To Be Someone (40 page)

Initially, Sam’s new—“nearly new”—lung had taken, and the operation tentatively declared successful. But then it all started to go wrong.

Within four days, an infection had crept into her vulnerable body, tearing at it, trying to oust the unfamiliar interloper crammed inside her rib cage. She was fighting hard, but her body was so weakened from the surgery that drugs and oxygen were having to do what her poor, struggling immune system could not.

That hospital room became my universe, a small, horrible, painful cosmos with bland textures and tension in the air. There were no flowers in the room—their superficial fussiness would have seemed too trivial amid the far more important business of preserving an existence. All around were pale colors; unadorned walls were framed by plain curtains and colorless lino floor. Even though Sam was hooked up to all kinds of breathing apparatus, barely conscious, there was a full jug of water, an inverted glass, and a box of Kleenex on the locker next to her bed.

It was a totally functional room, and despite all the expensive lifesaving equipment and the awful scent of hospital detergent, it smelled of sickness and despair, heartbroken love and rage. Inexorably, it smelled like a room in which to die, not to get well.

Sam was the room’s focus, lying still under a thin, nubbly yellow hospital blanket, her legs and feet defined like a skeleton’s under a sheet. She was hanging on to her poor, cut-up body by the merest of threads, and even as I watched she seemed to drift away and back again. The room was silent except for the mechanical
huff
and
thunk
of the ventilator. I wondered if she was alarmed by our appearance, as we were all masked and gowned up to prevent our germs from tipping her precarious balance. I felt that my mask had an additional purpose—to hold my own pain deep inside my body, to prevent it from spilling out of my mouth in a huge, jagged scream of frustration and fear.

Nurses bustled in and out, their rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the linoleum. They adjusted the equipment, took readings, gently plumped the pillows under Sam’s blue face, flipped the pages of her chart up and down before replacing it in its holder at the end of her bed. The writing on the pages did not appear to be in any language I’d ever seen before.

Sam’s eyes were closed, and she looked like a very old woman, or a wizened sick child. Cynthia and Mike hovered around, too, talking gently to her and to each other, and Dylan and his wife were outside drinking vending machine coffee from Styrofoam cups. I walked past them all on my way back from the ladies’; Dylan’s mouth was twisted up and trembling so much that he could hardly swallow his coffee.

There was a sign on a door across the corridor that read,
ELECTIVE SERVICES DIRECTORATE. MATTRESSES AND PILLOWS STORED IN HERE
. I did not understand what that meant any more than I understood the squiggles on Sam’s chart.

Every now and again Mike absently patted my shoulder, but he couldn’t look at me. He seemed fixated by the various items of hospital paraphernalia pushed or carried past by the nurses: yellow-wheeled trolleys, stainless-steel kidney trays, boxes of nonsterile latex gloves.

Later, back in Sam’s room, her jovial uncle, of whom I had heard but never met, came up to her bedside. His joviality was supposedly his strongest characteristic, but he was really fighting to find it at that moment.

“Hello, Sam, love,” he said to her quietly, passing a weary hand over his eyes. “Your Christmas roses are blooming a treat. You’ve got to hurry back and chase that damned neighbor’s cat out, mind. It’s trying its best to dig ‘em up.”

Last summer Sam had started cultivating a section of her parents’ large garden, and it was her pride and joy. Until it turned too cold, it had become nigh on impossible to reach her on the phone; she was always out in her wheelchair on the lawn, surrounded by hoes and pruning shears, either fiddling with her sweet peas and marigolds, or giving orders to her sweating father, who handled the more backbreaking tasks. But she didn’t give a flicker of acknowledgment now.

Her uncle stroked her still hand. “Well, I just wanted to come and see you, you know. Get well soon. Auntie Pauline sends her love—she’d have come, too, but her hip’s been playing her up again. Good-bye, love.”

He got up abruptly and lumbered out of the room. Sam stirred and moaned. She seemed frightened and disturbed. Her parents and I leaned forward, as though our proximity could chase away her fears. Tears spilled from Cynthia’s eyes.

“It’s all right, Sam darling, we’re here. Shhh now.” She held three of Sam’s fingers, gently but as though she would never let them go.

