Awake

Chapter Nine - Things That Have Been

Sandy lay beneath heaps of blankets and stared up at the knots in the wooden boards above him. If you looked at them in a certain way, they appeared to be a sad face gazing back at him. Once Sandy had seen the face, he couldn't un-see it.

  The winter had not eased a bit though it had been months now since it began. If anything, it was getting worse. But Sandy didn't go outside anymore so he couldn't be sure whether the roads were still clear enough to fight though or how many feet deep the harbour was frozen.

  Sandy had not left his bed in a long time. He could not anymore. He could no longer stand. His legs crumpled beneath him and he fell to the ground, and he felt sure that one more fall would shatter him completely. He wasn't sure, however, whether he would mind.

  Arnold could not carry him anymore. Even his gentle hands caused unbearable agony. No, Sandy was trapped in the tiny cabin below deck, heaped up amongst blankets, coffined and confined, staring up at the ceiling. Hopeless.

 It never stopped hurting now. He was aware, all the time, of a sense of falling to pieces within his skeleton, a dull ache as if he was shedding pieces of himself. He could no longer eat. Each time he tried, the pain that ripped through his jaw made him pass out. He was surviving on thin broth now, and water.

   Sandy rose in and out of fitful dreams, swaying in the gap between wakefulness and sleep. Sometimes he was lost in his own imagination, other times in his memories. The two were indistinguishable to him.

  Trying to remain himself until the end, Sandy dedicated hours at a time to going over the memories he was certain were real and reviewing them, labelling them, putting them in their place.

  His mother, with her golden hair twisted up behind her head and a dress of muted red. The lines around her mouth and at the corners of her eyes. The knuckles on her hands when she rapped them against the table in displeasure. The way she smoothed down her apron when she was stressed, flattening out the white fabric as though she was flattening out herself.

  Sandy saw her pouring drinks at the bar, sewing in the corner, standing in the yard and shouting at his father, slow-dancing with him late at night. Sandy could remember few occasions when her attention had been turned fully on him but he played them over and over, every conversation he could grab on to, every laugh, every expression.

  Because she was real. He knew that.

  His father, with his grizzled beard and mess of dark hair and broken nose. The way his collar always folded wrong. His hands bloodied from a fight. His laugh bouncing off the walls. The way he looked to his wife and smiled with the corner of his mouth, like he thought nobody could see. His eyebrows furrowed, mouth open in a furious roar.

  Sandy played back memories of the two of them fishing in the stream one day, of standing behind the bar with him, of listening into long conversations he was having with customers. He remembered being taught to read by him, haltingly, one word at a time because his father was scarcely more than illiterate himself.

  He was real too. Sandy couldn't doubt it.