Playing for the Ashes (74 page)

I knew that Chris would never be the one to bring up ALS. I had made the decision to start using a cane. I had made the decision when it was time for a second cane. I could see that the next step was going to be a walker so that I could drag myself more efficiently from bedroom to loo, from loo to galley, from galley to workroom to bedroom again. But after that, when the walker began putting demands on my endurance that I could no longer meet, I would be forced into a wheelchair. And it was the wheelchair I feared—the wheelchair I still desperately fear—and all that the wheelchair implies. But these were things that Chris would never speak of because the disease was mine, not his, and the decisions that went along with fighting the disease were mine, not his, as well. So if these pending decisions were going to be discussed, I was the one who was going to have to introduce the topic.

When I began to use the aluminium walker, to wrestle my way from the workroom into the galley, I knew it was time. The effort at movement with the walker brought sweat out in great patches down my back and beneath my arms. I tried to tell myself that the only problem was one of getting used to this new form of mobility, but to get used to a new form of mobility I was expecting myself to build upper-body strength in a situation in which strength was draining from me a teaspoon at a time. It became apparent that Chris and I would have to talk.

I’d been using the walker for less than three weeks when Max came to spend an evening with us. It was in early April, this very year, on a Sunday evening. We’d had dinner together, and we were sitting on the deck of the barge watching the dogs play-act at brawling on the roof of the cabin. Chris had carried me up the stairs, Max had lit my cigarette, both had pulled at non-existent forelocks, made sweeping bows, and disappeared below to fetch blankets, brandy, glasses, and the bowl of fruit. I heard the murmur of their voices: Chris saying, “No, nothing really,” and Max saying, “Seems weaker.” I turned away from the sound of them as best I could and concentrated on the canal, the pool, and Browning’s Island.

It was hard to believe that I’d been here
fiv
e years, coming and going, establishing myself at the zoo, moving animals in and out, alternately fighting with and loving Chris. There had been moments when I’d acknowledged the safety and the peace of this place, but never before had each element of Little Venice meant to me what it meant that night. I took all of it in in great gulps, like air. The one strange willow on Browning’s Island that, dissimilar to the others, leans like a reckless schoolboy over the water, drooping branches within an inch of the pier. The row of citruscoloured barges whose owners sit on the decks when the evening’s pleasant and nod and wave as we run the dogs by. The red and green wrought-iron of the Warwick Avenue bridge and the great row of white houses that line the avenue that leads to the bridge. And in front of those houses, the ornamental cherry trees are beginning to bloom, and the wind stirs the blossoms like angel’s hair and they float to the pavement and form palettes of pink. Birds scatter the petals. They dart from Warwick Avenue to the canal. There they
fli
tter from tree to towpath in a search for bits of string, small twigs, hair from which to fashion their nests…. How could I leave this place?

Then I heard their voices again.

“…difficult, you know…She calls it our trial by fire…doing her best to understand…”

And Max’s reply: “…whenever you need to get away, you know.”

And Chris: “Thanks. I know. It makes things more bearable.”

I studied the water, how the outline of the canal trees and the buildings beyond them zigzagged in the ripples, how a goose plopping into the pool from the island caused an ever-widening circle of undulations that ultimately reached but did not move the barge. I felt no betrayal in the fact that Chris and Max were talking about me, about her whose name I still didn’t know, about the miserable situation we found ourselves in. It was time I did some talking about myself.

They returned with the brandy, the glasses, the fruit. Chris wrapped a blanket round my legs and, with a smile, tapped his
fin
gers gently against my cheek. Beans leaped off the cabin’s roof to the deck, eager at the prospect of food. Toast pranced along the edge of the roof, whining and waiting for someone to lift him down.

“He’s being a baby,” Chris said as Max made a move to lower Toast to the deck. “He can manage well enough.”

“Ah, but he’s a sweet wee beastie,” Max said as he set Toast next to Beans. “That being the case, I don’t mind the trouble.”

“So long as he doesn’t get used to being catered to,” Chris said. “He’ll become too dependent if he knows someone’s willing to do for him what he can do for himself. And that, my friend, will be the ruination of him.”

“What?” I asked. “Dependence?”

Max took his time about cutting up an apple. Chris poured the brandy and sat at my feet. He pulled Beans down next to him and rubbed the tender spot he called “the area of supreme puppy ecstasy” just underneath the beagle’s
flo
ppy ears.

“It is,” I said.

“What?” Chris asked. Max fed a quarter of the apple to Toast.

“Ruination. You’re right. Dependence leads to ruination.”

“I was just blithering about nothing, Livie.”

“It’s like a fishing net,” I said. “You’ve seen them, haven’t you? The kind boats lay out on the surface of the water to catch a school of mackerel or something. That’s what ruination is, a net. It doesn’t just snag and destroy the dependent one. It catches everyone else as well. All the little fishes swimming blithely along with the single
fis
h who’s dependent in the
fir
st place.”

“That’s rather an elastic metaphor, girlie.” Max plunged his knife into another apple quarter and held it out to me. I shook my head.

“It suits,” I said. I looked at Chris. He held my gaze. His hand stopped rubbing beneath the beagle’s ears. Beans nudged his
fin
gers. Chris dropped his eyes.

“If all those fish swam apart from one another, they’d never be caught,” I said. “Oh, perhaps one or two of them, even ten or twelve. But not the whole school. That’s what’s so sad about the fact that they stay together.”

“It’s instinct,” Chris said. “That’s how they operate. Schools of
fis
h, flocks of birds, herds of animals. It’s all the same.”

