Pumping Up Napoleon (12 page)

Mother is sitting up in bed surrounded by a choppy sea of lilac invitations. She hasn't looked better since her operation: her white hair is washed and softly combed around her face, the intravenous drip has gone, though her left wrist and forearm are still wrapped in crêpe bandage; she's wearing her own nightie. The pillowcases and the turned-back sheet are smooth and fresh.

I'd asked her earlier if she wanted to choose her own cards from a catalogue. They say there is a greetings card for every occasion, but not this one. I know; I've looked. You could say there's a gap in the market, but I don't imagine it's very big. If there had been a choice, I thought mother would have gone for something bright, like a frantic bear on a unicycle maybe, holding the strings of some coloured balloons as if they were helping him stay upright. Inside, the card would have read: ‘The truth is unBEARable but let's not GRIZZLE about it… '. But mother surprised me by saying she didn't want anything fancy. She'd asked me to go to a printer's and order plain lilac. She'd given me the words she wanted to be set in silver type:
‘Please come'
and the address of the hospital.

Staff Nurse Susan has followed me into the room: ‘Your mother had a bath today,' she says, beaming at me, as if she's really proud of my mother, or herself, or, somehow, of me. ‘While her drip's out, it seemed like a good idea. Actually,' she says, lowering her voice, ‘we need to talk about your mother's “party”.' She puts the words into inverted commas with her fingers. ‘It's not as straightforward as she thinks. Sister says there may be a Health and Safety issue. Besides, we may need this room, and she could probably go back on the ward for a while.'

Mother, who is far from deaf, ignores her. ‘I think I've remembered everyone,' she says. ‘But if you think of anyone
you'
d like to invite, do say. Would you do the envelopes?' I move to her side and lean over to kiss her. As I put my hand on her shoulder, I am conscious of having to do it lightly. ‘Yes, mother,' I say. She smells of her own perfume again:
Ultraviolet
.

She looks at me then properly for the first time since I entered the room; her eyes are anxious. ‘Daniel,' she says, gripping my hand.

‘It's all right,' I say.
I'm
all right is what I mean.

‘Is it?' she asks, looking doubtful. ‘I do so want everyone to be here; and for everyone to have a good time.'

‘The staff nurse seems to think there may be a problem,' I say. The staff nurse nods.

My mother shakes her head and hands me a list of names. She lies back on the pillows and pushes out a long breath. She's always had this way of holding herself tense and then letting go with a sigh. ‘They just need addressing,' she says, closing her eyes. ‘I've signed all the cards, and put the names on the envelopes.'

I look helplessly at the staff nurse and shrug. Staff Nurse Susan gives me her smallest smile and says, in another stage whisper, ‘See if you can get her to drink something. We need to keep her fluids up.' She leaves us. I cannot help staring at the end of the bed, left vacant.

On that spot the Consultant stood when he explained to me and to my mother that they had opened her abdomen, taken a look, and sewn her up again, having realised that her cancer was, as they had feared all along, inoperable. Behind the Consultant had been the Senior House Officer, the House Officer and a medical student. The Consultant wore a tweedy suit, his tie swept back over his shoulder as if blown by the wind; the SHO's white coat was clean; it still bore creases where it had been folded and he had three different-coloured pens in his top pocket; the lapels of the HO's coat were curling a little. The white coat worn by the student, a straggly blonde with bags under her eyes, was rumpled and soft with use. Her every sagging pocket bulged with paraphernalia: notebooks, a dictionary, pens and spare pens. I could see the outline of a banana. She looked utterly stricken by the news.

My mother had taken a handful of sheet and gripped it tightly. I offered her my hand and she took it but she didn't squeeze. I wanted to tell her she could squeeze as hard as she liked.

There are twenty-two names on the list.

‘You won't be able to take calls on your mobile,' I tell mother. She's asked me to add her mobile number to the cards. ‘You can't….'

‘I know. It's switched off.' Even now, she's too impatient to wait for me to finish speaking.

‘You're like a pot on the boil,' my father would have said. ‘Your lid's always rattling.'

When I was a child she had seemed unable to contain her energy. ‘Full of herself,' my father had called it.

So full of herself she could burst. My friends thought she was great. The only time she slowed down was when she was ill. Then she turned herself down very low, until she was like a gas burner barely alight. But she'd always been able to turn it up again when she got better.

‘Are you drinking enough?' I ask her.

‘I'm sipping,' she says.

On the bedside cabinet is her beaker, half-full of water, with a stripey straw leaning up in it. The flowers I brought yesterday are still fresh.

‘When I can't sit up any more,' my mother says, ‘I'd like you to bring me some flowers that droop, so that I can see them from the horizontal. And nothing from the hospital shop. I'd rather have wild flowers: borage or some buttercups. A handful of parsley from the garden if you like. I wouldn't mind a little pot of basil. I could eat that if I was hungry. Or pinch its leaves.'

She'd been worried that as she got older she'd look like her mother. ‘I don't want to end up skinny and round-shouldered, with a pot belly.' She'd always been so slim. As her stomach swelled, she ate less. It seemed a natural reaction at the time.

I shuffle the envelopes. Many of the names I don't know. Some of them I remember as men I'd once called Uncle. What would I call them now? Some of the names are new: she can't stop making friends. Always talking to strangers.

‘What do you want to speak to
them
for?' my father would say. ‘Why?'

‘I don't know.' She seemed perplexed by the question. ‘How do I know? I haven't found out yet.'

‘Is it OK if I take some blood?' asks the medical student. She doesn't wear a name badge.

‘You don't need to ask me, dear,' says mother, holding out her arm.

The medical student sits beside the bed and taps mother's arm to find a vein.

