There they lay, the air passing through his mouth and her nose, along their tracheae and bronchi and bronchioles to their alveoli, inflating their pulmonary trees, permeating their respiratory surfaces; and out again, and in. Their hearts pump; their blood circulates; their stomachs continue to digest, their colons to propulse, their skins to perspire. In their brains, electricity ebbs and sparkles and eddies and flows. There they lie, upon a sheet of paymaster cotton nurtured to woolly blobs in the dusty fields of Tennessee, nourished with potassium, phosphorus, nitrogen and lime. There they snuggle, under a duvet of polyester microfibre, manufactured in hilly, thrusting Zhejiang, and shipped from Shanghai past Vietnam, Brunei, Sri Lanka; past Yemen, Eritrea, Libya, Morocco, Lisbon, Vigo, Quimper, to South Shields. There, upon a mattress constructed in Leeds, upon a frame made of Swedish pine, upon a carpet of tufted polypropylene, upon floorboards cut from Estonian pine, they lie; within walls of silica and alumina and lime and iron oxide and magnesia and polyisocyanurate and aluminium foil and gypsum; behind windows of glass sandwiched with argon and held in place with PVC that keep in the warmth and out the chill which settles now over the land outside: a square of patio and, beyond that, a margin of dandelions and sticky willie and grass; and, beyond that, a line of ash trees and a scattering of elders; and, beyond that, the railway which, in the morning, will speed Sue to the city and her workplace but which now lies still and silent, save for the very occasional passage of slow processions of night freight; and, beyond that, more elders, nettles, gravel, dandelion, until: Kidney Meadow, where the numb grass bows as the dew gathers upon it; where primrose and buttercup and willowherb and flax all hunker down against the coming cold; and where, beyond hawthorn, bramble, ash and willow, through the silent river, the endless, un-translucent water flows, at a rate of 10.3m3 per second, carrying perch, roach, bleak, a ripped Tesco bag, carp, chub, a diaphanous condom, barbel, snails, a bulbous pouch now empty of rolling tobacco, worms, leeches, a slithery shoe, fresh-water shrimps, crayfish, the shed skins of damselfly larvae, and a large amount of indeterminate material formed from lilies, reeds, rubber, pennywort, algae, bread, bark, grass, dead fish, and moss, and polystyrene, and willow leaves, and . . . and irises, and dead swans, and dandelions, and . . . and cardboard, and . . .
As an owl wheeled over the roof of 12 Eden Grove, Sue and Philip slept.
As Dr Adam Hibbert, among the hills of southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, stirred in the morning light, they slept.
As a cat tiptoed along the wall of their back patio, they slept; and they slept still as it sprang.
As old Mr Newell woke and rose and got out of bed in his pyjamas and went to the bathroom and peed and came back and sat on the edge of the bed for a moment with his head in his hands, they slept.
As Venus rose once more into the sky, they slept.
As, in the DI, the ventilator attached to the lungs of Toby Knight puffed and sucked and puffed and sucked, Sue and Philip slept.
As dew came down upon the land and the trees and the buildings, they slept.
