Reaper

by Hurley, Graham

  The coach plunged into the heart of Southampton, down the tree-lined avenue that Buddy had last driven only a week before, Jude beside him, after a farewell blow-out at a favourite Italian restaurant. At the coach station, he took a cab to the hospital. The cab dropped him outside the main entrance. At the reception desk, he gave Jude’s name, and his own, and waited while the receptionist rang a series of numbers. Then she looked across at him.

  “She’s in Intensive Care,” she told him, “you’ll find it on the fifth floor.”

  Buddy gazed at her. Intensive Care. Fifth floor. He turned on his heel, and walked to the lifts. He felt sick again, and slightly dizzy. The lift stopped at the fifth floor. Facing him was a long corridor. At the end of the corridor was a large, four-bedded bay. A sign suspended from the roof said: INTENSIVE CARE UNIT. QUIET PLEASE. He stood in the entrance to the Unit, a small, stocky man, lightly tanned, combative, two large holdalls, one in each hand. He looked at the beds. All the beds were occupied. Bandaged faces. Bodies barely breathing. Endless loops of tubing.

  He edged slowly into the Unit, leaving his bags outside. A nurse looked up and came across. He gave her his name. She looked at him a moment longer than she needed to, a look of mute sympathy, and then she nodded and led him over to a bed by the window. He stood by the bedside and looked down. He couldn’t believe it. Jude, his Jude, her face on the pillow, hideous metal tongs, like a pair of headphones, bracketing her head, the points of the tongs embedded in her temples, a wire stretched taut from the crest of the tongs, over a pulley, and down towards the floor. On the end of the wire, was a set of weights. Buddy swallowed hard.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  The nurse glanced up at him. “We call it traction,” she said, “it takes the pressure off her spine.”

  “Spine?”

  Jude’s eyes flickered open. She saw Buddy standing there. She smiled up at him and then her eyes closed again. He looked at her, the graze on the end of the snub nose, the long body under the blanket, the swell of the cage protecting her broken thigh, her arms lying on the crisp white sheets. He bent to her, and kissed her, and the eyes opened again.

  “Buddy,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  He reached for her hand and held it. It felt strangely flabby, no reaction, no grip. She licked her lips, as if she wanted to say a word or two, something else, then her face was shadowed as the nurse bent over her, moistening her lips with a bag full of ice cubes. Buddy stared at it.

  “Give her a drink,” he muttered, “she’s thirsty.”

  The nurse said nothing for a moment, then shook her head.

  “Can’t,” she said.

  “Can’t?”

  “No,” she withdrew the ice cubes, “she might choke.”

  Buddy turned again to Jude, frightened now, wondering what else the sheets might hide, what other terrible injury Jude might have sustained. The nurse turned to go. Buddy caught her arm.

  “What’s the matter with her?” he said, his voice low and urgent. “What’s she done?”

  The nurse smiled again. “The doctor will be down in a minute,” she said. “You’d better ask him.”

  “You tell me.”

  “I can’t.”

  The nurse disappeared into a side room. Buddy heard a fridge door open and close. He looked down at Jude again. She was very pale, her chest barely moving as she breathed, and Buddy dimly began to understand that something truly terrible had happened to her, something beyond his comprehension, that something had gone from her, been taken from her, and the knowledge was all the worse because he didn’t know what it was. He turned away, feeling the hot tears running down his face, ashamed of himself, the betrayal of her, his strength quite gone. A figure appeared at the door, a youngish man, with a thin, kindly, pale face and a long white coat. The nurse intercepted him at the door. They had a whispered conversation. The man in the white coat looked over at Buddy and nodded.

  “Mr Little?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My name is Cassidy. I’m the doctor in charge here.”

  Buddy followed him into a side office. There was a desk and a calendar. The doctor shut the door and offered him a seat. Buddy didn’t move.

  “What’s the matter with her?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  The doctor looked out, through the windows of the office, across the Unit. The nurse was back beside Jude’s bed, making some adjustment to the weights.

  “She’s broken her neck,” he said slowly. “We’re doing all we can but …” he trailed off.

