Inch Levels

by Neil Hegarty

  ‘Bad taste, if you ask me.’ Their mother had contributed the digital clock. Now, Margaret looked again at it, tilted her head to the right, pursed her lips, considered.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Better than one of those egg timer things, what are they called? You know, the sands of time. Imagine if they had one of those, instead, sitting on the window sill, looking at you.’ She too smoothed the bedspread. ‘You’d be entitled then, to talk about bad taste.’

  Patrick closed his eyes. Well, his family had a good line in mordancy, after all. It was their natural terrain.

  ‘I think you can probably go now,’ he said after another few minutes. ‘I’m settled and besides, I should try and sleep. I mean, if sleep is even possible in a place like this.’

  Margaret said, ‘Really?’ She looked around. She had been there all of ten minutes. Outside, gulls were wheeling and crying; they had been blown inland in the stiffening wind. A visiting family clipped and squeaked along the corridor outside. A child’s voice rose, clear and questioning, above the murmuring background noise. He watched Margaret listen, watched her shoulders stiffen and rise a little inside her sensible cardigan.

  ‘Really, yes.’ Now he closed his eyes. ‘I know you’d like to get up a game of Scrabble among the patients, and that’s very kind of you. But you know, this is a hospital; and besides, Robert’ll be expecting you.’

  Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me: well, and how many times had he proved that one wrong, over the last few years. He watched her flinch, as though struck, watched her retreat.

  And it paid her back for the egg timer, too.

  Margaret paused at the door.

  ‘Ma will hardly come in tonight, will she? Too late now, probably.’

  ‘Let’s hope it’s too late.’

  As Margaret opened the door, he said, ‘Thank you for the flowers.’

  She paused. ‘I should’ve snipped off the pollen heads,’ she said. ‘We don’t want them staining.’

  She left, and he waited a few minutes and then pressed the bell. A nurse appeared.

  ‘Will you take those flowers away, please? Give them to someone else?’

  ‘Someone else?’ the nurse said, frowning.

  ‘Not fond of lilies.’ He gestured with a fingertip at the vase. ‘Please. Let someone else enjoy them.’

  The nurse pursed her lips, bore away the glass vase, the lurid flowers.

  That had been then. And now, a day or two or three later (for time passed strangely in this place), there was the latest unwelcome visitor. There was Robert himself, all long arms and legs in the armchair.

  ‘No Margaret today?’

  ‘Couldn’t come,’ Robert said. ‘So I said I’d pop in instead.’ He was tall, lean; his cheekbones stood out in a gaunt face.

  They might have been brothers, the two of them. They might both have been sick.

  Patrick looked at those cheekbones, looked at the shadows under the eyes and the skin stretched tight over his brother-in-law’s skull. Thinner than ever, now. He thought: which one of us has the cancer? If I wasn’t lying here in this bed, you’d hardly know.

  ‘Oh, “pop”, is it? Pop in. Good of you,’ Patrick said.

  After a moment, Robert got up and went to the window, looking out at the view, the broad grounds of the place. The hospital had been built in the 1950s, a hulking block twelve storeys high on the crest of a hill: it faced into every wind that blew, and could be seen twenty miles away. To the west, the city opened up, ridge after ridge, with the Donegal hills a blue backdrop in the furthest distance. A grammar school edged the hospital grounds to the south: Patrick’s old school, where he had been a pupil and where he had for several years taught; for too many years his alma mater. This was an unfortunate juxtaposition, everyone agreed. The hospital mortuary edged into the school grounds. It was a pity to have so much death in close proximity to a mass of schoolboys, besides which, the sound of the school bell, tolling regularly, mournfully in the school’s handsome copper-topped belfry was much too funereal for some nerves to withstand. Very unfortunate; poor planning, to be sure. Nothing much to be done about it now.

  Robert looked out at the view for a while and then said, ‘Nice, isn’t it?’

  Patrick said nothing.

  ‘Very nice.’

  Silence fell. At last, Patrick broke it.

  ‘One positive thing, you know, about my situation.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Robert, still looking out at the hills, the views.

