Maggie bobbed up with a handful of paper napkins, and began wiping the waitress’s chest and dress. Desmond repeated ‘sorry’ countless times. Once more their party was the centre of covert attention. When the waitress had been quieted as much as possible, and had retired, Cathy ate a hearty portion from Maggie’s spoon. The others, including David, picked at their orders. David never had an appetite on these occasions, although he was fond of scampi and chips. Desmond’s unease always communicated to him like an electric current.

  It was resolved between Maggie and Desmond, that Cathy would follow with sticky toffee pudding, but before this request could be placed, the manager visited their table. He was young and affable, with a shaven and shining head, and shoulders which bulged under his suit. Desmond shook hands with him as though he was a foreign potentate, and launched into an ode of regret, subtly flavoured with self-pity, for the plight of one who has to manage a disabled person. He also produced a twenty pound note for ‘dry cleaning’ which disappeared into the wide palm of the manager.

  The manager was unperturbed. “We have a lot of people here from the Hall. We understand. We value the custom. Debbie isn’t hurt, that’s the main thing.”

  In this moment of peace, having achieved a perfect recovery, and with the manager about to depart following Desmond’s second hand-shake, Cathy let out a loud, and very long fart.

  “Oh, my God!” Desmond groaned, running his fingers through his hair in exasperation.

  The manager affected not to hear, and backed away. An unsavoury smell engulfed the table.

  “Are you all right, dear?” Maggie asked.

  “Pooh,” Cathy said.

  “She needs to go to the toilet,” David said.

  “Oh, no! I thought … surely she wears a nappy?” Desmond said.

  “She does,” Maggie said, “but she needs changing, like a baby.”

  “But this never happened before, I mean …”

  “Cheer up, Mr Marsden, shit happens!” Maggie said, holding up a plastic bag, with a spare nappy inside.

  “What will we do?” Desmond asked, plaintively.

  “I’ll take her to the ladies’ toilet, and try to clean her up, otherwise …you know it could be unpleasant and messy in your car,” Maggie said.

  “Can you manage her on your own?” David asked, thinking that the slender Maggie seemed to have no strength for such a task.

  “There’s nobody else, is there?” she said, in a chirpy tone.

  David began to foresee problems, but he didn’t voice them because there was no solution. On this floor there was only one ladies’ lavatory, which Cathy would have to occupy. The other lavatory, was a floor above, and there was no lift. It meant that the room on this level was in constant use. If Maggie went in there with Cathy, and Cathy wasn’t cooperative, there would be a delay. Cathy sometimes resisted being handled by carers, and the acrobatics of changing her pants in a confined space were almost unimaginable.

  Cathy was able to support herself, aided, for a few yards, and Maggie, with Desmond’s help, got her to the door of the lavatory, which was within sight of their table. Desmond pushed Cathy and Maggie inside the door, closed it, and went to the bar where he ordered, and drank, a double whisky before returning to David.

  David sat with Desmond while at least three women went into the lavatory, and came out immediately, looking uncomfortable and frowning.

  “Something’s gone wrong!” Desmond said, his mouth turned down.

  After five minutes, Maggie came out of the lavatory on her own, looking worried. She came across to them.

  “It’s a hell of a mess in there. I can’t get her clothes on. She’s on the floor. She can’t get up, and I can’t lift her, and there’s shit over everything, the floor, the walls, her clothes!”

  “And you,” Desmond said, distastefully.

  “What do you expect?” Maggie flared.

  “I’ll call Keith,” Desmond said, pulling out his mobile phone.

  “Why don’t you just come in, and help me, Mr Marsden?”

  “I can’t go in there!” Desmond said, looking mortified.

  “Why not? Nobody else can at the moment.”

  “David will go in and help, won’t you, David?” Desmond said, coaxingly.

  “David’s got a bad back. He can’t go in there,” Maggie said. “Sit down, David. You’ll make things worse.”

  “I’m not going into the ladies’ lavatory!” Desmond asserted, spitting out the words between his teeth, and proceeding with the call.

