In a Land of Plenty

by Tim Pears

  ‘I trust my boy’s not giving you any trouble?’ Charles boomed at the nurses.

  ‘Don’t worry. We tickle his feet if he does,’ they told him.

  ‘By God, James, I wouldn’t mind being in your position myself!’ he declared, before leaving.

  Mary, though, visited every day. Sometimes she came floating in smiling gaily, and older boys in the ward ignored their own visitors to watch her. More often she looked tired and worn in the harsh light. She brought James small, practical things like tissue-wipes, a long straw and a pen whose ink defied gravity so that he could write lying on his back. She conferred with the surgeon and the ward sister and the teacher; but when it came to talking with James they ran out of things to say.

  ‘You’re a brave boy,’ she told him. ‘Sister says you’re recuperating quicker than we could have hoped for.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum,’ James whispered in reply. He knew that there was lots more he could say, that he was frightened, and he couldn’t work out why this was happening to him. What had he done wrong? Had he done something to deserve it, or was it someone else’s fault? Would he be able to walk again, to run, to play football? And when could he go home? If he asked the first question, confided the first anxiety, then the rest would tumble out, all his brave bottled-up wretchedness. But then all questions would have to be asked, and there were things he needed to ask her. He wasn’t sure what they were, but there was something wrong, and he didn’t want to know what it was.

  ‘I’m trapped here,’ he said once when she appeared, frustration at his immobility overcoming his reticence. ‘I’m trapped here, Mum.’

  ‘I understand, James,’ she said, ‘I know that feeling,’ and her face clouded over as it did on those days she retreated into her dark room; James wondered who was visiting who. He almost asked her, then: ‘What’s the matter, Mum? What is it? What’s wrong?’ But instead he lay back and stared at the ceiling and she sat in her chair in silence, while the ward bustled and echoed around them.

  Despite such awkwardness, however, James enjoyed his visitors, because the days were so long and tedious, and he and his fellow patients shared only a desultory comradeship. Edna brought him bouquets of flowers from Alfred that he was too busy to bring himself and also paper bags with doughnuts and biscuits and cream pastries she’d made. She looked around the ward surreptitiously before handing them over.

  ‘They don’t feed you properly in here, anyone can see that,’ she told him. James didn’t have the heart to tell Edna he didn’t want her home-made delicacies: he decided that the weight he’d put on over the last couple of years had contributed to his condition and that he’d prefer to be thin again. He declined the desserts from the hospital food trolley, ate all the fruit visitors brought, and despatched Alice to the girls’ ward with the boxes of chocolates he was given, along with Edna’s pastries.

  I’ll leave this bed thinner than I got into it, he told himself. His diet helped in other ways, too.

  ‘Have you had any motions yet?’ a nurse asked him, scrutinizing her clipboard.

  ‘What?’ he whispered.

  ‘Have you had a bowel movement?’

  It wasn’t easy to lying down, and he went for days without being able to, his body filling up with food. They gave him laxatives and inserted suppositories up his backside, but nothing happened, partly because if he strained, the stitches in his hips screeched with pain. What a way to die, he thought, turning to shit from inside. Eventually they drew screens around the bed and administered an enema. He felt the soapy water gurgle and flood through his rectum, and with a gorgeous relief he felt the compact mass in there break up like a huge frozen river thawing and flow wonderfully out of him.

  The only person he didn’t much like to visit was his best friend. The rest of the time he was impressed by how well he was coping with his immobility, but whenever Lewis came in they discussed football gloomily, since that was all they knew what to discuss, and James’ invalidity was a shadow across every word of the conversation. It was as hard for Lewis as it was for James.

  ‘You’ll be out soon,’ he told James on his first visit, two days after the operation. ‘Won’t be long now, Jay,’ he said the next time.

