A collaboration with David Price

I jammed the brakes too hard, almost sending the car into a skid.

Breathing heavily, I wound the window down and gripped the steering wheel. A few deep breaths brought my heartbeat down to a semblance of normality, and if I’d sat there long enough I might even have got the colour back into my cheeks.

I threw the door open and dry-retched, but it was an involuntary reaction, almost like a tic. I’d spent a lot of time being sick over the last few weeks!

But I’m fine now – over the worst, taking things easy …

But hardly avoiding stress!

My hand shook a little as I turned the key in the ignition. Get this over with, I thought, the sooner the better.

As I pulled out onto the road I cursed my own stupidity. I was only visiting my sister for a few hours, where was the harm in that?

But dearest Gretchen had always been a little strange.

*

“Mike, come in. You’ve changed.”

It was hardly a subtle greeting; chemotherapy doesn’t exactly do wonders for a man’s appearance.

“Thanks Sis,” I said with irony.

In the living room I took a seat, wondering what the hell I was doing there. We may not have been sibling rivals, but we certainly hadn’t gone out of our way to keep in touch over the last few years.

As she made coffee I took in the room. Simply furnished, dull wallpaper, a carpet that disconcertingly resembled diarrhoea. The passing of time certainly hadn’t improved her imagination. As to Gretchen, she really was stuck in a time warp. At thirty-three she still looked like the fourteen-year old girl I’d said goodbye to when our parents had split up; short, dumpy, a mass of frizzy raven hair which made her look as if she’d had an electric shock – an impression reinforced by ridiculously thick, milk-bottle glasses which gave her a permanently startled appearance – and olive skin, which was her only attractive feature. Only a few telltale lines under the eyes and around the neck hinted at the passage of time.

Then I caught sight of my own reflection. Painfully thin, I looked like a skeleton in jeans and a leather jacket. The baseball cap, now resting on the table before me, did little to cover up my thinning hair. Self-consciously, I ran a hand over my head. Yes, still growing. I just wished like hell it would grow faster.

Gretchen returned with the coffee and two hideously sticky buns, which looked like curled-up dog turds coated in icing sugar. Even to be polite, I couldn’t see myself eating one of those.

“So, Michael,” she said, easing herself into the seat on the opposite side of the coffee table, “I expect you’re wondering why I asked you here?”

I shrugged and sipped my coffee. It was a natural assumption, and she was obviously going to tell me.

“Well, I heard of your little … problem.” She smiled. Sitting, as she was, with the sunlight on her face, her eyes had disconcertingly vanished in the glare from her spectacles. If she hadn’t greeted me at the door, I might have suspected a cunning disguise.

‘What thin hair you have, my dear.’

As to my little problem …

“Yes, I’ve had a touch of leukaemia … nothing to worry about at all.”

“You know what I meant.”

Typical Sis, shrugging off sarcasm like dandruff.

“Sorry. Only recently, I’ve become a recipient of the jobseekers allowance. In other words, I’ve just been fired. So, after weeks of spewing my guts up, losing my job, and very probably losing my house, I’m sure that having a chat with you about my ‘little problem’ is going to do me a world of good!”

A little rough on her, I knew, but just thinking about the day I lost my job was enough to send my blood pressure soaring. It had been a bad day from the start. Then, as I lay in my sickbed (puking for England, tubes sticking in and out of me), good old Sandy McBain paid me a visit.

“Sorry but – you know, we couldn’t keep your position open any longer, and – you know … sorry. We’ll pay you off, of course we will, but … you know.”

I knew; ten years service, then dismissed with a few grand to tide me over.

BASTARDS!

Gretchen, infuriating as ever, just smiled.

“Still got a temper, then? Life does have its ups and downs. It’s what you make it.”

“The old home-spun philosophy? Just what I needed.”

“As my husband used to say …”

“Ah, the late Jan Rodzenko. The catch of the century.” Rich, eccentric; don’t ask me what he saw in Gretchen. (Although, from what I’d heard, he wasn’t – strictly speaking – a ladies man. Beefcake sir? Not ‘alf!) Gretchen had been his secretary. Being an organized type of girl, old Jan must have married her in lieu of hiring a housekeeper.

“As I was saying …”

“Look, Gretchen; it’s nice to see you again …”

“We make our own fortune in this world. So Mike, I think it’s time we got our heads together … for once in our lives! Now lets drink this coffee. There’s somewhere I want to take you. You drive, I’ll direct.”

