A Perfectly Good Man

by Patrick Gale

  And as they were slowly bumping along the farm track to the pretty field where the static caravan was not quite shaded by an old oak tree, it came to Jim that he would never be lord of the manor or have the sort of wife who manned a plant stall and he would never go to heaven either because God was all rubbish, a bit like cream teas or trips to museums, just something people did and said how lovely about, regardless of what they really felt.

  There! he said to himself. I don’t believe in God. That’s that. It was more than not believing, he realized. That implied that some people did, that believing might be a valid option. In fact there were no options. There was no God. There was simply life followed at some entirely random point by death. There was, in fact, simply stuff and time. Nothing more. And the excitement, the beauty even of it was that stuff and time were still amazing.

  There was no distant thunder and no sudden onset of cosmic terror. He did not in truth feel any more alone that evening than he had that morning, and no less related to his unrelated family. He simply knew he was alone, which he hadn’t done at breakfast.

  He said nothing. To that extent, he began to realize, he was like his father; he would cause no bother for the rest of them. He wouldn’t make a scene about suddenly not believing, even though it was depressing to understand that from now on everything about his father’s life, its whole basis, would seem pointless to him. He wouldn’t even tell them unless they asked him directly, and that was highly unlikely. He would continue to go with them to church, at least until he left home, because that would be about supporting family now and avoiding conflict, nothing to do with God, but he knew he would never be confirmed. But that was fine too because he knew even now that Dad was too diffident to suggest it outright or even discuss it directly unless Jim brought it up.

  ‘Ham and salad for supper, I thought,’ Mum said as they came to a halt in the field and there was the caravan before them, a hot, little airless box like an off-white tomb. ‘And there are still those nice potatoes I can boil up.’

  Terror came later that night. A fox cry woke him and he felt a sensation he had felt before when woken from nightmares or enduring a high temperature, of being too much awake, too much aware, as though the volume control on his senses had been suddenly turned too high for comfort.

  He lay there, in the child’s bed that was too short and too narrow for him and so hemmed round it felt like a Formica-lined coffin, listening to the scary-sexy shrieks of the fox and the deep, regular breathing of his parents. He remembered in the instant that God no longer existed and began to enumerate in a kind of panic all the other things, the rights and musts, the duties and the oughts which presumably would crumble away without the idea of God and his huge approval (and its rarely mentioned opposite) to shore them up. Family. Responsibilities. Love, even. It was as though God were a vast ocean liner holed beyond repair beneath the waterline and all these other things were little tugs whose crews realized too late they were tied fast to the larger ship and about to be sucked from view.

  And his mounting sense of fear was indistinguishable from his growing sense of disgust at the way his parents were simply lying there, obliviously sucking all the air from the caravan, and, just as obliviously, replacing it with their night fug. When he could bear it no more, he slipped out of bed and opened the caravan door as quietly as he could.

  He walked away from the caravan and around it, enjoying the shock of dewy grass under his bare feet and against his pyjama bottoms. There was a moon. He saw a hunting owl. His fear and disgust were replaced with bewildering speed by a painful joy, fed by excitement at the realization that these intense surges of feeling must be part of what was involved in becoming an adult.

  At last, when the cold in his feet began to hurt, he enjoyed a long, luxurious piss against a tree, because he could, then let himself back into the caravan and returned to bed, as silent and calm as a practised assassin.

  BARNABY AT 21

  Barnaby’s stepmother had left a message with one of his housemates that morning. The housemate had forgotten to write it down on the little blackboard they kept for the purpose in the kitchen, so Barnaby had spent the entire day studying in the history faculty and had even come home for a spot of lunch and returned to the library, all unawares. He rang her back as soon as the housemate had thought to pass on the message, then raced to catch the next train to Bristol. He had felt so disoriented on finally arriving into Temple Meads long after dark and in driving rain that he had to walk back up into the station a few minutes after leaving it and search for a street map because he had momentarily forgotten the route to the hospital. He had the name of the ward written down, at least, so was able to navigate his way swiftly through the corridors and staircases once he got there.

  He did not recognize her at first. He had not been encouraged to visit since they had converted their house into flats and apparently had far less room for entertaining. He had done no more than speak to her on the telephone (and then fleetingly) for over two years.

  ‘I look a fright,’ she said, ‘but make-up takes so long and he can’t see me anyway. I still wear scent for him. He likes that.’ She kissed him on the cheek, which was even stranger than seeing her without make-up and with her roots growing out.

  ‘It makes you look rather sweet,’ he said honestly. ‘Approachable.’

  She made a scoffing noise. Neither of these was an epithet she welcomed but it was true; with her toughly enamelled nails, shiny gold hair and painted features, she had always dressed the part of the wicked stepmother and handed him and Alice neat evidence that she was an interloper on their scruffy family. Living far apart from her, more alienated from his father than ever, he found his memory of her appearance had hardened into unchanging parody, so that it was startling to be confronted with a reality that had, of course, been ageing, and now seemed vulnerable, even motherly.

