The Turnaround

by Mark Timlin

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘The operation was not a success. She knew the risks, and without it…’ She didn’t finish her sentence.

  ‘Is she…’ I didn’t finish my sentence either.

  She guessed what I was asking. How many other people hadn’t finished that sentence in her career? I wondered. ‘No, but the prognosis is not good.’

  ‘Can I see her?’

  ‘Of course. That’s why I’m telephoning. She’s asking to see you.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Whenever you want. There are no visiting hours in these circumstances.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes. The sooner the better, I feel.’

  ‘Will she recognise me?’

  ‘She hasn’t lost her mind, Mr Sharman.’

  ‘I’m sorry. She didn’t tell me anything about it, you see. It was pure coincidence that I got in touch with her last week.’

  ‘I see.’ But I’m sure she didn’t.

  ‘I’ll be there in thirty minutes.’

  ‘Good. I’ll tell her.’

  ‘Is she going to die?’ I asked her. I sounded like a kid. Thank God she didn’t make some smart reply. I couldn’t have handled that. In fact, her tone softened.

  ‘I’m afraid she is.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘I don’t know. But soon, very soon.’

  ‘I’m on my way,’ I said, and put the phone down and went and threw up. It made me feel better, but not much.

  I dressed quickly and raced Cat to the front door. I broke the speed limit to Waterloo. The ward was on the top floor of the tower block at Tommy’s. Wanda was in a small private room. The curtains were open and I looked down and saw the sun reflected on the surface of the river. Wanda was in bed with tubes coming out of her nose and mouth. She was wired into a machine that bleeped discreetly and more tubes were plugged into each arm. All the flesh had gone from her face and her skin was the same colour as the sheets and her eyes were closed. She was wearing a scarf turban-style around her head.

  ‘Wanda,’ I said. My voice sounded thick and too loud. She opened her eyes.

  ‘Nick, I’m glad you’re here.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘What could you have done?’

  ‘Something, surely?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  There was a straight-backed chair by the window. I pulled it close to the bed and sat down and touched her hand.

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ she said. ‘I must look awful.’

  She did.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I haven’t looked in a mirror for ages,’ she said. ‘I was looking so old and my hair started to fall out.’ She pulled up the scarf and I saw that her hair, once so thick and shiny, was lying thin and lank and damp on her scalp. Seeing her there, nothing like the woman I’d once known, I realised that I didn’t care what she looked like – I just felt sad that I was with possibly the best friend I had in the world, and she hadn’t even told me she was sick. She probably thought that I couldn’t have cared less. I held her hand. ‘You’re beautiful,’ I said, and meant every word.

  ‘Thank you, Nick. I’m grateful even if I know it’s not true.’

  I squeezed her hand gently. ‘Yes, it is.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I don’t even know what’s wrong with you,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not much of a detective. Didn’t you ask the nurse?’

  I shook my head. ‘I came straight in here.’

  ‘I got a pain,’ she said. ‘A bad pain. Months ago. It wouldn’t go away, so I went to the doctor. He sent me here. They told me I had cancer. They cut off my breasts.’

  She started to cry. ‘Anyway, apparently they found a lot more of the same. All over. Every bloody where they looked. The operation was a waste of time. I wish they’d just left me whole to die in peace… ’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know…’

  ‘Don’t be embarrassed, Nick. You don’t have to be embarrassed.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘And don’t be sorry.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, let me be something!’

  ‘That’s better. That’s more like the Nick I know.’

  ‘And who’s the Nick you know exactly?’

  ‘That’s right, Nick. Let’s talk about you.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘There you go again.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Nick. I shouldn’t take it out on you. It’s not your fault.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ I said.

  She smiled and for the first time she was the Wanda I recognised. ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ she said. ‘How’s your girlfriend?’

  ‘She’s fine.’ There was no point in going into details.

  ‘That’s good. Are you happy?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘I am.’

  I looked at her.

