Dispossession (13 page)

Bending over made my head spin again, so he dried my legs
for me while I patted a towel gingerly at all the sore places I could reach.
Then he helped me dress, and we argued cheerfully over the wheelchair until I
put a stop to argument by opening the door and walking out of there.

Well, scuttling out of there. Sidling, perhaps. Peeking to
see if the security guard was looking this way; seeing that he wasn’t, and
slipping as fast as I could manage, as quiet as I could manage down the
corridor and out of his line of sight. Simon followed me, with the empty chair;
he was grinning, I was praying.

There was a process to be gone through, he said, if I
insisted on discharging myself. Especially if I wouldn’t even wait to discuss
it with a doctor. Papers to be signed, he said. Please? he said; and I nodded,
and let him guide me to an office behind reception.

He left me there, and went to phone a taxi. I sat, with a
grunt of relief, and argued with the administrator until she produced my file.
I signed a release form, told her where I was going, said no, I wasn’t accompanied,
but the taxi would take me straight there; and then I repeated this new method
I’d discovered for resolving the irresolvable, I got up and walked out.

Simon was waiting, just outside the automatic doors. I
joined him, stood for a moment soaking up the sunshine, and said, “I suppose
you’d be outraged if I offered you a tip?”

“Damn right,” he agreed. “I know exactly how much you’ve got
in that wallet, and it wouldn’t begin to cover it. Besides,” when I didn’t grin
back, when I forced him to take me seriously, “I was just doing my job.”

“No, you weren’t. Smuggling patients out past Vernon
Deverill’s security guards is no part of your job, Simon.”

“No, but I enjoyed that bit.”

“It’s not going to get you into trouble, is it?”

He shook his head positively. “I don’t work for Mr
Deverill.”

“Even so, he’s got a lot of clout...”

“So’s my charge nurse. I’ll be fine. Here’s your taxi. Safe
home, mate,” and he was gone.

o0o

Every road and alleyway within the hospital grounds was
lined with parked cars; the main loop was slow with traffic as constant
arrivals trawled for space. The taxi-driver grumbled under his breath when we
came to a dead stop, queuing three behind a car that was heir-apparent to a
place currently being slowly and carefully backed out of by an old Morris 1000.
If I drove such a car, I thought, I too would be that careful; why take risks
with a pocket heaven?

And why would someone who feels
like that
, I thought,
whose ideal is a car
more than thirty years old already, why would such a person be driving—let
alone crashing at speed—an MR2?

At last the Moggy was out onto the roadway, given plenty of
manoeuvring-room by us polite queuers; and in the brief pause where all was
static, before its driver could select a new gear and potter forward, a car came
neatly out of an alley-mouth where it had clearly been lurking, it drove twenty
metres the wrong way up this one-way loop and nipped into the space the Moggy
had vacated.

And it parked, and its driver got out and walked blithely
away while all of us in the queue were still manipulating our startled jaws
back into position; and I think, I hope that any other day, any other driver I’d
have been cheering for the sheer nerve of it, once I got over my startlement.

Not this day, not this driver. I was sliding low as I could
get on that back seat, almost ducking my head below window-level not to let
Sue—no, Suzie, let her be Suzie—spot me as she sauntered up to the hospital’s
main entrance, her arms full of gifts and packages and Adolphus.

o0o

Not much money in my purse, just a fiver and small change;
but no matter for that, it was enough. Enough to get me home, at least, and I
wasn’t looking any further.

Never would have done, probably, if my insouciant mother had
had her way with me, if her training had held. This was how she’d always wanted
me to live; it was the way she lived herself, St Matthew her guiding preceptor,
though in her own translation:
Tomorrow? What’s
with tomorrow? This is today, my son, and it won’t last, so grab it.
Unnatural parent, she cared not a jot for my career or my safe, solid prospects
or my comfortably-settled love life. If I’d been visibly unhappy, I guess she
might have worried; as I wasn’t—or hadn’t been, any maternal visit these last
ten years—she’d cultivated blithe unconcern into an art form. She might have
failed utterly in her objective, if she’d really meant to turn me out a carbon
copy of her own disinterested self, but that was necessarily not a problem. I
could go to hell in a handcart, so long as that was the way I’d chosen to go;
her philosophy couldn’t point a finger at me.

