‘Can you spare some change, sir?’ asked the man with the HOMELESS sign. He asked it ironically: he knew Clint, and he knew Clint never gave.
‘Yes thanks. You’ve done well for yourself. Stay at it: keep that pavement warm.’
If you saw Clint’s jeep in your rearview mirror you’d think that an Airbus was landing in your wake. He needed a big car because he spent at least four hours a day in it, furiously commuting from Foulness, near Southend, where he had a semi.
Now, Smoker lived alone. He had never found it easy to begin, let alone maintain, a fulfilling relationship with a woman. His penultimate girlfriend had ended the connection because, apart from Clint’s other deficiencies, he was, she explained, ‘crap in bed’. Her successor, when she ended the connection, put it rather differently but in the same number of words (and letters): he was, she said, ‘a crap fuck’. That was a year ago. Clint Smoker: crap fuck. It did not enhance his sexual self-esteem. He thereafter relied on escort girls, entertained in various London hotels; and even these encounters were far from frictionless. The truth was that when it came to love, to the old old story (and face it, mate, he’d tell himself: see it foursquare), Clint Smoker had a little problem.
The Foulness semi. It was a ridiculous situation. He had the cash to relocate further in. But the yearlong deprivation of a feminine presence had reduced his place to a condition of untouchable sordor. It was a wonder he kept his person clean. (The bathroom was, in fact, the only non-unbelievable part of the house.) He couldn’t muck it out. He couldn’t sell it. He’d have to board it up and abandon it. The sordor exerted an influence, a paralysis, a nostalgie … And the house was also saturated with pornography in all its forms.
Clint hoisted himself up into the driving-seat of his black Avenger. He now weighed four tons and had a top speed of 160 miles per hour.
A short while ago Clint had received a communication from a young woman. It was not addressed to him but to the Lark‘s Ecstasy Aunt. It began: ‘dear donna: honestly, what’s all the fuss about orgasms about? I’ve never had one and i don’t want one.’ Clint responded personally, to ‘k’ of Kentish Town, saying that he found her views ‘most refreshing’. She’d e’d him back: dialogue. Ah, e-love, e-eros, e-amour; e-bimbo and e-toyboy; ah, e-wooing on the Web … What usually emerged (Clint found) was all vanity and shadow, inexistent, incorporeal: unreal mockery. But something told him that ‘k’ was a woman of substance.
Smoker’s cleated clog plunged down on the accelerator. Only weeks out of the showroom, the Avenger already resembled the bedroom of the Foulness semi. It smelt of new car and old man. Clint was now shouting at the truck he wanted to overtake. He quite sincerely hoped that the crocodile of schoolchildren crossing that zebra up ahead wouldn’t be there when he shot by.
Soon afterwards Homeless John went home, with his HOMELESS sign. His HOMELESS sign leant against the wardrobe while he slept. It leant against the table while Homeless John’s mother made his breakfast.
‘You love that sign, don’t you?’ she said.
‘Looks nice. Most of the blokes write it down with a Biro on a scrap of cardboard. That’s depressing, that is. They don’t even take it home with them. Chuck it away and do a new one in the morning. Couldn’t do that. My sign’s like a breath of fresh air.’
It was true. Homeless John’s HOMELESS sign was a gentrified HOMELESS sign. On the blond wood he had painted a yellow sun, a white moon and silvery stars; then, below, the word homeless, in capitals with double quotes: “HOMELESS”.
‘I wish you wouldn’t, you know,’ she said.
‘It’s just a summer job, Ma.’
‘That sign.’
‘What about my sign?’
‘Everyone sees you come whistling down the street with your HOMELESS sign and your door-key. You sit here having your tea with your HOMELESS sign. It makes me feel this isn’t a home.’
‘I’ll put you in a home in a minute. Don’t be silly, Ma. Course this is home. The sign’s just the tool of my trade. And it’s why I’m a superstar out there: top boy. Made a fortune last week.’
‘And I’ve heard them call you “Homeless” in the pub.’
He had an idea. His estimation of his sign, already very high, climbed a further notch. ‘Look at the quote marks, Ma. It’s saying I’m not “really” homeless.’