And just to keep the peace, I agreed. Ten minutes later we were heading up the dual carriageway, the soothing music of Enya drifting out of the car stereo. All well and good, but then we were wending our way through a twisting country lane, the car headlights barely penetrating the gloom. And when she finally said, “Alright, Mike, right here,” we might as well have been in the middle of nowhere. I was about to ask if we were lost when she stepped out of the car, so I killed the engine and joined her.

“Come on, Mike,” she said, smiling conspiratorially like we were both six-years old, “I’ve got something to show you,” and she led me into the mist. Within seconds we’d lost sight of the car. Totally disorientated, I found myself completely in her care. As a swirling mist enveloped us, I realised that I was putting my trust in someone that I really didn’t know at all.

*

Yet … if I didn’t know her at all, what had happened to my sister, the one I always knew as Gretchen? She who, up to when I was twelve, had been a fitful companion, often cruel, rarely friendly, never more than just a creature with which I’d been burdened by the accident of birth. Why had I, the younger one, been beset with an even crueller fate; a fate that some called blood-rot? I couldn’t help mixing up my thoughts out of sequence. Why had we even needed to part?

But she hadn’t been that bad, all those years ago. As we negotiated the roily mist, she grabbed my hand, ever the elder sister. And I recalled the times she’d acted similarly, when I was in trouble, lending a helping glance, rationing out her smiles for just such an occasion. And as the coolness of the night veritably hit my heart for the first time, she squeezed from her rosebud mouth the sweetest smile it had been my pleasure to witness in anybody … ever.

“Don’t worry, Mike. I’m not doing this for spite. This is real. This is us.”

I nodded, pretending to follow her gist. I didn’t want to surrender her good will for anything, least of all a misunderstanding; ever since the sticky bun, I’d been hers to do with what she wanted.

I suddenly recalled our parents. A fleeting glimpse of their loving faces, overlapped by more bitter versions; wrinkled by years of acrimony and disappointment. Fleeting, because we’d reached the destination my erstwhile sister had evidently intended us to reach. Erstwhile, because she was a stranger. A stranger, because she’d brought me to a place I couldn’t quite define as anywhere. Indefinable, because it may have been a gothic castle; it may even have been a dream version of my own home where I lived with my wife, whose face had crossed the same stages of love and disappointment as my own mother. Even my illness, the blood-rot … hadn’t achieved a reunion of spirits. She went even colder, did my wife, as if she feared her own circulation would be polluted by mine. Well, that was the gist of it.

No, it was none of these types of places. It was more a bivouac. A billet, maybe; a makeshift abode; essentially temporary, as if Gretchen had managed to erect it herself, with her own feminine hands. A venue … for what?

The catch of the century.

The phrase echoed and re-echoed. I wondered where I’d heard it before. A catchphrase to end all catchphrases.

The planks inside were pasted all over with scenes from famous cricket matches. Grace and Bedser. May and Edrich. Trueman and Compton. Even a modern, rather avant-garde daub depicting Ian Botham. There were stumps planted in the ground in threesomes; an obstacle course, as Gretchen and I staggered towards two wicker chairs. A weird, dream-like arc of light that seemed to emerge from one posters depiction of a bowlers arm was directed straight at the kitchen table, where squatted several red pods that reminded me of cricket balls. I sat down, placing my baseball cap on the table. On the front, The Marylebone Cricket Club logo, the letters MCC combined in the middle. It seemed that Gretchen knew of my little passion. Had I been blessed with a normal childhood, this room might well have resembled my old bedroom.

But life hadn’t been normal since the day I was born, and although things had been good (once), I now recalled how my father had fallen into decline after losing his job at the docks; the struggle to get by, the bad times as his addiction to alcohol got increasingly out of hand.

Then Gretchen ran away from home. Three days of worry before she was found sleeping rough on the streets of London. When they brought her home, dad took the belt to her. I now know that this was neither the beginning, nor the end of her abuse.

Then came the dreadful day we returned home from school to find the police cars outside our house. Father, it seemed, had attacked our mother while in the grip of delirium tremens. It was the end of a family.

Blood-rot. A father’s blood rotten through alcohol, a son’s blood rotten through disease.

