The Facts of Life

by Patrick Gale

  Fingers still meshed in Sam’s hair, Jamie turned to watch the candle flame. His breath made it waver about the wick.

  ‘When things get really bad,’ he began, then faltered. ‘Christ. It’s amazing how long you can keep moving the goalposts. A year ago I’d have thought losing my hair by the handful was really bad, or having to get up in the night to change the sheets because I shat all over them; now really bad is something else. There’s always something else.’

  ‘Jamie.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s the middle of the night. You’re rabbiting. What are you trying to say?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Jamie took a breath, stilling his mind into focus. ‘When things get really bad, I want you to kill me.’ He felt Sam’s hand flinch involuntarily. ‘Will you do that?’

  Sam withdrew his hand.

  ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ he protested.

  ‘It wouldn’t be hard. You’d know I wanted it. You’d just have to switch off my life-support system or turn off my drip or something. You could just hold a pillow over my face. It would be a kind of love thing. Our last sex.’

  ‘Fuck you’re getting weird. Shut up. I don’t want to hear this.’

  ‘Sam it’s not a big deal.’

  Sam sat up now, staring at him incredulously.

  ‘Oh no. I just top you, right? How do you expect me to live with that on my mind?’

  Jamie had not meant to discuss this at all. He knew such decisions would be easier to take if he were no longer available for discussion. Now that he had started, he had to continue however. He paused, trying to screw his mind to the right words. Sam lay back on the pillows, frowning, watching him.

  ‘Listen,’ Jamie explained gently. ‘A good death is a basic human right. We don’t ask to be born, we don’t get to choose how or where. The very least we should be allowed is to choose to die when we’re ready. Look.’ He touched Sam’s shoulder. ‘Forget pillows. Forget drips. I shouldn’t have said any of that.’

  ‘Quite right you shouldn’t.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking. All I want is for you to promise that when I next get ill you won’t let them try to cure me.’

  ‘But what if-?’

  ‘I’m ready, Sam. I’ve had enough. Haven’t you?’

  ‘No. I – I want –’ Sam broke off. He looked down at his hands on the sheets then out and away into the pool of darkness on which the bed now floated.

  ‘What do you want?’ Jamie demanded. ‘Tell me, Sam. You never tell me anything nowadays. You’ve become such a fucking nurse. Tell me.’

  Sam looked back at him defiantly.

  ‘I want you to get well again,’ he said, choked now.

  ‘Well I won’t. You know that now. You’ve got to accept it. Oh they can fix me up, one thing at a time. But it’s like a computer game; them against the aliens. The more they shoot down, the faster they pop up. It’s wearing me out. It’s worn me down. Look at me, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘I’m looking.’

  ‘Look at me, Sam. Really look. How much further do you want it to go. My eyes? My legs. If you like I can get rheumatoid arthritis in all my joints, like Guy did. You can push me in a wheelchair then, listen to me cry with pain when I try to get dressed.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Or maybe you want to see me covered in these.’ Jamie grabbed Sam’s hand and pressed it to the lesion on his scalp and the new one on his thigh. ‘If we wait a bit longer I can turn into Ribena Boy for you.’

  Sam tore away his hand defensively, furious.

  ‘I never said I –’

  ‘Or what about the brain? Some of us really start raving. My brain could go really doolally. In fact I reckon it’s already on the way.’

  ‘Okay I promise,’ Sam grunted.

  ‘How can I be sure?’

  ‘I said I promise, okay?’

  Jamie was astonished at the anger he was feeling. It felt hot on his face. It churned in his chest. Directionless anger. Almost a pain.

  ‘No more treatments?’ he asked, teeth chattering. ‘No more chemo?’

  ‘No more nothing.’

  ‘They can give me morphine. That’s all I’ll need. Apparently it gives you amazing dreams. Nightmares too sometimes. The trip of all trips, Sandy said –’

  Sam had rolled over, turning his back.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered, ‘but it’s really late and I’m fucking tired and I’m going to sleep.’

