by Sarah Moss
The Cathedral is strangely hard to find, hidden behind a building that looks like a Soviet-era Russian hotel and is a students’ hall of residence. I approached it from the side, head down, wanting to see it first without any later clutter in the way, as if I could trick myself into an authentic experience of some past moment of the place, as if I might see it suddenly. I stopped in front of Epstein’s St Michael and the Devil on the outside of the east wall; I had not yet discovered that one of the charms of Coventry Cathedral is that the geographical cardinal points are at odds with the ecclesiastical ones. The wall that faces the rising sun is called the south wall, because all altars are assumed to present themselves to the resurrection in the east, even when a compass would point north. I am reminded of an experiment once described to me by my friend Anna’s husband Giles, an ornithologist, in which migratory birds are shut in a windowless dome set up so that researchers can change the magnetic field to make north become south, to see if the birds are navigating by the pull of the North Pole when they leave Africa for Europe.
I’ve heard the sculpture called ‘St Michael Wrestling the Devil’, but he’s already triumphant, floating over prone Satan with his wings outstretched like those of eagles on church lecterns and his arms open. There’s no pantomime about this devil, no pitchfork or tail. His face looks like a death mask. Green bronze against sandstone. The air smelt of rain and the flagstones underfoot were dark with damp, but the clouds were only silver grey and no drops fell. When Basil Spence, the Cathedral’s architect, wanted to commission Epstein to make St Michael, the Reconstruction Committee objected – in 1957 – that Epstein was Jewish. So was Jesus, Spence said. Epstein died just before St Michael and Satan were installed. I found myself nodding to St Michael, or Satan, or maybe Epstein, as I went up the stairs towards the forum between the ruins of the medieval cathedral and the soaring of the new one.
I’m not a believer. I trust that’s already clear. The virgin birth, the miracles, the resurrection – no. But I’ve always liked churches. The community at Bryher Farm was in many ways a good place to grow up, and I’m glad Dad stayed there after my mother died, but it could be hard to find space for reading and writing. People join communes to be with other people, and often because they enjoy at least the idea of manual work. If they do want to be alone, it’s outside, watching the sea or meditating on a tree, and a person, especially a young person, found alone and at ease indoors is assumed to be in need of an improving occupation. Come and knead the bread with me, Adam, take that mood out on the dough. We need some more wood chopping, just what you need after a day stuck inside at school. The onion bed’s full of weeds. In a town, I’d probably have gone to the library, but even Porthleven was four miles along the coast path or six on the road, so I went to the church. It doesn’t occur to anyone to look for a teenaged boy in a church. I used to pile up the tapestry kneelers along one of the pews at the back, take off my shoes and stretch out my legs, using the holders for prayer books to keep my notes and books to hand. School work, often, but I was fortunate in having a school library that had plenty of space if little money, so the collections acquired in the ’60s and ’70s were still there, full of dust and the occasional annotations of people who were by the early ’90s settled in their jobs-for-life and industriously making untaxed repayments on six-bedroom houses bought for the cost of half a bin-shed on a modern estate now. In winter the church was already locked when the school bus reached the village, but from February to October I saw the fall of light through the stained glass windows lean, strengthen, and fade, heard the wind and rain on the roof, smelt the ghost of incense at Easter and the dying of roses after summer weddings. Sometimes, especially during the school holidays, the organist was there practising, or the ladies who cleaned and changed the flowers. You again, they said, just so you’re doing no harm, and later sometimes they included me in their tea breaks. Must be hard, growing up without a mum, see why his dad stays up there with the hippies, could be right lonely else. I didn’t often see the vicar, who was serving five churches across three parishes and probably regarded the sixteenth-century buildings in his care as nightmarish liabilities, all Grade I listed and apt at any moment to require impossibly costly repairs. Hello, Adam, he’d say, everything OK? As if it was my job to be in the church reading, the way it was other people’s jobs to be dusting the pews and weeding the path. I rarely looked at the altar, fenced off and swathed in cloths, but I came to know all the epitaphs and to imagine the life stories and especially the funerals of those interred around me. Robert Hendrick and Elizabeth his wife, she dead thirty-four years before him, two days before a nameless ‘infant son’. An assortment of young men killed in battle: Napoleon, various acts of imperial aggression, the Crimea, as well as the lists of those who didn’t return from the big two. Nearly forty gone in two weeks in 1916; it was surprising that the village had anyone to send in 1939. On the west wall, the Pengillick family, who lost seven children between 1822 and 1826.
