The Fish Ladder (25 page)

Notes on
Swimming Pool (2)

Innominate Stream

School finished. We stayed for the fireworks for the Feast of St John, and then Evie and I flew back to Mum’s house, as we had done every summer for the past six years. The three of us meant to spend a week at the cottage, and then I would fly back to help Rupert. Evie would stay with her cousins. The night before we were due to leave for Wales Mum stood outside her house. She was looking at my rental car in the driveway, walking around it, peering through the windows. For some reason she had been adamant that I should hire a car, although God knows I had little enough money, and now, after tapping the roof, she said:

‘I think we’ll go in my car tomorrow.’ I stared at her, unable to fathom her reasoning.

‘Well, what do you think we should do with this?’ I said.

‘We can leave it on the drive until we get back.’

The whole debate about the rental car had seemed bizarre to me, and in order to avoid an argument I went to my room, and started shuffling a deck of cards that Evie had brought with her. Mum was behaving extraordinarily oddly. One card flipped free and slid to the floor. The three of spades. I picked up the card and shuffled again, and then turned over the top card in the pack. The three of spades.

In Tarot, the suit that corresponds to spades is the called the suit of swords. The three shows a scarlet heart with three swords piercing it and rain clouds opening behind it. Black streaks of rain. I shuffled again. The three of spades. I tapped its surface, couldn’t resist speculating over its meaning. The first spade, it seemed to me, was the immediate, financial trouble in which we found ourselves. But the second and third pips worried me. I pushed the card back into the centre of the pack, and went to bed, irritated by my superstition.

‘Kate? Kate?’ It was Mum’s voice. I reeled into consciousness, was suddenly wide awake. I listened but could hear nothing more. I disentangled myself from the bed, and ran along the landing to Mum’s bedroom, which was empty, the covers thrown back. There was a smell that I could almost touch. Fear.

‘Kate?’ I looked over the stairwell and there was my little bird, my mother, reaching up the stairs, her eyes spoke where she could not, and I rushed down to her, and helped her to the sofa, her lungs bubbling with liquid. I telephoned 999 and then ran back up the stairs:

‘Evie, Grannie is very, very sick and I have called an ambulance, you must get dressed and come down right away.’

Mum waved to us from behind the oxygen mask as she was lifted in a wheelchair into the ambulance. I dropped Evie at my brother’s house, and continued to the hospital.

When I got there, Mum was in a bay in Accident and Emergency with two nurses trying to clip heart monitors onto her fingertips. She reached forward, her fingers stretched before her, as though she were trying to find something to hold onto, and pull herself clear of the bed. I touched her hand, but she pushed it away. It was something else that she needed, something more. A doctor appeared at her bedside, and said:

‘Prepare for defibrillation.’ I was swept aside as a cardiac team gathered around my mother. I saw her fall back on the bed, and her head roll to one side, her hair untidy as a rook’s nest. There was a bang, and an electronic whine.

A nurse moved me into a peach-coloured room, with
Bereavement Suite
written on the door.

‘It doesn’t mean that your mother is dead,’ she said, ‘but that this is the best place to be while this goes on. There are a lot of people round her.’ I heard again the butcher’s cleaver bang of the defibrillator behind the door. I telephoned my brother.

When John arrived, trailing Evie and his own family, and we had gathered in the peach-coloured room, the doctor came in to talk to us.

‘We have tried to resuscitate your mother three times with the defibrillator, and she has had an adrenalin shot to her heart, but she is unresponsive. Would you like us to continue to try to resuscitate her?’ The air in the room seemed to be made of plastic.

‘Will she have suffered brain damage?’ I asked.

‘She has been without oxygen for six minutes, so yes, there will be damage, but what it is I cannot say.’

I looked at John. Mum had never wanted to be revived. She had always been very clear about it. There was a moment where nobody seemed to move, and then one of us must have said something because the door was closing and the doctor had gone. A nurse came in and said that they were preparing Mum’s body, taking it to somewhere we could look at it, at her, and would we please wait a few minutes more. I phoned Rupert, and told him that Mum had died. The words sounded very strange to me.

