Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam (5 page)

Eve still had no time for false hope: ‘It
might
mean she has even less. She has used up her allotted span.’

Her bluntness, which had once seemed an asset — if only because they knew she would never lie to them — on this occasion seemed merely cruel. Rick shivered, a sudden involuntary spasm; Linda reached out and touched the polished wood of Eve’s desk. It was not the first time she had resorted to such gestures; gazing down on her sleeping daughter only a few nights before, she had found herself trying not to think how beautiful the child was, and had begun reciting maths tables aloud, trying to jam her mind against the thought. She studied the Sagittarian predictions of the horoscope column each morning, feeling a flood of stupid gratitude whenever good health or long life was promised. She imposed a series of diets, many suggested by her mother, on the entire family for months at a time — Pritikin, Vegan, gluten-free, yeast-free, Feingold — each time reverting to the meaty, yeasty, fatty norm when Emma herself finally complained.

Neither the protective magic of astrologers and diets, nor the prayers offered up in Church, could ward off the greater power of statistics, and the laws of probability. The disease returned a few months later; ‘active treatment’ was stopped shortly afterwards, after a last failure of response to chemotherapy. The phrase, and its coy replacement — ‘palliative treatment’ — seemed out-of-character for Eve Harrison: an evasion, which in itself told the parents of the seriousness of Emma’s plight.

‘The effects of further treatment would be worse than the disease,’ she added, when pressed.

‘There must be
something.’

‘We can offer transfusions if her blood count falls too low. We can control bleeding, and infections … But no more chemotherapy.’

Eve glanced down at her desk, at a sheaf of blood-screens that she had surely checked several times before: another uncharacteristic avoidance.

‘The time she has left isn’t long,’ she said. ‘I see no point in making her suffer unnecessarily.’

The parents held each other’s gaze, waiting for the other to act as spokesperson, waiting for one of their mouths to speak the thought.

‘How
long?’ Linda eventually asked

‘A few weeks. Four. Six. It’s difficult to be precise.’

Linda reached out her hand, Rick clasped it tightly.

‘I promise that she will be comfortable,’ Eve said. ‘I promise that she will feel no pain. But that’s all I can promise.’

There was no time for hysterics, or further recriminations. Even tears seemed a luxury, an indulgence that had to be postponed.

Until.

One question had to be answered rationally, and immediately: how to spend those last few weeks together, how to make them at least halfway happy. The idea of a Last Wish trip to Disneyland or Disney World in America — or even to the cluster of smaller, closer Lands and Worlds on the Queensland Gold Coast — was repellent to both parents: bread and circuses.

What did you do afterwards, they asked each other? What did you do after closing time on the last day in Disneyland, pushing out through the exit-turnstiles in a queue of weary parents and overtired children? Surely that was a kind of death itself, and to pin happiness on such a last wish was to die two deaths.

‘Imagine the flight back home. Like riding a tumbril to the guillotine. Much better to do nothing special. To spend these last weeks in our ordinary, everyday way.’

By the time they had argued this through — and changed their minds, and agreed to override their squeamishness if it was Emma’s wish — her weakness and fragility did not permit such long distance trips.

Or so Eve Harrison told them. Eve was still their sole confidante; for the moment they decided to keep all four grandparents in the dark, or half-dark; avoiding constant visits, constant fussing. Above all, they sought normalcy, they sought to restore the family games, the music, the book-readings of an earlier, happier, more mundane life. Perhaps they also half-believed that a return to these routines might magically transport them back through time, or at least allow them to pretend that they were still back there, that the intervening horror had never occurred.

‘You know what I miss most?’ Rick whispered in his wife’s ear one night.

They lay in bed together, spoon-nestled, having made love for the first time in many weeks, although more as an antidote for insomnia than out of love, or lust. The cure, like all others, had failed.

‘What do you miss?’

‘The opportunity to be bored. Like when we were first married.’

She almost laughed. ‘I used to
bore
you?’

‘Bad choice of words. You know what I mean. Having an empty mind every now and then. Not having this …
thing
always there, inside.’

