Authors: Polly Samson
Michael shakes his head. ‘What news?’ Jenna stops chopping fruit.
William pulls out a chair and slumps at the table: ‘Terrible news,’ he says, looking slowly from face to face. ‘It’s been confirmed. She’s dead.’
Jenna thrusting a bowl at him: Eat, eat, eat. The TV news blaring. The Prime Minister is standing outside a church wringing his hands. ‘Questions will need to be answered,’ he says. Katie, her elbows to the back of the sofa, stares at the TV in wide-eyed shock, William, though they’ve only just met, appears to have his arm around her waist. There’s footage of mangled metal in the tunnel. ‘Oh, just so sad,’ Jenna says, dabbing the corner of her eye with her sleeve.
Julian has to shout to make himself heard: ‘What are you all doing here?’ and Michael steers him away to his study, pulling the door shut behind them.
‘Julian, don’t take it out on everyone else. It was me. I said William should come . . .’
‘But, why?’
Julian knocks over the waste-paper basket, scattering his purge of balled-up notes, and leans on his desk, the glass surface clear now of that clutter. He keeps his back to Michael, attempting to reel in his temper, failing, and thumping his desk so hard the pens jump in their pot. ‘Can’t you see? I want to be alone!’
Michael lays a hand on his shoulder: ‘Calm down,’ tries to turn him around, but Julian shrugs him off.
‘If you’re alone you’ll need to be getting on with something. William is here to talk to you about the book. And now seems like a good time, while I’m still here,’ Michael says. ‘As you know, I’m very keen you should do it – it’s the book you’ve always wanted to write and right now you need something to pull you out of yourself.’
Michael hitches himself on to the corner of Julian’s desk, legs swinging: ‘Now’s your chance. Take it,’ he says.
He silences Julian’s objections with a raised hand: ‘I know life hasn’t turned out the way you thought it would, but you’re still young.’ He pauses to wave at the sea of screwed-up paper. ‘It’s not the end of your story, nor is it your only story. You’ve been given many gifts, a great imagination, the ability to write.’
‘Please stop.’
Michael takes a momentous breath: ‘I couldn’t be prouder of you if I was your father.’ There. He’s never said such a thing before. Julian looks up and hopes it’s the light glancing off his half-moons and not his eyes glistening. He stares beyond him to the window. Michael takes another big breath and continues: ‘You’ve had happiness and now you have sadness. But, believe me, there will be happiness again.’ Julian shakes his head. Michael lays his hand on the side of his face and leaves it there, which feels strange because they never do that. ‘There will be different versions of happiness.’ Again Julian shakes his head, but Michael’s hand is still on his cheek and he’s still talking: ‘I know your loss feels unbearable right now, I know all around you seems like hell, but perhaps by writing you’ll find some kind of a paradise within,’ and he coughs self-consciously. ‘Sorry about that Milton, my bad paraphrasing, but you get the drift. Let me take on Firdaws for a couple of years while you give it a go. What do you think?’
The problem is Julian isn’t thinking at all. While Michael is talking a wasp busies itself against the window, its incessant buzzing making these wise words come and go. Julian’s limbs grow heavy and his throat starts to close. The wasp hurls itself at the glass. Julian is struggling to swallow. From the sitting room he hears the others calling, sirens on the TV. Michael pats him on the cheek and he feels the warmth of his kindness burn through his skin: ‘So. What do you think? Call it a convalescence if you like. Your mother and I wanted to talk to you about it last night but we couldn’t because you had . . .’ and he rolls his eyes towards the other room. ‘Um, company.’
Julian leaps away from him, as though he’s been stung: ‘Oh, stop it! I didn’t invite Katie. You did. Or Mum did. And nothing happened. I don’t know what you think you’re all doing here, but I wish to God you’d leave me alone.’
Michael stubbornly shuffles himself deeper on to the desk. ‘Sit down a moment, Julian,’ and then less sternly: ‘Please. Let’s take a look at all your possible futures . . .’ He spreads his hands, palms up, open like a book.
‘Do we have to?’
