by Adam Baron
The colour of the pyjamas the nurses fit him into is one of the few things that ever change about my brother. The others are the length of his hair, or the light stubble which sits on his chin from time to time. It always strikes me as strange that his hair and beard should keep growing the way they do, as if some part of Luke is unaware that the rest of him has stopped, and carries on functioning regardless, like a striker who hasn’t heard the whistle. When I’d first started coming I’d asked Hazel if I could shave Luke and she had allowed it, and now I do that if he happens to need it when I’m there.
Luke didn’t need shaving today though so I was redundant in that capacity. Sharon held Luke’s hand, which I always feel strange about doing, and she ran her other hand through his hair and chatted to him. She told him about work, and the various things she’d been doing with her spare time. She behaved with a patience and an efficiency which made me feel clumsy and unimaginative. I thought it was good the way she was with him, and I wondered what she talked to him about when I wasn’t there. We both focused our attention on Luke, and Sharon did most of the talking. I could talk quite well when I was on my own with Luke, but was happy enough for Sharon to be in charge while I was there with her. I’m sure he would much rather listen to her.
As Sharon chatted away I studied Luke’s face, and tried to decide if he was looking any older since he had been here. He looked thinner certainly, drawn, and his skin was very pale, but I wasn’t sure if I could see any age on him. As often happens when I sit there watching him, I couldn’t help imagining him in ten years’ time. Twenty, thirty. Lying there as time passed him by, growing slowly into the body of an old man, a slower body, a body which had grown weary without having done anything to tire it. I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t imagine coming here every week or so for the rest of Luke’s or my life, bringing along the baggage I had acquired, the sights and sounds and experiences, the children maybe; all the things Luke may never have, because he put himself in a position of danger so that I would not be in it. I couldn’t imagine growing older, and watching Luke’s parody of ageing growing older alongside me.
Sharon chatted on and I said the odd thing now and then. The ward was warm and Sharon pulled her sweater over her head, her full breasts pressing upwards against a fitted, ribbed T-shirt. The contrast between the young, vivacious woman and her inert fiancé was startling, and I had to make myself remember what they had looked like before, fighting together on the sofa, or dancing salsa at the Mambo Inn. Imagining that made me think of that night and I asked Sharon if she remembered it, how Luke and I were too English to ask anyone other than her to dance, and how we had had to keep whisking her away from overly amorous Latinos. Sharon said of course she remembered. And then a private memory crossed her mind and she looked back down at Luke. A wistful breeze blew across her features and she squeezed Luke’s hand harder. As she set his hand down, however, the wistfulness was blown away by something stronger. She sat back in her chair, letting out a long, slow breath.
Sharon seemed to have gone somewhere and so I started to tell Luke about my case. I didn’t tell him any of the details, just that it was paying well and that I might be able to get away sometime, do some skiing after Christmas. I told him how Forest were doing, and how he had better get well because they needed all the support they could get at the moment. I talked about going back to Australia with him, up to the Northern Territories this time. I told him that Sharon had recently made me go to see a Spanish porn show with her, and then told him that his acting agent had phoned recently to ask how he was doing. Apparently, she still got the odd enquiry after him. I told Luke that it really was about time that he got off his arse and started working again; his public were demanding it.
While I was speaking I hadn’t really noticed Sharon. I turned towards her and saw that she wasn’t looking at Luke but at me. Her expression was blank, her eyes narrowed slightly and her mouth open as though she couldn’t quite believe something. I thought she was going to speak to me but suddenly she stood up and walked out of the door without a word. She didn’t look round, at either Luke or myself. I called after her but she had already gone. Hearing me call Sharon’s name, Hazel gave me a quizzical look from the other end of the ward.
I stayed with Luke another ten minutes. I didn’t know what Sharon’s problem was but soon became restless thinking about her. I tried to imagine how this all must be for her but because it was completely different for her than it was for me I couldn’t. In some respects it was far easier for me. I wondered if Sharon had met somebody recently, a man she couldn’t bring herself to go out with, or who she was going out with but was feeling very guilty about. Maybe that explained it. The thought was unpleasant to me, more so than it ever had been and I wondered why. It was probably seeing Luke lying there in his featureless limbo, imagining Sharon with another man. I thought about Sharon and the other man going out for a long time. Getting married maybe. Coming here together to see Luke. Or maybe Sharon would make the decision that she couldn’t come at all any more.
I said goodbye to Luke, and found Hazel to say goodbye to her too. I went to look for Sharon in the cafeteria, but it was empty except for a young man in a white coat reading a fat paperback over a cup of coffee. I found her on a bench by the lake. Her hands were folded into the sleeves of her sweater. I sat next to her and prised one of her hands out, holding it between mine, rubbing it. I’d wanted to cheer her up but it wasn’t sadness that I saw on her face. It was more like contempt. Contempt mixed with anger. I let go of her hand, which was as cold and unresponsive as Luke’s had been on the few occasions I had ever taken hold of it.
‘You OK?’ I said, after a second or two.
‘Yes.’
‘Yes?’
Sharon let out a breath and turned her head away, towards a muffled-up old man who was being led slowly around the lake by a middle-aged woman.
