What the Light Reveals

by Mick McCoy

  ‘I don’t mean about trivial stuff like packing away his clothes, or finishing off his Christmas present for Dad. Or hearing him in the flat, which is just plain weird and your way of manufacturing a conversation about him.’ He watched her. ‘I mean about something important.’ Alex pushed his breakfast, untouched, into the middle of the table.

  Ruby picked up her napkin and wiped her hands. ‘Apart from what you and Dad and the police told me, I don’t know what happened.’

  ‘Do you think there’s something more?’

  She didn’t want to have this conversation, at least not now, but it was the conversation they were having. Other mothers wouldn’t be like this, though. They’d let it go, stick to what they’d planned to say. They’d be more maternal. She wouldn’t be like this, if Peter was sitting at the table and Alex was dead. She knew that, and it put the lie to what she’d planned to say. To her, Alex was not just like Peter – that was the truth.

  ‘Is there something more?’

  ‘When you say you hear him in the flat, but then you realise it’s not him but me … it sounds like you’d rather I was dead and Peter was here now.’

  ‘I see him when I look in the bathroom mirror,’ she said. ‘Not standing beside me or behind me, but in me. In my eyes. I see him in your father’s eyes too. Especially if he smiles, although there’s precious little of that.’

  ‘And?’ Alex said. ‘In my eyes?’

  Ruby reached for him, but he retreated.

  ‘Why did you adopt me if you could have your own baby?’

  ‘The doctors told us we couldn’t have children,’ she said, hearing her own evasiveness. ‘But they were wrong.’ She still thought she should hold his hand. She wanted to. ‘Give me your hand,’ she said. ‘Please.’

  Alex folded his arms.

  ‘We couldn’t see into the future.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t have adopted me if you’d known you could have Peter?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that. We wanted a child and there you were.’

  His shoulders relaxed a little, or did they sag?

  ‘You were so beautiful,’ she said.

  ‘And there I was,’ he said. ‘So convenient.’

  When she reached for him again he didn’t retreat. ‘We wanted you,’ she said, but those words, even to her, sounded like a lie.

  ‘I don’t want to be Peter, or be like Peter,’ he said.

  She was quiet.

  ‘I’ve got an early lecture.’ He picked up his camera, threw his bag over his shoulder and headed for the door.

  ‘What time will you be back?’ she said, as the front door closed.

  CONRAD

  With the passing weeks Conrad’s lungs became so constricted he could only sip at the air, as if it were hot soup from a spoon. He’d developed secondary pneumococcus and influenza infections, so he was on higher doses of his medications, as well as a stronger antibiotic. Then the oxygen therapy started, a machine feeding him gas through a tube seemingly too thick for his nose, which passed down the back of his throat and into his windpipe. A Bird Respirator, they called it, although they denied it was a reference to his budgie-sized lungs, once Conrad had explained to them what a budgie was.

  But the doctors were puzzled about why his shortness of breath persisted, and why his body continued to run down its increasingly meagre reserves. These were good doctors with access to testing facilities and decent drugs, not fools like that Wadek from his block who prescribed mustard wrap and fresh air for everything from a sprained ankle to a heart attack. These were people who could actually help. His bacterial count was in decline and he coughed up less of the thick brown sputum, but his weight kept dropping. For a man of six-foot-three who normally tipped the scales at 175 pounds, a weight of only 105 pounds was worrying.

  A new round of tests were ordered, and two weeks before Christmas his doctor came to see him. ‘Doktor Zubrin, chto u vas yest dlya menya segodnya? Doctor Zubrin, what have you got for me today?’

  ‘Nyet testov, No tests,’ Zubrin said, without a trace of a smile. ‘Net bol’she. No more.’

  ‘Okay. That’s good, then. Right?’

  Zubrin had a leading man’s jawline and a thick but carefully groomed moustache extending well past the corners of his mouth. His dark, sombre eyes and olive skin suggested Middle Eastern heritage.

  ‘Comrade Murphy,’ he said, ‘can you tell me about your headaches?’

  ‘I’m not sure there’s anything I haven’t already told you.’

  ‘Could you to remind me please when they first started?’

