She reached out to him somehow with her eyes. What can it be about a microscopic adjustment in the iris, and a flicker in the muscles under the surrounding skin, that sends out what feels like such a strong message; that prompts Dr Newell to smile a little, the muscles in his shoulders to soften, his pulse to slow a pip or two.
Then she takes her eyes away.
‘I don’t think I want to be comfortable. I want to be aware. To understand. Not in the sense of theoretical understanding, of knowing what is happening. But of sensing. I want to watch and listen and taste and smell and feel the decay of me. I want to be in my body the way I have always been in the world: open to it. This is the great gift that . . . dying slowly like this can bring. You feel yourself unravelling. It is so arrogant, isn’t it, the way well young people stride about the world. Thoughtlessly. As though they were strong. As though they were individuals. But I am dividing. It is as though I am holding myself cupped in my own hands and I am falling to pieces there, slipping through my fingers. And that is true. That is how we are in the world. We are pieced together out of lots of different bits. It’s magical – I don’t deny it. It is amazing. But then we disintegrate back into what we were made out of to begin with. It is a great gift to be able to be in this, open-eyed, as it is happening.’
She had finished. She had said everything. Her gaze was now resting on the floor.
‘I wish everyone’ – Philip said helplessly – ‘could be so wise.’
She took a deep breath in, lifting her head as she did so, looking around her, seeing him as though for the first time. She spoke briskly: ‘I am feeling sick. I have been feeling sick for weeks. I retch. I don’t manage to hold much down. Under all this’ – she was referring to the clothes that wrapped her, the cloak, the scarf – ‘I am skin and bones.’ A smile flitted over her wrinkled face. ‘And lumps.’
‘Are you suffering from swollen lymph . . .’
‘Yes,’ she said sharply, ‘but I don’t mind that. I am even a bit interested in that. The new shapes I am developing. Some of which are really quite surprising. It is the nausea I want taking away now. I am bored of it.’
‘It is a horrible feeling. But I think we should be able to reduce it considerably, perhaps even get rid of it altogether;’ and he moved into clinical mode, suggesting metoclopramide for starters, gently introducing the idea of a suppository, warning her of side effects both likely and possible, explaining how the medicine worked. He proposed that she return in a week or so for a follow-up.
‘Thank you Dr Newell,’ she said. And then: ‘Really, thank you. But I would rather not. Or rather: let’s say that if there’s a problem I will come back; and if there is not, I won’t.’
‘That’s your choice, of course,’ Philip admitted, smiling with professional warmth. ‘Although’ – he adopted a more admonitory tone – ‘I hope you won’t take it the wrong way if I say that sometimes it takes a doctor to see if there is in fact a problem.’
‘As things seem to me, Dr Newell, I am currently, from a medical point of view, almost nothing but problems. The question is which of these problems I am content to live with, and which (if any) not. It is not a medical decision. It is personal. I am determined, above all, to continue making it for myself.’
‘No that’s fine, absolutely of course. Before we wrap up, would you mind if I just check through with you some other possibilities. Shall we start with pain?’
‘Yes, I do have pain. I am content to have this pain. I open up a space within my body, between me and the pain, and I watch it. I picture its origin and the path it follows. This interests me and gives me a feeling of control. Alternatively, I abstract myself. I sit straight and calm and breathe. I give my attention to the rhythm of my breathing. I let my mind float up and away. It wanders in the cool air like a cloud. Or it takes me back into the past. You can understand, Dr Newell, that I have a great deal of past. I am now at the end of a lot of things. When I was young there was the Empire. There were English gentlemen. Absurd, isn’t it? So much has changed since then. So much has got better.’
He murmured indistinctly in reply.
‘Do you ever’ – she continued – ‘go for walks in Kidney Meadow? When I was a girl, nightingales nested there. That’s something that has not got better. In fact, it has got very much worse. In one summer, when I was a girl, I counted sixteen varieties of butterfly: now there are four. Even the sparrows are dying. Even the bees. I walk along the river. Dead fish, floating. So it does not feel so very terrible that I too am being poisoned. It does not feel out of place.’