Homeless John’s mother was adopting an expression of sorrowful entreaty. She tipped her head and told him: ‘You won’t stay out in the wet, will you, love.’
‘Not me, Ma. I’ll come home.’
Which he would do. With his sign held up high against the rain.
* * *
February 14 (9.05 a.m., Universal Time): 101 Heavy
At Heathrow Airport they loaded the corpse into the hold of Flight CigAir 101—bound for Houston, Texas, USA. The corpse’s name was Royce Traynor. On February 11 the old oiler had been walking down a street in Kensington when a roofslate the size of a broadsheet newspaper came scything down at him. He died in the ambulance, cradled in the arms of his wife of forty-three years, Reynolds. Reynolds now sat in a more attractive part of the aeroplane, in seat 2B. She was tearfully drinking her second Buck’s Fizz and looking forward to the moment when the Captain would switch off the no-smoking sign.
Of the 399 passengers and crew on this ten-hour flight, Royce Traynor was the only one who would feel no erosion of his well-being.
CHAPTER TWO
1. The transfer to Trauma
Tender-yeared Billie Meo walked through Casualty with such fascination that the scored lino strained to feel the weight of her tread. Her slippers were landing heel-down, but there was a tiptoe in her somewhere – in the calves, perhaps. Russia Meo, when she took her daughter’s hand, could feel the fractional levitation of inquisitive anxiety as, all around them, figures like distorted statues were being lowered, winched up, bent over, turned. And the noises, and the smell.
It was nine o’clock before Russia called the police and started ringing round the hospitals. It was nearly ten when she learnt that her husband had been admitted to St Mary’s with a closed-head injury that was thought to be minor – as opposed to major. By that time Billie was altogether caught up in her mother’s agitation, and Russia felt she didn’t have a choice but to let her ‘come with’. (The baby, Sophie, had been down for hours – pompously at peace, with her nose upturned.) Russia had trusted herself to take the car, though she already felt like a driver on a stretch of black ice: no grip on the road, and many futures vying to become her next reality. But that would be to get ahead of yourself, because the evening had become a tunnel, and there was only one possible future now – the one at the hospital. She was aware that her body was being internally tranquillised, that time had slowed on her behalf. Like Billie, she was in a state of hallucinogenic curiosity. She parked the car across the street beneath the other building, where she had given birth to both her girls. Then the Reception area, where families and parts of families sat in taciturn vigil, some groups erectly tensed, others in sprawling abandon, as if for a twelve-hour flight delay.
In hospital, she thought: no the or a. In court, in jail, in church. What did these institutions have in common? Something to do with the settling of fates … Billie had been in hospital only twice before: on the occasion of her birth, and, more recently, when it was discovered that she had consumed half a bottle of liquid paracatemol. That had also taken place at night. Billie was in fact concluding that hospital was what automatically happened if you succeeded in staying up very late.
They were now directed to Trauma.
‘A head injury’, said the Intensivist, ‘entrains a sequence of events. We talk of the Three Injuries. The First Injury occurs in the first few seconds, the Second Injury in the first hour, the Third Injury in the first days or weeks or months. Your husband – Alex – has sustained the First Injury. It is my immediate task to prevent the Second and the Third. He lost consciousness, it seems, for about two or three minutes.’
‘I thou
ght anything over a minute …’
‘Three minutes is not the end of the world. Although he couldn’t remember his surname or his telephone number, he was lucid in the ambulance. His blood pressure was normal. The brain was not deprived of oxygen: the Second Injury. His respiration was found to be strong and regular. When there is irregular or depressed respiration in the presence of an adequate airway, the prognosis is invariably grave.’
Some doctors are diffident about the power they wield. Other doctors glitter with it. Dr Gandhi (satanically handsome, it seemed to Russia, but starting to bend in on himself as he reached the middle years) happened to be a doctor of the second kind. He was gratified, he was warmed, by how intently people listened to what he said, with their imploring eyes. They were right to do so, and it was natural to fear him, to love him: he was their interpreter of mortality. What he dispensed – what he withheld … Billie was in the adjacent playroom. Russia could hear her. The child, too, seemed to be taking deep breaths and then holding them; she gasped and sighed as she married and severed the plastic Sticklebricks.
