Athena (23 page)

It was a long way up the via dolorosa of that flight of stairs. What at first had seemed an easy burden grew heavier with each step and by the time I got to the top I was bent double and sweat was trickling into my eyes. I worried about getting the key to the flat out of my pocket – should I set her down or keep her balanced precariously on my back while I fished about for it? – but luckily she had left the door on the latch. Going through, I bumped her head on the door-frame and she groaned. Later on, Dr Mutter could not understand how she had survived the ordeal of that climb, with a broken hip and what must have been an incipient aneurysm. I meant well, Auntie, really I did. For those few minutes you were my life and all I had left undone in it, not to mention one or two things that I had done but should not have. I wanted to save you, to bring you back into the world, to knit up your poor shattered bones and make you whole. While all I managed to do was hasten your dying. I wish you had not left me your money.

I got her into the bedroom and unloaded her on to the bed as gently as I could; stevedore first, then fireman, and coal deliverer now. Aunt Corky and the bedsprings complained in unison. Her eyelids flickered open but her eyes were absent, trying to see into some impossible distance. I
stood back, breathing; I knew what must come next. I got the teagown off easily enough (those stick arms!) but underneath she was bound in various strapped and tethered things which took a lot of tugging and swearing to remove. What a mysterious and compelling object the human body is. It struck me that this was the first time in my life, within remembering, at least, that I had looked at a naked woman without desire. I thought of you, and shivered, and hastily covered Aunt Corky’s withered flesh with a blanket and went out to the kitchen to fetch a bowl of water and a rag. My movements were those of a frantic automaton. I knew that if I paused now to reflect for a second my nerve would fail me and I might slam shut the bedroom door and flee the house altogether and never come back. I returned to the bedroom and was faintly surprised to find my aunt still there, though how or where I might have expected her to have gone I don’t know. I switched on the bedside lamp and then switched it off again; the glimmer from the window was ample illumination for the task awaiting me. I lifted the blanket and, holding my breath, removed the bundle of soiled rags from under her hips and cleaned her with soap and water as best I could. When I was lifting one of her legs aside I heard a gristly, cracking sound that must have been, I realised later, the broken ends of her hip-bone shifting against each other. When I was done I covered her up again – she felt frighteningly cold – and went down to the telephone in the hall on the ground floor to call for help. I had brought no coins for the phone and had to bound upstairs again. In my memory of that afternoon I am constantly on the move, covering the distances between bedroom and kitchen and stairs in great, mad leaps, like a demented ballet dancer.

I called The Cypresses. I was not aware it was that number I had dialled until Mrs Haddon came squawking on the line. I began shouting back at her at once, in agitation and furious
hilarity. ‘I need a doctor!’ I cried, and kept repeating it, and she kept answering me with the same phrase over and over, which I could not make out; she seemed to be insisting that she had
told me so
; perhaps it was Dr Mutter’s name she was yelling – Kehoe, Devereaux, something like that? – for in a lull in the uproar she informed me in a small, hard voice that the doctor in fact was there, was standing at her elbow, no less, and that he would call in on his way home, if he had time. This last addition started me off shouting again, until the retired hangman who lived in the ground-floor flat put out his bristly head and glared at me. I took a breath and looked into the black, breathed-on hole of the receiver and said quietly that my aunt was dying. More than the words, it was the sudden calm in my voice, I think, that had an effect. There was a pause, and Mrs Haddon put her hand over the mouthpiece, making a squashing sound that gave me the sensation of being pushed in the face, and then came back and said sulkily that the doctor would set out right away.

