by Louise Voss
I grinned faintly and painfully, through gritted teeth.
“I’m sorry,” said Lulu.
“It’s okay. Don’t worry. I hope you don’t think it’s weird, but I want Ruby to have it.”
Ruby was tugging at the lid of the box. “Are there sweeties inside?”
“No, darling,” said Lulu.
“How ‘bout Toy Story video, then?”
We shook our heads sadly.
“What, then?”
Lulu put an arm around her. “Sweetheart, it’s just a special box for you to keep for when you’re older. It’s a bit hard to explain for now, but it’s really a very special present. Say thank you to Helena.”
Ruby stuck out her bottom lip and rubbed her eyes. “I like special box,” she whined.
I wished I’d had the foresight to bring her some chocolate buttons as well.
Lulu picked her up. “Okay, tired girl, now it really is bedtime. Say good night and thank you to Helena.” She leaned toward me so Ruby could give me a kiss, and for a brief intoxicating moment Ruby nuzzled in the side of my neck, her hair tickling my cheek.
“Tanks, Ellna. Any fireworks, any scaries?”
I glanced at Lulu for the answer, and she shook her head. “No, Ruby. No fireworks, no scaries. Sleep well, sweet dreams.”
Ruby waved at me as she was carried up the stairs, finger in mouth, her head already drooping on Lulu’s shoulder.
By the time Lulu returned several minutes later, I had regained my composure. She offered me another glass of wine, some supper, a coffee, but I declined. We did chat for a while longer, and again I marveled at what easy company she was, but it felt like a snare. The Middleton way of drawing me into their family so I wouldn’t want to leave—God, they all did it! If I stayed any longer, I’d be tempted to ask about Toby and Kate—if it was true that they really were getting back together—but I was desperate not to. It would be so demeaning, and the truth was that I simply didn’t need to know.
“I’ve taken up enough of your time already.” I stood up. “I really have to go now. I’ve got tons of things to do.”
This was true. I had to start thinking about getting my affairs in order: canceling my next outpatient checkup at the hospital, the smear test I had booked for October, all my standing orders.
At least Toby and Ruby had been dealt with, anyhow. I expected to feel less guilty, now that I’d closed the book on that episode, but to my horror the guilt merely transferred itself to thoughts of my parents instead, which was far worse. I felt like the biggest, yellowest coward that ever lived.
But as I said good-bye to Lulu and left the house, I changed my mind. I wasn’t a coward. It was surely more courageous to end a worthless life than to live in misery. Anyone who truly loved me would have to understand that.
Blur
THIS IS A LOW
WITHIN SIX MONTHS OF OUR RETURN FROM SANTORINI, SAM’S health had deteriorated even more dramatically. She couldn’t walk more than a few steps without getting exhausted and breathless, and had to have constant recourse to an oxygen mask and cylinder. Her need for a new lung finally became extremely pressing—it was no longer a matter of choice. She agreed to go on the waiting list, so the hospital gave her a pager, and she was on twenty-four-hour standby for a call to say that a donor lung had been located.
I still went down to Salisbury every weekend, and spoke to her on the phone every day. I’d have stayed down there permanently were it not for the fact that I had to do my show. My heart was torn to see her getting thinner and weaker every week.
On my last visit, she was just sitting hunched on her sofa, gray-faced and skeletal, with the oxygen tube now permanently fixed to her nostrils, a slave to the heavy metal tank next to her. She looked so sad and ill that all I could do was sit next to her and hold her in my arms like a child, rocking her gently against my shoulder. I couldn’t stop tears from rolling down my face, and she frowned at me faintly.
“Crybaby,” she whispered. Then she wrapped her arms around my waist, sighing heavily. She was so thin that I could feel all the bones in her shoulders and back as I rubbed them gently with my hand.
