Mr Toppit

by Charles Elton

  As Dr. Massingbird went out of the room on his ashtray hunt, Martha looked up at me. “It was a broken leg, that’s what she said, the woman on the phone, that’s all she said,” sounding as irritated as if a stranger had given her the wrong directions in the street. Then she sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand.

  When Dr. Massingbird came back, Martha appeared to have rallied a little. He had brought with him a little foil container that might once have held a cupcake. He smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry. That’s the best we can do, I’m afraid.” He cleared his throat. “Mrs. Hayman,” he began.

  Martha put her head at an angle and smiled at him. “Where are you from?” she asked. “Where’s your accent?”

  He had been about to start on the matter in hand, so the question threw him off track. “Ireland, actually,” he said, as if he was not entirely sure.

  “Ireland! Whereabouts? Which part?”

  “Well … Skibbereen. It’s just near—”

  “Skibbereen,” Martha repeated dreamily, exhaling a trail of cigarette smoke, as if the sound of that one word was the only way of defining a perplexing set of emotions. Then her voice hardened quizzically: “But isn’t Massingbird originally a Suffolk name?”

  His hand flew up and covered the name badge on his chest, as if he had unwittingly let out a secret. “Well …” he said.

  “A Father Massingbird accompanied Richard Coeur de Lion on a crusade. He died before he got to Constantinople. His body was sent home to Walberswick in a cask of brandy.” She got up and, ignoring the ashtray he had brought, walked over to the sink in the corner and turned the tap on. There was a little fizz as she put the cigarette under the stream of water, then dropped it into the basin. She gave a curious little sniff. “I think someone’s urinated in this,” she said.

  I gazed at the floor.

  Dr. Massingbird cleared his throat again. He was gearing himself up for another try. Now we were going to hear. “Mrs. Hayman,” he said. Then he glanced at me. “And …?”

  “Luke,” I said.

  “Luke,” he repeated, with a little nod, as if he had just needed his memory jogged. He took a deep breath and brought his hands, now clasped, up to his chin. “What we have here is … not a good situation. Not good, I’m afraid,” he said, bobbing his head up and down as if he was agreeing with himself. He turned to Martha and made a little gesture towards me. “Would you like Luke to …? Is it all right if …?”

  Outrage is not good for the breaking voice. “What am I meant to do? Go outside and read a comic?” came out as a petulant squawk, but Martha had already given a get-on-with-it flick of her hand, so Dr. Massingbird continued.

  “We haven’t succeeded in getting your husband stable yet. There’s been internal bleeding. An enormous amount, in fact.”

  Martha had gone white. I don’t know what color I was. She swallowed and her throat made a rusty squeak.

  “Do you have any questions you would like to ask me?” Dr. Massingbird said. Suddenly I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to know. In fact, I really wanted him to go away.

  Martha obviously felt the same. “I don’t think so. You’ve been so kind. Thank you,” she said graciously. “We’ll wait here. For news.” She was dismissing him.

  A flicker of panic passed across Dr. Massingbird’s face. He hadn’t finished and he didn’t know quite how to continue, so when he said, “We’ll probably have to amputate his legs,” it came out more brutally than he’d perhaps meant it to. I turned to the wall, and found myself almost kissing the faces of Charles and Di on the poster. Martha put a hand over her mouth as if she was about to be sick.

  “There’s been some major trauma to the lower half of his body, I’m afraid.”

  “Both his legs?” I whispered. I didn’t even mind that it sounded inane.

  He nodded. “We’ve been trying to get him stable enough to operate for the last hour.”

  “And then what would happen?” Martha asked.

  “We would operate as soon as we can.”

  “No. After the operation,” she snapped.

  “Well, there would be a long recovery period, if we were successful. Really quite extended. Before he could come home, that is.”

  Martha shook her head. “No. I’m sorry, no.”

  “I’m afraid an operation is the only chance.”

  Martha looked like a wax figure that was melting in the sun. Her eyes were wide, but everything else on her face was collapsing. “It’s quite impossible,” she said flatly.

  “Well …” Dr. Massingbird said awkwardly.

  “No, I’m sorry,” she said.

  I walked over to her and put my arms round her, but she slipped out of my grasp, her gaze directed intently at the doctor.

  “It’s not possible,” she said, emphasizing each word. “We don’t have the facilities.”

  Dr. Massingbird glanced at me, as if to elicit my help. “Mrs. Hayman—”

  “To have him at home.” Then she cried out, “Do you know how many stairs we have? We don’t live in a bungalow.” She slumped into the chair and put her head in her hands. “Ohhhh,” she moaned, “where’s Rachel? Where is Rachel?”

  When Rachel arrived, the first thing she said was, “Where’s Martha?” her eyes darting suspiciously round the room as if she might be hiding in a cupboard. Martha had left a few minutes before: Dr. Massingbird had come back to say they were getting ready to operate on Arthur, and she could have ten minutes with him.

  Rachel sat on Martha’s chair and she, too, pulled out a packet of cigarettes. Her hair was all over the place. “Couldn’t they have brought him somewhere closer?” she said. “Claude drove me. Damian was sulking and Claude actually had to pay him to take over the tour group. How’s Arthur’s leg?”

