by Patrick Gale
Petroc wondered if his brother and Troy had been doing their thing at the same time as he and Bettany had and then wondered if, by some miracle of synchronicity, Morwenna and Spencer had also been making out then, in the back of Spencer’s car or even, like proper grown-ups, on Spencer’s bed directly over the blare of the party. The idea of the three of them yards and yards apart but somehow linked by shared experience led to him unthinkingly doing what he had been taught to do in Meetings for Worship, holding each of them in turn, each pair, in the light of his mind.
He had compared notes with Morwenna once about what they did in Meeting and discovered that she imagined herself sort of holding the person in a warm light beam that fell on them from above. There wasn’t any setting as such, she said, just soft darkness and, in the middle of it, this healing light. And her task, as she saw it, in praying for someone, was to use her mind like a sort of tractor beam in Star Trek, to hold the person at the centre of that light, almost as if she was toasting them on a Bunsen burner only it came down instead of up and did the opposite of hurting them. Somehow his version was completely different. There was still light – they’d had the same Sunday School teacher, after all – but there was a room, a totally blank box of a room, about the person. It wasn’t much bigger than a lift and the light came from the walls of the room and the floor and ceiling and he had to make it bright enough to light the person until there were no shadows. What he didn’t tell Wenn was that, when he prayed for people, they had always seemed to be naked, even Rachel and Antony. Not in a sexy way but like naked people in old paintings, where the nakedness was sort of truthful and a sign of vulnerability and innocence. When he pictured a couple naked, it made him feel protective towards them, as if they were children, made it seem less pushy to be praying for them without their knowledge or permission.
So it was quite natural to picture him and Bettany, who admittedly he found stayed rather blurred and in the shadows. He felt guilty and left himself out of the picture and tried, more successfully, to picture her on her own, sucking rum and Coke from a can and dancing a brave, self-involved dance, her eyes shut and her expression as open as when she had been rocking and riding earlier.
Then he pictured Hed and Troy kissing. But that was hard to do so he pictured Hed on his own, just happy, very happy, and relaxed and unHedleyish, as if a Hedley-shaped suit of armour had finally been lifted off him to reveal the real Hedley underneath, sexy and cheeky and not so worried about what people thought.
Then there was Morwenna, doing a dance for Spencer or maybe just for herself, with her hands snaking up above her head and smiling to herself as though she knew something good the rest of them would only find out later.
Praying for Garfield was difficult. It was hard to make him smile or relax as he seemed to care even more than Hedley what people thought of him. He wanted to please so much it was almost painful. So Petroc concentrated on making the light so bright it almost blanked out Garfield’s expression and he made the light Rachel’s approval, which was what he sensed Garfield wanted best.
And this naturally led to thinking of Rachel and Antony. And they showed up in separate boxes because that was how they needed to be. So he made their light not just love and success but a kind of freedom too, from having to be parents and husbands and wives all the time. Seeing Antony on his own for once was a revelation. He was so practised at thinking of Antony as Rachel’s minder, her guard even, at thinking of him sometimes as the thing that held her back with pills and peace and Quakerly carefulness from being her own wild self, that it was startling to understand the truth might be the other way around and that it was her constraining Antony.
Petroc had reached the main road, almost without noticing how he got there. It was deserted, of course, but he still crossed with care as it was a notorious one for night-time accidents. Its hedges were regularly studded with improvised shrines of mouldering flowers and rain-soaked teddies. The dead were always young, all unproved potential and bad school photographs, tearing home from clubbing or a party. They were never the old and sensible.
Safely across the road he dived down the lane that led through Chyenhal to the edge of Paul. The first mile was one of his favourite stretches. Trees were rare in this bit of the world for some reason (like shallow soil or salty winds) but they thrived where the lane dipped around the edge of a damp valley for one magical stretch. They formed a kind of roof there, touching branches in a sequence of overhead arches that was thrilling when you flew beneath it in a car and looked up, because you were torn excitingly between the impulse to look up and watch the tree roof flying overhead and the instinct to look ahead, even though you weren’t driving, to look out for what might be coming in the other direction.
By night, he saw, it became special in a different way. Your eyes soon adjusted to the darkness so that the trunks and branches showed black against the blue-black of the sky. Moving so much more slowly gave the trees time to form a room about you rather than just a roof. He walked in the very centre of the lane, looking up and about him and it was like walking through a natural church, full of the twitchings and rustlings of night animals and not remotely frightening as a real church in darkness might have been.
A car engine revved in the distance but this place felt so far removed that the main road might have lain on the other side of a pane of thickened, frosted glass. He found he had left all thoughts of family behind and, just as happened after the best Meetings, felt as though he had returned to his body to find it made new and doubly alert. He felt he could have sprung up a tree with the agility of a squirrel or flitted into the darkness beyond the hedges with the silent elegance of a moth. The engine sounded closer and he remembered he was no longer a virgin and would never be quite as young and naïvely aimless as he had been that afternoon.
Coming in 2012, the new novel by Patrick Gale.
Returning readers to the same beloved Cornish coastline as Notes from an Exhibition, Patrick Gale brings us A Perfectly Good Man.
