Chasm

By Steven Cudahy

Simone has a good life with her husband, Charles, and their son, Perry. But a horrifying accident changes everything in a moment and she finds that the things she thought were so certain are now far less solid than she had believed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steven Cudahy
• Release date: Jan 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301527410

Book preview

Chasm

Steven Cudahy

Published by Bastard Words at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Copyright © Steven Cudahy 2012

Cover image copyright © Tim Fraser Brown 2012

All rights reserved

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people or events is entirely coincidental.

For Louisa, who believed when I couldn't.

Contents

End

Funeral

Burial

Wake

Moments

The Flesh Of The Swine

Holiday

Beginning

Afterword

End

The raw skid of tires unable to grip the road surface, then a clunk as the car mounted the kerb. The boy had bent over to pick up his football and the wing of the car caught him under the chin and drove hard into his chest, lifting him, spinning him into the brick wall. He slumped to the pavement and the car slammed into the granite gatepost. The football bounced in front of a hard-braking white Transit van.

The passenger door of the van opened and a young man in a plaster-stained baseball cap leaped out. The van was still braking, close to stopped, and he stumbled as his battered beige work boots hit the road then managed to recover his momentum and direct it into a staggering run towards the boy lying on the pavement. As he got there the boy’s father appeared in the gateway, dazed from napping in the heat, a mostly empty bottle of beer in one hand. In the crashed car the airbag slowly deflated and the driver looked blearily around him.

The young builder crouched by the child, two fingers on his neck. His colleague was out of the stopped van, and he fumbled his phone out of his ragged boiler suit and dialled, waited, shouted about an accident, started yelling street names, rubbing his free hand rapidly back and forth through his grey hair. The father knocked on the window of the crashed car, asking the driver if he was all right, oblivious to his son lying on the pavement beyond the bulk of the crumpled bonnet.

The older builder finished his call and stood in the road, staring from his phone to the crashed car to the child as if unsure what to do. There were a few moments of quiet, heavy and exhausted in the harsh sunlight, and all the noise to be heard was the gentle whir of the electric motor as the driver hit the switch to wind down his window, and the tinny floating voices from a radio in the garden, football commentators sounding bored and tired.

An engine noise faded in, purring back from the flat fronts of the houses. The older builder moved to help his colleague. The father offered his bottle of beer to the driver who sat and looked at him, stunned, tears rolling down his face. The engine noise came closer, dropped in pitch and faded as the silvery BMW rolled to a halt, and a woman got out, looking confused, standing still, leaning on her door for a moment to take in the scene.

The woman screamed.

The father looked round, baffled, and finally saw his son on the pavement. He dropped his beer, a smash and fizz of pale brown froth and jags of glass all over his trainers. The woman moved slowly towards the boy, walking with an odd, stiff stride as if she was having trouble lifting her feet. The grey-haired builder moved to intercept her, although it was unclear whether he was trying to stop her going to the boy or merely worried she may collapse. The father yanked open the door of the crashed car, grabbed the driver by the throat and hauled him out onto the side of the road. The young builder took his fingers from the child’s neck and stood, eyes wide and mouth hanging open, saw the father punch the driver once, twice, three times, and ran round the car to intervene.

‘The ambulance is on its way.’

‘What the fuck did you do to my son?’

‘Leave it mate, just leave him alone and let the police deal with him.’

‘Perry?’ The woman’s voice crackled and broke, more of a choked sob than a word. The older builder took her arm and helped her to where the boy lay.

‘Your son?’ he asked.

She pushed past him and fell to her knees next to the child, oblivious to the dust and grit scratching her knees. She brushed hair from the boy’s forehead. There was a little blood flowing from his nose, some abrasions on his cheek and forehead, and his eyes were closed. The older builder put his hand on her shoulder, to calm her, to support her, to reassure her that someone else was there. She seemed unaware of anything apart from the boy. She put a hand under his cheek as if to lift his head.

‘You shouldn’t move him,’ the builder said. ‘In case his spine…’ he trailed off. She took her hand gently away and sat stroking the boy's hair, making small noises, muted and incomprehensible.

