The Facts of Life

by Patrick Gale

  ‘Yes. He did a bit,’ Sam allowed.

  ‘I never lived with any of them, though. I’m not very good at domestic stuff. I get bored too easily.’ She was going to say that she thought the jump from passion to buying cat litter came all too easily once two lovers shared a roof, but stopped herself, remembering how cruelly Sam’s experience of the cat litter phase had been cut short.

  ‘Who was the most recent, then? Have I met him?’

  ‘Sam! This is most unlike you.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No. It’s all right. I tell Jamie everything normally but I didn’t tell him about this one. I couldn’t.’

  ‘Why not.’

  ‘Oh. I dunno.’ She looked up at Sam. ‘He was just a gatecrasher at Sandy’s birthday party. An American. Cute.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Sam smiled, anticipating a sexy story. Alison sighed, sipped her wine.

  ‘It started well enough but then I found I couldn’t stop thinking about Jamie and it sort of killed it for me. I felt such an idiot.’

  ‘Know the feeling.’

  ‘Really?’ She looked up again, surprised.

  ‘Well of course I do. I’m fucking in bed with the bloke.’

  ‘Sorry, that was crass of me –’

  ‘I mean. I’m fucking in bed with the bloke. And not fucking.’

  ‘Sam, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Stop apologising.’ He raised his voice. ‘It’s not your fault, is it? The stupid thing is he wants to. I still get horny too, but I can’t go through with it and that makes me feel such a shit, you know?’

  He was obviously upset, and as he lurched towards her across the carpet she took him easily in her arms. She thought he was going to break down and cry on her shoulder, but instead she felt him kissing the side of her neck, then kissing her mouth and, as he held her harder than she had been holding him, she kissed him back. There was so much of him suddenly, a hard, controlling force. The taste of his skin, his warm scent, the hard chill of his earring against her neck, the feel of him beneath his clothes was, for a few seconds, so precisely what she wanted of him that she was consumed by speechless hunger. Then, as he began to fumble with her shirt buttons, she tried to hold him off.

  ‘No,’ she said, trying to laugh. ‘Sam? Stop! This is … no.’

  ‘Please,’ he moaned. ‘Please.’

  And she remembered Jamie trying to explain, ‘He just took over. I didn’t have any will any more.’

  She froze. For what seemed like a full minute she was frightened, very frightened, aware only of Sam’s strength, of his potential for violence, of the danger of resistance. Then he tugged his tee-shirt over his head and crouched over her to nuzzle at her belly and she found herself hungry for him again.

  It should not have been erotic. It was, after all, a kind of assault – battery of a soft target. But she could not pretend, whatever the politics and morality of the deed, that a part of her was not eager for what was happening. As he began to enter her, she gabbled something about condoms in her bedside drawer but some crazed delicacy caused her to make her suggestion so enigmatic that it passed him by entirely and he was already in her and thrusting.

  ‘I’ll pull out,’ he gasped. ‘It’s okay. I’ll pull out in a second, before I –’

  But desperation overrode prudence. She wrapped her legs about him to pull him in more deeply, just as he juddered to an unpostponable climax, and came with a defiant curse. Her belly, breasts and cheeks on fire, she held him so deep within her she actually felt his cum pumping into the neck of her womb.

  Too stunned to talk, they drank the rest of the wine in silence, then lay entwined and sweating in front of the dying fire until Alison started to feel cold. Sam followed her to her bed where they escaped into almost immediate sleep, his chest pressed into her back beneath chilly, unaired bedding.

  When she woke he had already dressed and been out to buy them breakfast. Hastily bathed and dressed, she sat across the table from him, obediently munching the toast he had made.

  ‘Listen, Sam,’ she said at last, unable to cope with another minute of monosyllables. ‘We can’t pretend last night didn’t happen.’

  ‘Well what else do you expect us to do?’ he asked angrily. ‘Tell Jamie? You think we can waltz home and tell him all about it?’

  ‘No. No of course not. I’m just saying we can’t undo what we have done. It won’t go away just because we don’t think about it.’

