Matters of Life & Death Read online

  All the men’s magazines were about golf or cars. He picked up Vogue and flicked through it. Beautiful half-naked sophisticated women clattering with jewellery. But he couldn’t concentrate to read any of the text.

  His letter lay face up on the chair beside him.

  Your family doctor has referred you to the Diabetic Clinic to see if you are diabetic. To find this out we will need to perform a glucose tolerance test.

  He remembered a crazy guy at school who had diabetes – who went into comas. But school was fifty years ago. Since being given his appointment he’d read up even more frightening stuff about your eyesight and how you could lose it. And your extremities – how in some cases they could go gangrenous and have to be lopped off.

  His yellow outpatient card said Please bring this card with you when you next attend.

  A door at the far end of the waiting room opened and screeched closed. It took about thirty or forty seconds to close, with its irritating, long, dry squeak. There was a damping device on the mechanism to make it close more slowly. But no sooner had it closed fully and the noise stopped than somebody else came through it and began the whole process over again. ‘Collective responsibility is not being taken,’ he wanted to yell. If he had diabetes and had to come back to this God-forsaken place then next time he’d bring an oil can. Recently in the newspaper he’d read that grumpy old men were more liable to heart attacks than old men who were not grumpy. He tried to calm down. To degrump.

  He took out his Chekhov and looked at the list of contents. Something short. He did a quick sum, subtracting the page number from the following page number after each story. It was an old copy and the cheap paper had turned the colour of toast at the edges. The Vanguard Library edition – translated by the wonderful Constance Garnett. A nurse walked in and called people by their first names. She came to him.

  ‘Hi, my name is Phil,’ she said, ‘and that’s Myna at reception.’ She explained what was going to happen. He had to drink a whole bottle of Lucozade and then, over the next couple of hours, every half hour in fact, he had to give both blood and urine samples. He nodded. He understood. He had grey hair, he was overweight, but he understood.

  She took him into the corridor and sat him down in what looked like a wheelchair.

  ‘Did you have any breakfast?’ she said. ‘A cuppa tea maybe? Some toast?’

  ‘No. The leaflet said to come fasting.’

  ‘Not everybody pays attention to that.’

  ‘What a waste of everybody’s time. Do people actually do that?’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ she said.

  It turned out not to be a wheelchair but a weighing machine. She calculated something against a chart on the wall.

  ‘Did you bring a sample?’

  ‘Yes.’ He rummaged in his pocket and produced the bottle. It had returned to room temperature. Spring water with a hint of Apple. He handed it over and the nurse put a label on it.

  ‘It might be a little flavoured,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not going to drink it.’ She whisked it away into another room.

  When he was back in his seat by the window she brought him Lucozade, a plastic glass and four lozenge-shaped paper tubs. She stuck a white label with a bar-code on each and wrote a time on the rim with her biro. He wanted to make terrible jokes about giving urine samples and her name. Phil. Phil these please. P for Phil. But he realised everybody must do this. He said, ‘I hope these are not for blood.’

  She laughed. She had a nice face – in her early forties.

  ‘All at once now,’ she said. He poured the Lucozade into the plastic glass and drank it. Refilled it, drank it. Halfway down he had to stop, his swallow refused to work against the sweet bubbles. Eventually he finished everything and childishly expected praise.

  When she left him he tried to concentrate on his book. A story called ‘The Beauties’ looked feasible. Subtract one hundred and seventy-three from one hundred and eighty-three. It’d be hard with all this toing and froing – all the stabbing and pissing. All the people around him talking. He didn’t think he’d read it before. That had happened several times with Turgenev – after fifty pages he’d said, ‘I’ve read this before.’ It went down so easily. Nobody gagged on Turgenev.

  But Chekhov is Chekhov. He draws you in. He writes as if the thing is happening in front of your eyes. An unnamed boy of sixteen, maybe Chekhov himself, and his grandfather in a chaise are travelling through the summer heat and dust of the countryside to Rostov-on-the-Don. They stop to feed their horses at a rich Armenian’s and the grandfather talks endlessly to the owner about farms and feedstuffs and manure. The place is described in minute detail down to the floors painted with yellow ochre and the flies . . . and more flies. Then tea is brought in by a barefoot girl of sixteen wearing a white kerchief and when she turns from the sideboard to hand the boy his cup she has the most wonderful face he has ever seen. He feels a wind blow across his soul.

  ‘The Beauties’ had captured him. He knew exactly what Chekhov was talking about. He was there in that room experiencing the same things.

  At precisely a minute before a quarter to the hour he lifted one of his cardboard pee pots and went to the technician’s laboratory. The technician was a woman with long brown hair who smiled at him. She wore a white coat. Her breast pocket had several biro ink lines descending into it. She explained what she was about to do.

  ‘You can choose to have it done on four fingers. Or you can have it done on one finger four times. That’s the choice. Four sore fingers or one very sore finger?’

  He chose his middle finger and presented it – almost like an obscene gesture. He looked away, anticipating a scalpel or dagger. There was a winter tree outside. Without leaves a crow’s nest was visible. There was a click and the stab was amazingly tiny – like the smallest rose thorn in the world. He hardly felt anything. The technician squeezed his finger and harvested his drop of blood into a capillary tube the size of a toothpick. When she’d finished she nodded at his cardboard container. He lifted it and sought out the lavatory.

