Serious Sweet (42 page)

‘Meg—'

‘Shush.' She has to press on and not let him slow what she needs to say, or steer it, or interfere – this is her fucking story and she'll fucking tell it. ‘Shush. Please. The point about all that is – fuck you, actually, because I'm sober now. I am sober today. What you get, what you've got, is me sober. And we never, ever would chase each other along a pavement at night and scream and slap and … we wouldn't, Mr August. We're us. And I'm me and today was a long, long fucking day. Not the worst I've had. I'm not going to make you listen to the worst I've had – I don't want that day, or the days like that day, to come anywhere near you. Or near me. But I've been stuck in nights, in times when a man's shouted and the hands come in at you, Jon, and I've kept my head down and it's made no difference and where you live, your home – it isn't where you
can
live any more, after that – if that stuff happens even once, even only a little bit, then you've lost your home, because he could always do it again. The fucker could always do it again. Couldn't he? The guy. The guy whose name I'm not going to remember. And I don't want his name anywhere near your head, it would be like putting something dirty in you, if I make you hear it, you know? Jon?'

‘I think I know. I think. I'm … Please don't be upset, Meg.'

‘Too late. Way too late for that. I am fucking upset.' Although she only mentions this flatly, keeps it as a statement and isn't loud – nowhere near screaming. ‘I am upset. I don't understand what you want, Jon, and this is all … I'm upset. You can't do things that are the kind of things that would make a person be upset and then ask that person to act as if you hadn't and to not care about them … and just shush, please, shush.' She can hear him shift behind the barrier he's fixed to keep her out. ‘I don't get why you're bothering with the door – it's not like you don't have a great big fence around you, anyway – you don't need an actual … Anyway …'

Meg pats at the glass panel above her head –
taptaptaptap
 – touches it in the way she might touch his arm to reassure him and, after a while, a small while –
taptaptaptap
 – back comes the reply.

Like prisoners in adjoining bloody cells …

‘What the guy – the one who doesn't get a name – what he liked wasn't violence. What he liked was the other thing. I said a little bit about it, I wrote to you and said a little bit about it. He would do the other thing. Afterwards, I would bleed.'

‘Christ.'

‘I don't think about him. I haven't, except on days when there's medical stuff, gynaecology stuff, examinations … Which is me taking care of myself and doing what's right, let them check that I'm well – but it pisses me off that it makes me remember him. And I do … I …'

She pauses while something empties her lungs, and her lips stop being clean and a seal that can rest on proper loving. Her mouth stops being something she'd want to give – like a present, like a present that can hold a present.

‘Meg?'

‘I'm fine.'

I'm Fucked-up Insecure Neurotic and Emotional.

F.I.N.E.

Smug, fucking rubbish.

‘You don't sound …'

‘I'm as fine as I need to be, Jon.' She clears her throat and swallows and would like some water. Meg would like to be drinking cool water. ‘Today was one of the days for an examination and you have to book up weeks in advance and if I could have met you on any other day, I would have, but it's—'

‘That was my fault.'

‘All right, it was your fault.'

‘Oh.'

‘If you want it to be. I don't think it's anyone's fault.'

Oh.

‘I have … I get busy, Meg. I only understand about work, I do my work and the rest of … I don't do the rest of my life. I'd
rather not.' Jon's hands are clasping each other, slipping with worry when he grips too tight, unreassuring and ungentle. ‘I get busy – I prefer to be busy and once you're geared up to be someone who is busy … Today was a day – that is, yesterday was a good day when there would have been a fair chance that we'd make it.'

Hearing himself use the past tense when describing their fair chance –
oh
 – simply drops him into silence.

Meg calls to him, ‘Jon, I was the one who assumed that I could cope if all of this happened in one day. I could have told you no. I could have anticipated that I'd end up pretty much insane.'

‘You're not insane.'

