Chapter Forty-Three
Forty-three
Another week passed.
‘He is not himself,’ Alison said.
‘No,’ I replied.
‘I have trouble sleeping. And I have trouble waking,’ Hugo said. ‘How can they both be true?’
‘What do you think about, before you sleep?’
‘I try to think of you. But I always think of him.’
‘We need him back,’ said Alison. ‘I can’t afford a doctor who needs babysitting.’
I took his hand and placed his fingers on the pulse in my neck.
‘Close your eyes,’ I said. ‘Count the beats.’
I had not felt his touch in the weeks since we’d laid out the boy and for a moment I didn’t know if I was doing this for him or for me. Bodies are selfish, he’d said and I knew that to be true. I held his hand in place.
‘Are you counting?’ I said.
He nodded, his eyes still shut, and I watched his face.
His lips moved in that childish way of children counting in their head.
The hair I’d cut had long grown out and curls hung down.
I wanted to push them back. There were deep lines across his forehead and at the edges of his mouth.
His mouth, with his full lips still counting; they were dry and cracked and I wanted to cover them with mine.
It had been two years since I’d first seen him and he was the same, but changed.
He was no longer sure of who he was, what he believed.
Alison came into the storeroom and I looked at her over Hugo’s shoulder. I didn’t move and he didn’t stop counting. She stayed for a moment, then left. Needs must, I imagined her thinking.
‘We are here for the living, Hugo, not the dead.’
He stopped counting and opened his eyes. I released his hand, but he kept it against my neck. He nodded, slow and slight, as if he understood. As if he agreed.
I lay in my cot and put my fingers against my throat.
The pulse was steady and strong. I reached for the feeling of Hugo’s hand, the heat and pressure.
We are here for the living, I’d said, but did it help?
Even now I don’t know how to use words to describe that time properly, or how it made me feel or what it made me do.
I slept that night, buried beneath flaccid limbs detached from their bodies, pale and slack.
I woke, gasping. I grabbed at myself. I dug my fingers into the flesh of my thighs, my hips, my waist. I wrapped one hand around the opposite wrist and squeezed so tight that my fingers curled.
I kneaded each forearm in turn and let thumbs slide over bone and tendon.
I dug them into the tender place below my armpits.
Then one hand was on my throat feeling for a pulse.
It was steady and strong but it did not help.
I squeezed a little, then a little more.
My pulse became urgent, there was a restriction of air.
I felt a pressure building behind my eyes and wondered if it would be possible to continue.
Then my other hand reached up, took hold, began to pull and for a moment my two hands were in disagreement – one holding tight around my throat, the other trying to release it.
I lay there, nerve endings tingling. I did an inventory and could feel it all. But it was not enough, not nearly enough.