It seemed that she had come to a stop. After a moment, she stirred, lifted herself carefully from her chair and took the stick that Philip, having risen too, was holding out for her.
‘It has been very nice to meet you Dr Newell,’ she said, courteously.
‘Yes indeed. Do come back as soon as you wish.’ He was pulling the door open. She walked through it and methodically away.
The phone was ringing. Before he could speak as he picked it up a thin shrill voice leapt out at him: ‘Dr Newell can I go now?’
‘Jackie I’m so sorry it . . .’
‘Dr Newell, I know you are – new. Next time, spare a thought.’
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t . . .’
‘It’s sodding seven o’clock.’ A click and a buzz.
He sat. He should be completing the note on Mrs Hanworth but instead he sat. Her watery eyes: what colour were they? – He saw again their pallor and the hint of jaundice. Well, it was admirable. It was pig-headed; it was admirable. He should have asked about . . . shit, what had he been thinking of? – he should have asked about her family; he should have given more information about nursing care. But she had been so . . . armoured. Well, it could wait for another time.
Because inevitably there would be another time. With her tumour growing. With it, the chances are, fingering its way into her liver. The vicious brutal primitive little cancer cells breaking off and floating round, looking for trouble. Millions of them being neutralised in the circulation; millions more to take their place. One plus one plus two plus four plus eight. Snagging in a lymph node, and another, and another; spreading between the pleura of the lungs. And what good is medicine against that? A chute seemed to open in his mind and his being went spiralling down into a pit. His stomach knotted. His face drooped. Tears gathered in his eyes; but then he shook himself, and lifted his head, and pulled himself up and out of the clinging blackness. He put finger to keyboard. Dismissed the QOF prompts. Finished the note. Logged off the computer. Gathered his bag and his coat. Then, locking his door, he was away, down the corridor; reception; out of the front glass door, locking and double-locking.
As he scurried off along the pavement, shoulders hunched, Sue was nearing the end of her return train journey, speeding through the thickening gloom. As he crossed the Monet-style footbridge she was waiting by the soon-to-open carriage door; and, as he turned into Eden Grove, she was striding the asphalt pathway between chicken wire held high by concrete pillars. Having entered no. 12 he switched on lamps and drank a glass of water. He opened the fridge and pulled out a beer. Then Sue’s key was in the lock and as everywhere outside went dark the two of them were indoors in the light together.
Sixteen Hours in February
His father was floating towards him. His father rotated as he floated towards him through the mist blowing up over the cliff-edge. He held out his arms towards his father who was floating over verdant damp mossy grass towards him. The siren of an ambulance sounded in the distance. The siren of the ambulance sounded louder, louder. His father floated away, up, caught in a billow of the wind; his father was wearing undulant robes like Noah which made him mingle with the mist. The intrusive siren was becoming purer, sharper. Philip became aware of the skin of his body touching the sheet over the mattress. Philip became aware of the underside of the duvet-cover touching the skin of his body. That sound again: it was only the call of a bird, nothing but a bird. See-saw,
see-saw, see-saw, see-saw. Hi there. Hi there. Hi there. Wake up, wake up, wake up. Light was illuminating the thin blue curtains, leaking around their edges, sending a narrow shaft across the centre of the room. Ohmigod what time was it . . . but as Philip lifted his shoulders and craned his head to look for the bright green digits of the old clock radio, as his latissimus dorsi muscle pushed and his rectus abdomini muscle pulled, some spark of electricity in his brain sent him the happy news that it was Saturday. His head flopped down into the pillows and his eyelids drifted shut. What was that bird? He was a child again on a walk with his father. Little bird, black on a branch outlined against the blue and white piebald English summer sky. Great tit of course. Calmness came into his head again. He let himself sink back into the slow dawn of receding sleep where his head was heavy; where his eyes were egg-cups filled with mercury; where, with its slowed pulse, and lowered blood pressure, and softened muscle tone, and loosened ligaments and tendons, and unpressured cartilage and intervertebral discs, his body was laid out on the sheet on the underblanket on the mattress, massy and slack. He enjoyed the drag of gravity upon him. That great tit’s call again, high-pitched and insistent, careering around the elaborate entrance channels of his ear, oscillating the tympanic membrane, traversing his ossicles, doing something mysterious in his cochlea so that it then sounded, sounded, sounded in his mind, a great tit rejoicing at this first moment of possible spring, singing ‘it’s warmish, warmish, warmish, we didn’t die in the winter, winter, winter, didn’t freeze, and tumble from our perches, and hit the ground feet up in the frost or snow, to be scavenged by a fox, no no, no no, this is going to be my nest, my nest, my nest; look there’s a snowdrop, snowdrop, snowdrop; gosh and a crocus, crocus, crocus.’ Oh, and there were other chirps and twitters, of other birds, what would there be, robins, blackbirds, blue tits, each doing its own thing; no but also all doing the one same thing of saying ‘life, life’, contributing to the ‘beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep’ of the landscape’s ECG.
