Reaper

by Hurley, Graham

  “Surprise,” he said, peering out at the distant lump of rock, still intact on the beach. “Expect one thing to happen. Get the shock of your life when it doesn’t.” He glanced across at the Chief. “No?”

  The Chief frowned. He looked far from amused.

  “But you broke the rules,” he pointed out. “You told me the Daimler was along the beach there. Not half-way up the fucking cliff.”

  Scullen nodded. “Exactly,” he said.

  On the third day, Jude Little was transferred from Southampton to the Regional Spinal Unit, fifty miles north.

  Buddy went along with her in the ambulance, 25 mph, the driver flattening every bump in the road, slowing to a crawl for every corner, behind a succession of police motorcycle escorts. Jude lay in the back in her hospital bed, the traction weights still hanging from the tongs embedded in her skull. Buddy rode beside her, squatting on the tiny bench seat, holding her hand, not saying much.

  Since the Gulf, he’d barely slept at all, returning to the cottage in the New Forest for a wash and a change of clothes, circling the empty bedroom, the sheets still rumpled. Jude’s clothes everywhere, a paperback half open on the small bedside table. Exhausted, that first time, he’d collapsed onto the bed and tried to trick his body into sleep, but her scent lay on the pillow, musty, slightly sweet, and every time he closed his eyes, images from the hospital swarmed up. They were like a blanket, suffocating him, and after a minute or so he gave up, swinging his legs off the bed and clattering down the narrow wooden staircase, back to the safety of the living room, already cold and damp.

  There were photographs of the wedding, framed, on the mantelpiece, a small private affair, the pair of them outside the Register Office, blinking in the afternoon sunshine, Jude slightly taller, scarlet dress, long black hair, high leather boots, Buddy beside her, grinning madly, still not quite believing the big fat peach that life had been saving up for him. Twenty-odd years of bachelordom, vigorous, self-contained, content. And then this extraordinary woman, a chance encounter they’d both turned into real life.

  Gus had been there too, at the wedding. Gus was his mucker from the rigs. They’d shared the best years on the North Sea, and he’d been Buddy’s automatic choice for best man. He knew Buddy like a brother, and he’d watched the relationship grow over the five brief months they’d been together.

  Gus was a married man. He had a fat wife called Marge, and two appalling kids, and when the letters started arriving on the daily chopper out of Aberdeen, Jude’s distinctive handwriting on the long brown envelopes, the big confident loops on her gs and her fs, Buddy had shared the odd phrase, the odd promise, whetting Gus’s appetite, a subtle assurance that this was no ordinary affair, that life wasn’t baiting a trap for him, a mortgage, and slippers, and a brace of squalling infants.

  The letters. Buddy shook his head. He’d never read anything quite as frank, quite as direct. Jude wrote the way she talked, staccato, little punctuation, not a shred of grammar to mask the sound of her voice, and she put it all on paper, the smallest, most intimate details, charting the relationship as it developed, word perfect. He’d kept the letters in his locker in the tiny two-man cabin. Most nights he retired early from the cribbage school to read and reread them. He still had them now, clothespegged together on the kitchen shelf, certain phrases filed permanently in his brain.

  One letter, in particular, had taken his breath away. He’d known her for less than three months. They’d shared just two weekends. Yet here she was, putting it all down on paper, committing herself. Don’t get uptight, she’d written, but it’s true. I loved you the moment I saw you. You’re very funny, and you’re a beautiful man, and if all this bothers you chuck it in the ocean and think of me as bare-assed. Think of me the way you like it best. Think of me sitting on your face and count the days till they let you off again. I love you, Buddy. Tough shit. Buddy had folded this particular letter into his wallet and locked it away. If Gus ever read it, he’d have a stroke. If Marge ever sat on his face, he’d be fucking lucky to survive.

  Buddy paused in the gloom, gazing at the photos. He wanted to reach out and touch them. He wanted to carry them with him, a talisman against the terrible words these doctors kept using. Paralysis. Wheelchairs. Rehabilitation. What did any of that have to do with this woman of his? With her spirit? Her gutsiness? The way she laughed, throwing back her head? The mornings she woke him up? Curled in his crutch? Lapping and lapping? Straddling him? Opening their private set of curtains on the world?

