Birthday

‘I’m glad you have. Come on in.’

Everything you did was wrong, even more so when you thought well and long before doing it, but she seemed happy at him standing before her, the only sign a tremble of hands as he followed her in. ‘An old friend’s come to see us.’

George had been forewarned perhaps, so as to hide the importance of what they had been to each other, though he didn’t see why she should be diffident about it. George must have known of her life before they met, since she’d had a kid already, but the hint that they had been more than acquaintances made Brian smile. Maybe she thought that the old adolescent intensity might even now flame up between them. At least the lifetime of suffering under George’s misfortune hadn’t broken her.

They entered the brightly lit living room. ‘Brian’s an old friend. He used to know mam and dad.’

Large windows showed a well trimmed garden, an umbrageous laurel tree in the far corner beyond a newly creosoted tool shed. In the room blue and white plaster birds were fixed in attitudes of purposeful flight along the wall opposite the fireplace, on the wing to a place George might well mull on in his despairing hours, glazed eyes following the direction of their long necks. With such wings, and being heavier than air, they would fly neither far nor easily, kept from a real sky by the ceiling.

He looked away as they came into the room,the open book face down, on knees kept together by his all-tech wheelchair. A palish glow on his face suggested that movement was hard labour, as if eternally sitting with the useless lower part of himself sapped his energy, took far more of his attention than in the days when he had walked with his shovel from mould to mould around the foundry thinking of the ale he would put down in the pub after knocking-off time.

The shine of his intensely blue eyes, out of a broad face in which the bones were nevertheless visible, hinted that the accident happened last month instead of twenty-five years ago. His expression was of living by the minute, as if things hadn’t changed nor time moved from the moment he had come out of the hospital. Nothing to look forward to, and little enough to think back on the longer his incapacity lasted, kept him separate and aloof, king of each moment on his wheelchair throne, only able to reign since he could no longer hope.

The furnishings of a three-piece suite on the thick piled carpets gave a temporary aspect to the room, as if George hoped to be moving out in the next week or two. Maybe Jenny had created it that way out of a restless nature now that she too was imprisoned.

The floral pattern of wallpaper was broken by pictures and framed photographs of children on a climbing frame, a youth straddling a motorbike, two young wide-smiling girls in Goose Fair hats. He was never alone with so many children and grandchildren, a living theatre to vicariously take part in. He sometimes stared at the photographs as if he hardly knew the people in them, though he did right enough, because who else was there for such as him to acknowledge?

His blue shirt was open at the neck, grey hairs below the throat, pudgy white veined hands resting on a tartan blanket covering his withered knees. Order had been arranged around him by Jenny, as much for her benefit as his, because without the routine of a twenty-four hour job such a life would have been insupportable. She had to make sure he was fed, get him into and out of bed, wash him and dress him and see to his toilet requirements, knowing it would go on into old age, never a thought of giving in, of saying it was too much, that it was breaking her back and would one day burst her heart. Maybe she wanted to shout: ‘For God’s sake take him to a nursing home, this is killing me, I can no longer cope,’ but she’d never say it because George was king, and she the country he ruled over, a pact which enabled her to go on living.

He took Brian’s hand between cool fingers as if the rite was foreign but he wanted to pass the test nevertheless. ‘She’s told me about you a time or two.’

He wondered what she had said, though anything would be of interest to George, for whom the past, no matter how far off, was only yesterday. The face-down paperback on the arm of his chair was about the siege of Tobruk. ‘Are you reading that?’

His smile indicated eternal worry, self-pity the desert of his affliction, sandstorms depriving him of visibility on long passages through and back and through again. When able to rest from the irritation he was amazed that the small distance had taken such gruelling effort, which showed on the part of his mouth to which the smile was hinged. ‘I was there, once upon a time.’

‘It looks interesting.’

‘I find it so.’

‘Thanks, duck!’ Brian used the old lingo for Jenny when she came with tea and a plate of biscuits, the cup rattling against its saucer like a garbled telegraph message. ‘You were in the army, then?’ he said to George.

‘Yeh, when I was young. And after the war ended I never thought I’d look back and say how wonderful life had been in a German prison camp, though maybe it would have been the same even if I wasn’t in this contraption.’

