Your name is a biro smudge of meaning around the green plastic wrist tag. Stiff fingers grip the passenger door – you will them to move, to unclench.

The car bounces, twists and rattles. Loose bowels threaten your unruly body. Unsocked, your toes curl into paper-rough slippers, bought at the concourse kiosk. You slide back and forth in the seat, naked under a single layer of thin hospital cotton.

Pain pummels your side, pins and needles like cold rain, despite the warm air of the blower. The sun-flashes through trees, blinking across your eyes, closed or open.

You squint at the driver, half smiling to himself. Neither of you speak. His jaw is set in a look that makes him seem about to turn and say something. His gentleness unsettles you. A rosary sways from the rearview. You wonder if he found God after you left.

High on the horizon, a plane leaves no trail. A static glint above the hill, catching the late sun.

Something uneasy stirs inside you, an echo of old falseness. You imagine pulling the door-handle, your tumble, an inadequate bundle of bones and rags – the stunned thud of the road.

—

Time has passed. Uncountable days, weeks, months spent alone. Your decisions made by medical routine, masked, aproned, visored. The oxygen hiss and the euphoric sleep of drugs. The vertigo of waking, a sudden surfacing into the dead air of the hushed ward.

The lamplight pooled over the chair where you first saw him – where you woke to the wonder of a face without a mask. You took him for some professional bedside man. A medic, or religious.

His eyes moved across the page of his book. Your eyes watched him, then closed.

Dreams came and went, awake or asleep. Vivid fevers or dull versions of work routines depleted you. Painting lines on tarmac at your feet. On. Off. The cream-white touchdown of the flowing roller, its lift from the dash, leaving nothing. A will-less passivity. A void.

On. Off – bipp. Off – bipp – bipp – bipp –

The pain as you came back into the world, weakened. Mouth open in a silent O.

There he was, your visitor. Sitting, reading. Waiting. You were glad. The calmness in his half-smile felt old, unchanging in your turmoil. Your tongue-wetted lips responded in kind. A scrap of recall rose in your mind, erased instantly by the next thought. Then the slip, the dizzying turn of the horizon. You woke again and he was gone.

The delirium of dark to light to dark. Roughly shorn hair grew back in tufts while your head rested on the pillow. Your beard snagged on the blanket. The silent, castor-gliding ward emptied, filled. The disinfectant of changeover covered something yeasty, growing; the base note of sick, of someone too long asleep.

You lost the edges of yourself, scattered through those corridors. He was here – a mirror of you – then he wasn’t. A new question, and every time a different wordless answer as he came and went. He nodded, you nodded back, a delayed reflection. You pressed the edge of your bruise, the pink swell before the yellow-blue, to feel the difference. A memory surfaced again, like someone hesitating, uncertain at a door. Your face – unshaved, creased; his face –

On. Off. There – bipp. Not there.

You woke in his sight-line and you stared without flinching, unclear which way time was flowing. An all-at-once imagining. Then a mass of thoughts arrived. Big, important thoughts. Recognition and shame. The boy left behind.

Your tongue was stuck to your teeth, keeping words in. You paled for the other man, knowing how much time had passed. A short chord of confusion, of comprehension.

Then silence dropped like a heavy curtain.

—

Up into cool earthy air, he lifts you from the car. You are unbalanced, teetering. An undignified return.

His dog jumps and yips, tears great loops from owner to visitor and back – again and again and again – happy to be running the same patch, circling the land. Its powerful tail beats with the joy of not being abandoned.

Jackdaws wearily rise from its path, wheel and touch down with a bounce. Wet smells of livestock, of silage, of fresh sawn wood.

Your slippers scrape a hesitant shuffle. Uneven ruts cut the yard and the speed of dusk makes you feel vulnerable as light falls. The dog’s eyes flash green in the gloom. A sharp bark. Ewes call to lambs and move away, uneasy, across the field.

The day feels cut short, without time to properly end. Untold stories weigh heavy, toppling and unravelling.

The door of the farm is paint-thick, hefty, stubborn with unmoving generations. Behind it, you expect a forfeit for your return, for leaving – a debt to be paid. You’re waiting to find out what it is. The price.

You hesitate at the threshold. Through the door that you recognise, there is nothing familiar, nothing you remember. Your silence is awkward, and you feel it. Your mouth stitched shut, as if you’re looking out from a mask. Questions rise and fall in your chest before wandering away leaving nothing to say.

