‘Well, actually it’s done because of the severe limitations on the public finances. It’s done because there isn’t enough money to pay for everything that it would be nice to do.’
‘This isn’t something it would be nice . . .’
‘But let’s leave that aside.’ Graham Epsom was being airy once again. ‘To get back to your point. Once you’ve got control of your own budget, you can make that sort of decision for yourself.’
‘I don’t want to have to make that sort of decision. I want to be able to help the patient. I don’t want to be thinking the whole time: is this cost effective?’
‘Well maybe you should because what thinking is this cost effective actually means is: is this in the best interests of all my patients as a whole. OK? What your position ends up as is: I’d spend my whole budget just to help this one patient who happens to be sitting here before me. And then what about the next one?’
‘It’s such a long way from that,’ said Philip wearily. ‘It’s a straightforward, cheap operation. They do it in villages in Africa.’
But here was George again with the raised bottle of champagne. ‘Recruiting?’
‘Your young colleague is totally unreconstructed,’ said Graham Epsom.
‘Uncorrupted, you mean,’ said George Emory, topping up the glasses. ‘Graham,’ he said to Philip, ‘is a necessary evil.’
‘Maybe I’m . . .’
‘The system is changing. I completely agree with what I am sure you have been saying, that all we want to do is treat our patients. Mr Epsom is going to leave us free to do just that. Aren’t you Graham.’
‘And make sure you earn some decent money in the process.’
‘I don’t . . .’
But George was saying: ‘It’s nearly time for the fireworks.’
Fireworks?
George pressed on: ‘Could I ask you both to help? I have been meaning to invest in one of those computerised systems the Australians are so good at but for the moment it’s slave labour. Sorry.’ He looked from one to the other of them appealingly. Then: ‘I’ve got helmets.’
He turned and found his way through to a door at the back of the room. Graham Epsom followed; and Philip followed him. Oh, but here was Amanda who must just have arrived. They were in a back hallway with the kitchen beyond it. He could see Sue in there, pale in the bright light, talking to one of the couple dressed in black. He stepped out into the chill and the darkness.
‘They’re going out to do the fireworks,’ said the young woman.
‘Fireworks?’ said Sue.
‘Every year, ever since . . . you know this is the anniversary of when mum died?’
‘No I didn’t, I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’ Sue felt the need to add: ‘I hadn’t met George before this evening.’
‘He doesn’t tell people, doesn’t want to be morbid.’ She put a weight on that word, sort of twisted it. She must have had quite a lot to drink. ‘But that’s why we have to have the fireworks.’ The voice was higher now, spiralling. ‘When mum died I was six and Tasha was eight. And dad faced, I can understand it now, the terrible problem of what to do on the anniversary. So we did some remembering, and all that. Visited the horrible garden of rest. And then we came back and had fireworks. He must have got them cheap left over from Guy Fawkes. There were the two of us little girls, and him, having fireworks. And crying. There were the explosions up in the air, the white and the red and the green and the gold, and the sparkles came down, and do you see because I was looking up at it through tear-filled eyes they all mixed together and it was like . . . it was like the whole universe was crying too.’
‘It must have been very hard.’
‘It was. Still is to be honest. Though I know it’s a bit pathetic to say so after a decade.’
‘No.’
‘Tasha’s better at it than me. She gets on with things. She’s better at helping dad. But with me it’s like, once mum was taken away from us why shouldn’t everything else be? You can never trust anyone. And also you can never trust any thing. Which means, you can never really be happy. Even after all this time. Because you know there might be termites eating away at it from underneath and then – bang! – the whole floor you are standing on will disappear.’
She was standing leaning against the edge of the worktop. She had been looking down as though focusing on Sue’s uncomfortable shoes. But now she raised her head, stared into Sue’s face with her watery, red-rimmed eyes, then looked away, across through the open door, then back towards the dark window where all she could probably see was the two of them and the kitchen reflected. Her head moved slowly then came to a juddery halt. Now she was reaching for her glass. She started to raise it but put it back.
