Chapter Twenty: Attempted Suicide and Revenge of the Hairballs

If you really want to kill yourself, then you don’t use the same penknife that your Dad gave you when you were a kid. You don’t use the same knife that your Dad took to Scout Camp in nineteen fifty seven and used to sculpt arrows and cut out neat squares of terry towelling to fix tourniquets for the camp tortoise, Marvin.

You don’t cut across the wrists like you see in films, like you’re trying to separate your hands from your arms. Instead you cut up, towards the palms, following the paths of the veins.

These two mistakes had, in effect, saved George’s life. The antique knife had been so blunt that he’d had to saw away at his wrist for at least five minutes, this had obviously left him severely knackered and less able to make a start on the other one. On top of this, he’d started with his good hand so then had to use his left hand to finish the job. This had resulted in one very deep cut on his right wrist and one superficial one on his left. Nevertheless, he’d still lost a lot of blood. Mum had found him, slumped across the bed, a red puddle collecting on the floorboards where his arm hung over the bedside. I hate to say it but I felt like George had practiced this pose. It was too elegant. But he hadn’t factored on then throwing up at the sight of his own blood and ending up with bits of half-digested toast stuck to the side of his cheek. Luckily, Mum was excellent in emergencies, perhaps it was because she could see into the future, and knew in her heart that George would survive. She’d wrapped two tea towels around his wrists, then sat him upright, making him hold both arms aloft like he was cheering on a rock band. And George had been conscious all the time, mumbling he was sorry, mumbling that he’d been stupid, mumbling that he loved Carla and the baby. Then he’d gone quiet and let his arms flop down. Mum had then walked him round the room, trying to avoid him tripping over on the calcified socks, skateboards and half-eaten sandwiches. It had taken the ambulance twelve minutes to get there. These twelve minutes had been the longest she’d ever experienced. The two of them (Carla was at a pre-natal class), trapped in a strange dance, Mum pushing his arms up, George letting them fall, Mum lifting them up again, then George slumping further towards the ground.

By the time I saw him, his face matched the colour of the grey-white sheet. He looked like he’d been put on display as a warning to other teenagers - like one of those photos you see on the news, telling you not to take drugs/drink drive/drive too fast. And he had a plastic tube in his nose and monitors that linked him up to a machine by the bed. His hair had come all unstuck and flopped over one eye, in the same way it always had before he’d fast-forwarded into responsibility. I knew things weren’t as they’d been with Dad because the breath was still emanating from the right place, from his lungs and into the machine, and not the other way round. Both arms were bandaged, like a baby discouraged from scratching himself. All I could think about were the crows and the letters. All the cries for help that had disappeared into the pages of his diary. What would Dad say if he could see him now? At least this wasn’t the same hospital. But it smelt of the same terrible combination of pine disinfectant and stink bombs. George was sandwiched between two beds. On his left, a man had his head pushed hard into the contours of the pillow, his mouth hanging open with a strand of spittle like a string of mini- Christmas lights vibrating with each wheezy breath. His sickness had made him immune to the world around him. On George’s right, a cheery old codger who didn’t stop talking. This would have been reassuring (what do you say in these situations?) except, he seemed to have swum in the same soulless, gene pool as Carla and was only able to point out the worst possible case scenario. Despite our dire circumstances, this chump managed to make the future seem even more abundant with hopeless, sorrowful possibilities.

