Russell Hoban - Come Dance With Me

I walked up the New King’s Road and the King’s Road to Beaufort Street, then down to the Embankment. The wind was making wavelets on the river and the sailboats and power boats were rocking at their moorings. I headed towards the Albert Bridge, and as I approached the bronze Daphne I was passed by a jogger who reached her before I did, slapped her on the bottom, and rapidly grew small in the distance. ‘Cheek,’ I said aloud.

There’s a bench near the statue, and I sat down and looked at the bridge. Over troubled water, I thought. Sixty-two was hardly an age to think of new beginnings but Christabel might at this very moment be flying away from me to keep a date with the dead and I didn’t want her to be away from me.

26 January 2003. BIO-WAR SUITS FOUND IN LONDON MOSQUE, thundered The Sunday Times. Next to that was a smaller headline: ‘Bush to secure Baghdad after Saddam ousted.’ Good luck to us all, I thought. I put the paper down, wondering where Christabel was this morning. She left yesterday morning around 11:00. Figure two ten-hour flights plus a three-hour stopover in Los Angeles — that would put her in Honolulu today, maybe even on her way to Maui by now.

Here it was another cold grey day. After breakfast and a second cup of tea I put on Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and listened to their version of ‘Midnight Special’. That didn’t do it for me so I went to ‘Sonny’s Squall’ and that didn’t do it either. I tried ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’ and that was better although it wasn’t Jesus I wanted to walk with. I ended up with ‘Freight Train’ and that one did it for me. Here I was, a respected consultant, and I felt that my life was a train that I had no ticket to ride. I was riding the blinds or, worse than that, riding the rods and holding on for dear life while the sleepers and rails and the roadbed rushed backwards beneath me. ‘It’s a long low rail and a short cross tie,’ I sang along with them. ‘Ride the rods till the day I die, just don’t tell ‘em what train I’m on and they won’t know what route I’ve gone.’

Then I turned off the CD player and dug up the notebook I’d used when I was writing poetry. Had it come to that? It seems it had. I wrote:

Under the ocean deep and deep,

remembering nothing, dead owls weep.

‘Please, Rodney,’ I said, ‘you’re embarrassing me.’ I shook my head to clear it, dressed up warmly and went out for another walk. After a while I found myself on Putney Bridge. Below me the tide was out, the river had narrowed and the mud had widened. The wind was riffling the water, the sky was grey, the wind was cold. A rower in a single shell appeared from under the bridge and his oars walked him across the water and away. I thought of drowned cities, went home, opened a bottle of French Full Red, and watched Deliverance on video. I made a cheese omelette, finished the bottle, and settled down to do a little work on the neuropathy piece. Very little.

27 January 2003. Monday morning I put on my professional identity as Elias Newman, Diabetes Consultant, and did my regular round with Registrar Titus Smart, Senior House Officer Istvakar Rana, House Officer Brendan Yee, Clinical Pharmacist Winston Davies, and medical students Nancy Kwan and Elizabeth Yonghe, a vigorous team of fully shod verticals looking in on the barefoot horizontals in our care in various wards.

In Bay B of Samuel Plimsoll, in Bed 3 by the window, was Abraham Selby, a burly black man with a rugged face and an ironic smile. The grey daylight illuminating him was, like hospital food, not quite the same as what you get outside. He was reclining against several pillows with his left leg elevated by a stack of folded blankets and a couple of towels. As we approached he put down The Times. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Job’s comforters.’

Brendan Yee read from his notes: ‘Mr Selby is fifty-six, insulin dependent with a long-standing history of Type I diabetes. There is diabetic polyneuropathy. He suffers from ischaemic heart disease, had a coronary thrombosis in 1993 and a triple bypass in 1994. He was admitted on the twenty-first of January with cellulitis in his left leg. He is being treated with intravenous benzylpenicillin and flucloxacillin, also prophylactic heparin to reduce the risk of DVTs.’

‘How are you feeling?’ I asked Selby.

‘Overloaded,’ he said.

‘I know the IV is a bother and clearing this up is a slow business but the antibiotics will do the job.’

He nodded in a resigned way. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Do you believe in God?’

‘Why do you ask?’

He showed me a photograph in The Times, a close-up of a bat with long ears and a thoughtful face. I’d noticed the picture in my own Times when I was having breakfast and I’d been thinking about it. Selby said, ‘I’m wondering if His eye is on the bat.’

‘I’ll have to get back to you on that,’ I said.

‘Sure you will. I’ll be here.’

After the round I surprised him by appearing at his bedside again. He handed me the paper and I reread the caption under the bat portrait which identified the animal as a European free-tailed bat. It had come down, ‘exhausted, starving, and injured’, in a Cornwall graveyard. ‘It is believed it had been blown off course from its migration route to the Iberian peninsula’, wrote the reporter, Simon de Bruxelles. He went on to say that ‘European free-tailed bats are high fliers and have been spotted by airline pilots several miles up’.

‘“Nineteen-inch wingspan,’” I read. ‘That’s a pretty big bat.’

‘That’s what you could call a batline,’ said Selby. ‘Bat Air, last of the independents. Pilot sitting in his 747 looks out of his window and there’s Bat Air flapping along beside him. What’s Bat Air doing up there with the big guys?’

‘Migrating, it says here.’

‘But why so high?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s picking up a favourable air stream.’

‘I think there’s more to it than that. What if those are souls flying up there?’

‘Why would souls take the form of bats?’

‘Maybe when you die you stop being separate from every other animal. Maybe you take on a bat shape or a wolf shape or an elephant shape or a whale shape. Maybe the world is full of souls walking or swimming or flying around, and when some of those animals get extinct, those souls die. What if that, eh? Think about it.’

I did.

25 January 2003. What I like about Dr Newman is that he makes me feel a little less horizontal. He might be working too hard though, and not getting enough sleep. On his way out of the ward he walked into a bucket one of the cleaners was using and he almost fell over.

25 January 2003. Sometimes now I dream of music. Not opera music, what it is I don’t know. Over me, under me, all around me. I can hear it, I can feel it. When I wake up it is gone. Lost, nothing remembered.

25 January 2003. ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ treacled down the aisles as if a big can of bossa nova in the galley had sprung a leak. I know that the international airport in Rio was named after Antonio Carlos Jobim after his death but I don’t think he acquired posthumous performance rights in public conveyances worldwide. The 777 was no more than half full but people still managed to get in each other’s way as they found their seats and put things in the overhead compartments.

I was in 28C and I wasn’t surprised to find that the swarthy man between the empty seats in the departure lounge was next to me. We were on the left-hand side, about halfway back in Economy. I was aisle, he was middle, and window was a very fat man who smelled like Burger King and breathed heavily. Because Mr Window overflowed his space Mr Middle’s right arm sometimes pressed against my left arm. He smiled apologetically and made himself small. Then he took out a string of worry beads and began to worry them.