by Louise Voss
The doctor came in and asked us to leave for a minute. As I walked numbly out of the room, he took me aside. He had thick tufts of bristly reddish hair coming from his ears and nostrils that moved gently when he spoke, like sea anemones in a rock pool.
“Listen,” he said kindly. “I think it’s important that she gets some rest now. Really, the less people around her, the better. And I’m sure you could do with a break, too. You’ve been here all day. Why don’t you get a good night’s sleep and come back in the morning? She’s had a lot of visitors today. I really think it would be best for her.”
I didn’t want to leave, but I did want to do what was best. “Can I say good-bye?”
“Yes, go in now. Be as brief as you can, though.”
Cynthia and Mike stood aside to let me reenter the room. They looked the way they had all week—blank and stunned, as I’m sure I did—like shipwreck or inferno survivors.
I walked over to Sam’s bed, alone with her for the first time all day. I held her hand and stroked her hair; she was so familiar, even in these unnatural surroundings. I thought about that new strange lung inside her, which had not yet proved whether it was friend or foe.
The walls felt as though they were pressing in on me, and I had a fleeting desire to see something bright and colorful—a Matisse print, or a child’s building blocks—something happy. The bed-sheets looked like hard white plywood. I gazed into her face but could not see any peace there.
“I’ve got to go now, Sam, but I’ll be back tomorrow. Hang in there, okay?”
I paused, but there was no reply. I stood up and started to turn away. As I did so I felt, rather than heard, a tiny movement. I turned slowly back around to see Sam’s eyes flicker open, and with all her strength she lifted her arms a tiny way up toward me as though for a hug. I rushed back to her and embraced her gingerly around the tubes, feeling as though my head and heart would simultaneously burst with pain and grief.
I stumbled out of the room and walked in a daze back to the hotel up the road. That hotel seemed to have been built for people like me, guests all wandering around the corridors looking anxious and haunted. I sat numbly in an overstuffed armchair in the hotel’s big lobby, surrounded by a litter of low coffee tables and the hulks of marooned sofas, while a small washed-out waitress brought me coffee. I couldn’t really think what else to do. I didn’t want to go to my room, because I didn’t want to be alone.
Just then, the revolving doors spun around and deposited Vinnie right in front of me. Unshaven, a bit whiffy, and smoking, but Vinnie nonetheless.
“Hi, baby,” he said as I stood up to meet him. “It’s okay. I’m here.”
He wrapped his arms tightly around me, and I thought, Whatever else he’s done to me, I’ll always love him for this.
“Thanks for coming, Vin.”
He ordered a beer from the peaky waitress, and after I’d filled him in on the details of Sam’s condition, we sat in silence together.
“Strange old hotel, this, isn’t it?” Vinnie commented, looking around him.
I nodded. He was right; it was a very odd place. Presumably the effect was meant to be that of a large, friendly living room, but it felt to me like a plush dream version of the ICU’s waiting room. Perhaps the proximity of the hospital’s grim suspense had rubbed off on the designers, I thought with antiseptic-drenched imagination. I still could not speak, but Vinnie didn’t seem to mind. He swigged his beer as I grimly concentrated on the pale china of my coffee cup.
I was aware of what was going on around me, but I just kept seeing Sam’s face, hollow and betrayed-looking. The hotel seemed very busy—perhaps a lot of people were dying at this time of year, winter’s inevitable victims.
A mother walked by, crying, two small boys trailing behind her. The boys were making cawing sounds, like wheeling seagulls. They weren’t sounds borne out of grief, more from the boredom of their mother being so distracted. I wondered who she’d lost, or was losing, and saw Sam’s face again.
The two receptionists were chatting loudly and vacuously behind their impressive mahogany counter about a party one of them was planning.
“Spiffy-cahj,” she kept saying, shortening the word casual in an affected way. “I told him it’s going to be spiffy-cahj; spiffy-cahj, I said. If he’s not going to come spiffy-cahj like the rest of us, he needn’t bother coming at all.”
Vinnie leaned over to me from his end of the sofa. “That’s one party I really hope I’m not invited to,” he whispered, and I even managed to smile for a split second.
