Flesh: A Novel

9

HE DRIVES TO THE HOSPITAL in Cambridge. There’s highway for twenty minutes, and then small roads. The whole journey takes an hour.

Between Foxton and Harston he pulls over and pisses among some trees at the side of the road.

He’s needed to do that since he left the highway twenty miles ago.

While he does it, while he shakes his dick at a tree trunk, two or three vehicles pass behind him. He zips himself up. Clouds glint in the sky. There’s a smell of compost, of sweet decay, from a ditch.

He sits in the Bentley again, its interior cluttered with empty drinks cans and receipts from service stations, and looks over his shoulder as he pulls out.

Not long after Harston the suburbs of Cambridge start, and soon after that he arrives at the hospital.

“I’m here to see my wife,” he says to the woman in reception.

She asks him for his name and then invites him to have a seat.

They’re in a sort of atrium. It’s a private hospital. He sits there looking at his hands while a water feature makes a trickling sound.

After a few minutes a doctor approaches him. He doesn’t think he knows this doctor. She isn’t the one he dealt with in March and April, although they may have spoken on the phone.

She asks him when he was last here.

Telling her, he feels embarrassed that it’s been so long.

The doctor smiles sympathetically, and says she understands. She’s much younger than he is.

“How is she?” István asks.

“She’s pretty much the same,” the doctor says.

They’ve moved her. She’s not in the same room that she was in last time. A nurse shows him to the one she’s in now and then leaves him and shuts the door.

He sits down next to the bed.

The ventilator makes quite a lot of noise. It’s attached to that transparent plastic thing in her mouth. There are smaller tubes going into her nose as well, and into her arm.

As the doctor said, her condition is the same as it was when he was last here, more than a month ago. The same as it has been since they put her into this state.

He doesn’t entirely understand why they did put her into this state. Something to do with the pressure in her skull. They said they had to do it to save her life.

Now they’re waiting for something. He isn’t sure what. One of the doctors asked him if he knew what happened to Michael Schumacher, and when he said that he did, the doctor told him that the situation was similar to that.

“What does that mean?” István asked.

That was when the doctor told him what it was they were waiting for.

He didn’t quite understand it even at the time.

“And when will that happen?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” the doctor said. “Maybe never, I’m afraid.”

He experiences, as he did the last time he was here and saw her like this, a feeling of immense solitude.

She is the one person, he thinks, who would be able to share his pain. Or who would at least understand the extent of the pain he was in, since she would be feeling the same thing herself.

And yet she doesn’t even know what happened that day in March.

He wakes on the sofa downstairs in the gray light of the very early morning.

He has a half memory of his mother telling him, at some point, to go upstairs to bed and of him telling her that he was fine where he was.

Now, waking, he has a terrible headache.

A terrible headache and terrible thirst.

He finds his way to the kitchen and drinks directly from the tap there.

The red digits of the oven clock tell him that it’s just after five in the morning.

For a moment he thinks he’s going to be sick.

He waits.

Nothing happens, except that he’s sweating quite heavily.

When nothing happens he wonders whether to put his fingers down his throat.

He doesn’t.

He just stands there for a while, staring at the empty sink.

Every day he thinks he’s going to stop doing this. It wasn’t supposed to be something that went on indefinitely, that was never how he thought of it, and every day when he wakes up he feels sure that this will be the day that he stops.

When evening arrives, though, he finds it very difficult to do anything else.

There just doesn’t seem to be any point in doing anything else.

There doesn’t seem to be any point in not drinking.

What exactly is he saving himself for?

It’s usually with that thought, or something like it, that he has his first drink.

When he’s drunk there’s a feeling that none of this is properly real, and that’s a feeling that helps. Without that for at least part of the time every day he doesn’t know what he’d do.

He knows that his mother is suffering too. For one thing she’s visibly aged. It strikes him one day, that she looks like an old woman now.

She seems to have taken on the management of the estate. It must help her somehow to do that, he thinks, when he wakes in the afternoon with a strange, transparent feeling and finds her at the long table in the library with a laptop open, poring over spreadsheets and documents.

“What are you doing?” he says from the door.

