Inchworm (6 page)

Mum gets her a cup of tea.

‘You need whisky, not tea,’ she says, and Precious’s mum smiles through her tears.

‘What’s the
MDC
?’ I ask.

‘The Movement for Democratic Change,’ says Agnes and blows her nose.

I am surrounded by sadness these days, when I should be enveloped in happiness. After all, I have survived. I am a survivor. I only have one real problem – keeping well. Most people in the world have life-threatening problems – war, starvation, fear of imprisonment or torture, no clean water, fatal diseases with no hope of treatment, like Aids and typhoid fever; earthquake, floods, drought. They might be homeless, exiled, old and poor, or motherless, orphans with no hope. Life is very hard for most of the earth’s population. We are very lucky here. My Grandpop always said that. We have freedom of speech; we don’t get put in prison when we disagree with the government of the day. Our poets aren’t tortured as they are in some parts of the world. Dictators are frightened of poets because poets say what they think. Their poems can make people into dissidents. I think poets are great. I really must write some more poems.

I think of being in Kenya when I was little: the warmth of the air, the smells of pepper, the monkeys and butterflies.

‘You’ll be able to work in the
UK
, won’t you?’ Mum asks Agnes.

‘Maybe later, but I must get help to look after my daughters. And I cannot leave my son to care for himself just yet.’

Here is a poem I have written about Kenya.

Bamburi

I am on the beach all day,

find coral, cowries, puffer fish washed in by the sea,

watch monkeys fly from the sausage tree.

Catch huge millipedes to place on my arms,

race big butterflies folding fan-like through the palms,

chase dragons stalking dappled gloom of casuarina,

walk with the tall baboons.

Cotton-wool air filters scent of pepper,

sweet potato, banana, mango, papaya,

coconut, Mombasa meat market.

‘What’s vociferous, Mum?’

‘What do you think it means?’

‘Voice… loud-voiced?’

‘More or less, yes. Look it up in the dictionary.’

VOCIFEROUS—MAKING A LOUD OUTCRY; NOISY OR CLAMOROUS

We’re having our morning walk on Parliament Hill, wrapped up against a gusting east wind. The trees are still bare, their thin branches like arms stretched up to the sky begging for sun and warmth. Dry brown leaves rustle and rush across the grass like demented hamsters. A large party of pigeons rise from the grass in front of us. They flap around our heads in a blur of blue and grey, smelling of musty chicken food. (Grandma used to cook potato skins and porridge oats in a pressure cooker for her chickens. I quite like the smell.) There’s a woman with a little boy flying a kite. She looks sad. I wonder if her husband has left them. Mum used to fly kites with me here when we lived in London, when I was much younger. Where was Daddy then?

We watch the yellow kite tug at the string, the woman doing all the work, the little boy wandering off to chase a small gathering of Black-headed gulls, which run and rise together squealing. We stop to rest for a moment on a wooden bench.
Wayne loves Amy. Scott is fit.
Is it graffiti when it’s incised on wood? A flurry of leaves blows in a circle, a mini whirlwind. The road where Daddy lives looks like it’s been laid with a leaf-patterned laminate.

‘Mum, I’m going to phone and see if Summer’s around. She might come and see me.’ Summer is the only one of my old school friends in London that I have kept in touch with, sort of. Though she doesn’t know about my transplant.

No reply. I expect she’s away for the weekend. I don’t really have any other friends now in London. I can’t wait to go back to Cornwall and walk along a beach or go birding with Brett.

Today, I find a peacock butterfly in my bedroom. Poor thing, it’s much too cold for it outside, but now it’s awake I have to let it out into the garden. Who knows what will become of it – it could be part of a robin’s lunch. It won’t survive long, but at least it will have a moment’s freedom in the cold blue sky.

Daddy is back from Hungary but is staying elsewhere – with his latest girlfriend, Annika (leggy, blonde, big tits, not her own). He’s so predictable. There are photos of her pouting in his room. She should be wearing a
T
-shirt like the ones I’ve seen in a shop in St Ives, with a message on –
I wish these were brains –
an arrow pointing to her tits. He’s taken his car, though, and we’re renting one.

Mum invited three of her old London friends to supper, but one has cancelled as she has a cold and I mustn’t be exposed to germs. There’s so many things to be scared of post-transplant, or rather, be aware of. We’re having chicken, lentil and vegetable soup, a green salad and a lemon meringue pie. I made the salad with roasted sunflower seeds on top, lemon and olive oil. I mustn’t have mayonnaise as it’s high-risk for food poisoning, ditto raw egg, pâté and partially cooked meats. I don’t really like pink meat anyway.

