Everything You Need

by A. L. Kennedy

  “But you must have wanted to live. You let them operate.”

  “Oh, yes. I . . . did have a couple of reasons for wanting to stick around. But it wasn’t pleasant—the anticipation. The only way I found to deal with it was by learning the process, knowing exactly what they’d be doing in the absence of my conscious mind. It’s still here in my head, all catalogued: Guedal airways, Essex or McKerson face masks, the pluses and the minuses of the various makes of gas, sectional operation tables, antiseptic protocols, padded straps and pillows for holding a body adrift from its will, the function and form of scalpels, catgut packs, the size of needles and the closures they might use—mattress or blanket stitches, or figures of eight around pins—the washing and polishing of organic sutures cut and spun from the intestines of New Zealand lambs. I learned it all.”

  “And did it help?” She wanted to touch him.

  “Not really. I still had to put myself in order, be ready to go under and not come back. They still cut out my lung. When they touched my heart and stopped it I still died.”

  “But then they brought you back again.” She wanted to touch him and break his concentration, allow him to be less alone.

  “Me, or somebody like me.”

  “No, I’m sure it was you.” It felt odd to say, too personal. “I mean, I’d hope it was you.”

  Nathan lifted his face to her with a sudden, hungry stare. “Then probably it was.” Then he gave her a tentative smile, slipped his look away, shielded her from it. Or shielded it from her. “Probably it was me. It’s, it’s . . . um . . . difficult to kill people, actually. I mean, it seems quite difficult to die.”

  “Do you try to die often?” She’d intended that as a kind of joke, but instead it sounded insensitive. “Sorry, that’s a stupid question.”

  “No. No, it’s not.” But something about his manner had retreated, cooled. “And really I wasn’t making myself clear. It simply surprises me sometimes that I’m not dead. I should have been killed in a car crash I had once and then there was the time when I ate untreated kidney beans and was terribly, ridiculously ill—could have checked out then. Or the cancer could have got me, or they could have failed to start my heart again on the operating table. There was a time I almost kind of choked . . . I’m actually rather used to preparing myself for the worst. And then it doesn’t come. At least, not in the ways I’d expected.”

  And now she did touch him. Standing and walking to him, she kissed the slightly downy, warm skin at the crown of his head and set one hand on his back, feeling the muscle beneath his T-shirt give a single tick. “It’s all right, though. Isn’t it? Nathan?”

  “Being alive?” He leaned forward, his voice thinning, turning frail, tense. “Oh, it’s fine. Just here, just now—it’s fine.”

  Mary felt a large breath lift and then leave him. She realised her palm was resting on his empty side.

  “Yes.” He reached, took her wrist and then tugged her round to face him. “Yes, it’s fine. But I was supposed to be cheering you up, wasn’t I?”

  “I think we’re both doing OK, in actual fact.”

  “Well, I suppose . . .” He formed a mildly anguished grin and then nodded, she thought, rather solemnly.

  I wish he wouldn’t be so uneasy—I don’t know many people who are better at being caring, fatherly. And I’m not . . . I don’t want . . . there’s nothing I want from him any more.

  Nathan made a little meal for her to pass the time, demanded she help him, picking the shells from slippery, hot boiled eggs, dyeing her fingers with beetroot blood, keeping occupied. They both made a show of eating, until the room burst in at her softly with the scent of Bryn. Her heart pitched while she breathed his hair, his skin, his washing, shaving, waist-coat and cotton warmth. His touch walked through her, caught her neck with the unmistakable dab of his breath.

  When she could move again, think again, she looked at Nathan. He was staring at her, swallowing, fingertips stalled in tearing forgotten bread. “Are you . . . Is it . . . ?”

  She let him stumble up and round the table, reach and hold her, the press of his arms, for the first time, uncomfortable, a poor fit—she wanted to be holding Bryn.

  “Mr. Lamb. Bryn. I’m his . . .” Calm as marble, the certainty settled in her—who she was didn’t really matter any more. “How is he?”

