The Ruby Slippers (4 page)

‘That is, of course, presuming that you are in possession of an immortal soul. Because, come to think of it, Donna Inez, I have seen more feeling in a half-starved Mexican dog than I have ever seen in your slitty little eyes.’ He prolongs the moment, keeping her trapped in his glare until at last she counters, quietly but bravely, ‘It is very kind of you to show concern for my immortal soul, Mr McBride. But I think you should worry more that I am still here each day to follow after you and clean up your shit.’ He breaks into the devil of a smile – the one and only of the day: ‘Hmm, very, very good. But you will be here, won’t you?’ He fumbles in his cardigan pocket, and out comes a billfold, black and potent in his squint hand. He scrunches out a sheaf of dollars and drops it down on the floor in front of her. Then he backs off, reversing the chair, the bulk of him dwindling away to the living room and out of sight. Inez watches, stern and frozen in her rectangle of light, looking like a priest at the altar who has seen off thieves. Disdainfully, she turns her head away from the mound of notes in the middle of the floor. But the contempt is mostly for herself – she will, of course, conveniently tidy away that grubby heap before the serving of lunch.

■ ♦ ■

James stands in front of the flower stall outside the hospital. A pretty girl beams down from the counter. He cannot choose between the silk-pointed purples, the splashing whites and the star-spangled oranges. His senses are drawn to the more colourful flowers, yet he is wary of these scent-drenched attention-seekers. They seem like so many high-kicking dancers taking up the stage, while other, more modest blooms hide in the wings. James has more of an eye for the greenery, the stems and the stalks with their oriental filigrees and interweavings. If anything he prefers the fragrance of these humble supporting players to the sweet, cheap scents of the show-offs. There is something dark and ancient about them, with shades of melancholy, if such a word can be applied to vegetation. He really should get to know more about plants. There is a veranda to the apartment and one day, when all this is over, maybe he will wise up on it all and grow something beautiful out there.

James becomes aware again of the girl. Perhaps she would have an idea or two: ‘What would be a suitable choice of flowers for someone who’s in the hospital?’ he asks. Straight away, she comes back, ‘Well, sir, that would depend on the lady.’ For once, James is in no mood to be coy on the subject: ‘The
lady,’
he says, dwelling archly on the word, ‘is the most wonderful man that ever lived.’ The poor girl blushes to her roots, stammering out an apology that only makes James feel crass and insensitive. ‘Not at all, not at all,’ he reassures her. She has done him a favour by causing him to make private things public. Paolo and he were never strident about being gay, never desired to broadcast their love in theatrical kisses or hold hands in the street. But right now, it feels good to say it out loud and proud. ‘Well,’ she says, recovering, ‘white roses? That’s pretty good, I would say.’ James mulls it over: ‘You think so? OK. Roses it is then.’

■ ♦ ■

Ten blocks over, the St Patrick’s Day Parade cruises towards the intersection of Fifth and St Laurence, just as Old Rosa arrives, the lightless, silent mass of her with the cart and the dog, drawn into the Parade’s shining orbit. Mask-faced and parchment-stiff, she is surely indifferent to the pleasures of happy families, couples arm in arm and smile-high Asian tourists. But Rosa has known all of these sensations, and inside her mummified hide she is even now touched by sweet, invisible particles of pleasure, the charged ions of delight.

Her infant heart remembers marching to other tunes in other parades, though in an altogether different land. She remembers what it is like to be lifted high on your daddy’s shoulders; to catch sight of your own pretty, plait-framed face in the melting brass of a euphonium; to feel the shudder of drums pass through you to the core; to bury your face in candyfloss and feel its sweet fibres fuse with your own hot cheeks. And Rosa still recalls with painful clarity the face of a woman arriving, young and dreaming, in the new country. She who once danced naked on an oceangoing yacht, defying the lightning to strike; she who has stood stiletto-high on the lid of a baby grand and sung to 500 people whose names have long since passed into legend.

In truth, Old Rosa has been all her life a woman of blinding passions and hopeless hopes. It is precisely because she is at heart so passionate that she has been able to sustain herself, so cold and unforgiving, in turning against the world. If she can never have again what she once had, she will never look back in the ordinary, foolish way and say ‘if only’ and then ‘ah well’. If she cannot reclaim everything that was once her shining right, she will have nothing. So this, too, is Rosa: this terrible bat-like mass that sullenly dips its head and wades unheeding into the rippling flank of the crowd, ploughing its usual furrow of outrage, her only thought to cross the Avenue before the Parade swallows it up.

