id="uaf707d54-8030-568f-8813-a2add4280895">
The Fetch of Mardy Watt
CHARLES BUTLER
To Alison Leslie
CONTENTS
9: STREETS, SLAVES AND A CANYON
MRS WATT CAME into the bathroom without so much as a knock.
“There’s no such thing!” she complained.
Mardy jumped hastily off the bathroom scales and reached for a towel. “What did you say, Mum?”
Mrs Watt was carrying a rolled-up copy of Fave! She waved the magazine in Mardy’s face. “‘How to find your perfect weight and stay there!’ Do they realise that growing children read this nonsense? The perfect weight! There’s no such thing.”
“If there was, I’d be two stone over,” Mardy concluded gloomily. She stepped past her mother, through the scented bath steam to the door.
“There’s nothing wrong with the body God gave you, Mardy. Now then, have you seen my hair dye?”
Mardy discovered it behind the spare toilet roll. She knew what was coming next.
“If you want to worry about anyone’s weight, worry about your brother’s,” said Mrs Watt. “He’s a shadow of himself.”
“Yes, Mum. That’s different.”
“Different because it’s real.”
Mardy pulled a face. When her mother mentioned Alan it always made her feel guilty, though she didn’t know why. Probably guilt was just another way of worrying, like Hal said.
“Are you going to the hospital today? I’ll come with you – I’d like to.”
“I was going to drop in on the way home from work,” said Mrs Watt briskly. “But if you want, I’ll wait for you here. Just make sure you’re back by 4.15.”
“I will.”
“I don’t want to be late.”
“Of course not,” muttered Mardy.
Her mother made it sound as if Mardy hardly ever visited Alan. Surely that wasn’t true?
She mulled it over as she walked the mile to school. Mardy usually went the longer way, skirting the park because of the men who sat there drinking cheap vodka, the ones her mother called Undesirables. The park railings thrummed by and, in between bushes, she saw the raked soil where flowers were set to grow in spring, the paths and sludgy leaves. She saw the men too, lying on benches by the War Memorial – all stubble and urine and wheezing self-pity. They seemed not to notice the weather or even their own sad condition. But they must, she thought … they must. It made her angry that they could waste themselves like that while Alan lay unconscious week after week. And over the railings tinkled a thin, beaded string of notes, plucked from an instrument that Mardy could not name. The music crept between the railings and followed her some way down the street.
Alan had been in the General Hospital for three months now. He was in a coma and nobody knew why. At first he had been very ill indeed. Her mother had not said so, but Mardy knew she had believed Alan would die. For days the house had been deathly still. Even to turn on the television would have felt heartless. Besides, there was nothing Mardy had wished to see or hear, except that Alan was well again. Photographs of her elder brother – humorous, elegant, ironic – sat on every mantelpiece. It had been a terrible time.
But Alan had not died. “He’s a fighter, that one,” the doctor had told Mrs Watt, the day his breathing had first stabilised. “We thought he was fading, but he just refused to let go. I don’t know where he gets his strength from.”
Mrs Watt knew. She said that Alan had his strength from her.
“He’ll never leave us,” she said.
Alan had not left them, but he had not come back either. Ever since, he had hovered between death and life. Sometimes, when Mardy visited, he seemed barely more than an object, a half-wrapped parcel in folded blankets. On other days his sleep seemed so light that she would not have been surprised to see him sit up and say “Morning, Spud! Did I doze off? I could murder a bacon butty!”
Mardy turned up the collar on
