Walking the Dog

by Bernard Maclaverty

  ‘Chemotherapy. They say it’s worse.’

  ‘But they wouldn’t put you through all that if they thought . . . if they didn’t think you had an . . . excellent chance.’

  ‘Did she take him? To Lourdes?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He died the week he came back. We were just kids – didn’t even know he was ill.’

  ‘Fuck it – pour me some orange juice. In that glass.’ There was a carton on the grey metal locker and Ben stood and began to pour out of the torn spout of the cardboard. ‘Stop – go easy. Just enough to colour it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The whiskey.’

  ‘Are you sure? Paddy, I’d hate to be the one . . .’

  ‘I’ll do it myself then.’

  ‘Stay where you are.’ Ben crouched and took the half bottle out of the wash-bag. There was a series of small metallic snaps as he broke the screw-top, then the hollow rhythmic clunking as he poured whiskey into the tumbler of orange juice.

  ‘Say when.’ Ben kept his body between the tumbler and the door. He stopped pouring. Paddy said,

  ‘When.’

  He put the bottle back in the wash-bag and handed the glass to Paddy. Paddy sniffed at it.

  ‘Terrible fucking smell – orange juice.’ He raised the glass to his mouth, quickly tipped it back and swallowed half its contents. Then the remainder. He lay for a moment with his eyes closed. ‘Oh that’s good. What about yourself?’

  ‘No, it’s too early for me. Thanks all the same.’

  ‘That’s how it all started. Difficulty swallowing. It went on for a couple of months – and then it got so bad I went to Doctor Fuckin Jimmy. And now I’m here.’

  ‘Doctor Fuckin Jimmy.’ Ben shook his head, stood up and sniffed at the air. ‘Maybe I’d better open that window for a bit.’

  ‘Jesus, you’ll have it as cold as the caravan in here.’

  ‘It’s the smell – if the nurse comes in.’ The lower section of the window hinged in at the bottom. The wind gusted up into his face when he opened it. it didn’t stop us having some good nights.’

  ‘Plenty of internal central heating. Days in the Seaview, nights in the caravan.’

  ‘Good times, Paddy.’

  ‘Laughing to piss point.’

  ‘Mine’s a whiskey,’ said Ben, imitating Paddy’s voice, ‘and I’ll leave the measure up to yourself. And when it came to your round, you oul bastard – What kind of beer can I buy you a half pint of?’

  ‘That’s a lie.’ They laughed and nodded.

  ‘Do you still live in it?’

  ‘The caravan? Yeah. If it hasn’t blown away. It should be tied down a day like that. But I can’t be bothered any more.’

  ‘Come on Paddy . . .’

  ‘The doctors were saying – when I get out the District will have to house me. They say they’ll not release me until I get a place to recover in.’

  ‘You see – they expect you to get better.’ Paddy nodded but he didn’t seem sure. He said,

  ‘How’s the wife and weans?’

  ‘Fine – everybody’s fine.’ Ben looked at the racing grey sky and then down at the leafless trees in the grounds.

  ‘I liked the kid who thought wind was made by the trees waving.’ Ben looked round and Paddy was lying back on his pillows with his eyes clenched shut. ‘Maybe I’d better go,’ he said. ‘Is there anything you want?’

  ‘Yeah – you could run the cutter for me again. In fact, if you don’t I’ll break your legs for you.’

  ‘Okay – okay. But it’ll be Friday before I can come.’

  ‘And close that fucking window.’

  Ben snapped the wood frame back and snibbed it.

  ‘The windows must be like that to stop you jumping out. When it all gets too much.’ Just then Mrs MacDonald tapped the glass of the door with a fingernail. ‘I’m overstaying my welcome here.’

  ‘Fuck her. I remember seeing it written up in big six-foot letters once – on a wall. Do what you’re told – REBEL.’

  ‘So you keep telling me.’

  ‘She’s nothing but a saved oul bitch,’ said Paddy. ‘Before you go I want you to do something for me.’

  ‘Yeah sure.’

  It seemed important and he leaned forward to listen attentively. He thought of wills, of funeral arrangements, of last wishes.

  ‘See the wardrobe – there’s a dead man in my dressing-gown pocket. Dispose of it.’

