‘How will she remember me?’ he asked Barbara, and answered before she could – ‘With a cigarette hanging out of my mouth.’ He swore then and there that he would never smoke again. He shuddered at his selfish self of yesterday, this morning; found it inconceivable that he should have puffed away so blithely, poisoning the air where his own baby daughter was growing.
‘How do I tell people?’ he asked.
‘Let’s not tell anyone yet,’ said Barbara.
How wise she was, and how patient and kind! It was a bloody good job one of them was patient and kind – where would their poor child be otherwise? He saw now that these were the qualities he needed in a woman, the timeless womanly qualities of fidelity and selflessness and compassion. Plus, he couldn’t help but add, full-time nursing skills. How could he have berated her for being boring? Stimulation he could do without, he got enough of that at work surely. There were always books for fuck’s sake. It was the balance of the yin and the yang, they’d had their own dynamic all along; he saw that now.
There was one other person he felt he had to tell.
‘It’s not something for over the phone,’ he muttered into his mobile from inside the garden shed. He had offered to unearth Daisy’s tricycle and have another go at teaching her how to use it. Well, a first go, if he was honest.
‘That sounds intriguing,’ came Fiona’s laid-back drawl.
She was less amused when he told her his news over a glass of wine at her flat. She stopped looking sleek and smiling and pleased with herself. Her face went blank as though a cloud had gone over the sun.
‘The thing about lung cancer is that the, ah, prognosis is not good. The outlook.’
‘I know what prognosis means,’ she said, lowering her beautiful eyelids.
‘And yet the extraordinary thing is, I keep forgetting for a moment and imagining everything’s all right again. You know, like when there’s five minutes of blue sky after a month of rain and immediately you assume it’s going to stay like that for good.’
‘Mm,’ said Fiona, sipping her wine.
‘There’s this deep brainless underlying optimism,’ said Tom with a shaky laugh.
‘You’re in denial,’ said Fiona in a flat voice. ‘There are four stages, you know. Denial, anger, depression, acceptance. You’re still in the first.’
‘Not really. God, I wake in the night and it’s real enough then. Why me and all that. Why me.’
‘You should stop being such a victim and take control of your treatment,’ Fiona opined, and this time there was no mistaking the tone of her voice.
‘Victim?’ spluttered Tom.
Her revulsion was palpable. When he reached across and touched her neck, she got up and crossed the room to get away from him.
‘It’s not catching, you know,’ he said.
‘Why don’t you try that juice cure,’ she said, lighting a cigarette. ‘Flush all the toxins out.’
‘Forgive me.’ he murmured into Barbara’s hair that night.
‘What for?’
‘I haven’t been very. . . I’ve taken you for granted.’
She had had a lot to put up with over the years, he saw that now. He felt remorse for the times when he had been unkind and, yes actually, even cruel. Now that he was about to be plucked away from it, his life with her seemed foolishly underappreciated. The boats were burnt at last, if not in the way he had envisaged.
Gone were thoughts of sexual boredom. Gratefully he dived into Barbara. Vanished was his chilliness towards the under-threes. Ardently he courted Daisy, dazzling her with his funny faces and noises and tricks. Held in the unaccustomed beam of his goodwill, their smiles were pleased but cautious.
Four in the morning became the new time of waking. It was obviously an unconscious urge to be sentient for as much of his remaining non-ash time as possible. He wavered on the threshold of how to face the future. Would he brave it out with stoicism? Or not? The ideal held up for a dying man was of a good-humoured lack of self-mourning. Yet, was it really such a virtue not to mind? Or to lie and claim you didn’t mind? It would be a gallant pulling of the wool over the eyes to let the living off the hook by not showing pain or fear; but on the other hand, they weren’t the ones on the way out.
I’m crocked, he thought, hands behind head staring up at the ceiling; I’m finished. From some bleak dawn corner of his brain came the new voice.
– Go to sleep quietly; you knew all along it ended like this. For everybody. Who cares? In the end, so what. Who do you think you are? Why should you matter?