Philip stirred. The hairs on the backs of his fingers touched some bit of the surface of Sue. His skin touched her skin. The lovely curve at the top of her hip. This was the tenderest time, the waking together, or the not-quite-yet waking together. He eased onto his side, his knees bent, facing towards her, his weight resting on the flesh of upper arm and thigh. He let the backs of his fingers touch her skin again, halfway up her chest at the side. Didn’t want to wake her! He imagined a cocoon of something – rays of light or strands of silk – growing out of him and wrapping round her. That was it: his ribcage would unbend and the ribs would sprout, unfurling like the tendrils of ferns, curling round and wrapping her. She seemed to him so tranquil, lying still and neat, with her impulsive intakes of breath and all-but-silent exhalations; but in fact, inside her, her brain was sparking, her eyes were flickering and, on the edge of consciousness, the meeting with Elton Barfitt was re-enacting itself in her mind. The gateway opening and shutting. The courtyard of – what must it have been, some Victorian factory? Grass between the flagstones. High walls on every side. Windows that were semicircles: strange. Grey clouds speeding overhead. In the echoing building she was walking on the smooth concrete floor with a geometrical receding perspective ahead of her. Charlotte was beside her. They were following some assistant or PA who was wearing white Green Flash tennis shoes with a charcoal eighties trouser suit that gave her an almost triangular torso. The PA stopped and stood to one side and there were Elton Barfitt, sitting. Their strangely waxy facial skin, the light gleaming on it softly. They really did look identical. After a decade of plastic surgery. The dark skin lightened; the light skin darkened. The sharp nose rounded; the snub nose sharpened. One set of cheekbones bulked up; the other scraped away. Hair dyed. Eyebrows plucked. Which had been the woman, which the man? In their identical black lycra jumpsuits the two bodies moved as though they were magnets in the same network of forces. This limb repelled that; that limb repelled this. One mouth was moving and saying: ‘It’s not about prestige.’ The other mouth opened and said: ‘We don’t care about prestige.’ The tick-tock, unstoppable, alternate, horribly disappointing speech continued at its transgendered tenor pitch:
‘It’s courtesy.’
‘I.e. a lack of it.’
‘Pure and simple.’
‘No respect.’
‘Not even elementary tact.’
‘No courtesy.’
‘Good-’
‘-bye.’
The faces became Greek tragedy masks and an amazingly focused jet of air came out of the open mouths. ‘No,’ it howled: ‘No! No!’ as it hit her bang in the middle of her torso and pushed her backwards: she was spiralling and there was darkness and the wind was saying ‘No! No!’ and she landed somewhere with a thud.
There was a leaf on her tummy. No, there were some fingers on her tummy. She tensed for a moment at the horror of it but then sensed that actually she was in a bed, she was warm, she was waking up, these were Philip’s fingers, lovely Philip who was there snug beside her in that same one bed that was shared by the two of them. Sluggishly her arm drifted across, her fingers found his fingers and the two sets of fingers interwove themselves with one another. Really she needed to talk to him about it.
