by Rod Madocks
‘No mate she weren’t talking to me. She were talking to the surgeon!’”
Maxie convulsed on his pillows and gave out a racking cough, which turned into jerky laughter and I found myself smiling.
“Thought you would like that boss, it were me own. I made it up.”
He began to cough once more but this time in retching spasms. His sister came forward and pressed a button by his bed as his face contorted.
“Jeesas it hurts T’resa,” he muttered. Staff in blue and white uniforms came and one of them slid a curtain around the bed, sealing him from view. As she drew the curtain I glimpsed Max’s face turned to me, just giving a nod, and then he was obscured from my sight.
Surprisingly, Max didn’t die then, indeed he rallied. He confounded the doctors and although more chemo swelled and bloated him, he gained strength and began to shuffle about the oncology ward; he even smoked an illicit roll up or two in the stair well. He returned to Haven Court in November, after some weeks on the death ward, and appeared to be in a jokingly triumphant mood, clanking his drain bottles and chaffing with the residential staff as he leaned on a walking frame.
“Thought you’d seen the last of me didn’t yer!”
I marvelled to see him in late November, “Still here boss!” he croaked out as I entered his room.
The TV glowed and light gleamed on heaped bags of rolling baccy and the neatly arrayed nebuliser ampoules. His drip went Plip plop.
“Look,” said Maxie “I‘ve outlasted the crow, it’s a good day.”
He stared up at the screen which showed the famous photographs of that flinty, square, chiselled face with the heap of blonde hair and the later, softer images and the pictures of those that had campaigned for her release.
“That bitch Myra, dead, gone, good riddance. I follored her over the years. That Hindley crow.”
I sat with him looking at the news item reprise of the Moors Murderers, those criminal archetypes of our time. Her accomplice Brady was locked up in a sister hospital to the one in which I worked. She had died that day in prison. And I thought then of driving past Saddleworth Moor with Irina when we travelled to Raven’s View to see Monty at the beginning of our affair.
“There should be a program about your stuff too Maxie,” I said and he stared at me.
“Don’t go there boss. Let’s not fall out again,” he said. We watched in silence for a while, following the black and white images of the victims in their clumsy, old fashioned clothes and National Health spectacles as all the while Max’s drip continued its relentless Plip Plop. At one stage I glanced over at him. He was not watching the screen any longer and instead he looked out to the garden where a blustery wind tossed the pale undersides of the rhododendron leaves. There was a peaceful look to him that I had not seen before.
He did not seem so bad that day, with his hair slicked back at the sides and his skin lesions covered up by buttoned pyjamas.
“All the things we might have done, eh boss?” he suddenly said to me. “The people we might have been. What would you have done if not lookin’ for your girl, eh boss?”
“I find it hard to imagine that Max,” I replied then prompted by a strange impulse I said, “Why don’t you call me Jack?”
He smiled, “Hard to do that, the hospital drummed it in, the distance between us and staff. But mebbe we are the same. I’ll tell you what, I’ll help you if you help me. Help me write a letter to my sister, how I feel about her. I want to thank her, for the love and for stickin’ wi’ me and to say sorry for the hurt I brought into her life. I can’t write too well now.” He gestured with his swollen hands. “And don’t have the words anyway … I’ll also need you to tell me girlfriend Maeve I won’t be seeing her again. An’ if you do that I’ll tell yer about the past, what I know, about that picture, let’s see it, leave it wi’ me will yer?”
I helped him write a letter that morning, sitting on his bed, using my brief case as support. He wanted to express his love to Theresa and his thanks for her selfless attention. I wrote it out as he spoke it and got him to sign it with a shaky “x x” for kisses. He tucked the letter under his pillow as a care assistant came in and took away his uneaten jam sandwiches. I handed him the photo from the Paradise Stores out of my case.
