Being Small Page 13
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Dressed and damp, fresh and weary and alert, sipping water and fizzing with endorphins, I sit and watch Quin’s breathing, timed against the steady drip of saline through his port. I do this often at times like these, when I’m too hyped to read. It brings me down gently, it tunes me in with Quin’s day and where he stands within it. Slow and shallow, he’s asleep, if sleep is the proper word these days, I’m never sure. Sharper, faster but still steady, he’s dreaming, or what we’ve chosen to interpret that way, like Nigel when his paws twitch and he’s snoring and we say he’s chasing rabbits.
When there’s a break in the rhythm, a sudden silence or a sudden gasp, that’s when I know that Quin’s awake. When he’s suddenly tentative, unsure about his breathing or his body, what’s going to hurt and how much.
“Hey,” I say softly, just to test the water.
His lips move just a fraction, just enough. I reach over to touch them with the mouth of my bottle, test the water another way, see if he wants a drink – and catch myself just in time, I’ve been so shouted at for doing that, so threatened, we won’t leave you alone with him if you can’t be trusted.
So I draw my bottle back, one more thing that Quin is not allowed to share, and find his own bottle on the side table, and hold that for him to suck at. Which he does; and then he moves his mouth and forms his breath into shapes, into spiky whispered words; and I lean close to hear him and he says,
“Rook to King’s Bishop six.”
He always used to call them castles, but since talking grew harder he’s converted. We both use the old notation, by dint of childhood training in his case and learning from classic texts in my own, so no problem there. The only problem is that he’s offering me a mid-game move and he and I are not in the middle of a game, we haven’t played for weeks and then it was desultory and soon abandoned. I’m damn sure he’s not been holding that game in his head all this time, and if he had been this move would still make no sense within it.
“Quin? Where did that one come from?”
He only says it again, “Rook to King’s Bishop six, your move,” and it must be important, it must matter, to be worth the effort of air that it costs him and all the slipping focus of his mind. But it can’t be real in any space outside his head, and I can’t join in under these conditions because telepathy is a closed book to me. So I say, “I’m sorry, I don’t think I was here for the start of this one, d’you want to tell me how the pieces lie?”
We’ve still got his old set in the sideboard here, I could set the game up to his dictation, easier to get a grip that way; but I never imagined that he would be able to describe it and I’m right, he says “Never mind” and nothing more. A couple of dozen pieces and their places on the board, all the dynamics of the mid-game, opportunity and sacrifice and threat, all of that is way too much for Quin to keep a hold on nowadays. He’s building a dream in there, a fantasy, a little focal point he can believe in, with whatever capacity for faith he has remaining; and he’s trying to involve me, to give it depth and meaning.
And I’m frightened, suddenly and thoroughly. Of all the ways I’d thought an end could come, I’d never seen it here, not like this, where Quin tries to bind me to a game I can’t be playing in a world that isn’t mine. I can’t take that. I won’t let him possess me as an avatar: hollow or inhabited, either is as bad. And of course there should be nothing I can do, I can’t burrow into his brain to find myself and save myself, let myself out of there in whatever strange or sick distorted form he’s held me.
But neither can I shrug and smile and let it go, let myself go, down and down with Quin on this long slow spiral. If he’s got me – inside his smile somewhere, behind his bleeding blinding eyes, wherever – he won’t be letting me go. It’s a lesson well learned from him, from his friends, from everyone who ever loved him: Quin hates to be alone. If he’s found a way not to let that happen, to take someone with him when he goes, he’ll be relentless.
And all I can do is match him in his unrelenting, stop him swift and sudden and irrevocable. Before he’s got a better grip on me, while he still has only that little part of what I am that plays a little chess. Quin’s mind runs wide and deep, or at least it used to. I don’t know what resources he has in there that he can still tap into. Even unconsciously, maybe even when he’s unconscious because I don’t believe he sleeps as other people sleep, as we do, not any more. I think he could make me, keep me, take me away. And I do not want to go. I’ve been bottled up long enough already.
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I don’t have to think. I am not thinking. Someone else can do my thinking for me.
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I don’t even have to watch. I am not watching. Someone else can do my watching for me.
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Watch. You watch. Watch this:
where all I can feel is the tremble in my fingers and the pallor in my skin, I can, I can feel that in the dizziness and the pounding blood in my ears as I try to hold myself together unless I’m trying to pull myself apart, and vibration white finger is a joke but I’m not laughing and nor is he as we pull open the sideboard and rummage among the drugs, scattering bottles, scattering capsules and pills and blister-packs and boxes.
All Quin’s major medicine, all his heavy stuff is kept under lock and key and I do not have a copy of the key. But that still leaves a bevy, a raft, a pharmacopoeia of lesser drugs and draughts and potions, plenty of prescriptions and all the over-the-counter buys of a long sickness and a team of eager amateurs with money, all the homoeopathic and herbal medicines, all the vitamin supplements and dietary aids and of course the bags of saline and the needles, the drips and feeds and plastic gloves, the sharps box in its yellow, all the paraphernalia of nursing care...
