Sex and Death

by Sarah Hall

  The next morning, I went back to the hospital. As soon as I walked into his room, I saw a satisfied expression on my uncle’s face. This time I was the one who asked the questions. I asked him to tell me his story, starting with the time he lived in my grandparents’ house, what his childhood had been like and his time at university. His story did not contradict the one I had heard my family tell, but he added a dose of ridicule and a sense of humour that made it far more enjoyable. In his version, family dramas became comedy and the reactions of relatives a faithful caricature. In almost twenty years he hadn’t forgotten any of their personalities, and could mimic them uncannily, making me laugh out loud several times. The only one who escaped his barbs was my mother. That week I found out about a few family secrets: of my aunt Laura’s first love, which had led her to seek an abortion, of my father’s obsessive jealousy, of the mysterious death of a neighbour, which some people blamed on my grandfather . . . If they all had some dark episode in their history, why was he the only exile?

  I asked him in the most tactful way I could and he replied that he had been the one who chose to cut all contact so as not to feel judged by each one of his acts and choices.

  ‘But don’t you miss the support of a family?’

  ‘If I liked families, I would have started one myself, don’t you think?’

  My eyes must have grown wider than expected because my uncle burst out laughing.

  ‘Don’t make that face! One day you’ll see that I’m right. You’re not like them. I’ve known that ever since you were very little.’

  His comment sent a shiver down my spine. I was flattered that Frank thought me smarter than the rest of our relatives, in whom I too could see countless defects, but I was also afraid to be different. Even though I liked literature, even though I was attracted to transgressive, eccentric types like him, I did want to get married and have children. I worried an awful lot about never achieving these things and, in particular, about finding myself in hospital one day, without the support of anybody.

  ‘So you already knew me?’

  By way of a reply, Frank took my hand. It was the first time he had touched me – at least in my memory – but in spite of the circumstances, I felt in his warm, protective palm an indisputable intimacy. Somewhere, probably in one of those medical magazines that floated around in the hospital and to which I had become instantly addicted, I had read something about the trace left in our memory by the people we have contact with in our first few years of life. Imprinting, I think they call it. According to the article, family ties are based on this initial physical impression. We stayed like that for a few more minutes, his huge hand enclosing mine. Not even the presence of the nurses made us let go of each other. To me it was a silent pact, the tacit promise that I wasn’t going to leave him there to his fate.

  It was the start of the weekend. Even with accompanying Verónica as a pretext, it was going to be tricky to slip out of the house without anyone noticing. In any case, we had a wedding to go to on the Saturday and a dinner party to host on the Sunday.

  When I told him this, my uncle asked me to at least try to call him on the phone.

  ‘I was all right before you showed up. Now, after seeing you every day, I’ve got a feeling I’m going to miss you.’ I assured him I felt the same way.

  That afternoon, before going back to the university, I asked to speak to his doctor. The specialist wasn’t there at that moment, but the doctor on duty explained a few things to me: he’d had a tumour in his brain for several years and there was no longer any possible treatment for him. They were administering palliative care so that his final few days wouldn’t be so bad.

  I had to hide in the toilet so Verónica wouldn’t see me crying. My friend had been trying with all her might to stay afloat while her mother lay dying – what would she have thought if she’d seen me crying my heart out for a man I barely knew?

  The time I spent in the company of my family yet far away from him seemed endless. During the wedding, I had to try hard not to laugh as I remembered the imitations he’d done of them all. I would far rather have been in his hospital room with its smell of disinfectant than listening to those dull, repetitive conversations. I thought of how different all of our family celebrations would have been if he had been present. The reasons one falls into disgrace with one’s own family are strange. Over the years I have seen all kinds of cases and I’ve come to believe that they are never related to moral questions or principles, but rather to internal betrayals, perhaps invisible to everyone else, but unforgivable to the clan they belong to or, at the very least, to one of its members. On Sunday afternoon, as I helped my mother prepare the food, I tried to bring the subject up.

  ‘What did Uncle Frank do to make you stop talking to him?’ I asked, trying to play down the importance of the matter. Her answer was brief.

  ‘He acted like an asshole.’

  She was in a good mood that day and it reassured me that she had taken my question lightly. Almost immediately afterwards she left the kitchen to go and welcome her guests.

  When I got to the hospital on Monday morning, I found Frank with a ventilator in his mouth. I tried to hide how upset I was. I made a joke about the device and he smiled beneath the mask.

  That was the day we began the custom of watching films together on his computer. First we put on Blow-Up, and then The Best Intentions. I sat in the visitors’ chair and, from there, we held hands again, touching each other in a totally relaxed way. They were casual caresses, almost distracted, on the nape of the neck or along the arms, but to me they were delicious. We would spend hours like that, touching the other’s skin in silence, while on the screen a story unfolded to which we hardly paid any attention.

  Every afternoon, on the return bus journey, I gave Verónica a run-down of these visits. I told her of the affection I felt for my uncle and gave her a detailed progress report of how close we were growing: ‘Today he brushed his fingers against my lips’; ‘today he just touched my ear.’ One afternoon, however, my friend let me know she was not on my side at all.