The doctor came in and asked us to leave for a minute. As I walked numbly out of the room, he took me aside. He had thick tufts of bristly reddish hair coming from his ears and nostrils that moved gently when he spoke, like sea anemones in a rock pool.

“Listen,” he said kindly. “I think it’s important that she gets some rest now. Really, the less people around her, the better. And I’m sure you could do with a break, too. You’ve been here all day. Why don’t you get a good night’s sleep and come back in the morning? She’s had a lot of visitors today. I really think it would be best for her.”

I didn’t want to leave, but I did want to do what was best. “Can I say good-bye?”

“Yes, go in now. Be as brief as you can, though.”

Cynthia and Mike stood aside to let me reenter the room. They looked the way they had all week—blank and stunned, as I’m sure I did—like shipwreck or inferno survivors.

I walked over to Sam’s bed, alone with her for the first time all day. I held her hand and stroked her hair; she was so familiar, even in these unnatural surroundings. I thought about that new strange lung inside her, which had not yet proved whether it was friend or foe.

The walls felt as though they were pressing in on me, and I had a fleeting desire to see something bright and colorful—a Matisse print, or a child’s building blocks—something happy. The bed-sheets looked like hard white plywood. I gazed into her face but could not see any peace there.

“I’ve got to go now, Sam, but I’ll be back tomorrow. Hang in there, okay?”

I paused, but there was no reply. I stood up and started to turn away. As I did so I felt, rather than heard, a tiny movement. I turned slowly back around to see Sam’s eyes flicker open, and with all her strength she lifted her arms a tiny way up toward me as though for a hug. I rushed back to her and embraced her gingerly around the tubes, feeling as though my head and heart would simultaneously burst with pain and grief.

I stumbled out of the room and walked in a daze back to the hotel up the road. That hotel seemed to have been built for people like me, guests all wandering around the corridors looking anxious and haunted. I sat numbly in an overstuffed armchair in the hotel’s big lobby, surrounded by a litter of low coffee tables and the hulks of marooned sofas, while a small washed-out waitress brought me coffee. I couldn’t really think what else to do. I didn’t want to go to my room, because I didn’t want to be alone.

Just then, the revolving doors spun around and deposited Vinnie right in front of me. Unshaven, a bit whiffy, and smoking, but Vinnie nonetheless.

“Hi, baby,” he said as I stood up to meet him. “It’s okay. I’m here.”

He wrapped his arms tightly around me, and I thought, Whatever else he’s done to me, I’ll always love him for this.

“Thanks for coming, Vin.”

He ordered a beer from the peaky waitress, and after I’d filled him in on the details of Sam’s condition, we sat in silence together.

“Strange old hotel, this, isn’t it?” Vinnie commented, looking around him.

I nodded. He was right; it was a very odd place. Presumably the effect was meant to be that of a large, friendly living room, but it felt to me like a plush dream version of the ICU’s waiting room. Perhaps the proximity of the hospital’s grim suspense had rubbed off on the designers, I thought with antiseptic-drenched imagination. I still could not speak, but Vinnie didn’t seem to mind. He swigged his beer as I grimly concentrated on the pale china of my coffee cup.

I was aware of what was going on around me, but I just kept seeing Sam’s face, hollow and betrayed-looking. The hotel seemed very busy—perhaps a lot of people were dying at this time of year, winter’s inevitable victims.

A mother walked by, crying, two small boys trailing behind her. The boys were making cawing sounds, like wheeling seagulls. They weren’t sounds borne out of grief, more from the boredom of their mother being so distracted. I wondered who she’d lost, or was losing, and saw Sam’s face again.

The two receptionists were chatting loudly and vacuously behind their impressive mahogany counter about a party one of them was planning.

“Spiffy-
cahj
,” she kept saying, shortening the word
casual
in an affected way. “I told him it’s going to be spiffy-cahj; spiffy-cahj, I said. If he’s not going to come spiffy-cahj like the rest of us, he needn’t bother coming at all.”

Vinnie leaned over to me from his end of the sofa. “That’s one party I
really
hope I’m not invited to,” he whispered, and I even managed to smile for a split second.

“I wish I still felt so sure that she’ll be okay,” I said.