  At least two other women tried to get into the lavatory while Desmond was talking to Keith on the phone. A knot of women customers, who wished to relieve themselves, had gathered outside the door, and a waitress was listening sympathetically to their complaints. They had called the manager.

  The manager did not appear to be so generous when he swayed over to Desmond’s table this time. But eventually he accepted Desmond’s assurance that a team from the Hall would arrive in moments. They would, Desmond said, clean and disinfect the place like a hospital. While Desmond agonised, anxious women waited, or reluctantly climbed the stairs. Tempers simmered. Keith, true to form, arrived in half an hour with two female carers, fresh nappies, towels, cleaning materials, powders and disinfectants, and clean clothes for Cathy. He was business-like and cool, as though this kind of call-out was perfectly ordinary.

  Keith returned a refurbished and cheerful Cathy, to them twenty minutes after his ministrations began.

  “She’s been having a whale of a time in the loo, haven’t you, darling?” he said.

  Keith’s squad disappeared very quickly, and Desmond’s small procession wound its way towards the front door. Desmond, in the lead, seemed to dissociate himself, while Cathy, with help from Maggie and David, proceeded with her leg-locked gait like a walking peg. Customers of the White Swan glanced up from their beers, and probably thought Cathy was drunk, until they saw Maggie in her blue check shirt, with a plastic photo-identity card on a cord around her neck. Then they looked away.

  David spent a few mornings wandering about the Eccleston Street area, hoping to see somebody exercising Poppy, other than Mrs Temple. One day, Poppy was collected by a man in a van, which was full of dogs. Poppy was quickly bundled inside, and the van drove off in the direction of the South Downs. If that was the regular arrangement for Poppy, then David thought his mission was hopeless.

  On another morning, Poppy was collected by a stout, elderly woman with a mop of silver curls, who had four other dogs on leashes at the same time. One dog was a German Shepherd, another a woolly Old English Sheepdog with hair over its eyes, and two small well-barbered poodles. Mrs Temple’s maid, alarmed by the barking and scrambling of the animals on the porch, dropped Poppy’s leash before the dog-woman could grasp it. The maid bolted back inside the door, and shut it quickly, and the dog-walker had to dive into the melee of animals to retrieve the leash.

  The dog-walker had a rich round voice, commanding ‘Justina’ to come to heel. She soon assumed control of Poppy, and quietened the rest of the pack, issuing grave threats to Adolf, the shepherd, and Hercules, the sheepdog.

  The dog-walker progressed slowly down Eccleston Street, drawn by the straining animals, talking to the dogs in firm clear tones, about what was in store for them in the way of food, a bath, and grooming, and asserting how they would love it.

  “You’re all thoroughly spoiled, you lot,” she said to them.

  At times, she commented to the dogs on what took her fancy in the street.

  “That’s a delightful basket of lobelia, Hercules. That wonderful misty purple-white effect.”

  David was moving hesitantly under the trees, near the opposite side of the street, and deciding that he must take this opportunity. He swayed across the road.

  “Excuse me, could I speak to you, please?”

  The dog-woman watched his approach. She stopped, ringed by her charges. She had the haughty look of a celebrity surrounded by bodyguards.

  “L-l-l-ovely dogs,” David said.

  Before the woman could reply, Poppy began to bark, and strain at the leash.

  “Quiet, Justina!”

  Poppy was powerful enough to pull the woman toward him. At this moment, Adolf too, began to bark and strain. The poodles started yapping, and Hercules, who had watched with his one visible blue eye, joined in. David was engulfed by a pack of yelping dogs, pawing at him, and got caught up in their leashes.

  The commanding shouts of the dog-walker could not restore order, but she held the leashes firmly. David was able to extricate himself, soiled and a little frightened, with a small tear in his trousers from the teeth of one of the poodles. He was unhurt. As the dogs began to quieten down under the woman’s orders, David fell back several feet beyond their radius.

  “Whew! I…th-thought…” he began.

