by Michael Pye
“It can’t wait.”
The woman was like a bright, inflexible cutout of a shrew, a soft brown creature stiff with propriety.
“I’m very sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Rogers. I would be very glad if I could use the phone. Please.”
Grace had performed. Mrs. Rogers allowed.
And the boy rocked back and forth airlessly. Peter felt for the child’s ribs; they seemed to have great gaps between them with no flesh at all when the boy breathed, and then to fill out like a balloon when he struggled to pull in air. And the dust, from the fire and perhaps from the broken bits of the city, Peter could see that hanging in the air, a sample of what must have settled into the boy’s lungs. Dust glints, he saw. It wasn’t dull or inert at all; it was tiny blades.
“Nothing’s happened,” he said when Grace got back.
“He’ll want a drink,” Grace said. She brought in water, but it did not seem to help.
The ambulance arrived with bells. The whole street stood out of doors to see it, so she thought. The ambulance men put the boy on a stretcher, put the stretcher in the back, pulled Grace in afterward, and she wanted Peter to come, too. She shouted for him.
The boy rose up from the stretcher and hooted like a terrified owl: a grating sound, rough as sandpaper, that sent the neighbors back into their front rooms to watch between the curtains as the ambulance pulled away.
Peter followed. He followed, running. They’d never let him into the ambulance; he was just the mother’s new bloke. But he could not fail to be with her; that was the point. He didn’t know what he would do, any more than he knew what to do when the boy sat there looking like a bent paperclip with flesh on him, battling with something as ordinary as air.
He cut over a crossroads, by the Tube station, down a brick tunnel, along a street that somehow kept its plane trees even in the cold wartime winters, kept running until his breath caught up with him and he was running as though he was back on a track, running for glory.
He arrived sweating, awkward, falling over himself at the emergency room, and he found Grace at once.
“They took him,” she said. “They just took him.”
Both of them sat on wood chairs in the second row, in a low room painted white, with smells of antiseptic around them and cool, damp air coming from the door even though outside the sun was going down hot.
A nurse asked: “Has anything like this happened before?”
“He’s coughed sometimes. And he does wheeze at night, I noticed. Of course, he’s always seemed anxious, having grown up during the war, you’re not surprised. Are you?”
The nurse said: “Has he seen a doctor about it?”
“He seemed well enough. I never thought about a doctor.”
“We don’t often see asthma here,” the nurse said. “It’s something you treat at home.”
“But I didn’t know—”
Grace wanted to be judged, he could see that, wanted to be told what she had done wrong so she could always be right in the future, and bring her boy back from whatever white, cold place now held him.
Instead, the nurse smiled. “He’s going to be fine,” she said. “Sometimes it does happen, out of the blue, like they say.” Then she thought about the boy’s cyanosed face and she stopped smiling. “They give him ephedrine,” she said. “That controls the lungs. They may put him in an oxygen tent for a while, so he can breathe more easily. He’ll be fine. You’ll see.”
They did not get home that night. They sat together, not touching. Once, Grace was asked to go forward and Peter was told he must wait. Grace went through the swinging doors. He thought he could hear her heels on the linoleum of the corridor floor. He tried to imagine what she would see.
“How is he?” he asked.
“I couldn’t really see him,” she said.
After a minute he asked: “What do you mean?”
“He’s in a kind of hut. A sort of shelter. With oxygen.”
He wanted to know exactly what she had seen, so he could share the sight and share her feelings. She couldn’t say. Her heart was down there beating by the boy whose breaths were so desperate and forced.
At four in the morning, he went to fetch her tea in a thick, white cup. When she’d finished, he noticed that his cup was perfect, but the glaze on hers was crazed. He wished he’d taken the other cup.
A new nurse said: “You have to go home. There’s nothing to do here. Take yourself home.” She said to Peter: “Your brother will be fine—”
Grace said: “Thank you” before the nurse could say anything else.
Grace lay in bed like a plank, rigor mortis of the heart. She could not even cry. She was alert for news which would come to the door, like all the other news in her life had come: the death of her husband in a neat, official letter, the family letters before and after, but not many afterward when she had turned into an anomaly, a spare woman with a child. She would have liked a telegram saying that everything is now all right, and always will be. A telegram from the king.
He lay against her, flat against her, the skin of their hips and their shoulders touching and their bodies arching separately away in between. He wanted to share her warmth. He wanted her to share his warmth. It was a start. But the day was stark hot, a copper sun polishing the air, and she didn’t want touch, either.
He couldn’t bear this. Her pain touched him, but he couldn’t touch her back. She wasn’t just frightened for the boy in the next hours, the next days, he knew that. The boy had changed for her, become an unreliable body with frightening possibilities that she couldn’t handle alone. She sighed very deeply, and sighed again, and again.
He asked if she wanted tea. He went to make some, anyway. He stood on the linoleum squares in the little kitchen, boiling a kettle on an electric ring. He looked at the soles of his feet, but they were clean; her floors were always clean because they were used. It was only the parlor that had dust through the air.
He made the tea, took down a can of condensed milk. Hot, sweet tea; he knew it was what she needed.