‘Well, I could stand back while you do nothing but drink yourself stupid, not even bothering to wash properly, while your mother brings you little meals on trays and cries herself to sleep at night. Is that what you want? To let sadness rule your life? If it is I will still take on the Firdaws debt for you, I care enough to find a way to do that for you, but I’m not sure this is a good picture of your future. Tell me, what do you think?’
The wasp at the window ricochets from the glass, heading straight for Julian. Buzzing crazes his ears. He runs for the door. Faces loom, leaning over him, people patting him, touching him. Their demands coming at him like flashbulbs exploding. He battles his way out of the house, gasping for air. He outruns Michael and looks down to find Zeph bounding along at his side. His headache is blinding, every leaf and blade of grass the shatterings of a mirror, dust glitters with the fall of his feet on the gritty earth. Light stripes the rails of Horseman’s fence, the sun beating hard enough to make the creosote melt. Hot tar and hay dust fills his nostrils.
He passes the younger Miss Hamlyn by Horseman’s barn, her black Labrador runs bottom-sniffing rings around Zeph. ‘Julian!’ she calls to him with her thin quaver, waving at him with her stick. Her grey hair is in curlers, squashed beneath a pale-blue net.
‘Come and see this,’ she says, leaving him little option, though his heart is still pounding. ‘Look under here, how many ripe figs there are.’ She pokes her stick among the branches, unzipping the sound of angry buzzing. ‘Oh, but so many wasps,’ she says, batting her hands. The smell of the hot fruit has never pleased him, something too much like tom-cat pee. Where she parts the branch he can see a pair of figs hanging like purple testicles and he’s already starting to scoot off, but she’s rushing with him, saying what a shame it is that no one gets to eat those delicious-looking figs, her little legs working hard, two strides to his one. She stops him on the path with a hand on his elbow, says: ‘Let me catch my breath.’ She stands for a moment readjusting the net around her curlers, blinks a couple of times. A cloud passes across her face, the tremor of a sudden realisation, she even grows a little pale: ‘I had to come out here to get away from the radio. My sister is glued to it.’ Her hand flutters at her chest and she reaches to steady herself against him.
Julian is momentarily puzzled. What could Miss Hamlyn the Elder possibly be listening to that would drive her younger sister from the shop?
The Archers Omnibus
? Jazz? Hip-hop?
‘Oh, my goodness,’ she says. ‘You mean you haven’t heard? Oh, that poor woman.’ And to Julian’s horror a tear leaves a trail on her chalky cheek.
He’s past her now and he calls over his shoulder to where she stands motionless with her stick: ‘I’ve got to get out of here. If I get stung I go into shock.’
He’s running again and the dog couldn’t be happier, the ostrich feather of its tail streaming. The track is rutted from a tractor, his feet fall between hard ridges. At the stone bridge he passes a woman with a child throwing bread to the swans. What does the death of some princess have to do with him? With anything?
He searches his mind for clues as he runs: he must have missed something. Snatched meals in the hospital canteen, Julia never saying very much. It seemed, by then, that she did most of her talking to Oscar’s mum, Becky, who had torn at her fingernails so viciously in PICU the nail beds had to be covered by plasters. Julia scowling when he showed her Katie’s photographs of the reclaimed Rayburn for Firdaws, and the one of Mira’s new bedroom, her dinosaur lamp beside her bed and silver stars at the window. All the days she shot out to work almost as soon as he arrived. Julia running out of the playroom to be sick.
The nurses had to keep telling them to eat. ‘Even if it’s only chocolate or cake,’ they said. It was difficult to swallow. ‘Of course it is,’ they said. ‘We know how you feel, there’s a lump in your throat that won’t go away.’ They ushered them to go out, but Julia never wanted to. ‘Look, she’s sleeping now,’ they said. ‘We’ll be here looking after her.’ But she just shook her head.
He remembers Mira with Oscar, the pair of them on their knees over the train set – he was Thomas and she was Percy, her hair coming back in dandelion tufts. The way the sparse down met the nape of her neck gave her the appearance of a newborn and a pain straight to his heart. Through the port to Mira’s heart six more weeks of Vincristine before she could have the operation.
