The city is moving her towards him too easily, too quickly, and Iris is finding it difficult to breathe. She gets off at the next stop and walks the rest of the way so that by the time she arrives, the debate has begun. She’s hurried in and seated between two academics she doesn’t know. The first speaker from the opposite panel is mid-argument. It’s Meike, the majestic student who can’t see. There’s a large audience and the people either side of her look well prepared. She can’t stop herself scanning the room. Where is Raif? Meike is coming to her conclusion.
The objects we put in museums are representative, evocative, metaphorical … therefore they are about the idea of themselves. We don’t need to preserve their actual matter, which is inherently unstable. We shouldn’t be putting our dwindling resources into trying to keep materials stable when we can capture and store images of every aspect of them, on any scale.
Iris is being introduced. She has to speak but the pills she took are beginning to blur her thoughts. When she was walking along the river talking to Raif, it had been easy. They argued as a form of flirtation. But what is she to say here? And where is he?
She has the notes she began on the train but sets them aside. She wants to argue with Meike.
I would suggest that precisely because we can capture images of every aspect of an object, we need to preserve the object itself.
The audience are waiting for her to explain.
The more people learn only from images, the less idea they will have of the object.
Meike looks baffled or startled, Iris can’t tell but she’s starting to hate her. She tries again.
The object reminds us—
The man on her left coughs. Is he trying not to laugh?
The object reminds us that it is after all an object. Not an image or a description but a thing.
This feels utterly true to Iris, but it sounds too simple to satisfy the room. They wait.
I think what you’re trying to say— begins the man on her left.
He goes on to speak for fifteen minutes without pause. Iris isn’t insulted, she’s relieved. When it’s over she makes herself go up to Meike, to say hello and to thank her (she ought to thank someone) but she says something else.
I thought Raif was taking part in this? I mean, what I mean is, he was the one who—
Meike takes her time.
Hello. I hope you enjoyed that. We did so appreciate your contribution. Raif? Didn’t someone say? He had a family emergency.
Iris tries not to think about the tall, uncertain Helen.
What’s happened?
Meike shrugs.
They wouldn’t tell me, would they?
But who would they tell?
Iris wants Meike to meet her eyes so badly that she refuses to believe she can’t. Only now does she catch herself.
I just mean it would have been good to know, beforehand, that he wasn’t taking part. Someone should have said.
I’m sorry if you were inconvenienced but it was all very last-minute and we did so value your contribution.
Iris says something about getting home for the children and makes her way patiently back across the city. She needs time to compose herself and to get Raif back in place, in the past, in the life before David’s stroke, which is not her life now.
alarms
Raif is not at the debate because Helen rings to say that his mother has turned up at the flat and seems agitated.
She calms down when he appears, says she’s starving and then shakes her head at the plate put in front of her. Eventually she picks up a piece of chicken and gnaws on it briefly before wiping her hands on her blue silk shirt. She smiles at Helen like a guilty child but when Raif asks if she’d like coffee, her usual expression snaps back into place.
Lovely!
She doesn’t drink it.
Raif takes Bridget through to the sofa bed and watches while she unpacks her little case. She has everything she needs, neatly folded, and he is reassured. Evidently she just got in a muddle about dates. He starts to clear up in the kitchen but Helen says she’ll do it, he must need some rest. When he turns on the bedroom light Bridget is there in the bed, sitting up and smiling. The stained silk shirt looks dangerously loose.
Mum, this is my—
Did you see the moon?
In the moment it takes him to come up with a reply, he makes a massive adjustment. His mother is not herself and never will be again. He must take her hand now and lead her through whatever comes next. He will have to think about her, plan for her and decide for her. He cannot be uncertain now.
Come and show me the moon, he says. No, stay there. It’s a cold night. I’ll fetch your dressing gown.
When he reappears she gets up and he sees – but tries hard not to – that her lower half is naked. She steps calmly into the dressing gown.
Is it a cold night, darling?
Yes, Mum. It’s a very cold night.
In the hallway Bridget stops.
What was it I wanted?
Raif takes her arm.
Weren’t you about to brush your teeth?
When she’s finished he leads her back to the sofa bed and says goodnight.
In the morning Bridget is up first, sitting at the empty kitchen table, still wearing the shirt with the chicken grease on the front.
Have you seen the moon? she says, going to the window. Come and look. Now where’s it gone?
Doesn’t the moon sleep in the day?
She shakes her head over and over and then starts to shout.
No no no no!
Raif takes his frightened little mother in his arms and tells her that it’s alright, it doesn’t matter, it’s all going to be alright.
He rearranges his classes and takes her home, having made an emergency appointment with her doctor. If he can reassure her about each small step, she seems content. What are you looking at? The moon. Where are we going? Home.
