Catherine Leroux - Madame Victoria

“I’ll drink it in due course.”

She saw wars and trends and inventions come and go, things that were supposed to change the world but left human nature intact. She crossed oceans, stayed in penthouses, ate caviar off the backs of naked women when the boredom of the wealthy had reached that point. She played golf, billiards, and hockey, hunted and killed a bear with her left eye shut and her right eye flashing. She shook hands, was hugged, delivered memorable slaps on the backs of her associates, and, once, a punch to a big oaf in a bowtie who had tried to kiss her. She slept alone and stored her secrets inside her flask of Eon Special Reserve.

Her foes awaited her demise like scientists observing the erosion of a cliff. But they were unaware that Victoria, now over seventy, had already begun to erode, yet her heart, clean as a knife in cold water, and her alcohol-soaked nerves, let nothing show through. Only Olivia suspected the lesions and vapours that festered inside her boss, but she kept mum and got rid of the bloodstained tissues that Victoria carelessly dropped into the wastepaper basket.

One morning in May, her body suddenly failed. After a long night of work, Victoria stood up and, immediately, the room went soft; the hard facts of the floor, the walls, the objects that she had always taken for granted, slipped away. As she collapsed she tried to grab something to break her fall, but for the first time reality proved inadequate. Finding nothing more solid than herself, she clasped her own elbows and fainted.

On waking, she found herself in a drab room, parched and horizontal, tubes sprouting from every imaginable orifice. The bed on which she was stretched out smelled of the nameless multitude that had lain there before her. The corridor buzzed with activity that was at once hectic and sluggish, as if the surfeit of tasks was not enough to erase the weariness of the people performing them.

Over the more than seven decades of her lifetime, Victoria had consistently managed to avoid setting foot in a hospital. She had been seen, just once, in a private clinic, but only because she needed sutures and her teammates in the Chamber of Commerce league had refused to stitch her up directly at the hockey rink. As for those institutions crammed with the miseries of humankind in all its density and complexity, she had always given them a wide berth. So how did she end up there, when just a moment ago she had been torpedoing a parliamentary bill concerning the newspaper industry?

A note on her bedside table provided the answer.

I found you lying on the floor this morning. You had fallen and hit your head on the desk. It seems you will have to stay in the hospital for a good while. Don’t fret about the paper. I’ll take care of everything. Olivia.

“The little bitch,” Victoria spat as she crumpled the piece of paper.

“You shouldn’t say that!” replied a voice that made her jump.

At the far end of the room an attendant was folding sheets and looking at her in dismay.

“The woman who left that note saved your life. If she hadn’t given you first aid you wouldn’t be here.”

“And you think that’s doing someone a favour?”

“It’s better than ending up in the morgue,” the woman shot back on her way out.

Annoyed, Victoria yanked at the tubes that had been used, it seemed, to tie her down. Her efforts apparently set off an alarm, as three nurses swooped in to restrain her, repeatedly urging her to “calm down, my dear.” Continuing to struggle, Victoria thought of Olivia and hated her with a passion. She spent the night sweating and shivering while she pictured the swarm of pretenders jostling each other in front of her office. Toward four in the morning, when her sweat stopped smelling of malt, she grasped the full horror of her captivity. During those first days at the Royal Victoria she tried to escape seven times without ever managing to reach the door of her room. The basic mechanisms of her body seemed to have thrown in the towel. Young doctors talked to her about her liver, her intestines, her esophagus as though they were minefields; they affirmed the absolute necessity of eliminating alcohol from her diet, oblivious to the fact that without alcohol there would be no diet, strictly speaking. She was forced to swallow disgusting meals, which she vomited up on her plate. The housekeepers were the only ones to leave her alone; they went about cleaning her room with a degree of enthusiasm in line with their meagre wages. They were the weak links in the hospital chain and they soon became Victoria’s main allies.

In exchange for some paltry bribes they supplied her with bottles that made her days bearable. Deformed by dropsy, her skin yellowed by jaundice, Victoria would steal over to the washroom whenever possible and drink without restraint. Now that the long hours of work that had acted as a rampart between her and the Scotch were gone, what stretched before her was the slope of an unobstructed horizon, a barrier finally knocked down. Her sordid surroundings in no way diminished her delight. Like a tribute to the beauty of the world, the alcohol cancelled out the incontinence, the incivilities, the gastroenterologists, the gowns that exposed her backside. The boredom of being away from the newspaper.

But it could not blot out Olivia’s silhouette when she arrived in Victoria’s room one dreary morning holding a small package tied up with ribbons. After briefly scanning the room, she went out only to return a moment later.

“Pardon me, I’m looking for Victoria…”

“Here I am,” the patient cut in.

Olivia, struck dumb, peered at her former boss.

“It’s you? Sorry, I…”

“Yes, resting has worked wonders.”

The secretary approached the bed.

“No improvement?”

“As sharp-eyed as ever.”

“Well, at least your morale is holding up.”

“Why have you come? To give me absolution? One last embrace after sending me here to rot?”

“Why are you always so mean?”

“Mean? That’s what you think of me?” Victoria grinned. “I’m not mean. I simply have no time to lose. People don’t interest me.”

“Women don’t interest you.”

“Women have never been of any use to me.”

“So what does interest you?”

Victoria took another shot from the bottle stuffed inside a rumpled drawsheet.

“The ascent,” she declared casually.

Olivia nodded for a while. Then she slowly took hold of the Aberlour, gently pulled it out of her boss’s grip, and raised it to her lips. One quick, emphatic gulp. She replaced the bottle between the patient’s swollen fingers.

“I’ve come to tell you that Gendron has taken over your position again. The whole team thanks you for your work over the years.”

She tossed the package on the foot of the bed and left. Victoria knocked back a mouthful of Scotch. Someone else, doing her job. Someone else. Her job. Turning her eyes to the present left behind by Olivia, she reached out and tried to sit up to grasp the thing, which seemed to mock her. It was no use. She finally called out to an attendant who was walking past her room.

The woman sullenly handed the package to Victoria, who somehow succeeded in ripping it open. On a golden plaque were her name, two dates, and a Latin phrase summarizing her entire career. She clenched her jaws so hard it made her ears hum. So the world truly was the voracious, mutable animal that she had always imagined it to be. As soon as a crack appeared the organism spontaneously rearranged itself to fill the empty space and erase all signs of a gap. Someone else had taken over her job.

She drained the bottle of single malt in a few minutes. The great intoxication came down on her habitual gloom like a bludgeon. She managed—as if her body had been waiting for this—to climb down from her bed. Determined though unsteady, she went to the closet and fished out the jacket she had worn on arriving at the hospital. Then she filched a walker, which enabled her to wend her way down the corridors haunted by women in white. They seemed on the verge of grabbing her, of holding her against her will, of turning her into one more docile, defeated, indistinguishable patient. She swore at them. The flask glowed against her breast.