The next day, he was discharged.
‘Isn’t it a bit soon?’ he asked the rehab nurse.
‘You’ll be fine,’ she said.
She said people often felt a little anxious. But it really was a safe, easy, walk in, walk out procedure, and he could plan for a good outcome. She asked him if she could take him through some leaflets. ‘For instance,’ she pointed out, lowering her voice, ‘as soon as you can manage two flights of stairs you can have sexual activity.’ There was also a list of foods he should avoid. Short had a look at it. Before the attack, his diet had been sourced almost wholly from the red end of the scale. He wondered what he would eat.
‘I don’t drink much alcohol anyway,’ he said.
She gave him a number to call if he needed any further advice. ‘If you’re worried about anything at all,’ she said, ‘just ring.’
He wrote ‘sexual activity’ in his notebook.
‘That seems fine,’ he said.
Soon afterwards he found himself wearing his own clothes, carrying a two-day-old copy of the Guardian and some hospital toothpaste in a plastic bag, waiting for a cab to come down through the traffic and turn on to the hospital apron. When he got home he was exhausted just from leaning forward and telling the cabby how to get where they were going. He lay down on the sofa and pulled a blanket up over him and went to sleep. When he woke up it was on the edge of being dark. The street outside was quiet. The light in Short’s room had a kind of sixty-year-old smokiness, as if he was looking at things through nicotine-stained glass. The door of the room was open, and the man he had met in the hospital corridor now stood at the window, holding the net curtain back with one long hand so he could stare down into the street. He was whispering, ‘Yummie? Yummie?’ to himself.
I’m moving forward into something here, Short thought: but I don’t know what it is. He fell asleep again. The next day he rang the number the rehab nurse had given him and told her: ‘I don’t think I’m half as well as I feel.’
‘People often report a sense of vulnerability,’ the nurse explained. ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘Do they report a man with a round head?’ Short said.
‘Let’s get you to come in and have your blood pressure taken.’
In an attempt to normalise himself, Short walked around his neighbourhood, not far at first, twenty minutes here, twenty minutes there. He knew it well, but there are always a few little corners of a neighbourhood you don’t know. You always meant to explore them: today, perhaps, you do. Or in the end you glance into that short curving street – with its blackened gap halfway along where a woodyard used to be, or the Memorial Hall with the three tall cemented-up windows and stopped clock – and decide again that it only connects to some other street and then another after that. All the pubs down there, you suspect, have yellowed, patchy ceilings and a feeling of grease under the fingertips wherever you touch.
At home he slept a lot, dreaming repeatedly of his angioplasty – the bunker-like underground theatre, the table too narrow to rest on comfortably, the banks of cameras, the lively technicians and nurses in their colourful thyroid protectors, the air dark but also displaying a slight bluish-grey fluorescence in the corners as if it had absorbed the radioactive dyes from Short’s bloodstream. ‘How are you getting on,’ someone would ask, ‘in your ongoing struggle with the world of appearances?’ Short’s responses became increasingly facetious. He was embarrassed for himself. He woke sweating, his pulse a hundred and fifty beats a minute, experiencing such premonitions of disaster that he had to get up and move around the room. In these moments of unconscious hindsight, the essentially violent nature of the procedure – the feeling of racing feet-first forward on rails under a weird light while your heart is reamed, plumbed, measured to its full physical depth and found wanting – was only heightened. By day he thought he felt a little better. His blood pressure remained too high.
‘Whatever you say,’ Short told the man in his room, ‘Yummie isn’t a name.’
‘Who are you to tell me that?’ the man said. ‘It was your mother’s name, and her mother’s before her. It was your sister’s name.’
Short was becoming embittered with the whole thing.
‘I never had a sister,’ he said. ‘How did you get in here?’
‘I’m always here. I was here before they christened your father, and before they christened your mother, and before they buried the poor unstained sister you say you never had.’ His eyes were as round as his head, entirely without expression and yet somehow both confiding and expectant, as if he knew Short would soon admit to something. ‘The poor sister,’ he repeated, with a sentimental emphasis. When Short failed to answer – because this was not a past he could recognise, let alone own or identify with in any degree – he waved one hand dismissively and seemed to fade a little. ‘How are you getting on with those chickens?’ he said. ‘Yummie.’
Short made another appointment at Rehab and told them, ‘I think my medication might need adjusting.’
‘How do you think of me?’ the heart nurse said.
‘I think of you as the heart nurse,’ Short said.
‘Well, I am a nurse,’ she said. ‘But my name’s Linda.’
‘Then I’ll think of you as Sister Linda.’
They laughed and Short left with his new leaflets. A minute or two later he went back down the corridor to her office and stood in the doorway and said: ‘I’m supposed to talk when I’m walking?’
‘We recommend that,’ she said. ‘We need you to exercise, but we need you just to make sure your breathing stays inside the range: if you can walk and talk, you’re inside the range, you know your heart is fine.’
‘I can’t think of anything to say.’
She stared at him. ‘Well, for instance, you can just have a nice conversation with the other person.’
