Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam (6 page)

‘It’s as if there’s a wall there — we’re on one side, she’s on the other.’

‘We can’t help her — but I think she thinks we
won’t
help her.’

The worry-programme had bypassed one possible solution, or pathway, much earlier, but goaded by guilt, and self-blame, returned to it, was dragged back to it, again and again — although for some time neither discussed the path with the other, believing that for the first time in their marriage their thoughts had diverged too widely, that the idea was so outrageous, so
unspeakable,
that no two sane people would ever think it together.

Rick first spoke the unspeakable. They lay talking in bed in the small hours, trying, as always, to talk each other to sleep, to talk themselves empty, to talk out the day’s accumulated worries. A volume of Dickens lay discarded on the floor; another waif had died; he had become unreadable.

‘Maybe we should all go together,’ he said, inserting the words suddenly, without warning, into a lull in a conversation about household finances.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just that. We shouldn’t let her go … alone.’

‘You mean … we should go
with
her?’

Linda’s tone was surprisingly calm; he peered at her through the half-dark, trying to read her face.

‘You don’t seem surprised,’ he murmured.

‘It crossed my mind too. I’ve thought of it several times. I’ve tried
not
to think it — it seemed too crazy.’

She shivered in his arms: a convulsion that was more a shudder of disgust. He shivered himself, contagiously.

‘It
is
crazy,’ he said. ‘It’s crazy even to talk about it.’

She rolled away from him, but he followed, pressing against her from behind: ‘There’s Ben to think of, if nothing else,’ she murmured. ‘What right would we have to take him with us?’

Even now, the idea was only half speakable, couched in the euphemisms of travel and journeys. Of family holidays.

‘He would hate to be left out,’ Rick said, and they both suddenly laughed, briefly, too-loudly, then lay together for some minutes in silence, their bodies stilled, their hearts pounding, not quite believing that such thoughts had crept out into the open.

The subject of Ben had opened another door, the worry-programme had thrown up another weird solution, only slightly less unspeakable. This time it was Linda who found the words:

‘Maybe only one of us should go with her. Maybe I should go with her.’

Rick rolled apart from her: ‘You want me to lose
both
of you?

‘Is your grief going to be worse?’ she said. ‘Could it
be
any worse?’

‘Of course it would be worse.’

She could hear the doubt in his voice; she knew that he was already there, ahead, or at least abreast of her.

More long, slow minutes, then she spoke, as of old, for them both: ‘Are two griefs worse than one? How much worse can it be? Can things be worse than
worst?’

Their hearts pounded on as they lay there at rest, in bed. Sweat broke out across Rick’s face, his hands shook, the sheets were damp and clammy against his skin. The darkness, crowding and claustrophobic, surrounded him; it seemed a viscous element, heavy on his senses, preventing clear thought.

‘This is absurd,’ he said. ‘We’ll have other children. We can have another baby straight away.’

‘It’s not us we’re talking about,’ Linda said.

He lay in silence, rebuked.

‘It’s Wol,’ she continued. ‘I can’t bear to think of her going away — alone. It’s as though we’ve cast her out into the woods. Abandoned her, like something in a fairy-tale. And we won’t go with her.’

She paused; the idea was growing, taking more definite shape: ‘I
want
to go with her,’ she announced, more definitely.

‘I don’t want to hear any more about it,’ Rick said.

‘It’s late — we’re both exhausted. In the clear light of day you’ll realise how crazy this is.’

‘Just think about it,’ she urged. ‘That’s all I ask.’

He rolled away from her, to the far side of the bed, out of contact.

‘No,’ he said, angrily. ‘I won’t. Not ever. I don’t want to hear about it again.’

As the child’s immune system failed, she was fed an exotic daily salad of antibiotics to prevent infection; these in turn suppressed her appetite, she lost weight steadily. She rapidly came to resemble the snapshots of her forgotten foster siblings in Bangladesh and Ecuador: all skin and bones, her eyes sunk deeply into their dark sockets. Her period of self-isolation had passed, she now preferred to sleep in her parents’ bed each night, between them, facing her father — which meant that they slept even less themselves, anxious not to squash her frail bird-bones, or bruise her paper-thin skin. Often Linda would leave father and daughter together, sneaking off into Emma’s room, or into Ben’s room, spending the night squeezed even more uncomfortably into the narrow bed of a boy who was as unwilling as ever to be left out.