  ‘How is he?’ he asked her.

  ‘Not good. But he’s no longer agitated and the pain nurse or whatever they call her has been and adjusted the medication so he’s not suffering, or not so as you’d notice.’

  ‘Have you been here all day?’

  She nodded.

  ‘You must be shattered, Marcia.’ It felt weird to say her name out loud after years of chuckling over it in secret, weirder still that she didn’t seem to register the piece of familiarity.

  ‘I’m done in. Would you mind sitting with him for a couple of hours? Just so I can slip home for a bit and shower and change and maybe eat something?’

  ‘Of course. No rush to get back. I slept on the train and I’ve had loads of coffee.’

  ‘You’re so young still.’ She touched his cheek and smiled sadly, another unnerving gesture. ‘Silly. I’d forgotten somehow. Maybe because your letters were always so serious. I won’t be long. An hour at the most. And he’ll probably just be dozing. Don’t look for one of your old arguments or even anything much in the conversation line. I’ll take you in to him.’

  His father was in a room on his own. He was an unhealthy, deeply sallow colour and was plumbed into a catheter bag and a machine dispensing painkiller, Barnaby presumed.

  ‘Prof?’ she murmured and touched the back of his hand so that his eyelids fluttered. ‘I’m just slipping home to freshen up but look who’s here to see you.’

  ‘Hello,’ Barnaby said, finding himself unable to call his father anything. ‘It’s Barnaby.’

  ‘Touch him so he knows what side of the bed you’ll be sitting,’ she said and he touched his father’s forearm through his pyjamas and was shocked to find it as hard and skinny as a dog’s foreleg. ‘Back soon,’ she mouthed exaggeratedly and slipped out.

  ‘Sorry you’ve been in the wars,’ Barnaby said. ‘I’d have got here far earlier only I only got the … Marcia’s message when I got back from the library at about five. Why didn’t you tell anybody? They could have operated last year if you’d only said. The pain must have been …’

  ‘My body,’ his father said with enough
of his old clarity to bring an end to the matter.

  There was silence for a bit, broken only by the passing squeak of someone’s shoes on the corridor outside.

  ‘Has she gone?’ he asked then. ‘What did you two call her? The Butterfuck?’

  ‘That was Uncle James.’

  ‘You too.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Barnaby confessed. ‘Yes. She’s gone but only to shower and change. She’s been here all day.’

  ‘Tell me about it. Thanks for coming.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Never silly.’ His father broke off then to cry out sharply.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘It’s OK. Pain. Amazing machine this. Amazing. Wish I’d had it last night.’

  He was clutching some kind of control for the dispensing device, Barnaby realized, and had just squeezed it. There was a soft sound from the machine and his father sighed and closed his now sightless eyes.

  Barnaby sat back in the chair. In his rush to pack and leave he had brought only one book and it was a scholarly one on the Manichean heresies, quite unreadable for pleasure or distraction. He pulled it out now from the zipper on his case and tried again but had to read the same paragraph over and over. He was extremely hungry. The train’s sandwiches had seemed criminally expensive so he had eaten nothing but an apple since lunchtime. His father had been admitted in a hurry, following a severe rectal haemorrhage, so it was no surprise to find no grapes on his nightstand. He sat on, overriding his own impulses, trying to see in the withered old man in winceyette the fierce but impressive bogeyman of boyhood. It lived on, he realized, only in the voice, implacable, slightly mocking. He could only imagine it had been pride that had driven his father to keep his illness a secret until it was too late to save him from it. It surely wasn’t fear.

  The eyelids fluttered open. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Gone home for a bit. Not for long, though.’

  ‘Not her!’ Stupid boy was implied in the withering tone. ‘Always literal and a bit slow.’

  ‘You mean …’

  ‘Alice!’

  ‘Alice died, Dad. You remember.’

  ‘Of course I do but where is she? I don’t mean ashes. They were put in the garden. Under a fucking car park now, of course. Where … Where’s the essence?’

  ‘Her soul, you mean?’

  There was a pause and his father pulled a slow-motion face, as though sucking on the forbidden word and finding it inexpressibly unpalatable. ‘Do you still believe?’

  ‘Yes. I wasn’t sure for a while after Alice. But it sort of grew back and wouldn’t be ignored.’

  ‘Know the feeling.’ His father tried to laugh at his own gallows humour but moaned instead and squeezed again for more morphine, or whatever they had him on. The moan became a sigh and he slipped off into something resembling sleep.

  Barnaby watched him closely, picturing the two of them in their tiny room in the midst of a huge hospital as two people on a dimly lit sort of platform high in a great, black, concrete forest. He tried to work out what he felt for the man under the sheet before him then backed off from the attempt, fearful it was nothing loving, just an odd mix of heartless impatience and shameful fear. When his father spoke again it surprised him so that he jolted in his plastic seat.