‘Alex was reasonably lucid in the ambulance. By the time I examined him he was talking gibberish. I was not discouraged. He enjoyed obedient mobility and his eyes responded normally to light. Over the space of an hour his score on the Glasgow Scale rose from nine to fourteen, one short of the maximum. The X-ray revealed no fracture. Better still, the CT-scan revealed bruising but only minimal swelling. Which would have been the Third Injury. I administered a diuretic as a precaution. This dehydrates and thus shrinks the brain,’ said Dr Gandhi, reaching out his hand and clenching it. ‘He is in Intensive Care. And asleep, and breathing normally, and fully monitored.’
‘And that will be that?’
‘… Madam, your husband’s brain has been accelerated. The soft tissue has been impacted against its container: the skull. On the front underside of the brain there are bony ridges. What are they for! Nobody knows! To punish the head-injured, it would seem. As the brain accelerates it rips and tears on this – this grater. Nerve cells may be damaged, or at least temporarily stunned. The brain, we believe, attempts to restore the deficit, using surplus cells in a process of spontaneous reorganisation. This may take time. And there are a myriad possible side-effects. Headache, fatigue, poor concentration, poor balance, amnesia, emotional lability. Lability? Liable to change. Mrs Meo, which of these four words best describes your husband’s temperament: serene, easy, irritable, difficult.’
‘Oh, easy.’
‘Expect a tendency, in the coming weeks, towards the difficult. Would you and uh, Billie like to look in on your husband? He has been given a muscle-relaxant. I suggest you do not wake him. An hour ago my colleague tried to shine a light in his eyes. Alex was not best pleased!’
Intensive Care felt like a submarine or an elderly spaceship: dark compartments where important devices whirred and ticked – electrocardiograms, panting ventilators; the churning of life and death in shapes and shadows. Smiling, the charge nurse drew back the curtain. In they crept.
When she saw him Billie gave her characteristic groan of love – but there seemed to be grief in it now. Feeling a pain in her throat, Russia stooped hurriedly and lifted the child into her arms.
They had him at a steeper angle than she expected. The hefty white collar he wore and the way the sheets were puffed up round his neck made it impossible to avoid the thought that he was slowly emerging from the depths of a toilet bowl; and there were wires taped to his scalp.
‘Why he not awake?’
‘He’s asleep,’ she whispered sibilantly. ‘He got an ouch and he’s asleep.’
Suddenly his eyes opened and he was staring straight at her. She felt herself rock back: what was it? Accusation? Then focus was lost, and the lids sank slowly, obedient to a chemical torpor.
‘Blow a kiss,’ said Russia, ‘to make it better.’
As she was walking back through Reception, with that light tread, that flat-heeled tiptoe, Billie looked up at her mother and said, with unreadable contentment,
‘Daddy’s different now.’
‘Count down from one hundred in units of seven.’
‘One hundred … Ninety-three. Eighty-six. Seventy-nine. Seventy-two. Sixty-five. Et cetera.’
‘Good. What do a bird and an aeroplane have in common?’
‘Wings. But birds don’t crash.’
‘Can you name the Prime Minister?’
Xan named him.
‘Can you name the Royal Princess?’
Xan named her.
‘I’m going to ask you to memorise three words for me. Will you do that? They are: dog, pink, reality … All right. What were they?’
‘Pink. Cat. Reality.’
His condition felt like the twenty-first century: it was something you wanted to wake up from – snap out of. Now it was a dream within a dream. And both dreams were bad dreams.
That morning, with Russia present, Xan had been moved from the Intensive Care Unit to the Head Injury Ward. He had won (it seemed to him) insultingly excessive praise for slowly walking in a roughly straight line, for negotiating a flight of stairs depending only on the handrail, for ponderously combing his hair and cleaning his teeth, and for successfully getting into bed. The consumption of a fish finger, with full deployment of knife and fork, brought him further accolades. It was a dream and he couldn’t wake up. But he could go to sleep, and he did so, dreamlessly.