‘Dad feels the same way. I know this and I don’t think Tasha does. That’s why dad and me are closer to one another even though Tasha is nicer to him. It’s what makes him so big. Not big physically though he is’ – she admitted – ‘fatter than he used to be. But the way he asserts himself. With that loud voice. The way he’s got’ – here her accent shifted a bit to something Essexey – ‘so plummy. It’s like he’s persuading himself everything is more real than it is, more solid. Like he’s persuading himself he’s still here.’
Her voice was sliding and she seemed about to sob: Sue reached out, held her shoulder.
‘It’s alright,’ the young woman said. ‘Because he blames himself’ – she was carrying on the story – ‘for not having spotted it in time.’
‘What did she – what was it?’
‘Breast cancer. The usual,’ she added harshly. ‘But treatments weren’t so good back then. And anyway’ – she was speaking fiercely now – ‘it wasn’t his fault. He can’t screen his whole family for everything the whole time just because he’s a doctor. But because he’s a doctor he won’t accept there was nothing he could have done. And because he won’t accept there was nothing he could have done he lives with blaming himself. And because he blames himself he does this larger than . . .’
But here was George Emory, clashing the tines of a fork against a wine glass, calling ‘Fireworks! Fireworks!’ to the tune of ‘roll-up, roll-up’. People in the room across the way were murmuring, stirring, picking up or putting down their glasses, reaching for handbags, saying ‘Do we need coats?’ Slowly, sporadically, they made their way out through the narrow back door and found chairs or places to stand on the stone terrace outside. Sue and George’s younger daughter came out last.
In front of them, beyond the groups of watching people, the greyish space of the lawn. Crouching shadows detached themselves from the surrounding shadow and moved and then dissolved back into the surrounding shadow once more. Philip must be one of them, which? It was like freeze-frame when they moved; your brain must be struggling to make sense of the exiguous signals from your eyes. Beyond the greyishness, the real absorbent black of a wall of trees. Above, of course, the sky. As Sue looked, her eyes focused or sharpened or whatever it was they did with the, that’s it, cones giving way to rods. Mistiness receded and cold, unimaginably distant points of light emerged. Though actually if you really looked, if you really gave your mind up to it, you could possibly start to see how far away they really were.
A figure was coming forward on the shadow-lawn. George, his big body. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said; ‘it’s childish of me I know. But I do like fireworks. Especially . . .’ – he let the word hang in the air – ‘in February. When we are the only people in the whole country, probably the whole world’ (pause) ‘to be having them.’ There was a rustle of applause.
Now the voice from the shadows became more grave. ‘Those of you who know me well, also know, that fireworks this evening are a hallowed ritual. We send winter scampering away, shivering. Scare it off down into its burrow. And we welcome the glorious spring.’
His daughter was bending towards Sue’s ear, murmuring: ‘He never tells the truth.’
‘In one moment’ – George was concluding – ‘the mayhem will begi
n!’
More claps.
The misty figures were moving among the shadows of the lawn. Then they were still. You had to hold the positions of last-seen movement in your mind to persuade yourself you knew where they were. A flame. A pause, and then the familiar, surprising, sudden whoosh! – the watching heads rotating upwards to try to follow its trajectory. The moment of waiting silence and then: bang, bright white points of light expanding through the sky, luminous join-the-dots for, what might it be, a chrysanthemum; only now they had become little lines of light, or was that her vision tiring of them, no longer seeing them properly? Or on the other hand perhaps getting used to them, seeing them right for the first time? Sue shut her eyes and the little lines were still there inside them, moving within her at the same speed as they must be moving outside; when she opened her eyes would they coincide? She opened her eyes and the sky was black.
Only: bang, a green explosion! And bang, a red! And clatter clatter clatter a cacophony of spattering gold! What it all did in fact was shut out the terrifying distance of the stars. The billions and billions of them, billions and billions of miles away. Here were these man-made sparkles at a distance of a hundred metres and they were brighter, they were loud.
Wieiah, wieaih, waieaih, vertiginously whirling, whining worms!
So what it said was: concentrate on what is near. Be thrilled and moved by what is near. That was what they were meant to convey to the little mourning girls. Here are these lights which are so beautiful. They soar and fade and die away, and that is sad. But look, here is another one. And each one is an individual. Each one can be remembered.
