We have come eight miles, said Monica, and we have got eleven hundred miles to go and the Waterway is shut and there will be hurricanes and you are going to die on the way. What chance have we got of getting to Fort Myers?
I'm not going to die, I said. Five years ago I ran a fourteen-mile hill race. Jim and I walk an hour every day. If they won't fix me we'll go anyway. I'll hold myself together and stay alive and we'll have the boat carried round the shut bit or if we can find a pilot we will go out to sea and go round it. Bloody doctors, only interested in telling you how ill you are, and most of them drink too much and cheat on their wives and raid the drug cupboard and die before you do anyway. Don't cry Monnie, you're upsetting Jim. And Jim, shut up, why do you sit there and whine and look so damn miserable when things are going wrong? You are supposed to be a friend and a comfort but you are a bloody liability.
Jim started to howl.
NICE AMY FROM PORTSMOUTH MARINE TERMINAL and her husband, Mark, asked us for an evening meal. Their car came to the marina gate. The car was square and black with black windows, like a pumped-up Range Rover just before it burst. Most cars we had seen in the US were like that, apart from the pick-ups, which were the same except they were pick-ups.
Wooden houses, trees, shade, boats on the lawns. Some of the houses had flags outside and some had yellow ribbons. By Nice Amy's house a caravan thirty feet long. We keep our Harleys out back, said Nice Amy.
Inside, a wide room and a miniature pinscher called Shy, who looked like a rat that had been shined up a bit. She was wearing a pearl necklace. Jim and Shy chased each other cheerfully for the rest of our visit.
There was a young daughter, who set up a daybed in a reclining chair and in the manner of teenage girls became the centre of gravity. She handled the levee with restraint, Jim licking her feet obsequiously and Shy sitting on her shoulder like a parrot.
I have got you some Samuel Adams, said Nice Amy.
Mark was a big chap with a moustache. He did not drink—I have done my share, he said.
Mark was a fireman and retiring on 60 per cent pay in a few months. He didn't like being a fireman—Mainly going out to medical emergencies because some fool has cut his thumb, he said, or driving the fire chief around, and watching films. The training is boring after twenty years.
Mark was a chain-smoker, but a master of illusion in that he smoked with the half of him that you did not see—holding his cigarette the other side of the door, or out the car window. So there were two Marks, the one you were talking to, and the other, just to one side, smoking like mad. Sometimes he disappeared for a smoke.
I don't mind, I said, I like the smell.
Amy doesn't, said Mark, dematerializing.
He manifested himself again with another Samuel Adams and then joined himself in the garden for a smoke and I watched the baseball on the TV.
Baseball players are big like rugby forwards, and they hate each other—not in the jocular way that cricketers do, but with bland malevolence. This emotion drives the whole match.
The game takes place in a stadium with sloping sides, in front of many tens of thousands of spectators, who have come to have their dinner. The pitcher throws the ball repeatedly at the left foot of the hitter until in rage and despair the hitter swipes at it and misses three times and then he is out. Sometimes he hits it and then someone catches it in the outfield and he is out. After a lot of this everyone goes home including the spectators, full of hot dogs and saying Jesus that was a good stare Washawski gave Bernstein today, Dad, really fried him, and did you see the disrespectful look that Pileggi gave Slokenbergs?
Time for the meal, said Nice Amy. Would you like some sweet iced tea with the spaghetti?
Monica said that on the whole she would prefer another glass of that excellent wine offered earlier and we all sat down.
The door at the end of the kitchen burst open and a sheriff walked in. He was slim, uniformed, his gun at his hip.
I rose to my feet, my hands in the air—I'll come quietly!
The sheriff backed away.
That's Rusty, explained Nice Amy. He's my nephew. He's only a deputy sheriff. He is nineteen. He is just going on duty to the county gaol. He lives upstairs. He left his gun on the bed once, loaded, and I was really cross. His room is a terrible mess.
Half of Mark was with us and half of Mark was out of the French windows and Jim and Shy chased each other round and round on the lawn.