  She’d been married before. Her husband had been a personnel manager with an investment house in the City, and they’d been man and wife for nine years when he fell in love with a girl on the train. She wore glasses and worked for a television company. Evidently, she produced prize-winning films about the tropical rain forest, and fretted about the end of the world. She was doubtless great in the sack, but she was soulful too, and after he’d confessed it all, he even wanted to bring her home. Nice little supper. In-depth debate afterwards on the ethics of American multinationals. Jude had attacked him physically with a cast-iron skillet and changed the locks the next day. Since then, she’d seen him only once, the morning her lawyer escorted her to court. He looked thinner, and older, and had grown his hair long. Word was he was thinking of emigrating to Canada to work with the Eskimos. He’d waited at the end to talk to her, but she’d turned her back and walked out to the street. “Strictly no prisoners,” she often told Buddy, “camp rules.”

  Now, in the living room, he backed away again, retreating into the kitchen, with its rows and rows of carefully labelled jars, aduki beans, and kidney beans, and chick peas, and heavy brown rice, Jude’s chosen diet, the one favour she always said she owed her body. They drank famously, the pair of them, pints in the evening, and they ate well, this stuff of hers, herbed and spiced. Another door she’d opened for him. Another cupboard they’d shared.

  He reached up and touched them, glass jars for Chris-sakes, and then withdrew again, scorched by the memories, determined to keep going, a moving target. He knew there were endless things to see to – lessons to cancel, help to arrange for the horses, bills to pay – and he’d done what he could on the telephone, keeping grief at bay with a kind of manic energy, part fury, part desperation, that baffled friends who offered to help. By the second night, he was dead on his feet, but he still drove back to the hospital believing somehow that faith alone, his sheer presence at the bedside, might restore a flicker of movement – the old Jude – to the long pale body beneath the sheets.

  By agreement with the doctors, she had yet to learn the full implications of what had happened. He’d told them that it would be a private conversation, just the two of them, and that he’d break the news in his own way, when he thought it was right. Jude was the strongest woman he’d ever met, but he dreaded what the word “paralysis” might do to her. She’d never had any time for illness or complaint. She’d always confronted life head-on, something he’d occasionally associated with her nationality. Americans, he told himself, knew nothing about defeat. That’s why they’d always got on so well. That’s why he loved her so much.

  Now, fifteen miles north of Winchester, he looked down at her. In three long days, she seemed to have physically diminished. She looked thinner. The flesh on her arms had somehow loosened. Her face, normally so mobile, was the colour of chalk. Only her eyes were the same, a deep hazel, flicking left and right, patrolling the edges of this new world of hers.

  He tried to grin at her and she tried to grin back.

  “Lotta fuss,” she said, “all this.”

  He nodded. Her voice was still weak, barely audible above the purr of the engine.

  “Only the best,” he said, “for little you.”

  She looked at him for a moment, then her eyes went to the window.

  “So tell me,” she whispered, “what’s it like out there?”

  He didn’t bother to look but bent to the pillow and kissed her gently on the forehead.

&nb
sp; “That feels good,” she said, “do it again.”

  He kissed her again, his lips moving softly across her face. Two days’ growth of beard left a faint redness on her skin. He reached her lips, and his tongue met hers, the old greeting, the old hors-d’oeuvre. He began to explore her mouth, her teeth nibbling his tongue, teasing it. Then he withdrew, looking down at her, smiling. He nodded at the window.

  “Go to sleep,” he said. “You’re not missing much.”

  She blinked a couple of times, her eyes suddenly wet with tears.

  “Neither are you,” she whispered.

  They arrived at the Regional Unit at dusk. The hospital lay on the outskirts of the town, a collection of single-storey brick-built wards. There were lights on at the windows, a glimpse of beds inside. The place had a faint air of impermanence.

  The ambulancemen unbolted the bed from the floor, and carried Jude carefully into the hospital. Buddy walked beside her for a yard or two, but a woman in a uniform intercepted him, asking for a minute or two of his time, and before he could think of a reason for saying no, Jude had gone.