Neither of you mention her. You forget for each other’s sake, because remembering would mean confessing, telling, looking.

His phone pulses; he doesn’t answer. It glows briefly then dims, wakes as fingers automatically tap the passcode – his year of birth. You’re grateful for the interruption. You try to remember how old he is, how long since?

He talks quietly into the device. Chooses, selects, hesitates. His replies are neutral, guarded.

Hi — No, not right now.               Not sure —
            you on your own? —
                         how long is he staying?
Not yet.                       Okay.     Hmm           —
have you talked? —
               are you going to?
                                           Everything okay?
I miss you.           Yep.
Same.            Maybe — tomorrow?

The fluidity of it all makes you uncomfortable, a domestic intruder into his life. Eavesdropper to the quick vibration of intimacy in his voice, high and tight, the other voice pressed to his ear. He’s writing things down. The pencil whispers across the paper.

You picture your absence written across a page, filling and not filling the lines, and fumble your way out of sight.

Where was the bathroom?

You puzzle a path deeper into the house, longing to be alone again, moving in your own time.

In the dim light at the top of the stairs, you reach out, blind, and swim after your hand. Nausea makes you grunt and huff like a crawling animal unused to being upright. Your tongue waters. You feel the rise in your gut, the drugs’ churn. You hesitate; the doors are all identical. You panic, fretful, like something trapped.

You try a door. A smell inside – old, but once good. The back of food cupboards. The spice of ripe bodies. Your stomach eases past the clench, grumbling at whatever it is that wants to leave you.

This is now his room, where once it had been hers. The room where you hid, shaded in patchouli and sex and tobacco and Rizlas. Just you and her for a short time, secret and unseen. Here was where you mapped plans to see the world, to escape. Tomorrow. Soon. One day.

There is a silver hi-fi stack between towering wooden speakers. Fidelity in an italic script. A mix tape in your writing. A marker-pen car, a cartoon pun. OUR CAR TUNES. Ellipses for wheels and a cloud of exaggerated exhaust on the C90 inlay card. You rarely got far enough to play much of it. There is a sudden urge to steal it, to play it. Or break it.

You put it back.

—

It was unplanned, the pregnancy.

A new gravity arrived, weighted and waiting. You felt her grip the ground – her ground – unyielding. She planted herself like a tree.

And then the boy.

Her eyes now fixed on his face, and you were no longer in the same conversation. You went unheard, unseen beneath the patterns of her new future, the boy’s future. Shaped by her past, it always intruded, kept her here. Each year became an echo of the last, no longer new, no longer yours. No longer a discovery. You were both merely surviving, unchanged, like every generation rooted in this land. Soon she didn’t leave the farm except for market, and never left her boy.

A muted irritation grew. The den was a trap – you were stranded in anger. The audience to a hope that went nowhere. Restlessness. Stay, settle. One day.

You let go and you let go and you let go. It didn’t collapse with your retreat, but slowly the shared language of adventure died.

—

He fills the bath, the thunder of open taps. He fills the room, towels chalk-dry on the radiator, soap. You are pale and bony in the mirror. Alien. You’ve become shabby without noticing.

Buoyed by water, aches dissolve without a ripple. A condensed gathering and trickle on the windowsill. Motionless, you slump in the heat. Eyes close.

You wonder why he’s not curious about all those missed years on the road. On the roads.

Taps drip.

The roads that took you away. All ties cut, you moved across the country, job to job, at the speed of walking. Step by step you detached yourself, and just fell away. You were the cocky lad who closed off lanes. Long hours, part-time, cash in hand. Grit and cones and hi-vis and night shifts. Wherever and whenever. Seen and not seen on the lamp-lit stage of the road, in the gravel-skid verges with the unready animals, fur-scattered and roadkill-flat, jaws half smiling. Then asphalt, boiling bitumen, line-marking paint, the stink of diesel and petrol and the acrid cordite buzz of stone-cutters. Everything malleable with scaled-up tools. A crossing-out newly drawn on a map, a small name on a bold blue line. You bulldozed farms and chapels, slashed meadows, displaced earth and moved bone; you sliced hills, drilled deep into shale – under the roots, beneath the loam, into the clay and the flint, to the bedrock. All to prove you were right and she was wrong – that there was nothing there. You became one of the wiry men lifting more than your build would tell, who leaned, directed, tutted with grey hairs and stubble and a hernia. You had reached the east coast from the west some forty years later when it happened. Your falling apart.

