Small Circle of Beings (6 page)

When David sleeps, which he does often, I like to look out of the window at the streets below. I can see buildings from up here, biting into the sky like teeth.

It’s a hard place, this city, and I am afraid of it. Things move here more swiftly than I am used to. Cars surge in the streets. People jostle and push on the pavements. When I walk home
or in town, I keep close to the edges of buildings so as not to be in the way.

But in here it is different. In the quiet interior of the ward there is no hint of the frenzy outside. People pass. This is a world populated by strange and curious beasts: men in pyjamas, in
wheelchairs, women in bathrobes, on stretchers. There is a sharp singeing smell to everything. Voices are soft, playing in the background like relaxing music. I don’t know much about these
other people, and I have spoken to few of them. There is, I know, another small boy at the end of the passage whose mother comes to visit him. His name is Jason. His mother’s name is Sarah.
She seizes me one day in the corridor, her eyes round as bullet-holes, her mouth working. ‘You’re the …’ she gasps, ‘the other . . .’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I am.’

‘I am so sorry. I know, believe me, how it feels.’

‘Yes?’ I stare at her, alarmed.

‘We must,’ she says, ‘get together for tea. And talk.’

‘All right,’ I say, and she lets me go. But in truth I have no desire to meet her over tea. I think we have nothing to say to each other.

I ask David if he knows Jason.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I never get out of bed.’

This is so: he must lie as he is, moving only from side to side. In two months now he has not taken a single step.

‘Would you like to meet him? Would that be nice?’

‘No.’ He pulls a face. David is shy, and dislikes other boys.

‘He’s also sick,’ I urge him. ‘He’s also lonely.’

‘I’m not lonely.’ His lip is trembling. I become impatient, but control myself in time.

‘How do you feel?’ I ask.

‘Okay.’

His voice is tinny, like the voice of a ghost. To speak he must cover the hole in his throat with one hand, or all the air comes hissing out.

‘Why is the hole here?’

‘So that you can breathe.’

‘How did they make it?’

‘With a knife.’

‘Did you watch them do it?’

‘No.’

‘Did it bleed?’

‘I suppose it must have.’

All these questions. I smile. I suppose I should be grateful to see him this way, a resurrected version of himself. But I have been told over and over by Professor Terry that I must not raise my
hopes.

Professor Terry is the man I have travelled all this way to find: a substitute for Dr Bouch. He is large, built like a construction worker rather than a physician. His hands, too, are brutal and
big. But his face is delicate, made of fine bones. It’s the face of a pure man; clean-shaven, smooth-skinned, pale. He wears glasses when he reads. He has grey hair oiled down perfectly like
a cap.

It is Professor Terry who has explained to me the nature and course of my son’s disease. I listen, intrigued and dismayed, to what dreadful events were taking place in his body while I sat
by. The cells, Professor Terry explains, go mad. They divide and reproduce endlessly, out of control. I shift in my seat, unnerved at this description of nature gone berserk.

‘Do you have any questions?’ he says then, smiling kindly.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘If you don’t mind.’

‘Not at all. Please go ahead.’

I ask. He answers.

It’s a rare form of the disease, he tells me. Nobody is exactly sure what causes it, but that is beside the point. The point is that there are four stages to the disease, and David has
entered the fourth and final stage.

‘You must not raise your hopes,’ the professor says. ‘I’m afraid that there is very little chance.’

He speaks directly. Perhaps because my senses have been blunted over the many days past, his words have little effect. I lean forward and say:

‘There is a chance.’

He considers me gravely. He is a busy man.

‘David is still very, very sick,’ he says. ‘You must remember that. The operation has removed the growth, but it has not contained the illness. The illness is everywhere.
Everywhere. You must bear that in mind.’

I bear it in mind. I know these facts: his body is full of cells that are multiplying without cause. This condition has spread from his glands to his brain. His liver is eighteen times its
normal size and two per cent functioning. He is thinner than a thong.

‘What can you do for him?’ I ask.

‘We are giving him treatment.’

The first time I hear this word, it is with relief. I am prepared to give in to these men in white coats, to allow them their way with their pills and their needles.