‘Have they given him a Tetanus shot?’ he asked, licking his palm, then sticking his strand of hair (his only one) to the top of his head.
Mum ignored him and continued to squeeze George’s hand. Every few minutes his eyes would fly open and he’d look around, and then let his eyes close again. He didn’t look overjoyed that he’d failed to saw himself off this mortal coil.
‘If it was a rusty type of knife, then he needs to get a Tetanus. I had this mate once, worked down in Devon in the car business and he cut himself on this old, rusty chain saw. In a couple of days his whole hand was the size of a basketball. It looked like he had a pumpkin sticking out of his sleeve.’
Carla nodded sagely as the man babbled away. She’d already considered all the hopeless outcomes - George was brain damaged, George’s arms were paralysed, and George would never speak again. Needless to say, she seemed to find this doom-merchant’s presence reassuring. Nothing came close to the awful truth that nagged at her insides- the fact that George, the father of her baby, had been willing to leave her and hadn’t even cared that their baby would be fatherless for the rest of its life.
‘Hand the size of a 12-inch pizza. Like this big,’ the man gestured, painting a circle in the air with his bony finger.
‘He’s had a tetanus jab,’ Carla said turning round.
She rubbed her stomach and stood up, walking past the Christmas-light-festooned almost-dead one. She looked out the window and sighed.
‘I hope he gets better in time for the birth. I don’t think I can go through all this on my own. Am I right to feel so angry?’
‘Is this your first?’ one-strand shouted, ‘If it’s your first then you need to be careful you don’t get that pre-eclampsia. I’m no expert but you better make sure you’re in safe hands. It’s a dangerous business, the whole giving birth business.’
His finger still hung in the air from the virtual pizza drawing and he continued to draw an imaginary face which looked a bit like a skull with cross bones underneath. Wordlessly, Mum stood and reached for the curtain that divided the two beds. With one swift move, she drew the curtain so the man disappeared behind a sheet of blue and white stripy plastic. The man complained a bit at first- saying Mum was rude, that he was only trying to offer advice, that Tetanus was a dangerous business but not quite as dangerous as giving birth which was life threatening. Then after about five minutes, the only sounds that emanated from behind the curtain were the sounds of gentle snoring.

‘I had no idea,’ Mum said after a while.
‘What about Tetanus?’ I asked.
Mum rolled her eyes and went back to mentally chopping aubergines - slinging them into a pot the size of a prehistoric crater. Carla sat back down and closed her eyes. Her shape combined with all the colour drained from her face made her look like a giant snowman. I felt nothing but pity. My mobile vibrated in my pocket –it was a message from Medium. How are you? Since I’d raced over to the hospital, he’d messaged me not once but TWICE. Was this the same man who’d spent the past few months doing everything he could to get away from me? For a second, I allowed the warmth to work its way up from my stomach and into my chest, remembering him shuffling out of the bathroom all flowered up and bashful. Then I looked back at the bed and the warmth flew out the door, to be replaced with nothing but a gnawing, twisting sensation- like someone was wringing my guts between their fingers and hanging them out to dry.

I thought about the last time I’d seen George, just when he’d returned from his self-imposed exile in the Boulevard of Broken Books. His shoulders hunched, his eyes encircled with purple circles. The moment the midnight Taramasalata eating started up, we should have known. And I’d had even more damning evidence at my fingertips. I’d actually peered into his ears and seen his brain - all black, watery, shuddery and fearful. A nest of crows bombarded by headless men with bombs.

And I’d done nothing. I’d actually done worse than nothing. I’d gone and got pissed. And dragged home yet another one of my conquests. It was the damned biology - even when I wasn’t thinking about the eggs, they were fighting to eject themselves into the world - desperate to be free, to dance and drink and work in book shops and what for? So that one-day they could grind away at their wrists with a rusty, old penknife and end up back where they started? If only I could scoop those eggs up and dash them against the wall! Every stupid, mindless last one of them. All three hundred and whatever there were (How many were left? Even now I had to count them up, it was absurd!). Perhaps at the end of the day, the feelings I had for Medium were nothing to do with the fact that he liked Woody Allen films and thought Simon Le Bon was really funny. Instead it was part of a more sinister plot by the eggs to get endorphins pumping round my system. They were operating my strings in there – making my heart speed up, making my palms sweat, making me purr like a newborn, furry kitten.

I looked at George and then looked away. This was where my single-minded drive for procreation had got me. My brother almost killed by those damned eggs. Really I should have marched straight to the X ray unit and demanded to be made radioactive or whatever it was that would kill the blasted things. Then and only then would I be able to think straight.

