Song Of Time (8 page)

“You nearly drowned. But before that?”

He frowns again.

“Are you hungry? Thirsty? Do you need the…?” My eyes, and his, can’t help but travel down.

“Not hungry, no. Not…”

“Good. Well, I…” What else is there to say? He still seems scarcely here. I’ve had similar conversations with my son Edward when he used to sleepwalk. Then or later, nothing made any sense. “We’ll have to get you fixed and dressed. Do you think you could stand up? Could you make it upstairs with me?”

I hold out a hand. With the towel still bunched in one of his hands, he takes mine with the other. He’s so warm and strong and heavy. And so
tall
: he just keeps on going up as he rises. How on earth did I ever get him here from the shore?

“It’s this way.” Lights fan on in the hall. I hear Morryn’s surprised creaks as he follows me upstairs. “Watch that low beam. Turn right here. It’s through this door. If you’ll just…”

I sit him down on a stool in the bright bathroom, then consult the faded mysteries of my medicine cabinet.

“That music…” he murmurs with his hands primly folded across the towel he still clutches on his lap.

“Do you know,” I ask casually as I push aside yellowed bandages, “what it was?”

“Debussy. Some of the
Preludes
.”

I stare back at him. “You know that?”

“I don’t know why.” His eyes are blue-grey, innocently clear. “It’s just…” He blinks slowly, then swallows, as the mirrored front of the old cabinet squeaks back towards him. This, I realise, is the first chance he’s had to see his own face. “Shouldn’t I?”

“It’s not so common, these days, to have a ready knowledge of classical music.”

“But you do.”

“I’m a musician. Now…” Slowly, lightly, deliberately, so that he can see exactly what I’m doing, I touch the digs and abrasions on his wrist, then a deeper gouge which lies amid the golden hairs on his forearm. Like two flowers, his hands unbunch. “Do you know how any of this happened?”

“The rocks? The sea?” It’s a hopeful stab; neither of us believes it.

“Well—whatever it was, we’ll need to fix it.” I find an antiseptic spray in the back of the cabinet, then some strips of micropore, and an anti-biotic patch, a pack of artificial skin. “You’ll just have to sit still and bear with me. If you want me to stop, if it starts to hurt, just say. Is that okay?”

He doesn’t reply but, by the broad slouch of his body, he submits.

Beginning with the surfaces of his back, I dab and spray, dab and spray. There’s so
much
of him. The notches of his spine, the breadth of his shoulders, are architectural in their span and grace. These small marks are immaterial to his beauty, although they lack the randomness which I might have associated with being buffeted by the sea. The way the ones across his back line up, a clustered series of four or five long, diagonal strips, I can’t help thinking of the fall of a whip. But they’re not damaging, nor deep. More consistent with playful cajoling or goading than outright torture. But why? Adam lets out a deeper breath. The muscles within his shoulders slide within the golden skin.

“It’s nothing serious. If you’ll just be patient…”

Dab and spray. My thin fingers do a spider dance. Closer to the buttocks now. There’s bruising down there as well, but I decide not to go too far. His flesh is much warmer than mine. He’s so much more
alive
. This process, the smell and the sensation, take me back to times when Maria, or more likely it was Edward, sat on this same stool, knees or shins or elbows brightly bleeding whilst I attended to them with what was probably this same spray.

I move up to the tops of his shoulders and wipe away a trail of dried weed. He barely moves, his breathing is easy, his eyelashes rise and fall as he blinks, although I’m conscious that my lips are intimately close to the side of his face.

“You’ll have to hold still…” I’m a sculptor, shaping a bust—no, a whole body. I’m Michelangelo. Once again, he’s David.

“Would it be better,” he asks, “if I stood up?”

“No, no. Sitting is fine.”

I move to his feet, his calves, his grazed and battered knees. “It’s a bit worse here. Are you sure this isn’t hurting?”

“Yes.”

So I work on, although he’s like no man I’ve ever encountered in putting up with all of this without the usual dramas and fake modesties. As I approach mid-thigh, and with that clenched towel already agape between his muscled thighs, he simply lifts it away. I suppose modesty must seem irrelevant when you don’t even know who or what you are— but at least he’s okay down there. Still, this whole male terrain seems both eerie and familiar as I dab at the lesser marks on his lower belly and ignore the dimpled stare of his navel. We never really get used to the sight of the opposite sex, although they’re not so very different from us. Men also have their pectorals, their nipples. Their throats are thicker, but they share a womanly vulnerability and grace. We’re all works of art, or at least we should be…

“Can you move your arms a little?”