*
He talks to social services and care agencies, and they make a plan to install alarms. Someone will come in each day to make sure she’s eating and hasn’t had a fall. He’s shocked by agency fees. Will they have to sell the house? Her carer calls to say she won’t eat her lunch or a neighbour to report that she’s been peeing in the garden. He’s learning that this happens everywhere. Memory gives way and a person stops being able to moderate themselves according to the world.
There is the ice over the deep lake of loving and losing his wife, and there is the bed of that lake which is the death of his father. Where is his mother? Is she withdrawing or being withdrawn? She has always been there to move away from, encouraging him to make his own life. Now she has started to move away from him. He can already see her growing smaller, edging out onto the ice.
*
The triplets live twenty miles away and one of them brings their mother, Sorcha, to visit Bridget each week.
We’re family, says Ashley when she has to report that they found a pan boiled dry on the stove. We can manage. When’s the alarm system being put in?
I don’t want to worry you, says Jessica, but Bridget was out in the street in the night shouting about a fire. She locked herself out. You can’t rely on neighbours to sort out things like that.
Raif cancels another class and gets on another train. He finds his mother in the garden. She is barefoot, and her hands and face are smeared with earth.
There you are, she says, reaching out her mucky fingers.
Her brain moves to protect her from the knowledge that it’s dying and so she makes sense of his appearing by deciding she has summoned him.
You’re late. Aren’t you late?
I was worried. You didn’t answer your phone.
I had to divide these irises.
She’s standing on some geraniums and around her lies the wreckage of her irises. Every root ball has been dug up and split but nothing has been replanted.
Where did you find the strength to do all this? You must be exhausted.
What do yo
u mean?
Raif goes to make tea and finds her mobile, switched off, in a kitchen cupboard. So she knows how to switch it off. She doesn’t want to use it. Why not just say? At some level she’s doing these things on purpose.
He stays for two hours, because that seems a reasonable length of time, but the visit is not a success. He tries to talk about the things they’ve always talked about. Not just family and the weather but her work and his. He tells her about the museum stores, where his friend works, and how they have all these old X-ray machines.
Some of them are almost a hundred years old, so you were probably using them when you started out!
I wasn’t working a hundred years ago.
I know. That was a joke.
I hadn’t qualified then so I couldn’t have used those machines.
Would you like to see them? I brought you some pictures.
Raif opens his laptop but Bridget has spotted something stuck to the sofa and becomes absorbed in trying to scrape it off.
Don’t you want to see the pictures?
No, I don’t.
But I want to show them to you.
He’d spent an afternoon preparing this, pleased to think he was being a good son and anticipating her pleasure. Bridget is still picking at the sofa.
This might come off with a little vinegar.
I could take you on a special visit. Because of my friend, who works for the museum. You could see all the old machines.
There are better machines now.
I just thought. The history might—
You were always good at history.
It’s what I teach.
Do you? That’s nice.
But what I’m suggesting is—
Are you going now?
Going?
Yes.
Unless you want me to stay?
Not really.
The unsettlement of Bridget’s mind leads to collapsed bridges and fallen walls but also to clearings. Like a child she believes in how she feels. She can say that she is tired, hungry or cold. That she wants someone to stay or go. But there are the forces that drive her into the night or that creep up behind her and these she cannot express.
Nor can her son bring himself to say what he needs. So he stages his own emergency by ignoring a chest infection until it becomes pneumonia. Now he’s too sick to visit his mother.
The days that follow are happy ones. Helen cares for him but sleeps elsewhere so he can lie in the lake of himself, so worn out by each aching breath that he can put nothing into words. Usually his mind rushes ahead of his words, evaluating impact and pitfalls. Now he doesn’t have the energy. They just talk. He’s practical about his mother and seems to have cast off his grief. Helen relaxes. Raif finds himself wanting to reach her.
the iron lung
Does Raif want Helen to do his breathing for him? There are times when we need someone to run us for a while so that we can take a rest. People fall in love just to bring this about. They find someone they know will take over.
One of the ugliest objects in the museum, and one Iris is particularly fond of, is the iron lung. Built in the 1930s, it’s seven feet long and weighs around eight hundred pounds. It looks like an early space rocket or submarine and, like them, provides a place in which to breathe. The patient is sealed inside the iron lung up to their neck. A pump sucks out the air, lowering the pressure and forcing their lungs to expand. Then the air is pumped back in, forcing their lungs to compress.
It’s a brute operation: the pump clunks and the air is drawn through what sounds like the narrowest of apertures. The machine sounds desperate: as if, like the patient’s body, it’s being forced to keep going. It makes a noise that travels through the teeth and skull of the listener. Whatever rate the machine is set at, its breath sounds unnatural – neither fast nor slow, only horribly inexorable. Forcing the body to keep breathing can damage it even more. The lungs look strong, like a pair of bellows, but they are made up of tiny fragilities.
