Mourning Ruby (16 page)

‘But I’m leaving –’

‘I know. You told me. I heard.’

20

Adam

If ever I forget your name, let me forget home and Heaven!

Six-thirty on an August morning. There is the promise of heat in the sky already, but for now everything is cool and still. In the distance the city is beginning to grumble.

Adam opens the back door and sits to lace his gardening boots. A blackbird stops tugging at its worm and looks at him, then seizes its prey again before the worm has time to slide back into the earth. Adam stands, walks to the garden shed, pokes about in the dusty dark for his garden fork and his spade.

The end of the garden, where Ruby’s swing and climbing frame were planted, is overgrown with weeds and rough grass. This is where Adam is digging his vegetable beds. He’s planning to make four beds, with grass paths between them, and their edges shored with wood. He has never done this before, and he eats few vegetables, but it’s a project. The scuff marks where Ruby’s feet used to strike the earth under the swing have gone. The careful holes where the climbing frame was securely fastened have been filled in.

Adam has staked out four oblongs where his vegetable beds will be. He sets in his spade, drives it deep at the
side of the bed, and lifts his first spadeful of earth and matted grass.

In an hour he has double-dug the first bed. He has worked methodically, shaking loose soil off the roots of the grass and laying the tough yellowish clods in a pile. The soil is clay. Adam has bought bags of rotted horse manure and they lean against one another, sagging. He’s digging in the manure and a little sharp sand to improve the drainage of the soil. This, he’s been told, is the right thing to do.

At the house-backs the curtains are still drawn. It is Saturday morning. Adam always wakes early, and never lies in bed after waking. It’s the best way. He comes out of the silent house as fast as he can. He works in the garden, or runs circuits through the quiet streets. More often than either of these, he drives up to the hospital, whether he’s on duty or not. These babies are not like other patients. They can ask for nothing and tell nothing. They need a minute, almost infatuated watchfulness that the NHS doesn’t pay for. And because they can’t vote or write letters or frighten politicians by speaking eloquently of their plight on television, they need to be spoken for, too, in the grim, sweaty tug-of-war that is hospital funding.

There are footprints in the dew, and a stink of fox. The spider webs are unbroken. Under the black, pointed leaves of the pear tree there are dozens of immature fruit. Adam lifts the leaves to check the size of the pears. This year he has encased several pears inside glass bottles. They grow inside the glass until they are much too big to slide back through the neck of the bottle. When they are ripe, he’ll cut the stem, clean the outside of the bottle,
rinse the inside, let it drain until fruit and bottle are completely dry and fill the bottle with Calvados. Adam will give the bottles to friends. His own drinking is strict. He checks himself, drinks beer and red wine but never spirits. He’s seen too many doctors on the bottle, washing away the crowds of patients who clamour in their heads.

Adam settles the leaves over the fruit. A slug has got inside one bottle and eaten at the pear. But the slug has gone, and the hole in the flesh is small. As the pear grows, the damage may heal.

Carefully, Adam cleans his spade and fork with an oily rag, and places them back in the shed. But then he stands still, as if he has forgotten what comes next. He’s seen something no one else would notice, under the shed. A small, dirty piece of Lego. He’s certain it wasn’t there yesterday. Maybe a cat has slunk under the shed, and pushed the piece of Lego out. Adam bends down, puts the Lego brick on his palm and turns it over with his finger. It is packed solid with dirt. He catches himself thinking that he could clean the dirt out with the point of a knife. He bends down again and scoots the Lego piece back under the shed.

Adam looks at his watch. Seven forty-five. Pascal will be here in fifteen minutes. And he’s sweating. He’ll get his gardening clothes off, have a shower, put on his running stuff before Pascal gets here. Crazy to have a shower before running, but that’s what he feels like doing. There’s time to make coffee and take it up to the bathroom. But he’ll have to hurry.

The hot, fine prickling of the shower is good. He turns the water up until it’s so hot it’s only just bearable. Steam
oozes around the shower cubicle. He lathers his body in a business-like way, not really looking at it, not really feeling it. The touch of water is good. The touch of his own hands is disturbing.