  ‘Do you believe in hell, then? Buy into the whole system?’

  ‘I believe we make hell for ourselves, right here.’

  ‘Marlowe.’

  ‘Sorry, Dad? What was that?’

  ‘Hell is empty.’ His father fought to enunciate through the slurring of the drug. ‘And all the devils are here.’

  ‘That’s from The Tempest.’

  ‘Same difference.’

  ‘You’re quite safe here, Dad.’

  ‘I don’t want to die. Thought I did but …’

  ‘You won’t. Once they’ve stabilized you they’re going to run some—’ His puny attempt at comfort was cut short by his father crying out and scrabbling in the air as if for a handle or safety rail. ‘I’m here, Dad. Hold on.’ Barnaby had barely touched his fingers when his father seized his hands in his and squeezed furiously, continuing to cry out.

  A nurse hurried in, swore and hurried out. There was noise, more footsteps. The nurse returned with another.

  ‘Professor Johnson?’ she called over his father’s wailing. ‘Professor Johnson!’

  Both nurses seemed crazily young and bewildered, barely capable.

  ‘Where the hell is he?’ one of them muttered, glaring over her shoulder. ‘You might not like to watch this,’ she told Barnaby but he couldn’t leave, even had his father let go. The old man gripped so hard and painfully it felt as though Barnaby had all his body weight hanging from his hands, as though he were the only thing holding him back from a chasm.

  ‘It’s OK, Dad,’ he called, ignoring the nurses. ‘I’m still here. I’m with you,’ and a great surge of love came up within him out of nowhere, love such as he had never felt, it seemed, and he kissed both his hands on their grotesquely clenching knuckles. And then there was blood everywhere, stinking black blood, like blood mixed with coffee grounds and vomit and finally the doctor came and there was shouting and instructions and exclamations but he stayed put through it all, holding his father’s hands because there was nothing else he could do.

  The doctor had gone. The first nurse was gently prising his hands clear of his father’s and kindly wiping them clean with a delicious wet flannel. The other was opening the window.

  ‘Is she coming back, do you know? Your mother?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, not bothering to correct her.

  ‘If you wait outside, we’ll get your dad all nice and presentable for her. Do you want a cup of tea, love?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fetch him a tea,’ she told her colleague. ‘I can cope here.’

  The second nurse, who looked younger than he was, about eighteen, sat him back in the corridor and brought him a mug of sweet tea and a KitKat. The chocolate was the best thing he had ever tasted and he ate it slowly, relishing the satisfying way it broke into neat fingers under its foil and crumbled on his grateful tongue. ‘Are you going to be all right?’ the young nurse asked gently, sitting beside him for a moment.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ he told her. ‘Thank you. That was very kind of you.’

  By the time Marcia appeared, some twenty minutes later, he found he was not only all right but entirely composed, so that he was able to be strong for her when she collapsed into his arms when he told her she had missed the end. She cried wordlessly for a minute or two and he could feel little spasms shake her warm, soft frame. Then she blew her nose, composed herself and stood aside a little, tidying her clothes.

  ‘Would you …?’ she began to ask. ‘Would you come in to see him with me?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  The nurse had washed him, replaced his soiled pyjamas and unfolded a spotless sheet up to his chest. He didn’t look comfortable or peaceful but he was still and looked clean. The room smelled of disinfectant rather than death.

  He lied to her. ‘It was very peaceful,’ he said. ‘He asked for you but he was quite calm. He said he loved you.’

  ‘Did he?’ She seemed startled.

  ‘Yes,’ he lied again. ‘He held my hands and said, “I love her”.’

  But she seemed not to be listening. She touched a plump hand to the handle of the open window. ‘Funny how they still always do that,’ she said and closed it.

  She had come into some money soon after retirement and used it to convert his boyhood home from a large family house into four flats, selling off the basement and upper ones and living on with his father on the ground floor. The garden had indeed been largely tarmacked to provide parking for all the residents, although the larger trees and a fringe of gloomy laurel remained. He had felt no affection for the place before and was surprised rather than shocked at the brutal transformation. If anything it was a relief not to be sleeping in his old bedroom with whatever
memories of Alice might have haunted it, but in an entirely new room, clumsily carved from one corner of their old dining room, so that it retained just two strips of original cornice and a fireplace now quite out of proportion and in quite the wrong place.

  When they arrived there from the hospital Marcia fetched a bottle of red wine, cheese and crackers and they became rapidly, pleasantly drunk together. Even had she not still been without make-up she would have seemed an entirely different woman from the one he remembered. She was relaxed and frank with him in a way the Buttercluck could never have been. She told him they hadn’t married until after Alice’s death because Prof had wanted to spare Alice’s feelings, since Alice remembered her mother.