The Language of Dying

by Sarah Pinborough

  I don’t sleep much, but pull the duvet up round my neck on the sofa and watch you on the screen. I’ve got one of those ideas in my head. I think she’s going to creep into your room, settle you down and then put a pillow over your face. I don’t know why I think this. But it’s in my head, burrowing away. I watch her go in to you several times as you try to get out of bed. She settles you. She doesn’t put the pillow over your face.

  At some point in the night I hear her make a cup of tea. You are keeping her busy I think, up there. I see you sitting on the edge of the bed and your eyes shine white in the camera’s green night vision. I don’t see you in them, though. They are strange and confused. And a little afraid. And then I see her ease you back down.

  She leaves at six and I unwind myself from the sofa to say goodbye. In the dawn light I see the circles under her young eyes and the sympathy in them. She is pretty and delicate, but she is just human after all.

  ‘I’ll be back at the same time tonight. If you need anything in the meantime, just call the nurses. I’m sure Barbara will call in at some point.’ She smiles a little. ‘He should be calmer now, I think. His breathing is becoming more irregular, which is normally a sign that the agitations will ease.’

  I find it hard to understand her language. I just want to know what it all means. I think she sees this in my face. Her voice is soft. I wonder if it will melt into something like Barbara’s as she ages. I think it might.

  ‘Your father is moving into the next stage. His breathing will slow. The pauses between each breath will get longer and longer. It’s called Cheyne–Stoking. He’s not there yet, but I think in the next day or so.’

  She doesn’t need to point out the rest. The rest I understand. Chain-smoking causes Cheyne–Stoking. The little rhyme forms a rhythm in my empty thinking space. The rhythm is like hooves on tarmac.

  ‘Is he in any pain?’ I ask.

  She shakes her head. ‘No. The morphine and sedative are taking care of that. I’ve just changed them – upped his dose a little. He’s somewhere between sleep and unconsciousness. Quite peaceful.’ She pauses. ‘I don’t expect that he’ll come out of it much, if at all, anymore.’

  She knows the weight of those words. You’ve gone where I can’t reach you and you can’t reach me. Somewhere in-between.

  I thank her and let her out. The house suddenly feels cold. I turn the heating up.

  9

  I touch the walls as I creep upstairs to your room. Even as I trace the familiar light pattern of the paper it feels wrong under my fingertips. Things are changing again. And like all the most important changes, this one will be irreversible too.

  The sky is lifting outside as day leaves the dregs of night behind and I feel as if I am the only person alive in the world, trapped in this moment, torn between the two states of existence. This is something tea won’t cure.

  As I pass my room I hear Davey snoring. It’s a thick sound and if I’d heard it anywhere else in the world and had to pick the person that sound belonged to I would say Davey without missing a beat. Maybe we are most true to ourselves when we are asleep. Or when the rest of the world is asleep. My heart pounds quickly in my chest and I don’t know why. No sound comes from Penny’s room. Maybe if I listened harder I could hear her soft, steady, easy breath, but I don’t. Her breath will go on and on. I hope she doesn’t wake up just yet.

  The nurse has pulled your door to and it creaks a little as I open it. The sound doesn’t disturb you. There are different doors creaking open for you, ones that I can’t see and ones that you can’t quite get to yet, but somewhere in that strange sleep I think you’re seeking them out. I wonder how far down you’ve gone and whether the nurse is right and that you’re gone for good. I like to think you’ll find your way back to the surface just one more time. I think I need that one more time.

  I sit by the curtained window, but I don’t look out over the road and the field. There will be nothing out there. Nothing for me. There is no hot tingle in my bones. I watch you in the bed for a long time. Maybe an hour. Maybe more. You try to get out of bed once in that time, but the attempt is more half-hearted than the previous ones. Either you’re sinking or the sedative she’s given you is a strong one. Or a combination of both. I ease you down on to your back and you comply. The daylight that crawls into the room allows no softness. Your skin is yellow and your pyjamas look ludicrous on you. My head flashes with images of the commode and the crematorium and that awful smell and then from nowhere I see you laughing at a barbecue at Penny’s, a cigarette in hand, laughing because I’ve burnt the tuna steaks and she looks fit to explode. Your teeth fit your face then. Your skin is tanned and firm. Your eyes sparkle.