  On the way out in the main corridor he smelled the sweet intense perfume again. It was so strong it almost caught the back of his throat like cigarette smoke. Mrs MacDonald was now sitting at her desk in the light of an anglepoise. He stopped and waited for her to pause in her writing.

  ‘Yes?’ Mrs MacDonald looked up from her work and Ben felt he had to point vaguely in the direction he’d come from.

  ‘I’ve just been visiting Paddy Quinn.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And I wanted to give you my number – just in case. He hasn’t anybody. Here, that is.’ She wrote down Ben’s particulars.

  ‘You’re a friend of his?’

  ‘Yes – we’ve known each other for about ten years now. We were neighbours – sort of.’

  ‘In Tynagh?’

  ‘Yes – when I was teaching at the High School there.’

  ‘Lucky you. What a beautiful place. It’s my favourite seaside town.’

  ‘How do you know it?’

  ‘Mr MacDonald and I drive through it most years. On our way somewhere.’ Ben nodded but decided to say nothing. He cleared his throat.

  ‘How is he? I mean I know he’s weak but . . . how is he?’

  ‘Mr Milne – sorry, the surgeon – is convinced that he caught it in time. They are all quite hopeful.’

  ‘That is good news.’

  ‘But he’s almost sixty – and hasn’t treated himself as well as some.’

  ‘Thank you – thank you anyway for all you are doing.’

  Then he saw the source of the perfume – behind Mrs MacDonald’s desk – two bowls of hyacinths. Big bulbs sitting proud of the compost, flowering pink and blue and pervading the wards and corridor with their scent. It was a smell he hated because he associated it with childhood, with the death of his own father. A hospital in winter brightening itself with bowls of blue and pink hyacinths – a kind of hypocrisy, the stink of them everywhere. His mother crying, telling them all to be brave.

  It felt like the first day of summer – warm with the sun shining out of a cloudless sky and the trees in the hospital grounds in full leaf.

  When Ben went into the ward it was empty. Mrs MacDonald said with a repressed sigh that Paddy was probably in the smoking-room. Ben walked to the far end of the corridor and looked through the small window of the door. There were four or five men inside. He went in.

  ‘How’re ya,’ he said. Paddy was in his wheelchair sucking his pipe.

  ‘On fortune’s cap I am not the very button.’ They laughed. After the treatment the hair on the right-hand side of his face had fallen out and gave his beard a lop-sided look. He was fully dressed in trousers and jacket and sat apart, looking out the window. The others were in a group, smoking cigarettes. ‘Have you put on some weight?’

  ‘According to the scales,’ said Paddy. The room was bluish with smoke and smelled stale. There was a green metal waste bin quarter filled with cigarette butts. ‘And how are you?’

  ‘Great – the first week of the holidays. Like the first couple of hours on a Friday night.’

  ‘You can hardly see out this fucking window for nicotine. Look at it.’ The glass was yellowish, opaque. ‘It hasn’t been cleaned for months. Nobody ever sweeps the floor in here. The message is, if you smoke in this hospital we’re gonna make you feel like shit because we’re going to treat you like shit.’ He knocked his pipe out into the bucket and began to roll some tobacco between his hands. Ben sat down. The white-painted window sill had tan scorch lines where cigarettes had been
left to burn.

  ‘Take it easy – maybe in a . . . a ward of this nature they have a point.’

  ‘Fuck off, Ben. People get hooked on things.’ He tamped the tobacco into the bowl of his pipe and began lighting it with a gas lighter. ‘Addiction is a strange bastard. It creates a need where no need existed. And satisfying it creates a pleasure where no pleasure existed.’

  Ben looked at the cigarette smokers. At least two of them looked like winos, with dark-red abused faces. They wore hospital dressing-gowns over pyjamas and had open hospital sandals. Ben stared down at their feet. They were black like hide with pieces of cotton wool separating the toes. Their toes looked dried, encrusted and brittle. His eyes flinched away.

  ‘Let’s go outside. I’ll take you for a spin in the wheelchair.’

  ‘Did you run the cutter?’ Ben nodded and indicated his pocket. ‘Let’s stash it in my room first. And I’ll get you the money.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s a gift – this time.’ Ben wheeled him along the corridor. Mrs MacDonald was on the desk and she spoke to Ben as they passed.

