Asystole

SCENE ONE The Seeing In one bed, under a sheet, the body of a woman, heavy as a snowdrift. She is delirious, and calling for someone in her fever. In another, an old man so wizened only his head seems to be left, a mask on a pillow with a respiratory tube in the gap for the mouth. A pungent smell of injections and disinfectant. Stubble, a weak chin, swollen lips, a pointed, gristly nose. He looks like a teacher. A young, chubby face, already worn out. A bare, swaddled little fellow in a very ordinary municipal hospital’s palliative care ward which reeks of chlorine. A boy who loved everyone. Everyone. For how long? For how many days, nights? He has lost all sense of time, which has stopped in this white-tiled antechamber where sounds are so clear, the hollow white noise of the cosmos. This sterile, washed out place they have brought him to, isolated and alone, is like a sci-fi film set, a module in an alien spacecraft where the purpose of the equipment is to sustain life. But life is ebbing away and the man is floating effortlessly, weightlessly, a boat drifting without oars or sails downstream to somewhere unseen, unknown, far away The noise of a road, of death and a road, of a road and death, because death is a road. I fear death and the road. I fear death and departing a world that I know, despatched to another, a world different and distant. The road is a path down which all here is soon to disappear. A road and a road and a road. To disappear. A thought, “How soon, how soon,” but through the noise a tune, nearby, close, clear, dragging him back, perhaps playing through earbuds, ubiquitous, endless, cavorting, moronic, shameless. That is all there is, nothing more. “I’m a chocolate bunny and I want to be your honey. I will be to you as sweet as sweet can be ...” He thought, “It is good to sing.” Aloud he said, “I only want to be happy.” And then he hears her voice. A mobile phone. They say it is her, her voice calling him, caressing, tormenting, when he just wants to sleep. He hears his name, it sounds strange now, empty. He is so tired. He is far away, that is how it feels, although her voice tries to make him feel near. The connection is lost, the song dissipates, and now the noise is all around as he drifts and wakes and drifts. He thinks, “How long, how long,” senses her crying, remembers, “Never leave me alone like that again.” And then the seeing. The sun, a world flooded with light and warmth. A peal of happy laughter. A boy in a wheelchair is being pushed round the courtyard, a legless stump, puny, timid, one of a kind. “Stumpy” they call him. The boy is clutching an ordinary three-litre jar, hugging it to himself, afraid of dropping it. Scuffling about in sawdust the colour of ripe wheat, hamsters. The little family is being taken for an outing and peers out of its small world, their beady eyes not seeming to take in anything. The humble chair on wheels is being pushed as freely and cheerfully as a bike by a confident boy who might be taken for his older brother. Everybody knows this boy’s dad was a truck driver and died in a crash. That is why his mum is like she is, wandering about outside, or sitting on the bench by the entrance to their staircase till her son comes to take her back in, as if she were a little girl. He goes to a vocational school and will get a job as a truck driver. He is the bravest boy in the courtyard. If older boys hit him he just smiles, not letting them make him cry. He is a loner, but everything he does or says fills you with silent, envious admiration. Stumpy lives next along from him. He has chosen a cripple as his friend. They laugh together, not sharing their happiness with anyone else. It seems immune to everything around. Other children run excitedly after the wheelchair and beg to be allowed to see the hamsters. The jar glints in the sun, delicate little pink paws testing its elusive surface. They keep at it, blindly scratching and sliding on the glass, until they slip back down into the sawdust. Later it seemed to him it was those hamsters which died, before they could be remembered for anything, except for a frisky one who escaped from an identical jar, only with more food and even a little padded chair. One ginger, one white, one black, every colour they sold in a shop almost like a zoo. Its live wares were not that varied. There were goldfish, budgerigars, guinea pigs, and hamsters. Flocks of children would gather at the pet shop at the same time, after it had suddenly closed at midday and they were waiting excitedly for it to re-open. You could still look at the natural history corner through the enticing portal of the shop window. For the first time he too had his nose pressed, enchanted, against the magic screen. In there, in the seemingly airless space behind the heavy glass, stuffed wild birds and animals posed with aristocratic aloofness. They were dead, but almost indistinguishable from live animals, even the static pieces of glass they had instead of eyes appeared to see everything. There were no girls, no squealing voices, only a few of the boys led by the hand, not allowed to stray from the side of solicitous mothers. These towered above the surrounding throng of alien street children, greatly concerned that those other children were pushing, and loudly instructing them on how to behave. Nobody paid any attention, except their own offspring, aware that being good tended to pay off. Handsomely. Possibly with an aquarium, or budgerigars, which could only be had as presents. He had seen the budgerigars and goldfish in his classmates’ homes, chocolate-box apartments which even smelled sweet, not like his. Now here he stood at the entrance to the world of his dreams, drawn by covetousness and loneliness in an agony of delight, and by the even more agonizing desire to possess. Fear and disdain. Embarrassment and a proud awareness, instilled by his mother, that he was not like ordinary boys. It was pretty where the fish lived, and their mute, colourful shoals greeted would-be