Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam

by Peter Goldsworthy

  ‘This is absurd,’ he said. ‘We’ll have other children. We can have another baby straight away.’

  ‘It’s not us we’re talking about,’ Linda said.

  He lay in silence, rebuked.

  ‘It’s Wol,’ she continued. ‘I can’t bear to think of her going away — alone. It’s as though we’ve cast her out into the woods. Abandoned her, like something in a fairy-tale. And we won’t go with her.’

  She paused; the idea was growing, taking more definite shape: ‘I want to go with her,’ she announced, more definitely.

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more about it,’ Rick said.

  ‘It’s late — we’re both exhausted. In the clear light of day you’ll realise how crazy this is.’

  ‘Just think about it,’ she urged. ‘That’s all I ask.’

  He rolled away from her, to the far side of the bed, out of contact.

  ‘No,’ he said, angrily. ‘I won’t. Not ever. I don’t want to hear about it again.’

  10

  As the child’s immune system failed, she was fed an exotic daily salad of antibiotics to prevent infection; these in turn suppressed her appetite, she lost weight steadily. She rapidly came to resemble the snapshots of her forgotten foster siblings in Bangladesh and Ecuador: all skin and bones, her eyes sunk deeply into their dark sockets. Her period of self-isolation had passed, she now preferred to sleep in her parents’ bed each night, between them, facing her father — which meant that they slept even less themselves, anxious not to squash her frail bird-bones, or bruise her paper-thin skin. Often Linda would leave father and daughter together, sneaking off into Emma’s room, or into Ben’s room, spending the night squeezed even more uncomfortably into the narrow bed of a boy who was as unwilling as ever to be left out.

  And as Rick lay there, sleepless, his daughter’s small milky breath puffing rhythmically into his face, the realisation grew: that if their lunatic plan was ever followed through, if someone did choose to go with her, of course it would be him, not Linda.

  Night-thoughts, certainly, bred of insomnia and despair — but he was beginning to suspect that despair was the default state of the human mind, if normally hidden from the mind by lack of imagination, or the balms of warmth and food and love.

  This, at least, was clear: the child would want him with her at the end, it was his presence that would most reassure her.

  He decided, for the moment, to keep this realisation to himself.

  Eve Harrison was visiting the house daily at the time, checking Emma’s temperature, listening to her chest, peering into orifices. And still pricking her thumb-pads every second or third visit, siphoning tiny drops of blood

  ‘Does she have to go through this?’ Linda asked, although the needles seemed to bother her more than her stoical daughter.

  Several times Eve urged hospitalisation, but both parents had decided that Emma would die — although they still couldn’t bring themselves to utter the blunt word — at home, in a familiar world, believing it would be her own wish.

  Home had one other advantage, unspoken: although no decision had yet been made, and their lunatic plan had not been discussed again, both knew that it would be impossible to carry out in hospital.

  ‘How can hospital help her?’ Linda demanded of her friend.

  ‘She may need a transfusion. Depending on the blood count.’

  ‘Couldn’t she be transfused at home?’

  Eve was reluctant to agree, but it was the reluctance of fixed habits: ‘I suppose I could arrange a home-care nurse,’ she conceded.

  This was not enough for Linda: ‘I can do whatever needs to be done — I’m sure I can. With your help, of course.’

  ‘It’s a 24-hour job. When will you sleep? She will need constant nursing attention.’

  ‘We’ll work in shifts. I’ll sleep when Rick is awake.’

  ‘A night-nurse, then. Someone to keep watch overnight. Please, you can’t do it all yourself.’

  Rick, listening to the debate, intervened: ‘We don’t want to share the remaining time with strangers, Eve. Surely you can understand that?’

  Eve, ever practical, quickly realised that to argue with these stubborn parents was a waste of time. A crash course in basic nursing procedures followed, under her supervision. True to her promise, she left a stash of pain-killing liquids and suppositories, and several syringes and ampoules of stronger stuff, with written instructions on dosage schedules. An impromptu lecture on the properties and uses of each drug was followed by a kind of brief oral exam, or viva — delivered with Eve’s characteristic efficiency. This in turn was followed by a practical tutorial: she arrived one morning with a bag of big navel oranges, and had her two mature-age students slipping small butterfly needles through the skin of the fruit, getting the ‘feel’.

