“Well, that’s OK. You still can.”
“Yes. A good thing I didn’t have time to fix it.”
“So you’ll be seeing Becky again.”
“She’s coming to help me take the piece back home tomorrow. She’ll borrow her dad’s car, so I won’t need to bother you.”
Well, I thought, that’s a step in the right direction.
But, all the same, isn’t jealousy an ugly emotion!
“I’d better push off,” Karl said. “Thanks for today.”
“I enjoyed it. See you tomorrow.”
“Becky’s picking me up from work. So we’ll be here about six.”
It was then we heard the racket in the garden.
* Karl and his pals might not have heard this before, but I had. It was common in my childhood as a warning not to take any impulsive action you might regret or would be inappropriate at the time. I didn’t know then, though I do now, that it originated in 1858 on the island of Malta, where the 2nd Battalion, the Royal East Kent Regiment, was stationed. The regiment was one of oldest in the British Army, dating back to 1572. They were called “the Buffs” because at one time their uniforms were made of light brown leather. In 1858 they were quartered with the Royal North British Fusiliers, with whom there was some rivalry. One day on the parade ground, this rivalry would have led to competitive unseemliness, but it was forestalled by the very strict Royal Kent adjutant, a Scot named Cotter, who brooked no disobedience. He called out, “Steady, the Buffs!” and the brewing trouble was dispelled. From that day the Royal Kents used this as their battle cry, until in 1961 the regiment was amalgamated with others and is today part of the Princess of Wales Royal Regiment. I offer this item of useless information for your edification and amusement.
I KNEW THEM AT ONCE, EVEN THOUGH THE ONLY LIGHT WAS THE FADED orange blear from the streetlamp some way down on the other side of the road. The four who had jeered. The four from the incident in the pub. The four brain-dead apprentice thugs.
And this time not even the parade-ground authority of ex–warrant officer Cooksley would have stifled their mob-handed intent.
By the time Karl and I were outside and had taken in what was going on, they were ripping apart the rods from the sculpture and flinging them around the garden.
Karl let out a cry of rage and launched himself in ruggerstyle at the nearest vandal.
Instinctively aware that this was not a wise move, I shouted at him to stop and set off after him, meaning to hold him back. But had taken no more than a couple of strides when one of the rods came flying at me, struck me on the chest so hard that I stumbled, my foot slipped on the icy path, and down I went, cracking my head on the stone wall dividing my garden from my neighbour’s.
I came to in a hospital bed an hour or so later. For once, I can’t be exact about the time.
What happened next I know only from what I was told by Mrs. Williamson and Karl himself over the next two days, and from the testimony of my next-door neighbour, Gillian, a middle-aged divorced librarian, Tom the publican from the pub up the road, and the police, during the trial of the four offenders in the magistrate’s court a couple of months later.
Karl’s rugger tackle brought down one of the four, who struggled to get free while yelling to his pals to “get ’im off of me.” Karl was sure it was the one he’d had the barney with in the pub. (I learned the names of the four of them from the police after they were arrested. But can’t use their names for legal reasons.)
The others came to his aid and hauled Karl to his feet.
But Karl, with his robust and fit 180 pounds in full flood of anger, was not a force to mess with. And though his assailants were the soul of bravery when mob-handed and timidly opposed, their emboozed physique was no match for an enraged Karl. As he twisted out of their grip their flabby condition was no protection against an elbow rammed into the brewer’s gut of one, a plumber’s fist jabbed into the snozzle of another and a back-footed kick into the groin of the third.
The gutted one bent double, gripping his belly while he chundered the evening’s intake onto his feet. The snozzled one staggered back, holding his face in his hands while letting out a sound resembling an alpine yodel. And the groined one fell jackknifed to the ground, knees up and hands gripping himself between his legs, while alternately moaning and sobbing.
This should have been the end of it. But in the time the bout with the threesome was in progress, the one Karl had felled got to his feet, grabbed a rod, and as Karl turned from his demolition job, he thrashed the rod across Karl’s left leg just below the knee, sending Karl sprawling to the ground, gasping with pain. He knew at once that his leg was broken and didn’t try and stand.
It’s anyone’s guess whether the gang would have taken the chance to exact vengeance and cause more injury had it not been for Tom the publican, alarmed by the noise, coming to see what was going on. What he didn’t know was that Gillian had heard the noise when it started, had got out of bed and looked out of her bedroom window. Seeing the yobs attacking the sculpture she had called the police. And then, when she saw me collapse, had called an ambulance as well.
Tom recognised the foursome only too well from other episodes in his pub besides the one involving Karl. He would have tried to detain them but when he saw me comatose on the path and Karl shouting that his leg was broken, he decided it was more important to attend to us.
Gillian opened her window and shouted to Tom that she had called the police and an ambulance.
This news galvanised the foursome, distracting them enough from nursing their various bruises to hightail it out of the garden and away up the road.
The rest is straightforward. The police arrived and learned from Karl, Tom and Gillian what had happened and who the perpetrators were. The ambulance arrived moments after the police and carted Karl and me to hospital. Karl phoned his mother while we were on the way. Mrs. W. took a taxi to the hospital. She was the first person I saw when I came to.
