‘No, lummox works.’
‘I’m not saying he was Supernurse, he doesn’t believe in anything enough to be that, but when I was starting he was the one I went to if I didn’t know what to do or couldn’t see something. He has a good eye for, well, for people, for nuance.’
‘Has?’
‘Yeah, well, he’s not exactly back to his best but I still trust his judgment above just about anyone else’s.’
‘And he visits Libby because…?’
Grace shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. He doesn’t sleep much.’
‘He needs help,’ Anna said quietly.
‘Feel free to let him know.’
Anna sighed. ‘Why Libby?’
Grace shrugged again. ‘He knew her when he was a student.’
Anna looked at her, just holding her gaze as gently as she could and waited for Grace to speak again.
‘I think he… well, the night nurses say… he comes in sometimes and sits and chats to her quietly.’
‘Yeah, that was what he seemed to be doing last night.’
‘It isn’t harmful.’ Grace sounded defensive for the first time.
Anna sipped her tea. ‘Not normal though, is it?
‘What’s your point?’ And it was the inevitable place in the conversation, the place they knew they had to arrive at sooner or later.
‘My point is I noticed it. I don’t know the man. I’m pretty new here, so I am asking you rather than anyone else.’ Anna smiled again. ‘I’m guessing you have known him a while?’
At which point William, the student nurse with too much hair, burst into the kitchen. ‘Michael is going doolally with a snooker cue!’
Both women put down their tea and instinctively began to run.
‘Did you learn “doolally” in the school of nursing, William?’ Grace asked.
‘No… it’s… well, he’s hitting a chair with a snooker cue really hard.’
‘Is anyone in the chair?’ asked Anna.
‘No,’ said William.
Both nurses instinctively stopped running and begun to walk purposefully but calmly, letting William jog ahead to the day room where Michael—the near toothless and inarticulate man with schizophrenia, large doses of major tranquilizers in his blood and a swastika on his head—was beating the seat of his chair the way his mother probably beat the living room carpet, or something.
Both women arrived in the day room to find Michael thrashing, dribbling and panting for breath. To be fair, this was the nearest thing to proper exercise Michael had got to in years. He smoked sixty a day, he ate mostly chips and he took toxic, if prescribed, drugs. He was thirty-four but looked fifty, and he was breathing like a man who had given the chair his best but was probably about ready to surrender. One of the reasons for not running: it gave him a few more seconds to pass the peak of exertion and rage.
‘What’s the matter Michael?’ Grace asked quietly.
‘Voices…’ wheezed Michael.
‘From the chair?’ Grace sounded as soft as baby milk.
‘It’s got a transmitter.’
‘You said the same about your teeth, Michael,’ Anna said gently.
But he had no more reason than he had breath and he slumped to the ground gasping, close to tears. Grace crouched down beside him, placing her hand gently on his shoulder. Michael looked grotesque, his bloody gums visible as he swallowed air and wheezed, snot and sweat gathered around his unkempt black beard. If he were not so full of drugs he would be crying, defeated. Losing a fight to a noise in his head.
‘Should I call the doctor?’ William asked. Anna shook her head.
‘No,’ said Grace, ‘but you might want to make Michael a cup of tea?’ A question directed at Michael, who nodded. Grace put her arm round him as they sat on the floor.
‘What are we going to do, Michael? To make it better? Because whatever we are doing right now isn’t working, is it?’ Michael shook his head and wheezed.
‘Tea?’ whispered Anna, who was still crouching down in front of him. Michael nodded again. She half turned her head to William. ‘Tea for Michael, please William.’
And William walked slowly down to the kitchen muttering ‘What is it with these people and bloody tea?’
