The Lion Tamer Who Lost

by Louise Beech

  ‘If you’ve made the decision to have it,’ says Ben, ‘I’ll be there. For both of you.’

  He touches his dad’s letter. For the first time, he can relate a little to the man. He is going to be one too. A dad.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asks Esther. ‘You’re miles away again.’

  ‘Yes. Sorry. Just thinking about my dad.’

  ‘That’s understandable.’

  ‘Do you think you’ll ring him now?’

  Ben wants to say that he doubts it, but he doesn’t. Esther doesn’t need his outbursts and moods right now.

  ‘We’ll see.’ Ben pauses. ‘I won’t be the kind of dad he is though. I can promise you that.’

  ‘So you won’t shag any of my female relatives?’

  ‘Esther!’ Ben smiles though.

  ‘Sorry. That was bad of me.’

  ‘No. It’s fine. It’s bloody true.’

  Esther looks at him. ‘What shall we do then?’

  ‘Look, we can’t plan everything now.’ Ben tenderly moves a stray piece of hair from her cheek. ‘This is all new, isn’t it? But I guess we’ll have to decide what we’ll do about being here. I mean, you can’t have a baby here, can you?’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘You must want to go back to Newcastle? Will you phone and tell your family?’

  ‘No. I’ll tell them in person.’

  ‘Yes.’ Ben supposes he should too. He can’t think about that now. ‘I guess we should get you to an English hospital as soon as we can, have everything confirmed, make sure you’re okay.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘This changes everything,’ says Ben, more to himself.

  ‘It does.’

  Esther leans against him, clearly tired. He lets her. It’s time he did.

  It’s time he grew up.

  PART FOUR

  ANDREW

  23

  A Story of Forty-Three Peas

  When Ben said, ‘save me’ only Nancy understood. Ben’s ‘save me’ didn’t mean ‘rescue me’; it meant ‘put me aside until later’. Later was always better because the house got quiet and the moon rose and the animals came out.

  Andrew Fitzgerald, The Lion Tamer Who Lost

  The last time Andrew was hospitalised he slept on the children’s ward, in a bed too short for a taller-than-average ten-year-old. That ward had been prettied with animal window-paintings and under-stuffed teddies.

  The bed he now occupied was large enough but squeaked each time he moved; and this place was only decorated with blood. A splodge had been on the radiator since day one – it might have been there months, missed by exhausted cleaners. The food was tolerable and the nurses (particularly Sophie) cheerful, even after long shifts.

  But Andrew felt guilty about having a bed when he felt better now. The other ward residents were needier than him; in the next bed an elderly diabetic woman, Lily, cried out that rats were getting in. She refused food so had to be drip-fed and disturbed the night with scrape-footed wanderings into the corridor. Even Kimberley, who had been admitted just hours before Andrew, only stayed long enough to be checked over.

  He wanted to go home. To Ben.

  The day before, on his morning visit, Doctor Amdahl had told Andrew they needed to keep him in to do further blood tests.

  ‘Haven’t my sugars stabilised?’ Andrew had tested himself that morning, and was 9.9. ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘The exact cause of your hypoglycaemic episode,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe I didn’t eat enough that day.’

  The statement was ridiculous; he had eaten an entire Sunday lunch at Ben’s house.

  ‘We’re keeping you in.’ Andrew wondered if the doctor always spoke so quietly when delivering what a patient didn’t want to hear.

  Now he awaited the day’s highlight: Ben at visiting hours.

  The previous day he had arrived with grapes and Andrew’s notebook so he could write. Now he arrived bang on two. He pulled the curtain around the bed and kissed Andrew. His mouth felt cool. When their lips touched, Andrew didn’t move for a moment, eyes open, studying Ben. He felt Ben slide a hand under the sheet, along Andrew’s thigh.

  ‘You’d better stop, or I won’t,’ smiled Andrew. ‘It’s been too long.’

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ said Ben.

  Andrew put his hand over Ben’s fingers, said, ‘You’ll get us thrown out for obscene behaviour.’

  ‘Good.’ Ben perched on the bed rather than the chair beside it. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Didn’t get much sleep.’ He leaned in close, whispered. ‘The old dear over there was shouting about rats all night.’

