An excerpt from my novel…
For all Tom knew, when he stopped at his usual spot in the park, the day was like any other. He had been sitting there a few minutes before he noticed that it wasn’t. Leaves were detaching themselves from the skinny branches that stretched out overhead, as they always did this time of year. The floor was already carpeted with a mulch of their fellows. The rhythm of their descent was irregular, of course. Random.
And yet, Tom knew, even with his eyes closed tightly, the exact moment the next leaf would hit the ground. He was drumming his fingers against his thigh in perfect synchronisation with every tree in the park. He cast his gaze around to see if there was anyone to whom he could disclose this peculiar secret. He wanted to share that he, ordinary Tom Caffrey, could predict the unpredictable as easily as he could tap out the beat of a waltz. He smiled, excitement shining through the grey of his day. A flash of white caught his eye and he leaned forward to retrieve a newspaper from where it had fallen to the path in front of his chair and began to read.
The article was right. His hands were chilly, almost numb, in fact.
His sons didn’t visit enough. When had he last seen them all in the same room?
His jaw was wired shut. He could taste the cold metal where it wove through his cheeks.
An abstract sense of observed panic rose like bile in his throat, and he felt the beats of his heart quicken beneath his breast. He’d have to make his way home, through the house, out of the back door and down the garden to the shed, find the wire clippers and clip the wires. He knew from past experience that asking for help was pointless.
He reached down to unclip the brakes holding his wheelchair in place, but before cold fingers could fumble with colder metal, his focus was broken by a high-pitched screeching. He looked around and saw, mere feet away, a baby being lifted from a pushchair, squealing - not in pain, or in panic, but with pure, shining joy. The infant was being scooped into its mother’s arms, opening and closing chubby little fists, entirely trusting.
Tom couldn’t help but smile, remembering lifting his own children from their prams. Remembering seeing their faces change from the grumpy bewilderment of recent awakening to joyful excitement when they recognised him. The purity of the memory across the intervening years like sunlight through a broken cloud, and he felt its warmth soaking through his body, melting away the stiffness in his bones for a moment. With an almost inaudible pop, he felt the wires in his mouth disappear, leaving behind nothing more than a faint metallic tang.
Tom shook his head, gingerly opening and closing his mouth. The wires were gone, which was a relief, but so was the newspaper he’d been reading just a second ago. He frowned, wondering if somebody had stolen it when he’d blinked. If someone did steal it, which seemed increasingly likely, he’d put a tenner on it being the same somebody that had wired his jaws together. But how had they sneaked up on him so silently? How had they vanished so completely? His teeth ached where the wires had bored through them. He cast his gaze around, eyes narrowing as he spotted it.
That cloud, the one that was floating serenely overhead, was that the same cloud he’d noticed on his way here this morning? Yes, it definitely was. He could remember thinking how it looked like a bear flagging down a cab. It didn’t quite match the other wisps of cloud splattered across the blue. It was performatively serene - trying too hard to look like a cloud. It was hiding something. A vehicle? Yes, there it was. Now he was paying attention, squinting into the sky, Tom could see the little puffs of steam ejecting from what he supposed was the cloud-vehicle’s exhaust. Unseen by Tom, a woman in a navy macintosh, her iron-grey curls gathered into a stylish mess, sat down on a bench on the opposite side of the path to watch him with an impolite curiosity.
Tom reached up and pulled his hat more firmly onto his head. The cloud-people could take the paper off his lap if they wanted, he didn’t give a fig about that paper. They could have the leaves strewn on the path around him. They could have the baby, still squealing as his pram trundled onward. But this was a very good hat. It could well be the reason they were here at all. And Tom wouldn’t give it up without a fuss.
He waited for a minute that felt like an hour, one hand holding his hat in place, the other curled into a fist, before another thought trickled into a discernible shape that made him wonder if this wasn’t bigger than a hat heist after all. How had the newspaper printed the story on his new powers so quickly? And, now he thought about it, wasn’t Mr Bates long buried? Yes, Tom vaguely remembered attending his memorial at the old factory. The smell of old motor oil had mingled with the smell of fresh lilies and moth-eaten woollens.
No, it was unreasonable. And when had he bought the paper anyway? He didn’t remember going to the newsagents that morning. No, he must have imagined the paper. If he’d imagined the paper, might he have imagined the cloud craft that floated above him? He probed the insides of his cheeks with the tip of his tongue, trying to feel the holes the wires had left behind, but couldn’t find anything. The taste of blood in his mouth wasn’t any stronger than it normally was. Only the usual wobbly teeth were loose in their sockets. Tom mustered what little courage he had, wetting his dry lips so he would be able to shriek and yell if he needed to, and gradually tipped his head back. He searched the sky above him, but there was nothing to see. Just a few pigeons and wisps of cirrus clouds brushed softly onto the blue. The mac-clad woman sitting opposite tipped her head to one side, observing Tom’s relief without him realising it.