  “It’s not a broken leg, Rach, not really,” I began.

  “But that’s what Claude said.”

  “That’s what Claude said because that’s what I told him. That’s what I thought. Until I got here.” And then I told her.

  Afterwards—for a moment—she was like she used to be, when she was part of us, when you could say something to her and her response was reflexive, not like talking to someone on the phone whose voice was being routed through a succession of different exchanges before it got to you. She listened in silence and then she said, “But what about his books? What happens if he wants to write another?” Darkwood, the fifth, had been published a year before.

  “Has he said he’s going to do another one?”

  “He doesn’t normally say anything much, does he?”

  “It doesn’t mean he can’t do another book. They’re not saying he’s not going to get better.”

  “How many negatives can you fit into one sentence, Luke? Of course he’s not going to get better,” she shouted at me. Then she started crying. “Mr. Toppit’s only just come out of the Darkwood.” She bit her lip and put her hand over her mouth as if she was trying to stop herself screaming.

  I went over to where she was sitting and put my arms round her. It felt odd. I couldn’t remember the last time we had hugged. She smelled of cigarettes and joss sticks and old scent. Then she pulled away. She was trembling. “I must get Claude. I can’t leave him downstairs.”

  I couldn’t face him. “He’ll be fine,” I said.

  “He’s having a horrible time.”

  “Just leave him. This is nothing to do with him.”

  She was shaking her head, her hands clasped by her mouth. Like Martha’s had, her face was collapsing. “He’s the only person I’ve got now,” she wailed.

  “Apart from me,” I said, as neutrally as I could. “And Martha,” I added, but that didn’t come out quite so neutral.

  She managed to observe the civilities. “Yes. I know that. But Claude has nobody. Nobody at all.”

  “He’s got a mother, hasn’t he? And that grandfather who gives him money?”

  “You have no idea. His grandfather’s horrible. Oh, it’s so humiliating for him
.”

  “Why are we talking about Claude?”

  “What would you rather talk about? The funeral?”

  That was unfair. We sat in silence.

  “He’s not going to die,” I said.

  “I don’t know anybody who’s died.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Except …” Rachel’s voice tailed off.

  Animals have some kind of instinct to warn them of danger in the air. People like Rachel and I had it, too. It’s a sort of familial code, a dog-whistle signal so obscurely pitched, so far off any conventional tonal scale, that even those NASA computers monitoring sounds in space couldn’t pick it up. What Rachel had said had left a residue of something chemical in the air, a kind of static that set off a chain reaction, which forced the ions in the atmosphere to flow back on themselves, like a hand brushing suede against the grain.

  “Except who?” I said. I knew perfectly well. I was just trying to brush the grain back the other way as fast as I could.

  She looked at me and said, “Nothing’s gone right for us since then … Since …”

  I knew what she was going to say and prayed she wouldn’t. What defines a secret? Is it just something that one person knows and nobody else does? If it’s something that everyone knows, it can’t be a secret because they all know it and it isn’t secret. But we all knew it and it was still a secret. I was willing her to stay silent, but she went on.

  “… since Jordan,” she said.

  She had said it, and in a funny way I admired her for it. I thought: How brave, how fantastically brave. It had been unsaid for such a long time that I wasn’t sure what would happen when the word was uttered. And, of course, nothing did. When a train roars through a station without stopping, the sound, that clacking, rushing noise, doesn’t stay with you. It’s gone in a second, but your ears still throb.

  We held each other’s gaze. “But that’s all our lives, Rachel.”

  “I don’t think time’s got anything to do with it,” she said. “It doesn’t just go away because we don’t talk about it.”

  I didn’t know what to say. There wasn’t anything to say unless we wanted to go on. My bravery was nil. Rachel didn’t seem to have the appetite either.

  “Are you cold?” she said. “I’m freezing.”

  Actually, I was rather hot but I could see her shivering. “Why don’t you go and get some coffee or something? I’ll have some, too.”

  She looked relieved. “Yes, shall I? Maybe something to eat as well.”

  As she went out, I said, “It’s going to be all right.”

  “I doubt it,” she said.

  I wasn’t on my own for long, although I seemed to have lost all sense of time. I could have been sitting for days in that room. Then the door opened and it was Dr. Massingbird, followed by a young nurse, followed by Martha, clutching her handbag. The door stayed open until the nurse eased behind Martha and closed it.

  “What’s happened?” I asked. Martha was staring at the floor.

  Dr. Massingbird cleared his throat. “I told you how serious the situation was. While we were trying to get him stable enough for an operation his heart stopped beating three times, probably due to loss of blood.”

  “So what happens now?” My voice had gone trembly.

  Dr. Massingbird looked back at Martha. “Mrs. Hayman?” he said gently. They all stood there rather awkwardly.

  I suddenly realized. “He’s dead already, isn’t he?”

  Dr. Massingbird put his hand on my shoulder. “We did everything we could but we were unsuccessful. I’m so sorry.” For someone who probably had to say the same thing several times a day, I was impressed by how freshly minted he made it sound.