  ‘You don’t seem to have a clue what you’re doing,’ she said, her voice sharp. ‘You’re running a real risk. You’d be better off not coming to the hospital at all.’

  It was shortly after this, perhaps a day or so later, when Verónica unexpectedly opened the door to our room to announce that her mother had lapsed into a coma. She was sobbing more than howling and, although it was completely justified given the circumstances, I couldn’t bear for Frank to see her like that. And so I suggested we leave the room and go down to the cafeteria.

  Once there, she ordered a coffee and let the cup grow cold in her hands. I, meanwhile, gulped mine quickly down, eager to return as soon as possible to the intensive therapy ward, but not quite daring to leave my friend on her own. Neither of us said anything. She stared at her coffee, I at the visitors coming and going through the main doors of the hospital. In the midst of this multitude I suddenly made out my grandmother, accompanied by my mother and my uncle Amadeo.

  ‘They’re going to Frank’s room!’ I said to Verónica, desperately. ‘How did they find out he was here?’

  ‘I told them,’ she confessed, without looking up. ‘Forgive me, but I thought you were in danger.’

  I almost smacked her.

  ‘Go home and pretend you don’t know anything. Do it now while they’re going up the stairs.’

  Instead of taking her advice, I ran over to catch up with them. As soon as the lift doors opened, I heard my mother’s angry voice in the distance, but her words were completely indistinguishable. Once I was in the corridor where Frank’s room was, I pressed my face up against the door to listen, and what I managed to hear was the following: ‘. . . twenty years and when you find her you try and do the same thing to her.’ At that moment, a nurse came past with a trolley full of medicine and gave me a knowing smile. My uncle’s reply was drowned out by the clinking of her medicine bottles. I wondered what family secrets ca
me to light in that ward every week or, alternatively, would remain hidden forever. I couldn’t wait any longer and opened the door with no thought to the consequences. As soon as I was inside a pristine silence fell, only faintly interrupted by the heart monitor, which made clear Frank’s agitation through its fluctuating display. The air in the room was unbreathable. There was pain in my mother’s eyes and humiliation in my uncle’s face. I felt bad for them both.

  Without adding a single word, my mother took me by the arm like when I was a little girl. I felt the pressure from her tense fingers on my skin, the same fingers that had fed me, dressed and undressed me my whole childhood. No ideology, not even the tenderness my uncle brought out in me, could resist her touch. Out of all the imprints of my childhood, hers was without doubt the strongest. I let her lead me downstairs and then out to the car park where she had left her car. My grandmother and Uncle Amadeo remained in the room. I wondered what it would be like for Frank to have his mother’s hands close by.

  I spent that night wide awake, watching as the rain grew heavier, then lighter. I must have got up at least ten times to see if my grandmother had come home. On one of these occasions, it occurred to me to go into the study and look for the photographs I had seen a few weeks earlier. This time I didn’t stop to look at the childhood pictures. I took the images that had been sliced into and spread them out on the carpet like someone about to piece a jigsaw puzzle together. My task was to imagine or guess at the missing pieces. Unlike my grandmother’s, my parents’ bedroom was at the other end of the house. The risk of them catching me in the act was minimal. What I hadn’t thought of was that, like me, my mother couldn’t sleep that night, either. When there wasn’t room for one more photo on the floor, I looked up and saw her watching me in silence from the doorway. Her long nightdress that fell to her ankles made her look like a ghost. I had to make an effort not to cry out. Her bloodshot eyes revealed she’d been crying recently. I kept quiet for a few minutes to see if she felt like giving me some sort of explanation, but my strategy didn’t work and I chose not to push it. Outside, the rain had stopped. My mother sat down next to me on the floor and helped me to gather up the photos. When we’d finished, we put the box back in its place and settled down on the sofa to wait in silence for the sun to rise. I looked sideways at my mother, wrapped up in her own thoughts. She must also have had lots of questions with no answer, which, out of respect for me, she chose not to formulate.

  The next morning I went to the clinic without spending even an hour in the lecture theatres at the university. My grandmother let me in, her face distorted with tiredness. I asked her to leave us alone for a minute and, to my surprise, she accepted wordlessly. Frank was semi-conscious. With a hesitant gesture, I put my hand under the covers and took his, searching for some kind of answer. All that I found in his skin that morning, however, was a cold, motionless piece of flesh, an entirely unrecognisable feeling.

  PORTO BASO SCALE MODELLERS

  Alan Warner

  Porto Baso Scale Modellers – all three of us – were out the retail park and vectored for home, motoring up the slow lane of the autopista to the very familiar sound of King Crimson’s Larks’ Tongues in Aspic – stuck in the CD player of Norman’s old Peugeot since summer 2010.

