Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

As a child I had waited in the dream room, deaf to sentences of consolation or attempts to distract me from the realisation that my parents had left me alone. I deflected it all, I let it pass by. I knew the truth. Once was enough. I wouldn’t risk so much again to the chance of betrayal.

Then Joanne, smiling across the isolation, weakening me, vulnerable herself, had unfolded with hardly a move of my hand. She stayed with me. At first nothing involved us with each other beyond the skin-deep, the pleasure of sensations. Or that was what I wanted to believe, then; because I was still unsure about the distance between independence and loneliness. One sounded so brave and decisive, the other so pathetic and helpless, that I’d always imagined they must be separated by an immense space and time. When we started to depend on each other in small ways, hardly noticing it, I began to realise the closeness of the two. They could be only minutes or inches apart. One morning as we were lying in bed in the Parnell flat, I had woken early and stretched out my hand to draw aside a strand of hair which had fallen across her face in sleep. An expression like a smile had formed on her features for a moment, half-conscious. And I had moved the tips of my fingers down her face very gently and traced them down her throat and over her shoulder, and at that moment, with the waves of early light breaking through the curtains onto the walls of the room, I realised with a distinct and separate surprise that there were reserves of emotions somewhere inside me which I hadn’t suspected. There was no reason for their existence. If evolution and adaptation counted for anything in individuals, then expressions of tenderness, if that was what this gesture involved, should have been extinct.

If she’d gone away, after those first few weeks, I could still have coped with that and made my own sense of it and not been changed. Of course I would not have found it easy; but it would have fitted into the view of the world, the ideas about people, which I already held.

But she stayed. In secret I was amazed. Even more, when we invaded each other deeper, discovering more needs than a few millimetres of skin; that marked the start of waking to a new set of chances for my life. If I concealed from her how much I needed that chance, it was only because I was afraid of trusting so much to someone whose judgement I suspected, someone I didn’t fully understand. Our dependence on each other even made me think, suddenly, that perhaps she might be very like me. I pushed the idea aside. It was absurd; frightening. Anyhow, it could not survive in a time when I was happy. I held very close to that happiness and gave most of myself to what was not understandable.

So without my conscious awareness of how it was happening, the bitterness in me had retreated and faded. Yet my mind would run ahead at times in half-panic like a recluse in a remote home might rush to empty rooms, make them look used, open the blinds, check on what the light might show, then turn a casual face to the unexpected. The danger was alive.

Finally in spite of myself, I did trust too much, I ran risks, I got kicked for it. Self-pity? Why not? Who the hell else is there?

The image in the mirror dissolved to a blur as the eyes blinked liquid. Useless; a spill of saltwater down a face. But not selfish. The point of deception was gone now.

Steel oil from the gun barrel soured the inside of my mouth. Lifting the torch I walked slowly to the bathroom. The light picked out the dull cool of chrome and porcelain. Another mirror gave back the face with the silver trails on its paleness. I turned a tap and ran some water into a glass. The pressure was weak. The taste, in a quick rinse and spit, was musty. I threw water on my face and pushed a towel across it. Behind me in the mirror I could see the outline of the white bath.

In the nightmares I see it like that. There is the wet hand of a child holding the edge of the bath, tightly, then weakening. The hand lets go and the arm and hand slip back into the water and sink beneath the reflections of the fluorescent light. Beneath the clear water the eyes are still open. They collect images the brain never receives.

I shoved the towel over my face and pressed it against me, groped for the torch and stumbled out of the bathroom, closing the door securely.

‘He wanted to drown,’ Joanne had said; ‘I know he did.’ And she had looked straight at me. ‘It frightened me.’ When I shrugged as if I didn’t really believe her, she flared up; ‘Yes, I know what you think.’

‘Go on. What?’

‘I’m inventing it.’

She was right. I thought she was finding reasons for having Peter committed to an institution. She couldn’t cope. Of course she presented it as a humane answer. They would look after him properly there. He would be in the care of specialists.

‘Don’t be silly,’ I said.

‘Tomorrow night, you give him his bath.’

Peter was eight. A special nurse came several times a week to supervise him. This was to take some of the burden from Joanne. There had been no suggestion that Peter might be a danger to himself or to anyone else. I had noticed, though, a slight change. His invisible world seemed to be failing him in some way. He had begun to push it away, turning from whatever images were there for him in the empty parts of rooms, literally pushing back the air with an odd tightness set on his face, frowning and thin-lipped. I had only seen this once or twice. And once or twice, also, I’d seen him shake his head at nothing as if making a decisive denial, an absolute no to some unimaginable problem or object.

I gave him his bath, talking to him sensibly as if he could understand what I was saying, a technique one of the psychiatrists had suggested. I had hoped that sooner or later at least some of my words or even the tone of my voice might awaken just the slightest response in him. That evening he’d gone from hyperactive to passive and withdrawn. The bathing went without incident. Joanne was watching television.

Earlier he had refused to eat. I thought he might now be hungry. When I had got him into his pyjamas and dressing gown I led him into the kitchen and hauled him up onto a chair by the table. He sat with one arm rigidly extended across the table and the other loosely by his side, his head turned sideways and eyes staring at the blank wall. I opened a can of mandarin orange slices and spooned some into his plastic dish. It would have been wildly optimistic to have said that my son liked mandarin orange slices; all I knew after eight years was that often it was easier to feed him these than most other things. So I placed the dish in front of him and held the spoon up with two slices of orange on it, and spoke his name, tugging gently at his extended arm. Sometimes he would take the spoon; sometimes he had to be fed.

Now a terrible, horrifying thing happened. He turned his head and looked down at his arm. I took my hand away. His eyes flickered over the orange slices and back to his arm. The arm, still rigid, lifted, stopped, banged down on the table, lifted, banged down again, and again. He looked at it with a detached curiosity. Then he frowned, and a determined fierceness went across his face for a moment. His arm stopped banging and rested tense on the tabletop. He seemed to concentrate on it. My hand, holding the spoon, trembled. His arm relaxed and lay soft on the table, fingers uncurling. Then it moved towards the dish and stopped. It went no further. The determined look faded from his face. In a sudden movement he jerked his head back and stared straight at me. It was a gaze focused for the first time directly on my eyes, totally conscious and aware, only achieved with enormous effort. The message was unmistakeable, of immense pathos; it sprang from some trapped and defeated source of will inside him which said in effect, I don’t know why my arm behaves like that, I don’t know why I am like this, there’s nothing I can do about it, I hate it. And his eyes brimmed and there was a sudden run of tears down the sides of his cheeks before his head wrenched itself in another direction and ignored the world again as though nothing had happened.