  ‘There should be no need for these,’ Eve said. ‘But just in case. If she bleeds, I can instruct you by phone on what to give.’

  Having passed the orange-test, they moved onto human flesh: jabbing needles into each other’s veins, repeatedly, under Eve’s scrutiny. There was an odd relief in this, a mix of slapstick comedy and pain, that provided, temporarily, a release from their preoccupations.

  ‘Stick to the dose I’ve suggested,’ Eve advised, leaving. ‘These are powerful drugs. Too much could be fatal.’

  Rick wondered for a moment if she were suggesting the exact opposite, subtly: offering them a final pain-relief for Emma — a final safety net. Although of course Eve had no inkling of the full extent of their hidden agenda.

  An agenda that was still half-hidden, also, from each other. Their minds were moving in parallel: along true parallel lines, never touching. Rick, especially, refused to admit that he was still giving the matter thought. At times the plan seemed outrageously stupid — even the simple sums were so wrong. At other times it seemed inevitable, logical — even if it was the logic of despair.

  Finally, discussion could be deferred no more: an oblique mention by Linda began a series of escalating arguments. Soon they were debating, whispering heatedly, each night in bed — and thinking up counterarguments in silence all day, with Ben at school, but with Emma, too fragile now for school, always hovering at brink of ear-shot. At first these discussions were in subjunctive mode, preceded by an ‘if’ or a ‘should’; this kept the unspeakable hypothetical, and permitted a discussion of the plan — The Plan — as if it were science-fiction, or a kind of algebra which dealt with symbols rather than with real people and real events, yet still allowed a plan of action to be fleshed out, and modified, and tested.

  ‘If we told her,’ Linda said, ‘that you were going with her, then we could never change our minds. We could never take it back. We would have to be absolutely certain before we could tell her.’

  Behind these abstractions there was a mounting urgency, for time was short. Emma, too, appeared to sense this. She began sleeping poorly; refusing to go to bed, to any bed, even to her parents’ bed. She actively resisted sleep. Rick and Linda would wake at night to hear her padding about the house, or softly singing songs in the dark bed between them. Once they were woken by the dazzle of the bedlamp to find her propped up between them in bed, reading.

  ‘I don’t feel tired,’ she explained.

  When pressed to turn out the light and shut her eyes, she burst into tears: ‘What if I don’t wake up?’

  ‘One day, Wol,’ Rick told her, ‘you will wake up and you will be in heaven. You will close your eyes, here on earth, and when you open them you will be somewhere else.’

  They lay together in bed, the small girl cuddled between her parents. The emotion of the moment stripped bare the cliches he was speaking, freed them from trite associations. They were, simply, the only words that could be uttered.

  Rick’s heart pounded, he prepared himself to speak again, to force out the next words, knowing that once they were uttered they were a promise, binding and irrevocable. As he opened his mouth, Linda suddenly reached over and gripped his arm.
>
  ‘Don’t,’ she said, ‘Please. We need more time to think it through.’

  11

  From that night every light in the house was left burning — especially Ben’s bedroom light. But Emma’s fear of the dark, also, flushed her parents’ discussions out into the open, into the light, from behind the cover of hypothetical ifs and shoulds.

  ‘We need counselling,’ Linda stated. ‘That we could even contemplate it — don’t you think we’re a bit mad? That we need some sort of help?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean — yes, maybe we are mad. But no — no counselling. They’d take her away from us. They’d take them both from us.’

  ‘But we’ve lost perspective. We’re irrational — so caught up in this we can’t see the wood for the trees.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the best perspective.’

  To some extent the two sides of these debates were interchangeable: pro and con arguments were rotated between them. The deeper disagreement was not between the two parents, but within each of them.

  ‘It’s such a weight,’ Linda said. ‘If we could at least talk it over with someone. With friends.’