A clean, worn towel, his running stuff clean on the bottom shelf of the airing cupboard. He rubs his hair dry. It’s grey now, but it has stayed on his head, for which he’s grateful. His body is much as it always was. He looks after it, without letting himself get too close to it.

He slaps the towel against his thighs, then tosses it into a corner of the bathroom. There, Pascal will be here in a moment.

The bell sounds one sharp but short ring. Pascal knows the neighbours are in bed and that these skinny terraced houses have thin walls. Adam runs downstairs. His keys, his water, that’s everything.

Pascal, stronger and shorter than Adam, seems to bounce lightly on the balls of his feet even as he stands still on the doorstep. He’s wearing a tracksuit. He dumps his sports bag inside the front door.

They jog away slowly down the street. The postman glances then rests his eyes on the intense blackness of Pascal’s skin, the whiteness of Adam’s.

‘Morning,’ they call.

‘Beautiful morning,’ he replies.

They are going to run along the river, loop through the playing fields, across the park and back through the allotments. This is their regular Saturday run.

Afterwards they’ll shower at Adam’s, change and go out for breakfast.

Adam had never thought of running, before Pascal. It
was Pascal who came with him to buy his first pair of running shoes.

‘You will take the first pair they try to sell to you.’

He showed Adam how to run his finger inside the shoe to check the fit at his ankles. He debated fiercely over grip and cushioning. He took hold of Adam’s foot and squeezed it here and there and Adam was thrown back to childhood and the assistant pressing hard on the toes of his new shoes to judge where his flesh-and-blood toes fitted. The loose-limbed teenager who served them dropped his cool and wanted to please Pascal, find what he wanted, make the day good for him. That was the way Pascal worked on people. His serious, carved, intellectual face that you strove to please, his sudden smile that licked you like a flame and caught you alight.

They emerged with the running shoes pristine in their big square box and Pascal said, ‘Tell me the truth. You would have taken the first pair he offered you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Your heels would have been bruised in a week. You would have given up running because your back ached, Adam, and you would have thought it was because you were too old.’

‘You’re right. You’re completely right about that.’

‘But you are young.’

‘I am forty-eight, Pascal. I’m not immortal.’

‘Forty-eight is nothing for a man who keeps himself in shape.’

Pascal was right. Adam was not too old. Adam runs. Sweat breaks over his skin, the firm, cushiony cuffs of the trainers grip his ankles and his feet thud on the grass.
He accelerates, and for a moment believes he could accelerate for ever.

They slow. They fall back from their rush of speed and hit the rhythm they’ll keep to the end of the run. They’re side by side and Pascal glances across and grins to acknowledge that this is it, now they’ve hit their pace, now all they’ve got to do is keep on. Even the brown, suspicious river is bright as they run alongside it.

The noise of breathing is what Adam notices since he began running. The snort and rush of it, like horses in a field, startled. How much effort breath takes. Not the slipshod breathing of city life as you ease from car to home. Real breathing.

He knows about breathing. All its mechanics and how it fails. The crushed butterfly lungs of newborns whose wings for breathing won’t open. Collapse and scarring. Everything hard air does to soft stuff that isn’t ready for it. The anguish of parents watching the monitors that they don’t understand.

But he and Pascal run on. That boy there, fishing with his father. Adam wishes they would catch a fish now, before he’s passed them. That it would be on the boy’s line, the tug and thrum of it. That the boy would haul it into the air and go home proud.

After their shower, Adam and Pascal amble down the road to the café which for some reason has become their regular. It’s not the best café around, but they like it. A thin little dark-haired girl is inside, cleaning the window, rubbing hard. She’s new. In a few weeks’ time she won’t rub so vigorously and willingly.

After their run they deserve the fug of inside and
sausages, bacon, eggs for Pascal, mushrooms for Adam. They drink tea. Pascal will not touch the coffee here, and he eats his full English breakfast with a mixture of relish and suspicion which is the same each week and has once or twice led Adam to suggest a different café, a more expensive one where they sell bagels and proper coffee. But Pascal refuses to change.

Pascal wipes egg yolk from his plate with the soft white bread. He looks up.

‘Marie-Louise is pregnant,’ he says abruptly.

