by Lisa Jewell
Dean felt like he’d been slapped. His loss. He hadn’t realised until just then that he’d lost something. He tried to bring Sky to mind; not the Sky who’d just died on a delivery table, or the Sky who’d spent the last six months hating him, but the other Sky, the one he’d spent three years lusting after, fantasising about, the prettiest girl he’d ever been with. He wasn’t sure he’d ever loved her, but he’d liked her, more than he’d liked anyone else he’d been with.
No, he hadn’t lost the love of his life. He hadn’t lost his soul-mate. But he had lost the person who was going to bring up his baby. That person had gone, taking her milk and her lullabies and her enthusiasm for buying small pink dresses with her. This baby had no mother. One day soon, this baby would be big enough to leave this sunny little room and someone would have to take this baby home and raise it. And everybody was going to turn and look at him.
Images flashed through his head: an empty flat, a screaming baby over his shoulder, the black night outside the window, a bottle of milk illuminated and rotating in the microwave, his life desiccated to an existence of shit and noise and solitude. Dean said he wanted to go to the toilet. Instead he slipped out of the building and into a canopied walkway where he rolled together a spliff with shaking hands and sucked the life out of it.
He contemplated walking home. It was just getting dark, the day had gone by without him even noticing. He glanced up at the building. He thought of what lay in there. A tiny, too-early baby with tubes and wires extruded from every orifice; the body of that baby’s mother, floppy and drained of blood like a kosher calf; the baby’s grandmothers, sick and bleached and aged ten years in half an hour. He thought of the expectations, the needs and demands that lay inside that building. He felt sick. He felt weak. The sky loomed above him, purple and low. The walls of the building squashed up against him. He was being compressed from every angle. He knew he had to run, in one direction or another.
He chose away.
MAGGIE
Maggie Smith pulled the clear wrapping from a two-pack of Rich Tea biscuits and snapped one in half. It broke with a sound like a twig being stepped on in a forest. She dipped the corner of the semi-circle into her mug of tea and let it soften for three seconds before transferring it to her mouth and sucking the soft bit off the end. She gazed at her mug. And it was her mug. She’d brought it with her from home, tired of the taste and fragility of plastic. It was one that she’d taken from her mum’s house, after she died, a solid brown mug with a cream interior and a handle that looked like it had been stuck on as an afterthought. A hairline crack was forming on the mug, running downwards from the edge. She’d have to be careful, she pondered, the whole thing could give way one day and she’d be scalded.
She set the mug down gently on the table to her left and then she looked at the man in the bed and she smiled.
‘How are you, Daniel? Can I get you anything?’
The man in the bed grunted. That meant that he was in pain.
‘More meds, love? Shall I ask for more meds?’
He grunted again, and winced.
Maggie got to her feet, smoothing down the front of her trousers, and stuck her head around the door. Outside, the plush, carpeted corridor was empty. She turned her head from left to right. It could be a hotel when it was empty like this, she thought, a kind of two-star airport hotel possibly, with its eighties colour scheme of peach and spearmint, its upholstered seating of tubular metal, framed watercolours of French fishing villages and plaster moulded up-lighters.
She padded down the carpet towards a small glazed work-station where two women in white overalls sat leafing through paperwork.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ she began, in her gentlest, most considerate voice – who knew what onerous task she might be distracting these women from? – ‘Mr Blanchard, he seems to be in some discomfort … when you’re free, not now, when you get a minute …’ she tapered off.
One of the women – Maggie thought her name was Sarah but couldn’t be sure, there were so many people here, they came and went and it was hard to keep track – smiled patiently and put down her paperwork. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I’ll come right now.’
Maggie had never been to a hospice up until two weeks ago and she felt the same sense of awe about it as she’d felt about midwives on birthing units after she’d given birth to her first child, twenty-five years ago. Wow, she’d thought, people do this. She’d toyed with the idea of being a midwife herself for a while after she’d had her children, wanting to be part of the miraculous work they did, but the desire faded. Now she felt the same way about the men and women here. To be present at the far side of the spectrum, to give dignity and grace to these fading moments, to witness the exit of a whole human existence. It was truly inspiring. She felt at home here now. She felt like she belonged.