  Clear of Benidorm, Norm was insisting, ‘Bob Fripp. Real honest-to-goodness, dynamic front man; his uncle Alfie was last of the 39ers you know.’ Norm’s fingers scampered for the solitary CD case then quit. ‘You never tire of the classic Crimo.’ He turned his smile aside for the briefest instant from the carriageway.

  I looked out to my right. ‘You’ve mentioned this.’

  Henri is from Luxembourg and didn’t leave it long enough before asking from the back seat, ‘May we please change over to radio please?’

  I can report our en-route weather conditions for that one-hour journey home were highly favourable; clear alarms of full summer in the wild rose of the motorway central reservation. For a week roaming, balmy winds had been rampaging across the north country then down through our region; high cirrus bandings were fixed in the blue sky like the white streaks on fatty bacon. But the tags of chop on the sea were gone, so the day had turned still and warm – the car air con fixed at 1. Right out over the Med, a solo contrail dragged across the clearing roof of the afternoon.

  ‘What equipment’s that?’ Then Norm immediately answered himself, ‘Airbus 320.’ His chin had sunk, his eyes looked up under his ginger lashes. He never wore shades.

  ‘Not a 737? The squat fuselage.’

  ‘That is an Airbus, my friend.’

  ‘Henri?’

  We heard Henri unclip his safety belt and shift across the back seat in order to peer upward. ‘Where?’

  ‘Starboard, two o’clock.’

  ‘That’s a three-seven.’

  Norm used his irritated voice. ‘That’s an Airbus.’

  ‘It is the Boeing. Put on some Rayban.’

  There was a tense pause. ‘Well then, Henry.’ (Norm always anglicises the name.) ‘800 or a 900?’

  ‘Cannot tell unless you bring up flightradar24 on your phone. Probability would say an 800. Commercial traffic is boring today.’ He shifted across and put the seatbelt back on. Then as a bitter nostalgic coda, ‘Not like the seventies.’

  Norm grunted. Reluctant agreement.

  I asked the old plane-spotter’s classic, thinking Henri might never have heard it up in the Benelux realm. ‘What kind of hot snacks is the trolley serving then?’

  Henri took in a breath and I thought he was going to offer some accurate suggestions, but he held an obscure peace.

  Passing down to our right, with its white cells of new moorings and erect phalanxes of yacht masts, was the huge new supermarina, recently dug out the edge of this country. Aligned with us, the sun caught each hammered wavelet and fired it back like ten thousand polished dustbin lids.

  The speed limit was 120 but Norm held a steady eighty, until every possible variation of vehicle seemed to have overtaken us. He buzzed the Peugeot off at toll 63, each of us thrusting respective widower, bachelor or divorcee pot bellies upward, groping down into our pockets for loose change.

  We crossed through the terraced orange groves behind Calaborir, the cypresses black in the late afternoon high above the wide bay, then descended through Villafeliz into Porto Baso. As is usual on the return from our adventurous little jaunts to the Benidorm retail park, I had phoned ahead on my ancient Nokia and we parked in beside The Brave Gurkha.

  *

  I myself keep the www.portobasoscalemodellers.net website up and running: spry and of-the-moment.

  Not to boast, but we have all the latest links to the official Airfix, Revell and even Humbrol model paint websites; all slapped up there smartish by yours truly, especially when prodigious developments transpire: such as when Airfix took the Armstrong Whitworth Sea Hawk FGA6 out of 1:72 and did a limited edition in 1:24! And not just in 1959–60 Fleet Air Arm colours of 806 Naval Air Squadron out of RNAS Brawdy either. You could have painted that big sucker in RNHF colours out of RNAS Yeovilton, if that really tickled your fancy.

  Now we at PBSM are always striving to boost membership and to bring in a somewhat younger constituency – younger than ourselves that is – to draw the youth off the Facebook, get a set of assembly instructions into their left hand and a modelling airbrush in the right. The male youth that is.

  As well as patience, dexterity and a need for sobriety, scale modelling gives you a sense of history that didn’t do us any harm when we were younger blokes. Did it now? But this is why I don’t want photos of Norm, Henri or me up there on our website, brandishing our latest completed aircraft – one look at us, smiling by the barbecue with our bellies, our baldness and our bad shirts, and any potential young lads would scarper.

  I’m not being stuffy and all Daily Mail, but I don’t expect any Spaniards to join up with three old expats like us – there’s this bloody language barrier thing, though Henri has the lingo off – more or l
ess; your standard life-is-for-living Spaniard has no intrinsic hatred of the well-made aero scale modelling kit. Admittedly, the Spanish air force never fielded a very interesting native fleet, unless you give a little credit for the civil war’s old Polikarpov I-16, with, hopefully, a natty Popeye insignia painted on its upper rudder. But certainly any younger blood of any nationality would be very much appreciated by us in Porto Baso Scale Modellers – some spry fellow who could throw himself with real enthusiasm into Gulf War One/Two aircraft – or even these bloody drones – who would want to build a 1:24 drone? Search me. Yet several kit companies do offer them. It takes all kinds in the universe of scale modelling.