4. In The Wee Small Hours…
Anna lay next to Black, staring at the ceiling of his west London flat and noticing the gentle threading of post coital sweat slipping down her ribs onto his increasingly uncomfortable futon. She could tell he was asleep by his breathing, and she decided to make meaning from the fact that as he drifted off he had slipped from her shoulder—where he had lain heavily after ejaculation, baby-kissing the side of her neck and making her ear itch—then turned on to his back where his breathing grew laboured. Then quite quickly he turned away and faced the wall with his back to her. He was no more interested in her than she was in him. She smiled to herself and wondered if once would be enough, and if she should wake him or wait until the morning. Neither particularly appealed, but then that wasn’t really the point. She decided to wait. She didn’t want him to feel desired.
She noticed, not for the first time, that when he was asleep he breathed like Darth Vader. His back, which was pale and more expansive than his front suggested it was going to be, had a certain pigskin quality, although that was not how she experienced it the first time she had slept with him. She was curious then. Finding his smell, exploring him and noticing the way he explored her. He had been greedy, which passed as desirous with the right amount of wine. And he had been careful enough to stop to put on a condom. Something she had helped him to ignore tonight.
She didn’t feel comfortable in the west of the city. It felt alien: softer than the east but more unsettling somehow. She could walk around in Hackney and feel perfectly safe at any time of the night or day, but here she felt watched rather than seen. She knew rationally that it was just an issue of familiarity, but knowing something didn’t change the way you felt. Not unless you wanted it to and frankly she wasn’t planning on coming west again for quite a while.
She lay on her back and scanned the room. This was very much a man’s flat. One of the walls in the bedroom was even painted black, although it had a big mirror in the middle of it and a Klimt poster, ‘The Kiss’, in a plastic frame beside the mirror to soften the room and the sense it gave of the man who slept in it. ‘I’m fucking a cliché’ she thought and sighed. ‘Or at least I was.’
*
On the other side of London, at the cheap end of Crouch End that was really Turnpike Lane, getting to sleep hadn’t been the problem. Staying asleep was the problem. Adam would wake at 3.12am every night and try to lay still and lure his mind back from the torture that was consciousness. His preoccupations were always simple and mundane at first. Had he ordered the ward medication, had he paid the telephone bill, why was his Yucca plant dying? But as his eyes widened and his brain accelerated his life became a very dark place. He imagined his life through the eyes of his ex-girlfriend because he couldn’t imagine a less enthusiastic gaze. Catherine was an upwardly mobile solicitor who changed her accent for career reasons at the age of twenty-four. He didn’t like her very much, he didn’t find her attractive and he didn’t mind remotely that she was sleeping with a fat bloke old enough to be her father, probably also for career reasons. But at 3.25am he looked at himself through her eyes nonetheless, and he looked small and lonely and smelt of other people’s piss.
And then, inevitably, he thought of Graham Cochrane. He wondered how dark his night times were and just how invisible and pointless Adam had been to that man. Adam hated Graham Cochrane. How much rage must a man have to drink bleach and keep drinking it? And to do it with other people so near, to do it with other people ‘caring’ for him just down the hall. Variously he imagined that Graham Cochrane pitied him his unseeing eyes, or held him in contempt for being little more than a warden for the mad, o
r, such was his struggle with the demons Adam failed to help him wrestle, he simply disregarded him as an irrelevant spectator. Just a part of a system of restraint and pharmacy devoid of softness or warmth, unable to make a meaningful difference. By 3.51 Adam was little more than a concentration camp guard.
But it wasn’t the way he labelled his life that troubled him the most. His political failure, his failure of power or purpose or even to prevent harm, was but just a precursor to the full swell of despair that washed in around 4.22. His life, this gift of possibility, was both too precious and too heavy. He was edging toward thirty without a plan, or anything he could put in the space where a plan should go, like some beliefs or love or a purpose or a job that didn’t poke him in the liver every day. His body, in which he once invested much time and effort, had once trained almost obsessively, was beginning to bend. He filled it with aimless unhelpful drugs and cheap wine. His mind had stopped reaching outward and instead peered only in. And his heart told him only that it would always be like this. Even noticing his own rumination made him hate himself. He felt clumsy, unwise and self-indulgent.