“Except for people. We don’t need to operate on instinct. We can reason things through and do what’s best to protect our fellows from our own ruination. Don’t you agree? Chris? Well?”

He began to peel an orange. I could feel the rich oil of its scent on the back of my tongue as I drew a breath. He began to divide the orange into sections. He handed me one. Our fingers touched as I took it. He turned his head and examined the water as if he was searching for debris.

Max said, “There’s some sense to what you’re saying, girlie.”

Chris said, “Max,” in a cautious tone.

Max said, “It’s a question of responsibility. How far are we responsible for the lives that have meshed with our own?”

“And for the ruination of those lives,” I said. “Especially if we turn a blind eye to what we can do to prevent the ruination.”

Max fed the rest of his apple to the dogs—a quarter to Beans, a quarter to Toast. He set upon another with his paring knife. This time he peeled it, starting at the top and striving to achieve a single spiral. We watched him, Chris and I. The knife slipped three-quarters of the way through the project, slitting through the peel, which fell to the deck. The three of us observed it against the boards, a ribbon of red marking a failed attempt at perfection.

“So I can’t,” I said. “You see that, don’t you?”

“What?” Chris asked.

We watched the dogs sniff at and then reject the apple peel. They wanted the real thing, Beans and Toast. The sweet pith of the fruit, not the biting sharp taste of the skin.

“What?” Chris repeated. “Can’t what?”

“Be responsible.”

“For what?”

“You know. Come on, Chris.”

I watched him closely. He had to feel relief at my words. I wasn’t his wife, wasn’t even his lover, had never been either, had never been promised that I might be either. I was
fiv
e years later the tart he’d picked off the street across from Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre as he’d passed by with a ruined dog on a lead. I had held my own as his barge mate. I had made a contribution to our living circumstances. But the time that I was going to be able to continue doing so was fast running out. Both of us knew it. So I watched him and waited to see an indication that he recognised the moment when his deliverance was at hand.

And yes, I suppose I wanted him to protest. I imagined him saying, “I can cope. We can cope. We always have done. We always will do. We’re bound together, you and I are, Livie. We’re in it till the end.”

Because he’d said it before in rather different words when it was easier, when the ALS wasn’t quite as bad as it was fast becoming. Then we could talk bravely about how it would be, but we didn’t have to face it because it wasn’t how-it-would-be at the moment. But this time, he said nothing. He pulled Toast to him and scrutinised a rough patch between the dog’s eyes. Toast enjoyed the attention and brushed his tail happily against the deck.

“Chris?” I said.

“You’re not my ruination,” he answered. “Things’re tough, that’s all.”

Max pulled the cork from the brandy bottle and topped up our glasses although we’d none of us touched a drop yet. He rested his big hand on my knee for a moment. He squeezed. The pressure said, Take heart, girlie, go on.

“My legs are getting weaker. The walker’s not enough.”

“You need to get used to it. Build up your strength.”

“My legs’ll be like cooked spaghetti, Chris.”

“You’re not practising enough. You’re not using the walker as much as you could.”

“I won’t be able to stand in another two months.”

“If your arms are in shape, then—”

“Goddamn it,
listen
. I’m going to need a wheelchair.”

Chris made no reply. Max rose, rested his hips against the roof of the cabin. He drank from his brandy. He set the glass on the cabin roof and fished in his pocket for the stub of a cigar. He put it into his mouth, unlit.

“So we’ll get a wheelchair,” Chris said.

“And then what?” I asked.

“What?”

“Where do I live?”

“What do you mean? Here. Where else?”

“Don’t be so daft. I can’t. You know it. You built it, didn’t you?” Chris looked blank. “I can’t stay here,” I said. “I won’t be able to get about.”

“Of course you—”

“The doorways, Chris.”

I’d said all I could. The walker, the wheelchair. He didn’t need to know any more than that. I couldn’t talk about the vibrations that had started in my fingers. I couldn’t mention how a biro had begun to slide wildly across the paper like leather soles against polished wood when I tried to write. Because that told me that even the wheelchair I dreaded and loathed would serve me only a few precious months before ALS made my arms as useless as my legs were becoming.

“I’m not ill enough yet for a nursing home,” I told him. “But I’m getting too ill to stay here.”

Max tossed his cigar stub—still unlit—into the tomato tin. He stepped past the dogs who sprawled on either side of Chris and came round to the back of my chair. I felt his hands on my shoulders. Warmth and pressure, the faint indication of a massage. He saw me as noble and saintly, did Max, the best of English womanhood on the fade, a disease-ridden sufferer releasing her beloved into living a life of his own. What rubbish. I was hovering directly between hollow and nothing.

“We’ll move, then,” Chris said. “Find digs where you can get about easy in a chair.”

“Not from your home,” I said. “We won’t do that.”

“I can let the barge easier than anything, Livie. Probably for more than we’d pay for a flat. I don’t want you—”

“I’ve already phoned her,” I said. “She knows I want to see her. She just doesn’t know why.”

Chris raised his head to look behind me. I kept perfectly still. I summoned the presence of Liv Whitelaw the Outlaw to see me through the lie without a crack in composure.

“It’s done,” I said.

“When are you going to see her?”

“When I think it’s time. We left it at the I’d-like-to-get-together-with-you-if-you-canbear-it stage.”

“And she’s willing?”

“She’s still my mother, Chris.” I crushed out my cigarette and shook another into my lap. I held it between my fingers without lifting it to my mouth. I didn’t want to smoke it as much as I wanted something to do until he responded. But he said nothing. It was Max who replied.

“You’ve made a proper decision, girlie. She’s a right to know. You’ve a right to her help.”