by Lucy Durneen
A short woman he doesn’t recognise slams through the privacy curtain, followed by three students. ‘We’ve got you on our emergency list for tomorrow,’ she says brightly, as if offering him front row seats for the first game of the season. ‘Someone will be along later to talk through the risks with you.’
The last student in the line steps forward to ask if Bill’s next of kin are available.
‘Risks?’ Bill says but he is barely audible and the woman doesn’t linger, sensing how all this grand despair seems to put off the students. They follow her across the central corridor and away in gauzy slow-motion to the other side of the ward. But the last student in the line turns back to Bill’s bed, patting his pockets as if he has lost something, a pen, or his desire to be in this shadowed place. Bill shuts his eyes and breathes into the prism of the oxygen mask, out, out, out. Suddenly all his thoughts become questions. His only need is to be heard. If his voice is heard, he is living, he will continue to live.
‘At the precise moment of death, will I be able to look down at my body and see you trying to save me?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No, we don’t think so.’
‘But how can you know for sure?’
‘We don’t. But we’re fairly sure.’
‘Fairly?’
‘About 99.9% sure. Personally…’
But the last student in the line doesn’t say what he personally feels and Bill’s relief at identifying his voice is like being lost at sea and seeing land, because as long as the words remained dispossessed he was afraid the cancer had reached his brain, or it was God speaking.
‘How can that be?’ Bill hears himself asking. ‘We put a man on the moon but we don’t know what happens when we die? What kind of half-assed scientists are you?’
‘Science doesn’t have all the answers,’ the last student says as Bill opens his eyes. ‘But it’s better that way, don’t you think, Mr Hare? Shit, my biro! Did you see it? They’re like gold dust round here.’
In one of his deliriums Bill worries about the floor in his conservatory, which for some years has taken on an unpleasant smell in wet weather, he thinks possibly from when the dog was a puppy and still had accidents at night. The floor had been concrete at the time, the puppy having torn up the linoleum almost as soon as he arrived, so the urine soaked the floor in bright, phosphorescent circles that faded to shadows in seconds. He pictures the dog, surprised by the orbs of its own piss as if in a strange corruption of another old fable about the moon, where its reflection causes a fool to believe it has fallen into the lake. Bill imagines the fool striding into the cold, black water with a rope and harness, he feels the sudden freeze under his own skin and it’s a strange, feinting sort of plunge as he finally goes under, looking for the moon. When he wakes up, two nurses are bending over him, changing the sheets. ‘Don’t leave it until the last minute next time,’ the Nigerian one says sharply. ‘Press your buzzer. Or better still, keep the urinal where you can reach it.’
He looks out of the window and lets his eye follow the dark shapes that move towards and away from the glass like the coloured beads of a kaleidoscope. He watches the tree branches lunge down to the grass below and then rear, leonine, up into the night breeze, while the nurses roll and wipe and fold down an angry set of hospital corners. One of the shapes breaks free, and it seems that on the approach to the window some sharpness to the Autumn air is planing it down and down and down until it has angles, shadows and only in the last minute does the shape become a bird.
‘My dog,’ he says, in a hot fright. ‘Who is looking after my dog?’ Then Ellen’s voice and a blurred tang of ten-year-old Glenfiddich as she leans across, missing his hand when she says, ‘The dog’s dead, Billy-boy. He died, what, five years ago. We took his ashes up to Daymer Bay, don’t you remember?’
‘Can I tell you something?’ Bill asks the pretty nurse in the morning, surprised and glad that she is still on duty to prep and move him across the ward for surgery. He would like to ask if there is any point to this latest procedure. More than that he would like to know whether or not he will even want the few extra months that carving out a section of his beleaguered liver might give him—but these are not medical questions, and Bill has been here long enough to understand that even consultants who use the moon as therapy will be unable, or unwilling to go into it. There is something else anyway, something subtler but more important that needs to be resolved, because the bottom line is that when he is on the table in two hours’ time there will be no magic, only science, which hasn’t got all the answers.