And as Rick lay there, sleepless, his daughter’s small milky breath puffing rhythmically into his face, the realisation grew: that if their lunatic plan was ever followed through, if someone did choose to go with her, of course it would be him, not Linda.

Night-thoughts, certainly, bred of insomnia and despair — but he was beginning to suspect that despair was the default state of the human mind, if normally hidden from the mind by lack of imagination, or the balms of warmth and food and love.

This, at least, was clear: the child would want
him
with her at the end, it was his presence that would most reassure her.

He decided, for the moment, to keep this realisation to himself.

Eve Harrison was visiting the house daily at the time, checking Emma’s temperature, listening to her chest, peering into orifices. And still pricking her thumb-pads every second or third visit, siphoning tiny drops of blood

‘Does she have to go through this?’ Linda asked, although the needles seemed to bother her more than her stoical daughter.

Several times Eve urged hospitalisation, but both parents had decided that Emma would die — although they still couldn’t bring themselves to utter the blunt word — at home, in a familiar world, believing it would be her own wish.

Home had one other advantage, unspoken: although no decision had yet been made, and their lunatic plan had not been discussed again, both knew that it would be impossible to carry out in hospital.

‘How can hospital help her?’ Linda demanded of her friend.

‘She may need a transfusion. Depending on the blood count.’

‘Couldn’t she be transfused at home?’

Eve was reluctant to agree, but it was the reluctance of fixed habits: ‘I suppose I could arrange a home-care nurse,’ she conceded.

This was not enough for Linda: ‘I can do whatever needs to be done — I’m sure I can. With your help, of course.’

‘It’s a 24-hour job. When will you sleep? She will need constant nursing attention.’

‘We’ll work in shifts. I’ll sleep when Rick is awake.’

‘A night-nurse, then. Someone to keep watch overnight. Please, you can’t do it all yourself.’

Rick, listening to the debate, intervened: ‘We don’t want to share the remaining time with strangers, Eve. Surely you can understand that?’

Eve, ever practical, quickly realised that to argue with these stubborn parents was a waste of time. A crash course in basic nursing procedures followed, under her supervision. True to her promise, she left a stash of pain-killing liquids and suppositories, and several syringes and ampoules of stronger stuff, with written instructions on dosage schedules. An impromptu lecture on the properties and uses of each drug was followed by a kind of brief oral exam, or viva — delivered with Eve’s characteristic efficiency. This in turn was followed by a practical tutorial: she arrived one morning with a bag of big navel oranges, and had her two mature-age students slipping small butterfly needles through the skin of the fruit, getting the ‘feel’.

‘There should be no need for these,’ Eve said. ‘But just in case. If she bleeds, I can instruct you by phone on what to give.’

Having passed the orange-test, they moved onto human flesh: jabbing needles into each other’s veins, repeatedly, under Eve’s scrutiny. There was an odd relief in this, a mix of slapstick comedy and pain, that provided, temporarily, a release from their preoccupations.

‘Stick to the dose I’ve suggested,’ Eve advised, leaving. ‘These are powerful drugs. Too much could be fatal.’

Rick wondered for a moment if she were suggesting the exact opposite, subtly: offering them a final pain-relief for Emma — a final safety net. Although of course Eve had no inkling of the full extent of their hidden agenda.

An agenda that was still half-hidden, also, from each other. Their minds were moving in parallel: along true parallel lines, never touching. Rick, especially, refused to admit that he was still giving the matter thought. At times the plan seemed outrageously stupid — even the simple sums were so wrong. At other times it seemed inevitable, logical — even if it was the logic of despair.

Finally, discussion could be deferred no more: an oblique mention by Linda began a series of escalating arguments. Soon they were debating, whispering heatedly, each night in bed — and thinking up counterarguments in silence all day, with Ben at school, but with Emma, too fragile now for school, always hovering at brink of ear-shot. At first these discussions were in subjunctive mode, preceded by an ‘if’ or a ‘should’; this kept the unspeakable hypothetical, and permitted a discussion of the plan — The Plan — as if it were science-fiction, or a kind of algebra which dealt with symbols rather than with real people and real events, yet still allowed a plan of action to be fleshed out, and modified, and tested.

