The man was gritting his teeth, sucking his cheeks in, biting back tears, nodding his head.
‘Yup,’ he blurted. ‘I hope that’s right.’
‘But I should really . . .’ said Philip.
‘Yes of course,’ said Mr Hanworth, at last rising, heaving himself up out of his chair, advancing towards Philip. He took Philip’s hand between both of his, shook it, kept it in his grasp, looked achingly into Philip’s eyes, said ‘Thank you.’ Then he let go, and Philip was able to back out through the doorway, and walk along the passage, and open the front door, and step through it into the warm air of the world outside. The bright light came darting at his eyes and he narrowed his lids against it. The street was fluorescent white; the trees were purple and pink. Then gradually, as his pupils adjusted, things settled back into their ordinary colours. It was just a bright spring day.
Philip pulled the car door clunk shut beside him. He was enclosed by metal in the still flat air. He let his head lean against the headrest. He wanted his mind to go blank. His mind was a grey sheet. His mind was a shadowy empty bucket. Except for that little, floating nugget of colour and energy that was Sue, that dragonfly. Which now metamorphosed into a face, making the lip muscles of his own face tense in response, his cheeks plump up. But her face had no substance. When he tried to look at it with his so-called mind’s eye he couldn’t, it kept on twitching away. He tried chasing it for a moment: it jumped here and there away from him in the Tardis-like endless black space of the back of his skull.
His eyes opened. He reached for his laptop and made a record of the visit. He pulled out his phone and left a message for the nurse.
Job done. Now for the weekend.
But he sat there still, not wanting to move off yet, not knowing anyway where to go, how to get out of the professional mood, the stance of listening and assessing and diagnosing and uttering words appropriate to the context. The armour of it, the structure. The rigidity. The being expected to give a definitive response. And, even more surprisingly, the being able to do it. Being the person who knew.
He let his head fall backwards and shut his eyes once more. If it was a weekday he would just stay in role, there would be another visit to drive off to, probably, then return to the practice for afternoon surgery, then end of the day, back home, beer, Sue, cooking, telly or going out. He breathed in deeply, slowly. He opened his eyes, looked at his watch: Christ two o’clock already. But of course – he shut his eyes again – that absolutely didn’t matter. He breathed out, slowly and long. What should he, well there was always the idea of going to a garden centre or plant shop, brighten up the back patio. He stretched his neck upwards, let his shoulders drop. Since it seemed to have absolutely no plant life at all. Except for the strange little standard bay tree in the middle like a gobstopper on a stick. Which was entirely surrounded by stone-imitation concrete slabs. Except for the brick-walled raised bed along the back edge of the smallish rectangle. Which seemed to have nothing in it except gravel. Not even a weed. Not even earth.
Oh, that was it, they would have been filled with gravel to stop anything growing: they were designed as flowerbeds but then presumably the landlord filled them up with gravel because obviously you can’t trust tenants to do any gardening. Which was perhaps no doubt largely true.
So he could do that, but . . .
As his professional role fell away from him, as he relaxed, feelings and images came in its place. The vulnerability beneath the shell. All the visit to Grace Hanworth reappeared in his mind but not running at the same speed and volume, nor quite the same colours, nor even exactly the same order. Shouldn’t he have told Mr Hanworth that Grace had asked him, in effect, to kill her? Shouldn’t he have attempted a more thorough diagnosis after her hallucination? It was as though the sequence of time were a ribbon that rippled and folded back on itself. Should he have spoken in that personal way to Mr Hanworth? Shouldn’t he have interrupted Grace’s delusional monologue, which might have left her not so upset and tired, which might have . . .
