by Sara Alexi
‘Well, he should rest. He’s lucky, sometimes it can be very difficult to reduce the uneven ends of the bone so that they can be immobilised and fixed – or the other complication is if the bone fragments lacerate blood vessels and muscles. That’s quite common, but Cyril’s been very lucky.
Saabira tries not to visualise all the nurse is saying as she continues.
‘It’s rare that a spiral fracture is so clean, especially in adults. He’s had a local anaesthetic, it was immobilized, cast put on it. Done!’ She makes it sound quick and simple. Maybe it is. Saabira finds herself oddly interested, and makes a noise to indicate this, which encourages the nurse, who is happy to go on.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘it’ll be about four to six weeks to heal. Then I suggest swimming would be a good aid to his cardiovascular fitness, or running in chest-deep water. After that he’ll need a weight-bearing programme in the physio department.’ She takes a breath. ‘But that’s down the line a way. First thing is to get him home, make him feel comfortable, good nutrition.’ She seems friendlier now, and beams at Saabira.
‘I can cook for him.’ Saabira grabs at the familiar ground, which acts as an anchor in this huge, unfamiliar clinical environment, full of medical terminology and procedures she does not understand. It gives her some stability.
‘Well, there we go then. So we can discharge him. Have you a car or do you need an ambulance to get him home?’ The nurse seems very pleased.
‘I have no car,’ Saabira says wondering what taking care of Cyril really involves. The nurse marches off. Has she just become responsible for his welfare? But then, why not? She and Aaman’s mother saved Hanfi’s life, he has said so often. He said so just about every time they ate.
‘Badla.’ Hanfi would address Aaman’s mother by her given name. ‘You and Saabira saved my life. I would have starved to death!’ he would say, laughing as he dipped his roti into the spicy dishes.
‘It is true,’ Aaman’s grandmother would agree, the skin hanging from her tricep quivering as she reached for a naan. ‘He was as skinny as a forgotten goat.’ Her familiarity with Hanfi was born of their mothers growing up together, of them playing together, growing side by side, attending each other’s weddings and living next door for a lifetime.
The brief memory is chased away as the nurse returns.
‘Right, the ambulance has been ordered and will be here in half an hour, by the side door there.’ She points. ‘We’ll need your address.’ She crosses to his bed. ‘Cyril. Cyril. Come on. Wake up. Your clothes are all there. The ambulance is booked to take you home and your friend is here to help you.’ The nurse is very efficient as she pulls curtains around the bed.
‘Archie?’ Cyril asks, blinking.
The nurse comes out from behind the curtain. ‘I’ll start the discharge papers,’ she says and walks briskly out of the ward.
‘Hello. How was your day?’ Aaman asks Saabira, stepping into the house and pulling the front door shut behind him. He kisses her briefly on the mouth.
‘I found Cyril.’ Saabira makes a conscious effort to keep emotion from her voice.
‘Oh good. What is the amazing smell? You have made your aloo gobi again?’
‘Yes, I found fresh coriander when I was…’ But she does not complete her sentence. ‘About Cyril.’
‘Yes, he is well I hope?’ Aaman puts an envelope down on the table and takes off his woollen scarf and Saabira helps him off with his big winter coat.
‘He is not well.’ She looks over to Jay who is on the sofa playing with Cyril’s identification tag from the hospital.
‘Oh dear?’ He follows Saabira’s gaze, and then goes over to kiss his daughter. ‘What have you got there?’ He takes the plastic name tag from her. ‘What is this?’ he asks Saabira, but he looks at Jay and does not seem to be able to resist kissing her again. She giggles and grabs for the name tag.
‘It’s Cyril’s identification tag,’ Saabira says. ‘From the hospital.’
‘Hospital!’ He straightens. ‘He is so unwell?’
‘He’s had a fall, and broken his leg. He cannot get up for a while, maybe.’
‘So why do we have his hospital tag? Is he still in the hospital or is he home?’
‘Neither. Aaman, I have taken the liberty of providing our neighbour with the care he needs. I hope I will have your approval.’
