But now the volunteer returns with the teas and keeps his eyes turned down from the blood-drip. My lover has noticed his aversion and asks kindly, ‘Does the blood bother you?’
‘A bit.’
‘Just a bit?’
‘A lot.’ Finally he admits that he sometimes feels faint. My lover looks affectionately at the sump of blood suspended above his arm and drawls, from the drastic languor of his medication, ‘Just think of it as a big plastic kidney.’ The volunteer resists the cue to look at the blood-bag, with the result that he continues to look deeply into my lover’s eyes.
My lover pats the side of the bed. ‘Do you have a moment to sit down?’ I move over so that my lover can move his legs out of the volunteer’s way, but my lover leaves his legs where they are, so the volunteer must make contact or else perch on the very edge of the bed.
The volunteer sits quiet for a moment, then clears his throat. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’ he asks.
‘Feel free,’ my lover says. ‘You’re the guest.’
‘Well, you’re having a transfusion, and what I can never work out is, what happens to the blood you have extra, when you get someone else’s on top of your own?’
‘Yes, I used to wonder about that,’ admits my lover. ‘What happens is, they put another tube in your big toe, and drain the old blood out of there.’ He gives the sheet a tug to loosen it from the bottom of the bed. ‘Do you want a look?’
For the moment, the volunteer wants to go on looking at my lover’s face.
‘Don’t you think you should?’ my lover goes on. ‘Shouldn’t you try to overcome this silly fear of yours, if you’re going to do the sort of work you’re doing? Wouldn’t that be the responsible thing?’
Mesmerized, the volunteer looks down at my lover’s foot under the sheet. My lover pulls the sheet away from his foot. The big toe is pink and normal-looking. My lover looks startled and says, ‘Oh, Christ, it must have come out, now we’re in trouble, can you see it anywhere?’ The volunteer casts his eyes desperately this way and that.
For some time I have been sending my lover signals of mild reproach about the wind-up job that is giving him so much pleasure; finally he gives in to them. He drapes the sheet over his feet again and says, ‘Actually, since you ask, I pee away the surplus.’ He smiles at the volunteer, who smiles back, at first incredulously and then with wonder at my lover’s healthy sense of mischief.
My lover asks him please to tuck in the sheet around his feet, since it seems to have come adrift.
When the volunteer has gone at last, my lover says again, ‘Isn’t he gorgeous?’ He looks thoughtful. ‘But he can’t be gay. That’s never a gay beard. It’s too overgrown.’
‘I’m afraid you’re right.’
‘And you saw those corduroys.’
‘Cords are a bad sign. Still …’
My lover sighs. ‘At least he’s not mutton dressed as lamb. He’s mutton all right. But he has definite mutton appeal.’ It sounds like an advert for stock cubes. ‘He just can’t be gay, that’s all.’
My lover has a fantasy about living in the country with a vet who drives a half-timbered Morris Traveller, and this stranger comes close enough to set it off. A half-timbered Morris Traveller is apparently a car which even animals recognize as the appropriate vehicle for a person who will take care of them, so that they quieten down, even if their injuries are severe – or so my lover says – when they hear its engine note, some time before the car comes into view.
There is something I recognize as authentic in this fantasy of my lover’s. It has about it the whiff of self-oppression, which we are as quick to recognize in each other as other couples, I imagine, are at spotting egg-stains on ties or lipstick on collars. The imaginary vet is classified by fantasy as virile and caring, in a way no man could be who loved other men, while my lover enters the picture as a damaged animal, a creature who can’t hope to be treated as an equal but who accepts subordinate status, the price of tenderness.
All the same, the volunteer pays a number of return visits. He goes on holiday to Malta for a week and phones the hospital twice, so that the cordless phone – a treat that testifies to the volunteer’s special status – is delivered to my lover’s room, its aerial extended and gleaming. My lover has exercised once again his knack for being loved. The volunteer out of Born Free, meanwhile, is awarded a mark of privilege, a nickname: the Vet. Now my conversations with my lover have an extra layer of mysteriousness to nurses who hear me asking him if he’s seen the Vet today. The Vet turns out to be older than he looks, in his mid-forties, so that he could almost be my lover’s father. There’s certainly something fatherly about the Vet when he sits on the bed and plays absent-mindedly with the hairs on my lover’s leg. Sitting there, he might indeed be a father, trying to put off explaining the facts of life to an adolescent son, or a public-school housemaster explaining the meaning of confirmation.