  ‘It concentrates the mind. You think: “well, at least I don’t have to put up with certain things any longer”. You know, tick tock, and all that.’

  There was a little pause.

  ‘Tick tock,’ said Robert. ‘Sure.’

  ‘So we don’t need to go through certain pleasantries, is my point.’

  ‘Sure,’ Robert said again. ‘Meaning –’

  ‘Meaning you don’t need to come again. If I’m going to be knock knock knocking on Heaven’s door, I’d sooner be selective about who sees me off, if you get my drift.’

  It seemed that Robert did. Their mutual disregard, their mutual dislike, had been absolute from the moment they met. No, since before they had met. And it was oddly liberating: both were aware that they could say just about anything to each other; that little was out of bounds – even now.

  Still, Robert felt compelled to make some sort of gimcrack effort. ‘I’d have thought –’

  ‘And I’d have thought,’ Patrick interrupted, his eyes closed, ‘that you’d be content, social niceties not after all being your strong suit.’

  That settled it: Robert was soon bundled into his coat.

  ‘I’ll tell Margaret to drop in tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t.’

  A pause, a turn at the door. A hesitation, Patrick saw, as though his visitor were about to say something else, something unexpected. And then a change of mind: and instead, one last parting shot. ‘What about your mother? She’ll be in soon, I’m sure.’

  Patrick kept his eyes shut tightly. ‘Ma will please herself, as she always has done. Off you go now.’ He kept his eyes closed until the door had opened and then shut with its thin wheeze. Then he closed his eyes very tightly, as though in sudden pain. In the distance, the bell began to toll.

  2

  Patrick lay, stretched on the bed.

  Better, always, to think of the past.

  This was one lesson he had learned in this month of steadily increasing pain. Even with all its darkness, the past was better. It was over and done with. It was better than a present that was threaded with pain, with regret and guilt.

  He remembered a steep, ocean-facing hillside on the northern coast of Ireland.

  Long ago: twenty-five years and more ago. The colours, sights, smells, the wide landscape: all were vivid in his mind. He was clear about what he was doing: this was a time of grace, at least for him. A time when their lives were, or seemed to be, intact.

  This landscape was a palette of greens, changing with height into the deeper green-brown of bracken, purple of heather, hard silver glint of scree-strewn slopes. Sheep roamed on the upper slopes; and a few tethered goats grazed the rough grass. The lower fields were terraced, some of them, moulded onto the contours of the land – and the potatoes were already up on the west-facing slopes, line after neat line: the soil was dry, crumbling, after days of sunshine and steady southerly winds. Here and there arable fields shone with the fresh, luminous green of early summer, with a dense carpet of white clover, with spangled buttercups behind hawthorn hedges that still held a remnant of pale blossom. Red cows grazed; and away down there the land fell into a glen, along the bottom of which a peat-black stream rushed towards the sea. A few yellow whin blossoms still clung to the bushes, throwing out their languorous, incongruously tropical coconut scent.

  These fields ran to the cliff edge: beyond stretched the Atlantic, calm, smooth, unwrinkled. The coconut scent of whin blossom f
aded out there on the edge of the land, to be replaced by a clean smell of salt, carried on the mild wind. A haze gathered on the blue horizon – and islands floated in the haze: a few doubtful, faint, domed shapes in the warming air. To the left and right the coast swung away, all black gnarls of rock and white foaming waves, and a scattering of offshore skerries and islets, their tips stained a little with guano. And there were the gulls that take refuge on such places: there on the wind, with black-streaked heads and black legs; and cormorants and fulmars, wheeling silently in the blue sky, or perched on crag and rock, or sitting peaceably on the surface of the sea itself.

  Yes: this was better. Patrick felt his thin body relaxing a little under the blue coverlet. This was better, this was a comfort.

  And the light. The light was not cool as was customary in such high latitudes, but luminous on this day, radiant, pressing: light welled from the sky and broke from the sea; and started in fine, silver, infinitesimal lines and needles from each individual blade of grass waving and moving in these green fields.