At eleven she got up, pulled on a church frock, said she was going to the hospital. He went with her. She visited the boy in his oxygen tent, and this time she saw his eyes open so wide they must be hurting him.
“They’re looking after you, then?” she said, softly, just for the sake of his hearing her talk. “They’re looking after you. Special tanks. Special injections. They’ll make you good as new.” Then her words speeded up. “Better, even, maybe,” she said. “Better than new. You’ll see. You’ll be down playing football again. You’ll see.”
Peter Clarke sat on the hard seat outside. He wanted to help, somehow. He wanted to carry this burden that had suddenly fallen on Grace, and stop the boy hurting, too. He knew he had been ungenerous to his own father, that he had run away, and now he insisted on being quite magnificently kind.
She came out of the wards and she said: “They’re doing everything they can.”
The boy came home in an ambulance, but he walked out of the back. He smiled at the crew, who laughed back at him.
“What’s for dinner,” he said.
“Sausages,” Grace said. “I got you sausages.”
They sat in the kitchen. They spoke quietly, except for the boy, and they moved with care between the table and the cupboards.
Peter said: “You want to see the garden? Things are coming up now.”
“You don’t want to tire him,” Grace said.
The boy stuck out his tongue. “I’m all right,” he said.
“You have to rest,” Grace said.
And for a week or so, it was almost all right. The boy sat at the window and he didn’t seem to mind not rushing out to the other kids in the street; he was always a loner. He did visit the garden, but there was nothing much to see: a few broad-leaved sprouts above ground, the odd sight of weeds like willow herb all in pink formation.
Grace had the boy to sleep with her. She said she wanted to hear if his breathing changed during the n
ight. She was supposed to listen for wheezing, she said, and if his breath came in pants or in long, slow sucks. Peter tried to sleep on the sofa in the parlor, which was not quite long enough for him.
Grace’s concern was his concern. He was almost sure he did not become jealous.
The boy went to have a bath. He wouldn’t let Grace go with him; he said he was old enough now. And she couldn’t argue with him.
“He’s fine,” Peter said. He put out a hand. Grace said: “It’s all right for you.” He wanted to say: It’s not all right at all for me. I know what you feel. I feel it, too. “He’s never going to be all right,” Grace said, suddenly.
She went to a drawer and pulled out a new white shirt. She had ironed and starched it meticulously. “I bought it for him,” she said. “For later.” She turned to Peter. “I want him to have a good white shirt. It makes all the difference. People look at you—”
They both heard a cough upstairs. “That bloody heater,” she said. “It’ll be the gas. It’ll set off his asthma.”
She slipped on the carpet near the top of the stairs, dropped back for a moment onto Peter, and then threw herself forward. The bathroom door wasn’t locked; she wouldn’t let the boy lock it.
He was standing naked by the bath. He was fighting to breathe and he was winning for the moment: a tenuous kind of victory that only emphasized the skinny pale ribs, the way his chest seemed to sink and to blow beyond what a boy’s body ought to be able to do, the pallor of his tight face.
“I’m all right,” he said. “Really.”
All the boy had was a scrap of a life, enough to send Grace running for the terror and the ether smell of a casualty ward, enough to give her pain when he felt pain. There were going to be no miracles.
Peter Clarke had a sense of anger. This was a new bloody world, wasn’t it? A new world of homes for all and a welfare state and maybe even medicine you didn’t have to pay for, when pain would be somehow solved, when someone in authority would always know what to do.
So why don’t they save the boy, then? Doesn’t he matter in their grand overarching schemes? Doesn’t Grace count?
The boy had been in bed for two days, Grace giving him drinks with sugar, making balsam in bowls for him to inhale from under a thick towel. She seemed to think this was like a summer cold. He lay in the double bed, curled up at the top on Grace’s side, like a cat curls. She’d pushed a pillow under him where his back started to arch in spasms.
“Come and sit down,” Peter said and led her out of the room for a minute. She did sit, but awkwardly; her flesh and her muscles seemed to hang from tired bones. She took a cup of tea, she finished it quickly, and she said: “He’ll miss me.”
“He’ll be asleep.”
“He’ll miss me. He’s my boy.”
“I’ll sit with him for a bit. You rest. Listen to the radio, put your feet up.”
She glared at him as though she’d like to tell him he was wrong, all wrong. She couldn’t. Instead, she said: “Just for a minute, then.”
But the minute became an hour. He could hear her downstairs, not lying down sensibly but propped up in a chair and breathing awkwardly. He ought to have gone to cover her, but that would mean leaving the boy, who now lay still on his pillow in the crook of the big bed.
It’s breath that will kill him. He’ll fight for breath until his heart stops or the blood bursts in his brain. He’ll die, anyway.
The boy was quiet. Peter moved closer. The boy curled into himself, and shook as though a whole other body was trying to get out through his mouth, and couldn’t any longer stayed hunched down. He came up into Peter’s face, his white, pinched face like winter in the hot room. His eyes were unfocused, almost blind.
Peter said: “It’s all right.”
The boy tried to swallow all the air in the room. His face had the blue-white edge of a carcass in a butcher’s store, after the blood drains away.