The holograms in his mind sped backwards and forwards illustrating different chains of cause and effect. Mr Hanworth would be embarrassed at having been spoken to so intimately, he would ask to see a different doctor. The nails of Philip’s fingers clawed up a fistful of the fabric of his trousers over his thigh as he realised that he, Philip, would have to explain to George why that was, why, in the closing weeks of his mother’s life, Mr Hanworth had taken the unusual, nay, extraordinary step of asking a different doctor to step in. There was nausea in his chest and such a bad, dragging feeling in his mind, a terrible oiliness coating everything stiflingly. Worse, worse, Grace’s delusion would turn out to be caused by something obvious, some incompatibility between her drugs, which would immediately be spotted by the out-of-hours doctor who would be called when it happened again this afternoon, only by then it would be too late, too late. Philip ungripped his fingers from the trouser fabric and reached for the button on the door and pressed so the window wound down for a count of 1, 2, 3, then stopped it, felt the breeze creeping in, caressing him, was lightened by the new expansiveness of sound and the fresher air.
Breathe. Calm.
Because she was on a perfectly standard regimen of drugs. Really nothing dangerous in the least. Because he had responded humanly to Mr Hanworth, in a way that was wholly common sense and nowhere near in breach of the guidelines. Because he had respected his patient’s confidentiality, as he was obliged to. Because he had been honest and compassionate. He had exercised his professional judgment. He had recognised the special value of human life.
So it was alright.
So he could go and buy some plants.
Because obviously it was upsetting, it was someone dying.
And actually there ought to be a place to get a sandwich at the garden centre: he really needed to eat.
It was Grace Hanworth dying, whom he had really got to know quite well. And like. Who had in fact become a pretty important figure for him.
There had been nothing from Sue since the text he had found when he woke up saying that it was going OK, that she hoped to be back this evening. That she was missing him.
Because everyone thought that being a doctor was about curing people, i.e. saving life. Whereas it was also quite a lot about going in the opposite direction, about easing people into death.
So he texted back to say that he was going to buy some plants and could she think of any kind she wanted?
And the horrible thing was that he was going to get used to it. As he was already pretty used to it in fact when someone was dead already, when he didn’t know them and just had to certify the irreversible onset of apnoea and unconsciousness in the absence of the circulation. Though that too had been a shock the first time he had had to do it. To be the one whose signature said: this life has come to an end.
Should he go home and change into jeans and then go out again or just go as he was?
So that, officially, the person was still alive until he, Philip Newell, had signed his name.
Go as he was and change when he got home.
The name of Death was Dr Philip Newell.
He turned the key, dabbed the accelerator. Vroom.
So that it was OK for him to be upset, today, about Grace Hanworth.
He reversed a bit, turned the wheel, went forward a bit, turned the wheel the other way, reversed a bit, turned the wheel back again, wait, wait, and: now – out into a hiatus in the flow of traffic.
Because in fact it would be upsetting if he wasn’t. If he wasn’t upset. The upsetting thing would be not to be upset.
He indicated right, slowed. Tricky mini-roundabout, go almost all the way round so that you have done a ‘V’ almost doubling back on yourself.
But in the future he would be. Be not upset. In the future if he felt sympathetic towards a patient like Grace Hanworth and established quite a warm relationship with her as bit by bit, under his care, she died, bit by bit, painfully, with inevitably some indi
gnity, despite everything everyone could do, she died, kicking against it, in fear, despite her courage, despite her selfless convictions.
You went straight over at the lights, and kept on, and then the garden place was there at the edge of town.
When that happened he would not be upset. He would be functional. It would be all in a day’s work, like an undertaker.
Brake! Jesus, what was that, a dog, what was a dog . . . can’t people control their bloody dogs! It went streaking across like a . . . like the mechanical rabbit on a track that greyhounds chase at greyhound races.