“I wish I still felt so sure that she’ll be okay,” I said.
He took my half-full coffee cup from me and put it down on the glass-topped table. “Come on, sweetheart,” he said. “I think you need to go and have a lie-down, you look wrecked.”
I stretched my hand out toward him and let him lead me up to my room and steer me over to the bed. As soon as we were through the door, Vinnie was peeling off his clothes.
“I’ll just grab a shower, if you don’t mind. Haven’t had the chance to have one yet today. Back in a minute.”
He vanished into the bathroom, and I lay staring at the ceiling. I was thinking how unfair it was that I could just jump up off the bed any time I wanted to, and Sam couldn’t. I was so tired that I began to think that I was hallucinating; the slippery brown bedspread underneath me seemed like a vast card table on which my mind was turning over personalized Tarot cards: Sam holding up scales; the Grim Reaper; Sam, Sam, Sam; Vinnie holding out his hands. I felt cold, chilled to the bone, and all I wanted to do was to get warm again.
Before I even realized it, I had slid off the bed and into the bathroom, the hot splash of Vinnie’s shower calling me. I stripped and stumbled in to join him, falling into his wet arms, crying more than I had thought it possible for even me to cry.
Vinnie hugged me so hard my bones cracked, and I buried my face in the space between his neck and shoulder until the pounding water nearly suffocated me. I kissed him then, all salty and sobbing, as if he were a lifeboat on a stormy sea, and he kissed me back, hard and distracting.
He was so warm against my iced-over soul that I just wanted to get closer and closer to him. After the shower we crawled beneath the chilly bedcovers and he held me, pressing his body against mine, heavy and warm and curved, almost indistinguishable from my own; the only thing in the world that might possibly stop my pain.
We lay in silence, my grief occupying every ion of the air around us, rendering speech redundant. Vinnie was obviously not finding it easy to be naked in bed with me, but for once in his life, he had the sensitivity to realize that what I needed from him at that moment went much deeper than sex. To his credit, he didn’t even try to instigate it.
Eventually I fell into a dreamless black hole of sleep, as suddenly and violently as falling over a cliff. The last thing I remembered was the feel of my cheek on Vinnie’s chest, and my head lulled by the gentle rhythm of his breathing.
I was woken some time later by the sound of a match sparking as Vinnie lit a cigarette. He was sitting up in bed, drinking a beer from the minibar and watching television. It was dark outside, but he hadn’t drawn the curtains.
“Hello, gorgeous,” he said, kissing my nose. “I’ve got to make a move soon, you know. Things to do.”
I sat up groggily. “Really? I thought you were going to stay.”
“Sorry, baby, I can’t. I’ve got this big project to finish. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“Thanks again, Vin, I really appreciate it. How did you get here, anyway?”
“Borrowed a mate’s car. That’s another reason I have to get back. He’ll be wondering where I’ve got to. I didn’t actually tell him I was coming this far.”
He put out his cigarette by dropping it in the dregs of his beer, and then got out of bed, picking up and putting on the clothes he’d discarded earlier. I felt bereft that he was going but didn’t have the energy to stop him—my deep sleep had left me with a woozy
kind of hangover, as though I’d taken a sleeping pill. Once dressed, he came and lay back down on the bed next to me, stroking my breast thoughtfully.
“Oh, by the way, Helena,” he said, matter-of-factly. “The machine swallowed my card, and I’m completely strapped for cash. You couldn’t do me a huge favor and lend me a few quid, could you? Say, two hundred?”
I stared at him open-mouthed. I felt that nothing else had the power to hurt me, not while Sam was fighting for her life—but it didn’t stop me from feeling angry.
“So that’s why you came up here?”
Vinnie looked hurt. Predictably. “No way. You’re my baby. You keep kicking me out, but I’m always there for you when you need me. I was just hoping you could do the same for me, that’s all.”
“Me and my checkbook, you mean.”
“Is that okay? I mean, I know this is a really bad time for you, and I wouldn’t ask unless I was really stuck, honest.… I’m sorry, H.”