Without looking at him she tells him what she’s doing—something to do with a tenancy agreement or an insurance policy—and he stops listening almost immediately.

When he opens his eyes there’s a stranger looking down at him.

“Who are you?” he asks.

“I’m a doctor,” the man says.

István’s mother is there too, standing slightly farther away.

They’re in his room.

He’s not sure what time of day it is.

“What happened?” he asks.

“What do you remember?” the doctor says a few seconds later.

István thinks about it.

He remembers that he went out and walked in the rain.

It was raining.

And he went out and walked in it.

The doctor nods when he tells him that.

His mother just stands there looking worried.

And there’s someone else there too, nearer the door. A tall woman with reddish hair. It might be Mrs. Szymanski.

“What else do you remember?” the doctor asks him.

He remembers the rain soaking through his clothes, and the wet clothes hanging cold and heavy on him.

He wonders if it’s still raining.

For a moment he looks at the window.

It doesn’t seem to be.

It’s hard to tell though, because the curtains are almost fully drawn.

The light in the room is dim.

“I don’t know,” he says.

“You fell,” his mother tells him.

“I fell?”

“Yes,” his mother says.

The doctor nods.

István is looking up at him, almost up his nose.

His head, he notices, is throbbing with pain.

“When? Where?” he says.

His mother starts to explain that they found him on the steps of the Greek temple, that he must have slipped on the wet, slimy steps and hit his head on them or on one of the pillars of the temple.

He has no memory of any of that.

There’s just nothing.

He remembers the wet clothes.

And then being here, looking up at the doctor.

“When you didn’t come back we went to look for you,” his mother says.

She explains that she saw him walking away across the south lawn from her bedroom window at about eight in the morning.

When there was no sign of him two hours later, she and the Szymanskis went to look for him, she says.

It was still raining, they went with umbrellas.

Mrs. Szymanski found him.

“What time is it now?” István asks.

“Two in the afternoon,” the doctor says.

He says it without looking at his watch or anything.

He asks István to say the months of the year in reverse order, starting with December.

“December,” István says, not sure why he needs to do this. He tries to focus, which makes the pain in his head worse. There’s a dull pain everywhere inside his head, and a sharper more intense pain near the surface in one particular place. He says, “December. November. October. September.” He has to stop and think. “August. July. June. May. April. March. February. January.”

The doctor looks pleased.

He asks István who the prime minister is.

István tells him.

The doctor smiles and asks him a few more questions about how he’s feeling, whether he has a headache, whether he feels sick.

István says that he has a headache.

After shining a light in his eyes, the doctor tells him that he has a concussion, and that he should stay in bed for the rest of the day and take it easy for the next few days. He should let him know, he says, if his headache persists for more than twenty-four hours, or if he feels dizzy or nauseated.

“Okay,” István says.

“And he shouldn’t drink alcohol,” his mother says, as if it’s a point that she’s been wanting to make for a while.

“No,” the doctor agrees, with a friendly smile.

Then he leaves.

István’s mother and Mrs. Szymanski leave with him.

Mrs. Szymanski returns twenty minutes later with a tea tray.

“How are you feeling?” she asks.

“Okay,” István says.

She says that she’ll change the bandage on his head later—the doctor explained to her how to do it.

István wasn’t even aware that he had a bandage on his head.

“Okay,” he says.

There’s something terrible about the way normality asserts itself. About the way that summer insists on happening. About the way the chestnuts blossom and Wimbledon takes place.

His mother talks to him about the estate, about various trivial things that need to be dealt with, and also about the larger matter of the Nyman trust fund.

She has spoken to Heath, the lawyer in London. She explained to him that she would be dealing with things until her son was able to take over again.

Heath was unsure about that at first. He wanted to hear it from István himself. So István phoned him and told him that his mother would indeed be handling things for a while. Heath sent him something to sign to make it official.

Once she has access to the documents, his mother spends a lot of time looking at what’s been going on with the trust fund.

She makes some adjustments. She tells István about them, tells him that she’s trying to maximize the income from the fund.

He doesn’t seem that interested, and after a while his mother sighs and says that in less than a year Thomas will inherit it all outright anyway.

“Is there any way of stopping that?” he asks her.

“No,” she says. “Unless he dies.”

