the Helper arrives to take you up to X-rays. He’s hyper-friendly like he knows you’re dying and he’s trying to fill your last moments with warmth and bonhomie. He rattles and prattles all the way to the lift which whines in a high-pitched, almost human, voice until you arrive with a clunk. Frank pushes you through transparent plastic swing doors and he’s so damn jaunty you’d swear he was rolling you into a bar for a beer. His big head bobs and jerks and guffaws and suddenly he’s gone.
You are abandoned in a tiny cubicle near the swing doors. Except for the cosmic hum of the universe, there is no sign of anything anywhere.
You are floating in a pool of pain.
Your heart beats in your head.
Where’s Wendy? Why didn’t she insist on staying with you? You are going to die alone because she’s too polite.
You drift.
You are the drifting.
A huge pale green machine points its blunt nose at you. It hums and tuts and grunts and then nothing. You lie alone until Frank reappears and trundles you back into the lift, through the maze of corridors and out into a different room.
A fresh-faced young woman in a nurse’s uniform says, ‘Would you like to sit up?’
Without waiting for an answer, she winds the bed up and you can see a nurses’ station and other beds and a teenage girl with a drip in her arm sitting cross-legged on a bed, poised over a bucket.
Wendy’s compact figure walks towards you. Your mate Dazza once described her (a little too lasciviously for your liking) as ‘a tidy ship’. Her symmetrical face is rescued from generic prettiness by the startling blue of her eyes and an overly full lower lip that curves to reveal a crooked bottom tooth when she smiles, which she does now. It’s one of those appealing faces that people think they know. Quite often she is accosted by beaming strangers who have mistaken her for a long-lost friend or relative. At the last minute, of course, they realise their error and babble an embarrassed explanation. Wendy, being Wendy, always defuses the situation with her gracious good humour.
Your wife reaches the bed and takes your hand. She looks like she’s been through an ordeal but there’s a lightness about her that makes you feel enormously relieved.
Enormously relieved. Like a million fucking bucks actually.
The Indian doctor calls you miracle man and tells you there are no broken bones; you’ve fractured some teeth and they have to assess the extent of any internal bleeding blah blah blah and you’re looking at Wendy knowing you’re going to live and you’re going to walk and you’re floating on happiness and you start to vomit but nothing comes up.
The dry retching is probably caused by nausea which is probably caused by the pain, your Indian goddess declares in an I-told-you-so tone. Her pager beeps her off to more urgent matters and she orders the fresh-faced nurse to give you some painkillers and a shot of Somethingerol.
You’re a big baby when it comes to needles so you feel quite relieved there’s already a shunt in your arm. Wendy takes your hand as Fresh Face inserts a needle into the shunt with crisp, slightly theatrical efficiency. She smiles at you but she doesn’t see you; she sees the Patient. You realise you’re performing in a pageant, the star of which is the Fresh Faced Nurse. You’re a bit player, written in to demonstrate what a wonderful carer she is.
You avert your eyes from the needle and notice your left thigh is huge, swollen to twice its normal size.
‘It’s a haematoma,’ explains Fresh Face like she invented the word. ‘Your thigh muscle is filling with blood.’
You feel woozy.
‘There,’ she says, as an iciness crawls up the veins in your arm, ‘All better!’
But it’s not all better at all, at all.
Beads of cold sweat form on your forehead and your mouth dries up. You ask Wendy to get the children; you want to see them. Wendy protests. She doesn’t want to frighten them.
Declan is seventeen and in his final year at Mount Karver. He is not a steady student but thanks to his mother’s vigilance and his own gift for charming everyone he meets, he’s almost over the finish line. Rosie is living in fourteen-year-old hell, teetering on the edge of an eating disorder and permanently plugged into the vicious lyrics of dead rappers. She hates her parents, school and life, in that order.
You know Wendy is in shock and you know her first instinct is to protect the children but you want to shout, ‘For fuck’s sake! I just want to see my fucking children before I die!’ But you don’t need to say anything because Wendy knows what you are thinking and takes out her snazzy red phone.
‘You can’t use that in here!’ announces Fresh Face like Wendy’s trying to detonate a bomb.
Wendy squeezes your hand and scuttles through the blue swing doors. As you watch her go you remember you’re in the same hospital where your father died almost thirty years ago.
You’re twelve years old, kneeling in the hospital car park with your big sisters, pumping out Hail Marys, willing Holy Mary to save your dad. He didn’t come to Mass this morning because he was a bit wheezy with the asthma. Mum stayed home to keep an eye on him. Tess, who has just got her licence, drove you and Ingrid to St Agathas.
As Mass is finishing, an altar boy hands a note to Father Bourke. He scans it and asks in his thick Irish brogue that we pray for Bill O’Dell who is critically ill and being taken to hospital. Everyone looks and Ingrid shepherds you outside through a kind of blur. As you get into the car, an ambulance comes wailing past and Tess says, ‘That’s Dad.’
All that morning and into the afternoon you kneel in the hospital car park as various relatives join your vigil. Uncle Bryan arrives. He’s your godfather, not a real uncle, but he’s a policeman and always knows what to do. He tells you to keep praying. You pray—harder than you’ve ever prayed for anything—until the doctor appears, looking tired like they do on television, with his tie loosened around his neck. He doesn’t say anything.
You start to cry and Tess says, ‘Don’t cry.’
Ingrid says, ‘Let him cry,’ and she folds herself over you and cries too.
You can feel blood leaking out through your organs into the cavities of your body. You try to catch Fresh Face’s attention but you’re not enough of a person anymore. The pain has frayed your edges until you’re barely there. Even when she bustles by and adjusts the flow of the drip, you’re unable to reach beyond the fuzziness.
You hear a voice say, ‘I feel funny,’ and realise it’s you.
Fresh Face looks at you and says, ‘What kind of funny?’
And now you’re in all different places talking to all different people—Wendy, Declan, Rosie, Tess, Dad, Mum, God—having seven separate simultaneous conversations. It’s like watching seven different movies again, only they’re getting faster and shorter,
becoming fragments
of sentences
words
faces
mouth
eyes
I.
Most stories begin long before the point at which we choose to start telling them. You could have begun this story with…
I was born on the green vinyl seat of a two-tone Valiant;
or
I had never heard her utter a single syllable but when Wendy Weinstein spoke, she instantly sounded like home;
or
Wendy and I decided we were too young to have