Everything in her little flat was as bright and cheerful as ever: the crisp blue and white stripes of the sofa, the pictures on the wall, the thick, colorful rug on the floor. I always used to think how well she fitted this little basement. Like dogs who resembled their owners, Sam’s flat was the essence of herself, full of light and color and energy. Now she looked incongruous in her own place, almost inappropriate, like a gray vase full of wilting flowers in the middle of a florist’s shop, surrounded by a riot of fresh-colored blooms. I couldn’t bear it.
I tried to push the image away, and talked to her in a low voice about how wonderful things would be once she’d had the operation, reminding her again of all the things she would be able to do and see once more. How she’d have to lose the disabled sticker on her windscreen, and take her chances with the city’s traffic wardens like the rest of us. How she could come to gigs with me, and we could stay out till four in the morning, if we wanted. We’d live together, and cook, and try finally to bag ourselves a couple of decent blokes.
Sam just leaned against me and listened until I ran out of steam. Then we sat, in an undeniably depressed silence broken only by the soft hissing of oxygen from the cylinder into her poor, useless lungs.
Finally she fell asleep, and I maneuvered her into a horizontal position on the sofa, lifting up her feet and swinging them gently around and up onto the cushions. I covered her with a quilt, kissed her forehead, and crept upstairs to tell Cynthia that I was leaving.
When I climbed into my car, inhaling its faint plastic and air-freshener smell, I was overcome with a feeling—empathic, perhaps—of utter exhaustion and desolation. I leaned back and closed my eyes, trying to fight away the emotions of frustration and grief at seeing Sam that way and not being able to help her. I would willingly have donated one of my lungs to her then and there—both, if it were possible—and I cursed the fact that she didn’t need an organ I had spares of. For the first time ever I really thought that she might die, and the sensation overwhelmed me with pain.
Then suddenly, out of nowhere, the fog in my head lifted and all my senses sharpened up completely. Everything around me felt hyper-real, and I experienced a huge rush of adrenaline. The leaves on the tall trees across the road became a green so deep that they took my breath away. I sat bolt upright, surprised and stunned by this emotional transformation. Into the empty palette of my focused mind sprang five distinct words: She’s going to be fine. They stayed there, so clear that I could almost read them in bold black letters, for several seconds, until my grief was replaced by euphoria. I almost rushed back into the house to tell Sam and Cynthia, but changed my mind when I realized that I didn’t want either of them to think I’d ever doubted it. Instead, I drove back to London feeling a deep sense of calm, and a cautious joy.
One freezing November day a couple of weeks later, for want of anything better to do, I was cleaning the outside of my bathroom window with balled-up newspapers (the cleaner, who didn’t speak English, had indicated via a sketched window with a big X through it that this was a task she declined to incorporate in her routine; I’d felt that it was time to do something about it, since there were ribbons of bird crap festooning the panes, courtesy of the family of pigeons who lived in the bathroom gutter).
I was sitting almost in the sink, with one arm hooked around the closed side of the window, when the phone rang. Cursing, I extricated myself and went to the top of the stairs so I could hear the machine pick up the call. I didn’t want to talk to anyone except Sam or Vinnie. With a click and a crackle, I heard Cynthia Grant’s voice come onto the line, so I bounded downstairs two at a time and lunged for the receiver, my fingers numb with cold and terror.
In one sick moment I had a flashback to the time I’d called her from Ringside’s offices ten years before.
“Cynthia! What’s the matter? Is Sam oka
y?” I picked up the phone’s body with my free hand and started pacing around the room with it, leaving black newsprint all over its cream trunk.
“Now listen to me, Helena, don’t panic. She’s all right, but she was having so much trouble breathing that they’ve taken her into hospital, to put her on a ventilator until the donor lung comes through. She needs to get her strength up for the operation—she was using too much of it trying to catch her breath the whole time. This is the best thing for her; she needs the rest. But she’s fine, and in good spirits.”
“Can I have a phone number for her? When can I see her?”
I was horrified and relieved at the same time. I sat down heavily on my pale armchair and, before I noticed, left more sooty fingerprints on the arm and seat.
