by Jim Kelly
‘There were nurses. They didn’t call it palliative care then – that’s new, slicker. I felt excluded, envious really, they came and went with their own key, talking, making cups of tea. I felt like an outsider. And you were part of the mystery, part of what was going on in that bedroom. It was like being a kid again, with you and him in the Job, and never saying what it entailed, what was really happening.
‘I just wondered, George. I know it’s late, but was he ready to die? I can’t imagine he wanted to linger. It’s brutal, isn’t it, but he knew when he wasn’t wanted. Not in that state. That’s what he always told me about the booze … That if you’re not enjoying it, go home.
‘Did they hasten the end? I’m not angry, or vengeful – it’s just I left, and he was alive, and then I got the call, the next evening. Mum had it pat – died in his sleep, just floated away. I’ve seen a few people die, George. It’s never looked good. This last case just made me think again.’
Valentine re-filled his own glass from the bottle in the cooler. Taking an inch off the top, he held the back of his hand to his lips. ‘The pain was bad – he could hide it for twenty minutes, then he had to be alone. At night it was worse – a sort of delirium, I don’t think he knew I was there.’ He looked at Shaw. ‘He did ask. Not for the end, not directly, but he said he wanted the pain to stop and he didn’t mind how it stopped. They upped the medication, the morphine, we didn’t ask questions. Hours, they said, but they’d said that for weeks. Your mum stayed up til two, maybe three. I took over.
‘I’m not making this up. I should have said this all to you, one day, that day, but the moment passed and we’re all different people now.
‘There was a picture on the fireplace in that room, of you on the beach as a kid. This beach. You in a hole with a spade, Jack on his knees.
‘That night he asked me to put it by the bed where he could see it, by the glass of water and the whiskey. I did it straightaway. Then he fell asleep. The window rattled – there was a storm off the sea – so I got up and opened it out wide. I don’t know why. I stood there breathing in the air and when I looked back it was over. You can tell instantly because the lines of the face fall away, I’ve seen it before, like you’re watching a time-lapse film. I should have said before, Peter. It was a good death.’
They had a party then, on the sand, until dusk, when the conversation came back to St Valentine. Fran, using her smartphone, found a picture of the skull of the saint, encased in a glass and gold reliquary, in Rome. The Wikipedia entry said he was the patron saint of happy marriages, which prompted Valentine to announce that he’d asked Jan to marry him, although that had been against the backdrop of his – possible – imminent, death. She confirmed that the date was still in the diary.
Valentine stood, and they expected a toast, but instead he put his left foot on the bench and eased off his black slip-on shoe, followed by the right, then his socks.
Barefoot, he walked away in the sand until he was directly under the power cable which ran from the apex of the roof of the shop to its counter-point on the roof of the café bar.
Lacing the shoes together he launched them up, one from the right hand, one from the left, so that they passed the cable on opposite sides, the laces jerking them back, crossing in mid-air so that they hung down, spinning together, to form a single thread.
For Bernard
A connoisseur of memories