“Come back tomorrow, boss, and we’ll talk,” he said and turned back to look at Hindley’s face on the screen. I stopped at his door for a moment to bid him farewell and could see him outlined against the light from the window, the cage dome over his feet, the drip bottle shining and translucent. He did not look back at me; he just raised the photo in his hand, a gesture, a goodbye. It was the last time that I ever saw him.
*
Hosannah finally woke up! He who had united us in a way, had maintained his trance suspension and slept right through my nine month affair with Irina. Hosannah had slept on through our moments in the sun, but all of a sudden he began to show signs of waking up. It was announced one autumn day at a clinical meeting that he had taken up his bed and walked. He had apparently just roused himself, obeying some unknown signal, certainly not that of the clinicians who were tending to him for they had all but given up on him. He had first started stirring one evening shift by moving his arms about in an unprecedented fashion. Then staff found him sitting up at dawn, thin and weak, scratching his dreads and gazing vaguely about his room. Throughout the next day he lay on his bed and his eyes followed the staff as they moved about in his room. Later he pulled the tubes out of his arm, sat up and asked for water, then he shuffled around the ward on wobbly legs leaning on a walking aid. He ignored questions about his months of sleep and seemed as truculent and difficult as he had ever been. It was as if he had simply popped back into existence. The other patients regarded him with awe and wonder and murmured, “here comes FZ” as he slithered along the ward corridors.
“What’s this FZ then?” asked one staff nurse.
“The Fuckin’ Zombie that’s what!” came the reply.
It was just as Hosannah awoke that Irina began to ebb away from me although I did not realise it at first. I can see it all now. There were a number of factors in it but primarily Anton was quickly getting older and more knowing.
“Ack, Ack” became “Jack, Jack”. And perhaps Gosia resented looking after him as her sister slipped away to see me time after time. Had she let something out to betray us? Perhaps Aidan at last detected a rival or maybe the love just ran out in her. She still pressed me to her with a vivid current of energy when we were together, calling me, “My Jack, my darling Jack, my black doll,” but the intervals lengthened between our assignations and there was something in the business-like way she buttoned up her dress after her visits to my room.
Her forensic specialism was “Dyadic Death”, the killing of partners and spouses followed by the suicide of the perpetrator, and I often watched her prepare her slide shows for conferences which sometimes sent the audience gagging out of the room: vivid images of a woman dead in bed with a shattered face — shotgunned by a husband, or of a man who had beheaded himself with an elaborate, home-made guillotine after stabbing his wife. Irina was prickly and defensive about her work and although we could talk about most things she became irritable when I joked about her choice of subject. Now, little by little, she retreated from confiding in me, first about her work then about other things.
She began to give me presents instead of giving herself: a pillow stuffed with lavender, a pair of wooden Polish plates, a medallion bearing the head of Mickiewicz. One day she arrived with something stirring in a box.
“I am worried that you are lonely here and have brought you a friend,” she said showing me a kitten peering out of the container.
“You can stroke her and think of me,” she said as we watched the small thing gambol about on my carpet and begin to dab playfully at a house spider. “She has joy in life … radosna kotka … joyful kitten, yes, why don’t you call her Radza?”
And Radza she became, a compact little cat with dense fur, the co
lour of blued gunmetal. Her eyes followed my every movement and she would mewl out a greeting to me as I returned from my long shifts at the hospital. At first I resented the creature, seeing her as an emblem of Irina’s absence from me, yet I grew fond of her over time and often pressed my face to the flank of the animal for comfort.
I tried to hang on to Irina. I remember once, making love to her in a snatched moment during one of the last times in her house. We had shut Anton into his bedroom and we could hear him hammering and calling to be let out. As we lay twined together on the bed I found myself staring at our conjoined reflection in the bedroom mirror, somehow gaining comfort in seeing us objectified there. Irina turned her head as she lay and saw me looking at us like that in the mirror.
“I think you are using me,” she said sulkily later. After a few days she told me, “I am getting pressure from Aidan. I don’t think I can see you for a while, he is asking questions, going through my things.”
