Always the Sun (2 page)

His mother-in-law had started this process while Justine was still alive. Diane was ash-blonde, clipped, efficient. She suggested they gather those clothes her daughter would euphemistically ‘not be needing’, and take them to a charity shop. Sam agreed. He insisted only that the charity shop should not be in Hackney. He didn’t want to come across strangers dressed in his wife’s clothes. He and Diane stuffed the clothing into garden sacks, which Sam loaded into the back of Diane’s estate car. She drove the stuff home to Bath.

The same day, Sam packed their wedding and holiday photographs into a number of boxes and sealed them with tape. In blue marker pen, he wrote:
S&J wed
,
etc
,
B-bados 92
,
Turkey 89
,
Devon 90
,
mil
.
eve 00
.

He stared down at the boxes. Their marriage, codified.

The degenerative brain disorder that killed Justine was called ‘fatal familial insomnia’. It was a vanishingly rare condition caused by the action of prions, the enigmatic rogue proteins that also caused scrapie in sheep and bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle. Justine withdrew from them bit by bit, minute by minute until, near the end, it was impossible not to wish what remained of her more speedily gone.

The first sign had been difficulty in sleeping. But Justine was an art teacher in the local College of Further Education, which was underfunded and understaffed. She was stressed. They didn’t think much of it.

Within a few weeks, the ability to sleep—but not the longing for it—had deserted her. Her GP assured her that all chronic insomniacs slept far more than they imagined, and she prescribed pills. The pills didn’t work. Later, different doctors ran tests. Working shifts in a controlled environment, they observed the passage of forty-eight entirely sleepless hours. By now, Justine was debilitated and bewildered. She so very badly wanted to sleep.

Before the condition was diagnosed, Justine’s sanity left her. She was awake until being awake drove her insane.

Even when she became deranged, being awake gnawed at her bones, confining her eventually to a wheelchair. She could no longer distinguish between dream-states and waking reality. She passed randomly from one to the other. There came a time when she no longer knew her mother, her husband or her only son. During those final months she was shrunken and grotesque and sometimes violently maniacal, curled like a cricket and shrieking at chimeras and imaginary colours.

In the early days, Sam tried to take care of her. He took leave of absence to become her full-time nurse. Even when he unmistakably became unable to cope, he refused offers of Local Authority assistance. Instead, he relied on Diane. At first, she merely visited them often. But as the disease progressed, Diane moved in with them. She and Sam took it in turns to sleep. Diane slept on her own linen in the marital bed, while Sam was consigned to a sleeping bag on the floor of Jamie’s room.

In the evenings, when their waking moments intersected, Sam and Diane prepared a meal and sat together, watching television while Justine gibbered and dribbled and shrieked in her wheelchair. Weekday mornings, they prepared Jamie for school and tried hard to pretend this was normal life. On Friday afternoons, Diane took sole responsibility for Justine. Sam spent those few hours in a curious blank. He sat in empty cinemas and watched films whose plot he was unable to follow.

Privately, each of them dreamt of an ultimate flicker of clarity. Justine would fall silent. An expression of saintly peace would settle her wracked features. She would whisper:
Sam,
or
Mum,
or
Jamie: I love you
.

But no such moment came, and the disease that devoured Justine eventually vanquished Sam and Diane too. One day, Jamie came home from school to find his mother gone. Diane and Sam had worked hard to prepare a speech for him. Sam would tell him that Mummy was in hospital, where properly trained nurses would look after her, keeping her safe and comfortable. And although she was very, very ill, she was still his mum and she loved him very much. He could visit her any time he wanted.

Jamie took one long, acute look at his exhausted, baggy-eyed father and grandmother. Then he dumped his schoolbag in the middle of the floor and went to make himself a crisp sandwich.

Diane stayed another week. She and Sam went through Justine’s effects with an efficiency that resembled malice.

The evening that Diane returned to Bath, Jamie cooked the supper. He’d learnt in Food Science how to do lasagne. It took a long time and the result was nearly inedible, but Sam ate three portions, nevertheless, and a green-leaf salad whose dressing Jamie made himself, adding vinegar to olive oil and flourishing the bottle like a cocktail shaker.

Jamie never saw his mother again. Soon after entering the hospice, Justine contracted the viral pneumonia from which she did not recover.