LENNY AT 20
He had the heating on because immobility made him cold. The flat was recently built. Its windows and doors were all double-glazed but there was a keen easterly that had found a chink in one of the seals around the picture window and set up a wail. The whole flat was keening.
He was writing neat drafts of difficult letters to his mother and fiancée. Ex-fiancée. He kept getting the shakes, which spoiled his attempt at neat handwriting, and the unearthly noise was jangling his thoughts as effectively as a crying baby or a whining dog. He tossed down his pen and wheeled his chair to the window where he killed the noise by opening it a little. At once different sounds filled the room: traffic from the Ross Bridge, seagulls from the rooftops, the shouts of some hooded boys jumping their skateboards on and off a ledge in a corner of the harbour car park, one dog barking at another from the back of a pick-up.
It was sunny out but clean. Crisp. He liked that. With the boiler on and a window open he would be wasting fuel, heating outside, as his mother put it.
Sure enough, minutes after he wheeled himself back to the table and resumed writing, he heard the boiler fire up. There was a sudden blare of talking as Dilys next door, who was deaf, turned her television on. She watched the same programmes every day. As far as he could tell he was the only resident in the block who wasn’t over seventy. He had been there three months now. When a vacancy came up and the council offered it to him, he had seized the chance, spurred on, he was sure, by the grotesque local hero stories in The Cornishman.
Away from Pendeen and his mother’s stifling concern, given the opportunity to build an independent life for himself in town, where he needed nobody’s help to do anything, he was convinced that things would improve. The change of scene, the view, the independence had indeed all brought relief. The problem had moved house with him, of course. If anything it had been heightened. The flat was ingeniously perfect for his needs: a gentle ramp to the front door, all on the level within, and swings to help himself
into bed and into the shower. Tables, work surfaces, fridge and cooker, clothes storage were all modified to be usable from a sitting position. There was even a full-length mirror in the hall so that he could check before he went out that, yes, he looked fine, like a perfectly unremarkable twenty-year-old who just happened to be in a wheelchair. The only things out of his reach were the pictures his mother had hung for him – a reproduction of a fiery Rachel Kelly painting he had always liked and a framed enlargement of a photograph he had taken of a sunset at Sennen Cove. This had hung on his bedroom wall ever since he won a prize for it at school and he had agreed without thinking when his mother assumed he would want to take it with him. But now it embarrassed him and was the last thing he needed when trying to muster the motivation to haul himself, literally, out of bed. What had once filled him with teenage pride now reminded him of the motivational posters first on the walls at school and then in the rooms of the rehabilitation centre he had religiously attended. He recalled with particular rancour an image of a soaring seagull with a quotation from Virgil: ‘They can because they think they can!’
It didn’t matter now. Nothing especially mattered. Unless, of course, he had been ripped off, like the time he had bought Ecstasy tablets that had turned out to be little more than overpriced remodelled Aspirin. He finished the second letter, sealed it and set it beside the first. He had never been comfortable stringing sentences together, still less using a pen, but somehow, as with thank-you letters, a pen had seemed called for. He had been obliged to buy paper and envelopes, which, like the open window on a heated room, seemed wasteful. Some would think it sad that he could think of only two people who mattered enough to him to merit a letter. There were others, of course, but these were the two people who needed to understand. His rugby friends had all pulled together at first, just as one would expect from team players. They had all tried so hard to do and say the right thing but none of them quite arrived at the point of managing to think it, so as to make their words and gestures more than that.
People were gathering on the car park. He saw some children in matching white tee-shirts running with paper fish fluttering on long lengths of bamboo above their heads, and he remembered it was Golowan; local schools and bands were assembling for the annual Mazey Day parade up Market Jew Street.
He checked the time. There was still an hour to go. He wheeled himself over to the kitchen drawer where he had stashed the two deliveries – two small, innocuous, brown, padded envelopes. One from Mexico contained a small polystyrene carton protecting what the label claimed to be veterinary Nembutal. (Knowing no corruptible doctors, vets or nurses, he had found it impossible to source the drug in the UK.) The other, posted within England, bought from an online specialist, was a simple barbiturate-testing kit. He had read the instructions already but read them again now because since the accident he had become that kind of person, a careful reader of warnings and waiter for lights, a measure-twice-cut-once sort of man.
The kit consisted of a tiny translucent plastic case which opened to reveal three small syringes and three tiny, clinical containers of liquid, a mixing vial and instructions. Following the instructions, he carefully used one of the syringes to draw just one millilitre of the putative Nembutal through its sterile seal. He began to shake again – something else that often happened since his accident – and he had to set the syringe down on the table for a second or two to let his hands relax. He breathed deeply twice and watched a lorry edge by, a local steel band mounted on its decorated trailer. Then he took up the syringe again and in a single confident movement added its contents to the vial. Then he did the same, adding to the Nembutal a quantity of one of the containers. Then he drew up the second liquid into a syringe.
