I got up from the chair. It seemed to take a long time. I began to walk across the foyer to where Martha was standing and, at that moment, a number of things happened: a clanging ambulance squealed to a halt outside the entrance and the man in the glass office swiveled round to look; a troupe of chattering nurses holding clipboards banged through the double doors that led from the wards, their heels clicking on the lino like tap shoes, and crossed the foyer in front of Martha. It had been silent for such a long time that the noise was deafening, as if someone had turned up the volume too loud.
As I was moving past the glass office, the man’s eyes met mine and I saw something in them that made me snap. Before I knew what was happening, I had veered away from the straight line that led to Martha and I was beside the glass office banging with my fist on the sliding panel. The man was astonished. The nurses stopped in their tracks and turned towards me. I clawed the panel open and stuck my head through the gap. He drew backwards as I shouted, “That’s my mother, you silly, stupid man! There she is! That’s her! She’s not American!” At the same time, I shook my outstretched finger in Martha’s direction—but she was obscured now by the nurses. My nose was dripping and my mouth was filled with mucus. I had a vision of myself as a squalling, purple-faced, newborn baby. I slammed the panel shut with such force that the glass cracked and half of it fell out, shattering on the floor.
The ambulance that had stopped outside had disgorged three paramedics who were helping an old woman with a bleeding face through the entrance, and the man—grateful for the distraction—leaped from his chair and ran out of the door at the back of his office to help. The nurses were watching me, and as I moved towards them, they parted silently like a curtain. They ended up flanking Martha, looking nervously at this deranged child who probably had a carving knife hidden about his person. Everything was silent again, apart from some whimpering and shuffling as the injured woman was brought into the foyer.
Martha’s face was blank, her mouth slack. She seemed exhausted. Her eyes closed and she made a guttural sound in her throat. When she opened her eyes, her mouth began to tremble and her face crumpled. “Oh, baby, where have you been?” she said, in a thin, squeaky voice. “Where were you? Why didn’t you find me?” She looked me up and down. Tears were streaming over her cheeks. I couldn’t speak. A medium-size golf ball had lodged itself temporarily in my throat. Then she let out a long groan as if she was in pain. “Why do you always dress so horribly? You look so weak!”
As the man from the glass office passed us, leading the way for the three paramedics who were supporting the old woman, I thought I saw a smirk spreading across his face.
Laurie
Laurie had been sitting on the john for some time before she noticed that the toilet-paper holder was empty. She hiked her pants up, holding them round her waist without tying the drawstring, shuffled into the next booth and sat down again. Not that she cared much for kings and queens, but she couldn’t help thinking it was sad that a royal hospital—it was called the Royal Waterloo—wasn’t cared for better, especially when there was this big royal wedding about to happen.
There was even graffiti on the door. Someone had written “Bev swallows!!!” next to a drawing of a pair of lips clasped round what Alma called a diddly. The litter, the smell of food in the corridors, the scarred linoleum floors, the nurses and interns in scrubs that were clearly not fresh today, might not even have been fresh yesterday—oh, it was so depressing. It made the hospital look like somewhere people came to die instead of get better.
Laurie decided to zing for a bit. What had happened today had been so extraordinary that if she didn’t get the crap out of her head she wouldn’t be able to make any sense of it. It was as if she had picked up an odd piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Anyone would have said it wouldn’t fit. It certainly didn’t look as if it did, but Laurie knew that if she held it in her hand, if she molded it until it formed the right shape, it would slot in snugly.
The zinging had cleared her mind enough for her to realize something strange: when Mrs. Detweiler had put her on the spot last night, asking what show Laurie was going to see, Laurie had plucked Camelot out of nowhere. Ever since her experience in high school with Oklahoma!, a humiliation she would have long forgotten if Alma hadn’t kept reminding her about it, she had never cared much for musicals, only went to them if Marge dragged her. She wasn’t even sure she had ever seen Camelot. Yet that was the show she had come up with: a musical about someone called Arthur, who was a king. And now she—and he—were in a royal hospital, even if, in her case, she was sitting on the john with her pants round her ankles.