I stood inside the Cathedral and turned to the north-facing West Screen, the Screen of Saints and Angels. On both of my previous visits, I’d wanted to stand before it, to let it dwarf me, and to read both the intricacies of each figure and the sails of light and space between them. There are upright saints, angular, emaciated, bearing fairy-tale symbols of their particular lives and deaths, summoning from memory the stilted saints in the medieval windows smashed and melted by bombs in November 1940. They are human figures but there is no pretence of life. They look like the risen dead, flesh falling away, gazes averted. Between their ranks, angels rise and descend like a flock of birds, like rooks. A host of angels, a murder of crows. A parliament of rooks. John Hutton is said to have made his angels in the image of those liberated from Nazi concentration camps.
the rumble of the approaching train
Take the train, the friendly Welsh nurse had said to Emma. It’s cheaper than parking and probably quicker from where you live anyway, and frankly, Mum, you don’t really look as if you ought to be driving. That’s a shame, I didn’t say, considering that she’s planning to go into work and practise medicine the day after tomorrow, but the next day I took the train so that Emma wouldn’t have to drive home.
I stood on the platform and closed my eyes. Tiredness was a stone in my head, a weight on my throat, but it was also an anaesthetic of a kind, a small mercy. What if Rose had an emergency at school while Emma and I were a train journey away at the hospital, what if the trains were running late or cancelled and we needed to get back to Rose? I do not want to be here, I thought. I do not want to be doing this. I do not want to be the father of a critically ill child. I do not want to be the tragic figure at the school gates. The departure board showed trains to London, Glasgow and the airport; I had time, still, to go back through the underpass and come up on the other platform for Oxenholme, Penrith, Carlisle, Motherwell and Glasgow Queen Street, for the sour smell of the overheated red trains and the flashing of mountains and coast in the windows, the growing space between me and the High Dependency Unit.
I leant against one of the girders supporting the roof of our rather charming Victorian station and let my head tip back, felt the rumble of the approaching train in my skull.
here, already
My feet were learning the corridors the way they know my running routes, navigating by the announcements of realised fear on the walls. Children’s Wing: oncology, neurology, cardiology, IC U, and the unnameable misfortunes, the Bluebell Ward and the Rainbow Suite. Even the corridors were too hot and the hospital radio jabbered and jingled day and night. Jesus Christ, Miriam had said, do you think they’re playing that stuff to prevent bed-blocking, tip people over the edge one way or the other, imagine if you were dying and the last thing you heard was that addled twerp, he sounds like a crap teacher about to lose control of Year 1.
Up the stairs, lined with posters telling me how much energy I was using by assailing two flights of stairs rather than taking the lift, as if calories were an enemy to
be outwitted at every turn. Through the heavy double doors at the top, past the posters warning of the consequences of smoking around babies, and past the chapel – more posters about the evils of fizzy drinks and crisps – to the HDU. No-one has ever smoked near our kids, I thought. We do not buy crisps or sweet drinks and I make sure the girls get at least five portions of fruit and vegetables every day, remembering that fruit disrupts blood-sugar levels and that the widest range of colours approximates the widest range of nutrients. I remembered weaning Miriam, buying organic vegetables, steaming them because boiling removed too many vitamins, rubbing them through a strainer with a spoon because liquidising merely chopped up the indigestible fibre, blending them with organic baby rice and Emma’s expressed breastmilk. Remembered Miriam rubbing the resulting elixir through her hair, which was blond then, remembered her dropping it off the spoon onto the floor and pointing and beaming in triumph. Why don’t you, Emma said, give her food out of a jar to put in her hair while you spoon the good stuff in? All those years this was waiting to happen, lying in her future.
