Dying to Know You (24 page)

How far back in my life could I trace this intransigence? I remember as a very small boy refusing to eat what my mother put in front of me, and guzzling whatever she didn’t want me to eat.

“You’ve always gone against the grain,” my mother once said in exasperation.

I was up, abluted, dressed, and sitting impatiently in the chair beside my bed, plotting how I’d escape if “they” wouldn’t let me go by midday, when a nurse hove into view with Mrs. Williamson and Becky, both grinning widely. With a wheelchair!

“Your friends have come to take you home,” the nurse said in that cheery way they have. “They’ve promised to look after you. And we need your bed for a more deserving case.”

Mrs. Williamson winked. Becky, behind the nurse’s back, put a finger across her lips.

I perspired with gratitude.

And we were out of there in five minutes flat, me reluctantly in the wheelchair—but I’d have put up with anything no matter how humiliating in order to escape.

“How did you do it?” I asked, when we were safely on our way down one of those cubular, vinyl-tiled, antiseptic hospital corridors that seem designed to make you feel ill whether you are or not.

“With a little help from Becky’s friend,” Mrs. Williamson said, “and as the nurse said, by promising to look after you till you’re fully recovered.”

“And how do you plan to do that, when you live three miles from my house?”

“We’ll talk about that later,” Mrs. W. said. “The first thing we have to do is see Karl.”

“But it isn’t visiting hours yet,” I said.

“Mothers have their ways,” Mrs. W. said.

“I’ve met your ways before,” I said. “You are a finagling woman.”

“You watch your language,” Mrs. W. said. “We’re taking you to Karl, and leaving you with him for half an hour. That’s all you are allowed. Becky and I will have coffee in the café, if you can call it coffee, and we’ll fetch you when the time’s up and take you home in Becky’s father’s car. Then Becky will come back to be with Karl while I settle you at home. Understood?”

“Grief!” I said. “You
are
managerial today.”

“Stop complaining,” Becky said.

“It’s the effect hospitals have on me,” I said.

“It’s the disinfectant,” Becky said. “Makes you feel they are about to do something surgical to you. Or it does me, anyway.”

“Have they said when Karl can go home?” I asked.

“Not yet,” Mrs. W. said.

Becky gave me a look that meant “Don’t say any more.”

Hospitals are places where we suffer private pain in public. No wonder operations are performed in rooms called theatres. At the same time, they are a kind of prison,
which is why the rooms where patients are herded together are called wards. And the nurses, if the one who had just chucked me out was anything to go by, might as well be called warders. (Unless, of course, you have lavish amounts of money and then, as always, everything is different.)

Karl, who hated being on show at the best of times, did indeed look like a prisoner, shackled to his bed by a contraption that suspended his encased leg upstretched in the air as if he’d tried to kick a ball while lying on his back and had got stuck.

His face was a picture of brooding dejection. I remember thinking as I approached his bed: It’s not his leg that’s making him ill, it’s being in hospital.

Mrs. W. and Becky left me by his bedside. We said nothing to each other. But from the moment he saw me he never took his eyes from mine, and that was enough communication between us, knowing each other as we did now.

His eyes said, “Get me out of here.”

“They kept me in bed till this morning,” I said when it was time to speak.

“Your mother and Becky are taking me home,” I said. “They’ll come straight back when they’ve settled me in.”

“You’re OK?” Karl asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Concussed. They wanted to be sure it wasn’t dangerous. My age and all that guff.”

“We’ll get you out of here as soon as we can,” I said. “You’re going to be all right.”

“How do you know?” Karl said.

“Medically, you mean? I don’t. But you’re fit and young and they say they’ve fixed your leg up good and proper.”

“So who does know?” Karl said.

“The doctors. What do they say?”

“That I’ll be OK.”

“There you are then.”

“But I don’t trust them.”

“Why not?”

“The way they say it. And the way they look at each other and the nurses when they’re talking to me. I think they’re lying.”

“What about your mother? You trust her, don’t you?”

