In the bowels of the hospital, someone began to weep. A thumping sound, like a chef tenderizing steak, issued from the air-conditioning ducts. Two Thomas Dooleys awoke at the same instant, at separate tables, and looked around with bleary eyes.
*
‘I thought so! I’ve been hunting high and low for you, and I was just going to split when I remembered your thing about tea.’
Shirlaine had Floyd’s bloodied pyjamas, sheared off him by the nurses in the theatre, bundled up in a plastic bag. The cartoon character on the cloth was more irritating than ever. Perhaps it was that Snoopy Doggy Dog whose adages they were always invoking? The eyes were human enough, but the ears hung down at the side of the head like a Labrador’s.
‘How is Floyd?’
‘Needed some stitches. Sixty-five, if you don’t mind. But the doctor says it’s only a flesh wound. And he says it’s just as well he stabbed himself in the head, which is full of bone, or it could have been serious.’
‘Are they releasing him?’
‘No, he’s got to stay overnight.’
‘I suppose we should get going then.’
‘Suppose so. I just want to go past ICU to say goodbye.’
We went downstairs.
‘Thanks a lot, hey, Phil,’ she said. ‘You really stood by me.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
*
The matron left us at the window, with instructions not to tap. ‘They can’t hear you.’
Floyd lay on his back, the sheets tucked tightly around him. His head was tilted back on the pillow, his eyes were wide open and glazed, his mouth yawned. The wound had been bandaged, but I imagined that I could still see it throbbing under the gauze. He looked pale, strange to say.
The screens had been drawn around the next bed. The green cloth sprang out, buffeted by blows from inside, as if some master of ceremonies was trying to find the join in the stage curtains. But Floyd did not stir.
There is a simple physiological explanation, I’ve been told, for why the mouth of a corpse is so often open, as if the dead were gasping for breath until the end or gaping in horror at their first glimpse of the hereafter. I could almost believe that Floyd had breathed his last. Or was he pretending? Any moment now, he would start up and hurl a bedpan against the glass. But there was no sign of life.
‘Do you think he’s all right?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps we should call someone.’
‘He’s fine. You can tell by the ghetto-blaster.’
She meant the spurt of green lights on the monitor, pulsing to the rhythm of his heart.
*
‘Shall we call a taxi?’
‘Are you paying?’
I reached for my wallet. Gone. Swine must have stolen it during the invasion.
‘We could walk,’ she said, ‘if you’re up to it. It’s not that far.’
‘That would be very pleasant.’ Little did she know how fit I was for a man of my age. And if I exhausted myself, so much the better. It was bound to be dangerous as well, but after what I’d been through, ordinary perils no longer daunted.
We went out into the dark brown air. It was a thirst-slaking antidote to methylated spirits and floor polish, the smell of wet earth and cut grass rising up from beneath our feet as if it had been raining, although there was not a cloud in sight. The night sky was black and full of asterisms. A shooting star exclaimed and fell silent. Then a spatter of rain with a rhythm as steady as the pulse on the machine told me that De Wet’s sprinkler system had switched itself on.
‘Do you mind if I call you Phil? You won’t think I’m too big for my boots?’
‘That would scarcely be possible. And my name isn’t Phil. That was just my nom de guerre.’
‘Oh.’
In fact, she wasn’t wearing boots tonight, but a pair of oversized ‘tackies’, visibly sticky things like the pedipalps of an insect, marked correct with a grandiloquent tick. Nike, the label said. A Nipponese tycoon, I supposed; the marketing managers of the East could not be expected to know Nike of Samothrace, the Goddess of Victory.
‘What is it then? Your name.’
Aubrey, the erl-king, a bearded goblin who lures children to the Land of Death. Well, I wasn’t exactly bearded, but I needed a shave. ‘It’s Tearle.’
‘Is that why they call you Mr T?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘You don’t look like him.’
‘Like who?’
‘The guy who used to be on TV.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Mr T in the A-Team. He was nothing like you. A big black guy, very well built, wore a lot of jewellery. And he had a Mohican.’
‘Seems singularly inapposite, I must say.’
‘Sure.’
‘A Mohican? I thought we’d seen the last of them.’
The guard raised the boom for us, as if we were an emergency vehicle, and we went on into the darkness.
‘You have an interesting name yourself,’ I said.
‘My mom made it up. My grannies are Shirley and Charmaine, and she didn’t know which one to call me after, so she came up with a combination. It couldn’t go the other way round, because that would have been “Charley”.’
The poor thing was a portmanteau.
*
‘What do you do actually?’
‘I’m retired now, and pursuing private interests. But I was a proofreader.’
‘What’s that?’
I explained.
‘Sounds about as exciting as reading the Phone Book.’
‘Exactly.’
‘So your spelling must be really good?’
‘I like to think it’s perfect.’
‘You showed that cow of a clerk a thing or two.’
‘That was just my party trick.’
‘Maybe you can help me fill out my form for the Tech. I’m going in for Dental Technician. My mom wants me to apply for Beauty, but I’m not keen.’
We walked on for a while with our mouths full of teeth. Then I spelt ‘houyhnhnms’, ‘ophthalmology’, ‘phytophthora’ and, to show that difficulty was not purely a matter of consonantal bulk, ‘chaperon’ and ‘anemone’. She seemed engrossed. On the spur of the moment, I introduced Mark Twain.
‘Properly: Samuel Langhorne Clemens. An American. He said he had no respect for anyone who could spell a word only one way. Rubbish. Spelling a word one way ensures that we all know we’re talking about the same thing. Once you’re free to spell a word any way you like, chaos comes marching in. Imagine what might happen to Floyd if the doctors spelt the names of the medicines any way they chose. Or the names of the patients.’
She nodded in agreement, and so I pressed on: ‘Spelling changes everything. A realization in the English manner is more profound than an American-style realisation. Just as it is more meaningful to go through an experience than to go thru it. There’s a trend towards the superficial you should be mindful of; everything is being coated in the shiny veneers of advertising, that most appropriate exception to the rule. Nothing has done more to take the Christ out of Christmas than the “commercials”.’
Silence, for twenty paces, apart from the nutty crack of my heels on the pavement and the clammy whisper of her soles. And then she asked, with a touch of guile: ‘Aren’t there more important things to worry about than commas and full stops?’
‘Absolutely! The decline in the standard of proofreading is linked directly to the decline in standards everywhere else. Because nowhere is the maintenance of standards more important than in proofreading. Indeed, that’s all it is.’
More nodding and another silence, during which I realized with some discomfort that this was an approximation of the discussion I’d hoped to have with Spilkin earlier on. All mixed up with bits of my Introduction to ‘The Proofreader’s Derby’ and my keynote address to the inaugural championship. She could hardly be expected to hold her own on Horne Tooke or the Great Cham; yet I had no doubt that she would get the gist of it perfectly. Anyway, it had been so long since I’d had a chance to express myself fully on these questions, to argue my case, that there was no stopping me. The Highlander coming into view over her shoulder, aloft on his pedestal against the sky, a stone-hearted McAllister with the Transvaal Scottish clinging to his skirts, led me boldly on.