She is pretty but exhausted looking, like a former beauty queen who is down on her luck.
She’s in the staff room at Churchill’s when I turn up for work. Usually the room is empty when I arrive, but today this tired, pretty woman is occupying our only armchair, her face in a battered paperback.
That’s odd, I think to myself. You don’t see many teachers dressed like that.
“Have you read this?” she says, looking up.
Her voice is pure, working-class London. She has to be from Essex. Nobody talks like that in London anymore.
“What is it?”
“The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” she says. “By Carson McCullers. She wrote it when she was twenty-three. It’s about this young girl called Mick growing up in Georgia during the Second World War.”
“I know what it’s about. It’s about loneliness. I used to teach it.”
“Really?” she says, her painted eyes wide with wonder.
“Yes. To a bunch of fifteen-year-old boys who wouldn’t know their heart from their elbow.”
“You really taught this book?”
“That’s right.”
“But did you read it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, did you love it? Did it mean anything to you?”
“Well, I thought that the plot was a little-”
“Because to me it’s about the way life cheats you.”
“Well, the central theme of the book-”
“Look at Mick. She starts out full of dreams, full of plans. She wants to travel the world. She wants to be a musician. She wants to bust out of her little town. Everything excites her. And then she gets cheated.”
“Cheated?”
“Cheated. How old is she at the end of the book? Sixteen? Fifteen? She’s got a job in Woolworth’s because her family is so poor. And she already knows that none of her dreams are going to come true. Mick’s been cheated.” She smiles, shaking her head. “Wow! You taught The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Incredible.”
“I’m Alfie, by the way.”
She stands up. “Jackie Day,” she says.
Then she does something that makes me realize that she is not a teacher at all.
She goes to the cupboard in the corner of the room, forages around for a minute and comes out wearing a pair of yellow gloves. Why is she wearing yellow gloves to teach English as a foreign language?
Next she pulls on a blue nylon work coat, a bit like the one my mum wears in the kitchens of Nelson Mandela. Then she is standing there with a bucket in one hand and a bottle of disinfectant in the other.
It’s a bit like watching Clark Kent turn into Superman.
If Superman was a cleaning lady.
They pulled me from the sea and gave me oxygen on the deck of the dive boat.
I remember voices speaking in Tagalog, someone shouting into a radio, the boat’s engine kicking into life. Someone said something to me about a recompression chamber in Cebu. They needed to get me to a recompression chamber. I had come up from too deep, too fast. There were bubbles of excess nitrogen in my flesh and in my blood, although I couldn’t feel them yet. But I was definitely going to get the sickness. The decompression sickness.
I remember that I was flat on my back, the oxygen mask clamped across my mouth, the rain lashing my face. As I tried to sit up and tell them to wait for Rose, the bends began with a blinding pain in my back that made me gasp and weep. I had never known pain like it. My vision blurred with tears, and stayed blurred even when the tears were gone. With every second my eyesight was fading. I felt dizzy and sick, there was a tingling pain in all my joints, especially across my neck, shoulders and back, but what frightened me the most about the sickness was my fading vision. I was very quickly going blind. By the time we reached Cebu, I kept my eyes closed because the coming darkness terrified me, just terrified me.
Strapped to a stretcher, I was bundled on to the dock and into an ambulance. I couldn’t move my legs by now. I couldn’t even feel them. My head felt as though someone was hitting it with a hammer. A voice said something about an air embolism. They said it was a little bubble of air at the base of my brain, that was why I couldn’t feel anything in my legs. An air embolism. Jesus. I remember I kept my eyes closed. I remember praying. Even though I had lost everything that ever mattered to me, I didn’t want to die. I was very afraid.
The ambulance edged slowly through the thick Philippine traffic, its siren howling. At our destination there were excited voices in Tagalog and English as the stretcher was carried down crowded corridors. Finally we were in what seemed like some kind of cool, subterranean tomb. I remember there was the sound of a heavy metal door being opened and then, after I was carried inside, closing behind me. I remember I felt as though I had been deposited in a bank vault. This was the recompression chamber.
Someone was with me. A woman. A middle-aged Filipina. She held my hand and stroked my face and told me in good English that I was very sick but that everything was going to be all right. She promised to stay with me.
The chamber smelled damp and musty. It was all blackness. And I wondered how you know when you are dead, if it is possible to get it wrong, if you could mistake death for something else. I remember I kept thinking that perhaps I was dead already. Then after a stretch of time that couldn’t be measured, there were shadows in the chamber and a numb sensation in my legs.
The woman holding my hand told me that I was doing fine but I needed a special injection to stop the bubble at the base of my brain from swelling. A steroid injection. The woman laughed nervously and told me that she had only ever injected oranges before. There were people looking through the little portholes of the recompression chamber, telling her what to do, excited voices speaking in Tagalog, although all Tagalog sounds excited to me.
Frankly, the needle in the hands of the woman who had only injected oranges seemed like the least of my problems. And after all the nerves and anticipation and excited voices, her injection was next to nothing, like a bee sting given to a man who had just had the living daylights kicked out of him.
I remember she stayed awake with me. She constantly reassured me, and I felt like crying at her kindness. My vision slowly began to clear, my eyes sticky and sore, and she was revealed to me as a small woman about my mother’s age.
For the last ten hours in the chamber we were on special oxygen masks, and she squeezed my hand every time I had to take a breath. That’s what she had to do, that woman who saved my life. She had to keep reminding me to take another breath.
We were in that recompression chamber for two days and two nights, the sickness slowly seeping out of me. But sometimes I feel they didn’t get it all out. Sometimes I think sickness came into me that day. And it will be there for as long as I am.
It’s strange the way the loss of one person can leave such a giant hole in the middle of your life. It’s not as if the hole they leave behind feels like the size of another human being.
It feels more like the size of a world.
I should be going out more. I really should. Not all the time, of course. It’s far too soon to be going out all the time. It will always be too soon for that. But I should be going out once in a while.
One thousand years from today, I will be ready to go clubbing. I’ll put it in my diary. A man has his needs, you know. And a woman too no doubt.
But when I don’t see Josh, and I don’t see Josh all that often, I usually spend my nights in my room, listening to Sinatra on my mini stereo system, usually one of the great Capitol albums of the fifties, but sometimes a Reprise record from the sixties or seventies-not so good, of course, but not so familiar either.