The boy still didn’t leave. The doctor thought he was probably kneeling, or maybe sitting on his heels out there.
The boy said, ‘I just come from the Rib Room. Charlie says you got to come out. Says like you need the money anyhow. Why don’t you come out? Though you got a chain and lock they’ll just axe it down like the cops done last time. Charlie says to tell you he got a hatchet, too. But it’s good for you to come out, not just lie smoking the old pot. Please, eh?’
Still she watched the doctor and the doctor watched her.
‘What you looking at?’ the boy asked her. ‘You wink at me, I go back to the Rib Room, tell Charlie alright. Eh?’
And she didn’t move. After what seemed like an hour the boy said, ‘Sometime you gotta come out,’ and she closed her eyes. Then, long moments afterwards, the doctor heard the boy move. He didn’t say anything more. Curiously he knocked and then his hand appeared on the door not much higher than the chain. He waggled it to and fro for a moment, not as if he were trying to break the chain, but as if he were sad: even despairing. He stood doing that for a long time, just as if there wasn’t anything else for him to do all day. Then, maybe quarter of an hour later he wandered away. He went downstairs like a very young child sent out to play on a cold, cold day: dawdling all the way.
Only when he heard the street door slam did the doctor relax a little. His shoulders dropped an inch. Even that amount of movement could be heard in the room. She opened her eyes.
The doctor closed his. Waited as long as he could bear it, then opened them. Her eyes were still on him. Again he closed his and pretended to sleep. When he next opened his eyes hers were closed. Wrongly he took her to be asleep.
The wound was very tender and there was a board that creaked. But the basin after all was just above his head. He only had to shift a foot sideways, then reached up to the faucet. He began to make the move, then froze when the board creaked. Her eyes were still closed. He shifted again, then began to push himself up. He reached a twisted kind of kneeling position and then for some reason glanced back. Her eyes were wide open. But his thirst was terrible, now that he was so very close. Turning away from her he raised his arm, turned on the faucet and let out a ‘Yes. Water. Yes.’ He turned it and turned it. There was no water. The tap didn’t work. It seemed to take him a long time to appreciate this. Then with a groan he dropped on to the floor again. He lay, too weak to cry. After a while he rolled over so that he could see her.
She was sitting up in the bed drinking the milk. One of the diamanté buttons had come away in her sleep. She had a nipple like a huge dark disc.
When she’d finished the milk she seemed to feel better. She took a mentholated cigarette. She kept the pack on the window sill and she put the milk carton and the Coke bottle there too.
The dust on the floor choked up the doctor’s nostrils and mouth, making his thirst more insistent. He kept fading in and out of consciousness now. But he came round as soon as she stepped out of the bed.
Grabbing his collar and shoulders with both hands she hauled him up the room, and as he was on his belly the pain was appalling and hot as if he were being disembowelled with white-hot instruments. She left him between the door and the bed. She went around the corner of the cubicle to the water-closet.
The Coke and the milk were not far out of his reach. But it was necessary for him to haul himself up as far as the bed. He didn’t really have the use of his right arm. He felt compelled to keep his hand and wrist over his wound, as if that held him together. But he grabbed the chain on the door with his left hand and pulled and struggled, and in a quick second, found himself on the bed. He had no time to pause, but even as he struggled over to the sill he thought how futile, how pathetic it was that he should go through all this for a drink when so obviously he was going to die anyway.
He didn’t reach the carton or the bottle of Coke. She took him by the ankles and pulled him back so he was now half on and half off the lousy bed. He was gripping with his elbows because he thought he couldn’t bear the pain of another fall. She had a tremendous strength. She seized him under the armpits and in one movement she hauled him on to the bed where he remained in a sitting position. She brought him water in the milk carton. The water came from the cistern above the water closet. Then she patiently, methodically dressed herself while the doctor, shivering with pain, began a story. He didn’t know why he was telling it. And it took him a long time in the telling.
