The Swan Song of Doctor Malloy

by Robert Power

  ‘It’s okay, Dad. You don’t have to explain. I never expected two weeks to make any difference. I remember reading about old rock stars in one of my magazines. They’re always going to rehabs and places.’

  She looks at me with simple forgiveness in her eyes. And my heart, what’s left of it, dissolves.

  I sink on to the sofa and she comes to join me.

  ‘And how is your therapy going?’ she asks, trying to sound detached, like a grown-up, secretly hoping eventually it might mean we will all be back together again.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, trying to sound light and frivolous, instead of heavy and broken, ‘she asked me if I loved my mother and had I ever tried to kill my father. And I said, how did you guess and paid her a bonus.’

  ‘Why don’t you ever take me seriously?’ replies Lottie, looking hurt. And then the phone rings.

  It’s Matilda.

  Lottie pretends to read her music score, but I know she is listening to the conversation in vain hope of signs of reconciliation. She is adept at gauging the silent end of telephone conversations from the tone of the speaker’s voice.

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry. I can’t change anything. It’s out of my hands … No, I can’t put it off … I have to go in the next day or so … of course I am going to tell her … I know, I know … I know … look, it doesn’t really matter.’

  A loud click rings in my head as Matilda abruptly concludes the conversation.

  Lottie looks up from the swirling notes on her page.

  ‘What is it you are going to tell me?’ she asks quietly.

  ‘I was about to tell you, before your mother called. I have to go on a work trip for a month or so, or maybe longer.’

  The smile, the lightness, drops from her face in an instant.

  ‘When?’ she asks, cautiously.

  ‘Real soon. Friday. It’s all happened so suddenly. It’s a big chance to launch my syringe …’

  ‘Dad!’

  She rushes from the room, slamming the door behind her.

  It has all gone horribly wrong. I wanted to sit quietly with Lottie and tell her why I had to go away. That I was so sorry to have to miss the concert, but that I would be there for many more in the future. Half an hour later, Lottie emerges from her room. I am lying asleep on the sofa, a glass of whiskey by my side, with the news playing silently on the television. She strokes my hair and I stir. She lies on the sofa next to me. Her body fits neatly into the line of my torso. She holds my hand and says how sorry she is for being so selfish. She is glad my work is taking off. She asks me to tell her all about the places I visit, and to stop, wherever I am on Thursday at one-thirty next week, and imagine her beginning her piece at the concert. She makes me promise and I do. Later that night, before going to bed, I write Lottie’s Solo in my diary and surround it with asterisks.

  ‘It’s getting late, petal,’ I say, shifting my arm against my sleeping daughter.

  She rouses and makes her way slowly to the bathroom. I hear the slow motion of her pushing the toothbrush around her mouth. She comes back into the room, her hair long and tousled, her face sleepy and distant. She flings her arms around me, kisses and hugs me tight.

  ‘Love you for ever and ever,’ she whispers.

  ‘And I love you too, for ever and ever, whatever else happens,’ I reply, kissing her on each eyelid in turn.

  I go to my own bed with a terrible migraine. I felt it building up all day. That almost imperceptible fluttering of butterfly wings in the deep left side of my brain. I rummage through the medicine cabinet, even though I know I have not picked up the repeat prescription for the suppositories that do the trick. Instead I wash down a handful of headache pills with a large glassful of whiskey. As I look at the empty glass I think back to the Aftercare Meeting and the image of the rocks at the bottom of the ocean and decide maybe I’ve not dived that deep yet.

  As I drop off to sleep I am vaguely aware of the sound of crying in the room next door. But my dream world takes over.

  When I wake it is still dark. I turn over on my side and, closing my eyes, switch on the lamp on the floor. The pain in my head is thumping, but the dream I was having, of a young child alone in treehouse, still hovers like a flying insect, just out of sight. I remember the first time I had the dream as a small boy, hiding under the eiderdown as the stiff winter branches tapped on the frosted window of my bedroom like dead fingers.