  Jamie stared at him, trembling as the anger drained from his face.

  ‘Sam?’ he asked, softly. ‘Sam, I –’

  But he felt Sam’s determination and fell silent. He turned and blew out the candle, lay back on the pillows and pulled the bedding up over his shoulders again. Sam was retreating from him into a stony emotionless silence. Sam – who was always so free in his body, so easy to touch, so swift with his reactions-was becoming inhibited by the inability to express his rage and horror.

  I’ve lost him, Jamie thought to himself, voicing the simple statement in his head to see how it felt. I’ve lost him. All he could really feel, however, was a sense of fierce, playground triumph at having wrested the all-important promise from him.

  57

  That summer was one of the most consistently glorious in Alison’s memory. There was a succession of terrific June storms, which battered the plants and brought slugs and snails out of hiding, then there was no more rain until the autumn. The sun shone for week after blistering week. Lawns turned yellow, water was rationed, in some areas householders even had to fetch their water from stand-pipes in the street. There were daily warnings on radio and television about skin cancer and the dangers of sunbathing, but only the bed-ridden stayed pale. Even Alison, whose complexion rarely did more than turn an angry pink in the sun, or produce freckles, acquired a shade somewhere between honey and sand. People talked nostalgically of drizzle and hot meals. And yet for her, the summer was no more than one prolonged medical crisis.

  It began when Sam surprised her by driving up to London to meet her for lunch near the office. He took a while to come to the point but finally, haltingly, confessed that he was having trouble managing on his own and wondered if she had been serious when she had offered to take a compassionate leave from the office.

  ‘Of course,’ she said with blind certainty.

  There is no such thing as a fallow season in publishing – the summer lull is largely illusory, and the autumn ushers in another round of prizes, sales conferences and book fairs. She had never really thought through the logistics of leaving the office. She had vaguely planned to take a car-load of editorial work away with her and drop back in to Pharos once a week, but as soon as she started to outline the idea to some of the other staff, she saw how unfeasible the plan was. Her telephone rarely stopped ringing; there were queries from the production department, the publicity department, authors, agents, other editors. For every book at the calm, copy-editing stage, there was another in the frantic process of being launched upon an over-sated public. Raising the problem at an editorial meeting, she did not spell out the precise nature of Jamie’s illness at first.

  ‘He’s sick,’ she said simply. ‘I need to be with him. Visits aren’t enough. I’m owed about a fortnight’s holiday but I’m going to need double that. Maybe longer.’

  Cynthia started to raise objections. Could she not hire a nurse? Could she not simply move him up to London so she could see him every evening? Cornered, Alison realised that she was being called upon to weigh up her priorities, and that there was no question which came first. So she played the fear card and tossed the dread acronym onto the board table between them. The reaction was instantaneous. Oh my god. Her brother’s actually dying. As they speedily agreed to let her take a month’s compassionate leave, after which the situation would be reviewed, she sensed something distasteful in her colleagues’ sudden eagerness to oblige. There was prurience, naturally. They asked if there was anything they could do to help on a practical level, she knew they were wond
ering just how was he sick? Where? Which bits? Cynthia sweetly suggested that this might be the opportunity for Alison to do some writing of her own that she had always talked about, and Alison heard the commercial calculation in her voice. Jamie’s illness was a profoundly fashionable horror, after all, and there might conceivably be a non-fiction weepie in the making.

  As she hurried from the board room to see how swiftly she could clear her desk and cancel her appointments, the young protégé she had manoeuvred into an editorship all those months before gave her a hug. He looked closely at her with as much soulfulness as his cold blue eyes could muster. When he said it must be so awful and to let him know if there was anything he could do, anything at all, she realised that he would take advantage of her absence to poach her authors and her position.

