The Autograph Man (36 page)

“All I
meant,
” tried Alex again, “is that this business, you know . . . it’s insecure. Now, as it happens, I’m just the agent on those Kittys, you can believe that or not,” Alex bellowed over a flurry of International Gestures for incredulity. “Look, I’m not really fussed—but yes, if this puts me in the big league, it puts me in the big league. You’ve got to make something at this game, haven’t you? It’s not a vocation. I don’t want to turn out like bloody Duchamp, or something, minus a pot to bloody piss in.”

Here the vibe changed once more, it changed distinctly. It got quieter. Not just amongst the three of them, but to a radius of about twelve feet.

“What?” asked Alex.

Lovelear shook his head and rolled his eyes. Dove had on a certain kind of English face which is that island’s mild substitute for the wordless disgust of the Spanish fist, or the excoriating Italian glare, the French gasp or the Russian wail. The face that says:
That’s not really on, now, is it?

“
What?
What is it?” asked Alex.

“I actually tried to tell you earlier?” said Lovelear snootily, looking away. “But big man couldn’t be bothered to listen.”

“Will you just—”

“Duchamp’s dying,” said Dove.

3.

Alex, like everybody, held hospitals in the highest, purest dread and loathing. To come in with a bump and leave with the baby—this is the only grace available in a hospital. Other than that, there is only pain. The
concentration of pain.
Hospitals are unique in this concentration. There are no areas in the world dedicated to the concentration of pleasure (theme parks and their like are a concentration of the
symbols
of pleasure, not pleasure itself), there are no buildings dedicated to laughter, friendship or love. They’d probably be pretty gruesome if they existed, but would they smell of decay’s argument with disinfectant? Would people walk through the hallways, weeping? Would the shops sell only flowers and slippers and mints? Would the beds (so ominous, this!) have wheels?

“Brian,” said Alex, lowering himself into that too low, too orange, awkward plastic chair, “I brought you some mints. And some flowers. Daffs.”

From the head to the chest, Alex’s old trading partner was almost unchanged, but after this he radically tapered off. When you’re for it, your childhood legs come back to you, but they can’t take you anywhere. Brian’s were twiggish, white, without hair or muscle.

“I had a dream,” said Brian faintly. “Or maybe . . . and Kerry, the nurse, she was marrying Leon, in Holland somewhere, or Belgium. Flowers, all over, and cheese and pastries, like. Lovely. Feast, it was. Went on for days, seemed liked days anyway. She wore peach—I can’t remember about him. But you weren’t there, were you? Weren’t many there, really. Weren’t enough. Flowers and bells and cheeses. Beautiful.”

“Daffs, Brian,” said Alex helplessly. He was unmanned by tubes. Going in, going out. And beeping machines. And that pool of dried blood trapped under colorless tape that sat in a hollow of Brian’s pulsing neck.

“It was funny,” said Brian, opening one eye, “I thought he was queer, see. But there he was wiv her, dancing in the hall! Flowers on the floor!”

Now he undertook a series of burps, each one followed by a terrible wince. His hands were up on his chest, picking at the hairs, that final self-groom. He burped for the tenth time and this one was too much, it seemed; he moaned—pure, concentrated pain—and thrust his face into the pillow.

“Shall I get someone, Brian? Shall I—”

The ward was open plan, men, women, and Alex stood and searched it for help, for he was still in that world where pain, even the smallest hint of pain, is front-page news. It deserves attention from all quarters, demands the laying on of hands. Alex went to Dr. Huang for knee ache, for the
suggestion
of knee ache, for the
twinge.
And then you pass over into this world where the pain of Duchamp, acute as it may be, is graded on a rising scale against the man by the window who cannot breathe without assistance. The woman with no breasts watching TV. This, the cardiac ward, brought all sorts. People who had been traveling along their own singular road of pain—cancer, road accident, brain accident—now united in suffering as their hearts decided to stop or skip or explode. Brian Duchamp, as the matron had explained to Alex on arrival, had been undergoing the removal of his sole remaining cancerous kidney when ten minutes from the end of the operation his heart objected. “Lucky, really,” she had said, reaching for a ringing phone. “Now we know he has a bad heart. We wouldn’t have known otherwise, now would we?”
Lucky?

