Authors: Jonathan Coe
‘Perhaps.’
‘And yet I understand you were quite the young firebrand at college, Mr Packard.’
Graham paused in the act of sipping his coffee.
‘Who told you that?’
‘Oh, I’ve made a few little routine inquiries, just as any sensible businessman would. You’ve grown up quite a lot in the last few years, it would seem.’
‘In what way?’
‘Politically, I mean. Let me see: now was it the Socialist Workers, or the Revolutionary Communists who enjoyed your services as treasurer?’
Graham smiled bravely even as his spirits started to plunge. ‘It was the Socialist Workers.’
‘Quite a long journey, then, isn’t it, from that hotbed of revolution to this restaurant in Baghdad?’
‘As you say,’ Graham answered, ‘I’ve grown up a lot.’
‘I hope so, Mr Packard. We are playing for high stakes here, after all. I’d like to think you were a man I could trust: a man, for instance, who can keep a cool head in a difficult situation.’
‘I think I can do that,’ said Graham. ‘I think I’ve shown that already.’
Mark grabbed one of the waitresses by the edge of her miniskirt and pulled her towards him.
‘Apples,’ he said. ‘We need some apples.’
‘Yes, sir. You want them baked, or perhaps glazed in some way?’
‘Just bring five apples.’
‘And turn up that music!’ Louis shouted after her. ‘Make it loud, make it really loud!’
When she returned, Mark got all the waitresses to stand up against the wall.
‘Oh, it’s the game!’ said Louis, clapping his hands delightedly. ‘I
love
this game.’
Mark rested an apple on top of each of the waitresses’ heads, then reached inside his jacket and took out a revolver.
‘Who’s going to be first?’ he said.
Although drunk, the others turned out to be excellent shots – with the exception of Louis, whose bullet went some three feet wide of the mark and shattered one of the light fittings. The women screamed and whimpered, but they did not move, not even after their own apples had been targeted.
Finally it was Graham’s turn. He had never even known the feel of a gun in his hand before; but he knew that Mark Winshaw was putting him to some sort of monstrous test, and that if he were to back down, if his nerve were to fail, then his cover would be blown and before long, in a matter of weeks if not days, his own life would be taken. He raised the gun and pointed it at Lucila. Tears were streaming down her face and in her terrified eyes he could also read incomprehension: an imploring echo of the laughter and intimacy they had shared in the upstairs room. His hand was shaking. He must have stood like that for some time because he heard Mark say, ‘In your own time, Mr Packard,’ and then he heard the others clapping their hands and starting to sing the William Tell Overture, buzzing it through their lips as if they were playing on a kazoo. And then just as Lucila let out her first compulsive sob, he did it: the thing for which he would always hate himself, whenever he woke up in the middle of the night, chilled and sweating with the recollection of it; whenever he had to leave the room in the middle of a conversation, or pull over abruptly to the hard shoulder of the motorway, the gorge rising in his throat at the sudden clarity of the memory. He pulled the trigger.
Graham blacked out almost immediately, so he didn’t see his bullet split the stalk of the apple and lodge in the wall behind Lucila, or see her sink to her knees and vomit over the polished floorboards. He was dimly conscious of loud music and voices, of people slapping him on the back and making him drink more coffee, but he didn’t fully come back to his senses until he found himself sitting on the toilet, his head in his hands and his trousers around his ankles, the air thick with the stench of his diarrhoea, the tiny windowless room silent but for his robotic intonation of one word, toneless and mechanical.
Joan. Joan. Joan.
∗
Graham had earned Mark Winshaw’s respect. It came in the form of twenty months’ silence, followed by an invitation to a New Year’s party at his house in Mayfair.
∗
December 31st 1990
Eleven o’clock was about the earliest Graham thought he could politely make his excuses and leave. He told Mark that he was driving home to Birmingham that night, to be back with his wife and their eight-month-old daughter.
‘But I haven’t introduced you to Helke yet,’ Mark protested. ‘You really must say a few words to her before you go. Is your car parked near here?’
It was. Mark took the keys and gave them to one of his drivers, who was told to bring the car round to the front door immediately. In the meantime, Graham was obliged to swap a few pleasantries with the new Mrs Winshaw, whom he was surprised to find dauntingly attractive. He had wanted to dislike her – knowing that she was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist and notorious Nazi sympathizer – but her pale beauty and oddly coquettish manner made this difficult, even during such a brief meeting.