With her free hand mother rummages in her bag. She holds out her mobile to me and says, ‘I know you hate them, but will you take this and deal with any calls?'

I say, ‘Of course I will'.

‘Give me those invitations now a minute,' she says. I put them on the bed and she works through them until she finds the one she wants. She holds it out to the medical student. ‘Here you are, dear,' she says. ‘I hope you'll come to my party.'

‘Oh!' says the medical student, looking from her to me. ‘Thank you. Cheers. Yeah; I hope I can.'

‘Some friend of yours again, no doubt,' dad used to say to mum when the phone rang. ‘You and your friends. How come you're so nice to everybody else and not to me? You used to be nice to me.'

I remember mum laughing once and saying she was still nice to him, or would be if he'd only stop complaining.

Another time she said, ‘But I see
you
all the time'.

Later: ‘Because you keep
talking
'.

And finally: ‘I don't
love
you. I
don't
love you. I don't love
you
.'

There are some other names I recognise: old friends of mine. The ones who liked to say, ‘Your mum's the best.' Why did she want them there? I hadn't seen them for years.

They didn't know what she was really like. Oh, yes she was fun when she wanted to be, but other times, she'd say, ‘Don't talk to me. Sshh. You can't talk to me now. Stop talking; I'm trying to think.' And she'd be beating her head and groaning, literally ‘cudgelling her brains' to get out some idea she had in there, to let it be born. She cared more about that than about me. The old familiar resentment curdles in my stomach.

Later she'd come and sit with me on the sofa and stroke my hair and say, ‘I do love you; sorry I'm a grump. What do you want for tea?' But I didn't always let her off easy.

By the time she opens her eyes I have been through her address book.

‘Why them?' I say, pointing at two envelopes. ‘I don't even know where they live.'

‘Who?' I'm sure she's only pretending to be unable to see.

‘These are people from way back. Friends I had when I was ten.'

‘You can find their addresses.'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘I don't know them any more.'

And then she cries. ‘I'm so afraid,' she says. I put my arms around her and let her weep. I let her get my good suit wet. ‘Danny,' she says. ‘Danny.'

Her mantra has always been: ‘I want you to be happy; I don't care what you do as long as you're happy.' I thought it meant she couldn't be bothered to notice what I cared about.

But now she says: ‘I don't want you to be alone. Promise me you'll look on Friends Reunited.'

I say I will.

Staff Nurse Susan pops her head out of the office as I go past.

‘She seems to have perked up quite a bit,' she says. ‘Who knows how long it will be?' She eyes the invitations in my hand. ‘Only I don't think your mother's quite got the right idea about hospital visiting.'

‘She's going to die soon,' I say. ‘Surely she can do what she likes.'

Staff Nurse Susan is firm. She wants me to leave the envelopes with her until she's had a chance to talk to Sister again.

‘Not necessary,' I say. ‘I'll put them in the car.'

But in the car the envelopes slide across the seat. If I drive some will slip to the floor and get dirty. I can see that the sweat of my thumbprint has already puckered the paper of what used to be the top envelope.

Leaving two envelopes behind, I get out of the car and walk slowly back. It is starting to rain and I put the sheaf of lilac under the jacket of my suit to keep the cards dry.

The automatic doors jerk open. Just inside the entrance is the red post-box. Into its mouth I push the invitations. I wait to hear them fall.

Transit of Moira

At ten-past-midnight by the Tokyo clock, Gavin started floating down the service corridor. Most of the passengers were Japanese and would be strapped to their bunks by now; the only people he expected to be awake were a contingent from the West Country of England, playing endless games of gin rummy in the recreation pod. It seemed like a safe time to go clean the glass in the Bubble Observatory.

He was therefore intensely annoyed to catch sight of a pair of beige open-toed sandals of the kind old ladies wear – the ones with the patterns of little holes punched in the leather – floating ahead of him, kicking a little up and down as if their owner thought she was swimming. Further up were light-brown nylons, the flapping edges of a petticoat and an orange-and-yellow flower-print dress – an ensemble Gavin mentally labelled ‘hideous'. She wasn't supposed to be in here. This corridor was for crew only. She wasn't even suitably dressed for zero gravity! Gavin didn't say anything as he hauled past her, just turned and glared.

She was a silver-haired old lady with a determined but contented look on her face and all she did was nod and smile at him, which annoyed Gavin even more. When he got to the Bubble Observatory, well ahead of her, he thought about bolting the door behind him, but it was against regulations. Suppose she couldn't manage to get back the way she'd come? He couldn't really leave her floating there all night, like some over-fed, expiring goldfish.

Gavin rose to the top of the Bubble and began wiping the glass with his specially-impregnated rags; gone were the days when he could dream of space travel scented by leather seats and mood perfume. As usual, the glass was covered in finger marks and, as usual, Gavin wondered why people couldn't just hold on to the handles that were put there for the purpose. How many more times would he have to wipe the breath and snot and sweat of the world's most boring passengers off this glass before he could retire? He could count the days, but unfortunately there were still three thousand and twenty-four to go (Gavin was younger than he looked). By then, as he well knew, if he spent all his time in weightlessness, his wasted body would be useless back on Earth. He'd be condemned to spend the rest of his years in space or on the Moon, breathing canned air. But what did it matter? Wherever he went, he was sure to end up surrounded by scuffed plastic.

Earth; people always said the same things about it: ‘It's so beautiful; it's so blue; it looks just like a marble'. When he looked down at it, he always reminded himself that, though it did look peaceful from up here, really it was as busy as hell and full of tortures. You knew that once you stepped off the ferry you'd be put in line, processed, stamped, herded, sent here and there, told where you could stop and where you couldn't. He was glad to be up here, on the out-trip, going lunar.