Midwinter Break

by Bernard Maclaverty

  Mavis pulled a sad face when he came into the corridor. They’re not happy about having flowers in Intensive Care, she said. He discarded his cigarette in the next ashtray. Mavis looked at her watch and said they might as well return to the waiting area. It was an upside-down lapel watch but he couldn’t be bothered to ask her about it. Later she told him she was a retired nurse. Maybe that would explain the odd timepiece. He offered the flowers to her and she accepted and for a long time sat with the flowers cradled in her arms. She said she would find a good home for them. Some soul would be glad of them. He wished she would go away, not least because of the smell of the carnations. He felt the place bulge with their sweetness. And, as if reading his mind, she asked him would he object if she went off for a while and dealt with another matter which had come up. She would be back in good time to show him where to go. He sat looking down at his feet. He couldn’t not listen to what was going on around him. He looked at his watch far too often but could not help himself.

  Eventually Mavis arrived back, thankfully minus the flowers. She walked with him towards the lift and pressed the button. It took ages to come. Inside, Mavis pressed the button for the floor number. There were two other people in the lift. Someone had managed to scrawl graffiti on the back of the door. Although the two people were together they did not speak. They both got out on the third floor. There was an absence of mirrors. No hotel, this. He wanted to pray but couldn’t because he no longer believed. Prayer was just an intense wishing. For Stella to survive. For her not to be damaged. The doors opened and, outside, he felt less claustrophobic, was able to breathe again. What was he going to see? In the Intensive Care Unit they washed their hands when they entered. Soapy stuff which cooled when it evaporated. Gerry stood with his hands behind him, his right hand holding his left wrist. The sister stressed that his visit should be short. At the risk of sounding brusque – a minute or two. And he must remember that she was only coming round from the anaesthetic. He could talk to the doctors afterwards.

  The bed seemed large and high off the floor. Like a kind of draped altar. There were tubes and monitors, drip stands and catheters everywhere. But in the middle of it all, her face. With eyes closed. He said her name. Then his name, in case she didn’t recognise his voice. He went to the side of the bed and took her hand. There was something like a clothes peg clipped to her fingers. He squeezed her hand as best he could.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  He stood and looked at the snow beyond his reflection in the window glass. It must have been double glazed because there were two images overlapping. Seeing double. It was only in movie cartoons that drunks saw double. He tried to look at the reflection of the bruise on his chin but the moving images of the snow and flashing lights from aircraft made it difficult. The bruise was too small and the wrong colour. They had passed a chemist’s shop on their way to this row of seats. There was bound to be a mirror there. He had looked at himself in the hotel lobby before leaving – but hadn’t noticed the colour. But damned if he was going to trail back to the chemist’s just to see a bit of purple and black. Trailing two sets of hand luggage. His shoulder bag and Stella’s cabin case. If he left them unattended, there would be an announcement over the tannoy and before they knew it, their stuff would be blown to smithereens. So he sat down again. The whiskey was talking to him – murmuring pleasantly in his ear. He felt good and spread out his hands on either side of him. These chairs were a poor man’s version of one of Marcel Breuer’s creations. Steel tubing and black leather. He scored the black covering with his thumbnail and looked closely at the mark. It quickly disappeared. Synthetic. Not leather at all. Like old human skin – leather would hold the mark of his nail for longer.

  There was still some left in the bottle. It looked like a last mouthful. He denied himself the pleasure a little longer. Then he remembered he had bought a CD. He dug into his shoulder bag and produced it. Seven Last Words from the Cross. The shining disc sat looking up at him. He levered it out, turned it over and held it up to look at his chin. Bad enough – and getting uglier. She was right about the colour. The blood darkness he could see for himself. What a dish that would be – aubergine and strawberry. But what about the custard? When did the yellow come into a bruise? Later. Custard was for afters. Staring at himself he realised that there was a hole at the centre of his reflection. No soul. No such thing. Didn’t exist. He snapped the CD back into its case and slid it into his bag. ‘Seven Cross Words from the Last’. Fucking hell – he was getting drunk – mixing up words. Or maybe it was age? Beginning to dote. Getting to be an oul boy. He tried to imagine it, if those words were correct. If Stella was going to die soon – and she had only a week’s crosswords left to do before the last one in her life. Seven Crosswords from the Last. He should try and remember this. Tell her and she might laugh. Placate her, mollify her. That had been a terrible stare she’d given him just before she bolted.

  ‘Cross words’ might mean ‘Angry words’. Seven of them required. As a child, on his way to school, there’d been a plugged-in puppet in a shoe repairer’s window which hammered his last constantly all day, every day. Gerry grew to hate him. Slow tap – slow tap – slow tap. ‘Go and fuck your self, ya bastard.’ He couldn’t stop laughing. This was what he meant about wit and drink. Oh boy, did he feel good. He counted the words on his fingers. ‘Go and fuck your self, ya bastard.’ That was seven. Yet there was some difficulty. Was ‘yourself’ one or two words? He closed over his hand and began releasing and straightening his fingers one by one. Definitely seven words. He began to laugh and pretended to hammer nails into boots. Tap – tap – tap. He laughed so much he had to wipe the tears from his face with a hanky.

