Authors: Patrick Gale
‘I think he’s asleep now,’ he said. ‘He’s shut his eyes anyway.’
He pulled over a spare chair so that Alison and Miriam could sit on either side of the bed, then found a stool and sat at the mattress’s end. He had been holding one of Jamie’s hands. Now he reached out to where one of Jamie’s feet stood up, surprisingly big, beneath the sheet. Hesitantly, shy perhaps because Miriam was there, he touched the foot then slid his hand to rest on Jamie’s ankle, giving the joint a slight squeeze. Alison saw her mother’s eyes flick down to see what he was doing then flick away again.
The three of them sat there, symmetrically arranged as for a dinner party, boy, girl, boy, girl. No-one spoke, abashed and helpless in the presence of suffering, for nearly an hour. Now and then a burst of
The Sound of Music
reached them. Occasionally Miriam took a tissue from the night table and tenderly wiped Jamie’s face. She had not seen the waste bag hooked on the other side of the table, and kept the used tissues crumpled in her lap. Twice the nurse came in to check Jamie’s pulse and temperature, twice they refused his offer of tea. With nothing to counteract it or keep it in scale, the sound of Jamie’s breathing swelled until it was a large, fifth presence in the room, pressing up against them, stealing the air mouthful by greedy mouthful.
At last, Miriam stood stiffly, scattering tissues to the floor and, in a librarian’s whisper, said that she was going for a coffee after all and did either of them want one. Sam shook his head but Alison whispered that she was coming too. As they left, Sam stood to stretch his legs and moved to sit in Miriam’s chair, nearer Jamie’s hands. Alison glanced back from the door and saw him clasping one and leaning forward to murmur something.
‘Do you think this place has a cigarette machine?’ Miriam asked once they were outside.
‘Down in the lobby, probably. I thought you gave up years ago.’
‘I did.’
They rode down silently in the lift, avoiding the eyes of visitors who joined from other floors with their bags of library books, toys and nighties for washing. Miriam bought a packet of the mildest cigarettes in the machine and lit one at once. Alison took one too. They made no further comment on this emergency dereliction after years without nicotine. Halfway through, after they had slumped on a green nylon sofa in the smoker’s section, Miriam said, ‘That’s better. Christ I needed that.’ Then she started to weep, stopped almost immediately, apologised and lit a second cigarette from what remained of her first. Alison lit a second too, although she knew it would give her a headache. Abruptly, Miriam began to talk about her marriage.
To a casual listener, this would have sounded crassly self-centred, even irrelevant but, familiar with the diversionary tactics and codified grieving of callers to the helpline, Alison knew it was her mother’s way of talking about Jamie.
‘It’s no good,’ Miriam said. ‘I can’t leave him. Poor Francis. I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it often. But it’s so
comfortable
there and I never have to worry about anything any more. Going to the supermarket is a kind of pleasure now. An outing. I’m like a woman on the telly now. I can buy whatever takes my fancy and stick it in my trolley. Anything. Anything at all. He hates me to worry. He says that’s what he first wanted about me. All those sessions trying to sort out the commune’s taxes for me and he was sitting there with his calculator thinking, “I can stop her worrying if only she’ll let me”. Did you know I never paid his bill? He’s devoted to me. Poor Frank. He’s so boring and conventional. I know I’ve tried to make myself like that too. A bit. Conventions are restful after trying so hard to be different.’ She looked up sharply with a bitter laugh and caught Alison’s eye through the smoke.
‘What?’ Alison asked.
‘Some of his little habits … Like the way he hums to himself even when I’m in the room, and the way he closes doors too slowly – have you noticed that one? As if he’s afraid of making a noise.’
Alison nodded slowly.
‘Sometimes he makes me want to scream,’ Miriam went on.
‘So? Scream the house down.’
‘Angel, I couldn’t. Not now. Not ever. I’m too fucking
placid
. Too much stuff going into my system for much too long.’
‘Have an affair then. Most wives do.’ Alison hated herself for sounding so cool.
‘It’s not that easy, Angel. You make it sound like changing my hair or repainting the bedroom. I mean … there’ve been a few times I could have. I suppose. But it would be so humiliating to be turned down or discarded. I’m no chicken. Anyway, sex is so risky nowadays.’