“Excuse me . . .” began Alex, to a passing nurse, but something was bleeping on the other side of the room and she rushed to it. Brian burped again, moaned and seized Alex’s hand.

“I don’t fink I’m gonner make Thursday, mate,” he said, closing his eyes. A very pretty young man in white came and stood by them and watched a machine, suspended above the bed, where the pain of Brian, fed down various tubes, was represented in lines and numbers and beeps.

“He’s making these weird burps,” said Alex beseechingly. The boy turned, in no great hurry. His name tag said
LEON.
He was camp in the strict sense that none of his gestures were useful or necessary. With a pronounced lisp, he explained to Alex that without kidneys, stomach juices have nowhere to go. The toxins attack. A machine would come later to clean Brian’s blood for him.

“When? When will it come?”

“When the doctor says.”

“But he’s in pain. He’s in a lot of pain.”

“He’s got a button. That has painkillers in it. He just has to press it.”

“But he’s
pressing
it, isn’t he. And it obviously isn’t bloody
enough,
is it.”

“Enough would be too much,” said the boy primly, and walked away.

“I was dreaming it, about Leon,” said Duchamp sadly.

“What, Brian?” said Alex, still glaring at the ironed creases in Leon’s trousers, still contemplating running through the ward with one of the emergency fire extinguishers and using it to put an unholy dent in the boy’s skull.

“I didn’t go to no Belgium. I won’t be out of this bed, Tandem. Not in this life. That’s a fact. It’s jumped out of the kidney, you know. ’S all over me body.
In
it, I should say. They wos gonner come up with a cure, at one point, as I remember,” said Brian, and tried to smile. One of those vicious burps came reeking from him again. “Oooh . . . oh,
God.
Years ago, they were gonner cure it. What happened to that, eh? Iron lungs and pig’s hearts and miracle cures. Who arsed all that up?”

He drew one arm from under the cover and Alex was horrified afresh by a roaming bruise, purple-hearted, yellow-edged, that covered the underside of his forearm. Brian studied this, and the fistula that lay under the skin, with disinterested eyes.

“You go to the market,” said Brian bullishly. “Tell ’em my pitch is still my pitch, tell ’em to keep it for me, that’s all.”

“ ’Course, Brian. I’ll do that, of course.”

“What they sayin’ about me, then, them nurses?”

Nothing good. On Thursday night, as Nurse Wilkes told it, he had collapsed in his stairwell. That same night he was in hospital. On Friday they scanned him. On Saturday he had final-stage renal failure (you don’t have it, really, until you
know
you have it). On Sunday at five they operated to remove the cancerous kidney. During that he had a heart attack. Today, on Wednesday, the cancer was touring his body. His chance of becoming a full-time dialysis patient (itself, only half a life, a life half-lived by a machine) was minimal. All Alex could think of as he sat on a gaudy sofa in a quiet corner (“Shall we go to a quiet corner?”) listening to this staggering list, was this: religious war. This was Jerusalem of the cells. This was Belfast of the lower belly. The escalation. The concentration of pain.

“They’re saying you’re all right. They’re saying Duchamp, he’s . . . he’ll be all right. With some dialysis and . . .”

Something yellow came from Duchamp’s mouth and had body enough to wriggle wormishly down his chin. Alex passed him tissues and, with heaving stomach, took back the package a moment later. Unable to see a bin, he placed it in his coat pocket.

“Like a snowflake in a fahkin’ fire, I’ll be all right,” said Duchamp, and started a laugh soon cut short by a mighty groan, and a jolt. He was looking, with real panic, at his groin area, and Alex in response lifted in his seat, his hands hovering above the area of corresponding blanket, as if this might help.

“Dick on a pipe,” explained Duchamp once the crisis was over, and Alex did not inquire any further.

“Have you filled in your lunch preferences, Mr. Duchamp?” asked a curvy nurse who had materialized at the end of the bed. “Do you know what you’d like for lunch?”

“Your tits,” said Duchamp and laughed a great deal. Despite himself, Alex joined in.

Nurses are famous stoics, but they are not above revenge. There was something very clear in her face that said a price would be extracted for this later, once Alex had left, a physical humiliation of some kind. Duchamp, too, seemed to sense this, and bowed his head.

“No, really, Nurse, nuffing, nuffing, nuffing. Can’t. Won’t go down.”

