Lavinia Greenlaw - An Irresponsible Age

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 to stay put. If we let you out, you’d only frighten the horses.’ She was speaking too loudly, Jacob too much. They would have liked a little distance from which to observe what had happened to their mother and she, too, would have appreciated more space than the cubicle allowed. Jacob and Sally veered and loomed in front of her as parents must appear to a newborn.

Jacob found a tissue and dabbed Monica’s lips. ‘You’re drooling. Must be the smell of that hospital dinner. Now let’s run a few checks!’ Jacob was going to be bluff and cajoling because this is what would make his mother feel comfortable. He could adapt perfectly when he chose.

‘Who’s Prime Minister?’

‘That bloody woman. She is a woman, isn’t she?’

‘Clement Atlee! Absolutely right. And who’s on the throne?’

‘That other bloody woman.’

‘Boudicca! Nothing wrong with you at all! And the year?’

‘Just another bloody year …’

Half an hour later, Jacob and Sally fled. When the lift doors closed, Sally asked, ‘Did you understand anything she said?’

Jacob shrugged. ‘Not a word, poor old cow. Still, at least something’s finally rid her of that dreadful west-country burr.’

Sally screeched, delighted. She did not notice that her brother was shaking.

Jacob walked down to the river and east along the difficult north bank, where he was forced into detours among churches, coffee houses and money houses on streets that jack-knifed or divided, or brought you into alleyways and newly inserted corners, as if to compel you to keep up some kind of attention and pace. He walked tirelessly and lightly, and believed that he could keep moving forever and leave no trace. He hated his mother. When his father died, fifteen-year-old Jacob had caught her looking at him in church in a way he could only describe as triumphant. He hated his father, too, for forcing her to be so small and for, in the end and despite everything, belonging to his wife and not to his son.

It was raining hard. Jacob walked on with his coat open and his hat in his hand. His hair grew wet and his face cold and still he walked, wanting to find the dark that ought to come. Further east he reached a certain street where he stopped and waited. Two hours later, Barbara came downstairs and found him. She ran him a bath, took off his wet clothes and left him.

‘You can stay if you like,’ she said when he re-emerged wearing things he had found in cupboards neither he nor Barbara had emptied. ‘In the study, though, not –’

‘Thank you.’