by Emily Elgar
I laugh as he drops his head dramatically down onto the wooden counter and I pinch the last bit of cheese as he murmurs in an injured voice, ‘Promise me the year is going to get better than this.’
I grin at him, but I don’t reply. I start walking upstairs towards our bedroom instead, because I don’t want to make David any more promises I can’t keep.
2
Frank
When I was a kid, around six or seven maybe, my mum got ill. Nothing too serious it turns out but she had to go away for a couple of weeks and me and my brother went to stay with our grandparents. They were nice enough to us, but the point is, it’s the first time I can recall missing someone. Not a vague everyday kind of missing, but a sort of reverse umbilical wrench. Without my mum I felt embryonic, incapable on my own; every instinct wanted to be back inside her, where it was safe, where I couldn’t be alone. Then we went home and everything was normal again and in the way of kids, all the crying and calling out for her, well, it was as if it never happened.
Without Alice, I remembered that time, how I felt when my mum was ill. I’ve been panicky these last few days, scaring myself imagining her never coming back. She told me she wouldn’t be around for Christmas but I thought it’d just be a day or two. There were a couple of bank nurses over the holiday who didn’t even bother to learn my name. To them, I was just ‘the patient’.
That new one, Lizzie, tries the odd joke with me.
‘It’s turkey flavour today, Mr Ashcroft,’ she said from under her Santa hat on Christmas Day as she emptied a syringe into one of the tubes that spools out of me, pumping brown ICU mush directly into my stomach. Nice of her to try, but she should know I couldn’t tell the difference between turkey and tarmac. Lizzie’s new to us veggies as well; it’s obvious. She moves my head in hesitant, cautious jerks. It’s quite sweet really. She doesn’t want to hurt me, but she could take a cheese grater to my chest and a lighter to my balls and I’d feel it, every grate and burn, just like anyone else, but I wouldn’t be able to scream. I wouldn’t even be able to bat an eyelid.
I often wonder if Sharma had believed Alice and her diagnosis of ‘Locked In’ rather than ‘Persistent Vegetative State’ how different things would be for me here. PVS, as far as I can gather, is a pretty way of saying dead in all ways that count for the living. The PVS patient is balancing between life and death, their brain empty as a cloud but their lungs pumped with oxygen. The docs keep the patient going, like kids with a butterfly on a piece of string, they will not let go, but stick grimly to their game, because to turn off the machines, to let go of that string, would be to lose the game, to let the butterfly float away, and that can’t happen. It can’t be helped though, I suppose. The living are usually obsessive about life.
So that’s PVS, lights on but no one home. My situation is a little different, I’m home but my fuse has blown to the ‘off’ setting, Alice calls it ‘Locked In Syndrome’. An itchy nose, a sense of humour, sex drive, a voice in my head, needing to shit, regret, I’ve got it all, all those urges, needs and desires, as clear, prickly and torturous as ever. But I’m stuck, I can’t ‘do’ any of them. There’s no scratching, laughing, shagging, chatting, crapping or crying. It’s all done for me or over me, apart from the shagging.
Alice is still the only one who can sense me in here, trapped in my body, like a straitjacket.
This morning, I hear her before I see her; I know her step anywhere now. Her walk sounds like a pianist’s fingers across the keyboard. She lifts and lilts, the heel notes low and the toes higher. Relief pulses through me and crests as she comes into my line of vision.
Alice is back. She’s here.
A few strands of her wavy brown hair have escaped from her bun and bounce down towards me just inches from my face. Her blue eyes crease a little as she smiles, a dimple on her left cheek, and, yes, there it is … there’s the gap between her teeth; like a tiny secret cave, it only shows when she smiles. She told me once that when she was a student she tried to save enough money to have the gap closed up, but she went on holiday instead.
‘Hi, Frank, Happy New Year. Hope your Christmas was all right. It’s good to see you.’ I want her to touch me, to put her hand against my cheek, to tell me like my mum told me that she’s back and she’ll stay with me now. I don’t think even Alice knows how long ten days can be trapped in here. She chatters away about her Christmas, her niece and nephew, but I know what she’s thinking about as she bites her bottom lip. If I could, I’d tell her I know how loneliness gnaws, how rage blisters, I’d tell her we may be different, but she’s not alone.