“We’ll see about that,” she said curtly, and moved on. Alex watched Duchamp’s face complete its transformation from leering bully to fearful child.

“They’re nice in here,” said Brian meekly, pressing his button. “Do their best, you know. I like the black ones better, though. More cheerful. Oh
Gawd . . . awww . . .
”

Alex sat silently for another ten minutes, an effort of the most colossal will. He would be anywhere but here. He was unable to take his mind or eyes off the man in the next bed, who was much, much too young to be in this place. He was an affront to Alex’s own sense of himself, this out-of-place youth. It was obscene. There is a time and a place for youth and it’s not in a cardiac ward.
Excuse me
—this is what you wanted to demand of the nearest nurse—
exactly why is that man dying? Doesn’t he have anything better to do? Shouldn’t he be in school?
Hospitals are called St. Mary’s, St. Stephen’s, St. Somebody’s. This one was St. Christopher’s. They should all be called Job’s. Job is the rightful patron of hospitals. Job has guts. Job would ask: Why this young man? Why the children’s ward? Why (and this last one is almost impossible) the babies in intensive care? Why do babies get intensively sick? What is going
on
here?

“Brian,” said Alex, recovering his breath from this uphill train of thought, “Brian, I have to go, I think.”

Brian had just concluded another tiny unit of sleep, the stuff which comes between the pain. He opened his eyes.

“Tandem. ’Fore I forget. That Kitty. Make anything on that Kitty?”

“Yes,” said Alex. He had no idea where that Kitty had gone. It had evaporated. It had spiraled away, like burnt paper up a chimney, along with the rest of last week.

“Yeah? You managed to sell it, then?”

“Yes,”
said Alex, emphatically, and reached for his bag. He drew out his checkbook from a pocket and dug around in Brian’s dark cupboard for a pen.

“How much? A lot?”

“Fifteen grand.”

“Fifteen
grand
?”

“Yes. She died yesterday.”

“Yesterday?”

“Yes. Prices rocketed. I went to the Columbard. Flogged it. Should have mentioned it earlier.”

“Fifteen?”

“Fifteen.”

“Bloody
hell.
”

They were Autograph Men again, for a moment. Just doing business.

“So, fifteen, minus my fifteen per—”

“Oi! Ten, more like.”

“Right. You’re right, Brian. You know what? Forget my commission. I’ve had a bit of a windfall myself, today.”

“You sure?”

“Certain.”

“Stone the
crows.
And they never figured it? Never ’ad a doubt?”

“Not for a second. You’re too good, Brian.”

Alex wrote out the check. He signed it. Held it up over Brian’s face.

“Fifteen thousand pounds and no pence,” read Brian, slowly, grandly, “Bloody
’ell.
Paid to the order of Brian Duchamp. That’s me. Though
Gawd
only knows when I’ll ’ave a chance to spend it. Signed by Alex-Li Tandem,” he said, taking a finger and pressing it gently to Alex’s wrist. “That’s
you.
”

4.

Couldn’t face the Underground,
being underground.
Couldn’t face a cab, either, those black theaters playing cockney monologues. Spat out by the hospital into the middle of nowhere, Alex finds instead an Overground station and a line that will take him tolerably close to Mountjoy. The platform is all cigarettes and schoolgirls. This feels like traveling. The train does not simply
appear
as it does underground. Underground you get impatient with lateness, because essentially you don’t believe the tube has any real distance to travel. It should just
be
here, and then
be
there. But with the Overground, you will wait, and quite happily wait, and smile when you can see it coming, the train, rounding the corner under the vast azure sky, chuffing past trees and houses.

The doors open. Everybody in the North of London knows this line affectionately as the Free Train. There are no machines and no one ever pays. Kids smoke on it, tramps live on it, and the mad like to sit in the lotus position and strike up conversations. It takes you to the big parks at the top of the city and the ghettos at the bottom. Teachers ride it because admin and essays can be laid out on the many empty seats and calmly dealt with. Nurses sleep on it. Buskers play concerts uninterrupted. Dogs are welcome. Sometimes you walk into a carriage and the clouds of marijuana smoke make your eyes sore. To look out of the windows at the passing world is to think that the city consists only of forests and schools and sporting arenas and swimming pools. The dark satanic mills must be somewhere else. The whole place looks like the Promised Land.

Alex phones Esther and speaks to Kitty. He tells her his news.