She has started going to a Baptist church in Stevenage.

One Sunday she suggests that he join her.

“What have you got to lose?” she asks.

He doesn’t seem to have anything to lose.

It’s a modest red-brick church in a quiet part of Stevenage.

He finds somewhere to park and they walk in.

Inside, there’s obviously been some renovation work. It’s all very light and airy. White undecorated spaces. Hard-wearing gray carpet. It feels more like a conference center than a traditional church. They sit on molded plastic seats, facing a lectern from which a man in jeans and a T-shirt speaks to them. There’s also a drum kit up there and some sort of electric piano. The only thing to show it’s a church is a plain wooden cross on the wall.

The first week he just sits there, not even listening most of the time as the man in the T-shirt talks about the Bible.

The second week—when his mother persuades him to accompany her again—he does listen to some of it.

The third week he even joins in with some of the singing.

He understands, as he mouths the words, what’s happening here.

He desperately wants to believe that his son still exists—still exists in some actual sense, not just as a memory—and that what happened to him is somehow part of some larger plan or scheme, and not just a meaningless single event.

What these people believe seems to make that possible. He assumes that that’s what drew his mother here, or something like it. She has never shown any interest in this sort of thing until now. So he understands why she comes here and how it might help her.

He also understands, after a few weeks, that it won’t be able to help him.

He knows it’s not true, that’s the problem.

He wants to believe that his son still exists, and his desire to believe that is almost enough to make him believe everything else that he needs to believe in order to make that possible, but not quite. The part of him that knows those things aren’t true is just too strong for him to overcome.

Soon after that he starts drinking again. Sometimes when he’s drunk he has the feeling that he and Jacob will be reunited in the future. It’s not that he thinks they will actually meet again in any sort of afterlife or anything like that. He knows that they won’t. He knows that the only sense in which they will be reunited is that one day he will also revert to being insentient matter, and sometimes when he’s drunk that seems like a strangely comforting idea.

He tells Mrs. Szymanski about it.

She looks at him sadly. “You shouldn’t think like that,” she says.

He shrugs.

“Are you saying you want to die?” she asks him.

“I don’t know,” he says.

They talk quite a lot now.

Probably it started during those days in the early part of the summer when he was recovering from the concussion.

“What about you?” he asks her one day.

“What about me?”

“How are you?”

She laughs at that.

“Why do you laugh?”

She just shrugs. She’s ironing.

He’s still waiting for her to say something though.

“I don’t know,” she finally says.

“Are you happy?” he asks her.

“Not really,” she says.

“No?”

She shakes her head.

“Why not?”

She shrugs again.

He leaves it at that.

He is not, in fact, that interested in whether she is happy or not and why.

And she doesn’t seem to want to talk about it anyway.

Then a few days later she says, “You asked me why I wasn’t happy.”

“Yeah.”

She’s unloading the dishwasher. She keeps doing that while she tells him that she and her husband have been trying for a baby for years without success.

“I’m sorry,” István says.

“So,” she says. “Maybe that’s why.”

“I’m sorry,” István says again after a silence. “Have you tried IVF?” he asks.

“Of course,” she says.

“Okay.”

“It didn’t work.”

They talk about it for a while, or at least she does.

Eventually he stops listening.

“You’re not interested,” she says when she notices that.

“Sure I am,” he says.

She keeps talking. She says that she’s disappointed at how her life has turned out.

“Why?” he asks.

“I just am,” she says.

“Well,” he says, as if to point out that she’s not the only one.

They walk on the estate together. She talks about her husband. She says that her husband doesn’t seem to understand her, that she’s not sure whether the marriage will last.

“Do you want it to last?” István asks her.

When she just shrugs he asks her if she loves her husband.

“I don’t know,” she says. And then, “I think I love somebody else.”

“Oh yeah?”

She nods.

They’ve stopped walking and are standing on the path.

“Who’s that?” he asks, smiling at her.

“You,” she says.

He laughs, partly just with surprise.

“What?” she says.

“When did this start?” he asks her.

“I don’t know,” she says.

They have sex for the first time a few days later. He’s not sure why he does it. He thinks it might help him somehow.

Afterward he feels slightly disgusted with himself.