Sam didn’t have to break the news. On his way home from school, Jamie saw Diane’s Volvo parked outside the flat and guessed. From politeness, he hugged Diane and assured her that yes, he would be a brave boy.

Jamie didn’t go to the funeral. That was the worst argument he and Sam ever had, except only Sam was arguing. Jamie’s detachment bordered on the autistic. He looked at his ranting, weeping father with gentle but utter lack of comprehension, as if Sam might be rehearsing a play in Latin. He sat there and absorbed without recoil everything Sam pitched at him, including threats of violence. When Sam’s ire was exhausted, Jamie returned his attention to the GameBoy.

Sam recalled the infuriating, circular trilling of the game’s melody. He thought the meaningless sound might drive him insane. Jamie’s lack of response was dreamlike and claustrophobic.

Sam walked out of the flat, slamming the door behind him.

It was late winter, and he didn’t stop to pick up his jacket. The air was cold and filthy, a particulate miasma. He wanted to punch someone, but the hordes of Hackney flowed by, without anyone meeting his eye. He went into a brightly-lit corner shop and bought a pack of Marlboro Lights. He bitterly enjoyed the absurdity that, after everything, it should take an argument with a child to drive him back to cigarettes.

Shivering in his shirtsleeves, he sat on a much-vandalized municipal park bench. He watched the traffic and the buses and the people. He chainsmoked half the pack of Marlboro, then walked home.

He found Jamie on the sofa, watching
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
.
The GameBoy was discarded on the cushion alongside him. Neither he nor Sam mentioned the argument, and Jamie got his way: on the morning of the funeral, he was collected by Diane’s neighbours, who’d driven all the way especially, and taken for a day out.

Sam barely knew the neighbours. They’d been guests at the wedding, and over the years they’d exchanged pleasantries at various Christmas parties and midsummer barbecues. But they’d known Justine since she was four years old and Sam was touched by the quiet modesty of their desire to help.

They had mapped a full day’s itinerary. Jamie would not be allowed an instant in which to become bored or reflective. Sam watched from the window as they drove him away. He could see him, tiny and regally serene, perched on the back seat of the Astra estate.

Sam didn’t know how to get through the day without him.

He barely remembered the funeral. At the wake, he was officiously anxious for everybody’s comfort. For the first time since Jamie’s christening, he hugged Diane. She hugged him back, and that was the moment when he thought he might break, crazing into pieces like a cheap vase. He allowed Justine’s sister to sob on his shoulder. He said ‘
There, there
.’
He smiled tightly at her husband, whom he knew to have had a number of extramarital affairs, and whom he very much disliked.

By the time Jamie came home, everybody had gone. Sam was alone among the paper plates and uneaten sausage rolls. He was lying on the sofa. The new shoes had worn his black socks translucent at the heel.

Jamie was wearing his Walkman. Sam could hear the rapid, tinny sibilance of sequenced hi-hats. Jamie stomped through to the kitchen and began opening and closing cupboards. He returned with a plate of chocolate HobNobs and a can of Dr Pepper.

He swept Sam’s feet from the sofa and sat.

He looked at the TV.

He said, ‘Are you watching this?’

Sam wiped his eyes.

‘Not really.’

Jamie flicked over to Sky 1. They watched
The Simpsons
.
Terrified and exhilarated, Homer sailed over Springfield canyon on Bart’s skateboard. He almost made it to the other side. But he fell at the last, as Homer always did.

‘Can I watch
Die Hard 2
?’

Sam sat up. Jamie was shaking his shoulder. He had fallen asleep. He wiped his lips. Ran a hand through his tangled hair.

‘Of course you can. Go on.’

At the end, they both cheered.

A week after the funeral, Sam woke to find Jamie asleep on the floor at the foot of his bed.

He knew he should return him to his own room. Instead, he lifted Jamie and laid him in the bed, on Justine’s side. The presence of his sleeping, delicate son filled him with a tenderness that blunted the jagged edge of his grief. Sometimes Jamie whimpered in his sleep and thrashed his limbs. Twice he wet the bed: Sam was woken by a warm jet of urine on his lower back and thighs. Jamie, still sleeping, turned his back and curled foetally at the cool, dry edge of the mattress. Sam chuckled, quietly and fondly, and never mentioned it.