I pressed the bell outside the first set of doors and waited. It takes time. Of course answering the door is not the first priority for the nurses on the paediatric HDU, where the resus trolley wanders the hallway like a hopeful dog and several children a week are transferred to Intensive Care and not expected to return. How do you do it, I wanted to ask the nurses, how do you return every day to this place where families have fallen into ruin, how do you live in a world where it is normal for children to die and parents to grieve? Except that we all live in that world, don’t we, only some of us, most of us in Britain today, are able to pretend otherwise. It is normal for children to die. Look at Syria, at Palestine, at Eritrea and Somalia. Look at the tidelines of beaches in Italy and Greece. Look, while we are on the subject, at certain parts of Chicago and Los Angeles. The nurses’ world, the hospital version of normality, is true and what most of us here and now regard as ordinary life is a lie. Perhaps that is why we don’t pay them very much. I read the posters about vegetables and not smoking and tried not to ring the bell again. I peered through the wired glass panels in the door, making sure that things were only normally busy, that there wasn’t someone lying on the floor or a red emergency light flashing over one of the doors. I caught the eye of another parent watching her four-year-old watching the fish, but she was quite right not to move, parents are not allowed to answer the door, to admit strangers. I read the poster about fizzy drinks and exercise and tried to imagine a future in which I would leave Miriam alone in the house and go out running again. I failed. I rang the bell again and this time someone came to let me in.
There were curtains drawn around her bed.
No.
‘Mim?’
She was sitting up, leaning forward with Emma on one side of her and a nurse on the other, the mask over her face. She waved a hand.
Emma glanced around. ‘She’s been wheezing again. Her sats were a bit low, we’re just giving her some more nebs.’
Miriam reached round the plastic thing to push her hair aside and give me the kind of pissed-off expression I used to think she over-used. Not everything, I used to say, needs your best sarcasm. I blew her a kiss and she closed her eyes. Stop embarrassing me, Dad.
I put the parcels down at Miriam’s feet. ‘Look, people have been sending you things. Quite heavy things. And I made muffins for you. Rose had a couple for breakfast. I picked up a smoothie from that place outside the station, blueberry and banana. And your New Internationalist came.’
I’d wondered whether to bring the New Internationalist, which is a monthly digest of reasons why civilised human beings should despair of their species and their planet, but Miriam likes such despair, uses it as the foundation stone of her teenage identity.
The nurse stepped back so I could see the monitors. Her heart was going faster than usual, high 70s, and her O2 was only 92. ‘All right, darling, we’re nearly done here. I’ll just ask you to keep that probe on your finger for a bit, all right?’
Miriam handed the plastic thing, the nebuliser, back to the nurse. ‘I need the loo.’
Emma and the nurse exchanged glances.
Emma cleared her throat. ‘Could you wait a few minutes? Just while we see how that’s worked?’
Mimi swung her legs out of the bed. She was still in her pyjamas, as if she was ill. ‘No, actually. I had three cups of tea.’
‘Oh.’
The nurse took over. ‘All right then, darling, we’ll take you off the monitors but I’m going to ask you to keep talking to me, all right?’
Miriam was unclipping the oxygen probe and reaching into her top to detach the heart monitor’s wires from the pads stuck to her chest. ‘I’ll sing, OK? Save you making conversation.’
They left, Mim defenceless in her gingham pyjamas and the Chinese black velvet Mary Janes she affects as slippers, the nurse tired in her pastel tunic and trousers and the trainers they all wear as if about to enter a fun run dressed as a nurse.
Emma sagged as if someone had cut her string. I should have stridden across the room and taken her in my arms but I didn’t feel like it.
‘So?’ I said.