THE ROOM AT THE HOSPITAL WAS LIT BY A guttering neon tube.
It was too dark to see Drew properly before he grabbed me, but I could smell his aftershave and feel the thick hairs on his arm and as he pressed his cheek against mine I realized he was one of those really bristly guys.
He punched me in the neck—That is your jugular, he whispered. I resisted but he got me turned and hit me in the belly with something hard—one two three.
I lived on the New York gay scene, he said. All my flat-mates were gay. Saw some stuff I tell you.
Always rather liked the idea of being gay myself, I said.
Nearly got mixed up in it after the New York Marathon once, but I am crazy about girls, so I never followed through.
Me neither, said Drew. You'll see bruises tomorrow, black and blue.
I think he was smiling. While we struggled he was watching the TV screen above my head.
Three more high on the chest, his fist boring into me, and another one square on my left nipple. There it is, that's the money shot, cried Drew. I am the righteous one, the one who never fails. Now look at that. I bet you have never seen one of those before.
He freed me from his embrace and Monica and I looked at the screen, where a shadowy jellyfish was contracting, its delicate tones changing as it fought to get away.
You have atrial fibrillation, said Drew. Your ventricles, which are the main heart pump, are OK but your atria—the bits that send the blood into the ventricles—are just sitting there quivering. It could mess up the pattern of contraction in your ventricles and drop you in your tracks or the blood could clot and give you a stroke or a heart attack.
Is it serious? I asked.
It is if the blood supply to your heart is bad, said Drew. It depends on the tests you are having next week. But it doesn't look right on the ultrasound.
IN THE EVENING JIM AND I WENT FOR A WALK round the island.
They say that just before you die your whole life flashes in front of your eyes. It's a bit like that if you think you may die fairly soon. Does it matter now that I was beaten in the Paris Marathon by Jack Harding? And I shouldn't worry that I refused to fight that soldier in Pembroke Dock over that waitress when I was seventeen—he would probably have killed me anyway. But I wish I had been nicer to my dad and not rude to that poor job applicant who worked for Arthur Andersen—though Arthur Andersen were a bunch of crooks. In any case if I die the race is not becoming extinct or anything, nor am I the last of the Darlingtons. It's just not going to be me any more—it's a question of moving over and leaving room. They do the big tests tomorrow and we'll know the options. But in the end there are no options.
A cairn terrier had turned up and challenged Jim to a race and by cutting off corners was keeping the game going. It was good to see Jim run, to imagine the great heart clenching.
You going soon? asked the cairn's owner.
Pardon? I said. Oh you mean the boat! I've got to have a hernia fixed first.
I've got one of those—I just pushes her back in.
We walked along the island. Atlantic Yacht Basin is the best marine workshop on the East Coast, said my new friend. They are nice guys here too.
Always Owya doon Jim, I said, and a joke about the new air-conditioning unit they put in for me. It was late but my hernia operation was delayed so it didn't matter too much. They've done a lovely job—every day they come and varnish it again and then they have a board meeting about whether the colour is a match. Looks like a coffin stood on end, but you would swear it has been there since the boat was buil
t. It takes fifteen degrees out of the temperature and all the humidity. And it will run backwards and turn into a heat pump if we get cold further down the track. Sometimes I hug it like a tree.
My new friend was on a sailing boat and he had gone outside the Intracoastal Waterway for most of the way from Florida, right out at sea, and I said he was very brave and he said Oh no and he would have liked to see my boat but he had to go back because they were leaving and I never saw him again and Jim never saw the cairn terrier again.
JIM AND I WALKED ON ACROSS THE BRIDGE from the island and into the northern part of the marina, which is mainly great sheds over the water, held up by wooden rafters like medieval barns. There were ten sheds, full of the tall cruisers they call trawlers: and powerboats and sport-fishers and yachts. Some boats were a hundred feet long, some Tupperware, some steel, some fifty years old in wood and bright varnish. It was dark and silent inside the sheds and the security lighting made a shadowy film-set for adventure and mystery. We walked the pontoons over the black water.