  ‘You don’t believe me?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘No, you don’t. But I am. At least I know what’s in the future. Most people don’t.’

  ‘What’s in the future is you out of here, and us going out for a drink.’

  It was the wrong thing to say.

  ‘No, Nick,’ she said softly. ‘No getting out, not for me.’

  I started to argue but she shook her head. ‘You don’t have to pretend,’ she said. ‘Although I’m grateful for that too. I must be going soft in my old age.’

  ‘What did you do with all those bloody cats?’ I asked, changing the subject.

  ‘They’re all right. I found every one a home before I came in here.’

  Typical Wanda. Always thinking of someone or something else first.

  She asked me if I was working. I told her I had been. She asked me about the case. I think she just wanted to take her mind off her pain. I told her a bit about the Kellermans. Not a lot. Not even as much as I’d told Fiona at the Thai restaurant. Then I told her I’d knocked the enquiry on the head. I didn’t tell her all the reasons.

  ‘You didn’t look very hard, did you?’ she said.

  I shrugged. What the hell, I thought.

  ‘Those poor children,’ she said. ‘They didn’t deserve to die. No matter what anyone had done, it wasn’t their fault. You were their last chance.’

  ‘Last chance for what?’

  ‘Last chance for peace.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Wanda!’ I said. ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Maybe it is.’

  ‘You shouldn’t give up, Nick. Life’s too short.’

  Maybe she was right. Maybe she wasn’t. She lay back and her eyelids fluttered and she was asleep.

  I sat with her for the rest of the day. She dozed and woke and we talked. About nothing mostly. Just after four I had to go and take a piss and smoke a cigarette. She was asleep. I gently disengaged my hand from hers and went and found a nurse. She made me a cup of tea and I used the loo. I drank the tea and went and stood by the lifts and smoked a bunch of cigarettes, one after another, and looked through the high windows over London. They went round three sides of the building. It was a panoramic view.

  The sky was pearly lavender and the sun was setting over Battersea with a golden crash. A sliver of moon, the shape and colour of a fingernail cutting, was floating over Big Ben. The nurse came and found me and said that Wanda was getting worse. I went back into the room. She was awake again. Her eyes were bright and wet and her hands were claws that I held gently until she pulled them free and flapped them in front of her face and pulled at the bed covers and her nightgown to get at the wounds that hurt her so. Once or twice she looked at me with recognition and opened her gummy lips, and her tongue, white and swollen from the illness and the drugs that had been pumped into her, flicked over them. On those occasions I touched her mouth with a damp cloth which she sucked greedily but never spoke another word.

  Outside in the corridor someone was whistl
ing The Star of the County Down. It’s the kind of tune you’d recognise right away, even if you didn’t know its name and you were tone deaf. Whoever it was, was a real whistler and he’d chosen the right tune. As he went about his business he trilled and changed tempo, and as the afternoon and Wanda slowly died I sat next to her bed and held her hand and listened to that tune. I’ve never heard anything so beautiful or so mournful before or since. And as the tune and her spirit floated out over the river under that fingernail of moon, I realised she was right. The Kellermans deserved better than I’d given them.

  I think she must have been dead for ten minutes before I knew she was gone. I could still feel the warmth in her skin but it was only the temperature of my hand radiated into hers. Finally I realised she was breathing no more, and called for the nurse with a voice that broke from bass to contralto. I saw the nurse through a veil of tears that I wiped away with the back of my hand, but no amount of wiping could stop them for long.

  I felt a cold lump under my breastbone, and every time I think of Wanda now that cold lump comes back like a memory of pain I never felt properly.

  I’ve cried for her since many times. But I know that my real time of crying is yet to come.

  But at least I was there when she died. I was trying to give her some comfort. I was holding her hand when she finally couldn’t take any more pain or suffering and her body closed down. Thank God I was. Some poor bastards aren’t there when the ones they love die, and they have to live with that forever.