“Well, there’s no point you phoning her—she can’t talk. She’s got a tube in her throat from the ventilator.”
“Oh my God, poor Sam,” I said, appalled.
“She shouldn’t really have visitors, either, but I’ve spoken to the nursing staff and told them that you should be allowed to come and see her regularly. Only once or twice a week, Helena, mind, and just for a few minutes. She won’t be able to cope with more than that.”
This felt terrible, final and deadly serious. I knew then that if Sam didn’t leave that hospital with a new lung, she wouldn’t leave at all. It was, I supposed, what people called “make-or-break time.” After I hung up from Cynthia, I sat in the chair taking long deep breaths and wishing I could do the same for Sam. Then I remembered what I’d heard the day I last saw her, and repeated it softly out loud, over and over again, until my fears were calmed. “She’s going to be fine, she’s going to be fine.”
Eventually I decided that the only thing I could do was to go and visit her immediately. As I left the sitting room to conduct my habitual pocket-rummaging for keys, in coat-cupboard and wardrobe, I happened to glance back over my shoulder, the black marks on the chair and phone finally catching my eye. I ignored them.
Sam was on the ventilator for four weeks, every moment of which felt measured by the rise and fall of each of her machine-manufactured breaths. I carried on doing my show, on autopilot, crying quietly off-mic every time someone requested a song for a sick friend—a sick anyone, really. Someone mourning their dead hamster would’ve set me off just as easily. I could have claimed any number of other people’s records for myself: “The Bitterest Pill,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “Us and Them.” The requests all seemed to feed my grief and worry, plumping them up like raisins in milk, the pain of others mingling secretly with my own.
I commuted to Sam’s hospital in Oxfordshire as often as the staff permitted, even if I could only see her for a few minutes at a time, and I monitored every little change in her condition, for better or worse. After a week, I decided that I was going to talk to Geoff and Gus as soon as I could, and ask for some compassionate leave so I could be with her until she had the operation. I didn’t care how long she had to wait for it—they could fire me if they didn’t like it.
Of course, as soon as I announced this to Sam, she wouldn’t hear of it. Her thin fingers picked up the felt-tip pen beside her right hand and wrote on her notepad in surprisingly firm letters, “It might be months before they find me a new lung.” I had argued with her, but she retaliated by scribbling, “If you don’t stay at work, I won’t tell you when I have my op!”
“Blackmail!” I said—but felt much better about it. She placated me further by adding, “You know I’m much stronger now.”
It was true—although she still had an ethereal, almost ghostly quality about her, she had put on a little weight and her eyes were regaining some of their old spark. The doctors were very pleased with her progress and had told us that should a donor lung become available, she would be strong enough to have the operation immediately.
“You just don’t want me around because I’m better at crosswords than you are,” I whined. She rolled her eyes and grinned at me.
The message from Cynthia came through in the fourth week, just as I was finishing the show one December morning. A donor lung had turned up for Sam, from a young biker killed on a patch of black ice the day before. She’d had the operation immediately, and was in Intensive Care, very ill, but alive.
I must have wondered whether it was the last time I’d ever see her, but my brain would not allow the thought to articulate itself. I created a huge roadblock in my head, complete with armed soldiers barring entry to the enemy territory. It was four days after the operation, and I’d been at the hospital as much as the nurses allowed me to be, catching a few hours’ sleep whenever forced to at a nearby hotel.
I had made two phone calls: One was a message I left for Geoff, to say that I was taking compassionate leave, and that I’d keep him posted, and one to Vinnie, to ask if he would come and be with me at the hospital. I was desperate for the solid reassurance of his body, a real human body to ground me, when it seemed like Sam’s might be slipping away. I’d given him the address and phone number of the hotel, but two days later there was no word from him. I wasn’t surprised.
Initially, Sam’s new—“nearly new”—lung had taken, and the operation tentatively declared successful. But then it all started to go wrong.