Gillian made sure everything was secure in my house and locked up. We have keys to each other’s house in case of emergency when one of us is away.
The foursome were rounded up by the police next day, appeared before the magistrates on charges of grievous bodily harm, trespass and destruction of property. They were bound over to keep the peace until their trial came to court two months later. They were found guilty, but because they had no previous convictions, and their snazzy lawyer, paid for by the local councillor father of one of them, argued they had been provoked by Karl attacking them and were only acting in self-defence, they received a telling-off by the magistrate, and were sentenced to twelve months’ probation and one hundred hours’ community service.
THERE ISN’T MUCH MORE TO TELL.
As I mentioned, when I came to in the hospital, Mrs. Williamson was at my bedside. I was dazy and remember only that she made sure I was conscious and aware of where I was and what had happened to me but nothing more, before she went off to be with Karl, about whose condition she said nothing and I was still too confused to ask.
Later, a nurse told me I was suffering from concussion and because I’d been unconscious for so long, which was a bad thing, and because of my age, when complications might set in, they needed to keep me under observation for a day or two.
I also needed three stitches in the cut on my head where I had hit the wall, and treatment for a few bruises sustained when I fell down. As it turned out I was perfectly all right and recovered without any ill effects.
It was not until the next day that I heard about Karl.
Mrs. Williamson came to see me around midday, bearing the usual hospital gifts: fruit, flowers, soft drinks.
She asked me how I was before detailing the events of the night before. And only then, when, I suppose, she had assured herself that I was strong enough to bear it, she told me about Karl.
His leg was so badly shattered they had performed an emergency operation, which took four hours to complete, during which the surgeons in
serted a metal pin into his tibia and repaired the other bones and muscles as best they could.
His mother had been with him when he regained consciousness that morning, and had only come to me when Karl drifted off to analgesic sleep. The doctors thought the operation had been a success, but they wouldn’t know for sure for a few days. Karl was young and strong and fit and was responding well to treatment, so there was, they’d told Mrs. Williamson, no cause for worry and every sign that all would turn out well.
We reassured each other with the usual bromides: he’d pull through, he’d be OK, he was in good hands, everything was being done that could be done.
But our eyes spoke realities to each other, not hopes. We both knew that every operation is a risk, and doctors are always optimistic and put the brightest spin on a prognosis.
As we looked at each other, Mrs. Williamson’s eyes filled with tears, she reached out, took my hand in both of hers and held it tight.
In all she had gone through with Karl in the past year, not once during the trauma of his crisis or the relief of his recovery, not once until now had she touched me intimately.
“I’m sorry!” she said, but held on.
“Don’t be,” I said. “I’m glad you can.”
“It’s the sight of him lying there like that. Tubes and drips. His leg. Unconscious. Helpless. And not able to do anything.”
“Being there,” I said.
“D’you think he knows? When he wasn’t conscious, I mean. When he’s not awake.”
“My wife,” I said, “before she died. She was in a coma for a while. I was with her all the time. When she came out of it, she thanked me for staying with her. I asked her, I said, ‘You knew?’ Yes, she said, she’d known. Not like when she was awake but not like in a dream, either. A different kind of knowing. But she knew. She said she knew she was going. But because I was there, she wanted to come back and say good-bye. She died a few hours later.”
Mrs. Williamson let out a deep sigh. “We never know,” she said. “We don’t know everything about life. Or death, come to that. Do we?”
I said with a “that’s life” smile, “No, we don’t.”
She smiled too and gave a fatalistic shrug.
I said, wanting to give her the cue to go back to her son, “Thanks for coming to see me. And for the gifts. I’m OK. I’m fine. Waited on hand and foot. Having a holiday really.”
“I’ll come back later,” she said.
“Say hello to Karl for me and give him my love.”
“I certainly will,” she said.
I was sorry to lose her hands.
The day was long. They wanted me to rest and avoid all strenuous activity. They had to be sure the symptoms were clearing up and I didn’t need a brain scan. The worst of it was they wouldn’t let me read or write because that was supposed to be bad for me too. I realised once more how unbearable life would be if I could never read and write again.
Mrs. Williamson visited briefly that evening. Karl was recovering well. “Sitting up and taking notice,” she said. But was still fuzzy from the anaesthetic and the painkillers they were giving him.
She was going home for the night. Would be back tomorrow.
Next day was a day of visits.
Twice from Mrs. Williamson. The first time, happier, livelier, more confident, more like her best self. Karl was doing well.
The second time late that day, less hearty. Karl had taken a dip. The nurses said it was normal. Postoperative depression. As the anaesthetic wore off the patient was more aware of the pain, more aware of the consequences of what had happened. But Mrs. Williamson felt there was more to it than that. She recognised the signs. Karl had withdrawn into himself, wouldn’t talk about what was really bothering him. She was afraid this latest catastrophe might trigger the melancholia again.
Between Mrs. Williamson’s visits two others.
The first from Fiorella, in the afternoon.
