‘Hello, luvvie,’ she says, snapping shut the lid of a Tupperware box. ‘He’s really sleepy today.’
‘Is he? Is that a bad sign?’
‘Well, he’s unsettled. His bloods are up, too.’ I have no idea what this means. ‘Until they sort themselves we can’t do a lot. I wanted to give him a bath today but that will have to wait.’ I don’t like the thought of Mac being given a bath, like a baby. I flick through the images in my mind and select one of him laughing in the shower at the Wiltshire Hotel in Soho, his chest hair all soapy and water falling from flattened hair into his face.
‘When did the doctors last come round?’
‘This morning. They’re happy with him, I think, generally. We just need to keep an eye out, you know.’
‘OK. Well, thanks, Fran.’
Mac is asleep when I go over. I smooth his hair away from his face and brave a quick, light kiss on his cheek. I hope he doesn’t mind; he has been in my head all night and all day. His cheek is papery and soft and warm. The man in the next bed calls over something but I can’t quite hear it.
‘Sorry?’ I enquire.
‘I said, he’s Rip Van Winkle today, that boy,’ responds the man.
‘Ah, is he? Thank you.’ I sit anyway, as Mac sleeps. I watch a bit of telly; the London news, The Chase. I’m near to closing my eyes myself – my eyelids feel heavy. But I’d rather be here than at home. What would I be doing there? Whiling away the hours watching TV until I can go back to work again? Privately nursing wounds that have stayed with me too long? I’d much rather be here.
After an hour I wonder if James is coming tonight. Perhaps he’s busy showing people around houses. Perhaps he doesn’t want to come again. Why would he? He’s only Mac’s neighbour. He’s not a lonely ex-lover like I am, with a bruise for a heart.
I study Mac’s face. His eyelids are still closed; he’s softly breathing. He looks peaceful. I select another image from my mind and hold it in front of me for a good look: Mac, sleeping in that white bed in his flat at Westwood, the night after a funny Valentine’s dinner we had in a pub – the sheet and blankets helter-skeltered round him; his foot hanging out the bottom of the bed. I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off him. He was a blond prince. An angel without wings. A slumbering god … or I expect I had used such over-the-top imagery to describe him at the time. Precocious, I was. Pretentious. I miss that girl a lot.
I think about sending Becky a quick email – saying what, I don’t know – but before I reach down to the phone in my bag, Mac’s eyes open. He smiles gently at me. I take his hand and hold it in mine. His lips are moving; is he trying to say something? I bend down so my face is next to his and he croaks to me so softly I can barely hear him.
‘Give … me … the … skinny, Ilsa.’
I grin, my lips close to his cheek. Rick and Ilsa. Casablanca. The next film on The List. There’s a scene where Humphrey Bogart asks Ingrid Bergman who she really is, what she was before she met him, but she enigmatically refuses, saying she doesn’t think they should ask questions of each other. In my usual cheeky fashion I’d paraphrased Bogart’s famous line to ‘Give me the skinny!’, which had amused Mac no end. He said they should have let me write the script and he started using that line on me himself, until it became a bit of an in-joke – him asking me for the ‘skinny’ – but he got it, more or less. I told him about Marilyn, my dad, my home life before I went to Warwick. I kept it light, though; I didn’t go into the full extent of the misery, the boredom and the despair. Conversely, I knew very little of Mac, but that was fine by me, at the time. There was a lot I didn’t want to know, until I found out everything.
I wonder if Mac’s asking me it because once again he wants to know the answer. Who am I now? What have I been doing for the past thirty-odd years? He closes his eyes again; he is asleep.
‘Mac’s just spoken,’ I say to a passing Fran, raising my head away from Mac’s. I want to give her some good news today. I want to tell her he has said something – it might reflect an improvement in those ‘bloods’.
‘Oh, fantastic! What did he say?’
I stand up and move towards her. ‘A reference to another movie. Well, an in-joke, really.’
‘Oh?’ She stops, a file in her hand. ‘Which one?’
‘Casablanca,’ I say, proud on Mac’s behalf.
‘Another of the films you watched together?’ she says. ‘Wow. He’s really pulling things from that right hemisphere.’
‘He saw the same films time and time again.’ And every time he must have remembered the things I said, I think. ‘He was a Film Studies lecturer at Warwick University. I was one of his students,’ I lie.