I go in to the hospital twice a day: for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. That is all I am allowed. During the rest of the day I wander in town, I go shopping. In the evenings
I return to where I sleep, which is at the home of Stephen’s sister and her husband. Her name is Linda. His name is Glenn.

Linda is as tall as Stephen, but where his hair is rough and dark, hers is fine and white. Her skin is covered with blemishes and freckles, marked like a surface on which stains have formed.
There is a gap between her two front teeth through which her tongue gleams pink. She is a nervous woman, always changing position and touching at her face with long, unpainted nails. She wears
slacksuits and belts with flat shoes, under which her body seems even thinner than it is.

‘You must be so worn out,’ she cries. ‘My dear.’

Like the rest of her, her voice is reedy and dull. I have never liked her much. I don’t know her well, as she and Glenn come up to see us only over Christmas. But I can’t bring
myself to trust her now, with her pleas of sympathy, her offers of help.

‘Anything,’ she says. ‘Anything, my dear, that you might need.’

‘Yes,’ says Glenn. ‘You have only to ask.’

He is a short man, and overweight. He is a journalist by profession and wears journalists’ clothes: casual, colourless, neat. His pouchy face wobbles as he talks, pushing out words like
little puffs of smoke. I have no reason for believing so, but I suspect he treats Linda badly.

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘It’s very good of you.’

‘Not at all, my dear . . .’

‘It’s only a pleasure,’ says Glenn, shaking his head.

They live in a flat close to the city centre. It’s not a large flat, but is equipped, Linda explains, with everything they need. I am given a key of my own.

My room is blue and pink, with a white carpet on the floor. There is a bathroom next door. From my window I have a view of a large park in the adjoining block, full of gravel drives and
trees.

I go for walks in this park in the long evenings, with the light dying overhead — so much more easily than we. The shadows gather, clotting like blue blood under trees and fountains,
spilling out. There is a statue in the middle of the park, cast in iron: the figure of a man I have not heard of, who stands in stiff, ungainly clothes, staring out into the gloom. Pigeons roost
beneath his hat.

How strangely and how much my life has changed. There are moments now when I reflect on all that has taken place and like a woman asleep, I jerk to my senses, amazed. Nothing is the way it was.
All that I had taken for granted has been pulled out from under me like a mat. My home – the house built of stones and straw – is far away from here, so far that I can only imagine
it.

Stephen is there. He drove down to be with me when he heard about the operation, but has since gone back. There is work to be done, he explains. He has a school to run. I feel sorry for Stephen,
who has no choice, but I miss him enough to be angry with him. He phones me each night and the sound of his voice provokes me to tears.

‘Don’t cry,’ he says. ‘I know it’s hard.’

‘It’s easy on you,’ I say. ‘I’m the one who has to be here, watching . . . If you only knew what they’re doing to him . . .’

‘I know. Of course I know. But what else can I do?’

It has become possible for us to snap. Even Stephen, in his tight blue suits, is given to irritation these days. We are not what we were.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘It’s difficult for both of us.’

‘Stephen,’ I say, and I start to cry again. ‘I want to come home. I want this to be over.’

‘It will be over,’ he says, ‘soon enough.’

Over weekends, when he can, he drives down to be with me. We sleep together then in my blue and pink room in Linda’s flat. These are awkward times for me, with Linda bobbing around her
brother like a frightened moth.

‘Poor Stephen,’ she says. ‘What a terrible strain. Back and forth.’

It is a long way, but he doesn’t, I think, resent the trip. It is five hours in the car; five hours that bring him to David and to me. But Linda’s pity puts questions in my head: am
I a burden to him? Does he begrudge me his time?

I ask him.

‘Of course not,’ he says. ‘How can you think that?’

‘I just wondered.’

He comes to me and takes my face in his hands. He looks into my eyes. ‘You don’t look well,’ he says. ‘You need a rest.’

‘I know,’ I say. Before I can help it, I begin to cry again. I am so ashamed of these tears, over which it seems I have no control. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

‘Why don’t you take a break? Why don’t you go away?’

‘And David? What about him? What will he do while I’m away and there is no one, no one, to be with him?’

He doesn’t reply. There is nothing to say.

When Stephen is here, we go in together to visit David.

My heart lurches at the way he smiles when he catches sight of his father. I am jealous, I admit, of his delight. Things are easier between them now than ever before. Distance and pain have made
them warm to each other. Stephen takes his hand and they talk.