Mimi is half-Italian, half-Australian and larger than life – which means she talks loudly, swears a lot and wears outrageous clothes, false eyelashes and scarlet nails. She’s
The Italian Job.
Celeste, fierce and stern and chic is from Paris. She wears a black trouser suit and has short blonde hair and pale make-up –
The French Connection.
She smokes, but Mum doesn’t let her do it indoors, sends her outside in the rain and shuts the door so the smoke doesn’t drift in. Mum is… I haven’t decided what movie Mum is yet.
Mommie Dearest
! Of course. I must ask Mum if her name really is Lara or if it’s Laura or Lorna. Daddy might have made her change it to Lara because of
Doctor Zhivago
. I could call Alistair Dr Z maybe? What is Daddy, though?
The Vanishing
.

I go to bed early with my book and Rena Wooflie –
The Big Sleep
– no, an ordinary sleep, I hope. The Big Sleep means death.

It’s good to hear Mum laughing. Mimi’s voice becomes more Australian and less Italian when she’s had a few glasses of wine.

‘Kill for a ciggie,’ I hear her say. ‘Gave it up New Year and I’ve put on ten kilos.’

Valentine’s Day – I forgot. One card, hand-made, with a red heart and blue arrow surrounded by kisses – luv yu lots, xxx no signature – must be Gabriel. And a box of flowers from the Scillies – Paper Whites – from Brett. The small card inside says: ‘
Remember the islands? We’ll go again one day, Brett x
.’

The flowers smell of cold sea air and dark earth. I phone to thank him and he tells me they have frog and toad spawn in their pond. I love tadpoles: that big black mouth with a tail. I wonder if our tiny pond has any life in it? We should have, as a giant toad lives in the grow-bag under our garden seat. I can hear seagulls at his end of the phone. I do miss the sound of gulls. Why hasn’t Daddy got an animal? His flat seems so un-homelike without even a single goldfish.

Mum has a card too, from Alistair. She’s rather old to have a Valentine’s card. It makes her smile and cry. She won’t let me see what it says.

Back at the cardiac rehab clinic (I have to go back to hospital twice a week for six weeks). I’m doing fine, they say. But when I mention bird-watching and then the pigeons on Parliament Hill, one of the doctors tells me to stay away from them.

‘But why?

‘
C. Neoformans
.’

‘What’s that?’

‘
Cryptococcus Neoformans
– it’s a fungus that’s a major threat to people with weak immune systems. It appears in bird droppings, and you might breathe it in. Caged birds are to be avoided too. You don’t have a parrot, do you?’

I shake my head. Grandpop had a parrot and I was scared of its sharp beak. It was jealous of me.

‘Budgie? Canary?’

‘No.’

‘Better not take chances, Gussie.’

I think of the thick cloud of dusty birds and hope I haven’t inhaled the deadly fungus. Oh dear, does that mean I can never get close to flocks of any birds or is it only pigeons I must beware of? ‘Be afraid. Be very afraid.’ (Geena Davis, in
The Fly.
)

One of Daddy’s favourite directors is Alfred Hitchcock, who made a film about birds suddenly ganging up against people and attacking them. It was originally a story by Daphne Du Maurier, who lived in Cornwall and wrote
Rebecca
and lots of other romantic adventure stories.

I’ve had a terrible thought: what about Paradise Park? It’s one of my favourite places in Cornwall. They have all sorts of birds there in huge aviaries and they breed threatened species like choughs. One of the staff gave me some blue and green macaw feathers once. Should I throw them away? I don’t want to.

On our walk today we went into the corner shop and a small boy in front of us in the queue was grizzling because he wanted to eat his bar of chocolate straight away.

‘When we’ve gone past the witch’s house you can have it,’ his mother said.

When I was little we used to drive past a house with a neon ‘Guest House’ sign, and I used to hide my eyes in terror because I thought it said ghost house. Presumably
he
isn’t frightened of witches. We walk as far as the pond and watch the swans, feathers ruffled forwards as they drift in the strong wind. They always look cross, like Flo, our alpha female cat. She has black spots each side of her nose and they make her look like a bad-tempered swan.

Joggers run past with red legs.

