Authors: Patrick Gale
Jamie’s deterioration accelerated so fast that several weeks passed before Alison realised she had missed a period.
It’s stress
, she told herself.
Just a common symptom of stress. I’ve read about it
.
And still she told no-one. The Cynthia in her wanted to announce it at the supper table, the Good Child knew that the last thing Sam needed now was to be worried with the news, only to have it prove a false alarm.
One evening Miriam finally paid a visit with Francis. Any new face in the house, any new witness to what they were all undergoing, was welcome by this stage. Alison saw shock at the sight of Jamie’s body turn him grey and, feeling sorry for him, led him out of the sickroom on the pretext of asking for advice on the sorting out of some papers to do with Jamie’s various savings and bank accounts. Suddenly there was a terrific shout from upstairs that made Francis start as though a gun had gone off. There was another shout. It was Jamie. Alison jumped up.
‘Stay here,’ she told Francis, who looked immediately grateful. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing. He may need more morphine or something.’
Closing the door behind her, she ran out into the hall just as Sam appeared from the kitchen where he was making fillings for baked potatoes-their principal diet at the time. She followed him upstairs and around the landing to Jamie’s room. They had moved him back to the little room with the barred window once it became obvious that he and Sam could no longer share a bed.
Miriam was sitting at his side, her back to the door, holding one of Jamie’s skeletal hands in both of hers. She was stroking it and making little soothing, urging noises. They froze at the end of the bed as Jamie shouted again. As he shouted, he threw back his head and arched his back, pressing down on the mattress with his feet. Then he subsided, panting. Alison ran forward.
‘Jamie? What is it? I’m here. Sam’s here. Jamie?’
Again he yelled. Again he threw back his head and arched his back.
‘Jesus!’ Sam whispered, stepping forward.
‘Where’s the bloody nurse?’ Alison asked. ‘She should be here by now. Sam, shall I call a doctor?’
‘It’s all right,’ Miriam said quietly.
‘How can you say that?’ Alison shouted at her over another yell from the bed. Still holding Jamie’s hand, Miriam turned to face them. Her face was wet with tears but her voice was still and curiously dignified.
‘He’s having some kind of fit,’ Sam said, his voice calm but his face appalled.
‘He isn’t,’ Miriam said. ‘He thinks he’s having a baby.’
The dismissive retort dried on Alison’s lips as Jamie shouted again, drawing all their eyes back onto him as he arched and subsided under the sheet, his pyjamas dark with sweat. There were footsteps on the stairs and Francis came in with her grandfather.
They all watched, Miriam with her round, soft face still washed in tears, as Jamie yelled and collapsed, yelled and collapsed in what was now a discernibly accelerating rhythm. Alison fought down an impulse to yell encouragement to him in his labour.
‘Push,’ she wanted to shout. ‘Breathe. Breathe! Now push again. Nearly there. We can see the head now. Push, Jamie!’
The nurse hurried in, walked to the bedside and checked his pulse and temperature before administering more morphine. After three or four further spasms, silent now, Jamie collapsed back on to the mattress into a sleep that was calm rather than merely drugged. It seemed queer not to hear his yells replaced by the furious squalling of the new-born, not to see the sheet gaudy with blood. Francis came to Miriam’s side and touched her shoulder tenderly.
‘Look,’ she said, half turning but keeping her eyes on Jamie’s sleeping face. ‘He’s smiling. He’s happy! Oh darling, I’m so
glad
!’
Embarrassed, Francis passed her the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit and she mopped her face and blew her nose, breaking the spell that had held them all. Alison suddenly realised that she had been clutching Sam’s hand, or he had been clutching hers-it was impossible to say which. She released him with a little squeeze and hurried past the others, profoundly shaken, to lose herself in the swift making of a salad and laying of the table.
As a boy, Jamie had imagined his death often enough, usually at those times when the adult world had crossed or slighted him. There would be recriminations around his coffin.
‘If only we had known!’ people would cry. ‘He was so good to us all and we never knew!’