Until they woke; after which, having risen and dressed and eaten, Philip waved goodbye to Sue who had risen and dressed and eaten too. He watched, coffee in hand, as she strode across the courtyard away from him through the grey light, and vanished; and then, 10 minutes later, it was his turn to begin his journey, though as he now walked, what, 800 yards to his workplace, she was zooming 54 miles to hers. Having passed the fourth, shiny, Victorian-style lamp-post on Parnassus he turned into Elysium, then down Inglenook Passage which opened onto Felicity Place where he took the Monet-style little footbridge over the villagey pond and pressed on, into the narrow entrance way of Lily Walk which spat him out halfway along a street of the old town. Here the houses are bigger, and there is more space between them, and the paint on the windows is flaking, and the front doors are of varying design. Here the walls are crusted with lichen, bushes bulge over fences, cars squat casually by the side of the road, and streetlamps look their real age. Seeing the black edge of the health centre at the top of the street, he accelerates towards it so as to arrive urgent and slightly out of breath. His hand pushes at the wire glass and hides, for a moment, the year-old faded notice that reads: ‘If you are exhibiting flu-like symptoms please do not . . .’; and then he has lumbered in, around the awkward corner to reception where Sushma looks up with her face blank and enquiring for a moment until she registers that it is him and not a patient and flowers into an encouraging smile. ‘Morning,’ she says, turning to see if there is post or paperwork for him, which of course there is. Then he is off again, along the strip-lit, windowless passageway, left, right; stop; struggle with your bunch of keys, drop it, pick it up, open the door, and get yourself into the little room, Dr Adam Hibbert’s room, which is yours, Philip’s, for the circle of the year. The metal and chipboard and laminate desk with its lockable drawers. The heavy, black, worn, gleaming couch with the roll of covering paper at the foot of it. The laminate lockable cupboard and laminate shelves on metal brackets, bearing books left behind by Dr Hibbert: BNF, Oxford Handbook of General Practice, Gray’s Anatomy (38th edition), World According to Clarkson, Wisden 2003. The three orange plastic bucket chairs, on a chessboard of mahogany- and mushroom-coloured carpet tiles. The grubby white desktop, purring already, portal to the practice EMIS web, and email of course, and the blessed internet, gateway to the world, and the better little Skype window that lets him glimpse Sue from time to time during the working day, and the clip-on camera through which she likewise can glimpse him. He clicks into EMIS for his appointments. All new to him except Stone, A right at the end. Can they have been to their referral already? Surely not. He clicks open the notes to make sure that it is them. Yes, and there is his record of last time: ‘Ongoing treatment for ADHD. Discussed reduction or cessation of Ritalin dosage, ref. Paediatrics’.
Still five minutes till the first patient. He scanned the notes: last seen, of course, by Dr Hibbert for an asthma check-up, could be anything. He clicked open the Guardian: Rooney targets move to City, you amaze me; American pays drug addict to have vasectomy. He started Skype and minimised it because on the one hand obviously patient confidentiality but on the other it is nice sometimes to simply know when Sue is there online. Now a window opens in his head and shows him Sue on the train, or rather his imagining of her on the train: the little tensed figure, black tight jacket and trousers, thighs crossed and her ankle doing that thing he could never manage, winding round behind the other ankle so her legs are in a plait. She would – he thinks – be angled away from everyone, looking out. Or looking down at her phone or her notebook. She would be scribbling or sketching. Or she would be watching the passing world, her mind empty and open, her pupils oscillating as trees and birds and houses snag them and let go.
But if by some miracle Albert and Janet Stone had been to Paediatrics already he should have heard from the consultant. They appear in his mind, walking away from him along a corridor: Janet’s floppy dungarees, the white T-shirt underneath criss-cross denim straps, the shining polished floor, light coming in from the left, wide swing-doors with booming, muffled, high-pitched noises echoing around. Albert’s thin arm lifted, his hand in hers. But only for that little moment because, as they came towards a place where people were, he would, with sudden sulkiness, pull it away. Philip remembered Albert in the bucket chair in front of him in the consulting room, when Ms Stone had stretched her hand across towards her child as she began to talk about his father, and the boy had shifted, his cheek twitching, the mechanism of arms and legs reconfiguring as he turned away from her, lifted himself up off the chair and moved towards the window to look out onto the tiny pebbled courtyard through the blind’s metal slats. Nothing to see there. Ms Stone had glanced up into his, Philip’s, face as though to say ‘Is it OK for him to stand there?’ – and: ‘You see how things are?’ At which he, Philip, looking back, had done something with his eyes and eyebrows and mouth and cheeks to signify: ‘Yes that’s fine’ and ‘Yes I do.’ So
she had talked on, reaching out to him with her worries: the dad who was sometimes there and sometimes not but made it crystal clear there were more important things in the world than her and Albert. But who somehow still always managed to get them to accept him back in – only the instant they felt they could rely on him he bloody upped and went. At which the chemical-electrical responses of Philip’s brain had permeated him with feelings of engagement and resolve. For here was a case where doctoring absolutely was not just pills and sympathy. This was complex. This was about the whole person, no, about three people. This was going to be a challenge.