His heart had stopped by the time the ambulance arrived, and the crew worked his fragile chest and blew air into him and still could not bring him back to life.
Grace came from the hospital and she could not speak. He tried to nurse her, but she did not notice. She sat in the kitchen, back straight, arms on the table so she did not even need to make the muscular effort to hold them up or down or out. She stayed like that for fourteen hours; he counted. Then he thought he heard her snuffling or whimpering, but she was trying to sing to herself, or perhaps to sing to the boy, something plangent and sentimental and now without tune or rhythm: “Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling . . .”
Then she said: “I did it all for him, you know.”
He didn’t expect her to make sense, not in these circumstances. He was just glad she could speak to him again.
“You have to eat something. Drink something.”
“I’d like a gin,” she said.
“You don’t drink gin.”
“How would you know?”
She was right; he didn’t know anything about her tastes except for what she had given away in the past few weeks.
“Do you have gin in the house?”
She laughed. “You been looking for it?”
“You said you wanted it—”
“I said I’d like it. I’d like to sit in the pub and have a good glass of gin. I would. I might as well. I don’t do anyone any good sitting here like a statue, do I?”
He knew this was a trap. He just hadn’t lived long enough to see how the trap worked and when it would spring.
“That’s what you think, isn’t it? You want me to cry. I won’t cry. I won’t do it.”
She stood up without due care, and the long sitting made her unsteady. “I thought I could make the fire in the parlor, just lay it, not light it. Then again I could wash the floors.” She looked around her, as though the house now puzzled her. “What do you want me to do?”
He said: “He’s at rest now.”
“You expect me to be grateful?”
“It’s kinder. He’s with God.”
“You don’t bloody want me to thank God, do you?”
He didn’t know how to react. She could almost be accusing him, but he was almost sure she had no grounds. The boy’s death was officially natural, a matter of dirty air and ruined airways. Anything he did, if he did anything, he did to spare her pain.
But now she was in full, fierce spate. “I did it all for him,” she said. “Had you in. Had you to live here. It was all so he’d have a man about, and so we could get more food, so I could look after him and make a life for him and there’d be someone else to care for him. You needn’t fancy yourself.”
He said: “Listen, I don’t have to stay—”
“No,” she said. “No, you don’t.”
He’d been told, down the years, in the worried tones of a house full of men, about women’s moods and hysterias and how they blow out as suddenly as they appear. He thought she might think again after a night, after a week, and need him again.
“I’ll sleep in the garden,” he said. He took only the uniform he was wearing when he first came, nothing else. To find it, he had to clear drawers. He saw the starched white shirt she bought for the boy out of her hopes for him. He handled it as carefully as he would handle the boy himself.
He lay down on the dry ground between neglected rows of peas and beans, using his jacket for a pillow.
He wanted a sign that he should go back. He was almost sure he should go back. But she couldn’t phone him, couldn’t smile at the window when he went past; he felt too self-conscious just to walk in her street, anyway. She’d have to come to the garden to find him, and he knew in his heart that she would never do that because she was not the one in the wrong. Even if what he did was right, and drastic enough to be truly kind, he knew he could not claim to be in the right.
Three mornings later, the stubble itching on his face, sandy dirt ground into his khakis, he climbed onto a train and went back to his father’s house.
SEVEN
> He never did like being left out. People were meeting. People were talking, not to mention hints and glances. Sarah’s story was being drafted and polished where he couldn’t see, couldn’t read it.
He had sort of a right to know.
He’d already changed the whole city into a puzzle, and his occupation. He read the dullest corner carefully. Show him a pleasant bakery, with strong women eating cake, and he tried to work out their wartime stories. He contemplated crime encoded on the discreet facades of private banks. The process was a mad, solipsistic kind of politics: anything might require action, so everything was charged with drama, even the tram slinking into town or the girl selling vitamins in the pharmacy or the damp, high inner halls of a flowershop full of tulips and palms or the ticket line at the Hauptbahnhof.
He began to eat lunch alertly. He fussed about Sarah, in case she was just waiting for the right time to explain things.
He strolled past the bookshops on either side of Lucia’s shop. He considered maps, prints, volumes of Max Frisch carefully bound, some Goethe and some Rilke. He waited for someone to go into Lucia’s shop, someone to come out.
He wondered if this Lucia would simply talk to him. He was almost in her country of the very old; she would trust him. They were fellow conspirators against time and the young.
But he could not quite imagine how he would make a social half hour with her, and then how he would put his questions.
He tapped his fingers on his thigh. He pinched the cloth.
He longed for the familiar precision of his fields, his seedbeds, the sight of rogue colors, rogue shapes. He longed to know where he was down to the last row of the last cultivar because, here in this polite city, he seemed to live in the middle of an abstraction: faces in whose business he had no business, streets like the idea of streets, not specific, not dirtied, not full of particular and demanding faces, and landscapes hanging like postcards at the end of those streets.
Helen had control of the kitchen for the day: and Sarah sat across the table from her, looking quizzically at the carrots being shredded, the chicory being grilled, as though these were museum things you don’t see every day.