‘Sharon,’ I asked her, ‘is there something you want to tell me? I mean, if there is, you can. In fact, I want you to.’
Sharon turned, and looked at me.
‘I mean it,’ I assured her. ‘You can. Really.’
She nodded to herself. She thought for a second and then looked at me with hard, measured eyes.
‘Billy,’ she said, ‘what do the doctors say about Luke?’
The question threw me. She knew what they said.
‘They say he’s in a PVS.’
‘And what does that mean?’
‘Well, they say that he has no control of any of his physical faculties, but that they are uncertain as to any level—’
‘Billy,’ Sharon said, cutting me off. There was an edge to her voice. ‘What do they say about recovery? About the chances of Luke waking up again?’
It was my turn to look away. ‘The whole subject is open to debate,’ I said. ‘I’ve read about it. Occasionally someone is misdiagnosed and—’
‘How occasionally? How occasionally is that, Billy?’
‘Christ,’ I said, ‘I don’t know. But it happens. And the doctor says that Luke isn’t suffering at all. Not at all. So I see no reason why they shouldn’t keep him alive, just in case, you know. It happens, it does …’
‘Oh Billy,’ Sharon said, her voice full of anger, ‘I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it when you talk to Luke as if he’s going to get better. I can’t bear it!’
‘Sharon …’
‘Trips to Australia, going to see the football, oh God, Billy, it’s so stupid of you! It’s so stupid! He’s never going to go away with you, or act again, or watch Nottingham bloody Forest. He’s not. I wish you wouldn’t speak like that. Every time you do it’s like a wall is put up in front of me. It’s killing me, Billy! It really is.’
I was shocked. Sharon was looking at me with something approaching hatred. Her eyes filled and her mouth trembled but she held on to it. I didn’t know what to say.
‘I don’t understand …’
‘Billy,’ Sharon went on, ignoring me. ‘You don’t have to
turn his machines off. You don’t.’ She took a breath. ‘Because he’s dead. Luke’s dead. He is. He is. He’s dead now and you just keep on pretending he isn’t. We meet up all the time and you just pretend Luke couldn’t make it, that he’ll be along next time, that he’s got a cold or something! But he hasn’t got a cold. He’s dead.’
Sharon’s eyes filled up completely this time and I put a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it away as though it was painful to her. She moved further down the bench. I moved closer to her but she pushed herself off from the bench and ran into the trees. I saw her stop on the other side of the man-made lake and sit against a tree with her head in her hands. I couldn’t hear her crying but it was only a small tree Sharon was leaning against and the rocking motion she was making disturbed the last of the flame-coloured leaves clinging to the thin, dark branches, leading several of them to lose their hold and float down to the floor around her. I turned my eyes away from her, to the ducks diving in the dirty brown water.
My brother wasn’t dead. I understood why Sharon said what she had but she was wrong. I wasn’t going to get mad with her, or think badly of her, but I couldn’t help her either, not if that was the way she was choosing to deal with it. I felt sure now that someone else was involved. I was disappointed that killing Luke in her mind was the only way Sharon could deal with his presence in her life.
But then, I had always known how practical a person she was, how she dealt with things decisively before they took control of her. It was her way of getting on with her life, of not allowing what happened to Luke to claim her as well. I knew that. But I saw her as ruthless, the way she could decide to end something like that, to shut out my brother. I pictured her set face as she had walked out of the ward, not even turning to look at Luke.
I found myself thinking of Peter Morgan. I wondered if he had told his wife about employing me. I wondered what she had said. Leave it. Just accept it. Accept what happened, however bad it was. Don’t make it worse for yourself by living in the past, raking over things you can’t change. Maybe that’s why I felt such sympathy for him, because he couldn’t do this. Because he had lost his brother like I had and all he was left with was an image. The only difference was that the image he had was of blood, and sharp glass, and semen, while mine was of a greying young man who was still alive but equally motionless, whole but completely severed from himself. Present, a hundred yards away, but lost. Lost as a kid on a street corner.
When she was calmer Sharon walked back towards me. Her face was set hard again. We got into the car. We drove back into London with a pregnant silence joining the remnant of scent left from Luke’s flowers. The roads were busier now, and it was slower going. As night fell I realized that I hadn’t put the clock in my car back the night before. I did it with one hand as I drove along, feeling sad that it would be dark so early from now on. I made that point to Sharon but she didn’t answer me. I turned the radio on, but every channel sounded tinny and annoying so I gave up on it. Once or twice, I glanced at Sharon in the passenger seat, but she kept her gaze fixed at nothing through her side window and wouldn’t look at me. After the third time, I didn’t look over again.
I pulled up outside Sharon’s flat in Ladbroke Grove. It was residents’ parking but as it was Sunday I was fine. I didn’t have to leave the car there long however. When I went to undo my seat belt Sharon reached out a hand to stop me.
‘I think I want to be on my own.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Right.’
Sharon waited for a second. She looked at me for a long time, studying my face. Her look was one of complete self-control, the way you look when you’ve made a decision no one can talk you out of. A decision which has made itself.
