by Unknown
When he goes back, Geordie’s propped up against the pillows, their whiteness making his skin look dingy. ‘I’m not having any doctor.’
‘Too late. I’ve rung the surgery.’
‘Aw hadaway, man, there’s nowt he can do. We all know what it is.’ He subsides, muttering, ‘Complete waste of bloody time.’
He turns away, shoulders hunched, sulky as a parrot. Nick asks about the pain, gets no reply.
Downstairs Frieda’s buttering bread. ‘I don’t want anything,’ he says automatically, then thinks she needs it herself and she’s more likely to eat if he eats with her.
‘No, go on, then. We’ll probably feel better if we have something.’
They sit at the kitchen table together. Nick forces himself to take a bite and washes it down with hot sweet tea. They eat in silence. When she’s finished she wets her forefinger and reflectively picks up crumbs of bread.
‘This is it, isn’t it?’ she says.
‘Yes, he can’t survive that.’
By ‘that’ Nick means not the haemorrhage so much as the humiliating weakness, the exposure. Geordie’s a self-contained man in many ways, fastidious, particular about fingernails and underwear. Nick feels he’s never known him, not because they’ve been distant from each other – far from it – but because they’ve been too close. It’s like seeing somebody an inch away, so that if you were asked to describe them you could probably manage to recall nothing more distinctive than the size of the pores in their nose. Only now, when the proximity of death’s starting to make him recede a little, can Nick make meaningful statements about him: that he’s fanatically clean, that he minds about the state of his fingernails.
After they finish the sandwiches he goes upstairs, but Geordie’s asleep or, at any rate, has his eyes closed. Nick bends over him, trying to check from the movement of his chest that he’s still breathing. Immediately the blue eyes flicker open and he’s subjected to a bright ironical gaze that knows exactly what he’s doing and why.
‘Not yet.’
The doctor arrives mid-morning, Dr Liddle, a middle-aged man with a vaguely clerical demeanour, Scottish accent, repaired hare lip.
Nick runs upstairs ahead of him and tries to lift Grandad into a better position, but he seems to be hardly conscious, his lips move in protest, his eyes remain closed. Nick doesn’t know whether he’s getting worse by the minute or whether he’s simply decided to close his consciousness against this medical invasion. Not that this is particularly invasive. Liddle raises his eyebrows at the sample, takes Geordie’s temperature, his blood pressure, listens to his chest, feels his pulse, looks at the swollen stomach. ‘I’m not going to mess him about prodding his tummy, I can see all I need to see.’
Geordie opens his eyes at last, perhaps objecting to being spoken about in the third person. ‘It’s bleeding again, isn’t it?’ he says, pressing his hands to the old scar.
‘Ye-es, but you’ve got good healing flesh,’ Liddle says comfortably. ‘I don’t think it’ll bleed again.’
No attempt to grapple with the real cause of the haemorrhage. They humour him, all of them, but perhaps that’s what he wants. Perhaps in his own way he’s humouring them. There’s something here Nick can’t grasp. Grandad’s not a man of much formal education, certainly when forced to refer to bodily functions it’s all front passage, back passage stuff, but he’s not stupid. His belief that he’s dying of this ancient wound may be strange, but it isn’t meaningless. The bleeding bayonet wound’s the physical equivalent of the eruption of memory that makes his nights dreadful.
‘You’ll feel a bit weak for a couple of days. Take it easy. We’ll soon have you up and about again.’
Geordie seems to find this optimism consoling. He doesn’t believe a word of it, but he likes to feel the proper things are being said, a tried and trusted routine adhered to.
‘How much pain is he in?’ Liddle asks when they’re out of the room.
Nick and Frieda look at each other. ‘Surprisingly little,’ Nick says.
‘I’m inclined to leave him at home,’ Liddle says. ‘As long as you think you can manage.’
Frieda says, ‘We can manage.’
‘How long do you think he’s got?’ Nick asks.
‘Not long. Days rather than weeks.’
After seeing Liddle out, they go back upstairs and stand at the foot of the bed, looking at Geordie.
