‘This is Roxanna,’ Neil said. ‘Dan.’
Neil wanted to be generous. He knew what a niece or nephew could mean: the salvaging of someone from the mess, an outlet for affections that bottomless grudges had stifled, a chance for atonement. More than that, he owed Dan, he finally understood, because Dan had known about their mother from the beginning, back when they were teenagers themselves. He had lived with the secret for months, Neil’s own, personal human shield, and for all Neil knew everything that had happened to Dan since began with that.
He let his brother handle his child, let him jiggle her and arch his body above her, holding her hands as she took a few precarious, drunkard’s steps. They talked about the possibility of bringing Sam to a hospital in London. No, neither of them had been back to Harrow, a Romanian family had taken the house, Neil said.
‘Dad,’ said Dan, ‘before he died… You probably worked this out, I know you sorted the lawyer and that, the will. He tried to help me… I was having a rough patch, you remember, and — the house — he…’
‘Forget it, Danny,’ Neil said. ‘It’s fine, forget it. Really.’
Dan traced snail trails and mouse runs on the inside of Leila’s arms while Roxanna unloaded her shopping. After a few more minutes, Neil said to his brother, ‘Give her to me now, Dan. Now.’
Sam gave a thumbs up when Neil passed him the iPad, and another when he made a puerile remark about the departed nurse’s arse. Neil regretted the joke immediately: better not to encourage that. Before she left the nurse had put an oxygen mask on Sam’s face, and after that he couldn’t say anything, at least not intelligibly. After a few minutes he closed his eyes. The iPad slid from his hand.
Neil had seen this gear before, on Brian, after his stroke. The ominous tubes, like extruded plastic intestines; the multiple drips; the monitors that made him feel like a cameo turn in the pre-credit sequence of a hospital drama, the heaving chords and contextual sirens of the theme set to cut in at any moment. The whole get-up looked wrong on Sam, outsized and fancy-dress.
He couldn’t make out whether the boy was asleep. Probably he was in and out. Talk: he should talk. ‘Hope you’re comfortable, Sammy. Food okay? Guess you haven’t eaten much. Roxanna sends her love. Leila would send hers too, but she can’t speak yet, unfortunately. So.’
The gossip and niceties ran out pretty quickly. Then what? Depressing to talk about the illness, absurd to ignore it.
‘Doctors seem nice, Sam. They say you’re doing well.’ Or so Dan reported: apart from making sure he scrubbed up on his way in, none of the hospital people said much to Neil at all, even though he was footing the bills, since he wasn’t the primary relative.
‘Does anything hurt?’ He thought he saw Sam grimace. ‘We can get more painkillers if it hurts. Shall I get her back?’
That nurse (Greek, Neil thought, possibly Spanish) ought to do something about the pain. Where the hell was she? Or the flinch might just have been wind, Neil supposed, like the neonatal creases of Leila’s lips that he had optimistically interpreted as smiles. Or Sam might be wholly asleep and dreaming — fighting off muggers, tonguing Lara Croft, failing to revise for his exams, flying down the stairs, whatever the fuck it was that teenagers dreamed about these days. He might be listening to Neil and agreeing, or listening and disagreeing. Or his twitches might be gestures of protest against the cosmic injustice that had landed on him.
‘I’ve seen your father. He seems okay.’ He waited for a flinch but none materialised. ‘Between us we’ll see to everything, Sammy. And Stacy, of course. Whoever the hell Stacy is. Don’t worry about your exams, I’ll find someone to take them for you. I could get someone to take care of Stacy too, if you like.’
No flinch; no smile. Ridiculous, in a way, to ramble on when it was unlikely that Sam was listening. But these hospital-ward monologues were a bit like cooing over your child in public. You didn’t feel embarrassed, you just had to do it. You had to talk, partly because it was the only thing you could do, and partly because of the strange, irrational apprehension that if you didn’t keep talking, that might be the end.
What else? Reminiscences: ‘… that time you came to stay with me and Jess, you ate that knickerbocker glory, remember? You puked in a plant in the restaurant foyer, all over it… That waitress… The time we went out to that old airfield, you remember, I let you drive the car — how old were you? — and I had to grab the wheel back…’
Reminiscences might be ill-advised, Neil saw, contrasting as they did the whackily eventful past and uncertain future. He trailed off.
Once, as a teenager, Neil had witnessed two men beating up a third outside a Tube station, their shoes thudding dully into his midriff and skull. He had run over, a reflex rather than premeditated valour, but the men had done enough and ambled away. To his surprise the victim sat up, coughed, spat and walked off. Up close, even routine violence was the worst thing in the world.
Sam’s illness was like violence. It wasn’t like violence, it was violence. The worst thing in the world.
The news, maybe: ‘… kicking off in Libya and everywhere else down there… They’ve tweeted the News of the World to death… Kicking off in Greece. Portugal next, they reckon, or the Micks, maybe…’
Again the euro crisis: Sam wouldn’t give a toss about the bloody euro crisis. Neil didn’t give a toss about it, either, come to that.
Leila had been ten days old when Sam came to meet her. For a second, while Neil was changing the baby’s nappy, he caught Sam’s face in a mirror: open mouth, crestfallen eyes, which he righted when he saw that he was being watched. He had come to stay with them only a few times since.
Neil hadn’t done what he wanted to do for Sam. He felt remiss, and, worse, he felt irrationally implicated. Here you go, the American girl had said when she gave him her address that morning, as if he had asked for it, which he hadn’t, or might use it, which he never did. Perhaps it would have been better if they had called the police, and Neil had taken his chances in — he groped for the prison’s name — San Somewhere.
Hocus-pocus. Ridiculous.
What was left? Song lyrics: the last refuge of the bedside desperado. You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, When I first met you… In the jungle, the quiet jungle, the lion sleeps tonight… Well I’m runnin’ down the road tryin’ to loosen my load.
Sam flinched.
A flinch as in, It’s okay, I know you’re trying? Or, on the contrary, a Knock it off, will you, for fuck’s sake? sort of flinch? Because, when you stopped to think about it, what was Neil really saying in all his talk? You are ill… You are very very ill… You are ill and I am scared. Nobody wanted to listen to that. Probably his chatter made only one of them feel better.
He shut up. He noticed a little crescent of zits above the corner of Sam’s mouth, an adolescent affliction that seemed touchingly banal in the circumstances. When he was Sam’s age, Neil had salacious, anarchistic thoughts about what he would do in this situation. Fuck hookers, punch policemen, egg the Queen. It wasn’t like that at all.
The tempo of beeps from the monitors picked up; he looked around for a white coat but no one rushed in. Just as he was about to leave, Sam opened his eyes again and seemed to blink an acknowledgement. Neil felt the unwonted tears coming and fought them back. He reconsidered, tried to force them out, and felt something glide down his cheek.
You didn’t get to choose when calamity struck. At a minimum, Neil caught himself thinking during the taxi ride from Harley Street, you should get a say in that. All this would be easier if it had come at a different time: easier in the practicalities, at least, if not the emotions. If the disease had held off until Leila was older. If it had developed before his split with Adam. That was a disreputable, egocentric thought, Neil realised; he was ashamed of it.