Read by Louisa Gummer
"Still with us, Mr C?"
He surfaces into a dapple of light, an orchestra of tweeting. It is a slow hard awakening, through sickly layers of recognition: his garden in Reigate, no. A Sunday dragnet of marital sheets in Croydon, window flung wide, no. Not for decades.
Fingers press at his wrist and lift his arm. Pins and needles rush his skin.
“Bad night last night, my love. The doctor’ll be along to see you in a minute.”
My love. Nurse thingummybob. Who touches with such a brisk tenderness, knows all about his bad nights, but nothing at all about the thirty thousand days that came first. Peter closes his eyes so he can’t see the powdered rubber on her fingers.
“Just going to pop this on.” The canvas of the blood pressure sleeve. It gathers up the loose sling of his arm flesh and presses it tightly to the bone once more. “Another cold one today.”
Peter turns his head to the window. The ward is always too warm, but the sky outside is that dense grey-white that used to mean snow. Today it clouds into the white of a face, pale egg-shell cheeks and dull porcelain of eye, surprised still to be waiting, leaning closer to see whether he’ll be brave when it comes to it. Bridget. In the cold.
“Okay my love. Breathing’s not too good is it? Let’s pop the oxygen on.”
The face dissolves a little. Nurse thingummybob again. Peter gargles some thanks from behind the mask.
“You’re welcome, pet. Try and calm down a bit.”
The nurse wraps her hand around his upper arm where the blood pressure sleeve was. A part of his anatomy hidden from public view for two decades or more, and untouched for about the same, it prickles at the distant recognition of young flesh. Be brave, the touch says, while the eye looks discreetly away. Everyone has secrets. Everything can be forgiven.
By visiting time, Peter has been ignored by two rounds of meals and felt up by two doctors, including one from something called burns and plastics – Nurse thingummybob has been puffing around like she'd conjured up a genie – who looked at Peter’s arm and told him nothing at all. They have to look at everything, he supposes, even the jungle of raw flesh where some old duffer’s poured boiling water on himself, even when it’s not this but the rising tide in his lungs that’ll see him off.
Peter closes his eyes. Let it fester. Let at least some of this show on his outsides. Otherwise it's too easy. Never mind all the tedious senile chat, all the pus and bowels – a mop of freshly laundered white hair and they think you’re a saint.
“Your sister is here, Mr Cross.”
Nurse Jamal is on shift suddenly and Peter is awake again. Every moment feels like a jolt back into awareness. The mask is peeled from his face so that his jelly lips can tremble upwards into something like a smile.
She is fresh from the cold. Drops of snow melt cling to the fibres of her red wool hat and her cheeks are mottled pink and a pale bloodless yellow. He wants to cry, but his body fluids are collecting in all the wrong places. He murmurs some lunacy instead.
"Nanny Bridget."
“No, love. Not Nanny Bridget, it's Muriel. Bridget's gone, remember?” Her mouth beams dentures at him, but her eyes are wet.
Muriel. He’s been waiting for her.
"You've got some colour," she says. She peels a glove off and puts the backs of her knuckles to his cheek. Peter tries to draw a hand from under the sheet to take hold of her, but against the undertow of his weakness it's slow and impossible.
"Cold."
"Oh, sorry, love. Of course." She pulls her hand away. He hadn't meant her to stop touching. "It's bitter out there. Coldest December since…"
Remember that winter when the pond froze? Does she say that?
Yes. In 1940 the pond in the back garden at Reigate iced over. Nanny Bridget told them the fish would be fine, but Peter cried from fear, watching them swim about, frantic under the glass seal and tripping great brown clouds of scum. In the end they remembered the little tool that Peter's father used to punch extra holes in his belt. Muriel came out of the shed waving it, then sat with Peter, who was shuddery in the aftermath of his tears. They watched Nanny Bridget huff her way into an unstable crouch, coat stretched tight between her spread legs, and drill little air holes in the thick ice. Afterwards Peter was only too happy to be convinced that the fish slowed, bobbed a second or two at their breathing stations, waved a fin in thanks.
There were other winters when Peter was a boy, but it's the cold sharp ones that stick when everything else is muddy with morphine. The hard clamp of cold that gripped his backside as he perched on a frozen log, a sweet dark smell of chestnuts muffling the steel in the air. The needling cold that crept through his tam to pincer his scalp as he lay half-numb in the snow and Muriel showed him how to sweep out with his arms and legs to make an angel.
"Just triangles."
