The Last Act of Love

by Cathy Rentzenbrink

  All the customers wanted to buy us drinks.

  ‘Have one for yourself,’ they said, thrusting notes at us.

  ‘I won’t, thanks,’ said my dad. ‘We’ll be heading back to the hospital after last orders. I’ll take a drink off you when our boy is better.’

  The hours inched on. We sat and watched Matty breathing. The other young man, Alex, died. He’d had a massive brain haemorrhage, it turned out, and there was nothing the doctors could do. He was pronounced brain dead and the ventilator was switched off. I could hardly look at his girlfriend as they said goodbye to us and wished us luck. I couldn’t bear for her to see my relief that it was her boyfriend who had died and not my brother.

  The nurses told us to talk to Matty; they said he must have been physically very fit to have survived. He was, we said. We told them about his sporting prowess, all those trophies for running and football. About the way he could lift himself onto the roof terrace at the back of the pub just by pulling himself up with his hands. How he would then walk across the roof and through the patio door of our upstairs kitchen, giving anyone who was in there a fright. Surely someone this fit and strong couldn’t die? Surely someone who was loved this much couldn’t die?

  Two policemen called round to the pub on Sunday evening to tell us that the driver had come forward, and one came back later to take a witness statement from me. I told them about being at the Rainbow. I could hardly choke out the words when I described how Matty had turned down the chance of a lift and decided to stay behind without me.

  I slept at the hospital on the Monday night. I sat beside Matty until tiredness overwhelmed me and then, on the way to the room I had been assigned, I found the chapel. I knelt and put my hands together. I was an unbaptized atheist, but I had been to the Catholic school in our village, where I had read at Mass and won the school RE prize. I knew all the prayers, and that the God I didn’t believe in was kind.

  I said the Our Father, a Hail Mary. I asked for my sins to be forgiven. I asked that Mary, mother of God, prayed for us now and at the hour of our death. I said the Hail Mary again in French. I had learned it on an exchange trip with school and thought it sounded very beautiful.

  Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce.

  I tried to make up my own prayers.

  ‘If you are there, if you exist, if someone can listen to me . . .’

  I did my best, then went off to find the tiny white room and fell asleep on the narrow cot-like bed.

  In the morning, I woke up thinking it had all been a dream. I stretched and smiled and gloried in the safe warmth. It was a dream, I thought, just a dream. And then I sensed something unfamiliar about my surroundings, scratchiness against my chin from a woollen blanket, not my own soft duvet. I opened my eyes. These were not my walls. No sage and lilac, only the unbroken white of the relatives’ overnight room. No dream, no respite.

  I got dressed and hurried back to intensive care. Today might be the day, I thought, if the scan shows the doctors what they want to see, that they stop sedating Matty. Today might be the day that he wakes up.

  I had not yet learned to be thankful for the absence of nightmares.

  YOUTH CRITICAL AFTER COLLISION

  A Snaith teenager remains in a critical condition following a horrifying road accident in the early hours of Sunday.

  Matthew Mintern (16), whose parents run the Bell and Crown public house in Snaith, was believed to have been walking home along the A654 road when he was in a collision with a car.

  Goole police said Matthew was making his way home from the Rainbow Snooker Club in Pontefract Road just before 2am when he was struck from behind by a car and carried some twenty metres along the road before being thrown onto the road surface. He sustained serious head injuries.

  Immediately following the collision, police appealed for information and yesterday a driver was interviewed. Police inquiries are continuing.

  Matthew has lived in Snaith since last October when his parents, Kevin and Margaret Mintern, took over the Bell and Crown. Previously the family lived in Carlton.

  Another motorist who passed the scene called at the public house and told them about the collision.

  Following the accident, Matthew was rushed to Pontefract Infirmary and then transferred to the intensive care unit at Leeds Infirmary.

  His parents maintained a vigil at his bedside, where his mother was as we went to press. A hospital spokesman said Matthew’s condition was critical.