He said, ‘I was in hospital. I was a patient in the same hospital where I was taught. I lay there quite ill, in bed.’
She didn’t seem at all interested.
‘A boy, just a child, can’t have been more than nine or ten which is a kind of heartbreaking age, this boy was in the next bed to mine.’
‘He’d been burnt quite badly. A week or two before. So one night he starts to cry. One Sunday evening. I asked him why he should cry. He said, “Things are crawling out of my bandage.”’
She went out, not long after that. She never showed that the story had affected her. Really, the doctor couldn’t believe that she spoke any language, except that she looked at him sometimes, very slowly, almost, almost smiled. She went out in her jeans and shiny boots and plastic coat. And the doctor lay back with his eyes shut and still didn’t dare to look down at his wound. That little boy’s whimpering and his sweetness and life’s appalling cruelty would never leave him, he thought.
He woke to find her immediately in front of him, kneeling on the floor. When he opened his eyes her huge yellow orbs were about two inches away. She woke him that way, by just staring him awake. Maybe she wondered if he were dead.
Her expression gave him no clue towards her feelings. But she had been and bought various things from the drugstore. She had a basin and some disinfectant and a sponge and a bandage and lint. She’d laid them all out on the filthy floor and seemed to have no idea whatsoever what to do with them, now. It did not occur to the doctor, until very much later, what a risk she must have taken by going into a shop in this district where a white man was known to be hiding and wounded; by daring to buy these things.
Together, so to speak, they stretched out the body of the doctor; which meant pain.
She hadn’t bought any scissors. He asked her, snipping his fingers in gesture because he was never confident that she understood him. She looked at his fingers and thought. She grabbed his hand in her big hand and looked at it as if it were new to her. The doctor’s was a good, sensitive hand.
Then she put it to one side again as if it bored her and she wandered over to the other side of the room.
The doctor who was now laid out, knew that the straightening process had once again opened the wound. He couldn’t move. He just managed to tip his neck. He saw that she was idling about, smoking a cigarette. Evidently she’d brought some provisions, too. And a paraffin stove, which was good news. It was already lit.
The doctor said, ‘I’m bleeding, I think.’
She was opening a tin of peanut butter. She paused. Then she screwed it up tight again. She moved to the basin and picked up a rusty razor-blade there. She took a long drag at her cigarette, then stubbed it out. She removed her satin slippers. She gave one to the doctor and opened and closed her mouth indicating that he should bite hard.
He did not at once obey and as she began to slice away the cloth of shirt and trousers which was congealed with blood he let out a cry. She slapped his face. The slipper fell inside the bed against the wall. She burrowed underneath, knocked some of the dust off it and gave it back to him. The doctor stared at it. He stared absently at the toe of the satin slipper. He saw it was marked. Looking closer he rightly recognised blood. He supposed it to be his own. She picked up the rusty razor-blade again. It was as if, until this moment, she had decided to leave everything in the hands of God. Now something had made her decide to cope: maybe the maggots on the boy’s burn.
But she didn’t find it easy. The doctor could tell that from the sweat on her brow. He hardly tr
usted his judgments about her, she was always unpredictable, but he thought she perhaps was squeamish about the sight of blood.
He still thought that as she cut and tugged and tore, and pulled the cloth away. He had to chew the slipper all the time now as she took the sponge. He thought about the blood: how quickly it congealed. For a moment he dared to look down. There were no maggots. She shoved his face back, with her big hand.
She seemed very puzzled about the bandaging once she had laid the lint. But eventually she decided that the only possible way was round and round his waist. He arched his back a little. It took a long time but in the end the pain was easier. She had remembered to buy a safety pin.
When she had finished, she smiled; the first time he had ever seen that huge, generous golden grin: literally golden, thanks to the gold-capped teeth. She seemed most pleased with the final pin. She seemed pleased with herself. She didn’t smile at him, but at the bandage and the pin. She walked away and lit another cigarette. She smoked mentholated cigarettes.