And then the doctor came back. ‘This is really very unusual,’ he said, his hands raised as though in blessing, ‘but your mother’s heart has begun to beat of its own accord although she is unable to breathe. We have put her on life support and are moving her to our critical care unit. If there is no improvement in twenty-four hours we will turn off the support. In the meantime we’ll try and find out what has caused this.’

Critical care
.

I woke in darkness at my brother’s house. I was in the spare bed in my nephew Connor’s room. He was awake. ‘Connor, I’m going to go over to the hospital. Do you want to come?’

‘It’s OK. I’ll stay here and look after Evie. I’ll tell the others where you’ve gone.’

I drove to the hospital and parked Mum’s car in the almost empty car park. Trees huffed and nodded. Blue streaks lightened the inky sky. A copy of
Jane Eyre
was tucked beneath my elbow. I made my way through the quiet corridors, their vinyl floors and fluttering fluorescents, and rang the buzzer outside the critical care unit. A nurse admitted me and then rejoined her colleagues sitting peaceably at their station. Mum and two other patients rested, each with their private, internal struggle, each mechanically suspended in a space held open between life and non-life, an opportunity, a place of choosing. Mum was all wired up, with a tube taped to her nose. There were a lot of pipes. The rhythmic sound of her mechanically controlled breathing was like waves on an artificial beach.

I pulled up a chair and leaned close to Mum’s face. Ordinarily she was deaf, and the life support had a range of noises all of its own. I had to lift my voice even to hear myself above it. I read the part where Jane Eyre frightens Mr Rochester’s horse and he accuses her of being a fairy. Mum gave no indication of knowing that I was there, but the nurses were very appreciative. After a while, the man in the next bed, who had been in a coma, woke up. There was a choking and whirring as his lungs began to inflate of their own accord, causing a flutter of activity as he fought against the machinery, which suddenly threatened to smother him. Shortly afterwards his wife arrived. He seemed to be trying to say something. His wife translated for him, through his pipes and tubes:

‘He wants to know what you were reading,’ she said.

‘It was
Jane Eyre
.’ She looked nonplussed. ‘By Charlotte Brontë.’

‘He very much enjoyed the story,’ she said. Her husband wheezed and rasped. He looked from me to my mum. ‘And he wants to know if you’re going to come and read again tonight.’

Tonight.

Mum’s condition was to be reviewed at four o’clock that afternoon, and if there was no improvement, they would disconnect the breathing apparatus.

‘If I’m here, yes, certainly,’ I replied.

At some point during the morning Mum’s doctor told us that her heartbeat had stabilised, although she was unable to breathe without the machine. He thought she had suffered a thrombosis to her heart, and was almost certain that she would not recover. She had been without oxygen for six minutes before her heart began to beat. It had been damaged by what had happened. He put her chances of recovery at about a million to one. But the medical team agreed that they would postpone turning off the machine until the following afternoon. So Mum was to be given another day. Others came to visit. Evie stayed with the cousins. I went back to Mum’s house and collected some personal things. Pyjamas. A photograph of Dad, held in a silver frame. It had been taken on holiday, in France. Feet apart, arms folded. His happy smile as he squinted through bright sunlight at the camera, and at the woman who was taking the picture. He must have been about fifty. I cleaned the glass. It had been Mum’s habit to kiss the photograph each night before she went to bed.

When I got back to the hospital and the wide, artificially lit space of the critical care unit, and saw the nurses sitting at their station, it was as though I were looking at it for the first time. I seemed to recognise nothing. Possibly because until this moment I had been focused on Mum, her tiny form, the tubes. Looking at it now, in the middle of the day, it felt more like NASA than a hospital. The intubated patients weren’t in space, but they were suspended, several yards apart from one another, each with a bank of equipment and wires maintaining their life on earth. The gasp and bubble of mechanical breath. It took me a while to notice that the man in the next bed, the man who had woken up, and had enjoyed
Jane Eyre
, had gone, and so too had his bed. Only the husk of machinery remained, cracked open like an empty chrysalis. A nurse told me that Mum’s condition was stable, but that she was making no effort to breathe.