  The sign on the door indicated both men and women. Inside there were adjacent cubicles and the mother of the woman in the black hejab was coming out of the ladies’ bearing her cardboard pot before her like an offering. He smiled and opened the outer door for her.

  Inside the men’s lavatory was a poster about ‘impotence’. A man sitting on a park bench with his head in his hands. How did he discover his condition in a public park? Talk to your doctor, said the words.

  Conjuring up a sample so soon after the one in the house took a long time. But eventually he succeeded and left it in the laboratory. The technician was working near the window. Her long hair was down her back almost to her waist.

  ‘There you are,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  The nurse brought him a plastic jug of tap water and ice.

  ‘You might be able to give blood every time,’ she said, ‘but for the other you need to keep drinking this.’

  He swirled the jug and poured himself some. It sounded hollow compared to ice against glass. Sipping he tried to return to the Chekhov. A distant radio was far enough away to be indistinct but it was still distracting. At the moment the only other sound was of magazine pages being turned – the kind of magazines which were looked at rather than read – Hello! and OK. Flick, flick, flick. The nurse, Phil, came in and announced a name.

  ‘Andrew? Andrew Elliot?’

  A man stood and swaggered forward responding as if he had just been chosen for a Hollywood audition. In a music-hall kind of American drawl he said, ‘You caalled for me, lady?’

  Everybody in the waiting room laughed.

  He tried to return to the mood of that hot, dusty afternoon in Rostov-on-the-Don but the smile was still on his face. He couldn’t concentrate.

  He was at that age when things were starting to go wrong. Knee joints were beginning to scringe. Putting on socks had become a burden. Pains where there shouldn’t
be pains. Breathlessness. Occasional dizziness.

  An immensely fat woman came in. All her weight seemed to be below her waist. Her thighs and lower belly bulged as if she’d left her bedding in her tights. Sheets, pillows, duvets. The lot. After her, an old couple came through the doors, panting after the stairs. They sank onto chairs, incapable of speech, and sat there mouth breathing. They both had skin the colour of putty.

  When he began to read again he found it awkward to turn the page because, like many people in the waiting room he had a piece of lint clenched between his chosen finger and his thumb.

  The boy in ‘The Beauties’ when confronted with the girl in the white kerchief feels himself utterly inferior. Sunburned, dusty and only a child. But that does not stop him adoring her and having adored her his reaction is one of – sadness. Where does such perfection fit into the world? He hears the thud of her bare feet on the board floor, she disappears into a grimy outhouse which is full of the smell of mutton and angry argument. The more he watches her going about her tasks the more painful becomes his inexplicable sadness.

  The first part of the story ends and Chekhov switches to another, similar incident when he has become a student. Maybe a medical student. This time he is travelling by train.

  In the waiting room of the Diabetic Clinic the talk was of medical stuff.

  ‘I have an irregular heartbeat . . .’

  ‘Oh God help ye . . .’

  ‘I’m just trying to keep the weight down . . .’

  ‘Does the stick help?’

  ‘It helps the balance . . .’

  This is all in front of me, he thought.

  But despite his age he felt good, felt ridiculously proud he had outlived his father who had died at the early age of forty-five. He didn’t have a problem that would drive him to sit on a park bench with his head in his hands. So he felt good about that. He looked up at the clock above the posters. He picked up his pee pot and headed for the laboratory again.

  This time when he looked away from the little machine which drew his blood he saw a crow settling in the branches of the tree outside. The thinnest of pinpricks and again she milked the blood from his finger into her glass capillary. This stranger was holding his hand. Her perfume radiated into his space – not perfume, but soap – maybe the smell of her shampoo. Camomile, maybe. She clipped her capillary to a little sloped rack. There were two of them now, like the double red line he’d had to rule beneath the title of his essays at school. He provided another urine sample.

  When he sat down again in the waiting room he finished his jug of water and asked for another. He returned to his book. And as he read, the room gradually disappeared. Somewhere in southern Russia a train stopped at a small station on a May evening. The sun was setting and the station buildings threw long shadows. The student gets off to stretch his legs. He sees the stationmaster’s daughter. She, too, is utterly captivating. As she stands talking to an old lady the youth remembers the Armenian’s daughter, the girl with the white kerchief, and the sadness it brought him. Again he experiences the whoosh of feeling and tries to analyse it but cannot. Not only was the student, Chekhov, watching this exquisite woman, she was being watched by almost all the men on the platform, including a ginger telegraphist with a flat opaque face sitting by his apparatus in the station window. What chance for someone like him? The stationmaster’s daughter wouldn’t look at him twice.

  He was struck yet again by the power of the word. Here he was – about to be told he had difficult changes to make to his life and yet by reading words on a page, pictures of Russia a hundred years ago come into his head. Not only that, but he can share sensations and emotions with this student character, created by a real man he never met and translated by a real woman he never met. It was so immediate, the choice of words so delicately accurate, that they blotted out the reality of the present. He ached now for the stationmaster’s daughter the way the student aches. It’s in his blood.