‘So? Wear a condom, don’t floss your teeth before a date and don’t let him come in your mouth.’
Alison drew in her breath sharply. The words had just slipped out of her but they left as strong a charge on the air about them as a brutal slap to the older woman’s face. She was surprised people didn’t turn to stare at the outbreak of violence.
‘Listen to me,’ Miriam sighed, letting Alison’s retort pass and exhaling wearily. ‘I suppose I should find a payphone and ring him.’
‘Yes.’
Neither of them moved. Miriam stubbed out her cigarette. She offered Alison another and, when Alison shook her head, she crushed the packet viciously in one hand and tossed it into the coffee-streaked litter bin beside them. She stared for a few seconds after it. When she turned back, her eyes were tearful again.
‘I do love you, you know. Both of you. Equally.’
‘I know,’ Alison said, mortified.
‘No you don’t. I’m so proud of you. Look.’ She reached for her wallet. ‘I carry this everywhere.’ She produced a dog-eared photograph. Alison was shocked. She thought it one of the least flattering she had ever seen of herself. She and Jamie were pictured side by side in front of the willow tree at The Roundel, wearing matching, pea-green, tie-dyed vests. She had no chin and a thick fringe. Jamie’s hair covered his ears and his face looked slightly dirty, with its dark adolescent fluff and greasy nose. Alison marvelled at how much he had changed and was appalled that this poor, haphazard reproduction of their youth had become a memory their mother cherished. She wondered whether to counter it by producing her similarly grisly shot of Miriam and the Beards.
‘I’ve been a lousy mother,’ Miriam went on, fondly smoothing out the picture’s creases with a thumb. Alison knew a good child should contradict her but she failed to.
‘I suppose it was lacking any example to follow or something. All alone in the world. Huh! When I think about it, I had you so
young
. Eighteen!’
‘I thought it was nineteen.’
‘Eighteen, nineteen-something like that. Who’s counting? I was still an art student. I was a child myself.’
‘I know.’
‘Little fool that I was. I mean,’ she added hastily, ‘I never regretted
having
you. I wanted you both so much. But still, I was very very young.’
‘Yes.’
‘If there wasn’t Francis. I mean, if I still lived at The Roundel and everything, would it make a difference?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Alison protested, because it was true, of course. If Miriam were still drifting around in Indian cotton with home-hennaed hair, trying to sell candles, soap and inexpert little rugs, she might even love her. My mother the eccentric. My mum the old hippy.
They bought watery coffees and chocolate from some machines, embarrassed to bother the nurse having refused him twice already, and went back to join Sam’s vigil. On the way, in the lift, Alison heard herself suggesting Miriam come up for lunch occasionally, or dinner and a play, like other people’s provincial mothers.
‘You could even stay the night,’ she said. ‘Brave London’s fashionable East End. That would be fun. We could start having girls’ nights out, if Francis could survive without you, that is.’
They walked back along the corridor sounding as easy together as office workers returning from a lunch hour on a park bench. When they opened the door they found a doctor and a new nurse busy at the bedside and saw Sam, leaning pale against the window, unable to do more than raise his eyebrows in greeting. Alison wondered whether all her bad Christmases had been rehearsals for this one. She handed Sam his coffee and snapped off a chunk of chocolate.
‘No thanks,’ he muttered.
‘Eat,’ she whispered, making him take it. ‘You didn’t eat lunch.’ She reached up to rest a hand on his shoulder as he sadly munched.
She thought ahead to her return to the office. People would ask her how
her
Christmas had been. She realised she would have to lie. Anything for a quiet life.
‘Fine,’ she’d say. ‘The usual. Mother, turkey, presents, telly. How about yours?’
In the unconsciously harsh language of tired nurses the world over, Jamie was not a good patient. He lacked the inner resources and ready passivity necessary for life as an invalid. The very word, invalid, with its connotations of low worth and non-participation, raised his defences. His was not one of those personalities that allowed itself to be overshadowed by an interesting malady. The very opposite of a hypochondriac, he would always deny an illness rather than let it take him to bed, staggering on through attacks of ‘flu when his colleagues would call in sick. It had taken the advent of Sam in his life to persuade him even to take lie-ins, much less enjoy them.
