Oh Dear Silvia (2 page)

‘As I went down in the river to pray’

She washes Silvia’s face

‘Studying about that good ol’ way’

She washes Silvia’s arms

‘And who shall wear the starry crown’

She washes Silvia’s breasts and shoulders

‘Good Lord show me the way’

She washes Silvia’s fanny, careful not to dislodge the catheter

‘Oh sinners, let’s go down’

She changes the sanitary sheet under Silvia’s bum, and washes her there

‘Let’s go down, c’mon down’

She washes Silvia’s legs and feet

‘C’mon sinners, let’s go down’

She straightens up the sheets and tidies Silvia’s nightie

‘Down in the river to pray’

She brushes Silvia’s hair.

When she’s finished, she speaks out loud with a pronounced but gentle Jamaican burr.

‘Dere you are, Silvia, nice ’n’ fresh, yes? Now, we don’t want you to be too hot, but I cyan’t open the window due to possible cold or h’infection. BUT, mi cyan pull dis down here.’

She pulls down the blind.

‘So dere, now you have no direct sunlight on you whatsoever PLUS, mi fetch you up de h’electric fan to cool you, yes? OK.’

She pats Silvia’s foot.

She likes to stay in physical contact with her comatose patients at all times whilst she’s in the room. It must be very lonely, she thinks, to be so locked away. She has seen this state time and time again, and although she is inured to the shock of it, she still empathizes anew with each fresh patient. No,
she
isn’t shocked, but
they
are. They have just had all normal life snatched away in a heartbeat, and somewhere, deep inside the brain of this paralysed body, there is life. There are brainwaves.

Winnie saw them when the ITU intensivists and the consultant conducted the EEG scan the evening Silvia was first brought in. There were enough signs of life for them to hook her up, although she scored very badly when they measured the depth of her coma using the Glasgow Coma Scale which Winnie knows all about. It rates:

a. Whether she can open her eyes. She can’t.

b. Her motor response. None.

c. Her verbal response. None.

But Winnie knows that just because Silvia doesn’t show a response, it doesn’t necessarily mean she is not aware. Sometimes Winnie notices the tiniest rise in heartbeat on the monitor when she comes into the room of one of her patients. Not Silvia. Silvia is pretty much spark out, and Winnie can’t
locate anything she could usefully feed back to the doctors or the family. That doesn’t mean she won’t though. You have to have two important attributes in this job: patience and vigilance. Oh, and add to those, hope.

Yes, hope, the most important thing of all.

The patients, the doctors, the families and the d’yam hospital itself will give up hope before Winnie does. Winnie’s life is about hope. She brings bargain buckets of it with her to work every day. She knows that it’s a certain truth, because she’s seen it with her own two eyes, that often, it’s only at the very edge of life and death that we truly live. Her privilege is to witness that phenomenon daily.

‘Phew! You right Silvia, it too hot in here. Mi a burn up. I’ll get dat fan, and some remover fi dem red fingers dere. Be right back darlin.’

The door slams shut. Silvia lies alone in intensive care suite number 5, like a marble sarcophagus.

A still, grey effigy.

Cold. But hot.

Thursday 8pm

Ed is standing just inside the door of suite number 5 with his coat still on. He came in easily ten minutes ago but he hasn’t quite been able to advance any further into the room or into his visit yet. Although this is his second time here, he is rooted to the spot by the woeful sight of his ex-wife lying so strangely still. He mirrors her inertia, and hasn’t moved a muscle except for his eyes which dart around the room, scanning every tiny detail of the grim scene. His paralysis is fed by a creeping sense – one part guilt to two parts irony – as he is remembering with increasing horror how he has actively wished ill on Silvia many times, over the last few, difficult years.

He didn’t intend
this
level of ill though.

All he really wanted was for her to experience, or at least
acknowledge, even a tiny percentage of his pain, rather than parading her new-found freedom with such seeming indifference. It diminished him, and it injured him very deeply. He couldn’t believe that so many years of trying and compromising and forgiving and listening were so easily dismissed.

So, in the depths of his humiliated hurt, he had indeed often wished upon her a grisly illness. Something long and slow and debilitating, at least as intolerable as his intolerable suffering.

