Authors: Jonathan Coe
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.
‘How is she now?’ she asked.
‘Well, they’re putting her on a ventilator at the moment,’ I said. ‘I assume that means things are fairly serious.’
Her response was noncommittal. ‘She’ll be very well looked after.’
I nodded glumly, and she sat down in the chair opposite me.
‘How are
you
feeling, though?’
I hadn’t really thought about this. After a second or two I said, rather to my own surprise: ‘I’m not sure. Angry, if anything.’
‘Not with Dr Bishop, I hope.’
‘No, not with anyone specific. I’d say it was with fate, except that I don’t actually believe in fate. With the particular chain of circumstances, I suppose, which has brought –’ Suddenly it struck me that I hadn’t understood her remark. ‘Why should I be angry with Dr Bishop?’
‘Well, it probably
would
have been better if she’d been given the antibiotics last night,’ she said doubtfully. ‘She might at least have been more comfortable that way. Not that it ought to make that much difference, in the long run …’
‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I thought she did have them last night. I mean, that’s what they told me was going to happen.’
I could see it dawning on her that she shouldn’t have told me. She must have assumed that I already knew.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I ought to be getting back to the ward …’
I followed her into the corridor but she wouldn’t answer any more of my questions, and I gave up when I caught sight of Dr Gillam out in the car park, wrapped up against the winter cold in her gloves and trench coat. I hurried to the main entrance and ran after her, catching up just as she was fumbling in her pocket for the car keys.
‘Can I have a word with you?’ I said.
‘Of course.’
‘I don’t want to keep you, if you’ve finished for the day …’
‘Never mind that. Was there something you wanted to know?’
‘Yes, there was.’ I hesitated. There seemed to be no tactful way of approaching this. ‘Is it true that Dr Bishop forgot to give Fiona her antibiotics last night?’
She said: ‘Where did you hear that?’
I said: ‘Is that what you were so angry about this morning?’
She said: ‘It might be a good idea if we went for a drink.’
As it was a Bank Holiday and the middle of the afternoon, all the pubs were shut. We were in a gloomy backwater of South West London. The best we could manage, in the end, was a bleak and characterless little café, rendered all the more tacky by the fact that it had obviously been designed to fool unwary customers into thinking that it was part of a well-known fast food chain. It called itself ‘Nantucket Fried Chicken’.
‘I think I’ve got the coffee,’ said Dr Gillam, after sipping from her paper cup. We swapped drinks.
‘No, this could be the tea,’ I said, testing it doubtfully. But we didn’t swap again. There didn’t seem much point.
‘You went through quite an ordeal last night,’ she began, after a few moments’ thought. ‘To tell the truth, what you went through was unacceptable. But I’m afraid I can’t apologize, because it happens all the time, and it would have happened anywhere else.’
‘It wasn’t quite what I … would have expected,’ I said, not sure where any of this was leading.
‘This is my last month as a doctor,’ she now announced, abruptly.
I nodded, more confused than ever.