An Irresponsible Age. Lavinia Greenlaw
Fred covered his ears.
Fred’s room was at the back of the house where he slept in the brass bed he had had since growing out of his cot. He had painted his walls red, thinking this would make the room warmer. His shirts, pounded in a bathful of suds and inadequately rinsed and ironed, were arranged on hangers suspended from picture hooks hammered badly into the wall. His two suits were squashed up on the back of the door while his shoes and ties, underwear and waistcoats were scattered about.
Juliet came to wake Fred at six-thirty. He had to be at his desk within the hour. She stroked his cheek. ‘Every time I come in here,’ she said, ‘I think you’ve just exploded.’
Juliet continued to listen through the office wall. Jacob Dart might have been sitting beside her, including her; she had no choice.
‘Hullo, Sally.’
Juliet had guessed by now that Sally was Jacob Dart’s sister. He talked to her in the kind of shorthand that siblings use, swore a lot and laughed more from his belly. She imagined him sliding down in his chair as if he were at home and it was just after dinner, and he and this sister (they also talked about a Monica – ‘Bloody Monica’, ‘You know what Monica’s like’) were drunk and up for a late night of banter.
‘Hullo, Sally.’
He said ‘Hullo’ in the old-fashioned way, with an audible ‘u’ rather than an ‘e’. Juliet tried it out when answering her own telephone: ‘Hullo. The opening? Yes, she’ll be delighted. You’re not sure? Fine. I don’t suppose she’ll notice whether you’re there or not. Yes, I can spell it.’
‘Right … right … right …’ with each repetition, the word grew smaller. ‘Which hospital? Are you there now? I’ll be, it’s alright, I’ll be right there. It’s OK Sally, I’m on my on my my way.’
Juliet realised that he was crying. He cried for a long time, as if letting go of something that once it began to unravel would go on and on. What came to mind was a story Fred had written as a child about a magician who was cursed and went to hell, where, ‘leaking small tears and tidy sobs’, he had to spend eternity pulling a scarf from his sleeve.
She couldn’t go and knock on his door. They had not yet met and what would she say? Then his door opened and shut. Juliet looked at her watch and saying loudly, ‘Time to go home!’, put on her coat and stepped outside.
As she cycled into the alley, she glimpsed a figure in a pale coat and a dark hat passing under a lamp, and hurried to catch up. She turned into the street so fast that she found herself overtaking him and had to keep going so that he wouldn’t suspect. Guessing that he was heading for the main road, Juliet sped on and hid round a corner. How could he not spot her immediately? He continued past with a loose stride that made him seem more like a farmer walking his fields than someone hurrying across a city to a hospital. She liked this walk; it made her think of him as a generous man.
The road was a one-way system which gathered up everything heading west and forced it east for a while, around the bend where Jacob vaulted over the railing and danced across four lanes. He hopped over a crash barrier and crossed through the traffic on the other side, where drivers accelerated, relieved to be once more heading the right way. Juliet cycled round and was just in time to see Jacob slip back onto the pavement through a gap where the railings had been wrenched out of place. He continued, half running now, lightly, lightly, disappearing as the road squeezed under the first of the railway bridges which fused here so thickly that they created long tunnels of blackened brickwork and squalid tiles, under-powered striplights and dummy speed cameras, encrusted girders, pallid chickweed, lush moss, pigeons and power cables, all faltering on and on.
‘Can I help you?’ The man patrolling the hospital forecourt was wearing a vaguely military uniform and carrying a walkie-talkie.
‘I’m visiting,’ Jacob whispered.
‘What’s that?’
Jacob shrugged and the man decided that the best way out of this was to pretend that he had heard.
‘Know the way?’
‘No,’ Jacob admitted, then turned and walked off.
‘Which ward then?’ the man called after Jacob, who loped up one of the ramps marked ‘Ambulance Only’ and then came down the other side.
‘Which ward then?’ the man repeated, more challengingly.
‘How should I know?’ Jacob murmured, heading for the steps that led to the even-numbered floors.
‘What you say, mate?’
Jacob came strolling back down the stairs and headed for the opposite set. The man bellowed after him: ‘Here!’
Jacob stopped and turned very slightly, and the man half sang, half spat: ‘Where did you get that hat? Where did you get that hat?’ He grinned, expecting Jacob to grin back only he didn’t but took the hat off his head and held it out: olive-coloured corduroy with the high cleft crown and a feminine, extravagant brim.
‘Have the fucking hat,’ he said evenly. The man coughed to disguise the red in his face, and put his hands in his pockets.
Level 3 looked like a section of multi-storey car park filled with signs that said ‘Do Not Park Here’. The patients who had come out to smoke, some in wheelchairs, others toting drips, huddled together on a strip of turf-like matting. They threw their dog-ends into flesh-coloured plastic barrels planted with dwarf conifers. The man in the floppy hat and coat hurried past. He jumped to peer through the dark glass façade, which was designed to be looked through the other way. At one point he even went up to the glass and pressed his hand against it. Eventually he stopped by the smokers, who indicated that the doors were right there, just behind them. He would have to go in now.
Jacob walked past the hospital map and along a corridor until he reached a lift. He walked back to the map and ran his eye down the list as far as ‘N’: Nye Bevan Ward. The name was in pink and so when Jacob set off again, he followed the line of pink tape on the linoleum floor only then he was following the blue, or the green. Where had the pink line gone?
‘There you are!’ Sally found him by the emergency staircase. He had got as far as the right floor and had not been able to go further. ‘You must have got lost. She’s through here.’
Jacob’s sister led him along a row of blue-curtained cubicles, so tightly packed that they billowed inwards under the pressure of neighbouring furniture and visitors. He sidled along the edge of the bed and squeezed himself into a chair just as a toddler visiting her grandmother rolled under the curtain’s hem. He edged the child back with his foot and leant over to kiss his mother.
‘Hullo there.’
‘Hello, love.’ She tried to raise a hand to greet her son.
‘You sound completely pissed. So you still know who I am, then?’
Monica smiled. The left corner of her mouth had been yanked down, making that side of her face sadder and younger.
Jacob ran a finger across her cheek as if testing a surface. ‘A half smile! You know how they say in novels “She half smiled”? I’ve never known what that meant before and here it is – a half smile.’
‘If I could lift this arm, my boy, I’d give you a clout.’
Jacob took her hand and stroked it.
She could see how tightly wound his mouth was and knew what that meant. ‘Don’t worry. Not much damage done. Good thing I was staying with Sally when it happened. They say London hospitals are the best.’
Sally leant in from the foot of the bed and patted her mother’s leg: ‘You’re