by Fin C Gray
Tom will pick up the urn and hold it to his chest. The grass will feel damp beneath his knees, so he will stand upright again, facing the tree. He will brush petals from his dewy trousers.
‘We could never have imagined having to do this, could we? Experiencing the death of our child – well, that was a punishment that was mine alone, thankfully. Thank God you never had to go through this. God knows, you suffered enough. Maybe, if you’d lived, Daniel would still be here too. He loved you so much, much more than he loved me. You would love our beautiful grandchildren, Alison and Danesh.’
Tom will cling to the silver urn as if it is a part of him that he doesn’t want to relinquish.
‘But, Daniel. Without him, I would never have survived your loss. I’m here now because of him. I just don’t know what happened, darling. I don’t know how I lost his love. I was a drunk. That’s when we started to drift apart, Daniel and me. He hated that about me. I’m not going to let anything spoil things between me and those two little ones. I have the chance to get things right again. Make amends. Pay my debts.’
Tom will take the lid off the urn and look inside. His eyes will fill with tears that he will be unable to stop flooding out. Some will mingle with the ashes, inside. ‘This is all we have left of him. Our boy. I brought him here to be with you.
Safe from all the haters. Those people hate a different Daniel. They hate the boy who was changed, brainwashed, lost and misled. That wasn’t our Daniel. Our boy wouldn’t have wanted to put us through this. So I give you our son, pure and innocent. Cleansed. At peace now with his beloved mother. Look after him, darling.’
He will scatter the ashes around the tree trunk and pick up a handful of blossom, covering the grey dust with pink petals. A feeling of relief, or perhaps release, will begin to wash over him as he pushes the silver vessel and the box back into his bag. For the first time, in as long as he will be able to remember, he will not feel sad. It won’t be happiness, exactly. More a feeling of having turned a corner and taken a better path.
‘Goodbye, Alison. Goodbye, Daniel. Goodbye, Rufus. For now. I’ll be with you all soon.’
Tom will pick up his bag and leave the woodland graveyard. He will take a long walk to Daniel’s old flat and will cry again as he looks at the cheerful curtains hanging at the windows, put there by whoever lives there now. During the walk to look at his old house in Cherry Lane, a sharp pain in his back will make him buckle. It won’t be the first time he will have felt this pain, and it will not be the last time either.
His oncologist will have told him that the cancer in his liver will have metastasised and will be invading his lymph nodes. Although he will ask not to know the prognosis, the doctor will tell him that it will reach his lungs, bones and who knows where else within a matter of months and that he must plan for the end. A liver transplant could be a possibility that might save him, and chemotherapy and radiotherapy will have the ability to delay the spread until a donor can be found, but Tom will not agree to undergo any form of treatment other than palliative care. The deal will have to be settled, and by this point, he will be ready. All his fight will have fled. He will realise that he has been prepared to pay his debt ever since the day he said goodbye to Alison.
He will decide not to tell Jenny to spare her the misery of waiting for him to die as she had her mother, and he will spend as much time with his grandchildren as he can until the pain starts to resist the drugs. Then he will kiss them all goodbye, and he will go to his house alone, telling them that he is going away for a few days.
He will congratulate himself on his selflessness. Tom will write a long, loving letter to Jenny and explain his reasons, and he will leave notes and presents for Alison and Danesh. ‘Hallelujah’ will play as he drinks from the bottles of wine he has hidden away so carefully from Jenny. This time, he will swallow down many pills, gradually, and make sure he keeps them down. The pills will be in boxes that bear his name. His body will not fight against the onslaught this time.
Alison, Daniel, Jenny, little Alison, Danesh and Rashid will never be his again. Tom will have learned by this point that deals such as he has made don’t work that way. All he will hope for is that his fate will be darkness, silence, infinite nothingness. As he breathes his last few breaths, he will wonder if all lives have the same outcome. All fear will be gone when his heart stops and his blood starts to congeal in his veins. If anyone thinks to ask Tom how he feels about dying, maybe his oncologist or one of his nurses, he will tell them that he is ready for it and that it holds no dread for him.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Today, Friday
‘We’re losing him, Trevor!’
‘I’ll get the pads, Bill. Hang fire,’ says the other paramedic.
Vince feels helpless. Benny stands near the archway to the living room looking as if he’s in a trance. The one called Bill has torn Tom’s shirt open and is pumping at his chest with both hands.
‘Keep doing the compressions. I’ll work around you,’ says Trevor.
