'What do you mean how do I know? It wasn't his fault he was born like that!' I said, getting quite angry.
'You only have his word for that.'
'I only have his word for _what_?' I said.
'That he's a dwarf!' Eric spat.
'What?' I shouted, scarcely able to believe my ears. 'I can _see_ he's a dwarf, you idiot!'
'That's what he _wants_ you to think! Maybe he's really an _alien_! Maybe the rest of them are even smaller than _he_ is! How do you know he isn't really a giant alien from a very small race of aliens? Eh?'
'Don't be _stupid_!' I screamed into the phone, gripping it sorely with my burned hand.
'Well, don't say I didn't warn you!' Eric shouted.
'Don't worry!' I shouted back.
'Anyway,' Eric said in a suddenly calm voice, so that for a second or two I thought somebody else had come on the line, and I was left somewhat nonplussed as he went on in level, ordinary speech: 'How are you?'
'Eh?' I said, confused. 'Ah... fine. Fine. How are you?'
'Oh, not too bad. Nearly there.'
'What? Here?'
'No. There. Christ, it can't be a bad line over this distance, can it?'
'What distance? Eh? Can it? I don't know.' I put my other hand to my forehead, getting the feeling that I was losing the thread of the conversation entirely.
'I'm nearly _there_,' Eric explained tiredly, with a calm sigh. 'Not nearly _here_. I'm already here. How else could I be calling you from here?'
'But where's "here"?' I said.
'You mean you don't know where you _are_ again?' Eric exclaimed incredulously. I closed my eyes again and moaned. He went on; 'And you accuse _me_ of forgetting things. Ha!'
'Look, you bloody madman!' I screamed into the green plastic as I gripped it hard and sent spears of pain up my right arm and felt my face contort. 'I'm getting fed up with you calling me up here and being deliberately awkward! _Stop playing games_!' I gasped for breath. 'You know damn well what I mean when I ask where "here " is! I mean where the hell are you! I _know_ where I am and you know where I am. Just stop trying to mess me about, OK?'
'H'm. Sure, Frank,' Eric said, sounding uninterested. 'Sorry if I was rubbing you up the wrong way.'
'Well-' I started to shout again, then controlled myself and quieted down, breathing hard. 'Well ... just ... just don't do that to me. I was only asking where you are.'
'Yeah, that's OK, Frank; I understand,' Eric said evenly. 'But I can't actually tell you where I am or somebody might overhear. Surely you can see that, can't you?'
'All right. All right,' I said. 'But you're not in a call-box, are you?' 'Well, of course I'm not in a call-box,' he said with a bit of an edge in his voice again; then I heard him control his tone. 'Yeah, that's right. I'm in somebody's house. Well, a cottage actually.'
'What?' I said. 'Who? Whose?'
'_I_ don't know,' he replied, and I could almost hear him shrug. 'I suppose I could find out if you're really that interested. Are you really that interested?'
'What? No. Yes. I mean, no. What does it matter? But where- I mean how- I mean who do you-?'
'Look, Frank, ' Eric said tiredly, 'it's just somebody's little holiday cottage or weekend retreat or something, right? I don't know whose it is; but, as you so perceptively put it, it doesn't matter, all right?'
'You mean you've _broken in_ to someobdy's _home_?' I said.
'Yeah; so what? I didn't even have to break in, in fact. I found the key to the back door in the guttering. What's wrong? It's a very nice little place.'
'Aren't you frightened of getting caught?'
'Not much. I'm sitting here in the front room looking down the drive and I can see way down the road. No problem. I've got food and there's a bath and there's a phone and there's a freezer- Christ, you could fit an Alsatian in there - and a bed and everything. Luxury.'
'An _Alsatian_!' I screeched.
'Well, yes, if I had one. I don't, but if I did I could have kept _that_ in there. As it is-'
'Don't,' I interrupted, closing my eyes yet again and holding up my hand as though he was there in the house with me. '_Don't_ tell me.'
'OK. Well, I just thought I'd ring you and tell you I'm all right, and see how you are.'
'I'm fine. Are you sure you're OK, too?'
