Eternal Shadows
by James McPherson
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: A lot of strong ones.
Description: Keeping watch over a terminally ill loved one, a man reflects on his own life.
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How do you begin to fix a broken thing, mend it I mean, make it work again? How do you face up to such a problem, look it in the eye and start dealing with it?
I don’t have the first idea, not a fucking clue - all I can do is stand here, sometimes sit, sometimes mull about, fidgety like an embarrassed child, infuriatingly helpless, and watch, deliberate, dispassionately perhaps over the thing wasting away on the bed before my eyes.
My big strong man, she said to me once a long time ago, my fixer, she said, explain to me just how the hell you plan to fix this almighty mess then, eh?
I remember her laughing when she said it, a harsh, loud kinda laugh, but there was no cynicism there, just quivering lips and the hint of a tear threatening to spill over the rim of each eye - tears never came, she wasn’t one for that, but I saw fear there, and it was her fear that got to me, broke my heart in fact. Been ages since she said that, ages since she said anything at all for that matter, and me, well, I’ve come to regard what remains of her, that heap of tissue, bone and bedsore skin on the bed as nothing more than ‘it’ or ‘that’ or ‘the thing’ - cruel, my true nature emerging perhaps, I don’t know, but all of my more altruistic thoughts, remembrances, emotions, are gone now, past tense, and it does me no favours at all to think of that thing as anything else - serves no purpose other than making me sad, or angry, or just plain bloody exhausted. Everything about the bed, the room, the monotonous bleep of the machines, the ugly strobe lighting in the corridor, my stiff joints and short breath ascending the Victorian stairs on the way into the hospital, the cold sandstone walls by the front entrance, the smell of the bus on the journey here, the almost somnambulant nature of my daily visits, seem pointless, a waste of my fucking time - and that thing before me, curled up under a thin sheet, is nothing more than an indifferent witness to all this, silent, pitiless even, not giving a flying fuck whether I’m here or not, alive or dead. I cease to be shocked at my own nastiness of thought these days, protected from misery by sheer callousness. I’m truly amazed with myself, surprised perhaps at how cynical I’ve become since it dawned on me just how useless I really am here, and armed with the grim certainty that this, this, this thing before me is beyond repair - a problem I’m never going to fucking fix.
It wasn’t always that way I have to say - this feeling of utter inadequacy I mean - once upon a time it was different, I was different. I used to be good at fixing broken things, other people’s things. I fixed them with my hands, toys, watches, phones, bits of furniture, clocks - old things, little things, unusual, beautiful things - a ship in a bottle with a broken mainsail - a tin soldier that lost its head - a china doll with a broken face - a train with a mangled track in a box that was stained with coffee and tobacco, and smelled of damp loft and rusty iron - all kinds of things, and I could breathe life back into each and every one of them. Fixing things is a process, a procedure if you like, and as in all procedures it takes time, needs careful thought before it’s begun. I’d take days, weeks, months sometimes just working out how I was going to repair a broken piece. I looked on them as souls, wee damaged souls I could restore to health once again. I had this place, a place I would go to - just a stale smelling little room hidden behind an archway below a railway line. Nothing much, not comfortable, bare really except for a table and a chair and a big old cabinet. The cabinet I’d picked up cheap in a fire-sale in the city once and kept all my tools there, and twice, three times, perhaps four times a week I’d take a cardboard box with my broken things to this place and lock the big old door behind me. I wore a thick black donkey jacket, always kept it on in there - it was so cold you see.
This room, the one in the hospital, isn’t cold - I rub sanitizer into my hands from a dispenser by the bed, my big stupid bloody hands. A whiff of alcoholic mist rises from the palms and sets me wondering for the thousandth time how the sticky substance would taste on my tongue - I won’t find out of course, never dare, and chastise myself for being idiotic enough to have such a thought in the first place. I drop my sanitized hands to my sides, unsure what to do with them next, patting my trouser pockets, clasping them behind my back, raising them, scratching my head, my sweaty face, down to my unsanitary arse, and thrust them self-consciously into the pockets of my jacket - out the way, hidden. Hands, clumsy bloody hands, I’ve come to hate those two useless fucking articles.