Trembling after this exchange, I hurried upstairs again. As I neared the open door of the flat I paused, hearing my aunt’s voice, and a crawling sensation passed up my back and across my shoulder-blades. Who was she talking to? Quakingly I went inside and shut the door behind me and approached the bedroom on tiptoe. I decided that if it was the Da, who had somehow got in again without my seeing him, I would kill him. I even pictured myself coming up behind his broad back with a poker in my hand and … But there was no one, only Aunt Corky lying on her back talking to the ceiling. Her eyes were open but they still had that distant, preoccupied expression. The wind had slammed the door, she was saying, a dreadful wind had sprung up in the night and slammed the door shut. She spoke in awed tones, as if of some great and terrible event. Eerily the scene rose before me: the shadowed furniture crouched in stillness, a
gleam of light on a polished wooden floor and a Biedermeier clock softly clicking its tongue, then a wary stirring as if something had been heard and then the great gust and the door swinging shut like a trap. Her big hand lay on the blanket, twitching; I took it in mine: it was chill and dry yet somehow slippery. I seemed to have been here for hours yet day still lingered in the window and the sky was a high dome of muddied radiance. I went and looked down into the tangled shadows in the garden and thought of the myriad secret lives teeming there. Rooks wheeled and tumbled in the wind-tossed sky like blown bits of black crape. I put my forehead to the coolness of a stippled pane and felt the soft throb of the world in the glass. Night was creeping up the garden. I did not know myself. Behind me the old woman whimpered. I began to pace the room and heard myself counting my steps. One two three four five six, turn. Time seemed to have faltered here; day surely was dead by now but still the sky clung to its tawny glimmer. Aunt Corky lay motionless with her eyes closed, like an effigy of herself, there and yet not there. I wanted to speak a word aloud and hear my own voice but I could not think what to say and anyway I was embarrassed; this was a special manner of being alone. One two three four five six, turn.

I recall that half hour with a strange and potent clarity. Nothing happened – precisely nothing happened: it was like time spent in a lift or waiting to hear news that will not come – yet I have the sense of an event so vast as to be imperceptible, like the world itself turning towards night. It was as if I were undergoing a ritual test or rite of purification: shadows, solitude, cawing rooks, the sleeping ancient, and I in the dimness pacing, pacing. When at last the doorbell rang, a sustained and somehow unfamiliar, harsh trilling, it sounded in my ears an urgently liturgical note.

When I opened the front door to him Dr Mutter stepped in quickly with a sideways motion, like a spy, or a man on
the run. He was tall and awkward with a small, rather fine head set upon a long stalk of neck. He reminded me of those unfortunates who in the last year of school would suddenly turn into six-footers, all wrists and knees and raw-boned anguish. When he spoke he had a habit, picked up from Mrs Haddon, perhaps, of gazing off intently to one side, as if he had just been struck by a terrible thought to do with something else entirely. He shook my hand gravely, his eye fixed on a patch of wall beside my shoulder, and followed me up the stairs with weary tread, sighing and softly talking, whether to me or to himself I did not know. In the bedroom I switched on the light and he stood a moment contemplating Aunt Corky with his bag in his hand and his shoulders stooped. He hooked a finger under his shirt-collar and – shades of Hackett, this time – tugged it vigorously, throwing up his chin and sliding his mouth sideways, while his adam’s apple bounced on its elastic. ‘Hmm,’ he said uncertainly. Aunt Corky was an ashen colour and she seemed to have shrunk appreciably in the minutes that I was away answering the doctor’s ring. Her wig of yellow curls was still incongruously in place. Dr Mutter laid a bony hand on her forehead. ‘Hmm,’ he said again, hitting the tone of gravity with more success this time, and frowned in what he must have thought was a professional way. I waited but nothing more came. I said I thought she must have broken something when she fell; I could not rid my voice of a note of impatience. He seemed not to have heard me. He turned to me but looked hard at the window. ‘We’ll have to have an ambulance, I think,’ he said.

The telephone again, and another lip-gnawing wait. I paced while Dr Mutter muttered. Then the ambulance and the blue light in the street, and two jolly ambulance men with a stretcher, and at the door of each flat on the way downstairs a face peering out in eager sympathy. On the pavement I hung back while they stowed my aunt. The
lighted interior of the ambulance reminded me of a nativity scene. The night roundabout this moving crib was wild and raw, with a black sky full of struggle and tumult. The blanket under which my aunt lay strapped was the colour of half-dried blood. One or two bundled passers-by slowed their steps and craned for a look. An ambulance man came to the open back door and held out a hand to me. ‘There’s a seat here,’ he said. For a second I did not know what he meant. Dr Mutter was already seated beside Aunt Corky with his bag on his knees. In the neon glare both patient and doctor had an identical pallor. Reluctantly I climbed up to join them, queasily feeling the big machine tilt under my weight and then right itself.

The hospital … Must I do the hospital? A windy porch faintly illumined by the swaying light of what my memory insists was a gaslamp; within, a corridor the colour of phlegm where my aunt on her trolley was briefly abandoned like a railway wagon shunted into a siding. There was a warm, gruelly smell that brought me straight back to infancy. Somewhere unseen what sounded like a doctor and a nurse were listlessly flirting. Then a flurry of starched uniforms and rubber soles squealing on rubber floors and Aunt Corky was briskly wheeled away.

