Since the accident Phil felt he had a target on his back to match the one he’d always carried on his front.
The pain in his hip and left leg came and went in waves as he waited for the drugs to start their work.
“C’mon, c’mon.” He chanted softly to himself, an atheistic prayer for some sort of relief. He dared to massage his leg gently, hoping it would speed things up.
Despite his pain, he treasured these morning moments before Deb was up and about. It was the only time he felt free of her sourness and her recriminations. He‘d always found her pitiless lack of understanding for the rest of humanity troubling - now that it was all focused on him, he often felt genuinely frightened.
He shifted uneasily in the wheelchair, setting it rolling gently back from the window before he managed to halt it. Most of the time it was as much the fear of pain than anything he suffered that determined his actions but he had always been too weak to outpace his cowardice.
This morning he was already shirted and trousered in an effort to placate her; the less she had to do for him the better they both liked it. Socking and shoeing was beyond his meagre resources, however, and so his feet would have to suffer her ministrations.
The raucous call of the gulls made him look up, peering across the lawn through the rain-misted windows. The house was three miles from the coast but at low tide a flock of the noisy scavengers would settle on the exposed mud bank of the river that flowed past the bottom of their garden.
A figure like a man stood on the lawn, its shape shifting occasionally as a beak darted out to preen a wing. But it always re-attained its shape swiftly, the birds working in concert. Sometimes the figure was close to the windows in the morning, staring in at him with piercing avian eyes. Once it opened its maw and let out a hungry scream like a dozen gulls, furious of being cheated of a meal.
He was convinced it came just to mock him and he’d often daydreamed of wheeling himself down to the river bank, some weapon in his hand, to put a stop to the tormenting cries. More satisfying still would be the chance to feel the neck of one of his avian persecutors stretch and snap in his strong hands.
“Go! Just go,” he murmured.
“Talking to youself again, Phil? I’ll have to talk to the doctor about your dosage again.” His wife’s sarcasm was cut short by the snap of her cigarette lighter as she lit her first gasper of the morning. It was the starting pistol for a verbal race that was bound to exhaust them both by the day’s end.
He stayed facing away from her, looking out at the lawn. “Mornin’.”
The word sounded more sullen than usual.
She settled down in a chair within his line of vision. “So what are your plans for today, sweetheart?” she asked, an almost visible bitterness mingling with her cigarette smoke as it rose to stain the ceiling. She found the situation almost comic and deliberately milked it for its amusement value. She often found herself thinking that if he wasn’t such a pathetic child he wouldn’t be in that wheelchair.
Noticing Phil’s hands twitch towards the rim of the wheels, she decided to get one last jab in before he took off for some obscure corner of the house in an attempt to escape her.
“Let’s put your shoes and socks on, shall we? I don’t want you to catch a cold.”
He suffered long minutes of discomfort while she helped him. He groaned in pain as she pushed his left shoe onto his foot.
“Ouch! You do that on purpose, don’t you?”
She looked up at him and shook her head seriously. She wasn’t going to allow him to paint her as his sadistic jailer - that would be too easy for him.
“I’m sorry if it hurts but there’s no other way, is there?”
“Well, it’s OK for you to say that ...”
Deb sighed heavily. She knew his self-pity would simply prolong the agony for both of them. Phil’s doctor had already said he should be trying to walk by now and her husband always put on a show of enthusiasm during his visits to the physio. Never any complaints about the pain then.
“Well, Dr Maitland has said you should be up and around on this by now,” she said, wagging his foot gently.
He winced. “Don’t!”
She glared at him in frustration. “If it hurts that much why don’t you ask the doctor for more painkillers?”
“I’m taking enough bloody tablets and stuff already. You know that!” He was too afraid of her to tell Deb about the figure that came each day to stare at him.
“Well, you can’t have it both ways, can you?”
Deb knew that something in Phil was enjoying the role of the invalid and that he wanted to spin it out for as long as possible. Perhaps he felt that by exaggerating the extent of his difficulties he was somehow warding off any criticism from friends and family, deflecting any blame for his condition away from himself. Not that anyone felt that way anyway, she thought.
Having to nurse him back to health was so galling but there was no way they could afford private nursing. Money was getting tighter. Deb had severely cut back on her workload and now her manager was beginning to apply some pressure - not much at the moment but it was bound to get worse.
It was the latest in a long series of indignities that Deb felt she’d suffered since meeting Phil. She’d quit her degree for him; every time she saw someone younger and less experienced promoted above her she was sure it was because of that one act of stupidity. She’d been on the verge of walking out on her aimless husband when the accident happened. She had no time or energy left to make up lost ground now. Every day she felt herself becoming less and less.
“Deb, can you pull this cushion free for me? It’s uncomfortable.”
She reached down and tugged at the cushion, which was stuck under his left buttock.
“Lift yourself up a bit.”
“Oow! I can’t, it hurts too much.” Outside the gulls cawed a chorus of derision.
Deb grunted with the effort. Finally she gave up.
“It’s stuck - if you just lifted yourself up a bit I could get it,” she told him.
“But I can’t!”
“Well, you’ve got to try!” She turned away in frustration, staring out at the rain-puddled lawn and balling her fists hard into her jeans pockets as if trying to pull the stitching free.
