Bed by David Whitehouse

Author:David Whitehouse [Whitehouse, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781451614220
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2010-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

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.

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