But then probably he wouldn’t have developed a warm, sympathetic, interested relationship with the future Grace Hanworth in the first place. She would have been just another patient, a creature to be treated, dealt with. Which was exactly what she, the present Grace Hanworth, the real Grace Hanworth, was so sensitive about – she was so sensitive to being thought of like that, so anxious not to be. But the future Philip Newell would have turned into a sort of automaton, like in sci-fi – was it in Star Trek? – a computerised medical machine who would provide a uniformly excellent standard of care without any interference from the feelings, who would not be even a little bit sickened by the smell of shit, frankly, all-but whited out by the smell of disinfectant; who would not be unnerved by the feel of her frail flesh under the thin cotton of her nightie, the rickety backbone, the deflated buttock that he had had no choice but to slide his hand under; who would not be at all sent reeling by the pine-yellow face looking up at him, asking for a sudden death, asking to be spared what lay ahead, the greater sickness and the sharper pain, the – so strange it must be, the awareness of everything progressively not working, the limbs heavy, unresponsive, you try to lift your arm and it will not lift, the fingers cold, the toes cold, the coldness spreading upwards, inwards, your skin greying, flaking, your heart reluctant, your lungs taking in less oxygen each breath and in any case your body isn’t asking for it, the peristaltic movement of your intestines slowing, stopping, so that your last meal simply sits there because you have no need for energy, no need for food; all this is happening and you are turning into basically a slab of meat and bone and gristle, only perhaps you don’t realise it because you, the real you, the mental you, is going to pieces too, this is what Grace was aware of, because the nerves aren’t working properly and so the brain isn’t working properly, the chemistry will have gone off-kilter, the synapses not sparking properly, the voltage-gated sodium channels creaking on their hinges so that the messages just don’t flow at pretty much the speed of light any more exactly where they are wanted but jam up, congeal, so that you get areas of stiffness, of blockage, your limbs don’t respond, they may be going cold but you don’t in fact know they are going cold, there is just a numbness so that if you look and see them you are surprised to see them there, because in the brain the same thing is happening at a cellular level, basically, because what had been a magical, unimaginably multitudinous web of connections is sagging, disjoining, so that you just can’t remember, or worse than that, you don’t know that there is anything to remember – the person who, for example, had been your son becomes a stranger, you have no sense of ever having had a son at all, and by the same token, you can’t process new material, you can’t place yourself in relation to what is around you, because you are like rotten fabric that just so easily rips, or like a wet-through cardboard box left out for the recycling that when you pick it up separates into the different layers of itself or pulls apart in soggy lumps, isolated areas of flailing chemical activity which perhaps throw up images into your mind, only your mind is too strong a way of putting it because there will just be images floating somewhere and the terrible thing will be that some of them are memories and some of them are fears and some of them are probably nothing to do with you at all, not in any way that matters, they are maybe the cheapest possible trashy things put into your mind by the morphine, Ronald McDonald maybe, he is dancing around with his red banana grin and you are watching him, only again it is an understatement to say that You are watching, because there is no You apart from Ronald McDonald or the magic roundabout, let’s say the magic roundabout, that would be better, Dougal and Zebedee and Dylan, that would be better, that wouldn’t be so bad at all.
He was crying.
He had better pull over because you can’t drive with tears running down your cheeks it is not good for your reactions.
The garden centre was just there, he could almost see it but still, he had better pull over.
Don’t fucking hoot at me you pillock I did indicate I am just pulling over, I just need to pull over.
There; and as Philip came to rest, not entirely parallel with the pavement but still out of the run of the traffic, Sue was saying: ‘So what do you think?’
And, as Philip put his thumb and index finger on the key and turned it so that the car went still and quiet, Sue was saying: ‘Do you think it’s good enough to put to Omar?’
And as Philip sobbed a little, and then stopped sobbing, his cheeks and eyes feeling plumped and tender, Sue was saying: ‘You think he would?’
With Philip, the stillness and quiet were entering into him, not consoling him exactly but somehow making him, too, stop; helping his mind, too, come to rest.
