Throughout the dark days of illness when he watched her life being sliced
away in thin, almost transparent curls of prosciutto ham in the morbidly sweet
smelling delicatessen that served only the finest of cancerous dishes, Richard had
never once doubted that he would cope. He thought of the slow unravelling of all that
they had assumed and planned for in terms of food because she was, she had been,
such a visionary in the kitchen, and ham in particular because of some long-ago
account that he had read of island tribesman calling cannibalised victims of ritualistic
ante-deluvian warfare Long-Pigs.
Richard cooked dishes for one now using a simple book of recipes probably
designed for students. Her own library, a cornucopia of Rhodes, Oliver, Burton-Race,
Fearnley-Whittingstall, Stein and David, sat on the bookshelves in his flat untouched,
a small memorial to the days of splendour. More often than not now he grilled
chicken breast, opened a bag of salad, and with a nod to past glories, made up his own
salad dressing out of the last of her red wine vinegar and walnut oil. When the time
came to replenish the cupboards he was sure that he would find something suitably
pre-prepared in Waitrose.
After one such meal, with the wine cap unscrewed and never to be
reintroduced to the bottle, Richard flicked through the digitally free channels on the
television and came up blank once again. Nothing of interest. This did not surprise or
annoy him. Richard told himself frequently that he enjoyed being phlegmatic. He had
not been able to listen to the Archers since she died. Once it had been an evening
ritual or, if they had been busy, a gentle Sunday laze in bed with tea and chocolate
biscuits after early morning love-making. It is what it is, he thought, so there’s no
point in getting upset. By accepting the inevitable passage through the many stages of
grief he was as certain as day follows night that he would surface again, would return
to something akin to the skin that he had once inhabited.
With nothing on the box but the silence of his now solitary life, Richard got up
from his armchair, walked across the open-plan living area of his small flat, picked up
a packet of Silk cut from the kitchen worktop and withdrew one cigarette. He did not
smoke in the ground floor flat, it being a rented space, a bolt hole that he could shutter
against the world, so he opened the patio doors that lead out onto the communal
gardens, leaned against the door frame and lit up. It is what it is.
The anti-smoking Nazi at his local Cotswold surgery, one Sister McGovern,
had actually told him not to bother about giving up. He should go on holiday, get
through the inevitable run of birthdays, anniversaries and Christmas, and then make
the ultimate sacrifice with the New Year. He had, she’d said, enough on his plate.
Richard inhaled deeply, stifling a rough, moist cough, and decided that he would not
beat himself up too much about it. A drink and a smoke were fine and dandy things to
indulge in given the unenviable circumstances of his life. He thought of them as
strong but forgiving crutches upon which he could hobble towards normality. He
mentally raised the rapidly cremating smoke together with his glass of something
Tesco red to the evening sky in salutation to Fuhrer McGovern. They’re not all
bastards, he mumbled to a feral cat that was twitching its behind predatorily beneath
his next door neighbour’s bird table.
A window slid shut in the flat above his, the owner, a florid, self-employed
painter and decorator who made noisy love to his paramour every Saturday morning,
evidently declining Richard’s invitation to join him in his passive acceptance of the
way of things. The first two fingers of Richards already raised and wine bejewelled
hand strayed just a little higher than true stoicism demanded.
Richard had managed sexual congress once since she left him to fend for
himself, a rather unsatisfactory affair, or shag as he’d referred to her in one of his rare
drifts down to the pub with his son-in-law. The physical act was about what he’d
expected. The primary assault had been over in a flash, a star-spangled whiz-bang that
betrayed the months of unfulfilled marital passion during his wife’s final, septic days.
Richard smiled at the duality of the memories. He was clearly not as unfit as he’d
thought prior to his hotel triste. The second and third waves of his sexual task force
had gone in without meeting much resistance and established a strong bridgehead
someway inland of the poor girl’s own stamina. Physically he’d got his rock offs. It
was sex, not lovemaking. What was unsatisfactory about it was the aftermath.
Beyond the sheer messiness of sharing intimate space with another human
body, all of which could be resolved by mopping up with man-size tissues, there was
the inherently dirty feeling of betrayal. Ridiculous but true. His wife had been cold in
her urn for months, and here he was, his ears ringing with the words of his counsellor
about doing things for his own benefit now, still feeling as though he was committing
treason. The thought of that night made him shudder on the doorstep. He could hear
his wife cocking the firing pins for each member of the firing squad before which he
sometimes dreamed that he stood. Emotional compensation; more wine and another
fag.
