by Louisa Young
I can’t get the headphones on him right because I can’t get at him because he’s entangled in hospital stuff. ‘I can’t get at it!’ is one of his phrases. I put on Martha Argerich playing Chopin, from my phone. I don’t know if it’s starting at the beginning. I don’t know if it’s too loud or too quiet. I want him to tell me if it is how he wants it, perfectionist musician. I run down the battery on my phone.
Louis is behind me all evening, quiet, there. The medics line up. Swift appears.
I’m at the top of a stairwell ringing his ex-wife. There had been discussion recently of something bureaucratic about their son and when I say ‘This is a difficult call’ she thinks it’s about that. I say, ‘No, it’s more difficult than that.’
He can’t stay here. They don’t want to take him upstairs because upstairs isn’t open. They don’t want to open it. Nobody actually says, just turn it off now, it’ll save us a lot of trouble. Nobody is unkind. They take him upstairs. We follow in a separate lift. They open upstairs specially, and then bring in another person, a very old person with laboured breathing. There is a relatives’ room. We are on the eleventh floor. It’s the Intensive Care Unit.
Robert’s son arrives, with his mother and stepfather. For a moment I think: he’ll come back to life now, for Jim. I feel us all to be strong and loving for Robert, standing around him. I wish I had done better, all my life, so that his son did not have to be here now for this. It gets late. They leave.
He is in the middle of a vast empty ward. The stertorous lady – Evelyn – has had a diabetic collapse; she is far away. After a while a man is in a glass room at the end. The machinery – apart from Robert’s – is silent, dark and watchful, waiting to save other lives, another time. The windows are wide and the sky and the lights of the city below are glorious. It is now night.
I sit. People bring me tea. Lola has taken hold of me and holds me to the earth. I feel her hand firm round my ankle when I start to float away like a balloon, drifting across landscapes, distant, high above. She stands by me, sits in the relatives’ room, refuses to go home. She is eighteen now.
I have an idea. I say to the doctor: ‘Can you marry someone who is brain dead?’
He says, ‘It wouldn’t be legally binding, but you can do whatever you want.’
Later on, as Louis leaves, I ask him to buy two wedding rings, the next morning. I don’t have my purse with me. Lola gives him her bank card.
‘What kind?’ Louis says; I say, ‘Ordinary.’
Lola dozes, fully dressed on the couch in the relatives’ room.
I lean over Robert again and again, lifting his eyelids gently. He stares straight up. He would not meet my eye. Now, I move myself around above him so that my eyes are on the line of his staring, and our eyes can meet. Hello, I say, into the bluest vacuum I ever saw, clear and blue as an empty lake, a cloudless sky, a perfect flower. Forget me not, I say. Speedwell. Blue to blue. I lift his eyelids over and over, swearing each time not to do it again. The restful fall as they drift shut each time. Pretending, you see. Hoping.
His heart is beating, and his breath rises and falls.
Absolutely blue and absolutely empty. I have never seen anything so empty.
I sit down again, and talk to him all night. Lola brings me tea. There is a nurse, a man, a perfect companion. He brings me tea. Greg.
I go up the corridor, and down the corridor.
I brush my teeth and think about his mouth, his teeth, his poor fucking battered bloodied mouth, massacred, surviving. So much work.
*
Before dawn a skein of Canada geese hurtle past the wide window against streaks of grey and pink: over the river, Hammersmith Bridge, banking round, heading for the gleaming reservoirs at Barn Elms, where we went that funny night with Truncheon, and many times since – or did we? Did we ever go anywhere? Or was it always going to be when things came right?
I had requested a chaplain. He comes at seven, and as the drab light rises he reads the bit about looking to the hills whence cometh my salvation. I lean over the top of the bed weeping and hugging Robert’s head and crying all over him and thinking I hope you are dead, because you wouldn’t like this – what if you witnessed it all, me signing you away? When I positioned myself so your dead stare seemed kind of to be looking in my eyes, did you see me? Feel me? How dead are you?
