Spring Tide

¹⁷ The Man Who Swallowed Himself

‘The poor guy’s a victim of emotional abuse,’ said Tim’s friend Peter to his wife Sue, as they sat on their sofa watching TV. ‘He can’t do anything without her criticising him.’

Sue didn’t agree.

‘Well, it’s his own fault,’ she said. ‘It’s too easy to paint a woman like Mary as some sort of harridan. She makes demands of Tim, yes, like I do of you and you of me, but she meets no resistance.’

‘Okay. So she gets exactly what she wants.’

‘She doesn’t, though. She doesn’t at all. Because resistance itself is one of the things she’s seeking. It’s like a child behaving badly as a way of finding the boundaries that will keep her safe. Not that Mary’s a child, I don’t mean that at all, but we all need those boundaries. You and me provide them for one another. We both know the limits of what the other will tolerate, and it makes us feel safe.’

Peter considered this for some time.

‘I guess you’re right. That’s interesting. I’ve never looked at it like that before. I mean, obviously I know that if I behave in certain kinds of ways you won’t put up with it, but it hadn’t occurred to me before that I actually need that from you. You’re right, though, I do.’

‘Well, it’s the same with me. Remember how I used to fly into a tantrum sometimes, all those years ago, when things didn’t go as I wanted? You just wouldn’t play along with it, would you? You just ignored me completely till I pulled myself together. So I stopped, didn’t I? And a good job too. You helped me to grow up.’

‘I guess if I’d have been someone like Tim I would have run around in a panic, desperately trying to figure out what I had to do to placate you.’

‘Exactly. And if I’d been someone like Tim, I’d have done the same when you went into one of those week-long sulks you used to go in for.’

Peter nodded.

‘Tim can be very passive,’ he conceded. ‘He’s like that at work as well. Dick treated him appallingly in a meeting the other day. I mean really appallingly. We all looked round at Tim, waiting for him to react – I mean it’s not like Dick is even his boss or anything – but Tim didn’t say anything at all. Not a word. He just looked down at his hands, and kind of… swallowed.’

‘Swallowed? That’s interesting. I’ve seen him do that too.’

‘He always does it when Mary has a go at him. You remember that time at the Gibsons’ party, for instance? Okay, I take your point, it may well be his own fault, but all the same, she really did humiliate him, dressing him down like a naughty child in front of everyone. And he just swallowed.’

‘Yes, and remember when we went to Tenerife with them,’ Sue said, ‘and that guy in the market blatantly ripped him off. You wait for him to react, but he just—’

‘—swallows. You can see his Adam’s apple move. You can almost hear the gulp. Pathetic really.’

‘And he’s so big. That’s the weird part. The tallest man we know, the broadest across the shoulders, a great big guy. He’s like a bear that thinks it’s a mouse.’

Peter laughed. ‘I do like him, though, for some reason.’

‘I quite like him too, though I often want to pick him up and shake him. I guess there’s a reason he is as he is. I just don’t accept that Mary made him that way.’

She watched the faces on the TV screen.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘he’s absolutely full of rage.’

Peter looked round at her in surprise. ‘Who? Tim? Are you mixing him up with someone else? The man hasn’t got an angry bone in his body! That’s his whole problem, surely?’

‘I have this pain inside me,’ Tim said, running his hand through his sandy-coloured hair. ‘Well, it’s more like a pressure really. Like something inside me squirming around and pushing outwards. It’s probably stupid of me, but I can’t help worrying that it’s cancer or something like that. It feels a bit that way. It feels like some kind of alien force deep down in… well, I don’t know where exactly, but somewhere right deep down in the core of me.’

The doctor laughed.

‘Sounds like indigestion to me, Tim.’

He was a new doctor, fresh out of medical school, and he’d never met Tim before, but for some reason he thought it was okay to use the short form of Tim’s first name, and to talk to him as if he was a child.

Tim swallowed. ‘Well, I think I know what indigestion’s like, actually. You could be right, I suppose, but it doesn’t feel like that at all.’

‘I’m sure you’re fine.’ The doctor had already turned to his keyboard. ‘But I’ll refer you for some tests for your own peace of mind. And meanwhile I’ll prescribe you some antacid pills and we’ll see if they’re any help.’

It was growing inside him and it felt alive. It was as if there was a living animal trapped in there, struggling to free itself. And not just an animal, but a dangerous one, he was quite sure of that. He knew he must contain it, however difficult that might be.

‘The doctor said it was just indigestion,’ he told Mary as he came into the kitchen. ‘He’s given me some tablets for stomach acid.’