  Nathan watched her while she asked the question, the evening’s heat thickening round them, but leaving them both cold, almost shivering. Mary wasn’t sure, but thought he must feel—as she did—that this was a game they were playing, all pointless now, after the fact.

  “He’s quite poorly.” Another new voice.

  “What do you mean quite poorly?” As if the meaning wasn’t perfectly clear now, wholly translated.

  “I’ll go and fetch the doctor.”

  The distant receiver was clacked down, still live, and offering her the mumble of a corridor, soft-soled shoes passing, trolley wheels.

  After too short a pause, “Miss Lamb?” A man speaking this time. “Is this Miss Lamb?” He sounded English and young.

  “Yes.”

  “You were calling about Mr. Lamb?”

  “My Uncle Bryn. Yes.” She wanted to hear his proper name.

  “We think you should come in and see him. Tonight, or tomorrow if you could. You live on an island, I understand?” As if this were a self-indulgent and unsupportive eccentricity on her part.

  “I’ll come tomorrow. He’s quite poorly? Is that right?” Repeating the numb phrase, “Quite poorly.”

  “Yes. I’m—”

  “I’ll be there tomorrow, as soon as I can. Thank you. Can you tell him?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you.”

  So he can still be told, then.

  She jerked the next thought away, kept talking, “Give him my, you know, my love. And tell him I’m on my way. Thank you.” She didn’t want to say goodbye. “Yes. Thank you. Thank you.”

  This is what we do. This is what we do. This is what we do.

  Nathan piloted Nathan, propelled both himself and his daughter through the dumb cogging of events.

  He took them across to Ancw, the boat engine echoing wearily inside a thundery, bruised dusk. He would drive through the darkness, have her there by dawn.

  He hired Radio Stevens’s car, pushing an uncounted fist of notes into the man’s unwilling palm.

  “Nathan, I don’t want the money. You just take the bloody thing.”

  He was too far beyond himself to argue. “For petrol. Damages. For fuck’s sake, just take it. Be offended if you like.”

  Mirror, signal, manoeuvre. Remember the way it all goes.

  What the hell kind of cunting gearbox is this, anyway?

  He was glad of the sweating concentration that driving took. He hadn’t done this in years, had forgotten the patterns his body used to make, his natural seat position, the knack of keeping an uncramped grip on the wheel. Behind him, Mary lay on the back seat, perhaps sleeping. He hoped, sleeping.

  He wound across Wales and into England, searching out wider, faster roads, then cut south under a sudden break of blinding rain. For a moment he felt the car slewing across the road, while his one hand fumbled stiffly for the windscreen-wiper control. His scalp crawled with quiet alarm. A paired smudge of lights rose and closed ahead of him, temptingly.

  And then he thought of Mary, curled behind him, in his care, and eased his steering back to responsiveness, safety, set the wipers swiping at the viscous depth of water across his windscreen and was in command again. A shiver tightened in his spine, outside, the temperature falling in the dark.

  He drove out of the twenty-fifth of June and on into the twenty-sixth. He drove his daughter into morning: into the early, empty grip of that.

  “Mary? That’s us. Come on, love. Wake up.” He led her into the hotel—an ugly block of modern brick that loomed beside the shopping centre. “You get yourself fresh and then we’ll go.” Her face was sleep-creased. “I asked them to give
us rooms that were on the same floor.”

  As if that will be a help.

  God, Kiddo.

  We’ll be OK, we’ll be OK.

  Waiting for her in the foyer, he knew he should have brought a jacket. The morning was cold, almost blacked out with rain, no place for shirt sleeves.

  Then she was standing, ready, pale. He took her hand, delaying, although there was nothing to stop them leaving now, setting out for the hospital. “Do you want to phone first?”

  “No.” She kept hold of his hand, but started walking, “I don’t want to know,” leading him outside. “I just want to see him. That’s all.”

  The curtains were closed around one bed. Mary noticed that as she came in.