She thought back to the scene of the accident—the phrase had started in her head as “the scene of the crime” but she had altered it. Well, what had happened certainly was a crime but, of course, it wasn’t a crime even though back home you wouldn’t have been able to take a truck that big down a street that narrow. You wouldn’t have been allowed to.
She tried to work out exactly how long she had had with Arthur. There was the first bit, from when she had knelt down beside him to when the paramedics arrived and tried to take her away from him. Then there was the second bit, from when Arthur hadn’t wanted to let her go when they had put him on the gurney. The first bit had been longer than the second. Neither had been very long, but Laurie knew that what had happened between her and Arthur had had nothing much to do with time anyway. It might have been five minutes in all, might even have been less, but it wasn’t how much he had said, it was what he had said and how he said it, and that he had said it to her.
She knew how badly he was hurt. He was cold and he was uncomfortable, but he wasn’t in too much pain. If he had been less badly hurt, he would have been in more pain, but every bit of adrenaline in him must have been juicing round his body. And they would have given him morphine in the IV. He would have been happier after that had kicked in, but it had made him talk so softly she’d had to strain to hear him. Still, she had no reason to doubt what he had said even if she hadn’t understood it all: his mind was clearly one hundred percent. After all, he had remembered his phone number just like that, reeled it off with no hesitation. With all that had happened to him, you wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d forgotten one of the digits or reversed a couple or just couldn’t remember it at all, but the number had been right the first time.
She felt calmer now. She had forced herself to be calm when she was sitting with Arthur on the curb, but as soon as the paramedics had got him on the gurney and were lifting him and trying to keep the drips level and the oxygen mask from slipping off, really the moment she was forced to take her hand from his, she had begun to tremble so badly it was as if someone was shaking her.
The worst was when the doors of the ambulance were banged shut, and she had her hands pressed on the glass knowing someone else was beside him now, leaning over him, trying to get him comfortable. She had wanted to shout his name so that he would know she was there, would know she hadn’t left him, but instead she whispered it and saw her breath condense on the window. He would hear that just as well as if she had screamed it. And then she was crying, great silly sobs, as the ambulance drove off, and she was left alone in the street with a crowd of silent, staring people who were already dispersing. Up the road, she could see the truck driver in a doorway with two policemen. She had moved somewhere else in her head now, felt almost no anger towards him. She was shaky on her feet, but she needed to get to a phone and do what Arthur had asked her to do, and she hoped she could do it before she threw up.
The first two phone booths she tried were broken. In one, the receiver was hanging down and when she put it to her ear, there was no dial tone. In another, there was no receiver, just a bit of curly black wire. When she found one that was working, she lodged herself tightly into it and took her glasses out of her bag so she could read the instructions. The phone system was different here : instead of putting a coin in right at the start, you were meant to dial the number and when the pe
rson picked up you put the coin in. She had written the number on the back of her hand, and she dialed it. It rang for a while and she began to panic: what would happen if nobody was home? She had promised Arthur she would call. He hadn’t asked her to promise, but she had anyway. She hadn’t wanted him to worry. But then there was a click, and a woman’s voice said, “Hello?”
Immediately the receiver beeped and Laurie pushed the coin into the slot. It was blocked. She groaned, “Oh, no!” She tried to force it in. She put her mouth as close as she could to the receiver and shouted, “Hi! Can you hear me? Can you hear me?” but the phone went on beeping until it was replaced by a single high-pitched note, like a cardiac monitor flatlining. Laurie was drenched with sweat now. She tried again.
This time the woman picked up almost instantly. “Rachel?” she said, which took Laurie aback. She was about to say, “No, it’s Laurie,” when the beeping started and she tried again to push the coin in. She screamed in frustration when it wouldn’t go. She banged the receiver down. In the dirty little mirror, her face was red and blotchy. She looked like a crazy person. She searched in her purse for another kind of coin and started again. This time it worked. It went straight in when the beeping started, and then the line was quiet. Laurie realized she had no idea what to say.