Because yes, he took silly drugs and hated his failures, but that was hardly tragic was it? He didn’t have cancer or schizophrenia. He didn’t so much as limp. In theory he could do whatever he wanted but here he lay, psychically throbbing and being crushed by the bloody universe. If he could not control the self-destructive wanderings of his own thoughts, what on earth was he doing taking money from the world to help others? This idea of life, the notion of gathering understanding and using it in some way to produce… produce what? Good? Something helpful? It was a sham. It was all just a nonsense to hide from the existential reality that was his complete and indisputable pointlessness, and now it was 4.27.
If it had been earlier he would have gone to see Libby. Say sorry quietly again for the things that had happened to her that he hadn’t prevented, or even been born in time to see. A ritual that made him feel closer to human and somehow less dirty. If it was any later he would get up and soak in the bath but the hot water wasn’t on yet and sitting in a cold bath was ridiculous. 5.01 was the worst. Neither one thing nor the other. He put the radio on: something soft and absurd by Foreigner. He retuned: a programme about farming. He retuned: news about banking; disco music; a radio phone-in where everyone was cross about traffic or homosexuality or the fact that it wasn’t 1953. He turned the radio off. He turned on to his side and tried to clear his mind of everything. Libby had said once, nearly four years ago, in the single moment of clarity that haunted him still: ‘Just because you weren’t here it doesn’t mean you aren’t guilty.’ She was talking of a time long before he had even known the hospital existed but the words cut him to the bone. He sat up, picked up one of the books on the table beside him. Some class pantomime by an Amis. He read a few lines. It wasn’t funny. He dropped it on the floor. He looked at the next book in the pile: something fraught and emotionally pornographic by an angry woman. Had he stopped liking books? Or had he stopped reading books he liked? Why would someone do that?
He decided not to sleep alone this weekend and he smelt the cover to his duvet, resolving to change it before Friday night. 5.24: if he could just get back to sleep for an hour or so…
*
Anna slept fitfully. She had broken dreams about ovaries and work. They didn’t form or even hint at any sort of narrative and by 5.52 she was awake in a way that made her certain she wasn’t going to go back to sleep. She toyed with the idea of getting dressed and leaving a note saying ‘It’s been nice but I’m bored now so don’t call. Thanks. Anna.’ But she was unconvinced that she would manage to get out of the flat without waking him so she lay staring at the ceiling until 6.24, by which time Black’s breathing and occasional movement suggested that he was, if not quite ready to be woken, probably available for arousal. She slid closer and lay close to his back. Her breasts pressed into his back and her breath warmed his ear. That was, she knew, all that it would take.
Later, a little after seven, she sighed and decided to play. ‘Tell me a story, Black.’
Black had been stroking her hair distractedly and wondering when she was going to leave. He liked sex in the morning, of course he did, but once it was finished and an appropriate period for post coital good manners had passed he wanted to get on with the day. He was planning what to wear and looking at Anna’s right nipple with a detachment that he would have considered unimaginable twenty minutes earlier. A story? He didn’t collect stories. He gathered images, sometimes made them into symbols and took money in return, but stories? They tended to confuse the world for him, make it more elaborate than he required. He didn’t know any stories. ‘I don’t know any stories.’
‘Of course you do, don’t be lazy.’
Black had no time for emotions in the morning, particularly other people’s. He had learned, however, that if there were going to be emotions they should be of his choosing. He sighed and he remembered a story someone had told him once, in bed. He had rules of course, rules about not confusing lovers with each other nor letting one body spill over into the next, but those sorts of rules are more like guidelines really, existing mainly to imply that he lived according to a code rather than simply a sex drive. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘but I am not a storyteller.’
Anna rolled on to her back and said neutrally: ‘Everyone is a storyteller.’
‘Right, OK… Once upon a time…’ Black turned to face Anna but she didn’t smile. She simply stared at the ceiling waiting for the words. Black sighed, turned on his back, being careful not to let his body brush against hers, and began again.