His heavy body was moving and there was his hard head laying itself on her chest. He must have wondered what was going on: she must have seemed so preoccupied and really she owed it to him to come clean.
His skull was pressing at the bottom of her throat and her right nipple was being prickled, tingled, she could feel it becoming solid, the sherbet sparkles of sensation spread, there was a tickling underneath her tongue. She really needed to sit down with him and say: this is what I’m doing, it’s a risk but I’m happy with that, I’m committed and I need you to be as well.
But now his fingertips were tracing the outline of her hip, finding a winding path down the centre of the top of her thigh. Because actually it was probably going to get quite hard over the next few months, she would probably go quite manic.
And now his tongue was sliding over that lumpy right nipple, and his teeth were nibbling at it, and the palm of his other hand was giving some attention to the neglected soft other nipple, and she stirred and her breath became a moan as endorphinergic and morphinergic mechanisms spluttered into life.
Softly his lips moved over her tummy’s tender skin, making the cutaneous receptors tremble; and probably actually – the words were going blurry now in her mind – she would be glad of – blurrier – some rea.sur.nce.
Their faces were nuzzling and their mouths, chewy and bitter from sleep, were meeting and their lips were scuffing each other’s cheeks and lips and necks. Hearts thudding, the valves snapping open, slamming shut.
She grins. She wraps her arms around his shoulders and hugs him to her, feeling her body seem to soften and proliferate as, in his body too, arteries dilate and tissue swells, and all the beautifully adapted and various receptor neurones fire in happy harmony making brain cells iridesce and swirl and jive.
In the dappled shadows the bodies cling and thrust and arc and stretch. Toes splay. Arms prop shoulders from which a torso slopes. Two legs spring into the air. A head flaps from side to side. Fingers tense, hips grip and ankles twine. Forehead bows to forehead and hair touches in the air as eyes look longingly into eyes, thighs vie, lip lips lip and . . .
But, damn, dammit! – what was this?
Anxiously he began to get the impression that his vas deferens was initiating its rhythmic squeezing too soon, too soon . . .
But phew she too seemed to be surfing the waves of neuromuscular euphoria, so that as, sweating, panting, he bowed his forehead to her chest, she gripped him tight, her sharp nails stabbing; and then they were grinning and kissing each other’s noses, cheeks; and then they lay entangled for a moment, breathing; and then they rose, one after another, went for a piss, came back and settled into bed again.
His head was on her chest and her hand was in his hair and she was full of warmth a
nd tenderness towards him and he felt safe.
In her mind she saw an image from some months before: his face turned towards her smiling, his cheeks plumped up beneath the sparkling eyes, the whole of him emanating happiness that she was there.
In his mind he saw the outline of her body burnished in shadowy light: shoulder and upper arm and breast and the little lynchet undulations of her ribs. He felt a trickle of something electrochemical down around his ilium and was wanting her again, wanting her longer and better in some epic desert scenery to theme music by Ennio Morricone.
Then his mind switched and tranquillity came through him. He was remembering when he had said that he was going to have to move here for a year and she had said straight off: ‘I’ll come.’ And he had said: ‘But the commute and it’ll be pretty dull there.’ And she had said: ‘That’s OK’; and then: ‘It’ll be interesting living in a nowhere place.’ Then she must have seen anxiety still trembling in his face; seen him thinking that she couldn’t really mean it, that she would get bored and give up after a month or two or, worse, would get bored and want to leave but wouldn’t because she would feel under an obligation. She had leaned forward and taken his hand between her two hands and looked up at him so sunnily: ‘We’ll have one another.’ And in his chest had been the thrumming of a harp.
Now they were lying side by side, calm, supine, holding hands.
‘We should go for a walk later,’ she was saying.
‘There’s George’s party.’
‘Not till the evening.’
‘Listen. That’s a great tit.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Just do. It’s one of the easiest. Don’t you?’
‘We never went to the country.’
‘And we never went to a city.’ He snorted-giggled. He nuzzled her shoulder as she, smiling, draped her arm across his neck.
The World Was All Before Them Page 6