The dubious pleasure of knowing that one’s sudden departure left lives shattered depended, however, on a belief that one would still be around, in some form, to bear witness. Even when he had rebelliously had himself confirmed as a Christian at thirteen he had been beginning to harbour doubts concerning the plausibility of an afterlife, doubts which increased in direct proportion to his body’s output of adult hormones. His powers of imagination dwindled just as his store of painful knowledge was swelled. Death, he came to realise, could bring nothing worse than life could present. As the virus sabotaged his body’s defences, death came to seem no more than the ultimate painkiller.
The process seemed inordinately long. At around the time they started giving him small doses of morphine to deaden the agony in his joints, he became aware that his mind was going. He saw no hallucinations – nothing so frightening as his experience at Godfreys’s party. Rather, the decay registered as a progressive dismantling of grammar; small but essential syntactical bolts seemed to slip out of place overnight so that speech became a defective construction toy too wearisome and distressing to bother with. He saw the poorly disguised perplexity in their faces when he failed to make sense. He tried to apologise to Sam when he shat all over the bed, but found he could only shout at him incoherently. Then his vision clouded over, something he could only communicate to them by his inability to feed himself or find the bedside lightswitch without knocking things over.
After that he began to drift in and out of consciousness. At times it felt as though he had withdrawn inside his upper body and was no longer in control. It was like a grotesque cartoon he remembered from a childhood comic –
Beano
perhaps, or
Dandy
– with the interior of a character’s head pictured as the command deck of some monstrous war engine in which helpless, indignant subsidiary characters darted to and fro, peering out of the eyes, listening at loudspeakers connected to the ears, pulling at huge inefficient cranks labelled Sit, Eat, Smile, Swallow, Concentrate. Sometimes he could hear quite clearly and his tongue and brain would miraculously connect. Sometimes, more often, he could hear someone shouting or mumbling and it was minutes before he realised the mouth at work was his own. Sometimes, he could hear people talking to him. He was powerless to do much more than nod, or, with sudden rediscovery of ability, smile. He felt them hold his hands, kiss his cheek. He always knew when Sam was at the bedside on his own because he felt his hand slip between the buttons on his pyjama jacket and rest, heavy and cool against his heart as he talked. Alison used to brush his hair very gently, as one might a baby’s. Miriam cut his nails for him. His grandfather was the only one not to touch him while he talked. His voice would just arrive out of the air, bodiless and unheralded, like the voice of God. He played music.
The whole experience was quite unlike the morbid imaginings of his boyhood. No-one unburdened themselves. Not even Sam. Their talk was strenuously matter of fact; a passing on of information. Still no rain. A cactus unexpectedly flowering on a downstairs windowsill. The results of the women’s final at Wimbledon. Myra Toye’s return to London in the wake of her axing from
Mulroney Park
to appear in a Bernard Shaw revival. A scandal involving the minister for health and an American pharmaceuticals giant. Sometimes their talk began nervously and he knew that he must have been scaring them by going out of his mind.
Out of his mind;
the little idiom, so commonplace before, now seemed astonishingly precise, as did that other,
beside oneself
.
Then there were the nurses. Always rather formal. Quite unlike the boisterous ones in the hospital. Politely aware of his blindness they would reintroduce themselves:
‘Good evening, Mr Pepper. I’m Kathy.’
‘Hello, Jamie. It’s me again. Pru. Kathy’s off with a bug so I’m doing two nights in a row.’
If he woke with a start, they’d be there again:
‘It’s all right, Mr Pepper. It’s me. Kathy. Try to sleep. Here. Your pillow’s fallen. That’s better. Try to sleep.’
The nurses replaced the moonlight. It was only their soft, rustling presences at his bedside, their cooler touches, more reserved than those of his family, that told him another night had fallen.
One night he came to after what felt like a long spell in the depths. There was a delectable coolness about him and he guessed that his sheets had just been changed. The house was utterly silent and there was no birdsong so he knew it was night. Someone was in the room with him. He sensed rather than heard their movement towards him.
