Gotham (15 page)

‘We'll have breakfast and I'll take her to the park.'

I can tell she's about to bring up the risk of infection, but she stops herself. Ariel's white cell count is good enough now, if we take precautions. That was yesterday's news.

‘You didn't sleep either,' she says instead, because it's decent to note it.

‘I'll sleep after the treatment.'

She puts her hand out, touches my arm, then drifts into the dark bedroom without a word.

As I'm setting up next to Ariel, I can hear Lindsey flop onto the bed and roll over. For the first time in hours she is not responsible, and has instantly thrown all switches to sleep. It's an ability I wish I had.

‘Are you ready?' I try to keep my voice down, and it accidentally comes out in a whisper.

‘Yeah,' Ariel whispers back. She has her
Frozen
figurines in front of her on the glass top of the coffee table, and she sets Olaf down with a clunk. ‘You'll sit next to me?'

‘All the way.'

I would pay fifty bucks, if I had it spare, not to see
Frozen
one more time. Once we're through this, all of us, long through it, a single frame of that movie will bring me right back here to this room. It could be forty years, and
Frozen
will smell like feeding formula and feel like Beacon carpet.

I attach the syringe to the tube, release the clamp and draw up yellow gastric fluid. I swing it around to the front for Ariel to check.

‘Good to go,' she says. It's an expression she's picked up at the clinic.

I push the fluid back down and clamp again, set up the extension tubing, connect the syringe and draw the plunger out with a pop.

Ariel says, ‘Pop,' as she usually does.

I run the feed in and attach the apparatus to Ariel's feeding tube.

‘Ready to roll.'

I wait until she nods before releasing the clamp. She needs to know that breakfast is about to start. No brain is wired to receive gastric filling signals when the mouth isn't engaged, but she has trained herself to imagine food at exactly the right time. I check the flow. Ariel moves in close to me and I put my arm around her, keeping the syringe barrel close to mouth height and letting gravity do its job.

‘So, we'll go to the park today,' I tell her.

‘Really?' She turns away from the screen and looks at me. She has seen Central Park in our old photos, and through a car window.

‘Yeah. And I got a tip last night about a particularly good playground.'

‘Yay,' she says in a small voice, acknowledging something positive but not more engaged than that. She's already back watching the TV.

And we are back in the world, with a park visit. Today is that day, a milestone by my reckoning, even if she's not one for marking such things. I hug a little closer to her as the level in the syringe slowly falls. I can convince myself she is less obviously bony than she once was.

From all the clothes we've brought—the sun-dresses, the princess costumes, the shades of pink everything—Ariel elects to go to the park as Batman. She wears the hood up with the clamp tucked back inside it, tube sneaking forward to her nose. With the clamp out of sight, the rest
is barely visible, or at least I can tell myself that. She has not had a public life since she's been a kid with a tube—just the Beacon and the clinic. I'm glad she chose Batman.

The hotel lends us a stroller, and the concierge hurries to help when I pull out a pack of antiseptic wipes and start rubbing it down. I can't yet face the maths of the tip we'll be giving the staff when we leave.

Ariel and I hit the street smelling more like a hospital than we should, but the breeze soon deals with that. She's a bit long for the stroller, but I could fold her up and she still wouldn't fill it. It has a simple frame, and wheels with none of the shock absorbency of the Bugaboo at home. Lindsey would not approve, but it will take us where we want to go.

Ariel looks up through the filtered light at the tree canopy and tall buildings. She is searching for superheroes, she tells me, or supervillains.
She confirms with me that she is now on the streets of Gotham City. From the hotel room she has looked out to the water towers, watching for Spider-Man. Superheroes work a decent kind of magic as far as she's concerned, and she is glad to be in their world.

On Central Park West a subway train thunders below us, and I stop the stroller on a grate to let her feel the rush of warm wind.

‘There's a famous scene in a movie like this,' I tell her. ‘A lady standing on one of these grates gets her skirt blown right up.'

‘Is it on YouTube?' She grips the struts of the stroller and peers down into the darkness, her bat ears pointing up and forward. She is the caped crusader in his eyrie, vigilant for evil deeds on the grimy streets below. ‘I want to see it.'

‘I bet it's there. We'll find it.'

We enter the park near Strawberry Fields and I'm about to tell her we'll add John Lennon
to our YouTube list but she seems more taken with the glum man sitting on a bench selling dollar jokes to no one. He has a handwritten sign: ‘I tell jokes—
1 a piece—laffs guaranteed.' The spelling tells me all I need to know.

Ariel makes me read it aloud, as if he's a waxwork or not really there, and, as I wheel her away, she says, ‘But how do you sell jokes? Jokes just are. And what if they're not funny?'

Maps never help me in Central Park, so I take my bearings from the buildings I can see and we edge our way across. Every so often I check behind us for the two towers of the San Remo to see they're where they should be, northwest of us, with the Beacon out of view beyond them, three blocks down 74th Street.

There is plenty to discuss out in the world, and for Ariel that is as good as anything. I could sleep where I stand, but I thread a few thoughts together and hold up my end of the conversation.

‘Look, a horse,' she says. ‘A horse and carriage. Like for a princess.' She's only seen carriages in movies until now.

The driver is exactly as the movies promise, wearing a top hat and black frock coat, but the couple behind him on the plush red leather bench seat are tourists in their fifties in white tracksuits and Yankees' baseball caps. Japanese or Korean, I'd guess. Not Anna and Elsa, or anyone else Disney has put in a carriage. Ariel stares at them, trying to work it out.

‘Here everyone gets a turn,' I tell her. ‘Maybe we could come back and have a ride in a few days, if you feel up to it.'

It is a gift just to talk and to be here and not killing time on a moulded plastic chair with my eyes on hospital tiles or the clock, talking about treatments and prognoses and what just went beep.