Little Sean was already at the table, waiting for his tea. He was five years old.

‘Well, I told you it was nothing, didn’t I?’ Mary said. ‘You don’t need a doctor, Tim, you really don’t, but if you carry on like this, you’re going to need a shrink.’

‘What’s a shrink?’ asked Sean.

‘Hello there, my little man,’ said Tim, kissing the boy’s head as he sat down at the table.

He loved his son with such intensity that sometimes it felt to him as if a dazzling light was blazing outwards from the little boy, almost too bright to look at.

‘A shrink is someone you go to when your suit’s too tight,’ Mary said.

She meant it to be a joke of course but, funnily enough, it wasn’t a bad description of what his symptoms actually felt like.

‘Really?’ Sean asked doubtfully.

‘Well, sort of,’ Tim said, ‘except that I feel like the suit.’

Sean looked worried.

‘No, not really, Sean,’ Tim told his son, squeezing his hand. ‘Your mum was only kidding. She means your dad is making a big fuss about nothing, and she’s probably right.’

He glanced at Mary, and she gave him a thin taut smile as she laid out the sausages and mash. Later he would read Sean his bedtime story and then the little boy, already half asleep, would reach up his arms and plant a soft wet kiss on his mouth.

‘Goodnight, my little man,’ Tim would say, as he tiptoed out, leaving his son to the protection of the plastic lion that always kept watch on his bedside table.

‘You’re quite right, of course,’ he said to Mary later, when they were lying in bed. ‘I must stop worrying about it so much.’

‘You really must,’ she said, turning the page of her book. ‘It’s one of those silly things that feed on themselves. You’re a bit prone to those, aren’t you? You’ve let this blow up out of all proportion.’

‘I have,’ he admitted. ‘I’m glad about the tests, though. Let’s hope when they come back, I’ll be able to lay the whole thing to rest.’

He glanced across at her. She looked very appealing with her low-cut nightdress showing a great deal of those shapely breasts that were beginning to swell and fill with pregnancy.

‘I don’t suppose you…?’

‘Not tonight, Tim. It’s been a long day, and I need to get some sleep.’

Tim nodded.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘That’s absolutely fine. Only it’s been quite a while.’

Tim swallowed. Mary turned out the light.

Suddenly he saw the creature vividly in his mind. It was bloody and red, with fierce, burning eyes. He knew it would terrify Sean if he ever saw it. He knew it would tear their little home apart. So one thing at least was absolutely clear: whatever happened, whether the symptoms could be alleviated or not, he must keep that thing locked away inside himself, he must never never —

But now, lying there in the dark, Tim checked himself. These were mad thoughts, surely? Either this was an illness of some kind, like indigestion, or, more likely, it was something in his head, like that time he became convinced that there was a gas leak, even though Mary couldn’t smell anything, and even though the guy from the gas company came out twice and found no trace at all. An illness, or something in his head: it was one of those two. He must stop thinking of it as some kind of living thing.

‘He shouldn’t have spoken to me like that, though,’ he muttered, thinking about the young doctor and his patronising tone.

A spark of anger appeared in his mind, apparently from nowhere. It was as if he was looking at a fireplace sideways from across a room. He couldn’t see the grate, he couldn’t see the fire itself, but he could see the red hot fragment as it jumped out onto the floor.

He swallowed again.

‘I’m actually getting quite worried about Tim,’ Peter said to his wife. ‘He looks so distracted these days.’

They were washing the dishes together. She was drying. Outside the window, rain was falling into their patio from a heavy dark grey sky.

‘Hasn’t he always looked like that? I often get the feeling with Tim that he’s not really there at all. He’s somewhere far away, operating his body with some difficulty by remote control, while simultaneously dealing with something else entirely that none of us can see.’

Peter laughed. ‘That’s a bit harsh!’

She picked up a wet saucepan from the drying rack.

‘I’m not criticising him, I’m just telling you how I see him. Like he’s never quite learnt how to inhabit himself.’

‘Maybe,’ said Peter. ‘But there’s something else going on for him now. Some new thing. Sometimes, when he doesn’t know I’m looking, I see him wincing like he’s in pain.’

‘Well, maybe he is.’

‘He did say something about going to the doctor a couple of weeks ago. Something about stomach problems. But when I asked him how he got on, he just laughed and said it had turned out to be nothing. “Possibly indigestion,” he said, “but probably just hypochondria.” Something’s eating him, though, Sue. It’s obvious. Something’s really eating him. He’s not right at all.’

Peter’s wife put down the now-dry saucepan and picked up a dripping casserole.

