This Is the Life (8 page)

12

Crossing

I came out of the twenty-four-hour mini-mart and joined the crowd at the lights, waiting to cross the road. I had the usual stuff in the bag: chocolate bars, chips, cereal bars, bottles of juice, newspaper, spare toothbrush, toothpaste, that kind of thing—all the objects, necessary and unnecessary, that you carry to the hospital and put in the bedside cabinet, just in case and because you never know.

The road was a busy one, five lanes of thundering traffic, with preoccupied drivers at the wheels, thinking of deadlines and commitments and obligations; of clients who had to be visited and things that had to be done; of work and meals and children to be picked up; of marriages on the rocks; of love just lately come along, and love dying; of holiday arrangements and financial problems; of property; of rents; of mortgages; of concerts; of football games; of ideas for novels; of manuscripts dispatched and of fame and money to come.

We stood in a bunch, waiting for the green man to start flashing so that we could stream across and walk on up to the
hospital. The lights took a long time to change. Across the road from us was another group of people waiting to come to where we were, as if in confirmation of the other man's grass being believed to be eternally greener and the necessity of investigating that conjecture to prove or disprove it.

Plenty of individuals had already poked the button to change the lights, but as more people came along, more of them gave it an extra prod, maybe to be on the safe side, maybe from impatience and anxiety, maybe because they thought the rest of us looked like the kind of simpleminded types who would stand at crossings indefinitely, never taking the initiative, but resigned to waiting for fate to intervene on our behalf.

I looked around as we waited and I saw that almost every other person there was the same as me—holding a bag from the mini-mart or clutching an armful of purchases. It was all the same stuff too, all the things that people take to those laid up in hospitals: fruit and sweet things, drinks and magazines, toiletries and tissues, small bunches of flowers.

It was all probably quite useless too, and would be dumped in a cabinet and never used. But there we all were anyway, doing the only thing we could think of, as we were fit for not much else.

The people around me appeared preoccupied and stressed and strained. There were problems here that they could not solve, that the experts who specialized in such things could not solve, for there was no solution to them, despite illusions to the contrary—those great illusions of cure and scientific advancement and huge revolving machines that looked like wonders but which had reputations that no machine could ever live up to.

The people were staring ahead at the lights, some impa
tient, some seeming content to stand and wait, maybe not even wanting the lights to change at all—ever. If we could, some of us would have stood there in eternal waiting, knowing that things, at least, would not get worse.

I looked at all the mostly useless purchases and thought that at every crossing by every hospital in every city of the world such scenes went on. Fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, daughters and sons, lovers and neighbors and friends—there they all stood, with their armfuls of small items, as they waited for the lights to change.

And when they finally did, everyone would hurry across the tarmac and take the path up to the hospital entrance, and from there they would follow the corridors or ascend ­in the elevators, and then enter the wards and rooms, with their white and green order, with their flashing lights and their buzzers and bleeps.

They would take their places at the bedsides, moving a chair, opening a cupboard, saying a word. “I got you this. I bought you some . . .”

In every hospital in every city and town in every country.

I read somewhere that at any one time there are a million people in the sky, sitting in airplanes, being carried around the world. How many there are in hospitals, I do not know. Maybe the same, maybe more. Probably more, I would guess.

On the planes the flight attendants bring the passengers their cashew nuts and drinks. On the ground people flood into hospitals, bringing whatever they got at the mini-mart down the road, which does good business, being where it is.

But it's all they can do. They have no stethoscopes or scalpels or medical expertise, so they bring their worry and love and concern and care, disguised as small packages, as lumps of confectionery and as tubes of cream and toothpaste and
as bottles of shampoo. It's almost like praying. It won't make any difference or really do any good, but you do it anyway, because there isn't anything else.