He tells her that he wishes they hadn’t done it.

Then a few days later they do it again.

And again a few days after that.

While they’re actually doing it, it feels like a sort of escape. There’s an oblivion there, and something satisfyingly like violence as well. It seems to give him something that violence would also give him, something physical and destructive, something that he seems to need.

She keeps saying that she loves him.

“Stop saying that,” he tells her.

“It’s true,” she says.

“No it’s not,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

At that moment, more than anything else, he just wishes that she wasn’t there, and while he smokes his cigarette and she wipes her eyes he promises himself that he’s not going to have sex with her again.

Then a few days later he does.

And it’s not just the physical need and the minute of oblivion that makes him do it, he thinks. It’s that in a way he actually enjoys the feelings of self-hatred that always follow his encounters with her.

He starts to hate her as well, and he finds a sort of enjoyment in that, too.

He finds a sort of enjoyment in hurting her, emotionally and sometimes even physically. “You’re hurting me,” she says as he squeezes her neck, and he understands that he was inflicting the pain on her deliberately and for his own pleasure, or at least for some form of satisfaction that it gave him.

He thinks he’s probably not as nice a person as he thought he was.

He’s probably not a very nice person at all.

He tells her that. “I’m not a very nice person,” he says.

She says that that isn’t true.

And something about the way she says it makes him want to hurt her even more.

Cambridge is plastered with wet leaves. He spends less than half an hour at the hospital and for most of that time he’s talking to the doctor, who sounds more pessimistic than she did before.

Afterward he’s in the Bentley and is about to start the engine when he sees a black BMW arrive at the hospital entrance.

It seems to be a hire limousine, delivering a visitor, and since it’s in his way and he’s unable to leave while it’s there, he keeps his eyes on it until someone emerges.

At first the person, seen from behind and across the width of the parking area, looks only vaguely familiar. It’s a young man, dressed mostly in black. Further obscuring his identity, he’s also wearing sunglasses, and has a beard.

There’s no doubt about it though.

It is Thomas.

The way he moves, as much as anything, makes István sure of that, even though he sees him for only a few seconds as he leaves his limo and enters the hospital.

He’s gone almost before István is sure that it’s him. But he is sure, and he sits there for quite a long time after he has disappeared into the building.

He sits there, in fact, until he emerges again, after about half an hour, stepping out through the automatic door and signaling to his driver to wait a bit longer.

He wants to smoke a cigarette first, that’s why.

István hasn’t seen him since that evening at the Gagosian, nearly three years ago.

He was thinking about that evening all the time that Thomas was inside the hospital, and he’s still thinking about it now as he watches him smoke his cigarette.

When he has finished it, Thomas waves to the BMW, which leaves its parking space and pulls up in front of him.

It drives away, and for a few moments after that István doesn’t move.

Then, as if suddenly arriving at a decision, he starts the engine of his own vehicle and drives after it, keeping his distance as he follows it along the tree-lined street of Victorian villas at the end of which the hospital is located.

For a while they pass through other, similar streets.

They seem to be heading for the highway and when they arrive at it he follows the BMW onto the on ramp. He keeps it in view as it does a steady seventy toward London, which he assumes is where they’re going.

The land, very flat around Cambridge, starts to pick up slightly into modest hills. Mostly it’s plowed fields. The odd stand of trees.

Almost imperceptibly at first, London starts to solidify around them.

István isn’t very familiar with this approach to it and for quite a long time he’s not sure where they are.

Then he suddenly understands that they’re on the North Circular near Ilford, where he used to live. They even pass under the pedestrian bridge that he often used in those days on his way home from running on Wanstead Flats.

He doesn’t have much time to think about that though—the traffic is heavy and he needs to focus on staying in touch with the BMW.

On the highway that was quite easy.

Now it’s much harder.

At every traffic light there’s the possibility of losing it.

The trouble is he has no idea where it’s going.

He follows it through Wanstead.

In Hackney a bus, pulling out, separates him from it, and for a few minutes he loses sight of it altogether.

It’s still there though, not far ahead of him.

It finally stops somewhere in Islington.

He has to pass it and pull over farther up, where there’s a space.