She picks the tinsel off the end of my bed and I think, Cheers, Alice, not my sort of thing, to be honest. She hesitates for a moment by my Christmas cards, but she doesn’t take them down, and then she’s gone, off for rounds. I’m grateful she leaves the cards; I’ve only seen them once, when Lizzie opened them just before Christmas. The rest of the time they’ve been stuck onto the side panel of my bedside unit and it’s rare they move my neck far enough to the right for me to see them. I only got three this year, which is fair enough, I suppose, considering I didn’t send any. I can remember them fairly well; my brain’s good at taking photos now. Small mercies. There’s one from my little brother Dex who about a year ago moved to Costa del Somewhere with his new wife. My mum moved out of the house in Swindon we grew up in, where she lived on her own since Dad died, twenty-nine years ago, to live with Dex and his new wife, Bridget, in Spain six months ago. I was amazed Dex had done something for Mum, for the family, but then I found out the minicab company he’s set up is in her name for tax breaks, and she has to be registered as living in the Costa del Somewhere. Their card is of a cartoon Santa in his sleigh landing on a roof. My mum would’ve chosen it; when Lizzie hovered the card in front of my face, I saw the writing is in her spidery hand.
All OK here. Dex’s business is going well and most shops sell English food so I can get my Branston and cheddar so I’m happy! No one told me it gets so cold down here over winter but it should pick up again soon. We’ll come and see you next time we’re over. Sorry we couldn’t come for Christmas, love, but things have been tight since the move. Hope you’re keeping your chin up! Love Mum, Dex and Bridget.
Dex and Mum visited me before they left for Spain. I didn’t see Mum properly; she didn’t like looking at me. I don’t blame her. Instead she sat in my chair and cried softly while Dex paced around me, wincing at the tubes that plunge into me, and said something about how we’re kinder to animals. He’s never been the tactful type.
My other card is of a wintery scene with a hare running across the snow. It was from my old mate John, another site manager I worked with for years, before the redundancies rolled in. He didn’t say much, as I recall. No one ever does when they think you’re as good as dead.
The last one – an ice-skating polar bear – was from my Luce. She knows, of course, that someone will read out my cards so she doesn’t say much either but she included a photo: me dressed as Santa Claus and a five-year-old Luce sitting on my knee with dark pigtails and a red tartan dress, in our new-build semi on Summerhill Close just outside Brighton. Moments before the photo, she’d pulled down my beard, and seeing me underneath, stammered, her eyes wide with the magical truth, ‘Daddy! You’re Santa Claus!’ It became a Christmas tradition for me to tell that story every year. Imagine if she could pull away my breathing tube, look beyond my putrefying body and see, really see, me here, now – ‘Daddy! You’re here!’ – but I shoo the thought away. It’ll mess with my head.
Celia, George’s wife, visited for most of Christmas Day. She’d been to church and brought along some of her church friends after the service for a visit. I get the impression church is Celia’s interest and George’s triple bypass and the pneumonia that has led to his incarceration here on 9B have provided Celia the perfect platform to really try and hammer Jesus into George’s re-upholstered heart. On Christmas Day, the prayers muttered around George were longer and said with ev
en more gusto than usual, Celia’s soft West Indian accent floating above all the other voices for the ‘Amen!’ One of the members of the congregation started humming ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ and by the time they’d got to ‘Glory to the newborn king!’ everyone else had joined in, and before I knew it there was an impromptu carol concert here on 9B and for a moment the ward felt as much like home as any house I’ve lived in.