‘You're not exactly best placed to judge.' And this sounds cruel, which she doesn't intend to be, but then she hears Jon make a half-laugh in response and that's a fine sound, a lovely sound – one of the best. ‘I just … Jon, I'm going to tell you about something from last year. From about six months ago. It's a story – my dad would do this, he'd come upstairs when I was a kid and if I couldn't sleep because I was worried, he'd give me something else to think about. He was no use at fairy tales or those kinds of things, but he could talk about things that had happened to him. He could give me his life. In pieces. That's what he did.'

‘He sounds like a good father.'

‘You'll have been the same.'

‘I was away a lot. Too much.'

‘And you're doing better now.'

‘I don't know.'

‘I'm sure it's fine – this is where I talk, though. About me. Self-obsessed alky. I talk and you, you don't have to stop worrying, or doing whatever you are doing in there, but you listen and that's all you have to do. No duties otherwise. OK?'

‘OK.' Something young in his voice, something of being peeled back to his child self.

‘Six months ago, I went into hospital—'

‘You didn't say, love.'

‘Shush, for fuck's sake. No. I didn't. I couldn't work out how to tell you and it was just a small thing, day surgery, and I assumed
that I'd be fine. Like I always assume that I'll be fine. Or that I'll be dead. No intermediate positions. Just those two. Even if somebody sawed my head off, I would probably assume I would be fine, that I'd get by … If there's no threat at all, then I'll fold flat and just wait for the Four Horsemen, order a coffin … I'm wired up wrong – backwards. If there's something horrendous and dramatic and it's only going to ruin me – nobody else – then it seems to sound reasonable. I probably could deserve it, I probably could survive it. Something like that. I tell myself I'll bounce on through it and hardly notice. It makes planning a bitch.'

And this faulty wiring is perhaps why Meg is thinking that Jon will leave tonight and not come back, but that she won't be destroyed by his loss.

She tells herself
shush
.

And then she says, ‘They tell you to be at the hospital with a little bag – as if you're just taking an overnight trip, Paris and back, and you go with that as a nice idea. You can't bring anything with you that might get stolen while you're off in theatre, or unconscious. Which makes the journey sound like a pretty tough trip.

‘I mean, I hid money in my knickers – and put my phone inside my sock, inside my shoe … childish. You do need your money, though, and you do need the phone.

‘Or at least money. You'll have to get away at the end.

‘I've no clue when this will all be done with, when a cab could be called in to pick me up, when I could stroll out, apparently unscathed, hardy … But I'm not concerned about that, I'm saying in my head that I have my little bag and I'm checking into this hotel – a big hotel that smells of bacon and gravy – there's a lot of catering places as you go in and it's breakfast time, powerful aroma of toast, pale toast and disinfectant and the smell of people who aren't well. Not a great hotel. Hand-sanitising bottles all over the shop and great big metal lifts. You have to not size up the lifts and work out you could get a trolley into any one of them, or a coffin.

‘It's really early. So no one's about except for a few of the staff heading off for toast and coffee and the other people who are checking in with their little bags.

‘You go to the desk – not exactly a check-in desk – and you say your name and date of birth and then you sit on a chair – it's always chairs and waiting – and I had a book with me in my little bag, one about polar explorers, because those bastards had it worse than anyone. Their teeth shattered in the cold – that doesn't seem fair. The frostbite and starving and snow blindness and all that is horrible, but it's not – I'm saying this is my opinion – it's not unexpected. Walking along in a snowstorm and dealing with that and then having no bloody teeth, that's fucking unreasonable.

‘And I'm sitting on the chair and being outraged about these fuckers in the snow with no teeth and that's cheering. I reckon I've made a wise choice with the reading material. I like finding out about the suffering and the sledges and mittens and portable stoves and tents. It's letting me feel comfortable. They made it back, this particular team, so that keeps it calm and not depressing.