My father’s death had been a squalid affair. A shambling drunk walking the streets, he’d punched out the window of an off-licence to get another drink. I almost hope he enjoyed that malt more than anything else in life, for when he punched out that window he’d been too drunk to notice (or too drunk to care) that he’d cut his arm open. Bleeding to death in a drunken stupor had been a fitting end.

I was overcome with an almost unbearable melancholy as I thought of our mother; existing rather than living out her last days in a ‘home’, her mind and spirit broken. If disaffected blood spreads its poison like this …

But that line of thought will help no-one. My wife, Alice, can stay with her mother; my colleagues at work can go fuck themselves! My father may have brought the rot into his blood, but I didn’t.

“Why are you standing at the door, Alice? Come closer; touch me, even. It’s leukaemia, you’re not going to catch it off me.”

But it’s like the pictures you see on television of third-world countries; too much suffering and you just look away from the sufferers. It’s so easy just to look away, pretend it’s not happening.

“But Alice, dear, this is happening, and it’s happening to your hubby.”

Gretchen places a hand over mine. Wringing my hands in agitation, I must learn to control my body language.

“Just wool-gathering,” I grinned.

“No, Mike, you were facing up to the past. It’s the only way. If you’re going to put things right, you have to accept that they went wrong in the first place.”

“Ho, they went wrong, Sis; did they ever!”

The point hardly seemed worth mentioning. It was a fact, one I could hardly escape from.

“Gretchen,” I said, “You’re telling someone who looks like Marley’s Ghost that life is a bitch!”

She pulled something wrapped in a napkin out of her pocket. Shaking it open, she revealed the uneaten sticky bun.

“In all our lives,” she said, “we’ve never shared anything – except our parents, of course, but that was hardly a matter of choice.” She broke the bun in two, offering one half to me. “Lets eat this bun.”

And I took it, biting into the sticky texture. The taste wasn’t unpleasant; at least I could hold it down.

So there we were, acting out a disconcertingly normal scene; a room, a brother and sister eating a sticky bun; you’d think that normality had been the norm.

The bun eaten, Gretchen stood, picking two of the red pods off the table. Without being told, I did the same. They had a soft texture, like wax.

“The balls in your court, Sis; after all, you made the catch of the century.”

For the life of me, I couldn’t think why I said that … yet it seemed so true. Indeed, why does anybody ever say anything – because they think it’s appropriate in the circumstances. I had, it was true, been wool gathering. Enough time to count sheep when you’re dead, I say; so, because it seemed that both of us had exhausted the conversation of any further direction, I sank my teeth into the red pod. For the life of me I couldn’t think why I did that … yet it seemed so right.

We’d sorted out life, hadn’t we? Chewed over the communal fat. Given body to the bodiless. Fleshed out some skeletons. Given provenance to some ghosts. Ghosts can’t get the blood-rot, can they? Not part of their territory. But, after all, I started this as a ghost story, so why not give us the ghosts we could toy with and shudder at? Give us the Kirlian aura and we’d sure bowl a googly straight back! Nothing could make us take our eye off the ball. What better than two closely related people – who, nevertheless, didn’t know each other very well, despite the common antecedence of their souls – for loosening the knots of fate?

My line of thought unravelled amid the sound of clacking needles in the bivouac.

“What’s that?” whispered Gretchen, unpicking the noise with a knitted frown.

“It sounds like Grandma knitting a cardigan. Do you remember her? Nobody could get anything over her.”

I laughed, then almost cried. Those had been happier days, when matriarchs were all the fashion. She’d held us together for, it seemed, an eternity, until even she couldn’t patch up our parents marriage. She was the one with the treat, like a sticky bun or a bag of pear drops.

I then recalled gripping the steering wheel. A sticky bun I’d hated because it was one that my Grandma had once given me; no wonder it was uneatable. Elapsed time. Enya. Memories were both distant and immediate. Dad had taken me to my first cricket match. Before his malt blood fizzled over the edge. Before he hit our mum with a hard red fist. Before he went to that fairisle jump-off place called death …

There were many men in cloth caps watching the match, none of them jobseekers. There was no such thing then. Either you were in work or you were not. No fancy titles. But there seemed something that lifted you out of one’s own class with cricket. Soccer was too down to earth. Not hands-on. More a boot in the face that the city centres later became full of. Cricket was thoughtful, laid-back, civilized. I recalled Sandy McBain, without actually knowing what part he played in my life. Jan Rodzenko. Who was he? Someone who wrote this and later translated it into several other languages for others to wonder why he’d bothered in the first place?