They’re in a quiet square of terraced houses with gardens in the middle, surrounded by railings.

He watches in the mirror as Thomas emerges from the BMW and pushes the doorbell of one of the houses.

A few seconds later he goes in.

The BMW is still there, presumably having been told to wait.

István waits as well.

It’s nearly dark now. The sky above the square is a vivid blue.

He lights a cigarette.

It might be hours, of course.

In fact it’s only four or five minutes before Thomas reappears.

They head farther into central London, along Euston Road and down Regent Street. They spend some time in traffic on Piccadilly, and when they arrive at Hyde Park Corner they use the underpass. For half a minute they’re in its orange light and onrushing noise, and then they’re under the dark sky again, and the BMW positions itself for an immediate left turn.

István takes the turn deliberately slowly himself, trying to increase the distance between them. The BMW is about fifty meters ahead of him now.

It turns left again, and he follows it a few seconds later, almost too late to see it make yet another left turn into a mews-like street that’s marked as a dead end.

Thinking that this must be it, he pulls over a short way into the mews and switches off.

From there he is able to see the BMW, still about fifty meters ahead of him, and also stationary now.

The mews is very quiet. Almost all of its houses are unlit. Even the pub about halfway up, although fully illuminated, seems strangely inactive, as if it might not even be open this Friday night.

Thomas is letting himself into one of the houses while the BMW starts to perform a three-point turn.

A few seconds later it passes István on its way out of the mews.

For quite a long time after that he just sits there.

A light has come on in the house that Thomas went into.

István wonders if he lives there alone—if he’s alone in there or if anyone else is there with him.

He leaves the Bentley and stands in front of the two-story house, the brick façade of which is painted dark gray. There are small trees in planters on either side of the front door.

He is about to press the doorbell, when he stops himself.

He really does want to know if Thomas is alone.

The curtains of the ground-floor windows are not quite fully drawn and, stepping across the cobbles, he brings his face to the gap. The room he sees looks somehow underfurnished. It’s like a rental house that only has the bare bones—a sofa, a few chairs, not much more than that. There’s nothing on the walls except some weird lighting fixtures involving metal leaves.

He’s just taking that in when Thomas appears, in a dressing gown now, and sits down on the sofa.

There’s no sign of anyone else.

István steps back and peers up at the higher windows—all dark.

He looks up and down the mews—no one.

Before ringing the doorbell he again brings his face to the gap in the curtains, which is about the width of his hand.

Thomas is still sitting on the sofa.

He’s doing something.

It’s not clear what.

He seems to be heating something with the flame of a lighter, a spoonful of something.

A few moments later István understands.

The first time he saw this was in Iraq, where it was a habit that some of the men developed. The stuff was quite easily available there, and not very expensive.

He never tried it himself. Some of the others smoked a bit of it. Only a very few of them, though, went on to do what Thomas is doing now. He has put the spoon down on the low glass table in front of him, which is one of the few other pieces of furniture in the room. Then he draws the liquid that’s in the bowl of the spoon into a syringe he must have had in the pocket of his dressing gown.

He uses the belt of the dressing gown for the next part, tying it around his upper arm and then holding the end of it in his teeth to pull it tight. With the belt still in his mouth, and his head at an odd angle to keep it tight, he physically stimulates the inner elbow of his left arm. When he has done that he takes the syringe. He holds it up and applies a small amount of pressure to the plunger until some liquid drips out. Then, focusing intently, he turns his attention to his arm.

His teeth finally release the belt.

He lies back on the sofa and the syringe slides out of his hand.

For a long time, half sitting on the sofa and half lying on it, he doesn’t move at all. He seems to be staring at something on the ceiling.

From his position at the window István is able to see his expressionless face.

He has been looking at it with amazement for a minute or two when he notices that there’s something slightly strange about it. Something more than mere expressionlessness—an emptiness behind the eyes.

And there’s something else as well.

A sort of darkness of the lips.

At first István isn’t sure if he’s actually seeing that, or if he’s just imagining it.

After another minute, there’s no doubt.

Thomas’s lips are distinctly blue.

István saw this in Iraq too, and also once or twice since then in the toilets of nightclubs where he was working.

He understands what it means.