He sticks electrode pads onto Tom’s upper body as the other man pumps furiously. A low-pitched rising tone sounds from the machine that Trevor has placed by Tom’s side. When it stops, he says to Bill, ‘Stand clear.’
He presses a button on the machine and Tom’s body jerks. Bill recommences pumping at Tom’s chest as Trevor presses another button on the unit. The tone begins to sound again, and the whole process repeats.
Vince turns to his colleague and says, ‘Go back and look after the desk, Benny. We’ve left it unattended too long. I’ll stay here.’
Benny mumbles something and shuffles out of the flat, looking glad to be released from this scene.
When Vince looks back to Tom and the two paramedics, the one called Bill is pulling the pads from Tom’s chest, and the other one is looking at his watch.
‘Time of death: 23:57 hours,’ he announces, gravely.
‘He’s dead?’ asks Vince, a sick feeling spreading through him. ‘But he had a pulse when you got here. He was breathing. I cleared his airways.’
‘He was already in cardiac arrest when we arrived, mate. Sorry.’
The two paramedics are already unrolling a plastic zipper bag and assembling the stretcher gurney.
‘We don’t normally take them when they die at home,’ says Trevor. ‘But given that he lived alone, we’ll take him to the mortuary at St Thomas’s. There’ll have to be a post-mortem, but it looks pretty cut and dried. Do you know if he has any next of kin?’
‘Yeah,’ says Vince, ‘a daughter. I can call her and tell her what’s happened if you like.’
‘Thanks, mate,’ Bill says as he helps manoeuvre Tom into the plastic body bag. Tom’s face looks ghoulish, his head bent to one side and his mouth agape in a silent scream. Vince shudders as Tom disappears behind the metallic ‘zzzzzup’ of the zip as it reaches its closing point. The two paramedics bundle the body onto the gurney and start wheeling him down the long hallway.
Vince opens the grand double doors and races ahead to the service lift and pushes the call button. When Tom is in the lift, he heads back to Flat 67 to turn off the lights and close the doors. As he is about to switch off the hallway lights, he notices the wooden cat again, still lying on its side. He stands it upright and reads the inscription on the silver Tiffany tag: I SAW THIS AND THOUGHT OF YOU. ALL MY LOVE, ALWAYS, T XXX
Vince smiles sadly. Who was that meant for?
‘What a fucking waste,’ he mutters as he runs his hand along the deep shiny red of the Venetian plaster. ‘You had it all, Tom McIntyre. You had it all and you threw it down the plughole like it was nothing.’
He gazes down the hallway to the dim dining room and the twinkling of the London Eye through the windows. Three or four versions of Vince’s flat would fit in this hall and dining room alone. What a fucking waste. All he had to do was wait until the grief passed. Some folk just don’t value what they’ve got. Such a shame. One of the nicest residents in the building too, and gone, for what? No
ne of it was his fault.
‘That poor girl. What on earth am I going to say to her?’ he mumbles. He switches off the light and closes the door.
Epilogue
Perhaps Tom’s moment of truth will be different. Infinite nothingness should not fulfil the payment for such a diabolical deal, after all. Who knows? Perhaps the doorbell will ring at four a.m. just as the last breath rattles from his chest, and he will awake to the buzz of the music system back in Buckingham Court. Who will know what part of purgatory each of us will enter after every death we will be made to endure? Daniel will already know this, or will at least have a sense of déjà vu as his face presses into the red tartan rug, or as he raises the sword in the desert. One thing will be sure: his yearning for Waqar, or some version of Waqar, will be eternal.
And Waqar? For him, the violence he will continually endure from his father may destroy him and allow someone else to inveigle their way into Daniel’s soul as he seeks out a different purgatory. Maybe, each time Tom, Daniel, Waqar and all the other wanderers wallow in their misery, they will turn to one of their gods and believe again that their version of God will save them and release them from their awful existence. There will be no god to answer them. The faith they will invest all their energy in will be an eternal echo in a vast chamber of emptiness. The irony will be forever lost.
Ah, he serves you well, indeed!
He scorns earth’s fare and drinks celestial mead.
Poor fool, his ferment drives him far!
He half knows his own madness, I’ll be bound.
He’d pillage heaven for its brightest star,
And earth for every last delight that’s to be found;
Not all that’s near nor all that’s far
Can satisfy a heart so restless and profound.
‘Prologue in Heaven’ in Faust, Johann Wolfgang Goethe.
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