  ‘Yes it will,’ he said. ‘It’s got to.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘If that’s what you want.’

  She toyed with the possibility of letting him go back without her, then sensed that would raise suspicions. They had the radio on as he drove them home again. It played bright, frenetic dance music and they managed eventually to talk about things, other things.

  After running upstairs to check on Jamie, Sam drove off swiftly again on the pretext of buying groceries. Miriam was having a last chat with her son before returning home. Jamie wore the love beads Alison had bought him on the march the previous summer. They were gaudy against his white pyjamas. She found it easy enough to kiss brother and mother on the cheek and enthuse about the show. She had enjoyed it after all.

  ‘And how was the restaurant afterwards?’ Miriam asked.

  ‘We didn’t go,’ she said. ‘Well. We did, then we thought a takeaway was more fun because it was such a lovely evening.’

  ‘A takeaway?’ Jamie sounded disgusted.

  ‘From Fou Tsong,’ Alison added.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, more approving. ‘Fou Tsong. Well that’s all right. Happy birthday.’

  He sounded exhausted although he had barely woken. He patted her hand, yawned and closed his eyes, falling asleep again as suddenly as a kitten. She left the room quietly and saw her mother off. There would be no more questions about her evening. Her guilt weighed heavily enough to merit an inquisition, but there would be none. What she and Sam had done was so unthinkable, she realised, as to leave them above suspicion. Incest was that easy. When Sam returned with the shopping, she caught him before he had a chance to speak to Jamie.

  ‘I told him we enjoyed the show and bought ourselves a takeaway,’ she said quickly. ‘That’s all. There’s no need to lie.’

  ‘Right,’ he said, standing awkwardly on the kitchen stairs below her. ‘Look. About this morning. I’m sorry if … well … You know.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. It happens all the time.’

  She had meant to follow him to the kitchen, reassure him by offering the sisterly companionship of helping unpack groceries and making coffee, but bitterness rose up in her like bile and she had to turn away from him.

  ‘Got to call the office,’ she muttered.

  His steps sounded lighter than usual as he carried on down; the steps of a man pardoned.

  Over the following days her ‘birthday treat’ as she wryly christened it, continued to rise, an unacknowledged spectre, whenever their paths crossed. This was not entirely a new experience for her. There had been inconvenient indiscretions before – like the young editor at Pharos – but before, if she had regretted an encounter, it was because of her embarrassment at a lapse in taste. Her night with Sam only left her wanting him more. She sought self-disgust but instead found herself recalling the feel of his hands. She helped him turn Jamie’s mattress and watched the flexing of his forearms. He brushed past her on the staircase and her skin seemed to buzz. For once, she did not confide in Sandy. Telling would only grant oxygen to a fire best stifled.

  Jamie’s condition suddenly began to worsen. It was astonishing that a body could withstand such an assault. He developed a kind of arthritis. Thanks to Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions forming inside his bowel, he suffered another plague of chronic diarrhoea. Spasms seized his agonized bowels up to four times in just half an hour. He lost his sight courtesy of cytomegalovirus and then, mercifully Alison felt, he was struck by encephalopathy which clouded his thinking. Like someone enfeebled by senility, he forgo
t names, forgot what he was saying Half-way through a sentence and occasionally stirred from a doze to produce a sentence of perfectly grammatical nonsense. Returning from Germany, where he had spent far longer than originally planned, Edward took one look at Jamie, one at Alison and Sam’s exhausted faces and insisted on paying for a night nurse. A nurse arrived every evening at six and left early the following morning. Used to patients in Jamie’s position who wanted to remain at home for their last weeks, the Rexbridge AIDS clinic cooperated by lending equipment – a wheelchair, a drip feed and so on – and supervised the administration of oxygen and morphine.

  Jamie’s deterioration accelerated so fast that several weeks passed before Alison realised she had missed a period.

  It’s stress, she told herself. Just a common symptom of stress. I’ve read about it.

  And still she told no-one. The Cynthia in her wanted to announce it at the supper table, the Good Child knew that the last thing Sam needed now was to be worried with the news, only to have it prove a false alarm.