The impulse to tell is as urgent as anything he has ever known. He recalls that so many people die on the toilet because the need to defecate and an impending heart attack feel very much the same, and a worry fires up in him that either one of these two things might be about to happen. But minutes pass and neither does, so it is just the need to get the words out after all. The nurse sits on the edge of the bed and looks at him expectantly. After all that he doesn’t know how to start. ‘If I don’t tell you then it’s like…’ he tries, but Bill cannot verbalise his fear on the first go.
‘I know what you’re saying,’ she says. ‘It’s like if a butterfly flaps its wings.’
‘It is?’
‘No, it’s not! It’s something else. It’s like if a tree falls in a forest. If a tree falls and nobody hears it, did it make a sound?’
You break my heart, he wants to say, because it is clear that human existence comes down to no more than this, a seesaw from the sublime to the ridiculous where everything is either absurd or happening in such deep isolation that no-one notices the moment of collapse. But he does not say it. Instead he motions for the urinal, heeding last night’s warning.
‘Wait,’ she says. ‘Maybe it is the butterfly.’
Bill Hare knows he can only be a disappointment now. He says that he worries he’s built this up into something big and she gives him a little thumbs up, psyching him along. When he starts to talk he won’t look at her, partly through embarrassment but also because, away over her shoulder he can actually see the past again, or at least a version of it where things seem to have become separated into their component parts for ease of classification. Under Nervous Apprehension he sees a parking meter, a bottle of wine. A weeping willow stands for Romance. He doesn’t remember the kids with a bucket bong being under the willow but memory works in strange ways like that, holding back some of the details until you are ready to embrace them all. ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ he begins, but it isn’t much of a beginning. He finds there is less to say than he expected. Clare College Gardens. 1975. One of those outdoor theatre things. The nurse raises an eyebrow and he says, ‘It wasn’t my idea. You do these things for people, don’t you?’
He says ‘people’ in the same way he says ‘you do these things’ but the pretty nurse sees it is not the same at all. She pats his hand. ‘I’m listening,’ she says. ‘Take it away, mister.’
She is right about how hard it is to tell a story. He tries one opening and then another. When he settles on a final version, not the most detailed but accurate enough, the words come out of him in a rush like a flock of tiny demented birds. It was dark and we were waiting for a lift I kept talking about the show I should have shut up but the night was like a miracle I wanted to tell someone the night was a miracle but those were the words I couldn’t seem to find. The words fly high and fast and free.
‘This was a person you were in love with?’
‘Loved,’ is all he can say, relieved.
‘But you didn’t say anything.’
‘No.’
‘Couldn’t you have…?’
‘Moments go, baby,’ he says.
Bill cannot tell her how things went from there like little movements down a mountain, from this pinnacle of breathless, violent joy to some half way limbo and then suddenly it was as if the two of them were home free and there were no more obstacles, except that a crucial, exploratory urge had
left them. But perhaps the pretty nurse feels the hurt under his skin in the same, simple way plants pull water out of the earth, perhaps she senses that what he is saying is that this is his one experience of romantic love and after that night, he was all done. That was the damndest part, being done with love so soon and with such permanence.
‘The lift turned up,’ he says, instead. ‘That’s what happened.’
‘So is that what you wanted to tell me?’
‘Yeah, that’s it.’
He is quiet for a minute, thinking of Stephen Hopkins in Clare College Gardens. Up until this morning he has only imagined them in the dark, under the trees in the same square foot of decanted light, but now he remembers that before this, at dusk, they were walking along the main road into the city and a dog ran out, a terrier or something equally small and snappy, scared the bejesus out of them. He remembers too that on Stephen Hopkins’ thumb was a wart the size of a small button and all the while the dog was snapping in circles around them it seemed that if Bill pressed the button a connection might be made, a circuit completed. But when the shock died down and the dog ran off into the bushes there was no reason for their hands to be touching in any way. He had not pushed the button. More and more things, he realises, are going to become like this, memories without focus like inexpert photographs with no-one to identify them, just a guessing game of disparate months, weeks, days.
