Blood
Chapter Three
Fiction from me as we head toward Halloween. I’ll post one chapter every Friday at 9pm.
This is Chapter Three.
Previously, Chapter Two.
To start from the beginning — Blood: Chapter One.
Blood
III.
Bedtime when it finally came happened painlessly enough, with none of the expected emotional wobbles from Jake. The boys whirled about each other, at Matthew’s lead, in a finely-choreographed dance of toothbrushes and pyjamas, played out between the bathroom and a magical cupboard on the landing which halfway through provided them both with comforting, newly-warm towels.
The boys might have been allowed, had they got back a little earlier, and had they not been delayed by injury, to build a den of blankets and pillows in the living room downstairs; but, for tonight, they would sleep separately. Matthew would be up the top flight of stairs, in his own room, which was oddly small for the house, was decorated with a frieze of rocket-ships and planets, and did not have space even for an arrangement of sofa cushions on the floor. Jake would be in the spare room, opposite the parents’ bedroom. Every summer, and over every Christmas break, it became Matthew’s older brother’s room again, but tonight it would be Jake’s. The bed, which was right by the door, was already made, an inviting and luxurious den of white cotton, with a heavy grey blanket on top.
It was time to sleep. The dark in the spare room was not especially worrying to Jake; in fact, the bed being so close to the door, he decided not to put the light on at all, but to crouch on the end of the bed and push the door shut. When he burrowed himself under the covers, he relaxed further still. Even though he desperately wished he was in his own bed — desperately wished the clock at the far end of the downstairs hallway did not somehow project its ticking through the silence upstairs and into the room, into every room, as if it were mere feet away — whatever happened now, Jake would at least not have to encounter anyone, not any more. His day was over: he had spent time with a friend — for Matthew, he thought happily, was a friend, after all — he had spent time somewhere unfamiliar, he was sleeping away from home; and even though it had all gone unexpectedly well, it was an almost bodily relief that he could now be alone again.
He got into bed, slid both of his hands underneath the big, lavish pillows, found a position he liked, and after not many minutes with his face pressed into the deep softness, he was enjoying the earliest hints of feeling like a river, of beginning to curve outward toward sleep, when something inside his nose caught his attention. It was strange and indistinct, at first. In a second it was like a grain of something, whirring into and out of clarity, as if powered by a microscopic motor or the shrill buzzing of a flea. It became a little irritating. He sniffed twice, which did nothing, except to make him screw his face up, and to confirm this sensation as the impish spark which desires in its dancing to become a sneeze.
He mustn’t sneeze, he immediately warned himself. Although this roused him a little, he did not quite remember that he was alone in the room, and the warning intensified as it arrived because Jake in his drowsiness believed that Matthew was asleep a few feet away, and he didn’t want to wake him.
The longer he stayed in one position, the more potent the little grain became. Although he tried rolling around a few times, and variously contorting his nose and mouth, it seemed to move about on its own, inviting the uncomfortable idea that his face had tunnels in it, and that a tiny bee was exploring them. He had been stung by a bee last summer, on his left earlobe.
As Jake swam about the memory of that sting, of all the gorgeous, kind attention he had been paid afterward by the people at the farm shop — and of the delicious pink lemonade he had been given as a treat, for being brave — the effort not to sneeze transformed itself: the image was of a small flue or release-valve, a grubby pipe protruding from the top of an outbuilding, and he came to imagine he was drifting just inches above it — freely in the air he was a tarpaulin, or was somehow flying one, like an enchanted carpet; it was edged with several brass eyelets, which he could neither feel nor see, but he knew for sure that if one of these should accidentally align itself above the pipe, it would catch on it, and there would be a tremendous release of pressure. He must avoid it.
Soon his dream was was no longer airborne, and what had been the obscure presence of a bee became a visible ant, disappearing and reappearing among the soft mossy underlayers of a patch of grass until Jake could no longer follow it. A boy wearing shabby canvas shorts and a sailor’s neckerchief sat opposite him, cross-legged in the blazing sun, leaning forward as he intently rubbed dock-leaves into the side of his knee. It was pink with painful-looking bumps, so there were clearly stinging nettles about, thought Jake: he must avoid them. The boy’s name was Sorrel, and a beautiful simple tattoo on his shoulder seemed to show a constellation.