‘The other person,’ Short said: ‘OK.’
He wrote ‘other person’ in his notebook.
‘I’m usually on my own,’ he said. In fact, he was hearing voices in his room at night. One voice would say, ‘You’re accepting more, aren’t you?’ and after a pause another would answer, ‘Oh yes, yes, I’m accepting more. Definitely. I’m able to accept much more now.’ They sounded like an old couple, talking in the tea room at a garden centre. Short couldn’t quite locate them, or tell if they were male or female. They seemed to originate quite high up, in a region of discoloured wallpaper, then, in the weeks that followed, still invisible, lower themselves down until they were able to occupy the room proper, pulling themselves about quietly but jerkily between the larger items of furniture, murmuring, ‘Two funerals and now another house move. No wonder I can’t take anything in,’ or, ‘Look at this one, dear. He’s young enough.’
Once he had noticed them, he noticed others. Sometimes he woke in the night and it was quite a hubbub in there. They were everywhere. They were looking for the toilet. They had opinions about Catholicism and walking. Short had the feeling that they gathered round him while he slept, looking down at him considerately and with concern. Perhaps they even discussed him, and these fits and starts of language were the only way they could express what they knew. As their conversation decayed further, into a mumbled repetition he could hear only as ‘Yummie, yummie, yummie,’ he would see the tall, calm, round-headed figure waiting by the window, pulling back the curtain to look out, smiling a little. One night it whispered: ‘Research shows how rats dream repeatedly of the maze they have not yet solved.’ Short woke up with a sharp pain on the left side of his chest and called an ambulance.
‘The paramedics said I was fine,’ he told Sister Linda at his next appointment. ‘They said it wasn’t the right kind of pain. They were very kind.’
‘I should hope they were,’ she said.
‘It was just a moment of panic,’ Short admitted. He tried to think of a way to qualify that, but could only add: ‘My parents were the same.’
‘You’re due for the three-month echocardiogram
anyway.’
On his way to Sonography, Short became lost in the hospital basement; then the technicians didn’t want to admit he was in the cubicle with them, but carried on checking their equipment as if they were waiting for some more significant version of him to arrive. After a brief glimpse of what looked like a translucent marine animal pulsing and clutching inside his chest, Short kept his gaze directed away from the monitors. He couldn’t so easily ignore the swashy emphysemic whisper produced by this monster, surfacing in his life as if from the depths of a Hollywood ocean. He went back upstairs to Rehab and asked the nurse, ‘Have you heard that noise? It’s like a 1950s Hotpoint washing machine. Do you remember those?’
She stared at him, then down at the echocardiogram result.
‘This is all good,’ she said. ‘You can take it from me. You can look for a very positive outcome with results like this.’
‘So, a heart sounds like obsolete white goods.’
‘Really, no one’s surprised if you have some anxiety.’
That night he dreamed that a great hoard of household rubbish – broken beds, cheap soiled mattresses, used unpaired shoes stuffed into plastic shopping bags – covered the floor of his room. It smelled of urine. It smelled like a slot deep in the old hospital building. The ceiling was off, and the ceiling of the room above that, and the one above that too: all the way to the roof, which was also off. The room was open to the night sky. In some way, Short’s original procedure was still going on. The cameras whirred and shook above him. The walls, bluish with radioactive dyes and ruined by moonlight, were crawling with slow old people pulling themselves head-down towards the floor. ‘Where’s the toilet here?’ they whispered. ‘I think it’s over that way, dear.’ The tweed jackets of the men, the old fashioned wool skirts of the women, fell around their heads, muffling their dull talk; while by the window, Yummie the watchman kept his eye on the street below.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Short said.
‘You think you are alive. Have a closer look. These people were victims of that thought too. People come home from a visit and discover they’ve never left. Or they have a wall knocked down in their attic and find this behind it. Do you see?’
‘I don’t see, no.’
‘People imagine there will be no upshot from this, no discovery, that it will be the end of the story. Or so they hope.’
‘Another thing,’ Short said: ‘I don’t want you here.’
‘Good luck with that.’
That was a low point, Short was forced to admit; but afterwards his life seemed to improve. He found another room, not far from the hospital. He went to the gym every two or three days. From being a zone of anxiety, the weekly act of transferring his medication from its calendar-packaging into the dispenser became a comforting regime. Bisoprolol, losartan potassium, atorvastatin, lansoprazole like a cheap holiday destination in the Canary Islands: their side effects were legion, though in three months Short had suffered only a sudden but unimpressive swelling of the inner lip. He bought himself a blood pressure monitor. The clutch of its cuff was like a reassuring hand on his upper arm, although inevitably it reminded him of things he didn’t want to remember. Once a major organ has failed you – or you have failed it – your relations with the world become more tentative, more grateful and fragile. He had never liked to feel the beat of his heart. Other emotional reactions he experienced: a kind of protective reluctance; easily-triggered startle reflex; fear that every internal sensation might be the symptom of another event.
‘But there’s something else too,’ he told Sister Linda. He experienced it as ‘a kind of lifting up away from life and towards it at the same time. You can’t avoid it any more, so all you’re left with is to engage it.’