  Dr Mary Foster insists on meeting me in the lounge at London’s City Airport. Perhaps she wants to be sure I get on the plane. The first leg of my journey is to Paris. Out of the elevated window of the cafeteria I look over the wasteland of Docklands. The light on top of Canary Wharf winks at me conspiratorially. I feel as lonely and empty as the landscape.

  When Mary arrives we are the only ones occupying a table, the morning rush hour to Europe having long passed through boarding control.

  ‘So, all set?’ she asks, as if enquiring about a school trip to Luxembourg. There is no mention of her tracker dogs, no hint of blackmail.

  ‘Hmmm,’ I reply.

  All that needs to be said has already passed between us. I’ve had several phone discussions on the logistics and complexities with Taneffe’s research and development team. Our lab has retested my formula for thermosetting the rubber plunger, which is guaranteed to fuse and seal once the contents of the syringe have been emptied. Both the World Health Organisation and United Nations agencies have been approached and we are in the initial stages of negotiating and planning cross-national production. Key academics and relevant research institutions around the world have been alerted of my itinerary. I will fly from Paris to Ho Chi Minh City, then on to Nha Trang in Vietnam. Sometime later I will cross the world to Bogotá in Colombia by way of Chicago. Dr Foster had no problem in being convinced of the value of stopping off in Chicago. ‘Makes perfect sense to our wider agenda,’ she’d said with a smile. ‘We need to transit through a hub in the States, and we happen to have an agent based there.’ More smiles: what a surprise. And she finished off by echoing Richard’s prediction. ‘If you can convince the Yanks to use your needle for heroin users, then what a marketing opportunity for us all. You can be a hero and rich!’

  So my journey is set. Start from London; end back in London. What might transpire in-between is largely a mystery. A mystery lying in the lap of this enigmatic woman with whom I sip cappuccino. Yet, despite the intrigue, the blackmail, the chaos, I can’t help but be excited at the prospect of my syringe seeing the light of day.

  ‘The stooge in the gangster suit was unnecessary,’ I say, wanting to get that one out of the way.

  She raises her eyebrows and tilts her head to one side.

  ‘We had to be sure you wouldn’t back out. Not my idea, in case you wondered. But all of us have to take orders.’

  Across the lounge a large billboard catches my eye. It is advertising insurance cover, but the main text asks if I knew that ‘the can opener was invented two years after the can.’

  ‘What’s on your mind?’ asks Mary. I realize she is deliberately keeping me occupied, ensuring there is no time for second thoughts.

  ‘Did you know …?’ I begin, still staring at the billboard. But I am interrupted by the announcement of the departure of the Air France flight to Charles de Gaulle airport.

  Irene Blake sits on the cream leather sofa in the living room in the quiet suburban street where she has lived for the best part of three decades. In this living room – or ‘dying room’, as she has recently started calling it – she flicks through the channels of the interminable afternoon television programs. Dusk is encroaching across the carpet. Peter Blake, her husband, the professor (once of dreams, now of nightmares), had returned to see to the oil leak in the washing machine. The third oil leak in a week. This time she created it by tugging at an outlet tube until it was wrenched from the back of the machine.

  The room darkens. With the inane game show babbling on the television her thoughts shift to the bureau by the bay window. She takes the key
from beneath the aspidistra and opens the small drawer where she keeps his letters. She picks out one from Egypt with a date stamp that hurls her back down the years. How often she has imagined that scene of thirty years earlier, when Peter sat on the balcony of his hotel in Alexandria writing love letters to her. He, the young research scientist working on eradicating hepatitis; she, the aspiring artist. That long-ago morning she received the letter with the exotic stamps, the oil paint sticky on her fingers. Hurriedly, she had cleaned her hands and sat on the yellow sofa by the window of their top floor flat overlooking the lavender trees in the park across the road. Then she read the letter and his tender words had invigorated her. All the long nights he was away she worked on a canvas called ‘Valentine’s Day’ to commemorate their first night of passion.

  She lets the letter drop from her shaking hands. Too much has passed between the young doctor and the aspiring artist. Too much pain and sorrow and anguish. This middle-aged woman, who was promised the fiefdom of undying love, sits numb and shaking in a blackened room. There is coldness, there is sadness.