Across the car the younger builder pushed the father back a little and stood between him and the driver, palms out flat in a gesture of peace. The father snarled something at him, the words incomprehensible through his anger, his lips twisted and eyes narrowed. The builder said, ‘Your wife, your son?’ The father nodded, mute, ashamed perhaps that he had forgotten in his rage to check on the condition of the boy, ignored his wife’s distress. ‘Go to them,’ the young builder said. He gestured at the driver, curled up on the ground, blood oozing from a cut above one half-closed eye, ‘This bastard’s going nowhere. Trust me.’

The father nodded, moved round the car to where his wife was kneeling, rocking back and forth, moaning softly to herself. The older builder moved back to give them space. The father knelt next to his son and put out a trembling hand to touch the boy’s neck, searching gently with his fingertips, trying to find a pulse. Moments passed and his search became more frantic, he applied more pressure, and tears gathered and dropped from his eyes. In the distance sirens wailed, drawing closer, metallic, sounding futile and shallow in the hard summer sun.

* * *

The hospital lighting was harsh, over-bright, making everything razor-edged, too sharp to look at, and the air was stuffy, pervaded with the fusty smell of people and dust and dead air with occasional sharp undertones of cleaning products. Nurses and a doctor took over from the ambulance crew, rushed the child to a room, closed out the family. Simone and Charles paced the corridor in silence, each barely aware of the other, waiting for someone to tell them what to do next.

Simone was numb, a terrible calm masking a pent up nervous energy that she paced the corridor in an attempt to dissipate. She felt irregular jolts of energy flicker through her body, as if she’d been drinking coffee non-stop through the day and now the jitters were hitting hard. She remembered leaving her car in the street, engine running, door open, and panicked for a moment before she remembered the police breathalysing one man and interviewing two others. She wondered if the police would sort her car out. They would surely understand why it had slipped her mind.

She realised she was in a state of anticipation, unsure what she was expecting but certain she should be feeling something: grief or horror or pain. She wondered if she was in shock. Charles stopped his pacing, leant against the wall with his head in his hands. Two nurses went past, a couple of porters wheeling some kind of machine, a doctor in a hurry with the bottoms of his trousers flapping. Charles started sobbing, a strangled coughing noise, the raw force of it making his shoulders jerk. She felt something at last, anger, at Charles, at herself, at both of them acting out the clichés.

Her mind was a whirl of memories. She thought back to the paramedics in their overalls, one of them with a stain on his shirt, across the left of his chest, something dark brown that could have been either dried blood or dried ketchup. The heat of the sun and the dust gritty on her bare legs as it was blown ahead of the small breeze. A stretcher with straps and buckles and their controlled, rote-learned movements, effortless, as they slid the backboard under her son and lifted him onto the trolley. The sunlight tinged blue by the flashing light atop the ambulance as she watched them roll the stretcher into the back. Simone relived the moments, scrabbling for a memory that would trigger a feeling, anything that would be better than the vast hollow in her stomach and the anger towards her husband that she knew she didn’t want. It occurred to her that she should want to be in Charles’s arms, but she didn’t want to go to him, wanting him to come to her instead. Part of her felt it was his job to comfort her but another part of her knew she was being childish and should go to him, her husband, the father of her child. But the corridor seemed impossibly wide, flooded and made treacherous by the odd eddies and sharp submerged rocks of all their difficult years of marriage, become somehow too dangerous for her to cross. Standing by a coffee machine, leaning lightly against the wall, she was aware of her sore feet and tired eyes and wanted to be at home in a bath, some bubbles and soft music, a glass of wine to hand.

Voices crackled and grated through speakers, incomprehensible to her, goblins in the works croaking alien gibberish. She forced herself to look at her husband. He was broken and tiny, hunched over and hiding his head in his hands. She was next to him before she had realized she was moving, betraying her own wants, lifting his head and putting her arms around his neck, nuzzling her cheek against the stubble on his face and making vague noises in his ear, hoping he thought them suggestive of reassurance and love and hope.