  Conrad confirmed that he first became aware of the headaches in late November, after he’d been in the hospital for a couple of weeks. He endured them, simple as that. They brought a sharp, stabbing pain that pulsed above his left ear, which didn’t last for more than thirty seconds before ebbing away. Icepick headaches, Zubrin diagnosed back then. ‘Don’t worry,’ he’d said. ‘They feel a lot worse than they are.’

  As Conrad recounted the history, Zubrin nodded occasionally. ‘And have there been any visual disturbances?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Blank areas in your visual field, or an inability to notice objects in the periphery. Perhaps there are unusually bright spots, or dark ones, before your eyes? That kind of thing.’

  ‘How would I know there’s something I can’t see, if I can’t see it?’

  Zubrin stared impassively back at him.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Conrad said. ‘No blank spots, anyway. Or bright ones.’

  ‘What about your moods? Have you noticed that you get suddenly angry or frustrated with people?’

  ‘No. Has anyone reported it?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Zubrin said. ‘I was just wondering if you’d noticed any changes in the way you feel about things.’

  ‘What’s all this about?’

  ‘What about dizziness?’ Zubrin continued. ‘Has there been any dizziness?’

  ‘Well, yes. If I want to get out of bed, I need to sit on the side for a while until the world rights itself, before standing.’

  ‘But it does right itself, yes? This dizziness doesn’t last?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t last. Maybe ten seconds, but then it’s gone.’

  ‘And while you’re lying in bed there’s nothing?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Zubrin said.

  ‘I thought that was the low oxygen levels in my blood.’

  ‘Yes, it probably is.’ The doctor rocked his weight back onto his heels, lifting his toes clear of the floor. ‘Your symptoms – the main ones in your chest – are indicative of emphysema, with the TB and bacterial infections,’ Zubrin said. ‘This is not news, of course, and it is what we’ve been treating you for.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘But some of your symptoms indicate the possibility of a different condition.’ He paused again. ‘Your symptoms, the old ones we knew about earlier, plus the newer ones you’ve told us about, suggest that as well as everything else, you have cancer in the lungs.’ Zubrin paused for an instant then pressed on. ‘The tests we’ve done this past week are to confirm the diagnosis, and even though some results aren’t in, I thought it my duty to tell you what I know so far and what I believe the tests will show.’

  ‘The results aren’t available yet?’ Conrad spoke hurriedly, as if his words could overtake Zubrin’s talk of cancer and make it all unsaid.

  ‘Not all of them.’

  ‘So they could just as easily come back negative? This is only your opinion?’

  ‘No,’ Zubrin said. ‘I don’t believe so.’

  Conrad wondered which of his questions the doctor didn’t believe, that his diagnosis was no more than opinion, or that the tests might come back negative. Or both. ‘How long will it take to get the results?’

  ‘A week, perhaps two.’

  ‘Two weeks?’ Conrad said. ‘Why so long? That’ll be Christmas.’

  ‘We’ll start you on paraldeh
yde when the pain worsens. It is a sedative. We can’t give you morphine because it makes the breathing more difficult.’

  ‘What else?’ Conrad asked, tugging at his oxygen tube where it snaked into his nose. ‘A sedative won’t fix me.’

  ‘Comrade, I don’t believe there is any value in beginning other treatments.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I would gladly be mistaken, but I believe you may have less time to live than it will take for the tests to come back.’

  Conrad looked into Zubrin’s eyes, unsure what he was hoping to see. Doubt? Any of that would be a blessing, but he saw no doubt. The doctor was still talking but he wasn’t listening. He was thinking about his face and his whiskers. He’d stopped shaving weeks earlier and the hand mirror he’d been given had been taken away. After a week of invisibility he’d asked Ruby to bring one in but she resisted, feigning forgetfulness. When she eventually complied his appearance had shocked him. The lies he’d let his fingers tell when he’d rubbed their fleshy pads across his chin that past week! The old Conrad was gone and in his place was a man whose face was pale and lifeless and sagging from its bones. A face made not from skin and flesh, not warmed and reddened by blood, but one that was cold and fragile, as if held together with grey wax.