He listened to Barbara’s breathing and felt her warm thigh against his.
– Who cares? Friends? Family? Your other half?
– Yes no yes.
– Harm and grief. You don’t want to rip them out of their own lives.
– I do.
– Is life so fabulous after all?
– Yes.
– All the same, you’ll be dead soon, whether you like it or not. You know that, don’t you.
He lay there and waited, and gradually grey light crept above the curtains across the ceiling.
If, he vowed in his mind, IF I am spared, never again will I complain about anything. I will accept life as it comes and I will not waste any more of it in pandering to the greedy restless self. I see it all now, how it is and how life should be lived.
Barbara came with him to the next appointment. She paused at the majestic front door to breathe on the brass plaque where clusters of letters swarmed after Mr Orlando Horton’s name.
‘Impressive, eh?’ said Tom. ‘They’re only called mister when they’re really top of the pile. He’s obviously one of the best men for what I’ve got, at least there is that.’
He broke off into a fit of coughing, and spat the frightening blood-flecked results into a tissue. Barbara turned her head away and reached for more tissues. She handed him one and dabbed at her tears with another.
‘Do I look as though I’ve been crying?’ she asked.
‘Not at all,’ he lied, moved by the scarlet and turquoise of her eyes, and drew her into him, tucking her bowed head beneath his chin.
Fifteen minutes later they were standing out on the steps again in a very different state.
‘You haven’t got cancer,’ said Barbara, clutching his hand, his loose fist, and moving it with little rocking movements along her cheek, under her jaw. She hung on to his hand and kissed it.
‘I’m not going to die,’ marvelled Tom. He had his arm round her shoulders, sagged onto her.
‘You’ll get better,’ sniffed Barbara, holding his hand to her wet face. She wouldn’t let go.
‘It’ll take five sets of drugs,’ said Tom. ‘A cocktail of drugs as he put it. But there’s no question. They’ll work.’
‘Tuberculosis!’ marvelled Barbara. ‘I thought it had disappeared.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ he said, propelling her down to the pavement. ‘Let’s find somewhere for coffee.’
‘Did he actually say he’d made a mistake at any point?’ asked Barbara, her face in ruins after the last half-hour, ruins through which the sun now shone.
‘No he didn’t, did he,’ said Tom, halting again.
‘It was when he said, “In retrospect,”’ said Barbara. ‘Then I knew there was a chance.’
‘In retrospect,’ said Tom. ‘You’re right. It’s one of those phrases. Same as, “With the benefit of hindsight.” Bastard. Why didn’t I say anything? I just felt so stunned. I’m going back in right now.’
‘Oh Tom please,’ said Barbara. ‘You’re alive. I need a coffee.’
‘In retrospect,’ snarled Tom, leading her off to the nearest Starbucks.
That afternoon they had a celebration with Daisy; they collected her from the nursery and sat out on the pocket-handkerchief of lawn in the back garden with a cake and candles. ‘Happy birthday’, sang Daisy, and Barbara couldn’t stop smiling. I’ve been allowed back on, thought Tom. When Daisy blew out the candles, he lit them again. I did
n’t want to have to get off the train yet, he thought, and in the end I didn’t have to. Barbara cut the cake into slices, and he ate more than his fair share, though neither she nor Daisy seemed to mind.
Some weeks later, one fine warm evening late in May, Tom was standing out in the garden. It was almost dark, and Barbara was at the back door. She’d been nagging him about taking more time off, but nothing was going to stop him leaving tomorrow early. He was off to Islamabad and had just been informed that the lovely Sophie would be coming along as research assistant.
‘Tom,’ called Barbara softly from the back door.
‘In a minute,’ he replied.
She had been doing that thing she did. After they’d eaten their pasta, in the space where normally he’d be enjoying a cigarette with his coffee, she’d been fiddling with her wedding ring, twisting it round and round. It drove him mad. Why did she carry on doing it when she knew how much it irritated him? Then, when she thought he wasn’t looking, he saw her floss the gap between her front teeth with a strand of her long hair.