  Times & Chronicle, Goole, 16 August 1990

  THE FIRST TEN DAYS

  We spent the next few days driving between the hospital and the pub. I could hardly sleep at night, but I always dozed off on the journey there and back. Once my parents decided to let me sleep on and left me in the back of the car a couple of streets away from the hospital. When I woke, hot and groggy from the sun streaming in through the windows, I felt the usual relief that the whole thing had been a nightmare, then faced all over again the terrible realization that no, it was all true. I thought of the range of things that might have happened as I slept. I might have missed him dying. I might have missed him waking up. I hurried onto the ward, but nothing had happened, nothing had changed.

  As the drugs that had been paralysing Matty left his body, there were some initial reactions. His hands clenched, his mouth moved. We got very excited, but were told they were just spasms. He was given a tracheotomy; a hole cut into the base of his throat so that the tubes no longer needed to be put down through his mouth. He looked more comfortable, but we realized it meant the doctors were expecting him to need it for some time. I asked a nurse about it and she told me that the tubes down the throat served their purpose in an emergency, but the friction in the airways would mean sores if they were left in for much longer. I was overwhelmed with all the new things I was learning, and why.

  The day after the tracheotomy, Matty left intensive care and was moved onto Ward 26. At least we’re leaving intensive care, we said to each other. That must be a good thing.

  On Saturday, a week after the accident, I woke up at the hospital hoping, as I had hoped every morning, that today would be the day that Matty woke up. Instead, when I got to the ward, his forehead and the top of his head had swollen and were bulging out over his face. I tried to keep calm but kept thinking about what that customer had said about fifty-bob cabbages and crying. The doctors came and took him for a scan. ‘If it’s fluid,’ they said, ‘we’ll put in a drain.’

  It wasn’t fluid. It was the brain tissue swelling up, so another set of drugs went up on the pole to drip into him. This was our worst day yet.

  My mother and I sat and looked at Matty as we waited for the drugs to start working.

  ‘How would you even describe it?’ I said. I was thinking of our customers, trying to work out what to tell them when they asked for news. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’

  ‘It looks like something off a Tom and Jerry cartoon,’ she said. ‘Unreal.’

  ‘Or the Elephant Man,’ I said. ‘He looks a bit like that, but worse.’

  We knew we were failing to find the words.

  ‘Maybe we should take some photos,’ said Mum. ‘He’ll be interested when he gets better, and you’re right, we’ll never be able to fully explain to him what he looked like.’

  ‘That’s a good idea. We could get a disposable camera and save it for him.’

  I thought, but didn’t say, that if he died we could throw the camera away. If he died we would never want to be reminded of that moment.

  I walked into the city centre and bought one from Boots, and we snapped away as the drugs made no difference and his temperature continued to rise. We had to believe that in the future we’d be showing him these photos. We had to have something good to think about as it looked like his brain might burst out of his head.

  ‘Look,’ Mum said, pointing to the temperature chart after the nurse had filled it in. We collapsed into hysterical laughter. There was hardly any chart left for his tempera
ture to rise into. Matty was one single tiny square away from being hotter than anyone had ever envisaged that a human being could be.

  It took four days for Matty’s head to return to anything like its normal shape. As each day passed, he was in less imminent danger of death, yet still did not wake up. We’d seen plenty of films and read plenty of books – we knew it was our job to gaze at Matty’s beautiful face until the moment he either died or sat bolt upright in bed and asked what had happened to him. But this wasn’t Sleeping Beauty. Pretty soon, his tongue was covered in thick yellow fur and there was a stale, sweaty smell hanging around him. The emphasis switched from praying for him not to die, to learning how to look after a body that didn’t move in any intentional way.

  ‘Now, Matty,’ said a brisk, kind nurse, ‘we’re going to give you a bath today. Your mum’s going to help, and she’s going to wash bits of you she hasn’t seen since you were a baby.’