  One evening Miriam finally paid a visit with Francis. Any new face in the house, any new witness to what they were all undergoing, was welcome by this stage. Alison saw shock at the sight of Jamie’s body turn him grey and, feeling sorry for him, led him out of the sickroom on the pretext of asking for advice on the sorting out of some papers to do with Jamie’s various savings and bank accounts. Suddenly there was a terrific shout from upstairs that made Francis start as though a gun had gone off. There was another shout. It was Jamie. Alison jumped up.

  ‘Stay here,’ she told Francis, who looked immediately grateful. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing. He may need more morphine or something.’

  Closing the door behind her, she ran out into the hall just as Sam appeared from the kitchen where he was making fillings for baked potatoes-their principal diet at the time. She followed him upstairs and around the landing to Jamie’s room. They had moved him back to the little room with the barred window once it became obvious that he and Sam could no longer share a bed.

  Miriam was sitting at his side, her back to the door, holding one of Jamie’s skeletal hands in both of hers. She was stroking it and making little soothing, urging noises. They froze at the end of the bed as Jamie shouted again. As he shouted, he threw back his head and arched his back, pressing down on the mattress with his feet. Then he subsided, panting. Alison ran forward.

  ‘Jamie? What is it? I’m here. Sam’s here. Jamie?’

  Again he yelled. Again he threw back his head and arched his back.

  ‘Jesus!’ Sam whispered, stepping forward.

  ‘Where’s the bloody nurse?’ Alison asked. ‘She should be here by now. Sam, shall I call a doctor?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Miriam said quietly.

  ‘How can you say that?’ Alison shouted at her over another yell from the bed. Still holding Jamie’s hand, Miriam turned to face them. Her face was wet with tears but her voice was still and curiously dignified.

  ‘He’s having some kind of fit,’ Sam said, his voice calm but his face appalled.

  ‘He isn’t,’ Miriam said. ‘He thinks he’s having a baby.’

  The dismissive retort dried on Alison’s lips as Jamie shouted again, drawing all their eyes back onto him as he arched and subsided under the sheet, his pyjamas dark with sweat. There were footsteps on the stairs and Francis came in with her grandfather.

  They all watched, Miriam with her round, soft face still washed in tears, as Jamie yelled and collapsed, yelled and collapsed in what was now a discernibly accelerating rhythm. Alison fought down an impulse to yell encouragement to him in his labour.

  ‘Push,’ she wanted to shout. ‘Breathe. Breathe! Now push again. Nearly there. We can see the head now. Push, Jamie!’

  The nurse hurried in, walked to the bedside and checked his pulse and temperature before administering more morphine. After three or four further spasms, silent now, Jamie collapsed back on to the mattress into a sleep that was calm rather than merely drugged. It seemed queer not to hear his yells replaced by the furious squalling of the new-born, not to see the sheet gaudy with blood. Francis came to Miriam’s side and touched her shoulder tenderly.

  ‘Look,’ she said, half turning but keeping her eyes on Jamie’s sleeping face. ‘He’s smiling. He’s happy! Oh darling, I’m so glad!’

  Embarrassed, Francis passed her the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit and she mopped her face and blew her nose, breaking the spell that had held them all. Alison suddenly realised that she had been clutching Sam’s hand, or he had been clutching hers-it was impossible to say which. She released him with a little squeeze and hurried past the others, profoundly shaken, to lose herself in the swift making of a salad and laying of the table.

  58

  As a boy, Jamie had imagined his death often enough, usually at those times when the adult world had crossed or slighted him. There would be recriminations around his coffin.

  ‘If only we had known!’ people would cry. ‘He was so good to us all and we never knew!’

  The dubious pleasure of knowing that one’s sudden departure left lives shattered depended, however, on a belief that one would still be around, in some form, to bear witness. Even when he had rebelliously had himself confirmed as a Christian at thirteen he had been beginning to harbour doubts concerning the plausibility of an afterlife, doubts which increased in direct proportion to his body’s output of adult hormones. His powers of imagination dwindled just as his store of painful knowledge was swelled. Death, he came to realise, could bring nothing worse than life could present. As the virus sabotaged his body’s defences, death came to seem no more than the ultimate painkiller.

