Scissors, Paper, Stone (24 page)

Charlotte was again pondering the conversation with Gabriel when she drove to the hospital one Sunday morning. She didn’t normally go on her own, but Gabriel had arranged to meet Florence for brunch and Charlotte couldn’t bear the thought of seeing her in the morning, with the whole day stretching threateningly before them.

‘What if she wants to hang out with us all afternoon?’ Charlotte had asked him the night before. He laughed.

‘She won’t. She’s got the busiest social life of anyone I know. We’re very lucky she’s squeezed us in.’

But Charlotte hadn’t wanted to go. Part of her felt resentful that Florence was intruding on their lazy weekend time of togetherness, but she knew that it would annoy Gabriel if she admitted this, so she kept herself in check and said nothing. He was allowed to have friends independent of their relationship, she told herself. She just wished the friend in question wasn’t Florence. So she had invoked the hospital visit as an excuse, knowing that Gabriel couldn’t possibly object.

‘Do you want me to come with you?’ he offered, even though she knew it was the last thing he wanted to do.

‘No, that’s very lovely of you but I’ll be fine. It’s quite relaxing in a way. I’ve probably had some of the most meaningful exchanges I’ve ever had with him since he’s been comatose.’ She grinned, assuming a levity she did not feel.

Gabriel seemed relieved. They still weren’t having sex and she knew that it bothered him, that he found it increasingly difficult to be in her physical proximity without the question of it nagging away, deadening the air between them. She hadn’t told him about her encounter with Maya, only too aware that he would think it evidence of a borderline personality disorder. Instead, she had pushed it to one side in her mind but the knowledge of it, the depressing constancy of comparison, hung over her thickly.

‘OK, sweetie. I’ll see you later then?’

‘Yep. See you later.’

Charlotte had driven to the hospital on her own, knowing that Anne wouldn’t be there – Sunday morning was her sacrosanct time for listening to
The Archers
and doing the week’s load of laundry. She found that, once behind the steering wheel, negotiating an endless series of traffic lights that turned from amber to red just as she reached them, she felt unaccountably upset. It was one of those dry, overcast and slightly misty London days when the air seems to lie flat against you, pushing its weary greyness close to the skin. Everything Charlotte looked at through the windscreen made her more depressed. As she crossed over Putney Bridge, it seemed as though she were being taunted by happy vignettes of other lives lived: the families pushing buggies along the riverbank; a toddler in small Wellington boots kicking muddy dirt up from the track; rowers with ruddy cheeks, carrying boats into the water on their muscular shoulders; fat Canada geese waddling into the shallows; coffee shops playing earnest CDs of world music; and tinny, bright cars driven by twenty-something couples rushing off to Sunday lunch at cheerful pubs. Everyone had their place, negotiating the soft ebb and flow of an easy weekend.

Charlotte sighed. ‘Come on,’ she said out loud. ‘Stop being so self-indulgent.’ And she turned on the radio to Capital FM so that her ears were soon filled with the thumping bassline of assorted pop tunes she was embarrassed not to recognise.

She got to the hospital shortly after 2 p.m., despite her best efforts to make it half an hour earlier. She went through the usual rigmarole – the disinfectant squeezing, the effortful smile at the nurses, the long walk down the beige corridor – until she reached her father’s door. As she turned the handle and walked in, she was seized by a sudden certainty that he had woken up. For a brief second, Charlotte was convinced she had seen Charles sitting up rigidly in bed, staring at her with hollow eyes and a terrible smile on his face, arms twisted as if the bones had snapped and were no longer pinning the flesh together. In her mind’s eye, he looked like the skeleton that had once so terrified her on the ghost train ride at a theme park on a family holiday when she was little – an eerie figure rigged with wires to jump out of a coffin at precisely the most stomach-lurching moment.

It was such a lurid vision that Charlotte started to sweat lightly, a moistness breaking out along the top of her cheeks as it always did when she was nervous. She blinked violently, noticing the slight scratchy dryness of her contact lenses as the room readjusted into focus.

