Whiskey & Charlie (15 page)

* * *

In films Charlie has seen, episodes of soap operas, coma victims lie peacefully in dimly lit rooms, the machinery required to keep them alive beeping discreetly beside them. There are tubes and wires, but somehow these celluloid coma patients manage to look exactly like the people they were before they slipped into unconsciousness. Whereas Whiskey is still unrecognizable, and though it has been two weeks since the accident, the medical staff never leaves him alone, except during the long, dead hours of the night watch. During the day, there is always someone wanting to interfere with Whiskey, to adjust him, to measure him, to administer something to him.

Take
a
ticket
, Charlie feels like saying, every time a member of the medical team appears at the door. There are the regular ICU nurses who are always in and out—changing dressings and IV bags, emptying catheters, checking the monitors. There are Angie and Fergal, a physiotherapist named Grant, specialists of various kinds whom Charlie struggles to keep track of, even with his extensive list. Charlie knows he should feel grateful to these people, their efforts to treat Whiskey's injuries, to rouse him from his coma, but sometimes he resents them, wishes they would leave Whiskey alone.

Again and again, Charlie hears the medical staff use the term
secondary
complications
to describe the various problems that might arise, either because Whiskey cannot move or because his brain can no longer be relied upon to control his bodily functions. It is only after the temperature scare that Charlie begins to comprehend the seriousness of these secondary complications, the very real threats they pose to Whiskey's life.

Gradually it becomes apparent that Whiskey is just as likely to die of something Charlie has previously thought of as minor—such as pneumonia—as he is of something major, such as organ failure. Whiskey is susceptible to deep vein thrombosis, bladder infections, deformities of the bones, joints, and muscles. Simply from lying in the same position day after day, he can develop pressure sores on his skin that can be difficult to heal. These pressure sores can become gangrenous, can lead—in extreme cases—to the amputation of limbs. Charlie had thought of gangrene as a thing of the past, a condition that existed only in the adventure stories of his boyhood, something that affected wounded soldiers in the field hospitals of World War I, injured explorers who ventured into uncharted territory in colonial times. He had imagined that in an age of sterilization, in a modern hospital equipped with gleaming instruments, trained staff, tried and tested pharmaceuticals, no one's life could be threatened by something as simple as a bedsore. But every day at the hospital, what he sees and hears begins to convince him otherwise.

Whiskey has been placed on a pressure relief air mattress to avoid the development of bedsores. He wears intermittent pneumatic compression stockings to prevent the formation of blood clots. The staff checks regularly for symptoms of pneumonia, and the physiotherapist comes every day.

“Regular physio makes recovery much easier if the patient regains consciousness,” he tells Charlie.

Charlie likes Grant. He has unruly hair, muttonchops, a manner that suggests he knows how to have a good time when he's not working on life-threatening cases. He's the kind of person Charlie thinks he might have become friends with, under different circumstances, someone he might have invited out for a beer. But he says
if
the patient regains consciousness. Because Whiskey has now been in a coma for more than fourteen days, which means that statistically speaking, he has become more of an
if
case than a
when
.

Rosa has been asked to consider an operation in which Whiskey's nasogastric tube is replaced with what the medical staff call a G-tube—a gastronomy tube, which is inserted in an incision in the stomach. Charlie almost laughs when he hears the word
gastronomy
. He imagines the gastronomy Whiskey is used to enjoying—the oysters and white truffles, wagyu beef and Iranian caviar—all the delicacies he must have charged to his company credit card over the years, wining and dining corporate clients at Melbourne's finest restaurants.

The operation is recommended for patients who need a feeding tube for an extended period. It is a simple operation that will make Whiskey more comfortable, Rosa has been told. That is enough for her. But not for Charlie. He is suspicious of the term
extended
period
. And in a short space of time, he has already come to the conclusion that in a case like Whiskey's, there is no such thing as a simple operation. For starters, the operation requires a general anesthetic. Almost everyone Charlie knows has, at one time or another, undergone a medical procedure that required a general anesthetic. In the past, it has never crossed Charlie's mind that in even the most routine of operations, something might go wrong, that a person might fall into that sickly sweet sleep and never wake up. But it is different for Whiskey. Charlie has had it explained to him more than once that being in a coma is not like being asleep, that, in fact, one of the characteristics of coma is a lack of sleep–wake cycles. But to Charlie, this is a medical technicality. As far as he is concerned, Whiskey might as well be asleep. Might an anesthetic not wrap him in another layer of unconsciousness, let him descend to the next level?