  As though to assert her existence Lily cried out, ‘Hilda, are you there, love?’

  ‘Do you think Hilda’s a rat?’ They laughed quietly. ‘Is she diabetic, too?’ Andrew nodded, and Ben asked, ‘Don’t you fear all those complications when you’re old?’

  Andrew insisted that if he ended up looking for vermin all night Ben should suffocate him with a pillow.

  ‘Did you get the results of the blood tests yet?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Not yet.’ Andrew avoided Ben’s eyes.

  ‘Are you worried something’s really wrong?’

  ‘No.’ He paused. ‘Okay, a bit.’

  ‘To do with diabetes?’ He sounded hopeful. Andrew found it harder to face Ben’s uncertainties than his own, to see them in his lined brow.

  ‘What else would it be?’

  ‘I miss staying at the flat.’

  ‘Stay there if you want,’ said Andrew.

  He had given him a key. Leo, the man he had loved (or a word close to love) for four years had asked endlessly for one, but Andrew had never handed it over.

  ‘It’s the only place in the world I want to be,’ said Ben. ‘It’ll be good to get away from home. Dad got so drunk last night he fell over in the garden and I couldn’t get him back inside. Had to leave him on his back in the grass, shouting at the sky. I heard him at four this morning, staggering up the stairs, crying for Molly. God knows who she is.’

  ‘It’s sad,’ said Andrew. ‘Why do you think he drinks?’

  Ben shrugged. ‘When I ask, he says it’s just a few, his only pleasure.’

  ‘And how about the new baby?’

  ‘She’s good.’

  ‘A lot for you to worry about.’ Andrew squeezed his hand.

  ‘More for you.’ Ben squeezed his back.

  Preceded by an unappetising smell, the lunch trolley arrived late. The curtain was wrenched open by a puffy-faced server. Andrew chose carrots, peas and chips, unable to stomach more. Pea skin floated like petals. Lily cried out for Hilda again.

  ‘Eat more,’ said Ben. ‘They might let you go home.’

  He ate one chip, pulling a pained face. ‘Cold.’

  Ben picked at the abandoned peas on the plate, grouping them, quietly counting each one.

  ‘Why do you always count them?’ Andrew asked, with no criticism, only curiosity.

  Ben looked up, his mouth still forming the number.

  He told Andrew the story of when his mum stopped eating.

  He said that as she grew weaker and the cancer in her ovaries spread, her appetite diminished too. It was cruel that a woman who loved to bake apple pies with pastry that crumbled, and lemon meringue that stayed on your taste buds for hours, would lose not only her interest in food but her ability to eat it. Ben told Andrew he found comfort in the days when she ate forty peas; misery in the days she left that many on her plate. He’d sit with her and joke that if she ate just four more it would make her hair curl, and she’d tell him that was cauliflower, and her hair was curly enough. Or it had been once. Not much remained by the time she couldn’t eat.

  Near the end, when they all knew it was coming, Ben said, he ate what she didn’t. An hour before she died he counted one hundred and fifty-eight cornflakes but couldn’t eat them and poured them into the bin. Later her medication and stained bedding followed. Ben paused at the words sta
ined bedding; Andrew sensed his reluctance to add anything unclean to his mum’s story. He put his hand over Ben’s, not wanting to interrupt. Even Lily ceased her cries for Hilda.

  ‘Now you have to eat,’ Ben said, his voice small. ‘It’s like some weird twist of fate, and you know I don’t buy such crap. Like I’m here to count the food for you now.’

  Andrew picked up the fork and ate his peas, Ben telling him there had been forty-three on the plate.

  They didn’t talk for a while.

  ‘You must hate hospitals,’ Ben said eventually.

  ‘Not had much experience,’ said Andrew. ‘Just when I was ten.’

  ‘You’ve never been in hospital since you were diagnosed?’

  ‘I go to the clinic twice a year. Never had more than a minor hypo. Thank God for you. If I’d collapsed at the flat, I daren’t imagine how long I’d have lain there.’

  ‘It was nothing.’

  Andrew looked up from his peas.