  I pull the cover over you and sit back in the chair, my face burning. Time unwinds, bubbles of time bursting, exploding in my head. Tension buzzes under my skin. I’m at breaking point. Or maybe just beyond it. Who knows? Inside I feel the distant drumming of hooves. I squeeze your fingers.

  *

  When I’m calmer I go downstairs. Penny is in the kitchen. She looks at me funny. ‘You okay, darling? I popped my head into Dad’s room and you were just sitting there, staring into space.’

  I shrug. I can’t think of what to say because I have no recollection of her coming in. I wonder at that. ‘Sorry, I was lost in my own world. Thinking about things. You know, Dad. The past. Stuff. Probably half asleep.’

  Hey, Lady Penelope. Nudge your sister, she’s off again.

  Penny hands me a cup of tea. ‘As long as you’re okay.’

  I wish she wouldn’t look at me like that. I grin and kiss her on the cheek. ‘I’m fine. As fine as can be expected, anyway.’

  She picks up her phone and pushes the call button. Nothing happens and she hangs up.

  ‘I’m trying to get hold of Paul, but it’s on answer-phone.’ She tries again to no avail. I snort and raise an eyebrow.

  ‘Don’t,’ she says, lighting a cigarette. ‘Things are bad enough as it is. I hate that we’re all upset and angry and falling out. I hate it. And now we can’t get hold of Paul.’

  She uses ‘we’ because she thinks it makes her words less accusatory, but it just makes them vaguely patronising. She hasn’t actually fallen out with anyone. I don’t think she ever has. It’s always easier to get along. I watch her try the phone again and sip my tea.

  ‘I know you hate that, Pen, and I’m sorry about what I said to him.’ Whatever the hell it was, I think inside. The place where those words should be is still blank. Just angry white noise. I take a cigarette from her packet and light it. ‘But he’s the one who’s turned his phone off. Not you.’ I wave my arm around dramatically. ‘In the middle of all this, he’s turned his phone off.’

  ‘He can’t deal with it, that’s all,’ she says.

  ‘That may be true,’ I answer. ‘But it doesn’t make him any less of a shit.’

  She doesn’t say anything after that. I can see her trying, those ridiculous swollen lips twitching, but even Penny, who’s always been so tight with Paul, can’t really defend him now.

  She goes into the lounge with her cup of tea and takes her phone. She doesn’t say much more to me, but I hear her ringing home and talking to little James. She probably tries Paul again but I don’t hear her talk to him and it doesn’t surprise me. He’s gone into hiding. Not as far hidden as you, but still out of our reach.

  Davey gets up not long after and makes himself some toast. We don’t say much. He goes into the lounge and I hear normality blare from the TV. A bulb flickers above me, threatening to go out. The house is subdued, just as we are. I wonder if the bricks feel anything other than the cold.

  Eventually I go into the lounge and join the other two.

  On the monitor, you are lying still in bed. Not even your hands are trembling.

  ‘He hasn’t moved since we got up. Maybe he’s settling down.’

  I nod. ‘The nurse said it would pass.’

  There is silence for a while and I wonder if it’s my ima
gination, but it feels as if the tension isn’t just inside me. I can feel it between we three, tight as a tripwire. There is another snap inside my head. I need those breaks to stop. I need some peace.

  ‘You know, I was thinking,’ I say, ‘why don’t you go home for a day or so? See James. You could take Davey. Nothing’s going to change here by tomorrow and now that he’s calmed down and the night nurse is booked, it seems silly all of us just sitting here.’ I wonder if I’m rambling. All I know is that I don’t want them here. They don’t belong here. Not now. I look up to catch a glance go between them and I see all I need to see to know; they don’t want to be here either. It surprises me. It hurts me.

  ‘I was thinking the same thing,’ Penny says, ‘but I don’t want to leave you alone. Will you be okay?’

  I grin through tight, thin, unplumped lips. ‘I’ve been okay for the past few months, Pen. I can manage a night on my own.’