I hear shrieks ahead of us, the happy shrieks of children. When we round a bend I see a fence, and a gate with a sign next to it.

‘It's Johnson or Jackson.'

It's meant to stay in my head as a thought, but I know it's come out when Ariel says, ‘What? What is?'

‘The park. The playground. The one we're looking for.'

Billy Johnson, the sign reads. We are here.

The gate groans as we swing it open, then clangs behind us. It's a school day, so anyone playing here is small. Two nannies sit on a bench, talking over takeaway coffees. A tourist looks through photos on his camera while his two boys battle with sticks and shout at each other in French.

This is acceptable exposure for Ariel. It's not a huddle of sick people. The slide, though,
might be beyond her. It curves down from the top of a rise in the corner of the playground and the boy I can see flying down it stacks on the bend and comes off his cardboard. But there are swings and simple structures to climb on. It's some way to have come not to slide, but I can't see her making it down there herself.

‘It's a good day, though, isn't it,' I say to her, ‘whatever we do here. It's nice to be outside.'

She is watching the next slider, who takes the bend like a master, shoots off the end and lands on his feet, his cardboard flipping up behind him.

‘Well, if it ain't the Fosters,' someone says behind my shoulder.

It's Smokey, in trackpants and a T-shirt.

‘I didn't get no sleep neither,' he says, pulling out his phone. His pants' pocket inverts itself and flops from his hip like a dog's ear. He still has his grills on and they sparkle like Christmas
in the direct sunlight. ‘Here's my girl.' He shows me a photo. She has plump mauve lips and swirls of black hair. She's swaddled and sleeping peacefully. ‘Still decidin' the name. 'Spect I'll lose on that one, too.' Before I can mention any of the things a person's supposed to about a photo of a newborn, he says, ‘It was us talking 'bout this place last night that made me come here today. My lady D'vonne's getting some sleep. We just blowing off a little steam before my boy gets to go meet his sister.' The stroller and back view of my tiny Batman arrive properly in his consciousness for the first time. ‘And, hey, who's this?'

‘She's…'

He steps around to see her before I can prepare him at all. She's thinner than the wallpaper shot on my phone. He's got his happy meeting-a-kid face stuck on and he's fighting to hold it, to pretend for all our sakes that he's not shocked.

‘Hey, honey,' he says eventually, softly, cautiously, as he crouches down. ‘So good to meet you. I'm a friend of your daddy's.'

He edges his hand forward to shake or high-five hers, but then settles for resting his forearm on his knee. Ariel sticks a hand out, in high-five pose. She is used to New Yorkers crouching, forcing a smile and a bright tone of voice, then talking through whatever grim thing they are planning to do to her to make her well.

Smokey looks up at me. ‘Is it cool?' he says, pointing to her hand and his.

‘It is now. Unless you've got some disease I should know about.'

‘High-five,' he says, and his big hand meets her much smaller one with a satisfying slap. The sun sparks on his grin. ‘No diseases other than sleep deprivation and a distinct lack of popularity with my lady, but we'll get past that. Now, honey, what we gonna do? What is there
in the Billy Johnson Playground that takes your fancy?' He's talking animatedly, keeping the grin on, keeping his spiel moving at a clip so that we can all pretend all's well with our caped crusader. ‘I believe you have already noticed our excellent stone slide, soon to be written about in newspapers across Australia by a man well-known to you.'

I can't stop myself picturing her bones, all her unprotected points, bumping on granite all the way down. She's had weeks when only sheepskin was close to comfortable, though we're past that now.

‘I don't know that she's…'

Ariel cuts in and says, ‘Dad…I want to.'

‘Sure, honey, sure,' Smokey says. ‘It's your dad's call but if he okays it, we can make it work. Because I have a plan.' He moves directly in front of her and crouches again. ‘Some people call me Smokey, honey, but you can call me Eugene. My
boy's over there.' He indicates the master slider, shooting down again, like a torpedo in a tube. ‘He's Eugene, too, so we made that nice and easy. But we call him Junior, mostly. He'll answer to either.' Ariel is staring at his grills as the light dances from the gold. ‘You readin' my teeth?' He draws his lips back to give her a good look.

She laughs. ‘I can do letters.'

‘Maybe I best keep my mouth shut then.'

He folds his lips over his teeth in a comical, bulky way. He covers his mouth with his hand and pretends to go on with the conversation about the slide, making all kinds of nonsensical sounds, as though he's giving a meticulous muffled outline of what he's got in mind. His free hand is measuring, pointing, making all kinds of shapes, fingers running up steps, sliders on cardboard swooping around the curve, braking screechily or stacking, Wile E. Coyote-style. Ariel
laughs so much the stroller shakes and takes a hop backwards.

‘Yes!' she shouts, and her hands give an involuntary clap. ‘I want to.'

Smokey cranks his lips apart with his thumb and finger, making can-opener sounds, and says, ‘We got a plan. She'll go down with Junior. Tandem. He'll take all the knocks.' He reaches into his other pants' pocket. There's a jangle of keys. ‘I'll get him ready for it, too. D'vonne don't let me out the door without my pockets full of this shit.'

He pulls out a bottle of green sanitiser, squirts it on his own hands and then calls Junior over and goes to lube his legs.

‘What?' Junior takes half a step back and almost stumbles over his father's hand.

‘Be cool, buddy.' Smokey wipes another hand-ful of goo down one of Junior's arms.

‘But…'

‘I ain't makin' you swallow it.' He lifts Junior's shirtfront and wipes a final squirt under there. ‘You goin' tandem and we just playin' it safe.' He clips the empty bottle shut and slips it back into his pocket. ‘Now, you take Batman up there and you look after her like she's a princess. A superhero princess. You come down together and you take all the bumps.'