  ‘Which friends? Who could we possibly burden with this? I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.’

  In this fashion, passed back and forth, like a shared load, too hot or too heavy to handle alone, it was slowly decided. When their daughter next burst into tears, and refused to risk sleep, and Rick opened his mouth, Linda held her peace, allowing him to speak.

  The words still took some time to emerge, they seemed stuck to the dry roof of his mouth.

  ‘When you die, Wol,’ he said. ‘Whenever it is, I will be there with you. I am going to die before you.’

  Her tears had vanished; she watched him, curious.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I can make myself die,’ he told her. ‘With an injection. I’m going to die first, so I’ll be there waiting for you.’

  And so there could be no turning back, no chickening out, no abandoning her if she went first. This also had been planned — that she was to see him dead, to know him dead, before she died herself.

  A calm gravity returned to her face. She asked a few further questions — technical questions — then within minutes her wide Wol-eyes closed, and she was sleeping, snuggled against her father’s still-pounding heart. He realised that she took it for granted that he would choose to die with her; it was a wonderful comfort to her, yes, but his intended sacrifice — a sacrifice of everything — meant nothing else to her. He saw no selfishness in her reaction, not even the normal self-centredness of a child, but an entirely reasonable interpretation of events to an intelligent six-year-old mind: if heaven was such a wonderful place, why wouldn’t he choose to come too?

  His own view of the road ahead was a little more terrifying. And yet — at the same time, once the decision had been made, and was locked in place — oddly exciting. A far, far better place? He doubted it. Whatever faith he had once had now seemed shallow: a routine, social faith. He felt he was going nowhere, just ending — but perhaps those last few days, and especially nights, of peace, would make it worthwhile. And perhaps, just perhaps …

  ‘You know the cemetery’s a bit like home to me,’ he whispered to his wife, in bed.

  She set aside the book she was reading, and looked at him, disturbed, uncertain of his tone: ‘Rick — don’t be morbid.’

  ‘No — I’ve been there before. As a boy. I once spent a Saturday night in the local graveyard — camping with a friend.’

  She listened, reluctantly. Once such a story would have surprised her, now it seemed little more than tame; she knew that both of them had depths that were darker and weirder than had once seemed possible.

  ‘It was his idea,’ Rick was saying. ‘We each told our parents we were staying at the other’s. We took our sleeping bags, and lay there most of the night, among the gravestones, telling ghost stories, trying to terrify ourselves.’

  She shivered: ‘You must have been crazy.’

  ‘It was a dare — you had to do it. But it was an anticlimax. Suddenly it was morning — we must have slept — and nothing had happened. Of course we were heroes at school — we made up all kinds of horror stories. But deep down I was disappointed. It was the end of something — the end of the tooth-fairy. There just wasn’t anything out there — no other dimension. There were no ghosts.’

  12

  Ben was told of the plan — after further intense discussion — the following night. Both parents were unsure what he would make of it, had even worried that he might demand to go too, jealous to the end of the way his entire world had come to orbit another, different focal point: his younger sister.

  To him, their explanation was subjunctive again, peppered with ifs and maybes and even with the outright lie that the decision was not yet made, and what did he, Ben, think?

  The boy moved to his mother’s side, and held tightly to her, and watched his father for some time, for once silent and undemanding, unable to fully grasp what was being said to him, but sensing its gravity. Rick prattled on, talking far too quickly, telling his son that one day they would be together again, all of them, that until then he would have to look after his mother, that he would be the man of the house.