She followed the nurse back to Daniel’s room and watched as she fiddled with the dials on the equipment to which he was attached.
‘Thank you,’ she heard him whisper, as the morphine drained into him. ‘Thank you.’
‘You are very welcome!’ trilled the nurse. She paused and pushed her hands into her pockets, stood for a while and gazed down upon him, smiling. ‘Can I get you anything else, Mr Blanchard? Some juice? A paper?’
Daniel smiled, a small pucker of his lips, and shook his head, just once.
‘OK!’ sang Sarah. ‘I’ll just leave you here with your friend then, let you get some rest. You should start to feel a lot better very soon.’ She gave his hand a squeeze where it lay against his white bed sheets, and then she left.
Maggie picked up his other hand and held it inside both of hers. She watched him for a moment, watched the lines of tension start to ease from his face, his beautiful face. She still remembered the first time she’d seen that face. Just over a year ago. He’d appeared to her like an apparition, a grimacing angel, above the desk that she manned twice a week at the physiotherapy practice.
‘Good morning,’ he’d said, and she’d immediately been enthralled by his accent, a soft, milky French affair. Then she’d caught the strong angles of his face, the cushiony lips, the black hair streaked with silver, the olivey skin, the turquoise eyes, and felt her stomach collapse in on itself. It was rare, as a woman of a certain age, to find a man of a comparable age who made your stomach sag and your heart begin to pump more purposefully.
‘Good morning.’ She’d smiled, feeling glad that she’d treated herself to that teeth-whitening session a month earlier, feeling prettier for it. ‘Can I help you?’
‘It’s my back.’ He winced. ‘My friend recommended this place. He said I should see a Candy Stapleton?’
‘Ah, yes.’ She smiled again, showing off her lovely white teeth. ‘Of course. Would you like me to make you an appointment?’
He straightened himself and stared at her, disconsolately. Maggie’s heart ached for him. ‘I was hoping to see her now. Today. I was hoping for immediate attention. My back is so …’ He winced again and clutched his lower back.
Backs. Always backs. Knees in skiing season, backs the rest of the time. She looked at him sympathetically. ‘I’ll see what I can do. Take a seat.’
He was there for nearly three hours in the end. Long enough for some unforced conversation to surface, long enough for her to find out that he was indeed French, that he had lived in England for nearly thirty years, that he had never married and that his back had been troubling him to a greater and greater extent for the past two months. Maggie made him a cup of tea from her kettle and told him that she was divorced with two grown-up children and that she’d been working at the practice for nearly five years. Just for pocket money. Her ex-husband looked after her very nicely, she didn’t really need to work. She tried her hardest to make herself sound interesting. She had made the assumption that because he was French he was intrinsically more interesting than her. It occurred to her that there were probably boring people in France too but it seemed somehow unlikely. England was just the
sort of boring place where boring people came from, Maggie felt. And she included herself in that.
He wasn’t much of a smiler. He didn’t smile once for the full three hours he was in the waiting room, not even when she gave him his tea. But then, she’d concluded, who smiled with a bad back?
He came in every day after that, to see Candy. The therapy didn’t seem to be helping much; if anything his back grew worse and worse as the days went by. Eventually Candy referred him to a specialist at the local hospital and Maggie knew that she might never see him again so she did one of the bravest things she’d ever done in her life and said: ‘Maybe we could …’
And he had smiled and said: ‘Yes, we could. Tomorrow night? We could have dinner? Yes?’
She’d smiled gratefully at him. She’d been about to say that they could meet up for a cup of tea, but dinner was really what she’d been after. She was glad that she hadn’t misread the signals. She was glad that he wanted to take her out for dinner.