Charlie knows everyone thinks Rosa is suffering the most as a result of Whiskey's situation, closely followed by his mother. He suspects many people—especially Whiskey's friends—think it matters less to Charlie because he didn't get on with Whiskey. No one understands that makes it matter more, that it is Charlie, in some ways, who has the most to lose by Whiskey dying.

Charlie wishes to be presented with a mathematical diagram in which Whiskey's increased comfort is measured against the risks of the G-tube operation. In the absence of this, he wishes for the opportunity to ask a few simple questions. But he doesn't even get that much. It is Rosa's decision, and as soon as it is made, the preparations for the operation begin. And then no one has time to talk to Charlie, to explain what he needs to know, to wait while he writes it down in Whiskey's journal. Everyone is too busy getting Whiskey ready. There is a brief flurry of activity, and then Whiskey is gone, wheeled away to the operating room, and Charlie is left with his questions in an empty room.

Whiskey was in a South Yarra side street around the corner from his office when the car hit him. A driver exiting a parking lot suffered a massive heart attack, careened across the road, mounted the curb, and slammed Whiskey against a wall. One moment Whiskey was on his way to get a coffee, the next he was unconscious on the pavement, his bones crushed, bleeding inside and out.

Charlie was walking down Swanston Street when his mother called to tell him about the accident. Thinking back on it, Charlie cannot remember exactly what his mother said; he remembers only that she used the phrase
critical
condition
. He had heard this phrase many times before, but it had always been in relation to someone far removed from his own life. To hear it applied in the context of his own brother knocked the wind out of Charlie. What did he say to his mother? Did he swear or gasp or moan? He remembers looking at a sign outside a bookshop that said
Only
30 shopping days to Christmas!
The sign made no sense to him. He understood it was the last week of November, but in the space of that phone call from his mother, Christmas had become utterly irrelevant, nonsensical even, some exotic land he might never visit again.

These were the thoughts that ran through his head as he stood on the corner of Collins Street trying to hail a taxi. He remembers calling Juliet, but he does not remember what he said. He remembers that every taxi he saw was already occupied and that eventually he got on a tram for the Alfred Hospital. He remembers that on the tram he had the sense that people were staring at him. Was he crying?

x x x

In the days that followed, Charlie felt overwhelmed by information and yet, at the same time, he felt he knew nothing, understood nothing. His brother was in a coma. But what was a coma? Charlie's head was filled with questions. He talked to the doctors and nurses, to Rosa and Juliet, his mother, their friends. He was told that Whiskey had a high chance of this, a low chance of that, he might be paralyzed or brain damaged or both, he may have the mental age of a child, be confined to a wheelchair or bedridden for the rest of his life. Charlie was offered expert opinions and hunches, facts and statistics, fears and prayers and miracle stories—a desperate hodgepodge of science and blind faith. He heard so many different things from so many different people that he couldn't keep it straight in his head.

There were the things he knew and wished he didn't, the things he didn't know and didn't want to, and then there were the things he needed to know and could not ask. He read an article in the local newspaper about the accident, though he knew nothing he read could tell him how to feel about what had happened, how to deal with those feelings. Charlie did not need a tin-pot journalist to tell him it was a
freak
accident
. It was of no interest to him that local residents, business owners, and shoppers had expressed shock and heartfelt sympathy for the victims and their families. According to the article, Whiskey was
only
at
the
beginning
of
a
stellar
career
in advertising and the car that took him down was a pewter 1991 Mazda 626. As he read this, Charlie came to understand that Whiskey's accident, which was, to him and his family, a very real tragedy, was being turned not into news, not even that, but entertainment.

Since neither Charlie's family nor the family of the man driving the car would talk to the journalist from the local paper, he had interviewed anyone who was willing to say anything at all. The owner of the café where Whiskey was headed that morning was reported to have said Whiskey's coffee of choice was a soy latte. And a café regular said she had seen Whiskey at the café many times and had always noticed him because he was so well dressed. Charlie wished he could find this woman, this woman who could say something so utterly inane in such a situation; he wished he could find her and slap her face. Instead, he cut the article out of the paper and burned it in the sink.

x x x

When Charlie tried to imagine a car accident, it was always nighttime on a remote stretch of a dark freeway. He found it incomprehensible that such an accident could happen just off Chapel Street, in broad daylight, on an ordinary weekday morning, while less than a few hundred feet away, people were listening to CDs at the Virgin Megastore or trying on jeans at General Pants. Charlie thought of all the people who were in the vicinity of the accident on that day, how it might easily have been one of them who was hit by the car instead, how if Whiskey had stopped for a moment to make a phone call, slowed down to look at a window display, left his office ten seconds earlier or later, the car would have narrowly missed him.