From his jeans pocket now he extracted the contraband pack of Marlboro. There was the brief flare of a match in the dark, then the end of his cigarette glowed scarlet. He pulled out his mobile and tapped in a number. As he waited for the connection he took a draught of nicotine, bathing himself like a Roman emperor in its fabulous drench.
‘Is that Sophie?’ he murmured. ‘Ah, just the goddess I wanted to talk to. Now, tell me . . .’
He was standing in the lush dusk of early summer, his shoes white with petals in grass still wet from the afternoon rain. The yellow-lit windows of the terraced houses opposite were silent pictures of talk and appetite and solitude. All round the back gardens the candles of horse chestnut trees glowed creamy in the gloom and a soft marzipan scent blew from their clusters over and around him. He didn’t really notice any of that; he was too busy talking, soft and urgent, into his mobile.
The Phlebotomist’s Love Life
Sun slid early over the curtains and woke her still smiling from their victorious photo finish of the night before. They had been together for a year and together was the word. She saw now that without this private truthful allying in powerful pairs all over the globe, without this nothing would work and the world would come to an end.
Then came the tide of unease like a body blush, the flush of dismay. What had they done in the night? She flicked on the radio and he moaned in his sleep beside her.
‘Sorry,’ she whispered, remembering he was on a late, and slipped off to the kitchen with her work clothes. She put some toast on and filled the kettle. ‘Has he killed as many people as Stalin?’ came the voice from the radio, keen as mustard, ‘Proportionately, that is?’
How eager they had all been to step out of the blood-boltered twentieth century, she thought as she pulled on her tights; how sick to the back teeth of the fangs of history and misery they all were. Now look. Some belle époque. Not even one prelapsarian decade this time; not even one paltry year of peace.
Stopping at the corner shop to buy a paper, she scanned the photos beneath the headlines on display, palm trees and oily black cumulus clouds and silent howling faces.
‘Lovely morning,’ said Ahmed as she paid him.
‘Beautiful,’ she agreed. ‘Terrible,’ she added, indicating the front page of her paper.
‘Terrible, terrible,’ muttered Ahmed. ‘The poor people. What have they done? They have done nothing.’
She stifled the impulse to apologise. He too, presumably, had helped to vote in this government.
On the bus it was standing room only. It had always caused her trouble with men – war. She dreaded its approach, from the moment when they first mentioned its possibility on the news to the pretend discussion about rights and wrongs in the run-up. She remembered her first proper boyfriend, Ewan, and his rage at her objections to the Gulf War. True, her talk had sounded childish even to her, even then when she was only twenty – wishing that women could go off and live on another continent, man-free, war-free. Or at least, go to that neutral continent taking the children with them for the duration of any war the men had created. Without testosterone and the desire for phallic toys, she’d argued, the world would be a better place.
Bollocks, he’d said.
Who had she been with during the Kosovo conflict? With Dan, of course. War is the worst, she’d told him; living in a state of murder and the reversal of all things good.
What about the Second World War? he demanded. Eh? Wasn’t that a just war? You’d have been wringing your hands along with Neville Chamberlain, wouldn’t you, all out for appeasement.
At times like this, she cried, women get put in their place. They go horribly quiet. It comes down to rape and babies. Ah, ah, you don’t like me going on at you like this. You’d prefer me in a chador! A burqa!
You’re like a fox terrier, aren’t you, he’d said when she’d continued to disagree with him; you get hold of an idea and then nothing’ll stop the yapping.
Up on the fifth floor in Haematology, they were slopping around with their early-morning caffè lattes and setting up for the day ahead. Ambulance sirens hooted like owls, the noise drifting up from the roads round the hospital. She took her own coffee to a grime-streaked window and looked down over the waking city, its tower blocks and churches and grids of terraced houses spread out to the sun, some hundreds of thousands of lives within her purlieu, and as she looked her eye’s imagination pumped clouds of poison in an unnerving pall across the landscape.