When I met her at the party, we said only a few words to each other. Not enough for me to gain any sense of what she was really like. People often put on their party persona along with their party clothes, and just as often their persona, like their clothes, is quite the opposite of their everyday self. Which of us would want to be judged by our hair-down hijinks?
Fiorella was certainly got up to kill that day, leaving, as Mr. Cooksley put it, “not much to the imagination,” and strutted her stuff to the delight of the rugby youngbloods and the (envious?) scandal of the ancientry. (“I’m glad she’s not my daughter,” Mr. Cooksley muttered.) I thought at the time, whatever else you could say about Fiorella, one thing was for sure: she did nothing by half.
I say she delighted the youngbloods. But as I discovered later (and report in chapter twenty-four), one youngblood was not impressed—Karl, for whose eyes, I supposed, Fiorella had dolled herself up in her glad rags (if anything as expensive could be called rags) and to capture whose attention she flounced among the lads. Maybe she hoped the flames of jealousy might reignite Karl’s interest in her. If so, she badly misread her man.
When Fiorella turned up unexpectedly in the hospital, she was subdued and dressed as soberly as a nun.
Strangely enough, given what she said later, my instant thought was: She’s a performer. An actress. Her emails, I saw then, were all performances, voices she was acting out to see how they sounded. So who and what was the real Fiorella?
“Becky told me what happened,” Fiorella said with the face of a tragedian. “I thought I’d come and see how you are.”
“Very good of you,” I said, in the role of the suffering patient. “And to see Karl too, of course,” I added, switching to the role of the undeceived.
“Yes,” Fiorella said, with a quick change from tragic to coy. “But you mainly.”
“Really?” The question was rhetorical, and offered with the smile of disbelief.
“I want to explain.”
“What is there to explain?”
“Karl and me.”
“What about you and Karl?”
Her expression now was of intended seriousness.
She said, “I won’t be seeing him anymore.”
This was an announcement that worried me. Not for her sake but for Karl’s.
“Oh? When was this decided?”
“Yesterday.”
“Yesterday? But Karl was out of it most of yesterday. Did you see him then?”
“No. He doesn’t know yet. I was going to tell him today, but it wasn’t the right time. He’s worse than I thought.”
“And when it is the right time, what are you going to tell him?”
“That he isn’t my type.”
“I see! Well, in fact, I don’t see. I’m surprised, after all you wrote in your emails.”
“I was wrong. I thought he was, but he isn’t.”
“And this became clear to you yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“And what was it you realised?”
“That I’d been pretending.”
“Pretending? Pretending what?”
“Well, for a start, that I didn’t mind standing in the cold on the touchline while he played rugby when I’m actually not that keen on rugby, and then not seeing him for hours afterwards while he raved it up with his rugby mates. And pretending I didn’t mind sitting under a tree all day while he fished and paid me no attention, when I’m not that keen on fishing or sitting under trees all day. Maybe I wouldn’t have minded the rugby and the fishing if he’d talked to me about himself. And if he’d paid me more attention. But I never felt he was really thinking about me. It was always like there was something else than me on his mind and I didn’t know what it was and he wouldn’t tell me. I did try. That’s why I gave him the list of questions. And I thought if I asked him to write the answers it would be easier for him. I’m not that keen myself on talking about myself, but I do like writing about myself and I thought he might be like that too. Big mistake, as it turned out. But how was I to know he was dyslexic?
He didn’t tell me, and neither did his mother. It might have been different if I’d known. Too late now, though.”
“But you must have known all along, about the rugby and the fishing?”
“I did. But, like I said, I pretended. To myself, not just to him. Because physically he is my type. And there is something about him. Like a mystery, a secret, something special locked up inside. And I really wanted to know what it was. And I thought I could kind of, you know, unlock it. And he was keen on me. Very keen. So I thought he’d let me in if I went along with him. So I did … Do you understand?”
“I think so. But what happened that made everything clear?”
“When I went to see him in his shed. His workshop. I wrote to you about it.”
“I remember.”
“We’d broken it off after … the trouble at the camp.”
“You’d broken it off, to be accurate.”
“Yes, I broke it off. But then I regretted it. I couldn’t get him out of my mind. So I thought I’d try again and went to see him. And I told you how I felt like I was being tested. But I didn’t know what the test was. Like an exam when you’re expected to give the answer to a question you haven’t been asked but have to guess.”
“I think you’re right. You were. Karl is like that. He does test you. He wants to be understood without having to explain.”
“I wrote to you about it. And all you wrote back was ‘Think artefact.’ “
“I did.”
“But I couldn’t think what you meant.”
“No?”
“No. I mean, I guessed you meant it had something to do with the bits of wire I’d seen. But what? I couldn’t work it out. You really weren’t much help.”
“I’m sorry.” I lied. I wasn’t a bit sorry. If she couldn’t work out what I meant, she was right, Karl wasn’t her type. More important—which Fiorella didn’t seem to have considered so far—Karl knew for sure then, that day in his workshop, that she wasn’t his type, either.
Dying to Know You Page 16