With Sue and Charlotte, sitting in the open air, upon grass, in a small park in the middle of the city, where there was a really great playground if you were a kid, all walkways, and climbing walls, and firemen’s poles, and colourful nylon rope netting and a fountain-pool thing, a wide, shallow dish of granite, probably fifty feet across and perhaps only one inch deep at the deepest part, so that the granite shone and the sky mixed with the stone, the blue with the grey, the clouds with the granulation; with Sue and Charlotte the space and sunshine stimulated their thoughts, especially since all around, at the edges of the little park, the grass rose in brick-edged terraces like paddy fields with, beyond them, a fence in wavy, anodised steel and, beyond that, the winding distinctive streets of a carefully planned new development, really much better than The Willows, frankly modern, the houses higgledy-piggledy, flat-roofed, with balconies to bring the inside out and big square windows to let the outside in, and beyond that, the busy streets of the rest of the city. They were in an artificial oasis, a bit of nature gated and on display.
To Philip, the sense of just sitting there, enclosed and quiet, was increased by the vibrations of other cars passing by. To Sue and Charlotte, the noise of the rather distant busy streets came echoingly as something not unpleasant, almost the murmur of the sea, almost the susurrus of breathing, were it not for the periodic chainsaw rasp of motorbikes, or were they angry bees?
So, as Philip, more together now, looked in his wing-mirror and touched the accelerator and moved out, Charlotte was saying, ‘But he’s not gonna let us do it as ourselves.’
‘Why do you . . .’
‘Sue, he talked to me,’ Charlotte said flatly. ‘He talked to me and he said . . .’ She looked awkwardly across the park. ‘He talked to me and he said that it was Elton Barfitt or nothing.’
Sue’s body was wax.
‘That’s why I couldn’t, really couldn’t tell him they’d said no.’
Wax melting; feathers in the breeze, fluttering, falling.
‘I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you were so attached to . . . well, what we’ve been doing. I hoped there’d be some give, something would change.’
In Sue’s head there was a single, continuous, high-pitched sound.
‘But it hasn’t, except . . . Sue?’ – Charlotte called the name more perkily. ‘There is a way of doing it, I think there is a way of doing it.’
‘Is there.’
‘Listen. We just don’t’ – she spoke slowly – ‘ever tell him they said no.’
‘Charlotte, Jesus!’
‘No, but listen,’ said Charlotte.
‘It’s not. A bloody. Game!’ – said Sue. ‘Why can’t we’ – she was speaking shrilly, breathily – ‘Just . . .
be . . . straightforward.’ Tears were threatening to come.
‘Listen,’ said Charlotte gently. Charlotte reached out and held Sue’s knee. ‘Sue?’ – she said, looking enquiringly into her eyes.
Sue calmed a little.
‘Listen.’ Charlotte became methodical. ‘We can tell him that they are doing the show but that they need it to be anonymous. Top secret. So that – do you see?’
‘No I don’t.’
‘He is the only person who thinks it is by them. Do you see? All anyone else knows is that it is an anonymous show. With some secret high-profile artist behind it but basically an anonymous show.’
Though maybe. Though maybe actually . . .
‘So he can tell himself he’s got a big name artist behind it,’ said Charlotte, as Philip at last turned into the car park for the garden centre.
‘So we could still do our thing,’ said Sue, observing the new possibility, gauging it. ‘But,’ she then said, ‘we’ll have to make him think all the instructions come from them.’
‘Yeh but we can,’ said Charlotte, mildly. ‘They are conceptual artists. They’ll be doing, I mean he’ll think they’re doing, the completely usual thing of just sending a blueprint that the poor curators have to build.’
Philip slammed the car door and walked towards the building where large grey and black placards announced: ‘Specialist Compost’, ‘Sands and Grits’. He aimed right, towards the entrance, past a table of British Grown Hanging Basket Plants, 4 for £10, Petunia, Geranium, Mecardonium. The colours of Lego.
‘I don’t mind writing the instructions,’ said Charlotte. ‘I’m’ – an operatic flourish – ‘practised in deception.’
Inside, there were large, long, display areas, edged with low concrete walls. Concrete paths went between them. Behind each concrete wall were plants, their roots in plastic pots, their stems strapped to bamboo canes. They were separated according to type (for instance: Herbaceous Perennials) and arrayed, within each type, in alphabetical order of their Latin names.
The World Was All Before Them Page 19