At last the lights changed and we went across. The crowd crossing the other way moved too, and we passed through each other with a thousand small and instinctive adjustments so that we did not clash, nor bump, nor collide, like two shoals of fishes passing through and rejoining, and somehow remaining whole. And then, once arrived on the other side of the road, we dispersed, the way that the great rivers of commuting cars turn homeward in the nighttime and the way the crowd becomes individual again, and each droplet of that river has its own peculiar and particular dimension and destination, and they all become human again. Each car contains a person with a life of some kind and a home of some kind to return to—even if a solitary and a lonely one. All those great floods and rivers that sweep along the magnificent highways and alongside the towers of glass and aspiration and brilliant light are reduced to their elements by their homecoming. And so were we.

We entered the hospital and some checked the boards while others already knew the wards they wanted. And we dispersed, like teams at the blowing of a whistle, or children at the ringing of a bell. Away we went, and it was just each of us now, and the strength of our numbers was gone. There was only the bag of grapes and the pack of razors and the magazine that would never be looked at and the already stale news of the newspapers to give us courage.

Then we entered our wards and found those we were there to visit, and we tried not to seem too falsely hearty, yet to carry ourselves with optimism and confidence and inner strength.

“Hi, Louis,” I said. “I got you some chocolate bars and stuff.”

But he was asleep and didn't hear me. So I put the things in his cupboard, and pulled a chair up and sat by the bed. Then I turned the pages of the newspaper I had brought and listened to the sound of his breathing. The air conditioning hummed and then a buzzer sounded as someone's IV drip ran low and triggered a sensor, and after a few minutes a nurse came and attached a new one and then the sound of the buzzing stopped.

13

Chain

Louis didn't come back. By 6 p.m. I wondered what had happened to him, but then I also thought that I was his brother, not his mother, and he was grown-up and could go where he wanted and do what he liked, and it was none of my business, even if a chunk of his brain had been taken out.

But eventually I rang the car service at the hospital to ask what was going on. They told me his return trip had been canceled. I asked by whom. They didn't know, but said that it probably meant he'd been kept in. So I called the main switchboard and found him on the oncology ward. He'd passed out after the radiotherapy treatment and they were keeping him in.

Louis's house was called a Queenslander, a kind of bungalow up on stilts, with outer stairs leading up to rear and side verandas and to the back and main doors.

The house was divided into two units. His ex-partner, the once sun-kissed—and now maybe a little sun-damaged—blonde, still owned the front part of the house, which she no
longer lived in but rented out, while Louis had the back. He and Bella hadn't been a couple in more than twenty years now, but had never sorted out the house ownership, and their affairs were still entangled, like inter- and over-growing tree roots.

Under the house was a storage area, with room for parking cars, keeping canoes, setting up workbenches, and storing tools.

Louis had a couple of bikes down there, so I took one of them and set off for the hospital. It was a twenty-minute ride away, along a cycle way and through a park.

The light was going and the air was cooling down. I rode past a floodlit field where schoolchildren were playing Australian rules football, their coaches and parents shouting them to glory. Alongside the path, high up and dangling from the trees, were myriad fruit bats, hanging upside down and starting to move, now that it was twilight, in search of food.

They stank. They had a sweet, sickly smell of warm urine and rotten apples and bananas turning brown.

“If you ever need to use the bike,” Louis had said, “there's a lock and chain and a pump and patches in the bag there.”

So I had slung it over my shoulder and taken it along.

I got to the hospital and found a place to secure the bike. Then I opened the bag and took out the lock and chain.

Sonofabitch.

It was Louis all over. It was Louis once again. It wasn't a proper bike lock at all. It was a small brass padlock and a very short length of chain with a few loops of metal to it that looked like a remnant of some longer, more useful thing.

I tried to wrap the chain around the tube of a post, but it was too short and wouldn't go around.

Sonofabitch, Louis.

I tried a drainpipe, the shaft of a traffic sign; I tried a railing, a fence.

Goddamn it, Louis.

The ends of the chain wouldn't meet. What the hell had he ever chained his bike to with a chain like this?

Goddamn it, Louis, I thought. Goddamn it and goddamn you too.

Anger and frustration welled up in me and for a while turned to rage and bitterest resentment.

Goddamn typical, Louis, just so goddamn typical.