In the knapsack on the grass between them Jake found small plastic knives in primary colours. There was also a handkerchief, a plastic toy moulded in the shape of a half-opened box of matches, whose wind-up cog seemed to do nothing, five gleaming-white teeth, huge teeth, the size of chocolates, but human teeth still, and a sheaf of treasure-maps — the writing all sans-serif, in boxes with rounded corners — each one laminated in the manner of a pizza-restaurant menu.
The heat of the sun on Jake’s skin set glowing in him an instinct for adventure. But he was fearful, too. Sorrel kept looking at something, darting a glance along a tiny waterway edged with reeds; he seemed to be looking almost as far as the horizon, but he wouldn’t say why.
Details of reality sketched themselves in, like the revealed forms of a landscape as dawn breaks over it. Jake became aware, gradually — it grew sharper each time he inhaled — of the smell of metal, perhaps of keys, or of the bright smell left on fingers which had held them. He was waking up. His dreams had carried him through colourful, heady landscapes, tinctured with summer, the beach, lagoons, maps, unfamiliar shapes in the stars, and had induced in him an almost tearful yearning to be clambering upon vast boats, shirtless in the sun and performing tasks vital for a voyage: all these fantasies, freighted with such promise and warmth, beaded and snaked away like rain from a waterproof surface — with every breath they lost form or hue, gave way further to something else. Now everything was sharper, and colder, and claustrophobic in the sudden dark. It was, Jake noticed, impossible to see anything at all. This was his first clear thought, the one that told him he was awake.
His nose was runny. He sniffed, automatically, thought he smelled metal again, and dragged the fingers of his right hand first under his right nostril, then under his left. He sat up a little and held his hand flat in front of him to look at it, forgetting that he was in total darkness. His cheek felt warm and wet, and slippery; he rubbed his hand on his pyjamas, to dry it off, felt his pillow, which was also damp, and swallowed.
Under his nose, his face still seemed to be wet. With his other hand this time he wiped across his nose, and his mouth, again. Then he felt something emerge from his right nostril, and heard on the duvet in front of him the soft, heavy tap of a drip landing. Wiping his mouth there seemed a constant flow now. He really was streaming — yet he didn’t feel unwell, and was aware neither of having sneezed, nor of having the slightest sense of needing to. The memory of dreamt nettles to be avoided flickered through him, vanishingly. Into the back of his throat he felt something trickle. He swallowed, twice, beginning to panic, clutching at his throat as he swallowed a third time, more forcefully. His nose was now running non-stop, and it was dripping down the front of him, as well as in his mouth, onto the very back of his tongue.
Not even half a minute had passed, but chaos had made itself swiftly known. Jake was hectically smearing his hands across his mouth, his face, rubbing his eyes with sticky hands, pushing them up across his forehead and even through his hair. Frantically licking his lips achieved absolutely nothing, and at last he realised, in the dark with his palms open, as his head jutted forward over them, that his open mouth was full of blood. Every part of his face and hands was clammy and slick with it.
His first thought was to put something up his nose: gobstoppers, or aniseed balls, or even chewing gum. The tactic seemed to belong to the dreams he had just been wrenched from, and even as it struck him he knew it would not have worked — never mind where he was supposed to find such equipment in the middle of the night. Then with a shock that made him sit completely upright, like in the films, he thought of the bedclothes, their white cotton. Everything was almost certainly expensive. His own mother would probably go spare, whatever that meant: someone ‘going spare’ was a threat, and the person to whom it was usually attached was his father, which was why he had never seen it happen — but he knew that it was very bad.
There was nothing he could do about that now. He would walk quietly across the landing to the bathroom, to have a look at himself, and have a wash. Maybe he could bung small damp balls of toilet paper up his nose. He did not, or so he thought, have to wait as long as usual for his dick to go back to normal, but he wasn’t taking into account how long he had been smearing blood over everything in a pitch-dark panic. Perhaps if it had all taken longer, he would not have had the encounter he did.