One day I give my lover a bath; feeling clean, after all, is the nearest that people on this ward can come to feeling well. My lover is dizzy and unsteady on his feet, so I use a wheelchair to carry him back along the corridor to his room. I return the wheelchair to the bathroom right away, like a good boy, and the Vet must have arrived just while I was down the corridor, because when I come back I see that the door is closed. I look through the window and see the Vet perched on the bed, conducting his usual earnest conversation with my lover’s leg. So I kill time doing a tour of the ward.
I offer to buy the patient in the room next to my lover’s some of the ice-lollies he sucks when his mouth flares up, but he’s well supplied at the moment, and his thrush doesn’t even seem too bad. In fact he’s unusually perky altogether. It was his birthday last week, and his ex-lover continued the custom they’d had by bringing him one practical present (a toasted-sandwich-maker) and one pampering present: a big bottle of essence of violets from Jermyn Street. I’m mean enough, by the way, to think that ex-lovers can afford to be generous when they visit; I look on them the way lifers in a prison must look on youngsters who are in for a short sharp shock.
The sandwich-maker was taken home, and the essence bottle was wrapped in a flannel and put by the basin, where a cleaner smashed it two days later. She burst into tears, and he told her not to worry about it, but in fact he wants to be reimbursed, and if the hospital doesn’t have the relevant insurance he wants it taken out of the cleaner’s wages. So now he’s unpopular with the staff, but he’s sticking to his guns. If dirty looks were radiotherapy he’d have lost a lot of hair by now, but the sense of defending a principle has given his health a definite boost.
When I return to my lover’s room and peep through the window, the conversation shows no sign of stopping, so I leave them to it and go back to his neighbour’s room, where the basin still smells like a florist’s. There was something I glimpsed on the window sill a minute ago that puzzled me, and I summon up the nerve to ask about it.
It’s a soft toy in the shape of a fat scheming cat, but a cat that seems to have two tiny hoops of wire fixed high on its stomach.
‘That’s my hospital Garfield,’ explains the neighbour with a little embarrassment. ‘I only use it in hospital.’
‘No, I don’t mean that,’ I say, ‘I mean, what are those?’ I point at the little hoops.
He blushes outright and shyly opens his pyjama jacket. ‘What you really mean is, what are these?’
His nipples have little inserted hoops of their own, and the hospital Garfield is indeed, as I thought incredulously at first glance, a soft toy with an erotic piercing.
My lover’s neighbour nods at his customized toy. ‘The nurses have this great sense of humour,’ he says. ‘They did that while I was out.’
I am slow to take in the information he is giving me. It is a few moments before I realize that by ‘out’ he means not just socially unavailable but profoundly unconscious.
I keep away from my lover as long as I plausibly can. Purely from a medical point of view, flirtati
on is likely to have a beneficial effect on his low blood pressure. A little teasing romance may actually make him stronger at the knees.
From my own point of view I feel not jealousy, but a definite tremor of worry. My lover’s instinct for help is profound and I trust it. If he thinks I’m capable, then I am. But if he enlists the Vet, I lose confidence. It’s not that I don’t want to share the load. I’d love to. But if my lover is hedging his bets, then I suddenly fear that he has good reason. Perhaps he now realizes I will crack up or get ill myself. My equilibrium falters, and the glands of selfish worry, that I have been suppressing for the duration, flare up at once and all together.
On subsequent visits, the Vet consolidates his burly charisma in my lover’s eyes by turning out to own the right cars. He doesn’t drive a Morris Traveller as such – that would be a little bit spooky. But he does buy glamorous or gloriously dowdy cars cheap in auctions, and garages them with friends or in fields when they need a little more work than he can do, handy though he is. He drives an Alfa that costs him more in insurance every year than he paid in the first place. One of these days he knows that the police will pull him over and ask him ever so nicely not to wear it in public again. Waiting in various locations for a little more cash or an elusive spare part are a Bentley, an Aston Martin and a Wolseley.