“She’ll tell me the good news but not the bad. Not while I’m in here. In case I go off the rails again.”

“So you feel you can’t trust anybody?”

He gave me the hint of a smile.

“What is …”

“Is!”

The hint broadened into an actual smile.

“Let’s talk about something else,” I said. “They won’t let me stay long.”

“Like what?”

“After the party you said you’d thought of how to make the sculpture better.”

He looked away for the first time.

“I’m not doing it again,” he said.

“Why not?”

“They’ll only smash it up again.”

“If they do, you’ll make another.”

“Oh, thanks!”

“But I don’t think they will.”

“Why not?”

“That sort get bored very easily. No stamina.”

“But what’s the use!”

“Doing it. The use is
doing it.”

“So some dickhead can smash it up.”

“That’s the reason for doing it again.”

“For it to be smashed up? Talk sense!”

“You want the world to be left to the dickheads?”

“Course not!”

“Then you’re going the right way about it.”

“Me! I’m not doing anything.”

“Exactly.”

“Exactly
what
?”

“You know why they smashed it up?”

“For fun. For laughs. I don’t know.”

“Because it threatens them.”

“Threatens them? How?”

“Because they don’t understand it.”

“Neither did most of the people at the party.”

“Not the way you wanted them to. But they didn’t smash it up.”

“Only because they know me.”

“Give them a bit more credit than that.”

“All right, so they didn’t understand it, but they didn’t smash it up. So what?”

“They didn’t understand it, but they were trying to. They wanted to. That’s the difference between them and the dickheads who did smash it up.”

He shifted in the bed, trying to sit up more. Winced with the pain the movement caused in his leg.

I said, “I had a chat with your boss at the party.”

“And?”

“You’ve known him a long time, I gathered.”

“Since I was born. He was my dad’s best friend.”

“Did he tell you what he thought?”

“Not his cup of tea.”

“Anything else?”

“It was well made.”

“Nothing more?”

“No, why?”

“He didn’t tell you he was glad you’d made it?”

“No.”

“And how proud your father would have been?”

Karl gave me a suspicious look.

“He said that?”

“He did.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

He turned away.

Then, muttering: “So you’re saying the dickheads
smashed it up because they didn’t understand it and didn’t want to.”

“Exactly. And they smashed it up to try and get rid of it. To feel they had won.”

He looked at me again. Now his eyes were lively again.

“I’ll bet,” he said with a grin. “A lot more dickheads around than people who don’t understand but want to.”

“There are always more destroyers of what you are trying to do than there are people who are on our side.”

“Which means they’ll always win.”

“Only if you stop making. For one thing, the dickheads never manage to smash everything. And for another thing, if you, and the people like you, the true artists, keep on making, the philistines can’t smash up everything. There may be fewer of you.
Of us.
But we win in the end.”

Silence.

“And even if we don’t,” I went on after a moment. “Even if they smash everything we make, it doesn’t matter, because in making it we give pleasure to people who love us, people who admire us, people who
try
to understand. Like your boss. And your mother … And Becky … And Fiorella too, you know, whatever you might think about her now.”

Another silence. But I could feel his mood shifting.

I took from my pocket the little stone he gave me after we’d built the cairn.

“Remember this?” I said, holding it out in the palm of my hand for him to see.

He glanced at it and turned away again.

“Course. I found it in the river.”

“You gave it to me.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Don’t know. I thought you’d like it.”

“Only that? We saw a lot of stones that day. Why give me this one?”

“No idea. It just seemed different. I hadn’t seen anything like it before.”

“What d’you think it is?”

He gave me a huffing look. “A stone with a hole in it.”

I laughed out loud.

“What’s so funny?”

“You are! You’re the one complaining that people don’t understand what you’re trying to do, but when I show you this, all you can say is it’s a stone with a hole in it.”

“Get to the point.”

“OK. I’ll admit, at first, I thought it was just a stone with a hole in it. I kept it on me all the time, because you gave it to me and I valued it for that. I’ve looked at it a lot. Have a good look at it yourself.”