In the afternoon everything became a little clearer. There were fourteen patients in the ward, and they had all of them been split in time. Their minds had gone backwards, while their bodies had floundered on into age. The dullest chores of body-maintenance, those that normally made you numb with inanition, were hereabouts hailed as skills. For example: voidance. An unassisted visit to the toilet could win a round of applause from the staff and from all the patients who knew how to clap. (And even Sophie, at ten months, knew how to clap: a tinny, ticky sound, to be sure, but she seldom actually missed.) Then, too, there were accomplishments that were even more basic than going to the toilet – like not going to the toilet when you weren’t in the toilet. Aslant the next bed but one there lay a seventy-year-old who was being taught how to swallow. And there were others, at different points along different roads, trudging off in tracksuits to the woodshop or the physiotherapy pool. And there were two or three like himself, the uncrowned kings of Head Injury – virtuosos of toothbrush and hairbrush, crack urinators, adepts of the shoelace and the beltbuckle, silky eaters: Renaissance Men.
‘Do you know what the en ee oh is?’
‘Meo. Neo. No.’
‘Near Earth Object. Have you seen a newspaper? It rather drove you off the front page, I’m afraid. It’s coming on Valentine’s Day. Don’t worry. It’ll be close, but it’ll miss.’
Valentine’s Day, he thought. Not a good day for this particular woman. The full orange lips against the downy pallor, the massed orange hair. And yet there was something …
‘Could you write out a sentence for me? Any sentence.’
Xan was handed a pencil and pad. His interlocutor was a forty-year-old clinical psychologist called Tilda Quant. She was having a reasonably good time, partly because it made a change from cajoling an elderly into spelling the word the, but also because this patient was indeed in the newspapers, was in show business, was a mediated individual. Tilda wasn’t succumbing to the old-style reverence for fame. This was something more subliminal and interactive. Partaking of his publicity, his exposure to general observation, her own publicity was minutely enhanced. For his part, Xan thought it tremendously significant, for reasons as yet unclear to him, that Tilda Quant was a woman. She said,
‘“The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog.” Hm.’
‘It’s an exercise,’ he said. ‘Supposed to contain every letter in the alphabet.’
‘Yes, you’re a qwerty too. Qwerty? You know: qwerty uiop.’
‘Oh yeah. I think I got it wrong though. The sentence. Don’t see
a vee in it. I could never remember that one. Even before.’
‘… You say you don’t remember it, the uh, violence.’
‘I do. I do. It wasn’t just the rough stuff in the last few months. The whole process was unbelievably violent. I’ll tell you how I felt. I thought: If I could find some very old people to sit near to, then maybe for ten seconds nothing that bad would happen. Then I wouldn’t feel so incredibly frail.’
She was looking at him with a new fascination. She said,
‘What are you talking about?’
‘My divorce.’
‘Hah,’ she said, taking notes. ‘I’d call that your first dabble in cognitive dysfunction. An inappropriate response to a question that was clearly related to the assault.’
‘The assault? No, I don’t remember the assault.’
‘Do you remember the three words I asked you to memorise?’
‘… Cat. A colour: yellow or blue. Oh, and reality.’
Outside the sun was an hour above the horizon, still showing one thing to another: showing the other thing to this thing, and this thing to the other thing. He watched shadows move. They moved, it seemed to him, at the same speed as the minute-hand of the clock on the wall of the sister’s office, behind her sheet of glass. This felt like a discovery: shadows moved at the speed of time … Xan kept thinking about his dead sister, Leda: he hadn’t seen her for fifteen years, and when he went to the hospital she never woke up.
His wife came, with Billie and the baby, and Imaculada.
When the girls had gone Russia called for the screens to be drawn around his bed, which she then climbed into, wearing only her slip. The way she did this made him think of the phrase petticoat government … He responded palpably to her warmth, her breadth. This was a distant reassurance, but it soon joined the pulse of his headache, and was then lost in his exhaustion and nausea and the ambient grief of his wound. He wanted to submit to a body of moving water. He wanted to let the waves do it.