The Question

by Jane Asher

  ‘Oh, it’s not – not really?’

  ‘Yes, really.’

  ‘I nearly said Sophie before, instead of Amanda. It’s not – not really?’

  ‘Yes, it is. Well, it didn’t … It was … No, it’s—Yes it is. Sophie.’

  ‘Fuck me. Well, mine’s not really Simon. It’s Robbie.’

  ‘Robbie. You mean Robert?’

  ‘No. I mean Robbie.’

  Sophie reached out her hand and leant towards the chair. ‘How do you do?’

  ‘How do you do?’ Robbie answered, taking her hand in his and shaking it. ‘At least I’ve got one that works, you see. And it’s good at a lot more than shaking hands.’

  As Sophie smiled back at him, she found herself wondering just what exactly Robbie’s hand might be good at, and for the second time that morning surprised herself by realising how much she would like to find out.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘May I have a word with you, Eleanor? And I think perhaps Barbara should be in on this too, if that’s all right with you.’

  Eleanor had always assumed occupational therapy to involve things like basket making and papier mâché but had learnt over the weeks John had been in the hospital just how wrong she was. Rae was one of the most extraordinary people she had ever met – small and gentle in appearance, but magnificently daunting in the way she controlled the OT department and in her firmness in dealing with matters that were as near to touching the very meaning of being that Eleanor had ever come across.

  ‘I’m sure I can tell Barbara whatever it is that you have to say,’ Eleanor suggested. ‘I’ll make sure she understands, if that’s what’s worrying you. It’s really easier I think if I see you alone.’

  ‘No – I have no worries at all about her understanding. She’s a very bright woman and I have never had any reason to doubt that either of you is fully aware of the implications of everything that we tell you about John’s condition. As you know, we’ve had every possible sort of family situation here to deal with and nothing can surprise or embarrass us now, Eleanor.’

  ‘No, of course not. I didn’t think for a second that—’

  ‘And, indeed, the two of you appear to have such a very civilised relationship that you’re an example to all of us who have “exes” to deal with.’

  ‘Ah well, yes.’ Eleanor looked down for a moment. ‘I’ve always felt there’s no point in making problems. We, um, we all get on pretty well.’

  ‘In any event, I think it’s time we had a get-together. Will you call Barbara or shall I catch her this evening when she comes in?’

  It had been some time since she and Barbara had been in the same room, and Eleanor had to work very hard not to let the old familiar feelings of contempt and fear overwhelm her so that she would be unable to take in what Rae was saying. She succeeded in maintaining a friendly and polite exterior, but noticed that she could only keep her mind on the woman’s words by avoiding looking at Barbara, whose neat, irritating figure was perched on the edge of her chair, bent forward in supplicant concentration.

  ‘You may remember,’ Rae was saying, ‘that when you first came here I mentioned briefly the new equipment that we use now as part of the attempt to find awareness in some of our clients. We have had some remarkable results and I have begun to use it on John during some of my sessions with him. He is physically fit enough now for me to attempt communication with him regularly.’

  ‘Do you mean he may not be in permanent vegetable after all?’ Barbara asked, her face strained with the effort of trying to prise every possible ounce of meaning from what the therapist was telling them.

  ‘Persistent vegetative state, we prefer, Barbara, as you know. And even that is a very unsatisfactory term. How long is persistent? We have had several cases admitted here classed as irredeemably vegetative, which have since proved to be misdiagnosed. I myself have worked with several clients who have been diagnosed as PVS and with whom I have eventually managed to establish a clear dialogue. You may even have seen pieces about them in the paper,’ she smiled, gesturing briefly at a large notice board on the wall behind her desk.

  Eleanor looked up at the cuttings pinned to the board and saw among them a photograph of a young man sitting in a wheelchair with an elderly man and woman on either side.

  ‘But how?’ she asked. ‘How do you establish a dialogue, as you call it?’

  Rae opened a drawer in the desk and pulled out a small metal pad with a wire attached to it. ‘Here,’ she said, passing it to Eleanor. ‘You see that the top piece of metal moves a tiny bit – rather like a foot pedal, but needing less pressure? Well, that’s attached to a little bleeper, and I use the simple old method of one bleep for yes, two for no. You’d be surprised how little physical effort it needs to operate one of those. And of course it doesn’t need to be the hand – I’ve searched many patients for days and days, trying to find the slightest bit of movement, just a fraction of muscle that they can use under their own control: the side of the foot, perhaps, or underneath of a thigh – and you’d be amazed how many times there is awareness in there just waiting for the right way to express it.’

  ‘And you think that John may be—’

  ‘It’s too soon to say anything for sure, Barbara, but I do seem to be getting responses that are correct slightly more often than I would expect for random chance. I want to continue to work with him for a while longer before I can say for sure that he is understanding me, but I thought it was time to tell you both how things were going. I’d also like you to watch me with the bleeper so that you can begin to use it with him yourselves.’

  Eleanor pressed the metal flange gently with her fingers and felt it move with a small click.

