A Perfectly Good Man
Patrick Gale
A Perfectly Good Man
For Aidan Hicks
All perfection in this life hath some
imperfection bound up with it; and no
knowledge of ours is without some darkness.
THOMAS À KEMPIS
,
De Imitatione Christi
The reader is asked to remember that what follows is neither journalism nor history but a work of fiction. The novel’s principal settings and church parishes are real ones near my own home but their inhabitants, in particular the priest in their midst, are entirely imaginary. Where such true events as the March for Geevor are included, I have made use of the novelist’s prerogative to embroider on the facts for the low purpose of entertainment.
My text quotes from Dorothy Sayers’s radio play,
The Man Born to be King
, with the permission of the Sayers Estate, and from U.A. Fanthorpe’s poem ‘Atlas’, with kind permission from Dr Rosie Bailey.
PG
Contents
He had the heating on because immobility made him cold. The flat was recently built. Its windows and doors were all double-glazed but there was a keen easterly that had found a chink in one of the seals around the picture window and set up a wail. The whole flat was keening.
He was writing neat drafts of difficult letters to his mother and fiancée. Ex-fiancée. He kept getting the shakes, which spoiled his attempt at neat handwriting, and the unearthly noise was jangling his thoughts as effectively as a crying baby or a whining dog. He tossed down his pen and wheeled his chair to the window where he killed the noise by opening it a little. At once different sounds filled the room: traffic from the Ross Bridge, seagulls from the rooftops, the shouts of some hooded boys jumping their skateboards on and off a ledge in a corner of the harbour car park, one dog barking at another from the back of a pick-up.
It was sunny out but clean. Crisp. He liked that. With the boiler on and a window open he would be wasting fuel,
heating outside
, as his mother put it.
Sure enough, minutes after he wheeled himself back to the table and resumed writing, he heard the boiler fire up. There was a sudden blare of talking as Dilys next door, who was deaf, turned her television on. She watched the same programmes every day. As far as he could tell he was the only resident in the block who wasn’t over seventy. He had been there three months now. When a vacancy came up and the council offered it to him, he had seized the chance, spurred on, he was sure, by the grotesque local hero stories in
The Cornishman
.
Away from Pendeen and his mother’s stifling concern, given the opportunity to build an independent life for himself in town, where he needed nobody’s help to do anything, he was convinced that things would improve. The change of scene, the view, the independence had indeed all brought relief. The problem had moved house with him, of course. If anything it had been heightened. The flat was ingeniously perfect for his needs: a gentle ramp to the front door, all on the level within, and swings to help himself into bed and into the shower. Tables, work surfaces, fridge and cooker, clothes storage were all modified to be usable from a sitting position. There was even a full-length mirror in the hall so that he could check before he went out that, yes, he looked fine, like a perfectly unremarkable twenty-year-old who just happened to be in a wheelchair. The only things out of his reach were the pictures his mother had hung for him – a reproduction of a fiery Rachel Kelly painting he had always liked and a framed enlargement of a photograph he had taken of a sunset at Sennen Cove. This had hung on his bedroom wall ever since he won a prize for it at school and he had agreed without thinking when his mother assumed he would want to take it with him. But now it embarrassed him and was the last thing he needed when trying to muster the motivation to haul himself, literally, out of bed. What had once filled him with teenage pride now reminded him of the motivational posters first on the walls at school and then in the rooms of the rehabilitation centre he had religiously attended. He recalled with particular rancour an image of a soaring seagull with a quotation from Virgil: ‘They can because they think they can!’
It didn’t matter now. Nothing especially mattered. Unless, of course, he had been ripped off, like the time he had bought Ecstasy tablets that had turned out to be little more than overpriced remodelled Aspirin. He finished the second letter, sealed it and set it beside the first. He had never been comfortable stringing sentences together, still less using a pen, but somehow, as with thank-you letters, a pen had seemed called for. He had been obliged to buy paper and envelopes, which, like the open window on a heated room, seemed wasteful. Some would think it sad that he could think of only two people who mattered enough to him to merit a letter. There were others, of course, but these were the two people who needed to understand. His rugby friends had all pulled together at first, just as one would expect from team players. They had all tried so hard to do and say the right thing but none of them quite arrived at the point of managing to think it, so as to make their words and gestures more than that.
People were gathering on the car park. He saw some children in matching white tee-shirts running with paper fish fluttering on long lengths of bamboo above their heads, and he remembered it was Golowan; local schools and bands were assembling for the annual Mazey Day parade up Market Jew Street.