  He paused and looked at the clock. It was time again. He gave another blood sample and when providing the urine sample he splashed the label. He patted it dry with toilet roll and hoped that the technician with the long hair wouldn’t notice.

  In the waiting room he returned to his book. Was the story accurate? About such feelings? Was this not about women as decoration? Neither woman in the story said anything – showed anything of her inner self – in order to be attractive. Was this not the worst of Hollywood before Hollywood was ever thought of? Audrey Hepburn – Julia Roberts – the stationmaster’s daughter.

  ‘There’s the water you asked for.’

  ‘Oh thanks.’

  He poured himself another glass. The water was icy. With his concentration broken he looked at the posters on the wall. He could barely bring himself to read them. They made him quake for his future. But he couldn’t be that bad – his doctor had referred him because he was ‘borderline’. The poster warnings were for the worst cases. Diabetic retinopathy – can lead to permanent loss of vision. Blindness. Never to be able to read again. Atherosclerosis leading to dry gangrene. Wear well-fitting shoes, visit your chiropodist frequently. Care for your feet. Or else you’ll lose them, was the implication. Jesus. He drained the glass and poured himself another.

  The door, which had been silent for a while, screeched open and a wheelchair was pushed through. A woman in her seventies, wearing a dressing gown, was being pushed by a younger woman. The screeching door must lead to the wards. When they came into the waiting area it was obvious the old woman had no legs. She wore a blue cellular blanket over her lap. She was empty to the floor. The woman pushing her sat down on a chair in front of her. From their body language they were mother and daughter.

  Their talk became entangled with the Chekhov and he read the same line again and again. He needed silence.

  During his final visit to give blood he tried to joke with the technician about there being no more left in that finger. This time there were two crows perched on either side of the black nest. In the lavatory he noticed that his last sample was crystal clear. The water was just going through him.

  He sat and finished the Chekhov. It was a wonderful story which ended with the train moving on under a darkening sky, leaving behind the stationmaster’s beautiful daughter. In the departing carriage there is an air of sadness. The last image is of the figure of the guard coming through the train beginning to light the candles.

  The next thing he was aware of was hearing his name called out by a male voice. He was sitting with his eyes closed, savouring the ending of the story. He stood. The doctor smiled – he was not wearing a white coat. He had a checked shirt and was distinctly overweight – straining the buttons. He led him into an office and looked up after consulting a piece of paper.

  ‘Well I’m pleased to say you don’t have diabetes. You have something we call impaired glucose tolerance – which could well develop into diabetes. You must begin to take some avoiding action – more exercise, better diet. Talk it over with your GP. I’ll write to him with these results.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  As he walked to the head of the stairs he heard the distant door screech for one last time. He will not have to come back. No need for the oil can. He went out into the November midday and across the car park. The sun was shining. He looked up at the blue sky criss-crossed with jet trails. People travelling. Going places, meeting folk. He thought of those people he had just left who daren’t misplace their outpatient cards. Above him the crows made a raucous cawing. His middle finger felt tender and bruised.

  He took out his mobile and phoned his wife, dabbing the keys with his thumb. He had seen her across a dance floor forty years ago and felt the wind blow across his soul.

  She sounded anxious and concerned.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’m OK,’ he said.

  A TRUSTED NEIGHBOUR

  Ben dried a fork and set it in the correct compartment of the cutlery drawer. Maureen liked to keep them all facing the same way so tha
t they socketed together. The same with the spoons. He stared vacantly out the window at the Warners, the old couple next door. Their kitchens faced each other. They were fussing around behind swagged net curtains making their evening meal.

  The girls had gone to the school disco and Ben was hopeful. Maureen was in the sitting room watching the News. He joined her at the closing music and was about to switch the television off.

  ‘Leave that on,’ she said. ‘I’ve some ironing to do.’

  Maureen went out and came back with a plastic barrel of washed clothes.

  ‘What channel?’

  ‘UTV.’

  ‘Ulster television?’ His voice was high with incredulity. She set up her ironing board with a clank and a metallic screech.

  ‘It’s a programme about Donegal.’

  ‘No need to be so defensive,’ he said. He went to her and kissed her, held her in his arms for a long time, caressed the D curve of her stomach – she was six months gone. The steam iron sighed as it heated.

  Ben sat down. After a while he said, ‘When will it be over?’

  ‘Half past. And the answer is no.’

  Ben laughed. ‘You can’t get more pregnant.’

  The ironing board creaked.

  ‘I have too much to do.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘The fact that you don’t even know means that you have no idea what’s involved.’

  ‘Anything I can help with?’

  ‘Not really.’ The iron clicked against the button of a shirt. ‘How’s Aunt Norah?’

  ‘Fine.’

  Since her operation Ben called in most days to his Aunt’s house to check on her. It was just around the corner from his work. She nearly always had a bowl of soup for him. Over his lunch he read the paper. That day in the obituary columns he’d read of the death of Dawson Orr. He hadn’t told Maureen yet because such news could create uncertainty. Everything would become unpredictable and it was an extremely rare event for the two girls to be out together. He could tell her afterwards.