‘Well, what else can you do about it?’ she asked. ‘It sounds like you’ve offered him plenty of chances to talk. I’m not sure there’s much more you can contribute, apart from doing the same from time to time.’

‘Tim’s on his own for a week, as of today. Mary and Sean have gone to stay with her mum in Gloucester so he can get on with some decorating before the new baby comes. I said I’d call him and take him out for a drink. Okay, I appreciate it may be his fault as much as hers but, rightly or wrongly, Mary really does scare the life out of him. I thought he might feel able to talk more freely when she was out of the picture.’

‘Good idea.’

Peter’s wife laid down the casserole and kissed him on the cheek.

‘I know Tim’s a bit of a drip in many ways,’ Peter said, ‘but I do like him. There’s more to him than meets the eye. There are layers to him.’

‘I agree,’ she said. And then, picking up a wet plate: ‘It’s not just Mary he’s frightened of, is it? It’s everyone. The only person in the world he really feels safe with is that little boy of his.’

‘Well, it would be hard to deal with other people, if you had to operate your body by remote control. Imagine how stressful it would be.’

‘God, will you look at this rain!’ Sue said. ‘I’m glad we live on a hill.’

The tests had come back negative.

‘There’s nothing inside you that shouldn’t be, Tim,’ the doctor had said with a laugh.

But there it was anyway, pressing imperiously outwards, prodding and clamouring for his attention.

He piled books into boxes in the back bedroom and lugged the full boxes out onto the landing. He rolled up the carpet, carried out all the furniture that he could easily move on his own, and then dragged the bed away from the wall and threw a dustsheet over it. It had been the spare bedroom since they moved in, but now it was going to be Sean’s. The new baby would have the middle room.

Tim doused the walls in paper stripper, and then went downstairs for a mug of tea while it soaked in. As he was pouring in the milk, the phone began to ring. He could see on the phone’s little screen that it was Peter calling, his good friend Peter, probably his best friend, ringing no doubt to arrange the drink he’d suggested earlier in the week. But Tim didn’t pick up. He just stood there in the kitchen with the mug in his hand, watching the phone ring and ring, and feeling the eerie presence of another mind reaching towards him, unable to see him, but prodding and poking into his house as it blindly sought him out. It was hard to believe, really, that Peter couldn’t sense him here, right beside the ringing phone. Tim backed away from it, as if into the shadows.

Ten times the phone rang. And then suddenly it stopped. There was complete silence. No one was near him any more. The probe had withdrawn. The other mind had pulled back, and was once again a whole mile away across the city, turning its attention to other things.

‘I’ll call him back tomorrow,’ Tim said.

He went back upstairs and began to attack the walls. The blade slid easily between the liner and the plaster beneath, right up to the handle, and he pulled away a long and satisfying strip and tossed it behind him onto the floor. It was like pulling off a scab from a large but well-healed wound. Soon he’d established a rhythm, working so fast and hard that he was able to forget all his worries, including the creature inside him.

About halfway along the wall he uncovered a scrawl in his own writing on the bare plaster.

‘Help!’ it said, and there was a little cartoon face beneath it, with its mouth open, like that famous painting The Scream.

He usually wrote or drew random things on walls before he papered or painted them. Secrets and hiding places had always appealed to him: time capsules, hidden rooms, magic wardrobes. Every room in the house had one or more of these messages, all of them intended to be funny or surreal, so perhaps it wasn’t all that surprising he had no particular recollection of writing this one. But it felt very strange to uncover this evidence of another Tim, thinking and acting in a moment that the present Tim no longer had any connection with. It was like that thing that sometimes happened on car journeys, when he’d suddenly realise he had no memory of the last ten miles. Clearly someone had been conscious and driving the car because here he was, having apparently successfully negotiated two roundabouts and a busy T-junction, and no doubt the someone who’d accomplished all of that would have considered himself to be Tim. But this Tim had no memory of that one, and of course that Tim had had no memory of a Tim who, at the time, had not yet even come into being. So in what sense could they be said to be one and the same person?

Outside the window rain was falling steadily, pattering on the glass, gurgling down pipes and into drains, battering against wet leaves.

Tim fetched a pencil, and added more words to the message on the wall.

‘Help! Missing self. Answers to the name of Tim. £50 reward for information leading to its safe return.’

All that night the rain kept up, and on into the next day. In the lower parts of the city drains overflowed, and rivers and streams, long buried under tarmac and concrete, rose from their hidden conduits and began running down the streets. Some people put sandbags outside their front doors, or moved their best furniture in case of floods. It was all very exciting. The local news was full of it.