  14

  The staff came and took over and I was redundant. I got Wanda’s belongings from one of the nurses. There wasn’t much. A small suitcase containing a few clothes; a wash bag; her handbag containing her address book, her purse, her house keys and a note to me.

  The nurse told me there would be a post mortem. I told her I knew.

  I took Wanda’s stuff to the pub over the road. God knows how many walking wounded the barman had seen in there, fresh from someone’s deathbed or the morgue, looking to drown their sorrows. I would have bet I wasn’t the first by a long way, and I sure wouldn’t be the last. The boozer was half empty and I took my glass to a table and opened the letter.

  Dear Nick,

  If you read this, then I’m dead. And as I probably am, then you’re reading it, if you know what I mean.

  Poor Nick, I wonder if I can get through all this without telling you what’s happening, or if I’ll crack at the last minute and try to get in touch with you. That’s in the lap of the gods and the hands of the surgeon. Same thing these days, I often think. And lately, Nick, I think too often, I think. Sorry, I’m rambling. Everyone tells me he’s brilliant (the surgeon that is) but some things you can’t cure by cutting lumps out.

  If I don’t see you, or can’t, I want you to take care of everything. There’s enough money for the funeral, you know where. I want to be cremated. No big deal. No flowers. All donations to the cats’ home.

  My cats are taken care of, or maybe you already know that. This is getting confusing.

  Anyway, whatever. Goodbye and love,

  Your friend,

  Wanda

  I was glad she’d wanted to see me, even if she had waited as long as possible to let me know.

  That was the Wanda I remembered.

  I sat and finished my drink and smoked a couple of cigarettes as it got darker, then I took her few things and left.

  I stopped off at my place and let Cat in, fed him and let him out again. He’d be all right. I collected a change of clothes and a toothbrush and went to Wanda’s house in Brixton.

  It was fully dark by the time I got there. The house was terribly tidy and cold, even on that mild evening. I turned on the central heating. I’d never seen the place that neat when Wanda was alive. There were always cats all over the shop. The place still smelled of them, but you soon got used to it.

  I walked through all the rooms turning on the lights as I went. It reminded me of the house in Crown Point. Lately I seemed to be doing a lot of walking through cold, lonely houses. Dead people’s houses. I wasn’t getting used to it.

  The fridge was empty, turned off, and the door propped open. I shut the door, turned it on and went out to get some milk. The corner shop was still open. Thank God the people didn’t recognise me as a friend of Wanda’s. I didn’t want to start explaining things just then.

  I went back and made some tea and re-read her letter. I went to ‘you know where’, a loose brick in the old scullery. If I’d told her once, I’d told her a hundred times that it was a stupid place to leave cash but she’d never listened. It didn’t matter much now. Under the brick was a thousand pounds in fifties and her will in a plain envelope. There was a covering note telling whomever it concerned that the original was lodged at her solicitor’s, and their address. Every base covered. She’d left everything to me. The lot. The house and its contents, her personal jewellery that was in the bank for safe keeping, and an unspecified amount of money. Her solicitor was the executor.

  I put the grand in my jacket pocket. She’d get a good send off with that. Then I realised that I didn’t know any of her other friends. In fact, thinking about it, I didn’t know much about her at all. She never talked much about her past. I used to pry, but she’d get the hump and in the end I left it alone. I got her address book out of her bag. It was jammed packed with names and numbers of all sorts – hotels, shops, newspapers – with names scribbled next to them that could have meant anything. There were lots of individual names too, with what I assumed were home phone numbers, but whether they were business or personal I had no way of knowing. Only one name meant anything to me apart from my own: John Rice, her ex-husband. That much I did know.

  There were two numbers listed for him, one marked ‘office’, one marked ‘home’. Both were 071 numbers. Central London, or at least what Telecom arbitrarily considered central London to be. I dialled his home number and a woman answered. ‘Is John Rice there?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Can I tell him who’s calling?’

