by Jo Baker
“You okay?” Will asks.
“I okay.”
He nods at Will’s limp arm. Will grimaces, shakes his head. The toffee tin and penknife are lying on the gravel at his feet. He shoves at them with his good foot: “You go on.”
Cosimo looks at him, doesn’t seem to understand.
“You take them,” Will says. He feels faint.
The men are close now. He can hear them calling breathlessly, their heavy running tread.
“Go on, get out of here,” Will says. The world has narrowed to a tunnel; it fizzes. He is done for; but Cosimo still has a chance. “Go on!”
Cosimo obligingly ducks down, picks up the toffee tin.
“Now run,” Will says.
Cosimo looks at the tin, then back at his friend.
“Please.” The pain is really bad. He’s going to black out. “Please, go.”
But Cosimo just squats down beside Will. He sets the tin aside, and reaches into the pocket of his flannel dressing gown. He takes out his cigarettes. He shakes them so that a couple of them stick out, nips one between his teeth, angles the packet towards Will.
Will looks at him for a moment. Then reaches for one unsteadily. His eyes blur.
They light up. Cosimo grabs a pillow and shoves it in under Will. Will lies back. “Thanks.”
They blow spools of smoke up towards the blue September sky. Will’s head gets clearer. His arm hurts a lot. He feels sick. But he’s not going to black out now. He wishes he could. He thinks he might cry. The men come into view. Jackson a column of blue trousers and brown coat, and then the flapping white coats of two of the younger doctors.
“Sorry, Cos,” he says. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
On Thursday, when they wheel Cosimo back in after his operation, he looks like he is dead and half mummified already. The doctors—Mr. Smyth and the students with their pathetic moustaches and shaved-over spots—they all look so proud of themselves. Will just wants to be sick.
Will’s left arm is angled, set solid and hammocked in a sling. The cast is newish still, and clean. It smells of the workshop, of canvas and plaster. His leg, though, is out of plaster. They’re treating him, he thinks, like an important prisoner, like a captured officer. Distant, respectful, occasionally cruel. When she cut the old cast off him, Matron left a beaded line of blood up his leg; he gritted his teeth and bore it. Given what Cosimo was going through, it didn’t seem right to make a fuss.
There was a shower of dead grey skin in there. Grey as Cosimo’s face.
He’d thought he was going to be brave, but in the end he’d been very far from brave. His arm had hurt so much; moving him had hurt so much. He’d gone into a total funk, wailing, streaming tears. He doesn’t like to think back to that, to see himself in that state. But, somehow, it had done the trick. Sister Kathleen promised she’d talk to Mr. Smyth. And then Mum and Dad drove down, and Mum looked huddled and anxious in her new jacket and lipstick, and Janet scribbled in her colouring book and sniffed, and Dad kept calling Mr. Smyth “Doctor” until Mr. Smyth corrected him.
There was a hissed scolding about the fuss and bother, and the nurses and the doctors who knew best, and were doing their jobs, looking after him and making him better and him thinking he knew best? Will watched his dad’s hands clench and unclench. There was oil beneath the nails—the car had broken down on the way—but he couldn’t hit Will, not there in the public ward, with the nurses stalking up and down and Mr. Smyth actually listening to Sister Kathleen and Matron, heads together at the nurses’ station. And with Will up to his shoulder in plaster of Paris.
So he got away with it. They won’t pin his hip. But they won’t give him any ice cream either.
Cosimo, though, hadn’t cried and wailed and got into a state. He’d been in not that much more pain than usual. He’d followed Will as Jackson carried him back, walking between the two doctors, stumpy bandaged hand swinging, calmly finishing his cigarette. On Thursday he was wheeled off to theatre while Will was still sleeping. Will thinks it was a nasty trick to do that, to sneak off with him in the night. But it was also a relief to wake and find the bed next to his empty. It had already happened, so he didn’t have to try to stop it.
At first, the curtains are kept drawn round Cosimo’s bed. Will can imagine every detail of it—the bloody cut, the flap of skin stretched over the stump, the skin stitched back onto the scarred wrist, everything scabbing up; all of it swaddled, strapped down tight. Because you would tear it straight out otherwise; you wouldn’t be able to help yourself. Waking up to find they’d turned you into a freak.