That first dinner had been a muted affair. Daniel’s (for that was his name) back had been an issue. He’d numbed the pain with red wine and little white pills that he kept in his jacket pocket in a clear plastic pot. By the time their desserts had arrived he’d been straining to get out of his chair so they’d retired to a corner of the bar where they had a small low sofa and some flattering lighting, and things had improved for a while. Daniel had complimented Maggie on her hair: ‘It is very lovely hair, Maggie, you look after yourself.’ And she did look after herself. She’d not been a good-looking teenager and then in her twenties she’d let herself get fat with the babies, sat around like a pudding really for the best part of a decade. Then she’d got divorced and lost the weight and suddenly there she’d been, thirty-six years old and a very attractive woman, like a stranger who’d been hiding inside her all along. She’d got more and more attractive as she headed towards her forties, her bones finally fitting well inside the flesh of her face, keeping her make-up modern and fresh like they told you to in the magazines, professional highlights and a good diet. She’d never looked better than she did on her forty-second birthday. She’d peaked and then it had started to go and she’d thought: No, not yet, I’ve only just got used to being attractive, I’m not ready to let go of it yet. So the odd little procedure, the teeth whitening, a tiny bit of Botox and some fillers, expensive supplements and creams, and now she was fifty-three and, in a soft light like this, away from the cruel scrutiny of English daylight, she could still pass for forty-two, she really could.
But although Daniel had praised her hair and her general levels of personal upkeep, he had not tried to kiss her that night, nor any of the other nights that followed. And then one night they’d met, for Chinese she recalled, she’d deliberately packed some Polo mints into her handbag to mask the garlic, just in case, and he’d said: ‘Maggie, I want to thank you for being my friend. I am a lonely man and I have lived a lonely life and I do not have many friends. But I count you, Maggie, as a good friend. A very good friend.’
Maggie’s smile had frozen in place. He was going to dump her, she’d thought, dump her before he’d even kissed her. She’d felt her heart ache with sadness.
‘So I hope that you won’t mind if I burden you with the fact of my condition? Which I learned of only today, so excuse me if I am not quite myself. But it appears that I have a large tumour, in my lung. This is what has been causing the pain in my back. And beyond that it also seems that I have secondary cancer in my legs and in my stomach. So … it seems,’ he laid his large hands flat upon the table, ‘that there is not a lot that can be done for me. It seems that I am to die.’
Maggie had clasped her hands to her mouth and stifled a squeal. Then she’d let them fall to her lap and stared at Daniel in mute horror. ‘No,’ she’d said, ‘no!’
He’d smiled then. It struck her as a strange time for him to expend a smile, when they were seemingly in such short supply. It was almost, she’d felt, as though he were happy about it. No, not happy, just relieved.
‘It is fine, Maggie, it is fine. It is destiny, you know? I never saw myself as an old man, and now … well, sixty would have been nice, but fifty-three? Fifty-three will just have to do …’
But inside Maggie’s head, a little voice was still saying: No, no, no. Inside Maggie’s head was the sound of shattered dreams and a broken heart. Fifty-three would not do, would not do at all.
They’d managed two more dinners after that, before Daniel had to go in for chemotherapy. He’d told her not to visit him in the hospital but she had, catching him in his cotton pyjamas – pale-blue edged with cream piping. His slippers were tucked underneath the bed and a copy of the Telegraph lay on the tray in front of him and he was wearing half-moon reading glasses. She’d never seen them before. They made him look, of course, more intelligent, but also more vulnerable. Her heart turned over with love. But he’d removed them with a haste that suggested vanity when he saw her approaching over the top of them.
‘Oh,’ she’d said, ‘you wear glasses.’
‘I usually wear lenses,’ he’d muttered distractedly, ‘but I thought, on top of everything else, here, in this place, all this,’ he indicated the medical paraphernalia surrounding him, ‘did I need to be fiddling around with those little things? Also, I thought I would not see anyone who knows me.’ She searched his face for a sign that he was teasing her, that really he was secretly delighted that she had disobeyed his instructions and come to see him. But there was none.