And I kicked the bike and chucked the chain down and I thought to myself, Yeah, Louis, yeah. This is you, isn't it? This is you all over; this is you all around. This is just so goddamn typical of you and always was. Always going for the make-do, Louis, and the cheap option. Always jury-rigging something and going for the temporary fix. This is you all over, isn't it, Louis, with the kettle that doesn't have a handle and the water heater that breaks down and it takes you ten years to repair. And then, when you do get it fixed, the sink doesn't drain. And the shower doesn't drain either, and you have exactly one minute to stand in it before it overflows.

This is you, isn't it, Louis? This was always you and always will be, ever since we were kids. And even back then, there you were, with your pullover tucked into your trousers, or your clashing colors, or your tie tucked into your belt, or one half of your collar stuck up, and you oblivious to it all when I was trying to be a bit cool.

And you and your goddamn telescope and the huge slabs of glass you were going to grind into lenses. You couldn't just buy them ready-made. Oh no. You had to do it the hard way, make things as difficult as possible for yourself and for
everybody else too. And then, when it couldn't be done, you'd get depressed about it, and give up, and then get equally as impractical about something else.

And now it's this goddamn chain, Louis, that doesn't have enough links to go around anything. This is you all over, isn't it? You've screwed me up once again.

I felt angry enough for violence and frustrated enough for tears. I wished he was fit and healthy so I could have got hold of him and had a good and decent row with him and told him the facts.

It's always been like this, hasn't it, Louis? What the hell is wrong with you? Why are you so goddamn impractical? Why do you do these crap jobs so undemanding of your capabilities, and then take them so seriously and conscientiously, and why do you want so much for everyone to give you responsibilities that they won't pay you for—except to give you some cheap cost-nothing compliment saying what a good worker you are, which you seem to treasure so much?

Is that it, Louis? Is that what you want? A pat on the back and a well-done? Just like back at school when you were coming first in all the exams and it was “Well done, Louis,” all the time. Is that all it is, just wanting that again?

And then there was your boat, Louis, your goddamn narrow boat down on the docks, that you were always going to fix up and never did. And the women you used to bring back and screw on my sofa, while Iona and I lay in bed on the other side of that cheap partition wall, hearing every embarrassing grunt and squeal of it.

And you remember that one time, do you, Louis, when you asked us to your narrow boat for Sunday lunch, and we got there at one, and at six o'clock that evening we were still waiting for the chicken to cook on that stove you had, and
you ended up boiling it. Boiled chicken and hard carrots. And then we ended up in a pub, just to take the taste away.

And then there was the house, wasn't there, Louis, that you were going to build one day. Buy the land and build a place and be self-sufficient, and all very admirable and fine. Only you weren't just going to build a house, were you, Louis, no, first of all you were going to make the goddamn bricks. That's right. Make the goddamn bricks and saw the goddamn timbers yourself in person, because that would be more authentic and in tune with the land. Maybe you even intended to plant the goddamn trees first and that was why nothing ever got done. And it never did, did it, Louis, or maybe only occasionally. For, in fairness, you did build that sailboat. But then you neglected it and got rid of it. And you look at the boat you have now and there's junk everywhere and the head's off the engine and there isn't even a patch of room to sit down, and everything stinks of oil and grease and damp and rot.

Goddamn it, Louis. I could hate you sometimes. The kettle with no handle and the frying pan covered in rust and the filthy cutlery and dirty plates and the five inches of dust under the bed, so thick it's turning into dreadlocks, and the tacky curtains and the Salvation Army furniture with the price stickers still on it. And the oven you have to light in a special way because there's a knack to it. And the things you have to give a bang or a tap or a kick to, to get them to work. And the goddamn ute with the window that slowly falls down and the blower that's stuck on maximum and the radio that doesn't work and the passenger door that can only be opened from the inside, and all the crap, Louis, all the goddamned crap that you have always lived with your whole life for no good reason. You, with all your damned degrees and
your exam passes. Why, Louis, why? And why isn't there someone here now, Louis, by your side? I mean, okay, you have some good friends, I know that. But what went wrong, Louis? Why isn't Bella here or Kirstin or Chancelle or Martha? Or a couple of grown-up children? Or a dog?