  ‘Okay – it was scary. I heard someone say coma so when you finally woke my heart flipped over.’

  Andrew wanted to press his palms to Ben’s chest.

  ‘Have you been up much?’ asked Ben.

  Andrew liked to walk around when thinking. At his flat he would pace the floor by the window. That morning he went to the main landing, where a floor-to-ceiling window offered panoramic views. It was a grey scene, dull to anyone else, with mostly flat landscape, the river and bridge beyond, but it was his home city. A poster advertised the circus with the ferocious, man-eating cats! Andrew wondered how it could be only ten days since they were there.

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘I’ve decided I’m going to confront my dad about Kim and him,’ said Ben.

  Andrew nodded and waited for Ben to go on.

  ‘I owe it to my brother.’

  Andrew asked what Ben would do if it was true; he said he would think about that when he had to.

  ‘Maybe at the same time tell him about us?’

  ‘Tell me again how old were you when you told your mum?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Twenty-nine. She just shrugged, said she had known.’

  ‘Plenty of time for me yet then.’

  Then Ben changed the subject: ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What is it you like about me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just humour me.’

  ‘How long have you got?’

  Ben looked at the clock. ‘Ten minutes and they’ll be chucking me out.’

  ‘It’s not long enough,’ said Andrew.

  ‘Condensulate it – you’re the writer.’

  Andrew realised he was serious; this hospital and the imminent test had taken him to a long-ago time he now understood. Ben’s last trip to a ward must have been when his mum was ill.

  But how could Andrew tell him in minutes what he liked about him; describe in detail the times he watched him staring into nowhere, eyes narrowed, and how endearing it was. Say he loved the way Ben said his name, like a question. How no one had ever learned about the diabetes like Ben had. No one had ever kissed his stomach after injections, asking, ‘Did it hurt?’ and saying he wished he could take it away, without a trace of pity.

  Andrew said simply, ‘Your face. Everything you are is there … the passion in your eyes when they burn orange. How your mouth curls up with humour. When you frown.’

  When Andrew regained consciousness two days before, Ben’s face was the first one he had seen. The crowds in the emergency room appeared as a mass but Ben stood out in that sea of strangeness.

  ‘This girl at uni once said my face didn’t quite work,’ Ben said now.

  ‘She must have been short-sighted,’ said Andrew.

  Ben left the chair with a fervent scrape, pulled the curtain around the bed again, and slid his tongue between Andrew’s lips, like a game of tag. Catch me and I’ll catch you back.

  Andrew said, ‘We could tell them I’m sleeping.’

  It was when Ben whispered yes in Andrew’s ear that Doctor Amdahl turned up. Ben sat back in the chair, his face flushed. Andrew pulled his hospital gown across his body.

  The doctor spoke his news so faintly that Andrew had to lip-read. That was what he remembered most later; the strange drawl and unidentifiable accent.

  ‘Would you prefer your friend stayed?’ Doctor Amdahl asked Andrew.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We have some results.’ Doctor Amdahl held charts, which he looked at now. ‘They show that you have more white cells than red, and not enough platelets in your blood. It’s an imbalance that we need to investigate further, to ascertain why.’

  ‘Why might it be?’ asked Ben.

  Andrew put a hand on Ben’s arm to shush him, but he ignored him.

  ‘Isn’t it just the diabetes?’

  The doctor shook his head.

  ‘You must know what might be causing it?’ Ben leaned forwards in his chair.

  Doctor Amdahl assured Ben that various things can cause the abundance of white blood cells and it would be unwise to even hazard a guess.

  ‘The limited platelets in your blood are why you bruised so easily,’ he said. ‘We’re going to test a sample of bone marrow cells.’

  ‘How do you that?’ asked Ben.

  Andrew said Ben should just let the doctor talk.

  ‘A sample is taken from the pelvis,’ said Doctor Amdahl. ‘We inject a local anaesthetic, make a small cut to insert a needle, and suck out liquid bone marrow – about a teaspoon.’

  Andrew found it odd that the doctor talked as though he wasn’t there, and then realised he was telling Ben.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ he told Ben, realising he was comforting him. ‘I’ll get this done and I can go home.’