  Up here, up on the unfenced cliff edge, the ground fell quite steeply down to the sea. Here also was an unexpected hint of the tropics, for the long slopes of the hill were not bare rock but instead were dense with heavy vegetation: a dark bush landscape, suggestive of warmer climes; and the sand on the curving beach at the foot of the slope was brilliant white in the sunshine, and the sea shallows brilliant too, in a range of turquoises, azures, peacock blues. Offshore, the sea broke against the skerries, against a reef of black basalt rocks, which formed a natural breakwater; within this sketchy lagoon, the sea swelled softly, lazily.

  Still early in the day: the sun in the sky suggesting eleven o’clock, perhaps; and only a handful of family parties on the beach. And new arrivals to the scene – five small figures walking there in the distance below, picked out against the white sand. A man and two women: and dressed in a way that suggested subtly, in hems and cuts and cardigans, another time. Their car, tucked in the sandy, rough little car park at the end of the beach, made this manifest: a Triumph, perhaps, or something of that sort, in solid, dark green, all curves and outsized headlights.

  And with these adults came a pair of children: a boy, aged five or six, perhaps; a girl a year or two older. They dropped their sandals, they wriggled from clothes, they rushed for the water: the boy made it first, only to be pulled up sharply by – it must be – the frigidity of these northern seas. He waded in more slowly now, the girl behind him, then the boy seemed to take a breath – and went under. And now the girl plunged too, and the two children seemed to vanish for a few seconds. A head popped up, vanished again. Now the man, paddling in the shallows, waded a little further in: more splashing, and the children emerged from the water. Definitively emerged: waving arms, and angry gesticulations; and now a raised voice carried along the beach, floated up the slope, up, up here to the edge of the cliff.

  The two women waiting on the sand watched. They sat and faced the sea, the pair of them, watching the dipping, the plunging, the gesticulations. One of them motionless; the other stretching her legs out into the sun, pushing her heels, her hands into the warm sand.

  A family in early summer up on the northern fringes of Ireland. Dark figures, white sand, black rocks, silver light, green fields, purple heather and blue ocean.

  The starkness of it all, silhouetted against the sea. Impressed on the landscape.

  Impressed on his mind. Patrick woke.

  The nurse – busy with a chart, with a pen – looked up to the head of the bed. ‘Alright there, sweetheart?’

  Patrick nodded his head, a very little.

  ‘A dream. I was dreaming.’

  ‘A nice dream, I hope.’

  He flinched at her hearty tone. ‘Remembering when I was a boy,’ he said. ‘With my sister. A trip to the beach we made.’

  The nurse nodded knowledgeably. This was standard, she knew from her training. The patients tended to go back as the end drew near: to evaluate and shuffle memories, reassessing, considering.

  ‘What beach was it?’ she asked. It was always best to encourage them.

  ‘Kinnagoe,’ he murmured. ‘The summer of –’

  ‘– not all that long ago, then,’ the nurse said.

  ‘– 1960 or so, I suppose it was.’

  ‘Kinnagoe: that’s a nice spot,’ said the nurse and left a pause, as she was trained to do, for him to fill. There was silence. ‘And what happened in the dream?’ she coaxed. ‘Can you remember?’

  He murmured, ‘We were all there. My sister and me, and my parents and Cassie.’

  ‘Cassie? Is that another sister?’

  ‘No. Just someone who lived with us.’

  The nurse waited.

  ‘We were in the water. Diving to touch the sea bed.’ He stopped.

  ‘And –’

  But – nothing now, suddenly: a slight shake of the head and eyes firmly closed; and after a few disappointed moments, she moved towards the door. A difficult patient, they’d already told her: didn’t like to play the game. A squeak of shoes on the rubber floor and the door wheezed: and behind her, in the bed, Patrick opened his eyes again. If it wanted to, it would resume. It was out of his hands.

  Impressed on his mind: that was it. Like a tattoo, he thought: impressed on the skin, on his brain. He remembered that plunge into the freezing Atlantic – as if it was yesterday and not twenty-five, twenty-six years ago. His mind was humming along today: sorting, arranging, wrapping up, discarding, making sense of a life.