A few minutes later, as he slumped into the driver’s seat, Graham breathed a sigh of relief. He was damp with sweat. Then he was knocked unconscious with a blow to the back of the head.
He was driven to a lock-up garage in Clapham. The driver pulled him out of the car while the engine was still running, and laid him on the ground near to the exhaust pipe. He kicked him four or five times in the face, and once in the stomach. He stripped him of his trousers, took the camcorder, and jumped up and down on Graham’s legs. Then he left the garage and locked the doors behind him.
That kick in the stomach had been a mistake, for it had the effect of shocking Graham into semi-consciousness. But he was unable to move for several minutes, during which time even as his body got stronger, his brain was fast running out of oxygen. Eventually, with tremendous effort, he dragged himself back to the driver’s seat. He put the engine into gear, and reversed back into the garage doors. It wasn’t enough to smash them open, so he tried again. It still wasn’t enough: and that was as much as he could manage.
But the noise had caught the attention of a group of drunken passers-by, who succeeded in forcing the doors open and getting the car out into the street. One of them ran off to find a phone box.
Graham was on the pavement, surrounded by strangers.
He was in an ambulance. Lights were flashing and there was a mask on his face.
He was in a hospital. It was very cold.
Big Ben was chiming midnight.
January 1991
I took the beakers of orange juice and carried them back to the cubicle. Fiona drank hers slowly and gratefully: then she drank half of mine. She said that I looked a bit distracted and asked me what had happened.
‘This guy’s just been brought in. He’s unconscious, and he’s in a pretty bad way. It just gave me a bit of a shock.’
Fiona said: ‘I’m sorry. This is a terrible way to start the New Year.’
I said: ‘Don’t be silly.’
She was getting weaker, I could see. After her drink she lay back on the trolley and didn’t try to speak again until the nurse reappeared.
‘Progress report,’ she said brightly. ‘The sister’s trying to find you a bed, and as soon as we’ve got one, you can go on to the ward and Dr Bishop will give you your antibiotics. Dr Gillam, our registrar, is very busy at the moment, so she’ll have to come and see you in the morning.’
This didn’t sound very much like progress to me.
‘But they’ve been looking for a bed for more than half an hour, now. What’s the problem?’
‘Things are very tight,’ she said. ‘There were some surgical wards closed just before Christmas and that has a knock-on effect. It means that a lot of the surgical patients are now on the medical wards. We keep a chart of all the beds available but it has to be updated all the time. We did think we’d found one for you just now, and we sent the sister along to check but she found there was already someone in it. Anyway, it really shouldn’t be much longer.’
‘Fine,’ I said, with a touch of grimness.
‘There is one problem, though.’
‘Oh?’
There was a pause. I could tell it was something she felt bad about.
‘Well, the thing is, we need this cubicle. I’m afraid we’re going to have to move you.’
‘Move us? But I thought you didn’t have anywhere to move us
to.’
It turned out that they did. They wheeled Fiona’s trolley out into the corridor, pulled up a chair for me to sit beside her, and left us there. It took another ninety minutes to find the bed. We didn’t get to see any more doctors in that time: both the houseman and the elusive Dr Gillam were fully occupied, so I gathered, dealing with the new arrival – the man I’d half-recognized – who it seemed they had somehow managed to revive. It was almost two o’clock when the nurses came to take Fiona away, and by then she looked helpless and frightened. I clasped her hand tightly and kissed her on the lips. They were very cold. Then I watched as they wheeled her off down the corridor.
∗
The staff had insisted that I went home and got some rest, but I was only able to carry out the first half of this instruction. Physically I was exhausted, not least because I walked all the way back from the hospital, reaching the flat some time after four o’clock. But I’d never felt less like sleep, knowing as I did that in a darkened ward three or four miles away Fiona too was lying awake, her gaze fixed blankly on the ceiling. How could it have taken them so long to get her there? After I’d found her kneeling in front of the wardrobe, it had been more than five hours before she was put safely in that bed – hours in which her condition had clearly worsened. And yet nobody had been negligent, as far as I could see: the atmosphere had been one of frantic, resolute efficiency under pressure. So how could it have taken them so long?
