by Graham Mort
He hadn’t wanted anyone around when he went to the theatre. The anesthetist had been an Irishman, about his own age. Jovial. He’d had the pre-med, then waited as time dissolved around him. He’d slipped away from consciousness and they put him under and started work. Diverting his blood supply, cutting away diseased vessels, grafting new ones. Like the way they’d tended the vines he was walking through. Six hours of surgery. Death and resurrection. When he came to, it was evening. He’d been worried that he’d wake up shouting obscenities under the effects of the anaesthetic. But he felt at peace, and was being washed by a beautiful Malaysian nurse who had gold hoops in her ears. She was smiling at him, teeth glinting, eyes dark as occlusions in honey. His body, still painted with iodine, looked radiant, as if he’d been coated with gold leaf. His chest was seared with a bloody line and his pubic hair gleamed like copper wire. He had the sensation of floating in warm water, of a wide dark river with fire playing over the surface. A small apocalypse in which he felt like a river god with his bride, her hands light as tender flames across his body.
It must have been hours later when he woke again and Stella and Simon were sitting beside the bed. He didn’t remember this, but they said he’d been in good form. Pleased to see them, genial, peeping down his tee shirt, smiling sardonically, babbling. That would be the legend back in the Department. He hadn’t feared pain or death, but the end of life: the axe, not its shadow. He’d waited for days before the op to have the tests that would confirm him as viable. He’d had lung capacity tests and more x-rays. Thank God he’d never smoked. Then the surgeon had appeared early one evening, flipping through Ralph’s notes to pronounce him an excellent candidate before rattling through his survival rates.
After the op and that visit from Simon and Stella, he’d been alone in the ward. Not alone in fact, but alone in some profound sense with his hurt. He’d remembered Raleigh’s words to the executioner as he examined the axe: Let me see it. Do you think I’m afraid of it? This is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases. And he’d realised that he wasn’t really viable, after all. That sharp medicine had done its worst. He was stranded with his wound, his constant need of care. He was dependent. The hours had passed in a slow ache of realisation. Morphine had reduced the tangible to phantasmagorical shadows. The pain was coming closer; something stalking him, something he already knew. He asked the sister for some painkillers and he saw her approaching the consultant who was making a ward round. He’d stopped to fuss with Ralph’s drip and reassure him about the operation. He’d done a quadruple bypass in the end, the Greek. When the ache began he felt as he’d been sawn in half, which he had. He saw the surgeon turn away from the nurse before she even asked her question. It was three hours later when the pain was rasping along his sternum that the ward sister came by with some tablets.
The first signs had first come on five years ago when he’d been playing cricket for the university. The senior team, that is. He’d bowled twelve consecutive overs: five maidens, twenty-seven for none because he’d been dropped five times. It was probably his best ever spell, the ball swinging away late, pitching just short of a length outside off stump and then seaming towards first slip. He’d crafted each over, swinging the odd ball in, getting some to lift from a length, even making some cut into the stumps. The batsman was an old adversary, a Professor of Music, and they’d been able to share a joke between overs. Then he’d stood under the trees on the boundary with an ache spreading from chest to shoulder. It came back when he was playing tennis, then cycling. He’d gone to his GP and been referred to cardiology and had the treadmill test. He didn’t believe that there was anything seriously wrong with him. Re-reading Lolita he found that Nabakov’s Humbert Humbert had suffered from intercostal neuralgia and he’d Googled it out of curiosity. It was a condition of the intercostal muscles that mimicked angina. Perfect. When the young cardiologist had told him – categorically – that there was nothing wrong with his heart he’d tried that bit of theory out on her. She’d smiled. No, she hadn’t read Nabakov. Yes, it was possible.
Before the op they put him in a ward with men who’d already had it, coughing with rolled-up towels pressed to their chests. After the op, he was kept awake by old men who’d had heart or lung operations, breathing into oxygen masks and nebulisers, struggling for their lives or what was left of them. They’d brought a guy in, younger than him, who’d lain deliriously calling for his mother, shouting at ghosts. Oh you fucking bastards! His eyes were magnified behind smeared glasses and his hair was tangled with sweat. Oh you cunts! He pulled off his monitor so that the beeper sounded all night, ripped out his cannula so that blood sprayed the bed sheets. Let me not be mad, Ralph had prayed, let me not be, please.