When Cosimo is awake again, and the curtains are drawn back, Will tries to be as he always was. They play backgammon, both one-handed, on the ridges of Will’s knees. They crunch Will’s Maltesers from the box. Later, Will passes him a fresh comic. Cosimo can read the pictures, and gets the sense of words like Aargh and Achtung and Phew. And it goes on like this for a while, for days, even a week. But Will can’t really look at him any more. Can’t think about him even. That hand tucked and sewn inside himself. Though he unwraps him sweets and passes comics and slides his backgammon chips around the board for him, he keeps his mind averted, from what he thinks and feels and what it must be like to be Cosimo now. An experiment.
Mickey is worse too. His speech has somehow slumped, and Will finds it embarrassing trying to pick apart the words.
The nurses keep a close eye on Will. They’ve confiscated his arrows and his penknife. Bed rest, and a set of exercises, supervised by Mr. Smyth. This is a new kind of experiment for Mr. Smyth, rather different from his usual hack-and-slash approach: physiotherapy, they call it. Will rather likes it.
They start off with a football, in the lobby. He has to kick it with his good foot, which means balancing on the bad. Then the other way. He grits his teeth and tries and wobbles and clutches Sister Kathleen and tries again. Mr. Smyth looks on, frowns, takes notes. Will kicks the ball. Sister Kathleen laughs and claps and runs to fetch it, her footfalls echoing off the marble floor.
The old isolation ward upstairs is being cleared of beds. Will can hear it going on from where he lies playing cards with Cosimo—the rumbling of the wheels on the boards, the shuffling as new equipment is moved in. When Sister Brenda takes him up there, along with another three boys from off the ward—Spastic Pete is one of them, one’s a new boy with a compound fracture that isn’t healing right, the other is Humpy Hoggarth, who has scoliosis—there are parallel bars and mats and balls and ropes and it looks like great fun, but it turns out that it is exhausting too. Nights are just black oblivion, he sleeps so deeply. He doesn’t mind the hard work, or the pain, because it’s for a reason.
Make the muscles strong and they’ll support the joint; keep the joint supported and the damaged bone won’t fail. This is what Mr. Smyth says. He says it directly to Will now, rather than over his head, involving him in his treatment, making him take responsibility for it. The problem is that the joint is so damaged and unsupported at this point that it just wobbles around—it’s these minor dislocations that’ve been causing Will the pain. That’s what the pin was supposed to do—stop the wobbling. But if Will works hard, and builds up that muscle to hold his joint in place, then his pain will be reduced, can be made perhaps to just go entirely away. No need for that pin. He can be like other boys. He can even play football. This, Will wants to say, is what he’s been saying all along. But he doesn’t say it now, in case that makes them decide to take all of this away.
“We could take them swimming,” Sister Kathleen suggests.
Mr. Smyth gives her a look. “Do they look like they need a dose of polio, sister?”
And she blushes and no more is said, which seems a shame as it would be nice to go swimming with Sister Kathleen.
Soon, he has read all his comics to rags. Mum has stopped sending them, as a punishment. When the library cart comes round, he asks to have a closer look. He borrows a book. It is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. It’s smashing.
>
Cosimo has new friends, Clive and Trev and Tiny Brian, from down the far end of the ward. They play darts together, the four of them. It works out quite well for Cosimo; he’s got better balance than the other boys, a steadier hand, even if it is only the one of them.
Will finishes Treasure Island. He picks a paperback next, with a cowboy on the cover, and that’s quite exciting. He ploughs through the Just So Stories, but finds them silly and a bit boring. Then he finds Kidnapped, which is by the same old fellow as Treasure Island, and he just romps through it. When he has read his way through the library trolley, Sister Kathleen starts to fetch books in from the library in town. He likes westerns, and adventures, and war stories. One day she comes in with a book as fat as a loaf; she hands it over to him and it drops in his hands, heavier than he’d expected.
“I asked the librarian. You’ve got through all their Junior Readers.”
