Little Fingers! (4 page)

God said
“Human, all too human.”

When Christ
ascended back into heaven he looked downcast and said “Father, I
have failed you. I have not stopped them, and I have started
shouting myself.”

God said
“Catchy little so-and-sos, aren't they? Do not distress yourself.
We are all doomed to failure. It is an inevitability of the
universe. I understand that now. I shall no longer interfere in the
universe's affairs, except for fun. I am not going to have the
universe deny me some fun. I want to see the smile of children when
they are given their favourite toy. I want to rejoice with the
mother who has given birth to her child. I want to feel the
exhilaration of men who achieve great feats at the limit of their
capacities. I want to share the breathtaking beauty of landscapes,
sunsets and of all creatures. I now declare that good is everything
that is joyous and generous, and that evil is the opposite. Now all
I need to work out is how to judge it. It is an intractable
problem.”

* *
*

Chapter
3

My sister,
Louise, died at the age of six of leukaemia.

I was ten at
the time, so I can remember her well.

She was the
nicest of children, and I talk as a rival for affection. Well, less
a rival than a loser. Everyone doted over Louise because she was
blonde and pretty, and smiled easily. At the time I was dark and
plain-looking, and inclined to sulk.

Children grow
different ways. While in my case my transformation came at the end
of a surgeon's knife, I have seen many girls (and especially those
wearing glasses) shock all those around them by seemingly overnight
switching from pug-ugly not-a-chance-in-hell-of-getting-laid types
into slinky-legged sizzling sex objects. You can always tell these
types by the startled look on their faces when it becomes obvious
that the most handsome man in the room fancies them..

Equally, I
have seen very pretty little girls bulk out into ordinary looking
adults with four kids, a pushchair, and a best friend they moan to
as they walk along the pavement. Maybe Louise would have become one
of these, but at the time of her death she was still
beautiful.

Beautiful but
ethereal. For two years we all fought to keep her, and the medical
profession did everything it possibly could for, or arguably
against, her. The holy hope is first of all the bone marrow match,
then the transplant. I would certainly have given my bones to help
her, even my entire body, but I was not a match. Appeals went out
around the country as her surgeon sharpened his scalpels for a spot
of heroic surgery.

We were told
throughout that the odds were good, that most recovered from
childhood leukaemia. A match would be found, the chemo and
radiation therapy would work, and she would “soon be clambering
back on board the raft of life”. You may think that was my analogy,
but you should be able to tell from the clunk it gave that the
words came directly from a euphemism-wielding medical
professional.

Hope started
low, leapt high in the air, followed by progress, regress, and
finally digress. By the end we were consulting anyone at all no
matter how unlikely their treatment régimes. Louise was an innocent
child led by the hand from waiting room to waiting room. She
carried her toys with her, knowing that she would be there most of
the day, and that there would be another “there”
tomorrow.

Throughout her
extended ordeal she remained good-natured and calm, a professional
patient carefully examining patient professionals. Perhaps that was
the problem. Perhaps we should have taken her to someone who would
have shouted and screamed and railed at the injustice of it all,
and actually done something. There is a belief that the true
professional is the one with the reassuring manner, however, in my
experience, it is the over-the-top raging lunatic who is the one
you should back every time in a crisis. They really fight on your
behalf, and absolutely refuse to let you go. Your death is their
death, and they aren't about to give up on either of you. That is
what my surgeon was like. I was lucky.

On the other
hand, if you are a parent, your biggest anxiety is that your
mortally sick child becomes either frightened or intimidated. You
quiz your friends and acquaintances over the reputation of each
consultant, waiting for someone to say that Mr. So-and-So really
looks like he knows what he is doing. Unfortunately, the one who
will actually do what is necessary is often the one everyone
describes as “a bit out on a limb.” We are talking about the
consultancy business here. The most successful consultants, in
terms of revenue and reputation, are those who look the part and
offer a safe, if fatal, choice.

Inevitably,
Louise's slow slide towards the grave raised the question of “Why
her?” On the basis of any sort of merit where life is the prize, it
was inconceivable that this plucky, beautiful, courageous,
honourable and frail child should be singled out for this gruesome
treatment. “Why her?” My mother discussed it many times with her
priest, who confessed that he could not begin to phrase an answer.
She questioned each successive medical professional how it could
have happened. Each one had his own list of potential causes from
electro-magnetic currents, to pollution, to diet, to genes, but
none was conclusive. We asked each other the question many more
times besides, knowing it was rhetorical, and that we were more
giving expression to despair than expecting the other to attempt an
answer. The only acceptable and appropriate response was for me to
shake my head dolefully, and ask her if there was anything she
needed, giving her the opportunity to suggest once again “a
miracle”. Please, please.

From what I
know now, I can still not venture any explanation beyond that life
is morally random. Lottery winners are seldom saints, and child
victims are rarely sinners.

You can
comfort yourself with the notion that we all have to experience
life, and for the very best of us God says after only a few years
“They are ready for the next life. They have nothing more to prove.
They have graduated”, before whisking them away. I think that this
is rubbish, but it is some consolation.

Strangely,
Louise never asked “Why me?”, or at least not that I ever
overheard. She accepted that it was her immediately, and followed
the trail of her fate with great thoughtfulness, and minimal
dissent. It was all happening to a child who had her body, and who
wasn't really her. It is a remarkable phenomenon to watch, and a
much better one to be spared.