The further Justine’s death receded, the harder it grew to mention it. In those strange days, Sam and Jamie wandered like spectres within decreasing boundaries. London lost all meaning. The edges of their territory drew together like a drawstring purse, until it was defined by a few Hackney streets and convenience stores. The flat was no longer the place where they’d once been happy. It was simply a place where terrible things had happened, long ago and to other people. It had a dusty, museum feel. It became dirty as well as disordered. They stopped washing up. They ate off paper plates. The curtains were seldom opened. There were mice, and a urinous cockroach stink in the kitchen. At night, wrapped tight in a greying white duvet, Sam imagined the skittering of tiny claws. He dreamt of a tangled rat-king hidden among the decaying mementoes of their dear, dead days.

Early in March, Diane arrived to visit them. Pointedly, she opened all the windows, letting in the winter cold. Sam remembered that he’d not washed the sheets for many weeks, not even after Jamie had pissed on them. He supposed they smelt like a zoo, two helpless mooncalves locked away with the windows and curtains forever drawn on the world. Sometimes Sam forgot how old Jamie was. Sometimes he seemed as flawless and innocent as a toddler; at others, as clumsy, angular and raw-boned as an adolescent.

He told Diane that he’d resigned his job.

Her mouth pursed, lipstick-bled at the edges.

She said, ‘It’s too late to fall to pieces now, Sam. You got through the hard part. Now look at you. Has Jamie been going to school?’

‘Of course.’

‘Have you been doing the laundry?’

‘Yes.’

‘How often?’

‘Diane, I don’t know. But I’ve been doing it.’

She wrinkled her nose. Once, it might have been endearing, even sexy.

‘Sam,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry to say it. But you smell, darling.’

Surreptitiously, he sniffed at his armpits. He smelt sour and yellow, vaguely feline. He ran his hands through his hair.

He said, ‘Oh Christ, Diane. Please.’

‘Don’t
please
me,’ she said. ‘You’re not a student. You have responsibilities to that child.’

‘Di, he’s fine.’

‘Living in
this
?’

He looked around him.

‘Who makes his breakfast?’ she said.

‘He’s nearly a
teenager
,
for Christ’s sake. He needs some independence.’

‘He’s a child, and he needs supervision. Do you make his breakfast?’

‘He made his own this morning.’

‘What did he have?’

‘I don’t know. Cereal. Eggs or something.’

‘And do you have fresh milk and eggs? A loaf of
bread
?’

He closed his eyes, massaged his forehead.

‘Yeah,’ he said vaguely. ‘We went—I did the shopping. A few days ago.’

She crossed her arms.

‘Gather your things.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Throw some clothes in a suitcase. And some of Jamie’s. You’re coming back to spend some time with me.’

‘I can’t. He’s got
school
.’

‘It’s practically half-term. A few days off won’t hurt him.’ She looked eloquently around herself. ‘Quite the contrary.’

By the time Jamie came home, his shirt untucked and one lace trailing, Diane had cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom and made inroads into the sitting room. According to her instruction, Sam had shifted as many of the boxes and crates as possible into Jamie’s room.

‘Hello, Grandma,’ said Jamie.

‘Hello, darling.’ In rubber gloves and pinafore, she gave him a quick hug.

‘All right, Dad?’

‘All right, mate.’

Jamie dumped his weight on to the sofa and dug the GameBoy from his bag.

Sam looked at him. His blazer was too small. The shirt was yellowish, missing a couple of buttons. His trousers were nearly through at the knees and one of his trainers was split along the insole. His hair needed cutting.

Sam lit a cigarette.

‘We’re going to spend a few days at Grandma’s,’ he said.

Jamie looked up. ‘Cool,’ he said, without inflection, and returned to his game.

Diane’s house, white and well-appointed, backed on to farmland.

Sam woke to the sound of sheep and cattle. He was in a clean room, in crisp bedding. It had been Justine’s childhood bedroom, the room they stayed in when they came to visit. They’d had sex there, on the single bed, many times before Jamie was born. He endured a desolate erection at the memory.

It was a guest bedroom now. He lay for a while, enjoying the spring sunshine through the curtains. His skin was still faintly scented with last night’s shower. Just inside the bedroom door was a plastic laundry basket, full of freshly washed and pressed clothing. Diane had probably been up since before dawn.