In Too Deep (9 page)

This morning, I woke feeling very cold. A heavy drift of snow had fallen during the night, but the cloud cleared early and the temperatures must have plummeted. I looked out the window, but it was still a little dark to see very much. The glass was frosted over, in odd, vague swirls and clefts that made me think of stained glass windows in churches. Not the colours so much as the texture, that same hearty, chiselled effect that seemed to twist everything askew.

A memory hung over me, one from years before, dating back to the time I had gone to visit my aunt in hospital. Jenny, my father's sister. I must have been dreaming about her, though it didn't feel that way, and what I was remembering was what had happened, nothing particularly fantastic at all. She'd undergone an operation – for a woman's problem, I think; something painfully routine and permanent – but when I arrived at the hospital she was asleep, drunk on medication. Her bed was in the far right corner of a very bright six-bed ward, and I stood around for a minute or two just looking at her, thinking to myself how strange she looked, not really like her usual self at all. We had been so close growing up; she was twelve years older than me but we lived near one another and, as an only child, I had always looked upon her as a big sister. When I was eight or nine years old, I used to imagine that one day we'd marry, and of course I was too young then to understand that such a thing could never happen. I loved her that much, though, and I know she felt the same way about me. But then time played one of its deft tricks, and a day came when we were both more than a little shocked to realise that the ties had been undone and our lives had somehow grown apart.

That afternoon in the hospital, sleep, combined with the trauma of the surgery, had reduced her to a lump, and made a further stranger of her. Huddled under crisp white linen sheets, she looked old and overweight, a pulp of waxy flesh, dyed blonde corkscrew hair and brand new cerise pink silk pyjamas, and her face held a pointed expression, most probably because of the pain. Worry lines had slit faint ruts into her forehead with a determination that even the after-effects of an anaesthetic couldn't rub smooth, and her mouth constantly pursed and puckered, the lips pale without their daub of lipstick, as if she was speaking inside her dreams. When I was eight or nine, I'd been sure that one day our age gap would narrow enough so that it ceased to matter, but in actuality it had only seemed to widen.

I stood there, as I've said, for a minute or two, thinking that maybe it would be okay for me to just stoop and kiss her, a simple peck on her cheek or her brow and just for old times' sake, but a feeling of discomfort stirred and began to swell, eventually forcing me to turn away. The ward, because of its stillness and high ceilings, seemed to yawn emptily, and I had reached the door before I realised that a girl was watching me from the bed to my left. I smiled at her with some embarrassment, and I was about to push the door open when she smiled back. For some reason, that stopped me. There was something about her expression that seemed so forlorn I just couldn't bring myself to ignore it. I hesitated for an instant, then moved to the side of her bed. I glanced around for a visitor's chair, but found none, and she shuffled her body awkwardly and sat up in the bed, drawing up her legs in a way that made some room on the mattress and seemed to invite me to sit. I nodded, understanding, and perched on the edge of the bed; all very proper, but friendly too. The mattress was firm and didn't dip much beneath my weight. I had brought a small bunch of flowers for Jenny, nothing fancy, just some posies, and I held them out to this girl on impulse, sensing perhaps that she truly needed them.

‘Well,' I said. ‘The rain's stopped. The way it's been falling lately, I was beginning to think the government had stock in the stuff.'

Her face tensed with confusion, in a way that brought out the fully stupidity in my words.

‘My name is Billy,' I added, and held my breath for a return.

Her name was Marketa. Her English, when it finally came, was soft and slow, fluent enough, but a long way from natural, withered in places and in others thickly over-pronounced, and she spoke with an uncertainty that echoed shyness as well as fear. I tried to make her feel at ease, and even though I could see that she was struggling with the hard corners of my accent, I rambled on and on, taking a shot at anything that came to mind, afraid for both our sakes of what the silence might bring if we let it take hold. She made sounds that I took to be agreeable, but the bemusement in her eyes spoke volumes. When I had fully exhausted the asinine and the small-talk became too much of a struggle, I skipped on into the safer, easier rut of asking questions, keeping a happy and upbeat voice and then nodding with exaggerated interest to her replies, leaning in to catch every nuance of her answers – as if they mattered at all one way or the other – and making sure to pull and bend my facial expressions to match their tone. She was forthright in everything she said, speaking as if from a textbook. We were playing a kind of game, one that she needed and one that I felt obliged to continue. None of it was easy. I gathered in the facts, made sympathetic gestures with my mouth and tried my best to make her feel important, at least for a little while.