Your stomach gurgles.

A ribbon of red hangs in the water. You trace the line to your wrist, the cannula dressing an unstuck flap. You sit up in dizzy heat. Waver, unbalanced. Slip. Unable to land yourself, you submerge below the soap scum. Ears fill, and all you hear is the metal drum of the bath squeak and slosh at your efforts.

The water pinks. The strength of grip needed to right yourself fails and you gasp a long howl, unstoppered and messy.

The door clicks open. The hollow sound of steps on floorboards. His arm beneath you. The plug. The puck of released air. Your bladder lets go.

You hate being seen like this by him. Your weakness, your skin-shine scars and burns. The veins in your forehead as you strain.

He sees how you are similar. Sees the same matted black hair of both your chests silvered; sees that, like his, your sternum pushes out; the same rude nub at your belly-button and hips that tuck everything below, safe between legs. He sees all he has inherited and his bear hug on the slippery ballast of your old body makes you want to hold him.

And push him aside.

—

There are clothes for you on the bed. Neutral, new clothes – plain pants, socks, vests – and softer, worn hand-him-downs. He’s your size, before you crumpled with age.

You pull his jumper over your head and breathe sherbet, wood smoke, sweat. It traps your arms, and like half-skinned prey you are tucked in, strung up. Hands high in a woolly surrender. You stop struggling.

He’s a stranger. You’re unsure how you got here. There was a clipboard displaying N-o-K, but he could hardly call you that. You heard the words from nurses. Kin. Softly said, it took up more space.

One arm frees itself. A familiar judder as muscles complain. A flash of lightning tears along nerves and your breath quickens with hurt. A wave of suspicion. Is he trying to trap you, best you – bring you back to the scene like a trophy? A doormat-found, broken, hunted animal?

—

A microwave turntable drone.

You sit in the kitchen-diner. A kettle boils. A thermostat ticks. The dog trails him, eyeing any possible treat.

You are small in the knocked-through space. It feels lavish just for food. For fuel. A bodily function. Heart of a home. A heart – a bundle of pulsing, pumping meat offered, broken. Hardened. A bloody, raw thing to stand in for affection. For feeling.
Your heart. How recently it was bipp-ing out your life in a ward where everyone pumped out a different signature.

The microwave pings. Steam billows. The cutlery clack and ting as food reaches the table.

You lift a forkful, hasty, not thinking what it is on the plate. It’s savoury. Frozen too long, it tastes of winter.

Suddenly you’re ashamed of how you eat, like a hound with a primal, gnawing hunger at its back. Life has been catered for so long – in packets, in wrappers or pots. Food is opened, devoured, binned.

—

He turns on the TV for you – oversize and loud – and places the remote on the arm of the sofa. Christmas cake. Cold and hard. Tea. Your hand, held like an empty glove, tremors and the cup clatters. Quietly you stop it with the other.

The dog ambles to and fro. Claws tap the hard floor, hush at the carpet. It licks your fingers, and you let it.

In the kitchen, plates stack. Drawers open and close.

You wait in limbo. You wonder what you should be doing. The dog lowers its head, ears back, and rests its heft on your knee. At your feet it rolls against you, scented, marked.

Your eyes are wet with the weight of affection. You fix on the film. Fast-moving, jerky, unimportant. You press a button and the picture disappears, but not the din. An arrow points into a square. You stare at the symbol, tired. Without an image, sounds feel louder, music grows over unsubtle dialogue and gunshots. A car screeches.

MUTE.

You wonder how she explained – whether you could explain. You moved in a straight line away from answering anything.

You hadn’t planned to leave.

The rattle of the engine had grown distant. Her voice faded. The car at a halt, headlights reaching blind into the night. You had felt relieved. A gust of silence, the sort that follows an accident.

—

Dust motes drift around the room in amber light, glowing low between the trees. A blackbird flies across the window with an abrupt silent momentum.

You hunker into the not-your-clothes. Feet flat to the floor, a hand limp on the arm of the sofa. As light fades, your eyes strain until dimness lifts the burden of looking and effort subsides.