  ‘We’ll do it tomorrow,’ said Doctor Amdahl. ‘Try and get a good night’s sleep. Any questions?’

  Andrew shook his head.

  Afterwards the news sat between them like an unwanted Christmas gift. Ben got up, went to the window, resumed his chair. Andrew said it would be okay. Ben snapped that he couldn’t know that – his mum had been Andrew’s age when she died.

  A nurse informed the ward sharply that visiting hours were over. Andrew was the only patient with anyone at his bedside.

  ‘You have to wish,’ Ben said.

  ‘What?’

  Someone in the corridor dropped something that sounded like glass.

  Ben nodded like a wind-up toy. ‘Wish it’ll be okay.’

  ‘You don’t believe in them.’ Andrew tried to laugh.

  ‘But you do. I’ll get your Wish Box. I’ll bring it tonight and you can write it down. You have to wish that the result will be good.’

  Andrew shook his head and asked Ben to kiss him; he wouldn’t.

  ‘Don’t you want to be okay?’ he asked.

  Andrew said he should go.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Ben shoved the grapes off the cabinet.

  Lily cried out: ‘Hilda come and stop the rats!’

  ‘Right. I’ll fucking go then.’

  Green fruit squelched under his shoes and marked his departure across the tiled floor. Andrew counted the grapes as he left, just as he imagined Ben would: there were thirteen.

  Andrew had only wanted Ben to go so he could cry. He did, soundlessly, in a toilet cubicle. He didn’t cry about the test or for the heavy feeling that something was very wrong. He cried because he couldn’t stand how Ben had looked when he wouldn’t wish.

  The wish formed for a moment in Andrew’s mind; it tried to exist.

  But he didn’t believe it.

  24

  Running through Nettles

  Mr Ellerington asked the class why a hungry crocodile might free an antelope caught securely in its jaws. Nancy said, ‘Because his teeth are wonky?’ Mr Ellerington explained that predators won’t eat bad food, so the antelope must have been ill.

  Andrew Fitzgerald, The Lion Tamer Who Lost

  When a doctor twisted his fat needle
into Andrew’s bone, Andrew was surprised to think of Jonathon Edwards.

  Aged twelve and a half, Andrew once ran through nettles because Jonathon said he was a coward if he didn’t. Andrew wanted to appear brave. He ran bare-legged, in PE shorts, through the overgrown patch that separated the bike sheds from the hedge where the fifth years smoked at lunchtime. Jonathon had laughed afterwards, said only a total dickhead would have done it.

  Andrew had already learned at this tender age that some hurt was necessary; after two years of diabetes he barely flinched at the five-times-daily puncture of needle and the prick of blood test. He found that his mood enhanced or decreased pain. Now – as a needle went in agonising search of bone marrow – Andrew pushed Jonathon’s face away and saw only Ben. When he did, the pain disappeared like butterflies freed from a net.

  Ben’s kiss after a hypo had always soothed; his touch before a finger-prick test made it hurt less. And when they had sex, the exquisite pleasure of his touch had to be tempered by a simultaneous bite.

  After the procedure, Ben was waiting by Andrew’s hospital bed, eyes pale with concern.

  ‘How did it feel?’ he asked.

  How could Andrew answer?

  ‘It felt like … just life,’ he muttered.

  ‘So now we wait?’

  ‘Yes, now we wait,’ said Andrew, and went into the bathroom to begin.

  Sunday was Results Day. Like the Wish Box, this day was a proper noun. Andrew knew it was also the day when Ben planned to ask his dad about Kimberley. Ben had texted that morning to say he would visit him afterwards.

  When Sophie, the cheeriest nurse, said the doctor would be coming that afternoon to talk about the test, Andrew resisted texting Ben. It wouldn’t help his emotional confrontation with his dad. Also, he hoped the doctor would come before visiting hours because he couldn’t bear the thought of Ben’s face if the news was bad. At least if he got bad news alone, when telling Ben he could emphasise the positives.

  ‘Hilda! I wish you’d show yourself!’ cried Lily at one-thirty, after the lunchtime plates had been cleared.