That curled up thing doesn’t speak anymore, so I’m quiet in this room - all I can do in here is think. In the silence the world outside seems unimportant somehow - I see things from a different angle in here, and I see absurdity just about everywhere I look - all the rush, the push and shove, the instant this and rapid that - people whizzing by, heads buried in something, mobiles, tablets, lap-tops, touch-screen images, everything in a gigaflash - a child starving to death - bomb landing on a school - a young girl abused on the whim of a sadistic adult. They watch but never really see, feel, take it in, look up even - not a single bloody glance. No one takes time now to just, ach, just care anymore. And here’s me, slow, hesitant, my stupid hands fumbling about in my jacket pockets, wondering constantly what it’ll be like without this bizarre room, the unrelenting bleep of the machines and that grotesque on the bed. It’s perverse but I actually believe I’ll miss all this, the thought of this ridiculously petty routine coming to an abrupt halt frightens the life out of me, getting by without that thing, without her, is too painful to even contemplate. And yet I despise every second, blame that thing for every terrible act ever committed. And the people, the ones out there, rushing about, heads down, most of them probably oblivious to even the existence of a place like this - where are they going? Well, no doubt one day they’re heading for this room, here - all that rushing around eventually ends in a place just like this.
Had a dream the other day, sitting here on the chair beside the bed - must've dozed off or something. I dreamt that the thing suddenly sat up straight, turned towards me and began to speak. The voice was familiar, her voice, but with a sneering edge to it - sinister even.
I know what you’re thinking, she said, I know you too well - you’re lying to yourself, you don’t want this to last, you want to switch me off, put an end to all this, don’t you? Well, go on, I dare you my big strong man, go for it... You’ll survive, go for it… and look at me, LOOK AT ME… Do I look as if I care one way or another! And I‘m not asking for anyone’s permission, just switch me off damn you… do it!
I woke with a start, probably only slept a few minutes, and discovered there was a young nurse, one of the foreign ones, an oriental girl, by the bed, tending to the sheets, moving the thing into a different position. She noticed the sweat on my forehead and my fingers clasped together in a two-handed fist, like I was in the middle of an angry prayer or something. She looked at me funny - thought I was fucking mad perhaps, but smiled sympathetically on her way out. I’m well aware the dream was just a grizzly projection of my own darker wishes, but I look at that limp thing on the bed sometimes and imagine there’s still a glimpse of ‘her’ there, an echo, faint cry perhaps, but something nonetheless. Heard a story once, a while ago now, a story about the bomb, the Hiroshima bomb. The story goes that in the aftermath of detonation, when people were evaporated to nothing in a flash of nuclear light, some shadows remained, shadows of people imprinted on a pavement, a wall, on steps - residue, a brief memory if you like of the people killed that morning. Those shadows still exist today, and if those shadows, those eternal shadows exist, then so in a way do the people. I can relate to those eternal shadows because I see a similar shadow every time I enter this room, ache for it to have a voice again, talk to me, tell me what I need to do to fix things - but she only ever speaks in my dreams now. I know, I torture myself, I’ve grown to live with it now. The hospital staff understand I suppose, bloody well accustomed to it I would think - they say hello, and smile at me when they come into the room or when I meet them in the corridor, but they keep a healthy distance. No one ever states the obvious, but it’s clear they don’t want what I have - no one ever willingly wants to be near someone who’s been lumbered with a broken thing, an unfixable thing.
That jacket of mine, the one that kept me warm in my workroom, still hangs on a big nail behind the door. I hammered the nail in there myself one day, threw the jacket over it, switched the bare light-bulb off and locked the big old door of that archway under the railway behind me. I walked away from there that day, the day ‘she’ became ‘the thing’ - never returned. The big cardboard box I was carrying remains on the table where I left it, the things inside still in need of repair - maybe they‘ll always be like that, a lasting testimony to my utter fucking ineptness. That jacket, that fucking jacket gives me nightmares sometimes - the thought of it hanging there, just like me in a way, hanging, suspended, waiting to be useful again. Funny how a notion can grip you though, take hold, possess to the point where you just can‘t concentrate on anything else. That jacket is a bit like those shadows for me, a ghost of my former self, a reminder of how it used to be…
…And now I just sit here, listening to the bleep of the machines, with my big stupid hands in my big stupid pockets, wondering what to do next. I can smell my aftershave, mixed with the stench of the thing’s skin cream and festering flesh, and it makes me want to vomit. For the umpteenth time it crosses my mind to use those hands of mine and pull out the tubes and wires connected to the thing, switch off that infernal bleep and just let her be, let her go - but I won’t, I’m too fucking weak for that. Instead I just watch, and wait, and think about those shadows, those eternal bloody shadows.
Swearwords: A lot of strong ones.
Description: Keeping watch over a terminally ill loved one, a man reflects on his own life.
_____________________________________________________________________
How do you begin to fix a broken thing, mend it I mean, make it work again? How do you face up to such a problem, look it in the eye and start dealing with it?