She had left her home, she said, a small town called Stonava, in the Czech Republic's eastern region, to make a new life with her boyfriend. They had tried Paris first, but Paris was a hard city, unwelcoming, and after a couple of months they decided to give Ireland a go. That had been a little over a year before. She liked Cork, she said, but there was something in her smile that seemed to add a caveat to that, and she saw me notice and shrugged. It could be lonely at times, she added, not really needing to make mention of the boyfriend again, because that was a well-worn tale of woe.

A week ago, she had been to see a doctor, for something to ease the pain that crept up and down her side and which seemed to be getting increasingly worse. He took some blood, and the following day phoned her to come in for further tests. Only a week, a little less than that, even, but already the bed had made a mess of her, just as it had with Jenny. I lowered my gaze as she talked and, without meaning to, took to studying her hands. They were delicate hands, pale skinned and demure, the bones spraying out from her wrists and rising in spindles to the jut of her knuckles. Her fingers were slender, with meticulously trimmed nails, and she were no rings, not even the mark of one. She'd been chasing promises. Her voice kept on and on, just a little above a hush and delectably foreign, the vowels of her words carrying all the throaty allure of a Cold War spy film. I watched as she folded and resettled her hands over and over, gently wrestling in and out of a prayerful grip and occasionally worrying the hem of the bed's pale blue woollen blanket. I didn't realise she was even crying until I looked up again.

‘Since the doctor told me, I've been thinking about home. But I can't go back. That would be too sad.'

What was there to say? I didn't know this girl at all. I had her name, as well as an image burnt into my mind, but nothing else. I felt something shift inside of me, but I put that down to pity, and I had a notion that it wasn't right to feel that way. Her hands parted, fluttered uncertainly or dismissively in the air and then slumped down to lie in her lap, fingers of her left hand overlapping at a slant the fingers of the right. I wanted to say something, to offer some few words of solace, but nothing came to mind.

‘I don't sleep now,' she added, in a whisper. A tear chased a runnel down one cheek and clung to the ridge of her jaw. In the strong white light I could clearly see the trace it left behind. More tears bristled in her eyes and I remember thinking that they blurred vision in the very same way as stained glass. Not the colour, of course, but that texture. When you give the matter some thought, you realise that it takes very little to contort the world; one tear can ruin everything if it has a good reason to fall. I took a handkerchief from my pocket, reached out and dried her eyes. It was a reflex gesture; she'd become a child, and without tensing she surrendered wholly to it. ‘When I do drift off,' she said, ‘terrible things are waiting. I'm not so troubled about what happens to me in the dreams as I am about how it affects the people around me. Even strangers cry for me, and I don't want that. At least, I don't think I do.'

After a little while, a bell went off somewhere, and a few minutes after that a nurse came to the door and said that she was very sorry, but visiting hours were over. I nodded and stood. The girl in the bed, Marketa, looked up at me. She thanked me for talking to her and also for the flowers, and neither of us mentioned the fact that both occurrences had been accidents, twists of fate. Unsure what to say, I leaned down and kissed her cheek, which made her blush but also smile with something like happiness. She dealt with that smile by chewing on one side of her lower lip, but I saw past that and was glad that I'd done it. I mumbled a so long, and assured her that I'd call again, that I had to come back anyway because my aunt, Jenny, down there in the last bed across, had slept right through my visit. Jenny could hold onto a grudge until a day after forever, I said, though that was nearly the very opposite of true. I almost smiled as I watched the girl's expression grow bemused again.

That was it. We mean a lot of the things we say, and I fully intended to go back, but life, work and a dozen other excuses conspired to keep me grounded. Then Jenny was discharged, armed with a crutch and a distant stare. We spoke on the phone as often as I was around to answer and, when she began to feel a little better, we made coffee dates to fill up Saturday mornings and picked at pecan and maple syrup muffins while she rambled on about hospital food and I chugged my eyebrows over cheesy, Groucho-styled double entendre cracks about wanting to see her scar.