‘That went off all right,’ he says, dismissing Liddle, glad to be alone again.
Frieda tidies round, straightening the sheets. Geordie’s tolerant now, letting himself be tidied up, though he rules out shaving, he’s too tired at the moment. He’ll tackle shaving later. Then he leans back against the pillow, his eyes drooping, but not closed. Nick realizes he’s watching shadows dance on the counterpane, leaves with a blue tit pecking about in them, searching for tiny insects. He’s lying like a baby will sometimes lie in its cot, entranced by the play of light and shade.
Frieda’s searching through Geordie’s bureau for his insurance policies.
‘Have you found any?’ Nick asks.
‘Not yet, but they’ll be here somewhere. Here, look at this.’ She holds up a bundle of receipts. ‘He kept everything. Mind you, he was right. They can come back at you.’
‘Not after seven years.’
By the time he’s washed up and tidied the kitchen she’s found the policies, and sits in the armchair, clutching them, looking breathless, excited and slightly guilty. ‘I know you might think this is terrible, with the poor old soul still alive, but you’ve got to be practical,’ she says, turning pink.
‘I don’t think it’s terrible at all.’
But she’s not comfortable. Every remark about the funeral, who should be told, what Grandad’s said he wants done, has to be prefaced by copious disclaimers about not being morbid, grasping, premature, etc. ‘He went in for that thing, you know, that scheme where you sort of freeze the cost of the funeral at what it would’ve been if you’d died at the time you sign on. No matter how long you live it stays the same price.’
‘They’ll be losing money on him.’
‘No, they won’t. He’s not been in it that long.’
Grandad calls down to them. He’s woken up after a long sleep, and Frieda puts the bundle of policies to one side and goes up to attend to him.
While she’s gone Nick opens a small drawer in the centre of the bureau, where Grandad keeps family snap-shots, a few letters, his birth and marriage certificates, and his field service postcards. All his letters from France have vanished over the years, but these, for some unaccountable reason, have survived.
NOTHING is to be written on this side except the date and signature of the sender. Sentences not required may be erased. If anything else is added the postcard will be destroyed.
After this encouragement to economy of expression, the list of choices.
What fascinates Nick is that word ‘quite’. Does it mean ‘fairly’ or ‘absolutely’? In neither sense can it have been an accurate description of the state of the men who, in the immediate aftermath of battle, sat down, stubby pencils in hand, and crossed out the least appropriate choices.
On 2 July, ten days after Harry’s death, Geordie was ‘quite well’. He was neither sick nor wounded, he had not been admitted to hospital or sent down to base, and he had received a letter from his mother dated the 27th of June.
There are five postcards from then till the end of 1916. In each of them Geordie has crossed out ‘Lately’ so the final message on each card reads: ‘I have received no letter from you for a long time.’
On 14 April 1917, three days after he’d been bayoneted, he’s been admitted to hospital (wounded) and ‘am going on well’ (he nearly died). The address on the other side of the card has been written by somebody else, but the signature, though shaky, is his own. On that occasion too he had not heard from his mother for a long time.
It’s almost as if his mother stopped writing to him after Harry’s death, or
at least wrote very rarely. Perhaps she was so shattered she found it difficult to write to anyone, but a son? And in the front line?
Me mam never got over our Harry… Wrong one died, simple as that.
Perhaps it wasn’t ‘survivor’s guilt’ that made Geordie imagine his mother had rejected him. Perhaps it was true.
The time wagon travels backwards, pulling them away from the present. On either side figures slip past and vanish: an air-raid warden from the Blitz, an unemployed man in a cloth cap, a First World War officer, his arm raised, cheering, a lady in a crinoline, and so on until the wagon backs into the roar and crackle of flame, shouts, cries, a woman with a wounded baby in her arms, screaming. Leaving her behind, the wagon travels further back, then stops, turns, and moves forward into the light of Viking Jorvik.
Not only into the sights of a fifth-century village, but the sounds and smells as well. A little boy in the wagon behind says, ‘Ugh, Mummy, Viking poo,’ and everybody laughs.