  Buddy stared at him. The words made no sense. It wasn’t real. It didn’t happen to real people. Certainly not to Jude.

  “She’s done what?” he said.

  The doctor looked up. He told Buddy about the accident, the dog, the horse. He said she’d been lucky. It might, he said, have been worse. Buddy gazed across at her. The nurse had gone again.

  “How?” he said. “How could it have been worse?”

  “She might have died.”

  “But?”

  “But …” he shrugged, “she didn’t. She’s survived. After a fashion.”

  He looked up at Buddy again, trying to gauge how best to put it, what to say and what not to say, how much detail to risk. He told him about the injury to her neck, the fifth cervical, bone number five, the spinal cord damaged, probably for ever.

  “So …?”

  “So …” He dipped his head, not finding it easy, looking for some formula that might soften the next few seconds. Buddy was still staring across the ward.

  “So?” he said again, looking back at the doctor.

  “So …” the doctor drew a line across the desk top with his fingertip, an almost unconscious movement, “so … she may never walk again. Or move her arms. Or feel anything below here …” The finger left the desk and drew a line across his own body, one shoulder to the other.

  Buddy’s hand felt for the wall. “You mean paralysed? She’ll be paralysed? Rest of her life?”

  The doctor nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m truly sorry.”

  Buddy opened his mouth. Nothing happened. Then he tried again.

  “No,” he said.

  The doctor nodded again, the worst of it over.

  “Yes,” he said, “I’m afraid so.”

  “No,” Buddy said for the second time.

  The doctor closed his eyes a moment, wanting the exchange to end, knowing there was nothing left to say, not now, not at this precise moment. Later, there’d be plenty of time, all too much of it, for the fine print, the care she’d need, the nursing, the limitless patience, the endless days, the years ahead, half a lifetime still to come. For now, though, it was enough to simply absorb the worst of it. His wife in a wheelchair. Probably for ever.

  The doctor opened his eyes again. Buddy had left the office. He was walking back across the ward. He was returning to her bedside. The doctor went after him, fearing the worst, a scene of some kind, the inevitable torrent of anger and grief. But something in Buddy’s manner held him back. The man was in complete possession of himself. He paused by the bedside. He bent to the pillow. The doctor stepped a little closer, curious now. Jude’s eyes were still closed. Her breathing was as shallow as ever. A tiny vein was pulsing slowly in her temple. Buddy’s lips began to move, some private message, and the doctor strained to catch the words, but it was impossible. Buddy’s fingertips brushed his wife’s face. He kissed her. Then he turned, and left.

  TWO

  Derek Connolly sat in the perpetual twilight of the Oxford and Cambridge Club, waiting for Leeson. He’d arrived forty minutes early, an over-cautious estimate on the bus transfer from Heathrow, and already he felt wrong-footed. He hadn’t seen the man for nearly two years. He’d avoided every phone call, left every letter unanswered, and now he’d have to account for it. The prospect had been haunting him all week. Now, he felt slightly nauseous, searching desperately in his wardrobe of personas for something that might see him through the
next couple of hours.

  He stirred the lukewarm tea the waiter had brought him. The obvious ploy was the line he’d taken on the phone. Just passing through. Thought it might be nice to meet, catch up on mutual friends, swap gossip, compare notes, but he knew Leeson wouldn’t be fooled. Opaque and imperturbable as ever, he’d want to know why the sudden interest, why the voice from the past. On the phone, before Connolly had hung up, he’d suggested dinner. A new Thai plaice in Gerrard Street. Coffee afterwards at home. Connolly shuddered at the implications, trying to dam the images that flooded back at the sound of the man’s voice. Better, he decided, to think about Mairead. If it was a cause he needed, and he did, she was better than most. More to the point, the phone call had been her suggestion.