The accident that had put Whiskey in a coma had also left the driver of the car dead. Charlie did not know whether it was the heart attack or the accident that killed the driver, or some combination of the two. It made no difference. What mattered was that it was not the driver's fault Whiskey was in a coma. It was no one's fault.

Sometimes Charlie wished there was someone to blame. He thought that if he had someone else to be angry with, he might be less angry with himself. He knew, of course, that he was not responsible for the state Whiskey was in. But he could not avoid the fact that he had made no attempt to repair his relationship with his only brother while he had the chance, that he had held a grudge against him long after he should have let it go.

All the times he had thought about the demise of his relationship with Whiskey, it had always been Whiskey's fault. In Charlie's version of events, any bad behavior on his part had always been justifiable as a response to a graver misdemeanor on Whiskey's part. But now that Whiskey was in a coma, it no longer mattered whether Whiskey had been a bad brother to Charlie. The moment that car hit him, Whiskey entered the realm of the blameless, a state in which he was responsible for nothing, and nothing could be held against him. Their relationship, or lack thereof, was now Charlie's responsibility entirely.

It was less than three weeks after Whiskey's accident when Juliet's nephew Oscar was rushed to the hospital with breathing problems.

“It's not a virus, Mummy,” he had said to Juliet's sister, Genevieve, between sobs. “I'm actually dying.”

It turned out to be just a severe case of croup, and he was back home in bed within hours, but Charlie was still upset when Genevieve rang and told them.

“First Whiskey, now Oscar. It feels like the last straw,” Charlie said to Juliet.

“You really love him, don't you?” Juliet asked, touched by Charlie's response.

“He's my little buddy,” Charlie said.

It had taken him a while to warm up to Oscar. When Juliet first started spending time with him, Charlie had kept clear. He loved the children he worked with at the school, but toddlers were a different story. Oscar could walk, but he couldn't run or throw and catch a ball, and though, allegedly, he could say a few words, Charlie couldn't understand a thing that came out of his mouth. Apart from birthday parties, which Charlie was expected to attend, looking after Oscar was Juliet's thing.

Then one Saturday, long before Whiskey's accident, Juliet had agreed to look after Oscar so Genevieve and her husband, Maurice, could choose the fixtures and fittings for their bathroom renovation. Genevieve had just dropped Oscar off and Juliet was making him some fairy bread when the phone rang.

“I completely forgot!” Charlie heard her say. “No, no, I'll be there in ten minutes.”

“My dentist appointment,” she said to Charlie when she hung up. “I can't believe I forgot it.”

Charlie could believe it. Though she was extremely organized in other ways, Juliet dreaded going to the dentist and somehow always managed to forget her appointments.

“I have to go, Charlie. You'll be all right with Oscar for a couple of hours, won't you?”

“Me?” Charlie was shocked. “Can't you reschedule?”

“I've already rescheduled twice.”

“Why can't you take him with you?”

“I'm going to be stuck in that horrible chair for over an hour. What's Oscar supposed to do for all that time?”

“You could take some books for him,” Charlie had suggested hopefully.

“Don't be silly, Charlie. I can't possibly take him with me.”

“Well, maybe we should ring Genevieve and ask her to come and get him.”

“I don't want to do that. She only just dropped him off. They've got things to do today; that's why I took Oscar in the first place. All I'm asking you to do is look after him for a couple of hours. I don't know why you're making such a fuss about it.”

“I'm meeting Marco,” Charlie protested. They often caught up at the Windsor Castle, a pub that at one time had been their local and years on was still their favorite. They had a couple of pots of Tooheys pale ale and a counter meal, always the same: a rib eye for Charlie, medium rare, chicken parmigiana for Marco, crinkle-cut fries all around.

“You can take Oscar with you.”

“To the pub?”

“Of course not. It's too smoky for a child in a pub. I'm sure you could find somewhere else to have lunch this once.”

“What time will you be back?”

“I don't know. Around three, I suppose.”

“That's more than three hours! What am I supposed to do with him for all that time?”

“Take him on the train,” Juliet suggested. “Take him to the park. Take him to Marco's workshop, he'd love that. He likes tools, like Bob the Builder, don't you, sweetheart?” she said, giving Oscar a kiss on his sticky cheek.