"What's that, love?" A cool finger strokes at his jaw. "Shhh."
He has to concentrate and remember, explain.
It's just triangles. But how spooked he had been in secret, seeing those figures scooped out white in the snow, a long dark strand of Muriel's hair curling into the hollow dish left by her head.
He remembers. Yes, that's it. The 1950s. The house in Clapham. The Morris snowed in and the long long walk to work. Peter walked an hour into the office on wet heavy feet until the smog came down and they closed it, then he heated half the house with oil radiators and shut up the rest. Schools closed early and masked children swooped across the wide expanses between the front doors on each side, freed from the tyranny of pavement, road and traffic.
A winter of letters to and from clients and, in late December, a letter from his old nanny, who could no longer manage the stairs at her flat. He wrote back to her, yes of course, and she moved into the outhouse behind Peter's garage, living on goodwill with a little gas fire. Once or twice a week she'd come to his door with a sagging cheese and egg sandwich which he'd swallow down, smiling, and spend the afternoon picking off his teeth and palate. She talked and talked, but he listened no more than was polite. Bridget was old then and full of vague stories. She muffled herself up in scarves and wore a red wool hat on white hair thin and soft as the fluff inside a chestnut shell. When the sandwiches stopped he did not miss them.
"His neighbour found him on the kitchen floor. He was still holding onto the kettle. Not wearing his panic button. He never would."
The bleeps and moans of the machines filter back.
"Well it was a big stroke. It wouldn't have made any difference, the button. He got here quickly, really. He has good neighbours."
"Everyone loves Peter." He blinks at her stretched mouth, the pink of her lips bleeding away, and at the tears on her cheeks. "Peter, love?"
Did he say something? Muriel. She's come to see him die, that's it, hear a confession she hasn't asked for. He says her name, and she leans close as if she hasn't understood. Her hand drifts in front of his face. Peter's tongue is sticky, weighted with a thick liquid. It crusts at the corners of his mouth. Try and remember.
Yes, all right. In the middle of December 1953, in the outhouse behind Peter's garage, a valve failed on the little gas fire, a rusted crack no wider than an eyelash, and poison seeped silently into a cramped room.
On Christmas Eve he sighed with annoyance and went, packet of Fortnum's tea crinkling in his numbed clutch, to find Bridget sitting in a deckchair in the little outhouse. Cardigan, scarf and red wool hat were stiff with ice crystals. Ice tracked in whorls and sprays across her cheeks, tiny frozen teardrops at the edges of her mouth and eyelashes. The skin beneath like the shell of an egg, fragile and off-white, cold as earth, but sweet still, under a fortnight of frost.
Her face overwrites all the other faces. A wife came later, a niece and two nephews. Friends. Neighbours. Pink faces with warm lives and warm deaths. But it's Bridget he sees next to him in the chair by his bed, crouching in the back garden, by the window, still and silent, etched with that icy filigree.
"Excuse me! Can you…?"
Nurse Jamal is leaning over. The mask goes back on.
Oxygen. A small spark of life threading down into his fingers and toes. Muriel it is, not Bridget, but the shape of her swims and melts. Something flutters on his face. There, that's better. Shhhh. There's a thing he wanted her to know. Oxygen spills roughly into his mouth. It doesn't matter. He lets it stop him up. Shhh, my darling. Sleep for a bit. Yes, all right. Someone pushes warm fingers through his. Peter turns his head away from them, and away from the angry tweeting of his machines. It's late.
The snow is falling thicker outside the window, through the vents in the ceiling where warm air used to blow. Peter moves one weak arm through the thick drift beneath him. A little triangle of a wing.
A side room, someone is saying, but Peter looks at the window. At Bridget, who once saved the fish in a frozen pond.
© Rebecca Skipwith, 2012
Rebecca Skipwith has twelve years of Latin and a poor work ethic. Past endeavours include co-translating 16th-century Italian pornography and returning to university at the drop of a hat. She is a former editor, now charity worker in South London, and is learning to write with Literary Kitchen.
Louisa Gummer trained at Mountview. TV includes EastEnders (BBC1); The Sitcom Trials (ITV), various commercials and independent films including The Ultimate Truth (Best Foreign Film - Long Island) and The Orange Tree (Shooting People's Mobile Cinema). Theatre includes Girls’ Night (UK No1 Tour); Listen to My Heart (Brockley Jack); The Sitcom Trials( Edinburgh 2004 & Tour). Louisa is also an experienced voice-over artist.
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