Jim stopped suddenly. I should have expected her. There, over the other side of the shed, under the bow of a great cruiser, was my mother. I shouldn't feel scared when she appears—she is my mother after all, or was—but I always do. She was dressed in her winter coat and one of those felt hats with a bit of veiling like the Queen Mother wore. She was smiling. I don't have much hair but it stood up like the velvet on Jim's back and a breeze passed by like ice.
I wonder why she turned up over there? said Monica back at the boat—she normally appears by the stove.
I think the air-conditioning is a bit noisy for her, I said, and if I was coming back from the dead I would manifest myself in those sheds—all the shadows, all the memories. She was smiling.
That's all right then, said Monica, if she was smiling. Everything will go well with your big tests at the hospital next week.
Perhaps she is smiling because soon we will be together again, I said.
ON THE QUAY NEXT MORNING THERE WAS A thin man with long legs and white hair. He stalked along the boardwalk, stooping slightly, looking into the water. Two or three of those little silvery slippery guys would make a nice breakfast, he said. We love your boat—why is she so thin?
When he was thirty-one Lieutenant Colonel Dr James Marquardt ran a military hospital in Vietnam. I didn't think about the rights and wrongs, said James—we treated people from both sides.
James is now a professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado. He and Joni have a fifty-foot trawler, a square white vessel with five storeys. It was ninety-six degrees and we all took refuge in their air-conditioned cabin. Jim stayed on the Phyllis May because Joni was allergic to him.
We lost more boys in the American Civil War than in both world wars put together, said James. More than half a million. One in a hundred of the population. There were towns in the South with no young men left. The arms manufacturers had discovered that by rifling the gun barrels you could more than double the accuracy of the weapons. You can't send men to charge against rifled ordnance. The suffering was terrible on the battlefields and worse in the field stations and hospitals. You know those legends of the Wild West—those cowboys with six-guns? They were Civil War veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress.
Night fell hot and damp and we patched up a meal from both boats. As we ate, James and Joni told us a heartbreaking story of love and loss.
It was late afternoon on a March day in Georgetown, South Carolina, and it was raining. James was wearing his yellow rain-jacket over his white jeans. He was bare-headed. He was by the boat when a Great White Egret landed on the grass a few yards away. It was a magnificent creature, over three feet tall, and its cheeks along its yellow beak were vivid green. It looked at James from one angle then another and came nearer and then stopped and looked at him again. She was real elegant, said James, real beautiful—she was kinda eyeing me.
The egret appeared again that evening when James and Joni were having dinner. She looked in at the window, gazing at James's white hair, moving her head back and forth.
In the morning Joni was in the galley and she saw the egret striding along the boardwalk, following James. He looked round and the egret came within a few feet, looking at him from one angle then another. The great bird stood and watched him all morning until the boat left.
As they sailed north the egret flew away.
So, I said, she didn't phone, she didn't write, and the relationship was never consummated? You have had no egrets?
I have thought about it a lot from a professional standpoint, said James, and I wonder if she was interested in me because of my yellow jacket or my white hair or my white jeans or because I am tall or because I am thin or because I was looking at the fish from the quay. Maybe one of those elements triggered the mating response. She was eyeing me as if she was looking for something but I didn't quite fit. Perhaps she had become habituated to people or imprinted like Lorenz's geese. The marina owner said he had never seen anything like it before.
She had the hots for you, said Joni.
MONICA AND I GOT INTO OUR HIRED CAR AND headed out twenty miles to Virginia Beach. We didn't talk much.
The first test was the blood test. The blood test wasn't too bad if you don't mind having needles stuck in you and your veins are on the outside of your body instead of inside as they are on normal people like me.
Then the radiographers stuck more needles in me and injected me with radioactive thallium and strapped me to a table and pressed a button and a machine slowly circled me, buzzing and clicking, like in the science fiction movies. Make sure you get my best side, I said, and they laughed. Bet they never heard that one before.