“Who's Bob the Builder?” Charlie said, but she was already gone. He had forgotten to say good luck.

Charlie rang Marco. “Change of plans. I'm in charge of Juliet's nephew. We can't have lunch at the pub. It's too smoky, apparently.”

“What about the beer garden?”

“Good idea,” Charlie said, brightening.

x x x

Charlie had held Oscar's hand as they walked down to the station. Juliet always chatted to Oscar, but Charlie couldn't think of anything to say. He was surprised when Oscar pointed at a Holden Commodore and asked, “Is that a Porsche?” Charlie hadn't realized how much his language had come on. He couldn't think of how to keep the conversation going. It was only later that he thought he could have asked Oscar if he liked cars, thought of telling him about Whiskey's convertible.

Charlie was relieved when they arrived at the station, and the process of letting Oscar press the buttons and put the coins in for the tickets consumed all their attention.

“It's a new train,” Oscar said when it pulled into the station.

Charlie looked. Oscar was right. It was one of the new trains. Charlie sat down in a double seat halfway down the carriage. Oscar did not sit next to him.

“I want to sit near the doors,” he said. They changed seats.

“The doors go like this,” Oscar said, and he held his palms apart in the air and then moved them slowly together, making a
shhh
sound. When his two pinkies were touching, he brought his hands toward his chest. Ten seconds later, the doors closed in exactly the way Oscar had demonstrated.

“Can we go on the elascator?” Oscar asked.

“That's only in the city. We're not going to the city. We're only going as far as Windsor.”

“How many stops?”

“One.”

On the train, people looked at the two of them. Charlie supposed it was because he was fair and Oscar was dark, like Maurice. People could see at a glance that Charlie wasn't his father. Charlie wondered what they were thinking. He tried to wear an expression suggesting
kindly
uncle
. Oscar demonstrated the action of the doors over and over again. Women smiled at him and then, less certainly, at Charlie.

“He's beautiful,” one woman said. Charlie looked at Oscar's little round face, his dark eyes and long eyelashes. He looked like pictures Charlie had seen of the Dalai Lama as a child.

“How old is he?” the woman asked.

“Nearly two,” Charlie said, trying to remember.

The woman frowned suspiciously. Charlie wondered if he might be wrong about the age. He was relieved to get off the train.

x x x

Marco was already sitting in the garden with a beer when they arrived at the pub.

“Hello, young man,” he said. He introduced himself and shook Oscar's hand.

Oscar did not seem to find this strange. He said his name and shook hands back. “We came on a new train,” he said by way of conversation.

“A new train, eh? Did it go very fast?”

Oscar nodded.

“How old are you, Oscar?” Marco asked.

“He's two and a bit,” Charlie tried.

“I was two,” Oscar said, “but I turned into three.”

“I thought you said he was a baby,” Marco said to Charlie.

Charlie shrugged. “He's grown up a bit since I last spent time with him. Listen, what do you think about taking him to see your workshop later? I've got to keep him entertained all afternoon. Juliet said he might like it. He likes tools, apparently.”

Marco checked with Oscar. “You like tools?” he asked.

Oscar nodded.

“I've got a lot of tools.”

“Have you got an angle grinder?” He pronounced it
gwoinder
.

Charlie and Marco laughed. “That's a big word for a little guy,” Marco said. “Do you go to preschool?”

Charlie noticed Marco was much better at talking to Oscar than he was.

“Not preschool. Kindy,” Oscar corrected.

“And do you like kindy?”

Oscar looked at Marco and Charlie slyly. “I like it. But I tell Mummy that I don't.”

“Why do you do that?”

Oscar looked at Marco as though he was stupid. “Because I want to stay at home and watch
The
Wiggles
!”

“Who's your friend?” the barmaid, Emily, asked when she took their order.

“Oscar,” Charlie said. “He's Juliet's nephew.”

“And what's Oscar having?”

Charlie hadn't even thought about Oscar. He hadn't a clue what children ate.

“Chicken curry,” Oscar said decisively. “I like chicken curry.”

Emily giggled. “Eat a lot of curry, do you?”

“Sometimes it's too spicy for me,” he admitted solemnly.

“What a character,” Emily said, and Charlie felt strangely proud, as though he was responsible for Oscar's charm.

“We've got chicken pasta. Would that do?”