  She rode home in a taxi with several bags of paper and, by the time she had emptied the fridge of perishables, turned off the boiler, packed in a cursing rush and set off for the motorway in a car loaded to the roof, her revulsion at her colleagues’ reactions was great enough to give her pause for serious thought as to whether she would ever return to Pharos. Within days of her arrival at The Roundel, however, all thoughts of office politics had been swept aside by her concern for Jamie. As the hot days melted into one long, terrible blur, the bags of unpublished fiction stacked in a corner of her bedroom came to represent a little harbour of normality, slipping ever nearer the margin of her vision. Formerly an advocate of the psychological realists in the field, she now learned the true value of fictive escapism. Her daily phone call to the office, always in mid-afternoon, when Jamie was taking a nap, assumed all the spiritual importance of a religious observance; some people prayed, Alison rang her secretary.

  Jamie now spent most of his time asleep, either in bed or in a drugged doze, pale from pain, beneath a rug on a sofa or garden chair. Alison spent more hours alone with Sam than she had in the brief time he was her lodger. She noticed the changes in him. He was more confident about the house, knowing where everything was, easy in his use of the objects of her childhood. Sometimes it was as though she were the visitor, he the host. She realised now how superior her old attitude to him must have been when she had regarded him as a safe, doglike presence. Either that or he had been on best behaviour, in deference to her hospitality or gender. He had become the dominant presence in a male household. He peed without closing the bathroom door, and it seemed she was forever lowering lavatory seats. The fridge was full of beer, which he drank straight from the can with appreciative burps. He cooked them large, uncompromisingly meaty meals on a barbecue he had built outside the kitchen windows.

  Under stress, he lost his temper often now, usually with blameless, inanimate objects — the motorbike, the lawn mower, the television’s remote control unit – occasionally with her grandfather or Jamie. He was furious having cooked a large, rich brew of chili con carne, only to find Jamie unable to cope with its spiciness, and hurled the mixture, pan and all, into the kitchen dustbin. He yelled at her grandfather for having forgotten to buy some blank video cassettes on a trip into town. He never shouted at Alison however, although she often expected it of him. There was something impressive about his sudden rages. Their pretexts were often so slight that it was easy to feel he was merely venting the impotent anger the rest of them were bottling up. She often kept out of his way when she felt vulnerable or sensed one of his storms approaching, but whenever, instead of shouting at someone or smashing a plate on the floor, he sped off on the motorbike for a few hours, she felt cheated. She began to feel his absences keenly. On the worst days it was only his unruly presence which saved the place from feeling too much a nursing home, too little a house.

  Jamie refused to return to hospital. He refused all medication beyond what was necessary to spare himself pain. While Alison respected his courage in this, she hated the way it made the rest of them feel so powerless. It was like watching a slow-motion suicide through thick glass. He developed more and more Kaposi’s sarcomas; on his chest, his arms, his legs and on his face. This last, which she had been dreading, finally sapped Alison’s hope of his recovery. Appalled at the way he now looked, Miriam insisted he be taken to hospital to have the cancer treated and tried to enlist their support against the tyranny of the Living Will he had drawn up. Worn down, Alison was all for acceding to her mother’s fresh strength and suspected her grandfather would agree, were he ever there. Sam shamed her, however, by standing up to Miriam.

  ‘A good death is a basic human right,’ he told her, and Alison sensed he was quoting Jamie. ‘This is the way he wants it. He told me. He made me promise.’

  ‘Oh. And who do you think you are to be deciding these things?’ Miriam had snapped.

  ‘Closer to him than you,’ Sam had stated quite calmly. Miriam had crumpled, wept, apologised and then left after retrieving a last batch of doped gingerbread from the freezer. The violent little scene, played out across the kitchen table while Jamie slept upstairs constituted a black kind of marriage, leaving behind the sense that Sam was now irreducibly ‘family’.