Someone spoke from behind her. There was a doctor there, youngish and soft-faced, and he called them Mr and Mrs and used their surname, Charles’s surname, the name she had taken for her own without really thinking about it, the name that now sounded wrong, as if she was hoping that somehow it didn’t apply to her. The name she didn’t want to be hers because then it wouldn’t be Perry’s either and this could be a huge misunderstanding that, once cleared up, would see her on her way home with her son in tow. He said he was sorry, they had done all they could, everything science and medicine could do, but there had been too much damage, no real chance of Perry surviving such an accident. He said Perry hadn't suffered any pain and Simone wanted to scream at him, grab the lapels of his white coat and shriek at him, shake him, demand to know how the fuck he could be so sure of that, to ask how many kids in that position had come back and told him that it was bad being dead but at least they hadn’t suffered. The doctor said something about the extent of the trauma to Perry’s brain, about unconsciousness and crushed ribs and punctured lungs, about the ambulance crew and trying all the options, doing everything that could be done, and she thought for a moment he was implying that children were more important somehow, more precious. Simone hated him with all the energy she could muster, balled it up and held onto it, fed it as best she could, stringing together increasingly implausible reasons why she hated this smug little man, so superficially mournful and sympathetic as he delivered his carefully thought-out speech, raging at him just to feel something, anything, that she could hold onto so she didn’t collapse. The floor tiles seemed to generate increased gravity, a pull so strong she wanted to be horizontal, curled up in a ball, spared the need to fight so hard to stay upright and remain respectable and appropriate.

There was nothing but sorrow and pain in what the doctor said, and she felt hot and heavy under the bright strip lights of the corridor. She wanted to punch him, this soft little man with his receding hairline and his perfect white teeth and she thought there was something of the crow about him, a little hunch and beady-eyed gleam. She felt like carrion in waiting, and her son was carrion for real and this man was already feasting on his death just as others like him would eventually feed on her own.

My son is dead, she thought, but it meant nothing to her. Charles was asking questions, pretending to be knowledgeable, spouting half-remembered facts and misinformation culled from newspapers, the internet, dramas and documentaries on TV. The doctor was being generous and helpful and answering him as if he was making sense, which Simone knew he wasn’t because any time Charles found himself in a crisis, under any kind of pressure, he babbled incoherently until someone told him to shut up or otherwise took charge of the situation.

‘Can we see him?’ she asked. Charles and the doctor stopped talking and her husband looked at her, open mouthed, as if she had said she wanted Perry butchered and the prize cuts grilled and served on a bed of seasonal greens.

‘Of course,’ the doctor said. ‘Follow me.’

* * *

‘He doesn’t look dead,’ Simone said. Charles turned to her and she could see the familiar curl in his lip, the narrowing of his eyes. For a moment she felt her legs wilt, unable to hold her up, buckling before the full force of his disdain. She took a small step, a little dance shuffle to the right and put a hand flat against the wall for support. The doctor asked if she was okay, advised her to take a seat. She felt ridiculous and overwhelmed and gawky, and a dozen other things she couldn’t name. She didn’t feel grief or horror or sadness and she was worried about her reaction, her lack of reaction. She wanted to ask the doctor if they had a machine that would show what damage to her brain enabled her to feel so tired and matter-of-fact about looking at the body of her dead son.

‘I’m fine,’ she said, ‘I don’t need to sit down.’ Charles put an arm around her shoulder and they stood and looked at the little boy in the bed. They had cleaned the blood from his nose, closed his eyes, and the sheets were tucked up under his chin. He looked like he was asleep except Simone knew differently because normally when she checked on him at night she would find him churning in a sprawled tangle of sheet and pillow and limb and hair. That he was so peaceful made her feel sick because the only way Perry could be still was if the energy had all run out of him leaving nothing behind. She stroked his face, avoiding the reddish patch on his cheek where he had scraped the pavement. His skin was impossibly smooth beneath her fingertips, still warm because of the heat in the hospital room.

‘Why did he die?’ she asked. She felt Charles stiffen next to her and quickly added, ‘I mean, what did he die of?’

‘His neck was broken in, we think, two or three places. It’s very likely he suffered extensive brain damage as well. His rib-cage was crushed and his lungs punctured. His heart may have been ruptured. The autopsy will tell us more, but I’m certain he was dead before the ambulance arrived. I am sorry, to lose a child…’ The doctor trailed off and Simone glanced at him, felt a sudden rush of sympathy, a brief sense of how difficult this must be for a man who had dedicated his life to healing and helping.

‘Thank you,’ she said. She turned back to look at the bed and was aware of Charles leaving the room with the doctor. There was probably paperwork to be done, signatures required. Charles liked signing things, the codified life lived through his scrawl on thousands of pieces of paper, contracts and cheques and forms and letters, their marriage certificate, mortgage and credit agreements, Christmas cards and the two love letters he managed to write her during their entire relationship. She knew he would sign whatever he was asked to without thinking, without connecting it to Perry in any real sense, just more paper to him. She knew she wouldn’t be able to do it, the act would be too final, too much a betrayal of her son, striking him out of existence with the loops and whirls of the signature she had practised in notebooks back when her world was still fresh and new.

