Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

‘Oh God, listen to you, Nicky. You sound like the corny bourgeois you always claimed to despise.’

‘I was stupid to despise them. I’ve seen the future and it’s doing jigsaw puzzles on your own in a South London bedsit and having no connection to the outside world.’

‘Well, I think it sounds, forgive me, like your idea of heaven.’

‘I love you.’

‘Please, Nicky. Don’t be so boring.’ She grimaced. ‘Has it occurred to you’, she said, ‘that this isn’t about you ? It’s not you I want to change. I want to be a different me . And with Caspar I am. I feel like finally I’m the me I was supposed to be.’

The impact of her words was almost physical, as though a soft part of me had collided with her stony intransigence.

*

The portents for our holiday were grim. We arrived in rain after a seven-hour drive to a caravan park that seemed ominously full of shaven-headed families in sportswear. The children regressed to a glum, uncommunicative phase of adolescence and I despaired of getting through the week.

The first morning, the sun came up and I booked them both into a surf school. After two hours, they were hooked. We spent six days of uncomplicated bliss together: they were in the sea all morning while I ploughed ahead with the footnotes to the letters, working outside if the wind wasn’t too strong, or at the dining table in the caravan. I watched them sometimes from the beach, like dolphins in the surf, all glittering adolescent limbs and laughter. We ate out extravagantly and I let Sarah drink wine. We played board games together in the evening before they dropped off to sleep, exhausted from their watery exertion.

I think in some ways my experience of Jack made me a better parent. I had a better sense of what it was to be truly vulnerable. And I think, having been forced to let go of my children once, I was less prescriptive, more ready to listen, more awed by their independence and their compassion for one another.

There was no mobile phone coverage at the caravan. The three of us would go up on the cliffs to call home, looking out on the uninhabited limestone stacks a few hundred yards from shore. I would eavesdrop on the children’s gratifyingly monosyllabic conversations with their mother and then check in with Tadeusz, who assured me that all was well with Jack.

But on the drive home, locked into returning traffic on the M4, I received a barrage of text messages in fractured English. I wasn’t able to call until I’d dropped off the kids. It’s one of my continuing regrets that this farewell was clouded with an irrelevant anxiety. Sarah hugged me with the fierce affection that she had showed me as a toddler and went into the house without letting me see her tears. Lucius was more laconic, but I could tell he was sorry to see me go.

When I finally spoke to Tadeusz, he said Jack was sick and refusing all medication. I drove round immediately.

The first thing I noticed on entering his airless bedroom was the smell of pear drops. Jack lay upright in bed, wearing a grimy yellow dressing gown. He was shockingly transformed. His body seemed to have shrunk. His breath was stertorous.

I hauled open the sash window. The scent of cut grass and sunlight drifted in from the garden. Jack stirred slightly, but his eyes were closed and he seemed delirious. I asked Tadeusz how long he’d been in this condition.

‘Two days,’ Tadeusz said. ‘He needs doctor but …’ He gave me a doubtful and panicky look. ‘I worry his visa not good.’

I touched Jack’s clammy forehead. He looked at me without recognition. His taste-buds stood out on his dry tongue as he breathed open-mouthed. I told Tadeusz I was calling an ambulance.

The ambulance crew arrived within twenty minutes. They manoeuvred Jack gently down the stairs on a blanket, put him on a saline drip and took him straight to St George’s Hospital, where an orderly called Keith with corn-rows and a do-rag wheeled him down to the X-ray department. He shuffled along behind Jack’s wheelchair with his baggy navy trousers bunching around his oversized feet. We followed a back route that passed through Accident and Emergency. ‘The VIP area,’ I joked darkly.

Keith kissed his teeth. ‘That’s the last place you want to be, bruv.’

The doctor who read the X-rays was an underslept woman in her early thirties, who wanted to know if I was the next of kin.

I explained that Jack’s sister was out of the country and that I was looking after him as a favour.

The doctor asked if there was any way to get hold of her.

‘I’m trying,’ I said. ‘How bad is it?’

‘It’s pneumonia,’ she said. ‘We’ll give him antibiotics anyway, but we won’t know if it’s bacterial or viral until we get the lab results.’

They inserted a cannula messily into Jack’s bony hand. He flinched as it went in, but submitted to everything with the resignation of a man with no options left.

I stayed at his bedside that night, sleeping only fitfully, watching the saturation probe glowing red on his finger and listening to the sound of water bubbling in the respirator. There were groans from the beds around us. The ward seemed hellish, deathly. And the place had a melancholy personal signficance for me. Two decades before, my sister Emily had died there while I was away at university.

The next morning, we moved him to a cubicle closer to the window. We had a view south as far as the distant green of the North Downs. Leaning back against his pillows, Jack stared out at the sky. It was cloudless. A gull-grey jetliner passed slowly across the arc of the city towards Gatwick. Its engine made the glass in the windows vibrate.

Jack pulled off his oxygen mask. ‘Now I am sure I dream,’ he said, in a frail and croaky voice.

I’d previously tried and failed to explain to him the principles of aerodynamic lift, my O level in physics being unequal to the task, but I made another attempt: ‘I think it’s to do with the rate at which the air passes over the top of the wing.’

‘Nay, sir, the specific levity of air is too great for the support of such burthens.’ He shut his eyes as if the inexplicable sight were causing him pain. ‘God have mercy upon me.’

*

I went home that morning for a change of clothes for both of us and some decent tea bags. Intermittently, I called Vera without any success. I’d either get the long, plaintive foghorn of a European ringtone that told me she was in Moscow, or the clipped recorded Russian operator saying that the abonent couldn’t be reached and I should try again later.

On my return, Jack had rallied a little. He was sitting up in bed eating boiled eggs. There was something reassuring and homely about their faintly sulphurous smell. He asked about my trip to Cornwall and I showed him pictures of the children on my mobile phone. He lingered fondly over one of Lucius. ‘He has a touch of young Davy Garrick about him,’ he said.

We did a jigsaw puzzle together until he seemed weary. Just as the doctor had warned, his condition deteriorated again in the night. His breathing slowed, and once his pulse-rate plummeted so low that an alarm sounded and the nurses rushed to inject him with adrenalin.

In his moments of wakefulness, I read to him from Erasmus Darwin’s epic poem The Economy of Vegetation. His face bore no expression, but his hands on the bedspread flexed weakly to the beat of the verse.

Once more, the morning brought an improvement in his breathing. The nurse lowered his oxygen. Outside, the morning sun shone its yellow rays on the rise of the landscape from Tooting Broadway to the imperceptible hill where I knew my house stood, empty. There were no planes, but a contrail was dissipating above Crystal Palace in two lines of fiery dots and dashes, like a communication from the biblical God or a detail in a sublime painting.