Somehow, between us, we make it to the loo. I half-close the door, ensuring he’s OK, then leave him in peace. During the afternoon, I’ve found the airing cupboard where Tim keeps his bed linen and now I take the opportunity to strip the bed and fit a fresh sheet. The old one, I ball up and stow in a pair of Waitrose bags, one secured around the other. Think Covid, I keep telling myself. Don’t let the virus have everything its own way.
Back down the corridor, Sunil has finished. Given the stench from the loo, he has acute bowel problems on top of everything else, and I help him back to bed, aware of how weak he is, and how short of breath. H, again. Exactly the same story. When I tell him I must take his temperature, he nods helplessly, a gesture of mute compliance.
Taalia has given me a hand-held, non-contact model that looks a little like a gun. I take a reading and shield it from Sunil. His temperature is 104 degrees, which, to me, sounds impossibly high, but a couple of minutes on H’s tablet tells me that this degree of fever is still bearable. Just. It’s at this point that I hear the lightest knock on the front door. I freeze for a moment, thinking at once of Dessie, but then – out in the corridor – I hear a woman’s voice.
It’s Taalia. She’s brought two boxes of Kleenex and more painkillers. When she asks about Sunil, I tell her he’s suffering.
‘He has a fever of a hundred and four degrees,’ I say.
‘That’s high.’ She looks horrified. ‘And so quick, too.’
I nod, resisting the temptation to tell her about the HIV. Instead, I ask her what I should be doing.
‘Keep taking his temperature. If it goes any higher, phone for an ambulance. Above a hundred and six degrees he might get convulsions.’
I nod and thank her. I think she wants to come in and take a look for herself, but the expression on her face has already told me everything I need to know. I’m hearing Berndt again, and his theories about courage. Just now, mine has pretty much run out. I’ve done my best, but the virus has beaten me.
I say goodbye to Taalia, gently close the bedroom door and stand by the window, Sunil’s pay-as-you-go phone to my ear. When the 999 operator answers, I give my name and address and ask for the ambulance service.
THIRTY-SEVEN
The paramedics are tramping up the stairs within the hour, a man and a woman. The woman is young, the man much older. Both are wearing full PPE. I show them through to the bedroom. Sunil is hallucinating now, his eyes wild, fighting God knows how many demons. According to the ID taped to his chest, the older of the two paramedics answers to Frank. He studies Sunil for a moment, checks his pulse with his gloved hand, and then takes me back to the sitting room.
‘I need his name and details,’ he says.
I’ve been dreading this question, but I know it’s inevitable. Since making the call, I’ve managed to find Sunil’s passport. Frank looks at the burgundy cover, and the lines of script across the top. Inside, the laminated page at the front offers the key details. Sunil Salam. Father’s name Ishad Mohmood. Born 17/11/1990. Frank makes a note, before asking if there’s anything else I should be telling him.
‘Yes,’ I say carefully. ‘He’s got HIV.’
‘And you’re next of kin?’
‘Just a friend.’
He nods, curious now, and makes another note when I give him my name and a contact number.
The other paramedic emerges from the bedroom. Despite the visor, I can see the anxiety on her face.
‘Hundred and six degrees,’ she mutters. ‘We need to get a move on.’
Between them, they manage to get Sunil down the stairs. For decency’s sake, if no other reason, I’ve managed to get a blanket round him, but he hasn’t even got the strength to keep it on. Twice, on the way down to the street, I retrieve it, and wrap it round him once again, but the third time it falls off, Frank tells me to leave it.
‘No one’s watching,’ he says, ‘at this time of night.’
The ambulance is waiting at the kerbside. I put my arm round Sunil as they ready the stretcher, and do my best to comfort him, but I can tell he hasn’t a clue what’s happening. I put my lips to his ear and tell him he’s going to hospital where they’ll take proper care of him, and he nods as if he understands but I know he doesn’t. Then, with a sudden lurch, he starts to vomit and all three of us pause, just the way you might freeze-frame a moment in a movie, staring at the pool of yellowish gunk at our feet.
