The Devil's Music (38 page)

    Grampy goes on sleeping. His mouth drops open. The food trolley comes in and another nurse looks at the chart at the end of Grampy’s bed and then puts a hand lightly on his forehead. He closes his mouth but doesn’t wake up. ‘He’s all done in,’ she says. ‘He has so many visitors.’

    Who else comes to visit Grampy? Mum must come, of course.

    ‘Has my mum been?’

    ‘Today?’

    ‘Any time.’

    ‘Couldn’t tell you, sweetheart, sorry.’

    I can’t sit by the high white bed any longer, but I can’t go without saying goodbye. I’ll leave Grampy a message on the bedside cabinet, something that only he will understand. From the pocket of my school shorts I pull out the key to my bike padlock on its string fob. I put the key on the cabinet by the browny-pink plastic hearing-aid box. I’ll have to walk home now. I pick up my satchel and slip my arms though the straps so it’s on my back. I push through the swinging doors and out into the long corridor. I’ll leave my blazer here too, with Grampy, so he knows I’ll be back tomorrow before school.

I sleep under my bed. Susie is on a camp bed in my room because Auntie Jean is in Susie’s bed.

    The telephone rings in the night and Father comes out of the bedroom and knocks on Auntie Jean’s door and their voices whisper. Later the front door opens and closes, a car starts up: Father going out to a patient.

    In the morning there’s the sound of the wireless in the kitchen. It’s not Auntie Jean’s Light Programme. I put my fingers up to the sack stuff on the underside of the mattress, pressing to feel the metal springs.

    Auntie Jean listens to the Light Programme, but when Father is there the wireless does not go on at breakfasttime. Today there is no other noise except for the radio. There is no cigarette smoke. It is too quiet for Auntie Jean and Father, who are always cross with each other in the mornings. Father bangs his porridge saucepan, Auntie Jean clatters her teacup and saucer together to take them out to the back porch because Father will not allow her to smoke inside. When Father’s out on call Auntie Jean ignores his rules and smokes in the kitchen. She opens the window and waves a tea towel about when she’s finished, pulling faces and making us laugh.

    Honey’s claws clatter across the kitchen lino and there’s a quiet voice.

    I roll out from under the bed, go down the stairs in my pyjamas and push open the kitchen door.

    Mrs Hubbard looks up from where she is sitting at the kitchen table with Honey at her feet. She is not wearing her overall and she’s stroking Honey behind the ears. Honey’s tail begins a slow wag across the floor and a drool hangs from her mouth. Mrs Hubbard is smoothing down her skirt and asking what I would like for breakfast. She says there is porridge that Father left to soak the night before.

    It’s far too early for Mrs Hubbard to be here.

    I pull up my pyjama bottoms. ‘Where are they?’

    ‘Well,’ Mrs Hubbard’s hand rises to the sausage-shaped curls at her neck and pats them. ‘They’ve been called away to the hospital and ...’ She turns her back, goes to the stove, stirs the porridge. ‘Better get ready for school now, dear. Mr Hubbard will drive you today.’

    A man with his shirt untucked comes out of our sitting room holding an open newspaper in fat red fingers like the butcher’s. Rain hits the windows hard.

    And if they were both called away it means,

    It means that

    ‘Good morn—’

    Under the newspaper, past him, to the front door as Mrs Hubbard rushes out and squeaks, ‘It’s pouring!’ I reach for the latch, turning it, then the front path, the alleyway, the bridge, the railway line. My slippers slop so I take them off and wear them on my hands. There’s pain pulling tighter and tighter in my chest like a stitch.

    At the hospital there are too many doors and corridors. I get lost.

    I lie down by the grey wheels of a trolley. My feet are hot and cut and bleeding and I can’t find where I’ve hidden the stick to pick the lock to get out and something hurts very very badly in my chest and for it to hurt so badly I must have hidden the stick to pick the lock in there, in my chest, so I tear open my pyjama top and the buttons roll on the floor and I must open my chest and if don’t I won’t get out and I will drown in seven minutes.

I ran amok, they told me afterwards, dribbling and shrieking in the wind like a maniac. But I only remember the pain, throbbing like a wound. And a raging thirst. Mucus gathered like glue in my mouth and throat. Colours blurred, fluid in the sway of a curtain, the glitter of metal bed frames and trolleys: water. Watching a crack in the ceiling, edges of cabinets, rippling shadows on the floor. The air dripped and trickled. It would come from somewhere.

    The thud of my heart: a fist. Dryness cracked my ribs, breath a sandpaper rasp. A tinkle of curtain-rings and the heave of a face as a doctor loomed over the bed.

    And the thirst.

    The doctor seemed to be saying something about tincture of hemp for the spasms but that couldn’t be right and at the periphery of my vision, something swirled like liquid in a dark corner of the ward. Every scratch of the doctor’s pencil startled me, soaked me again in a cold sweat. I had to drink.

    Someone leaned towards me, lifting a metal beaker to my lips. I glimpsed the transparent menace of the water’s surface, a slanting zero, and was flung from side to side. They held me down. The bed rattled with rage. Rain on the window. My back arched and twisted. My joints snapped from their sockets, bones splintered. My neck squeezed, locking. I was strangled, blood in my nails.