  She’d first mentioned it a couple of weeks back. He’d talked about Leeson three or four times, part of the past he’d left behind him, back on the mainland, before he’d made the firm decision for Belfast. He’d told her about the years at Glennister, the scholarship boy with the world at his feet, the obligatory membership of the Old Boys’ Association that went with his elevation to Head of School. He described the meetings he’d attended, the formal dinners, the clatter of spoons banging on the long refectory tables, the accents and the attitudes that went with this curious freemasonry of public school glitterati. Deep down, he’d hated it, but for three terms, at the very top of the school, it went with the job, and he lacked the courage to decline the endless invitations.

  Leeson’s had been the most insistent. He was half a decade older than Connolly, a diplomat of ten years’ standing, already a high flyer at the Foreign Office. He spoke fluent French and Spanish, adequate German. He knew his way around the capitals of South America, and had served with distinction in the embassy at Buenos Aires. On the diplomatic circuit, he was tipped as an early prospect for First Secretary at one of the blue riband embassies, Paris or Washington. He was a credit to his housemaster, and to the old school tie he often wore in preference to the dozens of others in his ample wardrobe. With his slow smile, and his almost insolent charm, everyone agreed he was a bit of a star.

  That he was also gay, Connolly had been slow to understand. At first, he’d been flattered at the older man’s attentions. He’d enjoyed his guided tour of the Foreign Office, and the meal afterwards had been exquisite. He’d never tasted Rioja before, and after six years of school food, it smacked of something infinitely rich and infinitely promising. For the first time, over the crisp pink tablecloth, he’d realized that there might be something more to life than three good A-levels and a place at Cambridge, and the modest excitements of this discovery blinded him to the likelihood of what was to follow.

  In the taxi, that first time, it had been subtle, a glance from Leeson, the lightest pressure on his thigh, one eye raised in mock salute behind the thick pebble glasses as Connolly said his goodbyes and made his way across the pavement towards Victoria Station.

  Mairead, the product of a keener education, marvelled at his innocence.

  “Six years locked up with them?” she queried. “And you still didn’t guess?”

  “It was different. It wasn’t school. It was outside. You don’t understand.”

  She hadn’t, either. And neither had he. The invitations had continued. Theatre tickets. A Bartok concert at the Royal Festival Hall. A couple of casual excursions around Cambridge once he’d left Glennister and found his feet in the small college room with the sunless view of the Department of Anatomy morgue. It had been a tender, infinitely considerate courtship, each fresh advance undertaken in such a way that it brooked a thousand interpretations. In a curious sense, as Connolly had begun to realize, getting him into bed had itself been a masterpiece of diplomacy. Charming, funny, enormously well-informed, Leeson had deftly shepherded him towards that chill November day when there suddenly seemed no other option.

  They’d drunk, between them, three bottles of wine. They’d picked at a bad Bengali curry. Back in college, the rain had been falling on the black cobblestones, and Leeson had propped his umbrella in the raffia wastepaper basket by the door before undressing at the tiny sink and carefully soaping himself all over. There was, in that simple action, an abrupt resolution of all the games playing, all the ambiguity. It meant they were going to bed. It meant they’d make love. There was no prospect of anything else. And so they’d pulled the curtains, left the light on, and afterwards Connolly had been sick. Leeson, watching him from the bed, had lit a small cigar, an act of modest celebration.

  “For a beginner,” he said, “you were outstanding.”

  Now, there was a movement by the door. Connolly glanced up. Leeson stood there, folding his camel-hair coat carefully over his arm. He was silhouetted in the light from the street outside, but Connolly sensed instinctively that something didn’t fit. He was swaying slightly on his feet, and when he stepped across and paused beside the big leather armchair, Connolly knew at once what was wrong. Leeson was blind drunk.

  Connolly got up, held out his hand. The same light kiss of palm on palm. The same warm squeeze.

  “Good evening.”

  “Hello.”

  Connolly looked at him, trying to mask the sense of physical shock. F. G. L. Leeson. The hero who’d stalked his adolescent dreams. Gold copperplate letters on the Glennister Honours Board. Twice winner of the Victor Ludorum. The best Hamlet since the war. Balliol Exhibitioner. Pissed out of his brain.