Now, he numbly stands stock-still, in abject fear that this whole catastrophe may well be his doing. He is as still as her. He wonders what he can do to put it right? That’s the job of the man of the family; to put right whatever might be wrong. He is currently the ex-man, so perhaps the job is redundant? He couldn’t fix it when they were married, so why would it be different now?

Actually, he thinks, there is one massive irrefutable difference. Now, here, today, he can talk without Silvia interrupting. That was always a big problem. She wouldn’t let him speak for long enough without either getting irritated or changing the subject, proving that she simply wasn’t interested in his ideas. He was aware, right from the outset, that he wasn’t as fizzy as her, he could never think as fast or be as assured. Which is a shame because in fact Ed is every bit as bright as his ex-wife. Just not as confident. Squeaky wheel, and all that.

Silvia told him in the early days that she found his self-doubt endearing. She apparently loved the dichotomy of his
tall, imposing angular good looks and yet his many seeming inadequacies. An assured-looking chap who was in fact nothing of the sort. A diffident man, Ed was for her ‘a proper-looking bloke’ who represented perfect husband and father material. She listened to him more at the beginning, sometimes he would rap on about his dreams and plans for easily twenty uninterrupted minutes before she became fidgety.

If only he’d known then that he would never again have such a window of opportunity to be heard. He might have risked telling her the really big dream. The one he has since realized, unbeknownst to her. The one that gives him purpose and saved his life. The one that offers him the significance he would never find with her.

He is suddenly aware his back is hurting from standing still for so long, so he gathers his achy bones up and moves stiffly to the seat next to her bed.

‘Hello Silvia.’

His voice falters, it’s croaky, he hasn’t used it much today. He secures it with a steadying cough, and restarts.

‘Silv. Hello there. It’s me, Ed. I’m not sure whether you can hear me, but the doctors have told us to keep talking … um … at you … for you … well no, to you. Yes, talking to you. So righto, that’s what I’ll do. You probably don’t relish the idea of me blethering on, but I’m hoping that’s preferable to the sound of an empty room at least … ha ha … Christ, I hope it
is
, otherwise I am genuinely dull. “Duller than the world’s dullest-ever
thing, so dull it’s not worth the time it takes to imagine it,” as you not very succinctly put it once, if I remember it correctly. Which I do … unfortunately. Anyway love, I’m here right next to you, and I’d like to tell you some stuff. Even if you only hear bits of it, that’s OK. Let me … just think …’

He stares up at the ceiling, wondering where to start. The ventilator wheezes rhythmically and to his horror, he finds he is tapping his toe in time with it. His foot the metronome for her life. He stops immediately. Then he starts again but this time on the off-beat. Something about Silvia being helpless promotes an irresistible urge in him to misbehave.

Can his footbeat persuade the machine to change its tempo? He feels an overwhelming impulse to drum on the bed. She always said he was a child. She used to laugh when she said it. He took that to mean she found some of his more childlike qualities attractive. She giggled at his bad jokes and appreciated his shyness. Slowly, incrementally, that changed though. She didn’t call him childlike any more, she flatly called him childish. Well … yes, he is, in many ways, and glad of it. He likes doing his silly voices, mimicking everyone that amuses him. He likes tickling and wrestling with those he loves. He likes making faces with his food on the plate, he pretends to walk with a club foot, and he knows he can get babbly when he’s overexcited. But he isn’t an actual child.

That was another depth charge that hurt so badly when she exploded it.

How did she always manage to insult him with barbs that contained just enough truth to pierce his skin?

She was astute, no doubt about that. He thought he liked smart women, he thought their impressive brainage was an aphrodisiac. He hadn’t quite thought through how it would feel when a smart woman decides to round on you wielding her sharpest cleverest incisors, if you fall out of favour with her.

‘OK. Well, righto, best to start at the beginning I suppose, which ironically was also the end. The end of us anyway. Just out of interest, why did you decide to become so hellishly unkind in that last couple of months? I knew things weren’t great for you in the marriage but honestly I thought we could work it through. Then suddenly I was right royally dumped after twenty-odd years for reasons that are still not clear to me today, apparently to do with “being stuck in adolescence” and “failing to operate as a functioning recognizably human being”. I was already in enough distress, did I really need to feel the full power of your turbo sarcasm?