‘I’ll take care of it,’ I say. ‘You’ll need this.’
The female paramedic is helping Sunil on to the stretcher. Frank turns round.
‘What is it?’
‘His passport.’
Moments later, the ambulance has gone. I watch the tail lights disappearing down the road. There’s no traffic around but the blue lights are flashing, reflections jumping from shop window to shop window along the road. I shake my head, knowing in my heart of hearts that I’ll never see Sunil again, then I slowly climb the stairs back to Tim’s flat. He keeps the bleach under his kitchen sink. Half an hour later, after two buckets of water, I’m still chasing the last of the vomit into the nearby drain.
I get the call from the hospital at just gone four in the morning. It comes from a clerical assistant in A&E. She wants to know my exact relationship to Sunil Salam.
‘I’m a friend,’ I say again.
‘Are you aware that Mr Salam is flagged?’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means that we’re obliged to notify the police that he’s on the premises.’
‘I see.’ To be honest, this comes as no surprise. ‘So, how is he?’
‘That’s a question I’m afraid I can’t answer, Ms Andressen. You might phone back later.’ She gives me a number, which I scribble down. When I ask her where the number will take me, she says ICU.
Intensive Care Unit. This is where this story of ours began, I think. Fat Dave coughing his life away on Cynthia’s iPad. That grey monochrome morning a week and a half later when a handful of us gathered at the Crem. Dessie Wren’s big face at my car window. The little scar above his right eyebrow.
Dessie himself phones at half past eight. Still groggy from a night on Tim’s floor, I ask where he is.
‘Outside,’ he says. ‘You didn’t recognize the car?’
I go to the window. He’s standing beside the VW, the phone to his ear, nursing a tall paper cup with the word ‘Costa’ on the side.
‘You can’t come up,’ I say at once. ‘It’s against the law.’
‘I wasn’t planning to. I just thought you might want to know about your friend.’
‘Sunil?’
‘Of course.’
‘You’ve come to tell me he’s dead?’
‘Not quite. I’ve come to tell you he’s very poorly, but then I’m guessing you know that already. I’ve also come to tell you I hadn’t a clue about the HIV.’
‘This is for the record? When they hold the inquest?’
‘This is for your benefit. I know I’m a bad man in your books, and I know I’ve pulled some strokes in my time, but even I wouldn’t go that far. There was no indication on the Home Office file that he was HIV positive. None. That’s a secret he kept to himself.’
‘And now, it’ll probably kill him.’
‘Yes.’
‘No guilt? On your part?’
‘None, I’m afraid. I’m just sorry it didn’t work out.’
‘Us, you mean? Staying friends?’
‘H. We wanted to bang him up.’ He raises the cup. ‘Happy days, eh?’
I spend the rest of the morning steeling myself to get in touch with the hospital. When I finally make the call, I find myself talking to a woman who happens to be standing two beds away from Sunil. She checks who I am, and tallies the name against his details, and then tells me he’s very sick indeed.
‘He’s on a ventilator?’
‘He is.’
‘And do you think he’ll make it?’
‘It’s not my place to tell you, Ms Andressen. Bes
t to phone back this evening. We’ve just put him on high-dosage antibiotics. This is the nuclear option. Can you hang on a moment?’
I nod, say nothing, bite my lower lip. Then I’m talking to another woman, younger voice. She says she’s the respiratory registrar. In view of the HIV, she says, Sunil’s prognosis is very poor indeed. Just now, his sats are down in the high eighties, despite hours of ventilation, and there are signs of hyper-stimulation in what’s left of his immune system.
‘It’s doing its best,’ she says. ‘But don’t hold your breath.’
I’ve been reading about this reaction, more and more common among older patients.
‘You mean his kidneys?’ I ask.
‘I’m afraid so. And his liver. His lungs are shot to pieces already, and we’re starting to worry about his brain.’
I nod. Kidneys, liver, lungs, brain. What else could possibly go wrong?
‘So, you’ll phone me?’ I ask plaintively. ‘Once he’s gone?’
