husband and wife

jean in black

~ jim clayton ~ 2 Comments

Stephen is telling me about the dream he had last night. He’s sitting in his chair looking left towards the windows with his eyes tightly shut, his bony fingers laced in his lap, one long leg crossed over the other, the foot gently bouncing up and down, as if he’s judging the weight of the slipper hanging from the toes.
‘I’ve been having these vivid dreams,’ he says. ‘They’re so real it takes me a while to wake up from them. I wondered if it might be the medication.’
‘Possibly. What kind of dreams?’
‘Last night I was floating in a warm, deep sea. And there were all these people splashing about around me, laughing and shouting. Some I knew, some I didn’t. And then I started to sink, down and down and down, not drowning exactly, but not happy about it either. And no-one tried to help me or seemed all that bothered, and everything was getting far away. It was such an odd, lonely feeling. I can’t say it was a nightmare, exactly, but I didn’t like it all that much. And when I woke up, I found I’d … had an accident.’
He opens his eyes at that point and twists his mouth into a one-sided smile, cartoon-like, superficial. I can’t help thinking he’s spent his whole life practising it.
‘The last time I wet the bed must have been seventy years ago, so you can imagine how surprised I was. Still,’ he says, his slipper falling to the floor,’ I’ve put something on the mattress tonight, in case I have the sea dream again.’
I pick his slipper up and hang it back on his foot.
‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘Now – what else do you need to know?’
We go over his medical history, medications, recent admission to hospital.
‘And of course, no sooner have I come out than Jean goes in. We’re like those funny little people on a weather clock.’
‘So why has Jean gone to hospital?’
‘Didn’t they tell you?’ he says, closing his eyes and turning his face to the window again. ‘I fell on her. She was helping me down the stairs and I lost my balance. Broke her arm in three places. And then they found other things wrong with her, too, in that way they have. So all in all it’s been a bit of a disaster.’

* * *

Later on, when I’ve finished all the tests and I’m writing them up, Stephen asks me where I live.
‘Oh really?’ he says. ‘Well it’s a shame Jean isn’t here, because I think I’m right in saying that’s where her grandfather came from. He was a policeman – oh! I’m talking years ago, before the war. I remember her telling me about him. He used to ride around on a motorcycle, like he owned the place. And everyone hated him and his dreadful moustache, which is why they had him killed.’
‘Killed? Really?’
‘Apparently. And they all showed up at the funeral, lining the streets with their heads bowed and their hands in front of them, and all of them thinking the same thing. Glad to be shot of him.’
‘I’ll have to look into that.’
‘It was a long time ago. The old police station’s flats now, apparently. Called Peelers, I think. Funnily enough, that’s where I met Jean. At a funeral. She’s not my first wife. My first wife died unexpectedly.’
Stephen suddenly opens his eyes and stares straight at me.
‘It wasn’t her funeral we met at,’ he says. ‘I don’t want you getting the wrong idea.’
‘No, no,’ I tell him. ‘I didn’t think it could’ve been.’
‘Good,’ he says. ‘Because I know how it sounds.’
He finds another cartoon smile, then resumes his blind inspection of the window.
‘Yes. Jean looked wonderful in black. She was a shorthand typist, down from Scotland. We got chatting over the cold meat selection, and then shared a cab back to mine. And do you know what I tell people?’
‘No? What do you tell them?’
‘I tell them it was the only one-night stand I ever had, and so far it’s lasted ten years.’

shattered

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There are three goldfish swimming in a round plastic washing-up bowl on the floor.
‘He took the tank down with him when he went’ says Janice. ‘I had to scoop them off the carpet.’

It explains why John’s so wet, the coloured gravel in his pants.
‘Did you hurt yourself?’ I ask him.
‘Only my side where I hit the tank’ he says. ‘It’s nothing really.’
Janice is sitting on the sofa, holding a remote control with such a sense of purpose it looks like she thinks it’ll do more than just turn up the golf.

‘Good job the tank didn’t shatter’ I say, towelling John dry.
It’s sitting on the floor by the washing up bowl, three of the glass sides slid out from the uprights and resting against the furthest arm of the sofa. There’s a greasy-looking deep sea diver exposed in the middle of it, looking a little slumped over, like he’s depressed no-one’s come to take his helmet off.
‘They don’t these days,’ says Janice, staring at the TV. ‘Shatter, I mean.’

Neither of them seem bothered. In fact, to look at them you’d think one or other of them spent most days crashing to the floor covered in fish. It’s really not that big of a deal.

Once John is presentable I run through his obs and make sure everything’s as it should be. He’s due to go to a rehab bed, and really it can’t come soon enough. That’s certainly the impression Janice gives, flicking slack-faced from the golf to a sci-fi film where a man and a woman are being attacked by a giant ant. And then back again.

‘Are you going to be alright?’ I ask him.
He shrugs, starts rolling a cigarette.
‘Have you got one of those personal alarms?’
‘No.’
‘But Janice is here, isn’t she? She’ll be able to call the ambulance?’
I smile at her encouragingly.
‘I’m not well myself,’ she says. ‘I can’t do anything.’
‘Yes, but you could call for an ambulance?’
‘I go to bed early.’
‘Wouldn’t you hear him call out?’
‘I’m a heavy sleeper. Anyway – he’s got his mobile.’
I look back to John, who nods, then starts running his tongue along the edge of the cigarette.