******
Deb thought that Phil had come by his injuries in one of the stupidest ways known to man.
They’d driven to the abandoned resort’s cafe along the beach in the 4X4 at low tide. Since the council refused to repair the road destroyed by the cliff fall three years ago it had been the only way to reach the place by car. Though quite why Phil had wanted to reach it was a mystery to her. She had just gone along for the ride.
Deb remembered going there with her dad when she was a kid. It was ancient even then.
After parking they trudged across the sand, woven in ridges like an elaborate model of a famous desert plucked straight from a television documentary.
Phil paused at a bench, nearly doubled over with laughter. Someone had chalked on the back of it the word ‘sit’ flanked by two arrows which pointed down to the seat.
“Subtitles for the hard-of-thinking,” wheezed Phil through his laughter. Deb barely cracked a smile.
He started kicking his way through the debris until he’d made his way around the back of the cafe. The sand had already invaded much of the flat concrete parking lot.
She trotted over and followed his gaze at his wild exclamations of delight.
There, its elaborate ornamentation half buried in a sizeable drift of sand, was an old jukebox. Intact.
“It’s still got all its records. Looks really old, too,” he said, clearly intending to liberate it before it became completely entombed.
She protested when he went back to get a spade from the 4X4. He clearly hadn’t thought about how to get such a heavy object across the beach and up onto the road.
When he returned he began digging furiously.
Bored within minutes, Deb announced: “I’m off to get some ice creams. I presume you want one?”
Peeved at her ignored comment and with no intention of repeating it, she set off up the slope to the road that led to the village.
If she’d known then what pain and anguish it would cause them she would have stayed and put herself physically between him and his childish enthusiasm.
As with most things, Phil was no expert at moving large quantities of sand and he soon grew tired.
He slumped onto the sand in the large pit he’d excavated in front of the machine, intending to catch his breath before his next assault.
When the modern antique toppled onto him, he heard a wet crunching as his pelvis and leg succumbed to the almost unbelievable weight of the device.
He screamed in anger and pain until his throat burned dry and his lungs felt like they were bleeding. Across the sands a knot of gulls had stood, staring at him coldly, before shrieking with delight as they fled into the air.
Even once Deb returned, tossing the quickly forgotten ice creams to their sandy doom, it took the ambulance another two hours to reach him. Thankfully the tide was still out. He was unconscious by then, conquered by the pain and frustration.
Months, the doctors had said, before he’d be able to walk again - if at all.
She’d known then that things could not go on in their haphazard, accepting way.
******
Phil knew somewhere inside him that his love of finding odd objects and strange treasures in unexplored corners had driven him into one of the darkest corners of his life. Deb had found his treasure-seeking tendencies endearing when they first met. It had taken them to some strange places and they had met some real oddballs. It had started to pale when it began to take over their house and eat away their money.
Phil’s ‘collector’s eye’ meant that she was forced to live in a Surrealist’s toy box.
After a frosty dinner Deb decided she was too tired for their usual mid-evening duel of insults.
“I’m going upstairs to phone my sister,” she announced.
“Uuuuh, before you do that, I need to use the loo.”
Deb sighed inwardly. This was one of Phil’s typically manipulative tricks.
“Surely you can manage to get there on your own?”
“You know how difficult it is to get out of the chair,” he protested.
“Look, the doctor said you’ve got to start trying to do things on your own. Now would be a good time to start. After all, what if I wasn’t here? What would you do, mess yourself?”
He looked at her with a hurt expression. She couldn’t tell if he was acting; she suspected he was but didn’t want to take the chance. After all, it was her that’d have to clean up the mess.
“Allright. Allright.”
Standing behind the chair, she began to wheel him slowly towards the door.
“I’m sorry about all this, Deb,” he began.
I can’t stand much more of his self-pity, thought Deb. Not down this well-trodden path again - please, God, let him shut up!
“I know I must be a burden and all that now that I can’t do much for myself. Sometimes I think you’d be better off without me. Just stick me in a wooden box and forget all ... “
That phrase again!
“Oh, for Christ’s sake will you just shut up, you infuriating little sod!” Deb’s fingers curled more tightly, vindictively, around the handles of his wheelchair and she shoved hard.
Phil rolled forward, his knees banging into the bookshelves near the window. He yelled in pain as his left leg seemed to burst into flame. He wanted to curse her, call her obscene names but when he opened his mouth the pain had taken his will and the tears reduced his world to two blurred points of light.
The noise cut through Deb, tightening her already knotted nerves and she ran from the room, swinging the door hard behind her.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up! Just fucking shut up!”
Outside, as the cold eye of the moon rose above the trees, the delight of the man made from birds rose to an ecstasy of competing cries as he literally flew apart. Where he had stood, a raucous knot of gulls had the last word as they rose into the air, wheeling out to sea.
DINO BUZZATI - Restless Nights
ARTHUR MACHEN - The Hill of Dreams
FERNANDO PESSOA - The Book of Disquiet
ANGELA CARTER - The Bloody Chamber
J G BALLARD - The Terminal Beach
RHYS DAVIES - A Human Condition
BLAISE CENDRARS - Moravagine