  The woman took him to one side and sat down in a chair by the wall. She had a clipboard and a biro. She was very businesslike.

  “Just some personal details,” she said, not bothering to look up.

  Buddy sank into the chair beside her, and told her what she wanted to know. Jude’s full name. Their address. Her date of birth. Her nationality. The woman scribbled busily on the form. Then she looked up.

  “You’re married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Children?”

  “No.”

  She nodded, making no comment, but her expression was enough. Just as well, it said. Lucky you. Buddy looked at her, too tired to pursue the point, to enquire why she’d asked. He hated the hospital already, the long central corridor disappearing into the middle distance, the wheelchairs rolling past, the smell. Jude didn’t belong here. And neither did he.

  “Where is she?” he said.

  “Who?”

  “My wife.”

  “She’ll be on the ward by now. There’s an assessment procedure. It’ll be an hour or so yet.” The pen paused. “There’s a canteen for visitors. They do cakes and things.” She stood up. “Look for the signs off the main corridor.”

  She smiled at him, a vague rearrangement of the bottom half of her face, and bustled away.

  Buddy watched her go, feeling suddenly exhausted. He found the canteen, a cheerless collection of tables and chairs, and had two cups of tea. After half an hour, he set off in search of his wife. He found her in one of the women’s wards, a long white room, shiny lino, beds down each side. Jude was at the far end. The weights were still attached to her head, and her eyes were closed. Buddy paused at the foot of the bed. There was a medical chart already clipped to the bed, figures in black biro, lines on a graph. Buddy stared at them. They made no sense. A nurse appeared and began to pull the curtains on the long, metal-framed windows. Buddy caught her eye.

  “My wife,” he said, nodding at Jude.

  The nurse smiled at him. She was young and pretty, short curly hair. She came over and glanced at the chart at the foot of the bed. Buddy could tell from her face that the news wasn’t good. The nurse looked up.

  “Mr Little?” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m afraid she’s asleep. You’re welcome to stay.”

  Buddy thanked her, seeing Jude’s eyes flick open, the sound of his voice. He walked across to her, bending low over the bed. She looked up at him.

  Something was wrong. She was frowning.

  “Tell me …” she whispered.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Tell me …” she paused and took a shallow breath. “Tell me why the place is full of goddam dwarfs.”

  “Goddam what?”

  “Dwarfs.”

  Buddy stared at her. Dwarfs? He looked round the ward, trying to make some sense of the question. Then he brought his eyeline down to hers, tried to imagine himself flat on his back, his head clamped tight, unable to move, and he realized at last what she meant. Jude had seen only the heads of patients rolling past. What she hadn’t seen were the wheelchairs in which they sat, propelling themselves endlessly along the corridors, nosing in and out of wards, fellow cripples, wheels instead of legs. He swallowed hard, resisting the truth. Then he grinned down at her. And kissed her again.

  “Dwarfs,” he agreed, “thousands of ’em.”

  Buddy left the hospital at nine, Jude asleep again. He walked the mile and a half into the town and booked into a small guest house. He lay on the bed for a moment, still fully clothed, and was asleep in seconds. He awoke, briefly, at three, pulling off his jeans and getting under the covers. Next day, he was back at the hospital by mid-morning, strong again, cheerful, determined. Sleep had worked the usual miracle. Jude, he knew, would recover. There had to be a way.

  He found her in the bed at the end of the ward. She looked even more pale than yesterday, and he knew at once that she’d been crying. He glanced across at the nurse. The nurse turned away. He sat down on the bed. He looked at her. Her eyes didn’t leave the ceiling.

  “You didn’t tell me,” she said.

  “Tell you what?”

  “What the matter was. All this …” she paused, and Buddy could see the tears welling up again. He reached across for a box of tissues at the bedside. She followed the movement of his hands.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want you to.”

  Buddy looked at her, saying nothing. Two beds away, he could hear a middle-aged woman telling a girl about a holiday she’d booked. A week on a specially adapted canal barge. It would be marvellous, she said. They had special lifts. She’d even be allowed a turn at the wheel. He looked at Jude again.

