Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam (3 page)

He watched the blank screen as if waiting for more information, trying to understand this odd germ of a thought, to
grow
it.

‘Misplaced love,’ he said, groping. ‘If you’re depressed, and the world is not worth living in, you want to save your loved ones from it. You want to protect them.’

He paused, caught her astonished eye, and added, hastily: ‘Maybe.’

They sat in silence, stunned: Rick even more than his wife, mystified by the origins of these words that had jumped from his mouth, unpremeditated. With his chopsticks he poked a wad of rice into that mouth, and chewed, allowing himself a little thinking time.

Linda saved him from further inspirations; she came up with a more convincing theory: ‘I think it’s merely selfish. They want someone to go
with
them.’

Rick swallowed his food. ‘Like the Egyptian pharaohs,’ he said, ‘taking their whole households into the pyramids, buried alive.’

Their thoughts were back in harmony.

‘Or the rajahs in India,’ she said, remembering a movie she had seen as a child, ‘burning their wives on their own funeral pyres.’

She shuddered, then jerked up out of her chair as if disguising the shudder in a larger, more deliberate movement. Finding herself on her feet, she moved down the hall, and softly, protectively, closed the doors to the bedrooms where the children slept.

‘This is morbid,’ she whispered as she returned. ‘How did we get onto this?’

‘The news.’

‘Let’s talk about something else.’

Her husband resisted one last time; still tantalised, perhaps, by his earlier heresy: ‘I know it’s unpleasant, but should we turn our backs on the world?’

‘If we can’t change it, what’s the point? I don’t want to
know
about those ugly things. I don’t see why I should have to.’

She watched him, waiting for agreement.

‘We do what we can,’ she repeated. ‘We do our bit. Why should we thrust our noses in it?’

She was right, he knew. You had to draw chalklines, erect barricades. There was so much pain and misery in the world you would drown in it: a great ocean of pain, of which the cathode-ray tube sprayed only a few selected drops in their direction each night. With the zeal of a convert, or of a fresh runner in a relay, he took the argument from her and carried it further:

‘Maybe we should sell the television. Or give it away. Get rid of it altogether. Especially with the children getting older.’

They watched each other for a few further seconds. At length Rick rose, and wedged open the back door.Without a word he unplugged the television set, carried it outside and heaved it into the backseat of his car. A theatrical gesture, perhaps — the disgraced television would sit there for several days, tamely buckled in a rear seat-belt, before being traded in for a new sound-system — but both felt somehow cleaner, even purified: a satisfaction akin to the sweet aftermath of spring-cleaning.

New routines quickly replaced the old. Their evenings were filled with music, with educational games — Scrabble, crosswords, Trivial Pursuit — and, once again, with books.

The young couple had inherited a reverence for books. Both had brought several tea-chests packed with books to the marriage: an intellectual dowry of children’s books, old school texts, gift-sets of Shakespeare and Shaw and Jane Austen and assorted Brontës, plus, from Linda’s side, everything that Dickens had ever written: a metre-length, at least, of matching volumes, bound in calf, plus assorted dogeared school-paperback editions of the same. These had multiplied in the years since: each Christmas they received as gifts almost as many books as they gave. Their shelves — makeshift constructions of plank and brick — were crammed: unread books, many of them,but their presence alone was reassuring, their names were a kind of incantation, like the names of saints or household gods: small geometric household gods of learning and self-improvement and uplift; protectors against ignorance. The books had worn more sacred with time. They were dipped into, like the Bible, as sources of quotations, and poetry, and Trivial Pursuit clues — but seldom read.

Until now. Delivered from television, Linda decided they should read aloud to each other every night, as they had in the first days of marriage, before children.

‘And as my father read to me,’ she announced over a meal one night, and immediately rose and began tugging books from the shelves before turning to invite Rick to help, or even to agree.

‘Where shall we start?’ she wondered aloud.

‘Anywhere but Dickens,’ he said, teasing.