I catch the soft musk of his scent as he raises them. But I’m almost done now. And what better way, Roushana, I can’t help musing, to spend a little of your last corporeal time on this earth, than in doing something like this? The sheer physicality of his flesh, the things the mullahs and mystics either wallow in or claim to detest, is overwhelming. It’s simply here, like a painting or a symphony…

As I move around to his left side, I notice that something just beneath his ribs that I’d previously imagined was mostly a bruise or a stain of seaweed is in fact a larger cut.

“Is it alright…?” He breathes down at me as I stoop towards it.

“Fine. I’ll just…” My belly drops as he moves himself slightly and the rent in his side opens a pale mouth. “If you can hold still…”

At least the wound appears clean, but it’s so large that I can’t really bring myself to look fully into it. Amazing, that some vital aspect of artery or connective tissue hasn’t been severed…I grope for the packet of artificial flesh in the far back of the cabinet and knead and work a Satsuma-sized lump until it’s soft and warm. My fingers tingle and cringe as I mould it into the cut, but he doesn’t flinch.

“There.” Much as a builder might cover up some hopeless brickwork, I spray a patch of waterproof covering over my bodged job. I really should get him to a clinic. There’ll probably be scar tissue. What I’ve done is nothing like enough. A little dizzy, I straighten up. “We’re finished.”

“Thanks.”The towel drops entirely as he stands.

“Didn’t any of that
hurt
? I thought you were being brave.”

“No.” Another half shrug, which looks, with him standing there so beautifully naked, like the archetype of all the half-shrugs which humankind has ever made. “I just feel numb. It’s odd. Look…” He gestures beautifully towards the scissors I used to cut open the pack of artificial skin. Stupidly, I hand them to him.

“This…” He grasps the handle. With slow but relentless pressure, he begins to push the tip into the palm of his left hand. The flesh tents inwards as the steel sinks down, and the scissors’ point vanishes in a bead of blood.

I let out a small groan. “You can’t…”

Then, just when I’m convinced that he’s going to drive the thing through his hand, he relents, and the flesh bounds back with the elasticity of youth. It’s scarcely a wound at all, although a crimson droplet dangles at the tip of the scissors as he hands them back to me.

“
That
didn’t hurt?”

“I could feel it. But it’s as if it was happening to someone else.” Now, at last, and as if he’s just realised the implications of what he’s just done, he gives a coltish shudder.

“Let’s get you dressed.”

Morryn stirs with new presence. Our shapes turn against the windows, our shadows fall across the walls, and I can feel myself breaking through fresh layers of intimacy as I creak open wardrobes in my bedroom. Claude’s black evening suits, his ruffled shirts, still have the whiff of applause about them—a spotlight gleam to the silk. I can’t dress him in those, but here, in a drawer beneath, lie my husband’s working clothes. Old denims. Sweats and tees. Oil-stained, snagged and holed and frayed, and then washed grubbily clean so he could dirty them again as he worked on his precious car, the DB5. I lift them out in a loose pile and hand them to my drowned man. Socks and underwear will be more difficult, and I’ve got rid of all of Edward’s old stuff, but already he’s pulling things on, bending with delicious ease, hopping toe to toe. He catches sight of me watching him just as his head disappears into a frayed crew-neck still flecked with ghosts of sump oil, the black stars of welding burns. Glancing away, I give a happy shiver—thinking how, despite everything, I’m no longer alone.

He’s finished dressing. The faded denims are baggy around his waist. Much though he detested it, Claude plumped up through middle age. I hand over a belt. Adam takes it almost gingerly. His gaze is intense as he works it through the loops.

“Well,” I say, “Can I call you Adam? I mean, I know it’s probably not your name.”

“Adam…” He shrugs, still searching for the belt’s innermost notch.

“I’m sorry this stuff is so old. I’m not used…” I swallow. “You’d better put on these, too.” I catch a small, sour pungency as I pass him old trainers, their doggy tongues hanging out, and remember Claude, humming
Figaro
, his hands busy with their laces.

“You must be hungry—and thirsty.”