‘I don’t understand.’
A thump of something falling upstairs creates a tiny cloud of dust that falls like wedding confetti on their hair. They both look up.
Chapter 32
Cyril has been holding his breath, straining to hear the conversation between Saabira and Aaman. Using just his arms he tries to ease himself to the side of the bed to pull open the door so he can hear more clearly. In his struggle his wrist gives, his elbow shoots out at an angle and he knocks the lamp off the bedside table.
‘Oh, no, no, no,’ he says to himself and leans over further to pick it up. If he bends to one side from his waist, without moving his legs, he might just be able to grasp it. But his judgement is off, the ends of his fingers make contact and the lamp rolls away. The sheets slip against the mattress under him and, knowing it is going to happen and knowing it is going hurt, he slides from the bed and falls heavily on the floor.
‘Awwwwwwww.’ He cannot hold back his yowl of pain. Then someone is taking the stairs two at a time, the footsteps thumping on the wood. They are coming. With the pain still coursing up his leg he pulls the sheet off the bed to cover the pajamas they gave him at the hospital.
‘Oh goodness gracious me!’ It is Aaman. ‘Saabira!’ he calls, but she is just behind him.
‘Oh Cyril. Oh my.’ She is crouching beside him, trying to work out what is to be done. His cheeks burn but the throbbing in his legs is more urgent. Saabira’s face is so close to his, Aaman is also squatting now, on his other side. They both seem distraught at his predicament. The concern is too much, he is unused to such consideration and tears threaten to fall. He wants to be home in his own bed, with no broken leg and his dogs around him.
‘My dogs.’ He says it out loud.
‘Your dogs are fine. You didn’t lock the back door, and I have fed them.’
‘Saabira, put your arm under.’ Aaman grips Cyril under his left arm. ‘And we can lift together.’
Cyril closes his eyes. He cannot bear to see their faces strain as they struggle to put him back on the bed. He has never caused such a fuss in his life. His cheeks are flushed and he would like the window open. He is burning up but at least the throbbing in his legs is subsiding. The tears that roll down his cheeks feel cooling.
‘Ah, there you go.’ Saabira pulls the sheets over him, and Aaman lets go and picks up the light. Once the lamp is on the bedside table he draws up a stool from behind the door and sits next to the bed. ‘So, my friend,’ he says as if nothing has just happened. ‘You have had a bad accident, I hear.’ He indicates Cyril’s leg. ‘Well, if anything is going to get you better it is Saabira’s cooking.’ Aaman pats him on the shoulder. ‘Oh, and before I forget, I found a letter out on the street addressed to you. I think the wind must have blown it from your door. I will bring it.’ The letter is crisp and white. Letters seem very official when they are like that. If they are left out a few days in the drizzle, they become old and soggy and it does not take much to tread them into the ground or toe-flick them out into the gutter. They look like nothing then. Just debris. But when they are still crisp they command his attention even though he will not read them.
Saabira intervenes.
‘You will not be able to read it with your broken glasses. Would you like me to?’ Her bangles slide down her arm as she takes it from Aaman.
He would like to say no. The few letters Archie read for him brought only bad news. But the way she offers is so kind, to say no might sound like he is not grateful. He is grateful, he is very, very grateful. He nods without meaning it and immediately wishes he hadn’t.
Aaman is looking at the boxes of pai
nkillers on the bedside table as Saabira carefully splits the envelope open.
‘Dear Mr Cyril,’ she begins. ‘I wonder why they don’t address you by your surname?’ Cyril shrugs. This is one of those questions that has come up before but he has never known what his surname is and, as no one has been able to tell him what it is, it has become another area in his life that has just been left, leaving him feeling abnormal and sometimes uncomfortable. Like the time Archie took him into town, telling him that he needed to open a bank account, for example – that had felt so humiliating. The girl helping them looked at him as if he was stupid.