  ‘If it means anything, my name’s Nick Sharman.’ Obviously it didn’t to her. ‘I’ll get him for you, Mr Sharman,’ she said. She was gone for less than a minute when the phone was picked up again.

  ‘John Rice speaking,’ an anonymous male voice said.

  ‘My name is Nick Sharman,’ I said. ‘I was a friend of your ex-wife’s, Wanda.’

  ‘So?’ His voice was cool and it annoyed me.

  ‘So, I was a friend because she’s dead.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard,’ I said. ‘She’s dead. She died a few hours ago. I thought you might be interested.’

  He ignored the last sentence. ‘How?’ he asked.

  ‘An operation that went wrong.’

  ‘Christ, I had no idea.’ And I felt like a shit for giving him a hard time. If she hadn’t told me, why should she have told anyone else?

  ‘Nor did I,’ I said.

  ‘Christ,’ he said again. ‘Are you… ?’

  I knew what he was getting at. ‘No,’ I said. ‘A friend.’

  ‘What’s your name again?’

  ‘Nick Sharman.’

  ‘She mentioned you. She liked you.’

  ‘I liked her.’

  ‘A lot of people did. Years ago that was our trouble. I never believed she wasn’t interested. I made a lot of mistakes.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said. ‘One was not seeing her for months and not knowing she was ill. She’s been ill a long time apparently. She kept it a secret.’

  ‘She didn’t tell me either,’ said Rice. ‘We spoke on the telephone sometimes. She called me at the office. My wife didn’t understand.’

  I bet you say that to all the girls, I thought.

  ‘Look, I’d like to see you,’ I said. ‘I promised to arrange the funeral but I don’t know who to ask. Her address book is thicker than the Gutenberg Bible.’

  ‘That was Wanda,’ said Rice. ‘Everybody’s friend.’

  ‘But nobody’s sweet
heart.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. Let’s meet. When?’

  ‘Tomorrow lunchtime?’

  ‘Fine. Come to my office.’ He gave me an address in Wardour Street and I jotted it next to his work number in Wanda’s book. I wasn’t going to throw it away.

  I slept in her bed that night. It wasn’t the first time, but the only other time I hadn’t known anything about it. The sheets smelled of Wanda. I liked that.

  I was up early and back home to change, and feed Cat again. Then I went to the undertakers. It was one of the most miserable experiences of my life. The boss was OK, a young bloke in a black suit, white shirt, black tie and black shoes. I explained what had happened. He told me the death certificate would probably take two or three days to come through, what with the PM and all. I told him I wanted him to take care of everything. All I had to do was choose the coffin. He showed me a book full of coloured photographs of them. I picked the most expensive of the bunch. It was the least I could do. I gave him my Access card and he filled out a slip and I signed it. I told him what Wanda wanted. He told me he’d handle everything, and that I should phone back later. I thanked him and left.

  I got to John Rice’s glass and chrome office where he was something in PR at ten to one, and he took me to a pub in Golden Square where we fought an engagement for a corner table and won. He went through her book indicating people he thought should be invited to the funeral. We had a couple of drinks and, although I thought he was a nice guy and I liked him, he was slightly awkward with me. I guessed we’d meet again at the funeral and that would be that. I left him and went back to Wanda’s and phoned the undertaker. He told me everything was copacetic and the funeral would be in one week at Streatham cemetery. I thought about the Kellermans again.

  I stayed on the phone and went through Wanda’s book from A-Z. It was not the most pleasant of jobs. When I heard myself repeating the story for the twentieth time, and in a strange way beginning to almost relish it, I had a stiff drink.

  By the evening I’d reached the majority of people and told them the time and place of the funeral.

  15

  A fter all that, I phoned Fiona. I hadn’t seen or spoken to her since she’d walked out on me the night she’d found the photographs, although I’d thought about her constantly. Especially when Wanda had died.