David Mitchell - The Book of Other People

As we drove to see my mother that morning, I could not ask Suzie a question that was on my mind. My mother had been sick for four days now and was lying there maybe frightened, and I wondered if she had reached out her hand to Cathal and if they had held hands in the hospital, if they had actually grown close enough for that. Or if she had made some gesture to Suzie. And if she might do the same to me. It was a stupid, selfish thing I wondered about, and, like everything else that came into my mind in those days, it allowed me to avoid the fact that there would be no time any more for anything to be explained or said. We had used up all our time. And I wondered if that made any difference to my mother then, as she lay awake in the hospital those last few nights of her life: we had used up all our time.

She was in intensive care. We had to ring the bell and wait to be admitted. There was a hush over the place. We had discussed what I would say to her so as not to alarm her, how I would explain why I had come back. I told Suzie that I would simply say that I’d heard she was in the hospital and I’d had a few days free before classes began and had decided to come back to make sure that she was OK.

‘Are you feeling better?’ I asked her.

She could not speak. Slowly and laboriously, she let us know that she was thirsty and they would not allow her to drink anything. She had a drip in her arm. We told the nurses that her mouth was dry, and they said that there was nothing much we could do, except perhaps take tiny drops of cold water and put them on her lips using those special little sticks with cotton-wool tips that women use to put on eye make-up.

I sat by her bed and spent a while wetting her lips. I was at home with her now. I knew how much she hated physical discomfort; her appetite for this water was so overwhelming and so desperate that nothing else mattered.

And then word came that the doctors would see us. When we stood up and told her that we would be back, she hardly responded. We were ushered by a nurse with an English accent down some corridors to a room. There were two doctors there; the nurse stayed in the room. The doctor who seemed to be in charge, who said that he would have been the one to perform the operation, told us that he had just spoken to the anaesthetist, who had insisted that my mother’s heart would not survive an operation. The stroke did not really matter, he said, although it did not help.

‘I could have a go,’ he said, and then immediately apologized for speaking like that. He corrected himself: ‘I could operate, but she would die on the operating table.’

There was a blockage somewhere, he said. There was no blood getting to her kidneys and maybe elsewhere as well – the operation would tell us for certain, but it would probably do nothing to solve the problem. It was her circulation, he said. The heart was simply not beating strongly enough to send blood into every part of her body.

He knew to leave silence then, and the other doctor did, too. The nurse looked at the floor.

‘There’s nothing you can do, then, is there?’ I said.

‘We can make her comfortable,’ he replied.

‘How long can she survive like this?’ I asked.

‘Not long,’ he said.

‘I mean, hours or days?’

‘Days. Some days.’

‘We can make her very comfortable,’ the nurse said.

There was nothing more to say. Afterwards, I wondered if we should have spoken to the anaesthetist personally, or tried to contact our mother’s consultant, or asked that she be moved to a bigger hospital for another opinion. But I don’t think any of this would have made a difference. For years, we had been given warnings that this moment would come, as she fainted in public places and lost her balance and declined. It had been clear that her heart was giving out, but not clear enough for me to have come to see her more than once or twice in the summer – and then when I did come I was protected from what might have been said, or not said, by the presence of Suzie and Jim and Cathal. Maybe I should have phoned a few times a week, or written her letters like a good son. But, despite all the warning signals, or perhaps even because of them, I had kept my distance. And as soon as I entertained this thought, with all the regret that it carried, I imagined how coldly or nonchalantly a decision to spend the summer close by, seeing her often, might have been greeted by her, and how difficult and enervating for her, as much as for me, some of those visits or phone calls might have been. And how curtly efficient and brief her letters in reply to mine would have seemed.

And, as we walked back down to see her, the nurse coming with us, there was this double regret – the simple one that I had kept away, and the other one, much harder to fathom, that I had been given no choice, that she had never wanted me very much, and that she was not going to be able to rectify that in the few days that she had left in the world. She would be distracted by her own pain and discomfort, and by the great effort she was making to be dignified and calm. She was wonderful, as she always had been. I touched her hand a few times in case she might open it and seek my hand, but she never did this. She did not respond to being touched.