Then they brought me into another room that was brightly lit and full of people. They took off my T-shirt and covered me with patches like plastic tits with wires coming out and put me on a treadmill. I was nervous. I walked and then I ran and ran and the treadmill went faster and faster and steeper and steeper and they all seemed to be shouting because I was doing it wrong and they shouted and shouted and I ran faster and faster and then they stopped the treadmill and helped me off. I didn't feel very good at all. A lot of people came running in—Sit down Mr Darlington.
The doctor was a thin gentleman with grey hair, in a suit. My God, he said, your heartbeat went up to two hundred and fifty. They all agreed they had never seen that before, and ran out to tell some other people, who came in and said they had never seen that before. You must have been pumping air, said the thin gentleman.
Am I going to die? I asked. The fast heartbeat won't kill you, said the thin gentleman, but there could be an underlying problem to do with the blood supply to your heart. We'll know soon.
TWO HOURS LATER THEY STRAPPED ME ON THE table again and the machine began to buzz. You already did this, I said—what's going on?
You have had photos taken of your heart when you are resting, and now we are taking them after you have been stressed, said the radiographer. If there are blockages in the blood supply to your heart they will show up as hot spots where the thallium has sort of stuck. You will get the results tomorrow.
I drove us back to the boat. When will we be free of all this? asked Monica. Here we are moored on the side of a tin shed waiting and waiting, too worried to sleep and never knowing when we can get going to Florida or if you are going to die and when we get going we have to cross Albemarle Sound and it's thirty miles wide and we'll probably drown or the boat will be smashed up in the hurricanes and Jim will be killed or we will be killed and no one will have Jim because he bit Rhiannon on Christmas Day because he was overexcited and he was only a puppy and he'll have to go for rescue and they'll cut his balls off and he'll be neglected and I haven't got my daughters or my son or my friends, just a lot of black chaps with spanners wandering around saying Owya doon and frogs and turtles. Poor Tel, you are having a terrible time with all the doctors and the worry and the tests and they made you feel so bad you could hardly drive us home. And poor Moni
ca, poor me, it's awful—I've had about a bloody nuff.
HELLO MR DARLINGTON—YOUR RADIOACTIVE thallium stress tests were negative—no Mr Darlington, please Mr Darlington, come back Mr Darlington, that doesn't mean you are going to die—it means there is nothing wrong with the blood supply to your heart. You just take the tablet each day that Doctor prescribed and we will go ahead and fix your hernia.
Great news, said Monica—you are not going to die!
Five grand, I said, to be told my heart is irregular. It's been going for seventy years—it's a high-mileage heart. And it speeds up if I am nervous—is that a big deal? Now it's a wait of weeks and weeks for the hernia operation and then six weeks to get better. Monica, we have encountered an advanced capitalist society in full flower. They get a hold of you and never let you go. And they are so nice about it, and so thorough, and so professional. Resistance is futile—stand back and marvel; stand and deliver.
But if we leave before October we could get smashed to bits in the hurricanes, said Monica. All the other boats are going to wait. They said we would be mad to leave. Remember the ice storm. This is a nice boatyard and there is plenty going on round here—Chesapeake is only one of the cities—there is Norfolk, and Portsmouth, and Suffolk, and Virginia Beach. And over the Roads there is Hampton and Newport News. A million people—we can get around; meet some Americans. We can eat out, go shopping, go to church. We can have a look at the Great Dismal Swamp, and at the marina in Elizabeth City on the way to Albemarle Sound. We can leave in October and still have plenty of time to reach Florida by the spring.
We will become students of American culture, I said, and arm ourselves spiritually for our pilgrimage. Then in October the Phyllis May will sail south towards Indian River and Florida. At the helm Tits Magee, the ruptured hero, his heart pounding, his resolve undimmed; the beautiful Gulfstream Rose at his side and his faithful hound shuddering below. We shall overcome—the Curse of Darlington will bring down all who stand in my way.
Narrow Dog to Indian River Page 6