I don’t have the first idea, not a fucking clue - all I can do is stand here, sometimes sit, sometimes mull about, fidgety like an embarrassed child, infuriatingly helpless, and watch, deliberate, dispassionately perhaps over the thing wasting away on the bed before my eyes.
My big strong man, she said to me once a long time ago, my fixer, she said, explain to me just how the hell you plan to fix this almighty mess then, eh?
I remember her laughing when she said it, a harsh, loud kinda laugh, but there was no cynicism there, just quivering lips and the hint of a tear threatening to spill over the rim of each eye - tears never came, she wasn’t one for that, but I saw fear there, and it was her fear that got to me, broke my heart in fact. Been ages since she said that, ages since she said anything at all for that matter, and me, well, I’ve come to regard what remains of her, that heap of tissue, bone and bedsore skin on the bed as nothing more than ‘it’ or ‘that’ or ‘the thing’ - cruel, my true nature emerging perhaps, I don’t know, but all of my more altruistic thoughts, remembrances, emotions, are gone now, past tense, and it does me no favours at all to think of that thing as anything else - serves no purpose other than making me sad, or angry, or just plain bloody exhausted. Everything about the bed, the room, the monotonous bleep of the machines, the ugly strobe lighting in the corridor, my stiff joints and short breath ascending the Victorian stairs on the way into the hospital, the cold sandstone walls by the front entrance, the smell of the bus on the journey here, the almost somnambulant nature of my daily visits, seem pointless, a waste of my fucking time - and that thing before me, curled up under a thin sheet, is nothing more than an indifferent witness to all this, silent, pitiless even, not giving a flying fuck whether I’m here or not, alive or dead. I cease to be shocked at my own nastiness of thought these days, protected from misery by sheer callousness. I’m truly amazed with myself, surprised perhaps at how cynical I’ve become since it dawned on me just how useless I really am here, and armed with the grim certainty that this, this, this thing before me is beyond repair - a problem I’m never going to fucking fix.
It wasn’t always that way I have to say - this feeling of utter inadequacy I mean - once upon a time it was different, I was different. I used to be good at fixing broken things, other people’s things. I fixed them with my hands, toys, watches, phones, bits of furniture, clocks - old things, little things, unusual, beautiful things - a ship in a bottle with a broken mainsail - a tin soldier that lost its head - a china doll with a broken face - a train with a mangled track in a box that was stained with coffee and tobacco, and smelled of damp loft and rusty iron - all kinds of things, and I could breathe life back into each and every one of them. Fixing things is a process, a procedure if you like, and as in all procedures it takes time, needs careful thought before it’s begun. I’d take days, weeks, months sometimes just working out how I was going to repair a broken piece. I looked on them as souls, wee damaged souls I could restore to health once again. I had this place, a place I would go to - just a stale smelling little room hidden behind an archway below a railway line. Nothing much, not comfortable, bare really except for a table and a chair and a big old cabinet. The cabinet I’d picked up cheap in a fire-sale in the city once and kept all my tools there, and twice, three times, perhaps four times a week I’d take a cardboard box with my broken things to this place and lock the big old door behind me. I wore a thick black donkey jacket, always kept it on in there - it was so cold you see.
This room, the one in the hospital, isn’t cold - I rub sanitizer into my hands from a dispenser by the bed, my big stupid bloody hands. A whiff of alcoholic mist rises from the palms and sets me wondering for the thousandth time how the sticky substance would taste on my tongue - I won’t find out of course, never dare, and chastise myself for being idiotic enough to have such a thought in the first place. I drop my sanitized hands to my sides, unsure what to do with them next, patting my trouser pockets, clasping them behind my back, raising them, scratching my head, my sweaty face, down to my unsanitary arse, and thrust them self-consciously into the pockets of my jacket - out the way, hidden. Hands, clumsy bloody hands, I’ve come to hate those two useless fucking articles.
That curled up thing doesn’t speak anymore, so I’m quiet in this room - all I can do in here is think. In the silence the world outside seems unimportant somehow - I see things from a different angle in here, and I see absurdity just about everywhere I look - all the rush, the push and shove, the instant this and rapid that - people whizzing by, heads buried in something, mobiles, tablets, lap-tops, touch-screen images, everything in a gigaflash - a child starving to death - bomb landing on a school - a young girl abused on the whim of a sadistic adult. They watch but never really see, feel, take it in, look up even - not a single bloody glance. No one takes time now to just, ach, just care anymore. And here’s me, slow, hesitant, my stupid hands fumbling about in my jacket pockets, wondering constantly what it’ll be like without this bizarre room, the unrelenting bleep of the machines and that grotesque on the bed. It’s perverse but I actually believe I’ll miss all this, the thought of this ridiculously petty routine coming to an abrupt halt frightens the life out of me, getting by without that thing, without her, is too painful to even contemplate. And yet I despise every second, blame that thing for every terrible act ever committed. And the people, the ones out there, rushing about, heads down, most of them probably oblivious to even the existence of a place like this - where are they going? Well, no doubt one day they’re heading for this room, here - all that rushing around eventually ends in a place just like this.