‘I’m not sure I follow you,’ she said.
‘The other thing is I’m determined to be kinder to myself.’
By day he walked the streets – chatting out loud to no one, maintaining a brisk pace but always checking that his heart rate remained safely within the range – or toured the supermarket aisles foraging for products at the green end of the scale. At night he watched on-demand television; worked on the Guardian crossword puzzle he had begun in hospital. He had to admit now that he had enjoyed his stay there, the warmth at night, the regular coming and going of the staff by day. He had felt safe for the first time in his life. He went through his belongings until he found the toothpaste and toothbrush he had brought back with him from Coronary Care, laying them out on top of his chest of drawers where he could see them, along with a pair of red non-slip ward socks still in their packaging. While he was doing that, Yummie climbed slowly down the wall behind him and said:
‘You needn’t think collecting a lot of old rubbish will help. They all thought that.’
‘Those chickens you used to mention,’ Short said: ‘I never saw them. How are they now? I often think of you on the street, waiting outside the hospices and care homes in all weathers. I worry on your behalf.’
‘Worry about yourself,’ said Yummie, ‘not me. That’s my advice.’
Places you Didn’t Think to Look for Yourself
In the light falling horizontally along grey lapboards. In very fast light, as on any seafront. In the idea of coughing up your large organs due to drink even though you don’t drink very much. In a related feebleness of your own actions which is not physical. In a tendency to hate being followed, especially in October. In the sense of things adding up or ticking away or both. In such a perfect empathy with other people it enables you to do what they want before they know what it is. In Rotherham. In any real sense of looking at yourself from outside. In the softness of your decisions. In a tendency to copy down signage. In failures not your own which, when you read about them, make you feel uncomfortable for two days or give you the feeling you are living out the ending of a Robert Stone novel. In any town in the US. In any town in which people’s lives are directly determined by local economics. In decaying trajectories. In Portsmouth. In real dejection, not just the kind we have now. In the sense that you have reduced your options according to an inner program you don’t understand but which is obvious to anyone who has known you longer than a year. In the failure to be shameless. In a concrete pipe, or on a large ship. In a Turkish film.
Not All Men
When you email me and say you’ve seen me on the train again, I don’t know how to answer you. Those people you see aren’t me.
I thought you weren’t going to send me any more video? I thought we agreed that? This stuff is just so dark and blurry it could be anybody. It doesn’t even look like the inside of a train, which is what you say in your mail, ‘I took this on the Central Line in the rush hour yesterday morning.’ No you didn’t, Julie, because you’re always at work before the rush hour starts. Anyway it just doesn’t look like a train. The seats are wrong.
I don’t care that you’ve started following people again. You’ll get in trouble for it the way you did before. Don’t blame me. I could feel sympathy for you the first time because you were hurt. Anyone can be hurt, and we often do unpredictable things because of it. But you weren’t that hurt, and in the end just nobody believed what you said you saw.
Another thing, I never travel on the Central Line now anyway.
The sound file that came along with the video is wrong too. Tube trains don’t sound like that. It sounds like somebody making a noise into a pipe. Some child. I don’t think it’s clever, you making a noise into a pipe like that to imitate the noise of a train when it doesn’t sound anything like it.
I don’t think we can ever get back with one another again, no. For one thing I’m with someone else now. I’ve been completely honest about that from the start, whatever you say. Not all men are liars. Another thing, we just didn’t work out. It’s no good you saying we wanted different things out of life. Wanting different things out of life is being incompatible. That’s what being incompatible is.
And why send me all this stuff again?
; I remember perfectly well what you claim happened. I didn’t believe it then, I don’t believe it now. I’m not stupid. I understand what you’re saying. What I can’t understand is why you think I’d believe it. You went out in the morning two weeks after we broke up. You got your train, the same train you always get from Shepherd’s Bush, that’s fine, I’m sure you did, because you were always completely anal about that. But then you say you saw me in a carriage on the Central Line, and you said hello and I just flat-out ignored you like that, even when you got right up close to me and tried to make me speak.
Well, it wasn’t me, Julie.
You know why? Two things. Firstly from your own description. In your latest mail you say, ‘It was you, but with different clothes and a different haircut.’ For God’s sake, Julie, how could it be me if I was different? Also you say, ‘There was something different about your face.’ If I had a different face, and different clothes, and a different haircut, how could I be me?
The second thing is this: I don’t remember that, Julie. Don’t you think I’d remember that if it happened?
One thing about our relationship and how it ended. I never once told you to leave. It was you who said you wanted space, whatever that means. I was the one willing to work things out, right up until you threw the scissors. Now you tell people I dumped you for Fareda. Well, that’s really hurtful, you know. Because I didn’t meet her until two months after you left. It wasn’t me who threw things and walked out. I would never treat anyone like that. Just because it didn’t work out between us, why would I ignore you in public? I know you were hurt. I always tried to make it as easy for you as possible. People owe each other that. By the way, it wouldn’t hurt you to call her by her name.
You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts Page 7