  She looks at Davey as if to say, I can’t do anything right. She doesn’t say that, though. She says, ‘Well, if you’re sure. I’ll have my mobile on. Call if you need me or there’s any change. I’ll be straight back in the morning.’ I nod.

  They sip their tea and pretend they’re not in a hurry to get out, but I see through their cracks. Just like I think they’re starting to see through mine.

  An hour later and we’ve hugged our goodbyes and made promises to call every couple of hours. As we hug I feel the solidity crumble. Watching the small, flash car heading away down the drive, it’s crystal clear that we’ve fallen apart. We’ve fallen apart and we didn’t even have the good manners to wait until you’d gone before we did it. I can still smell Penny’s perfume in the hall when I shut the door and it forms a ghost of her. Everything is ghostly. Or maybe I’m the ghost and they’re all real.

  I wish my head wouldn’t hurt so much. Or my heart.

  *

  The day goes by in a drift. I feel as if I’m standing still and the world is passing by, not touching me but avoiding me, as if I’m outside of its natural ebb and flow. Or maybe it wants me outside. I stand in the kitchen for a long time, staring out of the window at the ivy on the garden wall. I wonder how long the vine took to smother the bricks while I wasn’t paying attention. When my feet get pins and needles I come round a little and notice I’ve made myself a cup of tea. It’s covered with a film and stone cold. I think about making another, but don’t. I open the fridge and think about food, but my stomach churns. I look at the cheese and bacon in there and think for a minute that if I stare hard enough I can see it slowly rotting despite the chill. I turn the thermostat inside the fridge up to four, but then I leave the door open. Let’s see what the cheese makes of that.

  *

  Barbara comes round and I smile and let her voice caress me. It coats me and hardens on my skin. Then Penny calls to say that they have got back safely and to check on us. I hear my words, Yes, we’re fine, no change, love you too, and they seem normal enough, but I’m glad when she’s gone and I can have the peace back again. I’m waiting for night to fall. The daylight, grey as it is, makes me feel unsettled. I smoke a cigarette and stare out at it. I don’t open the window, but let the acrid smoke fill the kitchen. Grey outside, grey inside. I go upstairs. The walls stare at me, accusing. I ignore them. They’re not real.

  The chair creaks when I lean forward and talk to you.

  I talk for a long time. I tell you all this and more, but I don’t think you hear me, even though I think I see you hiding in there, a little way down. It’s hard to tell because your eyes aren’t closing properly anymore and they’re becoming coated in a milky film. Kind of like dogs get when they have cataracts. I look at your eyes with their marble sheen. Even your surfaces are shutting you off from us.

  I talk anyway. I let it all come out. Everything. I want you to know everything about me because I can’t know everything about you. I pour myself into what’s left of you, hoping you can wrap it all up and take it with you. I talk until my throat is raw and dry.

  When I’m done I sit in silence and watch you descend into your cells and beyond. I listen to the endless ticking of the clock. I listen to your Cheyne–Stoking. I think about the language. I think about the Macmillan nurse coming later and I think about Penny and Davey and Simon and Paul. My heart pounds a little.

  As darkness falls my head thickens and I feel how alone we are here, you and me and the nightfall. The nurse will be here soon and that privacy will crack. I wonder about the monitor downstairs projecting your image into an empty room. I look at the Listerine and tears and anger spark in my eyes. I twist in the chair. My face is burning. I feel swallowed up by the emptiness and I want to be free of it. I’ve always wanted to be free of it.

  It’s black outside, in the nothing on the other side of the glass, but I squint and search out the black fields below. Scanning. Seeking. Hunting. I haven’t looked out of this window for a long time. Not in this way. Not really looking. I wonder whether he will come tonight. It’s been so long I sometimes wonder if I’ve ever seen him – it – at all. I wonder whether it was just brief bouts of madness. God knows the wildness of lunacy runs in our blood and no one would be surprised if we all turned out to be fey in one way or another. So maybe the occasional brief bout of madness is all my special gift ever was.

  But still I look. Forty next birthday and looking out of the window for something that I haven’t seen in fifteen years, if ever I saw it at all.