Some of her friends came. Cathal came and stayed with her. Suzie and I remained close by. On Friday morning, when the nurse asked me if I thought she was in distress, I said that I did. I knew that, if I insisted now, I could get her morphine and a private room. I did not consult the others; I knew that they would agree. I did not mention morphine to the nurse, but I knew that she was wise, and I saw by the way she looked at me as I spoke that she knew that I knew what morphine would do. It would ease my mother into sleep and ease her out of the world. Her breathing would come and go, shallow and deep, her pulse would become faint, her breathing would stop, and then come and go again.

It would come and go until, in that private room late in the evening, it seemed to stop altogether, as, horrified and helpless, we sat and watched her, then sat up straight as the breathing started again, but not for long. Not for long at all. It stopped one last time, and it stayed stopped. It did not start again.

She was gone. She lay still. We sat with her until a nurse came in and quietly checked her pulse and shook her head sadly and left the room.

We stayed with her for a while; then, when they asked us to leave, we touched her on the forehead one by one, and we left the room, closing the door. We walked down the corridor as though for the rest of our lives our own breathing would bear traces of the end of hers, of her final struggle, as though our own way of being in the world had just been halved or quartered by what we had seen.

We buried her beside my father, who had been in the grave waiting for her for thirty-three years. And the next morning I flew back to New York, to my half-furnished apartment on Columbus and 90th, and began my teaching a day later. I understood, just as you might tell me now – if you picked up the phone and found me on the other end of the line, silent at first and then saying that I needed to talk to you – you might tell me that I had over all the years postponed too much. As I settled down to sleep in that new bed in the dark city, I saw that it was too late now, too late for everything. I would not be given a second chance. In the hours when I woke, I have to tell you that this struck me almost with relief.

Newton’s best friend, back when he was New, was chosen for him. First friends often are. Hard to know how it started, though two children, five years old and wary from the world of kindergarten, must have been put in a living room together, as zoo handlers will place two creatures of the same species in the painted setting of their habitat. The young adults – untenured colleagues – sat in some other room and laughed over the clattering ice of their drinks, over the Peter, Paul and Mary album (they will call the kids in when Puff comes on), and the boys were left to stare wildly at each other. Who knows if they even recognized their own kind? Who knows if this was even hard for them, a first friendship, when every single thing is thorned with newness? The boy’s name was Martin, and, since this was his house, he introduced Newton to his various toys. There was a tense silence as Newton held a small plastic fireman with Felix-the-Cat eyes; he moved the arms and legs, and suddenly he was miniaturized into the deep beige pile of the carpet, shoulder high, and the world was a jungle for a fireman to escape from. ‘No, no, see,’ Martin said, and Newton was full sized again, ashamed, as the toy was taken from him and made to sit in a dirty carriage clearly made for some other toy, now lost. ‘No, see, he rides in here and goes around, see, he’s in charge of looking out for bats.’ And indeed two rubber bats were taken out of the box and jiggled in the air menacingly. Like a TV show – like everything, in fact – Newton had stumbled upon a long-running story whose beginning he would never be able to deduce. He was given another fireman, who wore his vest backwards and no hat. ‘You be the princess.’ This was only fair. In time, at Newton’s own house, Martin will himself be forced into minor roles, talking animals and sidekicks. And eventually Martin will relinquish even his own heroes to Newton, the better storyteller. But this is probably why they became friends: because Newton, in the first few moments of their meeting, rather than snarl and complain, accepted the shame of playing the girl. At other meetings, Martin revealed that these toys were minor, like a preamble set before the curtain rises, or the series of people who interview you before you are shown into the executive office. Newton was shown into Martin’s bedroom, where a hopeful puppet theater sat on folding feet, striped and painted with an elaborate foreign announcement (German, it turned out, meaning: ‘The next performance is at…,’) drawn above a clock with real cardboard hands, set to 4.30. It was 4.00. The performance – scheduled by optimistic Martin – never came. Instead, Newton was drawn to a tableau of paper knights, each only two inches high, in a magical woodland setting. Martin explained he had punched them out of a book, but he did not explain his problems with their paper half-moon stands, how they bent in his eager sweaty hands, or why his favorite one – the Black Knight – had a mangled stand and had to be leaned against a wall or a bedpost in order to take part in battle. Once they were in the fur of the rug, of course, it didn’t matter. They could be pushed down into the pile and made to sit there forever. The bunkbed became a tower, the sheets became a mountain, the underbed a cavern, and, while they kept to realistic roles for a while, eventually each was granted one wish: to fly. Soon the knights did battle from bookshelf to bookshelf. The bats were brought up from downstairs. Nobody had to play the princess.