Mum’s fascinated. Miranda’s fascinated. Gareth’s bored. Jasper’s bored too, but since he’s on Mum’s lap and sucking his thumb he doesn’t mind. Looking down, Gareth can see the bald patch where the nurse cut his hair off, and the little barbed-wire ridge of stitches. Everybody says he’s getting over the accident really well. And it was an accident. It’s fixed in Gareth’s mind now, what happened that afternoon, and it won’t change. The pebbles he threw will never grow back into stones. None of them will ever connect with Jasper’s head.
There comes a time when you’re watching somebody die when the sheer tedium of it overcomes you. How much longer, you catch yourself thinking, can this possibly go on? And then you’re overwhelmed by guilt because every moment should be treasured.
Sitting on a hard chair in Geordie’s room, watching him sleep with open toothless mouth and thin lids stretched across constantly mobile eyes, Nick catches himself thinking, I’ll have a bottle of wine this evening. I wonder if there’s any cricket on, and then he’s ashamed that, even for a second, he could have taken his thoughts away from the dying man. This is one of the last few days, he thinks. The last time we’ll ever have together. He tries to whip his tired brain into feeling the seriousness of the events, the preciousness of the last few grains of sand, but his thoughts run into cliché. The fact is that birth and death both go on too long for those who watch beside the bed. The appropriate emotions dry up. You stretch, scratch, ease sticky thighs away from plastic seats, plan forays into the canteen or the kitchen for reviving cups of tea, the chance of a chat. When Frieda comes back with the shopping they giggle in the kitchen like a couple of school kids. Nick’s persuaded Frieda to go home for the rest of the day and have a lie down, though she insists on coming back for the night. They each have an unspoken sense that it won’t be long. ‘I’ll just look in on him before I go,’ she says. ‘I’ll not wake him.’
But Geordie feels her presence, the outdoor air on her clothes, and forces his eyes open. ‘Hello, Dad,’ she says, moving further up the bed. He peers up at her, moistens his dry lips, and says, ‘How long does it take for a chap to die?’ And immediately Nick’s more ashamed than ever, for he sees that Geordie’s being spared nothing of all this, not even the tedium. Rather he feels it worse than they do, because for him there’s no escape.
After Frieda goes, Nick sits in Geordie’s room and tries to make him talk about the past, poking him between the bars of his inertia, as you’d try to rouse a moribund animal. Reminding him of his memories is one way of restoring him, of shoring up the crumbling self. He feeds his own stories back to him. ‘Tell us about the time…’ ‘Do you remember when…?’
There’s little response. Either he’s given up entirely or all the memories have contracted into a single memory that he’s not prepared to speak about. ‘Tell me about Harry,’ Nick wants to say, but he says nothing. Instead he watches the brown-spotted hand crawl across the counterpane, all that’s left of those midnight patrols. Geordie’s too weak now to leave the house. He can’t last long, Nick thinks, watching him sink back into sleep.
As you leave the exhibition there’s a video screen. Miranda stops in front of it. In the Viking village she’d noticed a man on a barrel gutting fish.
The video tells the story of how they made his face. You uncover a skeleton. From the bones and the teeth you discover the age, the gender and the build of the person it belonged to. Then you detach the skull and put it on a revolving stand, direct a laser beam at it, and feed the exact measurements into a computer, which uses them to produce a three-dimensional model. Select a living person of the same age, gender and build as the skeleton. Dust talcum powder over the face and hair, and then using the same techniques produce a three-dimensional computer model of the head. Then, on the computer, the living person’s flesh is wrapped around the bones of the skull. What results is a composite face, but because facial features are determined more by bone structure than by anything else, the resemblance is to the dead person rather than to the living. You are now looking at the face of the past, or as close to it as we can get.
Miranda watches the entire video through twice, then walks, white-faced, through the shop and out of the exhibition into the street, where there are crowds of people laughing, talking, eating, and you need never think about the skull beneath the skin, or the anger that’s always on the outside, trying to get in.
EIGHTEEN
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Geordie says, sitting up in bed chasing the scrambled eggs he’d requested, with diminishing enthusiasm, around the plate. ‘I’d like to see Helen again.’