My lover has a passion for fast and/or classic cars. Before I knew him he owned an MG – he put an old phone in it, in fact, the kind you crank, and used to mime conversations at traffic-lights in summer, with the top down. This was before the days of car phones, let alone the days of commercially made imitation car phones – which I think makes it all right.
I don’t follow my lover’s car conversations with the Vet. I don’t begin to understand what makes one car boxy but lovable, and another one nippy but a little Japanese about the hips.
There must be something about cars that makes people use a different register, almost a different language. Keith, my instructor, uses a whole mysterious vocabulary of phrases, so that I had to learn to understand his language, if not actually to speak Instructor, before I could really begin learning to drive. He mutters, ‘Baby clutch … baby clutch,’ when he wants me to be subtle with my left foot, and, ‘Double gas … TREBLE gas,’ when he wants me to be brash with my right. When I’m fumbling between gears he prompts me (‘then three … then two’), and when I’ve finally got it right and married speed to ratio, he says with mild put-on surprise, ‘It works!’ or else he gives a sort of jeer of approval (‘Yeeeeah!’). If I don’t need prompting for a minute or so, he’ll murmur, ‘Looking good’ or, ‘I’m almost impressed.’ More often he gets me to slow down, with a warning ‘Cool it,’ or to speed up – for which he mutters, ‘It’s not happening’ and makes gestures with his hands, sweeping them forwards.
I used to interpret the phrase and the gesture the wrong way, as if what Keith wanted was for the road to be taken away from in front of him, but I suppose that was just my old reluctance surfacing again in the lightest of disguises. I’ve got it worked out now and give the accelerator a squeeze. If I’ve been slow to understand him and to deliver the speed he requires, Keith gets more direct. The phrases for this are ‘Let’s piss off out of here’ or ‘Give it a bit of poke.’
If I take my time before changing up, he goes ‘mmmm’, with a sharp intonation that says what-are-you-waiting-for? If I’m not properly positioned in my lane, he makes a flick of the hand to guide me in the right direction. Often, when I’ve misjudged a manoeuvre or underestimated a hazard, he says, with a quiet satisfaction, ‘Not a good gear.’ To remind me of the mirror he sometimes taps it with his forefinger or mutters – there seems no obvious reason for his choice of language – ‘Spiegel’.
I start to relax in the lesson at the point where Keith lights up his first cigarette. I’m sure he’s got enough of a craving that he’d light up sooner or later, whatever sort of idiot I was being, but I become more competent knowing he’s felt able to focus his attention on the cigarette packet and the matches for a few seconds. Unless of course it’s my terrible driving that makes the comfort of a cigarette so hugely attractive.
Keith opens the window a crack and leans forward to adjust the heating. I take every move he makes as a looming comment on my driving, so I’m absurdly relieved when he’s only making adjustments to the car’s interior climate. Then Keith talks. It’s as if he’s trying to simulate the distractions of traffic, when we’re on a clear road. There’s nothing I find harder than giving talking a low priority; left to my instincts, I’d rather be attentive in the conversation than safe on the road. It’s not that I get flustered when he’s really trying to put me off my stride – like the time he asked, ‘When you going to get married, then?’ after he had warned me he was about to request an emergency stop, and before he actually smacked the dashboard to give me my cue. That question doesn’t faze me, though I gather it’s pretty much guaranteed to make the young men botch their manoeuvre. But I’m interested in Keith and what he has to say, and when he stops talking because there’s tricky work ahead I can’t wait to get the hazards behind me, whatever they are, and go back to what he’s saying.
Sometimes Keith talks about nothing, anything, the daily papers, and how he’s going to give up the Sun when they stop running their Bingo game – unless of course they announce another. He wrote a letter to the Sun’s Grouse of the Week column just recently, which they didn’t print, complaining about a doctor in the news who’d overturned the car giving his daughter a driving lesson in the grounds of his house. It was taking a living away from driving instructors, that was Keith’s Grouse, and served the doctor right, and what would he think if people started doing operations on each other in their kitchens?
