As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor. Now, my narrative is over. Switch off your silver orison. In two hours enforcers will escort me into the Litehouse. I claim my last request.
… name it.
Your sony and access codes.
What do you wish to download?
A certain disney I once began, one nite long ago in another age.
“Mr. Cavendish? Are we awake?” A licorice snake on a field of cream wriggles into focus. The number five. November 5. Why does my old John Thomas hurt so? A prank? My God, I have a tube stuck up my willy! I fight to free myself, but my muscles ignore me. A bottle up there feeds a tube. The tube feeds a needle in my arm. The needle feeds me. A woman’s stiff face framed with a pageboy haircut. “Tut tut. Lucky you were here when you fell over, Mr. Cavendish. Very lucky indeed. If we had let you go wandering over heaths, you’d be dead in a ditch by now!”
Cavendish, a familiar name, Cavendish, who is this “Cavendish”? Where am I? I try to ask her, but I can only squeal, like Peter Rabbit tossed off Salisbury Cathedral’s spire. Blackness embraces me. Thank God.
A number six. November 6. I’ve woken here before. A picture of a thatched cottage. Text in Cornish or Druidic. The willy tube is gone. Something stinks. Of what? My calves are raised and my arse is wiped with a brisk, cold, wet cloth. Excrement, feces, cloying, clogging, smearing … poo. Did I sit on a tube of the stuff? Oh. No. How did I come to this? I try to fight the cloth away, but my body only trembles. A sullen automaton looks into my eyes. A discarded lover? I’m afraid she is going to kiss me. She suffers from vitamin deficiencies. She should eat more fruit and veg, her breath stinks. But at least she controls her motor functions. At least she can use a lavatory. Sleep, sleep, sleep, come free me.
———
Speak, Memory. No, not a word. My neck moves. Hallelujah. Timothy Langland Cavendish can command his neck and his name has come home. November 7. I recall a yesterday and see a tomorrow. Time, no arrow, no boomerang, but a concertina. Bedsores. How many days have I lain here? Pass. How old is Tim Cavendish? Fifty? Seventy? A hundred? How can you forget your age?
“Mr. Cavendish?” A face rises to the muddy surface.
“Ursula?”
The woman peers in. “Was Ursula your lady wife, Mr. Cavendish?” Don’t trust her. “No, I’m Mrs. Judd. You’ve had a stroke, Mr. Cavendish. Do you understand? A teeny-weeny stroke.”
When did it happen? I tried to say. “Airn-dit-hpn” came out.
She crooned. “That’s why everything’s so topsy-turvy. But don’t worry, Dr. Upward says we’re making super progress. No horrid hospital for us!” A stroke? Two-stroker? Stroke me? Margo Roker had a stroke. Margo Roker?
Who are all you people? Memory, you old sod.
I offer that trio of vignettes for the benefit of lucky readers whose psyches have never been razed to rubble by capillaries rupturing in their brains. Putting Timothy Cavendish together again was a Tolstoyan editing job, even for the man who once condensed the nine-volume Story of Oral Hygiene on the Isle of Wight to a mere seven hundred pages. Memories refused to fit, or fitted but came unglued. Even months later, how would I know if some major tranche of myself remained lost?
My stroke was relatively light, true, but the month that followed was the most mortifying of my life. I spoke like a spastic. My arms were dead. I couldn’t wipe my own arse. My mind shambled in fog yet was aware of my witlessness, and ashamed. I couldn’t bring myself to ask the doctor or Sister Noakes or Mrs. Judd, “Who are you?” “Have we met before?” “Where do I go when I leave here?” I kept asking for Mrs. Latham.
Basta! A Cavendish is down but never out. When The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish is turned into a film, I advise thee, Director dearest, whom I picture as an intense, turtlenecked Swede named Lars, to render that November as a boxer-in-training-for-the-big-fight montage. True Grit Cavendish takes his injections without a quiver. Curious Cavendish rediscovers language. Feral Cavendish redomesticated by Dr. Upward and Nurse Noakes. John Wayne Cavendish on a walker (I graduated to a stick, which I still use. Veronica said it lends me a Lloyd George air). Cavendish à la Carl Sagan, caged in a Dandelion Clock. As long as Cavendish was anesthetized by amnesia, you could say he was content enough.