“Was it you who just phoned?” the woman said.
After a moment Laurie said doubtfully, “Yes.” She had considered saying no.
“Who’s speaking?”
“Is that Mrs. Hayman?”
“Yes. Who’s speaking? Who’s that?”
“Your husband, Mr. Arthur Hayman …”
“Yes?”
“Oh, Mrs. Hayman …” Laurie’s voice broke.
The woman didn’t sound angry, just perplexed. “Please—who are you?”
“Your husband’s had an accident.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Yes, he’s … broken his leg.” She didn’t know what else to say.
“But when?”
“Now—just now … It just happened now. Here.”
“Where?”
Laurie looked at the street through the glass of the phone booth. She didn’t know where she was. “Just … here,” she said.
“Is he there now? Should I talk to him? Who are you?”
“You can’t talk to him. He’s gone. They’ve taken him to the Royal Waterloo Hospital.”
The woman said something, and then Laurie did a terrible thing: she hung up. She stumbled out of the phone booth, leaned back on it and took some deep breaths. Right next to her, a black cab was waiting by the curb. She hadn’t noticed it at first, but as she glanced up at it, a yellow light, saying FOR HIRE, flashed above the windscreen. As if she had been taking cabs in London all her life, she opened the door, got in, slumped into the comfortable leather seat and said, “The Royal Waterloo Hospital,” and added—for the second time that day, “I’m a nurse.”
In the john she was sifting and sorting now, processing bits of information, moving things from one slot to another, then back again. The shapes and colors were random, but she could feel them acquiring form and meaning. She knew it would take a while, but eventually it would be like flying high above the earth and seeing how the shapes that seemed arbitrary on the ground were part of some greater pattern.
She was so tired. What she would really have liked was a hot shower, a real one, not the English kind that she’d had in the hotel, like a dog pissing on you. She pulled her pants up and stretched as much as the little booth would allow. She unlocked the door, came out and stood in front of a basin. She tried the hot tap, but it was jammed so she turned on the cold, splashed water on her face and tried to get her hair back to something like it had looked when she’d had it cut and styled the day before she left Modesto. She could smell herself. She pulled some paper towel out of the dispenser, put a wad of it under the tap and rubbed the sliver of discolored soap over it. She raised both arms in turn and wiped her armpits. Then, with a glance at the door to make sure nobody was coming in, she pulled the waistband of her pants away from her body, put her hand down and wiped the damp paper between her legs.
She was just about to open the door when panic welled in her. She touched her shoulder, looked at the ground and ran to the first booth she had been in and then the one she had moved to. Nothing. She had lost her bag. Tears of anger and frustration came into her eyes and she let out a groaning yelp. It wasn’t as if she had lost her money and stuff, which was still in the belt round her middle. That wouldn’t have been so bad. You could call up about credit cards, passports, and driving licenses, even though she wouldn’t have wanted to try in England—not with that phone system. Her bag had the notebook, which was like a record, which was like proof, of the time she had spent with Arthur. Of course she had it in her head, too, but she wanted every single last everything she could have.
She yanked open the door of the bathroom so hard that it crashed against the wall with a bang, then ran down the corridor, huffing and puffing, going red in the face and clearing everything out of her way like a runaway train. By the time she got back to the entrance where she had been sitting she was in pain and she was lopsided. Her knee had been giving her trouble for a while, another of the many reasons she was meant to be on a weight-loss program. It was okay: at the far end, by the glass doors that led to the forecourt, she could see her bag on the chair where she had left it. She leaned against the wall and tried to get her breath back. Well, that was one difference between this hospital and Holy Spirit. There, someone would have taken the bag in a second. Marge had even had her golf clubs stolen from outside the hospital chapel while she was at the interdenominational Sunday service.