  The evening after she found the photo of the two lovers in his jacket pocket was their wedding anniversary. It was their yearly treat. A big night out with a bottle of champagne, a big effort in bed to rekindle a passion on the wane. More often than not their bedtime together focused on progress in the lab. His obsession with livers seemed to replace his obsession with her body. But they were close; she felt secure in his enduring love, if not his passion. She was confident they would enter old age hand in hand. On that particular anniversary night Peter came home early with a big bunch of flowers and a broad, innocent, unsuspecting smile. She marvelled at his acting skills. They had the meal, the champagne, and then came home to make love. When they finished she gently reached over his prostrate body.

  ‘Cigarette, darling?’ she whispered.

  ‘Mmm,’ came the muffled reply.

  And then she took the photo from under her book (Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) and placed it casually, nonchalantly, beside his sweating face. She gave him time to focus, the beginnings of panic to register in his eyes, and then she said, ‘Paris, was it? It has the look of a Parisian interior. That hectic European Collaborators’ Conference last summer, if I’m not mistaken. And you do look tired, worn out, you poor soul. After all, they worked you so hard and late into the night that you didn’t have time to call me.’

  The photo showed Professor Blake and his research assistant in bed in a shuttered hotel bedroom, both naked, arms entwined.

  ‘You borrowed my Olympus, I remember, the self-timer shutter release. You …’

  She could keep up the act no longer. He never said a word. He held his head in his hands and just lay there. When she screamed and beat him on the back and the neck he took the blows. When she exhausted herself and went to the bathroom, he got up and went to the spare bedroom where he shut the door and sat by the window, smoking cigarettes. The night turned to morning: a new day. True to his word he ended the affair and promised fidelity. But something had shifted. He began to drink more and she slipped into another world. A world where gas seeped from the floorboards and washing machines bled.

  And so tonight, even though she had phoned to say a strange man was in the street, Peter is not coming back. The clock shows it is getting late, though he rarely comes home now before she has long gone to bed. She always hears the key in the door. Sometimes, to torture herself, she pretends it is of old and he will come to her in the comfort of love. Tonight she is no mood for games. She hauls herself up from the sofa and climbs the stairs to the bathroom. She leaves the light off – she has long since refused to see herself in the mirror. In the half-light she opens the medicine cabinet above the sink and feels for the small plastic bottle containing her sleeping tablets. She rattles the bottle and goes into the bedroom and lies down on the bed. She does not need water. She has done this many times. She rolls each little green capsule between her forefinger and thumb, feeling the smoothness of its shell.

  ‘My little eggs,’ she whispers. ‘My little green eggs.’

  One by one she swallows them, enough to kill a horse. She feels the calm waft over her like a snowdrift, starting deep in her chest then caressing every part of her body. She fancies the eggs filling her ovaries, growing into the babies she never conceived, the children she would never see. She imagines a host of embryos floating in the heavens.

  ‘Come to me, my darlings,’ she sobs, as her conscious life drifts from her, a fairytale turned into a nightmare. ‘My little green eggs. My darling sweet children,’ she whispers softly.

  And then she is gone.

  The plane taxies down the runway, the engines roar, and we gather speed. As always, I put aside the magazine and close my eyes. Quietly, I repeat an ancient Buddhist chant. If we crash and I am extinguished, I am determined my last conscious thought is not to be a litany of duty-free items. Before I grab a second breath to repeat the cycle of the chant, we are in the air. Once the tray is down and the tonic is in the gin, I feel free and light. As the plane hums through the night I sink back into my seat and forget, for the time being, my troubles. I am anonymous in the air, my worries fading away in the slipstream, my concerns muffled by the thick blanket of clouds separating me from the ground. The dull buzz of the engine soothes and holds me. The wonderful predictability of it all is hypnotic. The trays of drink and food. The switches and appliances, all in their regular places. The announcements from the cockpit comforting and reassuring: cruising speed, air temperature, the names of the captain and his navigator, the purser, first officer and cabin crew. ‘Sit back and enjoy the flight.’

