He did seem sort of fine now that he was in bed again. Rousing an emergency nurse might be worse than just sleeping. Or so I told myself.
In the clinic the following morning, we learned that an internal infection had set in. The nurse chided. A move into the multi-storey University College Hospital would follow imminently – or, rather, when a bed came free in the haematology ward with its sealed quarters. That only happened in the evening. With John in a wheelchair we were led along a subterranean passage through a block and a half of London streets. As the corridor twisted and turned, I wondered whether we were skirting the morgue where my father had lain.
Just like a thriller, I tried to joke.
Only as I write this does the body count my attempted joke may have conjured up for him come to me.
I waited until he was settled and asleep, then went to that now foreign place called home.
The next day was a Sunday. I drove to the hospital: it made it easier to bring food and fresh books. So focused was I on John getting better that I conveyed a week’s worth. When I got to his room, he was asleep. Staff were busy elsewhere. There was no one of whom I could ask questions.
I AM SITTING on a plastic chair beside his bed. We are relatively high up, but the windows are murky and the light that comes in is grey and blemished. He is dozing, it seems peacefully. His lips are parched, and when he opens his eyes, I ask him if he’d like some water or some of the ice cream I’ve brought for him, thinking it might go down well. I’ve been inspired by the large number of lollies he was forced to eat while the harvested stem cells were introduced back into his blood with a drip.
He’s weak and I feed him – just a few mouthfuls. He dozes off again, and sometime in that doze, he murmurs, ‘I’m glad you’re here.’
I stroke his hand. Tears come to my eyes. In all these gruelling weeks he has never before said that to me.
A little later he wakes again. This time he is more troubled. When the nurse comes to check on him, he grunts and groans. She has nothing to say to my questions, so I leave her to him, making my way through the two sets of doors that barricade the room from invisible killers. I stretch my legs. I realize that the dark is setting in. I also realize I haven’t brought my specs with me and need them to drive in the dark. When I’m back with John, I explain I have to make a dash home. He tells me to take his pyjamas with me and wash them.
In the toilet the reek is overwhelming. I see a cascade of diarrhoea – in its midst sodden pyjama bottoms.
I come out and tell him there’s no point. I’ll bring fresh ones.
‘No, take them,’ he says. His eyes are two angry slits. ‘Take them.’ He raises his voice.
I know he loves these pyjamas above any others. They’re ancient, but his favourites.
I go back into the toilet, not allowing myself to breathe, and realize I simply can’t lift this squelch of body and other materials. I feel defiled. I will dissolve, liquefy into the stench. My body is turning to waste, mirroring his, yet I’m being called upon to be mother to this ageing toddler.
‘That’s all you’re good for,’ I hear him shouting. ‘Cleaning shit.’
That was the last sentence he uttered to me. It hit me with the force of a body blow and mired me. Engulfed.
IF I RECOUNT such febrile unpleasantness, ordinary enough, it’s because his words played themselves over and over in my ears and in my nose, night and day, after he died. When I was making coffee in the early hours of the morning, they clanged through my mind and filled the air. I would go to bed and they were there, waiting for me, with their attendant smell.
I was abased, worthless. A punished infant. Maybe it was the vertiginous throwback to helpless infancy that gave the words such power.
They set up one of the first refrains of my mourning state, punctuating my life for months of that year. Even when they had lost their stench, they seemed an ultimate judgement. The last words of the dying can be a terrible thing.
It’s what he really thought of me, my inner voices say over and over. That was his final estimate. After all those thirty-two years together, that was what I was good for. Cleaning shit.
Of course I also realized that the fever was making him delirious. Of course I knew that a few hours before he had expressed a kindness, though I had now begun to doubt he had recognized the addressee of those words. Of course I knew he wasn’t himself. But the cutting edge of the putdown, combined with the assault on the senses, reduced me to a cleaner of everyday detritus. The words seemed to have carved themselves into my flesh. Instead of Hester Prynne’s A for adultery in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, I wore an imaginary S.
Over the course of the next months, this judgement grew into the bottom line of our partnership and our afterthought of a marriage. In the scales of mourning, it weighed more heavily than our long years as lovers, partners, co-authors, intellectual sparring mates, devoted parents, friends. I was only good for cleaning shit.
As every novelist and reader knows, the end of a story colours everything that came before. I was shit-coloured.
Despite their far more evident delirium, I had half believed my father’s last words to me about my mother, or at least the underlying truth of his fantasy. I had been pleased that he had mistaken me for a sister and taken me into his confidence. I hadn’t considered for a moment what effect kindred words poured out to my mother might have had on her. Now I thought of her and her tearless state, her pleading voice as she addressed my father’s dead body. Perhaps she, too, wanted some sign that their long lives together – in their case lived through the scarring turbulence of war as well as mundane peace – had had some value.
John’s words took on the onus of his revenge on me for somehow staying alive, outliving him. They were my punishment, the sign of my guilt. They would toll in my ears every time anyone talked of him. They left me barely in control.
If a friend or an acquaintance sang his praises, spoke of his vast knowledge, his wit, his gentleness and kindness, I would instantly hear his last words and feel abased. I would want to fight back, fight out of this masochism and shout, ‘Yes, kind to everyone, except to me!’ I would have to struggle to thank friends and acquaintances offering warm condolences without somehow uttering a comment that put me in the frame as well, or drew attention to the fact that I might be valuable, too, that I was implicated in the good in his life.
I put a silencing lock on my lips, which were always in danger of betraying me. Never in front of the children, I repeated to myself, over and over, like a mantra. Honour, respect, admire, not this sullying narrative and the madness of my response.
But language was out of my control. I was out of control. It was impossible to do more than offer a smiling – or was it grimacing? – acknowledgement to reminiscences and consoling thoughts. Much as I might want to. Much as I appreciated the words and letters of friends and the person they almost conjured up, I couldn’t trust my own lips – myself. The self I thought I knew, or at least had more than a passing acquaintance with, had gone missing.
Trapped in too many contradictions, I was in a perpetual rage in those first weeks and months, perhaps year. Rage – that ancient cornerstone of madness, so much one of its constitutive parts that in American English ‘mad’ is a cognate of ‘angry’.
I couldn’t read, certainly not fiction. Characters’ names and doings would vanish as soon as my eyes had got to the end of a page, sometimes the end of a sentence. If I started a novel I wanted or needed to read, I could never get to the end. I just didn’t want endings. The pile of novels by the bedside spilled over on to his side of the bed.