  The process seemed inordinately long. At around the time they started giving him small doses of morphine to deaden the agony in his joints, he became aware that his mind was going. He saw no hallucinations – nothing so frightening as his experience at Godfreys’s party. Rather, the decay registered as a progressive dismantling of grammar; small but essential syntactical bolts seemed to slip out of place overnight so that speech became a defective construction toy too wearisome and distressing to bother with. He saw the poorly disguised perplexity in their faces when he failed to make sense. He tried to apologise to Sam when he shat all over the bed, but found he could only shout at him incoherently. Then his vision clouded over, something he could only communicate to them by his inability to feed himself or find the bedside lightswitch without knocking things over.

  After that he began to drift in and out of consciousness. At times it felt as though he had withdrawn inside his upper body and was no longer in control. It was like a grotesque cartoon he remembered from a childhood comic – Beano perhaps, or Dandy – with the interior of a character’s head pictured as the command deck of some monstrous war engine in which helpless, indignant subsidiary characters darted to and fro, peering out of the eyes, listening at loudspeakers connected to the ears, pulling at huge inefficient cranks labelled Sit, Eat, Smile, Swallow, Concentrate. Sometimes he could hear quite clearly and his tongue and brain would miraculously connect. Sometimes, more often, he could hear someone shouting or mumbling and it was minutes before he realised the mouth at work was his own. Sometimes, he could hear people talking to him. He was powerless to do much more than nod, or, with sudden rediscovery of ability, smile. He felt them hold his hands, kiss his cheek. He always knew when Sam was at the bedside on his own because he felt his hand slip between the buttons on his pyjama jacket and rest, heavy and cool against his heart as he talked. Alison used to brush his hair very gently, as one might a baby’s. Miriam cut his nails for him. His grandfather was the only one not to touch him while he talked. His voice would just arrive out of the air, bodiless and unheralded, like the voice of God. He played music.

  The whole experience was quite unlike the morbid imaginings of his boyhood. No-one unburdened themselves. Not even Sam. Their talk was strenuously matter of fact; a passing on of information. Still no rain. A cactus unexp
ectedly flowering on a downstairs windowsill. The results of the women’s final at Wimbledon. Myra Toye’s return to London in the wake of her axing from Mulroney Park to appear in a Bernard Shaw revival. A scandal involving the minister for health and an American pharmaceuticals giant. Sometimes their talk began nervously and he knew that he must have been scaring them by going out of his mind. Out of his mind; the little idiom, so commonplace before, now seemed astonishingly precise, as did that other, beside oneself.

  Then there were the nurses. Always rather formal. Quite unlike the boisterous ones in the hospital. Politely aware of his blindness they would reintroduce themselves:

  ‘Good evening, Mr Pepper. I’m Kathy.’

  ‘Hello, Jamie. It’s me again. Pru. Kathy’s off with a bug so I’m doing two nights in a row.’

  If he woke with a start, they’d be there again:

  ‘It’s all right, Mr Pepper. It’s me. Kathy. Try to sleep. Here. Your pillow’s fallen. That’s better. Try to sleep.’

  The nurses replaced the moonlight. It was only their soft, rustling presences at his bedside, their cooler touches, more reserved than those of his family, that told him another night had fallen.

  One night he came to after what felt like a long spell in the depths. There was a delectable coolness about him and he guessed that his sheets had just been changed. The house was utterly silent and there was no birdsong so he knew it was night. Someone was in the room with him. He sensed rather than heard their movement towards him.

  ‘Nurse?’ he asked. There was no reply. ‘Kathy?’ Still nothing. He felt a hand briefly press his brow. ‘Alison?’ he asked. She smelled, very faintly, of vanilla, as though she had been making biscuits.

  ‘It’s Sally,’ she said. ‘It’s time you were up.’

  ‘I don’t remember. Are you new?’

  She laughed softly.