  It was true: he had no say in the matter. The clifftop vantage point was a – what? A useful tool? Lying there in his bed, fogged by pain and medication, Patrick was able nevertheless to admire.

  To admire – myself, he thought. This is my mind, he thought, my imagination. This is all my doing. Setting the scene: stretching a canvas. Blank, to begin with, a tabula rasa to begin with – but already peopled, already filled in a little: a background, a few colours tested here and there. This is not bad, he thought. I wish she hadn’t gone, he thought – the nurse, I wish I hadn’t chased her away. I want some tea. I never learn how best to manage these people. I was distracted, my mind running away with itself. With myself. Making stories and shapes inside my head.

  Outside, the bell began to toll in the school: the end of another lesson. The sound cut his head.

  As in the past.

  Until four months ago he had been obliged to listen to it clanging in its belfry just above the classroom, every forty minutes, all day long, day and daily. Only a few years, fewer than ten, really – though like so many of his colleagues, he had spent most of the period willing time forward, too much time calculating how many years remained until retirement. Wishing it would come sooner.

  ‘Be careful,’ he told a visitor, ‘be careful what you wish for.’

  ‘Oh, Patrick, stop,’ the visitor replied. She was a teacher too, a colleague; she tittered uneasily.

  ‘I’m serious,’ he said. His mouth tended to be dry these days – a side effect of the medication, so they’d told him – and he ran his tongue along his bottom teeth. ‘I’m serious: teachers spend too much time at that lark. Look what happened to me.’

  The weight, he meant, that began to fall off his frame, which had been lean to begin with. He was perplexed for a little while and then alarmed and then – and then rapidly other people began to notice; and then a belated visit to the GP, and tests and more tests.

  And then whisked to the hospital – and gradually upwards through the wards, settling at last here on the eighth floor. Now he resembled his brother-in-law: now his skin was stretched taut on his skull, now his cheekbones stood out, now his reflection shocked him. Now he saw this shock echoed in the face of each fresh visitor. Now his wish for an early retirement had come true. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ he said. ‘Don’t I know what I’m talking about?’

  His life shrunk to this one room: this bed, this locker, this corkboard on the wall, festooned with a card or two, t
hose unlined curtains and that shiny, wipe-clean, yellowish paint on the walls.

  That was it – and the grating sound of the bells – the sound that had accompanied him all the way through his teaching years. ‘Well, my comfort is that I won’t have to listen to it for all that much longer. So they tell me.’

  The visitor tittered again, uneasily.

  And in the meantime, he was a fixture.

  ‘A fixture, Mr Jackson,’ they said, cheerily. Presumably a good proportion of their eighth-floor residents didn’t last much beyond a day or two. He also noted that the ‘Mr Jackson’ vanished fairly quickly: soon it was ‘Patrick’ this and ‘Patrick’ that. Or ‘Pat’, the sound of which made him curdle. His name shrinking as he approached the end.

  Pat: noun: a potato-digging farmer or similar.

  Or ‘dear’ or ‘sweetheart’: all of these choice monikers proffered by slips of things five or six or seven years younger than he was.

  And the bells.

  There was, he thought, probably some comfortable idea doing the rounds they were doing him a favour, installing him in a room with a side view into his old school, his old stamping grounds, complete with green copper belfry, grey stone buildings and hipped roofs and smooth green lawns. Do him good, perhaps they said, slapping themselves on their collective backs, he imagined, in true self-congratulatory style. Poor guy, perhaps they said: struck down much too soon – but now he can remember the good times. What a comfort for him.

  Clang, clang.

  He had thought of complaining, raising a stink, demanding a new room – and then in the very next moment waving a feeble hand in the air and tell them not to bother, that everything was just fine. This was always part of his knack: to turn from waspish to self-deprecatory in a moment: the better, of course, to keep people feeling ill at ease, confused. Well, he thought, it worked on my students; and it sometimes worked on the adults too.