He never imagined any of that when he walked away from the cardiologist with his Nabakov story and nothing wrong with his heart. When there was everything wrong with it. When something was working away inside him. He never found out why it hadn’t been spotted, but five years later when the shoulder pain came back he had an MRI scan to check for a compressed vertebra. It was like being trapped in a toothpaste tube with a pod of whales calling. Nothing. Apart from the usual wear and tear. Then a humourless Slovakian neurologist had advised him to revisit cardiology. Hobbling back to the car, he realised that she was right. That he might be running out of time. The heart attack came two days before he was due to take a treadmill test again. Not a pain in the chest, but an intense ache in his jaw and shoulder. Simon had driven him to the hospital as he held a pack of ice to his clavicle. Friday night and the town had been full of young people out on the lash, boys in tight jeans and tee shirts, girls in short skirts and plunging halter tops. All that life, that vibrancy, that need, that sexual drive. He’d never been afraid to die, but he’d been afraid of losing Simon through dying. That had happened anyway. It was a fucking joke, really. Though he should have seen it coming, Paul Kretzinski and all.
The path was so steep now that Ralph could only walk in moderate spurts. Thirty or forty paces or so, then a rest, then forty more and a rest. The sun had swung higher in the sky and he could feel it burning behind his knees. He paused to rest his hat on a rock, smear on more sun cream, wipe the sweat from his neck. The sun glinted on a windscreen down in the village. There was a very faint breeze up this high, but the air was heated from its passage overland. The sea was crimped into wave crests and the wind surfers were almost invisible from this height. He could just make out one of the trawlers putting to sea. Yesterday he’d wandered down to the harbour with his camera in the early evening. They’d let him into the fish auction with a few other tourists as the crates of fish came by on the conveyor and the traders made hoarse bids in Catalan. A tall African sailor was shoveling ice into crates, muscular, high shouldered and narrow hipped. His skin gleamed in the dim interior light. He was a kind of perfection. But Ralph felt no desire, not even in the abstract.
He passed crates of squid, hake, cod. Some pink fish he didn’t even recognise. Then a swordfish. It gleamed like beaten silver, its eyes huge and inky and indelibly sad. It had made him melancholy, as if what had happened to him had suddenly coalesced, had melded with all the other sadness of creation. He’d felt like an intruder, hadn’t taken a photograph, an image that would sit uselessly on his hard-drive. Another memento mori. The camera was his way of putting a membrane between him and the world. Simon had told him that once, cruelly accurate.
Back at the flat he’d written in his notebook, covering the pages with fine script. He was supposed to be working on a new academic book this summer, but he’d started writing poems instead – actually writing poems instead of writing about them. It was nearly twenty years since he’d published some ‘promising’ work in Poetry Review and the TLS, so it had all come as a bit of a surprise. He was due a term of research leave next year and he hardly knew what to do with it now. Maybe he’d go for a book of his own poems now that creative writing was all the rage. You had to laugh. The University was filling up with writer
s who needed to make a living on the side and what lazy, self-serving bastards most of them were.
The last hundred or so yards up the path were a slog though dust and sifting gravel. The breeze stiffened, bringing some relief from the heat. He saw a green wheelie bin, then a steel barrier. Incongruously the path ended at the car park for the monastery where a road zigzagged up the north side of the mountain in a series of stacked hairpin bends. The car park was about five hundred yards from the restored buildings, the path sagging into a dip then rising up to the squat towers and crenellated walls where the monks had looked down on everything and everyone below. It was said that the locals had sacked the place in the sixteenth century. It wasn’t hard to imagine, living in the village under their gaze. The monks with all that wealth and self-sufficiency, their olives and vines and bakeries and tanneries, creaming it as the villagers flogged up and down the path with half-starved mules to trade with them. Ralph took another swig of water, stooping to pick dried grass and broken stems from his socks where they were scratching his ankle. The blood had dried on his right leg, congealing in a rivulet that matched the scar on the other. He was knackered but exultant. He’d done it. So fuck the lot of them, whoever they were. It was meant nothing: slog, slog, slog to the top. But it felt good. It felt like meaning. And he was looking forward to coffee and agua mineral in one of the cafés on the seafront when he got back. He’d feel good then, feel that he’d achieved something he’d set out to do. That was advance retrospection: another theory, but one that worked. One that existed, like experience did.