Wahay, a release of wriggling whistling incandescent spermy globs!
Whereas actually if you think of how many people there really are in the world they are more like the billions of distant unimaginable stars.
So Sue thought. Or so Sue thought to begin with. But soon the sparkles and splurts of light, the kerchings and kerbooms, the splats and peonies and diadems and scattered pearls, the rhythm of it all, and the pleasant smell, came into her body and smoothed the thoughts away. Ker-bang, the gallery was exploding again, and ta-trang, Palm Jumeirah erupted into a million, beautiful, all-but immaterial sparks, and ger-whoosh, Philip was spurting hotly on her tummy, and wa-la-la-la she and Charlotte and Elton Barfitt and Omar Olagunju were morris dancing merrily clanging tambourines. These were the traces that the reaction of potassium nitrate, sulphur and carbon released in her mind as bang! they produced nitrogen and carbon dioxide gases and potassium sulphide.
As carbon and oxygen formed vroom! carbon dioxide and energy so that
So physics and chemistry performed their destiny while, on the wet cheeks of the younger daughter of George and the late Mrs Emory, the blurry, reflected colours shone.
Forty-Seven Hours in April
As Philip pulled open the surgery door and stepped out into the warmish, breezy air, he had to crease his eyes against the light; and when Charlotte pushed open the door of her flat, Sue, following her in, admired the afternoon sunbeams angled through high windows.
Philip was holding a folded piece of paper, for, on his way out, Jackie had called: ‘This came for you’; and Sue carried a little grey holdall which she dumped on the floor before pressing on into the ample living-dining-kitchen area: ‘What a nice place.’
Having walked a bit, Philip saw that attractive pub on the other side of the road and thought, sod it, why not, even if I do bump into a patient, for there was a terrace with tables on it lit by the sun. Meanwhile, Charlotte was saying: ‘You can sleep on the sofa’ which was squashy and wide ‘or else . . . double up with me: the bed’s quite big.’
As Philip got his pint of lager from the bar, Charlotte was looking into her tall grey fridge and calling out: ‘White wine?’ And as Philip found a place, dragging one of the chairs away from its table so that, when he sat, he could rest his head against the softened brick of the pub wall, Sue stood on Charlotte’s little balcony looking down at the canal and along to the plaza where the bars were and across to the similar flats opposite.
Philip hooked his thumb under the sellotape that held the folded paper shut, and yanked as Sue came in and went to her bag and rootled until she found a notebook and pen. Philip gave up yanking and instead began to tear carefully along the edge of the sellotape as Sue sat at Charlotte’s circular glass table, reaching for her goblet and dropping the notebook in front of her with a bang.
The handwriting on the folded paper was jagged, big. There were two sheets, in fact. He lifted one and scanned to the bottom of the other for the signature. Janet Stone. Right. A little spurt of adrenalin from his internal carburettor. He took a pull of his pint and settled back to read as Sue was saying ‘So here we are.’
‘Yup,’ said Charlotte briskly.
‘And it was a final, definite no?’
‘Yup,’ said Charlotte, as though she were thinking it over: ‘A . . . final . . . definite . . . no.’ And then, quickly, callously: ‘Elton Barfitt – who are they?’
Philip realised with relief that Janet was telling him that Albert had in fact been to the behavioural therapist, and that she had in fact been to the support group, and things were going OK. Not that there weren’t still bad days. To tell the truth, every day was a struggle. But she felt she could cope. And she felt it was worth it. Because Albert was still her little boy. Not a zombie. When you pushed them even the school admitted it was nice for him to be lively so long as it didn’t get out of bounds. So you were right to be firm with me, Dr Newell. And I’m sorry if I didn’t show respect.
Sue meanwhile was saying: ‘So it’s plan B.’
‘Yup,’ said Charlotte.
‘You think we’ve got a chance? – that Omar, if we pull something really good together, there’s a chance he’ll give us the go-ahead?’
‘I hope so,’ said Charlotte, suddenly turning quiet and wan. She was looking out through the French windows: ‘All we can do is try. So what I say’ – she brought her attention back into the room, glanced at Sue, spoke vehemently – ‘is: you’d better have some good ideas, girl.’