When he got to the bedroom door, forgetting the state of his hands, he pushed whatever garment was hanging out of the way to find the latch. He angled the door open, back into the room, and saw that the landing was a little less dark, tinted chilly grey by what must have been dazzlingly bright moonlight, if you could have seen it directly, from outside. Jake realised that since he was not going to the toilet, and since also nobody was awake, he needn’t have waited for his dick to go soft at all.
As if to prove him wrong immediately, there was a rattle from the door opposite. It opened, quickly, and Matthew’s mother padded out backwards in a light-blue towelled dressing gown, carefully closing the door behind her, almost silently. Jake froze, still a few feet back in his room. Matthew’s mother turned around, looking, if at anything, at the floor, and where should have been a closed door she saw two feet and a pair of pyjama-bottoms in the shadows.
‘Oh!’ she shrieked, tearing into the silence like a seagull — then, seeing his face, much louder— ‘Oh! My fucking Christ! Jacob!’
He remained completely still, though he felt his eyes get bigger again; to her, this only made him look more shocking. For some reason he grabbed his right hand with his left and held it tightly in front of him. They both felt sticky, and were mottled black with blood in the dim blueish light.
Matthew’s mother breathed in, heavily, closing her eyes on this hellish apparition, before breathing out and quite deliberately opening them again to the sight of what she reminded herself was a timid little boy. Her body relaxed, and she next spoke tenderly, and far quieter. ‘For crying out loud, Jacob. What’s happened?’
He didn’t know what the first part meant, really, but it seemed like he didn’t need to. He stepped forward into the vague, blue light of the landing. His calm became less eerie to Matthew’s mother as she realised that he hadn’t fallen over, or bashed into something. There would have been tears. For a heart-stopping second it crossed her mind that Matthew might have done this to him. Yet Jake’s face was placid now, almost content; certainly he returned her gaze with the hint of an endearing, apologetic smile.
‘Look at you,’ she said. ‘Is it still going?’
Neither she nor he could quite tell; the blood around his mouth was still so wet. She crouched a little, felt for the correct part of his nose, and pinched it. Quickly she realised this was awkward, and pinched her own nose in demonstration instead. ‘Can you pinch it, here? And hold your head back for me, like this?’
Matthew’s mother wasn’t convinced this technique, in itself, did any good at all — didn’t some people say to hang your head downward? — but she knew that it worked well enough to distract the patient, which was what needed to happen now. The blood would stop when it stopped, if it hadn’t already; in the meantime, Jake simply needed a project. Her face tensed as suddenly, the shock over, she realised why she was out of bed.
‘Oh, hang on. Sorry, Jacob — I’m absolutely busting.’
She plunged her hand into the bathroom and grabbed a pink box of scented tissues for Jake, which he took with his free hand. She went in and pulled the cord which turned the light on; something heavy and ornamental dangling on the end rapped on the wall a couple of times as it bounced. ‘Just… stay there a second for me,’ she said, as she shut the door. Jake shot a sudden glance at the far end of the landing, wondering whether Jim was stood there, hearing all this. It was so dark there that he couldn’t make out a thing.
Jake thought Matthew’s mother went for a very long wee. It was louder than the clock downstairs. He was glad he could wee toward the sides on purpose, avoiding the water, so that it made less noise. He was staring through the blur of his own hand, which was pinching his nose tight enough to hurt; his neck was bent exaggeratedly upwards as far as he could, also until it hurt, his shoulders were unnecessarily hunched, and with his other hand he was holding the box of tissues uselessly out in front of him like a tray. Eventually he heard a flush, then the sound of running water, then the clunk of the lock as it resonated through the wood of the door.
‘Come on,’ said Matthew’s mother, as the door opened. The warm light in there made everything very different, and was immensely reassuring; Jake was happy that he was about to go into it.