‘Ah, really? I could tell he was something fancy. The chap just looks bloody clever, you know?’
‘He does, doesn’t he?’ I agree. Mac has always been so very, very clever. ‘I wonder why he’s not at least trying to say something else,’ I say to her. ‘Why only these little snippets from films? Can’t he at least say “hello” to me, or something? That must be in his long-term memory, too.’
‘No two cases are the same in this kind of thing, but non-fluent aphasia patients sometimes only speak in idioms, swear words, occasionally numbers,’ ponders Fran. She clasps the file to her neck and drums her fingers on it. ‘I had one stroke patient who would only mutter stock phrases about the weather. Sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason to it, but, you never know, Mac might be saying what is most important to him.’
‘Perhaps,’ I say. Is that what he’s doing? I wonder, or is he saying what is most important to me?
‘Talk to him,’ she suggests. ‘He’s got good comprehension and will understand everything you say. He can’t fill in his gaps but you can fill in yours. Tell him about your life, tell him your story, I’m sure he’d like to hear it.’
‘It’s not a very happy story,’ I say.
She shrugs. ‘I’m sure he won’t mind. Who has one of those, anyway?’
Fran heads to the next bed and I sit down and take Mac’s hand. I suppose I could talk to him, tell him a bit about my life. Not all of it, just some edited highlights. I don’t want to make him feel worse than he already does, poor bloke. I can tell him the decent stuff. The stuff that doesn’t make me fear my soul will never dance in the streets again, or, sometimes, even get out of bed. I can give him the skinny.
‘I have a son,’ I say, and Mac opens his eyes and looks at me. ‘Julian. He’s nineteen. He’s the best thing in my life.’ Mac continues to gaze at me, giving nothing away. I wish he could tell me about his son, about Lloyd. ‘I have a house,’ I continue, ‘not far from here, on a lovely tree-lined road. It’s all mine and I live alone, which is really great.’ This is lame and not strictly true, I think. I don’t really like living alone and I am lonely. I have alienated my best friend and now she has come back to me I feel so guilty I am continually pushing her away. I know I’ll never fall in love again and despite what I said to Charlie, it actually makes me feel incredibly sad.
Oh sod it, I think, I will tell Mac the unhappy story. He can’t give me pity, as he can’t speak. He can’t express his disappointment things didn’t turn out that well for me, as he can’t express much of anything. But I can tell him who I am, really, and what I was before.
‘My life … since you, has been, well, a little bit rocky.’ Mac continues to look at me, his blue eyes steady and with those flashes of pistachio light. ‘I went utterly textbook,’ I say, ‘after you. As in, I did that thing after the end of an affair where you go for the complete opposite to someone.’
I had. After Mac, I pitched myself at non-clever wide boys, in the sense they had no academic sheen but they glittered bright in other brittle and exciting ways and in other places; in the City, the Stock Exchange, on dance floors and in bars and hot new restaurants. I hoped there would be safety in them, after the end of our affair, and I dated a lot of them: party boys who loved a pint and a good boogie, who promised a few laughs and a carefree, easy-going kind of love
, with no accompanying toad of angst or drama on its back. Plus, I had little career myself to distract me during these seemingly carefree times.
‘The country was recovering from a bad recession the year I left Warwick,’ I say. ‘Well, you know that. Jobs were still thin on the ground, despite the Milk Rounds and the jolly jobs conventions and all the promises.’ Mac smiles slowly in recognition. Those ‘bloody Milk Rounds’, he used to call them. ‘I could have got a role as a dogsbody in a publishing house or something – if I could beat off the competition of the other three thousand girls applying for it – but the money was terrible anyway, so I got a job in telesales, selling advertising space in women’s magazines, and I started dating these good-time boys. Boys who were fun and uncomplicated, not like you. Although you were fun, you know, sometimes …’ I’m teasing. He tries to give me a wink but can’t quite do it. Hey, I’m teasing, I think. I haven’t done that for a while.