‘Nurse?’ he asked. There was no reply. ‘Kathy?’ Still nothing. He felt a hand briefly press his brow. ‘Alison?’ he asked. She smelled, very faintly, of vanilla, as though she had been making biscuits.
‘It’s Sally,’ she said. ‘It’s time you were up.’
‘I don’t remember. Are you new?’
She laughed softly.
‘I’m old as the hills. It’s time you were up.’
‘Why?’
‘Come on.’
There was a firmness in her voice, an air of command.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I can.’
‘I’ll help you,’ she said. ‘Take my hands.’
‘How much is a gill, for pity’s sake?’ Miriam asked, poised over the electric mixer with a bottle of milk and a measuring jug.
‘A tablespoon?’ Alison suggested weakly. ‘Two? Why don’t you just add enough to make it all join up in a lump? Otherwise I think there’s a table of measurements and equivalents in the back of that old pink book.’
Miriam pointed with a floury hand to the shelf of cookery books. ‘This one?’ she asked.
‘No. The one with all the cocoa and stuff on it.’
Miriam winced and took out the book. Alison turned back to the task of trying to cream butter and sugar with too small a wooden spoon. The lumps of butter were simply swishing around spilling sugar over the edges of the bowl occasionally, but she would not give up. She could not. They had started cooking things two hours before. It was still hot outside, and the kitchen, normally a haven of cool from the sunshine, was sweltering with the heat from the oven. Alison had protested that surely only a handful of people would be able to come out to East Anglia for a mid-week funeral.
‘You’d be surprised,’ Miriam had said. ‘When Reefer’s sister, Polly, managed to OD out at that farm in Wales the place was over-run. It was hell. There wasn’t a thing to eat, so everyone just got blind drunk. If we make it tea rather than lunch, you can freeze anything that’s left over and we won’t need loads of cutlery or plates and things. I can probably borrow a couple of boxes of mugs from the Red Cross and some big teapots. You make some fruit cakes and I’ll do a load of scones. Okay?’
It had all seemed utterly unnecessary to Alison. She saw no reason why people would want to eat after a funeral – still less have the indelicacy to expect the chief mourners to feed them – but once she started she realised she was grateful for the activity. Weighing sultanas, washing the sticky syrup off glacé cherries, rooting in the larder for spices none of them ever normally used, she found herself remembering girlhood domestic science lessons. She remembered that cherries rolled in self-raising flour before being folded into the mixture were less likely to sink during baking, and that a circle of greaseproof paper lightly pressed onto the surface of the fruit cake before baking stopped it forming a crust too swiftly. The air was perfumed with cinnamon, allspice and hot sugar. Miriam had turned the radio to a rock channel and Alison was amused to hear that her unpredictable mother had found time to learn the words to songs by teenage bands of which
she
was blithely unaware.
‘It feels like Christmas,’ she said.
‘Bloody Australian sort of Christmas in this heat.’ Miriam used a clean tea towel to tie the hair up out of her hot face, then turned on the mixer.
Alison felt the strangest thing about Jamie’s death was his physical absence. The sudden lack of him was as brutal and shocking as vandalism. She had found him. She was grateful for that; it meant that she didn’t have to have the news broken to her. He was lying in an almost orderly fashion, his arms stretched out on top of the covers as though he had reached out for something, then grown tired in the attempt. His eyes, mercifully, were closed. The night nurse usually left at about seven and it was only nine when Alison found him, so he could not have been dead for long. She sat with him for a while, had a brief cry, then remembered to telephone to stop the night nurse coming back. She called the doctor to register the death, and called the gay funeral directors Sandy had tracked down. She cried again, briefly, blew her nose and called Miriam. Luckily it was Francis who answered. It was easier telling him. Then she steeled herself and went to wake Sam.
His room was still fuggy with sleep, his breathing heavy. She drew the curtains a little to let some light in, then sat on the edge of the bed as he stirred.