  “Who told you?”

  “The doctor.”

  “Doctor who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said I was tetraplegic.”

  “What?”

  “It means I’ll never use my arms again. Or my legs.” She paused. “He said he’d seen the X-rays.”

  She stared at the ceiling, her voice a whisper. Buddy closed his eyes. The anger began at his toes, in his fingertips, at the furthest ends of his body. It gathered force, and it surged through him. He bent towards her.

  “He’s wrong,” he said.

  “He’s a doctor. He must know.”

  “He’s wrong,” he said again.

  “Yeah?”

  She looked at him for the first time. Her voice was so low, he couldn’t be sure of the inflection. It might have been hope. Or it might have been despair.

  Abruptly, Buddy got up. The nurse he’d seen the previous evening was standing at the other end of the ward, checking the contents of a trolley. He stopped beside her.

  “My wife,” he said thickly. “What’s the name of her doctor?”

  “Bishop,” she said, not looking up, “Dr Bishop.”

  “Where do I find him?”

  “Down the corridor. Third door on the right.”

  Buddy turned and left the ward. The door of Bishop’s office was closed. He knocked once and went in. A man of about forty sat behind a desk. He wore a white coat. He was on the telephone. Buddy closed the door and sat down in front of the desk. The doctor watched him, expressionless, carrying on with the conversation. The conversation came to an end. He put the phone down. He made a note on a pad, then looked up at Buddy.

  “Yes?” he said.

  Buddy took a deep breath, controlling himself, damming the anger.

  “My wife,” he said, “is in your hospital. You’ve just seen her. You told her— ”

  The doctor interrupted him, leaning back in the chair, his hands clasped behind his head. He was older than Buddy had first thought, perhaps fifty. He had longish curly hair and wore a green bow tie. There was a large Mickey Mouse watch o
n his wrist. The man was a joke. Some kind of comedian. Certainly not what Buddy had expected. He studied Buddy for a moment or two, taking his time.

  “Mrs …?” he said at last.

  “Little.”

  “Ah …” he let the chair tip slowly forward, “C5.”

  “What?”

  “Fifth cervical. This bone here …” he indicated a bone in his own neck, midway between his shoulder blades, “nasty break.”

  Buddy stared at him, determined not to lose the initiative, determined to make his point.

  “You told her she’d never walk again,” he said.

  “She won’t.”

  “How do you know? Without looking? Getting inside? Operating?”

  “We never operate,” he said mildly. “It doesn’t do the patients any good.”

  Buddy frowned, out of his depth, confused. “But how will she ever get better?”

  “She won’t,” he said again, “she’ll adapt. Like you will. Like people always do.” He smiled. “You’ll be amazed. You think it’s the end of the world. But it isn’t.”

  Buddy blinked at him. “Adapt?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “You mean accept it?”

  “Yes.” He smiled again. “I’m afraid you’ll have to. You have no other choice.”

  Buddy gazed at him, hating the man, his complacency, his tone of voice, his utter lack of passion. Cripples were meat and drink to him. His world would fall apart without them.

  “There must be other places,” Buddy said. “Somewhere else.”

  The doctor shrugged.

  “There are,” he said, “and you’re welcome to try them. But I tell you this, my friend. Your wife has a very severe injury, and a very poor prognosis. One day, medical science may be able to help her, but not yet. Getting better means coping. It means learning to cope. That’s what we do here. We teach people to cope. I happen to think there’s no other way. If you know better, prove me wrong.”

  The doctor glanced at his watch, the exchange evidently over, and for a moment Buddy was tempted to hit him. It was something he’d occasionally done in his life when words wouldn’t work any more, and he’d always regretted it afterwards. But there was an arrogance about this man that touched a nerve in him, and he wanted to express exactly what he felt, driving a fist into his face, battering him senseless against the wall, trusting that one day, when he’d had a chance to think about it, the poor fool would have the wit to associate his job with something useful. Like a cure. Buddy sat motionless for several moments, enjoying the thought, his hands clenched in his lap. Then he stood up.