  The boy stared at him, uncomprehending — perhaps, even at nine, disbelieving. Explanations that had sounded profound the night before — talk of journeys, of waking in heaven, of future meetings — now sounded banal, or untrue, or even meaningless. Not for the first time, panic overwhelmed Rick, a wave of terror at the enormity, and absurdity, of the scheme. For the first time also — as his son watched him, suspiciously — he wondered also at the long-term effects it would surely have on the boy. Agitated, emptied of words, he left him with Linda, and swallowed a sleeping pill that Eve had prescribed for both of them some months before — knowing that he wouldn’t sleep, but that at least he might be calmed. Later, in the silence of the very smallest hours, as the rest of the household slept, he rose from his bed, and spent much of the night writing a series of letters to his son: letters to be opened yearly, posthumously, on each successive birthday. He began with simple declarations of love — messages to a little boy from his father in heaven — then for the later years a gradually more complex mix of explanations and exhortations, and, finally, requests for forgiveness. He tried to recall his own states of mind, his own level of development, at various ages — ten, thirteen, sixteen — and tailor his messages accordingly. This was not as difficult as it first seemed: the chronology of the letters, splashed here and there with tears, followed, simply, the evolving complexity of his own thoughts as the long night progressed. The earlier letters to a younger Ben were drafts for the more subtle and sophisticated versions that the boy would open as he grew older.

  You are 18, it’s been a year since we last talked, and this is the last time we will talk. I hope these letters have not been a burden to you — hauntings from an old ghost. You are nearly as old as I was when you were born, writing this, and it would seem presumptuous to offer any more guidance …

  Sometime before dawn he heard Linda rise and begin moving about in the kitchen. He finished the last letter, and joined her outside on the back terrace. She was sitting at the garden table with a pot of coffee and two cups, clearly expecting him.

  He seemed to have spent all his agitation of the night before; extruded it, poured it into that pile of letters. The outside world was starkly defined: sharp silhouettes and edges, a world of knife-edge clarity. An early bird glided between trees in a neighbour’s backyard; the cool air was so still that Rick imagined he could feel the trace of its passage: a faint stirring of wings, a spreading ripple.

  Perhaps the tranquillity of the morning seduced them, lulled them into the belief that their plan was not as difficult or as stupid as it had often seemed. Sitting there, holding hands, sipping coffee as light slowly flooded the eastern sky, they decided, almost matter-of-factly, as if scribbling a dental appointment
in a diary, on the date.

  13

  On the second-to-last evening the four grandparents were invited to dinner. They arrived bearing gifts: big soft toys, chocolates for the children. There were no gifts for Rick; he watched, wistfully, as his parents and parents-in-law spent the evening fussing over Ben and Emma, careful to share their attentions, and their gifts, equably. There was no way of telling them what was planned, or receiving his due share of that attention. There was no proper way of saying goodbye.

  Linda brought her father an ashtray as they sat in the family room, sipping pre-dinner drinks, but he declared that he had given up.

  ‘Weeks ago,’ his wife added, mildly. ‘It’s the one good thing to come out of all this.’

  The evening ended with offers from both grandmothers to stay in the house ‘until the end’ — offers that were politely, even gratefully, declined.

  ‘It might be weeks, Mum,’ Linda lied.

  On the doorstep Rick hugged his mother, and then — impulsively — his father. The older man, surprised to receive any sign of affection beyond the usual handshake — hugged him back.

  ‘Be strong,’ he said. ‘Our thoughts are with you.’

  On the last evening the smaller family ate together at the nearby Pizza Hut, a favourite of the childrens. Unwilling to carry Emma, increasingly frail, past a hundred staring faces, Rick had rung the manager; they were permitted to arrive and eat early, half an hour before opening time. If this approached the dimensions of a Last Wish, it was never mentioned — and if the ride home would be by tumbril, it would at least be a short trip.

  At home afterwards the four played Monopoly — both children as engrossed as always, both parents unable to concentrate, but doing their best, buying and selling properties on autopilot. Apart from the care with which the fragile Emma had been set down on a sheepskin rug and soft pillows, they might have been one of the idealised families pictured on the boxes of other board-games stacked in their shelves, sprawled on carpet in family rooms, with a board between them. Reminders of their life together surrounded them: gift books, home videos, souvenirs of family holidays, framed paintings done by the children at school or kindergarten or home, family photographs. If the big open space at the back of the house was more family shrine or chapel than family room, these photographs were its icons: small framed group portraits of the four, a smattering of older ancestors, but above all, everywhere the glowing photographs of Ben and Emma, at various ages.