  The staff on the ward kept her walking from one nurse to another and then on, leading her down a corridor, saying nothing as they went, and letting her into the cream-coloured office, where the doctor sat and asked her to sit, too, and then quietly, precisely told her that Bryn was dead.

  But she’d known that already, because of the curtains, the way that they were closed around one bed.

  She’d forgotten how naked his pulse could be, so clear in his body when she held him that she caught his beat, raced with him while they lay, tight in one still ache, not moving, because this was all they wanted for now, all that they could stand. Mary and Jonathan, safe and folded away in her hotel bed. Quiet, for the sake of Nathan, asleep in the next room.

  “Mary?” Her name made another, softer rhythm in his torso and his throat, against her torso and her throat.

  “Sssh.”

  “OK.”

  She found herself tensing against him, as she gathered him closer, hard in, past the point where it hurt, and all the time she was thinking of Gofeg, the whole of Gofeg, halted as the hearse went by, and the sweep of Old Howells’s top hat as he bowed to the coffin and then walked ahead, his coat as black as dignity, as black as respect.

  Mary pressed her forehead to Jonathan’s, felt him breathe, allowed the warm shift of his leg, moving in between hers, while the hollowed house in Gofeg—Bryn’s house, left for dead—sang out all the way to Cardiff, found her, recited the list of furniture and the little time it took to clear: the bin liners heaped full of blankets, linen, clothes. And then there were the boxes and the cases full of everything: photographs, glasses, a cribbage board, the scent of one afternoon in a small, easy summer when she’d stared at the sweet peas in the garden until their colours fixed, stained everywhere she looked when she ran inside.

  And in her palm and fingers she still held the final, indelible touch of Bryn’s hand, laid flat on the hospital coverlet, cool and emptied of all memory. She thought she’d seen a little bruise behind his knuckle, but couldn’t be sure—the way the light fell had been strange, misleading.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Jack was confusing Nathan and Nathan was loving him for it, laughing really rather too much, because right now, any sign of life—no matter how unnatural—was exactly and positively what he wanted.

  “I’m talking about a new and anointed beginning for me and perhaps for you. My son.”

  “The only way you’ll anoint me will be under general anaesthetic.”

  Jack gave a sputtering giggle. “I wanted you to be the first to know. That’s all. And now your lack of proper reverence is wounding me to the quick.”

  “What on earth would be the proper degree of reverence to show? You—possibly the least God-fearing, most blasphemous, devotedly substance-abusing, manipulatively libidinous—”

  “Any cunt in a storm.”

  “Any port in a storm.”

  “Well, a good glass of wine does go down pretty pleasantly, too . . .”

  “Which just goes to demonstrate exactly what I mean—you are a completely and irretrievably depraved and sorry wreck of a man—and now you’re trying to tell me that you’ve just received your ordination.”

  “As a Christian minister. Yes. And I am now—for a moderate fee, paid in dollars by post—entitled to all the rights, privileges and benefits accorded thereto, including the possible foundation of my own, pleasantly informal, church, affording me easy access to the ardent supplications of as many tantalisingly vulnerable parishioners as my lower back can stand. The Church of the Second Coming. Hallelujah and Amen.”

  “Seriously, though, why’ve you done it?”

  “Because the aphrodisiac effects of my recent professional successes were beginning to wear thin. Or because I do have the fear of God in me somewhere and this seemed an appropriately threadbare response to it.” This having, perhaps, tickled a genuine nerve, he paused. “Oh, I don’t know. It amused me. And I have always wanted the Benefit of Clergy.”

  “That just stopped you being hanged if you could read and write.”

  “As good a reason as any. Literacy going the way it is—I can see it making a comeback. Or maybe they’ll start hanging people who can read and write.” He sniffed, straightened his diction. “I thought I might also call and ask how Mary is. And, by implication, how you are. Did you go to the funeral?”