‘If
we told her,’ Linda said, ‘that you were going with her, then we could never change our minds. We could never take it back. We would have to be absolutely certain before we could tell her.’

Behind these abstractions there was a mounting urgency, for time was short. Emma, too, appeared to sense this. She began sleeping poorly; refusing to go to bed, to any bed, even to her parents’ bed. She actively resisted sleep. Rick and Linda would wake at night to hear her padding about the house, or softly singing songs in the dark bed between them. Once they were woken by the dazzle of the bedlamp to find her propped up between them in bed, reading.

‘I don’t feel tired,’ she explained.

When pressed to turn out the light and shut her eyes, she burst into tears: ‘What if I don’t wake up?’

‘One day, Wol,’ Rick told her, ‘you will wake up and you will be in heaven. You will close your eyes, here on earth, and when you open them you will be somewhere else.’

They lay together in bed, the small girl cuddled between her parents. The emotion of the moment stripped bare the cliches he was speaking, freed them from trite associations. They were, simply, the only words that could be uttered.

Rick’s heart pounded, he prepared himself to speak again, to force out the next words, knowing that once they were uttered they were a promise, binding and irrevocable. As he opened his mouth, Linda suddenly reached over and gripped his arm.

‘Don’t,’ she said, ‘Please. We need more time to think it through.’

From that night every light in the house was left burning — especially Ben’s bedroom light. But Emma’s fear of the dark, also, flushed her parents’ discussions out into the open, into the light, from behind the cover of hypothetical ifs and shoulds.

‘We need counselling,’ Linda stated. ‘That we could even
contemplate
it — don’t you think we’re a bit mad? That we need some sort of help?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean — yes, maybe we are mad. But no — no counselling. They’d take her away from us. They’d take them
both
from us.’

‘But we’ve lost perspective. We’re irrational — so caught up in this we can’t see the wood for the trees.’

‘Maybe that’s the best perspective.’

To some extent the two sides of these debates were interchangeable: pro and con arguments were rotated between them. The deeper disagreement was not between the two parents, but within each of them.

‘It’s such a weight,’ Linda said. ‘If we could at least
talk
it over with someone. With friends.’

‘Which friends? Who could we possibly burden with this? I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.’

In this fashion, passed back and forth, like a shared load, too hot or too heavy to handle alone, it was slowly decided. When their daughter next burst into tears, and refused to risk sleep, and Rick opened his mouth, Linda held her peace, allowing him to speak.

The words still took some time to emerge, they seemed stuck to the dry roof of his mouth.

‘When you die, Wol,’ he said. ‘Whenever it is, I will be there with you. I am going to die before you.’

Her tears had vanished; she watched him, curious.

‘How do you know that?’

‘I can make myself die,’ he told her. ‘With an injection. I’m going to die first, so I’ll be there waiting for you.’

And so there could be no turning back, no chickening out, no abandoning her if she went first. This also had been planned — that she was to see him dead, to
know
him dead, before she died herself.

A calm gravity returned to her face. She asked a few further questions — technical questions — then within minutes her wide Wol-eyes closed, and she was sleeping, snuggled against her father’s still-pounding heart. He realised that she took it for granted that he would choose to die with her; it was a wonderful comfort to her, yes, but his intended sacrifice — a sacrifice of everything — meant nothing else to her. He saw no selfishness in her reaction, not even the normal self-centredness of a child, but an entirely reasonable interpretation of events to an intelligent six-year-old mind: if heaven was such a wonderful place, why wouldn’t he choose to come too?

His own view of the road ahead was a little more terrifying. And yet — at the same time, once the decision had been made, and was locked in place — oddly exciting. A far, far better place? He doubted it. Whatever faith he had once had now seemed shallow: a routine, social faith. He felt he was going nowhere, just ending — but perhaps those last few days, and especially nights, of peace, would make it worthwhile. And perhaps, just
perhaps
…