  Lewis did, though, bring James a pair of water-pistols. James, like all the boys in the ward, fell in love with the junior nurses. Much of his sedentary time he spent wondering which was his favourite, beguiled by their sensitivity, sophistication and common sense. The only thing he disliked was that they tickled his toes whenever they passed his bed. There was nothing he could do about it except curse, which only encouraged them, and he was so ticklish that he couldn’t help wriggling inside the plaster, his hips flaring up hot. So he asked Lewis to get him water-pistols and he waited until his two favourite nurses passed by the end of his bed.

  ‘I just want to warn you, that’s all,’ he whispered. They didn’t hear him, so he said it again louder, rediscovering in that moment his normal voice: ‘I’m just warning you,’ he said.

  They stopped. ‘Warning us what?’ they asked.

  ‘Just don’t tickle my feet again, that’s all.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ said one, taken aback.

  ‘Good. Just as well for you.’

  ‘What if we do?’ asked the other one, bolder.

  ‘You’ll find out. Just you try it,’ James challenged them. They looked at each other, grinned, and stepped towards the end of his bed. His hands were under the blanket, fingers gripping the handles of the water-pistols.

  ‘I just thought I ought to warn you,’ he reiterated. ‘Don’t say I didn’t.’

  They lifted the end of the blanket and took a foot each, and James waited a second or two before drawing his weapons and firing. He hit them both with thin jets of water. Shocked, they dropped back for a moment, but then rushed him, giggling, one each side of the bed, braving the oncoming water. They grabbed his arms and the three of them tussled. James was surprised by how strong he was: he wouldn’t let go his finger on the trigger and water sprayed on their uniforms and faces and into the air. They all three saw the ward sister at the same moment: she was standing in the doorway of her office, glaring. The nurses let go of James’ arms and scampered away.

  Alice was the only one to whom James’ incarceration seemed nothing out of the ordinary, the most normal thing in the world, and although it wasn’t, of course, her denial of reality made it bearable. Alice took James’ condition in her stride, as if it were as natural coming to visit him here after school as popping into his room at home: she told him what she’d been doing, tidied his bedside cabinet, and swapped the latest jokes and riddles, until at some point her attention shifted, she’d have that look that said she was thinking of something else, and she rushed off. She became a regular visitor to the girls’ ward next door, and as well as sharing out James’ surplus chocolates and sticky buns she assumed the role of go-between, delivering messages of greeting and declarations of love between immobile admirers.

  Laura came with Alice, and when Alice set off to tour the beds of children without a visitor of their own Laura stayed with James. They played chess, her hand absent-mindedly stroking his arm. She smiled when he made a good move, and he noticed for the first time that when she smiled two tiny dimples appeared above her cheekbones.

  ‘I’ll beat you one day,’ she promised.

  ‘It’s a shame you’re not older, Laura,’ he told her.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know, really,’ he admitted.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ Laura stated. ‘You wouldn’t say it if there wasn’t a reason. You ought to think about it.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Don’t be so grown-up. Come on, it’s your move.’

  James dreamed of a wedding in the ward. The nurses were bridesmaids in their uniforms and the patients in their beds were the congregation, except that they were mostly members of his own family: Robert was in the bed next to his, staring at him, and Simon was on the other side, speaking r
apidly, nonsensically, with two male nurses. The teacher came over and bent towards him.

  ‘I’m your best man,’ she told James, enveloping him in her bad breath. He grimaced and closed his eyes, and leaned forward to accept her lips. They began to kiss but were interrupted by music: the sister was playing an organ in a corner of the ward, glaring around the room as she struck the keys. In a bed opposite James his mother was moaning with pain.

  ‘She’s only just come out of the operation,’ he said loudly. ‘She shouldn’t be here yet.’

  No one took any notice of him. They were all watching Alice, who was running around the empty centre of the ward shouting out: ‘Where is she? Where is she?’

