Sacred Country (37 page)

With one movement of his arm, Sonny swept all the plates, cutlery and glasses from the table onto the tiled floor. The sound of everything breaking was like an injection of sudden pleasure into his vein. He staggered to the back door and went out into the night. Estelle covered her face with her hands inside the cardigan sleeves.

The next morning, quite late, Sonny came like a penitent to Timmy’s room. His hands were shaking. He thought, I’ll do anything, just as long as he stays here. I’ll even kneel if he wants me to.

Timmy wasn’t in his room. He was in Swaithey church. He was sitting in a front pew and staring up at the sun coming through the Sower Window. He was trying to calm his mind by remembering a Hebrew prayer. Though what he felt was horror, his face showed only an intense concentration.

He didn’t hear the church door open. He was very surprised when someone said his name. He looked down from the Sower and saw Pearl Simmonds standing by him, carrying a watering can.

She was smiling at him. Her limbs looked brown from the sun. She wore a faded blue dress. The pleasure and relief he felt when he found her there was beyond what he could describe.

He said her name.

‘Tim,’ she said, smiling, ‘you look so different. Much older.’

‘I
am
older,’ he said. ‘You look beautiful, Pearl.’

He stood up and put his arms round Pearl and kissed her cheek. And he thought, as he did so and smelt her hair, it reminds me of the smell of poppies in a field, in our childhoods – mine and Mary’s. Pearl was one of the few amazing things. And I never saw her clearly until now.

Pearl put down her watering can. She took Timmy’s hand and held it and looked down at it. She thought, he never had beautiful handwriting.

And she smiled.

Twenty years and six months after the two-minute silence I went into hospital.

Three incisions, like a triangle, were made near to my nipples and through these wounds all the breast tissue that remained in me was taken out. The operation was called a bilateral mastectomy. The incisions were sewn up and there was my chest, neat and flat, with a bright white bandage round it.

The surgeon had good skin and eyes that were kind. He said before he cut me: ‘In time, the scars will barely be visible, but the wounds will take a few months to heal.’

I lay on my back with a wire cage over my torso, to stop the sheet from pressing on me. Inside the cage I could feel nothing at first except a scalding pain. I thought I must have fallen out of my window into the airwell and broken myself in half. I couldn’t imagine who had rescued me, but I remembered that, when a person falls, there is usually, by great good fortune, some other person to pick him up.

And then, in time, the pain became less.

Two faces popped up over the sides of the cage, one freckled, one tanned.

‘Mart,’ said Rob. ‘How are you, hey?’

‘Mart,’ said Tony. ‘We brought you a watermelon from Safeway’s.’

I said: ‘I’m not sure I can talk.’

Glad as I was to see them, I couldn’t hold them in my vision for long. I tried to apologise for letting them slip away.

When I woke up again it was pitch dark except for a little violet-coloured bit of illumination somewhere and what had woken me was the pain returning.

I remembered how, in the past, I had imagined pain was my ally. I had imagined that if I suffered enough I would become a man, of my body’s own accord.

It was so hot in the cage, I tried to move it, but raising my
arm was like raising the lever on a dam and letting new pain flood through me. I lowered the lever and called out, but no one heard me.

I thought, Mary would cry now, but I refuse to. I will wait.

While I waited, I had a dream. It was of the deserted houseboat I’d seen on the river near Twickenham, with the families of ducks all round it in wire pens. In my dream, the boat broke loose from its moorings and began to float away on the current. A breeze lifted the flag and made it flutter. The boat dragged the duck pens after it, but the ducks couldn’t swim fast enough and they were going to be crushed by the wire and drowned. At the thought of this, I began to cry out.

A nurse came. She said: ‘All right, Martin?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No.’

When I next woke, it was light and there was hardly any pain at all.

Nurses have these cool, beautiful arms. They put their arms under yours and lift you up gracefully, as if you weighed nothing. They sit you on a pan. They sponge your face. They do everything smiling. I say to them: ‘My special friend, Pearl, wants to be a nurse, but a dental one.’

They say: ‘Here’s a cup of tea, love. Drink it slowly.’

I would like to spend the rest of my life in the cool, soft arms of a nurse.