Thereafter I saw less of her and she had long absences from work, and I settled to a long wait.
Then came the shock. It was a Saturday and I was pottering about the flat with Radza scampering at my feet. I had left the front door open to let the cool air sweep in and was rinsing plates in the kitchen. I heard a peremptory, loud knocking at the door and assumed it was the postman. It was Aidan. I encountered him, bulky and looming, in my hallway.
“I am Irina’s husband,” he boomed out. “My name is Aidan, do you have a moment? … I thought it was time that we met.”
He put his hand out which I shook automatically. He had a powerfully assertive grip.
“May I come in a minute?” he announced, already advancing down my hall corridor.
I gestured acquiescence and he strode past me and I followed behind, my hand moving away from the haft of the hunting knife, hidden, taped to the underside of the hall table.
He seated himself on my threadbare sofa, adjusted his slacks and shook out the sleeves of his dark blazer as if they were in danger of contamination. I offered him a cup of tea in a reflex of politeness, which he declined, and I sat on the arm of a chair to give myself some height over him. His eyes scanned around the room, taking in my books, my poverty, my austerity. Radza scuttled at his feet and he absently reached down to stroke her back.
I was astonished at his poise and audacity.
“My wife has mentioned you; she doesn’t know I’m here.”
My face betrayed no expression.
“What is going on between you two? I think I have a right to know.”
Again I made no response.
“We can sort this out between ourselves.”
He emitted more banal phrases which fell into the space between us. I have difficulty recalling them, for I was flooded by anger and with fear and was thinking desperately how best to respond. I began to fence and to quibble with him and all the while I hated and I pitied him. I told him Irina and I were friends, colleagues.
I said, “You had much better speak to your wife about all this.”
“And my son, you have been spending time with him?”
It was a statement that could not be denied.
“I like children,” I replied.
He veered away from frontal assault and began to ask me about work. I parried his queries with vague replies.
“Secretive types you forensic ones,” he said.
I replied, “We have difficult work.”
And that was it.
He accepted defeat and abruptly rose from the sofa then stopped and boomed out, “You have nothing else to say?”
I shrugged in a gesture of passive negation and rose to usher him out.
“Hope you don’t mind me just fetching up like this, just thought it important that we meet, you understand?”
He said this as he turned again to face me in the narrow hallway, and again I was amazed at the breathtaking arrogance of the man as he checked me out and marked his territory. I sensed his incoherent pain behind the courtesy and loathed him for bringing this to me.
Then he left, and afterwards I laughed to myself at surviving an encounter with the wronged husband. I even joked about it when Irina rang me later. She apologised for his behaviour and for involving me and said that she was angry with him. Her voice sounded strained. I hoped this event had betokened a crisis and I even began to entertain thoughts that she would leave him and come to me and somehow it would all come right.
Then came Bartram’s wedding.
It was the talk of the department, such a surprise. A neat, deckle-edged card was distributed to his colleagues inviting us to the civil ceremony and the reception. He was marrying Mika, a quiet, young Malaysian-Chinese pharmacist who had been a discreet presence in his hospital reviews over the previous few years. No one had noticed that they had struck up a connection. Many had not even known that he had divorced his wife some time after his son’s death. The loss of the son had brought about the death of the marriage.
I went out of respect and curiosity. There were only one or two other guests at the registry office. I stood at the back and watched Bartram’s stout figure, clad in an old fashioned lobster claw coat with an ornate silk waistcoat, looming next to the trim, sleek figure of Mika in a silk quipao of midnight blue with silvered plum blossom embroidery, as they made their promises. Neither was accompanied by any member of their families and I wondered at the sacrifices they must have made to be together.
The reception was held in a community hall in the city, a place with stained glass windows depicting civic scenes of industry and leisure.