  I didn’t think, given the extreme circumstances, that Matty would mind Mum washing him until he got better, but I knew that if he could speak he’d express a strong aversion to me getting involved. I could imagine the eyebrow-raise and the hard stare, could hear him say, ‘You can fuck right off with the cock washing, sis.’

  I learned smaller tasks. I helped change his position every two hours so that he didn’t get bedsores. I wiped his face, swabbed his mouth, cleaned his tongue and brushed his teeth using special sticks with pink foam heads. Mum told me that when Matty was born, I’d come to visit at the hospital clutching my brand new toothbrush and tried to poke it into his mouth to clean his non-existent teeth.

  ‘That’s lovely,’ said a nurse who overheard. ‘It’s a really good idea to tell him lots of stories that he’s in or about people he knows.’

  ‘Tell us how you and Dad met,’ I said to Mum. ‘Tell us how we came to exist.’

  Matty and I had always loved this story. We were fascinated that our father was an orphan and his family had been very poor. That the Christmas after his mother died, when he was eight, he’d hung up a stocking but got nothing in it. We liked his tales of truanting. He’d stopped going to school because he was teased for being dirty, and when he was fifteen he’d run away from his aunt’s house and joined the merchant navy. Three years later, covered in tattoos, he’d sailed into Falmouth and met our mother on Custom House Quay.

  It had been a local scandal. This scarcely literate Irish sailor knocking up the head girl of the grammar school. Our granny wanted Mum to get an abortion, but she wouldn’t do it. Mum told us how she’d loved Dad because he was so different. She was in thrall to his lilting voice. When they’d walked up Spernen Wyn together, she couldn’t take her eyes off him and had walked smack bang into a lamp post.

  Do you remember, Matty, that night out with the parents and Mum’s friend from school, Viv, in the Bon Ton Roulet in Falmouth when you were still hungry and had another corn on the cob instead of a pudding, and Viv kept saying I was a love child, a child of love, and we both made sick noises?

  We told him stories from the pub, reminding him that he’d found out it was for sale and said ‘Why don’t we buy it, Dad?’ as we were all in the Chinese takeaway next door waiting for our dinner ‘B’ for four to be ready. We talked about how Dad had recently had another narrow escape at work at Maltby pit – in his time he’d fallen between two ships in Rotterdam, and had been crushed between the underground wagons at Mount Wellington mine in Cornwall – and thought he’d used up his nine lives and how it was time for a different sort of job. We talked about how exciting it had been to move into the pub and get to know all the customers and their funny ways and stories. We told him that Dick was in trouble after being caught sneaking a look at the Racing Post when he was at a wedding with his girlfriend, about Stuart’s wife hitting him over the head with an ashtray when he’d come home late and drunk, and about how Gilly had put his false teeth into someone’s pint pot when they went to the loo.

  Mum read the paper to him, and when I was alone with him I’d remind him of secrets and naughtiness.

  Do you remember that time we were hanging around at the train station and you were trying to roll a joint as I sheltered you from the wind, but a sudden gust blew it all away and we walked home without getting stoned? . . . Do you remember the time I was caught smoking in the boys’ toilets at school and the teacher said that for an intelligent girl I did some stupid things? . . . Do you remember when I drank all that vodka on the French exchange trip and passed out? The last thing I remember is your face. You were crying. You hardly ever cry but you cried then . . . Do you remember when you and your mates drank all that Blue Label Vodka upstairs and you were OK but Justin was sick in the bath and Lee had to go to hospital? . . . Do you remember that night when we were both working behind the bar and you told Terry off when he said I had a big mouth? I was amazed at you. He’s so much older, dominant, the sort of man who likes to boss people around. He got right up close to you, and said, ‘Don’t think you can treat me like a cunt and get away with it.’

  And you said, ‘Watch yourself with my sister and you won’t have a problem with me.’

  I asked you about it later. I said, ‘I can’t believe you were so cool with Terry.’

  You laughed and said, ‘I was fucking shitting myself, but you can’t let people like that see that you’re scared of them.’