The following morning was a Saturday, and Peter and his wife stayed home, sitting companionably side by side on their living room sofa with the radio on, while they caught up on emails and paperwork that they’d been putting off: a bill to pay, a letter to answer, a car insurance document to file. Several times, Peter picked up his phone and tried to call his friend but the phone just rang and rang.

‘What’s the matter, I wonder? Why won’t he pick up?’

‘Well, he’s decorating, isn’t he?’ his wife said. ‘He’ll be all covered with paint or something, and he doesn’t want to have to keep stopping and coming to the phone. You’re probably driving him nuts with all your ringing.’

‘I’m not sure. I’ve sent him a couple of texts and he hasn’t replied to them either. I feel he’s hiding from me. I think he does that sometimes, hides away, when the one thing he most needs is to get out and be with other people.’

Tim slept very badly that night, woken again and again by the pressure inside himself, and at 6 a.m. he finally gave up on the hope of more rest, made himself coffee, and began to put up the new paper in Sean’s room. Sean had chosen it himself from a catalogue. It had a design of railway tracks and trains with cheerful drivers and passengers smiling and waving out of the windows. By 10.30 Tim had papered over his pencilled message, and by midday he’d completed the whole room. Before he went down to eat, he moved all Sean’s things back into it, made up the bed with the train-themed covers they’d bought to match the wallpaper, and carefully replaced Sean’s plastic lion on the bedside table.

‘He’ll love this,’ Tim said to himself, as he stood back and admired the overall effect. He could hardly wait to show it to his boy.

Then a sharp stab of pain made him gasp.

Damn that doctor! That hurt! This was way too raw and crude and physical to just be a trick of the mind! There was something in there, something solid and real.

But then a new and disturbing thought came to him. If there really was something in there, then perhaps there was no choice about it? Perhaps it had to come out?

Mary was not a coward and she wasn’t at all given to self-pity, but at the beginning of her labour with Sean, she’d quailed for a short while as she realised just what an assault on her body this was going to be. The antenatal classes had taught her all sorts of sensible and useful things, but they hadn’t prepared her at all for the sheer primal violence of the process, the utter indifference that nature showed towards the individual creatures that were its instruments. The classes had been warm and reassuring. They hadn’t really engaged with the fact that, through most of history, and still through much of the world, labour was a time of acute jeopardy, a time when mother or baby or both were at serious risk of death.

‘I can’t do this,’ she’d whimpered to Tim. ‘I just can’t do this.’

But of course she’d had no choice. You might as well ask a hurricane to take a different route, or a river to flow back uphill. The baby must come out of her, alive or dead, if she herself was going to survive.

And quickly seeing this, Mary had taken a grip on herself, set her brief moment of funk behind her, and begun to push.

‘No!’ Tim muttered, as he started draping sheets over the furniture in the living room. ‘That’s stupid. There’s no comparison at all.’

The living room was second on the to-do list that Mary had prepared for him.

‘For one thing there’s no danger to me,’ he pointed out as he mixed up wallpaper stripper in a bucket. ‘The doctor said so, and the tests backed him up. Whatever this is, it isn’t a threat to my life.’

But the creature inside him wasn’t listening. It gave a violent shove that made him yelp out loud. And at that moment, the phone began to ring yet again, probing into the house with its blind insistent fingers.

‘For Christ’s sake, give it a rest!’ Tim screamed at it. ‘Why can’t you just leave me alone? I don’t need you to deal with as well. I don’t need you and your bloody friendship.’

‘He’s still not picking up,’ Peter said. ‘I’m actually quite worried now. I think I’ll stroll over there after tea.’

His wife was lying with her head in his lap, half-watching TV and half-sleeping.

‘In this rain? I wouldn’t call that a stroll!’

‘Well, I do own a raincoat, Sue,’ he pointed out. ‘And it’s less than a mile away. I’ll enjoy the rest of the evening more if I’ve seen he’s alright and arranged a time to meet with him.’

Tim scraped away at the living room wall so hard and so fast that he had to strip to the waist to keep cool. Covered in sweat, with aching arms and a pounding heart, he attacked the paper, he ripped it apart, he assaulted it, but all the while he was really fighting the creature inside himself. It must not come out! Nothing could be allowed to threaten the warm nest that he and Mary had made for the little boy that Tim loved far more than he loved himself, and for the new baby that he would love in the same way. It must stay inside him!