Ralph rested on the barrier for a few minutes. Three workmen arrived in a white Seat van and began to put on gauntlets and facemasks. They unloaded strimmers and started them up in a fug of white smoke, cutting back the grass and thistles at the edge of the steel barrier. When Simon walked on they snarled behind him like a three-headed dog.
He’d decided not to enter the monastery. Not this time. Sometimes he liked that holy feeling, that sense of connection with the past and a necessary God. But not today. He glanced at his watch. There was moisture clinging to the inside of the glass. His own sweat. It was only ten forty-five. He’d made it in good time, getting up before the main heat of the day set in. He followed the path to the side of the perimeter wall where there was a shady garden with a drinking tap set into a stone recess where he splashed his face.
The view to the northwest showed the Pyrenees still dusky in the morning heat. On the road below a posse of cyclists went past in yellow jerseys, toes pointed, legs pumping almost in unison. Ralph filled his water bottle from the brass tap, lingering in the shade. His route home lay down a gentler valley that would take him round the bay on the coastal path and back into the town. He’d have time for a shower and a change of clothes before taking the hire-car to meet Stella at Gerona. He placed his bag and hat and water bottle on the wall and took a photograph of them with the mountains in the distance. The last time he’d done this Simon had been with him and he had a shot of him leaning forwards and laughing, halfway through saying something. That’d been two years ago. One thing a scholar of the sonnet should know is that things change suddenly and then end.
Ralph sat on the wall and felt the breeze feather over his face. He imagined Stella clumping towards him, with her wheeled suitcase and ridiculous shoes and tattoo, to hug him and ask him how he was. Tomorrow, they’d settle into the flat together, reading, bitching about their colleagues, walking, swimming, touring bars in the early evening before settling down to eat somewhere. He’d choose the balconied restaurant where they’d have tuna salad with olives or gazpacho. Then freshly caught merluza and white wine. Then coffee and crema catalana and sweet Spanish brandy. She’d skip out between courses for a smoke and he’d warn her about cancer and she’d flick her finger against her nose, laughing, glad he was alive to goad her. Tomorrow, he’d watch her freckled body spread out on the stones of the beach, without desire but with a kind of amazement. He’d realise that his heart was good, that he was healed of all but the deepest pain and unworthiness. He’d realise that in their own unachievable way that they loved each other – without passion, without longing, but with a kind of recognition.
The future was uncertain again and in a good way. It was a premonition, like poetry coming on, its aura. The way things had to begin again, had to exist before they could mean anything. Ralph stood up and turned to leave. He took up the bag and put on his damp hat, flexing his leg where the scar was tight again, reminding him. Then he set off, filling his lungs with dry air, crossing the metalled road, following the dusty track down through rock and scrub. It would take him through the valley to the sea. La Vall de Santa Creu. There were stands of broom in flower and the scent of jasmine. He found some ripe blackberries and picked them. They were tart and sweet at the same time, their seeds sticking in his teeth. Ralph took a swig of water and swallowed. It had the brackish taste of soil and rock. He never thought he would die.
PIANOFORTE
You get used to words. You have to. But they have meanings you don’t always think about. Like pianoforte, meaning soft and loud. It’s obvious, really, when you look. Then, photography, meaning drawing with light. Light, of all things. The reason we see, or don’t. People find what they’re looking for, what they expect to see. That’s obvious when you develop their films.