Sue didn’t know how to reply.
‘What we’ll do,’ said Charlotte, methodical now, ‘is get the thing together, see how it looks – then work out how to handle it.’
Sue wondered: ‘Will there be a budget?’
‘Same pot as for Al Ahmed.’
‘I thought that was ring-fenced for . . .’
‘Oh, it’s alright. Anyway if there’s a problem I can always cover it. Let’s not worry about it.’
‘You can cover it?’
‘Little rich girl,’ Charlotte said. ‘But it’s not going to come to that. Anyway’ – she called out teasingly – ‘you’re married to a doctor!’
‘Not married.’
‘No but . . .’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Sue was suddenly prickling with irritation. ‘Charlotte, we’re talking about work. An exhibition in a public gallery. I mean, we’re not meant to have to contribute, I mean we shouldn’t.’ It really was a bizarre suggestion.
‘No, OK, OK. I was just saying. Just offering.’
‘Sure. No . . . thank you,’ said Sue, softening. Then: ‘So you have money from your parents?’
‘Yup. Well, sometimes. From my dad. He bought me this.’ Charlotte gestured around her with a queenly wave. Then she shrugged her shoulders, grimaced. ‘They’ve got too much of it. It’s’ – she looked up smilingly – ‘a social duty.’
At which Sue said: ‘Nice duty.’ And then: ‘Shall we start?’
In the sun 53½ miles away Philip was remembering Janet’s wrought-up face, pink, eyes bulging asymmetrically, worried into rage. He was thinking that you could see the similarities between the mother’s behaviour and the child’s. I could have cured her with a pill too, got her to drop a lorazepam, job done. Only that’s hardly a good long-term solution any more than ritalin is for Albert. He remembered talking her down, repeating to her what she had
said to him that first time she had come for a consultation. Listening patiently as she had spat back in a twisted voice, ‘I may have said that then but look what’s happened now. I can’t have him coming to harm. I’m not gonna risk it.’ And using that fear to get her finally to cross the dreaded threshold of the hospital and see the psych and set up a proper programme of care. Which now, yippee, they were properly engaged in.
The ethanol from his sweet, white beer was now osmosing through his intestine and permeating much of his body, wreaking its twinkly magic on his gamma-aminobutyric acid receptors. Given that, and the Friday evening feeling, and the good news, and the lovely warm spring sun, it all now seemed to him quite pleasant and even mildly amusing. Albert on the school roof walking the ridge tiles like a tightrope. The worried representations from the head teacher and social services. George and Sara thankfully supportive at the practice meeting. And even the thing he had kept secret from them, the thing he really probably ought not to have done . . . Though actually, no, surely it was secure – surely the bits all slotted into place unshakeably?
Janet had explained that Albert was scared stiff that Ash, his father, was about to leave again. Because they had been at the boat the night before and Ash had been talking of moving on. So the exploit on the roof must have been an eruption of anguish, a way of crying out to his dad, Stay! Stay! Which meant the therapeutic challenge shifted. Now they were at a stage where Albert’s behaviour was manageable so long as Ash was there. Philip had seen for himself the boy’s happiness – as well as the mother’s happiness – when he had been to that eco-diatribe a couple of months ago. But Ash was clearly not the sort of person who could be persuaded to stay long-term. The challenge now was to strengthen Albert’s better behaviour so it could survive the shock of Ash’s departure, whenever that eventually came.
So really you could understand why Janet had wanted him to speak to Ash. To which of course he had replied that it really absolutely was not in his remit; that it was something her social worker might possibly be able to do, draw the father into the conversation. To which she had replied that Ash was not going to speak to no social worker, he was against that structure of mind control. At which he, Philip, had said that there wasn’t much chance Ash would talk to him then either. But then she said that he, Philip, was about the only person Ash would talk to because he knew that he, Philip, had been there to experience the Birth of the Earth (I hope he didn’t notice my expression, Philip thought). And still Philip had said no because an unsolicited visit to someone associated with a patient was completely beyond the boundaries of what was acceptable. And she had said: in that case we won’t go see the specialist.
The World Was All Before Them Page 12