Nick stares at him blankly. Until this moment he’s resolutely refused to see any of his friends, has restricted awareness of the inevitably squalid symptoms of physical decay to his immediate family. Nick’s surprised by this sudden desire, distrusts the vivid circles of red on Geordie’s hollow cheeks which burn there as distinct and unnatural as a doll’s paint. ‘All right,’ he says cautiously. ‘I’ll give her a ring.’
Geordie abandons all pretence of eating. Silence. Nick realizes he’s expected to get up mid-breakfast and phone Helen now. ‘All right.’
Her telephone voice is clear, cool, almost wary, making Nick wonder whom she thought the call might be from, but the tone warms gratifyingly when he says his name, and softens when he mentions Geordie’s request. ‘On my way,’ she says.
‘Hey, not yet. Late morning. Eleven-thirty. He needs a couple of hours to pull himself together,’ he explains apologetically. ‘He’s looking a bit rough.’
‘All right. Eleven-thirty. See you then.’
As soon as Nick repeats this, Geordie’s eyes go to the clock, counting.
‘I thought we might change the sheets,’ Nick says, not relishing the prospect.
‘No, I’ll come down.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘ ’Course I’m sure. And get some fresh air into the place.’
In spite of all Frieda’s efforts the house smells of his sickness. Another thing Nick’s been hoping he didn’t know.
The next two hours are spent on Geordie’s toilette, getting him dressed, pushing the frail limbs into tubes of cloth which suddenly seem as inflexible as corrugated cardboard. ‘You’re going to have to rest on your bed after this,’ Nick says firmly.
‘All right.’ But he can hardly keep still, squirming about in the chair, while Nick tries to shave him. Why is it so difficult? He uses a razor himself, has never felt comfortable with a dry shave, a legacy from watching Grandad shave himself: the intent gaze, the careful scraping round the curves of the nostrils, the cleft in the chin, the smears of soap dabbed away with the special pink towel, the rapping of the razor against the edge of the enamel bowl. All watched intently, and then, behind closed doors for fear of being laughed at, practised on childish down and disappointingly sparse adolescent hairs. A lot of shared unspoken history’s gone into these scrapings and tappings, though it’s bloody difficult to reverse the movements on somebody else’s chin. At last in desperation
he stands behind Geordie, leaning over him, and gets the bulk of it done that way.
‘Sweeney bloody Todd,’ says Geordie, not relishing the position, head held back, the razor hovering near his throat. He dries his chin himself. ‘There,’ he says accusingly, pointing at a tiny red stain on the towel.
‘I’ll put a plaster on it.’
‘You will not. I‘ll have some o’ yon pansy stuff you put on your chin.’
Will you indeed? Nick thinks, going to fetch his carefully hoarded bottle of Antaeus.
‘Jesus wept,’ Geordie says, sniffing it. ‘Smells like a French whore’s bedroom.’
He often said that in Nick’s teenage years, watching Nick getting ready to go out, desperate to impress some girl.
‘Were you ever in a French whore’s bedroom?’ Nick asks.
‘Never you mind.’
The doorbell rings. ‘I think that’s your date,’ Nick says, going to answer it.
Helen’s looking away from him down the street when he opens the door, so that for a split second he’s able to observe her before she turns to him and smiles. She’s wearing, instead of her usual jeans and T-shirt, an ankle-length dress made of some dark blue material, the crinkly stuff that doesn’t need ironing. He guesses she’s made a special effort for Geordie and likes her even better for it. When she turns to face him, he sees she’s carrying a big bunch of roses, not the cruelly wired formal drops of blood you buy in a florist’s, but floppy open-hearted blooms from the garden. He kisses her and the stalks wet the front of his shirt. ‘Come in.’
Geordie’s sitting up, incredibly erect, though a few minutes ago he’d been slumped over his swollen belly. The suspicious areas of brightness in his cheeks are more clearly marked than ever.
‘Hello, Geordie,’ she says, bending over Grandad and kissing him. ‘I’ve brought you these. I didn’t know whether to bring you beer instead.’