‘Sorry,’ she’d said, nervously, trying not to cry. ‘Couldn’t bear to think of you here, all alone. And I brought you some fruit, look.’ She pulled a carrier from her shoulder bag and took three green apples and two bananas out of it. She laid them on his tray and immediately wished she had not brought the fruit. It looked insensitively healthy. And also clichéd.
Daniel didn’t look at the fruit. Instead he looked at her wanly and sighed. She thought he was about to complain about the fruit, tell her she was a fool to bring him fruit, that he was too ill to eat fruit, that he did not even like fruit, but he didn’t. Instead he took her hand in his and as Maggie glanced at him she saw a single tear roll down his cheek. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered, ‘you are a very good person.’
‘You are very welcome.’ She smiled compassionately and handed him a tissue. ‘Very, very welcome.’
In some ways, she pondered over the intervening months, it was a bit unfair that she had finally, after nearly twenty years on her own, started to fall in love with someone, and then he got terminally ill. If she wasn’t such a positive, glass half full kind of person, she’d almost say it was typical. But it wasn’t typical. It was atypical. Generally her life ran quite smoothly and in a vaguely upward direction. Generally Maggie got what she wanted, but then, Maggie didn’t really ask for much. So instead of seeing the impending death of her new boyfriend as a bad thing, Maggie decided to view it as a gift. An opportunity to make a difference to someone’s life. A chance to care. And so, for the last few months, that was what Maggie had done. Instead of being Daniel’s girlfriend, she became his carer. Instead of waiting by the phone for him to call and fantasising about engagement rings and white weddings, Maggie did his shopping for him and managed his medication. Instead of sitting opposite him in low-lit restaurants and meeting him for picnics on sunny afternoons, she accompanied him on hospital appointments and cooked him stews.
He was close to the end now. It could be days, it could be weeks, but certainly no more than a handful. He was thin and his face had lost its previous perfect symmetry, hanging slack in places, knotted with tension in others. In the hours when he was in pain, the morphine rendered him silent and still. She missed him then and felt a sense of his life force draining away through his grey skin and into sticky puddles on the floor below his bed. But on good days, when his body held more essential spirit than opiates, she and Daniel would talk until his mouth began to chafe with dryness or sleep pulled him back into silence. Maggie sensed that the conversa
tions they had during these moments were more candid and open than any of the conversations they’d had during the preceding months, when they’d shared wine in restaurants and enjoyed the fanciful notion that both of them would remain alive for at least another twenty years.
In a Thai restaurant on their fourth date she’d asked him about his mother. He’d shrugged, as though someone’s mother could not possibly be of any real interest to another person. ‘She is very old,’ he’d said after a moment. ‘She is not the person she used to be.’
‘And what sort of person did she use to be?’ Maggie had gently urged.
He’d shrugged again. ‘A different person,’ he’d said. ‘You know?’
‘Where does she live?’
‘In France,’ he’d replied, with a note of exasperation.
She’d wanted to push it: where in France? With whom: brothers, sisters, grandchildren, a cat – alone? But she had felt his impatience and she’d let him change the subject. But today he’d volunteered something new: his mother lived in a home. In Dieppe. And then this: he had a brother. The brother lived near the home in Dieppe and visited her every day. ‘I feel no guilt,’ he said, ‘for my mother. She is old. She doesn’t know that she is in a home. She doesn’t know who she is. But my brother, every day he has to get into his sad little car and drive across the sad little town where he lives and on to the grey highway, to that big house by the sea where it always smells of fish and spume, and sit with a woman with glassy eyes and cold hands who used to be his mother. And she will not know him and then he will leave and feel guilty that she is on her own until he makes the same journey the next day.’
‘What about his wife, his family?’
‘He has no wife, no family. He is like me. He is alone. So, we die and our line dies with us.’ He coughed then and Maggie passed him a cup of squash.
‘Oh, well, you never know,’ she said, light-heartedly, ‘that’s the thing with being a man. There might be a little you out there somewhere and you just don’t know it.’ She let out a small tinkle of laughter and glanced at him, checking she hadn’t crossed yet another invisible line.