  Later that evening, Eleanor watched as a young nurse made John’s bed. Something worried her about the scene in the occupational therapy room and she tried to think back over everything that had been said and remember what it was that was echoing uncomfortably in her head. She could clearly see the bleeper in her mind’s eye, the shiny metal catching the light as she had turned it in her hands, excited and nervous at the same time at the extraordinary possibility of being able, once more, to get through to her husband. But it wasn’t that. There was something else.

  She remembered. It was the cutting. The cutting on the notice board about the young man who had been taken for a vegetable and then discovered to have awareness and to be able to communicate. But it wasn’t the story that had worried her. It was – what? What was it about the newspaper cutting that was niggling at her? She tried to take another good look at it, closing her eyes and resting her head on one hand to picture it more clearly. She could see the headline: something like, ‘The Son We Thought We’d Lost For Ever – Man in Vegetative State for 8 Years Found to be Aware’. But it wasn’t that.

  ‘Are you all right, Eleanor?’ the nurse asked, tucking the sheet underneath John’s inert body.

  ‘Oh yes, Katie, I’m fine. Just thinking, that’s all,’ Eleanor smiled at her.

  Sophie had taken to having a drink in the downstairs waiting area every time she visited her father. She valued the quiet time she was able to have there, relaxing in the absence of both Eleanor and Barbara. She still had to think twice to stop herself thinking of Eleanor as her aunt, and the shock of the retrospective discovery of a stepmother was still fresh enough to cause her enormous emotional confusion. The rare moments when she had to cope with both women at once were the hardest. She could sense the friction between the two of them, however carefully they covered it with their civilised, polite veneer of tolerance, and an excuse to leave the intense atmosphere of the ward was too tempting to pass up. She had no desire to question either of them as to details of their marriages, feeling she had quite enough to deal with in coping with her father’s condition, and happy to push aside the complications of his previous life as being irrelevant to the present situation.

  But it wasn’t just the thought of escape that persuaded her to seek out the small room on the ground
floor after every visit. She also hoped – without quite admitting it to herself – that she might just happen to bump into Robbie again. She had been surprised to find herself thinking about him in the days since their first meeting; rerunning, as she lay in bed or sat on the coach on the way to the hospital, the brief conversation they had had. As she went back over the things that had been said she would replace her own answers with alternatives that were far wittier and more amusing; change the clothes she had been wearing for sexier ones, and redo her hair and makeup in the way that she felt would have made her most attractive. She was puzzled by just how often she found herself going over it and by how much she kept hoping to see him again – wondering if the pity she had instinctively felt for him was fooling her into thinking she had experienced some sort of instantaneous emotional affinity with him. The ludicrous phrase ‘love at first sight’ kept popping into her head.

  But for two and a half weeks there had been no sign of him and she began, reluctantly, to assume she would never see him again. She briefly considered asking the nurses on that floor if they knew who he was, but was too embarrassed at the idea of Robbie hearing that she had been asking about him to risk it, and at the same time unsure, in any case, as to what she would do with any information she might pick up. The whole subject felt so much like a fantasy that the idea of giving it any kind of reality by mentioning it out loud felt too preposterous to be possible; it seemed the words would dissolve like candyfloss in her mouth before she could say them.

  But it didn’t stop her dreaming. She came to the hospital three or four times a week, and three or four times a week she collected a Coke from the machine, carried it over to the same chair in the window and thought about the boy in the wheelchair. She imagined hearing the low wolf whistle behind her, and turning to find him smiling at her, reaching out his good arm towards her. She saw herself getting up and walking across to him, grasping his hand in hers and bringing it up to her cheek. Sometimes she would wheel him out into the grounds, or read a book to him while he gazed at her adoringly.

  ‘I suppose this is some sort of madness,’ she said out loud to herself one evening as she put the empty Coke can down on the table. ‘Some sort of replacement or whatever they call it. I’m compensating for having a father whose mind has been sucked out of his head. Oh well,’ she went on, as she stretched her arms above her head and looked at her reflection in the rain-spattered window, ‘it’s fun, anyway.’

  She folded her arms over her chest as she went on looking at herself. The garden was dark outside and the curtains were open; the light from the standard lamp next to her chair outlined her figure with a fringe of yellow down one side against the blackness of the glass, and she turned her head a little to one side to let it shine onto her profile. She rubbed her nose with her index finger and sighed. ‘It’s not as if Dad ever talked that much to you, anyway, is it? Not as if he ever really seemed to like having you around, is it?’

  Suddenly something moved in the garden and made her jump. For a split second she saw a shining Tinkerbell darting across the window, but at the same moment realised it was simply light reflected in the glass from something behind her. She turned round quickly to see the metal of Robbie’s wheelchair gleaming as he moved it towards her.

  ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I – er – I jumped. I mean – I didn’t know you were there.’

  ‘I wasn’t. I’ve only just come in. Who were you talking to? There’s no one here.’

  ‘Oh, nothing. I was just talking out loud, that’s all. How are you?’

  ‘Fine. Great, thanks.’