'Yeah ; never felt better. Feeling great. I think it's my diet; all-'
'Listen!' I broke in desperately, feeling my eyes widen as I thought of what I wanted to ask him. 'You didn't _feel_ anything this morning, did you? About dawn? Anything? I mean, anything at all? Nothing inside you - ah - you didn't feel anything? Did you feel anything?'
'What _are_ you gibbering about?' Eric said, slightly angrily.
'Did you feel anything this morning, very early?'
'What on earth do you mean - "feel anything"?'
'I mean did you _experience_ anything; anything at all about dawn this morning?'
'Well,' Eric said in measured tones, and slowly, 'Funny you should say that....'
'Yes ? Yes ?' I said excitedly, pressing the receiver so close to my mouth that my teeth clattered off the mouthpiece.
'Not a damn thing. This morning was one of the few I can honestly say I experienced not a thing,' Eric informed me urbanely. 'I was asleep.'
'But you said you didn't sleep!' I said furiously.
'Christ, Frank, nobody's perfect.' I could hear him start to laugh.
'But-' I started. I closed my mouth and gritted my teeth. Once more, I closed my eyes.
He said: ' Anyway, Frank, old sport; to be quite honest, this is getting boring. I might call you again but, either way, I'll see you soon. Ta ta.'
Before I could say anything, the line went dead, and I was left fuming and belligerent, holding the telephone and glaring at it like it was to blame. I considered hitting something with it, but decided that would be too much like a bad joke, so I slammed it down on the cradle instead. It chimed once in response and I gave it another glare, then turned my back on it and stamped downstairs, threw myself into an easy chair and punched the buttons on the remote control for the television repeatedly through channel after channel time after time for about ten minutes. At the end of that period I realised that I had got just as much out of watching three programmes simultaneously (the news, yet another awful American crime series and a programme on archaeology) as I ever got from watching the damn things separately. I hurled the control unit away in disgust and stormed outside in the fading light to go and throw a few stones at the waves.
9: What Happened to Eric
I SLEPT fairly late, for me. My father had arrived back at the house just as I returned from the beach, and I had gone to bed at once, so I had a good long sleep. In the morning I called Jamie, got his mother, and found out he had gone to the doctor's but would be straight back. I packed my day-pack and told my father I'd be back in the early evening, then set off for the town.
Jamie was in when I got to his house. We drank a couple of cans of the old Red Death and chatted away; then, after sharing in elevenses and some of his mother's home-made cakes, I left and made my way out of town for the hills behind.
High on a heathered summit, a gentle slope of rock and earth above the Forestry Commission's tree line, I sat on a big rock and ate my lunch. I looked out over the heat-hazed distance, over Porteneil, the pastureland dotted white with sheep, the dunes, the dump, the island (not that you could see it as such; it looked like part of the land), the sands and the sea. The sky held a few small clouds; it beat blue over the view, fading to paleness towards the horizon and the calm expanse of firth and sea. Larks sung in the air above me and I watched a buzzard hover as it looked for movement in the grass and heather, broom and whin beneath. Insects buzzed and danced, and I waved a fan of fern in front of my face to keep them away as I ate my sandwiches and drank my orange juice.
To my left, the mounting peaks of the hills marched off northward, growing gradually higher as they went and fading into grey and blue, shimmering with distance. I watched the town beneath me through the binoculars, saw trucks and cars make their way along the main road, and followed a train as it headed south, stopping in the town then going on again, snaking across the level ground before the sea.
I like to get away from the island now and again. Not too far; I still like to be able to see it if possible, but it is good to remove oneself sometimes and get a sense of perspective from a little farther away. Of course, I know how small a piece of land it is; I'm not a fool. I know the size of the planet and just how minuscule is that part of it I know. I've watched too much television and seen too many nature and travel programmes not to appreciate how limited my own knowledge is in terms of first-hand experience of other places; but I don't want to go farther afield, I don't need to travel or see foreign climes or know different people. I know who I am and I know my limitations. I restrict my horizons for my own good reasons; fear - oh, yes, I admit it - and a need for reassurance and safety in a world which just so happened to treat me very cruelly at an age before I had any real chance of affecting it.