Sometimes he talks about his history, about Barnardo’s and the army and home-ownership.
‘I had a lovely house in an acre, lovely car, two-car garage, garden with a rockery and floodlights – spent a grand on landscaping – fruit trees, currant bushes, but it wasn’t what I wanted, none of it. I think I worked that out before I finished laying the rockery, but I still installed those bloody floodlights.’
He moved out from the house he shared with Sue and took up with Olga. Olga is the battered mobile home where he lives, parked in a muddy field a few miles out of town. She’s a hulk, but he seems well set up there, in his way. We went out there once, on a lesson; I needed practice, apparently, manoeuvring in muddy conditions, and Keith certainly needed a Calor Gas container picked up and taken for refilling. We had a cup of tea in Olga while we were at it, though his eyes narrowed with distrust at the idea that anyone could drink it without sugar. He takes four spoonfuls and gives the tea-bag a good drubbing with the spoon, as if the point of the procedure was not to infuse a drink but actually to wash the tea-bag free of stains.
Laundry is one of the few services that he’s not found a way of doing for himself. He does any telephoning he needs at the driving school, and even brings his electric razor in to work for recharging with BSM current. He leaves the right change for milk and newspapers in Olga’s mighty glove compartment and has them delivered right into her cab. But laundry is one thing that’s beyond him and so he pops over to Sue’s every week or so (and takes a bath while he’s at it). He has a ‘leg-over’ while he’s there, but to hear him talk about it, that leg-over isn’t the linchpin of the arrangement. I imagine Sue in front of her mirror on one of the evenings Keith is expected – he doesn’t always turn up, but he knows how to keep just enough on the right side of her that she doesn’t come to find him, her horn sounding furiously all the way from the main road as her car crawls into the treacherous field where Olga sits. I imagine her powdering her face and wondering whether she should try some new perfume. She doesn’t know it’s Ariel that arouses Keith’s senses, not Chanel.
I need a pee after my cup of tea. Keith shows me the lavatory, which is chemical and tucked away in a low cupboard. Keith can stand up in most parts of Olga, but there’s nowhere that the roof’s high
enough to give my head clearance. To use the lavatory, I have to kneel and face forward. Keith gives me a little privacy by going to the cab, where he hasn’t bothered to put up cork tiling. He presses a hand to the roof and says, ‘Some mornings the condensation’s unbelievable in here. It’s like Niagara bastard Falls.’
Only when I’m finished with my rather awkward pee does he mention that personally, personally, speaking for himself, he finds it more convenient to piss in a bottle and then pour it away, though of course everybody’s different, aren’t they? There’s a coffee jar, scrupulously clean and free of labels, tucked away at the side of the lavatory, which I suspect is his chosen bottle. I wish I’d spotted it earlier, though I doubt if I’d have had the nerve to use it.
Before we leave, Keith shows me his photo album. It’s like anybody’s photo album – anybody who wasn’t thought worthy of a photograph before he joined the army, who built a raft in Malaya based on what people built in films when they were marooned, who had four children by two wives before there was ever a Sue, who kept sheep and chickens for a while in Devon – except that nothing’s in order. It’s the sort of album where each thick page has a thick sheet of Cellophane to hold the pictures down, no need of photo corners, and Keith seems to like keeping even the past provisional. Perhaps on non-bath evenings he amuses himself by rearranging the photographs, shuffling the blurred sheep and the precise soldiers, the blurred children. In every picture that shows Keith, he is pointing out of the frame, insisting that the real subject is out there somewhere, refusing to be the focus of the composition.
On the way back to town, he gets me to do some emergency stops. If it’s at all possible, he synchronizes them with young women walking alone. He smacks the dashboard just before we pass. The woman usually glares at us as we stop dead right next to her and then she relaxes into a pitying half-smile when she sees it’s only a learner driver. No real threat. Then her face goes half-way back to its original expression, when she sees that Keith is staring at her with a defiant hunger. At times like this, I am able to look at Keith outside the terms of our sealed-in little relationship, outside its flux of resentment and dependence, and he seems, I must admit, like a pretty ordinary little shit.
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story Page 71