“I suppose I am.”

“But first—perhaps you’d like…” I lead him mutely towards the upstairs toilet and he nods his understanding as goes inside. The facilities are antique, like so much of Morryn, but it seems that he knows how to lift a toilet seat, and use a flush—taps and towels, even—in the old-fashioned way which I still prefer.

There’s a dog-like obedience to the way he then follows me back downstairs when he’s finished. For all that mannish strength, he’s timid. Yes, I think, as I steer him towards the night-segmented iron and glass claw of my new kitchen, perhaps he has been imprisoned, brutalised, hurt. It’s easiest to think of him as some kind of escapee. Why, other-wise, would I be sheltering him?

“This kitchen was designed by my daughter Maria,” I tell him after I’ve I sat him down at the counter and handed him the tumbler of water which the scurrying kitchen implements have provided, which he sips rather than gulps. “She’s an architect. She lives in Barcelona. You know where I mean by Barcelona?”

“It’s a city in Catalonia.”

How come…
I bite back the words. He’s a child. He’s wounded. He’s vulnerable. And I’ve seen him naked. Anyway, isn’t this exactly how amnesia works—or is that just in old two dimensional films?—you remember generalities easily enough, but your own life remains absent. “You really can’t remember anything?”

“No.”

“What about…Things which aren’t specifically about you. You can obviously speak English, for a start. Are you English, do you think?”

“We’re in England, aren’t we?”

“You know that?”

“Isn’t that what you told me?”

His voice, now that I’m hearing more of it, has a slight, shifting accent. A slide to some of the vowels. That stuttering b. Could be foreign. Could almost be Cornish.

“This is so
strange
.” More animated now, he puts, almost bashes, down the tumbler and shoves at his dark blonde hair. His elbows slide across the counter. These are a young man’s gestures, full of easy frustration and expansive, unintended, grace. Then he looks back up at me. “Where exactly did you say this was?”

“We’re just outside a Cornish town called…” I pause: a small experiment. “I’ll spell it out for you and you see if you can say it. F-O-W-E-Y.”

“You mean Fowey?” Amazingly, he says it correctly: Foy

“You’ve heard of it?”

“I don’t know. It’s just…There.”

“Perhaps you’re local.”

“Perhaps I am.” Although he doesn’t seem particularly happy about the prospect.

“I…” I sit down myself in this sun-segmented room. Close but not too close to him. “I decided not to report you, or take you to a clinic. Not right away. You could be—”

“What? A refugee?”

“Something like that. Some kind of migrant, anyway.”

“Which means I’d be sent away again?”

“After…” I think about dressing it up. But what would be the point? “Yes. You’d be sent away again. Back to wherever you’ve come from.”

“And if I don’t come from anywhere?” Another small glint of humour—or mere resignation?

“That’s not possible, is it?”

“No.” In a more positive negative, he shakes his head. “Thanks for taking me in. I’d like…” His hands make a sudden gesture. “To stay. For a just a while. If I may?”

“Of course,” I say. “Do you feel okay? Physically, I mean?”

“I think so. Tired, and a bit scratched, but…Nothing more.”

“Do you know what year it is?” I gesture towards the time and date shown in one of the kitchen’s displays. “Does that seem odd, or right, to you?”

“It’s
there
, isn’t it? Time’s time. Doesn’t really matter what I think.” He smiles winningly, sitting here in my kitchen wearing my dead husband’s clothes. Then he raises his arms and yawns. It’s an impressive sight, with all those fine new muscles bunching up and the arms slowly cart-wheeling. I think of Michelangelo again—that archetypal man pinioned in all the neat concentric shapes and circles which then seemingly make up the world. He’s filling Claude’s clothes far more than Claude, even when he grew more softly bulky, ever did. I think, as he yawns so cavernously, of lions and other predatory beasts, then wonder at the dreams which must have possessed him as he lay all day on that red divan.

“And you must be hungry. Umm…”

“Please—you might as well call me Adam.” He still says it in that oddly stuttering way.

“What would you like to eat? Something plain, I imagine? Do you recall likes, dislikes, preferences?”

Barriers are going up as he looks at me. He’s quick—he can tell when I’m testing him. “It’s like pain. Some part of me knows that I need to eat…But that’s it. What were you going to eat, Roushana? Can I share some of that, perhaps?”