Within four days, an infection had crept into her vulnerable body, tearing at it, trying to oust the unfamiliar interloper crammed inside her rib cage. She was fighting hard, but her body was so weakened from the surgery that drugs and oxygen were having to do what her poor, struggling immune system could not.
That hospital room became my universe, a small, horrible, painful cosmos with bland textures and tension in the air. There were no flowers in the room—their superficial fussiness would have seemed too trivial amid the far more important business of preserving an existence. All around were pale colors; unadorned walls were framed by plain curtains and colorless lino floor. Even though Sam was hooked up to all kinds of breathing apparatus, barely conscious, there was a full jug of water, an inverted glass, and a box of Kleenex on the locker next to her bed.
It was a totally functional room, and despite all the expensive lifesaving equipment and the awful scent of hospital detergent, it smelled of sickness and despair, heartbroken love and rage. Inexorably, it smelled like a room in which to die, not to get well.
Sam was the room’s focus, lying still under a thin, nubbly yellow hospital blanket, her legs and feet defined like a skeleton’s under a sheet. She was hanging on to her poor, cut-up body by the merest of threads, and even as I watched she seemed to drift away and back again. The room was silent except for the mechanical huff and thunk of the ventilator. I wondered if she was alarmed by our appearance, as we were all masked and gowned up to prevent our germs from tipping her precarious balance. I felt that my mask had an additional purpose—to hold my own pain deep inside my body, to prevent it from spilling out of my mouth in a huge, jagged scream of frustration and fear.
Nurses bustled in and out, their rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the linoleum. They adjusted the equipment, took readings, gently plumped the pillows under Sam’s blue face, flipped the pages of her chart up and down before replacing it in its holder at the end of her bed. The writing on the pages did not appear to be in any language I’d ever seen before.
Sam’s eyes were closed, and she looked like a very old woman, or a wizened sick child. Cynthia and Mike hovered around, too, talking gently to her and to each other, and Dylan and his wife were outside drinking vending machine coffee from Styrofoam cups. I walked past them all on my way back from the ladies’; Dylan’s mouth was twisted up and trembling so much that he could hardly swallow his coffee.
There was a sign on a door across the corridor that read, ELECTIVE SERVICES DIRECTORATE. MATTRESSES AND PILLOWS STORED IN HERE. I did not understand what that meant any more than I understood the squiggles on Sam’s chart.
Every now and again Mike absently patted my shoulder, but he couldn’t look at me. He seemed fixated by the various items of
hospital paraphernalia pushed or carried past by the nurses: yellow-wheeled trolleys, stainless-steel kidney trays, boxes of nonsterile latex gloves.
Later, back in Sam’s room, her jovial uncle, of whom I had heard but never met, came up to her bedside. His joviality was supposedly his strongest characteristic, but he was really fighting to find it at that moment.
“Hello, Sam, love,” he said to her quietly, passing a weary hand over his eyes. “Your Christmas roses are blooming a treat. You’ve got to hurry back and chase that damned neighbor’s cat out, mind. It’s trying its best to dig ‘em up.”
Last summer Sam had started cultivating a section of her parents’ large garden, and it was her pride and joy. Until it turned too cold, it had become nigh on impossible to reach her on the phone; she was always out in her wheelchair on the lawn, surrounded by hoes and pruning shears, either fiddling with her sweet peas and marigolds, or giving orders to her sweating father, who handled the more backbreaking tasks. But she didn’t give a flicker of acknowledgment now.
Her uncle stroked her still hand. “Well, I just wanted to come and see you, you know. Get well soon. Auntie Pauline sends her love—she’d have come, too, but her hip’s been playing her up again. Good-bye, love.”
He got up abruptly and lumbered out of the room. Sam stirred and moaned. She seemed frightened and disturbed. Her parents and I leaned forward, as though our proximity could chase away her fears. Tears spilled from Cynthia’s eyes.
“It’s all right, Sam darling, we’re here. Shhh now.” She held three of Sam’s fingers, gently but as though she would never let them go.