“Yum,” Oscar said.

x x x

After he had finished his arts degree, Marco had decided what he really wanted to do was make furniture. He said he was too old to do an apprenticeship and he liked the good life too much to work for two hundred dollars a week, so he took whatever jobs he could find—a bit of turning, a bit of carving, a bit of French polishing—until, after a few years, he had learned enough and saved enough to have a go at doing it on his own. He set up a workshop and made chairs and tables and beds, whatever people asked for. After a couple of years, one of his clients had asked him to make a new front door for his house. He had shown Marco a photo of an ornate door he had seen in Prague and asked if he could replicate it. The door was hundreds of years old, and Marco had spent several months aging the wood, carving it, copying every detail until the door he had made looked exactly like the door in the photo. After that, Marco was suddenly a specialist, and before long, all he made were doors. People paid over five thousand dollars and waited up to six months for some of them.

Charlie always liked going to Marco's workshop. He liked the smells of wood and varnish, the combination of chaos and order. Oscar seemed to like it too. He went over to the workbench to examine Marco's tools.

Marco sat him up on a stool so he could see better. “Do you know what this is?” he asked, holding up a screwdriver.

Oscar examined it carefully. “Phillips screwdriver.”
Scwoodwoiver
.

Marco took it back. “Phillips head. He's right. Priceless. What about this one?”

Marco held up a tool Charlie would have described as a saw.

“Hacksaw,” Oscar said without hesitating.

Marco whistled. “Are you going to be a carpenter when you grow up?”

“And a train driver,” he said.

x x x

The game of naming all the tools took a long time, and then Marco put on a bit of a show, did some sanding and sawing and boring for Oscar's entertainment. By the time Charlie got him home, it was after four.

“You've been gone for ages,” Juliet said. “Why didn't you take your phone? I've been worried about you. Is he all right?” She picked Oscar up and gave him a kiss.

“He's perfectly all right,” Charlie said, feeling slightly put out. “There's nothing to worry about. We had a great time, didn't we, Oscar?”

“We went to Marco's workshop,” Oscar said. “He's got more more more tools than I've ever seen.”

“Sounds like you boys had fun together,” Juliet said, relieved.

“It wasn't as bad as you expected then,” she said to Charlie once Oscar was playing with his toys in the family room.

“He's more grown up than I thought,” Charlie said. “I didn't realize he could talk so much. He's amazing.”

“He does seem to be quite advanced for a three-year-old, doesn't he?”

“I didn't realize he was three.”

“We went to his third birthday party.”

Charlie shrugged. “I couldn't remember how old he turned.”

Juliet laughed. “Sometimes you're truly useless, Charlie.”

“Rubbish,” Charlie said, putting his arms around her. “You're just jealous because I'm his new favorite.”

x x x

After that, Charlie had tried to make sure he was around whenever Juliet looked after Oscar. He bought him toys, shoes with lights that flashed when he took a step, a T-shirt saying
Talk
to
My
Agent
. Charlie took dozens of photos of him, wrote down the funny things Oscar said so he wouldn't forget them.

“I can't come over,” he had said on the phone one day. “I've got chicken pops. I'm in quarantine.”

Charlie cracked up when he told Juliet. He couldn't say
pox
but he could say
quarantine
.

Before long, Oscar's visits were established rituals. They would ride a couple stops on the train, go to a nearby park for running races—in which Charlie was under strict instructions from Juliet to let Oscar win two out of three—and then catch the train home again.

“Play dough now?” Oscar would ask after lunch, and they would roll out the dough on the kitchen bench and cut shapes out of it with cookie molds. And now and again, if Juliet was busy, they would go to Marco's workshop.

x x x

“Shall we go and see Oscar?” Juliet suggested after Genevieve rang to tell them about the croup.

“Is it catching?” Charlie asked.

“Not for adults, I don't think.”

“Let's get him a present, to cheer him up.”

They stopped at a toy shop on the way, and Charlie picked out an enormous LEGO robot.

“That seems a little bit over the top,” Juliet said when she saw the size of it. “I mean, I know he's sick, but…”

“He went to the
hospital
, Juliet,” Charlie said defensively. “He deserves something special.”

Oscar loved the robot. Charlie sat on the end of his bed for two hours, helping him build it.

“Look how big it is, Mummy!” Oscar shrieked excitedly when it was finished.

“You've perked up,” Genevieve said. “Perhaps Uncle Charlie should have been a doctor, Oscar. What do you think?”

“Why?” Oscar asked.

“Well, you certainly seem to be feeling a lot better since he arrived.”