Even with his body in the bed it was too much to accept he was dead. She wanted there to have been a mistake, that this was Perry’s doppelgänger and her own son was lying asleep, head cocooned in swathes of white linen in some other room where some other doctor, a better doctor, had managed to save his life, hauling him back from the brink through skilled determination and the brilliant deployment of sterile tools and machines that beeped and whirred with the clean power of science over the fragility of the human body. She wanted to cry. She wanted to feel something.

She bent over to kiss Perry on the forehead and caught his scent, little boy, clean and sharp. Everything blurred and there was something in her throat, a blockage, and she was making tortured noises. She realised she was crying, an abyss rising in her chest, a hungry absence impossible to contain, and she was crouched at the side of the bed, clutching great fistfuls of sheet and howling her throat raw and sore. The abyss expanded through her, swallowing love and hope and joy and all she had ever held dear, scattering dust and ashes in its wake.

She lost track of time. Eventually she felt a hand on her shoulder and heard Charles say, ‘We should go home. There’s nothing more for us here.’ She kept her head down, shielding her eyes from him, from Perry, from the world. There was darkness and spots of colour and the feeling at the back of her throat like her insides were coming out through her mouth.

‘Simone,’ Charles said, gently, stroking her hair. ‘They did everything they could. They just couldn’t save him. No one could have saved him.’

She whipped her head round and stared up at him. He took a step back, raised his hands in a gesture of peace. She mustered her voice, made a huge effort to not be sick and focus on breathing, get the air in and then out, a monumental task, almost too much for her. A stranger’s voice fell from her mouth, cracked and raspy, ‘I know, I know.’

‘Let’s go home.’ Charles offered her his hand.

‘Okay.’ She didn’t resist as he took her arm and helped her to her feet. She thought for a moment he was going to hold her, take her in his arms and stroke her back gently, and she moved towards him, leant into him, welcoming the closeness and warmth. He stepped back and took her elbow to guide her through the door and down the corridor. She felt bitter and empty, annoyed at herself for having expected something more, at him for not having given it, at her own capability for pettiness while her son was freshly dead back in the room. There was a moment of rising panic, a desire to run back and take one last look, but she quashed it almost as soon as it started, feeling light-headed, stumbling a little.

They walked slowly through reception. She felt that everyone averted their eyes from them, as if the two of them were the bearers of some plague that could be contracted through gaze. They stepped through the automatic doors into the murky heat of the day. It was bright, glare coming back strong off parked cars and the pale pavement, and Simone felt her eyes burn and blear and knew she was crying again. She smelt heat and dust and a rich, mouldy scent from the troughs of flowers by the entrance. Cars and people and birds and insects and a tired little breeze exhausted from forcing its way through the fatty air. No Perry now, and never again.

An exhaust backfired and she felt Charles, his hand still on her arm, jump. She couldn’t see anything clearly and she could feel her cheeks were wet, could taste the salt on her lips when she licked them.

‘Here,’ she heard Charles say, and she grasped the handkerchief he thrust into her hand and mopped at her face. She was starting to sweat in the heat. She wanted to collapse, fall to the floor and weep and wail, become someone else’s problem. The air was pressing down, too heavy and bulky to bear.

‘I’ll get us a taxi,’ she heard Charles say.

She couldn’t speak, couldn’t get enough air into her lungs to force the sounds out. She settled for a nod instead and allowed Charles to lead her by the arm across the hot concrete towards the taxi rank. She climbed in and Charles followed her and gave their address. He reached across her and pulled the seatbelt out, clicked it home. She stared at nothing, occasionally dabbing her eyes with the sodden handkerchief. She felt the thrum and hurl of the car through traffic, the sense-rumble of the wheels on the road and the nerve-tingling vibration from the engine transmitted through the shell and seats. She swallowed repeatedly, hoping for some saliva, but her mouth and throat remained dry. The passing smear of the cars and pedestrians and the stationary brick and concrete and glass heft of the city hurt her eyes. She leant back in her seat and closed them, resting them, trying to recall her son, the shape and motion of him as he played through the world.