  The bride, apparently, had disappeared. Everyone was mortified. James was filled with fear and shame. Then he felt something on his arm and looked across to find Laura there beside him, calmly gazing out of the huge glass doors at the green lawn, and softly patting his arm. Suddenly something struck him and he discovered that Robert was shooting a water-pistol at him, except it wasn’t water that came out but hot urine. It splashed on his face. He couldn’t move to escape, and didn’t want to take his arm away from Laura. As if as a form of protection, the teacher began caressing his face, and then his neck and chest, smothering him with her hands and her bad breath, and he realized that he’d had a bottle between his legs for a long time, unable or unwilling to piss. Now he felt it rush out of him in a fitful stream of relief, hot and pleasant, and he woke up from his first wet dream, his pyjamas damp and sticky.

  By the time they took off the plaster, after three months, James was squirming inside its shell. They hardly needed to saw it: he could almost have sloughed it off on his own. His clothes looked comically baggy on him at the same time as being too short at the wrists and ankles. He was given a wheelchair in which he raced another boy along the corridors until the sister caught them at it and threatened them with being kept in hospital an extra week. He had physiotherapy sessions in the pool, and from the wheelchair he graduated to crutches: James was well balanced on them, agile, and he felt, strangely, more athletic than he had for two or three years. The day before he was let out of hospital – four months after entering it – Mary came in and went with him back to the surgeon’s office.

  ‘You’re a very fortunate young man,’ he told James while pointing at the X-rays on which they could see clamps and pins inserted into James’ femur and hips, clearly defined metal in the ghostly bone.

  ‘If this had happened fifty, a hundred years ago,’ the surgeon continued, ‘you’d be crippled. Thanks to modern orthopaedic surgery, you can look forward to a normal, reasonably active life. Of course,’ he added, ‘you’ll be restricted in some ways: no contact sports, and keep off bicycles, I should. But otherwise, you’re fine. Come back in a couple of years and we’ll take the hardware out.’

  Mary pushed James back to the ward in a wheelchair, along endless echoey corridors that had exhausted him on his crutches on the way there. James felt like Odysseus in a film he’d seen in the cinema – wounded but defiant as he was carried to safety by Menelaus from the battle on the Trojan plain, holding his crutches like spears.

  James got into bed.

  ‘Would you like us to get the nurses a big box of chocolates?’ Mary suggested.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘and some flowers. They’re always putting flowers into vases for other people. It’d be nice for them to have some of their own.’

  Mary smiled at him. ‘You’ll be all right,’ she said, nodding. ‘You’ll be OK, James. You’re a little man, now. And you’ll soon be free again, that’s the important thing.’ She poured him a glass of orange juice. ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she said.

  ‘What, Mum?’ he asked, matter-of-factly, his question followed by a flush of anticipation as he realized that she was about to announce some special treat to make up for his ordeal. Maybe a holiday or some extravagant present awaited him. Her face was serious.

  ‘James, I’m not going to be there when you get home.’

  This was a complicated gift. Maybe a riddle had to be solved first? She’d have to give him a clue, though.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve stayed while you’ve been in hospital. I’m going away, James.’

  James could feel the blood draining from his head. It didn’t make his mind any clearer.

  ‘Are we going on holiday?’ he whispered.

  Mary chewed the inside of her cheek for a moment, and frowned. ‘James,’ she said intently, looking him in the eye, ‘I’m leaving.’

  ‘But you can’t,’ he whispered.

  ‘It’ll be best for everyone, for all of you, in the long run, I’m sure.’

  ‘What’s he done?’ James blurted out.

  ‘Don’t blame your father, James,’ Mary said. ‘Don’t blame him. None of you must do that.’

  James lay back on the pillow.

  ‘It’s not an easy decision,’ Mary was saying. ‘I’ve thought about it for a long time.’

  James stared at the ceiling and tried to lose himself, but he couldn’t shut out the sound of her voice.

  ‘It’s something I have to do, James. I don’t expect you to understand. Not yet, anyway. Maybe one day.’

  There was silence. James wasn’t sure whether he’d succeeded in blocking out the sound of his mother’s voice or whether she’d finished. Maybe she’d just leave now, just slip out without another word, that would be best. But then he heard her again.