She bowed her head. There was dandruff on her shoulders and her hair needed a wash.
‘She started wheezing a bit around midnight. I’d tried to get her to settle down but she hadn’t gone to sleep. It wasn’t too bad at first, the inhaler seemed to work, but then her sats kept going down and we ended up with the nebs again. This is the second lot. She’s going to end up on oxygen at this rate.’
I fiddled with the tape on one of the parcels. It was franked by the University of Glasgow, where my friend Anna works. ‘And what does it mean?’
Emma shrugged. ‘Either it’s a coincidence and she arrested because of something else, or it was a reaction to something and it’s still rumbling.’
‘A reaction?’
‘Anaphylaxis. I’ve been reading her notes. But we need a proper eye-witness account. Mrs Collier’s talking to Mr Stanton.’
‘But she’s not allergic to anything.’
I could hear the words in Emma’s head. She is now, stupid.
‘We’ll see,’ she said. ‘It’s too early to say.’
Stop being such a fucking doctor, I wanted to say.
They came back. Mim sat on the bed, on the NHS blanket like cotton chicken-wire, and held out her hand for the probe’s bite. Stop it, I thought, stop making her sick, let me just take her home and we’ll start again.
‘Lift your top for me, darling, and I’ll just pop you back on the monitor.’
‘I can do it myself.’
I stepped out through the screens, met the eyes of the mother of the spindly blond boy in the next bed. He’d been there when we arrived, propped up on pillows with a drawing pad on his lap, the bed covered in felt-tip pens and his torso scoured with surgical scars, old silver lines intersecting and overwritten by newer red ones. He was still drawing and she was just sitting there, large and pale and unwashed, her hands drooping in her lap.
‘She had a bad night, your girl.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Sorry. I hope we didn’t disturb you.’
She shook her head. ‘You don’t come in here for a rest, do you?’
The nurse pulled back Miriam’s curtains and the ward got bigger. ‘All done for now, Dad. I’ll pop along and check on her in a little bit.’
Sats at 94, heart-rate 69, 66, 67. She lay back and watched her own monitors. Emma was at the window, watching rain fall on cars.
I went in and sat on the bed. ‘Have you had breakfast?’
Mimi shook her head. ‘You know what it’s like. I experimented, that bread really is waterproof. And the cereals are all full of crap. You have to wonder how many of the people in here’ve just got malnutrition from being in hospital.’
Emma leant against the wall. ‘There’s been research. You’re right. But the money’s not there and most people aren’t in long enough for it to
make a difference.’
Mim pleated her blanket. ‘How long am I going to be here?’
‘Until we know what happened,’ Emma said. ‘Until we know how to stop it happening again. Believe me, no-one’s going to keep you on the HDU any longer than they have to, these beds cost hundreds of pounds a day.’
I held out the first parcel. ‘Here, see what Glasgow’s sending you. And I’ll get a plate for those muffins.’
She looked up. ‘Can I have a coffee?’
Darling girl, you can have anything in this world. ‘Yes. Emma, why don’t you go get a proper coffee for her and one for you, get off the ward for a bit?’
She shrugged. ‘Whatever you say.’
I opened the blind all the way and turned off the bright white light over Miriam’s bed, turned the monitor so that we couldn’t see it so easily. I picked up the books sliding across the plastic armchair where Emma had spent the night and piled them on the plastic table at the end of the bed. Miriam watched me.
‘Shall we send some of these home with Mum and ask her to bring some new ones when she comes back with Rose?’
Miriam let her head fall back on the pillow. ‘Dad, how long am I going to be here? Really?’
I sat down and rested my hand on her knee under the blanket. ‘Really, I don’t know. I suppose there are two things: are you well enough to leave hospital now, and do we know what happened well enough to know how to stop it happening again? And I’d guess that mostly you are well enough, though the wheezing thing isn’t great, but we don’t yet know that we can keep you safe at home. Or school, or wherever. So for now, you’re here, and distraction’s probably your best bet.’
