Эндрю Миллер - Oxygen

He switched on a table light, pulled up his shirt and examined his chest in one of the room’s several mirrors. He could not decide whether his mysterious ‘complaint’ was marginally better or slightly worse, though there was no particular discomfort now, nothing that required him to take a painkiller with his aperitif. All the same, he thought of shadows on the lungs, of emphysema, of gross impediments in the branching of his airways. When he got back to Paris he would see someone about getting an X-ray, and he sat on the end of the bed, recalling the names of all the doctors he knew.

The night of the visit to Granny Wilcox’s house, Alec was woken by a noise he could not at first identify. He lay in bed, staring up through the not-quite-dark of the air, listening, but hearing only his heart, his breath, his brother’s breath, and the faint mechanical basso of the water pumping station behind the Joys’ house. Yet whatever it was that had woken him, it had thrust him out of sleep, startled him, so that he knew at some level he had been listening for it all night – for many nights perhaps – monitoring the audible world for a sound that could not be innocently explained.

He sat up and lifted a corner of the curtain. The storm that had broken over their heads on the drive home (striking the windscreen with waves of stone-coloured rain) had passed, leaving in its wake a coolness of clear, moonless air. It felt late – three, four a.m. – but the alarm clock on the table with its luminous hands was turned away from him towards the camp-bed.

‘Larry?’

‘Yeah,’ said Larry, ‘I thought I heard something too.’

‘What?’

‘No idea.’ Larry fumbled for the rocker switch on the cord of the bedside lamp, put the lamp on, and unzipped the sleeping bag.

‘You’re going out?’ asked Alec.

‘I need to piss.’ He yawned until his body shuddered, then pushed a hand through his hair and moved to the door. He was wearing a pair of Felix the Cat boxer shorts. ‘I may be some time,’ he said.

Alec heard him flick on the landing light. Then a pause of three, four seconds, and he was back, leaning into the room, brittle-faced. ‘Mum’, he said, and disappeared again.

Alec climbed from his bed. He felt small and powerless and utterly unprepared. He put on his glasses. There was really nowhere to hide. After a few moments he went out.

Alice was face down in the doorway of her bedroom, her nightdress caught up around her thighs, her panties in a tangle round her ankles. The backs of her legs were streaked with diarrhoea, and there were small black pools of it on the carpet. It was not hard to see what must have happened. The confusion. The floundering in the dark. A last panicky attempt not to foul herself. Had she called out to them? Was that what they had heard?

Larry was crouched beside her, his fingers feeling for the pulse at her throat. He looked up at Alec. ‘Go downstairs and call Una. Tell her what’s happened, but that it doesn’t look like she’s broken anything. And she’s not unconscious. Tell her I’m going to get her back into bed…’

‘Should she be moved?’

‘I’m not going to leave her here. Not like this.’

‘No,’ said Alec. The stink was very real. A smell of rot. A stench like the smell of the sickness itself.

‘Ask if there’s anything else we should do. Anything we should give her. And when you come up bring all the cleaning stuff you can find. OK? Go!’

Alone with her, Larry spoke in a whisper, telling her he would take care of her. He checked again for signs that she had damaged herself in the fall – he had once performed a similar procedure as Dr Barry, though on that occasion the patient had been a female lifeguard thrown from a moving limo by her jealous lover – then he stood, leaned, lifted her in the cradle of his arms, and carried her into the bedroom. Her legs were very cold. He thought: She’s going to die on me. I came too late.

He laid her on the bed, covered her feet and went into the en-suite bathroom. In the mirror he caught glimpses of himself frantically snatching towels, sponges. There was a pink plastic bowl. He put a bar of soap in it and filled it with warm water.

When he came back into the bedroom Alice was stirring, tugging feebly at her nightdress. Her breathing was much louder now, though whether that was good or not Larry had no idea. He put the oxygen bottle on the bed, opened the valve and pressed the mask over her face. It seemed to frighten her at first, as though he were trying to stifle her, but as she took in the gas she grew calmer.

‘Everything’s all right,’ he said. ‘Everything’s dandy.’

He pulled off the soiled panties and dropped them on to the floor by the bed. ‘We’ve got to clean you up,’ he said. ‘Is that OK?’

He dipped the sponge into the bowl, squeezed it out, and began to wipe her legs. He worked methodically, wiping her with the sponge and dabbing her dry with the towel. He washed between her legs, wiped the pinched red skin of her backside, cleaning her as sometimes he had cleaned Ella. He was unaware of any emotion other than an irreducible tenderness that embraced them both. He was babbling, telling her things he had told to no one. Shameful moments. Low-life moments culled from his progress through the bars and motel rooms of America. Private, frightened moments in the last third of a bottle on nights when getting drunk would not do at all. He gave her names, acts, everything he could dredge up, including the deal with T. Bone and Ranch. The garage at San Fernando. The gorilla mask. ‘And this is me,’ he said, ‘this is what I am now. The other’s all gone. I fucked up. Do you see? I fucked up and I can’t get back. I’m sorry, Mum. I’m very, very sorry.’

While he spoke he went on washing her, towelling the wasted muscles, the tissue-paper skin, the black-and-grey pubes that still seemed to grow strongly from her sex. When he thought she was clean he fetched a fresh nightdress, a good warm woollen one, from the chest of drawers. He was hurrying now. She was so cold. Her arms, thin as his wrists, had no force of their own. He had to guide them into the sleeves of the nightie, trying not to get her fingers tangled.

‘Larry?’

It was Kirsty. She was standing by the open door in the long T-shirt she had been sleeping in. He wondered how he looked to her, his face glazed with tears, dried shit on his arms. What kind of madman.

She came closer, leaning over Alice from the other side of the bed.

‘How is she?’ she whispered.

He shook his head. ‘I really don’t know.’

‘I spoke to Alec. Una’s coming first thing. We have to call her again if, you know, we get worried.’

‘Where’s Alec now?’

She touched his cheek. ‘He can’t deal with any of this. You know that.’

He nodded. A tattoo of mulberry bruises was starting to show along the length of Alice’s right forearm, but there were no marks on her head.

‘You sit with her,’ said Kirsty. ‘I’ll clean up outside.’

‘Ella?’ he asked.

‘Asleep.’

‘Good’

‘You were talking to her,’ said Kirsty. ‘To Alice.’

‘Yeah. Though I don’t suppose she could hear any of it.’

‘It’s better to think that she can.’

‘Yes.’

‘Baby? Talk to me some time. Will you do that? Talk to me some time.’

She left him and went on to the landing. ‘God, you frightened me,’ she said. Alec was kneeling on the top step of the stairs, his hands in the pink rubber gloves Mrs Samson used, a scrubbing brush in one hand, a blue J-cloth in the other. He didn’t have his glasses now and in the white light of the overhead bulb he looked about sixteen. He held up a brightly coloured plastic bottle of disinfectant spray that he had found under the sink in the kitchen and asked if she thought it was the right thing, or whether it would bleach the colour out of the carpet.