Laurie hobbled back to her seat. As she passed the glass office she almost tripped over someone on their hands and knees on the floor. They were clearing up some broken glass with a little brush. There must have been an accident. She quickly checked in her bag. Everything was still there. She hadn’t realized how much chocolate she’d eaten but she finished it anyway. Then she got out her notebook and pen and began to write. She was still thinking about King Arthur and Camelot. She was pretty hazy about what had happened to him and Queen Guinevere, but she knew there was something about a round table.
After a while, she went back to working on her Hiawatha poem. When she had been there for about twenty minutes, the doors opened and a young couple came in. They were whispering in an agitated way, as if they had just had a row. The girl was tall and thin with thick brown hair that was all mussed up. The boy was several inches shorter and was wearing a floor-length purple coat, which appeared to be made of velvet, with a dirty white, ruffled shirt underneath that hung over his pants. He had tiny wire-rimmed spectacles—the lenses were round, the size of quarters—perched on the end of his nose. He needed some orthodontic work: his teeth were crooked and stuck out. Laurie went back to her writing, but then she heard the girl say, in an imperious tone, “I’ve come to see my father. He’s broken his leg. My name’s Rachel Hayman.”
Luke
Back in the little room where I had started out, Martha was sitting on a fold-up chair underneath a NO SMOKING sign holding a cigarette between her fingers. I was standing at the other end of the room next to a poster of Prince Charles and Lady Di that had been stuck crookedly to the wall.
When Dr. Massingbird had first come in and cleared his throat nervously to prepare himself for telling us what he had come to tell us, Martha had suddenly leaned down and rifled through her handbag, which was beside her on the floor. Out of courtesy he had paused, and when she resurfaced with a packet of cigarettes, her face had crumpled like a balloon with the air let out and tears were pouring down her cheeks again. She had pulled out a cigarette, put it between her lips, and held the flame of the lighter to it. She drew on it, took it out of her mouth, and let her hand rest on the table. Then she turned her head away from Dr. Massingbird. There was an awkward silence. I saw his eyes flick up to the NO SMOKING sign. He glanced at
me and turned back to her. “Let me get you an ashtray,” he said. Then I knew we were really in trouble.
Since we had got back to the room, many people had been in to see us. In fact, the same person never came twice. When one left, there would be a brief lull, then the door would open and a different one would come in. I was hazy about hospital etiquette, about who were the important people and who were not. Nobody introduced themselves. They came in, said their piece, and left. The team had assembled, they said. Mr. Hayman was just being moved out of the resuscitation room. He was being made comfortable. Dr. Massingbird kept being promised : he would be with us imminently, he was on his way, he was expected out of the operating theater at any moment.
Why couldn’t there just be a single person who came and told us everything all in one go? It would have been better for Martha: she needed one person for her magic to work. A procession of different people did not play to her strengths. It distracted her, diminished her throw. At a party, she never stayed in a group. You always found her in a room other than the one where the party was taking place with some man she had extracted. She would be deep in conversation with him in the kitchen, or upstairs in a bedroom sitting on a pile of coats, or in a study perched on the edge of the desk. By the end of the party her head bobbed gently, as if it was floating on a rippling sea, her eyes misty as she talked to whoever was the chosen one.
Even if we were ready to leave, there was always time for another cigarette or another drink. Normally, Arthur, Rachel—if she had deigned to come—and I would be standing, powerless, by the door in our coats as the guests were leaving, making awkward conversation with the wife of the person Martha was talking to. Finally, she would appear and make her way towards us, negotiating each step carefully with her small feet and elegant shoes. At the door, she would take the hand of the person she had been talking to, might hold it in both of hers and, oblivious to the rest of us, finish off her conversation while we waited. The man, having first thought she was going to shake his hand, was now unsure whether to take it back or to leave it in her grasp, so it lay there in a kind of limbo like a small, hibernating animal. Then, often in mid-sentence, she would stop talking, give the man a distracted smile and—ignoring his wife—walk out of the door without another word. Martha always had a problem with good-byes.
Mr Toppit Page 7