I've come halfway around the world, Louis, and, of course, I'd have done that anyway. But if there had been someone else here, Louis, some woman who cared for you, some man who loved you, someone I could share this with. Not just the slightly arm's-length distance of friendship, but the intimacy of love, of a bed and a breakfast table shared—why is there no such person here now, Louis, what happened, where and why have they gone? They were there once. So what happened?

But no. There isn't anyone like that. And now I've cycled out here, Louis, on your goddamned bike, and the gears don't change properly, you know that, Louis? And you need to adjust the saddle. You're my height and I'm yours and the saddle is far too goddamn low. And how long have you been riding the bike like that? How long, Louis? Yeah. That's what I thought. Exactly. Precisely, Louis. That's my point.

And your clothes, Louis. And the beard and eyebrows. And the out-at-elbow pullovers and the shorts splattered in paint and stained with oil. No, it's not the tumor, Louis, you were always like that, always. For Chrissake, Louis, for Chrissake. What about me, Louis? What about me? Why'd you never ask about me, every time you rang up or I called you over the years, why'd you never ask about me?

I couldn't find anywhere to secure the bike, so I just left it somewhere to take its chances. If it got stolen, too bad, and if it didn't, then that was lucky.

I went into the hospital and found the way to the oncol
ogy unit and went up and I discovered him there, in a room with two other guys and three other beds, one of them empty.

“Hi, Louis.” He looked drawn and tired and half-asleep. “How are you feeling?”

A nurse came in and explained that he had passed out after the radiotherapy and they were keeping him in at least until they had done another scan; they were worried that the brain was swelling and pressing against the skull. He was on anti-inflammatories and painkillers and anti-nauseas and his chemo, and then he still had his glaucoma drops to take.

“How are you, Louis?”

He looked up and smiled and seemed pleased to see me.

“I'm okay. How are you?”

“I'm all right, man. Don't worry about me. I'm all right.”

Then I remembered the time, shortly after our father had died, when I couldn't sleep and lay staring at the moonlight in my bed in the room we shared.

“Louis,” I said. “Are you awake?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I'm awake.”

“Louis, tell me a story. You remember those stories Dad used to tell. Tell me one of those.”

“Okay,” he said. “If you want.”

And I remembered his voice and the comfort of it as he made up some story using the same characters that our father had once invented—or maybe they were characters someone had told him stories about too.

And then I fell into sleep, while Louis was still telling me the story, and I'd always felt a little bad about that—I'd requested the story in the first place, but hadn't stayed awake enough to hear it all.

Louis, I thought, goddamn it, Louis. It's not your fault or
mine or anyone's. It's just how it is and how people are, and how the world is, and no one can do anything about it.

“You want a cup of tea or something, Louis? Can I get you something?”

“Yeah, cup of tea, thanks.”

There was a small kitchen area for the use of visitors. I made some tea for us. While I did a nurse came along and started talking to me and asked who I was visiting. Then, out of the blue, she said, “And does he have a funeral plan?”

There was almost malice in her voice.

“What?” I said.

“Funerals can be expensive,” she said. “Your brother got a funeral plan?”

I looked at her. What I wanted to say to her was “Are you sick? Do you think I give a shit whether my brother has a funeral plan? Do you think I wouldn't pay to bury my own brother?”

I walked away, disgusted, and took the tea to the ward.

She was the only one. Everyone else was kindness itself. But maybe there always has to be someone like that, just to keep you on your toes.

Louis managed to sit up and drink his tea.

“How'd you get here?” he said. “Did you walk? Drive?”

“No,” I said. “I was worried about driving. I borrowed your bike and cycled.”

“Did you remember where I told you the bag was, with the puncture repair kit and the lock and everything?”

“Yeah, I remembered.”

“That was all okay then?”

“Yeah, it was fine, Louis. It was fine.”