But a time came when he just couldn’t concentrate any more on scraping. He was exhausted for one thing – he’d reached a point where he had to keep pausing just to catch his breath and let his heart rate slow – but, more than that, he was finding that, however vigorously he worked, the job was still too static to be bearable in his present state of mind. He needed to move. He couldn’t bear to be in one place. Clutching the scraper in his hand, he began to roam the house, restlessly prowling upstairs and downstairs and from room to room, muttering and groaning, kicking at skirting boards from time to time, pounding his fist on the walls.

It was in Sean’s new room, as it turned out, the one with the happy trains on the walls and the lion on the bedside table, that he finally realised he’d lost the battle.

‘It just has to come out,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t hold it in any more.’

He had no more choice than Mary had had in that room in the maternity suite. No matter how many machines were humming around her, how many tubes and wires were attached to her, how many dispassionate little green graphs were tracking the rhythms of her body, the basic fact remained that the baby inside her would have to emerge in one way or another.

And now a strange thing happened, which he hadn’t anticipated at all. As he finally gave way to the brute reality which he’d been fighting for so long, he discovered that he wasn’t pushing in any more, but pushing out. It was as if the rules of the game had been reversed. Having abandoned the project of keeping the alien creature inside himself, he was noticing the rigid cage that held it in. Up to now this cage had simply been himself, the real Tim, its rigidity the expression of his own will, the measure of his own determination to contain the threat. He’d even taken a certain pride in its firmness. He knew perfectly well that others saw him as unassertive and weak, but that rigid cage had proved to him that he was stronger than they knew, brave in a way they couldn’t see.

But now, quite suddenly, he was experiencing that cage as an alien presence, a hard unyielding obstacle that was constricting and stifling him, denying him movement, limiting his access to light and air, standing between him and the world. Only a few seconds ago he would have called that cage himself, but it wasn’t him. It was the opposite of him. It was the thing that had imprisoned him all his life.

‘Let me out, fuck you,’ he heard his own voice screaming at it. ‘Let me out, you bastard, and let me breathe.’

After that he stopped using words. He just bellowed and roared and punched the walls, like a boxer pumping himself up before a fight, building up immunity to pain and fear.

Rain beat down on the roofs and pavements, and onto the doorsteps, and into the hedges and the little front gardens. The few cars that were out crept slowly along with their headlights on, their wipers flinging out great wet dollops with every sweep. Lights were switched on inside the houses, curtains drawn. No one but Peter was out on foot.

When he reached Tim’s house, he found the front door wide open, with rain blowing in, and the doormat sitting in a pool of water. All the lights were turned on, but when he called Tim’s name there was no answer. Peter stepped inside, throwing back the hood of his raincoat.

He found one of the living room walls stripped down, and half of another, furniture clumped in the middle of the room under sheets, and old wallpaper lying on the floor in twisted heaps. There was even a swathe of paper dangling from the wall, as if Tim had stopped in mid-scrape. Peter looked into the kitchen and the downstairs toilet. He saw a couple of teacups waiting to be washed, a dirty plate, a paintbrush set to soak in a bucket of water.

‘Tim?’ he called. ‘Are you there?’

Tim could have fallen from a ladder or something, Peter had been thinking as he’d walked over from his house. He could have knocked himself out, or broken a bone and been unable to get to the phone. But if so, where was he now? The living room was obviously what he’d been working on. If he’d had a fall, wouldn’t it have been in there?

Then Peter noticed something that he hadn’t spotted when he first came in. There were red marks on the stairs. Perhaps Tim had cut himself somehow and gone up to the bathroom to dress the wound. He could have passed out from loss of blood.

‘Tim? It’s Peter! Are you alright?’

There was nothing unusual in the bathroom, though, or in the front bedroom, or the middle room which, as Tim had told him, was going to be the baby’s.

‘Tim?’

The door of the back bedroom was ajar and the light inside was on, as all the lights had been, all round the house.

‘Tim, are you in there?’

Another possibility occurred to Peter. Perhaps there’d been a break-in. Perhaps there was a stranger in there, holding a knife to Tim’s throat, or even crouching in readiness beside Tim’s corpse. He picked up a hammer that had been propped against the landing wall, and, clutching it firmly, advanced into the little boy’s new room.

‘Tim? Are you—?’

Peter broke off. There was no one in there, alive or dead, but, strewn right across the room were bloody flaps of skin and hunks of sandy-coloured hair. Dark red strips were scattered over the bed and the chest of drawers. Congealing fragments clung to the walls, with red trails above them to indicate how far they’d slid downwards since they were first splattered over those cheerful little trains. A single narrow shred of skin was draped over the lion on the bedside table.

The scraper lay in the middle of the floor, with dark blood clinging to its blade and handle. But there was no Tim. Whatever had happened here, Tim had gone.