Man on Fire

16

The bellyaches came a couple of months after I first saw Bibhuti on TV. They started to bother me and they didn’t go away. Movements were getting harder and my energy was gone. I knew what it was before I was told. I’d been feeling like the end of something was coming for years but it had been coming so slowly that I could call it my imagination if I wanted to. The scans made it all real. They gave me a reason to be feeling the way I’d been feeling that wasn’t just grumbling at life’s failing to live up to expectations. My expectations didn’t come into it. It was a real thing, a disease. It was something I’d done to myself.

The consultant showed me a picture of the tumour. It looked like an alien being, something out of science fiction. She used a technical name, I can’t remember what it was. It reminded me of the word they’d used when Ellen wouldn’t stop bleeding: ectopic. I wondered if it had hurt her like this hurt me, the same kind of way in the same kind of place. Probably everyone’s pain feels different, something they alone can feel. Ellen wasn’t with me, I’d gone on my own. I didn’t want to be responsible for another disappointment. I’d told her nothing, hidden the letter with its hospital stamp. She had enough to worry about.

They wanted to open me up and cut a section of my bowel out, stitch the two new ends back together again.

Wasn’t it complicated down there? Would I be walking funny for the rest of my life?

She promised they’d put me back the way I’d always been. Chemo to mop up any traces that were left and more cameras up the bum to check it hadn’t come back. Five years of monitoring and optimism. She wanted to give me another twenty years.

I watched the creases round her eyes ripple as she spoke and wondered if all the bad news she carried around with her meant she couldn’t enjoy slapstick anymore. I thought about sliding off my chair to test her laughter reflex but I couldn’t figure out a way to do it that wouldn’t look premeditated.

There was outrage and at first it was directed at fate. Then it turned back in on me. I heard the rotten cells racing around inside. They made a high-pitched whizzing sound and they were hell-bent on killing me. I couldn’t blame them. I’d done everything wrong and the payback was a fair one. It was my fault for all the meat I’d eaten and for going too slow. The animals were getting their revenge on me and I was being taught a lesson for my lethargy, for my lack of gumption. Another twenty years sounded like a bad joke. I didn’t know what I’d do with them. I was very tired.

I asked the consultant what would happen if I didn’t have the op. How much time would I have and when would it start hurting. She gave me her best guess.

It’s not that I wanted to die particularly. I just didn’t think I had the fight in me. I was too old and it was too big a thing to go through. It would be too hard. Ellen would have to look after me and that wouldn’t be fair. I was supposed to look after her. I thanked the consultant for everything and told her I’d take my chances.

The cleaner was blocking the corridor with her bucket. I couldn’t wait for her so I took a run up and jumped it. For the split second I was airborne I still hoped a mistake had been made. When I landed again the hope was gone. The mercenary cells were raging. It felt like the years I’d been alive were all in my head. As if I hadn’t really lived them, just been watching them on TV. Now the programme was finished I could hardly remember what it was about. All I could see was Bibhuti taking the sledgehammer, choosing not to crumble. Standing up and smiling shyly for the cameras. He knew how to hold himself when death came marching at him. He knew it even if I didn’t.

The birds were singing too loudly for the time of day. The light was brighter and I smelled freshly cut grass. I dipped my foot in a puddle and pasted my shoeprint down on the tarmac in front of the car so I could watch it dissolve while I worked out the best way to leave so that Ellen wouldn’t blame me.

I stopped off for fish and chips on the way home. The boy who served me was wearing an earring in the shape of a skull. I told him to go to Niagara Falls if he ever got the chance. He said he would but it lacked the substance of a genuine promise. Nobody ever took me seriously.

Ellen was out when I got back, buying things at the market to turn into my dinner. I looked through her drawers and found nothing incriminating. No proof that she’d had an affair, no bundled letters or pictures of strange men. Just the special knickers she used to wear sometimes, balled up at the back under her everyday pairs. I took them out and held them. There were pulls in the satin and the lace was coming away at the trim. I pretended I knew what it meant to be a woman. I felt her hope and her fear and I was in awe of her, of the kindness she showed in reaching for a quiet inelegant man when there must have been other better handholds out there in the world.

Her fish and chips went cold but she ate them anyway, happy not to have to cook. That night in bed when the darkness hid me I brought up the dream she’d had, the one I’d tried to make true. The one that proved I was once as kind and honourable as her.

‘Do you remember?’ I said. ‘The one about the piano?’

She didn’t say anything for a while, and the silence was stifling. I lay beside her in the dark and wished I could undo all the moments when she’d felt like a stranger to me.

‘I was hoping you’d forgotten.’

‘I’ll never forget it. I’d rather die first.’

‘Don’t say that.’

I meant it.

She’d had a dream that she could play the piano. It felt real, more than any other dream she’d had. She’d woken up with the music still in her fingers. The feeling was so strong she’d been convinced something magical had happened, that somehow the capacity to play had been breathed into her while she’d been sleeping.