  But it’s one of those nights, isn’t it, Dad? A special, terrible night. A full night. And that’s always when it comes.

  If it comes at all.

  I push my face into the glass.

  I stare so long my eyes hurt and nothing exists outside the frame of the window. I can feel veins throbbing in my brain, or so it seems. My head is too full of memories and I can’t get them in any sort of order and they randomly attack me. You, me, him, all of us, even Mum. You all fill me too full. You’ve taken my empty thinking space. I pinch myself and wish for a drift, but it won’t come. I rock forward, keening, trying to cry it all out. Trying to cry you out. Trying to cry away this waiting for you to rot into death. My throat tightens. The world glitters in the corners and my own breath threatens to choke me.

  Sound throbs loudly and painfully and I squeeze my eyes shut for a second. The pulse spreads through my body from my skull to my toes and when I open my eyes I see the Listerine in the spit jar shaking slightly in the rhythm. I stare at it, unsure. Reality wants to twist away from me, but I grip it. The glass is shaking. I am shaking. The world is shaking. I feel the magic in the empty air.

  I am alive with tension. I think my face might burn me up from the inside. The house watches you with me. You lie still and grab at a mouthful of slow air.

  I turn back to the window and, panting like a small girl, I glance out into the dark and all I can see are red eyes and a whirl of energy. I smile. I knew what I would see before I looked. Something that was snapped inside heals as I watch. The creature dances in the road and in my soul. I see you and me and my lost babies in the clattering of those heavy hooves, in the dark hide that shines with sweat. I stare, and feel my heart sing.

  The beast must feel it too, because it stops and whinnies, the base of the sound making me flinch, and it paws at the ground, sending shards of tarmac up to the sky like black stars.

  It shakes that terrible mane and I know.

  My nose is streaming with snot and I lick it and the tears away as I push myself out of the chair. My legs shake under me and my whole body trembles. I feel vaguely sick – sick and hot – burning-up hot. I lean over you and look into your milky eyes. I need to know. I need to be sure. The beast roars for me outside and as I sob I think – I’m sure – I see the tiniest red pinprick shimmer beneath the smell and the wasting and the nothingness that breathes reluctantly from where you used to live.

  I smile. You understand. You know.

  Very gently, despite the heat and energy raging at me from outside, I kiss your head. I leave
my love there forever and my lips there for a moment, savouring your heat. One hand slips under and holds your skull gently as the other pulls out the pillow before laying you back down again. I watch you. Your breathing doesn’t change. One exhale. Four seconds of silence.

  I think of him. I think of the ivy. I think of the poor Macmillan nurse and what she will say, and then, my vision blurred, I say goodbye to your face and push the pillow down over it. I hope it doesn’t hurt.

  Your hands tremble slightly and then your back arches, and then nothing. It didn’t take so very much for you to die, after all.

  I step away.

  I leave the pillow where it lies.

  *

  After a second I turn and run. I can’t be late. I can’t be late this time, not this last time, this last chance. I pound down the stairs, my legs heavy and solid. My feet slip on the kitchen floor, but I stay upright. I can hear sobs in my chest but they don’t slow me down as I tear out of the back door and down the path to the gate. I don’t look at the swings.

  *

  The night air is cold and my lungs burn as I suck it in, deep down inside, no Cheyne–Stoking for me, my legs desperate to reach it before it disappears. It always disappears. But not this time, please not this time. I turn into the road, my limbs aching and clothes sticking to me. My hair is slick to my face.

  *

  I have nothing to fear. The creature is waiting for me. It’s always been waiting for me. I stand before it and wail as it roars and rears up, shaking the ground beneath us as it lands and then I grab for it, my hands entwined in that rough mane and I pull myself up, burying my face in its hot, sweaty neck. It smells exactly as I imagined it would. As it turns to the field, I am ten and twenty-five and forty next birthday, I am everything I will ever be and ever was. And I am alive.

  The blackness of the field and the night stretch out before us as the beast and I leap the fence. I laugh and my hair blows out behind me as we gallop. I feel my hooves pounding through the night as I rage onwards. Behind me, the lights from the house fade.