Also, I have the lesson of Eric.
Eric went away. Eric, with all his brightness, all his intelligence and sensitivity and promise, left the island and tried to make his way; chose a path and followed it. That path led to the destruction of most of what he was, changed him into a quite different person in whom the similarities to the sane young man he had been before only appeared obscene.
But he was my brother, and I still loved him in a way. I loved him despite his alteration the way, I suppose, he had loved me despite my disability. That feeling of wanting to protect, I suppose, which women are supposed to feel for the young and men are meant to feel for women.
Eric left the island before I was even born, only coming back for holidays, but I think that spiritually he was always there, and when he did return properly, a year after my little accident, when my father thought we both old enough for him to be able to look after the two of us, I didn't resent him being there at all. On the contrary, we got on well from the start, and I'm sure I must have embarrassed him with my slavish following around and copying, though, being Eric, he was too sensitive to other people's feelings to tell me so and risk hurting me.
When he was sent off to private schools I pined; when he came back on holidays I enthused; I jumped and bubbled and got excited. Summer after summer we spent on the island, flying kites, making models from wood and plastic, Lego and Meccano and anything else we found lying about, building dams and constructing huts and trenches. We flew model airplanes, sailed model yachts, built sand-yachts with sails and invented secret societies, codes and languages. He told me stories, inventing them as he went along. We played some stories out: brave soldiers in the dunes and fighting, winning and fighting and fighting and sometimes dying. Those were the only times he deliberately hurt me, when his stories required his own heroic death and I would take it all too seriously as he lay expiring on the grass or the sands, having just blown up the bridge or the dam or the enemy convoy and like as not saved me from death, too; I would choke back tears and punch him lightly as I tried to change the story myself and he refused, slipping away from me and dying; too often dying.
When he had his migraines - sometimes lasting days - I lived on edge, taking cool drinks and some food up to the darkened room on the second floor, creeping in, standing and shaking sometimes if he moaned and shifted on the bed. I was wretched while he suffered, and nothing meant anything; the games and the stories seemed stupid and pointless, and only throwing stones at bottles or seagulls made much sense. I went out fishing for gulls, determined things other than Eric should suffer: when he recovered it was like him coming back for the summer allover again, and I was irrepressible.
Finally, though, that outward urge consumed him, as it does any real man, and it took him away from me, to the outside world with all its fabulous opportunities and awful dangers. Eric decided to follow in his father's footsteps and become a doctor. He told me then that nothing much would change; he would still have most of the summer off, even if he would have to stay down in Glasgow to do hospital work or go around with doctors when they visited people; he told me that we would still be the same when we were together, but I knew it wasn't true, and I could see that in his heart he knew it, too. It was there in his eyes and his words. He was leaving the island, leaving me.
I couldn't blame him, even then, when I felt it hardest. He was Eric, he was my brother, he was doing what he had to do, just like the brave soldier who died for the cause, or for me.
How could I doubt or blame him when he had never even started to _suggest_ that he doubted or blamed me ? My God; all those murders, those three young children killed, one a fratricide. And he simply could not have entertained the idea that I had had a hand in even one of them. I would have known. He couldn't have looked me in the face if he had suspected, he was so incapable of deceit.
So south he went, first one year, carried there earlier than most by his brilliant examination results, then another. The summer in between he came back, but he was changed. He still tried to get along with me the way he always had, but I could feel it was forced. He was away from me, his heart was no longer on the island. It was with the people he knew in the University, with his studies, which he loved; it was in all the rest of the world perhaps, but it was no longer on the island. No longer with me.
We went out, we flew kites, built dams and so on, but it wasn't the same; he was an adult helping me to enjoy myself, not another boy sharing his own joy. It wasn't a bad time, and I was still glad he was there, but he was relieved to go after a month to join some of his student friends on a holiday in the South of France. I mourned what I knew was the passing of the friend and brother I had known, and felt more keenly than at any other time my injury - that thing which I knew would keep me in my adolescent state for ever, would never let me grow up and be a real man, able to make my own way in the world.