‘Oh, easy.’
‘Expect a tendency, in the coming weeks, towards the difficult. Would you and uh, Billie like to look in on your husband? He has been given a muscle-relaxant. I suggest you do not wake him. An hour ago my colleague tried to shine a light in his eyes. Alex was not best pleased!’
Intensive Care felt like a submarine or an elderly spaceship: dark compartments where important devices whirred and ticked — electrocardiograms, panting ventilators; the churning of life and death in shapes and shadows. Smiling, the charge nurse drew back the curtain. In they crept.
When she saw him Billie gave her characteristic groan of love — but there seemed to be grief in it now. Feeling a pain in her throat, Russia stooped hurriedly and lifted the child into her arms.
They had him at a steeper angle than she expected. The hefty white collar he wore and the way the sheets were puffed up round his neck made it impossible to avoid the thought that he was slowly emerging from the depths of a toilet bowl; and there were wires taped to his scalp.
‘Why he not awake?’
‘He’s asleep,’ she whispered sibilantly. ‘He got an ouch and he’s asleep.’
Suddenly his eyes opened and he was staring straight at her. She felt herself rock back: what was it? Accusation? Then focus was lost, and the lids sank slowly, obedient to a chemical torpor.
‘Blow a kiss,’ said Russia, ‘to make it better.’
As she was walking back through Reception, with that light tread, that flat-heeled tiptoe, Billie looked up at her mother and said, with unreadable contentment,
‘Daddy’s different now.’
‘Count down from one hundred in units of seven.’
‘One hundred … Ninety-three. Eighty-six. Seventy-nine. Seventy-two. Sixty-five. Et cetera.’
‘Good. What do a bird and an aeroplane have in common?’
‘Wings. But birds don’t crash.’
‘Can you name the Prime Minister?’
Xan named him.
‘Can you name the Royal Princess?’
Xan named her.
‘I’m going to ask you to memorise three words for me. Will you do that? They are: dog, pink, reality … All right. What were they?’
‘Pink. Cat. Reality.’
His condition felt like the twenty-first century: it was something you wanted to wake up from — snap out of. Now it was a dream within a dream. And both dreams were bad dreams.
That morning, with Russia present, Xan had been moved from the Intensive Care Unit to the Head Injury Ward. He had won (it seemed to him) insultingly excessive praise for slowly walking in a roughly straight line, for negotiating a flight of stairs depending only on the handrail, for ponderously combing his hair and cleaning his teeth, and for successfully getting into bed. The consumption of a fish finger, with full deployment of knife and fork, brought him further accolades. It was a dream and he couldn’t wake up. But he could go to sleep, and he did so, dreamlessly.
In the afternoon everything became a little clearer. There were fourteen patients in the ward, and they had all of them been split in time. Their minds had gone backwards, while their bodies had floundered on into age. The dullest chores of body-maintenance, those that normally made you numb with inanition, were hereabouts hailed as skills. For example: voidance. An unassisted visit to the toilet could win a round of applause from the staff and from all the patients who knew how to clap. (And even Sophie, at ten months, knew how to clap: a tinny, ticky sound, to be sure, but she seldom actually missed.) Then, too, there were accomplishments that were even more basic than going to the toilet — like not going to the toilet when you weren’t in the toilet. Aslant the next bed but one there lay a seventy-year-old who was being taught how to swallow. And there were others, at different points along different roads, trudging off in tracksuits to the woodshop or the physiotherapy pool. And there were two or three like himself, the uncrowned kings of Head Injury — virtuosos of toothbrush and hairbrush, crack urinators, adepts of the shoelace and the beltbuckle, silky eaters: Renaissance Men.
‘Do you know what the en ee oh is?’
‘Meo. Neo. No.’
‘Near Earth Object. Have you seen a newspaper? It rather drove you off the front page, I’m afraid. It’s coming on Valentine’s Day. Don’t worry. It’ll be close, but it’ll miss.’
Valentine’s Day, he thought. Not a good day for this particular woman. The full orange lips against the downy pallor, the massed orange hair. And yet there was something …
‘Could you write out a sentence for me? Any sentence.’
Xan was handed a pencil and pad. His interlocutor was a forty-year-old clinical psychologist called Tilda Quant. She was having a reasonably good time, partly because it made a change from cajoling an elderly into spelling the word the, but also because this patient was indeed in the newspapers, was in show business, was a mediated individual. Tilda wasn’t succumbing to the old-style reverence for fame. This was something more subliminal and interactive. Partaking of his publicity, his exposure to general observation, her own publicity was minutely enhanced. For his part, Xan thought it tremendously significant, for reasons as yet unclear to him, that Tilda Quant was a woman. She said,
‘“The quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog.” Hm.’
‘It’s an exercise,’ he said. ‘Supposed to contain every letter in the alphabet.’
‘Yes, you’re a qwerty too. Qwerty? You know: qwerty uiop.’
‘Oh yeah. I think I got it wrong though. The sentence. Don’t see a vee in it. I could never remember that one. Even before.’
‘… You say you don’t remember it, the uh, violence.’
‘I do. I do. It wasn’t just the rough stuff in the last few months. The whole process was unbelievably violent. I’ll tell you how I felt. I thought: If I could find some very old people to sit near to, then maybe for ten seconds nothing that bad would happen. Then I wouldn’t feel so incredibly frail.’
She was looking at him with a new fascination. She said,
‘What are you talking about?’
‘My divorce.’
‘Hah,’ she said, taking notes. ‘I’d call that your first dabble in cognitive dysfunction. An inappropriate response to a question that was clearly related to the assault.’
‘The assault? No, I don’t remember the assault.’
‘Do you remember the three words I asked you to memorise?’
‘… Cat. A colour: yellow or blue. Oh, and reality.’
Outside the sun was an hour above the horizon, still showing one thing to another: showing the other thing to this thing, and this thing to the other thing. He watched shadows move. They moved, it seemed to him, at the same speed as the minute-hand of the clock on the wall of the sister’s office, behind her sheet of glass. This felt like a discovery: shadows moved at the speed of time … Xan kept thinking about his dead sister, Leda: he hadn’t seen her for fifteen years, and when he went to the hospital she never woke up.
His wife came, with Billie and the baby, and Imaculada.
When the girls had gone Russia called for the screens to be drawn around his bed, which she then climbed into, wearing only her slip. The way she did this made him think of the phrase petticoat government … He responded palpably to her warmth, her breadth. This was a distant reassurance, but it soon joined the pulse of his headache, and was then lost in his exhaustion and nausea and the ambient grief of his wound. He wanted to submit to a body of moving water. He wanted to let the waves do it.