Jenny’s smile showed relief at George talking with such liveliness. In trying to read more from her expression, Brian got as far into nowhere as he always had. Her back was straighter than when she had met him at the door, a stance showing more alertness, though why it should be necessary he couldn’t tell, unless on kneeling by the chair to rework the blanket over his legs, or wipe the tea his shaking hands had spilled, she was fearful of his fist, powered by an inboiling irritation from a mind demented by uselessness, snaking out at her face. He wouldn’t do it before a guest, but was easy to imagine in the quiet and seemingly endless afternoons when they were alone. He sensed something and wished he hadn’t, wanted to go, sorry he had come, such scenes of domestic knockabout familiar from childhood when the old man battered his mother and the rest of the family out of despair at being unemployed, or at not being able to read or write.

‘The only break I get these days,’ George went on, ‘is a fortnight every year at Ingoldmells. Still, it gets me away from this place.’

‘My brother Arthur and his wife go fishing near Skegness,’ Brian said. ‘I stay with them overnight when they hire a caravan.’

‘He fishes in the sea?’

Brian laughed, for no reason except that it was about time somebody did. ‘No, it’s a mile inland, at a big pond in the middle of a field. But it’s good sport.’ He had bought Arthur The Compleat Angler and he had read it more than once. ‘The caravan’s parked by the water, so they stagger out in their dressing gowns for an hour’s fishing before breakfast. They chuck everything back, naturally.’ He didn’t want to dwell too long on such a pastime with a man who wasn’t able to take part in it, though maybe he could if someone pushed him to the water’s edge. ‘If Jenny gave you a rod and some bait you could try your luck. You’d probably catch buckets.’

George laughed, for the first time. ‘Not on your life. She might push me in.’

‘Don’t talk so daft,’ Jenny said.

‘Well, I’m not serious, am I? When I was a kid’ – he smiled, as if he might still be one, and have life to live over again – ‘I went after tiddlers, scooped ’em up in a jam jar with a bit of string around the neck. It wasn’t easy, but I always got some. We lived in Basford Crossing, and the Leen was our favourite stream. There were eight of us kids in the family, and when we went out as a tribe nobody could harm us. We often stayed by the water all day, rain or shine. Mam would wrap us up sandwiches in greaseproof paper, and fill bottles of cold tea left over from breakfast. There was always something interesting to look at, as long as the stream kept running, and it always did. Never stopped, did it? Well, it couldn’t, could it?’ The idea of the stream ceasing to flow seemed to alarm him. ‘It could no more stop than the Trent could stop. Or any river, come to that, though the Leen’s only a piddling little brook.’ He smiled again. ‘It was cold, though, if you fell in, and I did a time or two. It’s a wonder one of us didn’t drown, but kids had charmed lives in those days.’

Old times meant more to him than anybody else, but they were important to everybody the older or more physically difficult life became. With Arthur and Derek he often made fun of them, because if you didn’t the reality of so-called halcyon days didn’t bear thinking about, and there was too much happening in the present to have their weight as well on your back. Even so, it would be cruel to scoff at such times in front of George, who dropped a host of sugars into his tea: ‘Jenny tells me you’ve done very well for yourself in London.’

‘You could say I’ve made a living.’ George’s tone implied that he must have done so out of trickery and skiving. ‘But I like to come up and see my brothers, who are always glad to see me. In any case, I’m still fond of the old place.’

‘Why did you leave it, then?’

‘I lived here till I was eighteen, then thought I’d take off.’ Enough of the apologetic tone for having made use of his legs. ‘We called at the White Horse for a pint or two last night.’

‘Sometimes we get in the car,’ Jenny said, ‘and go for a drink, don’t we, duck?’

‘Aye, and a right bleddy ta-tar it is, lifting me in and out of this thing.’ He looked at Brian, ignoring Jenny. ‘I ain’t been in the White Horse for years. Not that I could put much back if I did. Apart from having to watch my weight, I’ve got too many pills inside to swill ale down as well. Still, I can let myself go a bit when I’m in Ingoldmells. When I’m away from home, if you see what I mean. I don’t have Jenny fussing over me every second of the day and night. It’s the only time we get a rest from each other, and I’m sure she deserves it. I know I do.’

