’ Dad had said. Not for a second did he consider that this might actually happen.

‘He can’t starve,’ Mum said, her voice shaped powerfully.

‘He won’t starve!’

‘He’s my son and I’ll look after him if he needs looking after.’

‘You’re a fucking martyr, you are!’

‘Go up in your loft. Don’t you worry about anyone else.’

The next morning I asked Mal to stop. To get out of bed and carry on. I reminded him about his flat. About his job. About Lou. I begged him. But it had begun. It had most definitely begun. I just hoped that his interest would wither and die like a seed planted in alien terrain.

‘Get up.’

‘No.’

Goaded, I grabbed him by the ankle and in one almighty pull heaved his muscular naked frame from the bed and onto the floor at my feet. My hands open, I slapped and scratched at his face, head and neck as he wound foetal around my legs. I jabbed at his chest with my heels, pinching his stubborn flesh between my shoes and the floor. Exasperated, I slapped at the red handprints around his ribs, at the cut above his eye. In that instant I felt like beating him to half his size. I pounded harder and harder into his chest, thud thud thud, then dropped to my knees, vacant and breathless.

Dad rushed in and all but tore the door from its hinges. He put both of his enormous hands upon my shoulders and lifted me out of Mal’s reach. Mal clambered slowly back into bed and pulled the quilt up over his cut, swollen face.

Pushing me into the kitchen, Dad ran my bruised fingers underneath the cold tap. He didn’t need to speak.

Hours passed before I poked my head tentatively around the bedroom door.

‘Hello,’ he said, something of a surprise, the will of a brother to forgive another.

The flesh that framed the socket of his right eye had swollen and blackened, his naked chest was pocked with deep red grazes and tiny star-shaped formations where dried blood had collected after I’d cut into him with the heel of my shoe. He seemed completely nonplussed by the fight or by the arguments but what frustrated me most was that he’d ignored all attempts at communication from Lou. She had called at the door upwards of three times a day so far, alerting us each time with that same rat-a-tat-tat. Dad would always be in his attic, which would clang with dropped tools, the mesmeric rolling sound of loose screws spiralling about the frail wooden floorboards.

Mum would be being similarly noisy in the kitchen, smashing pots and pans together, blaming them for a burnt cake or over-salted bread sauce. I imagined that when she wasn’t there they all sprang to life, their handles and joins forming smooth-edged eyes, noses and mouths like in a Disney film. I imagined they all congregated around the wise old talking oven and moaned about how hard they were worked.

It would instead be left to me to answer the door to Lou. I didn’t mind. She’d cry, I’d hold her. She’d ask to see Mal. I’d inform her that he didn’t want any guests and apologise and apologise again. Mum would lock the bedroom door with the small bolt she’d asked Dad to affix. I’d get the words Let’s run away together stuck in the taste buds on the back of my tongue.

One week in, he’d still not changed his mind.

We were playing chess. Mal lay nude under a white cotton sheet, draped over him so neatly that from a distance he looked like a fallen pillar crumbling in an ancient lost ampitheatre. I’d pulled a chair to his bed and turned it around so that my legs straddled the back of it on either side. Mal’s failure to appreciate the rules of a game established for many hundreds of years meant that the levels of concentration required when playing chess against him were of lunar-module-landing levels of intensity.

‘Your move,’ said Mal.

‘OK,’ I said, glancing down at the board and then back up at him. I posed no threat whatsoever.

‘And if she comes, I can’t see her.’

‘Are you going to tell me what you are doing?’ I asked.

He didn’t answer.

Lou arrived again eventually. Her eyes were tropical spiders, red rings with faint black legs.

‘Why?’ she asked.

I said I didn’t know.

‘I love him,’ she said, and then she wept.

Every last ounce of what was inside me squeezed up inside a tight rubber ball and bounced around my body.

I watched Lou leave, back to her father. So did Mum, through a slit in the curtains.