Precious and his Mum are very excited. His father is coming to London soon with the two girls. His mum looks ecstatic at the prospect of seeing them; they have been apart for nine months.

There are daffodils everywhere on the way home – in window boxes and on little front lawns and in swathes on the Heath. I like the ordinary single flowers, not double ones that fall over when they are wet. No, I like all of them – living lovely flowers, the brightness of them. After each dark winter we are given daffodils, like a huge smile from God. Except that I don’t think I believe in God. I don’t know what I believe in. I suppose I believe in the human spirit. Our ability to overcome bad experiences, like the loss of loved ones. I am feeling less unhappy about the death of my grandparents, for example. We have to say goodbye to our old people when they come to the end of their lives. They have to make room for the rest of us. It’s sad, but it’s life. And I am alive. Mum says the daffs are blooming early this year especially for me.

‘Mum, do you think Precious’s family had to pay for his transplant?’

‘I don’t know, darling, I imagine they did.’

I wonder how much a new heart costs? And how much for a pair of lungs. And they would have to pay for the surgeon’s time, the anaesthetist’s time. And then there’s paying for the nursing and drugs he’ll have to take for the rest of his life.

‘We didn’t have to pay anything for my new heart and lungs, did we?’

‘No Guss, our taxes help pay for the National Health Service so all our treatment is free – sort of.’

METAPHOR—A FIGURE OF SPEECH BY WHICH A THING IS SPOKEN OF AS BEING THAT WHICH IT ONLY RESEMBLES, AS WHEN A FEROCIOUS MAN IS CALLED A TIGER

PSYCHOANALYST—ONE WHO PRACTICES PSYCHOANALYSIS, A METHOD OF INVESTIGATION AND PSYCHOTHERAPY WHEREBY NERVOUS DISEASES OR MENTAL AILMENTS ARE TRACED TO FORGOTTEN HIDDEN CONCEPTS IN THE PATIENT’S MIND AND TREATED BY BRINGING THESE TO LIGHT

The Geometer (earth measurer) moths or Geometridae are a family of the order Lepidoptera. Its caterpillar lacks most of the prolegs of other Lepidoptera caterpillars. Equipped with appendages at both ends of the body, a caterpillar will clasp with its front legs and draw up the hind end, then clasp with the hind end (prolegs) and reach out again for a new front attachment, so it looks like it is measuring its journey. The caterpillars are accordingly called loopers, spanworms, or inchworms (they are about one inch long). They tend to be grey, green or brownish and hide from predators by fading into the background or resembling twigs. Some have humps or filaments. They are seldom hairy or gregarious. Typically they eat leaves. However, some eat lichen, flowers or pollen. Some, such as the Eupithecia, are even carnivorous.

from a pocket-book on moths

I do like moths. I had no idea the inchworm was a moth caterpillar.

There was a song about inchworms measuring marigolds in that old Danny Kaye musical,
Hans Christian Andersen –
he wonders why they don’t stop to look at how beautiful the marigolds are. I always think marigolds smell of raw rhubarb – earthy and sharp. I suppose the lyrics mean that you shouldn’t try only to scientifically assess something that’s lovely; you should enjoy it for itself. You can’t measure beauty.

Moths have such lovely names: latticed heath; brimstone moth; purple thorn; scalloped hazel; swallow-tailed moth; feathered thorn; peppered moth; dotted border; mottled umber; clouded border; willow beauty; clouded silver; the dingy footman, the flame shoulder; the dew moth; bordered white; common white wave; light emerald; (I don’t like spring cankerworm much, though); small fan-footed wave; cream wave; small dusty wave; juniper carpet; may highflyer; winter moth; the streak; ash pug; lime-speck pug. There’s loads more. Naming them must be a bit like naming decorating paints. You have to keep coming up with interesting but descriptive words, like Apple-Blossom White, or Coated Tongue Pink. I made up that last one. I could make up my own colour chart easily: Squirrel Red and, of course, Squirrel Grey; Pulmonary Atresia Grey (mauve grey like I used to be); Post-op Pink; Nurse White; London Grass (that’s a sort of grey-brown rather than green); Hospital Green – or Theatre Gown Green; Jealousy – a violent lime green (Bridget feels in colour); Painful Purple (see above); Silver Lining; Lightning; (the last two are shades of white); Rain Grey. I’ll think up more, later. It’s the sort of thing I do when I can’t sleep and I’ve read too much and made my eyes sore.