Before I came here my life was governed by time.
Robert always set the alarm early. We’d juggle bathroom duty, swallow mugs of scalding tea and eat slices of toast standing up in the kitchen. There’d be the usual frantic hunt for the car keys and then he’d drop me off at one of the last outposts of the District Line. I’d just make it to the office by eight-thirty.
Some days time flew. I’d be busy taking calls, placing orders, fielding customer complaints and wouldn’t even glance at the large, old-fashioned, railway station-style clock on the wall until colleagues shrugging on coats reminded me that it was time for the long commute home. Other days, when the phones remained reproachfully silent and I’d had too many cups of coffee, my eyes seemed drawn to the big black hands of the clock and I’d long for the working day to end. So many hours wasted and willed away.
Robert’s job at Hartingdale High meant he got home before me except when there was a parents’ evening or the Headmaster had press-ganged him into helping out with a carol concert, a fundraiser, a theatre or a museum trip, any one of the extra-curricular events on offer at the select private school where Robert was Head of Languages. He’d always get up when I’d bustle through the front door bearing a couple of supermarket carriers and full of indignation about delays, signal failures or escalators out of action. We’d hug and have a drink and talk about our day. Then I’d prepare supper whilst he sat at the kitchen table marking his Third Year’s mock exam papers or preparing the Fourth Year’s lesson notes. Domestic moments that were humdrum and routine but……. they were our moments. We’d eat, bathe and go to bed, setting the alarm again. Another tomorrow, another day determined by the clock.
The days here have there own routine. The nurses change shift at eight o’clock but by then I’ve already had my morning shots and sometimes I manage to hold down breakfast. Celia and Rose are the ones I like best. Rose is warm and funny. She tells me stories of her Jamaican family that make me laugh and feel sad at the same time. Celia is more reserved, as if wary of getting too close to her patients. I suspect that she feels, as I do, that if we had met somewhere else and at some other time, then we might have become friends. She likes to read and to go to the theatre. She loves a vodka martini, has done a Thai cookery course and is nearly the same age as me, forty.
Today is my fortieth birthday; Rose reminded me of that at about five o’clock this morning. Mornings are best and almost the only time I can be sure of what’s going on around me. There is a lot of chart filling: on the hour, every hour, even through the night and now, of course, there are bed pans and sponge baths. I can’t quite remember how long it is since I could manage the bathroom on my own. That’s the problem with these new drugs, I don’t get much pain but I loose track of things. I can’t always get things quite straight in my mind.
I’d heard the disease described as an advancing army, steadily vanquishing everything in its path, all the healthy cells; but that’s not how I see it. I remember watching some televised experiment years ago: a huge snail-shell spiral of oversized Dominoes erected in the studio and the presenter pointing out the giant white spots on the ebony counters. I remember that he slowly and deliberately pushed the end counter and how, as if in slow motion, it slipped down on to the next… and then the next… and the next. Round and round the whole whorl the counters fell, until at last, the final one crashed heavily to the floor. That’s what’s happening to me.
The day is punctuated by visits. Robert is here every day and Mum too. Friends and colleagues come with flowers and fruit but I can see that it’s difficult for them, they don’t know what to say, they don’t know how to react. My appearance shocks them to begin with, especially my girlfriends. From then on their uneasy blend of pity and relief that it is not them lying on that bed with tubes in a blue-white arm on the coverlet, makes their conversation nervous and staccato. Sometimes they do loosen up and I’m grateful when the talk is easy and natural. I want them to tell me of their own affairs, of the outside world, of their lives and of their loves. I don’t want them to feel guilty about being strong and alive……. but I can’t seem to summon up the energy. I’m not up to it, pain makes me selfish. I can’t give them comfort. I can’t give it to myself.
I find no peace in religion. I did try to renew my childhood faith, longing for the potency of its capacity for hope, but it has turned its face from me. Yet sometimes I sense it waiting, holding back. Perhaps because of this, a fragment of poetry keeps coming back to me, reverberations of a past longing for the rapturous certainty of the presence of God.
“Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings”
On those nights, as I drift in and out of sleep, I hear the beating of giant wings somewhere distantly overhead.
Mum cries a lot and I did too at first but I’m all dried up now. When we are alone, I listen and let her words wash over me. She talks to me of the past: of belt-at-the back dresses that I hazily recollect; of rollicking tantrums; ballet lessons; Easter egg hunts; styrographs and school prize days that I look back on and see from a great distance, as if they had happened to someone else.
She recalls a particular endless summer, and in particular a wasp-infested riverside picnic with paste sandwiches and a daisy chain. A chain of daisy heads that I was intent upon making into the longest and most beautiful necklace that had ever been; and suddenly, as she talks, I see it. I see joyous yellow faces framed in delicate white petals, tipped with a faint pink flush as if being noticed for the first time at a school dance. I can feel their long thin stems between my fingers and smell the slightly bitter sap, as my thumbnails dig sharply into the fleshiest part to create the slit through which the next stem will thread and will make the next link of the chain.
Since Mum reminded me, I keep returning to that close and concentrated afternoon. From there I can piece together other memories and the daisy chain becomes a series of connected events. Each little head seems to represent a moment of my private history: from my first holy communion, awkward and proud in stiff white net, through to my first real kiss in the front seat of a MGB; to leaving school and the dread and excitement of becoming an adult. My twenties a blur of parties and adventures, of affairs and disappointments that left me totally unprepared, at twenty-nine, for the acute and clearly focused realization when I met Robert, that here, at last, was love.
We married after eight months, no doubts at all on either side. We fitted. We made plans for the future, talked it all out. We talked about everything, made declarations, shared confidences, so many words spent that I wonder if we used them all up? They are quite bleached of meaning now.
When I first became ill, we talked about ‘when I come home’ and ‘when I’m better’ but now we don’t speak of it. We both know that I will never go home. We have shared the private language of lovers and yet we haven’t actually said goodbye.
More links in the chain: the announcement, the preparation and then the wedding itself, not in the local Catholic Church I’d been baptized in, as Mum would have liked, but in an Outer London registry office. Friends and champagne. A beautiful dress. Then setting up home together. Over the years I had continued in the random but progressive sequence of my life unaware that each episode made up another link in my daisy chain, making it more beautiful but more fragile with every strand. I know now that it has sat loosely in my fingers all this time.
I’m forty today. Surely I’m not meant to be lying here? Not today. The sound of the beating of wings has been with me ever since I woke up, in my ears, all around me. I feel them pulsating, their vibrations cool upon my face. I’m not sure what time it is now but I know that it’s late. I can’t quite make out the hands on the old fashioned railway station clock on the wall. Only Robert was here today. He said he wanted me all to himself on my special day. There was a cake. I couldn’t blow out the candles, couldn’t raise my head. He held my hand for a long time and then he was gone.
It’s odd, I feel strangely awake, tensed and ready for something. The giant white dots on the ebony counters are sharply in focus, their faces loom and stare me down. And the beating of wings has grown so much louder. Its deafening, drowning out every other sound, all thought, all memory. The daisy chain is in my hand but I can feel it slipping through my fingers. For a moment I think that maybe I can hold it. But I know that I can’t. Slowly and without regret, I loosen my grip and allow it to fall.