‘I’m telling you this because you can’t take it with you,’ he says, suddenly afraid the pretty nurse doesn’t understand. This is all he has to pass on and suddenly it seems so small. He has heard the words as if the first time—this was someone you were in love with—and he starts to laugh, but it is the same sort of laugh that he couldn’t stop from coming when the doctor explained to him why it was too late for chemotherapy, a laugh pulled up from a sublimely lonely place. The doctor, who he feels he has come to know better than some of the people he unwillingly calls friends, had tapped across a map of his digestive organs with the eye of an expert jeweller finding imperfections on a set of stones you thought were going to be your fortune. See this shadow on your liver? Our best guess is a haematoma but the whole thing is covered in cysts in any case; the function is critically impaired. Then there’s your pancreas—shot to shit if I’m frank. Kidneys are good for another few months though, and Bill had rolled on to his side on the leather sofa, laughing at his valiant renal system, laughing his way into a darkness that some of the worst people he has met wouldn’t know. He laughs that way now.
‘It’s like a gift,’ Bill says to the pretty nurse, sobering down. ‘Maybe some of the other goners give you something proper, watches maybe. Does that ever happen?’
She doesn’t answer, just holds his hand. ‘You’re not a goner,’ she says softly.
‘There was an owl hooting,’ he says. ‘It hooted just at the bit where Romeo goes into the tomb. He says something about the lightning before death. That was my friend’s favourite line. If you’re ever imagining that night, don’t forget to put in the owl.’
The fluorescent strips spatter a yellow light that’s enough to depress a person into giving up the ghost, which is pretty much how Bill imagined it would be on this side of the ward. The feeling of moving underwater has returned, but this time he is definitely swimming, stroking out into the cosmos alone where he can’t feel the palsied motions of Apollo 8 anymore. He lets the anaesthetist do what he has to, stares up at the fading strips. There is some mild concern about his clotting levels but his kidneys are still good, which really is funny. Bill has never seen the point in the expression funny ha ha or funny peculiar. Even before he was diagnosed it seemed to him that most things are pretty peculiar, that so much consequence should be attributed to a life system that is only the result of random catastrophe after all.
Your sister is in the relatives’ room, the pretty nurse mouths from the door and he shakes his head fast, God no, feeling a sudden panic that Ellen will come in and this odd little illusion he has created for himself will be ruined. ‘See you on the other side then,’ she says, turning to follow the anaesthetist, but Bill isn’t done, won’t let her go. He doesn’t want to see what is on the other side. ‘Sit with me,’ he says. He wants her to know what it felt like to be standing out on the road at dusk, right there next to Stephen Hopkins, and in one crazed moment he wants her to find Stephen Hopkins and bring him here to this hospital, the middle-aged man that will be Stephen Hopkins sitting here with the old man that is William Hare, F347008. Instead, by some mean, alchemical process it comes out as: ‘A girl your age doesn’t know about love.’
The nurse won’t accept this to be true. ‘I happen to be in love this very minute,’ she says.
‘What are you, twenty? Twenty two?’
‘Nineteen,’ she rounds up.
‘Then you don’t know about love.’
‘That’s such a cliché,’ she says, and her face tightens so quickly into an approximation of womanhood that he suspects she has to do this just to buy a lottery ticket.
‘Okay, tell me,’ Bill says gently and he really does want to know if it is possible to love and be loved from such a hallowed place as your teenage years. It seems a long time since he was nineteen, he can only suppose times have greatly changed. But he is glad to have asked, seeing how her face shimmers with the thrill of the tale. ‘The most significant development in the history of love has been the Internet,’ she tells him. This is how she met PJ, who has been so good for her confidence, always telling her she’s beautiful, letting her meet all his friends. ‘He takes pictures of me,’ she tells him proudly, then blushes. ‘His friends take pictures of me. I never thought I was anything special, but they say I could be a real model. It must be the light or something. You have to know how to use the light, right?’ She is giddy with a sudden thought. ‘I feel like Cheryl Cole, sometimes. PJ knows the right people, and I can’t keep doing double shifts just to pay the rent, so maybe…’ and the pretty nurse with diamond skin stares past Bill into a dream of money and paparazzi fanning her door.