The next time Rob and Tony came, I was sitting up. They brought me a copy of the
New Statesman
and a bag of cherries.

I said: ‘How many days have I been here?’

Tony said: ‘Four thousand two hundred and thirty-six. It’s 1984.’

Rob said: ‘Three, Mart. This is your resurrection, man.’

They sat there, smiling at me. In a few weeks’ time our family of three was going to break up. Tony was getting married and going back to Sydney. He had a job lined up on the
Sydney Morning Herald
. His pony tail was a thing of the past. Rob said that he and I would keep the flag of
Liberty
flying, but
I wondered how long it would fly after Tony left. Georgia once screamed at me that everyone in the world is replaceable but, like much of what she said, I knew this to be untrue.

Tony’s wife-to-be had wild corkscrew hair and the name of Bella. Rob and I had tried to love her, but when we realised she was going to take Tony away, we stopped trying and started sulking. Bella’s father was an editor on the
Sydney Morning Herald
. We never forgave either of them, father or daughter. I felt guilty about this, but Rob didn’t. He said: ‘In South Africa no one forgives anyone else anything,
ever
. And that’s how it’s always been.’

I felt hungry, so I started eating the cherries. I put the stones into a cluster on my night table.

Tony said: ‘Tell us about it, then, Mart. Is it better without tits?’

‘It will be,’ I said.

‘What d’you mean “will be”?’ said Tony. ‘What about now?’

‘Now,’ I said, ‘it’s not anything. It’s just pain, then no pain, then pain again and so on. But soon –’

Tony sighed. ‘With you, it’s always “soon” or “later” or “next year”,’ he said. ‘When is it going to be today?’

I stopped eating cherries. After a while, I said: ‘I don’t know. I’ll know when it comes.’

Walter Loomis came to see me. He’d got very thin and his hair was long and shaggy. He looked as though he could be dying, but he said he wasn’t, he said that on the contrary he was less than a week away from beginning his life.

He sat by me in the hospital for a long time. He ate three oranges and all the biscuits that were brought on a saucer with my tea. He wore his cowboy clothes, everything except the hat. He smelled of sweat and soot.

I asked him how he’d got enough money for his fare to Nashville.

He said: ‘Do you remember Gilbert Blakey?’

I said: ‘Yes. Nobody forgets their first dentist.’

He laughed. He said: ‘That’s a hollow laugh, Martin, not a real one.’

Then he told me about his love affair with Gilbert. He said it had happened because of the death of two world statesman, John F. Kennedy and Anthony Eden. He described the wire wheels of Gilbert’s car and the way Gilbert had tired of him for no apparent reason.

Then he said: ‘I decided recently that Gilbert owed me something, so I went to see him.’

I said: ‘That’s brave of you Walter. I can’t bear to look at the past.’

He said: ‘You should see where he works now. He’s got oil paintings in the waiting room and copies of the
Tatler
.

‘His nurse said: “You’re not in the appointment book, Mr Loomis.” I said: “Yes, I am. I’ve been in it since 1963.”

‘I refused to leave. I said I’d sit there reading magazines until the Third World War arrived or until Mr Blakey agreed to see me – whichever came first. I said I was used to going without food.’

Walter was smiling his vacant smile all through this story. I kept trying to imagine whether the people of Nashville would take Walter Loomis to their hearts or laugh at him until their ribs cracked. I said: ‘Go on, Walter.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘at about six, when his last patient had gone and I’d looked all through
Country Life
and
Harper’s Bazaar
Gilbert came in. He looked peculiar. His hair looked dyed. He looked far older. His voice had changed. It was all blah-blah-blah now.

‘I explained about getting to Nashville. He said in his blah-blah, Why on earth d’you want to go
there?
So I tried to explain that and how I had to have a life before it was over and I hadn’t had one.

‘I started to threaten him. I said I’d tell all his posh patients what he was and what he did. He looked exhausted by now, Martin. I was going to say, This is Suez, don’t bungle it; but then I couldn’t remember exactly what had happened at Suez and what had been bungled. I didn’t want him to catch me out. He’s far cleverer than me.’

Walter got the money he asked for. A hundred and fifty pounds wasn’t much to Gilbert Blakey with his smart practice in Chelsea and I expect the news that Walter was leaving England was news he’d wanted to hear for years and years, Just In Case. He knew that Just In Case sometimes arrives, like Just Until.