purchasers with a flutter of excitement. Their colours gleamed mother-of-pearl in a green-lit underwater realm like the picture on a colour television set, which might be why the fish seemed to be floating in a dream. The hamsters were more like tiny piglets in a miniature pigsty. Their nook in the pet shop had a musty smell, and life dimly lit up the myriad cowering beasties. The one he chose died within a few days, as if it had already been ill. The boy cried, but with resentment, feeling cheated, or punished for something he had not done. Later, however, he felt it was his fault they died, some lasting a week, others only a few days. The longest lived was the frisky one which disappeared into the expanses of their suddenly lonely apartment. He looked for him everywhere he could, even if only by pushing in a hand. At night he heard, or thought he heard, rustling, and the expectation built up something bright in his heart and the hamster was resurrected. Hungry, he scuttled nimbly out from the dark recesses beneath a huge wardrobe but, retreating behind a rampart of food and litter, convulsively gave up the ghost a few days later in the bottom of his round, transparent prison, so reminiscent of a big empty drop of water. The boy cried from love, because he had come to love his frisky hamster while waiting in hope for such a long time. He could not understand why they were all dying, no matter what he fed them, no matter what kind he bought, big or small, white or ginger. Uncomprehending, he just hid them, disposing of their little corpses the sooner to forget them. He buried them in mayonnaise jars, but visited the graves and even tried to decorate them, and that was his secret. Their convulsions as they died, which he observed, peeping, made him feel powerless and pathetic, and, as they recurred, callous. He would give them a funeral, say his goodbyes, and return to visit them. He was no more able to forget them than to keep them alive or even alleviate their suffering. His jar had the stench of death. He tried to comfort himself that everything would come right if he bought just one more. He imagined one day he would have a whole family living with him, a town in a large glass tank as big as the aquarium for the fish at the pet shop. That was why everything recurred so many times. The latest one also became ill and was eventually hiding in a corner, quivering, soiling itself and its little prison, covered in its own evil-smelling filth. He kept it in a cage, hiding it, he hoped, from death. He was baffled, afraid of what he had done, as if he had not bought it but stolen a small live toy. He felt nothing for it, no wish to play with it, no joy at the sight of it, only a sense, cowed when he covertly watched, cowardly when he hid, of possessing something doomed. But this time his ownership did not come to its usual end. Life quivered on and on. He hid the cage under some bushes in the courtyard and opened the mesh hatch, frightened at first, then pained, but then just relieved. He ran home and waited, but could not resist going back to look. The hamster was still there, still alive. Children were playing in the yard and he pretended just to be out for a stroll, reluctant to leave. The children split up, looking for a ball they had lost, and someone yelled out for the others to come. Afraid of keeping his distance, which might give him away, but also of going over and being noticed, the boy heard they had found a mousetrap with a dead hamster in the bushes. For some reason, he smiled. The children came away, walking past him to get on with their game, and one who was older suddenly looked him straight in the eyes, as if he knew everything, but said nothing to anyone. The boy ... A bright summer day came back to him like a dream. People had gathered in their apartment, waiting. They seemed to have come to see him but were holding back, as if he was stronger than they were. They wanted to say something caring, or at least to touch him. He felt very grown up. He heard a lot of new words he did not understand, and responded by saying nothing and looking important. He frowned, tired and bored with the game. In this dream he did not see his mother. Perhaps she said something to him and even hugged him, but it did not lodge in his memory. He did, though, remember hiding in his room, undressing, getting under the blanket, and suddenly falling asleep, again, in his dream. In the morning, he was woken by a woman he did not know. There were several of them, confident, motherly, and seemingly in charge in the hushed apartment. He immediately behaved, doing everything he was told to, as if back at the Young Pioneers’ summer camp where a new day began when the team leader decided it did. There was a party smell of food. Dressed in smart clothes he had not chosen, he waited uneasily for his parents to appear, afraid to ask where they were. The strange party preparations reminded him he was to say goodbye to his father today. A doleful succession of people in dark clothing came into the apartment, his parents’ relatives and friends, their faces frozen like masks, respectfully silent. The guests seemed to have grown heavier when they slowly took their places at the set table, leaving empty the place for their host. “Mummy, where’s Daddy?” Enormous eyes. Neither pity nor fear. She takes him by the hand and leads him away to a small room. Muffled sounds. No one will hear. She whispers, as hard as she can, “Daddy is not here any more. He has died.” At the moment he heard that he wanted to smile. He wanted his mummy to go back to being kind again, but she squeezed his hand painfully and said, “Remember, Daddy loved you very, very much!” Her invincible face suddenly broke into a twitching, purple grimace. It looked old and flabby, and she frowned, terribly wounded by everything in the world. A visceral groan through her teeth before, a moment later, she put on a proud look and said in a clear, calm, but trembling voice, “Now we need to go and look after our guests.”