  “You’re all right, of course, young man! Soft as butter. That’s what they are. Soft as butter!”

  “L-l-l-ovely dogs,” he said again, as the woman began to proceed on her way, impregnable within the cordon of her guards.

  “They’re very boisterous,” she said lightly, turning her head back to David with her chin up, “and you have to keep clear, even if you love them!”

  8

  When the White Swan became too difficult, David continued to take Cathy for visits to Cafe Nero in Brighton, or ‘Fay Nero’ as she called it, for cappuccino and chocolate cake – that was if he could arrange the Hall’s minibus. He would spoon broken pieces of cake into Cathy’s mouth, and lift the cup to her lips. When Cathy didn’t swallow, chocolate and cream dripped from her chin. He would end their treat with a pile of crumpled paper napkins in front of him on the table. The lower part of Cathy’s carefully wiped face, would have a distinct brown tinge. They both enjoyed themselves, but these occasions became less and less possible as the months passed. Now Cathy could not walk, talk or perform any task. Her limbs had become uncontrollable flippers, and she was fed and pottied like a baby. Through this deterioration she retained a sedateness and sense of humour, which David admired. Cathy could still sometimes understand a joke, and she still laughed.

  The mystery about Cathy, was how much she understood about what was happening around her. Clearly, an everdiminishing something, but exactly how much? Cathy was viewed with affection by the staff, but did they, nevertheless, have to take care what they said about her, in her presence? This unknown set Cathy apart – the increasingly useless body, locking in a mind which was much less useless. Not everybody dealing with Cathy reckoned on the probability that she knew more than her bodily signals suggested. Desmond was the prime example. After Cathy had been at the Hall a couple of years, he spoke in front of her as though she wasn’t there. The staff were much more sensitive, but David could see a point, not too far ahead, when Cathy would become merely part of the furniture.

  Before Cathy’s ability to speak had declined markedly, she tried to explain her condition to David. He remembered a summer, when he was wheeling her along the Brighton esplanade. The Denby Hall minibus, which had transported a group of inmates to the beach, was parked a quarter of a mile back. Cathy and David had Ian’s permission to go off for half an hour on their own, while the rest of the group sat in deck chairs in the sun and licked ice-creams. David pushed Cathy along the footpath and cycle track, past the bathing huts and the sunburnt croquet green. He stopped in a bus shelter to rest his painful leg, pulling the wheelchair close. He took a cigarette from the supply he carried for Cathy, lit it, and held it to her lips. The noise from the passing cars and buses was partially shielded by the shelter. No other people were on the footpath at that time. They were quite private.

  Cathy drew deeply on the cigarette. She was regretting the scene she had made a little earlier, in the confusion, when they were getting off the bus.

  “I know I get frustrated, and I start shouting when I can’t get what I want.”

  “Nobody cares. A bit of noise.”

  “I can sometimes understand what’s going on, but I can’t communicate what I want, David.”

  “You’re doing well.”

  “You sound like Dr Floor. I’m conscious. I know what’s going on in my mind. I understand a lot of what’s going on in the minds of others. But there’s a gulf, a disconnection. I can be manipulated, but I can’t manipulate.”

  David grinned. “People ask questions we can’t answer, and then they act on the answers they’ve supplied themselves.”

  “I can’t do anything but cry out. You see, it’s like being bricked into a cell.”

  “Prison?”

  “Yes. The cell has a solid roof and walls. There’s no door. I can’t get out. I’ll never get out. And the bricks are constantly being added to the small viewing space I have.”

  “You can see through the hole,” David said, optimistically.

  Cathy was being pragmatic, not looking for sympathy. She talked as though she was describing a piece of building work.

  “I can more or less see and hear who is out there, through the hole, but they can’t really hear me – except you – although sometimes they think they can. I have to scream.”

  “What about the bricks?” David asked.

  “As more bricks are placed in the space where the hole is, the view diminishes. Everything is gradually disappearing from view. I can see, hear and feel less. I’m being buried alive, bricked into a dark cavity. Eventually, only a tiny crack of light will come in, if that.”