I wearily hauled myself out of bed and extracted said checkbook from the depths of my handbag. Two hundred pounds was nothing to me; Vinnie was nothing to me. Sam was all that mattered.
“No, it’s not okay, Vinnie.” But I gave him the check anyway.
I lay motionless on my bed for the rest of the evening, not watching the flickering muted television, not listening to the mutterings of the radio, which I’d switched on for company.
It was eight-thirty P.M. when the call came from Cynthia at the hospital to tell me that Sam had died. Before I even picked up the receiver I was already wondering how my positive thought could have been so wrong, how She’s going to be fine could have dissolved into these final, terrible words across a phone line.
When the brief call was finished, some impulse made me turn up the volume on the radio by my bed, willing there to be a song on which I could hang my grief. Something fitting, something dignified, something for Sam.
It was a gift. Blur, “This Is a Low,” the opening trippy acoustic chord sequence climbing up my emotions: E, F sharp minor, G, A, just as I began to listen. The most emotive song about shipping forecasts ever written. It was like a tornado whipping all its power round and round into a tiny deadly funnel. I poured everything into that song. Volume up and up and up until the little speakers of the radio quivered and shook … I let it lift me up, too, and take me away from there. Away from the feeling of utter and complete loneliness and desolation, the feeling that nothing would ever be right again.
Damon Albarn almost howled the chorus out: “This is a low, but it won’t hurt you / When you’re alone, it will be there with you/finding ways to stay solo …”
It did hurt me, though. God, it hurt me so much. But for the next five minutes, at least for that long, I could survive by letting the song take on my pain for me.
I couldn’t feel the light rising of Sam’s soul up toward a different world, but I imagined that this song was escorting her there, the chords and words, sentiment and volume, and my own feelings for her along with it.
As the song’s final bars faded out, it made it easier for me to understand that She’s going to be fine held much truer when it was not limited to a broken shell of a body.
FIFTY QUID
BY COINCIDENCE, OR PERHAPS SOME STRANGE SYNERGY, GUS FROM New World phoned and left an urgent message for me to ring him back, on the day I was writing the final chapter of the manuscript. Whether it was urgent or not, however, I was utterly incapable of returning his call until the next day. By the time I’d completed the last words, about Sam’s poor broken body, I was absolutely hammered on vodka and was in no fit state to speak to anybody.
The only reason I even heard the phone’s distant ring was because I had just spilled an entire glass of vodka and pulpy orange juice all over my keyboard and had had to take a break from my frenzied weeping to try to wipe it up.
Drunkenness was essential to the operation. It was the only way I could bear to relive those memories without having “This Is a Low” to act as a dock-leaf on the sting, and I couldn’t play the record before the show. I’d set myself a strict embargo on all the tracks accompanying the manuscript, until the actual broadcast. When I listened to them all together for that one last time, I wanted them to have the maximum impact on me, in case I needed an extra spur to assist me in carrying out the Plan. They were not just little iridescent plastic CDs. They were computer disks with my memories stored on them, and I wanted them to remain as new and shiny as was possible under the circumstances.
Nonetheless, writing about Sam’s operation nearly finished me off. The vodka acted as an anesthetic, but not a particularly effective one. I had to keep drinking and drinking it, trying to remember the details objectively, and failing miserably.
On reflection, alcohol and sorrow never did go awfully well together. My brain-drilling headache informed me of this the next day, when the room had finally stopped spinning enough for me to locate the telephone and dial the number Gus had left on my machine.
“Gus? It’s Helena Nicholls. How are you?”
“Helena! I’m great, thanks—but more to the point, how are you? Why are you whispering?”
“Hideous hangover, that’s why. But otherwise fine, thanks. I got your message. What did you want to talk to me about?”
“Right, well, I understand you sent Geoff a letter a couple of months ago, registering your interest in the two-to-four A.M. slot. He wrote you back, care of your agent, asking you to confirm a date, but we haven’t heard from you. Have you changed your mind? Or didn’t you get the letter?”
I guiltily remembered the letters I’d dumped unread in the bin, that day when Vinnie was lurking in the undergrowth.