She smiled, and squeezed the calf-bound book she had already selected back into a narrow slot among its fellows, and tugged out a slim paperback.

‘I taught that last year,’ he protested.

‘Then you can read it to me.’

‘I’d prefer something with more meat.’

‘You mean more fat,’ she said, but returned the book to the shelf, before selecting something thicker.

At first there were frequent interruptions. Emma, placid from birth, slept unbroken from early evening to early morning — but her older brother insisted on staying awake with his parents. The television had often kept him tranquillised in the past, now new routines were needed. A war of attrition followed — a war of tears and nerve and bluff — ending in the parents’ capitulation. Weary of running to the child’s bedroom every few minutes, it simply seemed easier to have him with them, playing on the rug in the lounge, late at night. Listening to, or at least hearing, their book-readings also had a soothing, hypnotic effect on the child. His eyes soon drooped shut, his restless twitching ceased — often, oddly, at the end of a chapter, or on the last page of a book, as if cued by some subtle change in the tone of his mother’s voice. Or was it some resolution in the music of the words themselves, words whose meanings were still largely beyond him?

‘The
growing good of the world’,
Linda recited,
‘is partly dependant on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half-owing to the number who have lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’

Rick — if he was still awake — would rise and carry the sleeping boy to bed at the end of such passages; this was the sign for a general lights-out.

Isolated from the wider world, their small life contracted even more tightly about their children, their family board-games and book-readings. Old friends from University, staff-room colleagues from school — many still single — were rarely seen. There seemed so little time. Linda had chosen to stay at home with Ben for the first year; Rick took leave without pay the following year while she returned to work. The opposite pattern continued with the birth of Emma. Rick spent the year at home, mothering her; Linda went back to school.

‘But what of Rick’s career?’ his mother summoned the courage to inquire one evening as she collected their weekly laundry.

‘The family is my career, Mum.’

Linda added: ‘In ten years everyone will share work like this, Mother.’

The young couple exchanged satisfied smiles behind the older woman’s back. They felt themselves to be pioneers, ahead of their time, and relished their notoriety among less ‘liberated’ friends. That Rick’s mother still did the family’s laundry, and Linda’s mother still bestowed a weekly meal, went unacknowledged. The mothers wanted to help; Rick appreciated the extra time this permitted him to spend with his adored baby daughter. Emma was a small serious child: slow and methodical in her movements, a watcher of games rather than a participant. Her nickname — ‘Wol’ — came from Rick, amused by his daughter’s solemn owl-like appearance, wise beyond her years.

With Ben at kindergarten now for much of each day, Rick’s life revolved around his daughter: reading stories, reciting rhymes, singing songs, playing games, fingerpainting, visiting local playgrounds and paddling pools — and each Wednesday taking her to the neighbourhood play-group, sole father among a gathering of mildly discomfited mothers.

‘It seemed a little … awkward,’ he reported home to Linda after the first. ‘Long silences.’

‘They’ll get used to you.’

He sat through the weekly coffee and carrot-cake and largely ignored the gossip that soon began to fill the silences. The women might not have been there, he had eyes and ears only for his precious Wol, studying her interactions with other children, protecting her against their viciousness, excusing her own as over-tiredness — and memorising every detail to report back later to Linda. And so within their family geometry a further symmetry, or mirror-reflection, was growing: the father was closer to the daughter, the mother to the son.

Emma’s sore throat seemed trivial at first: another of the shared communal viruses that were swapped back and forth between the toddlers at play-group like counters, or dice, in a board-game. Ben, at school now, also brought home a regular supply of sniffly noses and sore throats to share with her. He had always been the sickly one; missing one or two days a fortnight of school, his alleged ugliness failing to ward off the invisible influence of germs. Emma seemed made of tougher gristle — less complaining, more robust. Rick and Linda paid little attention to her symptoms at first.

But the swollen glands remained swollen; a blood screen hinted at vague abnormalities.

Their local doctor — silver-haired, silver-tongued — was reassuring as he studied the print-out.