  Nathan wandered to his kitchen window and studied the drizzle outside, the summer broken, something in the slant of the day to make him chill. “Yes. Yes, I did. And Mary got through very well. But then she had her . . . her . . .The boy she used to go out with, he was there.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well, there’s no need to say it like that. He did well, too.”

  The sly little fucker.

  I mean, he was concerned, I could see that. And he did seem genuine. But even so . . . the way that he touched her shoulders, said he was there to help. I don’t have to have liked that. I do not.

  “A touch of paternal disapproval in there, Nathan? Hm?”

  “I haven’t the right.”

  He had her. That last night in the hotel, I’d bet my lung he came back once I’d gone to bed and had her. The way she looked in the morning, the way she slept on the drive: there was something there as well as the sadness. And I could swear that I heard . . .

  Not that I’m saying it wasn’t the best thing she could have done.

  A good act on his part.

  A good act. Although if it was only an act I will, of course, kill him.

  Having waited for him to say more, Jack chipped in, “And since when did not having the right to feel something ever change the way you feel?”

  And then in the service station, when she cried and held me and cried again—she smelt of him, of what they’d done.

  “Nathan, you’ve gone quiet.”

  And I’d have done the same, in their place—just the same.

  But if that bastard Davies thinks he’ll take advantage, get his feet in under the table while she’s vulnerable . . . when he comes to Ancw . . .

  Pre-emptive anger churned at the base of his skull.

  He’d better make her fucking happy.

  “Nathan? This is your friend, Pastor Jack—speak to me. What are you thinking?”

  “That he’d better make her happy—this Davies bastard—that if he hurts her in any way I will peg him out in the field behind my house using the sharpened ends of his own long bones.”

  “But you didn’t tell him that?” Jack making an appeal on behalf of sanity—something new.

  “No, I didn’t tell him that. But I did . . . I did . . .”

  Jack allowed a tiny sigh to escape him. “But you did . . . ?

  “I did look at him. I did look to the back of his eyes, where all of the crap gets tucked away, the shiftiness—you know?”

  “Oh, I know. Yes, indeed.”

  “And I did ask if . . . I did say that . . .” Nathan’s throat was closing over, either with jealousy or fear. Or both. He bolted on: “I told him that lots of people were fond of her—very fond of her—and anxious that nothing should hurt her. Ever.” The plaintive dizziness of the moment was tugging at him again.

  “And . . . ?”

  “He met my eyes.” The bastar
d. “Said he understood.” The fuck. “Said he would never let anything harm her if he could help it.” The unmitigated cunt.

  “That’s OK, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sound as if you mean it.”

  “Yes.” Nathan could hear it in his voice—the sound of a man becoming superfluous.

  Jack nipped in gently, trying to calm the mood, playing the pacifying pastor—playing the friend. “How is she now?” Being the friend. “How’s Mary?”

  Nathan moved to the other window—looking out to see no light in Mary’s window, no chimney smoke. “She’s . . . I don’t know. She sleeps all the time, Jack. I go down and see her—take her sandwiches, I even make her soup, for Christ’s sake—and sometimes she’s up to eat a little bit, but most of the time she’s not.”

  “It’s shock.”

  “I know, I know. That’s the worst thing about it—I’m absolutely sure it’s shock, because we both take it the same way. You remember how I was after Maura . . . I don’t want her to have to feel that way.”

  And now that I’ve said Maura’s name, he’ll ask me because he can’t help it. And I’ll tell him, because I can’t help it either.

  “Was she there? Nate? That is, I’m assuming that she wasn’t, because you would have said, but—”

  “No. Maura wasn’t there.”

  “Her own brother’s funeral? And she didn’t go?”

  “Mary called and told her what had happened. I think they both agreed that it would have been hypocritical for her to turn up at the funeral when she hadn’t seen him living for so many years. And neither of them wanted the gossip it might have kicked up. And I think Mary wanted to be sure it was Bryn’s day and no one else’s. She wanted to be there by herself. And with this Jonathan . . .”