The Emperor Waltz (46 page)

‘I don’t know where my mates are,’ Joe said. ‘They’re all fucking cunts. I never want to see them again. They can fuck off. And my fucking sister. She knows I’ve been here for six weeks, dying, and no sign of improvement. Where the fuck is she, my own fucking flesh and blood, the shite.’

‘It’s sad when you’ve no mates,’ his friend said. ‘Me, I’ve got hundreds. I’m like him at the end with the fucking flowers and the fucking queue of visitors.’

‘Ah, him,’ Joe said. ‘Him with the roses. Nurse, can you take me out for a fucking cigarette, now, you’re treating me like a cunt.’

‘Not now, Joe,’ Lucy said, walking past. The flowers were tulips, brought by my friend Richard. But otherwise Joe and his friend were right. I had been lucky in the number of visitors I had had.

5.

In the space of the ward, contact with the world was exiguous. What I remembered best about a previous three-week stay in hospital when I was fourteen was how very odd the world looked when I came out: sparkling, cold, fresh. I had had the sense of everyone moving quite gingerly through its air. On this occasion, since I didn’t feel ill, I had no compunction about taking the lift down eleven floors once or twice a day to the cafés and shops that were making money out of the hospital’s unclinical lobbies. In my pyjamas, slippers and dressing-gown among the crowds, but licensed in my
déshabillé
, I felt inexplicably invisible. Nobody looked at me, though to be caught in public in your night- or sick-wear is a familiar dreadful dream of conspicuous discovery. I think they were perhaps tactfully averting their eyes, since nobody wants to be caught staring at a person who is seriously ill, or just insane. The lift upstairs was a capsule returning me to an enclosed, epic and safe world. It was easy to see how a week or two would rob you of any curiosity about the world, even where your nurse had come from that morning, even about the long, laden boats sliding noiselessly over the grey-surfaced river below, with the silent pregnant greatness of the boats in Homer. For this reason, the nurses and other medical staff would be surprised and vulnerable to any genuine-sounding or interested enquiry in their circumstances. I banked on this.

The lack of curiosity about the world was strong in Joe and his Irish friend. I put it like that, since the lack seemed a positive, even an energetic, quality of decision and the averted head. I never heard them ask a question that wasn’t aimed fairly directly at extracting a favour for themselves. Their sight could have extended only three feet from the borders of their bed, taking cognizance only of what happened to blunder against them. Beyond that, there was nothing but inaccurate speculation, a world made out of rage-filled fantasy, sentimental constructions – those hundreds of imaginary mates in the pub – and a great emptiness of malice. Of the world they knew and saw and cared nothing at all, and those blundering and aim-directed objects came into their circumference from nowhere, and went on to nowhere, to do nothing further once they were detached from Joe. Joe’s imagination did not fail. It had never begun to work. The ward existed in a kind of void that from time to time provided a laden trolley with tea or machinery or medicine. From time to time, the remote end of the bed would be crowded with white-coated dignitaries. They would shake their heads, metaphorically speaking – in reality, one or two would raise their heads and gaze penetratingly at nothing in particular while the rest hung their faces over their notes, hoping not to be addressed. Below, on the river, long empty boats, like yellow shoeboxes, went from right to left in the early morning’s mercury-shining light; in the early evening, the same boats went from left to right, bearing ribbed burdens of iron-boxed waste, and the boats sank deep in the water with their new weight. Where did they come from, and where did they go to disgorge themselves? In the placid world of the ward, I looked down from the steel-framed window and began not to care.

Joe and his friend had forgotten all about the world, and the world had certainly forgotten about them. There were few visitors to the patients in the ward; the quintuple stroke victim had a visit from three gigantically obese people, his daughters and a grandson. A sharp-faced girl with skin as red as a scrubbed thing turned up, and spent exactly ten minutes with the other Irishman. Outside, in the world, polemicists and activists were arguing that it was a tragedy that the physically infirm and helpless had been forgotten about, were ignored by society. Up here, the physically infirm had forgotten not only about the world, but even what to do to enquire about it. They knew their nurses’ first names, since they sometimes wanted to call one to do something for them. More than that they could not venture, and would have been astonished to discover that normal people could not live in such empty boredom without enquiring about idle details. But, of course, they were normal people: that was what life made of normal people, friendless and incurious, attended only by the dutiful, who had no choice in the matter.