Mum and Carla went off to get a coffee, and the room grew dark and quiet with nothing but the death rasp of the near-dead one and the pessimistic, sleep whisper of the one – strand. I stroked George’s fingers, the tips still stained with dried blood.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said under my breath.
George opened one eye and then closed it again.
‘No I mean it, I’m really sorry.’
‘He didn’t hear you, it’s the Tetanus!’ the one-strand shouted from behind his stripy tent.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said louder.
George opened both eyes. Then cleared his throat. I reached over, picked up a glass of water from the bedside table and raised it to his lips that were beginning to look more healthy and not the line of blue biro I’d seen when I’d first arrived ten hours earlier.
‘I fucked up,’ he said finally.
‘You should have talked to me about it. You should have told me how bad it was,’ I said.
George nodded. His floppy hair falling over his eye. I pushed it back from his face.
‘I read the diary. I read the letters. I saw the drawings,’ I said, all in one breath.
I saw the contents of your brain and yet I did nothing.
‘I thought you’d taken it,’ he said after a pause, ‘ I couldn’t find it anywhere,’ then he started to cough and didn’t stop coughing until I’d shifted him forwards and whacked him across the back.
‘I’m not angry,’ he said once he’d recovered.

And with that my brother proved his nobility, his maturity and his courage. And I shrank and became so small that I disappeared underneath the metal bed frame and was almost suffocated by a giant dust ball of hair, dead skin, all mixed with a couple of broken off fingernails. I carried on rolling in this ball out of the room and down the corridor. With each roll, I tumbled forwards and I saw Hairy, then Tiny Penis and the Polish Hucknall. Each one was nothing but a ball of genes, strands of DNA, which waved in the air, thread-like tendrils reaching out to snatch at me as I rolled past. And the eggs were even less significant. They were just microdots of television static. Together we rolled through the legs of the nurses who paced up and down the corridor clutching folders and pushing trolleys, past the porters carrying boxes of clean bed sheets and towels, past the doctors who ran, two at a time, their beepers flashing. Past the X-ray units, A&E, past the Emergency Mental Health unit and then into the lift. Slowly we climbed the five floors. Tiny Penis (finally his body and penis in perfect tiny proportion) babbling in one ear - ‘Feel how hard I am.’ Then Hucknall thrusting away but then flailing against the linoleum because I was so minuscule, that even a human hair was a tree in comparison. And each thrust worked him deeper into the linoleum until he was stuck there, the size of a toothpick, forever drilled into the floor. Then it was just Hairy and I. His hairs entangled with the ball of human dead stuff and we kept spinning until we became entangled and the lift doors opened with a ping and we rolled out. We rolled straight into the maternity ward. Behind each door came the sounds of panting, screeching, and cries of encouragement. I tried to roll under one of the doorframes. I wanted to see the end result – the BIG KAHUNA. But all I could see through the sliver, the chink of white light were legs and other balls of hair and dust. ‘Do you really think I’m too hairy?’ he asked as we rolled on and before I knew what was happening, we plunged down a service lift shaft and went down, deep into the bowels of the hospital - where they kept the diseased lungs and the dickey hearts and the tumors and they all got mulched up and made into dog food. We rolled on into the morgue. ‘Am I too hairy?’ he continued and I managed to roll free with a sharp twist in the opposite direction, just in time to see him squished by a porter’s shoe, then carried away stuck to a piece of chewing gum, still half- alive, still questioning his hairy destiny. And then I came to a stop under a gurney and I listened as they dissected the body. The arm looked familiar. All these eggs, the man conducting the post-mortem said. She was driven crazy by these eggs. And there was a squelching sound like when you stir pesto into a bowl of wet pasta. Yes – they almost look like they’re still alive. Look at that one trying to break free. Let’s get those out so we can see them at close range. Hand me that microscope. Yes, they’re actually pretty ordinary. Nothing stupendous. If anything, a little grey around the gills, a little, dare I say it - disappointing. Just as well. Wouldn’t amount to much. What’s that on the floor? Is that a hairball?

And I rolled the coat of hair and nails tight so they insulated me against the voices, so they became more muffled. And with all my weight I leant to one side and rolled out from the gurney and underneath a cabinet that stank of alcohol. When I opened my eyes, George had fallen asleep and my phone was vibrating. I slipped the phone out of my pocket and switched it off. I picked up George’s water jug and went out into the corridor to get a refill. Mum was sitting with Carla next to the coffee machine and Carla was crying. Not all of this was my responsibility but some of it was. From this day forward, I would no longer be held ransom by those eggs.

When I got back to George’s bedside I switched my phone on and sent one final text message.
Sorry I made a mistake. Don’t contact me again.
‘Giant hand it was, like a frisbee,’ the curtain whispered.
And with that the door that hadn’t fully opened yet, swung firmly shut again and I heaved a sigh of relief.