A rat-tat on the door interrupted Philip’s memory and he jumped himself back into the present; called ‘come in’ and at the same time checked again the name of this first patient of the day. As the door opened and a foot and a face appeared, Sue, 36 miles away already, was thinking that, to be fair, the problem about working in an institution, about being subordinate to other people – which was that you had to give time to things that, if it was just you, you wouldn’t bother with – this minus could also sometimes be a plus, or partly. So that, although Al Ahmed as a type, going by what he mainly stood for, wasn’t her thing at all, it really had been educative tracking step by step through his career. Alright, she had groaned when Charlotte had asked her to do a trawl to gather material for the catalogue. But if she hadn’t had to do it then she wouldn’t have got to know about Al Ahmed’s early interventions in the iconography of the veil – slim white shop dummies bare except for their heads which were wrapped in the rich, patterned Fortuny cloth as though their faces were mummified but the rest of them untouched. Or the really intense, wall-hung pieces that were in dialogue with Arte Povera – rectangles of fabric stretched over a frame like a canvas and slashed in the manner of Lucio Fontana. Or the lighter-hearted but actually rather magnificent work to do with freedom: toy boats, with beautiful billowing opal and emerald and ruby-toned Fortuny sails, that had been released a mile or two out from Sumqayit on the Caspian Sea and left to wash up where they would on the coasts of Iran or Turkmenistan or wherever, depending on, well, literally depending on the wind or the currents but metaphorically depending on the so-many factors that need to mesh to create freedom. Lots of them had sunk, of course; and most of the ones that had been recovered were bedraggled or damaged; but a few were not. A few arrived somewhere pristine.
So that – but they were getting to the outskirts of the city now, grey warehouse walls up close against the track – so that there really was a lot to admire and learn from in Al Ahmed, even if he was, well, what was the problem with him? The problems were: he was too masculine, he was too grand, he was too much held up to be admired. And probably actually that wasn’t even his fault, or hardly. It was the fault of the Art World which had done its relentless Art World thing, valued him and interpreted him and turned him into a commodity, basically shrink-wrapped him in this super-high-class supermarket that was the International Art World, so that he could be safely exhibited by people like Omar in galleries where everyone would gather round and admire. Instead of being really affected. Instead of being needled and tantalised and awakened in the way that she, Sue, really liked to be, and really wanted other people to like to be too. But now the train was slowing and she needed to be ready for the off: phone stowed, bag grabbed, stand and edge into the aisle. Beyond the window she can see bodies escaping, hitting the platform, speeding away. And now just – can I squeeze past – thank you – she is one of them, striding among the other striding people, their steps forming for a moment a rhythmic synchrony, then shifting into syncopation, then disintegrating into non-relation. The ticket barrier. The concourse with its high roof, lights, strange shoddy arrangement of low shacks, La Croissanterie, Pret, Phones4U. Human beings pinballing here and there. Out onto the street with its colder, fresher air, and noise: Scaffolding Alarmed / 07832 99 . . . edge round it; smell of paint; the lower overall-legs of a painter, himself a painting, splattered in baby blue. Cars Parked Here Without A . . . a cyclist skims past, lycra, thighs pumping: looked at from behind he seems to have no head, how slim the bike is, carbon fibre. There is a group of people in front and she slows, joins them in their waiting to cross the road; but cars too are slowing, stopping; green man: go. Round a railing and into a triangle of parkland, pressing on through the space and quiet of it, poplars lining the edge of it, beginning to thin now, to show their bones. Another railing: left. Cross and right down the quiet road along the back of the warehouse. Left and right and left. And there at the end of this street is the white concrete and greenish glass of Spike, expanding as she walks toward it. She waits again to cross. There is the sloping line of windows, the cut-off top front edge of the building which forms one side of her workspace. Anglepoises on inside. A van pushing past, Open Reach, then a blue car. There at the end of the sloping line of windows is the protruding jaunty cube of Omar’s office, dark. Over she goes and across the pavement and in through the glass doors to the economical white entrance hall, Oisin at the white concrete desk not looking up.
The World Was All Before Them Page 3