  ‘He’s fair putting on the pounds,’ she said. Ben felt obliged to stop the wheelchair. He nodded.

  ‘It’ll be food – you must be giving him food.’

  Paddy sat staring ahead.

  ‘Why don’t you go out – that lovely day. Get a breath of fresh air.’

  ‘It’s not fresh air I want,’ said Paddy, ‘but the good fug of a pub somewhere.’

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ said Mrs MacDonald and Ben and she laughed. Paddy’s knuckles were white on the armrests of his chair.

  Ben slipped him the half bottle and Paddy stood up and went into the toilet with it. He tried to vary the places he stored it. Ben stood waiting, staring out the ward window. Mrs MacDonald passed the door with a slip of paper in her hand. She smiled and stopped. She put on a whispering voice.

  ‘I’m serious about that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The pub business. It would be terrible to undo all the good work. I’m holding you responible.’ She grinned and walked away in her flat shoes, flicking at her piece of paper with her finger.

  When Paddy came out of the toilet Ben smelled the whiskey off his breath as he got back into wheelchair.

  ‘How much weight have you put on?’

  ‘A couple of pounds but I’m still lighter than when I came in. It’s that fucking chemotherapy-therapy that goes for you. And the no drink laws. They stop you drinking and then ask you to put on weight – for fucksake. Drink’s full of calories.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about half bottles – the shape of them. There’s something Calvinist about them. They’re made flat like that for the pocket. No bulge, no evidence. A design to fit the Scots and the Irish psyche.’

  ‘Shut up and drive.’

  There were many patients outside in the hospital grounds, sitting on benches in pyjamas and dressing-gowns tilting their faces up to the sun, or being wheeled about. A couple of female nurses in white uniforms lay on the grass. There was a blackbird over by the railway cutting singing constantly.

  ‘It even feels like summer,’ said Ben. They stopped at an empty bench beside a laburnum tree and Paddy got out of the chair onto the bench. He sat filling his pipe, staring at the cascades of yellow blossom.

  ‘This bastard’s poisonous. You’ve no regard for my health at all.’

  ‘What was wrong with those guys’ feet – in the smoking room?’

  ‘Gangrene – smoking makes your legs drop off.’

  ‘What?’ They both laughed. ‘That’s crap. Why doesn’t it happen to you?’

  ‘I guess I’m just lucky. Naw – it happens mostly to cigarette smokers. It’s called . . . some big fuckin name. It stops the circulation to your feet. They go black and drop off.’ ‘And those guys are still up there smoking?’

  ‘You’ve never smoked Ben, so shut your mouth.’ He lit his pipe with the gas lighter and exaggerated every gesture and sigh of satisfaction. ‘It gives a selected few of us a little pleasure as we funnel our way down the black hole to oblivion. Speaking of which . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why don’t we go for a drink?’

  ‘Naw –’

  ‘At the clinic where they used to dry me out they taught me to drink. They said . . .’

  ‘Never drink on your own.’

  ‘And now you are here. It can’t be too far to the nearest pub, for fucksake. Isn’t there one just at the gate?’

  ‘Naw –’

  ‘What the fuck’s wrong. Are you on the wagon or something?’

  ‘No – it’s inadvisable. It’s very pleasant here.’ A train rattled through the cutting but they could not see it. The blackbird changed trees and began singing from the opposite side of the tracks. ‘So – any word of a house yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or any word of them letting you home?’

  ‘No.’ His pipe wasn’t going well and he knocked it against the spokes of the wheelchair. ‘Fuck it.’ He sucked and blew but couldn’t free the blockage.

  ‘There’s no need to go into a huff, Quinn.’

  ‘The first time in twelve fuckin weeks that I get a chance to have a drink without those nurses breathing down my neck – and you won’t take me.’

  ‘That’s right.’ There was an ornamental flower-bed with bushes and grasses screening them from the front of the hospital.

  ‘Pull me a bit of that stuff,’ said Paddy pointing to stalks of wheat-like grass. Ben glanced in the direction of the hospital then did what he’d been asked. Paddy pulled his pipe apart and pushed the stalk through the plastic mouthpiece. When it was cleared he blew through it and reassembled the pipe. He threw the grass stalk on the ground at his feet. It was black with tar.

