I had an Aroma coffee and went to WH Smith to get a book. I was thinking of Donna Leon’s latest but The Woman in Black by Susan Hill saw me first and jumped into my hand. I don’t have to buy this, I thought, I’ll just glance at the first couple of pages to see what it’s like. But after the opening lines of the first chapter, ‘Christmas Eve’, it refused to let go of me and I was afraid I’d finish the whole thing before we took off, so I’d need another book for the ten hours to Los Angeles and somehow I missed Donna Leon and was waylaid by Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Covering all that, it had to be value for money, so I bought it.
I found a seat with a good view of the monitor screens and noticed that there was a Middle-Eastern-looking man three seats away in the same row. Three seats on the other side of him were also vacant. He was reading an Arabic paper and I wondered if there was any way of spotting a suicide bomber just by looking at him. I probably look suicidal as often as not; lots of people with thoughtful faces might be about to do anything at all.
Boarding was at 10:40, and at 10:15 I rang Elias on my mobile. ‘Hello?’ he said.
‘Hi. It’s me. I was hoping to see you last night.’
‘I was hoping to see you too, but the debate on the international situation was too much for me so I left. I tried to reach you on your mobile but you weren’t available.’
‘I’m sorry, but I was surrounded by record company execs and by the time I got away you weren’t available either.’
‘So anyhow, can we meet tomorrow?’
‘That’s why I wanted to see you after the gig. I’m at Heathrow now. My flight’s leaving soon and I’ll be gone for a few days, back on the 2nd February’
‘What are you doing at Heathrow? Where are you going?’
‘Honolulu and Maui. It’s nothing that’s happening now, it’s to do with the past — a kind of remembrance day. I’ll tell you about it when I get back.’ I couldn’t quite say what I wanted to say next.
‘What?’ he said after a few seconds.
‘How do you feel about luck?’ I said.
‘Some days I feel lucky, some I don’t. How about you?’
‘Sometimes I feel unlucky. Sometimes I feel like a bad-luck carrier.’
‘You’re not. Finding you has been the luckiest thing that’s happened to me in a long time.’ Pause. ‘I miss you when you’re not here. When does your return flight get in? I’ll meet you at Heathrow.’
‘Don’t do that — with two long flights and a stopover at LA there are bound to be delays. I’ll come straight to you when I arrive, leave a key for me in case you’re out.’
‘Yes! I’ll leave a key under the right-hand box tree, under the pot so you can let yourself in any time of the day or night.’
‘Right. I’ll see you soon then.’
‘Yes. Please fly carefully’
‘I’ll try. See you soon, God willing.’ I did a phone kiss and rang off. I’d never said ‘God willing’ before. I hadn’t given him a phone kiss before either. Now I almost didn’t want to go.
16 Elias Newman
25 January 2003. ‘A kind of remembrance day,’ she said. Whom was Christabel remembering? Sid Horstmann? A wave of unreasoning jealousy swept over me but then it subsided and left me with the blueness and the dark that had come to me last night at the Hammersmith Apollo. This Saturday was a working day for me: I had a neuropathy piece to finish for the Lancet as well as my aetiology notes to organise. I’m a very disciplined person but today the discipline wasn’t working — I put on a coat and a woollen hat and muffler and went out into the cold and the greyness.
I walked up the New King’s Road and the King’s Road to Beaufort Street, then down to the Embankment. The wind was making wavelets on the river and the sailboats and power boats were rocking at their moorings. I headed towards the Albert Bridge, and as I approached the bronze Daphne I was passed by a jogger who reached her before I did, slapped her on the bottom, and rapidly grew small in the distance. ‘Cheek,’ I said aloud.
There’s a bench near the statue, and I sat down and looked at the bridge. Over troubled water, I thought. Sixty-two was hardly an age to think of new beginnings but Christabel might at this very moment be flying away from me to keep a date with the dead and I didn’t want her to be away from me.
26 January 2003. BIO-WAR SUITS FOUND IN LONDON MOSQUE, thundered The Sunday Times. Next to that was a smaller headline: ‘Bush to secure Baghdad after Saddam ousted.’ Good luck to us all, I thought. I put the paper down, wondering where Christabel was this morning. She left yesterday morning around 11:00. Figure two ten-hour flights plus a three-hour stopover in Los Angeles — that would put her in Honolulu today, maybe even on her way to Maui by now.
Here it was another cold grey day. After breakfast and a second cup of tea I put on Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and listened to their version of ‘Midnight Special’. That didn’t do it for me so I went to ‘Sonny’s Squall’ and that didn’t do it either. I tried ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’ and that was better although it wasn’t Jesus I wanted to walk with. I ended up with ‘Freight Train’ and that one did it for me. Here I was, a respected consultant, and I felt that my life was a train that I had no ticket to ride. I was riding the blinds or, worse than that, riding the rods and holding on for dear life while the sleepers and rails and the roadbed rushed backwards beneath me. ‘It’s a long low rail and a short cross tie,’ I sang along with them. ‘Ride the rods till the day I die, just don’t tell ‘em what train I’m on and they won’t know what route I’ve gone.’
Then I turned off the CD player and dug up the notebook I’d used when I was writing poetry. Had it come to that? It seems it had. I wrote:
Under the ocean deep and deep,
remembering nothing, dead owls weep.
‘Please, Rodney,’ I said, ‘you’re embarrassing me.’ I shook my head to clear it, dressed up warmly and went out for another walk. After a while I found myself on Putney Bridge. Below me the tide was out, the river had narrowed and the mud had widened. The wind was riffling the water, the sky was grey, the wind was cold. A rower in a single shell appeared from under the bridge and his oars walked him across the water and away. I thought of drowned cities, went home, opened a bottle of French Full Red, and watched Deliverance on video. I made a cheese omelette, finished the bottle, and settled down to do a little work on the neuropathy piece. Very little.
27 January 2003. Monday morning I put on my professional identity as Elias Newman, Diabetes Consultant, and did my regular round with Registrar Titus Smart, Senior House Officer Istvakar Rana, House Officer Brendan Yee, Clinical Pharmacist Winston Davies, and medical students Nancy Kwan and Elizabeth Yonghe, a vigorous team of fully shod verticals looking in on the barefoot horizontals in our care in various wards.
In Bay B of Samuel Plimsoll, in Bed 3 by the window, was Abraham Selby, a burly black man with a rugged face and an ironic smile. The grey daylight illuminating him was, like hospital food, not quite the same as what you get outside. He was reclining against several pillows with his left leg elevated by a stack of folded blankets and a couple of towels. As we approached he put down The Times. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Job’s comforters.’
Brendan Yee read from his notes: ‘Mr Selby is fifty-six, insulin dependent with a long-standing history of Type I diabetes. There is diabetic polyneuropathy. He suffers from ischaemic heart disease, had a coronary thrombosis in 1993 and a triple bypass in 1994. He was admitted on the twenty-first of January with cellulitis in his left leg. He is being treated with intravenous benzylpenicillin and flucloxacillin, also prophylactic heparin to reduce the risk of DVTs.’