THEY WERE SITTING at a table in the window, looking down at the river, drinking slowly, not speaking much; just waiting. Hoping for something to happen, waiting for the momentum to kick in and move them.
The bar — The Mill on the River — was new, with shiny tables and chairs and up-market clientele stopping off for a few drinks or a spot of lunch after viewing the paintings in the Baltic galleries. The bar (it was a
Brendan wasn’t comfortable in places like this. He felt more at home in dingy drinking dens on impoverished estates, sharing space with drunken old men, youngsters already on their way down the slippery slope of drink- dependency, and broken-down single mothers looking for a brief window out of the hole they’d made for themselves. People in nice suits bothered him. He felt uneasy around them, as if he were an interloper and they knew it.
He sat opposite Simon sipping his pint — an expensive round; almost a tenner for two beers — and staring over his friend’s shoulder. The river was the same one he’d known all his life, but from this angle it looked different. The colour was lighter, the slight waves less threatening, the current moving at a slower pace that might not tug you under if you fell in. The river he knew and loved — and sometimes hated — would pull you down and kill you within seconds.
“Just relax,” said Simon. His face looked somehow loose on his skull, as if the last few days had tired him beyond anything he’d ever expected. Brendan knew the feeling. It wasn’t just Harry’s episode, the trip to the hospital and the night without sleep; there was a lot more going on than that. Like the river, his life had developed a weird current, and he was being dragged along by forces he would not have dreamed of months before. Even his own body was rebelling, taking on a life of its own. The skin of his back was trying to tear away from his frame, seeking a freedom that during darker moments he suspected might benefit him.
When he’d returned from the hospital in the early hours of the morning, he’d made sure his family were asleep and then gone into the bathroom. Stripping off his clothes, he’d been presented with a hideous sight: the flesh from the nape of his neck down to the base of his spine, just above his backside, was infected again. The skin had torn and split; viscous yellow fluid was slathered all over him. He was polluted; his body could no longer accept what was being done, the badness that he had held inside him for so long. His system was rejecting the filth; or was the filth simply coming out to play?
“I need to go to the bathroom.” He slid his pint glass across the table and staggered across the room, following the signs to the gents. As he pushed through the door he bumped into a man coming the other way, and snarled. The man — who was talking loudly into a mobile phone — stumbled aside, letting Brendan pass, and there was such a look of pity in his eyes that Brendan wanted to smash the guy’s face in.
He walked along a narrow hallway, bouncing off the walls, and came to the toilets. He pushed open the door to the gents and leaned against it, breathing heavily. His back felt soft, yielding more than it should against the wooden door, but there was no pain.
“Oh, fuck…” He looked around the small room. There was nobody else in there. He kicked open the four cubicle doors, but they were also empty. Then he grabbed a tall litter bin from the corner and pushed it over onto its side on the floor at the base of the door. Dirty paper towels spilled from the bin. It was a flimsy barricade, but at least it would warn him if someone was coming. He would have time to duck inside a cubicle and out of the way.
Brendan approached the wall-length mirror set above the row of stainless steel sinks. The sinks were pristine. In fact, the entire room was spotless — no piss on the floor tiles, no shit stains on the back of the cubicle doors, no graffiti scrawled on the walls.
He stared at himself in the mirror. His eyes were sunken, as if his skull was swallowing them, and his cheeks were dark, hollow. His hair had never looked so thin; he could see patches of pink scalp beneath the greasy filaments. He ran the cold tap and ducked his head to the sink, scooped cold water onto his brow. It did no good; he could not cool down. Something was boiling inside him, and it wasn’t anger or resentment, not any more. It was pollution. He was polluted by whatever had happened to the three of them, tainted by the influence of that weekend.
He leaned forward, his hands gripping the sides of the sink, and stared into his own dead eyes. Red-rimmed, yellow at the edges, as shallow as glass. He looked wasted, defeated; the fight was already done, and they had lost.
His back crawled.
“Leave me alone…”
He thought of goat eyes and hummingbird wings.
As if in answer to his plea, a clicking sound started up behind him, inside one of the cubicles. It was soft at first, like someone snapping their fingers to low music, but as he turned to face the sound it intensified, growing stronger and faster.
Brendan walked slowly across the room, his feet whispering on the floor tiles. When he reached the open cubicle door he halted, listening. The sound was emanating from the toilet bowl. He took another step forward, so that he was standing over the bowl, as if preparing to unzip his pants and take a leak. The clicking sound continued. Brendan went down on his knees, grasping the sides of the porcelain bowl, and stared down into the clean, still water. Only his reflection stared back up at him, but it looked thin, ghostly: the face of a man who was haunting himself.
He pulled back from the image, a gag reflex causing his own throat to echo the sounds coming from the bowl. He fell backwards, onto his arse, and pushed with his feet against the bottom of the bowl. Sliding backwards across the tiles, he closed his eyes and wished that all of this would just stop, that everything would go away and leave him alone.
The clicking sound ceased.
Slowly, Brendan got to his feet and returned to his spot before the mirror. Scrawled across the glass in what looked like grease — perhaps oil and sweat wiped off human skin — was a word he’d never encountered before:
Brendan peered at the strange word, unsure of what it meant. Was it a name, a place, a person? What the fuck did it mean?
The word faded, as if drawn in mist. He reached out and rubbed the mirror clean, and saw a fleeting, jerky movement behind him. He spun around, but of course there was nothing there. He was spooked, seeing things. He could no longer trust even his own senses. Sight, sound, smell, touch… liars, all of them. He doubted now that he had even seen the word written on the glass.
He took off his jacket and laid it on the next sink along, draping the collar over the taps so that it wouldn’t fall onto the floor. Then, without looking down, he began to unbutton his shirt. He did it slowly, methodically, not wanting to rush. Still there was no pain; no feeling at all. His entire back was numb, as if the nerves had been stripped away, the meat cleaved off the bone.
He placed his shirt on top of his jacket.
Even facing forward, looking at himself in the mirror, he could see the red blotches as they crept around his sides beneath his arms, caressing his small love handles. He turned to the left, looking at his right side, and the first of the boils came into view. Whatever had entered him — possessed him? — that night, when the acorn had disgorged its occupant, had done this to him. It had crawled inside him, letting out the twenty-year-old pollution but also bringing its own toxins, mingling them, stirring them up.
He turned the rest of the way around, craning his neck so that he could keep an eye on the damage in the mirror. Last night he had noticed the suggestion of something within the mass of ruptured tissue, something with eyes. Today that formation was clearer, the picture taking shape.
A rudimentary face was forming out of the chaos across his back, the marks and striations, the ruined flesh. A face that was at once familiar: features that somehow resembled his own.
The face sat between his shoulder blades, its eyelids level with the centre of his back. Its nose stuck out of the skin, the nostrils perfectly formed, and he could even make out the bone structure he’d stared at every morning in the mirror, the cheeks he’d spent years shaving every other day, the lips with which he had kissed his wife and