During my teenage years, while she was burdening me with
freedoms I didn’t want and I was rebelling as hard as I could manage, loading
myself with chains, often and often she’d say,
There’s
only one rule in this family, darling: don’t ever find yourself stranded,
because I may not be able to come get you. Run and find out, go and have fun,
any party you fancy anywhere in the world; but just you make sure you’ve got
enough cash to get home with.

With licence like that, was it any wonder I never took
advantage?

Well, hardly ever.

I’d been a little prig, probably: a schoolboy with savings,
a teenager who refused to be a tearaway, a student who studied and wouldn’t
ever play beyond his means.

And, of course, a solicitor who drove a Volvo about twenty
years too soon...

Ah, what the hell. Too late for regrets.
Non, je ne regrette rien
, about the only one of
my mother’s precepts that really had taken with me, even if in a form she
thought perversely twisted; and if my whole life thus far had been designed to
make sure I never had cause to regret, I could at least do myself the courtesy
of not changing the standard now.
Be safe, be
certain
had always been my battle-cry, impetuosity the thing to fear,
the very stuff of later regrets.

And besides, here I was finally doing something my mother
would wholeheartedly have approved of: coming home from some kind of a party a
week late, with massive holes in my memory and just enough cash for the
taxi-fare. Bingo. Must remember to tell her, whenever she surfaced next...

o0o

Ten minutes in the taxi, one side of town to the other: and
these streets were second nature to me, every corner long since logged and
charted. There was the pub, the
Beamish Boy
;
there was the delicatessen, with its yellow paintwork and its inevitable
student conclave just outside the door; there the two rival corner-shops on
adjacent corners, and here at last were the street and the door that meant home
to me, and had done for as long as I wanted to remember.

I handed over the fiver, with my usual embarrassed mumble
that meant
keep the change, if there is any
;
I got out of the cab, and watched it drive away; I fished my old key-wallet out
of the unfamiliar pocket of these unfamiliar jeans, and waited for my fingers
to find the ones that would let me in.

And of course they didn’t, because those keys weren’t there.

I’d
known
that, damn it,
I’d seen it in the hospital. ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go
there, they have to take you in’—but it was startlingly, frighteningly easy to
find yourself homeless. Me, I’d just put my head down and run without thinking,
to where instinct and history both said I’d find welcome and security; and here
I was, and here was neither one of those, and I’d been a fool to expect them.

Still, you can’t obliterate history, and affection’s roots
can run deep even when there’s little to be seen on the surface. She didn’t
have to take me in, maybe, but she might yet choose to.

So I went to the door anyway, and knocked; and I’d been so
hasty to run out of the hospital before Sue—Suzie, damn it,
Suzie
—turned up that I was still ahead of the day
here, Carol hadn’t left for work yet.

Carol opened the door, and saw me; and me, I saw the effort,
the tremendous effort it was for her not to slam that door in my face the
moment she clocked who I was behind the scabs and the bruises.

“What the hell,” she said, who never swore, “what the
fucking
hell
do you want here?”

Shelter from the storm
,
but I couldn’t ask that, she had to offer. “I want to talk,” I said, with a
helpless, hopeless gesture. “I’ve got to talk to you, Carol.”

“What, now?” with an ostentatious glance at her watch,
some of us still go to work, Jonty
.

“Well, no, but... I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“Oh, really? What happened to your little ethnic friend?”

“I can’t handle her at the moment, I need...”

“Frankly, Jonty,” she said, “I don’t give a damn what you
need. You’re not my problem any more. Your choice, if you remember, not mine.
So now it’s my turn to choose; and no, I don’t want to talk to you, now or
preferably ever. And no, you certainly can’t come and wait the day out in here,
if that’s what you were suggesting. If you can’t go back to the little wife,
you can camp out on some park bench for all I care. Go and play wino in a
doorway, at least you look the part. Been good for you, hasn’t it, this big
change thing? You really look like you’ve grown...