  Instinctively, Connolly gestured him into the empty chair, doctor and patient, elementary first aid. Leeson watched him, amused as ever, the old ironic spark not quite extinguished. He shook his head, reaching out and touching Connolly lightly on the shoulder.

  “Come …” he said, “with me.”

  They took a cab to the Thai restaurant in Gerrard Street. Connolly guided Leeson to a table by the window. They ordered by numbers. Fourteen. Thirty-three. Heavenly Chicken. Singapore Noodles. Leeson sat slumped in the bentwood chair, his head tipped back against the pale, weathered timber boards. He had both hands on the table cloth and made no attempt to lift the glass of wine Connolly had decanted from the flask of house Soave.

  “So,” he said softly, “how’s life in the front line?”

  Connolly blinked, recognizing the old dig, Belfast, the war-wracked city, everyone’s favourite nightmare.

  “Fine,” he said, “it’s hardly Beirut. As you know.”

  Leeson narrowed his eyes, and then smiled. “I meant the University,” he said, “that job of yours.”

  Connolly felt himself blushing. Despite appearances, despite everything, the man had boxed him in yet again. His control, as ever, was quite effortless. Connolly began to stammer. A relic from his Lower School days.

  “Sorry,” he said, “I thought …”

  Leeson kept looking at him. One finger began to circle the rim of his wine glass.

  “Well,” he said, “still at it?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Not bored?”

  “No.”

  “Getting on with the natives?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anyone special?”

  Connolly hesitated a moment, then shook his head.

  “No.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Leeson nodded, a new directness in his manner, something infinitely cruder than Connolly had ever known in the man before.

  “Well …” he said, reaching for the chopsticks, “mustn’t get lonely, must we?”

  In the taxi, afterwards, Connolly thought again about Mairead. Anything, she’d told him. Anything the wee man might have to offer. What she’d meant was maddeningly imprecise, unspoken, and when Connolly had pushed her, she’d refused to elaborate. Enough, she’d said, to get close to the man, to find out what he might be worth. She knew nothing about the physical side to it. If she ever did, Connolly knew the relationship would be over.

  He glanced across at Leeson, wedged into the corner of the cab. His eyes were closed. He didn’t appear to be breath
ing. Connolly touched him gently on the cheek. A day’s growth. At least.

  “How about you?” he said. “How’s life in the Camel Corps?”

  The phrase was a souvenir from the first time they’d met, when Leeson was fending off the threat of a posting to the Middle East. It had always been worth a smile, but now he didn’t react. The cab stopped at a set of traffic lights in Notting Hill. Connolly glanced out. A young West Indian was sandwiched between two policemen. He was struggling. Connolly watched, fascinated. Leeson stirred beside him.

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bloody awful.”

  Connolly looked at him in surprise. Here it was, then. The drink. The eyes. The sense of utter detachment.

  “Bloody awful?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “I don’t know. Do you want to listen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Truly?”

  Leeson looked at him. Connolly smiled, genuinely touched. The man might, after all, be human. Beached and helpless, just like the rest of us. Leeson’s hand found his in the half-darkness. Connolly squeezed it. Simple friendship. The traffic lights changed and the cabbie engaged gear. Connolly glanced out again. The larger of the two policemen had pushed the West Indian up against a wall. The other was talking urgently into a radio. There was blood on the West Indian’s face. Leeson followed Connolly’s gaze, craning his head backwards as the cab accelerated away.

  “Bastards,” Connolly said softly, “Fascist bastards.”

  Leeson smiled. “Sweet,” he said.

  Connolly frowned, still watching the street. “Them?”

  “You.”

  The cab turned left, towards Holland Park.

  “Where are we going?” Leeson said.

  “Your place.”

  “Hmm …” Leeson lay back and closed his eyes again. “Good oh …”

  Leeson’s neighbourhood, a street of red-brick terrace houses in the no man’s land between Chiswick and Hammersmith, had visibly improved since Connolly had last visited. Neatly trimmed privet hedges. Hardwood double glazing. A couple of brand-new “X” reg. BMWs, one with an in-car phone.