    On page 65, Clifford Ashley describes the most suitable method for trying a delirious patient to the bedposts in order to prevent exhaustion. Strips of sheeting should be used to tie the patient spread-eagled, passing a smooth round turn about the wrist or ankle and finishing with a Bowline close up around the bedposts so that it will neither bind nor work loose, yet can be easily untied.

   
it’s raining it’s pouring the old man is snoring

    A scream hurtled down the corridor and out into the black.

There’s a note in a plastic bag stuck to the sun-room door with a drawing pin. I lever it off with my penknife blade and unfold the paper.

    FRIDAY, it says.

    I look at my watch, but it doesn’t tell me what day it is.

    COME AND SEE ME AS SOON AS YOU CAN. IT’S IMPORTANT. SXX

    I’m wet and cold from last night’s walking. I probably smell. I hang the sodden sheepskin jacket on the back of a kitchen chair and run a bath.

    Sometime later I wake, in cold bathwater, to loud knocking at the front door. I wrap a towel around myself, but when I limp to the front door there’s no one. I’m heading back to the bathroom when the knocking starts again, this time on the sun-room door. Bloody Hell.

    Her long legs. The plait with its escaping corkscrews of hair. I reach for her wiry warmth.

    ‘God, you stink of garlic!’

    ‘Olives. I stole some from your box of supplies – broke in. You stink yourself. Get back in that bath.’ Her mouth wobbles, but it’s a sort of smile.

    I have never seen her cry. That’s one of the things that brought me back.

    ‘For God’s sake!’ she exclaims when there’s no more hot water and when she sees my feet are blistered raw and when she picks up the sodden sheepskin jacket. She grabs the hospital blanket from the sofa, wraps me in it and holds me like a child, rubbing my back. ‘Come on you, stupid man. Let’s get you cleaned up.’ Then she takes me by the hand to her railway carriage house.

    She’s not gentle. She’s bossy and cross and ignores my erection.

    ‘I suppose you’ve been a nurse too,’ I say, as her fingers make quick circular movements over my scalp, lathering up shampoo that smells of apples. She doesn’t say anything. Soap stings my eyes as she rinses the shampoo off. For a moment she holds one of my hands in hers, studying the palm, and she kisses my fingertips again, as she did weeks ago, in the sun room. Then she hands me the nail brush.

    She fetches me dry clothes from The Siding. They smell of the leaf litter linoleum. ‘Get dressed. Once you’ve eaten something, we’ll talk.’

    She leaves me in the bathroom and bangs about in the kitchen.

    She pushes a full bowl of some sort of thick brown broth towards me. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I’m not hungry. You eat, I’ll talk. It’s only left-over veggies.’ She rips hunks of bread from a loaf and sits down opposite. ‘I won’t waste time telling you what I think about the way you’ve behaved.’

    I look up, startled at the anger in her voice.

    ‘No,’ she holds up a hand, palm towards me. ‘The deal is, you eat and I talk. You can say your bit later.’ She picks up her lighter and turns it over and over. ‘First things first: Susie is still in hospital.’

    She shakes her head, gestures that I should keep eating.

    ‘She had eclampsia and lost the baby but they now think she will survive. It’s been touch and go.’

    Susie’s voice on the phone – excited as a child.

    The steam from the soup dampens my face. I wipe my sleeve across my eyes.

    Sarah’s hand, when it reaches across the table top for her Rizlas, is shaking. She takes out a paper.

    ‘Keep eating,’ she says. ‘That night—’ she flashes me a glance ‘—Susie had driven down, alone, late, because she was worried about you. Earlier that day she’d been to the doctor’s. There was concern about pre-eclampsia. Her blood pressure had shot up, she had protein in her urine, she was breathless. They wanted her in straight away. But earlier that afternoon she spoke to you on the phone and the line went dead. Richard told her she was being ridiculous. Reminded her you’re a grown man, etcetera. They argued. He said he’d drive her to the hospital in the morning. He put her to bed. She crept out of the house and drove down here. The fit that she had in your kitchen was the eclampsia. Andrew, she could have died.’

    I have been lifting the spoon in an automatic, measured way between the bowl and my mouth but when Sarah pauses to seal her roll-up and light it, I stop.

    ‘She’s OK?’

    Sarah nods and takes a drag, her cheeks sucking in with the smoke. ‘It was close. She’s been moved now, nearer home.’ She looks me steadily in the eye. ‘Andrew, you do remember? Her convulsions?’

    I try, but I can’t see it.

    Sarah rubs her face with both hands. ‘We didn’t get to hospital in time to save the baby.’

    I rip some bread to mop up the last of the soup, watch the brown liquid seep into the rounded spaces left by air. I focus on these, the air pockets filling with soup, thinking that bread is a sort of froth, cooked, and how strange it is, the way the bread itself stretches and there are these spaces  ...

    Sarah’s voice cuts in. ‘Susie said this disappearing act of yours is not the first. She blames herself, for giving you the news about your mother over the phone. Says she should have known you’d go off on one.’

   
Go off on one.

    ‘You can’t keep doing this to people, Andrew. I’m not saying any of this is your fault – the baby or anything – Susie already had pre-eclampsia – but ...’ an intake of breath as she takes another drag on her roll-up. I watch her hand shaking and wonder what she’s been doing while I’ve been away.