Thomas is asphyxiating.

He took too much.

István isn’t sure, suddenly, whether that was accidental or not. His first assumption, when he noticed it, was that it was. Now, thinking about it, he isn’t sure.

It might have been an accident, it might have been deliberate, it might have been not quite either.

In any case Thomas is definitely dying.

His lungs have stopped working properly. Deprived of oxygen it will only be a matter of minutes before he dies.

István stands there watching him through the gap in the curtains.

He’s not sure what he feels.

Mostly a sort of emptiness.

After maybe another minute, he turns and walks toward the Bentley.

He unlocks it and sits at the wheel.

Something, however, makes it hard for him to start the engine and drive away, which is what he thought he was going to do.

He just sits there, staring out through the windshield at the mews.

He knows that every minute that passes makes it more likely that Thomas will die, alone in that empty room.

And still he sits there, not leaving, and not doing anything to help him either, just staring out through the windshield at the silent mews, with its single streetlamp throwing shadowy light onto the cobbles and the fallen leaves and the parked luxury cars.

He isn’t looking at those things though.

His thoughts are elsewhere, they are somewhere far away.

His hands are shaking as he lights a cigarette.

He has smoked about half of it when he takes out his phone.

He tells the paramedics the truth, more or less. That Thomas is his wife’s son, that he was there to see him, and that when he didn’t answer the door he looked in at the window and saw what had happened.

After forcing the front door the paramedics bring Thomas out on a stretcher.

“Is he?” István asks.

“He’s not dead,” one of them tells him.

István nods. He’s standing next to one of the potted miniature trees that flank the entrance of the house.

And in fact the mews has some life in it after all—from the doorways of some of the other houses, and from windows, people are looking out to see what’s happening, to see the paramedics load the stretcher into the ambulance with its silently flashing blue lights.

“He would have been, in a few more minutes,” the paramedic says to István. “Lucky for him you were here.”

“Maybe,” István says.

“Definitely,” the paramedic insists.

István asks him which hospital they’re taking Thomas to.

UCL, the man tells him. “You coming with us?” he wants to know.

István shakes his head.

He watches the ambulance drive away.

He wonders what to do now.

He isn’t sure what has happened here tonight.

By the time he arrives at Cheyne Walk it has started to rain.

Sitting on the sofa in the second-floor drawing room he phones his mother and tells her that he’s in London and won’t be back tonight.

“Okay,” she says.

When she asks him what he’s doing in London and he tells her what happened she is silent for a long time.

“Are you still there?” he finally asks.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m still here.”

She doesn’t say anything else though.

In his own room on the floor above he partially undresses and lies down on the bed.

It’s surprising that he isn’t hungry. He hasn’t eaten anything since lunch, which he had at Ayot St. Peter before driving to the hospital in Cambridge.

He opens the window and lights a cigarette.

It has already stopped raining. There’s just the sound of water dripping from the trees in the dark. He wonders again what it is that has happened tonight. He has a strange feeling that something very significant has happened, only he isn’t sure what.

In the morning he drives to University College Hospital, where they tell him that Thomas is still unconscious. They suggest that István, if he wants to see him, try again the next day.

When he does, however, he’s told that Thomas isn’t there anymore.

“Where is he?” he asks, surprised.

The nurse says that he transferred himself to another hospital, a private one.

“He’s awake, then?” István says. “Does he know what happened?”

“What happened?” the nurse says.

“How he got here.”

“Well, we told him that his father found him…”

“His father?”

“Yes.”

“I found him,” István says.

“Yes,” the nurse says.

“I’m not his father,” István tells her.

“Okay,” the nurse says. There’s an awkward moment. She says, “He seemed to know who we meant.”

“Where is he now?” István asks. “Which hospital?”

She doesn’t want to say at first, now that she knows that István isn’t Thomas’s father.

In the end, though, he persuades her to tell him.

It’s a place just outside London.

He drives there, through the suburbs and the autumn rain.

At reception they confirm that Thomas is a patient.

“Can I see him?” István asks, after explaining who he is.

They send someone to tell Thomas that István is there.

A few minutes later the person returns.

“I’m sorry,” they say to István. “He says he doesn’t want to see you.”