The second to
last time I saw Louise, she was lying on the grass in the garden,
watching some ants. She liked ants. Our mother had bought an ant
colony kit which was a plastic container into which she poured
sugared sand. You could see the ants burrowing away. Louise admired
their ceaseless energy.

The last time
I saw her was when she had already slipped into a coma over the
weekend. I had been away, sleeping over with friends, and my mother
believed that it would be too distressing for me to be recalled to
join her at Louise's bedside. I remember thinking that it was odd
that the sleepover was lasting so many nights. My friend Rupert's
parents came up with some plausible excuse or another.

The death bed
of a child is especially grim. It affects the hospital staff as
well as the family, as well as anyone who happens to be passing. It
is so against our desired order of things. We want to believe that
everything has its time and place, and that a child has no place
dying. We want to believe in meritocracy, such that all smokers,
and drinkers, and drug abusers, and child-batterers, and
wife-beaters, and rapists, and traffic wardens should go first. It
is not that way. The hospital beds of thousands of young children
tell you otherwise.

“
Oh God, why
her?”

I prayed for
special powers to save her.

* *
*

Chapter
4

Have you
thrown this book down yet, Inspector? You must be shouting “Get on
with it, Julia. Get on with it.” You must want to get to the heart
of things, and you are only getting to the heart of me. Maybe that
is some compensation. I am trying to get to the heart of me
too.

I am taking my
time, I am afraid.

I am giving
you a privileged insight into how my mind works because we have sat
so many times together, talking, that it is only fair that you
glimpse everything, and that you realise that I know everything -
your every thought.

Maybe you are
getting hot under the collar. That flush that starts as a thumping
in the chest, and rises to a heat buzzing through your ears. Then
the cold feeling descends, and the terrible realisation dawns. She
knows everything?

And when you
have read this, and we meet again, you will be attempting that
impossible task - not to think something that you are already
thinking about. “Do not think about pink elephants”, we used to
challenge each other, and laughed as we realised that we could not
subsequently banish pink elephants from our minds for the duration
of the task. “Do not think about my naked body as we talk,
Inspector.” One of us will be deeply uneasy throughout our
conversation. We will never be friends again, because you will be
unavoidably aware that I will have a detailed map of what you are
thinking as we talk, and that the playing field can never be level
between us.

I get a map,
and pictures too. It is a three-D neural map, the sort of map you
see if you buy brainstorming software where you can link any
concept to any other concept. On my map, labels shimmer as they are
in a constant flux of re-evaluation. On one side of my brain I get
the live pictures, either in scanning mode (where the most
interesting mental pictures around me zap in and out of my
consciousness), or in personal mode (where I can lock in on every
visual and aural thought a specific individual has).

I can also
scan groups, monitoring what each person is thinking of the other.
You can imagine that what you get is not what you see. I must have
spent most of those first few weeks with my mouth open, physically
reeling, occasionally laughing out loud.

You may have
the impression by now that I am the sort of person you definitely
do not want to spend time with any more. I am too bizarre, too
scary. I am not at all the person you thought I was.

That is the
question everyone asks, don't they? “Will they still love me when
they find out what I am really like? If the one I love had
unlimited and total access to every thought I have day and night,
what would they think of me? Would they forgive me?”

Our first
reaction is that they would despise us. They would know about our
greed, our peevishness, our anger, our pettiness, our spitefulness,
our contempt, our desire for serial adultery, our hope that our
parents will die so that we can inherit all the money from the sale
of their four-bedroomed detached house, our wish that our children
would up and leave us at the ages of 28 and 24, our almost
irresistible urge to pick up a shotgun and shoot all those people
who really annoy us.

Actually,
maybe what they would mostly discover is how nice we are. They
would find earnest, generous thoughts. There is a strong desire in
us all to do our best for everyone. When the person next to us is
in trouble, we want to help. Social rules often discourage us from
doing so, but we really do want to drag the person out of their
mire, at some considerable personal inconvenience.

Take mothers
and their children. I am not a mother. I will never be a mother. I
am not cut out for it. However, I have watched them. The amount of
worry the average mother gets through in a day planning how her
children can have a pleasant, invigorating, rewarding, educational
24 hours! And that is the tip of the iceberg. Mothers strategise
every few minutes as to how their children can develop, and grow,
and find fulfilment and happiness over a whole lifetime. Whenever
anything goes wrong for their children, their first concern is
whether the mishap hurts now and how it can be remedied, but the
very next thought is how this incident might blight their
children's entire lives. After this, will they ever be the same
again? They are constantly searching for things that will change
their children's fortunes for the better, and dreading those that
will change them for the worse.

Men are not
like that, even the house-husband types. They are generally baffled
watching this stream of uncertainty flow through their partners.
They are more physically aloof, but that is not it. Men simply
worry less about people, themselves and others. They have more of a
sense of the transitory nature of the world. Things will go wrong.
Things will go right. You cannot have the ups without the downs.
Women worry about people. Men worry about finances.

* *
*

You must, by
now, be wondering if I will ever get to the point when I arrived in
Hanburgh, and still more whether I will give my side of what
happened there.

Allow a woman
to tease you, Inspector, and to tease out the real truth for
herself. We women are wilful creatures, especially in front of a
willing audience.