  I looked down at him, not in any position now to look after himself, let alone me. I squeezed his hand. Thank you for that. I’ll look after you now for a little while.

  I reminded him how we used to fight. Do you remember our last ever physical fight, which was also the first one you ever won? It was in the kitchen at Almond Tree Avenue. We were twelve and thirteen, maybe, and we were arguing about the washing-up. I threw a milk jug at your head, and even though I missed, you pushed me onto the floor and kicked my head into the corner of the kitchen cabinets until it really hurt, and we never fought again . . . Do you remember that time you were pissed off with me for being noisy and boisterous at your school fete? You said my bright mustard tights and denim shorts looked ridiculous and said you wished I’d fuck off and stop being so annoying.

  I talked to him about times he’d made me cross, usually when he’d left chores undone because he knew I’d do them rather than annoy our parents, and I told him he was forgiven. But don’t think you can do it again when you’re better.

  One day I took in Rats, the James Herbert novel that Matty had been reading before the accident. I was reading out a scary section and enjoying putting lots of oomph into doing the voices – a couple were going into the woods for sex but it was clear something bad was about to happen – when a nurse stopped me.

  ‘I wouldn’t read him anything frightening. It might get into his dreams.’

  She told me about a man who’d read a book about snakes to his wife when she was unconscious, and when she was better she told them that she’d kept hallucinating snakes.

  After that, I didn’t want to say anything sad, scary or difficult to Matty, though I was fascinated and hopeful that surely this must mean there was something swirling around inside his head. I brought in the complete scripts of Fawlty Towers, which I’d given him for Christmas. We used to enact it together. He’d be Basil and I’d be Sybil, though he also liked to make me be Manuel.

  Remember how you made me be Manuel, Matty? Not just doing the play, either – you’d sneak up on me anywhere and try to whack me on the forehead with a spoon . . . Remember that thing we used to do that we got off a Jasper Carrott routine? It was a way of letting each other know that we thought the person we were talking to was a dickhead. We just had to very lightly touch the centre of our foreheads with our finger and then catch the other’s eye.

  Ten days had passed since the accident. Ten days of sitting by Matty in hospital wondering if we were imagining a tiny bit of movement behind his left eyelid. He had loads of visitors. All his friends and lots of our customers would come and tell him stories. His friend Justin had organized a ‘G
et Well Soon’ card from Manchester United football club. We pinned it up on the wall above him along with all the others, and tied ‘Get Well’ helium balloons to the frame of his bed. Then we went home to serve behind the bar and try to find the words to answer our customers’ questions.

  The fireplace in the pub was full of flowers for Matty. Upstairs had become a barren place. We hardly lived there any more, only passing through to eat, wash and sleep. The fridge was full of food people had brought for us. The landlady of the Downe Arms, the pub across the road, came over with a casserole every day. People were taking turns taking Polly out for walks. She looked sad all the time.

  One day at home I was walking past Matty’s bedroom door when I realized I’d started to miss him. I didn’t miss him for the very first few days while I was terrified he might die, and after that I didn’t think to miss him, the way I hadn’t missed him the year before when we went on separate holidays for a week. But now, standing by his bedroom door in our empty home, I was full of longing for him. I missed him appearing over the roof to startle me at the kitchen door. I missed the way he sat by the toaster eating a whole loaf of toast and peanut butter as we chatted. I felt weak and sad. I sat on his bed, looked at the POLICE, SLOW sign that he’d pinched from the roadworks around the corner, looked at the traffic cone he’d drawn a face on with black marker pen. I thought of the way he used to put the cone on his head and dance around. It used to make me laugh so much and now I was crying hard at the thought of it. I looked at his records and put on ‘Wish You Were Here’ by Pink Floyd. I remembered us sitting in this room listening to that song and imagining ourselves as lost souls in a fish bowl. I’d drawn a pair of intertwined goldfish on his jeans. It could only have been a few weeks ago, but it felt like years.