‘I miss how we used to read to each other. When Ben was a baby. How just the sound of the words would soothe him.’

‘Sedate
him, you mean.’

She shrugged in his arms. ‘Perhaps we need such sedation ourselves.’

She lay there for a moment longer, then rose, and felt her way to the door, and turned on the light. He watched her, naked in the sudden glare, standing at the bedroom bookshelves — every room in their house was filled with bookshelves — head-tilted, reading the spines.

‘Where shall we start?’

‘You had finished Middlemarch,’ he said. ‘You were working your way through Dickens — again.’

‘It’s so long ago I can’t remember.’

‘I remember,’ he said, and they both managed a small laugh.

‘You’re still not a fan?’

‘I didn’t like his last one,’ he said, and they laughed again.

‘We never read
A Tale of Two Cities,’
she told him.

‘I saw the film when I was a boy. A long time ago. I must have been eight or nine — but I remember it clearly.’

Head still tilted, she searched the close-packed shelves as he talked.

‘My father took me,’ he was saying. ‘I was amazed — he never went to the movies. Sorry — the
pictures. He
always said they numbed the mind.’

‘A man after my own heart.’

‘Even more amazing — it was on a week night. We never went anywhere on week nights. And suddenly he arrived home from work and announced he was taking me to the pictures. Just me. It was an old film — black and white. I can’t remember who was in it.’

‘Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton.’

‘The actors in the film?’

Linda laughed; she had been teasing him: ‘The characters in the book.’

He wasn’t listening to her; he was back in time, reliving that glowing night: ‘I still remember the last scene. The hero climbs the steps, the guillotine waits. He makes a very moving speech — or maybe he only thinks the words. And suddenly he’s lifted above it all — the guillotine, the basket of heads, the bloodthirsty mob, it’s all a long way away, far
below
him. I had goose-bumps all over. I must have been about Ben’s age.’

‘I wouldn’t take Ben to it,’ she said. ‘Nine is too young. It would give him nightmares.’

‘It’s not really violent,’ he said. ‘Not by today’s standards. And it meant a lot to me — I’d forgotten how much. Maybe I’ll take him to the movies again when he’s older.’

He paused: they both realised that they were talking about a child with a future. They were already talking about him as if he were an only child. They had broken an unspoken rule: that it was unfair to their daughter to make plans that did not include her, that were beyond her.

‘I know what the book looks like,’ Linda said, as she continued to search the shelves. ‘It’s not part of the set. Olive-green binding — very old, a little tatty.’

‘Maybe it’s in the lounge.’

But she tugged the book from some deep recess, blew dust from the pages, then turned immediately to the last page, and began to read: ‘It
is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.’

They sat, silenced, sharing the same thought: that each would willingly, gladly, take the place of their small daughter in the tumbril. And yet they were powerless. They would have donated a kidney or lung to save her — they would have donated both lungs, they would each have sacrificed a still-beating
heart
— but their bone marrow, the only gift she needed, spread plentifully through their bodies, in far, far greater quantities than they would ever require themselves, was useless, even fatally dangerous to her.

In the following weeks Emma slowly became aware, again, of the existence of that tumbril in which she was riding, of the fact that it had turned a last corner, and the square ahead, and all it contained, had come into view. Had some developmental threshold been crossed in her growth? A spurt in the imagination, or brain-size, which permitted her to clearly see the future, or the absence of future, for the first time? Or had she had come to sense, and be infected by, the desperation of her parents, which they always tried to shield from her? The attentions of her grandparents, fully briefed, finally, on the extent of her predicament, were a further cue. Her stoic, wise-owl manner vanished for longer intervals, and resisted jolting back to equilibrium. When she sat with her books, or paints, or drawing-pads, her gaze was often fixed to one side, defocussed.

Morbid fascination fuelled her talk at meal-times: endless questions about bones, dust, ashes, cremation, coffins. She solemnly examined the blue-black bruises that appeared on her body, at times even measured those bruises with her school ruler in a parody of one of the earlier obsessions of her parents.