At the end of the carol, I heard the curtain between George and me slide back, exposing me. Someone sucked their teeth. Celia stepped towards me and peered into my face. I’d only seen her properly once before, although I hear her weeping over George most days. I’ve only had a glimpse of George; he’s so covered in tubes he looks like a drawing a child tried to scribble out. I suppose he might think the same of me. I saw just a puff of white hair and his lower arm and hand, his skin must have been dark once, but now it’s almost chalky; so different to Celia’s which is the colour and silky texture of milky coffee. On Christmas Day, her eyes were alight either with the Holy Spirit or with the sweet sherry I smelt on her breath.
In a voice that seems to freshen the air, she said, ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Ashcroft, here’s a little something from us all at The Risen Lord church.’ She leant forward and whispered, ‘It’s a bible’, into my ear as if she’d just given me the elixir of life and everyone else on the ward would try and steal it if they knew. Still, it’s a happy surprise when someone thinks it’s worth whispering to me at all. She left the bible on my bedside unit. It must still be there now.
Lizzie opened my other present for me, which was a scarf from Luce. It prickled and scratched my skin like sackcloth all day. Although I’m sure the nurses felt sorry no one visited, I’m pleased Lucy didn’t come. I’d only make her feel low.
Ellen, an elderly patient, had her quiet, doughy-faced grandchildren with her for a few minutes on Christmas Day. She must have been unconscious. She started her bloody wailing while they were with her. ‘No! No!’ she called. ‘The siren!’ They left a few minutes after she started, their faces singed a sunset pink, probably worried the nurses would think they were doing something to upset her. They shouldn’t; she calls out like that all the time.
Today, I watch Lizzie across the ward tuck in the sheets in the bed opposite with aggressive movements. She’s not tall; she has to stand on her tiptoes and lean over the bed to pull the sheets taut. She reminds me of one of Luce’s friends from school. Her cheeks are freckled and pillow-like, and she has round hazel eyes that look like they’ve cared for people for many years already. There’s a well of feeling in those eyes. She still jumps every time one of our alarms goes off. She’ll get used to all the noise soon enough. It won’t take long for her to know which alarms are normal and which alarms mean someone is trying to escape. When she’s finished, the bed looks like it could be on a barracks not a ward. She sees my eyes are open and she smiles.
She comes over to me and says, ‘Morning, Mr Ashcroft’, before she moistens my eyes with a cotton bud soaked in saline solution. My eyes burn with relief. Because I don’t blink, my eyes have to be moistened when they’re open, at least every hour or so, otherwise they’ll dry up like raisins. Alice asks all the nurses to moisten my eyes whenever they see them open. I’m troublesome like that; it’s why some of the nurses will stroke my eyes shut when no one’s looking, as if I’m dead already. I’ve heard Sharma call my eye opening an ‘involuntary spasm’ and I’ll give him the involuntary – my eyelids do seem to follow their own laws – but Alice said it can be a sign of getting better too and although I don’t often let myself linger on the thought, this morning, as a treat, I rest there for a while, letting myself believe that it might be true.
Lizzie comes over to me some time during mid-morning, when the sunlight has settled into its space on the ward. She piles towels, waterproof blankets, soap and extra blankets in front of me.
‘Alice is busy, Mr Ashcroft,’ she says. ‘She asked me to give you your sponge bath. I hope that’s OK.’
To be honest, I’m a little disappointed it’s not Alice, but I’m in no position to make demands. Lizzie has forgotten to draw the curtains and I’m just bracing myself for a new humiliation, imagining Ellen’s kids and grandkids arriving and seeing Lizzie cleaning my arse like a toddler when, with a titter at herself, Lizzie remembers, and draws the curtain around us, saying, ‘Better to have some privacy, eh, Mr Ashcroft?’
Lizzie moves a soapy cloth methodically over my skin, over every inch of me. She talks about the weather. The water is warm. I feel each individual skin cell react to her massage, each pore opening like a starved mouth to the cloth. She moves me onto my side to wash my back. Every bed bath feels like the first time I’ve ever been touched, like an entirely new sensation.