Then, Lars, strike a chord sinister.
The Six O’Clock News on the first day of December (Advent calendars were on show) had just begun. I had fed myself mashed banana with evaporated milk without tipping it down my bib. Nurse Noakes passed by, and my fellow inmates fell silent, like songbirds under the shadow of a hawk.
All at once, my memory’s chastity belt was unlocked and removed.
I rather wished it hadn’t been. My “friends” at Aurora House were senile boors who cheated at Scrabble with stunning ineptitude and who were nice to me solely because in the Kingdom of the Dying the most Enfeebled is the common Maginot Line against the Unconquerable Führer. I had been imprisoned a whole month by my vengeful brother, so plainly no nationwide manhunt was under way. I would have to effect my own escape, but how to outrun that mutant groundsman, Withers, when a fifty-yard dash took a quarter of an hour? How to outwit the Noakes from the Black Lagoon when I couldn’t even remember my post code?
Oh, the horror, the horror. My mashed banana clagged my throat.
My senses rethroned, I observed the Decembral rituals of man, nature, and beast. The pond iced over in the first week of December, and disgusted ducks skated. Aurora House froze in the mornings and boiled in the evenings. The asexual care worker, whose name was Deirdre, unsurprisingly, strung tinsel from the light fittings and failed to electrocute herself. A plastic tree appeared in a bucket wrapped in crepe paper. Gwendolin Bendincks organized paper-chain drives to which the Undead flocked, both parties oblivious to the irony of the image. The Undead clamored to be the Advent calendar’s window opener, a privilege bestowed by Bendincks like the Queen awarding Maundy money: “Mrs. Birkin has found a cheeky snowman, everyone, isn’t that fabulous?” Being Nurse Noakes’s sheepdog was her and Warlock-Williams’s survival niche. I thought of Primo Levi’s Drowned and the Saved.
Dr. Upward was one of those Academy Award–winning Asses of Arrogance you find in educational administration, law, or medicine. He visited Aurora House twice a week, and if, at age fifty-five or so, his career was not living up to the destiny his name foretold, it was down to us damnable obstacles in the way of all Emissars of Healing, sick people. I dismissed him as a possible ally the moment I clapped eyes on him. Nor were the part-time botty wipers, bath scrubbers, and gunk cookers about to jeopardize their lofty positions in society by springing one of their charges.
No, I was stuck in Aurora House all right. A clock with no hands. “Freedom!” is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.
A few days before our Savior’s Birthday, a minibusload of private-school brats came to sing carols. The Undead sang along with wrong verses and death rattles, and the racket drove me out, it wasn’t even funny. I limped around Aurora House in search of my lost vigor, needing the lavvy every thirty minutes. (The Organs of Venus are well known to all but, Brothers, the Organ of Saturn is the Bladder.) Hooded doubts dogged my heels. Why was Denholme paying my captors his last precious kopecks to infantilize me? Had Georgette, incontinent with senility, told my brother about our brief diversion from the highway of fidelity, so many years ago? Was this trap a cuckold’s revenge?
———
Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book. Well, Mumsy, no, not really. Your beloved large-print sagas of rags, riches, and heartbreak were no camouflage against the miseries trained on you by the tennis ball launcher of life, were they? But, yes, Mum, there again, you have a point. Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw. God knows, I had bog all else to do at Aurora House except read. The day after my miracle recovery I pic
ked up Half-Lives and, ye gods, began wondering if Hilary V. Hush might not have written a publishable thriller after all. I had a vision of The First Luisa Rey Mystery in stylish black-and-bronze selling at Tesco checkouts; then a Second Mystery, then the Third. Queen Gwen(dolin Bendincks) exchanged a sharp 2B pencil for a blunt blandishment (missionaries are so malleable if you kid them you’re a possible convert), and I set about giving the thing a top-to-bottom edit. One or two things will have to go: the insinuation that Luisa Rey is this Robert Frobisher chap reincarnated, for example. Far too hippie-druggy–new age. (I, too, have a birthmark, below my left armpit, but no lover ever compared it to a comet. Georgette nicknamed it Timbo’s Turd.) But, overall, I concluded the young-hack-versus-corporate-corruption thriller had potential. (The Ghost of Sir Felix Finch whines, “But it’s been done a hundred times before!”—as if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void-Webber! As if Art is the What, not the How!)