‘The girl?' she said, and smirked while I plucked at her for information. ‘Oh yeah. I recognised your handiwork there, all right. A kid in floods of tears and a vase of wilting posies. Also, the nurse mentioned you were by. So thanks, I suppose. But you still owe me a bunch of flowers, okay? And nothing that you've lifted out of a graveyard, if you don't mind.'

Floods of tears. I recalled how, after leaving the hospital, I had spent a good part of the bus ride home trying to tag her with an age. My best guess put her somewhere in her mid-twenties, though it wouldn't have surprised me if the truth lay some five years either side of that. Funny how five years can be the world at that age, or it can be nothing. Depends, I suppose, on the person. And funny, but not in a good way. She hadn't been an awful lot to look at, but I put most of that down to the collateral damage of her treatment, and even if her skin was rough and blotched and her hair spun around her face in lank, tawny tendrils, there was no denying that she still had nice eyes, large, just the way I like them, and a shade of green so pale that in lesser light they had probably often passed for grey. Or silver. Her tears had made them glisten, and made everything seem fleeting, delicately poised but waiting to be torn asunder.

Using my thumbnail to scrape muffin residue from the channels of the pleated paper cup, I pretended that my interest in Marketa was one of simple curiosity. Which, I suppose, it was. Still, it had all the feel of an act, and Jenny's smirk cut newer, deeper divots into the flesh of her upper lip, ending finally in the revelation of teeth.

‘They moved her out of the ward a couple of days before I was allowed home. She didn't talk much, but I think she'd been given some pretty bad news. The doctors seemed very interested in her, and that's never a good thing.' My aunt broke her second muffin into chunks and picked out the pecans to eat first. I watched her, wishing she could have told me more.

This morning, the scree of frost combined with the tempered darkness to make something ethereal of the early hour. Beyond the window, snow lay banked along the ditches and hedgerows, its bleak pallor adding depth to the silence. It felt like weather for dying.

Hospitals have this way of emphasising the strangeness between people. The setup almost craves vulnerability and, with its cloying antiseptic stench, overly waxed floors and stultifying artificial glow, it quickly peels away whatever modicum of familiarity we might hold dear, until patients are reduced down to mush and visitors to hollow, creaking shells. This is a reality of our world. Perhaps though, it is because of this that we are allowed to hit upon some common note, a kind of knowing camaraderie, like survivors of some terrible disaster, or war veterans. I sometimes think that it is for just such reasons that we dream. At a time when social evolution threatens to send us spinning into space, scientists still scratch their heads in wonder at this most archaic of habits. They see dreaming as an obtuse reflex, some primeval semaphore worthless in our new world and lingering only for nostalgia's sake. But dreams store up all the memories, hopes and fears that in our daily lives we overcome or simply toss away, and I think we need constant reminders of those things in order to balance and counteract the way that we have chosen to live today.

I peeled off my T-shirt and dressed quickly, foregoing the notion of a shower. That was okay; today was my own, and I had no place to be, nothing much at all to do. I was clean enough for just milling around the house. The cold bit at me, savage teeth nuzzling my skin, but I've known colder mornings. ‘Marketa,' I whispered, because there was no one around to hear. I think I was hoping that by speaking of my dream, I'd somehow clear it from my mind, but the sound of it, my crushed voice, made me flinch. It seemed ripe with accusation. I paused, then I repeated the name, this time in my usual speaking voice. But that felt no better.

It was far too early to be getting up, but the day yawned all around me, its needs waiting to be filled, and I've never been one of those people who can just lie around once they've woken. Today was Sunday, an open-book kind of day and one simply built for idling. But there were right ways to idle. I decided that a walk would probably do me some good; take in some fresh air, wrapped up tight and warm against the cold. The exercise would help to build an appetite. Then, after a hearty breakfast, I could settle down with the papers and listen to a bit of
Rubber Soul
. Full of the feeling that I had wandered headlong into the early act of a story without an end, I sat on the edge of my bed and laced up my boots.