Mr Toppit (11 page)

So when I turned away from Dr. Massingbird and the nurse and Martha, and rested my head against the wall, I wasn’t
crying because Arthur was dead. In fact, I said to them, rather aggressively, “This is nothing to do with him being dead,” in order to make the point. I just didn’t want Arthur to be in limbo. I couldn’t bear that. I knew there had to be a mistake. You don’t break your leg and die from it. I knew he must be one of the few—so very few, according to Adam, that it’s a real headache for the statisticians—who had been taken before their time.

I wiped my nose on my sleeve. Dr. Massingbird and the nurse gazed at me with great moony eyes. I made a half-hearted attempt to explain: “It just isn’t the right time for him,” I said.

Dr. Massingbird shook his head. “It never is the right time, is it?” he said gently. “Not for the people we love.” The nurse rearranged her mouth and made a moist sound with her lips to show solidarity.

“No, it can be, actually,” I said. “That’s the whole point. It can be exactly the right time.”

I saw unease in Dr. Massingbird’s eyes. He was about to say something when Martha clenched her fists, tilted her head back, opened her mouth and let out a baying noise.
“Ohhhh,”
she howled,
“can’t we just get on?”
Then her head fell forward into her hands and she held it tightly, as if she was trying to stop it coming off her shoulders.

I wasn’t precisely sure what the phrase “get on” meant in this context, the context of a man lying dead from a broken leg on one floor of a hospital and his widow and son standing in a room on another floor with a nurse and a doctor, trying to make sense of what had happened and what was going to happen. In the event, I didn’t have much time to think about it because the door opened and the context changed: there was Rachel.

• • •

I’m not quite sure what happened when Rachel began to scream, whether bleepers were bleeped or alarms sounded or whether it was simply the level of noise that was coming from her, but there was some real action now, both in our room and out of it. Even before the nurse had got outside the door and was shouting down the corridor, I could hear running footsteps.

One thing you could say about Martha was that she was good in a crisis. Even before Dr. Massingbird had got to Rachel, Martha had launched herself across the room and was flailing around on the floor practically on top of her. By this time Rachel was on her hands and knees making a terrifying array of noises. Actually, it might have been Martha making them. It was hard to tell. I had turned away and put my hands over my ears. I wanted to block the whole day out, not only what was happening now but what had gone before: everything, every single thing.

Time must have passed, because when I turned back to face the room, the nurse was there, and so was Dr. Massingbird, with another man in a white coat. I couldn’t even see Rachel. They were bending over her. Dr. Massingbird held a syringe, and had obviously given her a shot of something. When they moved back, I saw Martha sitting on the floor with her back against the wall. Rachel was lying in a fetal position with her head on Martha’s lap making small whimpers while Martha stroked her hair. They looked like a deranged Madonna and Child in one of those
pietà
paintings we had studied in Art History.

Martha tried to get up. She stretched out her arm and I went over to help them up as best I could. Once on our feet, we put
our arms round each other. I could feel Martha shaking slightly. There was a silence. I was the first to speak: “What should we do now?”

“Well,” Dr. Massingbird said, letting out a deep breath, “if you would like to, you could see your father. They’ll be preparing him now, and then they’ll lay him out in the chapel of rest.” He turned to Martha. “Mrs. Hayman?”

I was quite surprised that this was a service a hospital offered. If you’d asked me I would have said it was more of an undertaker thing. Anyway, I took my hat off to Dr. Massingbird: it was brave of him to raise the subject of death again when his natural inclination must have been to talk about almost anything else. “You might like to have some time to gather yourselves first,” he added.

Martha was coming back to life. “I think we’ve gathered enough already,” she said.

Rachel was looking down and I put my hand on her cheek to bring her head up a little. “Rachel? Is that okay? Is that what you’d like to do?”

Her eyes were closed. She shook her head, but not to indicate that she didn’t want to, just that she couldn’t cope with making any decisions. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to, but I’d never seen a dead body before so it seemed silly not to take the opportunity. Anyway, Adam was sure to have a lot of questions.