‘So, after a while, you've just about persuaded yourself that you're in a hotel for real, on a holiday in this place that reeks of dead people and pies – you're ignoring that – but you're breathing in faith, or frost, or adventure – something that's bearable – and you're being thankful that you've got your little bag and that you still have access to health care, that you don't have to pay extra for it when you've already paid for the NHS – even though you shouldn't be thinking of health, because this is meant to be a hotel – but then a nurse appears – makes the hotel vanish – and she's got a list of names and there's something about a list of names which is a bit … It's never good, is it? You never can tell …

‘She wants you and all the other little bag people to follow her and – like mugs, like a bunch of mugs – you just do tag along. You go along these corridors that you'd never find your way out of and they seem kind of yellowy-faded and not quite … You'd want them cleaner … And then – which is a surprise – you're round a corner and here are the beds. Not a ward, precisely, just in a fat bit of corridor where there are beds. There are no swing doors you have to go through. You maybe wanted swing doors.

‘And the nurse with the list sends you off to your bed – the number of the bed is on the list, too – and your position is right
by the wall, this whole wall which is just radiating coldness. It is colder than the weather was outside, which isn't fair.

‘And then you end up sitting on another chair which is beside a bed and you're reading about the sledges again and waiting and pretending that you're a well and normal person visiting someone, because that's what people in their everyday clothes are doing if they're sitting on a chair beside a hospital bed.

‘But another nurse comes by and says you should take off your clothes and put on the gown she gives you and your dressing gown, which you have because it was on the list of things to put in your little bag.

‘So you pull round the curtain that hangs down from a track in the ceiling which circles the bed and doing this makes that chattering sound and that swish that it always does in films and soap operas – so you can be glad about that. You can be a film star, or just someone in a television series. Then you undress and put on the gown which isn't yours and then the dressing gown which is.

‘You can be glad of the dressing gown because it keeps in a bit of heat – the hospital gown is hardly there, it's just this shapeless, odd shroud of a thing, designed for the convenience of others, made out of cloth you'd imagine using to polish your car and then throwing away. You do wonder if it's meant to be disposable and if the fact that clearly it's quite old and has been washed often means that corners are being cut. You worry. Not about the operation – just about the gown and the missing corners.

‘You're also glad of the slippers you've brought – they were on the little bag list, too – the slippers which make a small place under each of your feet belong to you and your home and not to where you are, which now does not smell of death or gravy, but of other things you can't identify and don't exactly take to. One of the smells makes you think of embalming.

‘And even though you're glad of the comforting things, you're also thinking that hospitals are full of really ill people. And the ward is full of probably slightly ill people who are also pulling
their curtains and changing themselves into patients – strangers in dressing gowns with bare shins. They all look much iller than when they came in as soon as they've undressed. You suppose that you do, too, if it comes to that. And you're wondering if your dressing gown and your slippers aren't getting covered in illness and strangeness and if you won't have to throw them away once you're back home. And you liked your dressing gown.

‘And you're getting colder and colder. Beyond the wall, you could swear there are ice fields and white bears and unrusted ancient cans of meat. There are penguins with sloped shoulders waddling across these pale spaces like patients in contagious slippers and they're shaking their heads.

‘You're shivering.

‘Another nurse asks you again who you are and when you were born and where you live. And it makes you feel doubtful – this is the third or fourth time you've been asked. You want to imagine that they're being extra careful, but you end up being sure they can't keep hold of information and can't guarantee to remember what patients they have from one minute to the next.

‘Would you want them to cut you or burn you, or do what they have to do when they can't keep safe hold on an address?

‘You talk to your anaesthetist for a long time. He checks who you are again and your address and that stuff, and you don't care if he knows who you are, or could come round to where you live with a fucking Christmas card, you just want to be sure that he knows you're the alcoholic. You're the alcoholic who doesn't drink and who never wants to feel as if you have and that means no sedative. No feeling out of it, no recovery from feeling out of it – no chemical ripping about in your blood.