There are people who have spent most of their lives in an iron lung. They contracted polio in the 1950s and have been unable to breathe unaided ever since. Imagine being locked into something that you can never fully enter. You are outside it from the neck up. Do you separate yourself or do you eventually incorporate it into your sense of who you are?
The iron lung was replaced by a practice of diverting the blood to a machine that removes carbon dioxide and adds oxygen. It has made a vital difference to the prognosis of victims of the new types of flu. Does this mean that the act of breathing could become superfluous? And if so, how do we now define the moment of death? Will we have no clear end?
questions
In the city it’s not difficult to see the adjustments people have made. Some have locked up part of themselves as if in a separate room. Others multiply and set off in several directions at once. There are those who leave themselves behind or meet themselves in a place they swear they’ve never been.
Since David’s stroke, his brain has concentrated on what it can still manage. His thoughts go where they can and conserve their resources. He doesn’t like this doctor. She asks questions that he knows the answers to but tricks him into saying the wrong thing.
Are you familiar with the saying a rolling stone gathers no moss?
David nods.
What does it mean? she asks.
He doesn’t look at her because she has the shape that pulls him. And he wants to get this right. He knows it.
Moss is slow. The stone is gone.
The doctor is about to speak but pauses and then starts again.
What might we be trying to express when we say it?
Moss is in the earth. Not the stone.
Which is true, but what are we trying to express, about ourselves, when we use this saying?
Moss can’t move. A stone can.
The doctor makes a note and consults her list.
Good. Now could you complete this sentence: He posted a letter without a …
Stamp.
Very good. Now can you complete it again but use a word that doesn’t make sense.
He posted a letter without a … stamp. Sorry. He posted a letter without a st— He posted a letter without a … without a … Sorry, so sorry, the word—
David knows what he’s being asked to do. The sentence lays itself out in front of him like a short straight path but when he reaches the last word, something shoves him back to stamp.
Fuck it! Jesus! Fuck it! David is punching his head.
You’re doing very well, David. This isn’t a test. No right or wrong. One last question, can you tell me something that isn’t true?
Three times David starts to speak and stops again.
That the … my name is … ridiculous … Fuck it … Sorry … Ridiculous …
You must need some rest. Let’s finish there.
But David is still punching his head, which doesn’t feel like his at all.
what’s missing, what remains
Easter comes in March and Iris, who can only take half the holiday off work, sends Kate and Lou to a drama club which finishes at three. They can walk home and make themselves tea and toast. She can be back by six. They’re so capable and there are two of them so she has no qualms. On the second day, she receives a call from the drama club. Are they not well? The auditions are that afternoon and they’d seemed so keen. She tells the tutor that she’s on her way but is not sure where she should go. She starts to ring David and then remembers. Who should she ring? The police? No. The girls are probably at home. Perhaps one of them is, as the tutor said, unwell.
She forgets whatever she’s supposed to be doing that afternoon – two meetings and a conservation estimate on a key exhibit – and runs out of the building and into the street, where she finds a taxi and tells the driver it’s an emergency, her children are … are what? They’re not at home but they’ve left her a note. It says they’ve gone to see their father and will be back by five o’clock. They are using the
ir own money and have researched the route online.
Iris was told within weeks of David’s stroke that he was unlikely ever to leave secure care. But it has taken some time for her to be able to keep this in view. Kate and Lou must remember their father as himself and not the borderless creature he has become. Besides which, he might not recognise them as his daughters and how might he behave then? They must never see their father again.
Iris phones the unit and they say that the girls have arrived and no, they will not be given access to their father without her permission, nor should they leave the building without her. She says she’s on her way.
The girls are waiting in the visitors’ room, where there is a television, comics and games. They were so distressed when no one would let them see their father that one of the doctors had come to talk to them.
I’m sorry, she said. But there are strict rules. We need your mother’s permission.
Is that true of seeing everyone in hospital ever? asked Lou.
No. But some patients, those who have been acutely ill, who need a lot of rest or who are not themselves … It’s for everyone’s good.
He’s our dad! shouted Kate.
No, said Lou. He’s not. She said he’s not himself.
Well, who is he, then? yelled Kate. You’re yourself, aren’t you, unless you’re dead? Aren’t you?
Lou did what her mother would have done and took her sister in her arms. The doctor’s bleeper went off and she got up to leave. Lou stood up too.
If we were your kids and he was your husband, what would you do? Would you let us see him?
The doctor tried to give as much information as people asked for. These girls weren’t children. They were smart and they were so distressed. She started to shrug.
In the City of Love's Sleep Page 16