As I picked the red spaghetti from my teeth, I knew the blood-rot had at last come to the surface, spewed up from the deepest seat of sorrow, an exploding pod of remorse and regret. I knew this was the stickiest wicket of all, a full toss batted high with nobody underneath to catch it. Being dead, but not being able to properly die.

“I’m a ghost after all, Sis,” I said.

“No, Mike, we all are,” she said, kissing the arc of air I’d just become.

Totally disorientated, I found myself completely in God’s care. As a swirling mist enveloped us, I realised that I was putting my trust in someone that I really didn’t know at all.

Before long the enshrouding mist thickened, nothing existed beyond the confines of my own body. I called Gretchen’s name and reached out, but no comforting sisterly hand awaited me. I pressed forward, for any direction would do.

Weakness stole over me, I became drenched in sweat. But then I looked down and saw that I was bleeding profusely, the thick red substance leaking as though from a thousand wounds; stomach, chest, arms and legs. I fell to my knees; all that poisoned blood pooling around me, skin becoming withered, desiccated, like a calf that had been dead for a week. In no time at all I was drained, falling forward, hands before me, forehead to the ground as though kow-towing to some mighty emperor, every last fluid ounce of that dark, life-giving substance sinking into the ground as though absorbed by a giant sponge.

“For God’s sake, I’m dead! Why do I have to die again?”

In a moment of revelation I see myself in a hospital bed.

NOT EXPECTED TO LIVE

I’m in a coma, the music of Enya playing softly in the background.

Standing by the (death) bed, my wife and Gretchen comfort each other as the doctor switches off the life-support machine. On a screen, a long, continuous white line signals the end of my life.

Do I see this as it’s happening?

But then I see myself five years ago; at the church, proud as my bride-to-be walks down the aisle in white. I find it unbearably painful to watch.

I remember,

knitting needles –

A convalescence home (where people never do!) –

An ill-attended funeral for my father –

A night on the tiles to celebrate my twenty-first birthday (Just as well I

enjoyed it, I was only going to get another five!) –

My life over.

Then a soft hand slides into mine.

“Michael.”

The voice could not be more familiar, or more comforting. I look up, into my mother’s eyes.

“Come, Michael.”

She leads me forward.

To show me Heaven?

But what she leads me to is a vision of Hell, a scene of the crucifixion. A corpse, stretched out on a cross – green, putrid; but unmistakably alive, or at least animated. And blood, which should have dried up, is still coursing through the veins. Horribly fascinated, I step forward.

“Father.”

So bad people are made to suffer for their sins.

My mother slashes his wrist with a talon-like fingernail; the blood begins to flow.

“Drink,” she says, and I clamp my mouth around the putrid flesh, drinking deeply of my father’s blood.

And as the blood courses into my body and fills my veins, I begin to experience a final vision.

*

In the living room of a suburban home, a mother is changing a baby’s nappy. In one corner of the room, a young girl is watching a soap opera. In another, a man is drinking whisky straight from the bottle.

“He came at a bad time,” my father says of me.

“It couldn’t be helped,” my mother responds, but my father mumbles on. An enforced three-day week is causing hardship, the money’s short. “The kid’s timing was lousy.”

One hour later and the bottle is nearly empty – and my father is very drunk … drunk enough to stagger over to the baby, pick it up and throw it across the room. The baby rises like a perfectly struck cricket ball. Mother screams but Gretchen jumps out of her seat, arms out before her

(The catch of the century!)

and grabs the baby with a simple skip, pulling him to her chest , and safety.

And now my father’s blood is replacing my own, filling my veins, feeding me. No longer does my body look wasted, or ravaged; no longer is my complexion pallid. When there is no more blood I stand back, strong, and as healthy as I’d been in the days before the blood-rot set in. And my father, now drained, begins to crumble and fold, like a badly made papier-mâché doll being crushed in an invisible fist, sinking into the mist, sinking from sight with a crackling sound like dying embers. His salvation is a long way off.

*

I stood there for some time, alone. Maybe we’d all meet again one day, who could tell?

Up ahead is a faint light, so I set off in its direction, finally letting go of my hold on life.

Somehow, I knew that I’d see them again … even disaffected blood runs true.


Published ‘Unhinged’ 2000