The St Patrick’s Day Parade famously has no motorized floats, the whole thing going on foot, proud and purposeful: union men in their ranks, old soldiers, policemen, firemen, marching bands of all descriptions – any group whose glories can be stitched on a banner and waved up high. And it is Old Rosa’s fate, as she steps off the sidewalk, to arrive on the roadway at the same moment as the one and only motorized vehicle allowed anywhere near the Parade. The official camera van – a long, low-slung flatbed truck – sails on, slow and unstoppable, to dock against the flapping wall of Rosa’s skirts, throwing her over so that the back of her skull cracks audibly against the ground, raising a collective gasp of horror from the nearest spectators. Within seconds, this accident escalates into a tense, absurd drama as the broken bundle that is Rosa is overrun by a swarm of NYPD officers trained to the task. Some fan out to hold up the Parade, some form a barrier to keep back the crowd, and others go to Rosa’s aid, the more valiant of them cradling her slumped body into a more dignified shape. In their Sunday-bright uniforms the cops are like so many overeager schoolboys, an impression that intensifies as Rosa’s almighty stench declares itself and faces twist into infantile grimaces, at odds with the strong, silent aura of heroes. One officer, who is about to give some form of resuscitation, recoils from the task and staggers to his feet to save himself from passing out. Another man kneels down to give the kiss of life, but he is also too sickened to administer it.

Rosa chooses this very moment to come back to consciousness. The pearl-black eyes open in their leathery sockets and the scene spills into her vision: the gaggle of officers milling around, embarrassed, with one brave young man kneeling down knight-like to hold her hand. Sorrow creases his china-blue eyes. Incredibly, Rosa sees the scenario for what it is: the PD boys all dandified for their big day, but made to look like the Keystone Cops by a smelly old woman. It is, she decides, just plain funny. And Old Rosa, in her failing moments, starts to laugh – a high, girlish giggle that makes the officers all the more perplexed. Then her eyes roll back to white and she is gone. There is more than one sigh of relief from the cops, which is strange, because of course her smell lingers on, but at least it is where it belongs now: with the dead rather than the living.

■ ♦ ■

Harrison, at this moment in time, has no care for the Parade; he intends merely to get across it, having business to attend to on the other side of the Park. But he stops short when he realizes the whole parade has come to a halt, with banners keeling to, a ship shorn of sails. Why? On the sidewalk, voices cut across each other and hands flutter in elaborate mime as people mesh together their different takes on the story to arrive at an acceptable whole. Half knowing what he will find, he pushes his way to the kerbside and reaches the heart of the hullabaloo. Cops everywhere; a bundle lying by the film truck, its face a waxy yellow grub in a black flower; the fat, black dog sitting panting by the shopping cart, tongue hanging out, head going side to side like a Christmas toy. Harrison’s eyes swivel, too, as he sizes things up. There’s none of death’s deep mystery here, no sense of a soul departed or the presence of God, just grey-faced guys in uniform standing around giving out how they alone know how to handle this kind of stuff, moms tight-faced around their kids and the children themselves empty-eyed and licking ice-creams.

‘So that’s it. She dead. Too bad – time to move on.’

Harrison spits and moves on.

■ ♦ ■

James enters the ICU suite a shy child hiding behind flowers. He had meant to arrive bearing fine things and meaningful words, but between ground level and this high place, the courage has seeped out of him. It’s to do with hospitals themselves, of course – the horrible reminder of going into such places when he was young, of being with his mother in death’s waiting room. There are twenty paces and a door between him and the next unspeakable set of horrors to be endured, but as he finds the courage to continue forward, he stops in his stride, his eye held by a thing inexplicable. There, hovering in the shadows between the window and the door, is a young man he knows, but who simply doesn’t belong here, and who by his down-turned expression and the timid manner in which he says, ‘Hi, James,’ seems to be fairly cognizant of the fact himself. It takes James a moment to square the familiar face with the unfamiliar circumstance. This is Jack from the library . . . your colleague, your junior employee, so why is he here? He cannot think of anything connecting this absurdly young-looking man to the two separated parts of his life.

‘Jack, what are you doing here?’ he snaps, unintentionally rude.

Jack stares back at him, allowing himself a wounded pause. With his diminutive stature and bland round face, he is a child left with no sweeties when the rest have seized the bag and rushed away. ‘They wouldn’t let me in. Not now, they said. Close family only.’ He holds up his own large bunch of flowers, not white and graceful like James’s but bright and multicoloured, a rainbow bouquet, intended no doubt to offer cheer. ‘I just wanted to bring him these.’