Had a dream the other day, sitting here on the chair beside the bed - must've dozed off or something. I dreamt that the thing suddenly sat up straight, turned towards me and began to speak. The voice was familiar, her voice, but with a sneering edge to it - sinister even.
I know what you’re thinking, she said, I know you too well - you’re lying to yourself, you don’t want this to last, you want to switch me off, put an end to all this, don’t you? Well, go on, I dare you my big strong man, go for it... You’ll survive, go for it… and look at me, LOOK AT ME… Do I look as if I care one way or another! And I‘m not asking for anyone’s permission, just switch me off damn you… do it!
I woke with a start, probably only slept a few minutes, and discovered there was a young nurse, one of the foreign ones, an oriental girl, by the bed, tending to the sheets, moving the thing into a different position. She noticed the sweat on my forehead and my fingers clasped together in a two-handed fist, like I was in the middle of an angry prayer or something. She looked at me funny - thought I was fucking mad perhaps, but smiled sympathetically on her way out. I’m well aware the dream was just a grizzly projection of my own darker wishes, but I look at that limp thing on the bed sometimes and imagine there’s still a glimpse of ‘her’ there, an echo, faint cry perhaps, but something nonetheless. Heard a story once, a while ago now, a story about the bomb, the Hiroshima bomb. The story goes that in the aftermath of detonation, when people were evaporated to nothing in a flash of nuclear light, some shadows remained, shadows of people imprinted on a pavement, a wall, on steps - residue, a brief memory if you like of the people killed that morning. Those shadows still exist today, and if those shadows, those eternal shadows exist, then so in a way do the people. I can relate to those eternal shadows because I see a similar shadow every time I enter this room, ache for it to have a voice again, talk to me, tell me what I need to do to fix things - but she only ever speaks in my dreams now. I know, I torture myself, I’ve grown to live with it now. The hospital staff understand I suppose, bloody well accustomed to it I would think - they say hello, and smile at me when they come into the room or when I meet them in the corridor, but they keep a healthy distance. No one ever states the obvious, but it’s clear they don’t want what I have - no one ever willingly wants to be near someone who’s been lumbered with a broken thing, an unfixable thing.
That jacket of mine, the one that kept me warm in my workroom, still hangs on a big nail behind the door. I hammered the nail in there myself one day, threw the jacket over it, switched the bare light-bulb off and locked the big old door of that archway under the railway behind me. I walked away from there that day, the day ‘she’ became ‘the thing’ - never returned. The big cardboard box I was carrying remains on the table where I left it, the things inside still in need of repair - maybe they‘ll always be like that, a lasting testimony to my utter fucking ineptness. That jacket, that fucking jacket gives me nightmares sometimes - the thought of it hanging there, just like me in a way, hanging, suspended, waiting to be useful again. Funny how a notion can grip you though, take hold, possess to the point where you just can‘t concentrate on anything else. That jacket is a bit like those shadows for me, a ghost of my former self, a reminder of how it used to be…
…And now I just sit here, listening to the bleep of the machines, with my big stupid hands in my big stupid pockets, wondering what to do next. I can smell my aftershave, mixed with the stench of the thing’s skin cream and festering flesh, and it makes me want to vomit. For the umpteenth time it crosses my mind to use those hands of mine and pull out the tubes and wires connected to the thing, switch off that infernal bleep and just let her be, let her go - but I won’t, I’m too fucking weak for that. Instead I just watch, and wait, and think about those shadows, those eternal bloody shadows.
About the Author
Glasgow-born James McPherson is a fifty-something single Dad, who gave up his career as a senior care worker a few years back to bring up is daughter. "I've been writing for about ten years," he tells us, "but I really just started taking it seriously three years ago. I've got the bug now. This is all I want to do!"
Among his work so far, James has completed three novels, the most recent of which is Lucifer And Auld Lang Syne.
Among his work so far, James has completed three novels, the most recent of which is Lucifer And Auld Lang Syne.