* * *

At the house the police had moved her car into the driveway and an officer was sitting on the steps waiting for them, his radio burbling codes and street names into the summer evening. He stood as they approached and his eyes asked a question that Charles replied to with a shake of his head and a simple, ‘No.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ the PC said. ‘We have the driver in custody and the builders were very helpful. Did you speak to my colleague at the hospital?’

‘Yes,’ Charles said. Simone sank down on the front step, grateful for the shade. She heard the two men talking, a fuzzy noise at the edges of perception, and she wished they would hurry up and finish. Something about not wanting to leave the house unlocked. She was sure the young man was being sympathetic, probably doing a little more than his job required, but she wanted him gone, wanted to be inside and lying down in bed, trying to swaddle the void in her stomach, to build up enough energy to cry some more, throw up, wail and shriek and grieve. She could stand that, she could deal with it, but the killing numbness, the vacuum in her, was too much to cope with. Distress and loss in its purest form, the absence and the hollow, the span of years to come and the way looking forward was now looking at wastelands, barren and blanched and nothing but the soft dust and blankness of her own death down the line.

The policeman finished up and left. She watched his boots as he walked down the drive, listened to the creak from the right one every time he put his foot down, a wet sound, leather under duress. She heard Charles say something and felt his hand on her arm, under her arm, applying pressure to try to lift her up. She stood awkwardly and allowed him to guide her inside. He took her to the lounge and sat her in a chair and asked her if she wanted anything. When she didn’t respond he went somewhere and returned with water, condensation hazing the outside of the glass. She took small sips and tried to still the shaking in her hands, her arms, her entire body.

‘I have to go,’ Charles said. ‘I need to go and tell my parents what’s happened.’

‘Couldn’t you phone them?’ Her voice sounded strange to her, detached, flat and distant as if it was coming from somewhere other than her mouth.

‘They live twenty minutes down the road. Better to do it in person.’

‘I should phone my mother.’

‘When I get back,’ he said. ‘We can do it together.’ He knelt next to the chair and took her head between his hands, kissed her on the lips, a brief, dry, kiss, and looked her in the eyes. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’ Then he was gone and she heard the click of the front door and she was alone in the house.

Simone looked around the room, sipped her water, watched the dust dancing in shafts of afternoon sun. Dead skin and dirt and tiny mites floating in honeyed light. There was nothing to be done, nothing she wanted to do or could imagine doing. She thought about death, idly considered how nice it would be to no longer feel, tried to think of a better word than nice then decided it was exactly the right word. So bland, so offensive in its inoffensiveness. Death would be nice in all the senses. It would be scrupulously exact, she would be alive one moment and dead the next and there would be no more sorrow and no more pain and no more of this killing whirl of sadness and numbness mingled, curdling each other, poisoning her from within. It would be neat and tidy and polite and proper. It would be neither pleasurable nor painful but rather just as it was, commonplace, one of those experiences everyone shared. The end of her, the end of the world for her.

From nowhere she suddenly wanted a plane to crash on the house, a falling twist of metal and exploding fuel and the huge whirring blades in the massive engines, the speed and smash and instant end of it all. She would have to do nothing. Perhaps there would be a moment of pain, perhaps not. She had no idea what it would feel like. She felt nothing, could only imagine feeling nothing for the rest of her days. There was nothing she had to do. She settled in the chair, put the glass down on a nearby table, leaned back and closed her eyes and waited for something to happen.

* * *

Charles found himself speeding, heavy-footing the brakes into corners, barely aware of his progress through the streets. The car rolled and bucked in protest. He sighed and tried to take a deep breath, to calm the nerves, he thought, to settle down, but there was something that felt like a belt fastened far too tight around his chest. He caught a familiar landmark, a brief flash of childhood memories from bus journeys home from school, and took the next right.

The streets were still bright, still warm, and people were out with their kids, young couples kissing and grabbing at each other, teenagers playing football, old people sauntering along, enjoying the tired heat left over at the end of the day. He pulled a left and hammered the brake pedal as a kid pushed off from the kerb and sailed across the street on his bike. The car scraped to a halt, the kid oblivious, the bonnet ten feet away from his bike. A near miss from Charles’s point of view but nothing untoward as far as the boy was concerned. Charles leant against