‘This boy,’ Bill says slowly. ‘How old is he?’
‘PJ? He’s not a boy. He’s forty seven. And before you say it, it isn’t… some kind of syndrome. I know what you’re thinking. You know, like when you fall in love with your kidnapper. It’s not like that.’
‘Stockhausen’s?’ he says, taken aback, unsure if that is even the word he is looking for. That wasn’t what I was thinking.
‘Yeah, well, it isn’t Stockhausen’s.’
‘It’s love, right?’
‘Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. Love.’
Now the surgeons are late. The midday wind rolls in and Ellen Hare, crossing the hospital car park to the waiting taxi, is reminded that winter is coming. Inside the light is low, the pumps suck and slide. The radio plays I don’t want to talk about it by Rod Stewart and Bill wonders how it is that all the songs you ever hear are about how hard it is to stop loving someone and never how impossible it can be to start. How you want to try but the fire won’t light, or maybe sometimes there is no way of really knowing yourself and your own desires and that is why Stephen Hopkins never realised what it was they had between them.
‘I’m glad I told you about PJ,’ the pretty nurse is saying.’ I’d kind of been keeping it a secret, but what was it you said? You can’t take it with you.’
‘I did tell you that, didn’t I?’
‘For an old guy you’re okay.’
‘Yeah.’
‘That bag thing could have happened to anyone. To tell you the truth the surgeons never put the tubes in far enough.’
He says, ‘But why a secret?’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Because people are so judgemental. It’s just jealousy, I know that, but it feels so ugly.’
Groggily, Bill blinks at her. He flips what she is saying over in his mind, and over again and the thing she is saying feels heavy and smooth at the same time, like a ball-bearing he can’t quite get a grip on.
‘I felt o
ut of my depth at first,’ she says. ‘I’m not saying I didn’t. But you don’t go anywhere if you’re standing still, that’s what PJ says.’
He’s been lying there a while when suddenly Bill sees it coming, the dark side of the moon, and it’s coming so fast he can sense the air backing up, the fear of the astronauts as the lunar orbit pulls Apollo 8 into the shadow and there it is, one enormous mountain that the best minds in astrophysics hadn’t predicted. The Earth retreats at speed, so beautiful and so small. His mind won’t stop. ‘What are you saying?’ he asks, squinting for her name badge. ‘Ivy. Wait.’ Ivy. What are you saying? Did someone hurt you? Ivy. He waits for the impact. The mountain keeps coming.
But Ivy is called to attend to a faecal impaction and Bill Hare has been transferred to theatre by the time she returns to the ward.
The path of least resistance
She was already talking to him when I came back from the store. I was getting lunch—for me, not Jim. Jim is the sort of person who can wait for a more appropriate time, the way a rat snake goes a whole week on a single egg, but I have to eat, what can I say? The bell rang when I pushed the door open, and I had the sudden knowledge of what it feels like to be a stranger. And then I realised this isn’t particularly unusual, it’s just that I’m the one who doesn’t recognise me when I walk into a room.
They were admiring the Bergère armchair, the one with the damaged cane work that we were going to fix once, but now we just wanted people to want to fix themselves. Jim would explain to people how you could see past the damage if you just closed your eyes, imagined the way it would be piled with green velvet cushions fat with horsehair, as if closing your eyes was enough. He told people they were buying the experience and who’s to say they didn’t need that more. He had the girl closing her eyes, imagining. ‘Fit for a King’s mistress,’ he was saying. She was saying, ‘For a King’s ransom?’ and laughing.