‘There was this woman called Marie. She lived a well-ordered life with a successful husband and two healthy, happy kids. She was a teacher: she taught well-behaved kids in a private school. She also had a lover. His name was Ira.
‘Ira and Marie had met as student travellers in the early Seventies. She was already engaged but was travelling alone; her fiancé had gone to Spain with his mates, anxious to have a bit of fun before settling down, before real life began. Marie and Ira met on a Greek ferry and they talked for the whole two-hour crossing. They both booked into the only taverna which rented rooms on the island and that evening, after eating together and drinking together, they slept together. Marie saw in Ira a holiday from what she knew was an already written future. He was idealistic and blonde and his long hair made him appear slightly prettier than he actually was. It should have been a holiday romance, except that it lasted nearly a full month in that first year and perhaps it happened before they were fully set, or maybe they fell a little bit in love… if you can fall just a little bit in love. At the end of the month Ira said to her: “Meet me here one year from now. No matter what, just come. Come as a friend, if you like, or come as a lover, but meet me and we will spend a week together.”’
As Black spoke he noticed a sing-song rhythm to his words that almost squeezed any emotion from his voice. He noticed because the word lover sounded clumsy. He paused and looked at Anna. She was still staring at the ceiling, listening, waiting. He sighed and gave up his time to a story that didn’t even need to be told.
‘She agreed, never imagining for a moment that it would happen, but it did. One year later they both arrived, not expecting the other and unsure as to why they had come. But when they saw each other they remembered, and they spent a week walking and talking, swimming and eating and making love. And so it continued, every year, the same place, the same time. They became constants.
Ira’s life was not the adventure he’d planned, but he retained a talent for not being disappointed. He spent time in Central America writing promotional literature for international charities. He felt like an outsider, and he may have been nourished by the fact that once a year he met someone who saw him as an adventurer, or at least as a good and worthy man. When Marie told him of her two daughters, born three years apart, she looked for signs of jealousy or hurt but couldn’t see
any. When he told her, a few years later, of his new wife and his new job as a production editor for a charities magazine, living in Croydon and commuting into London every day, she felt a pang of sadness but held tight to the vision of Ira as adventurer.’
Anna, to her annoyance, found herself quite liking the story. She remembered why she had chosen Black: he was, despite his protestations, a storyteller. When they first met he told her tales of divas buying attention on the set of TV adverts and he told them neutrally, never to make a point about himself being better or worse than the person in his story. She liked that. She thought it lacked the need to judge. More lately she had come to think that in fact it reflected ambivalence. She knew, of course, that she saw whatever she wanted to see.
Black was still telling his story. ‘Only once did they discuss staying together, nearly ten years after they had met. Marie had come away despite having a three-month-old baby at home and was restless and ill at ease. Her husband, who was uncomfortable with the emotions that had accompanied this second pregnancy and birth, had been happy for her to go, secure in the knowledge that the nanny would take care of the children.
“Why did you come?” Ira had asked as tenderly as he could. She had shrugged and looked away. Later Ira had said: “I never felt I could make you happy… and now you have the girls…”’
Black glanced at Anna, who had closed her eyes. ‘At the end of that week Marie went home and her husband felt the break had done her good. Ira, unusually, stayed on the island alone for a while.
Twenty-three years after they had first met, Marie arrived at the taverna and waited in all the obvious ways but Ira didn’t come. Marie knew that if he could have come he would, and so he was, in all probability, dead. Nobody in his life knew she existed; there would be nobody to tell her. She stayed on the island alone for the week, to remember and to mourn.’
Black glanced at Anna to see if she offered any sign of a reaction. She might, out of politeness, look sad or even say ‘Ahh.’ She might even tut; deaths in stories can be so convenient, especially if the storyteller is in a hurry. She said nothing. He didn’t mind. He remembered the woman who had told him this story a year or two ago, she had built up to a big finish. They had had sex afterwards. Her name was Sarah. He didn’t really know what she was doing in his head right now. He took a deep breath.
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