He turns the book over. No exciting cover picture, just blank maroon cloth plastered onto cardboard. He can’t hold it comfortably.
“It’s very heavy.”
She smiles at him. “It’ll build up your strength.”
He turns it over, reads the spine. Great Expectations.
Denham Crescent, Mitcham
October 12, 1965
SHE CAN’T MAKE SENSE OF IT. The room is smaller than it should be, and the bed is in the wrong place. She has to get ready, get herself sorted out. She can’t get the blankets off her. She struggles up and sits, their weight across her knees. She heaves the blankets back and drags her legs round, her nightie all rucked up, and there are her slippers on the rug. She feels her toes into them.
She has to get herself tidied up and dressed and make some breakfast. He is coming home. It has been such a long voyage.
She goes over to the window and drags back the curtains. It’s dark, which seems strange, but it doesn’t put her off. What seems stranger is the shape of the sky. It should be a narrow strip above the houses opposite—and Knox Road itself a ribbed band of cobbles below—but here it is an open plane; a bald flat moon stands on the sky, and makes everything blue-silver—the gardens, the sheds, the back lane with chalky runnels and the backs of houses beyond. For a moment she is intensely troubled by this, where she is and how she got here, and what she’s going to do, and how he’s going to find her here, and then something shifts in her thoughts, and she knows it will be fine. The arrangements are made. They have agreed it. She will be safe. That’s why she’s here.
She stands on the bedside mat, her flesh goosepimpling. She is going to wear that suit. The new suit in the longer line, and her new hat. He’ll be so proud when he sees how their boy has looked after her. She moves towards the wardrobe, but then remembers, the album, her picture book; she has to find it. Show him how she kept the postcards that he sent. She casts around the room—and it is tiny, narrow, pokey—how they will fit his sea-chest and him in here as well she doesn’t know. She stumbles back across the bedside mat in her slippers, and flicks on the light. She can’t see it. There is a blue suitcase lying flat by the end of the bed, and there is the wardrobe with its knobs like petrified lace, and there is a dressing table pushed up next to it, and a chair with her cardie over the back of it, and a bed and beside the bed a nightstand with a glass with her teeth in it. She catches sight of her reflection, and sits down at the dressing table.
She turns her face from side to side. A good man doesn’t mind. She picks up her powderpuff and pads it against her cheeks and nose. A thick dust of lavender-white sticks there. She opens drawers and peers inside and tips a toilet bag out onto the glass top of the dresser. She finds a lipstick and draws it on.
She shivers. She picks up her cardigan and holds it for a moment, and then hooks it over the back of the chair carefully so that it will keep its shape and will not crease. She opens the door and goes out onto the landing. She knows this place but can’t work out how. There is one window on the landing, casting a pale rectangle on the patterned carpet. The stair treads are silvered with light from below. She climbs carefully down. He will be coming up the garden path. He will be about to step onto the doorstep, raise his hand to knock. A wooden sun rises across the door; its rays fan out across the frame, holding the glass segments in place. The light through the panes is muted blue, but then it flares into astonishing brightness. It’s a blessing, she realises: a promise. Any minute, his shadow will move across the light, and he will be there. He will be home. But the brightness grows, and then explodes. And it hurts.
It is Ruby who finds Amelia there, lying half on the hall carpet, half on the bottom two steps, her nightdress trailing round her calves, her mouth open. In that instant Ruby realises that she has been dreading this for months—this very moment, this very image. Amelia hurt. She might have been lying there all night, caught a chill. Ruby stumbles down to her, clutching the handrail, her own nightie and dressing gown bundled up in one hand to stop herself from tripping. She should have had Billy fit a gate across the stairs. They knew she was wandering: that’s why they moved her back in with them, to the room vacated by Will’s departure. They should have thought it through.
“Amelia?”
Ruby’s first concern is to get her up, get her into the sitting room, get the gas on and get her warmed up, get a hot cup of tea into her, call the doctor. But Amelia doesn’t stir.
Ruby crouches down beside her. “Mum?”
The woman’s mouth is open and dry and pale. Her eyes are open too. Ruby reaches out a hand and takes her wrist, and the skin is cold, and feels already different; the skin hardening, the flesh underneath gone somehow spongy.