  Cathy was calmly serious.

  David was disturbed. “Who… places the bricks?”

  Cathy’s face smoothed. “Nobody in particular, although I suppose people’s actions sometimes cause more bricks to be placed. It’s part of the process, I guess.”

  “Process?”

  “Dying. The progress of the disease.”

  “Can I do anything?”

  “Nobody can do anything. I’m reconciled to the dying of the light. It’s all right. It’s what’s happening to me. I’ve got used to the idea. It’s almost comforting to distance myself from what’s happening out there. I’m a very sick person, David. And when I say ‘I’, I don’t have any sense of myself. I can’t find myself.”

  “I’m not sure I can either. Maybe I lost myself in the accident. Maybe I never found myself anyway,” David said.

  “The truth, David, I think, is that there’s no self to find. All there is, is a bunch of reflexes and responses, coordinated in different ways at different times. When people say, ‘This is Cathy,’ or, pointing to the past, say ‘That was Cathy’ it’s an illusion. It’s an illusion in the sense that it’s not constant. It’s always changing, depending upon who sees what, at that moment. It’s a great freedom to find that there’s no definitive self. I can give up the search…”

  “Do you think that’s why people shy away from us… because we’ve kind of become disembodied or …disintegrated?”

  “I don’t think we’ve disintegrated, because we were never together. Nor were other people ever together. No. Others can still see what they regard as me, my body, like the gnarled old trunk of a tree, which survives the falling of leaves and branches over the years. But that old tree-trunk isn’t me. This useless body isn’t me.”

  David had a view of Cathy as a spirit, free of her body. “What are you, then?”

  “I think…I’m just a consciousness, in an ever-thickening darkness.”

  David found the thought pleasing. He, too, was a consciousness in cloudy daylight.

  Cathy said, “I’ll tell you what I do. I close my eyes. I don’t breathe. I let my breath come when it comes. If worries or fears come, I let them go, let them drift away. I feel there is nothing I want to grasp. It’s all empty, and I’m empty. I have no sense of ‘self ’ at all. I have let go and I’m at rest, completely free.”

  Cathy’s face was suffused in a smile, her eyes shone with changing lights, and her long, thin, dark eyebrows puckered. David fussed with the wheelchair, releasing the wheelbrakes. He tucked the cigarettes and matches into his pocket. Cathy strained back to see him. She had an impish look.

  She shrugged, and said quietly, “You see, what’s happening to me is both fearful, and liberating at the same time.”

  David patted her arm, and began to wheel the chair back along the promenade, toward the Denby Hall minibus. The sun was warm, and David felt like having a vanilla ice-cream.

  After David had been at Denby Hall for more than a year, his father came on a visit, a little put out that David had neither telephoned nor come home for a weekend recently. They ended the visit, after a short walk, in the empty sitting room. They were surrounded by the old collection of beaten up musical instruments used by the music class; the stained drums, dented trumpets and guitars with three strings. The sun streamed in on the faded couch. The room was very hot.

  His father set his jaw seriously, and assumed a lower, more intimate tone. “I know you’ve had a bad knock, son, but the doctors tell me that your intelligence is unimpaired. You’re a very clever boy. You can’t remember the past at the moment, but there’s no limit to what you can achieve in the present and future. No limit.”

  “That’s good, but I’m not sure what I want to do.”

  “I just want you to remember, David, that you can’t mark time here at Denby Hall.”

  “Why not?”

  “The future!” his father said, opening his eyes wide.

  “What is that?” David asked cautiously.

  “David, it’s a long road, fraught with challenges, and obstacles to be overcome.”

  “If that’s what it is, I’m not sure I want to go there.”

  His father disregarded the comment. He said, as though it was a revelation, “You have to have a plan.”

  “Supposing I don’t have a plan … can’t make up my mind?”

  “No such thing as can’t! I’m here to help.”

  “Can it be my plan?”

  This request surprised his father

  “As long as you’re serious, David,” he said doubtfully. “You have to be serious.”

 

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