For the moment, I was new and in unfamiliar territory. The world outside wanted to know what was up, and my friends came to visit. Nicola was first, at nine in the morning after my admission, then, as soon as he could, my husband Zaved. Then they all came. Richard, Yusef, Renaud, Alan, Lucy, Jess, Amy, Georgia, Erin, Nicholas, Ginny, Matthew, Giles, Thomas, one after the other, in pairs and threes, so many that they had to wait or we had to decamp to the pastel-green family room or to the café downstairs. Zaved, who was there from two till eight every day, heard me tell the story of my infection and admission so many times that he started removing himself, by the fifth day, in mild annoyance. I had so many visitors that I started to feel myself
popular
, though I had only seventeen visitors in two days; I felt myself popular even when my sister Kate came to visit. I also, interestingly and very authentically, began to feel myself tired by society, like an invalid in a book. The stream of visitors to my bed infuriated Joe, who listened keenly, making abusive comments in the third person when he could hear the conversation, or complaining about people whispering when he could not. But if the numbers irritated Joe, they made a positive impact on the nurses, who seemed to show an interest and to like me more when they saw that I had, at the least, two dozen friends and a sister who got on with me and who had not moved to Australia in high dudgeon, the better never to lay eyes on me again. By the end of the second day, I started to feel that I could have got the nurses to do anything I wanted.

6.

Once I wrote in a novel that sometimes we see a new friend coming from far off. He falls into step with us, companionably, and as he begins to talk, we recognize that we had a Bertie-shaped hole in our lives and affections. We didn’t know about it, but it was there, and now it has been filled, by Bertie. It is hard to remember seeing him for the first time, or what our life was like before we knew him.

How do we meet friends? How do we know that the person we have just met will or may become a friend? There he is, perhaps in a slightly awkward place in a group. You are not quite sure what his name is, and you make a remark that is not quite meant for him, though it does not exclude him, and not quite general in tendency. But he says something in return that is not quite what you expect, something that makes you pause, or that echoes something you’ve thought yourself. You look at him; he looks back when you make some kind of response; and a friendship begins. The next time you see him, you are not quite starting from scratch.

This theory of friendship leaves too much out. Our friends are not people we happen to agree with most of the time. Only very shallow egotists
choose
their friends at all, and what basis you might decide on approving a stranger as a friend for the future is not something to be listed. We prefer to think of our friends as happy accidents – the person we have an office next to, the person we happened to be standing by at the Freshers’ Drinks in a beeswax-smelling Arts and Crafts common room, and said, ‘I’m really terrified – I want to go home before they find me out’ to. That was thirty years ago. You saw a movie with him last night, and you offered him your popcorn without thinking. Or they were friends of friends who became friends in their own right. They were somebody we once met in a bar and took home, and the sex did not work, but you made each other laugh over breakfast, and a week later you bumped into each other in Vauxhall and you laughed again over drinks, but didn’t go home together again – ten years later, you wouldn’t dream even of thinking you once went to bed with your old friend. They were somebody you used to meet at parties to launch books, whom you thought of as a professional contact to be civil to. Then one day you broke your ankle falling off your bike, and the phone rang and it was the professional contact pointing out that they only lived five minutes’ walk away, and it would be no trouble to get some food from Waitrose. The alternative, she said, was going in and facing a series of phone calls from fucking poets about why their work wasn’t selling better. Was it embarrassing to ask her to get a bottle of white wine and the cheap shepherd’s pie, which wasn’t too bad at all? Well, you asked anyway, and now she’s your friend.

