56

After that first letter arrived, like a finger widening the hole where a tooth was knocked out, more and more dropped through the door and onto the mat. It slowly became an occurrence of such regularity that it was added to the list of chores Mum was to complete upon rising.

Get dressed.

Make Mal’s breakfast.

Collect the post.

We were having calls from the Post Office, questioning the influx, as if to check we were suitably deserving. Letters came from as far away as Australia. I saw postmarks of all colours and patterns. The rainbow squiggles of Japan. The red-yellow sunburst of Alaska. The criss-cross mint-cool blue-green thatch of Peru. The world dropping through our front door in tiny jigsaw pieces. Dad would save the stamps. Nameless heads of state. Placeless landmarks. Inventors, engineers and thinkers whose existence was not even in our time.

Some days I arrived home from work to find the corner of a room brimming with bulbous black bin bags, rustling and shifting. They bulged like the humongous eyes of giant flies. They spilled and rolled and moved. Their outline, like Mal’s, was becoming a lumpy, unnatural changeling. Sometimes I would find these big black sacks in the garden, breathing in the heat of summer, or caked in thin white frost come wintertime like a Scandinavian liquorice.

Mal didn’t read the letters. His fingers had grown too fat and stiff to hold something with the fragility of paper. He’d once worn a silver ring on his right forefinger but it had long since been swallowed up, his skin and flesh having grown over it, incorporating it into his all-consuming mass. He was part jewellery. I looked at his chin. It blended almost seamlessly into his shoulder blades, and I imagined his body consuming itself, the edges smoothing out. There was no outward evidence that he even had bones in there any more. If he were to live for ever, perhaps he’d eventually become one huge, amorphous pink blob. A globe without oceans. I imagined that belly of his wriggling and moving until it spilt open to a yawning chasm webbed with bloody strings, like a toothless old man, his gummy grin full of toffee. I imagined it spilling a sea of pearly white eggs across the bedspread, full of larvae that became insects that became clones of me, Mum, Dad and Lou.

My mind was wandering in this way when I heard, above Mal’s foul and coarse snore, Dad shouting from the attic.

‘What on earth!’

I opened my eyes and listened to the tinny clank of him trundling down his ladder into the kitchen, where, since I’d been secretly awake, Mum had been putting the finishing touches to a cake festooned with rich cherries. Breakfast.

‘Yorrnomgooindulikeiss.’

Dad’s voice, muffled and squeezed through the insulation of the walls. Eventually I understood: ‘You’re not going to like this.’ I pulled on Mal’s old jeans, my wardrobe long-since bolstered by his renouncement of clothing, and walked slowly to the window. I glanced to check he hadn’t stirred.

I was the fearful shake of red hands awaiting a caning at the thought that Lou might be gone. I took the cord of the curtains and I opened them steadily, as though I were master of the crushed red velvet drapes, twenty feet tall, of a stage in a town where the theatre was the oldest building. As though my drawstring were a thick golden plaited rope I needed both hands and all my might to unfurl from its great wound wheel in the ceiling. As though whatever lay outside for me were the opening night of a show and me and sleeping Mal the audience brimming with anticipation hot and sickly like an illness.

Behind the glass, behind Lou’s tent on the grass, was another. Big this time, in the professional camping shades of blue and grey, its ropes taut and poised on the ground like the legs of a preying mantis, its silver pegs sharp and shiny like claws. A green-toothed man sat outside it with his girlfriend. They were cooking sausages on a small gas stove, the blue flames fingering the bottom of a rusty pan.

I nudged Mal’s chubby knee with an outstretched toe that peeked from the hole in a sock he used to own.

‘What?’ he muttered, an angry shaven bear.

‘Look,’ I said, and gestured with the same toe like it was a stiffened finger. He followed the line of its nail to the view.

The way settlements become hamlets become villages become towns. Landing at the biggest river. Staying where there is action and food and reason. Mal. Dust and rocks and comets caught in the path of a comet hurtling nowhere.

‘And what do you think about that?’ I asked.

The light from the window hit his face in golden rafters and made his pupils expand and retract in perfect circles.

‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ he said.

‘It’s everything to do with you, Mal. That’s why they’re here. Because of you.’

‘And they can leave if they want to.’

He turned, his white naked back, blotched with inkdrop red blurs and the blackened heads of deep buried filth, facing the window.

‘So can you,’ he said.

By the time I arrived home from work, dried crusty lamb’s blood worn like a shawl around my shoulders, the second tent was gone, their fun had. And with the trap being open would come the opportunity to limp away.