She was on and off the nasal feed, she had to get the calories from somewhere. Heino was visiting the first time the nurse allowed Julia to set it up unaided. He sat beside the bed smoothing Mira’s forehead in a grandfatherly fashion and Mira took his cane because she liked to look at the carving of the snake. Julia leant across and attached a plastic syringe to the tube that came up from her stomach and was taped from her nose across her cheek. With a smile to reassure her, Julia withdrew the plunger, drawing out a minuscule amount of yellow liquid – this part never stopped making his own stomach heave, the taste of his own juices rising in his throat. Julia was less squeamish. She tested the little pool of yellow liquid with pH paper, holding it to the light to watch it bloom. It showed acid and they all sighed with relief. The tube was where it should be – there were nightmare accounts from other hospitals of patients killed by feeding tubes mistakenly pushed into the airways and not the stomach. Julia ran the pump to flush the system and attached the line to the bottle of creamy liquid food. ‘Very good,’ Heino said, and nodded at her. ‘I think this hospital should hire you immediately.’ As Mira closed her eyes Heino leant across the bed and enclosed her in his arms, his old brown cheek beside her young pale one on the pillow. Days felt like weeks. The outside world stopped.
Polling Day had passed them by. The whole election had. Tony Blair was now in power. Julian joined Julia and Becky in the Parents’ Room, huddled together, so close their heads touched. There was only space on the stiff little sofa for two. They looked up when he entered and carried on with their conversation, Julia’s shoulder set against him. Becky was trying to say something but had to keep blowing her nose in a tissue. His back creaked as he lowered himself into the chair beside the TV, twisting his head around to distract himself from their misery.
From the look of it the whole nation was rejoicing. The Blair children stood, all three awkwardly shod in trainers, on the doorstep of number 10. The girl’s hands were clenched together, a white baseball cap doing little to hide her anxiety, poor thing. The boys, arms hanging helplessly by their sides, had unfortunate haircuts that only drew attention to the fact they’d inherited their father’s ears. Cherie, their mother, sleekly groomed in tailored burnt orange, and Tony Blair waving, his white cuff and proper cufflink, his face turned to the sky in benediction. The children looked like they were at a separate occasion, earthbound and clumsy, unblessed, a different species.
‘We were just talking about that poor woman down in PICU,’ Becky said and Julian struggled to follow their conversation.
Tears wobbled at the rims of Julia’s eyes: ‘Those terrible cries, I never want to hear anyone in that much pain again,’ she said. He knelt beside the sofa so she could weep on his shoulder and felt like an insensitive pig when he noticed that Becky was crying too but had no one to comfort her. Now as then he can’t bring to mind the woman whose child died, has no memory of the noises she made as she threw herself to the floor. He has blanked her out. Every nerve cell was thrumming to the tune of one thing: Mira.
The pumps and IV tubes doled out the hours in droplets. He watched the rise and fall of her chest: if his concentration failed, her heart might stop. His eyes twitched from monitor to monitor, his ear tuned to every breath and click. Her feed might choke her. Her ventilator fail. Maybe she would open her eyes, or talk in her sleep, or grip his fingers. There’s only a hole where the flailing woman should be.
Mira was well enough to be bad-tempered when the day of her operation arrived. She’d been crying and whining non-stop since five in the morning; she wanted her breakfast and nothing they said would convince her they weren’t starving her by choice. His palms were so wet he had to keep wiping them on a cloth while the surgeon and the nurses filed out to meet them. Mira clung to Julia, her arms monkey-locked around her neck. A visiting clown flatfooted by, a woman one with a fluorescent green wig. Mira refused to honk her red nose and turned away from the stickers she gave her. The anaesthetist shook Julian’s damp hand and gave the usual reassuring patter, but Julian could make little sense, the clown had unnerved him. He worried it would give Mira disturbing dreams.
The anaesthetist told them he preferred not to use a mask, showed him the black hose secreted in his palm. He said that he would simply place his hand over her mouth while she sat on Julian’s lap.
Julian felt horrible, like a double agent, as he held on and tried to restrain her thrashing at the man’s hand, fighting for her life. It took two nurses to keep her still and both had earned scratches.
‘It’s good that she’s a fighter,’ one said, rubbing her hand, as Mira lay betrayed and lifeless in his arms, still wearing her own dress, the anaesthetist stopping to stroke the top of her head, the nurse taking her from him to lay his sleeping beauty on the trolley.