The Angel's Cut (33 page)

‘It was the chair,' Flora said, dogged. ‘It had leaves. You did it.' Then, ‘I hope you'll be all right.'

‘You know I will. And I promise that Alison will too.'

Flora nodded. She rested her head back on her piled pillows and gazed at the ceiling.

Alison had drained the bottle. Xas carried her to the bed and sat beside Flora, set Alison on his knee and began to jiggle her gently to dislodge wind.

‘Don't do that,' Flora complained.

Xas stopped jiggling and rubbed the baby between her shoulderblades instead.

Flora said, ‘I don't need Alison to admire me—'

‘But I'll show her your films,' Xas promised, eager.

Flora waved an impatient hand at him. ‘Never mind that. Alison is going to see this differently from everyone else, but you mustn't let her think she lost me because of what I did. She
is
what I did.'

‘The movies are what you did too,' Xas said.

Flora heaved a sigh. She looked exhausted. There was a film of sweat on her face. ‘Stop changing the subject. Why did I choose to have this baby?'

‘You loved Crow,' Xas said.

Flora stared at him and waited.

‘You loved me,' Xas said.

Flora nodded. ‘Yes, I do love you. And I love Connie. But, listen. You've spoken to him, haven't you? And after you
spoke to him you changed. You became quiet. Quiet and deliberate.'

‘I only spoke to him on the phone.'

Flora looked pained and impatient. ‘No,' she said, ‘Not Connie. Your
brother
.'

Xas didn't know what to say.

‘You told me he'd found you. That time when Millie thought you'd been bitten by a snake. He came back again, didn't he? I mean
after
he'd written his notes.'

‘Yes. I spoke to him. He spoke to me.'

‘I thought so.' Flora closed her eyes. ‘What did he offer you?'

‘Nothing.'

‘But he will one day.'

Alison managed a burp. Xas wiped the baby's chin with her bib. He stared at Flora. Her head lay in the socket of her pillow. Her face was lifeless, and closed.

‘Flora?'

Her eyelids stirred, as if she were dreaming. She said, ‘When she's grown I want Alison to see that I didn't make a stupid decision. It wasn't all about Connie. It wasn't all love.'

‘But it was,' Xas said, wounded, puzzled, plaintive.

‘Not all. I didn't hear anyone say, “Build an Ark”, but I have built one. “A shady bed in the whirlwind of mysteries.”' She fell silent. Several minutes went by and Xas supposed she had finally fallen asleep. He waited for one of the things that always woke her now: a myoclonic jerk, her restless legs. Then she said, ‘She's beautiful, anyway. Time always runs
forward, but the reasons for things sometimes go back. She's beautiful, and
that's
why I had her.'

After that conversation Xas didn't get any sense out of Flora—only responses. She wanted the toilet. She didn't want another sip of water. ‘Take that baby out of here if she is going to cry.' ‘Where's O'Brien?' ‘Could I have another pillow under my legs?'

To his relief she wasn't ever as incoherent as she had been about the ‘leaves' of the chair.

And then one morning there was blood in the toilet bowl. Flora couldn't answer his question but, by the smell, he guessed it was from her bowels. He cleaned her up and changed her nightgown and carried her back to bed. He restored her to her nest of pillows. For the last week she'd slept, when she'd been able to, propped up. It helped her to breathe, particularly in the early hours of the morning, when breathing was a real struggle for her.

Xas sat down on the edge of Flora's bed and stroked her earlobe till she looked at him. He said he thought he should take her to hospital.

‘It's too early,' she said, and he didn't know whether she meant it was too soon or thought they shouldn't bother anyone until a more reasonable hour. Then she said that she didn't like hospitals.

‘Perhaps I should call Avril to take Alison.'

‘Let her sleep,' Flora said, and Xas couldn't tell whether she meant Alison or Avril. He decided he would phone Avril. Then he'd wake Alison and bring her in to
her mother. He got up from the bed. ‘I'll be back in a minute.'

Flora was holding his hand. She let it go, then when he began to move away she reared up and snatched at him. ‘Where's O'Brien?' she gasped.