‘How can you not know your own name?’ she asked, pencilled-on eyebrows rising so high that little fine lines creased her tight, smooth skin. Archie stepped in then and called him Cyril Sugden, using his own surname. Cyril liked that. It was as if they were brothers. But the girl said that they couldn’t just make up a surname and Archie said that he would see about that and the thrill of feeling like he was Archie’s brother faded.
Saabira takes a breath and continues. Cyril just knows it is going to be bad news. ‘Following numerous complaints, the Yorkshire branch of the Health and Safety Department have conducted investigations into the alleged health hazards present in and around the house you are currently occupying …’
He cannot help it, it is the way it is written, the official way it is put, that makes his ears seal over. He doesn’t understand it and it makes him feel a little shaky. He would like to hide under the covers for a bit but feels he cannot do this with Saabira and Aaman in the room.
Even Saabira sounds like she is drowning as she struggles with the long words. Aaman’s expression tells him that it is bad news and, as she comes to the end – ‘Regards, Dawn Todman’ – his hearing seems to return. Saabira lowers the letter from in front of her eyes.
‘That is Monday,’ she says.
‘What is?’ he asks before he can stop himself.
‘The date they say your house must be cleared out and cleaned by. For the inspection.’
There, Cyril thought – the proof : letters are always bad news. Archie got a letter after the visit to the bank that made him swear, and he spent several days writing and receiving letters until that last one. That one brought a smug look into his eyes, and he announced ‘Ha!’ as if he had won something but Cyril had never found out what.
‘That is quite unrealistic, can they do that? Surely they have to give more notice than that?’ Aaman says.
‘Maybe, but where did you find this letter?’ Saabira asks.
‘It was just luck. I found it blowing down the street.’
‘It is dated a week ago, but maybe we could contact them and tell them the letter has only just arrived.’
‘Do you think it would make any difference if we called whoever wrote the letter and explained that Cyril has broken his leg?’ Aaman is straightening the arms that hold the lampshade on the bedside light. They must have bent when it fell. He switches it on and off, but the light doesn’t work. ‘We need a new bulb here – can you remind me?’ He is speaking to no one in particular.
‘It is from Dawn Todman,’ Saabira says as if she has a bad taste in her mouth. Cyril can understand why she says it like this.
‘Who is she?’
‘She is someone who will not care if my leg is broken.’ Cyril says.
The room is silent. For a moment he thinks he might have said the wrong thing. Saabira and Aaman are both looking at the floor.
‘Right.’ Aaman is the first to speak. ‘Well, if you would feel comfortable with us doing it for you Cyril, I have the weekend. We could get a lot done on the house in that time.’ Cyril notices the look Saabira gives her husband, her eyes all soft, her pupils growing large. It is the way Coco looks at him when he returns from work and she wants to lick his face but he won’t let her.
‘I am not physically strong but I can clean,’ Saabira says.
‘And we can take it in turns looking after Jay!’ Aaman sounds excited, as if he has just invented a game. Saabira smiles.
‘You see, it is no problem,’ Saabira says, confidence growing in her voice. ‘If you would feel comfortable with us doing it for you, of course. If there is anything that is not recyclable or suitable for burning in the fireplace, or we think it is personal, we will ask you what we should do with it.’
He wants to say yes. He wants the house as it was when Archie was there, with swept floors, hoovered carpets, and clean curtains, and the fire burning in the evening and Archie in his chair.
His head starts to nod backward and forward, tapping at the back against the headboard. Saabira puts a pillow behind his head, taking care of him. His head cannot rock now.
The images in his head are of his front room, one minute clean and tidy and Archie there, and then no Archie and all the things he has collected, the dark and the mess. The clean version is more like the hospital, the one he just stayed in as well as the one he lived in with Matron Jan. The dirty version is like the flats he and his mum called home when he was a child: dark, damp, and cramped. Out of nothing, a ball of emotions in his chest gathers and solidifies, and expands rapidly, surging into his veins as adrenaline. How dare she leave him! Her suicide shouted out that he was not worth living for. What a cow!