Relief flooded his body like liquor. Leaves were still drifting down around him, drumming into the ground. He resumed his magically in-time tapping. He could feel the pattern of each tree’s leaf-by-leaf descent on the breeze like a far away bodhrán, too distant to hear, just close enough to feel the beat trembling through the ground. If his legs were able to hold him up, he’d have danced to the leaves’ beat. If he had a piano in front of him right now, he knew he’d make completely unique music to this beat. Truly universal music that transcended the vagaries of taste.
But his legs didn’t work. And he had no piano. And there, pulsing at the outside edges of consciousness as he enjoyed his newfound preternatural skill was the understanding, and he couldn’t explain how he understood, that this skill would dissolve the moment he moved from this spot.
He must tell people about it now, without moving. Why didn’t anybody seem willing to have him catch their eye? The woman seated across the path as Tom’s gaze slid over her, seeing nothing more than an empty bench. The mother with her baby had rolled past at a leisurely pace. Other people passed by in front of him, their footsteps muffled by autumn’s carpet. They allowed their eyes to awkwardly skip over him, ignoring his attempts to get their attention, as if the wheelchair he occupied was empty, the seat devoid of life or anything like it. As if he were erased.
A strange feeling took over him, like a drop of ice cold water sliding down the length of his bowed spine, and Tom felt himself changing. He was becoming invisible. He looked down at his hands, registering with calm surprise that the tips of his fingers were shimmering and disappearing. One by one they evaporated to become something less than dust. He waved, but saw nothing more than a wobbly distortion in the air like a heat rising off hot tarmac.
He knew he should feel afraid. Most people would be afraid. But he felt peaceful. He had been expecting something like this for so long now – had spent so long on the brink of dissolution that it felt as natural as laughter. Today was just a day for the inexplicable, it seemed. He wondered idly as he disappeared who’d notice the things he left behind: his wheelchair; a pile of clothes; his good hip flask with half the morning’s whiskey left; a wallet, empty save for a torn picture of his boys as he had liked them best – 3, 7, and 10 years old and neatly arranged in height order, each of them grinning at the camera. Who took the picture? Tom couldn’t ever remember taking a photo of them.
His whole body was invisible now, and he felt himself rising slowly, his essence drifting gently upwards like a hot air balloon. The streets and fields became nothing more than a faraway patchwork quilt to him, traversed by ant-sized strangers.
‘Good morning,’ a voice called out from somewhere to his left. The tone was briskly, dutifully, cheerful – like that of a hospice nurse making the first round of the day. Tom felt the words echoing around the emptiness of his dissolving brain, their clipped richness bumping up against the edges of his mind. They began to repeat, echoing and merging gradually into a melody, morphing through ecclesiastical major chord shifts, practically begging for a full choral accompaniment. But how, Tom wondered, did his mind have edges if he was busy floating away and becoming nothing? How could there be thoughts without the spongy grey matter they called home?
“There can’t be thoughts without heads,” Tom pondered, aloud. His words split into fractals – each syllable falling to land around his feet like thrown rice at a wedding. He had a voice! One can’t have a voice without a throat and lungs and a tongue and all those other bits he most certainly had.
“There can’t be words without mouths!” he shouted at the park, hooting a laugh at the startled concern on the face of who he supposed was the good-morninger. His hands, clutching the arms of his wheelchair, had popped back into existence; although they still tingled with the residue of the magic that had caused them to disappear. He tried to wiggle his fingers and watched as they waved joyfully back at him. He smiled down at them, brimming with fondness for these hands of his. It didn’t last long, though. Happiness never seemed to last long. Familiar disappointment was welling up inside his chest, seeping into his body with each overwhelmingly solid breath, making its way through all the twisted and blackened branches of his lungs until he was saturated by it. He had felt a moment of pure joy as he looked down at the world with him apart from it, floating high above. Erased. And then another strange jolt of joy when he realised he still existed. But he had been outside of himself.
And now here he sat once more. Inside his broken body. Cold, alone, crippled and bitter and mad. The wretched unfairness of the hand he’d been dealt was too neatly complete, too well-constructed, to be random – something had it out for him. He had known it for a long time. No matter what his intentions were, torment invariably followed close on the heels of every action he took, like a malicious, monstrous dog dragging itself along, teeth bared and tail wagging, its eyes glowing with a sly intent. It had never let anything go right for him, and now it wouldn’t even let him drift off into a nothingness that looked so dreamily appealing.