‘How are you doing, big boy?’ says Stephen.

‘Fine,’ says David. ‘But they hurt me.’

‘It’s the only way to make you better.’

‘I know. But it’s sore.’

‘You must be a big brave boy,’ says Stephen. ‘For me. For your father.’

They grin, conspiring.

While he is here, Stephen makes a point of seeing Professor Terry. They get on well, these two, in the way of professional men. They shake hands and talk over the vast surface of the desk that
stands in the professor’s office.

‘Can you give me an idea of how he’s responding to the treatment?’ Stephen asks, fingers steepled under his chin.

‘Well, Stephen,’ the professor says, blowing out his cheeks. ‘It’s difficult to say. The drugs are very powerful, but it’s early days yet. Early days. As I have
told your wife, you must not raise your hopes.’

‘I understand,’ says Stephen pleasantly. He rises to go. ‘I’m afraid we must be off.’

‘Goodbye, Stephen. See you next weekend.’

I remember for a long time afterwards, and with bitterness, how pleasantly Stephen accepted that he should not raise his hopes.

We are, of course, all of us under pressure. Never before in our lives have we had to contend with such things as dispute and separation. But it occurs to me, as it has before, that my husband
is not the person I believed him to be.

The treatment of which Professor Terry spoke is a complicated business. Each morning, at a certain hour, a Dr Tredoux comes into the room, followed by two nurses pushing a
metal trolley. On this trolley are instruments of various kinds and bowls of steaming water. Dr Tredoux is a friendly man. With great bravura he enters, grinning broadly, rolling up his sleeves.
‘How are we today?’ he booms, as if all of us are suffering together. He goes to the tap to wash his hands, humming as he does some mindless, silly tune. The nurses close on David. They
take his pulse, his temperature. They ruffle his hair. Despite these signs of friendliness, David is not deceived. He looks at me with wildly rolling eyes, holding his breath. Eventually he begins
to cry.

‘What’s this, what’s this?’ Dr Tredoux advances on the bed till he looms whitely over us, big as an angel. ‘We’re not frightened, are we? Of a little
pain?’

David doesn’t answer. His hand grips mine like the jaws of a dog.

They unbutton and remove David’s pyjama top. Then, still humming, as unconcerned as if he is making himself a sandwich, Dr Tredoux prepares a syringe. He takes it from a sealed plastic
bag. He inserts a needle. One of the nurses ties a piece of rubber tubing about David’s upper arm. The other stands opposite me on the other side of the bed. She looks at me and smiles.

‘Shame,’ she whispers.

For a moment I’m not sure who she is referring to: me or David. But he is the more obvious subject for compassion. I look down to see what has, once again, become too normal: a little boy
in bed, terribly thin, except for the distended bulge that is his liver. His ribs stand out. His skin is grey. The hole in his throat is taped over with gauze. A drip stands beside me, attached by
a long pipe to a needle in his hand.

‘There now,’ crackles Dr Tredoux. ‘That wasn’t so bad.’

And I see that he has finished his first task. The syringe is bright with blood. As I watch, he plucks it out like a thorn. The flesh clings, lets go.

Then the next. It is this syringe that David eyes with shivering fear. He rolls away from it in the bed, grabbing at me. ‘Don’t let them,’ he says. ‘Don’t let
them.’ But I have no choice: with the nurses, I push him back into the pillow.

Dr Tredoux inserts the needle. He pushes the plunger, sending the column of yellow fluid into David’s arm. It’s over in a moment and the needle is withdrawn. I know very little about
the nature of this drug: only that it kills the cells that cause the anarchy. Professor Terry has explained. But in so doing, he tells me, it will kill many healthy cells too. David will lose his
hair. He will be sick.

‘The price we pay,’ he says, throwing up his hands.

David begins to vomit. Two seconds, perhaps, after the injection is done, he tells me he can feel it reach his tongue: a taste like rot. And he hunches over in the bed, convulsing with the
effort of emptying his body, trying to rid it of this poison. I clutch him. One of the nurses, well trained, is holding a bowl to catch the load. He heaves, shuddering. I raise my eyes to those of
Dr Tredoux, who looks steadily back at me, neutral and cool.