What made it worse were the phone calls. In that moment of self
congratulatory euphoria, under the influence of the endorphin rush, he had exchanged
phone numbers with the shag. Recently she had started to ring two or three times a
day. Richard had added her by name to his contacts list, which meant that he could
leave her to make plaintive noises on his voice mail. He instinctively deleted them
after the first syllable.
In the old days, before that moment when he had looked into his future wife’s
eyes and known the absolute truth of his dependence on her, he had remained
resolutely single. On more than one occasion he had been the bit on the side, the other
man in the cuckold equation, and it had not bothered him one little bit. Now that he
was single again, and even though the object of his momentary lust was reaching
terminal velocity in the divorce courts, he could not square the circle of his crime. Her
breathing in of air that should have been his wife’s just made him angry.
It should, therefore, be easy, he thought, as he poured another glass of the dry
red and pulled another cigarette from its snugly reassuring and mechanically sorted
place in the packet, to answer the woman’s calls and tell her that this thing between
them was a one off, was done and dusted. The problem, which Richard acknowledged
with a flick of his finger on the rough flint of the lighter, was that he had an addictive
nature. When things got desperate he would take one of her calls, apologise and say
that it was a hard time for him, and they would meet for another dose of something
scabrous and itchy. Richard managed a low chuckle. Why, oh why, couldn’t he take
the great Billy Mac’s advice and just get drunk and watch porn?
Questions about Richard’s sexual reintegration with the wider world were, he
felt, largely a distraction from the more important realisation that this thing, this
disease, this inevitably bankrupting game of dice with the beast, was what is was.
Acceptance was the key. Richard stepped out into the autumn evening, watching low,
grey clouds scud across the tree tops at the far end of the communal garden, and was
about to make for a bench over by a massive Copper Beech, when he stopped, turned,
and fetched from the flat the bottle and the packet of cigarettes. If he was going to
muse, he thought, best to do it professionally.
The nights were closing in now, the leaves falling with the strengthening
breeze that blew in the cold winds from the northern lands, a gift from the Snow
Queen of yore. Despite showers earlier in the day that same leaf stripping breeze had
dried out the bench seat, leaving streaks of dampness in the wood at the margins and
around the rusting screw heads that held his weight as he sat down. It was not yet the
full blown season for decay but already the manicured lawn was strewn with wet,
black leaves.
Looking back at the block of flats he caught a glimpse of the florid painter
caught in the glare of ceiling spot lights as he watched Richard in the garden, no doubt
muttering about polluting neighbours and the irony of a survivor of one cancer
ineluctably feeding the tumours of his own demise. The ruddy faced little man moved
away from the window the instant that he saw Richard look back and wave a misty-
blue hand.
After the initial shock of diagnosis, when he and she had sat in the consulting
room of the breast surgeon, with the senior nurse on hand to translate medical tech-
speak into plain English, when the tears had flowed between them like an automaton
tableau depicting Victoria Falls, they had, he thought, even then, begun to move
through space and time on different paths. His wife had borne the scars of mastectomy
and lymph node investigations with bravery and a determination to overcome that
awed him. The rolling months of chemo and radio, of Herceptin and consultation had
bound their lives into a cycle of three week blocks. Routes to and from hospital wore
a groove in their souls, the shape of a tree being passed first in one direction and then
another marking out a series of revolving, repeating steps. Nausea. Two days in bed
with the curtains closed. Soundless days of untouched food trays and muffled
footsteps on the stairs.
He should have sat with her for longer, but he found refuge in his study in
between these bouts of impotent caring. Then, when the immediate global poisoning
began to wear off she would surface and begin again the process of taking back her
life, until the next blood test revealed nutropenia. Hospital walkways and the special
care unit. The sound of the nurses voices became a soundtrack that played on a
permanent loop during his last glass of comfort while she slept upstairs, worn away by
the endless thunder of the chemotherapy cannonade.
She changed. Richard was forty-two when she was diagnosed. Two years
later, when the primary had been beaten, she looked fragile, like a Russian Babushka,
although very much like a Ukrainian peasant woman, she still packed one hell of a
punch. They tried to regain a sense of proportion, a semblance of normality, but
despite every appearance of success, neither one of them could really make much
headway against that constant fear.
In public they were an ideal couple, she always bright and bubbling, Richard
quietly complementary, unflappable and devoted. Their first granddaughter came into
the world and his wife made time to greet her by a sheer act of will. It was just a short
moment, but it mattered.