They are happy accidents, but there are plenty of happy accidents that fail to become the beginning of a happy friendship. The man who drove into you and broke your ankle, for instance, or the appalling man you used to work with, and had to be polite to every day, but who wrote prose poetry about clowns and small girls. He might have thought you were his friend, but the day you left that job was the day after which you never spoke to him again. There were other people, too, who came round with help when you were ill, whom you, indeed, visited with the second-best shepherd’s pie from Waitrose when they broke their ankle. They are not really your friends. If you saw a friend enter a crowded room of strangers, or walking unexpectedly across a crowded city street, your heart would rise at their dear flapping trousers and their church-bazaar orange-and-lime scarf wrapping itself round their face with the wind. If you saw a pseudo-friend like this, your heart would sink, inexplicably, guiltily, and you would wonder if they had seen you. The sentence, two weeks later, ‘I thought I saw you on Regent Street a couple of Saturdays ago,’ will fill you with terrible, unspeakable, unshareable self-flagellations, and you will promptly invite the man and his terrible wife to dinner, and cook a whole shoulder of mutton and even make both a green soup and a pink pudding from scratch, and at this dinner you and your partner will both get unforgivably, atrociously, unacceptably drunk.

Friends don’t happen because you share their views, or because they are going to be useful to you. But afterwards you do find yourself sharing their views and, to your mild surprise, you are cheerfully being helpful to them; they are cheerfully glimpsed lifting a box of thrillers into their car to take on your behalf to the charity shop. They are coming to see you in hospital, and bringing you whatever you need, without you having to ask, but you don’t mind asking. It could be that the appearance of friendship, in the guileful, could get strangers to do your bidding, too.

Perhaps there is a sense of the pariah, just outside the friendship. There are people whom we may agree we don’t care for – Liberal Democrats, hunting folk, people who are glimpsed transfixedly picking their nose just on the other side of their car window, sitting in a traffic jam, or single-issue activists, people who say, ‘A friend invited my wife and I on holiday,’ and explainers over dinner of the Chechnyan conflict. More specifically, there are the fucking poets or the friends of the past who introduced you to each other, who, years later, you confess that you wouldn’t care if you never saw the intermediary ever again. The pariahs cement our friendship, even if they are quite out of the room. And what are we, together? We may be holders of some special beliefs: our qualities will spread and the opinions we hold will triumph in the end, and the world will improve. Sometimes the opinions we hold, the ones that our pariahs would probably fight against, are on vegetarianism, racial equality, the purity of the Line, the importance of having a few hundred books and a nice painting or two around the place, the inferiority of certain races or of one gender, the idea that rhyming poetry and the C major chord aren’t done for quite yet, the rightness in all things of the Tory party or the Communist party, the conspiracy of the paedophile establishment, a single European currency, world peace and the excellence of the films of Douglas Sirk. (We don’t necessarily argue for any of this: sometimes we just embody it, and the belief gets spread just the same.) Sometimes these opinions that we jointly hold merely add up to the belief that, if we have to be in hospital at all, we should be in a small room, away from the smell of human shit, with, in ideal circumstances, a view of the Houses of Parliament there, just across the river. I was definitely going to get my way on this one.

7.

I began to work on a doctor whom, afterwards, I always referred to as Dr Arsehole. It was a childish play on his surname, which was not very much like the word Arsehole. At first he appeared to be a Vauxhall type, taking time off from a long shift at the disco coal-face. He had a shaved head and a twinkle in his eye: he was in early middle age and had a rascally quality. He was a podiatrist, not a doctor at all; he came in the first morning to examine my feet. The first thing he did was to get out a scalpel and cut off the dead skin that made up most of my toe, cut off the sodden white mass that was the previously hardened skin at the end, probed through the ulcerated segment at the end, probing down to the bone. I could feel nothing, and I watched him at work with interest and some social speculation. He was senior enough not to wear a uniform of any sort.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘I’ve often wondered, in circumstances like this, what leads people to decide to specialize in one unlovely part of the body or another. Or, rather, when it dawns on you that the foot is where you want to spend the rest of your life.’