When I saw her again, in the aquatic hush and glow of a dark-green room somewhere underground, I hardly recognised her. They had taken off her wig; the few wisps of her own hair that remained were the same shade of rusty red as mine. How pale her scalp was, white and porous, as if it were the bone itself that I was seeing. They had removed her teeth, too; I wonder why? I touched her cheek; very firm, cool but not yet cold, and slightly clammy, like recently moulded putty. I stepped back and heard it again, more distinctly this time, that black wind sweeping through the stillness of the European night and the dark door slamming shut.

A hand touched my shoulder. I jumped in fright. First my heart was in my mouth and then I seemed to have swallowed it. Dr Mutter hung behind me at a pained angle. ‘Have a word?’ he said softly. I followed him to another subterranean room, a windowless cell with a metal table and two metal chairs and a bare lightbulb that shivered on its flex in time to the beat of some vast motor silently throbbing at the core of the building. We sat. The chairs gave out prosthetic creaks. Dr Mutter leaned down sideways suddenly as if to lay his cheek on the table, but he was only reaching into his black bag. He produced a dog-eared form and looked at it grimly in silence for a long, unhappy moment. Then he shifted his gaze to a far corner of the room and sighed.

‘They’re insisting she must have died before the ambulance came,’ he said. His troubled eyes met mine briefly. ‘I didn’t think she was gone, did you?’ I looked at my hands on the table; in the shivery glow from the bulb above my head they had a greenish cast. He sighed again, crossly this time, and stuck a finger under his collar and did that thing with his chin and sideways sliding mouth. ‘I think they’re just avoiding paperwork, myself,’ he said crossly. ‘Anyhow, it means I have to do the cert. Now …’ He peered with misgiving at the paper before him and began to ask me questions about Aunt Corky that I could not answer. I told him I had hardly known her. He paused and nodded and sucked his pen. ‘But she was living with you,’ he said. I had no answer to that, either. It was an awkward moment. What could I do? Shamelessly I made it all up, dates and places, whatever he asked for; an invented life. I felt Aunt Corky would not mind. He wrote it all out happily; I would not have been surprised if he had started to whistle. Then we got to the tricky question of the cause of death and he became depressed again and sucked his pen and shifted in his chair, sighing and blinking, like a student sitting an examination for which he had not sufficiently prepared. He turned to me again
hopefully. With diffidence I suggested heart-failure. He thought it over briefly and shook his head. ‘Needs to be more specific,’ he said. We brooded. He considered the ceiling while I stared at the floor. Next, I suggested stroke. He was doubtful but I persisted. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘stroke it is.’ Still he hesitated, then frowning he bent over the document and, having dithered for a final second, inscribed the word and sat back with an air of dissatisfaction and faint resentment, as if it were a crossword puzzle he had been doing and I had solved the final clue for him. He flourished the paper in my face, like something he was about to palm; I tried to read his signature but could not make it out. Then he stowed it in his bag and we stood up awkwardly, patting our pockets and looking about at nothing. I could sense him working up to something. Suddenly he took my hand in both of his and gave it a sort of anguished shake. ‘I’m sorry,’ he blurted, looking desperately past my shoulder, ‘I’m sorry for your trouble,’ as if … well, as if I had suffered a real bereavement; as if, indeed, I were in pain. How had he come by such an idea? I stared at him, shocked, and inexplicably dismayed, then turned away without a word. Amazing, as Morden would have said.

Outside, the night set upon me with a vengeance. Black rain fell across the shaking lamplight in the porch and the carpark was awash with wrinkled water. On the road the wind was smacking its huge hands on the streaming tarmac and passing cars dragged white-fringed tailfins in their wake. It took me a long time to find a taxi. The driver, humped and hatted, reminded me of the fellow who had taken me to fetch Aunt Corky from The Cypresses; maybe it was the same one, I would not be surprised. In the suddenly, definitively empty flat I threw myself on the couch – would I be able to get myself into that bed ever again? – and slept fitfully, hearing the nightwind keening for Aunt Corky. She came to me in a dream and sat beside me calmly with her
labourer’s big square hands folded in her lap and told me many things, none of which I can remember. I woke into an exhausted dawn. The world outside looked tousled and awry after the night’s riotous gales. I was prey to an odd, fevered exhilaration; I felt buoyant and hollow, like a vessel that had been emptied out and scoured. The bedroom I avoided; the bathroom was not much better. I shaved with a shaky hand, and cut myself. I wanted to see you. That was all I could think, that I must see you.