He took my half-full coffee cup from me and put it down on the glass-topped table. “Come on, sweetheart,” he said. “I think you need to go and have a lie-down, you look wrecked.”

I stretched my hand out toward him and let him lead me up to my room and steer me over to the bed. As soon as we were through the door, Vinnie was peeling off his clothes.

“I’ll just grab a shower, if you don’t mind. Haven’t had the chance to have one yet today. Back in a minute.”

He vanished into the bathroom, and I lay staring at the ceiling. I was thinking how unfair it was that I could just jump up off the bed any time I wanted to, and Sam couldn’t. I was so tired that I began to think that I was hallucinating; the slippery brown bedspread underneath me seemed like a vast card table on which my mind was turning over personalized Tarot cards: Sam holding up scales; the Grim Reaper; Sam, Sam, Sam; Vinnie holding out his hands. I felt cold, chilled to the bone, and all I wanted to do was to get warm again.

Before I even realized it, I had slid off the bed and into the bathroom, the hot splash of Vinnie’s shower calling me. I stripped and stumbled in to join him, falling into his wet arms, crying more than I had thought it possible for even me to cry.

Vinnie hugged me so hard my bones cracked, and I buried my face in the space between his neck and shoulder until the pounding water nearly suffocated me. I kissed him then, all salty and sobbing, as if he were a lifeboat on a stormy sea, and he kissed me back, hard and distracting.

He was so warm against my iced-over soul that I just wanted to get closer and closer to him. After the shower we crawled beneath the chilly bedcovers and he held me, pressing his body against mine, heavy and warm and curved, almost indistinguishable from my own; the only thing in the world that might possibly stop my pain.

We lay in silence, my grief occupying every ion of the air around us, rendering speech redundant. Vinnie was obviously not finding it easy to be naked in bed with me, but for once in his life, he had the sensitivity to realize that what I needed from him at that moment went much deeper than sex. To his credit, he didn’t even try to instigate it.

Eventually I fell into a dreamless black hole of sleep, as suddenly and violently as falling over a cliff. The last thing I remembered was the feel of my cheek on Vinnie’s chest, and my head lulled by the gentle rhythm of his breathing.

I was woken some time later by the sound of a match sparking as Vinnie lit a cigarette. He was sitting up in bed, drinking a beer from the minibar and watching television. It was dark outside, but he hadn’t drawn the curtains.

“Hello, gorgeous,” he said, kissing my nose. “I’ve got to make a move soon, you know. Things to do.”

I sat up groggily. “Really? I thought you were going to stay.”

“Sorry, baby, I can’t. I’ve got this big project to finish. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Thanks again, Vin, I really appreciate it. How did you get here, anyway?”

“Borrowed a mate’s car. That’s another reason I have to get back. He’ll be wondering where I’ve got to. I didn’t actually tell him I was coming this far.”

He put out his cigarette by dropping it in the dregs of his beer, and then got out of bed, picking up and putting on the clothes he’d discarded earlier. I felt bereft that he was going but didn’t have the energy to stop him—my deep sleep had left me with a woozy kind of hangover, as though I’d taken a sleeping pill. Once dressed, he came and lay back down on the bed next to me, stroking my breast thoughtfully.

“Oh, by the way, Helena,” he said, matter-of-factly. “The machine swallowed my card, and I’m completely strapped for cash. You couldn’t do me a huge favor and lend me a few quid, could you? Say, two hundred?”

I stared at him open-mouthed. I felt that nothing else had the power to hurt me, not while Sam was fighting for her life—but it didn’t stop me from feeling angry.

“So that’s why you came up here?”

Vinnie looked hurt. Predictably. “No way. You’re my baby. You keep kicking me out, but I’m always there for you when you need me. I was just hoping you could do the same for me, that’s all.”

“Me and my checkbook, you mean.”

“Is that okay? I mean, I know this is a really bad time for you, and I wouldn’t ask unless I was really stuck, honest.… I’m sorry, H.”

I wearily hauled myself out of bed and extracted said checkbook from the depths of my handbag. Two hundred pounds was nothing to me; Vinnie was nothing to me. Sam was all that mattered.

“No, it’s not okay, Vinnie.” But I gave him the check anyway.