He’s moving through the house. Your cup rattles into the sink. A radio, muffled and bassy. A toilet flush. A fart. The dog rouses, pads excitedly to the kitchen. The front door moves a vacuum of air with a shhhk. A brief smell of the farm, a cold, waiting smell that arrives in autumn soil and doesn’t lift until spring.

You’re still. As still as your nerves allow.

The blackbird bounces, nimble, into the hedge. You feel your mass, your heavy limbs in the face of its weightlessness and you yield to sleep, comfortable.

Shapes and fizzing lights swim as you fall into slumber. You shudder and twitch and dream you are in fog. Everything is white. A blank space. You can’t see, but some things you know are there. They are thinkable. Other things lurk, unknown.

—

The light has failed.

He’s brisk, shedding layers, stamping boots. Coming in from the chill, a flush rises in his thin skin. He judders and huffs into the fug of the house, slows. Treads gently across the twilit room.

The dog walks a steady figure of eight around this new pack, the three of them in the same place. Reassured, it topples, stretches, content.

The click of the electric lamp makes a mirror of the window. In the reflection he watches you, adrift, the passage of sleep animating your face.

He sees you. He sees himself. A pool of light over his chair, like before. He is you – akin; the same mouth, the same brow. A version of you. A second-chance you. Hope runs through him like a tickle in his blood, a swell of breathtaking, undeserved pity.

He remembers you less than you think.

He remembers a ball kicked high, caught in a tree. Pub lemonade in a grown-up glass he’s to hold with both hands, on the bonnet of a purple car. Capsizing inside a wave and being lifted clear of the foamy sea.

But that was with her, not you.

She spoke little of you being in this house – the lover, the maker of mix tapes, the scared boy-dad. Frustrated and landlocked, trying to break apart, trapped. Nothing of the anger that grew in you, in spite, in pride.

He eyes the clock on the wall. The second hand sweeps past the minute hand and the hour barely moves.

He can’t share her with you because he remembers her at a different speed, faces her from a different direction. She was his, too fragile to loan. Packed, hidden. But you both link to her.

His memory is vivid but there are gaps in the story she told, things a child would not question. He senses the deeper meaning is in the gaps.

—

He remembers you driving, that night. She was in the passenger seat, he was sat on her lap, her arms wrapped secure, maternal at his waist. Her chin resting, light, on his head. He was finger-drawing on the steamed-up window. A face. A horse – vexed when finger-pool dots trickled. His free hand twisted her hair gently. The pleasure of curls’ spring on each turn.

His feet had set cold, like a stone brought from deep shade into sun. She had rubbed warmth back into them with vigorous hands.

He remembers being alert when the pattern of speech changed. Something was said, the car was uneasy. Long sounds like growling. Tight whispers. Short, sharp words. He had shut down, head lowered, swung socked-feet. He remembers tipping his head back to see her upside-down face, tickled by strands of her soft hair. Peep oh. She covers his eyes.

Peep oh.

The quiet menace of a row was still there. The car surged. He watched her hand hover mid-air, open, pleading – and reached for it, pulled it back to his lap.

That’s when he saw them. A pair of unblinking moons floating in the dark road ahead. Cross-eyed, he fixed on the two bright discs in wonder. He pointed, looked up at her, felt the sadness when she hadn’t seen.

Headlights hit the shape ahead, paralysed in the sudden light.

He had felt his mother’s legs stiffen. Her chest had jerked back, her grip tightened, enveloping him. An animal crouch from threat –

The thud as metal met bone.

A sound like a post driven into the ground. Brief and endless at once. He remembered the flick of its neck, how its fleece bounced and ripped before the swerve. The noise had come, and was gone.

A breath. Clear and empty.

Then tears erupted through him, gagged tongue-bit salt-sting sobs. He had screamed and gulped and she lifted him aloft to bring him back to her.

Tears trailed her own face – but all her focus was on her boy.

He remembers her distraction, smiling, We’re okay. We’re both okay. He wailed, dumb and helpless. She covered her face with his hands. Kissed his palms. Peep oh – hiding and reappearing, he was diverted by her reassuring voice. Peep oh. Then the fresh wave of panic when he couldn’t see her, the lung-full bawl of terror at being alone.

She jiggled his tiny frame, said that that wasn’t real magic. See? She said it just like that, as if real magic were somewhere else.

Peep oh.

And you had disappeared.●