She kissed him on the forehead. ‘It makes a change. You like to have young nurses pushing you up and down the seafront, don’t you? And all that sea air! You do look a lot better when you get back.’

‘Jenny takes me, and then she fetches me. Anyway,’ George said to him, ‘you manage to get around a bit?’

Brian set his empty cup on the table. ‘When I can. I drove through Yugoslavia to Greece last year, and put the car on a ship to Israel. It was a treat, steaming through the islands.’

‘Did you look in on Libya? Or Crete, where we changed ships as prisoners of bloody war.’

‘It wasn’t on our way. We stopped an hour or two at Cyprus, but there wasn’t time to get off.’

‘I’d like to go back and see Tobruk.’ He gazed at the window. ‘On the other hand, I wouldn’t. You can’t go back, can you? Not if you don’t want to you can’t. Or you can’t if you’re knackered like this. It would be funny if I did, though. Still, wanting to satisfies me. As long as you can dream you can tell yourself you’re still alive.’

He was sorry for George, because who wouldn’t be? But you couldn’t tell him so to his face. George was well aware of what everybody felt when they looked at him, knew they had to feel sorry, nothing else they could do. George would feel the same for somebody like himself if he was all fit and full of beans, or even if he was all fit and full of sludge. He’d much rather be the one who was feeling sorry, and if it happened that he was such a person he wouldn’t say he felt sorry for fear of being told to fuck off, though he’d still be over the moon at feeling it.

So the projection bounced back at Brian, to inform him that there was no need to feel sorry for George, or feel bad because you weren’t a cripple as well. George was done for, and comments of sympathy would be no help. He too had a roof over his head, all the food he could get into himself, any clothes he thought of wearing and, under the circumstances, the finest care in the world. He was all right for as long as Jenny stayed by his side, so it was her you should feel sorry for, and how could he not, heart bleeding drop by drop into his liver at her fate, and though it was proof that he could still feel pity for somebody he much preferred dealing with the emotional turmoil that came from himself, always useful for channelling into his work.

She stroked her husband’s pale hand. ‘Maybe one day we’ll win a lottery, then we’ll hire a private plane and go to Tobruk.’

‘Don’t be daft.’ He pushed the hand away, smiling at Brian as if to apologize, though not to Jenny, for his abruptness.

She didn’t have much of a life, shackled to his side and waiting for any little request that might pop into his circumscribed brain, but she was glad at hearing Brian tell of his drive through the Balkans, the description of a squalid night-stop in Macedonia exaggerated into as much of a narrative as would interest George and amuse Jenny. Set apart from the world, no such talk could lift them out of their imprisonment. By now he had taken in all he could, and had to leave, Jenny offering to show him out because she wanted to see what sort of a car someone drove who wrote scripts for television.

He had never been a flash lad for posh motors, he told them, not caring to impress anybody when he was on the road. A dependable estate served for whatever he wanted in the way of transport, no need of a blood-red underslung tin lizzie with the power of a Spitfire flashing up and down the motorway at a hundred and twenty till he was nicked for the third time and lost his ticket.

They smiled at his admission that the car wasn’t changed every three years, though his accountant said it should be for self-employed income tax. Maybe she was disappointed that he didn’t live up to his image, though why should she care? ‘It’s nothing to show off about, but come and look. Nice meeting you,’ he said to George, once being enough. ‘I’ll call again sometime, if that’s all right.’

‘You’re always welcome.’ He told Jenny to put on her mac, the first to notice a drop at the window.

She stood outside with Brian. ‘I didn’t really want to look at your car.’

‘I know.’

‘Sometimes he dozes off in the afternoon and wakes up with tears on his cheeks, but what can I do? He used to scream because the iron was falling on him in his dreams, but he doesn’t do that anymore, which is a blessing.’

He took her in his arms and kissed her. Because he wanted to? Because she expected it? To give her a treat in her miserable life? Whatever, he pressed her to him, his and her tears meeting after so much time. ‘I’m sorry, love.’

‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘It’s my bed, and I’ve got used to lying on it.’