I turned to Dr. Massingbird and said, “Thank you.” It was the best I could come up with. He offered his hand and I shook it.

Then he held it out to Martha. Her eyes filled with tears, and she did something really strange, even for Martha: she raised his hand to her lips and kissed it. “Thank you for all you’ve done,” she said. There was a little lump in my throat. It felt like the end of an era, like the last day of the summer holidays.

The nurse was standing by the door, holding it open for us. Martha was almost out of the room when she suddenly turned back to Dr. Massingbird and waved a finger at him. “You should research your family history,” she said. “Those Suffolk Massingbirds are more interesting than you know.” Then she followed the nurse out with halting steps.

I presume the majority of people leave hospitals alive, so I felt we were rather privileged to be seeing a side of one that few have the chance to see. Going to the chapel of rest felt like being taken backstage in a theater. We must have seemed a bedraggled trio as we trailed the nurse along the corridor. I imagined that we looked rather like the shell-shocked survivors of a train crash.

Eventually, we found ourselves in the lift going down to the ground floor, the same lift I’d been in earlier that afternoon. The doors parted and we came out into the lobby. “Not much further,” the nurse said. “It’s just down here through the double doors.”

As we turned away from the lobby, I saw Claude at the other end, sitting where I had been sitting, by the entrance. He got to his feet slowly and came across the lobby to where we were standing. Rachel was so knocked out by whatever the doctor had given her that she appeared scarcely to recognize him.

“He died, Claude,” I said. I didn’t know how else to handle it. He looked horrified. I hadn’t realized how embarrassing death could be. We stood there for a moment while Claude tried to think of something to say. His mouth opened, but nothing came out.

Once he did start to speak, though, he seemed unable to stop. “This is a tragedy, oh, it’s just unbelievable. I had no idea, I thought it was a broken—Damian will be so—”

Martha put a finger over her lips to indicate that she wanted him to stop talking. “Just look after Rachel,” she said, and propelled her into Claude’s arms. In order to put them round
her, he had to place the black bag he was holding on the ground. On it, in white lettering, it said, “KCIF Modesto—A Smoother Sound.”

“Claude,” I said, “where did you get that?”

“What?” he said.

“The bag, the black bag.”

“Oh, that? Some woman I was talking to. She asked me to keep an eye on it while she went to get something to eat.”

At that moment, the double doors opened and a woman came through them. She was short, probably Rachel’s height, but huge. She seemed to be wearing a black tent over her trousers. As soon as she saw us she stopped dead and stared at us warily, like a wild animal we had strayed across in the woods. Her eyes were taking everything in, darting from me to Rachel to Claude to Martha and back again. We had been studying this in Biology but I had never seen it in action before: neural receptors passing information to the brain for it to be processed so that—according to my class book—a hypothesis can be made based on the available evidence.

Martha, Rachel, and I were the available evidence, and the processing was quick: “He’s passed on, hasn’t he?” the woman said. “He’s gone.”

Martha’s eyes were wide with astonishment. She must have been completely confused. I wasn’t—I had seen inside the black bag with the white lettering. For a second, I thought the woman was going to flee, but then her body sagged as if some pressure had been released. The blood rushed to her face and her mouth opened in a great silent cry and she rocked back and forth as tears rolled down her red cheeks.

I had seen people cry, of course I had, but not like this. Her grief seemed totally naked. When we had cried, Martha and
Rachel and I, I knew we had really been crying for ourselves, everything overlaid with our own fear. This woman was crying like a child, grief so focused and concentrated it was shockingly pure. And just as you would have stopped and comforted a strange child you found weeping alone in the street, Martha, almost as a reflex, opened her arms and the woman stumbled into them.

When we were younger Rachel and I used to call them “The Rhymes.” It had been our secret name for Martha and Arthur, useful for talking about them in front of other people—or, indeed, in front of them—without anyone knowing. Now we were older it had fallen into disuse: too implicitly affectionate to generate the appropriate level of parental hostility required by angry adolescents. But I thought of it as we stood round Arthur’s body. It would be the last time I saw him and Martha together. Now that he was gone, there was no one for her to rhyme with: we could hardly make it singular and just call her “The Rhyme.”