I lay fully clothed on my bed, with the curtains open. A bed was a simple thing, or so I’d always thought. As far as I could remember there could hardly have been more than a dozen nights in my whole life when I hadn’t slept in a bed somewhere or other. And hospitals were full of beds. That was the whole point about hospitals: they were just rooms full of beds. It was true that my faith in medical science had always been limited. I knew there were many ailments which it was powerless to treat, but it would never have occurred to me that a bunch of highly qualified doctors and nurses could have such difficulty simply transferring a patient from one place to another: from a cubicle to a bed. I wondered who was responsible for this state of affairs (yes, Fiona, I still believed in conspiracies), what vested interest they might have in making these people’s lives even harder than they already were.
I’d been told to phone the hospital at about ten o’clock in the morning. Was there anyone else I should contact in the meantime? I got up and went into Fiona’s flat to fetch her address book. It was full of names she’d never mentioned to me, and there was a letter folded inside the back cover, dated March 1984. Probably most of the people in this book hadn’t heard from her in about six or seven years. One of them, presumably, was her ex-husband, the born-again Christian. As far as I knew they hadn’t spoken to each other since the divorce, so there was no point involving him. She always spoke quite fondly of her colleagues at work: perhaps I should give them a call. But of course they wouldn’t be in for another day or two.
She was alone: very much alone. We both were.
The table in my sitting room was still laid for our candlelit dinner, so I cleared everything away and then watched the first day of the New Year dawn feebly over Battersea. When it was light I considered taking a shower but settled for two cups of strong coffee instead. The prospect of waiting another three hours appalled me. I thought of my mother, and how she had done her best to fill out the empty days while my father lay in hospital. There were plenty of old newspapers in the flat so I gathered them together and started doing the crossword puzzles. I did half a dozen of the quick crosswords in no time at all and then got stuck into a jumbo-sized cryptic puzzle which required the use of dictionaries and reference books and a thesaurus. It didn’t actually take my mind off anything, but it was better than just sitting around. It kept me going until twenty to ten, when I phoned the hospital.
I was put through to a nurse who told me that Fiona was still looking ‘pretty poorly’, and said that I could come in and see her now if I wanted to. Rudely, I put the receiver down without even thanking her, and almost broke a leg running down the staircase.
∗
The ward was full but quiet: most of the patients looked bored rather than seriously ill. Fiona was in a bed near the nurses’ room. I didn’t recognize her at first, because she had an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth. There was a drip attached to her arm. I had to tap her on the shoulder before she realized I was there.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know what to get you, so I brought some grapes. Not very original.’
She took the mask off and smiled. Her lips were turning slightly blue.
‘They’re seedless,’ I added.
‘I’ll have some later.’
I held her hand, which was icy, and waited while she took some more breaths from the mask.
Fiona said: ‘They’re going to move me. To another ward.’
I said: ‘How come?’
She said: ‘Intensive care.’
I tried not to let the panic show in my face.
She said: ‘They did all these things to me this morning. It took about an hour. It was awful.’
I said: ‘What sort of things?’
She said: ‘First of all, I saw Dr Gillam. The registrar. She was very nice, but she seemed a bit angry about something. She made them do an X-ray here. Right away. I had to sit up in bed and they put this plate behind my back. Then I had to keep breathing in. That was quite bad. Then they wanted to do a blood gases test, so they got this needle and had to find an artery. Here.’ She showed me her wrist, which had several puncture marks. ‘I think it must be difficult to get it right first time.’
I said: ‘When are they moving you?’
She said: ‘Soon, I think. I don’t know what the delay is.’
I said: ‘Have they told you what’s wrong?’
She shook her head.
Dr Gillam took me aside into a private room. First of all she asked me if I was next of kin, and I said no, I was just a friend. She asked me how long I’d known Fiona and I said about four months, and she asked me if Fiona had any family and I said no, not unless there were uncles or cousins that I didn’t know about. Then I asked her why Fiona was suddenly so ill and she told me everything, starting with the pneumonia. She’d picked up a severe pneumonia from somewhere and her body wasn’t fighting it properly. The explanation for that lay in the X-rays (and, of course, in the consultant’s notes, locked up somewhere in a filing cabinet), which revealed large growths in the centre of her chest: a lymphoma, in fact. The word meant nothing to me so Dr Gillam explained that it was a form of cancer, and seemed, in this case, to be quite advanced.
‘How advanced?’ I said. ‘I mean, it’s not too late to do anything about this, is it?’
Dr Gillam was a tall woman whose jet-black hair was cut in a bob and whose small, gold-rimmed glasses framed a pair of striking and combative brown eyes. She thought carefully before answering.