‘All right,’ you’d say. ‘Half left.’
That dream you had, that you were in an improvisational theatre group and they said ‘Are you coming out to dinner, Robert?’ and you said, ‘I don’t know’ – and you didn’t know what it was about, and so I told you: it was about whether you were going to stay, to come with us, to live, to let yourself be nourished, to face having to make it all up as you go along, like we all do.
You had so little, and I dragged you on. ‘I want you back,’ I said, and you said, ‘I’m coming back. Slowly.’ And I said, ‘Good.’ But maybe you didn’t want to come back.
*
People start to return. I do not want the night to be over. I wish they had not come because they are harbingers. We drink tea.
Louis arrives with two big white cyclamen flowers from the pot by the front door and two stems off the dark red geranium, still flowering in this warm weird January, tied in a green tartan ribbon left over from Christmas. And two little square leather boxes, which he puts on the relatives’ coffee table.
Jim says, ‘What are they?’
I say, ‘Listen, Jim, I’ve got a sort of mad plan. You know how your dad and I were going to get married?’ – Jesus, did he know?
‘Yes,’ he says.
‘Well, I thought, let’s just do it anyway.’
He smiles – a tiny twitch of a smile. He nods. I say, ‘You can be best man. Lola could be the bridesmaid—’ I feel myself about to go off on one, hysterically – Jim’s mother as Matron of Honour, Louis as the vicar – I stop myself.
Louis shows Jim the rings.
Later, we are all around the bed, inside the pleated blue curtains. I pick up Robert’s left hand, the one without the oxygen monitor clipped to a finger. It’s not going to work to try to hold his fingers to the ring, so I just touch it to them. I’m not going to think about this or fumble it. I say, ‘Well, I was always the practical one’, and there’s almost some laughter, and I put the ring on my own finger and I say, I do, darling I do, and I kiss him. And I put the other one on his finger, and remember a line from a Lyle Lovett song where the preacher asks her, and she says ‘I do’; and the preacher asks him, and she says ‘Yeah, he does too’ – and maybe I say, yeah, he does too. The chaplain isn’t there. That wouldn’t have been right.
At one point I look at Jim across his father’s body and say, ‘Listen, anything. You know that, don’t you? Anything in my power you ever need from me.’
At another point some people outside are making a racket and someone tells them to shut up and they do.
Greg comes in. He says they will turn off the heart machine, the noradrenaline; they’ll turn the ventilator down bit by bit, it could take up to an hour. We all say um right. OK. But that fucking tube is still sticking out of his mouth with the tight bandage like a gag scarring his cheek, and I say, Can you not get rid of that, and Greg says yes he can. They pull the curtains round. I sit there, and Greg pulls the tube out and I am afraid it will pull up Robert’s guts, but there is nothing.
We step back in. There he is, his own lovely face. I could kiss him now but this is not a fairy tale. There will be no waking up. I look across at Jim on the other side. I take Robert’s hand, I think Jim has the other one, I put my palm flat on Robert’s heart and it beats and I think oh, it beat on its own, and that was for me, my love, it was for me, and I take it into my body, and I hold it, yes, in my heart, through the palm of my hand flat on his breast.
And I think he is dead, but then there seems a small, small breath – and then Greg pops his head round the curtain and says: ‘Robert’s dead now.’ And I say what? Because I can’t hear him, and
he has to say it again. And I look back and he is, and it is completely different: his lips are white and I want him back. I think, oh, no, I shouldn’t have looked away, we should have kept you forever on the ventilator, breathing with help, heart supported, we should have – Or do I? Or do I look to Jim? The only moment of anger I have with Robert then is the sadness on Jim’s face. My heart’s blood floods away from me, pouring away across the hospital floor; there is no gravity, no sense. It is just an awful mistake. All of it.
I don’t know what happened next.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Home, January 2012
After he died it started to get cold.
He died twice! Once in the pub; once under my hand.
Christ, could he not stop being complicated and liminal even when he was dead?