‘She has spent the last nine years waiting to join that man,’ I said, and pointed to the photograph of Dad. I had arranged it where Mum would see it if she were to wake. ‘You’re going to have to try very hard if you want to get her back.’ My brother and his wife and I took it in turns sitting with Mum. In the afternoon, the children came too. Evie was fascinated with the tubes. Rupert called from Barcelona. We were already discussing the funeral.

That night, when Evie was in bed, I again returned, alone, to the hospital. I had brought
Jane Eyre
with me, although the empty space where the man had been, and Mum’s continued unresponsiveness, made the effort seem pointless. The nurse I had spoken to earlier was sitting in the chair next to the bed. She held Mum’s hand.

‘Come on, Jean!’ she was saying. ‘You can do better than that!’ When she noticed me standing there we chatted for a moment or two, and the nurse gestured to the photograph of Dad.

‘How did they meet?’ she asked. I found myself telling her how Mum’s best friend had been Dad’s sister, and that they had all gone to school together. Dad had decided that he wanted to marry Mum when he saw her playing tennis at the village recreation ground. She must have been about sixteen.

‘She was just so
alive
!’ he would say.

‘What did your dad do?’ the nurse asked.

‘He was a teacher. At the university. A professor of Mechanical Engineering,’ I said.

‘You must be very proud of him.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I am.’ I had the feeling that the nurse’s questions might be in some way therapeutic, though whether intentionally, or accidentally, I couldn’t tell. I was very much aware that Mum might hear our voices. So I found myself telling the nurse how when Dad was a boy he had won a scholarship to the local grammar school. I was conscious that I should try to get the story right. Or more specifically, that the reason I was telling the story at all was in the hope that Mum might recognise it.

Dad had won a scholarship, sponsored by the tannery where his father worked. His grandfather – William – also worked at the tannery. William was a man with forearms like roasted hams, who had been converted to Methodism by John Wesley himself when he crossed the country on horseback.

I looked at the nurse. Then back at Mum. Her face was pale. The breathing apparatus bubbled as her breath condensed in the pipes.

‘No, I’m very sorry,’ I said. ‘That can’t possibly be right.’ John Wesley died in 1791. Great-Grandfather William must have been born around 1870. I had obviously crossed my wires. I had another go.

From the day of his conversion William Norbury never touched alcohol, and he even turned the other cheek when a fellow-worker struck him. Although, when his assailant hit that cheek also, William had decked him with a single punch to the jaw, saying: ‘The Lord said “tha’ must turn the other cheek”, but he never said owt about what to do if tha’s hit on that one.’ William had become a lay preacher. He travelled around the county with a suitcase full of sermons, written in a minute, cursive script, and carried by a young man who had incurred some sort of brain damage, but was devoted to William, and would not leave his side. William married and had five children. His first son, Wesley, named after William’s hero, had died of meningitis in childhood. The two younger boys had gone into the tannery, where they heaved the stinking hides of cattle into deep salt pits, their sleeves rolled up, rubber boots protecting their legs, their cotton shirts and twill trousers protected by black stuff aprons. This had gone on, day in, day out, until the coming of war in 1914 interrupted a grinding pattern. William remained at the tannery, but my grandfather, Russell, who was the same age as the century, was called up for the fighting. When he came back home again, injured, from France, he was still a teenager. Although his physical injuries healed quite quickly, the war left its mark in other ways. Russell spent four years looking at his face in a mirror, convinced that one side was bigger than the other, and that shrapnel was still embedded in his jaw. Because he was unable to work in the tannery proper, the owner, Mr Posnett, gave Russell a job in the Time Office, where he stamped cards for the workers as they began and ended their shifts. Mr Posnett was often heard to say: ‘I saved Russell Norbury’s life after the war.’ I wasn’t sure whether a mind-numbingly dull job in the Time Office constituted saving Granddad’s life, or not, but it had certainly provided him with an income. He was plagued by anxiety, although he was always a gentle man, with a fine tenor voice, and was good-humoured about everything except his neuroses.