‘If we could have got at this a bit earlier, we may have had a better chance.’ She gave the impression of holding something back, at this point. Like Fiona, I could sense a closely guarded anger. ‘As it is,’ she continued, ‘her blood oxygen level’s been allowed to get very low. The only thing we can do is move her to intensive care and keep a close eye on her.’
‘So what are you waiting for?’
‘Well, it’s not quite that simple. You see, first of all –’
I knew what was coming.
‘– we’ve got to find her a bed.’
∗
I stayed at the hospital until the bed was found. This time it only took about another half hour. It involved several telephone calls and appeared to depend, finally, on finding a patient two or three beds down the chain, throwing him off his ward and making him wait in the day room until he could be officially discharged. Then Fiona was taken away from me again and there was nothing I could do. I went home.
I didn’t have any medical books but the dictionaries I’d used for the crossword were still lying on the table, so I looked up ‘lymphoma’. All it said was ‘a tumour having the structure of a lymphatic gland’. Put like that it didn’t sound very frightening but apparently this was the cause of all those months of sore throats and fevers, and this was the reason her immune system had all but closed down and surrendered to the first infection that came its way. I stared at the word again, stared at it for so long that it stopped making any kind of sense and began to look like nothing but a meaningless jumble of letters. How could anything so small, so random as this silly little word possibly do so much damage? How could it (but this wasn’t going to happen)
destroy
a person?
It wasn’t going to happen.
Suddenly revolted by the sight of the half-finished crossword, which seemed trivial and offensive, I screwed the newspaper up into a ball and in the process knocked over the cold remains of my second cup of coffee. Then, after fetching a cloth and wiping away the stain, I fell into a frenzy of cleaning. I polished the table, dusted the shelves and attacked the skirting-board. I marshalled scourers and J-cloths, Pledge, Jif and Windolene. I went at it so ferociously that I started to take the paint off the window frames and the veneer off the coffee table. But even this wasn’t enough. I piled all the furniture from my sitting room into the hallway and vacuumed the carpet. I took a mop to the bathroom floor and polished the taps and the shower fittings and the mirrors. I cleaned out the lavatory bowl. Then I went round the flat with two big black dustbin liners, throwing in every out-of-date magazine, every wad of yellowing newsprint, every discarded note and scrap of paper. I didn’t stop until I came upon an unopened Jiffy bag, containing my parcel of books from the Peacock Press: then, seized by an absurd, almost hysterical curiosity, I tore it open and looked at the three volumes. I wanted to see something that would make me laugh.
There was a slender pamphlet entitled
Architectural Beauties of Croydon,
which boasted, according to the flyleaf, ‘three black and white illustrations’.
Plinths! Plinths! Plinths!,
by the Reverend J.W. Pottage, promised to be ‘the most accessible and humorous offering yet to fall from the pen of an author now internationally recognized as an authority in his field’. And the third book seemed to be yet another volume of war memoirs, bearing the somewhat enigmatic title,
I Was ‘Celery’.
Before I’d had time to attach any significance to this, the telephone rang. I threw the book down at once and went to answer it. It was the hospital. They were putting Fiona on to a ventilator and if I wanted to talk to her I should come right away.
∗
‘There’s been a circulatory collapse,’ Dr Gillam explained. ‘We’ve been treating her with high concentrations of oxygen, but the level in her blood’s still very low. So we’ll have to try the ventilator. Once she’s on it, though, she won’t be able to talk. I thought you’d better see her first.’
She could barely talk even now.
She said: ‘I can’t understand it.’
And: ‘Thanks for being here.’
And: ‘You look tired.’
And: ‘What happened to the lasagne?’
I said: ‘You’ll be all right.’
And: ‘Are you comfortable?’
And: ‘The doctors here are very good.’
And: ‘You’ll be all right.’
It was nothing special, as conversations go. I suppose none of our conversations had ever been all that special. Especially special, I nearly wrote. I think I must be going to pieces.
∗
They said it would take about ninety minutes to set the ventilator up and fit all the necessary drips, and after that I could go back to see her. I lingered for a few minutes in the Relatives’ Room, a functional-enough waiting area with a few unyielding black vinyl chairs and a selection of newspapers and magazines which seemed slightly more upmarket than usual. Then I went to get a cup of coffee, and managed to find a canteen which I think was intended for the use of staff rather than visitors, although nobody seemed to object when I took my seat. I’d been there for a while, drinking black coffee and getting through two and a half bars of Fruit and Nut, when someone stopped by my table and said hello.
I glanced up. It was the nurse who had been looking after Fiona that morning.