He took it from me, turned it over and over, looked closely at it.

“What d’you think now?”

He was puzzled.

“Dunno.”

“D’you think it’s just a little stone that got like that naturally. Smooth and perfectly round, and the hole dead centre?”

“Could have done.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“No. It feels …”

“What?”

“That it was made like that.”

“Exactly the conclusion I came to. So I did some research.”

He eyed me, knowing now I had a surprise in store.

“And?”

“I suspect it’s a marriage stone.”

“A what?”

“A marriage stone. You know how we give rings when we marry? Well, I think this is a very old version of that. Prehistoric, probably. Thousands of years old. Made by a man to give to the woman who was his wife. She probably hung it round her neck.”

“You’re not kidding me?”

“No, no. I can’t be sure. But I asked someone who’s an expert on that kind of stuff and he told me that’s what it could be.”

He looked at the stone again. Pushed his little finger through the hole, and showed it to me as if it were a ring, and laughed.

As I did too.

“A made thing,” I said. “And the man who made it doesn’t
have a headache anymore, that’s for sure. But now we have it. And even now, thousands of years after it was made, it still gives us pleasure. But more than that, when you picked it out of the river you knew, you knew instinctively, it was something different, something special. And you gave it to me. Why? Not just because you thought I’d like it.”

He shook his head.

“Level with me,” I said.

“All right! OK! A kind of thank-you.”

“Which you were too upset that day to say?”

“Probably.”

“Which I knew at the time and appreciated. You didn’t need to say it. The stone said it better. Just like I imagine it said more to the lover of the man who made it than he could say in words.”

He looked at me hard.

“You needn’t go on,” he said. “I get the point.”

“Exactly. No need to say it. But seeing it’s a marriage stone, I think you’d better have it back and keep it for the right person on the right occasion, don’t you?”

He laughed. “I’ll find something else to give you instead.”

“You don’t have to. You’ve already given it to me. It’s in my front garden. In pieces, yes, but ready to be put back together. And even better than before.”

He nodded and looked away, back to the little stone, which he fingered in his hand.

We were silent again.

Until I said, “Becky came to see me. She’s quite something.”

He nodded.

“Studies art history.”

He nodded.

“I’ll tell you what. Ask her about the oldest sculptures in the world and where they are. And then ask yourself how they’ve survived, just like that marriage stone, for thousands of years, if it’s true that the dickheads always win.”

Silence again.

Becky and Mrs. W. arrived at the door of the ward.

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “But you know what?”

“What?” Karl said, full face to me again.

“This talk about giving up, and not making any more sculpture, it’s not you talking.”

“Who, then?”

“Your leg.”

He smiled, full and bright, his eyes alive again.

“I’ll be back this evening,” I said.

I got up and turned to go.

“When you come, …” he said.

I turned to face him.

“Yes?”

“Bring some paper and a pencil, will you?”

“Anything else?” I said.

“Some of that wire I use, if you have any.”

“No problem,” I said.

On the way home we stopped at the nearest supermarket and stocked up with food for me and for Mrs. W.

I didn’t let on that I suddenly felt physically weak doing even this undemanding chore. Maybe, I thought, the docs and nurses were right about me being careful for a few days.

Back home, the rods from the sculpture were still scattered around the garden. A forlorn sight. As soon as we had opened up the house, switched on the heating and checked that all was well, Becky collected the pieces of rod and stored them in the garage.

While she was doing that, Mrs. W. prepared a pan of soup, ready for me to heat up at lunchtime.

The first thing I wanted before anything else was a shower. Why is it that hospitals, which are meant to be astringently clean, make you feel grubby and sticky?

Mrs. W. insisted on waiting till I was dressed in clean clothes before she allowed Becky to drive her to her own house, where she wanted to pick up some things for Karl. They both insisted they would call to see me again later, for which I was grateful. I felt wobbly and vulnerable, perhaps unconsciously fearing I might fall down and damage myself again.