‘You really can be cruel Silv, I didn’t deserve a lot of what you said. That kind of spite is corrosive, you know. It ate away at me when I was already full of holes. Gouda. I was a living Gouda man. Sometimes, when you attacked, I thought all the holes would just get bigger and bigger ’til they joined up and made one big empty hole. S’pose I’d then be a doughnut man.

‘Anyway, it was after I saw the lawyer that I really lost it. Being told you were selling the house. That was a body blow. I signed
it all over to you Silv, so you could stay there with the kids. Somewhere secure for all of you, you said. I didn’t realize their family time was up too. Neither did they. I know you and Jo were sent out of home so young, I know that, but it was different for you Silv. Cassie was only sixteen, for God’s sake. She had only ever lived in that house, that’s all she knew. Jamie put on a brave face but just because he’s a fella and a couple of years older didn’t mean he coped. It meant he “pretended” to cope.

‘What did you want with the money Silv? The money from our home, which you swindled the three of us out of?

‘What was more important than your family for God’s sake?!

‘Why didn’t we matter?!’

Ed puts his head in his calloused hands and for a moment he relives the heavy empty feeling he used to regularly have in his gut, all those years ago. The familiar wretchedness, the throbbing ache of helplessness. He can’t go back to that. It very nearly did for him. It became huge and impossible to endure. He realizes that here and now it’s different though, because now he can rant at last. Now is his chance to speak.

‘You’ve got no idea what you did to us. You broke us, Silv. We splintered off in so many bad ways. It’s still bad now. Sometimes.’

He pauses.

She breathes. Regular heavy breathing.

She is as impassive now as she was when he arrived. Even if she
can
hear, does she care? Is she faking it all and pur
posely sleeping through his torment? Of course not, stop it, Ed. Come on. Courage. Tell her.

‘So, one Friday evening, in the middle of the worst of it, when I was so blue that I felt I’d turned black inside, I decided to pretend to be cheerful and do what cheerful people do on a Friday night. Have fish and chips. A normal thing. That’s like having your rudder in the water. It’s steadying. It’s familiar and comforting and keeps you on kilter, upright. It’s what normal people are doing in their normal houses on a Friday night. Fish and chips. Normal. I needed some normal, just to get me through the weekend. I was only just surviving, a drip of ordinary at a time.

‘I was glad to see the queue at The Plaice To Be was long. I was grateful to have a purpose, to be in the warm, and to have a valid reason to swap cursory pleasantries with other shadows. In fact, I remember very clearly, letting other people go before me in the queue so that my time in the fishy fugginess would be extended. I didn’t want to leave there, to sit alone in my car. A car which, incidentally, had a noose in the boot. Well, not incidentally. Purposely. I had made it weeks before and I’d been carrying it around for when the tipping point came. It was close, constantly nipping at me. Up ’til then I knew I could stave it off by thinking about Cassie and Jamie and how much they needed me to stick around.

‘Cassie had only just moved into her first flat on her own, she was very scared, Silv. Neither of us could even manage to
get the oven on ’til we worked out that the timer was somehow stopping it. That took a whole morning of stomping and swearing. She was so young to be on her own but by then she’d been staying with me at Ma’s for too long, and it was all so obviously wrong. The teen and the old mad lady together. Both of them took to sleeping a lot to avoid seeing each other. There’s only the one bed at Ma’s as you know, I was sleeping on the couch, so Ma slept in the bed all night and Cassie slept in it all day. Shift-sleeping. I knew Cass would crack if it went on much longer, so we went and applied for the flat.

‘You should know all of this Silv, I shouldn’t have to be telling you … anyway, Jamie had already gone along to the Army Recruiting Office in town and they took him immediately. Course they would. A bright, lost, sad young man, full of potential and full of rage. Just what they’re looking for. So he was gone. In a heartbeat. She was gone, he was gone, you were gone and I was living with my mother whose bungalow reeks like a tanner’s hut. When Cassie complained of the stench, Ma just blamed the cats. The last cat died eight years ago. Ma claims there’s still one remaining rogue cat wandering about the house pissing on everything. Cassie agreed that yes, there might well be, and if there was, it would be called “Granma” …’