Free Half Broken Things by Morag Joss

Beth, Michael sat up and opened the book. It pained him to recall how she had always tried to encourage him, without managing to understand him at all; she made such efforts with the books, with his acting. She even tried to explain away how he made up stories when everybody else said he told lies. He switched on the light by his bed, not to read but to look at the pictures. As long as he could stop Beth taking hold in his mind, he thought he might soon be all right. He knew it for certain when, having begun almost by accident to read the words, his favourite part of the story (where the gruff old Grandfather made Heidi a soft little bed all of her own in the hay loft) made him cry as it always did.
    Later he got up, gathered together a change of clothes and knocked on Ken’s door across the walkway. Ken seemed grateful to see him. Michael had a bath and afterwards returned to Ken’s sitting room. The community nurse had been so Ken was doped up and not saying much, parked in his day chair in his usual combination of clothes and pyjamas with a thing on a cord round his neck that he could press if he fell, which rang an alarm somewhere. On the plastic hospital tray table next to him the nurse had left his sandwich lunch on a plate covered with cling film, the remote control for the television, yesterday’s
Express
and a jug of orange squash. A plastic cup with several tablets in it sat on a piece of paper with 12 O’CLOCK AFTER DINNER NOT BEFORE written on it. He seemed more bloated. His walking frame was within reach, though Michael noted that the commode chair was now positioned just behind Ken’s day chair and not in the bathroom, and the telephone had been pulled across the floor from its little table by the door so that he could reach it without getting up. Not that it ever rang. Michael was not feeling completely better, so while Ken dozed he dried his hair by the fierce gas fire, still unable to locate the space in himself that held any real pity. He did not ask if Ken had missed him. He would not have known what to do with the information, with the burden of having let him down, if Ken were to say he had. How he managed during Michael’s bad spells, when his popping in to chat or fetch his little bits of shopping came to an abrupt stop, was something they never discussed.
    â€˜Got a big deal on today, Ken,’ he said. ‘In the Cotswolds. There’s some nice stuff going in the Cotswolds. Nurse coming back, is she?’
    The nurse always came back at four thirty to wash Ken and get him ready for bed and Michael knew it, but his checking up struck a note of concern that seemed to please Ken. He nodded and croaked that he was a lucky chap, and that Michael was to mind how he went, and when he had dismissed him with a valiant lift of a hand, Michael took his leave.
    The van got to Sherston under protest, but Michael was feeling so much better now that this seemed merely an added challenge. After all, a groan under the bonnet was not a thing that would trouble Jeff Stevenson, curate of St Mary’s, Burnham Norton. Michael had telephoned this time and spoken to the woman at the vicarage so the vicar was expecting Jeff Stevenson, and Michael, as he drove along, began to enjoy the transition from himself into Jeff.
    It would be the usual doddle. Michael had always been able to act; he had shown a real ability in drama, his teacher had said so. In fact, he might have become an actor. If he had spent those years anywhere other than in Beth’s house on that estate on the edge of Swindon he might have made it, but it was impossible to get started from a place like that. Beth had had no idea. But he had definitely had some sort of knack for acting, for forgetting altogether that he was Michael. Probably he had been born with it, because it was the one thing he could do that felt effortless and natural. He just shucked Michael off, left him somewhere and sailed away in his mind and his body,