‘So my dad reckons this cold snap is going to last for a few more weeks, like last year, remember?’ The water runs over me, sheds my old skin, makes me new. Lizzie glances over an area on my back with her sponge. It doesn’t have as much feeling as the rest of me. ‘Oh, you’ve got a sore here, Mr Ashcroft. I’ll pop a dressing on that later.’ But now that she’s touched it, even so lightly, I can feel the skin around it start to pucker and burn, and I know what’s coming and I’m swearing and fucking livid that this moment is going to be ruined and here it comes, the lightest tingle at first, increasing in waves before the whole area explodes in a tsunami of itchiness.
‘Of course all my mum can think about is her bulbs; too much cold can kill them off apparently …’
The itch burrows itself into my back like a maggot in an apple, the flesh around it rotting with longing, longing to be scratched.
Dear God.
‘… and all my brother can talk about is getting a day off school if it snows.’
Please, Lizzie, please
The itch spreads; like an army of ants marching, it branches from the base of my spine up towards my shoulders
Scratch it!
I can’t enjoy her washing the backs of my legs or my feet; I can’t even think about it. I start counting with my breathing machine. It’s all I can do to distance myself from the million tiny feet drilling the itch deeper into my back.
SCRATCH IT!
‘I don’t really care either way, I like snow but I can’t stand slush!’
Finally, at count fifty-six she rolls me from my side onto my back and the relief is like a blanket on a fire. I can still feel the itch, licking up the base of my spine, but the worst of it has been snuffed out for now.
The last thing she does is move my head, rub the cloth behind my ears and gently dab my neck, avoiding the hole where my tracheotomy disappears into my throat. She rests my head back on the pillow, at the usual thirty-five-degree incline, and then she says, ‘That’s better isn’t it, Mr Ashcroft. Nice and clean.’
I hear a crinkle as she drops the sponge, soap packet, plastic apron and gloves she just used into the waste bin.
Lizzie leaves me and I silently thank her. She’s like Alice, with her well-tuned heart. I know my dignity is more important to her than her own. I’m facing forward, staring at the empty bed opposite, the heart monitor, IV and other machines, ready and waiting to slide into the new patient’s veins. Caleb went off to a whole orchestra of outraged wails and beeps from his machines, Mary barking at everyone on the ward, following the family orders to ‘do anything’ to keep poor old Caleb ticking. I hear everything that happens on the ward. A side effect, it seems, of being suspended in life is my new supersonic hearing. Like when someone loses a sense, another one becomes more acute, I can hear people talk quietly about ten metres away, at the end of the ward. None of the docs have picked up on it. I’m glad of that; I don’t want any tubes in my ears and worse, I don’t want people getting nervous, self-conscious when they talk. It’s my only entertainment. I never realised quite how much people moan before, about the weather, the neighbours, their children. It’s so petty, so mundane, so exquisite. I love hearing Carol cursing her bunions, or Mary bitching on the phone to some poo
r mug in India about how she still can’t access online videos. Small mercies.
By afternoon, my eyes have closed. In, out, in, out. I count along with my breathing machine as I listen to the nurses making the final preparations for the new patient, neat little footsteps checking machines, plastic being torn away from sterilised apparatus. In, out, in, out. I never know whether the next breath will come, whether I’ll die here today or whether I’ll be cocooned within myself as months turns to years, each day decomposing a little more, as life clatters on around me. People will fall in love, they’ll go on adventures, they’ll cry and shout, there’ll be wars and long, lazy summer days but I’ll still be here, staring at the grey ceiling, a statue, longing for some wonderful day when my feeling exhausts itself, and I’ll be left with a numbness so complete it’ll sweetly smother any memory of who I once was, who I once thought I could be. If I don’t die soon, my hope is to be relieved of hope, and even though my body may still be pumped, prodded and wiped, my mind will be frozen and Frank will be gone.
3
Cassie
In a way it was a surprise that Jack and Cassie had guests at their wedding at all. Even before they were engaged, they talked late at night, naked and curled around each other like vines, about getting married in Scotland, somewhere wild and new to them both, just the two of them with a couple of strangers as witnesses. But they’d only been together a few weeks then, and when, eight months later, they were on their way back from Paris flushed and newly engaged, they both knew it wouldn’t happen like that.