  There was an awkward pause, and Sophie thought how different this meeting felt to the way it had been in her imagination. She tried desperately to think of some of the scenarios that had worked so well in one of her many daydreams, but the phrases that had felt so right and flowed so easily were impossible to say in this uncomfortable reality. He even looked different. In the brief glimpse of his face she had had as she turned, she saw how wrongly she had remembered him. His nose was longer and his eyes less gentle than she had pictured them, and there was an uneasiness in his manner that surprised her.

  ‘How are you?’ he said at last, and Sophie looked back at him.

  ‘Oh I’m fine, thanks.’

  ‘Why are you here? Are you—’

  ‘No, I’m just visiting. My father.’

  ‘Oh, right. Is he HD or MS or what?’

  ‘What? No, no I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t know what you’re saying.’

  ‘Huntingdon’s. Or multiple sclerosis.’

  ‘Oh I see. Yes, of course, I know what MS is. No, he’s – um – he’s BG.’

  The boy frowned. ‘BG? What’s that?’

  ‘Brain gone.’

  ‘I see.’ There was another pause and Robbie looked down for a moment. ‘I haven’t heard of that.’

  ‘Well, no, you wouldn’t have.’

  Something in her tone made him look up again, and he laughed as he saw her smiling hugely at him. ‘Were you joking?’

  ‘Yes, of course I was. Or – no, I wasn’t joking when I said – I mean, his brain has gone, but I don’t think I’m meant to call it that. PVS, that’s what they call it. Persistent vegetative state.’

  ‘When they don’t hear or speak?’

  ‘Or understand, or look, or feel, or – or anything really. Yes, that’s the one.’

  ‘Christ. That’s a bugger.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  He looked down at his lap and Sophie studied him for a moment, wondering how she could possibly have felt disappointed those few seconds ago. He’s gorgeous, she thought. I want to rush over to him and kiss him.

  ‘How did he get like that?’ Robbie asked.

  ‘Car accident.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘How did you get like – like that?’

  ‘CP. Cerebral palsy. Born like it. I just come here every couple of weeks or so for physio. This wing is mostly for people like me – or the multiple sclerosis ones. Some live here and some come and go, like me.’

  ‘Can they do anything? Make you better?’

  ‘Not much. But I’m fine. Lead a normal life and all that. On the whole.’

  ‘Do you want a drink?’

  ‘Yeah, OK. I’ll have a Coke.’

  Sophie fetched a can from the machine and brought it over, using it as an excuse to sit in the chair next to his, and enjoying the brief touching of his hand as she passed it to him.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure.’

  ‘Oh – it’s a pleasure is it, Amanda?’ he said, dropping into the mimicry of her accent.

  ‘Don’t start that again. Anyway, I told you my name.’

  ‘Yes, of course – Sophie.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘OK. Sorry.’

  He pinioned the can between his legs and opened it with one hand, then took a quick drink before going on: ‘So, Sophie, do you want to go out?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you want to go out?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What do you mean, what do I mean? What do you think I mean? I mean, do you want to go out?’

  ‘Where?’

  He shrugged and smiled at her.

  She smiled back. ‘Yes. OK.’

  Later she couldn’t believe she’d said it.

  While Eleanor was washing up she remembered. As she turned to put her plate down on the draining board – she hadn’t bothered to use the dishwasher ever since John’s accident – she suddenly saw the caption under the photograph in the newspaper as clearly as if she were reading it in front of her. ‘Answers Yes or No – But One Question We Daren’t Ask Him, Say Parents.’ Why did that seem so disturbing? And what question didn’t they dare ask?

  Eleanor dried her hands and turned away from the sink. For the first time she began to imagine just what it would be like if there really was any awareness inside Joh
n. What the hell would she say to him? Would they be able to tell how long he had been aware? For the first few weeks after the accident there had never been any doubt in her mind that as soon as possible she would tell him everything: the thought of his never knowing had been unthinkable. But now, everything was getting hazy. Would she still tell him – and when would she, and what might his reaction be? It was perfectly possible, of course, that he already knew. There had been plenty of times when she and Barbara had been in the room together for a short time as they changed shifts, and more than once they had talked over his head – or talked to Sophie about each other. Eleanor tried to think back over some of the more recent visits and to what had been said within John’s earshot.

  She wasn’t sure if she felt elated or frightened by the thought that there was a possibility of establishing some kind of communication with him. There had been something rather comforting about the period since his accident; a time of enforced limbo, when she had had to take no major decisions about the future, or worry in quite the same way as before about the present. Now his potential reawakening seemed threatening, and she felt the old unease and jealousy begin to stir uncomfortably inside. Supposing he did know that she knew – what then? The thought of it didn’t bring her the satisfying vengeful exorcism of her jealousy that she had always imagined. Instead it made her frightened. Maybe he was lying there at this moment planning what he would do once he could make his wishes known. Would he abandon her totally in favour of Barbara? Would he be relieved that the confession had been pre-empted by circumstances? Perhaps Barbara was to be the one wheeling him peacefully along in his wheelchair, Sophie strolling beside them; John looking up gratefully into her eyes; lifting a weak hand onto her arm in loving gratitude. Eleanor despaired as she began to see that either option – John knowing or not knowing – was unbearable.

  ‘No!’ she shouted out loud, ‘I won’t have it. I won’t have it.’