Charles was lying, as normal, with his eyes closed, his arms straight down against his sides, the outline of his toes poking through the bottom of the blanket. As she got closer, Charlotte noticed that his nasal hair had grown and that one, thin, wiry black strand was shivering lightly in the breeze, so that it looked almost as if he were breathing on his own. He looked bizarrely well: there was a gentle flush of rosiness on his face, and his arms remained strong despite the intravenous diet, the veins twisting down his pale flesh like thick cable.

She noticed that she had not yet taken off her coat. She shrugged herself out of the heavy sleeves – it was a tweed woollen thing with the weight of a dead animal’s pelt but it was not yet quite warm enough to move to her spring raincoat – and tossed it on to the wooden-framed armchair. She stayed standing over her father, looking at him, etching out every detail of his face in her mind. There were his high cheekbones, so defined that a flirtatious housewife had once asked him if he had Cherokee blood in his family tree. There were his thin, crisp lips that, in consciousness, could twitch and snarl and smile and kiss in the same fluid movements. There were his eyelids, lightly flickering against the imagined blue, blue, blue of his irises. There was his hairline, receding in a heart-shape from his large brow, faded gold with pockets of speckled grey. There was his nose, broken twice from university rugby matches, now grown into a crooked nobility. There was Charles, in all his glory. And yet also absent, as if the fundamental essence of him was slowly being scrubbed away, the sharpened edges sanded down so that he no longer terrified or impressed with the ferocious power he once had. She was not scared of him. Not like this.

Charlotte did not, as she usually did, take a seat next to him. Nor did she start into her habitual recitation of the week’s events. Without Anne there, she felt no need. Instead, Charlotte stood in silence, hearing her own breathing mingle with the pumping motion of the life support.

The unhappiness came back to her then, in a savage gust, a sudden squall of internal pain. She felt on the verge of retching and yet also as if she was about to burst into uncontrolled laughter. She craved the lightheadedness that a cigarette would give her, although she never normally smoked. She wanted a sort of obliteration.

She walked across to her father’s bedside, unaware of what she was doing. Lightly, she lifted up his right hand, holding it out from her as she would a bit of wet seaweed on a beach. It was heavy in her loose grasp, the fingers hanging down like the legs of a dead animal. After a few seconds, she released her hold, letting Charles’s hand drop with a soft thud back on to the blankets. She looked around her, half-expecting someone to ask what she was doing. When no one did, she found herself lifting up his hand once again, holding it for a moment and then letting it drop. His flesh felt cool and thick and weighted down. She repeated the exercise with the hand three times and, each time, it gave her a small sense of victory.

‘Not such a strong man now, are you?’ she heard herself saying, her voice oddly flat and blank. His hand looked weirdly disembodied, a detached scrap of anatomy like the marbled chunks that drop off ancient statues: an arm here, a foot there, a piece of finger exhibited on a museum plinth as something that had once belonged to a bigger whole.

Still standing, she flattened her palm against his cheek. It felt flabby, and when she jiggled her hand from side to side, she found that his flesh wobbled with the movement. This sign of weakness gratified her and she smiled. Leaning into him, she stretched her other arm over the bed, catching her sleeve on the plastic tube running from his nose. She pressed her left hand to the opposite side of his face so that she was holding his head like a lover, in an intimate sort of caress. Half-crouching over him, her face was close enough to smell him – he smelled of chemicals, a tangy aroma of pharmaceuticals mingled with stale sweat. The smell both repelled her and made her want to lean closer. A strand of her hair hung lankly across his chin.

For a moment, she did nothing. Then, after a beat of silence like the pause before a flick of a switch, she slapped him gently across his jaw with one hand, feeling the reverberations of this physical jolt on the other side of his face. She tensed, listening for the sound of a nurse with her hand on the door handle. She could hear nothing except for the occasional muffled footfall.