His breathing comes rapidly. Is it okay to call her a cow? She is his mum. It is wrong to say bad things about her. But is it? He was desperate for her love. Yearningly, head-bangingly desperate. She never gave him it – never! She saved it all for his dead brother and then she took it to him with her own death.
Yet here is Saabira, someone he has known only such a short time, a neighbour, a woman from another land, a faraway place, who has had her own losses and sadness, and she is showing love to him, showing him kindness and concern.
He looks up at her.
All that sadness she had when she lost her baby – she was so sad she sent her husband away to make sure it didn’t happen again, to stop herself having another child. If she could have her thinking so twisted by the sadness, maybe his mum did too. Maybe his mum was not to blame. Maybe the untidy, dark, miserable rooms they lived in suited the sadness, and she had no choice. Maybe she never had a choice of whether to live or not. Maybe she didn’t kill herself; maybe it was the sadness that killed her.
He looks over at Aaman.
Saabira’s husband knows him even less than Saabira. Yet he has been nothing but kind and gentle. He was the one Saabira took her sadness out on. She did to Aaman what his mother did to him and yet Aaman has forgiven Saabira, and understands it was the sadness.
‘I would be very grateful if you would clear out the house.’ His voice speaks before he feels ready. But he agrees with himself. He would be very grateful.
Chapter 33
Saabira can hear Aaman through the wall, whistling as he works. She has just been up to give Cyril a cup of tea and promised that his dogs would get a walk. She might take them out with Jay but wonders if they will follow her. If they need to be on a lead she will not be strong enough.
Jay is enthralled with their latest game. They started taking dried beans out of a storage jar and then putting them back in, but at some point the game changed and now they are making sounds in the jar, listening to how their voices change, and Jay is laughing away at the echoes.
‘Eeee!’ Jay sings into the jar.
Aaman appears through the back door, his hair white with dust. ‘Do we know if Cyril is happy for us to take the porch off? It is going to be tricky taking out some of the larger stuff.’
‘If you stay with Jay I’ll ask him.’
With the teapot in one hand she heads up the stairs and pours more tea for Cyril, who thanks her again and again for her kindness and says Aaman can do just as he pleases.
Aaman does not stay for tea. He has on his old trousers, an out-of-shape T-shirt and the gloves he came back from Greece with. He is full of energy and wants to expend it, so no sooner is she back down the stairs than he is out the back door.
Mid-afternoon, Aaman is still singing and clattering next door. She takes a bowl of kadhi and rice up to Cyril but he is asleep so she leaves it on the bedside table. Aaman comes round half an hour later and he washes as she readies the table.
Jay is now hiding beans under a cushion and then pushing the cushion off and finding them again. Saabira wonders for how many days she will be finding escaped beans.
‘How is it going?’ she asks Aaman.
‘Sitting at a desk programming all day is very interesting but it is nice to be active. But I think it must be my fate to be always cleaning up other people’s messes.’ He does not refer to his time in Greece, when he helped clear Juliet’s garden, with sadness. Jay totters over to him and then squeals as he swings her around. ‘But I am now down to just carpets.’ He stops swinging their daughter and cuddles her.
‘What do you mean?’ `She serves him and he sits with Jay on his knee.
‘Well, I was getting rid of stuff that was broken and irreparable without thinking of the whole room, just the individual pieces – but when I stopped to look around there was nothing left. There is only a three-legged chair and a small highly polished table. Apart from those two things it is just carpets.’
‘Carpet,’ Saabira corrects him.
‘No, carpets.’
‘Now what do you mean?’ She sits to eat with him.
‘The carpets are the source of the smell. At some time in the past the dogs have made their dirt where they please. The amount that is fresh is probably since Cyril had his fall, but the rest looks very old, dried, encrusted.’
‘Stop! This is not helping my digestion!’ Saabira pauses with the kadhi on a piece of roti halfway to her mouth. Aaman is helping Jay dip a piece of roti into the flavours on his plate.
‘No, listen, there is more. It seems that, at some point, before all the furniture was put on top, the solution to this problem has been not to throw out the carpet that was soiled but to lay another one on top.’