Soon there were twenty or so patients clutching numbered paper tickets in the waiting room where she was. Her job was to take blood, but not till nine o’clock and it was still only five to. A mournful-faced elderly man appeared at the door, clutching a big pink plastic-covered number eight.
‘Is this where I should be?’ he asked.
‘No, you’re a Warfarin if you’ve been given that plastic number,’ she told him. ‘You want the anti-coagulant clinic down on the third floor.’
‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘This is the blood department, isn’t it? Some other young woman assured me it was up here.’
‘Well yes, this is one part of it, but you need the other part, and that’s on the third floor.’
‘Just my luck. The lift’s broken.’
‘There’s one that works on the other side of the building,’ she told him. ‘If you walk along that corridor, follow it along to the swing doors, then keep left.’
I’ll never believe the government again when it says there’s no money for public services, she thought; not after this, not after it’s written a blank cheque to the army without a murmur.
In her side room of sharps and vacutainers she passed her working days in a sequence of three-minute cycles. ‘Hello!’ she said with a reassuring smile, ‘Yes one arm out of a sleeve please’, some random chat if they wanted that while she hunted for the vein; then they looked away often talking rapidly while she slowly drew off a dark crimson tubeful. Occasionally someone would express surprise at the blood being purple-crimson, and she would take another half-minute to explain that this was venous blood as opposed to the oxygenated arterial scarlet sort that flows from cuts and wounds.
These days, rather than quiz them about holiday plans before she inserted the needle, she simply said in a neutral voice: ‘So what do you think of the war, then?’ She found the daily montage of opinion this tactic produced addictively compelling.
It’s all wrong that they’re e-mailing home, said one; soldiers should cut off from the soft domestic side of things, they shouldn’t be thinking about whether their boy was Man of the Match; you know he sends his football team to be tortured if they lose? I’m fifty, said another, and this is the first time in my life I’ve felt ashamed of my country; I wake up and I feel ashamed. War is inevitable, shrugged the third in line, it’s part of human nature; they haven’t had one for a while. Why is war inevitable? fumed the next one on; who says? People no longer fight duels to settle argume
nts, so why continue to do so at a national level? There are other ways to get what you want.
‘Here we all are,’ declared a stout well-dressed old man. ‘We’ve been managing to live alongside Muslims for the last thousand years – and now this! Don’t they know anything? Haven’t they read any history? Ouch.’ He rolled his eyes up to the sky with dismal sarcasm. ‘Maybe Jesus will save us.’
‘Everybody’s got used to it now, because it’s not affecting our lives here,’ claimed a large woman with a toddler in tow. ‘We’re all still doing what we normally do. It’s awful really, the way the children sit in front of the television and say “Oh not the war again”, and zap it with the remote. Ben, put that down. Now.’
He’s a vile dictator and he cannot be allowed to go on torturing and murdering his own people and manufacturing chemical weapons, she was told; he’s in breach of UN resolutions; he’s a menace to everyone and it’s high time he was taken out.
Surely there are other ways of saving a country than by making it uninhabitable, she heard; what they’ve spent on bombs in the last fortnight would have covered the cost of providing clean water for the entire world.
Her last of the morning was American, heavily pregnant and incandescent with indignation. ‘It’s like a bad dream,’ she cried, not waiting to be prompted. ‘But the trouble is when I wake up each morning I realise it’s not a dream. You know he’s from Texas? Did you know it’s legal there to carry a gun but against the law to own a vibrator? Make war not love, hey! I’m glad I’m not in the war zone right now, I’d be in the queue of pregnant women at the hospital begging for a Caesar. Cluster bombs, shrapnel, did you see that bus they bombed last night, killed eight children, the baby in a shroud . . .’
‘Shhh, shhh,’ she said to her once she’d sealed up her blood and put it safely to one side. She handed her a tissue. ‘You mustn’t think about it for the next few days, you must avoid the papers and the news generally or your blood pressure will go sky high and they’ll haul you in for observation and you don’t want that.’
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