The doctor thought that that knife, that little knife, couldn’t have touched his liver or he wouldn’t be alive still. It must have missed it by a fraction of an inch. Now maybe he was bleeding internally, but there was a chance of life.
She pulled a blanket over him, then put on her plastic coat and walked out.
He heard a Sinatra tune, played on some scratchy disc. When it stopped there was a short pause, then it began again: ‘Come Fly With Me’. And began again and again.
She was smoking pot. He was on the end of the bed. Her toes were under his thighs; he was her hot-water bottle. Even if she saw him stir and recognised that he was awake, it seemed she wasn’t interested. It was dark. She looked so contented that he dared not disturb her. He could see out of her window. The sky was quite clear. There was a moon with a frosty ring around it. He stretched to look down at the telephone kiosk. The disc ended. Then started again. They might be nearing dawn. It was very cold.
He drifted. Then the record stopped without starting again. It was a little bakelite machine that worked on batteries. She’d finished her smoke.
Quite suddenly he said, ‘I used to give my daughter Lilian candies.’ He had no idea what prompted him to say that out loud just like that. Some complicated defensive system; some instinct about salvation.
Then he shut up again. His mind flitted from childhood to the early days with Lilian. He didn’t seem to have the concentration to stick to any memory or problem for more than a few seconds at a stretch.
She was moving her toes; moving them persistently, pressing and knocking but not quite kicking him. She didn’t put them anywhere near his wound. She began to move her feet more impatiently, insistently, disturbing him.
He said, ‘You’ve got to have a blonde daughter.’
The toes stopped. He took one. She buffeted his leg with her feet again. He nodded. He said, ‘I’ll tell you about Lilian.’ The buffeting stopped. He couldn’t remember anything about Lilian, suddenly. But he tried.
He said, ‘A man who loses a wife and gains a daughter has got to hate his daughter or else love her too much. To spoil her. That’s what you’d think.’
He took a long pause. Then he said, ‘But that leaves out the daughter. It isn’t just up to the man. I got a good one. I got one that didn’t want to be spoilt. Maybe that’s because she has yellow hair and a very fine straightforward kind of face. With my eyes, exactly my eyes. Lilian never needed me, she just liked me, loved me. Lilian isn’t selfish, never was. She’s self-whatever it is. She’s composed. She’s self-sufficient. She never got in my way. Some folk say we lived in parallel, that’s not true. We love each other. We’re a good-mannered father and daughter. She knew how her mother made me the loser, so she didn’t have to ask about that. Once I started to tell her how maybe it wasn’t all her mother’s fault, she just put her hand over my mouth. We’re the best-mannered father and daughter. We didn’t go in for big scenes. She’s never seen me cry and I hardly ever saw her. We lived in the doctor’s house. She was very good with the patients if they rang. What a blessing Lilian was. Is.’
The doctor had run out. She waited for a while. Then she suddenly lifted up her knees and, with one big shove, pushed him right off the end of the bed. Two minutes later she was snoring, asleep.
He thought, If I could find that padlock key. It’s late now. Must be the middle of the night. Only the sounds of the war in the distance. The kiosk was almost exactly opposite, not more than fifty yards. He could make that. While she snored he sat up. He looked around the place. Where would she keep the key? Maybe in the pocket of her jeans or the pocket of her coat? Maybe under her pillow? Maybe on the sill?
He started to creep around. He didn’t find it in any of these places. He found something else on the sill. He found a newspaper and something about the headline caught his attention. The paper was three months old. Looking down the front page he saw how she’d marked a photograph with this big jumbo biro pen, a kind of joke pen she had. The picture was of some kind of disturbance or riot and it was in front of MISTER CHARLES’S RIB ROOM written up in lights. She’d ringed a girl fighting with the cops. The face was unrecognisable, half hidden by the police truncheons raining down on the victim: but the girl was wearing a white plastic raincoat.
Searching again for the key, even daring to put his hand under the bolster, the truth didn’t occur to the doctor. Was the padlock self-locking? There was no key. Neither, now, was there a lock.