I don’t suppose there are rules that say only the immediate family are allowed to see the body of the deceased, but you might wonder why we had brought Laurie and Claude with us to the chapel of rest. If Rachel had been capable of speech, she would have argued that Claude was the next best thing to family, and as for Laurie, well, it would have been cruel to exclude her after she had wept on Martha’s shoulder and spluttered out her story.

As she told it, it did pass through my mind that Arthur’s death would have been marginally easier if Laurie had not muddied the waters with the business of the so-called broken leg,
but I suppose that if there was ever a time to be forgiving, this was it. In her own way she had done the best she could—and at least someone was dripping hot salt tears for Arthur Hayman onto the scuffed linoleum floor of the Royal Waterloo Hospital. Without Laurie, we would have seemed like a group of zombies. She was like our official mourner. In Anthropology, the special class Adam and I had chosen because Mrs. Farrell, the teacher, was reputed not to wear any knickers, we had learned that in ancient Tahitian culture the designated mourner would parade through the dead person’s settlement, carrying a weapon edged with shark’s teeth that he would use against anyone who got in his way—not an inappropriate metaphor for Laurie, as it turned out.

As we were led into the chapel, I was so nervous that I thought I was going to be sick, but as soon as I saw Arthur I felt curiously calm. He was lying on a kind of plinth, with a blanket covering all of him except his head. Under the cover, you could see the shape of his body and I wondered if those really were his legs that I could see outlined, or whether they were so crushed that they had put rolled-up blankets in their place so his body wouldn’t appear damaged. The curious thing was how normal he looked, except for one thing: he was unmistakably dead. It didn’t seem to me that he was in limbo. His time probably had come.

It’s difficult to know what to do in these circumstances. Rachel and Martha were by his feet clinging to each other. Claude stood at his head and Laurie and I were opposite one another on either side of him. Whatever Rachel had been given by the doctor was wearing off and her eyes were brimming with tears. Martha was shaking her head. Laurie had a curious lost look on her face. The room was very silent. It was
as if we were playing that game in which the first person to make a noise loses a life.

Martha was the first to break. She made a strange kind of gurgling sound in her throat, which seemed to release some of the pressure that had built up in the room. Rachel began to cry in earnest, with squeaky noises like a rusty hinge. Claude seemed slightly desperate, as if he knew he was meant to do something but wasn’t sure what. I wished I could be in the room on my own: they were all cramping my style. Left to myself I would have reached out and touched Arthur, maybe to hold his hand or move the thin wisps of hair off his forehead, but I wasn’t going to do it with them there.

After a while Martha caught Claude’s eye and gestured with her head towards the door. Glad to have something to do, he went over and opened it. Martha propelled Rachel out, and I followed them into the waiting room reluctantly: I wasn’t convinced we had done the things we were meant to do in the chapel of rest, but we were new to this, and there was nobody to give us instructions. The door shut behind us. We stood for a moment, unsure what to do next.

“What about … What
is
her name?” Martha said, pointing towards the chapel where Laurie still was. Her voice was croaky.

“Laurie,” said Claude.

“How do you think it’s spelled?”

“I don’t know. With
ie
at the end? I mean, not like the lorry you drive.”

“Well, she’s the size of one,” Martha said. “Isn’t that an odd name for a woman?”

Rachel suddenly gave a gulping sob and laid her head on Claude’s shoulder. Martha put her arms round both of them so they made a small circle. “The boy …” Rachel began, but she
was crying so much she couldn’t get any more out. Now, in the face of Rachel’s inarticulate grief, the rest of us unraveled. Even Claude’s face crumpled, and he had to remove his little round spectacles so he could wipe his eyes. Rachel drew in several shuddering gasps of air, but every time she opened her mouth to speak she stumbled at the last fence. She had one last go: she moved her head from side to side as if summoning strength. “The boy in
Little Women
is called Laurie,” she whispered.

Tears were trickling down Claude’s face now. “Isn’t that one of the sisters?”