Jog On Fat Barry (26 page)

I stood on the edge of the tower block looking out across the city of London and felt this horrible feeling of loss bearing down on me. Jackie Pepper, Hymie Stump, Ronald Taylor, Kelly Day, Frankie Toast, Big Pat and Jimmy King were all gone. That might mean nothing to most, but little else meant anything at all to me. It started to shower. Drops of rain hit my face. My thoughts drifted back to when I was a boy pulling legs off spiders and woodlice and butterflies in the late afternoon sun of a long-forgotten summer. Life had been so full of hope; so full of possibilities. My mobile phone started to ring again. I reached into my pocket; answered it. Carol was on the other end. She said everyone had been worried sick when I wandered off before they’d even put Jack in the ground. She asked me where I was. I told her I was on the roof of a tower block. She asked me why. I told her I wanted to be that little boy in the garden again.

“Don’t be bloody daft,” she said. “And anyway, your tea’ll be on the table in half an hour.”

I put the phone back in my jacket and looked over the edge. The boys were still playing football. Perhaps me plummeting to my death and making a mess of myself on the pavement in front of them was not meant to be after all. Fate no doubt had something else in store for me. So many people ventured out to do one thing only to end up doing another. And you could no sooner change that, than you could change the blooming world.

fat barry

Fat Barry paid no attention to the floaters drifting across his eyes until it was too late to do anything about them, and then all he could do was watch, as his world began to turn opaque, and things, as he knew them, changed forever. Colour had been the first thing to go: that was in February. By April everything had become two-dimensional. In June objects lost their form. August saw the end of scale, which rendered distance and depth meaningless. And by the third week of September, Barry glanced up at the sky and saw sunlight for the very last time.

“I’m afraid it’s an infection,” an ophthalmologist had told him sometime in July. “It’s caused irreversible damage to your optic nerve, and, well, to put it bluntly, Mr. Price, I’m afraid you’ll soon be completely blind.”

Sometime in October, Fat Barry and Colleen started to argue, and by the end of November they’d stopped talking altogether. She told her mum she didn’t know what to do: that every day it got worse.

“All he ever does is lash out,’ she sobbed. “Acting like this thing with his eyes is because of me, that it’s something I did.”

Barry had become impossible to live with. Colleen kept telling her mum she was going to leave him. And then, two days before Christmas, while Barry dozed on the settee in the front room, she did just that: threw some things in a suitcase and left the flat—Colleen and Fat Barry had been married eight years.

Snow began falling in the early hours on Christmas morning, and by the time it was light, a layer of white powder carpeted Somers Town. The two policemen slowly climbing the stairs of Johnson House stopped on the third floor. Hot water was trickling along the landing. The two officers followed the trickle to number nineteen. There was water seeping out from under the door: little ribbons of steam curled up and away from it. The woman from number eighteen stepped out and nodded at ground.

“It’s been like that all morning,” she said.

One of the policemen peered through the letterbox. He saw water running down the stairs. He stepped back and started kicking the door. It began to crack and splinter. Moments later it gave way and swung open. The policemen entered the flat. The hall was submerged under half an inch of water. They walked past the kitchen and glanced into the sitting room. Anything that could be broken had been: an imitation Christmas tree was upended on the ground, its string of multicolored lights blinking on and off; gold and silver globes lay smashed and scattered around the room; an empty vodka bottle was poking out of the TV screen; a goldfish bowl was overturned; dead fish and gravel strewn across a vinyl tablecloth.

“Ho-fucking-ho-ho,” one of the policemen mumbled.

They started up the stairs: found Fat Barry slumped over a small step stool. One end of some rope was looped round his neck; the rest was coiled across his chest. His arms and legs were all twisted up and tangled, and water was gushing out of the broken pipe above his head.

“Is he dead?” one of the policemen asked.

The other knelt down and pressed three fingers against Barry’s neck.

“No,” he replied.

“He’s a lucky bastard then,” the first said.

“A lucky
fat
bastard,” the second said back.

The resident psychiatrist on call at St. Pancras Hospital Christmas morning sectioned Barry just after 9:00. He was medicated, placed on suicide watch, and admitted to a secure unit on the third floor. Firm instructions were given to the nursing staff to keep their eyes on him, and they were vigilant, but Barry took a running leap at his bedroom window all the same. The urge to end his life was too powerful a force to resist, and he knew plummeting three floors onto the cobblestones below the window would have done that and then some. But the windows in the psycho wards were indestructible for that very reason, and all Barry managed to do was break four fingers and dislocate his jaw.

The following day Barry decided he’d starve himself to death and stopped eating. Four weeks later he still hadn’t eaten and his condition was spiralling out of control. He could no longer stand without falling; kept cracking open his skull or fracturing other parts of his body. Foul-smelling liquid had begun to ooze out of his ears. The nursing staff tried force-feeding him, but Barry wouldn’t have it. Whatever they put in him came right back up again. And it made no difference whether Barry was conscious or not. He’d set his mind to killing himself and nothing was going to prevent him from doing it.