As the end also became clearer to Rick and Linda, they resumed church-going, choosing to look pity in the eye, to stare it down. In part this return to the fold was still a search for the routines of normality, an attempt to travel backwards in time; in part it was a last desperate reaching out — not for miracles, perhaps, but at least for answers. Each Sunday at St Paul’s they huddled together in a back pew, in a far corner, wanting only a private, family worship, a communion between them and whatever God might haunt the old stone church. Privacy was not so easy: once again the Reverend Cummings insisted on intervening and mediating — translating — between them and that God. He asked for shared prayers from the congregation, mentioned their trials in sermons; and after Rick protested — politely, but firmly — began visiting them at home instead, uninvited.

‘Don’t forget the power of faith,’ he exhorted over innumerable cups of tea. ‘The power of prayer.’

Linda had reached exasperation point.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘why that would help. And if it did — what kind of God would insist on it? Why should we have to
beg
for favours?’

He sat back in an armchair — Rick’s leather armchair, appropriated — and pursed his lips and pressed his fingertips together. More at home in the pulpit lecturing his flock on issues of social justice — poverty, land rights, unemployment — he seemed lost in the world of personal, immediate pain. He might have been enacting a role, playing a part meant for someone older: a wise uncle, or grandfather.

‘I don’t want to sound glib,’ he murmured, ‘But if we knew all the answers — if knowledge was given to us on a plate — what would be the point of faith?’

‘That’s fine advice for us,’ she said. ‘But what do we tell
her?
Jesus wants her for a sunbeam?’

‘Perhaps she doesn’t want to be told anything,’ he said. ‘In many ways this is far more difficult test for you.’

‘What you are saying — this is a test? This was given to us as a test of
faith?
What’s the answer? Is it an essay, or multi-choice?’

He paused before answering, shocked by her harshness. He licked his lips, his mouth opened and closed, without speaking, groping for an answer that was not quite ready. He was out of his depth, or had forgotten his lines. His avuncular manner had vanished, his eyes reddened, he was close to tears. He mumbled a few words about eternal peace, about Emma going to a better world, but they could plainly hear that his heart wasn’t in it; he was of their generation, skeptical of the unknown. His heaven was on earth, and would be man-made, if at all.

‘Remember the story of Abraham and Isaac?’ he finally said, huskily. ‘The Lord tested Abraham’s faith by asking him to sacrifice his son?’

Despite his anguish, Linda’s face purpled with rage, instantly.

‘Fuck you,’ she said. ‘And fuck any God who would play such horrible games.’

Rick rose from his chair, unastonished by the words she had spoken, even though he had never heard her utter such words before, or even seen such an extreme of anger. The same feelings, if not the same words, were on the tip of his own tongue; there was nothing else that could be felt.

‘Perhaps I didn’t choose my example well. What I meant to say …’

‘I think we’ve talked enough, John,’ Rick said. ‘We’d like to be alone.’

As they stood at the door, holding each other, watching Father Cummings drive away for the last time, they realised suddenly how much they had aged in the past months, at a much faster rate than their household clocks and calendars had measured out. It seemed that this young priest, approximately their own age, now belonged to a still younger generation.

‘It’s up to us,’ Rick said to his wife. ‘No-one can help except us.’

The priest’s words of advice stuck fast in their minds, nevertheless, like a tune heard once in the morning that can’t be shaken off, repeating, interminably, through the day. The possibility that it was somehow an ordeal, a trial, was difficult to shake loose, if only because of its deeper implication: it pandered to the hope of a solution. Their powerlessness was deformed into guilt, which was bent itself into over-attentiveness, into a smothery kind of love that the little girl was forced sometimes to turn away from, to physically
hide
from. Famine-thin, increasingly fragile, easily bruised, it was as if she sensed that her parents might cuddle her to death, or at least cuddle her back into hospital. She shut herself in her room for long periods, alone, and — it seemed to Rick and Linda, in their worst moments — betrayed.