‘Please,’ he thought. ‘Please, (just this once)’ and he squirted its contents into the mixing vial. At once the testing solution turned a bright, satisfying blue. He felt himself smiling honestly for the first time in weeks. ‘Bad news, mate,’ he said out loud. ‘You’re pregnant.’
Finally he took the third syringe, drew up the third liquid and added it to the rest. Nothing happened. No change. No diminishing of the intense, hope-laden blue. He screwed the cap back on the vial and gave it a shake to be sure. Still blue. ‘Still pregnant,’ he murmured.
Relief stole over him. He had searched and searched online and found only impossible, unconvincing websites offering the drug without prescription, alongside a lurid buffet of antidepressants and sex-enhancers. Blatant scammers were everywhere as were hysterical-sounding victims desperate to expose them.
His salvation had arrived unexpectedly in the course of a purgatorial night out with old friends from the rugby club. It was somebody’s stag night. Things had started silly and were sure to get sillier and a rowdy pub was no fun when your head was at the height of everyone else’s arse and jokers kept pushing your wheelchair about. Pretending to be staying outside for a smoke as they arrived at the Swordfish, the third pub of the evening, he scored some skunk off a raspy-voiced old hippy to help him cope. The hippy asked outright how he came to be in the chair and Lenny soon found himself matching bluntness with bluntness and confessing the trouble he’d been having finding a trustworthy source of suicide drugs online.
‘Nembutal,’ the hippy had sighed with welcome candour. ‘The paralytic’s pal. No problem. I’ve got a woman friend in Puerto Vallarta. She can get you the kind for dogs. You’ll need 100 mil. Yeah. 100 mil and a pause for thought. You go back inside, my friend, and I’ll send her a text and let you know.’
He murmured a price in Lenny’s ear twenty minutes later as he unexpectedly passed him a drink in the crowd. It seemed worryingly cheap, like the sex he had been offered in Amsterdam, and he had every expectation that the drug would have been diluted to inefficacy or lost its power with age, both of which the chatter on the suicide forums told him could happen.
But no. It was real and full of kindly force.
He needed to get out. Even with the window ajar, the little bottle’s potency seemed to be drawing all the oxygen from the flat.
He threw the testing kit into the bin, tucked the Nembutal back in the fridge then hoisted himself onto the loo because excitement was getting to him and he needed to piss.
After the accident he had returned to work at the same Penzance chemist’s that had taken him on as a dispensing assistant after school. The grand scheme – derailed by the accident, of course – was to work there, gaining useful experience while he retook his maths and chemistry A-levels with a view to studying pharmacy at university. During the previous day’s shift, he had stolen from his employers for the first time, pocketing the dose of prescription-only anti-emetic he now swallowed with a gulp of juice straight from the carton. He wanted to be sure he didn’t throw up the precious Nembutal when the time came.
He took the anti-emetic’s packaging with him to throw into a bin on the prom; he didn’t want anyone at work to get into trouble on his account and had even slipped the money for it into the till in the hope the theft wouldn’t be detected. As he pulled the door locked behind him he remembered afresh that he was the only resident, on his floor at least, who had not bothered to prettify the entrance to his flat. All the others, all his elderly neighbours, had planted window boxes or hung wind chimes or even set out garden gnomes or resin meerkats. Everyone but him had done something to mark out their small share of walkway as their own.
Two of the residents whom he saw every day but whose names he had yet to learn had met by the entrance ramp and paused to chat. They watched him with approval.
‘Morning, Lenny. Off to watch the parade?’
‘That’s right,’ he told them, although he wasn’t. ‘Thought I might as well.’
‘Good lad,’ said the other.
And as he wheeled away from them he knew they would be looking after him and saying pity or waste just as they would over a nice young man who turned out to be gay or a nice young couple whose baby turned out to be autistic. ‘Shame,’ they’d say, the
n sigh, then move the conversation on because there was nothing to be done. ‘You having that lamb thing you bought, or the chicken?’
He followed the pavement around to the seafront but then, instead of turning left to where the marchers and bands, the fish, mermaids and starfish were preparing to parade up the hill, he turned right and headed away from them, over the Ross Bridge, past the Scillonian dock, around the corner, where the funfair had been set up and the traffic diverted, and onto the promenade.
Provided one could cross the road and find an access point onto the pavement unblocked by thoughtlessly parked cars, it was a good place to exercise, he had discovered. The pavement was broad so that he could pause if he wanted to without feeling he was getting in people’s way and there was always plenty of life along there: rollerbladers and skateboarders, dog-walkers, people jogging or pushing babies, or simply sitting on benches or leaning on the railings to watch the sea and one another.
He knew this should change his mind. In the Hollywood version of his story he would see a happy old couple or a beautiful girl, or be asked directions by an elegant woman or catch a ball for an endearingly plain child and be charmed into lingering, seduced by life. As it was, he wheeled himself along the front with no such significant encounter. Sunshine was dazzling on the sea, the brightly coloured banners cracked and flapped in the breeze. Nobody asked him directions or tossed him a hope-restoring ball. The only eyes that met his gaze were those of dogs, and of children in pushchairs, fascinated to find an adult on their level and unashamed of staring.