  It had been a really good break. Just the two of them. Stella had been very quiet, hadn’t opened her cheeper all that much – yesterday and today. And that wasn’t like her. He should ask her. If anyone knew what was wrong with her – it would be her. She knew everything. Every last fucking thing. And he admired her for it. He had always found admiration part and parcel of love – even though he said she could have been prime minister or pope except that one of those jobs was not open to her. She had a Quality Street tin at home – full to the brim – labelled in her distinctive handwriting ‘keys of unknown origin’. He loved her optimism. Keys kept just in case locks should ever be found to fit them. As well as ornamental dishes full of things whose use he’d long forgotten – black plastic goes-inteys, small bent screws, nail clippers, unsharpened pencil stubs, dice, tweezers, tokens from Christmas crackers, small round tins of lip balm, nail files, a table tennis ball, a half-stick of white chalk, countless kirby grips. God knows what else. What kind of things did she know? There was no end to the categories. No end to the degrees he attributed to her in Gerontology and Dentistry and Philosophy and History and the PhDs she had in Theology and Embryology and William Morris wallpaper designs. She knew that the full name of the Litany recited after the rosary at benediction was the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She knew that Albert Pierrepoint’s father was also a hangman, that farinaceous meant floury when applied to potatoes but that flowery language could not be described as such, as farinaceous. Even though she had never suffered labyrinthitis herself she knew it was something that brought a middle-aged woman to her hands and knees suffering from dizziness and nausea. If she ever got such an attack she knew all the bus routes in the city of Glasgow that would bring her home or near home – the 66, the 20, the 11, the 59, the 18, the 44 and the 44A. That was until the City Fathers decided to change the bus route numbers, all on the same day, and then – like everybody else – she knew nothing about where she was going. And for months on end Glasgow folk were seen wandering round the city of Barcelona looking for Drumchapel. She knew what school Seamus Heaney’s sisters went to. She knew the Memorare off by heart. ‘Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or’ – what was it now? He was forgetting the Memorare. No great loss
to the memory bank.

  She knew the recipes for mushroom stroganoff and spaghetti carbonara and about forty-two other dishes without looking at a cookery book. She knew that a bonspiel was a major gathering of curlers on ice, that curling stones were quarried on Ailsa Craig, that Ailsa Craig was also known as Paddy’s Milestone. This and much, much more. Oh – and that a Sitzprobe was nothing medical but the rehearsal for an opera. She knew that another name for chambermaid was abigail. That jeggings were a cross between jeans and leggings. She knew the times of day when the News was on BBC1, ITV, BBC2, Channel 4 – even on holiday weekends when the schedules were upset. She knew that the make of a bin lorry was a Vulture. After a crawl of charity shops she was amazed at the number of people who had given up calligraphy. And those who had ceased to read the fictions of Cecelia Ahern and Maeve Binchy. She knew the questions to ask the wee ones who had just started at school. Questions they knew the answer to, like, who do you sit beside? She knew what stump work was, but was unable to do any of it. She had to content herself with knitting. She knew from her own primary school that Cambridge was on the river Cam and that Oxford was on the Cherwell. She knew that wedding invitations were issued only by the bride’s parents. She knew the novels of Graham Greene – not so much the thrillers but the big ones about faith. The Heart of the Matter, A Burnt-Out Case, The Power and the Glory. She knew that dances in the country districts of Northern Ireland were known as ‘fifty fifties’ – half ceilidh, half ballroom – that CODA stood for the Carnival of Dance, Andersonstown – a huge marquee with showbands playing in the 1960s which involved moving to music, licensed touching for all to see, hand holding with strangers. She knew that Vicky Coren, who wrote a column in the Observer on Sundays, was also a world-class poker player and that she was the daughter of Alan Coren, the humorist who wrote for Punch but was now, sadly, no longer with us. She knew that Claire Rayner, the agony aunt, was mother to Jay Rayner, the restaurant critic. She knew how to spell almost every word in the English language except ‘carrots’ – which she always misspelled with a double ‘t’. Carrotts. Chrysanthemum, hieroglyphic, miscellaneous, kaleidoscope, toucan – all these she got right. Carrotts she got wrong. She knew, despite her scant encounter with drink, that a few drops of vodka would remove red wine stains from a white linen tablecloth. That a Madrileño was a man from Madrid and his female counterpart could be referred to as Madrileña. She knew how to convert kilometres to miles by multiplying by five and dividing by eight and could do such sums in her head in a trice. ‘The town of Baltimore is 32 kilometres away,’ she would say with the map on her knee. ‘Twenty miles.’ She knew that it was Glen Campbell who sang ‘The Wichita Lineman’. She was of the opinion that if you were lying down you did not experience the wind as badly as when you were standing up. The breeze, not the belching. She knew that a routine eye test took three-quarters of an hour and not, as her husband suggested, thirty minutes. She knew something but not everything about Hopi ear candles. She knew that TMJ was an acronym for Temporomandibular joint disorder. She knew that Tony Blair’s son went to university in Bristol and that St Pauls was a dodgy district of that same city. She knew that Diego Forlán used to play for Manchester United but had moved on to play for Villareal, then Atletico Madrid. She knew that the Americans always elected their president in November and that British general elections were always on a Thursday. When it came to bullets she knew the difference between roll, yaw and pitch – knew when yaw became tumble. From the nuns at school she knew the different techniques for darning a hole and darning a thin place to strengthen it. She knew that there was a single word in Irish for a cow that sucks the tail of another cow. Bradáan. She knew that Cecil Frances Alexander was a woman from Derry, not a man, and that she was a writer of such well-loved hymns as ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, ‘There is a Green Hill Far Away’ and ‘Once in Royal David’s City’. Indeed, he thought, if he thought anything, that this was developing into a hymn to her. To Stella. Star of the Sea. Maybe even a him to her. Man to woman. Her ladyship. Although to set his thoughts to music would take a bit of time. She knew that Valencia oranges were very juicy and did not have a lot of pips in them and therefore were better for making an orange drink. That Seville oranges straight from the tree were as bitter as soot and fit only for the making of marmalade. That, to produce red berries, there have to be both male and female holly trees in the vicinity. And she knew about love – how to make it and how to mend it. She knew every step of the St Patrick’s Day Hornpipe and could have danced it – with or without him – had it not been for the present inflexibility of her limbs. She only knew two jokes but could tell neither of them. At any time, she knew where everything in the flat was – the double-sided mirror, the mustard – both the powdered variety and the stuff straight from the jar, the red-handled nail scissors, the tube of UHU glue, the black drinking straws, the ball of string, the Scrabble and Monopoly sets, a brass drawing pin or as she called it a thumb tack, paper clips, new toilet rolls, candles, paint scrapers, and where to find Radio 4 on the dial. She knew Ashby de la Zouch was not in the flat but in Leicestershire.