Alison was fast asleep in her cot, so Xas went out to find the cat for Flora.

Xas first checked under the rosemary bush, then walked to the top of the nearest rise, where the track to Flora's back gate branched from the main path. The sun wasn't up yet. There was just enough light to colour the closed poppies, and the tangles of bramble, and club-like flowers of the bulrushes.

Xas called. He walked away from the gate, calling. Minutes went by, then tens of minutes. He knew he should go back, should call Avril, shouldn't leave Flora alone. He looked over his shoulder. The neighbours' houses were quiet, windows still sealed by blinds or curtains. The only light showing was at their own kitchen window. He saw this, as he always had, as a sign that Flora was home. It was as if he'd been out late, at a jazz club, or with Cole, and had come home to find that Flora was up and might call out to him, so that he could go in and give her the news—what he'd heard, who he'd seen.

Xas walked on. He continued to call. He listened—heard nothing much—as if everything on the wasteland had fallen silent to make sure his voice was heard.

Xas sank down then, he sat on his heels. He dropped his head and said, in his own tongue, to God, to Whom he had
feigned deafness for nine years, ‘Father, let me find this cat.' He prayed, and then lifted his head and waited. God was there—always there—as unconcerned and unhurried as the morning.

Xas waited. Then he gave up waiting. He turned back to the house and made for its homely light. At the gate he did stop once more to look back. And there was O'Brien, coming over the crest of the low dune.

The cat trudged, slowly. Xas could see mud and leaf litter clinging to his draggled belly. As soon as he saw Xas, O'Brien flopped down.

The cat had walked—had come back—as far as he was able. Xas knew that O'Brien had been walking for as long as he'd been calling, and for as long as he'd prayed. God might have heard and understood his prayer, but O'Brien had come himself, out of the trust of his own tired heart, from love and from graciousness.

Xas went to the cat and scooped him up. He carried O'Brien indoors and put him down beside Flora. He placed Flora's hand on the panting cat and, his hand covering her own, they smoothed O'Brien's matted fur.

At what she thought were intervals of only a few minutes, Flora made an effort to open her eyes. She was waiting for the sun to come into the room. For the sun to come, and another night to be over. O'Brien was pressed against her leg, purring so fiercely that his exhalations shook the bed.

Xas brought the baby in. Alison's warm, wispy head brushed Flora's cheek. Then the baby gripped Flora's hair
and gave it a tug. Flora felt Xas extract Alison's fingers. The bed moved as he sat down, the baby on his lap. Alison had her bottle, she was slapping it as she drank, the formula making a musical splashing.

Flora opened her eyes. No sun yet. She closed them again.

Xas said something.

The air in the room was as cold and wet as fog, thicker than air, hard to manage. Flora remembered being in the lit capsule of a streetcar on a very foggy night, the mist fuming through the seams of its doors. She had been talking to someone that night about how to make sense of a story, and the difference between the audience watching a character do something—say, a woman burning her gloves—and another character observing the same thing, unseen themselves, say a man in the room the woman has come into. Was it Connie she'd been talking to? They'd often talked about things like that. Often, all of them, Connie, Carol, Wylie, Con on occasion too, and different cameramen, Pete, Jimmy Chan, and Cole's editor, the woman who'd taught her how to cut film.

Flora opened her eyes. Why was the sun so slow in coming? It seemed a thousand years since she was well.

Alison was making baby music in her milk-thickened voice, the happy singing with which she began every day.

So it was morning.

Flora closed her eyes. ‘Oh, Connie!' she thought. It was so funny, the way he gave away his real ambition every time he called the audience ‘the audience' instead of ‘the mob'.
Connie always loved to say that, for the audience, it was the story that was the thing, whether crafted by a novelist, or thrown together by a newspaper copy boy or an opera librettist. Connie and his ‘story'. Flora remembered him, in the middle of one of his expositions of his method, saying to Xas—also party to some of those discussions—‘Pretend you're in the story.' Of course Connie hadn't known that that's what Xas was always doing, and that the pretence pained and embarrassed him. Xas was always more comfortable off to one side and serving other people's stories. Always happier providing some business in the background, keeping moving, like a fake multitude, the column of soldiers that seem to go on forever but are only marching around behind the live area to enter the shot over and over. Xas was like that. He was back there, behind things, a thunder and shining that made everything seem real.