Richard worked when the treatments allowed, and loved her as best he found
that he could. Behind closed doors he drank ever more and deeply, and somewhere
along the line he stopped talking to her. Richard withdrew little by little behind the
façade of the perfect foil to the recovering cancer heroine The truth that he only
admitted to her in those final weeks when the friendship of all their years broke
through the debilitation, was that he too was mortally afraid. He was terrified of
losing her, and with her everything that defined who he thought he was.
The second diagnosis was incurable. Maybe a year, maybe two. She got nine
months, by which time a second bout of chemo had been stopped because it was
doing more damage than the multiple bloody tumours. Then, with no immune system
to speak of, she really did become that little, frail old lady, wracked by pain and
sepsis, until, with her family all around her, Richard had asked the doctors to stop the
antibiotics. It had been pain relief for every single one of them.
For weeks after her killed her all that Richard could remember was her death
face. When the morphine stilled her aching heart and burst his, when his tears fell on
her cooling cheek and he spoke soft, sweet nothings to her ghost, she had sagged. The
nurses did their best, but that face was simply not hers. The jaundice of enterochoccal
sepsis and the deflation of pneumothorax coloured his memory of her. She was a
foreign body, a simulacrum of what she should have been thirty years hence.
That had been the April shower that lasted all summer, but now, just recently,
coinciding with the dulling of the year and the closing in of the nights, and perhaps
with the woman in the hotel bedroom, he could remember laughter and life and fire in
his wife’s eyes. That was the fundamental problem that he grappled with as he sat on
the bench in the communal garden outside his ground floor flat.
He poured another glass of wine and demolished it. He lit and smoked another
cigarette. He emptied the last of the bottle and tried to savour it, knowing that, as
usual these days, he had bought just the one. Richard was sublimely, drunkenly
animated, talking rabidly to himself, the feral cat and the disapproving decorator in
number thirty-four. His hands moved through the now low night air as he rehashed
moments from these most recent of mourning days.
He found it difficult that the place where he lived, a quiet Cotswold market
town, was always full of couples, weekending parents who had palmed the kids off
onto Granny, or lovers sneaking off from a conference, usually middle-aged or older,
and he always had to repress the urge to run up to them and ask them why it was they
who could walk hand in hand towards a pension and a bus pass and not he and his
darling girl.
Then again, he had noticed how often these weekending lovers found the time
to spit and spat in between their lovemaking. He’d lost count of the times that he’d
spotted that frosty look or overheard a tell-tale tone of voice, the sort that could lead
to a recreation of the blitz or a glorious kindling of first-flush passion, and then he had
to fight an urge to run up to them and tell them, implore them, to realise that it was all
so fragile and that their time together should never, ever be wasted.
Most of the time Richard restrained these urges. He was in the habit of being
unflappable, of being dependable, of being, well, Richard.
But he had one more thought, one more urge, one more moment of realisation.
With the coming of memory there came the beast. In his most sanguine moments,
when he maintained the façade of getting his shit together, he would remember her
smile, would remember sketching her as she walked on a beach on Paros in the shade
of a cliff with a small Greek Orthodox chapel at the summit, or he might suddenly feel
her hand in his over the dinner table. He caught fragments of her conversation, stock
phrases and expressions, her look of smirking, affectionate disapproval when he
screwed up the do-it-yourself bodgery that was his household trademark. He smelled
her skin in the aftermath of one of their rows, the one where she slept on the sofa and
then crawled into bed on the Saturday morning with a mumbled apology because she
couldn’t remember what she had been so upset about.
With these memories came a primeval urge to howl, to bay at the moon, to call
the pack to grief now that the alpha female had run down her last caribou. Richard
downed the final swill of wine, and feeling his head spin under the raucous impulse he
climbed up onto the bench, raised his hands to cup the lunar beauty of the now dark
and clearing sky, and tilted his head back. The muscles in his chest tightened and from
deep in his belly he gathered up years of frustration and loss, knuckling and kneading
them into the shape of his anger and his own feral beauty before ejaculating one high,
keening shock of wild sound into the damp night air in a body wracking orgasm of
total and unadulterated grief. The hairs on Richards neck and arms and legs bristled.
He felt his nails sharpen against the palms of his hand. The howling grew, flooding
the air with pain. Richard bayed at the revealed moon as if all the worlds in the
universe were barren and he, the last wolf yet living, could run no more.