  So she was no dozer. Except for spelling carrots with two ‘t’s.

  He finished the bottle.

  A flashing orange light reflected from the window. Gerry looked up, heard the alarm of the shuttle cart. It stopped beside the row of seats but still its warning noise grated on and on. He turned. Stella was the only passenger behind the Sikh and she was gingerly climbing down onto terra firma.

  ‘Thank you. I’m much obliged,’ she said. The driver nodded. ‘He thought I could do with a lift,’ she said to Gerry. She was like a shy child. ‘He insisted.’

  ‘I thought I told you not to take lifts from strange men,’ said Gerry. ‘He probably thought you were old.’ The shuttle cart pulled away. ‘The sound of a corncrake. That suits you down to the ground. A species in danger of extinction.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Believers. I mean, where have they all gone? Apart from yourself.’ He was gesturing too much, waving his hands, trying to focus, swaying slightly. ‘You only find corncrakes in the outer bloody isles. Them and religious fanatics. Women who never get their hair cut. Places where the modern world – and its method . . . methodology have not reached.’

  ‘You are drunk,’ she said. ‘I know you’re drunk when you mock me.’

  ‘I do not.’

  ‘You don’t remember the mockery because you’re drunk.’

  ‘What is wrong with you?’

  ‘It’s not what’s wrong with me,’ said Stella. ‘If they don’t let you on this plane, I’d be delighted to go home on my own.’

  He heaved himself to his feet and stood facing her, staring.

  ‘Have you been crying?’ he said. She didn’t answer. ‘What about?’

  Stella sat down. She did not want to look at him but even when she stared ahead she could see his reflection. She made a visor of her hand, shaded her eyes and looked down.

  ‘Gerry . . .’

  ‘What?’ There was a long silence. ‘I always know it’s something bad when you start with my name.’

  ‘I want to leave you,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know how to go about it.’

  Gerry stood in the same position for a long time.

  ‘Is there somebody else?’

  She laughed out loud.

  ‘Catch yourself on.’

  He tried to drink from the bottle but failed to get anything out of it.

  ‘That’s it. Feeneeto.’

  ‘Us or the bottle?’ He turned to look around him but lurched a little. ‘Now if I could find a bin I could dispose of this fellow.’ He wandered off, both hands behind his back clutching the bottle. ‘You’re probably thinking exactly the same thing about me,’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘I’ll not be long.’

  Stella took out her washbag and unzipped it. Had he heard what she said? It was really foolish anyway, bringing it up at a time like this. He wouldn’t remember a t
hing about it. She found her wristbands and slid them on, making sure the plastic studs were to the inside – against her skin. Next, her powder compact – she opened it and looked at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were a little red but they weren’t that bad. She found her glasses and whatever way she unfolded them, the hinge nipped her finger. Like being bitten by a ladybird. Just one more indignity. She put on her specs and looked at the finger. She had not drawn blood. That summer in Toronto the ladybirds were everywhere. Millions and millions of them along the beach by the lake shore. And occasionally one nipped you. It was like the end of the world, being attacked by ladybirds. They were brown and yellow – not red and black like the British ones. It was impossible not to crush them underfoot – like walking on Rice Krispies. Coco Pops, even.