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Where’s best to hide a tree, a book, a purloined letter? Among their own kind, famously.
Our mother could look for porn, and never find it. Michael didn’t need it; nor did Small, for very different reasons, though Small might have liked it better if Michael did.
What came in brown paper from uncertain SingKong origins was not hot Asian teens or exotic bondage videos in dodgy formats. Shame on her, shame on you for ever thinking that it might be.
And if these hands trembled as they reached to the back of the cupboard, as they spilled bottles and boxes out onto the carpet until they found the little ones they wanted, no blame to them for that. Anyone might tremble, such a time and such a purpose. Anyone might fight himself, pull back and press ahead. It might be war, where only the strong survive.
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He is not strong, but I am. We are. When we do not fight between ourselves.
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When we fight between ourselves, victory is to the strong.
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Out of the strong comes forth sweetness.
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If these fingers tremble as they slip a hypodermic from its wrapping, as they uncap the bottles that have come so far, invert them one by one, thrust the needle through their seals and draw the clear liquids down, tap the syringe to mix the cocktail lightly, still no blame, even to the strong. If the hypodermic drags at them, momentous – well, they ought to feel the weight of what they do. This is not weak. Nothing here is weak now.
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This is us, watch us now, the man on the bed and the boy approaching. His eyes may flicker and his skin may sweat, he may breathe short and shallow from a dry mouth, but if he hesitates it isn’t doubt, it’s only indecision.
Through the port with the saline, an easy injection into the feed and let it drip down through the valve like a slow tide rising? Or else direct into a vein and swift away?
Youth has its urgencies, and the man on the bed has veins like flaccid cords beneath his inelastic skin. No pressure, it’s habit as much as heart that keeps his bad blood trudging with its boots on, undischarged. No matter. A thumb pressed down into the forearm can raise a vein, with patience.
Can raise his eyelids too, painful and unlikely; an
d his voice like querulous corn in the wind, “What is it, is that Michael?”
He can’t see. We can’t say. Small wonder.
Easy, now. Go with it. Go away...
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And he does, he does go, far and fast.
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And when he’s gone, then nothing more can happen, nothing must.
And so they find us, later: Quin gone and I am in a corner in the dark, afloat in my body with bottles all around me, and nothing new in that.
I know he didn’t want it, but I wanted, oh, I wanted him to want it. Too bad for one of us, or else for both.
I don’t know what I want; it isn’t this. This is what Small wanted, he’s a laughing gnome, Small always gets what he wants. Why can’t I?
Because I don’t know what I want, except it isn’t Small. Unlucky, then. Unlucky again. We’re mirror-twins, reversed. He knows how much he wants me. Ever and ever, amen.
X
BEING SMALL
Iam not myself.
In fact, I realise now, I’m Small.
Always we’d assumed – which means of course that my mother had told us, and she started doing that way back when I believed her, when I could still take her on trust – that there were two twins and the strong one came out on top, on the outside, and that was me and Small could only leech off me, my little leech, my brother. And so he died and that was sad but right, as it should be. That was the great certainty of my life, that we’d got us the right way round.
Not so. She was wrong, she raised us wrong, we had lived all our lives on a lie. On an inverted world, believing north to be south and vice versa.
Small it was who was the strong one, who lived inside me, off me, on me, through me. I was his vessel, his weaker vessel, nothing more: his shell, his transport, his eyes on the world, his pasture. Dying made no difference, not to him. Except that I grew fitter, I made a better host. He was embedded already, what reason did he have to let go?
All these years I’ve carried him and never realised. Body and mind he had me; no wonder he didn’t want to share. Except with our mother, of course. We made such a lovely family, a perfect trinity, mother and son and the wholly ghost. Wholeghost, with added grit and fibre.
He was the tough one, and he took me when he wanted to. He squats inside me somewhere like a genie in a bottle, and you only have to rub my scarred belly to make him speak. Don’t do it. That way madness lies, for one of us at least.
We always were identical, but now I look a lot like him: hairless and shrunken and gazing out through glass. I stay in my room mostly, when I’m allowed. He has me to himself, the way he always wanted. We play on the ChessLord to kill time, and he wins every game.
These days, these nights I dream his dreams.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chaz Brenchley has been making a living as a writer since the age of eighteen. He is the author of nine thrillers, most recently Shelter, and two fantasy series, The Books of Outremer and Selling Water by the River. As Daniel Fox, he has published a Chinese-based fantasy series, beginning with Dragon in Chains; as Ben Macallan, an urban fantasy series beginning with Desdaemona. A British Fantasy Award winner, he has also published books for children and more than 500 short stories. Chaz has recently married and moved from Newcastle to California, with two squabbling cats and a famous teddy bear.