Bartram stood with Mika at the entrance welcoming the guests as we came in. Both bore expressions of triumphant wonder as if hardly believing what they had accomplished. I realised, for the first time, that beneath Mika’s smooth, neat features there dwelled a determined spirit. I also sensed at once that she disliked me. Perhaps she saw my loose friendship and association with Bartram as some kind of threat. I moved past them to the main hall where buffet tables were ranked along the sides and a few couples danced in the centre. Bored and ill-at-ease, I picked up a drink and stood gazing about; waiting for a chance to leave after a decent interval.
Then I made out Irina dressed in a black cocktail dress with a little black and silver bolero jacket. Her hands rested on her husband’s shoulders and he in turn clasped her around the waist as they danced together. They swirled away to the far side of the room and the music followed me as I slid away through the revellers.
There was a whooping from the sound deck as Bill Ponds capered about wearing a Caribbean straw hat, accompanying the song through a microphone, “Heard it through the grapevine,” he bellowed. I walked away to a side room where the coats hung and a few guests clustered, still followed by Bill’s voice, “Honey, honey I know, that you’re letting me go,” I heard flickers of conversation and just nodded to the familiar faces. I slumped against the coat racks in a state of shock. A few guests continued to eddy around me and the music ate away at me.
“Are you alright, old man… enjoying yourself?” It was Bartram in his splendid, baroque attire with a flushed face and champagne glass in hand.
I stammered out congratulations.
“Thank you … it’s not my sort of thing, this reception, but Mika wanted an informal sort of do. Bill Ponds offered to do the music, but he’s been on the rum I’m afraid.” Mika now appeared in the doorway, her long, pendent earrings glinting; she smiled and gestured to Bartram to join her. “Coming darling,” he called out, “just one moment.”
He turned again to me and I concentrated on his excited face. It was so unlike his precise pedantic way and the surprise pulled me out of my feelings at seeing Irina embraced by her husband like that.
“I realise I might look foolish to you,” he said.
I just shrugged, not really wanting to speak.
“She is so much younger... coming from so different a world.”
He looked back at her admiringly as she stood in the doorway in her shin
y high-collared dress, speaking to someone, shaking her piled hair and smiling at her interlocutor but with her eyes on her new husband. Thankfully there was a pause in the music.
“I’ve realised a truth,” Bartram went on, seemingly finding it important to impart something to me, “we can love and are drawn to those that share what we are like... our kin, our siblings, our partners, and those who are similar to us. But we can only truly, intensely adore those who are not like us... those who possess an otherness. I realise this when I see Mika’s little round head on the pillow. When I take her face in my hands, those slanting eyes, the alien loveliness... I have never experienced a feeling like it. We only truly love what is different to us.”
I nodded, looking at his shiny, earnest face, thinking of Irina’s black doll. Bartram went on, talking to me with strange, drunken urgency, “Our work takes so much wonder from the world, I just want to hold on to that extraordinary feeling I find with Mika. Hope you don’t mind me talking like this. We have known each other for years, I think of you as a close colleague.”
“Known and not known,” I said.
Bartram smiled and said, “Ah, Jack, when I think of you there comes to mind the third Delphic maxim, not the ones everyone knows —‘know yourself ’ and ‘nothing in excess’ — no, with you, I think of the other one that runs Eggun Para B’ata in the Greek.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Literally it means ‘a pledge or bond alongside comes disaster’. It could also mean ‘Give yourself as surety and get ruin’. I think you will know instinctively what that means for you are a driven man, although I do not know what it is that you are after.”
Mika then broke in, pulling Bartram away by the hand, “Come on, dear, you really must mix.”
As he was drawn away, Bartram called to me, “And you, when will you know that you have found what you are looking for?”
I followed them out of the coat room. Bartram’s words had somehow given me composure and I scanned the room until I saw Irina and Aidan talking as the music thudded on, their heads close together. Then Aidan turned and left Irina and joined the crowd at the bar.