At first, he was so spaced out with fever and pain and drugs that his experience of hospital was ungraspable as a dream. Familiar faces – Sam’s, Alison’s, Miriam’s, Sandy’s – floated in and out of the fish-eye view of his suppressed consciousness, their words boomily nonsensical. He was wiped, patted, squeezed, injected and occasionally led, in a vertiginous daze that was pure Hitchcock, to an echoing bathroom. Insofar as he was aware of his body at all, it seemed to have become all weeping eyes, giant lungs and gasping mouth; a primitive, unsuccessful fish. His intervals of serenity were marked by delicious sensations of floating or sinking his sleepy way through an infinite expanse of harmless water. Then, like a tide, the fever receded, leaving him beached in a hospital room with a grey view of rooftops and his mother crying softly in an armchair.
‘A lot of help that is,’ he said, and she jumped up as though a corpse had spoken and ran into the corridor calling for a nurse.
His body was no longer burning up, his lungs no longer drowning in their own soup and his breath was once more his own, but the fever had left his body weaker than he would have thought it possible to be yet still live. The first few times he made his way down from the bed unassisted, his legs crumpled beneath him like a couple of straws. One of the male nurses – the camp, plain one as opposed to the cute, straight one-brought him a pair of walking sticks without having to be asked. Now Jamie could shuffle like an old man to his bathroom and review, with unflinching curiosity, his new face and body.
If he had been thin before Christmas, the New Year saw him skeletal. He turned his face this way and that in the merciless mirror. He now had the Montgomery Clift cheekbones he had always dreamed of, but the washboard stomach had been ousted by plate-rack ribs and a pelvis by Barbara Hepworth. His buttocks, once meatily pert, now drooped, wrinkled like tired balloons.
‘They could use me to sell famine relief,’ he told a plump Glaswegian nurse. ‘My adam’s apple’s become my best feature.’
‘And your hair,’ she said. ‘You’ve still got lovely hair.’
‘Gee thanks. You can come again.’
‘Look at it this way, sunshine,’ she told him. ‘For the first time in your life you can eat anything, absolutely anything you can keep down. Cheese. Cream. Chocolate. Cake. That sore patch in your mouth is a little bit of thrush, which we can knock on the head with Fluconazole. It’s going to hurt a bit when you swallow, but you’ve got to try to eat all you can.’
His bodily weakness had sapped his appetite, however, and the drugs he was on had placed him within constant sniffing distance of nausea. However delicious and calorie-rich the food that was set before him, he had become like the Queen; unable ever to eat more than half.
No less active than usual, his brain took poorly to under-occupation, which left him angry and bored. Now that he was aware of his surroundings, he started treating the ward like a luxury hotel, leaving towels on the floor for the cleaners to pick up, purposely dropping food on his sheets so they had to be changed more often, complaining about the light, the dark, the heat, the cold, the noise, the mattress. He knew he was being a bad patient. He expected a stiff talking-to, expected the last-ditch summoning-up of some Ealing comedy gorgon in starched hat and squeaky shoes, but the nurses were used to such reactions and maddened him further by meeting his bad behaviour with pained sighs and resolute patience. In their experienced eyes, his frustration was a common, easily diagnosed symptom that would pass with no more medication than time. This it duly did, once he realised that his gracelessness, like a child’s tantrums, was isolating him from small treats and tendernesses.
With her usual efficiency, unaware that he would see straight through it, Alison had worked out a visiting plan to ensure frequent stimulus for him, stave off depression and prevent visitor build-up. Miriam came to see him in the morning. Alison came in her lunch hour, Sandy came in the afternoon and Sam, freshly showered, appeared after work, ate supper with him and stayed, lying on the bed beside him, until Jamie fell asleep. Word spread by the usual mysterious channels, and surprise visitors began to appear too, not always entirely welcome, with their superstitiously generous bunches of flowers, their fearful, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God smiles and numbingly irrelevant observations.