My editing work on Half-Lives hit a natural obstacle when Luisa Rey was driven off a bridge and the ruddy manuscript ran out of pages. I tore my hair and beat my breast. Did part two even exist? Was it stuffed in a shoe box in Hilary V.’s Manhattan apartment? Still abed in her creative uterus? For the twentieth time I searched the secret recesses of my briefcase for the covering letter, but I had left it in my Haymarket office suite.
Other literary pickings were lean. Warlock-Williams told me Aurora House had once boasted a little library, now mothballed. (“The Jellyvision’s so much more Real for ordinary people, that’s what it boils down to.”) I needed a miner’s helmet and a ruddy pick to locate this “library.” It was down a dead end blocked off by stacked-up Great War memorial plaques headed “Lest We Forget.” The dust was deep and crisp and even. One shelf of back editions of a magazine called This England, a dozen Zane Grey westerns (in large print), a cookbook entitled No Meat for Me Please! That left All Quiet on the Western Front (in whose page corners a creative schoolboy had long ago drawn frames of a cartoon stick man masturbating with his own nose—where are they now?) and Jaguars of the Skies, a yarn of everyday helicopter pilots by “America’s Foremost Military Suspense Writer” (but, I happen to know, ghostwritten at his “Command Center”—I shall name no names for fear of legal reprisals), and, frankly, bugger all else.
I took the lot. To the starving man, potato peelings are haute cuisine.
Ernie Blacksmith and Veronica Costello, come in, your time is up. Ernie and I had our moments, but were it not for these fellow dissidents, Nurse Noakes would still have me drugged up to my ruddy eyeballs today. One overcast afternoon while the Undead were in rehearsal for the Big Sleep, the staff were in a meeting, and the only sound troubling Aurora House’s slumbers was a WWF contest between Fat One Fauntleroy and the Dispatcher, I noticed, unusually, a careless hand had left the front door ajar. I crept out on a reconnaissance mission, armed with a fib about dizziness and fresh air. Cold singed my lips, and I shivered! My convalescence had stripped me of subcutaneous fat; my frame had shrunk from quasi-Falstaffian to John of Gaunt. It was my first venture outside since the day of my stroke, six or seven weeks before. I circumnavigated the inner grounds and found the ruins of an old building, then fought through unkempt shrubberies to the brick perimeter wall to check for holes or breaches. An SAS sapper could have clambered over with a nylon rope but not a stroke victim with a stick. Drifts of brown-paper leaves were eroded and formed by the wind as I passed. I came to the magnificent iron gates, opened and closed by a flash pneumatic stroke electronic gizmo. Ruddy hell, they even had a surveillance camera and a two-way phone thingy! I imagined Nurse Noakes boasting to the children (I nearly wrote “parents”) of prospective residents that they slept safe and secure thanks to these state-of-the-art surveillance arrangements, meaning, of course, “Pay us on time and you won’t hear a dickey bird.” The view did not bode well. Hull lay to the south, a half-day hike away for a robust stripling down side roads lined with telegraph poles. Only lost holidaymakers would ever stumble across the institute gates. Walking back down the drive, I heard screeching tires and a furious beep from a Jupiter red Range Rover. I stepped aside. The driver was a bullish fellow clad in one of those silvery anoraks beloved of transpolar fund-raisers. The Range Rover screeched to a gravelly stop at the front steps, and the driver swaggered up to Reception like a flying ace from Jaguars of the Skies. Coming back to the main entrance, I passed the boiler room. Ernie Blacksmith poked his head out. “A dram of firewater, Mr. Cavendish?”
I didn’t need to be asked twice. The boiler room smelt of fertilizer but was warmed by the boiler’s coal furnace. Perched on a sack of coal and making contented baby noises was a longtime resident with the status of institution mascot, Mr. Meeks. Ernie Blacksmith was the kind of quiet man you notice at second glance. This observant Scot kept company with a lady named Veronica Costello, who had owned the finest hat shop, legend had it, in Edinburgh’s history. The couple’s demeanor suggested residents at a shabby Chekhovian hotel. Ernie and Veronica respected my wish to be a miserable bugger, and I respected that. He now produced a bottle of Irish malt from a coal scuttle. “You’re half-rocked if you’re thinking of getting out of here without a helicopter.”