It feels strange, but Ruby doesn’t let go. She takes Amelia’s hand between hers, and chafes it. The bulging knots of her fingers. The worn-in strip of gold. Like where a tree has grown around the wire of a fence, coming to some kind of accommodation with it, an acceptance.
Janet will sleep for another hour or so. Billy will sleep until Ruby wakes him. She leans down over the body and flicks the skirts of the nightgown straight. She holds the hand, rubs at it again. She should wake Billy, even though it is an hour and a half or so before his usual time. He should be told. But she doesn’t know what will happen then. His mother is dead. What is he going to be like, once he knows?
She lays the cold hand down on the thin fabric of the nightgown. She turns and climbs back up the stairs.
At first he seems to be handling it well. Between them they move the body up the stairs and back into Amelia’s bed. Then he calls the surgery and Dr. Bennett comes round even though it’s still so early. It is evident that this was not unexpected, at least as far as Dr. Bennett is concerned.
“She had a fall,” Ruby says, hushedly, standing over the narrow bed. Amelia lies there, pale and solid and waxy. Billy flashes Ruby a glare, like she’s mentioned something shameful. “We found her at the foot of the stairs. We didn’t like to leave her there.”
Dr. Bennett tilts his head. “I don’t think that was it. Any headaches, strange behaviour in recent weeks?”
Billy stands silent, dwarfed by the tall professionalism of Dr. Bennett.
“I don’t know. Maybe,” Ruby says. “Yes. I mean, she’d started to wander a bit.”
Billy turns stiffly away.
“Maybe we’re looking at a stroke,” the doctor continues. “She might have had them before, little ones. I’ll ring the coroner. We’ll have to be certain.”
“What for?” Billy asks.
“For the certificate. There’ll have to be an autopsy.”
“Oh.” Billy doesn’t look at his mother.
“Is that really necessary?” Ruby asks. “She was an old lady.”
The doctor nods sympathetically. “I do understand, believe me. I’m very sorry for your loss.”
Billy goes out of the room. He leaves the door open behind him. She watches him cross the landing and go into Janet’s room. There’s a moment’s quiet, and then a sleepy mumbling from the girl, and then Billy’s lower voice, and the
n the girl’s exclamation, Oh Daddy, and the rustling of bedding as the girl reaches up to hug him. It doesn’t seem fair, that—to go and tell her, insist that she wakes and knows. To claim her like that; to claim her sympathies.
Billy pushes his wide-headed broom around the gymnasium, collecting clots of shed hair and the fibres from coconut matting and the stuffing of vaulting horses and medicine balls and the threads that fall from the climbing ropes. He moves through the white grids of light from the high windows, scattering dust motes. He can hear one of the classes down the corridor—the massed voices chanting out their seven times tables. He knows his times tables better now than he ever did as a boy.
She has money saved with the Co-op for a funeral, he knows that. He’s known for years.
At lunchtime the children queue at the hatch and take their plates with slopped-on mince and mash and swede, and he could get his too, if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. Instead, he goes out into the October sunshine and crosses the grey, gritty cement and goes out the school gates and keeps on going until he’s standing at the corner of Denham Crescent even though he hadn’t meant to go home at all.
Ruby is at work. Janet is at school. Will is away at college. His mother is in the hospital mortuary. The house looks down at him with its blank glass. It is a good house. A clean and comfortable house. It’s his; he pays for it. That’s something. He kept her comfortable in her last years. That’s something too.
He goes down to the end of the street, and back up the lane behind the houses. He goes into the garage. For a moment he just looks up at his old track bike, its hanging wheels, its dust-filmed frame. If he had been stronger, fitter, faster, better—but he can’t even imagine it, because then the world would have to be such a different place, and he a different man entirely.
He lifts the bike down. He wipes the frame and forks with a clean rag. He drips oil onto another cloth and rubs at the joints. He lifts the back wheel, pulls the pedal round with a hand. It ticks round perfectly, the greased links of the chain meeting the gear teeth with easy precision. He’d forgotten this, the clarity of it, the perfection.