Sometime towards the end of January, a decision was made that recognized Barry had the right to starve himself to death, if that was what he truly wanted, and the nursing staff no longer intervened. Of course, they did monitor his deterioration, and everything was done to ensure his last moments would be as painless as possible. But other than that, he was no longer bothered, and faded quickly. His heartbeat became erratic; he drifted in and out of consciousness; could no longer speak; was unable to hear. There were odd moments when he did suddenly appear lucid, but more often than not, he was alive in a clinical sense only, and did little more than gasp for breath. And then, at 18:57 on the eleventh of February, just as it began to drizzle, Barry imagined he could see again. He opened his eyes and saw his own reflection in the hospital window. He’d withered away to nothing; was all bones and onionskin. He saw that there weren’t any flowers in his room, no cards, or bowl of fruit. Colleen wasn’t sitting there, holding his hand; sharing his last moment. It was just only Barry: alone. And then, he too, was gone.

Earlier that same day, just a few miles north of the hospital, Kevin Lyons had leapt into the Red Arches Viaduct pond on Hampstead Heath after he saw a nine-year-old girl fall through the thawing ice. Kevin was in the pond for twelve minutes; would’ve been in it even longer had the man who telephoned for the ambulance not prevented him from jumping into the freezing water for a second time. The police arrived nine minutes after the telephone call had been placed and found Kevin in his underpants: he’d removed his wet clothing, and his skin was all blue and puffy.

“Blimey,” one policeman whispered to the other after glancing at Kevin. “What’s wrong with his blooming head? Cold water couldn’t have done that to it, could it?”

Kevin was confused: he didn’t seem to know his own name, and he kept repeating, “I looked but couldn’t find him. I never saw him go in.” When the ambulance arrived two minutes later, the paramedics quickly wrapped Kevin and the girl in reflecting heat blankets and checked their vital signs. The girl wouldn’t stop sobbing, and was orally unresponsive, but she had a stable pulse and only slightly elevated respiration. Kevin’s pulse and respiration, on the other hand, were dangerously low, and his heart was fibrillating. He had stopped talking and his blue lips had turned gun-barrel grey.

“Oh dear,” one medic said to the other. “It’s not looking good, is it?”

A journalist from the Camden New Journal who slipped a porter £20 to get him into ICU at the Royal Free Hospital, was the first reporter to interview Kevin when he finally regained consciousness six days after falling into his coma.

“What was it that made you choose the girl and not her brother?” the journalist had asked him.

“I never saw the boy go in,” Kevin had answered. “I looked but couldn’t find him.”

The Camden New Journal put Kevin’s photograph on their front page. But Kevin wished they hadn’t. He didn’t like to look at himself. Acne had left his face badly scarred, and astigmatism forced him to wear black, thick-framed NHS glasses. Of course, what really grieved Kevin was the size of his head: he was a microcephalic, which meant his head was no bigger than a largish rock melon. And microcephaly had also impeded his brain development: Kevin had the intellect of a dimwitted nine-year-old. He was a champion of the people on one hand, but a pinheaded idiot on the other. The parents of the girl however were adamant that Kevin should be given the George Cross for bravery, even if he hadn’t saved their son.

Now not all nurses are pleasant; in fact, some are downright nasty, but some of the ones working the ICU were diamonds. They threw that journalist out quick smart, and did everything they could to make life a little bit brighter for Kevin, when they didn’t have their hands full with other patients, that is. Kevin confided in some of them that he wasn’t the only horrible thing to look at in the ICU. Other patients were equally so. One had leapt in front of a train at Archway station and not only lost both their arms and legs, but smashed their face in so badly that Kevin couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Someone else had been horribly burnt in a car crash and now had no ears, lips, eyelids, eyes, hair, or fingers. Most nights Kevin lay listening to the man in the bed next to his struggling for breath. The man was matchstick-thin and seemed to be clinging onto life by the slenderest of threads. Every mouthful of air he took was a battle, and Kevin overheard one of the nurses tell another, “The silly blind bugger’s been trying to starve himself to death,” while they were changing his soiled bedding.

Three days after Kevin had regained consciousness, a cardiologist stopped by the ICU to ask him if he knew what
cardiomyopathy
was. All Kevin could think to say in reply was that the silly blind bugger in the bed beside his was trying to starve himself to death. The cardiologist asked who looked after him.

“The lady from the council,” Kevin replied.

The cardiologist asked Kevin if his parents were still living, but Kevin just stared back at him blankly. The cardiologist asked if Kevin was in contact with his mother. Kevin didn’t say anything at first, but then said the lady from the council told another lady his mother had done a runner.

“How old are you?” the cardiologist asked.

Kevin began to count on his fingers but stopped when he reached twenty-six. He hesitated for a moment, puckering his lips and scratching his head.

“Forty odd,” he eventually said.

The cardiologist nodded and feigned a smile. Moments later she told one of the nurses that Kevin would need a heart transplant.

“Do you think he’d be approved for one?” the nurse asked.

“Probably not,” the cardiologist replied. “But what he’s got now is well past its sell-by date.”