“Um, no, I haven’t changed my mind.… Yes, I got the letter, I just, er, forgot to ring him with the date.”
“Not to worry. We’ve been having a reshuffle here, and if there’s any chance of you starting next week, Monday the twenty-eighth, that would be terrific. It would get us out of a hole, and it would just give us enough time to get your name in the listings.”
“I said I didn’t want any publicity!”
Raising my voice, even just to a faint, indignant squeak, caused the pressure in my head to build up still further, until I thought that steam would come out of my ears. I vowed not to drink another drop of booze until the day I died. Ho-ho.
“No, no, honestly, we won’t make a song and dance out of it. It’s just that we need a name to stick in the TimeOuts, and so on. Can’t leave a blank space, can we? Besides, no one’ll notice. Hardly anyone listens at that time of night, anyw—Well, what I mean is—”
“Oh, never mind, Gus. I know exactly what you mean.”
I could just see the headline: DISGRACED DJ DEMOTED TO GRAVEYARD SHIFT. Still, maybe a little bit of advance publicity for the Plan wouldn’t hurt.…
My feet suddenly turned into two immobile blocks of ice, at the realization that the endgame now had a date: Monday the twenty-eighth. The day I was scheduled to disappear off the face of the earth.
“All right, I’ll do it. Do I need to come in for a debriefing or anything?”
“No, you know the score. You’ve done it enough times. It’ll be just like the morning, only nighttime and without requests.”
What a wag.
Gus continued, “The security code is currently eight-one-five-seven. Don’t forget it, because no one else will be around at that time, unless you bump into Pete Harness and his producer on the way out. He’s taking over the eleven-to-two A.M. slot.”
“So who’s my producer, then?”
An important question, since he or she would be the last person to see me before I left. I found I’d stripped off a jagged piece of cuticle with my teeth, leaving a long white gash of flesh that instantly filled up with red spots of blood, which then dripped mercilessly onto the leg of my favorite combat trousers. Oh, well, I thought, won’t need to wash them again.
There was an embarrassed silence at the end of the line.
“I thought G
eoff told you in his letter, Helena. You won’t have a producer at that time. Nobody does. Pete only has one that late because he does phone-in quizzes and things on his show.”
I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about this. If I’d planned to do the show long-term, I’d have been hideously affronted. It was like expecting Elizabeth the First to get dressed up for a state banquet on her own, with no one to lace her stays or hang jewels in her hair. It also meant that nobody would be manning the phones. It was just as well that I wasn’t intending to do a request show.
Gus must have picked up on my disgruntled train of thought. “No point having anyone taking calls at that time of night. We’d get all the axe murderers and child molesters ringing in if we did.”
“Oh, great,” I said, trying to sound like someone who cared who’d be listening. “My target audience.”
Maybe not having a producer was a good thing, if I could get over the humiliation. Practically speaking, it meant that I’d have the studio to myself.
I tried to be brisk. “Right, then, I think I’m set. Monday the twenty-eighth it is. I’ll give you a shout if I think of any other questions.”
“Good girl. Are you excited?”
How incredibly patronizing, I fumed. Were it not for the fact that Gus had given me my first DJ job, I’d have seriously gone off him by this point.
“No, Gus, to be honest, I can’t say that I am wildly excited by having to do the graveyard shift. But it’s a job, I suppose, and I’ll guarantee you this: It’ll be a show to remember!”
Gus laughed uncertainly. “You bet, Helena. Well, best of luck, then. I’ll check in with you after the first show, all right?”
On Saturday the twenty-sixth I donned my sunglasses, even though it was raining, and set off to Richmond for a very specific shopping mission. Sainsburys Home Shopping would probably have balked at delivering the items I wanted, so a personal expedition was required. I parked at a meter on the edge of the green and strolled cautiously into the town center, noticing how much less paranoid I felt being out in public—probably because I knew it was the last time. Oddbins was my first port of call, where I purchased a large bottle of gin—I didn’t care for gin, but the hangover was still too fresh in my memory to even think about vodka without retching.