That’s how I started out after the war above our chemist’s shop in Deansgate. People brought in roll film from their box cameras and I printed out what they’d seen – not what they thought they’d seen, but all the out of focus stuff, all the nonsense and clutter, the unflattering inbetween expressions, the mess that gets in the way of the essence. Photographs have to be composed to be any good. So do people for that matter. I’ve still got all my old cameras and light meters lined up in a glass case in the living room: that first Kodak, the Rolleiflex, the Leica I never stopped using, the big Mamiya twin-lens I kept for studio work.
Most of the bombing in Manchester was in 1940, two days before Christmas. People talk about 1939, the phoney war, that long summer. I remember all that, but it’s not what sticks somehow. What I remember is the artificial Christmas tree we’d put up in the front parlour, strands of tinsel trembling in the draught from the front door and the little heap of presents tied up with string and blobs of sealing wax. Then hearing the sirens, pulling the blackout curtains and huddling under the kitchen table with our mother, waiting for the sound of aero engines. When the first bombs fell close by she grabbed my arm. Jesus, sweet Jesus, they’re killing us! And they were. Killing us, killing the city I’d grown up in. It was all I knew and now it was shaking under us as the bombs fell. I could feel it under my hands as if an earth tremor was pulling Manchester apart.
I can’t remember the weather, and there’s no snow on the pictures. Judging by people’s clothing – overcoats, gloves, hats, scarves – it was pretty cold. We heard they’d gone for the Avro factory in Chadderton and missed it, but they flattened Piccadilly, Corporation Street and the market. The cathedral took a hit and they brought in West Indian troops to clear the mess. That was the first time I’d seen black people, apart from in films.
I’d got my first decent camera – a folding Kodak Junior 6 – and was out photographing it all. You got some funny looks, but most people thought I worked for the Evening News. I was learning to use depth of field, to get what I wanted into focus – reading off the distance scale and f-stops – and blurring the rest. Or stopping down the lens and putting everything in the clear, with maybe just the foreground hazy. People got killed, I know, and it was a tragedy to see the old building and marketplace in ruins, but it looked amazing. It looked spectacular. Rubble, hosepipes, burst water mains, people staring upwards at the broken buildings or the sky, shock all over their faces.
There was a smell of plaster and the stink from a broken sewer, the strange feeling of looking into shattered houses with torn wallpaper and unmade beds in their upstairs rooms. It was all horribly intimate, as if the secrets of the city
– all the things that should happen behind closed doors, under slate roofs and scarves of chimney smoke – were being exposed by the enemy. Our enemy. I remember a Yorkshire terrier stranded in a shattered gable-end and a fireman going up for it and the crowd cheering. That made the news. It was extraordinary. Another one of those words. It was even more extraordinary to make contact prints in my little curtained-off darkroom in the kitchen, working under a red lamp to see images rising through the chemicals in the developing tray. The blackout made that easy, of course. Ghostly outlines, at first, then real, sharp images. It was just chemistry, I know, but the nearest thing to magic, the way I watched Noel appear in black and white then lie down.
I’d set up a little studio in the front room at home with my camera and a tripod. I had some business cards printed: Lewis Bannerman, Photographer. Then I hiked around all the pubs and guesthouses. A lot of the negro troops came by to have their photographs taken to send home. They were just like everyone else, though the exposures were more difficult. Polite, softly spoken, so that I couldn’t always tell what they were saying. Sometimes their English was beautiful, like something being read out of a book. Then posing for the camera, tucking in their stomachs, putting on a goofy smile. That’s when I realised that it wasn’t just me and Noel who were alike. We were all alike. More alike than we could ever be different. That’s when I learned to hate the only thing I’ve ever hated. Narrow-mindedness. Contempt for skin colour, language or customs different from our own. Mother loved having the West Indians and Canadians and Americans in the house, especially if they were in uniform, and she’d be running around making cups of tea, making a fuss of them. She was animated and girlish then, her frizzy hair flying out of control, her cheeks flushed with embarrassment and excitement. She had no idea that I was trying to run a business, though that kind of thing can be good for business. The personal touch. You never see that now with the big companies and corporations. Not unless you’re filthy rich.
