Doctor Who_ The Sleep of Reason - Martin Day [2]
The nurse smiled. ‘Tell me what happened, then. What brought you here?’
The man looked square at the nurse for the first time, his ocean-blue eyes full of wonder and longing. Their brightness and vibrancy so surprised the nurse that she couldn’t help but glance away.
‘Like all good stories,’ said the man, ‘I suppose it started with a girl. . . ’
2
One
Do You Remember the First Time?
(A Brief History of Self-Harm)
Caroline was fifteen when she’d first taken a blade to her arm.
It had never even occurred to her before, but suddenly, and without warning, the idea, the intent, were there. It wasn’t some nascent feeling either, a dreamlike suggestion that recedes the more tightly it is grasped. It was fully formed, reasoned, and complete, as if someone had slotted a report straight into her mind, complete with headings and page numbers and a summary of pros and cons.
For a moment, Caroline had been tempted to turn around, to see if anyone was there, whispering silently at her ear. But she was alone in the too-bright bathroom, save for her mirrored self staring back from the medicine cupboard door, and the bright, clean blade between her fingers.
She brought the blade before her eyes, and for an instant it seemed to be the most magical thing she had ever seen. Somehow more than a simple slice of metal, it throbbed with possibility, with the potential to change her life from top to bottom, from centre to circumference. She knew she was standing on the threshold of something new and terrible – and, once she chose that path, she would always think in terms of ‘before’ and ‘after’. It would be like being born again, into a different and more adult world.
The blade was one of her dad’s spares, as anachronistic as the man who persisted in a one-man stand against packaging and all things cellophane. She remembered the first time she’d stumbled upon him shaving, his face blown-up and frothy, gracefully pulling the ivory handle down his cheek, and then back up towards his Adam’s apple. The room smelled of soap and masculinity, the bristled brush on the edge of the sink still foaming gently.
‘Dad, what ya doin?’ Caroline had asked in a six-year-old’s singsong voice, hopping from foot to foot as if dying for a pee.
Her dad had chuckled, running the blade under the tap. She noticed a tiny red spot on his cheek, pinhead bright against his pale skin. ‘I’m shaving,’
he said, pausing before adding, not unreasonably, ‘You hate it when Daddy’s prickly, don’t you? This is how I get rid of my hedgehog face.’
3
‘Hedgepig, hedgepig!’ she exclaimed happily. She snorted and snuffled, though she knew that hedgehogs didn’t sound like pigs really, but moved noiselessly in gardens, and got squished flat under car wheels, silent and stoic.
She watched as the blade went into the water again.
‘Where do all the prickles go?’ she asked.
‘Down the drain.’
She reached for one of the blades.
‘No, you mustn’t touch, darling. You might hurt yourself. That’s why Daddy keeps them up in the cupboard.’
And she had barely thought about the blades again until the day when the idea formed in her head, when she stood with one of the mythical, naked blades in her hand.
True, her dad had bought Caroline a woman’s shaving kit for her sixteenth birthday, a silent and unexplained gift like the book on puberty and her first bra. It was the antithesis of her dad’s razor, all girly coloured and with its many blades safely sheathed behind cages. A few days later, over breakfast, he commented that ‘There’s nothing like a really close shave’, rubbing his own cheeks and grinning, as if that explained everything. ‘Those battery things are all very well, but. . . ’ His words trailed away, leaving her to put two and two together. As usual.
As she looked at the blade, Caroline noticed a white mark across the back of her index finger. Her dad had said that, when she was four or five, she’d sneaked into the kitchen, pulled a bread knife from the block, and had tried to turn an uncut loaf into a sandwich.