They stood in front of the sink and looked together into the bathroom mirror. At last he saw his face. He was absolutely covered in blood. His face, the front of his pyjamas, his hands and forearms, right up inside his sleeves. His mouth dropped slightly open and the white rings of his eyes shone back at him. Thin clumps of his fringe were pasted to his forehead in red.
‘You look like you’re done up for Halloween!’
Matthew’s mother was relieved that Jake, atrocious as he looked, seemed not to be upset or in pain, let alone presenting her with a medical emergency — however much he may have looked like one. Matthew would have taken this in his stride, had this happened to him; Jake, she would have expected to panic. Yet he seemed to be gliding through it, almost absent, as if the very disjunct between the apparent chaos of the situation and its actual peril — how disproportionately alarming is an innocuous nosebleed; how much more shocking at first sight for the witness, in this case, than for the victim — was just the short-circuit his otherwise overwhelming anxiety required. He even seemed content, if a little ghostly.
She wrung out the bloody flannel with which she had begun to clean his face, leaving it in the sink, and began dabbing large clumps of toilet roll under the hot tap. From nowhere, it occurred to Jake that she was being nicer to him than his own mother would have been. He found the feeling of being looked after by Matthew’s mother extremely relaxing, and he wondered what her name was. He noticed her curly, light-brown hair, with some jealousy, and, keeping them to himself, made wildly inaccurate guesses as to how old she might be.
The lightswitch of the guest bedroom had a curiously resonant mechanism, as if it was bolted to the body of a guitar, and when Matthew’s mother flicked it on — illuminating a grey blanket and a bed of expensive white sheets, which looked for all the world like an animal had been torn apart in them — what should have been a flat, plasticky click seemed instead to tock through the walls in sinister, throaty fanfare. Whatever strange vowel it had produced around the room, Matthew’s mother seemed to echo or continue it as she tutted pensively and stared at the bedclothes. She breathed out through her teeth, in a fraught sigh, constricted high up in her throat and reflected in a slight grimace on her face. ‘God,’ she said, quietly, and gathered herself with a slow breath. ‘Okay.’
Jake watched silently while Matthew’s mother removed the two pillowcases and the duvet cover. There was also a white fitted sheet, which had somehow escaped the blood; this she left where it was. She rummaged quickly in that magical cupboard on the landing for some old towels; unfortunately, none were darker than blood, but she found an enormous and very ropey-looking one, frayed and straggly at the edges, which had accompanied them on countless family holidays and had been laid out flat on many a beach. It was blue, with a pattern of wide stripes and concentric circles; tonight, it would function as a makeshift pillowcase.
The manoeuvre was almost complete. The two bloodsoaked pillowcases were now in the bath, along with the duvet cover and the blanket. She put the plug in and yawned, rubbing one of her eyes with the side of her hand as she put the cold tap on full, pulling the pillow-cases so that they were directly underneath it. She started to make the bed again, having checked with Jake she hoped he didn’t mind a duvet with no cover.
Throughout all this, Jake remained stood there, clean but shaken, in the moonlight on the landing, and still holding the box of tissues. Matthew’s mother was very, very tired, and beginning to show the merest hint of impatience; Jake was just so mutely, almost uncomprehendingly present, somehow filling more space than the shape of him took up, and he seemed to her to be desirous of something he wasn’t articulating. He was under and around her feet like a cat, and she was far from sure that leaving these sheets in water wouldn’t make them worse, even if she had the energy to change the water before she slept again, which she did not.
As he got back into the bed, Jake felt a little like he was climbing: it was the middle of the night, they were both exhausted, harrowed after their witching-hour encounter, and everything seemed that much more effortful. Matthew’s mother said to him that he should knock on their bedroom door if anything more happened, which Jake knew he absolutely would not and could not do, even under the worst circumstances.
‘Night-night, Jacob,’ said Matthew’s mother. ‘See you in the morning.’
He curled up, wriggling a little as soon as she turned off the loud light-switch — it sounded this time like a metal sink tapped with a wooden spoon, if anything — and she shut the door as gently as she could. Against Jake’s cheek, the texture of the careworn towel wrapped around the pillow was so unusual and so pleasant that he couldn’t help smiling as he drifted back to sleep.