Flora opened her eyes. The room was still dull. Perhaps it was an overcast day.

Alison was lying against Xas, her head on his chest, sucking her fingers. She stared at her mother, sleepy and solemn.

‘When I go into hospital, if I do say anything odd, they'll put it down to the psychosis,' Flora said.

‘You've been reading my book,' Xas said. Then, ‘Would you like to hold the baby?'

‘No. I can see her,' Flora said. She stared at her daughter.

‘Tell me what to do,' Xas said. ‘Tell me the rest of it.'

Flora closed her eyes. She couldn't understand what he meant. ‘The rest of it'—as though she was halfway through
telling him a story. Then she heard him say, ‘I mean—tell me what you want for her. For Alison.'

‘I can't imagine,' Flora said. Then, ‘It's all right, Xas, sweetheart. Pretend you're in the story.'

The world turned peach-coloured. The sun was shining on Flora's eyelids. O'Brien was shaking the bed with his purring, Xas was weeping, while Alison's puzzled complaints came and went in counterpoint.

Flora opened her eyes.

Xas went with Flora in the ambulance. The specialist had a room ready, a private room, so Xas could sit by her bed.

She'd lost consciousness shortly before the ambulance came, and didn't revive. Her admission form said, ‘Uraemic Coma.'

Xas sat beside her and held her hand. Flora's fingers were so swollen they felt rigid and boneless at once.

He had phoned Avril and she'd come, with her chauffeur. Flora had rallied enough to squeeze her friend's hand, but hadn't been able to find words. Then, once Avril and Alison had gone, Xas called an ambulance. He'd left O'Brien lying on the coverlet. Perhaps the cat would be too tired to stir again, but the back door was open, just in case O'Brien's animal needs drove him out again into the wasteland, to whatever bush he'd been hiding under before he was called. The ambulance had arrived, and the attendants were very gentle with Flora. They'd moved with dispatch, but without urgency. Flora had gone behind her body by then, was unreachable beyond her own face.

Xas didn't take his eyes off her face. He hoped she might surface. He didn't even blink. He sat by her stretcher in the ambulance, then by her hospital bed. He raised his voice over the sound of her laboured breathing to sing her the songs they'd both loved.

The nurses heard him singing—the young man with the much older wife. They looked in from time to time and did the little they were able to, took the patient's pulse and made notations on her chart.

At these times some spouses would watch all such activity with resentment or anxiety, while others were reassured. The young husband seemed oblivious. He seemed to notice no one but his struggling, comatose wife. One nurse thought this touching, another thought it rude.

They advised him to rest, to have something to eat. But he wouldn't stir. They didn't know how he managed it. For twelve hours he kept his seat and held his wife's hand. The doctor was in twice, at nine in the morning, shortly after the patient was admitted, and again at six in the evening, before going home to his dinner.

Then, at two in the morning, the young husband appeared at the ward sister's desk and said, ‘She's dead.' Just that. He followed the ward sister and a duty nurse back to the room, stood against the wall while, for a minute, they were busy by the bed. They whispered to one another, in deference to him, not the poor woman, the patient who, comatose on arrival, was a blank stranger to them. They closed the patient's mouth and drew the covers up under her chin, the
sheet rolled to hold her jaw in place. Later they'd cover her face. The ward sister moved the chair—its rubber feet squawking on the polished linoleum—to suggest to the husband he sit again. Sit awhile longer.

Xas resumed his seat. He put his palm on Flora's forehead, felt her cooling, but still elastic skin. Her soul was invisible to him. Invisible on earth. On earth—he thought—it was easy not to believe in souls.

The nurses had gone and he sat in silence. Time passed and, in time, he saw the bridge of Flora's nose sharpen, become stark. She was immobile, but sinking somehow, sinking perceptibly.

The noise in the corridors gradually increased. A cart was wheeled by. It paused at the door then went on, leaving behind it the smell of steamy unsalted eggs, butter and bread.