It happens to be Saturday. I spend the weekend waiting for the call, which never comes. I start a couple of Tim’s paperbacks, but fail to make any sense of the opening pages. I try listening to the radio, but everyone’s talking about Covid. I toy with having one of those soul-to-soul phone conversations with Tim, but I wouldn’t inflict this darkness on anyone. And so, in the end, I sit by the window with the blinds down, listening to albums from Tim’s collection of Delta blues. Muddy Waters. John Lee Hooker. Willie Brown. Much of this stuff is beyond plaintive and speaks to me in a language I can understand only too well. This is music about loss, about grieving, and about somehow making it through. Three times, my phone rings and every call comes from Malo. H may have borrowed his phone, I’ve no idea, but talking to anyone else on the planet is something I simply can’t manage. I haven’t felt this way since Pavel died, and his was also a death just waiting to happen.
It’s Monday morning before I finally get the call from the hospital. It’s the registrar again on the ICU, that same voice, and listening to her I can’t help wondering how many of these calls she has to make. Sunil, she says, put up a real fight. An induced coma meant that he was unconscious but towards the very end, barely an hour ago, he seemed to be struggling to break surface. Every vital sign, every trace on the bedside rack of monitors, was terminal, no chance of making it through, yet there he was, making a final effort.
‘He was in pain?’
‘I’m afraid so. We do our best but this virus is truly wicked, especially for someone as compromised as young Sunil. We still have his passport, Ms Andressen, and one or two other odds and ends. The police appear to have an interest in Sunil, so you might want to get in touch with them. Do you have a pen there, by any chance?’
I don’t need one. Mr Dessie Wren, I think. And I’m right.
He appears again, late afternoon the following day. This time he comes to the door.
‘You’ve had the cleaners in,’ he says. ‘Very wise.’
It’s true. I contacted the nursing agency for their number after I got the news that Sunil had died, and they turned up first thing this morning. They’ve spent half a day cleaning around me and now Tim’s flat smells like a hospital.
Dessie has a plastic bag in his hand, which appears to be the property of the Queen Alexandra Hospital.
‘One or two bits and pieces,’ he says. ‘I know you’re not next of kin, but you’re the closest we can find.’
‘His family?’ I query. ‘His mum and dad?’
‘They’re in Colombo. There are no flights. I’m afraid it’s down to you.’
‘The funeral?’
‘Yes. We’ve been in touch with his family. It turns out the boy was a Christian. I’d make the call sooner rather than later. The people at the Crem are losing their sense of humour.’ He gives me the bag. ‘Let me know when you’ve got a slot.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’d like to be there.’
With a nod, and the ghost of a smile, he’s gone.
I bolt the door and retreat to the living room. I’m pretty much certain that I have immunity from the virus thanks to the weekend it passed so briefly through me, but just in case I’ve despatched a swab to the Southampton lab. Now, I empty the contents of the QA bag on to my lap. It doesn’t amount to much. Sunil’s passport. His watch. The simple silver ring he wore on one thumb. And the little twist of dried ox-hide leather that belonged on his wrist. By now, thanks to his passport, I know exactly how old he was when he died. Thirty years of age. And nothing left but this tiny handful of items.
That night, I watch the TV news. I’ve decided to serve out the term of my quarantine here in Tim’s flat, largely for the sake of my own sanity, and I stare numbly at the screen, trying to make sense of today’s stats. In a single twenty-four-hour period, 1,401 people have died. And one of them was Sunil Salam. His passing, so far, has been unremarked but between us, I’m determined to give him at least a modest send-off.
Much later, the news over, I phone Malo’s number. As I suspected, it’s H who picks up. He starts to demand why I haven’t been in touch, why I’ve ignored all his calls. He sounds plaintive and angry at the same time, something I can’t stomach just now, and when I tell him that Sunil has gone, his tone abruptly changes.
‘Gone?’ he says. ‘As in dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fuck.’
‘Yes.’
‘But he was with us just now. How can that happen?’
I’m tempted to laugh, but I don’t. Instead, I tell him that it was complicated, and extremely painful, and that a peaceful death and the word Covid don’t belong in the same sentence.