  ‘Why wasn’t this picked up earlier?’ Conrad said, interrupting his doctor’s words.

  Zubrin frowned. ‘The results of the earlier tests were consistent with the original diagnosis, but it wasn’t until you failed to respond to the treatment that we began to suspect another problem.’

  ‘Failed to respond?’ Conrad repeated, glaring at him, but Zubrin held his tongue. ‘Can you at least keep me alive until Christmas? Can you promise me that?’

  ‘I can’t promise.’

  ‘I want a Christmas with my family. I want one last Christmas.’ Conrad was panting, his breath rapid and shallow.

  Zubrin reached for a water jug at the bedside, poured a full glass and held it out to Conrad, who stared at it. The doctor stepped closer and, one hand lightly supporting Conrad’s neck, held the glass to his lips. Conrad brushed away the doctor’s arm, spilling water on the sheets. ‘I’m not an invalid.’

  Zubrin stepped back. ‘When is your wife in? Would you like me to discuss it with her?’

  ‘I’ll tell her.’

  ‘Is there anything else you need?’

  ‘No,’ Conrad said. ‘Nothing.’

  Zubrin gave a single short nod of his head and walked to the door.

  * * *

  Ruby bent over the bed and kissed him on the lips, despite his foul breath. ‘You’d better go talk to the doctor,’ he said. ‘He thinks I’m sick.’

  ‘We already knew that.’

  He’d been rehearsing what he’d say to her and what he wouldn’t, to avoid crumbling at the sight of her. But his rehearsals were useless. ‘No, no. More than that.’

  ‘What has he told you? What am I going to ask him about?’

  ‘He says I have cancer.’ The last word scratched his throat. ‘And that I have only a few weeks to live.’

  ‘You …’ she began. Her eyes searched his face. ‘But I don’t believe this. You have emphysema. And TB.’

  ‘Ruby, you should talk to Zubrin. He can explain it better than me.’

  ‘No, I’ve seen this a hundred times. I treated people with symptoms like yours at Prince Henry’s. They had emphysema, nothing more.’

  ‘Don’t do this to me, please,’ he said. ‘Don’t make it harder.’

  ‘What if he’s wrong? Why has he suddenly changed his mind? Are the test results back?’

  Ruby had worked in the cardiothoracic ward at Prince Henry’s for eight years. She would have seen patients like him, just as she said. She’d know things he didn’t, but things the doctor didn’t? False hope was the last thing he wanted. He’d been guilty of that himself for far too long.

  ‘Not all of them,’ he said, ‘but he knows what they’ll say.’

  ‘How does he know? Without the results, how does he know?’ She paced the room.

  ‘He’s a doctor.’ For a moment, Conrad thought she might fly into a rage. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t care, your treatment is all wrong.’ She sat very close to him, almost on top of the pillow. ‘I don’t know why I haven’t said more.’

  ‘Ruby, talk to him, will you?’

  ‘Prince Henry’s twenty years ago was more advanced than this place is now.’

  ‘Ruby, please, that’s just silly. You’re just making it harder.’

  ‘How long have you known about this?’

  ‘An hour.’

  ‘I don’t believe that. How long have you really known?’

  ‘An hour, Ruby. The doctor can tell you.’

  ‘But you’ve known for longer than that,’ she said. ‘You’ve known. You’re not stupid. You didn’t need the doctor to confirm it for you.’

  ‘Are you saying now that Zubrin is right?’

  Outside, the noises of the hospital bounced off hard surfaces. Voices rose and sank, trolleys rolled and clattered, the worn soles of nurses’ shoes scuffed across floors. Conrad watched Ruby grappling with all the ways in which her future might play out. He realised then that he would never witness her grow old. He would never again sleep in the same bed with her. Never feel the full length of her body against his, or the warmth of her skin. He wiped at his eyes, pushed the tubing from side to side in his nose and began to cough. ‘Go and talk to him,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll have plenty of time.’

  ‘No, we won’t!’ she said. ‘A few weeks is not plenty of time. It’s barely enough for Christmas.’

  ‘Well, we’d better make it a good one.’