She’d pawed me awake to tell me. She went through it all while it was still fresh, and her eyes were sparkling. I breathed in early days asbestos and listened to her, enchanted. She could play. She was sure of it. It didn’t matter that she’d never played a note before, the dream had changed all that. A miracle. She got up and went to the window and played the windowsill as if it was keys. She played the kitchen table the same way, and she knew she was putting her fingers in the right places, she could hear the music, flawless in her head. It felt true, as true as anything she’d known, and she had to find out for sure before it wore off. She had to see for herself if dreams could come true.

We skipped breakfast and drove to the nearest music shop, a cluttered vault on the high street with ukuleles hanging like fruits in the window. She told me on the way how she’d always wished she could play but she’d been scared of never being good enough, that her hands could never reproduce the sound inside her head. The dream was a gift from herself, a wonder that happens sometimes after a trauma or an injury or just because you want it and it’s your turn.

‘I know it sounds silly,’ she said.

‘No it’s not,’ I said with conviction. I believed in her right to dream the improbable. I felt it was the least anyone owes another person.

She was like a little girl wandering between the scuffed uprights, feeling nicotined horseteeth keys that other people before her had wrung music from without a second thought for their good fortune. She touched every one, thoughtful and slow, feeling for the perfect symmetry between her new gift and the instrument that would bear it out.

She found the one she was looking for, sat down, rested her fingers on the keyboard.

‘What if it isn’t true?’ she said fearfully.

‘You’ll never know if you don’t try. Just give it a go. What’s the worst that could happen?’

Her expression answered for me. It said the worst that could happen would be the death of that part of herself that danced with its eyes closed. A loss I’d have to spend the rest of my life atoning for in acts of duty and diversionary bluster.

The sales assistant came over and I told him we were just looking. I shielded her from him while she took a breath, wriggled the wisdom into her fingers. She shaped them into a pattern that felt right. The movement on her lips might have been a prayer. Breathing fast she turned to me, young and hopeful, sweet-smelling of rain, and asked for luck.

‘Luck,’ I said.

She pressed her first key down with the little finger of her left hand. It made a sound that could easily become music. She pressed the next finger down. My heart was beating so fast I thought I might be dying of hope. One by one she pressed the keys down. The sounds they made individually rang true. She picked up her hands and moved them to a new configuration and with a final surge of fierce belief she brought them down.

‘I don’t know what I was thinking,’ Ellen said, her voice gaunt in the darkness. ‘I must have looked like a right idiot. You must have thought I’d lost it.’

‘You were beautiful. You believed in something magical. Even if it was just for an hour out of the day, you believed it and so did I. It broke my heart when—’

‘Don’t. I don’t want to think about it.’

It wasn’t the music her dream had promised. It was just noise. She’d kept going, looking for the sweet spot, waiting for the moment when everything would click into place, but it didn’t come.

It was just a dream like any other dream. It meant nothing.

I told her to keep trying, it might still happen, maybe there was just a delay in the signal between the heart and the hands, but it started to feel like a cruelty and I had to reach down and peel her fingers from the keys, as gently as I could.

‘Fuck it,’ she said.

‘I know,’ I said.

‘It felt so real.’

‘Dreams are funny. It’s not your fault.’

She slowly closed the lid on the tactless keys, got up and walked out the door. She didn’t cry, not on the way to the car when my arm around her was supposed to be a sandbag against her sadness. Not when we got home to a silent house. I filled the kettle with hard water and when I kissed her I could only feel what wasn’t there. I had no means of making up for it so I lurched for levity with a clumsy joke.

‘There’s always the tambourine,’ I said, and she laughed in spite of me. It was a Saturday and she went back to bed as if she had the flu. I wandered round the house like a stranger, opening cupboards to see what was inside and planning the best place to put a rocking horse. I heard her crying softly in the night and then it was done. We never talked about it again.

‘What made you think of that?’ Ellen asked.

I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t say it was a parting gift, so when I left she’d know at least that she’d been understood. I couldn’t say it was a breadcrumb she could follow, something that would lead directly to a comforting reminder of our common weakness for dreaming.

I said nothing, slid out of bed and went to make a cup of tea. Her aborted music followed me downstairs and Bibhuti danced behind my eyes. I saw him shining faultless and uninhibited on the TV screen, gliding through the pain barrier like a perfect arrow. I knew there was a message in him from a place beyond the idea of God, a message that I alone would see if I could crack him open. I knew it would invalidate death’s claim on me and rewrite it a brave end to a life poorly lived.

I read the printout I’d made of his interview where he appealed for witnesses to a miracle he’d thought up in his own head. Something beautiful, it was, a tragedy in the making that would sweeten the blood of whoever stood beside him for its duration.

I didn’t need a dogged wife to feed me from a spoon and hold my hand when it got cold. I wanted to die on my feet in a place that was warm and didn’t know my history.