  I kick off my shoes and wrap myself in the blanket. I put the blindfold over my eyes, pretend to be shot by the firing squad, and then suck on my gin and tonic. Sorry, guys, the first drink’s already done the damage.

  In a nondescript bar, some five miles away from his dying wife, Professor Blake is on his sixth beer and brandy chaser and has no intention of going anywhere, least of all home, until closing time. As he stares at the row of bottles in that miserable alcoholic space between loathing and oblivion, he wishes his wife were dead, everyone was dead. He scratches at the oil stain on his jacket sleeve and sighs. In the clear night sky, far above the grubby pub in the sleepy suburb, the wishing star shines bright and true. Professor Blake thinks of Anthony Malloy flying eastward towards a bright and glittering future. He looks around the dingy bar and sighs, recognizing that he has arrived at his.

  8

  Plastic corpus callosum

  I lie on my bed in the Rose Hotel. The flight was exhausting. A four-hour delay in Paris due to an Air France dispute. Then a three-hour layover in Ho Chi Minh City before the connecting flight to Nha Trang. I tried working during the long-haul flight. I looked over my itinerary, read through my notes and Richard’s research papers. But my thoughts drifted between Caitlin and Lottie, guilt and responsibility, responsibility and guilt. I am to present the proposals for the production and launch of the one-use syringe. To save lives, to make a difference. But the price, the hypocrisy. Caitlin’s life. My reputation and contribution set against deceit and drug smuggling and death peddling.

  The window is open to the street and, though the air is stifling, a breeze is blowing up. Maybe there will be a storm. It is late afternoon. The noises from the baker boys in the shop next door become distant as I drift away. Somewhere between dreams and wakefulness, between the chatter and clatter of the street, a powerful feeling wafts over me. There comes an image from my childhood. I am in the garden. My mother stands by the kitchen door, a huge blue-and-white hooped bowl in one hand and a gingham tea towel in the other. I seem to be looking down at her from above. Half-asleep, I look towards the balcony. The fresh white curtain billows in the breeze, beckoning, as if to embrace me. I fancy she is telling me to trust, to follow the path before me and let go of the result. I sink into the bed, and then into the deepest of sleeps.

  The next morn
ing, the dream still fresh in my mind, I am collected from my hotel and driven through the mayhem of cyclo drivers to my first appointment.

  Listening to the chairman of the Nha Trang People’s Rubber Factory Co-operative extolling the virtues of Vietnamese rubber is probably less than riveting at the best of times. With the nagging irritability of alcohol withdrawal, it is almost too much to bear. I look past the speaker and through the open door of the sparsely furnished office. Framed like a dream, like a promise of paradise, are the beach and palm trees, and beyond that the shimmering blue of the South China Sea. My mind wanders back to the balcony, my mother by the kitchen door, the unfamiliar feelings of well-being and safety. I imagine the drift of the curtain and try to conjure the strange peace it evoked in me. I find myself wanting more of it. In spite of the craving for a drink, even in the face of calamity. As the speaker continues with his introduction, I think of the brave sad look on Caitlin’s face in the photo.

  ‘Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is butter a dream,’ I hear her sing.

  Aware my attention is floating somewhere on the distant horizon, I drink some of the mud-black coffee before me and force myself to focus on the matter at hand. The four Vietnamese men and two women around the table are governmental and People’s Committee officials. Next to me sits Mr Lofgren, a Swede from the regional office of the World Health Organisation. On my other side is Miss Pham, my translator, who whispers in my ear like a lover or conspirator. I think of this ravaged country of Vietnam, where hospitals cannot afford sterile needles and syringes for routine work and vaccinations. Few will foresee the immense social and economic disaster of AIDS. I think back to the pool hall and Warren’s plea for drug injectors. It will be a huge task to get committed funding to supply my needle to vaccination programs; but it will be a far greater challenge for health activists and politicians to persuade the public of the virtue of providing illicit drug users with free and clean injecting equipment.