He says, 'Still here, Lucky? Yes, there is something you can do for me. How lucky do you feel?'
Vince
He's still lying there, with the mask over his face and the extra tubes, in the little unit where they put them after they wheel them out, the High Dependency Unit, and he don't know nothing yet because he aint woken up proper, he don't know sweet nothing. He don't know he's inoperable. And that geezer Strickland tells me it only took ten minutes, a quick opening up and sewing back together again, and he uses some word for it, a long fancy word, like something-sodomy. It's like he's pleased with what a quick piece of work it was. He don't spell it out for me plain and simple, he leaves me to work it out. Like it wasn't the two-hour job he said it could be if there was anything they could do. Inoperable, that's the word he uses, inoperable.
And I look across the corridor through the glass partition, where Jack's lying, number one on the right, and I think. He's inoperable, he can't be operated. He's still there but he's stopped running, he's pulled up at the side of the road. But that's how everything feels suddenly. Like we're all in some place where things have come to a standstill, and the rest of the world is whizzing on past, like traffic on a motorway.
He says, 'Is Mrs Dodds here?' And I say, 'Yes, she's gone back to get a cup of tea. She's with my wife.' Then he looks quick at his watch and he says, 'If you could fetch her, I could speak to her now, while I'm here. We could find somewhere private. Maybe the sister's office.' And I'm thinking, You turd. Because he aint thinking of the effect on me, or maybe he's thinking it aint important to me, I don't count, I'll just do as his messenger-boy, and I want to hit him, I want to smash his poxy four-eyed face. But I say, 'I'll go and get her.' He's already turning, as I say it, to a pile of notes some little junior doc's shoved under his nose. He says, Til be here.' He prods his glasses with his finger and gives me a tight little half-measure of a smile.
So I go and find Amy and Mandy. But it's like I aint going nowhere, it's the corridors and swing-doors that move past me, like one of those old machines in arcades, with a steering-wheel and a picture of a road spinning round, so you got the feeling you were travelling though you weren't.
They're sitting there with their cups of tea, and they don't know nothing yet, only that Jack's alive, he aint sparked out on the table, possibility number three. But I can tell that she knows, straight away, just by looking at me, that she can see in my face what I don't even need to tell her. I say, 'He aint come round yet. Strickland's in the ward. He said he'd like to speak to you.' Then I shake my head just a fraction, like it's hard to budge it, and she looks at me like she don't want anyone to say it. As if it's all her fault and she knows it and she's sorry, and she don't see why she has to go before the headmaster and get punished extra for it, when it's punishment already, just knowing. But maybe the headmaster's going to give her a second chance. Don't ever let this happen again. So she gets up, and as she gets up Mandy squeezes her arm. Then Mandy gets up too, giving me a little nod like a question. She looks good, Mandy looks good. And I nod back.
Then we go back along the corridors, which slide past and under us while we just pretend we're walking, and Amy don't say a word till we get near the ward, when she says, "Uncle Ray ought to know.' I say, 'What?' She aint called him that for years: Uncle Ray. Like Uncle Lenny. Like I'm a nipper again.
Strickland sees us coming and he says something quick to one of the nurses, then he ushers us into an office, it aint the sister's office, it's more like a store cupboard, and shuts the door behind us. There's only two chairs and he pulls one round for Amy to sit on and Mandy takes the other one, by the door. I stand close beside Amy, and Strickland stands in front of the desk with his arse half parked on it, and as he starts talking I put my arm behind Amy's head and clasp her shoulder and I feel her hand come across and grab my other hand.
He says he don't believe in not giving the facts straight, it don't serve any purpose otherwise. When he starts to talk he's looking at Amy but he switches his eyes pretty smart to me, as though in order to talk to Amy he has to talk to me, or he's seen something in Amy's face he don't want to look at. I can't see Amy's face. I have to look straight ahead, like when you're up on a charge, before they march you into the cooler. I have to look this bugger straight in the eye.
And when he's done, it's like Amy's pretending she hasn't heard him, she's pretending she aint even in the room. So it's up to me to keep things going, to ask the questions, though there's only one question, How long? Strickland looks pleased when I do, like we've shifted into a different area which aint his department, he's a repair-man, he aint a scrap dealer, and he'll be quit of all this just as soon as he walks out of this room. He starts talking about "symptom control', which sounds to me about the same as 'inoperable', and it's while he's talking about this that I feel Amy's hands start to clutch and grab at me and I hear her start to catch her breath. Strickland carries on about symptom control, looking straight at me, but Amy keeps clutching and grabbing, like her symptoms need controlling an' all. It's like her hands are climbing, scrambling up me and I'm a ladder, an escape route, up to some hatchway out of this room. But it seems to me Amy aint ever going to get out of this room, she's going to be locked up in it for ever, her own cooler. She's like June now. And I go rigid and fixed, like a mast, like a tower, while she clings and grabs at me. Thinking, She aint my mum, she aint my mum.
Then suddenly we're out of that room, as if we didn't do nothing, again, to make it happen, the world just shifted, twisted for us, and Strickland's disappeared, he's disappeared down his own escape route. Mandy's taken charge of Amy now, she's holding her and steering her towards the exit and looking at me sort of sharp, like this is a thing between women. But Amy aint Mandy's mum either.
Like my job's the thing between men. So I go back into the unit, before I follow them out, and just stand there by his bed, looking at him. He still aint so much as flicked an eyelid, he's just lying there under the mask, and Strickland said he'd speak to him, he'd speak to him himself, but he'd leave it a good twenty-four hours, even when he's come round, because what with the anaesthetic and everything, he won't take in proper what you say to him. But it seems to me that it aint Strickland's job to tell him, it aint really his job.
I stand by the bed, like I'm a tower, a mast still, but Jack aint trying to climb up me, he's just lying flat beneath me, and I think, It might be better if he died now, without waking up, so he'd never know and no one need ever tell him. Just him never knowing and the world travelling on and on without him. What you never know don't hurt. It's like I don't remember that bomb falling, I can't ever remember that bomb falling. They said so long as you could hear them, you were all right, it was when the sound cut. But I don't even remember not hearing it. So if that bomb had killed me too, I'd never've known I'd been born, I'd never've known I'd died. So I might've been anyone. I look at him like I'm looking down at a view. Golden days before they end. And I think, Someone's got to tell him, someone's got to.
Ray
I peered over the rim of my glass at Slattery's clock.