And then, without knowing why or how it happened, Charlotte felt her mind contract. It was as if she had slashed an internal mental artery and her thoughts came gushing out, leaving behind a pallid nothingness, a blank, empty screen. Suddenly she was screaming, screaming things that she did not know she thought or felt, things that made no sense other than that they were noise and she needed, more than anything, to make some noise, to rip the silence apart, to feel its brittle glass screens disintegrate into a violent shattering. Noise. Blankness. Hate. Rage. Tears.

‘You fucking bastard. You fucking, fucking bastard. You ruined me. You fucking ruined me.’

And as she screamed, she found that her hands were hitting and punching and slapping and scratching and clawing. She thumped his right temple with a clenched force she never knew she possessed and found that instead of his head bouncing back, it lay slackly on the pillow, turned to one side. She started pummelling his stomach through the sheets, bringing her fists down on to him in a wild blur. They made a strange sound like a car door slamming shut. Still, she shouted; shouted with spittle and spray, shouted to goad him into a reaction, to force him to stand up and slap her back, to hold her wrists firm in his hands until she stopped struggling. Still, he did nothing.

She lashed out with elbows, knees and fingernails. She hit his chest with the flank of her forearm, bringing it down on him like a guillotine blade. The mattress juddered beneath, the bed slid to one side. She gripped his neck in her two hands, pressing down on his Adam’s apple with the balls of her thumbs, squeezing the tendons so tightly that her fingers started to ache. One of her earrings fell on to the pillow, a burnished gold disc against the starched linen whiteness. Her hair stuck to her forehead. Her armpits felt damp with effort. And then she was crying, the tears coming without sound, simply falling down her face and on to the white sheets, leaving behind dark spots like raindrops in snow. Her words became howls, insensible cries and she was hiccuping at the same time so that everything sounded strangulated and sticky and she realised there was no point, no point at all to any of this, that it was too late, that she hated herself for being so cowardly, that no one was ever going to explain and nothing was ever going to make her feel better. There was nothing here. There never had been.

She heard the door open, the sound of feet rushing to her and then she felt thin but powerful arms pulling her back, restraining her, holding her in a vicious embrace, telling her to calm down, pulling, pulling, pulling her off her father even though she tried to grab hold of the bed, legs flailing in protest, the screams still sounding loudly inside her head.

Still, his eyes were closed. Still, he did nothing.

Still.

Anne

A nurse from the hospital phoned Anne at home. The nurse obviously didn’t know quite what to say or how to explain the reason for her call. Anne could sense her discomfort almost from the first breath of the conversation.

‘Mrs Redfern?’

Anne stifled an exhalation of impatience. She thought it was terribly rude for someone not to start off with a gentle ‘Hello’, introducing themselves and, briefly, the reason for their call. It was one of her pet peeves. When Charlotte had been younger and her schoolfriends rang up to speak to her, Anne would always notice the ones who had been well brought-up: the ones who said who they were, engaged Anne in a small exchange of politeness and then – but only then – asked to speak to Charlotte. The ones who didn’t display such elementary good manners were mentally blacklisted. If they rang during mealtimes, there was no hope for them. Anne had a frighteningly long memory for perceived slights.

‘Yes,’ said Anne. ‘Speaking.’

‘Oh, hello. Um. It’s Sanjita Rana here, I’m a nurse at the hospital. At London Bridge.’ There was a pause. ‘Where your husband is being cared for,’ she prompted, unnecessarily.

‘Is there anything wrong with him?’ asked Anne. There was a flustered coughing sound on the end of the line.

‘Well, no, not exactly.’

‘What do you mean “not exactly”?’ said Anne. A combined sense of impatience and anxiety started to prickle the surface of her skin.

‘The thing is, Mrs Redfern, we have your daughter here.’

‘Charlotte?’ she said, stupidly, as if she had countless other daughters to choose from. Anne looked at the wall calendar that she hung on a corkboard in front of the phone. It was Sunday. Anne thought it was strange that Charlotte had gone to visit Charles at the weekend – normally she chose to spend all her free time with Gabriel. That’s odd, she thought, but the thought hung, unfinished, in her mind. She brushed it aside and waited for the nurse to continue.