  She stood and moved to the middle of the room, apart from him, her back to him. ‘You’re not dying. I don’t believe it.’

  RUBY

  Ruby sat up in bed, naked, goosebumps rampant. She dragged the blankets up from her waist and pulled them tight. It was four o’clock and a rare winter sunset cast pink and orange clouds across the sky. ‘Kholodno. It’s cold,’ she said.

  With his feet exposed at the bottom of the bed, Karl Wadek rolled onto his side and curled up, facing her. ‘Ya dolzhen uyti. I should leave.’ He closed his eyes, no sign of moving.

  He was fuller than Conrad, not just physically. Shorter, hairier, louder, less caring, more male. She didn’t look at him, didn’t touch the shoulder that rested on her hip. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You should.’

  He peeled the blankets away and hauled himself up from the bed. ‘We should do this at my place, don’t you think?’

  Ruby wasn’t listening.

  After the front door furtively clicked shut, Ruby exhaled, fetched a pair of Conrad’s flannel pyjamas from the chest of drawers and put them on, with a pair of woollen socks, then stood at the door examining the room. She couldn’t remember ever being in bed at that time of day. The wallpaper, she noticed, was embossed with a floral motif, tiny repeated blooms etched into diagonal lines, each one so paltry they’d been invisible for thirteen years of nights, but kaleidoscopic on that afternoon.

  She was done with Karl Wadek.

  With the bedside table bare but for a lamp, the wardrobe and the chest of drawers closed, there was no trace of Conrad. No cigarette packet or wallet, no briefcase or pocketbook for scribbled notes. A key rested in the wardrobe door’s lock, never once having been turned to slide home the bolt. There was no need for it. Nothing to hide. She pictured Conrad’s suits and shirts, his heavy jacket, neatly organised behind the closed door, hanging empty, his scent already draining from their weave. His belt buckles would be hanging from hooks screwed to the inside wall, his hats and gloves on the high shelf, at the bottom his paired shoes with their laces loosened. All of it waiting to be used but of no further use.

  She retrieved her dressing gown from the bedpost and tied it tightly, then pulled down the biscuit tin from above the wardrobe. In the same seat where she’d found Alex after collecting Conrad from the police cells
, she sat and spread what remained of the tin’s contents across the living room table. Photographs and letters and documents telling a family’s story. Or lying about it. Sunshine-drenched backyard afternoons, evergreen trees with leaves like tinsel. A family, bigger, more connected to each other and to their world, none of it a lie. So when did the decay start? Was it really the royal commission, or had it already been germinating? Would it have happened anyway?

  The twist of the front door handle brought no surprise. Alex could’ve arrived home at any time, she knew that. Even while Karl was there, and that might have been better. She felt like she was the child, caught lighting a fire. He hadn’t felt that way when their places were traded and the smell of burnt history hung in the air, she was confident of that. But she had no such confidence in her own reasons for recreating the event, or for the whole sordid business with Karl Wadek. Had she actually wanted Alex to find him in her bed?

  Alex took the bag from his shoulder, laid it with unusual care on the chair beside her, and walked into the kitchenette. ‘Why are you in your dressing gown?’

  ‘It’s warmer,’ she said.

  He filled the kettle, set it on the stove and lit the jet. ‘Can I get you a hot drink?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ How long had it been since Karl had crept from the flat? One minute? Two? Then down the stairs as Alex had climbed them. What look would’ve passed between them if their paths crossed? He must know. ‘Do you have all you need from the tin for your father’s Christmas present?’

  Milk in a glass jar sat chilling on the kitchen windowsill. Alex poured some into the cup he’d readied for his tea, drank it, refilled the cup and drank again. ‘I thought they’d be better someplace people could see them,’ he said. ‘Where they meant something, rather than shut inside a tin box.’

  As far as she knew, Alex hadn’t told Conrad about discovering he was adopted. He seemed determined to reveal it by filling his album with the photos he found. Spring it on him on Christmas Day. Surprise him, shock him. Conrad’s last Christmas. Their first without Peter. She wouldn’t let that happen. ‘Why did you burn those birth certificates?’