  I wished I’d been directly involved in a death before—then I’d have known how to behave. Adam had some experience of it: his grandfather had choked on a roast potato in the middle of Sunday lunch. His father had given the old man mouth-to-mouth resuscitation but he had died anyway. “Well, you’d probably want to die if your father stuffed his tongue down your throat,” Adam said.

  Adam had this theory: it didn’t matter what you did because the day of your death is fixed from the moment you’re born. I said, “You mean that if your grandfather hadn’t choked on a roast potato he would have choked on something else, like a parsnip?” It wasn’t the method of death that was preordained, Adam said, just the day. If he hadn’t choked on a roast potato he might have tripped on the front step on his way home and cracked his head open. I asked what would happen if you were on a trip abroad and your preordained day was actually the day before or the day after because of the time difference. “No, no,” Adam said, “there’s no way you can ever beat the system. Sometimes there’s a malfunction and people get taken before their time: they become the undead and they’re in a state of limbo until their preordained day comes round, which might not be for another twenty years.” Adam didn’t think his grandfather had been one of them.

  So when I turned away from Dr. Massingbird and the nurse and Martha, and rested my head against the wall, I wasn’t crying because Arthur was dead. In fact, I said to them, rather aggressively, “This is nothing to do with him being dead,” in order to make the point. I just didn’t want Arthur to be in limbo. I couldn’t bear that. I knew there had to be a mistake. You don’t break your leg and die from it. I knew he must be one of the few—so very few, according to Adam, that it’s a real headache for the statisticians—who had been taken before their time.

  I wiped my nose on my sleeve. Dr. Massingbird and the nurse gazed at me with great moony eyes. I made a half-hearted attempt to explain: “It just isn’t the right time for him,” I said.

  Dr. Massingbird shook his head. “It never is the right time, is it?” he said gently. “Not for the people we love.” The nurse rearranged her mouth and made a moist sound with her lips to show solidarity.

  “No, it can be, actually,” I said. “That’s the whole point. It can be exactly the right time.”

  I saw unease in Dr. Massingbird’s eyes. He was about to say something when Martha clenched her fists, tilted her head back, opened her mouth and let out a baying noise. “Ohhhh,” she howled, “can’t we just get on?” Then her head fell forward into her hands and she held it tightly, as if she was trying to stop it coming off her shoulders.

  I wasn’t precisely sure what the phrase “get on” meant in this context, the context of a man lying dead from a broken leg on one floor of a hospital and his widow and son standing in a room on another floor with a nurse and a doctor, trying to make sense of what had happened and what was going to happen. In the event, I didn’t have much time to think about it because the door opened and the context changed: there was Rachel.

  • • •

  I’m not quite sure what happened when Rachel began to scream, whether bleepers were bleeped or alarms sounded or whether it was simply the level of noise that was coming from her, but there was some real action now, both in our room and out of it. Even before the nurse had got outside the door and was shouting down the corridor, I could hear running footsteps.

  One thing you could say about Martha was that she was good in a crisis. Even before Dr. Massingbird had got to Rachel, Martha had launched herself across the room and was flailing around on the floor practically on top of her. By this time Rachel was on her hands and knees making a terrifying array of noises. Actually, it might have been Martha making them. It was hard to tell. I had turned away and put my hands over my ears. I wanted to block the whole day out, not only what was happening now but what had gone before: everything, every single thing.

  Time must have passed, because when I turned back to face the room, the nurse was there, and so was Dr. Massingbird, with another man in a white coat. I couldn’t even see Rachel. They were bending over her. Dr. Massingbird held a syringe, and had obviously given her a shot of something. When they moved back, I saw Martha sitting on the floor with her back against the wall. Rachel was lying in a fetal position with her head on Mar
tha’s lap making small whimpers while Martha stroked her hair. They looked like a deranged Madonna and Child in one of those pietà paintings we had studied in Art History.

  Martha tried to get up. She stretched out her arm and I went over to help them up as best I could. Once on our feet, we put our arms round each other. I could feel Martha shaking slightly. There was a silence. I was the first to speak: “What should we do now?”

  “Well,” Dr. Massingbird said, letting out a deep breath, “if you would like to, you could see your father. They’ll be preparing him now, and then they’ll lay him out in the chapel of rest.” He turned to Martha. “Mrs. Hayman?”

  I was quite surprised that this was a service a hospital offered. If you’d asked me I would have said it was more of an undertaker thing. Anyway, I took my hat off to Dr. Massingbird: it was brave of him to raise the subject of death again when his natural inclination must have been to talk about almost anything else. “You might like to have some time to gather yourselves first,” he added.

  Martha was coming back to life. “I think we’ve gathered enough already,” she said.

  Rachel was looking down and I put my hand on her cheek to bring her head up a little. “Rachel? Is that okay? Is that what you’d like to do?”

  Her eyes were closed. She shook her head, but not to indicate that she didn’t want to, just that she couldn’t cope with making any decisions. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to, but I’d never seen a dead body before so it seemed silly not to take the opportunity. Anyway, Adam was sure to have a lot of questions.