Adam feels his face spring into a shield of pleasure. ‘That’s fantastic,’ he says. ‘Congratulations. I didn’t know –’

‘That we were trying? No. But it’s taken us a long time. My sperm were not so active,’ says Pascal, astonishingly. Adam stares at him, unable to picture any other man of his acquaintance saying that with the satisfied candour of Pascal.

‘But they got there in the end,’ says Pascal. He grins and lifts his mug as if to toast the success of his sperm. ‘Fourteen weeks.’

‘That’s great,’ says Adam. He lifts his own mug of tea, to hide his mouth. His lips are not doing the right smiling thing. But his hand shakes and quickly he puts down the mug. ‘That’s great, Pascal,’ he says again, baring his teeth.

But Pascal is watching him with narrow attention, the way he watches patients on the operating table. All the details of them, colour and pulse and pressure. Pascal is a consultant anaesthetist, and his reactions are knife sharp.

‘Adam –’

‘It’s OK,’ says Adam. Then he does something he has never done before, because he can’t bear the sensation of his own face, naked in the café. He bows his head, lifts his hands, covers his face with them.

‘Adam, do you want to leave?’

Adam shakes his head. He can’t leave. He can’t stand up or walk through the café or go out into the bright street. It’s coming over him, a rush, an acceleration he can’t stop.

Pascal rises from his chair and comes round to stand behind Adam, his hands on Adam’s shoulders, pressing, holding him down safe. Adam’s breath tears in his chest as if they’re still running, at another pace that no one can stand for long. His breath forces its way out of him and the noise of it is loud in his head.

It’s early. There are not many customers in the café. An old woman in a woolly hat who notices nothing, a pair of working men who glance at Adam and Pascal and then down at their newspapers again. The dark-haired thin little girl stops rubbing her windows. She stands there, not sure what to do, with her cloth in her hand. She comes over to Adam and Pascal.

‘Is he all right?’ she asks timidly. Pascal shakes his head.

‘His little girl has died,’ says Pascal.

Adam hears those words.
His little girl has died
. That’s what Pascal said. Pascal didn’t say when Ruby died, or that it was three years ago now and Adam’s getting over it although, of course, a thing like that, you never really –

His little girl has died
.

Always, over and over, in her everlasting present, Ruby dies. She curls her hand into his, she tucks her
thumb into her palm and her skin is sweaty but she’s not embarrassed at all because she’s only five and what she wants is to hold her father’s hand. Her hand melts into him, her sweat is like balm.

‘My hands are sweaty, aren’t they, Dad?’ she says, looking up at him.

The mug shakes on the table top and the tea spills because Adam’s body is shaking the chair and the chair is touching the table. Pascal lifts the mug and gives it to the girl who is still standing there, cloth in one hand. She dabs at the table with her cloth.

‘I’ll get you some more tea,’ she says.

‘I’m sorry,’ says Adam. ‘I’m sorry, Pascal, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry –’

He hears the echo in his head. Rebecca said that. She wept and he listened but he couldn’t weep. She sat in Ruby’s bedroom and he told her she must stop sitting there. In the dark and smell of Ruby she was happy, she said. He was afraid it was becoming an obsession. He asked her if she would see the counsellor who worked with parents after a baby in the unit died. Not the blonde counsellor, a different one. This one was good, he said, but Rebecca stared at him as if he was trying to steal something from her. As if Ruby was still in her arms and he was trying to take her. But it hadn’t been like that. They buried Ruby together. He carried her in the light woodland box made of compressed cardboard and she weighed enough to bow his back.

He can feel her weight. His shoulders hurt. It’s not finished, he’s not at the end of something or even beginning to get there. It is all still to come, only now beginning and he hasn’t felt it yet. He’s like a man who has
put his hand into a fire and stares at it for the first second and feels nothing.

‘We’ll go home now,’ says Pascal.

Adam walks around his house. It’s full of soft afternoon light now. He’s far away from himself after so many hours of grief. Grunts and salt and mucus and tearing sounds he would never have believed would come from his throat. His pillow is wet. He pulls off the pillowcase and the pillow itself is wet with mucus and tears. He wonders if it can be washed, or only the pillowcase. Rebecca would know.