‘I met someone called Felix. I never loved him but we got on well. He was uncomplicated, made me laugh. We moved in together and I got pregnant. I had Julian. My boy.’ Behind me a nurse drops a metal dish and it clatters to the floor. Someone from a bed shouts jauntily, ‘Sack the juggler!’ I turn back to Mac. ‘But we split up when Julian was three. Felix cheated on me, twice – I guess he was more complicated than I thought. He moved away, kept bare contact with Julian. Not a great father. And then I met Christian.’ Only this morning I had been trying to banish thoughts of him from my brain, now I was unburdening myself to Mac about him, as though he were that therapist I had refused to see. ‘He was positively a Good Samaritan when we first met. I was still working in telesales, I’d been running across the street one lunchtime, late back to work, and my heel snapped. You would say it was like something out of the movies, Mac, as he picked me up off the ground and took me into a bar and got me a drink while he dashed to Tesco’s down the road and bought me a pair of plimsolls, guessing – rightly – my size. Well, the Tesco wouldn’t have been in the movie but the rest of it was classic, don’t you think? He came back and put them on my feet and we fell in love. It was all kind of breezy and light. Not intense, like us.’ Mac manages to raise one eyebrow, ever so slightly, and I laugh and tuck his hospital blanket further around him.
‘He asked me to marry him after a year, and I said, “Yes.” He was so, so nice to me.’ I know my face is falling now from that laugh, my heart sinking way, way down. I have to remind myself that’s not where it is now. That things are now OK. ‘He made me feel so special. He said he wanted to be a dad to Julian and … and, well, then it all went wrong.’
‘Sorry, love.’ It’s Fran, bustling in. ‘Just need to take the fella’s temperature.’ She slips a glass thermometer under Mac’s tongue – old school. He looks sleepy again as she checks it. ‘There we go. That’s better. Oh, not too bad. Carry on.’ Carry On Nurse? I think, although Fran doesn’t have the titter or the dreadful puns.
‘Once we got married, it was … insidious,’ I continue, once she has bustled away again. ‘He was a recruitment consultant in the City, a big man to take both of us on. Very, very charming. He started small, like I expect they all do.’ I take Mac’s hand again; I need to anchor myself to him. ‘And his shrinking of me – because that’s what it was – took years. He started with making little comments, about things he didn’t like, things I had to adjust, to make him feel better. He suggested I close my bank account, move all my money and savings into his. He let me have housekeeping; I had to ask him for everything, on bended knee – school stuff for Julian, pencil cases, football socks, everything. I had to distance myself from my friends. I had to report to him, let him know what I was doing every hour of every day. I got accused of all sorts – affairs, mostly. But it was all OK, because he was looking after me. Because he was providing for me and my son.’
Mac says nothing, of course. His pale blue eyes just look, and absorb. I suddenly wonder if I should have made up some brilliant life to tell him all about, but it’s too late now. I have no choice but to carry on with my disappointing, pity-inducing monologue. ‘I was with him for eleven years. Eleven years … When things got really terrible he’d say, “I don’t hit you, Ardie,” as though that made all the other shit all right. That it wasn’t that bad. And because it wasn’t that bad – that, in between the bad stuff, he could be so, so nice again, turn it on, just like a tap, or he’d say he was stressed, I was over-exaggerating, he wouldn’t be like that again, “promise” – I was stupidly, catastrophically, with him for all those years, until I couldn’t be any more. I missed my friends, I missed being a person. He was either horrendous to Julian or ignored him – totally ignored him – and it broke my heart. How could I let that happen, Mac? How could I let it happen for so long …? My dad died – remember me talking about him, Mac, my dad? He died and it tore me apart but Christian was cold, so cold. He told me that I was pathetic to cry, that I was weak and irritating to be utterly devastated. And on it went … on it went, until one night he went mental because I was twenty minutes late home from work. He started throwing stuff; he ripped up my favourite dress. There was a moment – just a single moment – when there was a knife on the kitchen table between us – I had been making a tomato salad, I think – and I thought he might kill me.’ I am no longer looking at Mac now; I am looking down at my lap. ‘I tried to throw him out but he wouldn’t go. Refused to. Julian and I had to go to a women’s refuge while all the house and stuff got sorted out with the police and everything, because he got quite nasty, and it was two weeks before we could move back in. It was my house. I’d paid for it from my telesales job.’ I pause, take a breath. ‘I’ve got a new job now, Mac.’ I look back up at him. ‘I got it not long after my son and I came back home. It’s not quite Hollywood but I work in locations, on Coppers, the police drama. You might be quite proud.’ I shrug. ‘I don’t know. It’s nothing much. But that’s it. That’s my story.’