The house was full of flowers. People were there to prop me up and hold me down – Lola, Louis, friends who knew grief and knew how to be, quietly, never left my side. I was living on champagne and marzipan; Lola directed the over-sympathetic to the off-licence to get more when she saw they were hugging me too much. Casseroles appeared on the doorstep. People came in their lunch hours. Funeral planning.
Grandma’s funeral date was set in Accra. I could not miss her funeral. I could not leave Robert unburied in England. I was not talking, sleeping, eating, or actually breathing. The kitchen table was covered in notes in different writings: Swift’s, from the initial call to the vicar: ‘Could he be buried there before next Thursday?’ Lola’s: the coroner’s phone number, and that of Laura, the barmaid in whose arms he died the first time. Mine: ‘Hypoxic brain incident’. A list of music: ‘“My Song is Love Unknown”? Joni Mitchell “Trouble Child”?’ My sister’s on the back of an envelope: ‘£22.80 per line inc VAT, min 3 lines’ – the price of a death announcement in the paper.
Laura came by to tell me what had happened in the pub. She looks like a Modigliani. We talked about how she’d known him for years round the neighbourhood, how glad she was he had sobered up; how her co-worker Will had tracked down where I lived through a series of cafes and cab drivers who knew Robert, and had knocked on doors up and down the street. I told her I was jealous he had died in her arms, not mine. She said yes, she’d thought about that, and was sorry.
He was there; I was not. He was dying; I didn’t know. I don’t know if he was all right or in pain or what he was thinking. How could I not know these simple things about this, his irrevocable moment? If I’d been there he wouldn’t have died. He asked them for food and they didn’t know he shouldn’t have it. Should, that word we banned. They couldn’t understand him. They couldn’t help him. I never thought he would die not in my arms.
The ambulance people cut off his clothes: his handsome coat, his soft green jumper, his father’s shirt, his stripy thermals. The warm tweed trousers that he liked remain intact. The coat is lying on the piano now, shredded. Later, I made a cushion of the jumper.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
In the Kitchen, February 2012
Did I see it? How could they have let me see it?
I remember the telephone call. I was in the kitchen, in the evening, four or five days after his death(s). The handsome funeral director rang. She had buried my father, walking in front of his hearse in a top hat. She said something along the lines of, Why didn’t you let us know he had a communicable disease?
I said, ‘He didn’t have a communicable disease.’ Thinking – Did he? Christ, he could have – No. He’s spent the past four years pretty much in hospital. They’d have noticed.
She said, ‘Well, he’s come labelled with … are you sure?’ She’s a nice woman.
‘I really don’t think so. I think I’d know.’ I thought of all the things I’ve not known about him. ‘What do you mean “labelled”?’
‘Well,’ she said, and she didn’t want to say. I made her say. I pictured a big paper label with orange writing on, tied to his dead toe.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Contaminated.’
Contaminated?
She said, at last, that the details which came with him said he may have had hepatitis C.
What posthumous gift was this? Was he still causing trouble? Might I have hepatitis C now?
Part of me marvelled at him: how like him! I found myself laughing. Only not.
Because at various points throughout his illnesses information had been kept from me through spurious privacy or administrative correctness, I was thinking it might be possible that this had been diagnosed and I not told. But nothing had been kept from me since the cancer. Unless it had been diagnosed posthumously? Was that possible?
I recalled the label on his wrist, in A&E at Charing Cross: Unknown. My fury, because he was known. And loved. And now, contaminated. A fine insult.
Of course it was Charing Cross who had handled his death; who had sent him to the undertakers in Wiltshire. They didn’t know him as well as UCLH did.
‘Can you check?’ I asked.
Not till the morning.
I googled hepatitis C. Phrases like sexual intercourse, intravenous drug use, no symptoms, cancer and death leapt out. I could not bring myself to read. I knew he did not have hepatitis C, but why was someone – who? – saying he did? Where did they get the idea? Did he have it years ago, before I became involved in his medical life, and never tell me? But he wasn’t an injector. But he was a drinker and a maker of appalling decisions while drunk … And so, as usual, I ran with every possible iteration of every idea.