  Alison’s birthday stole up with no great expectation on her part. No-one asked her what she wanted or even talked about it so she assumed they had forgotten or, more depressingly, that they imagined she was reaching an age where she preferred the occasion to be marked as discreetly as possible. The day arrived with the expected small flutter of cards and presents – a book, some seeds for her garden, a diary, a sensible yellow cotton jersey. Miriam had already rung with her greetings, but she drove up unexpectedly during the late afternoon and it turned out that Jamie had invited her so as to give Sam and Alison the evening off. Having insisted they set out for Rexbridge remarkably early ‘for a look around before the shops close’, Sam did not stop but drove them straight out onto the London motorway and announced that Jamie had bought them tickets to a show and even supplied a wad of cash to pay for dinner afterwards.

  The show was a dazzlingly inane musical revival, with a candy-floss love story, lines of chorines stamping gold-spangled tap shoes and astonishingly mobile sets. They were neither of them musical devotees and there was a certain tension between them as they arrived at the theatre lest the present backfire. But it had been a cunning choice on Jamie’s part. The undiluted escapism was just what they both needed, enabling them to laugh and smile at nothing in particular, to stop thinking, in fact, for two merciful hours.

  Jamie had booked them a table at a restaurant nearby. The air was lively with conversation and delicious smells but they were no sooner seated than Alison began to feel uncomfortable amid so much luxurious jollity.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked Sam.

  ‘Very,’ he admitted. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m not sure I can face all this. Why don’t we get a really good takeaway and go home with it?’

  He agreed, with something like relief, so they went to one of Jamie’s favourite Chinese restaurants, then drove, with their portable dinner, out to Bow. It was a perfect evening, warm enough to drive with all the windows open. The sun had barely set, the pavements were crowded; it was one of those rare nights when London felt summery in the soignée European manner rather than the more usual hot and bothered English one. As the car filled with tantalising scents from the bags between her knees and Sam flicked between radio channels, Alison gazed out at the passing scenery and regained some of the mindless euphoria she had felt in the theatre.

  After the warmth outside her house felt clammily unlived-in. There was something deadening about arriving to a heap of freebie local newspapers, irrelevant mail and a silent, unplugged fridge. Sam divined her mood, however and, making himself as at home there as at The Roundel he threw open the windows and used the junk mail to start an unseasonal fire in the living room grate. They ate the takeaway sprawled across the floor surrounded by the food cartons, washing it down with some red wine she had set by for a special occasion. But then she found herself wondering, Now what?

  Conditioned by late nights at The Roundel,
they were both far too awake with food and freedom to go straight to bed. There was always music or the television, but the fire had established an atmosphere either of these would vandalise. Hunched up on the floor against the sofa, Sam prodded the coals with the poker, his long face decorated by the firelight.

  If he dares belch, she thought, we can watch television.

  He sighed heavily, however, looked at her with a sigh of bitter amusement then looked down at his hands, pretending to adjust his watchstrap.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘No. What?’ she insisted, but he only shook his head. ‘Thanks for a lovely evening,’ she went on. ‘I needed it. I think you did too.’

  ‘Don’t thank me. Thank Jamie.’

  ‘You never talk about him, Sam. You’re going through so much, it might help you cope.’

  ‘I’m not going to one of those bleeding groups you made him go to.’

  ‘I’m not saying that but –’

  ‘I talk to Jamie, all right?’

  ‘Yes. Of course you do. So do I. But you can’t tell him everything you feel any more, can you?’

  ‘Yes I can.’

  ‘You’re too busy protecting him.’

  ‘What would you know?’ he asked flatly, his temper flaring. The hurt must have shown on her face because he made a blunt apology immediately.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I was talking out of turn.’

  ‘You spend so much time around queers, you probably know more than I do,’ he added. ‘Why do you?’

  ‘I don’t mean to. It just happened that way. That’s who my friends are.’

  ‘Haven’t you ever had, well, you know …?’

  She grinned.

  ‘A lover? Well of course I have. Only a couple of months ago there was … Well. No. I mean.’ She felt her cheeks grow hot and moved away from the fire a little, was glad of the shadows on her face. She had not blushed in years. ‘I had boyfriends when I was a student and since then – Jamie must have told you.’