No reason to give anything away. “Me?”
My bluff was dashed to pieces on the Rock of Ernie. “Take a pew,” he told me, grim and knowing.
I did so. “Cozy in here.”
“I was a certificated boiler man once upon a time. I service the workings for free, so the management turn a blind eye to one or two little liberties I allow myself.” Ernie poured two generous measures into plastic beakers. “Down the hatch.”
Rain on the Serengeti! Cacti flowered, cheetahs loped! “Where do you get it?”
“The coal merchant is not an unreasonable man. Seriously, you want to be careful. Withers goes out to the gate for the second post at a quarter to four daily. You don’t want him to catch you plotting your getaway.”
“You sound well informed.”
“I was a locksmith too, that was after the army. You come into contact with the semicrim, in the security game. Gamekeepers and poachers and all. Not that I ever did anything illegal myself, mind you, I was straight as an arrow. But I learnt that a good three-quarters of prison bust outs fall flat, because all the gray matter”— he tapped his temple—”gets spent on the escape itself. Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. That fancy electric lock on the gate, for example, I could take it apart blindfolded if I had the mind to, but what about a vehicle on the other side? Money? Boltholes? You see, without logistics, where are you? Belly-up is where, and in the back of Withers’s van five minutes later.”
Mr. Meeks screwed up his gnomish features and ground out the only two coherent words he had retained: “I know! I know!”
Before I could discern whether or not Ernie Blacksmith was warning me or sounding me out, Veronica came in through the interior door wearing a hat of ice-melting scarlet. I just stopped myself from bowing. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Costello.”
“Mr. Cavendish, how pleasant. Wandering abroad in this biting cold?”
“Scouting,” Ernie answered, “for his one-man escape committee.”
“Oh, once you’ve been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn’t want you back.” Veronica settled herself in a rattan chair and adjusted her hat just so. “We—by whom I mean anyone over sixty—commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman’s memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.”
“Veronica’s parents served life sentences in the intelligentsia,” put in Ernie, with a dash of pride.
She smiled fondly. “Just look at the people who come here during visiting hours! They need treatment for shock. Why else do t
hey spout that ’You’re only as old as you feel!’ claptrap? Really, who are they hoping to fool? Not us—themselves!”
Ernie concluded, “Us elderly are the modern lepers. That’s the truth of it.”
I objected: “I’m no outcast! I have my own publishing house, and I need to get back to work, and I don’t expect you to believe me, but I am being confined here against my will.”
Ernie and Veronica exchanged a glance in their secret language.
“You are a publisher? Or you were, Mr. Cavendish?”
“Am. My office is in Haymarket.”
“Then what,” queried Ernie reasonably, “are you doing here?”
Now, that was the question. I recounted my unlikely yarn to date. Ernie and Veronica listened the way sane, attentive adults do. Mr. Meeks nodded off. I got as far as my stroke, when a yelling outside interrupted me. I assumed one of the Undead was having a fit, but a look through the crack showed the driver of the Jupiter red Range Rover shouting into his mobile phone. “Why bother?” Frustration twisted his face. “She’s in the clouds! She thinks it’s 1966! … No, she’s not faking it. Would you wet your knickers for kicks? … No, she didn’t. She thought I was her first husband. She said she didn’t have any sons … You’re telling me it’s Oedipal…. Yes, I described it again. Three times…. In detail, yes. Come and have a go yourself if you think you can do better…. Well, she never cared for me either. But bring perfume…. No, for you. She reeks…. What else would she reek of? … Of course they do, but it’s hard to keep up, it just … trickles out all the time.” He mounted his Range Rover and roared off down the drive. Sprinting after it and nipping through the gates before they swung shut did cross my mind, then I reminded myself of my age. Anyway, the surveillance camera would spot me, and Withers would pick me up before I could flag anyone down.
“Mrs. Hotchkiss’s son,” Veronica said. “She was a sweet soul, but her son, ooh, no. You don’t own half the hamburger franchises in Leeds and Sheffield by being nice. Not a family short of a bob or two.”
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