Tin Man(21)

His mother stood up and all eyes were upon her. She walked down to the river and climbed down the steps until she was mid-waist in water. Michael ran after her and said, Dora! Pretend to save me from drowning, and he jumped in and swam out to the middle of the pond with his arms and legs kicking and flailing. And there he waited for her, ignoring the laughter that came from the side. And his mother did it. She swam over to him and silenced people’s ridicule. She calmed him, told him not to panic, and she reached under his arms and gently pulled him the length of the pond through dappled light and ripples. And all the way, Michael quoted, O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells . . .

Ellis lifted himself out of the water and sat on the side. He covered his lap with a T-shirt, conscious of the possible appearance of children, and he dried off in the sun. He closed his eyes and his body softened. He wondered again why he hadn’t gone to the talk with them that long-ago evening. And he didn’t push the thought away as he usually did, but he stayed with it, listened to it because it couldn’t hurt him today, not there.

It was a book talk, that’s all, about what? He still couldn’t remember. They hadn’t even stayed for the duration, that’s why they were found out near Binsey. Annie loved to drive out there, that’s how he knew it was her idea and not Michael’s. Oh, Annie. Bad idea. Bad.

He remembered how the floorboards had just been delivered and he sat out in the garden with a beer, looking up at the sky, noticing its stillness, thinking how beautiful it would have been to be in a plane right then, the three of them again, heading towards a new horizon. He remembered music that night – Chet Baker, trumpet not vocals – and he remembered thinking how lucky he was to love them. That he should’ve had such a thought used to wake him up in a sweat.

That was the world he inhabited between the time of it happening and the time of him knowing. A brief window, not yet shattered, when music still stirred, when beer still tasted good, when dreams could still be hatched at the sight of a plane careering across a perfect summer sky.

The doorbell rang and he thought it was them, but it couldn’t have been them, could it? Because they each had a key. He opened the door and the policemen seemed too young to bring bad news, but they did. They walked him into the front room, where time evaporated. He thought he’d blacked out, but he hadn’t. It was life as he knew it shutting down.

They drove him to the hospital. There were no sirens or flashing lights, there was no hurry because it was all over. Annie looked peaceful. A bruise around her temple, stupid really, that that’s all it took. And when he told the nurse he was ready to see Michael she said that the doctor would be along in a minute. He sat and waited in the corridor with the policemen. They got him a cup of tea and a Kit Kat.

The doctor led him to an empty room where he told him Michael had been taken to the morgue. Ellis said, Why? Is that normal? And the doctor said, Under the circumstances it’s normal. What circumstances? said Ellis.

We found a cluster of lesions down his right side. Kaposi—

– I know what they’re called, said Ellis.

Michael had AIDS, he said.

I don’t think so, said Ellis, and he reached for a cigarette but the fucking doctor told him he couldn’t. He would’ve told me, he said.

He walked out into the night and he wanted to speak to someone but there was no one left. His father and Carol were waiting for him at the front gate. Talk to me, Carol kept saying, Talk to me. But he never did.

He scattered Michael’s ashes down by his favourite stretch of river, as per instructions. He was alone. The wind bit hard across the meadow. It was the end of summer.

Dusk was falling. Ellis sat out in the garden under a blue sky streaked with gold and lilac. Jazz played from next door. The students had borrowed his collection of Bill Evans, and they were cooking. The kitchen door was open and he could hear the clash of pans, beer bottles being opened, and the murmur of a recipe. He liked to listen to them, he had grown fond of their ways.

He felt cold after the swim. He hadn’t yet showered and he went back inside to get a jumper. It was on the armchair by the fire, and he put it on immediately. He stopped in front of his mother’s painting and wondered, as he so often did, what she’d been looking for. He found the painting peaceful, so could it have been as simple as that? Peace? He didn’t think so, but some mornings, when light fell on the canvas, the yellow did something to his head. Woke him up, made him feel brighter. Was that it, Mum? Was it? He turned round and caught his foot on the cardboard box he’d brought back from his father’s. He knelt down. When? he said to himself. If not now, then when?

He tore the tape away from the top and the brief glimpse of a shirt made him draw breath. He picked up the box and took it outside to the bench. He came back and grabbed a half-opened bottle of wine from the fridge and a glass that lived on the draining board. He sat in the garden and waited for his nerves to settle.

He had no idea what he’d kept or what he’d jettisoned all those years ago. What he never forgot, though, was his shock at how little Michael had owned. One chair. A radio. A few books. His flat was a lonely space or a clever space. Minimalist to the extreme. It was a place of contemplation not distraction. A place of thought.

He lifted the clothes from the box and placed them on his lap. The pale blue T-shirt he and Annie got him from New York, the neckline frayed because he never took it off. Ellis held it up to his nose and didn’t know what to expect, the only smell was a faint trace of washing powder lifting the must. A white linen shirt, a navy cashmere sweater, miraculously untouched by moths. A striped Breton top wrapped around a copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. On the inside cover ‘The Property of Cowley Library’ had been crossed out and replaced with the name ‘Michael Wright’.