James can only stare back at Jack’s little-kid face, with the tiny nose so absurdly, optimistically upturned and, as always, reminding him so maddeningly of someone, though he has never been able to put his finger on it. But then he hardly knows the guy, beyond the fact that they work at the same place. In truth, he doesn’t want to acknowledge this person in this place; he doesn’t want to hear his childish breathy voice or hold his unsubtle flowers. But there is a question he simply has to ask: ‘Forgive me, but I don’t understand. I mean I didn’t even know you know Paolo.’

Jack makes the same wounded pause before replying, which makes James begin to doubt himself, and when Jack speaks, he is made to feel guilty for having doubted him: ‘But of course I do. From Woody’s Bar – a whole lotta times.’ He insists, faintly wounded but noble with it. Even so, James cannot remember ever having seen Jack outside of work. ‘Such a great, great guy,’ he adds, piling on the agony. ‘Ah,’ says James, faintly apologetic now and prepared to put the mystery down to the chaos that has reigned in his head for so long.

‘No, no, it’s me,’ adds Jack hastily. ‘Put me in a crowd – parties, weddings and the like – I just go invisible. Plain shy, I guess.’ He visibly wriggles, doubly self-conscious in the contemplation of his own gaucheness. He holds out the flowers again. ‘Could you maybe just give these to him for me?’ And with this he turns and rushes for the elevator.

James turns back, shaking his head, then smooths himself down, ready to stand before the dreaded door again. First, though, he looks right then left and gently places Jack’s flowers on the windowsill for someone else to find.

■ ♦ ■

Paolo lies on the bed, stark and symmetrical as a jewel. His two arms extended from his sides, palms raised, like a saint beatified. Beneath the sheet, the sculpted outline of his legs is arranged into the same religious iconography. There seem to be fewer cables and tubes than yesterday, as if they have fallen away, their cycle completed, the sacrificial object sanitized and ready for the final offering. Steeling himself, James inches towards the bed. Never has he seen Paolo’s pale face look so spare. The sight stirs compassion in him, restoring some warmth to his spirit. He leans over and says softly, ‘Sweetheart.’ He imprints a kiss on Paolo’s desert-dry lips and draws back, expecting more of the empty silence. But, wonderfully, Paolo’s eyelids unmesh an instant, giving the faintest glint of grey. James is ecstatic; it is as if Paolo has just sat up in bed and smiled. He holds out the flowers, saying, ‘White roses . . .’

Paolo’s breathing is faraway, infinitesimal, but James has read somewhere that the dying have heightened sensory awareness. Convinced that his lover is alive to the scent of roses, James’s voice takes on a breezy note: ‘I ran into the Parade on the way here. It was so . . . fine and dandy. It was like I was five years old!’ He sits waiting, longing to see life in Paolo’s eyes again. But then a voice hisses out of the dead space behind him: ‘Sir . . . Sir . . .
Sir!’
He jerks around to see a white-frocked nurse – short, plump and middle-aged, but somehow childish, with her tiny cap perched on big strawberry-blonde hair and lipstick smeared crimson. Her eyes are wild as she stomps over and snatches the flowers from his hand. ‘You can’t bring these in here! This is Intensive Care!’ It doesn’t take much to make James feel foolish. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t—’

‘That’s no excuse! Intensive Care – you can’t read? There’s sick people here!’ she hisses, firing off a last poisonous barb, not knowing how close to his heart it passes, then stomps off. James reels; he’s so easily thrown right now, and this stupid woman has violated their intimacy, bringing the world in all flat-footed. He doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry, until the absurdity of it strikes him: sick people in a hospital? Well, that’s news! It prompts him to share the joke: ‘D’you hear that, Paolo? These flowers could make you very sick indeed; I could’ve . . .’ The words die in his throat as he sees a tiny movement ripple across Paolo’s sealed mouth! Instantly, his face is next to Paolo’s, his fingers wrapped around the broken bird of his hand. James leans over, astonished to see lips that were rusted shut begin to prise apart. Paolo is trying to speak! It is the faintest rustle – no more than a sigh – but there is no doubt that, after all this time, Paolo has broken out of the void and has something to say that has a greater claim than death. James strains even closer as the words emerge agonizingly slow: ‘I . . . love . . . you . . .’ James feels the flutter of a hand inside his own. Words stirring again: ‘Re . . . re . . . re . . .’ Unable to haul itself over the impossible summit of the word, his face falls back to nothing, eyes and mouth scalpel-slits in a carved mask.