Walter had bought his ticket. The idea of flying frightened him, he told me, but he expected somebody would look after him and tell him where the toilets were and how to change planes at New York. The date of his departure was four days away. He had written to Pete and Grace, telling them he was leaving, but only Pete had replied. The members of the Latchmere Country Music Association had given him an old map of Nashville and taught him the first lines of the Declaration of Independence. He said: ‘I wish I’d known years ago that the Pursuit of Happiness was a right. In Swaithey it wasn’t, was it?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It was a wrong.’

When Walter got up to leave, he looked all round my hospital room. I thought he was searching for something else edible but he said he’d got into the habit of staring at places, saying goodbye to little bits of England. Then he said: ‘I’d like to wish you good luck in your life as Martin.’

‘Thanks, Walter,’ I said.

‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever see each other again, will we?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘but send me a postcard. Tell me how you get on in Music City.’

He grinned.

I remembered him in the Loomis slaughtering yard, grinning at the sky.

‘Just that
name
makes me shiver,’ he said.

Then he was gone. Only the smell of him remained. An Indian nurse came in and opened my window.

I’d informed Pearl about my operation. She didn’t seem shocked or sad. She wrote me a letter saying: ‘When you get out of hospital I’ll come for a week and care for you. You can have
the bed and I’ll sleep on the floor. On our course we have to learn about first aid and resuscitation. I’m the perfect person to help you.’

I went home in a taxi. I felt weak. When I lifted anything, the pain came back to my wounds. I imagined all the other operations waiting for me in the future and the pain still to come; and I had a thought that I hardly ever allow myself to think: why couldn’t it have been simple? Why couldn’t I have just accepted being Mary Ward?

The answers are: because it wasn’t. Because I couldn’t. Because I am
not
Mary Ward. And no one – not Harker, not Sterns, not I – can explain it better than that. All we have are theories. It remains one of all the million mysteries left in the world.

When I got home to my room, Pearl was there. She was wearing a white overall, belted at the waist. She had stuck some cornflowers into a glass vase. She said: ‘This is Emergency Ward 10.’

I kissed her hair. If I hadn’t been in pain, I think I would have put my arm round Pearl’s waist and we would have stood like dancers, cheek-to-cheek, letting time pass.

‘How do you feel, Martin?’ she said.

This was the first time she’d ever called me Martin.

‘I’m glad you’re here,’ I said. ‘I haven’t got any strength.’

She’d tidied everything in my room. She’d put all my inks in a line and my sketches in neat piles. My little cooker was shining.

I sat down on the bed. Standing, I felt insubstantial. An icy sweat began to break out on my head.

I let Pearl undress me. I was too weak to feel shy. She folded up my clothes and put them on a chair. She helped me into my pyjamas and I got into bed. It was about mid-day but to me it felt like the other side of next week. Pearl said: ‘Shall I read to you or would you like to watch Fanny Cradock?’ But I couldn’t answer. A little rhyme my mother had taught me when I lay between her and Sonny in the sagging middle of
their bed came back to me and the words settled on my brain like snow:

Winking, Blinking and Nod one night

Sailed out in a wooden shoe

Into a land of misty light

Into a sea of blue.

I had a dream about Pearl. We were lying together on a raft made of logs. The sea under us was calm and blue, but in the distance we could see a storm coming towards us.

I was wearing a life jacket and Pearl was wearing nothing. I took my life jacket off and put it on Pearl because I knew that she still hadn’t learned to swim. I cradled her in my arms and stroked the hollow of her back. I knew that all my life had been a preparation for the moment when I would steer this raft safely through the storm. Then Pearl would settle down beside me and touch my lips with her soft fingers and say: ‘It’s all right, Martin. It’s over now.’

I woke up and stared at the cornflowers. I couldn’t seem to move my head or my eyes to see what was beyond them. I said: ‘Pearl, are you there?’

No one answered.

The pain in my chest was very bad. I thought, I don’t know what date it is. It could be the date on which Walter Loomis flies to Nashville and is never seen again. To keep the pain steady so that it could be borne, I tried to remember the names of Tennessee trees, starting with Hickory.