  ‘James?’ she said, and paused. ‘I’m sorry, James.’

  ‘Go away,’ he said, without knowing he was going to.

  ‘You know—’ she began.

  ‘Go away,’ he interrupted, whispering this time because words were bricks in a dam, each one spoken escaped and loosened it, and it mustn’t loosen now, in front of her, no, sir, no way. Hold on.

  There was a long silence. Eventually he heard her chair squeak back across the floor, her clothes rustle and her footsteps receding.

  He wondered if he could disappear inside himself. Sometimes on the edge of sleep the ward expanded and he felt himself tiny, minute in a corner of the vastly enlarged space. Maybe now he could achieve the same effect by willpower and then instead of living as his body he’d live deep inside it, and spend his life exploring its tunnels and caverns, rivers and caves and chambers. No. That was silly. Better to leave his body altogether. He didn’t want it, he didn’t like it. Fly away through the ceiling. Then the frightening thought came to him: I might find myself left behind. I’m not ready to die. I’m scared to die. I am my body. I am what I don’t like.

  It grew dark outside. The lights came on in the ward. Visitors left. James didn’t move. He was pretty sure one or two people asked or said something to him but he ignored them and they must have gone away.

  Maybe then, he thought, I can stay here just like this, still, barely breathing, and time can carry on without me.

  Unlike the rest of the boys in the other beds, James didn’t notice the commotion of energy that swept into the ward until she’d identified him and come over to his bed.

  He smelled patchouli oil a moment before he heard her voice.

  ‘Well, sweetheart, I’ve had to look through every single ward of this bloody hospital to find you.’

  James opened his eyes. It was Zoe, but he hardly recognized her: her hair was cropped, her skin was brown, she was dressed in flowing silk.

  ‘We just got back from Goa. Harry – I don’t call him Dad any more, James, it’s so passé – ran out of bread. They said you’d been here for months, poor baby, I didn’t have a clue.’

  Suddenly a middle-aged staff nurse was striding towards them.

  ‘You can’t be here now, young lady,’ she exclaimed. ‘Visiting hours are long over.’

  Zoe didn’t even bother to look at her. ‘Stuff it, sister,’ she said over her shoulder.

  The nurse stopped in her tracks. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘He’s my long-lost
cousin. I haven’t seen him for years. Go away and leave us alone.’

  To James’ surprise the nurse turned around and scuttled off.

  ‘Well?’ Zoe said. ‘Are you pleased to see me or what?’

  James wanted to smile but his bottom lip was unstable and if he smiled he knew the dam would burst.

  ‘Blimey! You could at least say something before I give you a great big hug, James Freeman.’

  James could feel his whole face trembling.

  ‘What’s the matter, honey?’ Zoe asked him, her grin vanishing. She leaned closer.

  ‘What’s wrong, sweetheart?’ she asked again, reaching both her arms towards him. One hand touched his shoulder and the other touched his cheek and, groaning with the surrender of his willpower, James both pushed himself up and collapsed forward, letting the dam burst, into her arms.

  Chapter 3

  THE SWIMMING POOL

  THAT NIGHT MARY resumed her sleepwalking. At least, that was the official version. It was what Charles told everyone, and maybe he believed it himself. It was accepted by the coroner: death by misadventure, a tragic accident. Perhaps it really was; James would never be sure. He didn’t repeat what she had told him, even though they found a suitcase in her dressing-room, half-packed with her clothes.

  They found Mary’s body in the back yard, broken glass and splintered mullions all around it. She’d gone straight through her dressing-room window on the second floor and had escaped for good.

  Charles watched undertakers drive Mary’s body away. When they’d disappeared through the wrought-iron gates he turned around without a word to anyone and made his way to his study. There he lit the open fire and sat down in an armchair facing it, and proceeded to stay there the rest of the day, staring at the flames, stewing with what appeared to be a mixture of stupefaction and rage.