‘Bad?’
‘Very bad.’
‘Fat Dave bad?’
‘Probably worse. I wasn’t there, but the medics have learned how to be frank at last. He suffered, H. That’s all I know.’
‘You sound gutted.’
‘I am.’
‘So, when are you back?’
‘A week on Saturday. I’ll push for the funeral during the week after. That’s all you really need to know, H. Take care, the pair of you.’
To his lasting credit, H makes no objection. Instead he says he’s sorry about Sunil, and promises to take care of our own boy.
‘Taalia?’ I enquire. ‘She’s still there?’
‘Off and on, yeah.’ He chuckles. ‘And she makes a great fucking curry.’
THIRTY-EIGHT
I spend the next week and a half on Tim’s PC. I’ve mustered the courage to phone him and explained pretty much most of what happened. He’s still in Bere Regis, still in love with his mum’s veggie patch, and shows no sign of wanting to return to Pompey.
‘Treat the place as your own,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry about your friend.’
So am I. I spend far too long thinking about where I went wrong with Sunil, whether I was reckless to call him out in front of Dessie Wren, and whether he might still have been with us had I not tried to play God. But then I talk to Dennis Mortimer, telling him that Sunil is no longer with us.
‘No Marbella?’
‘No Marbella,’ I confirm.
‘Did he ever get the news? Did you ever tell him?’
‘No. The morning I dropped by to tell him you’d said yes, he was already ill. I’m afraid there was no way he’d ever make it, and I think he knew that.’
‘Best left unsaid?’
‘Definitely. But thanks all the same. H thinks the world of you, by the way. Had he ever gone legit, you’d have been his role model.’
Den takes this as a compliment, which it most definitely is, and tells me to take care. The new Agincourt, he says, is a big, big ship and I’m welcome aboard any time.
We part, I think, as friends, which – just now – is important.
I have a week and a half to myself, no interruptions, no prospect of entanglements with the darker elements in the city, and I’m determined to use the time to get on better terms with myself. Pavel once told me that writing is
the shortest cut to proper convalescence, and because I feel so detached, so adrift, I decide to give it a try.
The trigger, oddly enough, is the lingering smell the deep-cleaning crew have left behind. I recognize this smell from my days in the hands of a neurosurgeon in the weeks that followed the diagnosis of my brain tumour. After the operation, I spent long days in a hospital bed wondering how much life I had left, and that experience has stayed with me ever since. We’re all much closer to the Reaper than we might imagine. As the virus has been pleased to confirm.
And so I take advantage of Tim’s generosity, and sit at his PC for day after day, trying to recall all those hospital encounters, and then shape what happened afterwards into some kind of narrative. At first it feels odd and hopelessly self-indulgent to devote so much time and paper to my own story, but then I lift another page from the Pavel Survival Guide, and pretend that I’m someone else, someone I’ve never met before, an outsider charged with getting the right words in the right order. I even, for an entire chapter, write in the third person rather than the first, but then I go back, and change all the pronouns, and suddenly the ‘me’ on the page is really me.
This, you might agree, is a bit of a revelation but from that point onwards, the writing becomes a surprise and a delight. When I started, I was writing six hours a day. A week into the book, I’m up at six and in bed by midnight, with brief breaks to secure a slot at the Crem for Sunil. Everything I write is true, has really happened, but this is the first time it makes any kind of organized sense. The story closes with me and my beautiful son on a stretch of springy turf on the Isle of Wight. The sky is full of scudding clouds, and we can see all the way to the Needles. I think it only fair to warn Malo that he might not have a mum for much longer, and what he says in return closes the book. It made me cry then, as it makes me cry now.
The following day, I stow my few belongings in Malo’s rucksack, and buy a Jiffy bag from the Post Office down the road. The printed-out manuscript, all 330 pages, fits very nicely, and I scrawl the name of the book across the bag in heavy black Pentel. Curtain Call will soon be with my lovely friend Evelyn, who was – until her recent retirement – the doyenne of London editors, and I shall await her verdict with interest.
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