The goldfish continue to swim round and round the washing bowl. I wonder when they’ll get transferred to something better. If they ever will.

the very hungry caterpillar

~ jim clayton ~ 2 Comments

‘I’m sorry if I was snippy when I answered the door,’ says Marjorie. ‘I thought you’d come to read the meter.’
‘That’s okay. I’d be the same if someone knocked me up first thing on a Sunday. I did try calling you…’
‘Yes. Well. We don’t answer if we don’t know who it is.’

Marjorie is sitting one end of the table, her husband John the other, making me feel less like a clinician and more like a family counsellor. It’s John I’ve come to see, though. He doesn’t seem anywhere near as bad as the referral suggested. In fact I’d go as far as saying he looks perfectly fine, chomping enthusiastically through a small stack of jam toast, with occasional gulps of tea to wash it all down.
‘Ahh!’ he says, setting the mug aside, and then, after picking up another slice of toast and holding it in front of him for a moment with something like a lover’s gaze, begins again. It’s like watching a giant caterpillar methodically working round a leaf – a caterpillar dressed in an Arsenal bobble hat, fleece and jogging bottoms.
‘Mind your fingers’ says Marjorie.
He nods, his eyes closed.
‘He fell off a ladder, you see,’ sighs Marjorie, securing her dressing gown with a resolute tug of the cord. ‘A few years ago now. He didn’t fall that far, but it was down onto the patio, and all the pots. He was pruning the jasmine. I’d told him to wait till I got back so I could foot the bottom. But no – he’s always just carried on regardless. And now look. One leg shorter than the other. He wears an insert in his shoe, but it doesn’t make any difference. And of course, everything else gets thrown out of whack. He’s got permanent back pain.’
John finishes his toast with a sigh, pushes the empty plate forwards and leans back in the chair.
I ask him what he takes for the pain.
‘Paracetamol!’ he says, slapping his tummy. ‘Four times a day.’
‘You shouldn’t be taking so much,’ says Marjorie. ‘It’s not good for you to take it all the time.’
He shrugs.
‘The doctor says it’s okay. If the doctor’s happy, I’m happy.’
‘It’s bad for your liver.’
‘I don’t see what it’s got to do with you,’ says John. ‘Are you a doctor?’
‘Everyone knows paracetamol are bad for you.’
‘Are you a doctor, Marg?’
‘Doctors don’t know everything, John.’
‘I say again – are you a doctor?’
‘I’m not having this discussion.’
‘I’m happy with paracetamol. The doctor’s happy with paracetamol. Let that be an end to it.’
It’s obviously a sore point between them. I try to take a middle position.
‘It’s difficult,’ I say. ‘Chronic pain is different to acute pain. You handle it differently. I mean, if you get a headache, you take something to help with that. But if you have pain all the time, you need to take regular doses to keep yourself on an even keel. If you let the pain get too bad, it’ll take more of something to get you back into the okay zone. The idea is to maintain a good cruising altitude.’
To illustrate, I make a half-hearted rising and falling gesture with the flat of my hand. Marjorie watches me with a slack expression.
‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re on about,’ she says.
‘I do’ says John, sucking a glob of jam off his thumb. ‘I do.’

addio catania

~ jim clayton ~ 2 Comments

‘The doctor, he was here yesterday, he said Squeeze my hands. Hard as you can. I said to him, I said You sure you want me to do that, squire? He said Do your worst. So I grabbed a hold and give him a squeeze, and the next thing you know he was pulling ‘em away shouting All right, mate! All right! You’ve made your point!’
Mr Wilson laughs, a desiccated kind of rattle, and shakes his head.
‘I was a stone mason all my life. I could squeeze the juice’ve a pebble.’
I think the doctor was being kind, though. Whilst it’s true Mr Wilson’s wrists are still impressively thick, the rest of his body has been sadly depleted by age and illness, and he pays for his enthusiastic outbursts with a degree of gasping that the oxygen through his nasal cannulae struggles to correct.
I’ve arrived at the same time as Mr Wilson’s morning carers. It’s lovely to see how they chivy him along, making a game of it all, distracting him from the frustrations and indignities of his situation. I’ve no doubt Mr Wilson has been a positive kind of person all his life, though, used to making the best of things. He cusses and carries on in the wheelchair, tetchily snapping the oxygen cable when it gets in his way, kicking his slippers off when they snag in the footrests. The carers obviously love him.

When he’s settled in the wheelchair and recovered his strength, and the carers have given him a peck on the cheek, signed the book and left, he folds his great hands on his middle and shakes his head.
‘I can’t go to Catania,’ he says. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll ever see it again.’
I get the story in short bursts. He fought in Italy during the war. Met his wife there. Settled back in the UK, but every year they went back to Catania to see her family. But his wife died last year, and his illness had progressed, and he was faced with the fact that he’d never see Catania again.
‘I wanted to say goodbye proper, like,’ he said. ‘I wanted to say Addio. Now look at me.’
He picks up the green plastic tube and holds it in front of him, like he was showing me something else, the thing that was tethering him to this world, the line that he’d play out if he could, all the way to the eastern shores of Sicily, and Catania, and his wife, and the adventures and the life they’d had together, so he could relax his grip, and let go the end, and disappear himself, off into the sun.