He checked the time. There was still an hour to go. He wheeled himself over to the kitchen drawer where he had stashed the two deliveries – two small, innocuous, brown, padded envelopes. One from Mexico contained a small polystyrene carton protecting what the label claimed to be veterinary Nembutal. (Knowing no corruptible doctors, vets or nurses, he had found it impossible to source the drug in the UK.) The other, posted within England, bought from an online specialist, was a simple barbiturate-testing kit. He had read the instructions already but read them again now because since the accident he had become that kind of person, a careful reader of warnings and waiter for lights, a measure-twice-cut-once sort of man.
The kit consisted of a tiny translucent plastic case which opened to reveal three small syringes and three tiny, clinical containers of liquid, a mixing vial and instructions. Following the instructions, he carefully used one of the syringes to draw just one millilitre of the putative Nembutal through its sterile seal. He began to shake again – something else that often happened since his accident – and he had to set the syringe down on the table for a second or two to let his hands relax. He breathed deeply twice and watched a lorry edge by, a local steel band mounted on its decorated trailer. Then he took up the syringe again and in a single confident movement added its contents to the vial. Then he did the same, adding to the Nembutal a quantity of one of the containers. Then he drew up the second liquid into a syringe.
‘Please,’ he thought. ‘Please, (just this once)’ and he squirted its contents into the mixing vial. At once the testing solution turned a bright, satisfying blue. He felt himself smiling honestly for the first time in weeks. ‘Bad news, mate,’ he said out loud. ‘You’re pregnant.’
Finally he took the third syringe, drew up the third liquid and added it to the rest. Nothing happened. No change. No diminishing of the intense, hope-laden blue. He screwed the cap back on the vial and gave it a shake to be sure. Still blue. ‘Still pregnant,’ he murmured.
Relief stole over him. He had searched and searched online and found only impossible, unconvincing websites offering the drug without prescription, alongside a lurid buffet of antidepressants and sex-enhancers. Blatant scammers were everywhere as were hysterical-sounding victims desperate to expose them.
His salvation had arrived unexpectedly in the course of a purgatorial night out with old friends from the rugby club. It was somebody’s stag night. Things had started silly and were sure to get sillier and a rowdy pub was no fun when your head was at the height of everyone else’s arse and jokers kept pushing your wheelchair about. Pretending to be staying outside for a smoke as they arrived at the Swordfish, the third pub of the evening, he scored some skunk off a raspy-voiced old hippy to help him cope. The hippy asked outright how he came to be in the chair and Lenny soon found himself matching bluntness with bluntness and confessing the trouble he’d been having finding a trustworthy source of suicide drugs online.
‘Nembutal,’ the hippy had sighed with welcome candour. ‘The paralytic’s pal. No problem. I’ve got a woman friend in Puerto Vallarta. She can get you the kind for dogs. You’ll need 100 mil. Yeah. 100 mil and a pause for thought. You go back inside, my friend, and I’ll send her a text and let you know.’
He murmured a price in Lenny’s ear twenty minutes later as he unexpectedly passed him a drink in the crowd. It seemed worryingly cheap, like the sex he had been offered in Amsterdam, and he had every expectation that the drug would have been diluted to inefficacy or lost its power with age, both of which the chatter on the suicide forums told him could happen.
But no. It was real and full of kindly force.
He needed to get out. Even with the window ajar, the little bottle’s potency seemed to be drawing all the oxygen from the flat.
He threw the testing kit into the bin, tucked the Nembutal back in the fridge then hoisted himself onto the loo because excitement was getting to him and he needed to piss.
After the accident he had returned to work at the same Penzance chemist’s that had taken him on as a dispensing assistant after school. The grand scheme – derailed by the accident, of course – was to work there, gaining useful experience while he retook his maths and chemistry A-levels with a view to studying pharmacy at university. During the previous day’s shift, he had stolen from his employers for the first time, pocketing the dose of prescription-only anti-emetic he now swallowed with a gulp of juice straight from the carton. He wanted to be sure he didn’t throw up the precious Nembutal when the time came.
He took the anti-emetic’s packaging with him to throw into a bin on the prom; he didn’t want anyone at work to get into trouble on his account and had even slipped the money for it into the till in the hope the theft wouldn’t be detected. As he pulled the door locked behind him he remembered afresh that he was the only resident, on his floor at least, who had not bothered to prettify the entrance to his flat. All the others, all his elderly neighbours, had planted window boxes or hung wind chimes or even set out garden gnomes or resin meerkats. Everyone but him had done something to mark out their small share of walkway as their own.