‘I’ve seen numbers like this before,’ he said. ‘No cause for concern. Probably just a virus.’

‘Could it be serious?’

He shook his head: ‘Of course we’ll repeat the test in a week or two. Just to make sure everything is back to normal.’

Rick and Linda exchanged glances: ‘Then it
could
be serious?’

He smiled reassuringly, but the smile seemed to lack something: ‘I can’t see any point in worrying about it yet.’

They worried for a week: in small bursts at first, but lengthening, and growing uncontrollably as the child failed to improve.

The repeat screen was equally ambiguous. The doctor, while conceding the figures on his print-out ‘might’ not be as normal as he had first thought, still refused to name any disease, or even nominate a shortlist of candidates. He filibustered smoothly for some time before Linda interrupted:

‘If it might be something,
what
might it be?’

‘It would be premature to say. There are many possibilities.’

‘Serious?’

‘Some serious, some not so serious. But that applies to any illness …’

Rick and Linda rose simultaneously, angrily; Rick demanded a copy of both test print-outs which were reluctantly provided. From the receptionist’s phone they made an urgent call, and drove immediately to the rooms of a specialist paediatrician: Eve Harrison, an old school friend of Linda’s. Short, compact, quick-talking, Eve had been known for her frankness at school; she showed no hesitation in applying a label to the blood screens at first glance, a word Rick and Linda had already begun to sense, if only from the glare of its previous absence.

Like most parents, they had rehearsed over the years for that moment, emotionally: the moment they might hear the word leukaemia spoken to
them,
spoken
at
them. They had read the true stories, had tears jerked from them by films based on real-life events. They had grieved, vicariously, for other children: small strangers who were nevertheless part of the shared public property of parenthood. News of the illnesses of these others — friends of cousins of friends, or cousins of friends of cousins — spread as rapidly as jokes or gossip through a vast network of waiting, eavesdropping parents, in hushed, horrified tones.

‘Such
a lovely family.’

‘Nothing can be done? Surely
these
days — with all the new drugs …’

Beneath the horror of such stories there was also, surely, a deeper half-hidden note of relief: that it wasn’t happening to them, and theirs. Perhaps there was even an odd warped gratitude towards the victim, who had somehow — although this dark thought would never be put into words — saved everyone else by being chosen in their place: a statistical scape-goat, a statistical sacrifice.

For Rick and Linda there was also, at the end of that terrible week of waiting and worry, an odd feeling of relief that it
had
happened to them, and theirs. Anything was better than uncertainty; the waiting had been intolerable, the fear of the unmentionable had almost come to be a desire for the unmentionable; its certainty, its
mention,
was at least a resolution. To finally hear the word spoken aloud provided a focus for worry, a definite enemy that they could now face, and fight, together, as a family.

A bone marrow biopsy the following morning gave an even clearer view of this enemy.

‘Remission is possible,’ Eve Harrison told them. ‘But everyone who has this type dies of it, eventually.’

The young parents glanced at each other, more composed and prepared: ‘How long?’

‘The mean survival rate is three years. Fifty per cent of the victims are still alive at three years.’

They felt almost grateful again for these blunt figures: three years was better than, say, three months. They felt, after the initial diagnosis had taken everything away, that they had been given something back.

Emma sat on the thick carpet in Eve’s small office, solemnly reading a brightly coloured picture-book, ignoring their discussion. Three years was the length of her life to date: she was being offered her entire lifetime, repeated. Her parents sat watching her, breathing a little more easily. For the moment they could fall no further; they could even permit themselves a small ration of hope. A cure might well be found in three years. A marrow donor might even be found, although Eve was as frank as always on this: odd blood-lines in Rick’s family — a Finnish great-grandparent — had left the child with a rare tissue-type, possibly unique.

‘Of course we’ll type you both,’ she said. ‘And Ben. And all the grandparents, if they’re willing.’

‘Of
course
they’re willing.’