“But fuck off and do your growing somewhere else, not on my
doorstep. I’m
not
going to talk to you, I’m
not going to listen to you, even; and if you’re still here by the time I leave
for work, I’ll call the police and get an injunction. Understood?”

And she didn’t even wait for my nod of acceptance,
understood
, she just did what she’d so much
wanted to do before, and slammed the door in my face.

Firm, but fair. If I believed what I’d been told—and it was
surely impossible not to do that now, despite my soul’s rejection—then I had to
believe also what it implied, that I’d treated Carol appallingly.

I thought I’d seen her in every mood, but I’d never seen her
as angry as this; and this was a couple of months after the fact, after the
act, after I’d demonstrably left her. She didn’t ordinarily stew, she didn’t
hold grudges any more than she used what she called cheap language. She’d see
my leaving as a betrayal, of course, she’d have to; a betrayal that renewed
itself with every day apart, just as what we’d had formerly had been renewed
and strengthened—or so it had seemed, so we’d both affirmed—with every day
together.

That must be why she was so embittered, that I’d made what
seemed a waste and a deception out of all those long years of promises and
trust. I’d taken the bulk of her adult life with me, when I left; and I had no
way to give that back, no way to persuade her that she should believe memory
rather than revelation, the way it had seemed to be rather than the way she saw
it now.

That I was still nine-tenths in love with her, at least;
that I was the reverse of her, that I valued what we’d lost all the more for
having lost it; no, I wouldn’t, couldn’t have raised that with her even if she’d
let me talk at all. I’d surrendered the right, although I couldn’t remember
when or how. Indisputable now, that my hands had packed and my feet had walked
away from Carol. No matter that no shadow of my doing it remained to haunt me;
the thing had been done and was I thought unforgivable.

Which was probably the only thing left that Carol and I
could agree on.

o0o

Took me a minute, but I did walk dutifully away from her
door. Though it had been my door too, my home, and only my intellect could
believe now that it wasn’t; my heart still yearned for its familiar comforts
and hers also, strength of shoulder and softness of breast, tanglements of hair
and her low voice like an echo of the sea, distant, potent.

But I did walk, and I’d have walked to the pub if it was
open, though I barely had the cash to buy myself a pint, and what’s one pint in
a crisis?

Too early, though, by far. The Boy’s doors would be locked
for hours yet. Even the off-licences weren’t open, even if I’d wanted to follow
Carol’s recommendation and play wino in a doorway, which I didn’t.

Instead I just carried on walking, blindly, heedlessly; and
because I wasn’t thinking, my feet fell into old long-established habits and
carried me through the park and down the hill towards town.

And because I wasn’t thinking, I didn’t think
I can’t do this, I’m in no condition, I can’t walk forty
minutes without a break
; but I’d not been going long before my body reminded
me, and I’d not got halfway before I had to sit down because my legs simply
wouldn’t take me further.

But it had turned into a sunny morning, warmly spring; and
my way to town led through parks and public gardens, so it was really no
hardship to slump down onto a bench and lift my face to the restorative light.
Ten minutes
, I told myself firmly,
just ten minutes, and I’ll get moving...

Only that I had nowhere to move to, I had been moving
without purpose and having stopped, I couldn’t find the impetus to move again.
It wasn’t just the soreness of flesh barely healed and the weakness of muscles
barely off a bed that held me static in the sun for longer, much longer than my
ten minutes’ allotment.

It’s hard to tell time, with your eyes closed and all your
body, mind, spirit disorganised. Half an hour at least I sat on that bench, or
it might have been an hour, maybe more. And I might have, no, I would have sat
there longer still if someone else hadn’t been moved to move me.

Chance? Fate? Luke says there’s no such thing, he says that
accident and coincidence are only labels we apply to the more mysterious
workings of the higher powers, benign or otherwise. He would say that, of
course, but sometimes I feel impelled to believe him. Other times I find it hard
enough to fit my head around Luke himself; his theology, his Manichaean
puppet-master vision of all people as pawns in a multiplex game that as little
resembles chess as chess does hopscotch becomes altogether too much for me, and
I crash through into a comforting atheism where there is neither god nor devil
to disturb the workings and imaginings of men.