She never said a word. Occasionally she’d hum that Sinatra tune in a weird way of her own. But she had a tongue. She could laugh, too. She had the strangest sense of humour.
Waking one morning – and the doctor never knew whether it was two days or three days after – he felt altogether different. He felt stronger and it took him a moment to understand why. The sun had broken through the clouds outside. There was a noise of people and cars in the street. She must have opened the window. And as he lay watching the dust in the sunbeam that fell on to the bed and floor he felt a persistent pressure against the back of his neck. He moved a little then again felt the tickle. He didn’t think what it might be. He was warm in the sun. To begin with, he had thought she was more like an animal than a woman, she slept so much, night and day, but now he had quite taken to her ways. He too slept most of the time. Then again there was a pressing against the nape of his neck.
It was her toe. Her great big toe. He looked beyond it, over the mountains and forests of the great feline body, some hilltops in the sunshine, some valleys in the dark; he saw she was leaning on one elbow, grinning at him. He remembered now. They had eaten well the night before. She had gone out and bought hot dogs and some Mexican muck and bread and milk and beer. Now she was playful. But she was always dangerous. Sometimes, as they slept, he would move towards her, because he was cold, in his sleep. She more than once shoved him right out of the bed.
Again the toe wriggled and invited games. She pushed his nose and began to chuckle when he turned away and rubbed it with his hand. The toe pushed at his shoulder. It was a powerful great toe. So he caught hold of it and tickled the sole of her foot until she began to laugh. He twisted her other foot and she rolled over, laughing. She was more or less naked in the sun. She tried to get away from being tickled now. But the doctor knew the pressure points and the nerve centres. They moved round the bed in a childish, slumbrous, ridiculous kind of way, and the doctor was calling her names, in the way that a lion-tamer called a lioness all sorts of names. The message lay in his tone which went with the lazy morning sunbeam.
At last he put his thumb in that junction of the nerve that lies between shoulder and neck. The doctor’s hands were delicate, but they had strength. That was when she really began to laugh and without her saying a word the doctor understood why, completely. She really could not believe that this old invalid could hold her down. She tried to move out of his hold and he laughed at her. He was applying pressure only with one hand but he still had her face pinned to the awf
ul filthy striped bolster on that buggy bed. She moved her hips and legs and arms, without ever striking near his wound, but still she couldn’t fight free. Eventually she became so weak with laughter that he was holding her only with his thumb.
At last he let her go. She was determined that he should teach her where exactly to apply the pressure for this old, old hold. So the doctor became the victim, and she laughed as much again when she found she could pin him down with one finger. When she let go she took hold of his hair affectionately and shook his head about. For an instant he wondered if she had broken his neck. Then they had another big meal. The doctor developed a great taste for beer. He found some dollars in his pocket and told her to buy more, but she didn’t take his money. And the doctor asked her, ‘Why the hell are you doing this?’ At that she’d turned away.
It was the pressure point, strangely, that led to the only bad quarrel. Lord knows how many days later. They had eaten many more sausages and in the corner there were piles of beer cans. This time, it was later at night, maybe after too many beers, when she started fooling around. She pinned his head not on to the blanket but on to the floor, and it hurt. He tried to break free, but she applied the pressure much more strongly, and the pain increased. Like a boy, the doctor suddenly grew angry, and tried very hard to get free. Possibly she knew that he was in earnest and for some contrary reason continued to apply pressure.
He managed to catch her forefinger and sharply, very sharply bent it back. Not only did she release the pressure, she let out a cry and fell back in the corner by all the cans. Still angry, and swearing at her, vindictively, he slapped her face, to warn and punish her. Bitch.
She held her head to one side, as if waiting for him to strike again. She remained absolutely still. He felt afraid. He withdrew a step but did not apologise. He stood up and stared down at her. He was stronger, now, but not that strong. Besides, she still only had to call out the window and he would be dead. He knew that.
Household Ghosts Page 43