  ‘WHY will you not take me?’

  ‘Because you’re not allowed. The doctors do not allow you.’

  ‘What doctors have you been talking to, for fucksake?’ He turned away from Ben in irritation and looked towards the hospital gate. For a moment Ben thought the old man might attempt to make it on his own.

  ‘They serve coffee on the ground floor. We could go over there.’

  ‘What doctor said I wasn’t allowed to go to the pub?’

  ‘Look, Paddy – do you want to get better or not?’

  ‘That is not what we are talking about – we are talking about going for a fucking pint and maybe a chaser in a nice atmosphere with maybe a barmaid.’

  ‘Paddy – catch yourself on. Do you not think I know you of old? Nights spent in the terrible town of Tynagh. Once you get into a pub there’s no way of getting you out.’

  ‘You’re chicken. A coward. A man who can’t break the rules no matter who lays them down.’

  Ben stood up and ushered Paddy back into the wheelchair.

  ‘Come on. I’ll buy you a coffee.

  Paddy got unsteadily to his feet and almost fell into the chair. He was shaking his head in disbelief.

  Ben got the coffees in wobbly plastic containers and brought them down to Paddy by the window. Outside was a small lawn with more off-duty nurses, both male and female, sprawled on it.

  ‘Aw fuck,’ said Paddy, staring out. ‘Lift your knees a bit more, darling.’

  ‘Stop it. Would you like a biscuit or anything?’

  ‘No.’

  The formica table-top was covered in brown sugar spilled from a half-used paper sachet. The plastic container was too hot for Ben’s fingers and he left it to cool. A baby was crying somewhere and two children were running up and down between the tables chasing each other. A mother stood and called them to order. Paddy stared out the window, his hands joined across his midriff. Ben began wiping the spilled sugar into a neat pile with a paper napkin.

  ‘I sometimes do what they told you not to,’ he said.

  ‘What? Who?’

  ‘The drying-out clinic. I drink on my own. At night.’

  ‘Thank God you fucking drink sometimes.’

&nbs
p; ‘When everybody’s gone to bed.’

  ‘You mean your wife.’

  ‘I like to relax with a dram.’ ’

  ‘It’ll not do you a button of harm. There are worse things,’ said Paddy. The nurses on the lawn got up simultaneously and moved back into the hospital. Paddy looked up at Ben. ‘I believe you’re the undercow of that wife of yours.’

  ‘Nonsense, Paddy.’

  ‘Do you drink more or less when she’s there?’

  ‘Probably less. But I only have one or two.’

  ‘Or three? Or more? When you’re drinking you can only count to three.’

  Ben smiled.

  ‘Sometimes it’s frightening to see the level on the bottle the next day.’

  ‘You’re not too bad then – if there’s any left in the bottle. But it’ll get worse – you know that. You’re no fool, Ben.’

  ‘Thanks for the advice, Holy Father.’

  ‘I want you to remember this – you can only give advice to fools.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘If you feel the need to give someone advice you’re assuming that they are a fool.’

  ‘That is advice.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What you’re giving now – to me.’

  ‘It’s not advice. We’re having a fucking conversation.’

  Paddy pulled out his pipe and lighter. He pressed the plug of tobacco deeper into the bowl and aimed the flame at it. Ben fanned his hand in front of his face to keep the smoke at bay.

  ‘Problem drinking,’ he said, ‘is a thing that builds up gradually.’

  ‘Problem drinking? What are you talking about problem drinking for?’ Paddy laughed out loud. ‘Drinking’s the solution, for fucksake.’

  ‘Paddy, you’re right beneath a No Smoking sign.’

  ‘Fuck it. People like the smell of a pipe.’

  ‘In a hospital?’

  ‘Especially in a hospital.’

  Ben finished his coffee and made movements to stand up. ‘Look I’ll not be able to make it three times a week from now on. I have stuff for summer school. I’ll come Tuesdays and Saturdays, if that’s okay with you.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. It’s good of you to come at all.’

  ‘Naw –. It’s good to hear your crack again.’