I had half expected ghouls to reveal themselves after his death. I feared women spouting of infidelity. I hadn’t thought of past lies about drugs and contamination and communicable disease.
In the morning, the undertaker rang to tell me it was just that hepatitis C had not been ruled out –
Well did they rule out bubonic plague and leprosy and mad cow disease? I didn’t say this.
– it was just that they hadn’t had the chance to communicate properly with UCLH –
So they assumed he had it? What he did die of wasn’t enough for them?
– and there are procedures, necessary for the protection of the staff, she said. She was really sorry. It wasn’t her fault.
Why did I mind so much that it was hepatitis C? Why did I feel it as an accusation? Was it because it’s the needle-sharing disease, and whatever he was, he wasn’t a junkie? Maybe even, ‘at least he wasn’t a junkie’? Was I being as moralistic about drug addiction as I hated other people being about alcoholism?
At the time I think it was simply that it wasn’t true; it was a horrid thing to pile on to his poor body in its helplessness, and it was an unnecessary and untimely fear to put on me, both physically for my own health and the potential effect on the health of others, and also emotionally – the fear of ancient lies or betrayals suddenly appearing, that I would never be able to talk to him about, to understand or clear up, undermining our past.
So they communicated properly with UCLH, and no, he didn’t have hepatitis C.
I can picture that polythene sheet so clearly, with the tape with ‘CONTAMINATED’ written on it. I see it lying under and around his body in the special room at the undertakers, before I brought his coffin clothes. Or maybe the day I brought his clothes. That would make sense.
No! Beware of this phrase, which consolidates the possible from probable to manufactured memory.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Driving, February 2012
We – Lola, Louis and I – were driving down the M4, from London to Wiltshire, taking my father’s old green suit, which had become Robert’s preferred suit during the cheerful period (post recovery, pre-cancer) when he was capable of wearing a suit and feeling happy about it. He wore it to our birthday party. It was a tiny bit dapper. Now it was his coffin outfit. I had with me Robert’s share of John’s ashes; I’d put them in a heart-shaped box to put it into Robert’s coffin by his feet. That, the funeral directress told me, was the correct place. How pagan we are.
Louis wa
s at the wheel – Lola had banned me from driving. Someone had only to look at me for me to collapse. My legs had no strings. I was not safe standing in my own sitting room, nor lying in my own bed. I was in the passenger seat, talking to Swift on the phone when, as we paused at the entrance to the roundabout, we were rear-ended, by an airline pilot. ‘Good God,’ said my mother later when I told her. ‘Was he in his aeroplane?’ No, I said, a Volkswagen Golf. But he was in his one-piece camouflage flying suit, and didn’t want to get the insurers involved. I tried to get out, and dropped the phone, Swift’s voice calling my name. I fell over.
The car, it turned out, was – in that mysterious way which happens with cars which you can still drive and which look fine but for a dent in the back – written off. I was happy when they told me. I said to the insurance-company lady, OK, but you’re not taking the car away. ‘Well, madam,’ she said, and I said, ‘That car contains the engagement ring given to me by my dead fiancé and was rear-ended while I was bringing my dead dad’s suit to the undertaker for my dead fiancé to wear in his coffin and David has to come and get it out—’
‘OK,’ said the insurance-company lady, overwhelmed. ‘How much do we pay David?’ I wept.
In the street outside the house David puts on his fine silicone gloves and begins to take the front of the car apart. He unscrews the dashboard and lays it to one side as best he can, because wires within are still attached and must not be pulled too tight. The steering wheel is leant up, askew. He moves round to the other side of the door and approaches the ventilation system from the other direction, through the high open bonnet. He shifts tubes and gently lays aside important things whose names I don’t know. It is too redolent. I go inside and make tea.
Hours later he comes into the kitchen, holding the ring with the diamond as big as a very small Ritz delicately in his big car-grubby, silicone-gloved, Buddhist fingers.