I sigh and feel a relief that it is all out. ‘There,’ I say, like I am a nurse too. ‘I should have stuck with you, kid, if you’d let me. Because even though we were in some kind of Educating Rita fuck-up, as well as the obvious deceit and betrayal, it was an equal relationship, wasn’t it? I had a say, didn’t I? In fact, most of it was my doing!’ I know Mac is struggling to keep his eyes open; he is tired. I need to stop talking. ‘So that’s who I am and what I was before. I won’t be the person you remember, nothing near. But I’m trying to be stronger now, though I’m not sure how a lot of the time.’
Mac’s eyes hold mine. It feels like an eternity but I won’t look away. I drink him in. I want to see inside his soul, to know him, again. He doesn’t blink; I want him to see into my soul, to know me, once again. We look and we look, then, finally, with the flicker of the beginning of a smile, his eyes close. I feel drained. I am as exhausted as he is. He has heard me, though. He has heard me. I don’t want to go; I still feel the need to draw strength from him, though he has no strength to give. ‘Aren’t you going to say something, kid?’ I ask, to his silence.
‘Hello.’
I whip round, caught out. ‘Oh, hi, James.’
James is wearing a different suit. It’s a very dark navy. His hair looks like it’s been parted on the other side. I feel the need to compose myself, but all I can come up with is patting one side of my springy hair and saying brightly, ‘You’ve just got here?’
‘Yes.’ Oh God, how long has he been standing there? Did he hear my confession? I can’t imagine him as a creeper, though. I imagine he’s the kind of bloke to stand well back when someone is pouring out their heart in an over-the-top, melodramatic manner. ‘There’s not long left,’ I say, fiercely trying not to blush, ‘for visiting.’
‘No, I know. Just thought I’d pop in. I wanted to let Mac know someone came to the door about his car.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘I’ve got some documents to show him,’ he says, patting the inside jacket of his pocket. ‘I’ll read them to him when he wakes up. So, you’re h
ere again?’ he says, sitting down.
‘Yeah, I’ve got nothing better to do,’ I say and I like it when James gives a dry little smile, even though what I’ve said is the truth.
‘Would you like a biscuit?’ He pulls a packet of chocolate digestives from a kind of man bag he has over his shoulder. I wonder what else he has in there.
‘Thanks.’ We munch on the biscuits. I, unexpectedly unburdened, am suddenly ravenous; I ask him for another. I notice he has pink socks on tonight – bubblegum pink. I like to think they are a small rebellion amongst all his estate agent-ness, making me feel less awkward in his company, somehow. Like there’s a spark there he mostly likes to keep under wraps but allows others a glimpse of, to put them at ease. We sit and stare up at the television in almost companionable silence for the remaining fifteen minutes of visiting, then I put on my coat, James fastens his man bag and we leave the hospital, him to turn left, me to turn right.
‘I’ll be here again tomorrow. I’ll see you then?’ James asks.
A bit presumptive, I think, but, ‘Yes, I expect so,’ I reply.
THEN
Chapter 7: Casablanca
‘The thing with Casablanca,’ said Mac, ‘is that Ilsa was always going to go back to her husband, because of film censorship. It was 1942 when that film came out, the midst of the Second World War. The censors never would have allowed her to go off with another man, even if he was Humphrey Bogart.’
We were walking back to Westwood, in the dark. None of the lights in the alleyway were working that night. It was chilly; my flimsy denim jacket felt laughingly insubstantial in the mid-February air. I longed for Mac to put his arm round me but knew it was risky enough him walking beside me at this time of the evening, talking about old black-and-white movies.
‘Ultimately, Bergman had to be wholesome and admired by the audience. She had to do the right thing for the greater good of the country. Nobody gets what they want in Casablanca. She was only allowed to have an affair with Rick in the first place because she believed her husband was dead.’ I was taking this all in; it was fascinating. I had the fleeting thought that Mac was always going to go back to his wife, but it was fleeting, and largely redundant; I had no concern for the greater good, there was no censorship for Mac and me. I was getting what I wanted. ‘The Hays Code,’ concluded Mac. ‘It had a hell of a lot to answer for.’
You, Me and The Movies Page 9