‘Billy,’ she said, in a measured voice. ‘I’m sorry for shouting at you. But I have to change things. We both have to. We keep going round the same circle. I need …’ Her voice tailed off.
I didn’t say anything. Sharon took my silence as a rebuke and said, by way of a wounded justification, emphasizing each word:
‘I’m not very happy, Billy!
Her voice accused me. I started to speak but Sharon was out of the car before I could say anything. I fumbled for my seat belt but I was already too late to catch her. I gave up and watched her run over to the block of converted flats she lived in, then fumble for her door key. I’m not very happy. What the fuck did she think I was? I watched her open the door hurriedly and let it swing behind her, keeping sight of her as she ran towards the stairs, until the door closed. I wondered how long it would be before I saw her again. When the door clicked shut I stared at it for a second and then I was aware, suddenly, of the lingering scent from the flowers which had been on the back seat and were now in a cheap plastic vase a foot above my brother Luke’s head. The scent was cloying, insistent. I opened my window to get rid of it.
So, I thought, I’m dead too.
A light came on in her flat. A figure walked towards the window and drew the heavy curtains against the oncoming night. And me. I reversed up and pulled the car out into the street. I managed to scrape the side of a BMW parked too far out from the kerb, and its alarm went off, an outraged scream like a chisel rammed into my head. Fuck it. I drove back across London to Clerkenwell.
* * *
My flat was empty and I didn’t want to be there. I went down to the Old Ludensian, and Nicky shut the place early because I was the only customer and why waste the electricity? We sat at the bar, the tables stacked high with chairs casting twisted shadows from the streetlights on the pillars and the whitewashed brick walls. Nicky didn’t ask me about Carla so I didn’t tell him. We drank a few beers. I’d meant to tell him about what had happened at the hospital but found myself not wanting to. I wound up telling him all about Teddy Morgan and then about Dominic Lewes.
We got talking about the whole gay thing. Nicky confessed to me that he had actually had a fling with a guy on Rhodes, where he’d gone after breaking up with a girlfriend. I was surprised; Nicky had the most heterosexual life of anyone I knew. He told me that he had never felt that way about any other man, but still found himself thinking about the tall American from Kansas whom he had fallen for. He said that the whole thing had confused him at the time and still did, especially when he started getting serious about a girl. He looked troubled, and suddenly embarrassed.
‘You needn’t worry, by the way,’ he assured me. ‘He was blond.’
I laughed and told Nicky that I was shocked and offended that he had never considered me as a sexual partner. Then I wondered if I would ever, ever meet anyone whose life was simple and straightforward, who could live happily in mind and body. I wished that we could somehow find a way to circumvent the body, the power it has over us to make us miserable. To trap us, like Luke was trapped, or Peter Morgan was; unable to live in his body, making only brief, clandestine sorties. What it would be like if we could either be free of the body or else free of the guilt we feel at some of the demands the body makes. I wondered what it meant that I spent hours in the gym, causing myself pain, trying to get my body to obey my commands. I wondered what it would be like to have the need to do that, not to yourself, but to others. To have power over other bodies.
Nicky and I drank another beer and sat in silence for a while. A car drove by, sending the shadows from the stacked chairs running across the walls like a hoard of demons. I left Nicky to his thoughts and went home to mine.
Chapter Thirteen
On Monday I got to my office before nine, had two slices of toast with coffee and waited for the mail. There was a time when the mail came before you even thought about getting out of bed in the morning. Now you have to wait for it.
I wrote a list of things to do. I left two messages for Sir Peter to call me and then typed out a letter to Mrs Lewes. I told her that her son was physically fit and seemed to be living in a house which had electricity and was heated. I told her that he had dyed his hair, which would explain his appearance in the pictures I was sending. I di
dn’t want her thinking I was sending her photographs of somebody else’s child. I slid the letter into a hardback A4 envelope, addressed it, and resolved to pick the pictures up from Carl later in the day. I wrote a letter to a man who owed me some money but then tore it up when a cheque from him was included in the mail, which arrived at about half past nine. It was accompanied by a letter addressed to a Mr J. Brinsford, the previous occupant of my office who, I knew for a fact, had emigrated to Sydney four years ago. It was from the Renault people who valued him highly as a customer and wanted to offer him the chance to test-drive the new Renault Megane. The only other letter was a bill for business rates which, unfortunately, was addressed to me.
Once I had dealt with the mail, thoughts of Sharon drifted into my head. They made me feel weighted down and slow, as though someone had replaced my blood with mercury. I began to run through the events of the previous day, pausing and rewinding, seeing her set face, feeling her shrug away under my hand, hearing the sound she made as her tears fought with her words for space. I had just got to the point when she ran off towards her flat when the shrill tone of the phone brought me back to the present. It was Morgan. He sounded excited and worried at the same time until I assured him that I hadn’t called him for anything important.
‘I need a favour,’ I told him.
‘Anything,’ the MP replied. People seldom mean that.
‘It’s not a lot but you’re the only person in the Commons I know.’
‘I’m not in the Commons today, I’m afraid, I’m at the Treasury.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘What I need to know is how to get hold of the register of Members’ outside interests.’
